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Show notes
Trevor Newberry is the owner and operator of Newberry Consulting and the co-founder of AppThink. With both companies, Trevor's goal is to help first-time and non-technical founders save time and money building their software products by teaching and applying product management best practices. He likes talking with clients about how to build a software product when you've never done it before and you don't know how to code.
In fact, he spends a lot of his time working with first-time or non-technical founders. In this episode, Trevor shares how, even though he's creating digital products, he plans his week by putting his most important goals on paper and why he chooses this over a digital planner. His wife also works from home and uses a lot of ergonomic products, since she's of a shorter stature; however, Trevor talks about how his desk set up is more about having access to good quality stationery and pens as well as some software that helps him organize and manage his work.
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Transcript
April Malone 0:07
Hello, hello, my name is April Malone, and I'm with Yes I Work From Home, and this is the podcast. Today I have Trevor Newberry with me. He is the owner and operator of a company called Newberry Consulting, and he's the co-founder of AppThink. Trevor, thank you for coming today.
Trevor Newberry 0:24
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
April Malone 0:26
Good. Tell us about both of these companies that you're working with.
Trevor Newberry 0:30
Sure. They're really, really related. AppThink is grown out of my experiences with Newberry Consulting, so I'll give you a little bit of actually, sort of a high level of what I do in general. So, I am a product manager, and I work with first-time and non-technical founders to help them build their software products. So, if you've got an idea for an app or a web app, a website, etc., and you've never done it before, you're not technical, you don't have a CTO, I'm the guy that comes in and helps you understand what that process looks like, and I just sort of coach and guide you through that process. What I found with Newberry Consulting was that it's been a really, really great experience, but I have to get really deeply involved with my clients, so I typically only work with 2 to 3 people at a time which, you can probably guess, that's not very scalable. So what we did was a buddy and I, who also works in product, we decided that a lot of these principles and a lot of these learnings could be packaged up and taught in a more scalable fashion online, so we decided to found AppThink together. AppThink is really sort of the scaled, online, cohort-based outgrowth of that product management work that both he and I do, so I work for myself. He's actually the director of product for a local startup here in Birmingham, so perfect combination. There are plenty of other people out there that do similar work, but we are trying to change that game by adding just enough 1:1 help and coaching throughout that process that it's really, really impactful but also allows us to service more people at a time.
April Malone 2:06
Right. So did you say that you both are in Birmingham?
Trevor Newberry 2:09
Yeah.
April Malone 2:10
Okay, great. So do you get together and work like face to face, or do you do a lot of your work remotely with each other?
Trevor Newberry 2:16
It's a little bit of both, but he is actually my backyard neighbor, so he's about 150 feet away from me at most times, so yeah. Then you know, in the era of COVID, we do some face-to-face work, but it's always on my back deck and it's, you know, always distanced appropriately, so yeah.
April Malone 2:32
Well that's convenient. Do you literally like have a gate that opens up between your backyards, or do you have to like go around the block?
Trevor Newberry 2:38
There's a gate and a tiny little alley and then his backyard, so they're literally right there.
April Malone 2:46
I love it. Now was that planned, like were you guys partners before you became neighbors, or did it just happen this way?
Trevor Newberry 2:53
No, we didn't even really know each other before. I knew his wife, so I actually, maybe we'll get into this, but my background is in food and beverage hospitality actually, so it's kind of an odd start for someone that works in software now but, ya know, that is what it is. This is the millennial lifestyle. My mom always -- go ahead.
April Malone 3:14
Music and art, and here we are--
Trevor Newberry 3:16
Yeah. My mom always comments, "I'm so impressed how flexible you are and how you can change direction so easily," and I'm like, "That's literally all my generation knows."
April Malone 3:26
That's like the definition of...yeah.
Trevor Newberry 3:29
Yeah, that's what we do. So that being said, I knew his wife through a teaching farm, so she worked for a nonprofit teaching farm here in Birmingham, and we would buy a lot of produce from them. The proceeds from that went to help fund their education initiatives in schools, so I knew his wife, and then they bought a house right behind us and they moved in; then over the past couple years, we've just gotten to know them and become good friends. Yeah.
April Malone 3:55
Did you even know that she and her husband had bought the house, or just later?
Trevor Newberry 4:00
Yeah, and I tell people this all the time, Birmingham is the biggest small town in the world, so like everybody kind of knows everybody; everybody's just like a degree or two removed from each other. So yeah, there were people that we knew that were good friends that would say "Hey, you know Dave and Mary Beth are buying that house behind you," so we knew it was happening--
April Malone 4:17
Yeah, there's probably a few jokes about that sort of thing.
Trevor Newberry 4:20
Oh yeah.
April Malone 4:20
Oh yeah. I grew up in a small town, so I kind of get the idea.
Trevor Newberry 4:23
Yeah and actually, I didn't ask you; where are you located?
April Malone 4:27
I'm actually in Arizona.
Trevor Newberry 4:28
Oh cool.
April Malone 4:28
But I'm originally from Minnesota, and I spent time in Missouri and Illinois, so lots of Midwest and cold. And now, my husband and I were talking just last night, and we're like, "After living here and the beautiful winters that we have, my family had got dumped on with snow twice in the past week and it's like mid-October right now, you know in the second half of October, they literally have snow on the ground, and it looks like Christmas--
My parents live in Columbus, Ohio.
We're not sad to be here.
Trevor Newberry 4:57
Yeah no, it's fine.
April Malone 4:59
Rather, they say, "You can't shovel sunshine," and yeah, that's a whole other story, but I don't think I've ever been to Alabama.
Trevor Newberry 5:08
There's, you know, Alabama's a surprising state. It is, in some ways, a very problematic state, but also it's beautiful; it's one of the most biodiverse states in the country. It's sort of a hidden gem, so if you're into hiking, if you're into camping, we have everything from sort-of-flat pretty farmland to the very foothills of the Appalachian Mountains to a really beautiful coast all kind of packed into one state. It's a surprisingly pleasant place to live.
April Malone 5:37
You're selling it.
Trevor Newberry 5:39
Yeah, and it's a very inexpensive place to live, so there's that.
April Malone 5:43
Let's go back into your history a little bit.
Trevor Newberry 5:46
Sure.
April Malone 5:47
Why don't you--I know you gave me like the broad overview, bird's-eye view of this, but let's talk about how you got into the software development, and why specifically you're wanting to work with people who are non-techie.
Trevor Newberry 5:58
Yeah, absolutely. I know it's a big problem right now. Just to kind of give you the background that you asked for, I worked for a company that experienced a fire in 2017, and when that happened, we were closed for about 4 months. I didn't know what to do. I was really lucky I had a paycheck coming in.
April Malone 6:18
Oh wow.
Trevor Newberry 6:18
Yeah, a couple of very good friends of mine said, "Hey, you should look at consulting. You know a lot about the industry. You know, maybe you can help some people out this way." So I started by targeting food and beverage businesses, hospitality businesses; I knew a lot about everything from the accounting to purchasing; the supply chain; the logistics of it; hiring, firing, training--the whole thing. What I found was that that industry is very poorly situated to pay for, and even really not a lot of demand for, professional services. So along the way, I was really fortunate to be connected to a couple of accelerators, student accelerators, incubators here in the Birmingham area, and you may know, a lot of those have to do with tech. I was asked to be a mentor several times over and was exposed to some different software ideas, and I thought, "This is pretty cool. A lot of the same principles apply here. It's not a 1:1, but I'm really interested in this industry," so I just organically began to move my own training, so I did a lot of my own internal training, a lot of the work just sort of understanding the industry and what goes into working with building software and just over the past few years have really organically, but very intentionally, moved my business in that direction. Now when I talk about non-technical or first-time founders, what I find is that there are a lot of people out there that have really big ideas, and they want to build something like a mobile app; they want to build something like a website or a web app. Sometimes even people that I talk to that have big ideas for big SAS platforms that are really, really complex and really expensive to build, but because there's not a lot of experience or any experience with those people, there is a huge thing that we call at AppThink "the software sinkhole" where the process of building software is so different and so unique and so problematic if you don't know anything about it that a lot of people that don't have a technical co-founder, they don't have a CTO, they're not coders themselves, they end up losing a lot of money and a lot of time on these projects. So I have a really deep passion for those folks and saying like, "There's not really a reason that they shouldn't have a fair shake at building a really successful software product, so I really work hard to help those people understand what that process looks like and to have successful outcomes from those efforts, yeah.
April Malone 8:43
"Fair shake." I like that. So basically there's a market there, but there's also a sinkhole, and not very many people can navigate all of the nuances in the tech side of it.
Trevor Newberry 8:56
Yep.
April Malone 8:57
Yeah, I can see that. I've had big ideas before and definitely wasn't able to implement them so...
Trevor Newberry 9:03
It's really, really hard, and you know, this may not be the direction you want to go but, you know, I have lots and lots of deep thoughts around why that happens and what the specific elements of that sinkhole are, but suffice it to say that it's unlike building any other product; it's unlike building a sneaker or a pen or whatever. It's full of uncertainty. It's full of really hard decisions. It's full of a lot of hurrying up and waiting, right, which a lot of people are uncomfortable with, and there's really not a lot of very good analogues out there in "Product Land" in general that help people understand what this process is going to look like, so yeah.
Okay, so my audience is comprised of people who work from home who are either employees of a company or maybe like a small business owner working with a remote team, or they are entrepreneurs. So would you say that 99% of your people are these founders who are like first-time entrepreneurs, or do you ever work with the corporate side as well?
So somewhere in between, actually. It's a little more rare to find someone who's never done it before; usually what I actually find are people that have started a traditional business successfully and have said, "Hey look, I've banked some cash; I've got a big idea for an app. Let's move some of that funding in that direction." But I do run into people that are truly like no experience with entrepreneurship, no experience starting a business, and those are actually some of the most exciting people to work with because you see like immediate results, right? You see immediate impact with the first meeting that you have and say, "Here are the first three things that you need to do," and they go "Whoa, my mind is blown," because it is totally different. It is something that just doesn't, yeah like I said, it doesn't really have an analogue anywhere else.
April Malone 11:00
Doesn't necessarily come naturally.
Trevor Newberry 11:02
No, not at all. So when we think about starting businesses--and this applies to your stay-at-home people, your work-from-home people, your entrepreneurships--when we think about starting businesses, we think, "What's the first thing I need to do?" Well, maybe there's some research involved, but most people go out and find out like, "What is it going to cost?" "What are the components of it?" "If I want to build this mechanical pencil, you know, where do I source the materials? How do I get the CAD designs?" All this stuff. With software, the big risk is that you're going to build something that no one cares about, and you're going to pay $200 an hour for developers to build that thing over 6 months, and you're not going to know. If you do it the way that you normally produce a physical product, you're not gonna know if you've built something that anyone cares about until you have the product finished, right, which is a huge danger. You're putting $100-$150 thousand behind something that you literally have no idea if anyone cares about. So the real script flipping that happens for people is we do a lot of work on the front end to interview potential users. We do a lot of rapid prototyping. We do a lot of tests.
April Malone 12:10
Market research.
Trevor Newberry 12:11
It's market research in a different way than most people think about it though because it's actually getting in front of people and putting even fake products in front of people to see, you know, "How do you react to this interface? Can they find the right button to click? By the way, do you even care about--is this a problem that you don't care about solving, or is this a problem that you really care about solving, or is it not a problem at all?"
April Malone 12:34
So a dear friend, I don't know how long ago it was maybe 20-30 years ago, some family friends built a house, and the dad, he was an electrician that had a lot of people in the, you know, construction business. So he and his family members and friends and family built his dream house where they had 7 kids and built it out in the country between 2 really huge trees, and it was gorgeous, and it took so much time. And in the end, they lived in it for, I think, a year, and then they sold it. They said it cost so much more money than they expected; it took so much longer; and it was so stressful that they just had to basically move back into town into a much smaller house. They stayed there for like 20 years, and I guess what you're talking about was just making me think about that situation like, "Is it possible that everyone has like unrealistic expectations about how much money it's going to cost and how much time it's going to take?" And then they're like, "Oh my god, I had no idea it would be this involved.
Trevor Newberry 13:38
Yep.
April Malone 13:39
Do you ever have the happy ending where people are like, "Oh, that was easy."
Trevor Newberry 13:42
We always shoot for the happy ending. It's never easy, you know, starting a business and launching your product. I had this conversation yesterday with a new client that I'm onboarding, and I made recommendations that, you know, I've always got these books beside me that I'm like, "Read this book and read this book." But I always tell people, books are great resources. You can find the information that I provide in my services anywhere online, right, if you look hard enough.
April Malone 14:10
Yeah.
Trevor Newberry 14:10
But the practice is what's the most important thing. And that's where I think most of the hangups happen is the resistance to the time that it takes to get comfortable with these processes and these techniques, the time that it takes to do that, it's a little discomforting, but it is also the old adage of "You slow down to go faster," right? If you slow down early on with building specifically software products but really any product that comes with a lot more unknowns than knowns--that's the way that I put it--so if there are more things that you don't know than things that you do know at the beginning of the process, the agile methodology to get technical is a really good fit for that, and if you slow down at the very beginning and do the work that you need to do to turn some of those unknowns into knowns, you're going to have ultimately a cheaper, faster, and more successful experience. Very rarely does anybody build a new app or a new website or whatever and it's Uber, you know or Airbnb; like that iterative process is so important. Even if you get it out of the gate and it's moderately successful, there's still, over the lifetime of a product, you just still have to keep going through this process of iterating, talking to your customers, testing different things. It's a long process, but to get from idea to what we call an MVP is never painless, but it can be a successful process if you're willing to do some work that feels counterintuitive.
April Malone 15:43
Got it.
Trevor Newberry 15:44
Yeah. And also, you know, one of the things I thought about when you were talking about the house is that it's interesting because people use homes as analogues for building software, and it both works and doesn't work at all because the difference with software is that like with a house, you can't tear the foundation out and put a new one in; the whole house comes down, right. Once you've built, it you've built it. With software, you can, so that gives you a lot of flexibility, but it also brings a lot--that greater flexibility creates a lot of unknowns like, "What sort of database mechanisms do I need to have built here?" "If I change it out for this, what does that do to the experience of using the software?" You know, "If I tear the wallpaper off the walls, so to speak, like what does that do to the user experience?" And all those things are a lot more easy to do with software than they are to do with physical product, so it creates like opportunity but also creates, you know like we talk about Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and how they wore the same thing every day to reduce decision fatigue. You run into decision fatigue with applications, with software, because you can build most things that you want to build, but what's the best way to do it? And the process of answering those unknowns, turning those unknowns into knowns, that's what that process is, like "Okay, there's all these options. How do we narrow it into what's the best and most viable option?" Yeah.
April Malone 17:13
Let's talk about efficiency for a few minutes.
Trevor Newberry 17:16
Sure.
April Malone 17:16
When I was asking you some things that you might want to talk about in this interview, you seemed to have a lot of ideas about managing your own workflow, efficiency and, like you said, reducing that fatigue.
Trevor Newberry 17:28
Mm hmm.
April Malone 17:28
Did you say that? You you were talking about decisions that you make. How does that play into like your everyday life working from home.
Trevor Newberry 17:36
Yeah, so, you know, COVID-19 obviously changed a tremendous amount about working from home for a lot of people. My wife is working from home for the first time ever.
April Malone 17:45
Yeah, my husband too.
Trevor Newberry 17:46
Yeah. Thankfully, she loves it; it's a great change for her, but I know that's not true of everybody. So I want to say one thing out of the gate is that it's really, really hard and it's a neverending process of figuring out how to work from home and do it efficiently. My advice tends to stay high level because, as you probably saw from the the pre-interview questionnaire, I'm really acutely aware that everybody has different situations; people have differences in predilections for men and women, for different kinds of jobs, and so, you know, the biggest piece of advice that works for me is to have a schedule that you stick to, to have a routine that you stick to, because what I find is that--again, that's the decision fatigue thing--is that if one day I'm up at 10 o'clock in the morning and I start working, the next day I'm up at 6 o'clock in the morning and start working, I am so much less productive; I get so much less done, so I try to stay on the schedule. The flip side of that is that I do have some more flexibility. I mentioned that we have some construction next door.
April Malone 18:54
Yeah.
Trevor Newberry 18:54
So we live in a historic neighborhood; the homes were built really strangely close together.
April Malone 19:01
I live in a neighborhood like that.
Trevor Newberry 19:03
Yeah, so the workers in this home--someone just moved and the new owners doing remodeling--they left all the lights on in the house last night. And like our homes are so close together that all the light's like streaming into our bedroom
April Malone 19:15
Oh, wow.
Trevor Newberry 19:16
Neither me or my wife slept worth a crap at all. So, I had the flexibility to sleep till 7 this morning instead of 6 just because I needed some extra sleep, but I do that as in that's an exception to the rule. I get up at 6 every morning. I have a routine with the dogs. I have a routine with breakfast. And it's hard to describe in really concrete terms, but over time, that has a profoundly positive impact on what I'm able to get done. I also, and stop me if I'm getting too far into things here, but I also use--and I think, again, the tool that you use is entirely up to you, but I use Michael Hyatt's Full Focus Planner, but the point of that whole product is to have a plan for my day, and I try my very best to do that the day before. I don't wait until I start that day to plan what I'm doing. I also do planning for the week, so on Sunday afternoon--Sunday is what works for me; some people do it on Friday, Saturday--but on Sunday afternoon, I sit down and say, "I've got client 1, client 2, client 3. What are the most important things--if I'm going to call it a successful week--what are the most important things that I have to get done for client 1, client 2, client 3." I write those down, and I have a one-page, actually sort of like an open-to page, for every day where I can take notes, I can schedule my day, I can write those most important things down, and that really helps me stay on track because, as you may have picked up, it's complicated building software, and when you're working with 2 or 3 different software products in different industries, it can get a little bit wonky; your brain can get a little confused. So that planning the day before, and even taking stock of what your week, like defining what a successful week looks like on Sunday or Friday or Saturday, whatever, and writing that down and holding yourself to that is incredibly, incredibly helpful.
April Malone 21:09
Would you describe yourself as someone who is self-discipline focused, or would you find yourself more at the other end of that spectrum? I identify more with the probably undiagnosed ADHD and also sleep deprivation and 3 kids, and I have interviewed some people that just seem very driven and like they probably make spreadsheets of their spreadsheets kind of people; like where do you fall in there?
Trevor Newberry 21:34
Not quite that driven. I would just say I thrive on routine; I thrive on knowing what's going on in my day. I use the description--it's not unlike the conversation around decision fatigue, but it's like I've got a painting, right, and I can put whatever I want on the canvas, but I have to have a frame; I've got to have some boundaries around what I'm doing there, right. So structure and routine really helps me to sort of understand how I'm going to paint my day or paint my week, if you will to stay with the metaphor. You know that being said, it's not something that just comes naturally. I wouldn't call myself--I know having 2 companies probably doesn't sound like this, but I wouldn't call myself a "driven" person. I don't feel that competitive driven nature, but I like to be doing things all the time; that's something that is true of me. My wife and I often will argue about this; my wife really loves to have like downtime downtime, like not doing anything.
April Malone 22:41
Oh yeah.
Trevor Newberry 22:41
Yeah. I love having a weekend or a vacation, but I can't not be doing something. I just got to not be doing work, you know; maybe I'm doing something on the house, or I'm working on a different project that's just for fun or something, but I've got to be like up and doing something. So I think that's really not so much like a driven, "I've got to succeed" sort of thing; I just have a drive to do things, and having that structure and that routine helps me to organize some of that energy because otherwise I do, ironically, end up sitting in a chair, playing a video game, and feeling bad about myself or something like that, you know. It's not a very pleasant place to be when I don't have that structure and that routine.
April Malone 23:24
Right. So do you work a typical 40-hour work week, do you stack your days, or how do you do that with meetings and things?
Trevor Newberry 23:34
I've had it change over the years of working for myself and working from home. Generally speaking, I try to hit about 40 hours a week. There are times when you need to work more than 40 hours a week. Having 2 businesses, it certainly will increase those hours and also being in product management. It's hard because with product, you know, I'm interfacing with marketers; I'm interfacing with developers; I'm interfacing with the stakeholders so clients, people that have the money, and coordinating all of those interests can take a lot of time and take a lot of energy. But most of the time, 40 hours is all you need to get work done if you can find a system that works for helping you be efficient. Now that being said, you're the kind of person that needs 80 hours a week, but 30 of those you're like kind of just figuring things out; you have less of a structured workflow, you're sort of fine, whatever works for you. I would say that you don't need to have your nose to the grindstone for 80 hours a week; that's kind of silly. If you have a job that requires that of you, then you should reconsider. I just think that that's not a healthy way to be living. I've done that--I've worked in hospitality and food and beverage--I've done that life, and it was not good for me; it wasn't good for my marriage. I would never go back to it, and I'm very thankful for the lessons I learned from it, but I would never go back and do it again. But yeah, 40 hours a week is what I try to keep myself at. If I go up to 50, it doesn't bother me; sometimes it's required. But also in keeping with the theme of having a structure, like I target that, right, so it's like 40 hours a week; if I stay on track, I know I'm going to get all the things done that I need to get done in that 40 hours a week, right. So it's a good metric for me to measure whether or not I'm getting stuff done.
April Malone 25:26
I don't know if I asked you this at the beginning, but how long have you been working from home? because you talked about you were in the food and beverage hospitality industry, and how many years were you in that industry and, like, when did you go home?
Trevor Newberry 25:39
So I've been working from home in various capacities, you know, sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time since 2017.
April Malone 25:45
The fire.
Trevor Newberry 25:47
Yeah, the fire; that was really the beginning of me doing that and figuring this whole thing out which was, you know, kind of bonkers at first. I would spend a lot of time tooling around on Facebook because I couldn't figure out what to do. It's really, really hard. I want to keep going back to that for your listeners; like if you feel like you can't get it right, like welcome to the club; it's just part of it. Yeah, you get better at it, but you never get 100%; I don't know that many people that are 100% but yeah. So 2017, I was working in the food and beverage industry, God, I mean, since I was 16, for a long, long time. I went to college; I have a degree in political philosophy. The whole time, I worked in food and beverage; like I paid my bills, and drinking money and everything like that came from, you know, waiting tables and bartending and all of that.
April Malone 26:41
I did it for 9 years also so...
Trevor Newberry 26:43
Yeah. Okay, good; you understand then. And I think that, you know, one of the things that I struggle with now, just personally, is like my wife, she's changed jobs a few times. She's a nurse, and those hours are not as typical, but towards the end of her time in clinical work, she was doing more of a 9-to-5 kind of job, and I've never had that, you know. I've had running coffee shops where I was at work at 5 in the morning. I've had bartending shifts where I was coming in at 1 or 2 and staying until 1 or 2.
April Malone 27:14
Nights and weekends.
Trevor Newberry 27:15
Yeah, I never really had that experience of a 9-to-5, so I think that gave me an advantage going into work from home because I was more flexible. I didn't have sort of an ingrained expectation of what work was, right.
April Malone 27:31
Or when you went to work.
Trevor Newberry 27:33
Yeah, but also it sort of hamstrung me in the same regard because, you know, when I have friends that say like, "Hey, I'm applying for this job," you know, but I just don't have a lot of those reference points. I've never had a 401k. I've never had employee-sponsored health care. They're just experiences that I've not had that it makes it difficult for me to speak to, you know.
April Malone 27:55
Yeah, I did the restaurant thing too for a long time, and it's funny because I went from that into a 9-to-5 job, and then I ended up working nights for like 10 years, actually it's more like 12, and I kind of feel like I'm striving. I mean, I know a lot of people want to just drop that, but I'm driving back towards those regular business hours because that's what my husband does, and my kids are in school, and I want to have the evenings and weekends with my family and not be sleeping or a zombie or whatever we've been doing like basically my kids' entire life. Do you feel like you're trying to push yourself towards more of those regular business hours now?
Trevor Newberry 28:33
Well absolutely. Like I've said, I really thrive on having a reliable schedule. It allows me to make better use of my downtime; it allows me to make better use of the time when I'm not working because I can define when I'm not working. Because we don't have kids--we have 2 dogs, that's it--you know like last night I had to get a proposal to a potential client, and we ate dinner, and I sat down and spent an hour working on that. It's not a big deal, right; like I just don't have the demands on my time that a lot of people do. I have said, and will continue to say, that parents throughout the COVID-19 work-from-home lifestyle, y'all are the rock stars. I don't know how you do it. I don't want to do it. I'm sure it's really, really, really hard, and I cannot express adequately enough how much I respect the people that are able to do their work, have kids, manage learning from home or you know the the real uncertainties behind going back to school and all that comes along with that. I just, yeah, you have my utmost respect.
April Malone 29:37
Respect for sure. I kind of identify as like a stay-at-home mom since I am home all the time, but I also definitely identify as the working mom, but a working mom who works from home, who sends their kids to school is very different than that working mom who keeps your kids at home and homeschools them at the same time.
Trevor Newberry 29:56
Yeah.
April Malone 29:56
And those are like the champions right now. I feel like those are the unsung heroes that we're all like, "Teach us your ways."
Trevor Newberry 30:05
I mean, I follow people on Twitter and Instagram, and you know, my favorite people that I follow are really brutally honest about it. They're like, "Hey, this sucks. I'd love it if my kids went back to school because it's a real pain to have to manage all that." But they do it, and they're rock stars for it.
April Malone 30:22
Yeah, we are definitely taking one for the team. We kept our kids home. We are actually having an outbreak at our school right now; there have been a few positive cases, and I don't know when this is going to publish but it's not great, I'm not sure if they're going to go back to remote again or if they're going to try to like, you know, increase their protective measures. I don't know, but we definitely, you know, you make a sacrifice to keep your kids at home during this time, but there are also like some beautiful things that have come out of it. I have a daughter who is pretty high strung, a brilliant little girl, and also struggles with, I don't know, just anxiety maybe. We haven't had that diagnosed, but just like she would have like a meltdown about things that you wouldn't expect, and this has been the most peaceful 6 months, actually more like 8 months now that we've had. It's been wonderful--
That's awesome.
--Especially with her. The things that we were struggling with are not the struggle anymore. We have new things.
Trevor Newberry 31:22
I think it's made us reckon--and I think maybe this is relevant to the podcast--I think that COVID-19 has really made us reckon not just with the nature of work but also the nature of family and friends, you know. We were super, super careful at the very beginning of everything. We didn't see anybody for months; it was kind of a dark time, it was a tough time. We have, you know, a bubble now, so we have friends that we have had very frank conversations with that "We will see you guys. We will hang out with you guys, but we have to agree to be very transparent with each other. If anybody tests positive or starts to feel bad, you've got to let us know." And I think it's just been an interesting exercise--and I don't even know that we've really fallen on one side of it or the other, if there is a side or the other--but it's been an interesting exercise in exploring like "What is work? What is important for work to look like and what isn't? What have we been holding on to as sort of dogma?" And then, you know, what is that relationship, how does that impact our relationships with our family, with our friends, and things like that. So I think it's been very interesting just from a thought experiment standpoint to be going through this time. Yeah, I mean obviously it's been a terrible time; it's been a tragic time, but it has called a lot of things into question. I have, you know, lots of feelings about the dogma of work, and I think that those things have been called to task, yeah.
April Malone 32:53
Let's change gears a little bit. I could talk about that literally all day long, and I do; I do have my couple of friends that, you know, they stay at home; they work from home; they have everything delivered; their kids are not going to school; all of those things. And it is really important to have people that you can talk with, you know, openly and transparently about everything. I want to just kind of dive a little bit deeper into, like, one day.
Trevor Newberry 33:16
Yeah.
April Malone 33:16
Like how would you organize a day so that you feel like you're productive.
Trevor Newberry 33:21
Sure. So what the most important thing for me to do--and sadly I wish I could say I have a 100% track record on this; I don't. Again keeping with the theme of "be kind to yourself," you never get it 100% right--but the day before, I sit down. I go through what I got done that day. I write down what I need to get done the next day, and it's really important for me to keep that to 3 things.
April Malone 33:42
Okay, yep.
Trevor Newberry 33:43
My planner has space for 3 big things and then some space for like, "if you get those things done, tackle these things," so it sort of visually represents what's most important--
April Malone 33:54
And you're doing this on pen and paper or are you doing it on a digital format?
Trevor Newberry 33:56
I'm doing it on pen and paper. I am a digital guy; I love my technology. I ordered the new iPhone as soon as it came out; like, I love this stuff.
April Malone 34:06
I'm a little jealous.
Trevor Newberry 34:08
It is one of the things that brings me a lot of happiness in life, but pen and paper connects with your brain a little bit differently. I find that I process thoughts better on pen and paper, so I use my digital tools mostly to complement those things. Going back to that, I write down 1... 2... 3... anything else that would be great to get done if I have time, and then I even have a space in my planner--and again you can just create this in any notebook, you don't have to have a specific planner--
April Malone 34:39
I'm literally looking at like 1...2...3...4...5... Yeah, there's at least 8 empty journals in my office right now.
Trevor Newberry 34:48
I love and again I'll plug the Michael Hyatt Full Focus Planner. It's a really, really nice book; it's hard bound; the paper is really nice in it. I'm into stationery as well, so like I use fountain pens just because it's fun. Again, I have a virtual assistant who I think scheduled this, Paulina, and she put it really, really great. She said, you know, "It's the little things; like they don't really matter, but they just kind of make the process of doing work more fun and more enjoyable." Anyway so I use this planner, and I have a space that actually goes through the hours of the day, starts at 5 a.m. and goes through 9 p.m., and I block off what I'm going to do. I only write in pencil in this planner because things change, and I need to be able to erase it. I also really value the concept of being able to look back to previous planners and say, "What did I do last October? I think I did something on that day; I want to see what my day looked like." So I have a recording of that right, but I write down what my day is going to look like. I schedule in meetings, podcast recordings, lunch, things like that. So that's all the day before; that is, that's the night before. A lot of times I'll do that like, you know, 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock, after dinner, or something like that. When I wake up--and I'll just go through my day in painful detail--the first thing I do is I make some green tea. I'm a big coffee drinker, but green tea is a little more gentle in the morning; it's not quite as a, you know, jolting wake up. I let the dogs out. I make a smoothie for my wife and for myself, and then actually I have a meditation practice which, I have found, is a little "woowoo." I think it takes some people a little bit of time to kind of adjust to the concept of it, but it has been one of the most beneficial practices that I've taken up in the past few years. It's a basic mindfulness meditation practice; it's 15 minutes in the morning, really helps me keep the thoughts and emotions that are constantly with you when you work from home, especially if you own the business. So a lot of people are working from home, but they're still working from an employer. When you own a business and you work from home, everything is you. Marketing is you. Delivery is you. When things go wrong, it's you. There's no one else to look to. There's no one else to support, you know, something blew up today. Well, guess what? That's your problem, right? So there's a lot of emotional baggage that comes along with it. I tell people a lot of times--I know I'm kind of wandering here, but I feel like this is all important stuff and relevant--I tell people a lot of times that I would never go back...No, I take that back. I would be reticent to go back to working for an employer. I love working for myself, but I've never been more stressed in my life, so it's a trade off, you know. I have more anxiety and more stress, so that meditation practice, for me it's really crucial; it can look different for everybody, but I think it's really crucial. So I have my smoothie and all of that afterwards, and then I usually have what I call a "work day startup," 30 minutes where I go through my email; I typically have a lot of email. Actually, I would say I probably work out of my email for a quarter of the day. Go through my email, clear out anything. I'm a really aggressive archive, delete, snooze emails; I want to keep my email inbox down to like 5 emails at a time.
April Malone 37:59
I wish I could say I do that.
Trevor Newberry 38:02
Well it took me a long time to get that habit built in, but when you work in your email a lot, if you look at that inbox and it says like 1000 messages, it's just so overwhelming so I keep it to like--
April Malone 38:12
Or 20,000 messages or 50,000.
Trevor Newberry 38:14
Yeah, exactly. Like that gives me anxiety thinking about it. I try to keep it to about 10 emails in my inbox at any given time; everything else either gets snoozed, which means I can like make it disappear, and it'll come back to me when I need to look at it; I archive it; answer it, or I delete it. After that weekday startup, that 30 minutes, I jump into my day which I have already planned in my planner, so I can start to work. I've got my schedule. At the end of the day, I have a weekday shut down which typically is when I will try to planning my next day; sometimes it is occupied by final emails that I need to answer, sort of administrative setup for the next day. So sometimes I get to that planning process later in the evening. If I can, I try to hit that planning process at that time, usually about 3:30 in the afternoon. And then I go and do a workout, and then that's it. So one of the people, the only couple that's really in our bubble, I don't have a garage, but he does and working out has always been something really important to me, and I think it's also really great for your mental and emotional health. So we built a garage gym in his garage; we split the cost of the equipment and built that there. And that's really the end of my, you know, I have a schedule for the day; everything after that is, you know, dinner and hanging out with my wife.
April Malone 39:33
Where did you put your office in your home, and--okay, I'm going to ask 2 questions, and I'll just tell them both upfront--and when did you hire your virtual assistant?
Trevor Newberry 39:44
Yep, good questions. So the office in my home is in a guest bedroom that rarely, especially in COVID-19, gets used as a guest bedroom, so it is an office with a bed in it. That's where I'm sitting right now; you can barely see it. I kind of turn the lights off and close the blinds, but that's you know, there's some pillows right there...
April Malone 40:03
Yeah, I did that before, guest bedroom/office, and then when we had guests, I had to move everything out.
Trevor Newberry 40:09
Yeah, I leave the desk in here and everything; I just clean it up for guests. It's like 98% of the time, this is an office, and 2% of the time, someone sleeps in here, so stuff stays. But when it comes to the virtual assistant, Paulina has been a godsend. I could not express how much I appreciate having her as a part of my little, tiny team; really, it's just the 2 of us. She has transitioned to working with AppThink, so Newberry Consulting, because I really only work with 2 or 3 people at a time, it's manageable for myself. It's not really something that I have a hard time keeping up with, but AppThink is going to be a bigger deal, so she's helping with a lot of the digital marketing stuff, scheduling stuff, helping with like scheduling podcasts, things like that. So I hired her a little over a year ago, and I'll be honest--if she listens to this, she may get mad at me--I did it kind of out of curiosity, because I'd been looking into what it was like to have a virtual assistant, you know. Like there were all these things that I needed help keeping track of, and I wasn't doing a very good job of, you know. I was really fortunate that I had enough income that I could afford it, so I brought her on and was like, "Let's figure it out. Let's find a place for you because I thrive on having some human connection. I don't need a big team on my company; I don't need more than a handful of people at max, but I don't do well when it's just me, you know. My wife does not want to hear all of the problems that I have with work; she does not need to hear all that. I need someone that I can lean on and talk to and help process what's going on with my business. So you know, from the technical side of things from helping with digital marketing, prospecting, handling emails, scheduling, all of the above, she's been a godsend, but also just having someone there that I can shoot a text to and say, "You'll never believe what happened, what do you think about this?"
April Malone 41:59
Right.
Trevor Newberry 41:59
Because I can't do that with--you know, I can do that with Paulina, you know.
April Malone 42:03
I can relate like to everything that you just said. I hired a virtual assistant in June, and my company is brand new; we are not generating enough income right now. I'm still doing my working from home, teaching English stuff, but my husband is not involved in this business. He's got his own job, and he actually is more of the homemaker of the family. He really likes cooking and planning meals, and he probably wishes I'd help a little bit more with the cleaning.
Trevor Newberry 42:29
That's me too.
April Malone 42:29
Yeah. And so my grandma sent some money, and I know exactly how I'm going to use this because there are some things I want to do with this podcast, and especially since I wanted to do video, I have literally no idea how to edit; I mean like, there's not enough time in the day. Then we also knew that we would be keeping the kids to do online school remotely with their teachers at school, and that honestly has taken way, way more of my time than I expected. I come from a homeschooled family. I was homeschooled for 7 years, but homeschooling with just your mom helping you is different than having to like go through all of the hoops of like getting paperwork and worksheets and things back to a teacher in another location. That has taken, probably, 3 times as much of my time than I expected, and so I'm so thankful to have this extra support.
Trevor Newberry 43:24
Absolutely. I love it and I recommend that anybody that runs their own business at least consider it. You know, I used a company called Belay to source my virtual assistant, and they were really, really helpful. But you can just find people on Upwork or Fiverr or in your network; if you know someone that's used someone, they can make a recommendation for you. They're very, very helpful, and the one piece of advice I would give people, and you may echo this, one of the hardest things for me personally as a Type A person was giving over that responsibility, and it took several months for us to sort of like hash that out together. But the more responsibility you can give up and give over to that person, the more value you're going to find that you get back from their time.
April Malone 44:12
My virtual assistant is going to be literally editing and like doing the transcript with me for this, and so he'll be watching every single word and listening to it multiple times with me talking, but I totally agree. And you know, there's little things that I was picky about at the beginning, and then like about a week or two ago, I actually interviewed someone, and he kind of challenged me about my perfectionism and I was like, "You are so right." I have not pushed forward in my building the company and creating content that maybe I could sell or the things that will make more money, and I've been like nitty gritty on these little things that I'm like, "We've got to take our--I don't want to say bring our standard down--but we need to increase our efficiency by letting go of some of the things that maybe don't really matter. We had an interview a little while ago that had an echo in it.
Trevor Newberry 44:58
Sure.
April Malone 44:59
And, you know, we could have spent a week and a half trying to get rid of the echo.
Trevor Newberry 45:05
Trust me, I know.
April Malone 45:06
And then I was like, "Screw it."
Trevor Newberry 45:09
It's not worth it. Yeah.
April Malone 45:10
I think we'll be able to suffer through this, and we were able to bring it down quite a lot. But at the very end, I was just like, "It's not that big of a deal." And you have a podcast, and you started another one.
Trevor Newberry 45:21
Yeah. So we talked about this pre show, I have a podcast called The Dispatch with Trevor Newberry. I wouldn't even call it a passion project; it is a when-I-have-time-for-it project. I don't have a regular posting schedule. I interview people when I find something interesting that I want to talk about or someone interesting that I want to talk to. It's a purely creative outlet. I really don't care if it has 50 listeners or 50,000 listeners; it's just fun for me to do. I am getting ready to launch a podcast for AppThink which will be a more regular posting schedule. It'll be topically more concise, so it will deal with non-technical and/or first-time founders founding software products, so we'll be diving deep. Like the first series that I've got is a 3-part series on design. What is design for software, right? Because design is something that's generally thought of as like "How do you make it pretty?" But that's really like 10% of what design is honestly. Making it pretty, especially when it comes to software, it's the last thing that we need to think about. It's more about function and human interaction that we talk about. So the first 3 series is me talking to a good friend of mine that works at a software development firm about design, and we're going to move through some different processes with that podcast as well so we'll interview development shop CEOs and say, "Hey," you know, "What's your experience with non-technical vendors? What do you wish that they knew coming to you guys?" You know, so really just trying to create content on a regular schedule, which is a challenge for me obviously with podcasting, that will accent and help make the best of the AppThink product and the AppThink experience so, yeah. And actually, I don't want to totally jump off of that, so go listen to The Dispatch; I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. But you were mentioning something just a minute ago about, you know, lowering your standards; there's a principle out there in behavioral psychology, and I actually may get that part wrong, but it's called the Pareto principle, and I live by it because I have a similar problem. The Pareto principle basically says that 80% of the value of something comes from 20% of the work, and I live by that. I will try to get as much of that 80% as I can, and if I have time to look for the next 20%, I will. I find that it is a much lower efficiency use of my time and my effort to go beyond that. So, I'm like you. If I record a podcast, and there's weird coughing or something like that, I'll spend that 20% of the time removing everything that I can, and when I'm done with it, if I've spent an hour and a half, 2 hours editing it, I'm done. "Walk away from it. It's fine. People have heard coughing before. It's an audio podcast, it's fine." And it's the same thing; I used to obsess over reports that I would send to my clients right. And I know this is a terrible thing to admit, but what I found was that if I had some typos or if the formatting was a little off, no one cared because what they cared about was whether or not the content was valuable, whether or not it added value to their process as a founder, so I save a lot of time and a lot of energy and frankly a lot of grief by saying when I hit that 80%--it doesn't mean that I don't tackle that remaining 20% of value, I just do it when I have time for it, and I don't stress about it if I don't have time for it.
April Malone 48:50
Yeah. How do you spell Pareto?
Trevor Newberry 48:53
P-A-R-E-T-O principle.
April Malone 48:56
Okay.
Trevor Newberry 48:58
The 80/20 rule is what some people call it.
April Malone 49:00
I will have to look into that, and is it a book or did you just find it online?
Trevor Newberry 49:04
No, it's a theory. It's sort of a work--I'm blanking on the specific section of the psychological world that it applies to, so I'm gonna say behavioral psychology; I probably got that wrong, so forgive me--But yeah it's a theory that people have come up with, and it's often applied to work and saying, "You need to maybe put a stop at that 80% and reevaluate when you have time for it because you have other more important things to do."
April Malone 49:34
Yeah, I wonder if that like goes along with the things I've heard about like "20% of the people get 80% of the work done."
Trevor Newberry 49:41
It's the same thing. Yeah, and that applies in a lot of different ways. And actually you know, I mentioned that I work out a lot and strength training is the same thing. I have a trainer that I work with, and I'll never forget him telling me like "Here are the things that you absolutely need to do, and we'll get you 80% of the results that you want. The remaining 20% are going to cost you, four times as much effort, four times as much time, probably not worth it unless you're planning on like competing as a power lifter or something like that." Like these things are the most important things to do; it's 80% of the value. The rest of it's going to take so much more time. It's a common principle.
April Malone 50:23
I feel like we could talk for quite a while about all of these things, but I would like to hear you--and just off the cuff for 1 minute--could you just tell us what other books are you telling people to read? You said, "I've got a lot of books I recommend," and you held up 1, and you mentioned Michael Hyatt's planner. Is that actually a book about using a planner, or is it actually like a planner you buy?
Trevor Newberry 50:43
So Michael Hyatt produces gobs and gobs of content. He's got podcasts; he's got planners; you can buy books. That being said, I am typically a little skeptical of that. I have bought his books. I've read his books, and sometimes it's like "This was a little elementary, like you packaged up some pretty basic information and sold it for 20 bucks." So that being said, love Michael Hyatt; if he ever listens to this, please forgive me. I buy some of your stuff; I don't buy other things, 80/20 right? Like I'm gonna get the value I need from you and I'm gonna move along. The planner is a planner, so it is an actual, like, daily--I don't know if you can see this--like an actual daily planner. And he does it on a subscription model which is smart. Each one of these is a quarter, so I get 1 a quarter. The problem I'm running into is what am I going to do with all of these planners when I have 4 a year that I have to store somewhere, but I'll deal with that when I get there. As far as books, I think that everybody would benefit from learning a little bit more about messaging and positioning, about how to talk to your customers and about your product in a way that connects with your customer. So I always recommend Building a StoryBrand as a book. The company is StoryBrand. It's a guy named Donald Miller; he's out of Nashville, Tennessee. It is a really easy to understand and follow framework for building messaging. Again, it can get super deep. You can spend a lot of time on this, but I feel like that's a book that everyone should start with.
April Malone 52:15
I haven't read it. I'm familiar with him, and I've like Googled it, but I haven't like purchased it.
Trevor Newberry 52:22
It's quality information. You don't have to take the $3,000 or $4,000 seminar; buy the $20 book. He has so much free content. He has a podcast and an email series that you will get 80% of the value from that much, right. The other one is I think everybody would really get a lot of value from learning about product management, and here's the reason why. Product management is, you know, I talk about it in the context of software, but even if you don't do your product management, it is a human exercise in balancing competing interests and balancing what features do we need to build. What does the marketing team need from this? What does the sales team need from this. What does the stakeholder need from this, right. So I think everybody, even if you don't do product work as a business owner, as someone that has a product that you're trying to sell to people would really, really benefit from learning more about what product management is and what the principles are. So, Marty Cagan has a book called Inspired; I'll put that in here as well.
April Malone 53:27
Cool, thank you.
Trevor Newberry 53:28
That's a good one. I mean honestly, I stick to those I read a lot of business books; and most of them as Seth Godin says, you know, people ask Seth Godin, you know, "How do you get through all the books that you want to read in a year?" And he says, "I read until I get the joke, and then I put it down." And I do the same thing; I'll buy the book, and I'll read until it's like, "Okay, I figured out what this book is about. I've got the point," and then I put it down. But these are books that I go back to over and over again.
April Malone 53:57
I will say that, you know, now that I'm into this entrepreneurial world a little bit more and I've been, you know, keeping my eye on everything, everyone's trying to sell you their course or their product, but if they have a book you can really get a good deal for what they're teaching from a book, and then you know, you can consider whether or not you want to invest in like a more in depth or high contact program. But, man oh man, I mean, people sometimes put a few years into writing that book; and there's a lot in there.
Trevor Newberry 54:27
I think, to that point, there's a guy named Shawn Blanc, who's also great to follow. Shawn has a, he writes about this a lot, when he talks about buying books, he has a policy, and his policy is "Buy the book." Just buy the book. He's like, "Relatively speaking, as a business especially, it's a small business expense, usually 20 bucks or less. And worst case scenario, it's kind of helpful but not really, and you're only out 20 bucks. If you go to Building a StoryBrand or if you go to StoryBrand's conference, you're out a plane ticket, a hotel room, and $3,000 right? So it's a big investment, but the book is not. There is actually one more book if you don't mind, if you'll indulge me.
April Malone 55:09
Yeah.
Trevor Newberry 55:10
So a good friend of mine in Atlanta, his name's Mo Bunnell, Mo has a really phenomenal company called the Bunnell Idea Group, and he does business development training, and his friendship and mentorship and his content has been incredibly impactful for me because part of having a business like this, like mine especially, is sales, right? And it's icky. No one likes to sell; I don't like to sell. Mo's system, to put it in a very elementary description of it, is around being helpful, being kind, and providing value, right. It's a fantastic system, just the tactics of it but also the way that it couches sales in business development, in the context of if you're selling you need to be selling something that helps your potential customer; it needs to be helpful. You need to be generous, and you need to be kind about it. So he's got a book; again, his training is also very expensive, but he's got a book called the Snowball System that I probably--I can't believe I didn't think to mention it earlier--I have lost the dust jacket; it's highlighted and marked up with pen. It's a fantastic resource, so I highly recommend that. He's also got a podcast that I think would be beneficial to anybody listening and yeah.
April Malone 56:26
Thank you for these recommendations. We'll go ahead and put all of the links to all of those books into the chat. How can people find you if they're interested in what you serve, or if they're interested in the products that you serve.
Trevor Newberry 56:39
That's okay.
April Malone 56:39
If they're interested in the, in the...I can't even. You just take it from here; we will not edit this out, we'll just keep it going.
Trevor Newberry 56:47
No, that's fine; I do the same thing with my podcast. So if anybody wants to find me or get in touch with me, I will admit fully that I am the worst, I have the worst digital presence, because I spend my time doing work, and frankly digital marketing is kind of annoying to me, so I value having people in my life that are good at it. But that being said, I have a website newberryconsulting.com. There's also a website for AppThink; it's appthink.io. Currently we're in the process of developing our MVP for AppThink, so what you can do in the meantime is you can go and sign up for an email course. We've put together a 4-day, one-email-a-day drip email course introducing the basics of product management. Dave and I put that together. It's really, really helpful, so you can do that. But also @NewburyConsulting or @AppThink on Instagram, Facebook, etc., etc. Yeah, it's important to note that AppThink is appthink.io which is kind of one of those new TLDs, but that was the one that was available so that's what we have.
April Malone 57:48
Got it, got it. So if we reach out to you, maybe we'll end up in a conversation with Paulina.
Trevor Newberry 57:53
Yeah.
April Malone 57:55
Is the drip thing, it's a four-day email, is that free?
Trevor Newberry 57:59
Yeah, totally free.
April Malone 58:01
So we can kind of get a feel for what you're doing and go from there.
Trevor Newberry 58:03
Yeah, it's a great place to start. What's really interesting about it, I had somebody look at it that was a marketer, and they're like, "You're not promoting yourself enough," and I was like, "I'm not trying to." I'm actually trying to provide a lot of value. You know, we don't have our MVP built yet, so we don't have anything to sell you, but I want people to get a feel for what AppThink is going to do and the approach that we're going to take, so it is just a free MailChimp drip email course. Of course, you give us your email so when we have something to sell, we'll email you about it, but right now, we just want to be able to provide some value and introduce people to sort of the ethos that we're trying to create with AppThink.
That is fair. Well, I will also ask you to maybe just send me an email with some of the products, like you had mentioned in here that your wife is in love with her desk, or you talked a little bit about some of the things that you guys like to use. Why don't you just send it to me, and we'll put it into the show notes since we're out of time now.
Sure.
April Malone 58:59
They're starting school now so I need to go make sure they're in their classes.
Trevor Newberry 59:03
Yeah.
April Malone 59:03
And then I'll just put those in. We do a whole transcript; we do the video; and we have the podcast, the audio version, and yeah, people can find those links; and I appreciate that.
Trevor Newberry 59:13
Yeah, absolutely. I'll send that over to you.
April Malone 59:15
Well thank you, Trevor. This has been a pleasure. Do you have any final words you want to share with our audience?
Trevor Newberry 59:19
Yeah, you know, when it comes to working from home, stick with it. Pay attention to what works. Pay attention to if something makes you feel good, if something helps you get your work done more efficiently; there's not a cookie cutter approach to this thing. It's hard, and it takes time to get used to, so you know, I like having a schedule, I'm Type A; that may not be you, right? So pay attention to what helps you get your work done, write it down, and try to repeat it.
April Malone 59:44
You don't have to be like everyone else.
Trevor Newberry 59:46
You don't; you're probably not because that's a myth. So, yeah, pay attention to what works for you and drill down on that; pay attention to those little threads that you can pull on.
April Malone 59:56
I love it.
Trevor Newberry 59:58
Yeah.
April Malone 59:58
All right. Well thank you, Trevor. I am April Malone; this is Yes I Work From Home, and we'll see you next time.
Trevor Newberry 1:00:04
Thank you.