Starting + Building Your Own Business with Yardell Perkins

Intro: Hey, everybody. And welcome to another episode of Start Local, the podcast focused on helping businesses in Chester County, PA, and the greater Philly area as we try to navigate through the Covid-19 economy.

Joe Casabona: My name’s Joe Casabona, and before I bring my fellow co-host, Liam, and I want to tell you all about our newsletter, Start Local Monthly. You can sign up for this very free, very monthly newsletter over at [startlocal.co/news], and it will bring you insights that we’ve learned on this podcast on a monthly basis as well as news from around the county and the greater Philly area. So if you wanna know things that are going on, programs that might help you in your business and general tips, head on over to [startlocal.co/news]. That’s [startlocal.co/news].

All right. Now, let’s bring in my fellow co-host Liam Dempsey. Liam, how are you today? 

Liam Dempsey: Morning, Joe. I’m doing fantastic. Pleasure to be here.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Always glad to be on the microphone with you. And today our guest is Yardell Perkins. He is the Founder and Head Developer at Perckitech. Yardell. How are you? 

Yardell Perkins: I’m doing great. Very humbled and honored to have been invited on. 

Joe Casabona: Our pleasure. Liam and I both know you Yardell through the local WordPress community. You served as a co-organizer on WordCamp Philly last year, and you’ve, I’ve met you through the meetup. So we’re glad to bring you on to talk a little bit about what you are doing and how you are managing in 2020. But before we get to all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Yardell Perkins: Well, again, my company is Perkitech. The motto, which I may be dating myself a bit with is, ‘Let’s build your Soapbox’, and I assist individuals in organizations with either creating or reestablishing their digital presences. Usually, that’s through any combination of website branding or digital marketing plan. 

Joe Casabona: Gotcha, gotcha. So these are, so you say establish or reestablish. So, I’m interested, I’m sure a lot of people are trying to establish a better online presence, but when it comes to reestablishing, what exactly does that mean? You take their current presence, look at it, see what needs to be updated. Do you start from scratch? What’s, how’s that look? 

Yardell Perkins: Well, typically that involves maybe some type of audit of what they currently have is actually part of a new package. I’ve started to like put together an offer ’cause it was something I would just fall into with certain clients where they would come to me saying, “Hey, I want this new website, or I want these new socials”. And I’ll look around and say, “No”, but you have, you already have these and it’s like in one place it would say they’re this. In fact, for a realtor, I was just helping in one place. It said, he was at re max another place, it said he was at Century 21. There was another third social that had them at a place he had never done work at. 

Joe Casabona: So interesting. 

Yardell Perkins: It was basically, no, we, you have this, you have access to it. Let’s just reorganize everything. So all says you’re in one place. When it was done, we shot a video which I just posted on my socials, where he basically says, “Hi. I’m so-and-so… I’m at this place. I do this. I’m at so-and-so. Call me. I’m at, so and so..”

Joe Casabona: Awesome. So, that’s cool. So it sounds like you audit what they have and then you also kind of create a consistent message for them, which I know is super important, which is very cool. So,  thanks for that intro, Liam. I’ll turn it over to you for the first question.

Liam Dempsey: Thnks, Joe. 

Yardell, before we hit the record button and went live here today, we were chatting a little bit about how you started your business, what’ll be four years ago in November. And we heard on the show that we published this morning with Mark Avery, who runs the kind, the KSQ Barber Lounge down in Kennedy Square, that he’s hearing folks say in the chair a lot that a lot of them are looking to start their own business or take their career in a new, new direction. Can you tell us what you needed to do in terms of logistics, kind of a quick laundry list of what did it take to get your business up and going? And then maybe touch a little bit on how did you know that going into business for yourself was gonna be something that you really wanted to do and that the timing was right?

Yardell Perkins: Sure. Well, to make a bit of a long story as short as possible while hitting on all the high points, my previous paid job, I was working as a System Administrator for an organization called MCLINC in Montgomery County. And basically it was a nonprofit where all the libraries in Montgomery County got together and decided they wanted their own IT Department so they could share equipment, make orders in one place, get orders from one place and all the rest of it. And I came there from break fix and I really loved it there. I loved my boss. He was very supportive of my move into my own agency here, and Yes, he actually helped out with it in a lot of ways. And I wanted to, well, to make it short, it’s, I was getting burnt out working there, and I wanted to move into something of my own, but I wasn’t quite sure what that would look like.

I came across a website, a gym by the name of Rob Cubbon.and he talked about going into digital work. So like technically you could work from anywhere. And one of the things he talked about was getting your runway ready where you put together enough money where you can just kind of live off it for six months to a year and not do anything but focus on the work. 

So in one of my last years at MCLINC, I got my tax refund back after all the [Inaudible 6:04.07] offers happened, and it was about $1,900. I didn’t really have anything I needed or wanted to do with the money, so I said, you know what? Instead of just putting it in my savings account and sitting on it, let me try putting it into Bitcoin and turning it over.

So I got a Coinbase account. I stood in $1,900 and I didn’t think too much about it. And this was when Bitcoin was just kind of blowing up. About two or three months later, I was up about 60 grand. Holy shit! 

Joe Casabona: Wow. 

Yardell Perkins: Yes. Outstanding. So the condom merged into the question about when the timing was, right. I was… 

Liam Dempsey: That’s the right time then, isn’t it?

Yardell Perkins: Yeah. I said, you know what, I’m not getting any younger. I’ve learned everything I’m going to need to learn. Let’s just take everything I have and run with it. And the funny story I like to tell people about that time is shortly after I broke out on my own, which was November 3rd of I believe, 2013. It’s an anniversary for me now, there was another crypto you may have heard of, which was getting pretty big, called BitConnect, kind of like, and they had this scene with like Carlos Matos and he’s running across the stage like BitConnect. And I saw a lot of people talking about it and it’s, to me something about it just smack like pyramid scheme, but there’s these big crypto guy talking to say, “Yeah. It looks like a pyramid scheme, but it’s not.” So… .

Joe Casabona: That’s what everybody in the pyramid team says.

Yardell Perkins: right? So it was this one Tuesday night, I had this whole 60 grand I was about to transfer into BitConnect. Something in the back of my head said, ’cause it was starting to go down, but I thought it was kind of a ‘dead cap bounce’ they call it, where like something falls, but it was like comes back and it comes back up. I said, give it a week. Maybe it’ll come back. That week happened to be a week where BitConnect fell apart.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Yardell Perkins: So I said, fine. Let me just keep it. A Bitcoin a month later, Bitcoin started to crash naturally on its own. So I was panicking to get as much as I could out. So when I was done, I had about 30 grand out, but I was like, you know, fine. This is still one year. So… 

Liam Dempsey:  Yeah. Still a fantastic return on a $1,900 investment. 

Joe Casabona:: Absolutely.

Liam Dempsey: Well played, sir. Well played.

Joe Casabona: I will never forget the day or the time, it was 2011, my friend messaged me and said, “Hey, we should get into Bitcoin”. And I was like, “nah, man. That doesn’t make any sense to me”. And then a few years later, like I thought about it every day for a while, every time it was like, Bitcoin crosses whatever, I’m like, could have got in for like a hundred bucks. in any case, are you still into the crypto scene or was that kind of like a one and done thing to get your runway for your business?

Yardell Perkins: That was, I’m a little bit into it now. Not too much. I’m following Ripple a lot as of date, but I don’t really try to chase like alt coins or Bitcoin the way a lot of day traders do. That was kind of a one and done it. Kind of a serendipitous thing where it gave me why I needed to focus on the business and that’s where I’m hoping to make my brand my money at nowadays.

Liam Dempsey:  Yeah. Lemme circle back on that, ’cause you shared on the timing that, that was a great story. I’ve not heard that before. I love that. But now, you had the capacity, you had the financial space, if you will to take a risk on your own business. What, were next steps then? Did you fly on LlC? Did you, what did you do? How’d you get off the ground? 

Yardell Perkins: Well, actually the, the LLC itself came about a year prior to me leaving. And in the year up to that, I was basically just studying everything I could on Udemy, like self-teaching myself. And I was picking up projects through a platform called Catchifier, which is essentially like a volunteer job board for creatives where if you just wanna, you can find nonprofits to do web work or graphic design or grant writing for, so like, a nonprofit that needs to work done but probably can’t afford a get in exchange, you get to build your portfolio.

And I met a couple of great people and my first projects there that I ended up doing paid projects for. And again, my boss, who I was last working for, his name is [Inaudible 10:39.76]. He was the executive director of the nonprofit. He’s now a library director in the library of Haverford. He, again, he couldn’t have been more supportive like he would gimme like Tom at work to kind of just like build a business and work on things. And his thing was always, look, as long as all your other work is done on any given day, you’re not doing anything else. Read the books, chase clients. It’s like, it’s proud of you. I’m great. I wish I could be doing this. So he was kind of living through me a bit. 

Liam Dempsey: That kind of support’s really invaluable. My last boss in 2004, 2005 was quite similar, where, you know, she knew what I wanted to do and don’t cut corner’s, not your day job. I’m paying you do it. But if you’ve done everything and you’ve done it well, then yeah, of course, do what you need to do. Of course, that’s really important. Makes it a lot easier, doesn’t it?

Yardell Perkins: Yes. And in fact, the only, I had actually resigned I was going to leave September of that year, but when I went to talk to my boss about it, he basically said, and I didn’t know it until he told me he was making plans to go to this convention at the start of October, and it was, if I had tried to leave, then he would’ve had to stay and they would like threw all these monkey wrenches everywhere and he said, Yardell, listen, I get it. You’re burnt, you’re gone, you’re tapped. If you leave now, a whole lot of things are gonna be screwed up. Just, can you just come in for about two more months and just sit in the seat, do what you can. If you just come and sit in the seat and you just like slump over, fine. You can’t leave yet. please. Say, okay. Fine. For, you, it’s like, I”m A and for those next two months I came in and it’s not that I was like, “No. Screw the work. Screw everybody in.” I love the work. I loved my coworkers. I was that gone. I was just, I just came in and it was just like…

Joe Casabona: It’s almost like a senioritis effect, right? Like you’re, yeah. You’re mentally checked out. I’m sure your bosses could tell. And when I left my job, my last, my job at the university, my boss knew as soon as I walked in her office, she knew what I was gonna say, but it’s so great, you know, your boss supported you. And then when he asked you for a little extra support, I’m sure you were more willing to give it. My boss at that particular time was not very kind. She was very upset that I was leaving, and let her emotions show and, you know, it left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth. So, having that support works both ways, because you can maintain a good relationship that way.

Yardell Perkins: Yeah. On the last day, I have all, I have these pictures and there’s one on my Facebook page, add the typical like white box of all my stuff in it. Took a pictures next to ’em, and yeah, on my way out, I was being escorted through the networking room, make sure I wasn’t gonna pull. Like, here’s the key card, here’s the keys, and the doors are locked behind. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. But that’s procedure and I get it.

Liam Dempsey: Sure, sure, sure. At least you were able to have fun with it. 

Yardell Perkins: Yeah. 

Liam Dempsey: Yardell, I wanna talk about something that might have been less fun, and it’s really getting into how you’ve been dealing with covid-19 as a business owner. You had a few good years before Covid-19, and you were able to grow the business and get the client base, and go beyond charitable work through that website and really taking the business in the direction you wanted. What did Covid, what has Covid-19 looked like for your business and how have you responded?

Yardell Perkins: The short answer is that Covid looked like a situation where there’s an, you have like an arrow in a bow and quiver, and it’s pulling back. It looks like things are going down, but then it immediately shoots forward and things go up. 

And to elaborate on that, been working closely with of mortgage lending or real estate investor the gym by the name of Joe scaris and I’ve been largely helping him with his with his rehab and his events and through helping him while still having my own business, I kind of fell into the niche of, well, happily fell into the niche of assisting realtors and real estate investors, and we’ve worked very closely together over the past couple of years up to the point of covid. We were starting to kind of look into how to make his events more virtual so we wouldn’t have to run around and do things on the scene so much, which we enjoyed. But there were weeks when there was getting taxing. ’cause we had so many events to do. We had all the equipment, we had this three month plan. We’re gonna slowly ease into it. It was gonna start in March, but then when Covid-19 hit, a lot of those plans got broken down and falling apart.

So, we sat down and said, “Okay. We kind of have to go virtual now”. So, essentially the three month plan kind of turns into three weeks. We’re scrambling trying to figure out how to keep certain things going but just have them go completely online. So it was essentially the, ’cause a lot of the people, we had RSVPs for events were people really wanted to see and attend and they were asking us, “Hey, is this event going to be virtual now? ’cause we still want the information. You can keep our ticket money. Just tell us the zoom link, the Facebook Live”, whatever. We still wanna talk to this guy. We still wanna present.

So, essentially, kind of the silver lining of the cloud fell on top of us. So, once we figured something out and we learned very quickly, it was a baptism by fire, I like to say. People started to see what we were doing and we actually ended up getting more work ’cause we were one of the few who seemed like we tripped, but we almost immediately got back up on our feet.

Liam Dempsey: Wow. What a great story that it sounded like it was a stressful month, but once you caught yourself and found a rhythm, it worked out for you. 

Yardell Perkins: Yes. In fact, one of our very first recordings over Facebook Live, we were doing at 24/24 studios in Fishtown. And it was literally like I had one of their iPhones sitting on the special holder on top of like a camera mount and it was Facebook Live and you saw on Facebook it was like shaky and wobbly, and people are saying, you’re shaking and we can’t hear you, and we can’t see you. And we were just running with it. And every time it’s like, okay, we need a better iPhone. We got better iPhones. A little better. Say, hey, how about we get an actual camera instead of an iPhone? 

Liam Dempsey: Yardell, what you’re sharing is something that was very similar to what we heard from Don Reid Jr.  in a previous episode talking to, when he’s talking to his clients, just do something. If it’s iPhone, just do it and just get it out there and you’ll, sounds like you did it and, land it very well. Just learn on the fly and something is better than nothing and get it out there and connect with customers. And if they’re giving you feedback, you know, at least they’re watching.

Yardell Perkins: Right. Exactly. 

Liam Dempsey:  So you can learn from that. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. I wanna follow up with that ’cause what was that transition like? I mean, you know, traditionally when I think of realtors, I think they’re doing house showings and you gotta go to the house and walk through it and ask questions. But what was the move to virtual like? Was it more your clients are giving advice online or are they going into a house, kind of doing a virtual walkthrough and making that available. What was the transition like? 

Yardell Perkins: For me, the transition was more so realtors were given advice online about particular neighborhoods how they were starting to be affected, and what inventory was like. I’ve seen a couple other realtors where they do kind of like the mastermind groups talking to other realtors in spaces similar to what we’re doing now. One in particular was doing, we were on another podcast and she was talking about potentially doing live walkthroughs of houses where, and she was asking me for advice where I was basically saying, you may wanna have a situation where the two of them are in the Zoom room, and she’s walking through with Zoom on her camera, and she has someone on the side like taking questions where it’s like, Hey, can you walk into that room? Hey, show me that. And I think she actually started doing that. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah. That’s a great way to do it, right? Because it’s almost like an open house, but instead of it being prerecorded, now you can say, people who are watching and say like, oh, I wanna get, gimme a closer look at that tub, like, is there mold on that tub? Or whatever. 

Yardell Perkins: Right? Cool. In fact, there’s a monthly, well, it was a van tour that Joe used to do where he gets everyone in a van and he tours around to various different houses for sales, to show investors how to vet houses, and basically, okay, this is a good deal for these reasons. This is a bad deal. This is an okay deal if you know what you’re doing. If you’re first time, don’t try to do a deal like this. And again because of Covid and now the quarantine, he’s still doing those tours. But now,, it’s gone from van tour to caravan tour, whereas no one’s getting in the same vans like we all go to one place, everyone files with their cars from place to place, and we’re starting to record those so we can put those online factors. There’s one I’m close to finish and post-production on now where you run out all these places and I walk through the house looking around. And while I’m walking through certain points, Joe and the GC talking, I was like, okay, this is what the mechanicals in the basement look like, and this is the realtor says, this is what the house costs. And then Joe steps in and says, yeah, that quote’s too high. Is this, is that? You go to the seller and say, look, these are cops in the neighborhood. I’ll give you this. You say, no. You can say no. I’ll come back in a month and I’ll still offer you this, and then you’ll be begging me for it.

Liam Dempsey: Yar, you’ve talked a lot about digital work, video work, transitioning to Covid-19  particularly as it pertains to I guess I’ll call it education within the realtor real sector. And you started earlier in the show talking about how you’ve been looking at packaging some kind of new video focused service. And I, the three of us know because we work on the internet all day long. Video’s huge. But it’s still relatively early days in the grand scheme of things. You know? Yes. The high end producers, the big companies have amazing videos, but it sounds like you’re really at the point where you’re working with small and medium businesses, individual realtors to try to help them harness the power of video in a budget that isn’t 10,000 for a 32nd video. Are you,, am I right in understanding that you’ve got a new service or you’re putting that together? And if so, can you kind of tell us what that looks like to kind of help our listeners get an understanding of the support that’s available to them if they need it? 

Yardell Perkins: Yes, that’s correct. It’s video service, also kind of offering him the social media standardization because he had once standardize or build someone’s social media. It kind of helps us. There’s something to put on the channels and one of the best things is video. 

And there are a lot of other video organizations who do work much better than mine, admittedly ’cause I recently just got into this myself. But they’re kind of hard to get to these days. And if you can get somebody, they’re charging way more because, which you can’t blame. There’s lot other conservations have to think of, and they come to and basically say, Hey, I saw you doing video work at this event. Can you just shoot some simple videos for me and so I can get on my socials or add my socials? And I would tell them, “Yes, I do this work, but there are other people who do much better than me” like at my best,, my work is maybe B minus. I know some people whose worst is B+ but it basically say to. I need a C plus and I’m happy. It’s like, I just wanna get something up. If you can do it, if it’s C plus, it’s you. I’ll come to you and I’m sure you’ll get better. 

And so they start. Yeah. For the smaller stuff, they come to me. If they start to talk about more intricate or advanced stuff, it’s, look, whoa, it’s, I’d love to help you, but you really wanna talk to these other people I know who do this stuff all day in their sleep. Recovering from hangovers, the way I do websites all day in my sleep while I’m recovering from hangovers ’cause they’re that good and I have no problem saying that and referring to them. 

Joe Casabona: That’s really interesting, right, because it’s great that people are coming to you and they trust your honesty. And they know what they’re getting, right? And this is anybody who starts freelancing is gonna be in this position, right? 

My first website was terrible, but my client just wanted a website cheaply, and I was able to provide that for them. So it’s great that you’re willing to try new things and you’re honest and upfront with your clients and manage those expectations, and they’re willing to work with you. But then you also know your limitations, right?

Yardell Perkins: Correct. In fact, one of my prouder moments in my earlier freelancing career, which it was a bullet to bite when it happened, but it was in my first year, someone came to me, I don’t know how they found me. They basically said, “Hey, I know you do websites. I’ve heard you’re good”. It was literally, they had this blank check in front of me. Say, I need a website. Wherever you in, if it can do this, you’re paid. I want you. And I said, “Well sir, hold on. Sit down. Tell me exactly what you need and what you want”. The more he started to explain to me what he needed and what he want, the more I started to think to myself and say, “Sir, what you’re, that sounds like Wix like you go in, get an account with them and you can go through their builder and build something yourself and cost them a lot less”. So I said, “How about you do, I’ll help you set up an account. You play around with this, see what you think. If you need some help, come back to me”. He went and I think about a couple months later, I ran into him and he said, “Hey, Yardell, I just want to thank you. I’m glad for your advice and I tried out Wix, it was everything I needed and I have this base website up and it’s really, thank you for helping me out. And can, like, can I offer you something? I feel like I got so much. I, you know, I didn’t pay. I said, look, I’m just, I’m glad to see you’re doing okay, but I don’t need your money. And I said it was a blank check and it kind of ’cause not like I was rolling in there or singing Big Pimp and Jay-Z at the time, but…

Liam Dempsey: Well, I get it. Money’s tempting, right? And that’s why we go into business is to make money and to cover our costs and to do things for ourselves and for our loved ones. And that’s a tough challenge to turn down. But I, you know, I can only imagine the goodwill and, you know, could, did that person have the budget to build a Wix? And depending on how long it is ago, you know, if you’re doing WordPress stuff, page builders weren’t that great four years ago. There were a lot of challenges with them and they’re very good now. But, yeah. That’s a tough one. And I’m glad you shared that lesson because especially in covid-19 where money can be a real challenge, that the quick dollar is often a very dangerous dollar to grab ahold of.

Yardell Perkins: And yeah, as my colleague and he’s a business partner now, I’m actually a board member of the R Joe often says at the end of the day, we’re not the Salvation Army. We’re capitalists for better or worse, as a capitalist country, we all like to make money, but at the same time it’s, we have to consider our reputations and our conscience and our souls at night and we don’t wanna go around gouging people because, or cheating them ’cause then you’re only able to make but so much. 

Liam Dempsey:  And Joe, this is Mark Avery all over again, isn’t it? Focus on the relationship, focus on the customer and the money. We’ll follow. Yardell, Mark is a, the barber that I mentioned earlier in this conversation. Yeah.

Joe Casabona: And it’s true. We hear, we keep hearing this same, or similar messages, right? Focus on the customer and the relationship and your reputation because if, you know, if you took that guy for a whirl and charged him however much you wanted to charge him to do something that he could’ve done for, you know, tens of dollars a year, he would’ve remembered that too. And it’s better to have somebody who’s not badmouthing you, you know, and not saying, ah, this guy is a con artist. So…

Yardell, I wanna ask you, just ’cause I’m generally interested in this, I do a lot of video tutorials and stuff like that. What is your setup for creating videos? What do you use to shoot? What do you use to edit and things like that?

Yardell Perkins: Well, I have a very basic, like Panasonic camera that someone recently helped me pick out. I forget the exact make and model. I can provide it to you after the fact. And it’s a boom mic and some stands. I just, Joe recently just got a kind of like a very simple teleprompter, which is essentially a screen that you can set a tablet in so you get like the right teleprompter app. It’s, you see the text from the tablet on the screen and you can sit the camera behind it. 

As far as the software I use, I’ve been using a Windows program called Camtasia, which seems like a very, a more straightforward, what you see is what you get versions of Final Cut Pro. And at some point, I know I’m gonna have to get in the Final Cut Pro, but that point seems to be very far in the future because it’s like Camtasia, It’s like, I don’t wanna sound like I’m making an ad for ’em, but it’s like, it’s literal, like you drag and drop. 

Joe Casabona: Yeah.

Yardell Perkins: Start throwing stuff in, throwing down then like, okay, produce.

Joe Casabona: Produce. Yeah. Camtasia is very straightforward and it’s used by a lot of people especially in the like e-learning, online learning space. 

Awesome. Well thanks for that rundown. I will link, we will link all of this stuff in the show notes over at [startlocal.co]. 

Yardell, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you? 

Yardell Perkins: Well, yeah. My main website is [perkitech.com]. My phone number is 215-325-0403. There is a landing page, it’s [landing.perkitech.com], which still has some rough edges, but when it’s done, that’s gonna have all the socials connected to, as far as my Twitter, my Facebook and my Instagram. But if you wanna find me on any of those, you just look for peritech or you can just Google me, which if you go to Google now, it will now say, oh, do you mean Percocet.. In the very beginning when I picked got this name for myself and started to Google myself, Google would say, oh, are you looking for Percocet? 

Joe Casabona: I was actually worried. I was gonna say that in the intro. I like really wanted to slow down and make sure I said the right word. 

Yardell Perkins: I cannot tell you how many calls or conversations I got from people where it’s like, you don’t really sell Percocet, do you? Right. You don’t, I mean, I’m asking for a friend, but it’s like, no, you don’t sell Percocet, right? It’s like, ma’am, sir, ma’am, no, I do not sell Percocet. I don’t judge. I’m not law enforcement, but that’s not my wheelhouse. That’s not my inventory like really? Really. Really? No, no, you, no. I just forgot. Ask, forgot. Ask like, you know what? 

Joe Casabona: That’s funny and fantastic. So [perkitech.com]. Again, we’ll link all of that in the show notes over at [startlocal.co].

 Yardell, thanks so much for joining us today. We really appreciate it. 

Yardell Perkins: Again, thank you for having me.