SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Fractional, episode 21, where we talk about building a life that works for you and look at the ways that work can be improved. I'm your host, Joshua Wold, and this week, Lance Robbins is out. So on the other line, we have a fantastic guest, a friend of both mine and Lance. Welcome, Luke Karpis.

SPEAKER_00: 0:19

Hey, Joshua. Thanks for having me on the show. I am a longtime listener, first-time caller. You know, I've been listening since the very beginning.

SPEAKER_01: 0:26

You're the OG. One of the things that we have been chatting about is you were so kind to send me occasional thoughts and messages throughout the last couple of months. Like, hey, I love that you guys did this. Or hey, maybe lean in more on that. And it's been really fun. And you and I have another venture we're working on right now. And some logistical stuff came up. And I checked, hey, are you available to record an episode? So I appreciate you jumping on it.

SPEAKER_00: 0:54

You're welcome. it's actually really good timing because just this morning i was on a call with with my boss and i mean there's a a whole conversation to be had around what is full-time when you're doing contract work and when you live internationally like i do i'm from australia so You know, we can have that conversation, but I was on a call and I had prepared all of these notes, right? I had all of this note document to say, look, this isn't working out. We need to make some changes. And I said, I've got this, I've got this, and here's some examples. And, you know, it was very well-structured feedback. And I said, look, I've been really frustrated with how things have been going. And he said, yeah, I think you're right. I don't think that there's going to be a long-term fit here. I was like, oh, okay. So that was the end of that. Well, you know, four weeks notice, which is nice. But I am now, for the first time in maybe like two or three years, back to being a fractional worker.

SPEAKER_01: 2:02

So that's why I have you here today, because you sent me the message and the timing is perfect. I don't have a specific agenda more. I just want to get into your mindset, which is so fresh right now, where you're very aware of the fractional lifestyle. You've been full time. You've had your own company. You've sold your company. You've been all across the board from. And do you mind just saying really quickly what industry you're in and roughly what do you do as an occupation?

SPEAKER_00: 2:28

Yeah, so I'm a software engineer and I work mostly in the WordPress space. And that's how we've met in the past as well as through working on WordPress projects together. My history, I guess, we'll cut out most of the career history, but the fractional part is...

SPEAKER_01: 2:48

That's what happens when you start to get old.

SPEAKER_00: 2:50

Don't call me old. I'm feeling it, I'll tell you what. It starts when I left agency life to pursue my own thing. There was a point in time when I left, I said, all right, I've been working in this agency for somebody else for a while now. I want to do my own thing. So I left and started... working. At the time, I called it freelance. This was like 2019 or something like that. Maybe the term fractional existed, but I didn't know about it. But I determined in my head what sort of freelance work do I want to do. And I decided rather than just typical freelance work, which is you quote on a project, you deliver the project, you look for a new one, right? I decided I don't want to do that. I want to be more part of the team. And so I started telling that to my prospective clients, which was challenging, and saying, look, rather than do the project-based thing or just random hours here and there, let's do X amount of hours per week for X number of weeks or indefinitely. And I had some success with that. It went pretty well. And at the same time as working on that, I was also working on my own little side project startup, which ended up taking off and we sold it. And then from there, after we sold it, then I was working full time for a big, large company again. So I've been in that world for some time since we sold in 2020.

SPEAKER_01: 4:19

That's a really great way of just describing you've been across the whole field and you and I both used to work in an agency. So that's how we got to initially meet and work together. I am curious, do you see... fractional over the last couple of months we've defined it a bit and so i don't think i need to go into that a ton at the moment do you see it as a temporary stop gap until you figure out your next thing or are you interested in actually this could work for a longer period of time than maybe a few months and this is obviously also very fresh because you've been here before you're back here again

SPEAKER_00: 4:53

i'll answer that but first i think it's worth addressing the definitional aspect of it because i was having so yesterday i gave some old clients a call i guess i just was prescient you know i was thinking this isn't really working out so maybe i should get in touch with some old clients and i'd mentioned fractional to jen and jen said what's fractional i've seen this word come up a couple of times and i was on the spot and i said well i guess i guess it's just part time I don't know. She's like, oh, okay. So, Joshua, how is fractional different from part-time?

SPEAKER_01: 5:31

All right, that's a great point. Lance and I have defined this a few different times, so I'll take my best stab at how I define it today. I would say that fractional means... Internally, you know you're available for up to five teams that you could support. So you think of your full-time capacity, and in my mind, I don't think that's more than 40 hours a week. So you can just quickly do the math, divide that by up to five. and to me that's a fractional so if you get a really good two or three clients you you're happy you're totally fine but you can expand that out i've had up to six at once and i was a little bit worn out that was too much for me but if when i was doing fractional work in that capacity i found that three to four was a pretty sweet spot for me and The way that I've typically constructed my contracts in the past is hire me for a month or hire me for three months. Those have been the simplest ones for me to sell. And they're not actually based on any time. It's based on if you like me, you'll keep renewing. That's how I've done it as an IC, an individual contributor.

SPEAKER_00: 6:46

That's fantastic. I think I'll pick that. up as a you know let's you can either i'll bill you monthly or i'll bill you yearly or or three monthly quarterly and you'll get a different price and yeah that's great i really like that approach so how is it different from part-time i guess part-time means you're employed part of the time and you're unemployed the rest of the time whereas fractional is more contract it's got a contract nature to it and it implies that you're also taking on other work as well. So to answer your question from earlier, I'm really thinking of this as an opportunity to go full-time self-employed, full-time fractional. And if that means I end up having one client, is that a full-time job? What do you think? Is it? I don't know.

SPEAKER_01: 7:37

Are you interested in fractional roles that are individual contributor? Because I know you can do leadership level roles as well, and those are also fractional. So that's my first thing. Which of the two are you more interested in, or are you open to both?

SPEAKER_00: 7:54

Yeah. And when does fractional just become consulting? I have a customer at the moment, and with him, we just do an hour a week. It's You know, that's not really fractional, but we spent an hour a week together and we talked through some of the technical challenges and process based challenges that his growing tech startup is experiencing. So I think of them as a client, whether they are part of my like fractional pie. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 8:26

First, I've decided about a month or two ago with Lance that we're not going to be gatekeepers over the term. So however you define it is cool. But I do have an opinion. I think fractional is when you will actually get your hands dirty and do some of the IC level work. But you're there... that you are thinking in a strategic way. So when you're strictly strategic, I think you're a consultant. But if you're strategic plus doing IC-level work and you're doing it not quite part-time, to me, that's a fractional. So there's this sweet spot, and I'll share with you after the call, and I put it in the show notes before, a Venn diagram Lance created of where we think fractional sits as opposed to all these other terms. I've also heard other people define it differently, but that feels really good to me when I think about it.

SPEAKER_00: 9:18

And you mentioned hours like you've got a limit of 40 hours per week which seems eminently reasonable but you know there's this phenomenon in development and it must be the same in design as well where there's there's hours that you work and then there's also effective hours or deliverable hours. You know what I mean? Like I can take all day to do what should have been a two hour job and I can do an all day job in two hours depending on various unforeseen. So when you say that you're going to do As a fractional, if you're going to say you're going to do eight hours, is that like eight hours at the desk? In which case, you're not counting water cooler time, you're not taking lunch breaks, or is that eight deliverable hours of this sort of vague notion of what amount of work should I be getting done in eight hours?

SPEAKER_01: 10:16

You're holding me to the fire, which is great. I was being vague on purpose, but you know what? I'm going to be very candid. At my... absolute busiest as a fractional, I only logged 30 hours. That was my craziest week with six clients. On an average

SPEAKER_00: 10:38

hard week- But, but, but, but, before you go on, before you go on, how much did you bill for that week?

SPEAKER_01: 10:44

Yes. Yes. So let me, I'll break into the nitty gritty a little bit here. On an average week with three or four clients, I logged 20 hours. And what that means is I'm running a clock because I'm not using the restroom right now. I'm not having a lunch break. I'm not on a walk. I am heads down. And what I found is I can do that for about three or four hours a day, and then I am shot. That's my best, hardest work. And then the rest of the time might be a meeting if I need to have it or it might be kind of cooling down or processing or communication or running the business, et cetera. So you're bringing up a really valid point of if I have a really good three hours of deep work in a day, I'm good. I actually try to just stop and come back at it the next day. So a 40-hour fractional workload where I truly was logging time would burn me out. I could not do it. I've done it in the past. I could not do it.

SPEAKER_00: 11:48

Yeah, I've done it in the past too and was close to burnout. Psilocybin was my saving grace in that case. And I feel like I narrowly avoided burnout there. It was touch and go.

SPEAKER_01: 12:03

Psilocybin, what is that? It's

SPEAKER_00: 12:06

maybe more commonly known as magic mushrooms.

SPEAKER_01: 12:09

Ah, okay. Yeah, I'm familiar with that. So this actually gets into, I think, something that's really important that I wish more... owners and managers understood. I had a really great chat with a designer a couple of weeks ago, and he described that he only also has... He's a fantastic designer. I've seen his work. One of the top designers out there that I've been able to spend some time with. He only spends three to five solid hours a day. The rest is kind of being available, having meetings if he needs to. And this is as a full-time capacity. He's not fractional. So... You kind of asked the question earlier. I have not done any of my contracts based on hours. What I've told them is you're paying me for a month of my time and here's roughly my cycle of work that I'm going to give you in that month. And I do log every minute internally, but I never share the hours. I just want to see if I gave this many hours to client A and this many hours to client B and they're both happy, how should I modify that up or down next month?

SPEAKER_00: 13:12

It's hard to gauge with clients their level of contentment you know like should I be charging more should I be doing more should I be doing less charging less because clients will either tell you that they're happy or they'll cancel you know like it's so it's it's hard to gauge

SPEAKER_01: 13:31

I gauge it on are they renewing

SPEAKER_00: 13:33

so that's like a single positive only one thing but like were they just only they were considering maybe closing but they decided just to renew or they were like no this is a no brainer we are going to renew and renew and renew you know

SPEAKER_01: 13:47

This has turned into a reverse interview and I love it. Some of the clients I was working with, they had a very short runway because they were so early in the product cycle that it kind of just fizzled out after three months. And that was just, I worked with them for that. Others, they had a solid product and there was no question of whether I was valuable to the team. So we just worked out longer. So it kind of depends as a fractional, are you chasing this early pre-market fit stage or you seed stage? Where are you at in the type of company that you're trying to engage with.

SPEAKER_00: 14:19

Mate, it's a reverse interview because I'm like suddenly finding myself back in this world and so like I've got all of these questions of how does this work again and can you help me with this? It's a little bit scary, you know, all of a sudden.

SPEAKER_01: 14:34

I'll give you some advice then. As you know, I have a full-time job now, so I find it a little bit funny to be talking about fractional, where I'm not practicing it currently, but I care deeply about it. So Lance and I have talked about, like, should I continue the podcast?

SPEAKER_00: 14:51

Well, you have one renewing customer who gives you 40 hours a week every week.

SPEAKER_01: 14:55

That's a great way to look at it, and I try to keep them happy. And the thing, while I'll still talk fractional, I also care about, like, what does it mean to be a worker in this crazy world that we're in? We live in a knowledge worker. That's an interesting topic. So what I'll say is if I had to go be fractional tomorrow, I would first ask myself, what's my runway? Because this is what I had to do last year. I had a runway of three weeks. And that was terrifying. And so what I did is I actually got a full-time job and fractional leads all in three weeks. It was a miraculous how it went. And then I had the choice. Do I stay full-time or do I go fractional? My first thing, introspective question towards you is what's your runway? Do you have the capacity to figure this out for a few months? Do you have the backlog of clients who would be more than happy to pick you up? Or do you need to consider a full-time opportunity sooner than later? Those kinds of things will weigh into whether fractional is gonna be successful for you.

SPEAKER_00: 15:55

Yeah. Yeah, I would say that I'm in a safe-ish place. Although just last weekend, we bought a like$100,000 caravan. And now I'm like wondering, well, was that the right decision? Maybe we should have saved that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:09

For the American listeners, can you describe what the caravan is? It's pretty sweet. We call it an RV or...

SPEAKER_00: 16:14

Oh, right, right, right. You call it something different? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:17

It's a pull behind your vehicle trailer, which looks pretty awesome.

SPEAKER_00: 16:22

It's got all the cool features. I'm really excited for it. But I'm asking myself, Should I try and get my money back before it gets delivered to me and give myself a bit more runway? Or should I lean into it? And I work for myself. I can do what I want. Let's go off caravanning around Australia for half a year and take some time off as we need it and maybe do things a little bit more budget-friendly. I don't have any answers yet. This is all pretty fresh.

SPEAKER_01: 16:47

I would say, looking back at the last year, and actually... Looking back to 2015 when I started at the agency both of you and I worked at, I have never not been stressed. I've always had income. I've always paid the bills for my family. My stress has always been there. And what I'm starting to realize as I get older is my kids are growing up so fast before my eyes. They still want me to tuck them into bed at night. They still want to hold my hand when we cross the street. They want me to read to them. They want me to spend time with them. I will never, ever get that back. And the stress of the workload will continue probably till I retire, unless you and I figure out some way to make that change. And that's part of why I like to have these conversations. So for me and my wife, we are always looking at what's our runway goal. And how does that help us with how scared that makes us feel versus trying to spend time with our little kids who we dearly love? So I think that's the equation you and your wife can make, right? Of where do you want to follow your risk tolerance versus how fast your kids are growing up?

SPEAKER_00: 17:57

Yeah, it... of course you just the right answer is spend all the time with your kids but of course it's not quite that simple is it you know

SPEAKER_01: 18:04

we we also live in a capitalist world for better or worse right where we need to make sure we pay the bills so our kids can be taken care of so that taking care of them also is making money unfortunately

SPEAKER_00: 18:16

we need to buy all this fancy podcasting equipment that we got we need to be able to pay for that

SPEAKER_01: 18:20

holding up a piece of equipment to the microphone

SPEAKER_00: 18:23

piece of rubbish from aliexpress that i shouldn't have bought is just cheap plastic and i I regret it.

SPEAKER_01: 18:29

Here's the most amazing thing that happened with me with Fractional. And being very candid, it didn't last long enough. That's why I have a full-time job, right? But there were moments where everyone had to ask if they could have a meeting. They couldn't force a meeting because they weren't my boss. And they weren't more than... let's say 35% of my income. So the power dynamic for the first time in my career shifted and I didn't abuse it, but I was in awe of it where I'd say, actually, no, today doesn't work. Let's schedule next Monday at a time that works for me. And they were okay with that. And the second part, I don't think you'll have as much of a problem with this as me, because I think you're okay saying no to someone, but I've struggled with that. I started saying no to clients and I started Wow. Wow. Wow. They fixed it, they apologized, and they said they deeply respected me for having been willing to speak to them about it.

SPEAKER_00: 19:57

Yeah. Look, can I ask? I should have asked before the show started. Do we have an explicit... Are we allowed to swear on this podcast?

SPEAKER_01: 20:06

We are. I'll put a little E in the marker at the podcast, and then Apple will be happy.

SPEAKER_00: 20:12

Well, so what I want to say about this is that I think for anybody, full-time, but... maybe more so with fractional workers, is you've got to have a little reserve of what I like to call fuck-off money. You need to have your fuck-off money in a separate account so that when you do get into these situations where you have maybe an emotionally abusive client and a particularly stressful job, something that's keeping you up at night, you can just give them a middle finger and pull out of your fuck-off money kitty.

SPEAKER_01: 20:45

And I was able to do that two or three times. And I've never done that before in my career, where I just said, no, that's not acceptable. I'm not going to work that way. And I so far did not have a single case where they were bothered by that. They actually wanted to work with me more.

SPEAKER_00: 21:00

Yeah, that's right. More often than not, telling someone to back off a little bit. will actually increase their respect for you as opposed to... But you can't do that unless you have the confidence to be able to do it. And so you need that. You just need to have that money put aside.

SPEAKER_01: 21:16

And for me, it was a... my wife and I had, we could see that we had enough for three months of our expenses. The moment I had that, my entire demeanor changed with all of my clients. And frankly, that also isn't a super large amount of money, but to me, it was just enough to be able to say no to clients. And also during the sales cycle, they would always try to push back and say, well, can you cut the amount of money in half or can you wiggle on this? And I just said no. And I signed more than I'd ever signed before.

SPEAKER_00: 21:48

Yeah, exactly. It can be hard with friends and long-term clients as well.

SPEAKER_01: 21:52

The thing that if someone's listening and they're curious about fractional, you become more attractive to clients when you don't need them. Yeah. Because they... Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 22:29

Right. It's some sort of confidence-based phenomenon. It needs a name. You need to name it, Joshua, this phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01: 22:34

All right. I'll work on that because I've had those moments where I'll get off a call and I'll go tell my wife, like, here's what I was able to say to this client because I didn't need the money. And that's my inherent concern about a full-time job where, especially in my case, we're a single-income family. So really all of our money is tied up in one job. And so I spent the time to try and make sure that I found a full-time job that at least was better than the other opportunities where I didn't feel that I could be candid. And I've tested that here. I've been extremely candid. I've pushed back. I've said things that I disagree with. And to their credit, they've been awesome about it. So I don't know. We'll see where my brain goes with handling that way of talking to people.

SPEAKER_00: 23:24

Yeah, I've had full-time jobs in the past where I was maybe a little too candid, or let's say candid with the wrong people at the wrong times, and that didn't end well at all. So, you know, use sparingly, but also... I think that that is such a superpower for businesses to be able to have employees and maybe fractional workers are exceptionally talented at doing this who can say no, who can tell you you've got a bad idea, you know, that sort of thing. It's really, really important for businesses. So it's an interesting mindset shift when you start to think not only is saying no good for me, but it's also really good for the business owner.

SPEAKER_01: 24:09

I started to have some of the business owners say, hey, Joshua, what are your other clients doing in this realm when they come across this kind of a problem? They started understanding that me being fractional was a benefit to them, not a hindrance. I think we've both done freelance for years in different capacities. So it's not that this is new to me, but the difference is it not being tied to your time would be the thing I think... would be worth experimenting with. So as you start to pick up contracts, can you find a way to remove them from time? And a monthly retainer, that's the simplest thing. I say, hey, here's my rate for one month. It's 20% discounted for three months if you pay up front. That's the simple thing I've sold to people.

SPEAKER_00: 24:54

Yeah, but there must be some time involved. Like, what are you saying? I'm going to do a day a week for a month or like...

SPEAKER_01: 25:00

My time could be three hours or it could be 15 hours in a week for this one fractional client. There's a vast variance and I'm taking the hit on myself for that.

SPEAKER_00: 25:12

I get that. I understand that. But I'm putting myself in the client's shoes here and saying, well, what am I going to get for my one month? Is it going to be you full-time working on this undivided attention? Or is this going to be just your available bits and pieces for meetings and consulting? Or am I going to get you working on the product and delivering a particular deliverable in this time? What am I getting? And I can't imagine pitching to a client without saying, yeah, I'm going to be here for a day a week, and then I'll also get back to you inside of the workday within a certain time frame on the other days.

SPEAKER_01: 25:50

Here's my pitch, actually, and this is one I did in the past with a client. I said, option A. you will get two cycles of iterations from me in a week. So if you send me something on a Monday to get done, within 48 hours, you're going to get either a wireframe, a design, a sketch, a video response back where I've thought, processed, and followed up. And in the in-between 48 hours, I'll be slacking you with questions. And so in a week, we will do two cycles of that. That's option A, and that's the smaller amount of money. Option B is a much larger amount of money where you get three cycles of that, and we have a weekly call. Option A has no weekly call, but it has two monthly calls, so biweekly. And so that's how I've split it up where it's truly async-based. versus we'll have a little bit of synchronous. And then what I send them is if they're curious, but not sure, I've created a video that says, here's a fractional client and here's what I did for them in the first three weeks. And I talked through the list of tasks I accomplished in the first three weeks. And that's, It's actually a true client I had that I worked with for eight months. And I said, day one, here's what I did. Day five, here's what I did. Week one, two, three, here's what I did. And I just talked them through. I had a sketch. I had an onboarding call. I had a design. I had a wireframe. Here was our pivot halfway through. And usually between that organic conversation, it's enough to convince anyone to give me a one-month trial. I

SPEAKER_00: 27:17

understand. I'm trying to apply. I guess it applies to... dev as opposed to design, where maybe I could say two pull requests or I don't know. It seems a bit too amorphous for me. I'm on the fence. You're going to have to send me this video.

SPEAKER_01: 27:37

I've actually been questioning if this could work for a dev. And actually, I talked to one about six months ago, told him my whole direction. And he also was questioning whether he could do that as a dev. He wasn't sure. The thing that I would... So you'll need to take what I'm doing and figure out how to modify it for your own experience. The thing I would say is you know that you have, would you say, three or four good dev hours in a day? Is that a good day for you?

SPEAKER_00: 28:04

So it changes. Yeah. If you give me one big...

SPEAKER_01: 28:09

I'll caveat. If I spend five really good hours today, I'm probably a little shot and I might be an hour or two tomorrow.

SPEAKER_00: 28:16

I don't work that way, actually. To be honest with you, it's a bit different for me. So if you give me, Joshua, like a really exciting, interesting problem to solve, and you have maybe some fat marker sketches, but not too much detail, I can spend... I can spend 12 hours on that and not realize that the time is gone and be energized to do it again the next day. If it's a great, interesting, tough problem, I can really get in the zone on something. And if I'm able to iterate quickly, I actually have quite a lot of good hours in me in the daytime and nighttime. I'll work on it and I'll enjoy it. I don't know, I get a lot of fulfillment out of that. But if it's like, oh, bug fix here and the code is kind of poorly written and this has to be refactored or you're using jQuery or something like this, then it becomes all of a sudden a lot less interesting and I get less excited and my hours diminishes and diminishes into maybe two or three small tasks or one big-ish task, maybe a large task I'll split over two days, something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 29:27

I'm really curious to see if you'll be able to. What I've done with some clients when I was less certain has said, here's my ideal way of working and here's my backup way of working. So you could test that, right? If you're talking to them and you're telling they're not quite sure about your weird way of selling, you say, or I charge you this amount for a day a week. So you can still kind of have your cake and eat it too with testing out different ideas.

SPEAKER_00: 29:53

Yeah, this is really good because I feel like the first time I was working for myself, I was testing out the idea of just having a set period as opposed to project based. And I would feel a bit of trepidation and a little bit of fear about approaching this topic with prospective clients, especially when I was in a position where I really needed it. Uh, So like, I don't know, this is all feeling, starting to feel pretty familiar. You know, I'm comfortable now saying I want X hours for X months. But then switching that to I want one or three months of work and I will give you some, you'll have to wait and see what you get. You know, like that feels a little bit, obviously I'm exaggerating that. That's not a fair representation of what you're suggesting.

SPEAKER_01: 30:47

No, it is a little bit like that. And I have a lot of people ask the exact same things you've asked. And so I've basically said, hey, here's the people who have trusted me in the past and liked me. Here's the companies I've done it with. I would love to hear from you if you try this in some capacity, if it works as a dev, because design is different, right? It's a different way of processing and handling. I might be able to think about something in 10 minutes that I can create a quick fat marker sketch and send off that is worth a day's work. work essentially, right? Because I'm leaning on 15 years of experience to just look at UX patterns and share them with the team. Engineering does have some of that when you're a senior engineer, as I understand it. But there also is some level of you've still got to build the thing out and make sure it works.

SPEAKER_00: 31:35

Right. There's the testing and QA side of things. Maybe there's unit tests involved and various different things. Yeah, it is a bit different, but I'll But, you know, I'll give it a shot and see.

SPEAKER_01: 31:47

If you were, I'll use a term which is probably outdated, but we used to talk about an engineering architect, the person kind of deciding what the system will look like and working with the engineers to create it. This sounds like this would work really well in that capacity. But if you're strictly an individual contributor, senior engineer, I think it's a question mark.

SPEAKER_00: 32:10

Yeah, one thing that a lot of people appreciate my help with, actually, And maybe this is something, a direction I want to go in, because I do enjoy it, is setting up those dev practices. Give me three months and I'll onboard into your project. I'll get everybody using... PHP code sniffer or ESLint, depending on what sort of code base it is. I'll get everyone creating pull requests properly, standardized branch names and branching strategies, and we'll get the releases working. Give me another three months after that, and we'll start doing unit tests, things like that. And I think that to help sort of give me three, six, 12 months to... take that sort of leadership development role and get all of the other developers upskilled in those more industry best practices, that could be a really interesting direction.

SPEAKER_01: 33:10

And actually, that fits perfectly with what I think of as fractional, right? Because if you're only there for three months, you're leaving it better off than before you got there. I've done that with design, where I've helped founders learn how to do fat marker sketches. I've helped them learn how to do the process and cycle. And a couple of them, actually, we stopped working together after three months, and they had enough to keep going until they could hire a full-time designer. And what you're describing... that actually might be more interesting to you, right? To take on that type of a project.

SPEAKER_00: 33:44

Yeah, it also means that I'm not diving into someone else's messy code base and having to fix it. I have to ask you a question because we've talked about Fat Marcus sketches a few times and I wonder if this is like insider lingo for like, you know, Basecamp fans like I know you are and I am as well. So when you're onboarding with a company and maybe you're doing some of this type of work that we just described, are you talking more about Scrum and agile methodologies or do you try and push people towards shape up

SPEAKER_01: 34:14

i'll reference that by the way in the show notes um i push people towards shape up almost exclusively and i don't really do shape up in a in any true sense i do what it means to me after four or five years of being very aware of it and what i basically sell someone

SPEAKER_00: 34:32

which is how it's supposed to be

SPEAKER_01: 34:33

Yes, yes. You take it and you build it into your own thing. And I walk someone through, hey, if we work together, here's how my process of taking your nebulous, chaotic idea and getting it ready for code. Here's what my process looks like. I walk them through it. And I've actually gotten to the point where I'm defining the process for every company I work with. The full-time job I'm at now, they already essentially run off the same process. It was a mutual Spider-Man pointing to Spider-Man and both very happy type of situation. But I'm often defining the process and saying, hey, I will work to get stuff ready for development. And we're going to work in a diverging, converging manner where we'll take ideas, we'll create some clarity. I will give you whiteboard marker sketches of that idea. Once we're happy, I'll then design it out in Figma. But I always give a caveat that a good project doesn't need Figma, where maybe I can go from sketches to the developers picking it up in code with components and running. So I always try to bypass Figma if I can.

SPEAKER_00: 35:42

That's interesting. Yeah. I wonder how long a life Figma has, but not to get too distracted by that. I have had consulting customers in the last 12 months where I've just said to them, here's the book. It's free. It's short. I read it on my iPad in an afternoon in the hammock. It's interesting. going to change your entire business, you should read it. And everyone who I've sent to Shape Up has reported back that it's unbelievable, it's really good, really describes the pain that we're feeling and has great common sense, sensible solutions. So if any listeners haven't read Shape Up, I definitely would point people towards that. But Joshua, I've just had an idea, just had a great idea on air as we're talking. You know what would be great? if wouldn't it be good if that's how i like to start my ideas wouldn't it be cool if you're a startup owner and you we are wanting to get started maybe you've already got started a little bit but things are feeling kind of murky and you're trying to scale what you really need is you need someone to come in and set up all your dev best practices get the code base nice and neat and tidy upskill your devs you need someone to come in and start fleshing out the design system make sure everything looks good and is working nicely and of course you want to hire new people so you're going to need someone in hr temporarily as maybe three to six month contract to really kickstart your growth opportunity where we could be a big team. I

SPEAKER_01: 37:11

love that. And I actually, I've met some folks that they really, operate with multiple fractionals running together, where when a company is looking for something, they're like, hey, here's the three or two fractionals you need until you're ready to go full time. I'll actually, I'll pivot to that. If anyone is interested in what you described, where can they find you? And I think this would be actually probably a great place to wrap up. I know this is so new for you, but if someone is looking for that, yeah, how will they reach out?

SPEAKER_00: 37:42

I have it on my to-do list that I've already started making that I need to get my website updated to pitch me as a fractional worker. You can find my website. It's my surname, C-A-R-B dot I-S, Carbus. It's dot I-S, not dot com or dot I-U because I'm cool like that because I have a really short domain. I'm not really on the platform formerly known as Twitter. LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_01: 38:13

That's actually perfect for our field. And I find that LinkedIn is most commonly referred. So I'll put both of those into the show notes. And I think if someone... And this actually comes up quite often within my realm of someone... I don't know if you meant to describe this, but you're almost describing a fractional CTO type of role with what you defined, and that may be the area that you'll look out for. Hey, this has been fun, and I'd like to have you back on in a couple months. If this has been successful or if it hasn't been, I think it will be really fun to see.

SPEAKER_00: 38:45

I'd love that, Joshua.

SPEAKER_01: 38:47

Thank you, everyone, and we will end here. Have a great day.