Episode 72: Evelyn Powers

Hallway Chats

Introducing Evelyn Powers

Evelyn is a strategist and designer for Design Powers, Nice Work, and Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. All three businesses utilize her creative expertise to assist clients and colleagues to connect and communicate their services to their desired target market.

Show Notes

Website | Awesome Women Entrepreneurs
Twitter | @DesignPowers

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 72.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Evelyn Powers. Evelyn is a strategist and designer for Design Powers, Nice Work, and Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. All three businesses utilize her creative expertise to assist clients and colleagues to connect and communicate their services to their desired target market. Hello, Evelyn. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Evelyn: Hello. How are you two?

Liam: Very well, thank you. Evelyn, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us more about yourself, please?

Evelyn: Originally from Florida, moved to Maryland as a young child. Attended and earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, “Hon,” and I now currently live in Arlington, Virginia with my hubby since 1990 and I’m a mom to a daughter who’s a junior and a son who’s a freshman in college.

Liam: That is awesome.

Evelyn: Is it? [laughs]

Liam: It is.

Tara: We say ‘awesome’ a lot on this podcast intentionally and not intentionally. Also, in full disclosure, Evelyn and I do work together quite a bit so it’s a thrill for me to have her on the show. She has been on this journey with us since we first started talking about this podcast and she’s been an inspiration to me because she has a radio show. So we’re really excited and honored to have her here in all of her professional capacities and also because she does work quite a bit with WordPress. Thanks for having us here. Tell us a little bit about what you do in– why don’t you start with whichever of the three businesses you want to talk about or if you just want to spend time talking about one of the mostly– go ahead and talk to us about your choice?

Evelyn: You know, since you guys obviously focus on WordPress– my background is graphic design as in print graphic design. But how I began to get more into the WordPress community is really probably about five, six years ago. Clients starting to ask me more about translating some of the stuff that I was doing in print design into for the web. I took a front-end web development class for general assembly and quickly decided that it really wasn’t something at my age that I was really interested in doing. Not that it wasn’t interesting, I just felt like it was sort of too tedious and that I kind of wanted to work more in terms of the digital strategies, the UX, that kind of part of web design and development. I got into WordPress because one with Tara and just other people that I was working with that just seemed to be the platform that most people were working on. I mean, that’s really how I got into it. What I do with it in my businesses is I basically now do discovery, the strategy, the design, the UX and then sometimes project management, depending up who it’s for and what I’m doing. Does that answer your question?

Tara: It totally answers my question. I’d like to ask you a little bit even though it’s not maybe specifically to WordPress but tell us about the organization that you founded and that you’re growing all across the country, Awesome Women Entrepreneurs?

Evelyn: Okay, that started out very organically with another mutual friend of Tara and I. Her name is Karen Bate and she had the idea that we all were women entrepreneurs and wouldn’t it be really fun to get all of us together just to kind of talk about our clients and what we did and things like that? I always like to call it like the book club without the book. We would drink wine and talk about our struggles and juggles and things like that because all of us have children as well. Over a two-year period, I started a WordPress blog and took pictures and was kind of like the branding person for these very, very informal monthly events that we would have. We called it Arlington Women Entrepreneurs. And then after about a two-year period, we really started to see how women were very, very invested and excited in these monthly events. We thought, you know, gosh, it seems like the timing is just ironic. Trump got elected and there’s sort of this whole zeitgeist right now of trying to empower women and being in a supportive women community that we would kind of take this energy and this idea and see if we could start chapters. First regionally, of which we did last year. And now we’re trying to do it on a more national level. WordPress has been pretty integral in it and it’s also been, for me– and Tara, of course, has heard all the total points. It’s been just a complete utter nightmare learning experience. [laughs] And part of it was based on the fact– as I said, when we started as a very informal club, it was just a WordPress blog pretty much. And then when we decided to try to do chapters, we made an assumption that, oh, wouldn’t it be great if every chapter had its sub-site? So I did a multi-site with a developer. We had a main site and then every chapter had a sub-site. It was hosted on WP Engine. Then when we tried to do sort of all the chapter admin rules, integrating WooCommerce, all the advanced calendar tickets, it just kind of wasn’t built as cohesively as it needed to be because the foundation was kind of in parts and we sort of did it as we went along. That’s really not how you can do a membership site. We launched this multi-site basically last January. By March, I was like, “Okay, this is not going to work. It’s not scalable, it’s not sustainable, it’s expensive, it’s a nightmare for me who’s not a front-end web developer to maintain. Things are just happening that are not a good experience for the user. Let’s just scrap it and start from scratch.” I kind of said, “You know what? Maybe WordPress is not the right platform. Maybe I’ll go a little bit down, let myself go down a rabbit hole and see what else is out there.” I did, it took about two months to look at association platforms, non-WordPress, different kinds of platforms that were out there. What I found was there is some really great closed-system platforms. If anyone’s interested, I’ll even give you some of the links for the show notes. But what happens is the company will bring you in and say, “Yeah, we’ll charge you 2500 bucks to set this membership site up.” But then the monthly fees are onerous. And then should the membership increase, the fees increase. So over time– and what I mean by over time, a two to three-year period, the investment that you make in a quality WordPress site actually winds up being a more economic way to go. Ultimately, I went back to WordPress and just decided to work with a company who is in the UK but they had sort of a specialty for membership sites. We’re still working out some of the kinks but I think– the site just launched last week but I think it’s going to come together much nicer than what we had eight months ago.

Tara: Yeah, I remember those sites are tricky.

Evelyn: They’re very tricky. There’s a lot of moving parts, especially in WordPress, I think the thing that’s the most trickiest is those chapter admin roles and being able to finesse and assign permissions and roles for the various kinds of people that need to have access to different kinds of information. Yeah, that was the big learning curve on that.

Liam: Yeah, membership sites are tricky, aren’t they? Every organization wants to run their membership workflows differently and so there’s no out of the box membership program. “We’ll get you there.” They all need tweaking and they all need modifications. The question is, where does that modification go? How does that come in together?

Tara: Yeah, you also have–

Evelyn: Let me just give you guys a quick plug though. This couple in UK, they run a website, WordPress site called Member Site Academy. It’s something that you join. Again, if you want, you can put it in the show notes. But I thought they do a phenomenal job of teaching people who run WordPress membership sites how to do it. They have all kinds of ideas. I’m not a member of it currently, but I actually am going to probably re-up in it because they do a phenomenal job and just really good resource. And if you guys wanted to talk to people that maybe aren’t in the US, I would definitely recommend them as a great speaker for another show.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. That would be great. One thing I’ve noticed when I’ve done membership sites, it’s two things. One, you can’t predict everything that’s going to go wrong, and relayed to that is the amount of things that users will encounter when you open your website up to members who you haven’t trained to use the website. They inevitably are going to stumble upon a link or have some issue that you can’t replicate, that you couldn’t predict, and that’s a user error. A lot of times, you can even just boil it down to that. That’s really challenging because you can spend all this time setting everything up and then within days, the first days, some user is going to find some–

Evelyn: Caching. Let’s just take caching! [laughs] I mean, you can just knock your forehead to the wall plenty times that that rears its ugly head. Especially, that’s the thing that you love and you hate about WP Engine. They’re a phenomenal host but you’ve got to throw cash on them a lot. [laughs] But yeah, I’m always amazed and should never be amazed at the anomalies that people can find that you had no idea they were going to find.

Liam: Yeah, especially when you open it up to the members, it’s, “Oh, I didn’t know our website does that. Alright. Well, let’s have a look at that then, shall we?”

Evelyn: Every day is a learning experience. [laughs]

Liam: Evelyn, let me swing you around to one of our signature questions here. We’ve talked a little bit about your business and we’ve talked a little bit about Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. Within this milieu of different professional avenues that you’re pursuing. You mentioned your family as well and your children and living in Northern Virginia there. I want to ask you about your definition of success and how would you define success, be it personal, professional, or maybe a mix of both?

Evelyn: For me, success is simply to matter. I think that really everyone wants to feel like they make a difference and have value. I think I’m most fulfilled and most happy when I think that I have been able to help somebody or just that I matter to somebody, whether it’s personal or professional. And I honestly think that a lot of the world’s problems are because people don’t feel that they matter and they don’t feel like they’re getting treated with dignity or respected. And as emotional creatures, we need to matter. That to me is success. If I feel like I matter in whatever the particular instance is. It’s simply that day in and day out, honestly.

Tara: What do you do to work toward that definition of success? I really love that definition, by the way.

Evelyn: You know what I do? Honestly, and again, it’s another super simple thing. I smile a lot, I try to smile a lot, even when I don’t feel like smiling. I try to smile and I try to be nice to people that I think may not get people being nice to them. I do really try to practice that but I find that smiling is the easiest way– or making a little joke or humor or whatever, it’s the easiest way to make other people feel welcome and, again, feel like they matter. It’s not always easy to smile either. Sometimes you feel like, “Alright, I just got to smile because I’m really actually not happy right now. I gotta excite myself up.” It’s a really good internal mechanism for changing the zeitgeist or the feeling or whatever’s happening but it’s just a great way, I think, to try and go through the world is to be happy, to at least look happy, even when you’re not. [laughter]

Liam: I love the simplicity of to matter is success. What I wonder, your thoughts on how do we find the balance between wanting to matter but also knowing when it’s okay not to matter? Or if we don’t matter to somebody, not letting that affect our sense of self-worth?

Evelyn: There you go, I did kind of turn that around. I think that is success too, is that when you do do something and it’s not received in a way that you want it to be received to be able to move on. Having been a designer for 27 years, not everything that I’ve given to a client did they like. Early on, I’ve might hurt my feelings but I just think to myself, if we eventually get to something that achieves a goal, I’m not going to allow my ego to ruin that relationship and really these are just kind of small things in the scope of it. But yes, if something I did doesn’t matter to someone else, I just got to move on. That’s actually just maturity, too. And then even with my kids, a lot of times you think, well, it really is the perception of the other person, and that changes day to day and year to year, and sometimes you really matter to your children, and sometimes you don’t and you can’t let that sully how you move through the world.

Liam: I absolutely agree with that.

Evelyn: Yeah.

Liam: The opinions of the world, on one hand, are nice, but ultimately, I’d suggest they don’t matter. That’s more interjecting my views than yours.

Tara: And they matter to you even when you don’t feel like you matter to them. I think it’s part of it when it comes to children and family. I have a song going through my head right now because I’m a musical theatre person so there’s musical out there called Waitress written by Sara Bareilles and there’s a song in that everybody that’s called You matter to me. Look it up.

Evelyn: All right. Well, you go ahead and send me the link.

Liam: Hello, Baltimore. [laughter]

Tara: See? Another one. We were just doing WordCamp and I was explaining to Liam the meaning behind one of my tweets about Good Morning, Baltimore. Everything can relate back to musical theatre. Or I Love Lucy.

Evelyn: Charm City.

Tara: Yes. What would you say, Evelyn, is– maybe you’ve already touched on this a bit but is the biggest challenge in terms of mattering. What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in endeavoring to matter.

Evelyn: Professionally, I think it’s always just to make sure that I don’t allow too many things to sully the solution. You know what I’m saying? Often, there’s so many different ways to go about solving a problem, it can become overwhelming. It’s really being able to have the confidence that this is the decision that I’m going to make today. If I’m working with Tara, I’ll consult Tara, or depending on who I’m working with and who I consult. And just knowing that it was the best decision that I could make with the information that I had, knowing that I can’t vacillate over it forever. I have to make a decision. And maybe in the long run like that multi-site. That’s the perfect thing. When we made our decision, we had all our reasons why we made it, it turned out to not be the right decision. I quickly pivoted. Did we lose time and money? Absolutely. But did I learn a tremendous amount out of that whole experience? You know, I can’t say that I would want to repeat that, but I did glean some insights that I would not have had had I not made that particular decision at that time. That’s really kind of how I go about making professional and personal decisions is thinking, there’s nothing that you decide at this moment that you can’t pivot or undo and you just move on. And if it’s a wild success, then, yay. [laughs] If it’s not, it’s like, alright, well I gave it the best shot I could do. That matters, that’s really all you can do is do your best as much as possible, which I do feel I do try to prepare as much as I can within reason for every situation. I don’t really try to fly on the seat of my pants too much because I do think preparation is one of the hallmarks of quality decisions and a good job. I do think you have to prepare and you have to research and you have to make sure you get exercise, eat well, sleep, those kinds of things. But preparation–

Tara: Where does that approach come from, Evelyn? Do you think that focus on preparation? I often think of creative artists as being more, what did you say, fly by the seat of your pants type of people. To what do you attribute your focus on preparing?

Evelyn: Definitely art school was– when I went to art school, I can remember my drawing teacher saying, “You need to do a 15-hour drawing of trees.” And I remember I was like, “How do you know if I’m going to do a 15-hour drawing of trees?” But darn it, if he didn’t know, and then I started to see, wow, I can tell people who spend 15 hours on their drawing and people who spent five. I could tell. In high school, I had a couple of really, really excellent English teachers. Same thing. They would say, “You need to put the time in how you craft and construct your paragraphs.” And whenever I tried to do it really quickly, I could tell. But if I sat down and I did it, and I really gave myself the time to do it correctly, I was proud of myself. It really is an internal thing that I know when I prepare and I get out there and I feel like I did the best that I could with the time that I had, because we don’t always have a lot of time, I’m just happy with myself. I may not be the best to someone else, but it’s the best that I can do.

Tara: I appreciate that very much and I am definitely not that way.

Evelyn: I wouldn’t say that at all.

Tara: Would you say there are some people who can get away with that? Are those the ones that would come into the test and after hardly studying, they would be able to just accomplish something with much less preparation. Do you think that there’s a personality style or a type of person who needs more preparation than another?

Evelyn: I think it depends on the task. Like, let’s say you’re a really good talker and you go on to a sales presentation and you have to negotiate, and you kind of know what you’re talking about but you don’t really know what you’re talking about. It sort of depends on your audience. You make it that great contract. If you’re talking about a highly technical thing and you don’t know what you’re talking about and you go into a room with people who know what you don’t know, then yeah. Everything is context in content. Yeah, I think everyone can fly by the seat of their pants some of the time, but you’ve got to know your high ends and know what you’re getting into. I do know sometimes, I’ve been in situations where– for instance, Tara knows this story. Very first WordPress site that I sold was way above my head. Luckily, though, the client didn’t know that. That’s where I could fly by the seat of my pants. I got the job but then I quickly realized, I was like, “Okay, you got that job, now you’ve got to execute that job. Now you’re going to have to prepare.” At some point, the preparation either comes in prior or after but you have to prepare and research. if you can’t do it, find the people who can.

Liam: Speaking of finding people who can, I want to spin around to our other signature question. It has to do with advice. Evelyn, what’s the most valuable piece of advice that you’ve ever been given or found and implemented into your life with great success?

Evelyn: Well, I have two. One was my mother-in-law said to me when I had little kids, she said, “You can do it all but not at the same time.” And that really helped me because I was struggling. I had my own business and I had two little kids that are very close in age. My second child cried a lot and I was kind of at my wit’s end. Just hearing that, because I am a driven person. I was like, “Oh, I’m failing on all fronts.” But hearing that kind of gave me the permission to, “All right, I’m going to do the best I can with what I can at this moment. Even though I don’t feel like I’m doing what I want to be doing in some fronts, I can do it later. Then the other little piece of advice actually was a woman that I used to live with right out of high school, she was a friend’s mom. She said, “Watch what you ask for because you just might get it.” [laughter] And I always thought, watch what you ask for because if you get it, then you got to run with it. I kept those things in mind and basically, they’re both– you can do what you want to do but sometimes it may not be a good time, and then other times, you just run with it. Or don’t do it. [laughter] Now, disqualify things is a good thing too.

Tara: Yeah. That first bit of advice really can relate to multi-tasking which we’ve talked about with some guests before and which I talk about a lot and enjoy doing. But it is a good reminder that you can’t do two things well at once. There’s proven evidence of that. But certainly, I keep trying.

Evelyn: And as women, too, maybe a little bit more than men, because we kind of get more of the child-rearing role. Just again, speaking in generalities, but I think we’re very brutal on ourselves when we try to be a mom and work. Whereas, guys, I think– and again, just generalizing, are a little bit able to compartmentalize that. It helps me because here it is, my kids are gone now. I can spend every breathing moment that I want on work. Of course, I don’t but that’s not something you can do when you have little kids. Luckily, I’m living along enough life that actually what my mother-in-law said is true. You can do it all, you might not just be able to do it all at the same time. I do think it’s a good advice really for anyone that sometimes you just can’t do everything all at the same time. And give yourself a break, that’s basically what that says.

Tara: Yeah, and have patience.

Evelyn: Have patience, yeah, exactly. We’re all very impatient with ourselves, very impatient. It’s kind of sad we beat ourselves up. [laughs] Really, it’s kind of like, just chill.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Patience is a difficult skill-set to master, isn’t it? We want things today, now, or a week or two. Our 90-day plan and then it all begins. And 90 days is a blink of an eye in a lot of ways. Depending on what we’re working on, it can take years to make, can’t it?

Evelyn: And sometimes, Tara knows, things happen in your family that might just kind of blow up the best laid plans. I had just a situation in my extended family where my entire spring kind of got cannibalized by a leadership position that I had to take on. There was no one else to do it and I took it on and it was four intense months of dealing with it. And I’m glad I was able to be able to get what I got done but yeah, did other things suffer? Absolutely.

Tara: Well, I think that comes back to your definition of success in a way also because when your goal is to matter, you have to make choices about where you want to matter at that point in time.

Liam: And that’s not always easy to do when there’s competing challenges, whether it’s work or extended family, or even immediate family, depending on what the needs of those inner households are. That can definitely be a problem and I very much get that. Alas, speaking of time and priorities, we are out of time.

Evelyn: That was so quick. [laugh]

Liam: It was very, very quick. Before we say goodbye to you, would you please share where people can find you online, Evelyn?

Evelyn: Probably my best web presence right now is Awesomewomen.org and also the joint venture that I have with Tara, which is Getnicework.com. [laughs]

Tara: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us, it was really fun to have you on the show. I love your perspective and thanks for sharing your advice and your thoughts with us.

Evelyn: Well, thank you, Liam and Tara.

Liam: Thanks, Evelyn. Bye-bye.

Tara: Bye-bye.

Evelyn: Take care, bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.