Episode 80: Max and Beka Rice

Hallway Chats: Episode 80 - Max + Beka Rice

Introducing Max and Beka Rice

Max Rice is the CEO and co-founder of SkyVerge where his team builds tools for e-commerce merchants, both large and small. Beka Rice is the head of product at SkyVerge and manages Jilt, an email marketing tool for e-commerce, along with over 50 WooCommerce plugins.

Show Notes

Website | Jilt
Website | SkyVerge
Twitter | @beka_rice
Twitter | @maxrice

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 80.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Max and Beka Rice. Max is a CEO and co-founder of SkyVerge where his team builds tools for e-commerce merchants, both large and small. Beka is the head of product at SkyVerge and manages Jilt, an email marketing tool for e-commerce, along with over 50 WooCommerce plugins. Hello, Max. Hello, Beka.

Max: Hi.

Tara: Hi, welcome. Glad to meet you and see you here today. Can you tell us more about yourselves? One of you can start.

Beka: Sure thing. I’m Beka and I grew up in the Philadelphia area. Liam and I chatted at our local meetup, which is how we met. And I’ve been working with WordPress since I think 2009 or so. In college, I used it for some school projects. I have started using it for work for about four years now, getting into WooCommerce, which is what got me actually into developing things for WordPress. These days, I spend a lot of time in the WooCommerce admin, but in the Shopify admin as well working with a lot of e-commerce merchants.

Max: I’m Max. I grew up in Philadelphia area as well. CEO of SkyVerge. Our team is about 20 people these days. We started around six years ago, 100% remote. I got started with WordPress I think back in 2009 as well. I was first building a real estate website for a local real estate agent and just sort of got into it and started working with it and then later got into WooCommerce and we’ve been doing development for that for a number of years, did a little bit of core development and it’s just been a wild ride.

Tara: What is it about WooCommerce or what attracted you to WooCommerce and e-commerce in general, I guess?

Max: For me, the company that I was working at, it was a local pharmaceutical company and they asked me to redo their e-commerce website. So I was looking around for what is a good platform. At the time, WooCommerce had just sort of came out. It was maybe six months old. I could either do a totally custom e-commerce build. It would have been like 45,000$ or I could do it with WooCommerce and it would have been maybe 500$ in extensions. As I was talking to my boss and he was like, “Well, this is an easy decision.” I was like, “Yeah, cool. So we’ll start building that.” And at the time, there wasn’t an extension for Kissmetrics. I had a little bit of development experience from college so I built the extension, put it on WordPress.org, got a little bit of interest and then Aidy from WooThemes reached out to me and said, “Hey, this looks really cool. You should put it on our store.” Like, “Wow, yeah, that sounds great.” And put it on the store, and this was like, July 2012. It had two sales the first month and I was like, “This is amazing. I didn’t have to do any work for this.” After that, we just started kind of doing more, and more, and more, and here we are today.

Beka: Building a WooCommerce extension empire. [laughter]

Tara: Yeah. Well, it certainly seems to be a big focus when you look around in social media about WordPress. There’s just a lot of activity around WooCommerce. We’ve talked to some people on our show who don’t want to touch e-commerce. It seems like there are people who either love it and want to do it, and there are people who don’t want to deal with it. It can be very complicated, I think. There’s a lot of balls in the air. The fact that you’ve jumped in and become a big name in that space is great. Jilt I’ve seen a lot too, and that seems like a product that’s becoming more and more important and talked about. Can you tell us a little bit about that product?

Beka: Yeah, sure thing. From my end, managing products for all of our extension. A lot of what I do is customer research and customer development interviews and trying to talk a lot to people what are the challenges that your business is facing. And one of the most common things we heard over and over and over again was, “I’m not sure how to get traffic to my store and I’m not sure how to make a use of this traffic. How should I be marketing to those people? I know email is effective. How should I be using email?” For us, we’ve built a lot of tooling and a lot of plugins that would let you export orders and add notices on your site and do all these things with your site. But we hadn’t done a lot in the marketing side of things and we felt like this was a problem that these people in e-commerce were underserved. They have a lot of tools that are built to the generic email marketing solutions and nothing that was really tailored for an e-commerce experience that was also easy to use and help people not only send emails but understand how to have an email marketing strategy. That coupled with Max’s experience in working with a small e-commerce store, we sort of said, “This is a problem we can solve.” And Jilt kind of came out of that frustration that we felt from a lot of merchants in terms of not having a solution that was built for them.

Liam: That’s almost like the retail brick and mortar where they can put up their products on their shelves and rent the retail space and throw the sign out front that says, “We’re open.” That’s well and good but when you show up to connect, for example, the payment for the till, they say, “Well, that’s great. But how do I help people? How do I actually sell things? I’ve got people here.” That’s interesting. You make software, you’re not a marketing consultancy. I don’t think either of you mentioned any kind of marketing background or interest in a professional way. But there you were delivering software solutions to address that exact need. That’s really interesting. What was the ramp-up time on that? At some point, somebody on the team said, “This is probably something we could do.” And then the decision was, “Yeah, alright. Let’s do it.” Then what happened?

Max: I think it’s something we had in the back of our minds for a while. And one of the ways that we grew as a company was acquiring a lot of other products from the developers. We have done quite a bit in the WooCommerce space about half of our portfolio or 60 was probably acquired over a number of years. And we did a bunch of that in the Shopify space as well. We’ve always sort of kept our ear to the ground for different opportunities. And one of the opportunities that came up was Jilt and this was in late 2014. Originally, it was just sort of an abandoned cart platform for Shopify. And the developer, we had talked to him for a number of years and said, “Hey, if you’re ever interested in selling, let us know.” In late 2014, he reached out and was like, “Hey, I’m shutting it down. I have some technical issue with it and I’m just not interested in running it anymore.” We acquired everything from it. All the IP and the customer base and everything like that. It was originally just for Shopify and then we immediately saw an opportunity where we can take this and we can expand it into WordPress space. We can bring it to WooCommerce with our experience there. And we started down the path of making it cross-platform, it started growing. And it’s turned into quite a bit more these days than what it did originally.

Beka: And to add to that, it ended up being perfect timing because we were like, “We really need to move into this email space.” And we’ve kind of looked at this app in the past to acquire it but didn’t really move into it seriously. For us, we knew we were going to build it anyway. So we ended up actually rebuilding the app completely as soon as we acquired it. But what it did give us was an existing Shopify app posing in a customer base that we can then continue to talk to and do interviews with, so that when we rebuild this app, we have a really great understanding of what we were going to be building and what needs this app is solving already but what other things these customers wanted to do.

Liam: That’s neat. I just want to touch on buying products because that’s so not what I do. Tara and I are both service providers, we’re service consultants. Certainly, within the WordPress environment, and I know nothing about Shopify so I’ll just focus on WordPress. There’s a lot of plugins, a lot of plugin businesses that are side gigs. So somebody works full time or 30 hours a week for this agency or that agency, or maybe they work for themselves but their plugin gives them 8, 10, 15, 30,000$ a year but not enough to really pay for everything. And I wonder with your experience of buying plugins, is that mostly your experience as you were looking about the marketplace and acquiring, were you mostly acquiring from, I’ll call it, part-time product shops? Or did you buy up products off of companies that just didn’t want to carry on with that? What was that experience like?

Max: It was definitely the former. A lot of, I think, freelance developers and designers, especially things that came out of client projects. Or client says, “I want to do integration with this thing or this sort of idea.” So they would build, especially in WooCommerce, they would build that product and then put it in the marketplace. Over time, we would just reach out basically to everyone in the marketplace, whoever would listen to us and say, “Hey, if you’re ver interested in selling, if you’re just not interested in maintaining it anymore, let us know, we’d love to buy it.” And that strategy worked really well, especially in the early days when people didn’t think of WooCommerce that seriously, they didn’t think it was going to be a serious thing. There’s certainly an element of luck there that we just chose correctly that WooCommerce would turn into a much bigger thing. And the strategy just worked out really well for us.

Liam: That’s neat. And I wonder about the purchase of– where you’re not just buying the software, maybe with Jilt where there is an IP and there is a client base and there is a– was that like, “Hey, we want to buy this company. We should probably talk to a lawyer that we buy everything that we need and that we don’t forget, for example, the IP or whatever that other thing is like, oh, yeah, we need to go back and buy that, too. I hope they’re still around.” What was that like?

Max: It maybe wasn’t as rigorous in early days as it should have been. You sort of learn some of the stuff as you go along. Or you go to your attorney and you go, “Hey, by the way, we bought this.” He says, “Where’ your agreement?”, “What do you mean agreement?” We got a little bit more sophisticated at it over time. I think, especially in the WooCommerce space, we never had too many concerns because the people that we were talking to were developers we were working with everyday either on the core or we would doing– whatever it was. We never felt like we were going to have issues there, sort of just a friendly, “Hey, they don’t want to deal with the maintenance, deal with support every day.” And we’re like, all about doing that sort of thing. A lot of times, it was a really, really great fit, and sometimes, they didn’t want to do WooCommerce work anymore. They were going to go work on some other types of project. And so they might have a handful of extensions and we’d say, “Well, we’d just buy all of them, whatever you have, we’ll buy it.” And that turned out really well, too.

Beka: I think that what sort of forced that rigor for us was when we started to do larger acquisitions. When you’re acquiring a plugin that someone’s selling and it’s got a couple sales a month, you’re not talking a lot of money. It’s like, I’m going to send you a few thousand dollars in cash for this plugin. That certain degree of flexibility where it’s not a big deal and it’s more of a handshake thing. Once we start to get into acquisitions that were much larger, five and six figures, then it became like, “Maybe we should be really serious about this and go through a few rounds of ensuring we’ve done our due diligence here.” In terms of the way we’ve analyzed the net value of this acquisition as well as the contract and the purchase agreement around it.

Max: Yeah, and I definitely think we got more comfortable over time. So the first one we did was maybe a 1000$ or something like that and we sort of built that over time, a couple of years in, I think the largest one we did was maybe a 110,000$ or a little bit more than that. And by that point, we were more sophisticated, we had known some of the things we should ask and some of the things that we should look at. Definitely not something– if I was going to do it over again, I wouldn’t try to start at the higher end. It helps to start kind of do something small.

Tara: I’d like to switch gears and ask you about your working relationship. You run this company together and you’re related to each other. [laughs] How does that work out? How did that develop and how does that work for you?

Beka: We never intended to be a working couple. Some people think, “Oh, you work with your spouse, that’s great.” It’s definitely not all sunshine and roses and you have work arguments and it’s like, it then continues to spill over dinner. “I think this was stupid. We shouldn’t have done this.” I would say it’s not for everybody and we didn’t intend to do it at all. I have been teaching full time at Exeter High School in Reading. For me, I used WordPress for our softball website and my classroom website. When Max and Justin, who’s the other co-founder, had been building all of these extensions, we’re not great at writing documentation and telling people how to use them. We’re great at writing code and turning out a good product. Since you know to use WordPress and you know how to install plugins yourself, why don’t you play with this WooCommerce thing and write documentation that tells people how to use this? For me, I kind of reluctantly got roped into it, and at that point, grew from the point where I was doing just documentation and I was like, “Great, you have the documentation. Now you can answer pre-sales questions. Now that you’ve been answering pre-sales questions, now you can help with support.” It got to the point where we have dipped our toes in and it was working pretty well. I was essentially doing two full-time jobs. Max started to leave his full-time job and kind of transition full-time into SkyVerge. It’s harrowing to have both of you working in the same company as a startup and it feels pretty financially risky as a couple to do that. But we had saved up emergency fund and things were going really well. Given that we could have this kind of remote work lifestyle, it was pretty important to us to do that. That was when we decided to actually jump fully in and say, “Okay, you’re going to be employee number one and we’re actually going to do this and not just moonlighting nights and weekends.

Max: I think we had a lot of practice, too, doing it over the years. Stuff like day one, I wouldn’t say was wonderful and sometimes you’re in situations where you work all day and then you start to talk at dinner and you start to work on the evening. You sort of have to analyze how are things going. maybe we should make more of a separation there or we get an office, whatever it is. We’ve experimented quite a bit over the past couple of years and kind of gotten into something that works well for us.

Tara: Do you do anything to attentively separate work from your relationship? Is it something that you tend to or is it natural, does it happen sort of naturally to talk about dinner conversations and that type of thing? Is it something that you work on or is it just kind of organic?

Max: From my perspective, maybe Beka will surely disagree with me on this one. It feels organic to me. I think it’s natural if we were going out to dinner, for example, whatever. It’s natural to maybe cover something that we were thinking about during the day or whatever, and then just swap over to something that’s totally different, talk about family or whatever it may be. We talk quite a bit during the day and it’s funny, Beka’s in the other room next to me, but during the day, we very rarely actually talk to each other in person, mostly over Slack. I think part of that comes from being a remote company and that’s sort of just how we do things, but it definitely feels organic to me.

Beka: The thing that people sort of ignore is that you talk to your spouse about work, even if you don’t work together, you ask how are things going or whatever. We do have some of that that’s “outside of work”. But especially during the day, we try to make sure that we’re not in our bubble and then we’re communicating about things and our team’s not doing that. We actually try to push a ton conversation into Slack and our team really tries as a default to use open channels we don’t use a lot of like locked or team channels in Slack. We try to push a lot of conversation into a public sphere. And then from a personal perspective, you can call time out and say, “I just need to get away from this for a while.” But for the most part, I think you get kind of similar balance to what most people would be. Which is like, “Oh, what were you working on today? How is that going? Whatever.” And kind of the similar things that everybody else does with their stuff.

Liam: I really like that timeout practice and that’s something I needed with my wife as we were going from dating to married to married longer and longer. My wife is very, very smart and intellectually very quick on her feet. I’m pretty thick on my feet. Conversations didn’t end well because I just couldn’t keep up. But the ability to say, “Hey, you know what? This is important but not right now. I need time. We’ll talk about it Tuesday when we both get done for the day.” So it’s a real time, it’s not just an indefinite, “We’ll get to it, leave me alone.” That’s an important kind of pause button to be able to have that.

Beka: Absolutely. It’s just one of those things that you learn over time. At first, it’s like you realize you’re driving each other nuts and then after a little while, you learn how to kind of have these cycles that you go through.

Liam: Since we’re talking about you and we’ve spun on from talking about business and we know a little bit about how you both got into where you’re at today. I’d like to ask you about success. I wonder– and you can answer to this collectively, if you prefer to answer it individually. What are your definitions of success, maybe personal, maybe professional, maybe a mix of both?

Max: I think for me, from a personal perspective– something I thought a lot about. I don’t have a great answer maybe. But the way I’m currently thinking about it is just enjoying what you do every day. Sometimes, that can mean work, sometimes that can mean a hobby or whatever it is that you’re doing. But it’s not maybe so much driving towards pure happiness or a state of happiness but it’s just really enjoying in being engaged in what you’re doing every day. That’s how I currently define success maybe from a personal perspective. Professionally, I think I spend a lot of time thinking about how we build a company that can last. I really want our company to be around in five years, and ten years, and 15 years, and trying to take that long-term perspective and think about, okay, what are the factors that are involved in that? That’s what success is and what we do today to influence that, and I think that for me means a lot of work on our people and sort of making that the team is really happy to work on this stuff, they’re really excited to come into work. Customers again are trying to evaluate the product and we’re just really sort of excited as a company. There’s a whole ton of stuff that we try to do around that to be successful in that way. That’s how I think about it.

Liam: Beka?

Beka: For me, I think there’s personal successes in terms of where I want to be with my work and what not. One of those is that I feel the need to constantly be challenged. So having come from a background of athletics, I’m super competitive. And if I’m working on the same thing every day for five years, I’d be bored. There’s easy jobs and I’d be great, and I can’t do an easy job where I just come in or I do the same thing every day and I go home and disengage. I look to constantly have problems and constantly be solving things. For me, the stuff that we do with software is why I love doing what we do because it’s constantly changing, you constantly have to evolve your thinking and sort of thinking first principles and like, “We do it this way. But should we do it this way? Why do we do it this way? There are better ways we could do this.” As a company, I see it as sort of an extension of that base class, if you will. If that drive is something that is important to me, I think that that extends it into products to constantly say, “We’ve done it this way and this is the way this worked but can we make it better? Can we make better decisions for our users? Can we pull something that’s more fun to use. We spend a lot of time trying to be in that space to be successful with products, we want to make things that get out of people’s way, that you don’t think about using it because it’s intuitive, it feels right. And it’s sort of a nebulous thing but kind of going through that inner process of constantly breaking down, are we doing this the best way? I think that helps to drive the success for what we see with our products.

Tara: Yeah. As it relates to your products when I look at your website on Jilt, you talk about an ROI, so like in a very tangible level, you’re dealing with success in a monetary way every day with the products that you’re selling, which are really focused on how to measure that success. Looks like you have some great statements to make about that with your product that you have in terms of the ROI that you suggest. I guess how do you measure that in the less tangible way? Your definition of success?

Beka: Yeah, I think for Jilt, the ROI that someone gets from it, it has to be very clear. It’s like, if I send these emails, what kind of money is it going to drive for me. I think that’s a great hook to get people in. And certainly, it’s one thing to care about initially but on an ongoing basis, there are different needs. You have this kind of pyramid of needs that you have to hit with a product. That initial justification of, “Why should I pay for this?” Is a really early one. But over time, for us, success expands on that and it’s not just the amount of revenue this drives. But we also evaluate, is this building better relationships with your customers. Internally, we try to look at when you install Jilt, what was the average number of orders per customer versus over time. Has that increased as you’ve been using Jilt? Your customers reply to the emails that you send to them. For us as a product, there’s a relationship component to this that’s very important to us, from merchants who are using it to build their relationships with their customers. Because many of them are small businesses, niche businesses, so this relationship is their differentiating factor, their USP versus some faceless thing. These days you can’t get a hold of someone really easily. You used to be able to, not as much anymore. But then from us, looking at our product, that drives success for our merchants. Our success is when we look at our merchants and the way they use it. We do a lot of feedback and watching high chart recordings and trying to see how people are using this product, because the success for us is– are they being successful, is this meeting their needs, but then is it also something that when we watch them use it and when we get feedback from them that they enjoy it. I think it’s pretty rare for someone to say like, “I like to use this.”, “Oh, it does what I need and it has these features.”, “But do you like to use it? Does it meet those needs and it’s something that you feel like is clear, you feel like it does what you want, that you can bend it to your will without having to learn it or force it, it sort of understands what you want out of it.” It’s not something that’s easy for us to quantify but that’s why we’re trying to have really great feedback with some customers for us. We know we’ve made a good product when someone’s like, “I love using this. It’s awesome, it does what I want, and I love to use it.

Tara: Right. That’s a good element to get into. I’d like to ask about Max’s definition a little bit and that he thinks far down the road. I want to talk a little bit about WordPress and what role WordPress plays. I know that you don’t only work with WordPress but there is a big community in WordPress and that’s how we have encountered you guys. So we like to touch on the WordPress community and what that means for you guys, how you’re involved in it, and I guess relating to your success definition, how you see that fitting into your long-term with all the changes that are happening in WordPress?

Max: I think for me, the one thing about the WordPress community that’s always so welcoming, everyone’s so willing to help. Especially when I first got started with it back in 2009 and I really had no idea what I was doing. Sort of situations that I shouldn’t have agreed to build a site because I really didn’t know how to do it but I was like, “Well, I guess I’ll figure it out.” To get the help from the people in the community to be like, “I took on this site to build a real estate site, how do I do it?” And people were just super welcoming like, “Okay, here are some things you can look at, so on and so forth.” And that’s been true over time for pretty much every area that I’ve worked in. As we got more into WooCommerce, being able to interact with the core developers there and just sort of– everything in the community has always been that way. We’ve tried to be the same way when people are– we have a whole bunch of articles Skyverge.com on how to customize different things. Sort of when people are asking questions with comments, we’re trying to help and get people along in that respect. I think that has been my experience. The interesting thing I think over the past year that’s a little bit different that we haven’t done previously is we started to sponsor a lot more WordCamps. We sponsored eight over the past year. Beka and I, I think, attended seven. We just wrapped WordCamp US. That was sort of a new experience for us. We had attended them previously but sponsoring was sort of a very new thing. It was wonderful, it was just talking to everyone in the community and also all the different kinds of designers and developers, just everyone. And all the cool that they’re doing with WordPress, I think that was just a wonderful experience and I’m happy that we sort of– so it’s a little bit of a gamble to say Jilt is maybe a little tangential to direct WordPress. It’s e-commerce so you have to use WooCommerce and so on and so forth. But it worked out really, really well for us. When I think about that long-term, I guess I kind of think back to the different points in WordPress history since I’ve been in the community and sort of the evolution of the platform towards all this different sort of stuff that you can build on top of it. And I know I’m super excited for the future, I think what’s happening with Gutenberg, there’s a lot of cool stuff in bringing sort of the experience along. I think when I’m looking out five, ten, 15 years, if WordPress has been able to kind of evolve from the very early days to now and still be very dominant, very accessible. I think it’s a very good chance that it’s going to be that way in the future as well.

Beka: I think that community breathes that resiliency. It’s changed a lot since we’ve been in it and it continues to change but you have these people who– I’ve seen a lot of it in the past week where it’s like, Gutenberg’s out and everybody publishing these things about building your own blocks. I have one queued up myself because when we go into it, it’s like, “How to build a blog with JavaScript or CoffeeScript.” Which is what we’ve used in the past. Because there’s a lot that’s using ES Next and not vanilla Javascript. So those contributions to the community, from all of these teams working on it, I think breathes that resilience and no matter what amount of changes we’ve had recently kind of helps people sort of weather it and learn and elevate the overall quality of the ecosystem as all.

Tara: Thank you for that. I’m going to ask our other signature question about advice, and that is, if you could share with us the best advice that you’ve received, one thing that you recall being advised and how you’ve implemented that in your life?

Beka: Mine is actually one from Max which I know he’s stolen from a couple of places, that’s helped me as I’ve managed more people on my team, which you can always tell someone to go to hell tomorrow. [laughs]

Tara: I love that. [laughter]

Beka: It’s definitely one that I know that was probably not what you expected. Certainly, a non-centered piece of advice but kind of what we think about with it is you can always tell someone they’re wrong or you can say– if you feel like you’re right about something or you feel like someone’s done something wrong, you can pocket, it will still be there. As a manager, and as I’ve kind of been learning how to manage a team and not just do work but help other people do better work, I’ve drawn on a lot of experience, one being a lot of things I’ve done as a teacher. And it’s very easy to correct people, “I was disappointed that you did this. I don’t think this was the best way to do it. This is a thing I wouldn’t expect here.” that’s an easy way to do it. The thing is, I can tell you that tomorrow. I can tell you that later. What’s going to help you and what’s going to help me is for me to say, “Why did you do this this way? What was the thought process here? Can you walk me through this? Okay, if you thought this, why not this?” Giving yourself that patience I think for me is what it mostly is, a reminder to be patient. But I can tell you you’re wrong later, but it helps us kind of run that mentorship path and learn how we work together better. And then I can only say it later. “I appreciate that you thought of these things but I’m still disappointed in this work.” And I can say that at any point.

Tara: Yeah, holding off on that knee-jerk response is sometimes so hard to do but most of the time, when you do that knee-jerk response, you regret it afterward. So I think that’s great advice.

Beka: Yeah. I think there’s this temptation to be very open and honest with your team right away. It is important to be open and honest with your team. But there is the importance of understanding where they’ve come from when they reach a conclusion or when they do something. So we can still give that honest and open feedback but you can do it at any time. It’s still going to hold true no matter whether you dig into their thinking or their reasoning behind it, so it’s better to hold off on that and do that later.

Tara: Yeah, it probably applies outside of the workplace, as well, I think in personal relationships. It’s also sometimes good to take a breath and let some things settle in before you respond to it. I love the way that you stated it though, I’ve made a note of that. [laughter] How about you, Max?

Max: For me, what comes to mind is something that probably applies to both personal and professional life, and it’s to be generous. You can be generous with your time, your money, your knowledge, and it came from the owner of the company that I used to work for and he was super generous with the team, with the customers. And when I was going to go out of my own and start SkyVerge and we had a conversation. We sat down, he was going through some advice that he had and some of it was super specific and some of it more general. That’s one of the things that he said, he said, “In business, it’s great to have margin.” As he defined it. I think that allows you to be generous and it allows you to do other things. That’s something that we believe in so much that we’ve made generosity one of our core values at SkyVerge. It’s something that we’re always trying to– we try to fall back on that. If you’re thinking, “Can we do this? Can we not do this?” Try to be generous. And I think that comes back to you in all different sorts of ways. It’s not measurable, you’re not trying to do that, just thinking about it in that way.

Liam: I see the two then really just tying in. To Beka’s advice of tell them to go to hell tomorrow, it’s also an opportunity to give ourselves time to assess our emotional reaction. Was it accurate, was it right, was it justified? Setting aside any kind of intellectual, was there a thought process that’s strong as it should have been, but it just allows us to be generous with ourselves as well as with the others. And to come at it in a more rational way. And then to tie that generosity, Max, around to not just financial generosity. “We’re going to give to this charity at this year.” And that kind of thing. But give to our clients, give to our staff, give to our team, give to ourselves. I really like that. I think generosity in the workplace is vastly under-appreciated. Aside from just being nice to nice for niceness’ sake, but there’s a real commercial value to it, and I don’t mean that in a vicious capitalistic way. I know you weren’t saying it that kind of way but the value of that is pretty wonderful.

Beka: We find it a lot with content is a big one. We’ve always tried to publish a lot and share knowledge, which is sort of one of our operating principles that comes out of that. I think that we’ve not done as well of a job as we hoped this year, but definitely a lot of things we’ve done building a company culture, and building a team, and hiring remotely. Things we’ve been trying to share a lot more of, because of that.

Tara: Thank you guys for sharing that with us. I love both of those pieces of advice and it’s been great getting to know you a little bit. We are out of time, but we really appreciate you sharing your story and telling us about what you do, and look forward to meeting you sometime soon at one of the WordCamps that you’re sponsoring.

Liam: Thanks for joining us, Beka. Thanks, Max.

Max: Thanks for having us.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

Beka: Best places to find us are at Jilt.com and Skyverge.com. Often if you are chatting with us via one of those channels. The two of us, if we’re not trying to respond, are usually trying to keep up with all of the things that are coming through, these inboxes and having a good pulse on what customers are saying about our team and products. On Twitter, you can find me at @beka_rice.

Max: And I’m @Maxrice on Twitter.

Tara: Thank you.

Liam: Thank you. We’ll see you guys later. Bye.

Tara: Bye

Max: Bye.

Beka: 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.

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