Well not entirely. Obox still does the occasional client project and I think it’s incredibly important that we continue to do so.

There are of course criteria to these projects:

1. Must fit a certain cost threshold – I.E you better have a budget
2. We only choose projects where we are able to use our own products as the base

The reason we do this is because, through experience, we have come to realize the unique requests that clients have and it stands to reason that many of these clients could also be Obox Themes customers.

It also allows us to review our own work on a monthly basis. Each project leads us to improve our code, our documentation, our theme structure and our design decisions for future projects.

A prime example of product improvement via client work is our mag.Press theme. Through constant usage in projects we have learned the best way to describe widgets, setup dynamic code and strengthen its flexibility as a customer facing theme.

Other examples are the implementation of our color customizer and turning older themes into responsive and flexible code.

Finally, without client work we would have never made the Obox content widget. A powerful widget which can fit in any column and pull any content on your site. That widget alone has taken our themes to another level altogether.

I believe that in order to produce our best work, day in and day out, we need to have someone we respect – admire even – in the back of our minds judging our every pixel, word or line of code.

If we want to be the best that we can be, we have to be conscious of the best who have been. And we need to be thinking of what they would do or say all the time.

The more you pay attention to that voice inside your head the better you will become. The more judgmental you will be of your own work as you anticipate the best expecting the best from you.

You will never leave satisfied and you’ll always try improve.

I believe that this is why small bugs are slipping into Apple products more consistently at present times.

The thought of the 1 in 10000 chance of Jobs seeing your work would make anyone work harder and pay extra attention. But with him gone the temptation to let things slip is greater because the consequences aren’t as big. Not in terms of getting fired but in terms of impressing the genius.

Self improvement is a critical part of becoming successful. You have to push yourself every single day to be better but you won’t know to be better if you haven’t got something to measure against.

Being aware of what the best may think of your work will always drive you forward. Never be satisfied.

So it goes without saying that when you decide to partner with someone that you make the right choices because just as partners can make you, they can also break you.

There is a book called ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ which details the contrasting viewpoints of a person’s mentor and his father.

I have been fortunate to grow up in a similar situation in terms of mentor-ship. One was my real dad the other was a friend who used to help sponsor me when I raced karts.

In both cases they were extremely dedicated, working longer than anyone else and pouring blood sweat and tears into their ‘babies’ but what always fascinated me about these two was not how much money they had but rather how they got there, and it couldn’t be more different.

My real dad built a hugely profitable company on his own. He runs it his way and no other way. It’s his rules and his ideas which resulted in success.

On the other side my mentor built his multi-million dollar company with a partner, selling groceries. They had one of the smallest grocery stores in the franchise and yet they were top five in turn over beating much larger stores, which had better locations, and more staff.

My dad has always said that a partnership is a sinking ship and in his situation he couldn’t be more right but what about my mentor? He had created incredible success by effectively sharing the load.

When I was eighteen I was invited to join the committee at our sports club. I was the youngest person ever to join and the people who surrounded me were all in their late forties or early fifties and incredibly successful.

What convinced me to join the committee was the chance to listen in on the conflicting ideas of how to run the club as well as how they dealt with each other disagreeing on everything. Seeing and hearing what these people had to say when it came to running the club turned out to be invaluable.

My mentor was the chairperson so I would always listen in carefully to what he had to say. When he grouped the members of the committee to do tasks he always managed to get it right. We were all very productive in these teams and that was one of the best years for the club.

At the time my brother was now coming out of school and I saw us one day creating a company together but I always had the ‘partnership is a sinking ship’ mentality.

So one day driving back from an event I brought up the idea of partnerships with my mentor and asked what he felt about them and what he told me has stuck with me to this day.

It not only applies to whom you run your business with but also whom you do business with.

You need to find someone who has the same values as you. The second your values differ you will run into problems.

You need to make sure that your goals are aligned so that you are both eyeing the same prize. If your idea is to live a happy lifestyle with a comfortable company and yet your partner wants to be the next billionaire then there will come a point when things boil over on a late night when all you want to do is go home and live your life while your partner wants to work till the sun rises.

You need to make sure that your partner has the same values in many critical aspects of your company. Will they be happy with a small salary to start off with while you grow the company? How many sacrifices are they willing to make? Are they just in it for the money? Are you in it for the glory?

When running a company with someone else, you will always need to reassess cultures and outlooks.

On the committee was a particular businessman who ran a wood supply company with two other partners. They were three years in and it was becoming a huge success but the values of the three partners changed.

One wanted to keep things as is and continue to grow the company by re-investing profits into resources and expansion. The other two wanted higher salaries to get cars and boats. They felt they deserved it due to all the hard work they had put in.

Neither party was wrong but, because their values had shifted, the business took a hit and they ended up selling their shares and splitting up. It wasn’t pretty, especially when you are on receiving end at a trivial committee meeting!

Two years after my younger brother left school we left our dads business (we were doing his web development) and started our own company. Ideally we both wanted to do our own thing, one day running our own successful ventures, but as we spent more time together in the business environment we realized that our values were completely in line with one another’s.

Because of that comforting factor we are able to trust each other in our roles. I get the business and do the design, my brother leads the development. There are never questions about uncomfortable subjects like financials or who does more work than the other.

We both know our roles and we are both aiming for the same target with the same philosophies, which make us hop every morning.

Business relationships like ours are very rare and more times than not, a partnership will not succeed.

My mentor is a serial entrepreneur who has formed and broken many partnerships on his route to his success and it was through those failures that he learned what to look for in a partner. In his particular case it is hard work and a willingness to make certain sacrifices in order to become successful, be it financial or personal.

Two years ago my mentor was packing meat at the shop on a Sunday afternoon because not enough staff had pitched up to work. While packing, his partner arrived to collect some meat so that he could go home and make a BBQ with his mates. He saw his partner trying his best to get this meat into the freezers but did nothing to help and instead rushed home.

It was at that moment that my mentor realized their values had shifted. After twenty years in business together times had changed and their outlooks were completely different. The very next day he called a meeting and bought out his partner’s shares.

He now runs things his own way without having to answer to anyone else and could not be happier but if it wasn’t for his right hand man he probably would have never landed in this position in the first place.

So make sure that when you form a partnership that you hope will take you the whole way, that you choose someone not only for their skillset but also for what they value, because it’s at that most basic level that relationships and business can succeed or fail.

The execution required a simple form which a user would fill in and therefore get sent to us. On the surface this is a super simple feature which will make life a lot easier for some of the more novice users on Obox. However, Nothing is ever so simple is it? Especially when you need to make it seem easy.

Once Marc and I sat down to spec the flow of “Easy-form” we realized what a beast it actually was.  It’s amazing how often this comes up in client work. Especially near the end of a project were the most simplest of requests can be a complete nightmare to do. Oh how we hate those.

I’d like to shed some detail on how this form would work and how quickly something can scale from a 5min job to a few hours or even days of work.

The long and short of it is that a user fills in some details into a form which then emails us. This service would cost about $60.

So looking at it like that we see three steps:

1. Customer fills in form.
2. Form emails Team Obox.
3. Obox executes on request… customer happy.

But we’re missing so much detail there. Lets run through some questions which will require answering:

1. Where does the user find this form?
2. What are the most important questions?
3. Must we store this data somewhere?
4. What if the user makes a mistake?
5. How do we assign these tasks?
6. How do we list these tasks?

This is what we landed up with:

• User purchases a theme
• They login to their profile where a link to easy form is presented
• They arrive at easy form and are asked to fill in a series of items.
• Some of these items can be left blank but only if others are filled in first. This must not be confusing…
• Upon sending the form the customer will be redirected to a checkout form which auto fills in their details.
• Upon payment we store their data and email team Obox and the customer with instructions

We then generate a list of people who have requested the service and include a whole list of tracking and management functionality to make sure that requests are fulfilled on time

We provide the customer with the ability to edit their details should they have entered in something in incorrectly. This update then re-emails team Obox.

A customer should also be able to make multiple requests which run concurrently and don’t clash with other purchases.

Once the request has been fulfilled our customer will receive a notification and instructions on what to do next.

In each of these steps there are multiple routes and options which can be user tested and refined. In total there are also 4 emails and the initial easy-form which require copy writing – again something that can be A/B tested for better conversions and experience.

So what first seemed like an incredibly quick and easy task has escalated into something quite the opposite. It’s amazing how something like a simple form can open so many doors.

The customer will never notice the intricacy of the execution behind their request but that’s what makes great user experience so interesting. To achieve something seamless takes many moving parts in the background.

His company has been around for close on 30 years, doing the same thing day-in-day-out, and it’s a huge success. Something I aspire to achieve with Obox.

His most popular product, Cashbook, has over 20,000 active users and all those people are supported by one person via forums not dissimilar to those on Obox.

One person. 20,000 active users.

In our industry, WordPress themes, you hear of companies going through massive issues with support, back logs and response times. Their solution is to hire more support staff or move to different support structures to funnel user requests in the hope of managing a naturally out of control situation.

One quote from my dad which I carry with me everyday is this:

Your forums should be a ghost town, no one should be in them. That’s how good you want your product to be.

Obox has one permanent support person, the magical Vail Joy, and the rest of us chip in when necessary. Instead of hiring more support staff we invested in making our products easier to use and understand. Many times we have delayed launch by a week or two to test more thoroughly – kill hidden bugs and create better installation methods.

I truly believe that by hiring more support staff to deal with requests you are sticking a band aid on a much bigger problem. Maybe take a step back and ask yourself “Why are they asking so many questions in the first place?” instead of “How do we manage all this backlog?”

So, if you do this first project for maybe, half price, then we can guarantee future work at your regular prices. We just want to test the water with you, but we promise there is the opportunity for future work.

I call bullshit.

What your potential client has just done here is put themselves on a pedestal, making you feel like you need them more than they need you.

Cutting prices up front for a promise of future work is a red flag. Guess what will happen for project two? They will push you lower because they’ve “brought you repeat business.” It’s a death spiral you must avoid.

My recommendation is that the next time someone says that to you, rather come back at them with a better suggestion: You pay full price for the first project, and if you bring me future business I will consider knocking down my prices depending on the scope and spec.

Set the example up front by positioning yourself on the pedestal before it get’s out of control and you end up working for scraps.

Promises do not pay the bills.

Watch it.

At Obox we stretch ourselves thin to say the least. Some people may call us fragmented but since we put 99% of our focus on working with WordPress and using our own products I’d say we are learning more about our products every single day than most people.

That being said… 2012 was our breaking point.

In 2011, Marc and I decided to go into a joint venture with a major corporate to create a product called QikCommerce.

The day we got into work on the 3rd of Jan, to the day we left QC, we were quite literally flat out. 16-20hr days had become the norm again (circa 2009, pre-themes) and I found myself doing everything I hated:

1. Meetings
2. Pitching
3. Hard selling
4. Playing political warfare with corporate ninjas
5. More meetings
6. Making excuses for targets and demo’s not being met

This stuff didn’t happen over night though. Instead we slowly but surely slipped into this deep and dark abyss of ridiculous deadlines and one-up-manship.

We learned who you could trust and what were corporate red flags. We learned what KPI’s were and how they completely kill great products at any cost. We learned what it was like to have not one, but three ‘bosses’, in quick succession and we learned that unless the ink is DRY, you are completely exposed.

Luckily we were prepared for the final point.

By May, Marc and I were at our tipping point and couldn’t wait to get out. It was eventually agreed (it took 60 days to decide this… Sixty) that we would leave the QC team and continue with our themes.

By the time we faced the right way, what we had on our hands was a disaster of sorts. The biggest mistake we made all year was to chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when in fact we were building a gold mine back at base.

However, that gold mine was limping, maybe even in a wheelchair… What was once an incredibly stable business, growing at 100% p/a was now dormant and completely leaderless.

Never again will we let that happen.

We learned what really mattered and that no matter how good you are, you cannot give your core business 20% of your time while you pursue ventures which only have a 20% chance of succeeding.

From the moment we left QC we realized that 16-20hr days now had to become 20hr days, non stop.

We started by reviewing every product we made in 2012 and stripping them to the bone to rebuild. We killed bad products and re-released the ones which were doing better, with completely refreshed code and UX improvements. We focused on setup, copy writing, navigation and design.

Marc and I spent a ton of money on UX tests to improve our site and enlighten ourselves, we then took those learnings and applied them to our products.

We hired Gavin and got him to do the things we suck at, such as:

1. Maintaining leads and networking
2. Consistently interacting with our customers and affiliates
3. Challenging our ideas every single day
4. Blogging (!?!?)
5. Releasing more products more often

The problem is that the rot of early 2012 had already set in, so results were the opposite of immediate. Everything we did seemed to be worse.

Did we give up? Hell no, we pushed harder. We got more meticulous and spent even more time on products which at first didn’t seem to work at all. Why? Because we believed that there was an end game.

Businesses aren’t sprints, they’re marathons. What you do today may only work a year from now but you have to know and believe that what you are doing is right.

In 2012 part 1, we didn’t do that. We were working on something we’d lost faith in early on, but blindness and a refusal to give in led us down a garden path of ridiculousness and ultimately, failure.

2012 part 2 has been the complete opposite. We have been unrelenting in our efforts and our focus has been laser sharp. The result? A slow but steady return to normal – growth, happy customers and better products.

Products which are reaching levels that few can rival.

These days every time I see someone using WordPress or an Obox Theme, I pull out my phone and secretly take notes. The next day we’re in the boardroom asking ourselves why “X” was misunderstood or “Y” was actually quite shit and what made “Z” properly awesome.

When Marc and I started Obox we never had the idea of selling it to anyone. In fact I used to be quite rude to anyone even asking for a price. However somewhere along the line we forgot that, we started to rush things and worry about unnecessary stuff like valuations and JV’s which may have lead to acquisitions etc.

And what a mistake that was!

This ‘running a business’ thing is a long long game. Obox themes is only 3 years old, which is mickey-mouse compared to others more successful companies. But its also a critical time. It’s that transition period between make and break.

I believe 2012 was that period for us. We almost lost it but seeing how everyone in our little company has pulled back is awesome.

We’ve put short term to one side and are now betting on the long term. Making better products which are easier to use, fun to experience and break way less than our competition.

There are no more rush jobs and no more misdirections.

The next time someone comes to you with a good idea and the potential of a massive JV, I suggest that you squeeze them, no matter how big and connected and great they are. You need to realise that behind the name there are human beings and therefore your equals with equal abilities and vulnerabilities. So don’t do what we did and fall for all the bullshit. Rather remind them that they came to you for a reason… they need you and not the other way around.

Bring on 2013.

I’m not getting ahead of myself and thinking that because I’ve refreshed my blog I will suddenly start blogging more again. That won’t happen.

What has been happening recently though is that I’ve had some thoughts which warrant more than 140chars, so I’d like to use this design for some quick-fire thoughts and observations about my industry, my competition, user experiences and sometimes even traffic.

Glad to have you along for the ride. Now please shut up, because I’m talking.