modern tribe

Meet the Speaker: Shane Pearlman

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Shane Pearlman is a man of many hats, in the best way possible. Besides his role as partner at Modern Tribe, he’s also a freelance evangelist (he’s the founder of Freelance Camp, a worldwide network of events), a real estate investor, a frequent speaker, and a supporter of projects that contribute to the greater social good.

In all of his endeavors, Shane finds ways to incorporate his six keys to happiness and balance – family, friends, fun, finance, fitness and faith.

This sounds a whole lot like someone you want to get to know, doesn’t it? That’s why we invited Shane to present at Prestige Conference Minneapolis, where he’ll be speaking about how to land bigger clients.

In 3 sentences or less, please describe what you do for a living:

I’m a partner at Modern Tribe Inc and personally lead indie teams in UX/UI, web, mobile & product design and development. In addition to launching successful projects for fortune 500 companies, government institutions and well funded startups, I’ve led internal product efforts that have ended in a successful acquisition (Surfline iPhone App) and a multi-million dollar revenue stream (The Events Calendar).

Other things that describe me: Entrepreneur, Freelance Evangelist, Project Manager, Speaker, Blogger, Surfer, Kid Wrangler, Goat Herder, Real Estate Investor, Teacher, Intrepid Traveler & Voracious Reader.

Tell us a little about which came first for you - deciding how you wanted to work vs knowing how you wanted to live.

Ha. You know what is really going to mess with your mind? When you realize, there is no spoon. There is only life.

Why this career and not something else?

It provides me the right ingredients to carve out a meaningful life. The time and location flexibility to interweave work with play and family. I work with my best friends (and that is a great thing). I make enough money to live in the bay area without an overwhelming sense of financial doom. And is the nexus for an ongoing series of adventures that keep me engaged and excited. I could say a whole lot more, but would rather do that over a nice bourbon. =)

Once you figured out where you wanted to go, how did you start making things happen?

I grabbed onto people’s coat tails and actively sought mentorship.

I clocked my time methodically and voraciously consumed the data to make strategic decisions.

I made a daily plan on 3 things that I could do TODAY that would move my business in the right direction. It allowed me to keep the important in motion despite the pull of the urgent.

Who have been your most valuable mentors? How did you connect with them?

My dad. He has helped me with landing customers, leads, and guided me through so many challenges.

Quinn was the first freelancer I met who opened my eyes to the possibility and gave me my first client. I met him at a coffee shop.

Tom ran huge teams in an MLM and really taught me sales. Want to learn the basic of business? Few environments exist with the training platforms and human challenges offered by Amway.

The WordPress community. While I can’t call out anyone in particular, the relationships and conversation with people like Jake, Karim, Alex, Pippin, Jason, Chris and so many other WP agency owners have been extremely valuable.

What were some of the biggest roadblocks you encountered on your path to success?

Paying $20,000 out of pocket to SAP to build their solution. You haven’t internalized the meaning of over budget until you burned through your labor budget, overhead, then profit and start paying hard cash for the final push based upon principal. It caused Peter and I to sign up for the UC Berkeley school of project management. #neveragain

Loosing $67,000 in revenue to a poorly through out internal process from which birthed “The Clock Blocker”. =)

What is one early lesson you learned about working with a fully distributed workforce?

Be artfully intrusive. Relationships don’t grow without thoughtful investment, and that is what you need to cultivate a sustainable team.

My favorite litmus test: Do you know each person on your team (who you work with directly) well enough to buy them a super personal and awesome Hanukkah present?

What’s coming up next for you?

Service-wise the pipeline has a higher ed bent at the moment and we continue to grow (JOIN US).

Products-wise, in the short term, we are focused on some long due maintenance and addressing frequent requests from our user community. Beyond that things get more exciting: community powered tickets, a free ticketing plugin, flexible event recurrence, improved internationalization, recurring tickets, and maybe even special support for bands.

Within MT, we have a number of epics. A lot of people call them goals, but you can fail at a goal. An epic is a journey. We are working to extract the partners from pivotal execution roles in day to day service projects. We are building models for long-term sustainable teams. We are scaling (elements of) the products business.

What book(s) are you reading right now?

I typically have a few books that I wander between on my phone (thank you amazon kindle app) depending on whether I want to think, be inspired or escape. I easily read anywhere between 3 - 8 books a month.

Currently in Progress:
* Fool on the Hill
* Scaling up
* Let My People Go Surfing
* The Slow Regard of Silent Things

Just for fun. What’s your favorite junk food?

As of yesterday? Ripe summer figs with pan crisped prosciutto.

But typically - fresh made salsa and hot chips.

What are you looking forward to most for Prestige Conference Mpls?

This is a many pronged trip.
* Hang out with some tech buddies.
* We have a manager meetup which I have been working towards with enormous anticipation.
* I get to see my buddy (business partner) Reid’s new place and meet the newest addition to his family.
* I’m kind of excited to go running with our pm Carly who is coming out and see if I can just keep up with her. I’m training more and she had to take a break. I might have a chance.
* I have an offer on the table to buy two apartment building near the university and am excited to walk the neighborhoods and get to know another part of Minneapolis.

 

Want to go to Prestige Conference for Free?

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All you have to do is convince your boss to pay for your ticket. In trying to get your boss to cover the cost for Prestige Conference, it’s important that you show your boss the value of spending the money on a ticket is going to bring back to the office. A lot of you probably think, “I’m just a developer, I’m just a designer, and this is a business conference. My boss is not going to want to send me to this.” If you think that way, you’re right but only because you won’t ask!

Give me a minute and let’s see if we can change your Boss’s story

What you need to do is you need to get into his/her thinking and help them see it a little differently, ultimately have them begging you to go to the conference. To promote this change of thought, you must show return on the investment.

One of the things you’re going to learn at this conference is how Modern Tribe took a client project and abstracted it into a commercial plugin. You’ll learn about the potential value of a product like and some of the pitfalls and costs to support something like that. Being able to bring that kind of understanding back to the office is well worth the money spent. Unless you work weekends, you’re going to the conference on your own time and you have an example that makes it well worth $200 for your boss to buy your ticket to Prestige Conference.

Once you get your boss to convince you to go to the conference (see what I did there?), you get to learn from and talk with industry leaders that have built businesses from nothing. Jake Goldman is going to be talking about how he built 10up to be a premier WordPress agency. He grew his company from a one-man shop to over seventy people in less than 3-1/2 years. It’s a miraculous story! If you can bring that back to your boss and show how this knowledge will help grow business and impact the bottom line, that’s where it’s an easy sell. If even after all that you can’t sell your boss on springing for your Prestige Conference ticket, then you should come anyway. Pay for the ticket yourself because you probably should find a new job.

If you decide working for yourself is your path, Jennifer Bourn will help you learn from her mistakes and take more vacations while you’re at it. Her and her husband have been running Bourn Creative for over 10 years! The lessons she shares are always very eye-opening. You can read Jennifer’s post about Prestige Conference on her blog.

Those are some small snippets from the sessions we’ve announced so far. There are still three more session descriptions coming. Early Bird pricing lasts until Friday August 15th at 5pm Pacific. Make sure you get on your boss’s calendar so you can talk about this before the prices go to their normal price. Make the case to come to Prestige Conference for free by getting your boss to foot the bill. Most importantly, come learn the tricks of the trade from some of the best business leaders around.