Podcasts about advanta

Today's Flash Back Friday episode is from #213 that originally aired on Jan. 22, 2019. Without access to a high net worth individual or family office, are you out of options to syndicate real estate deals? Not quite. Scott Maurer of Advanta IRA knows of a method to solicit funding from the untapped trillions locked away in the average American's retirement accounts; via a self-directed IRA. Kevin and Scott discuss the self-directed IRA as a vehicle for average investors to purchase real estate using their IRA funds; converting their traditional IRA into a structure that is allowed to invest in assets outside the confines of the stock market. HIGHLIGHTS: 6:58 - What is Scott's Background? 9:23 - Why are self-directed IRAs rare? What can you do with one? 15:35 - Pros & Cons of investing in RE through an IRA structure. 21:32 - What's the advantages of working with Advanta? 24:48 - How to raise capital from self-directed IRA account holders. 32:01 - Closing thoughts.   Recommended Resources: Accredited Investors, you're invited to Join the Cashflow Investor Club to learn how you can partner with Kevin Bupp on current and upcoming opportunities to create passive cash flow and build wealth. Join the Club! If you're a high net worth investor with capital to deploy in the next 12 months and you want to build passive income and wealth with a trusted partner, go to InvestWithKB.com for opportunities to invest in real estate projects alongside Kevin and his team.  Looking for the ultimate guide to passive investing? Grab a copy of my latest book, The Cash Flow Investor at KevinBupp.com.  Tap into a wealth of free information on Commercial Real Estate Investing by listening to past podcast episodes at KevinBupp.com/Podcast.

Gaspo Cortes - Advanta

What is Siemens Advanta all about? Consulting? Yes, but there is so much more! In this episode, Siemens Advanta CFO Gerlinde Sturm and moderator Thomas Holzner shine light on the whole portfolio Siemens Advanta has to offer: end-to-end services for digital and sustainability transformation combined with the finest Siemens technologies. Gerlinde also shares insights into her path as CFO at Siemens Advanta and has some career tips as well.

Um was geht es eigentlich bei Siemens Advanta? Beratung? Ja, aber da steckt noch so viel mehr dahinter! In dieser Episode des DigiPodcast, geben Siemens Advanta CFO Gerlinde Sturm und Moderator Thomas Holzner Einblicke in das gesamte Portoflio, das Siemens Advanta anzubieten hat: end-to-end Services für digitale und nachhaltige Transformation in Verbindung mit den besten Technologien aus dem Hause Siemens. Gerlinde teilt zusätzliche Einblicke in ihre spannende Karriere als CFO und hat den ein oder anderen Tipp für junge Nachwuchstalente.

EPISODE SUMMARY: Ever felt boxed in by traditional retirement investment options? Scott Maurer from Advanta IRA joins us to break down the barriers of conventional thinking with self-directed IRAs. His legal expertise and extensive knowledge in retirement planning illuminate the path for investors looking to expand their portfolio reach. Have you ever considered owning a piece of an English soccer club or tapping into the real estate market with your IRA? This episode peels back the layers on how to make these aspirations a reality. Navigating the realm of IRAs can be as complex as a labyrinth, but fear not, Scott and I guide you through the nitty-gritty of traditional, Roth, SEP IRAs, and solo 401(k)s, including their unique tax implications. We don't just stop at theory; we equip you with practical steps and considerations for setting up your self-directed IRA. Real estate investments through this vehicle come under the microscope too, as we compare the tax benefits to personal real estate dealings. It's about giving you the tools and knowledge to make informed choices about where your retirement money can grow. This isn't just a journey through financial education; it's about connecting your investments to your passions. With Scott's insights, this episode serves as your catalyst for rethinking your financial trajectory and discovering the 'why' behind your investment goals. Join us for a discussion that's sure to leave you both enlightened and inspired. SCOTT'S BIO: Scott Maurer is the Vice President of Sales for Advanta IRA, a nationwide self-directed IRA administrator. Scott has worked for Advanta since 2006, helping thousands of people invest in alternative assets (mainly real estate) using their IRAs and old 401ks. Scott is a frequent speaker and lecturer on the topic of self-directed IRAs and has also appeared on many real estate and investment podcasts. Scott is also an attorney and a member of The Florida Bar, although he does not give legal advice to Advanta clients. Achievements: Over 50% growth in new business during 2023 (consistent growth also over the last 5 years) GET IN TOUCH WITH SCOTT : www.AdvantaIRA.com https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEE4_cMUgKC9g9t61vjPo_A https://www.facebook.com/AdvantaIRA/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-maurer-18998465/ EPISODE CHAPTERS: (0:00:00) - Understanding Self-Directed IRAs and Investment Options Scott shares his journey from law to self-directed IRAs, discussing misconceptions and educating investors about their potential. (0:10:33) - Traditional and Roth IRAs Nature's retirement accounts: traditional and Roth IRAs, SEP IRAs for small business owners, and setting up self-directed IRAs with designated beneficiaries. (0:15:06) - Transferring Funds and Tax Considerations Transferring funds into a self-directed IRA, investment process, tax implications of real estate in retirement accounts. (0:26:42) - Self Directed IRAs and Retirement Investments Retirement funds can be invested in real estate through self-directed IRAs, providing more control and potential for raising capital. (0:36:02) - Self-Directed IRAs and English Soccer Self-directed retirement accounts offer control over investments, while English soccer and cultural experiences enhance our connection to sports. (0:45:10) - Understanding Your Why Real estate investing, entrepreneurship, and personal development are discussed with expert Scott on the Know Your Why podcast. If you want to know more about Dr. Jason Balara and the Know your Why Podcast: https://linktr.ee/jasonbalara Audio Track: Back To The Wood by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Artist: http://audionautix.com/  

In this episode, Ryan and Stephen chat with Larissa Greene from Advanta IRA. Advanta is the company Stephen uses for his self-directed IRA. This product can be an incredible tool to turn your current retirement account into a tool that fuels other investments.   Links: https://www.advantaira.com/ Contact Larissa at 727-754-9963 with questions about your specific situation

In this episode of the AIA podcast, host Alex Perny of Advanta discusses taxes that are often misunderstood and overlooked by alternative investors who invest with their retirement plans. If you're interested in being a podcast guest speaker or have questions get in touch with us at Podcast@AdvantaIRA.com. Learn more about Advanta IRA: Website: https://www.AdvantaIRA.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Adva... Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdvantaIRA Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AdvantaIRA/ Advanta IRA does not offer investment, tax, or legal advice nor do we endorse any products, investments, or companies that offer such advice and/or investments. This includes any investments promoted or discussed during the podcast as neither Advanta IRA nor its employees, have reviewed or vetted any investments, persons, or companies that may discuss their services during this podcast.  All parties are strongly encouraged to perform their own due diligence and consult with the appropriate professional(s) before entering into any type of investment. The Alternative Investing Advantage is brought to you by Advanta IRA.

Scott Maurer is the Director of Business Development for Advanta IRA, a nationwide self-directed IRA administrator. Scott has worked for Advanta since 2006, helping thousands of people invest in alternative assets (mainly real estate) using their IRAs and old 401ks. Scott is a frequent speaker and lecturer on the topic of self-directed IRAs and has also appeared on many real estate and investment podcasts. Scott is also an attorney and a member of The Florida Bar, although he does not give legal advice to Advanta clients.    You can connect with Scott through linkedin: linkedin.com/in/scott-maurer-18998465   Book a 15 minute call with Chris.  15 Minute Call With Chris Freeman - Chris Freeman calendly.com   Host Contact Information - Chris Freeman LinkedIn - http://linkedin.com/in/chrisfreeman Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/chris.freeman.9461

Today's Flash Back Friday Episode is from Episode #192, which originally aired on January 2, 2019. Without access to a high net worth individual or family office, are you out of options to syndicate real estate deals? Not quite. In fact, Scott Maurer of Advanta IRA knows of a method to solicit funding from the untapped trillions locked away in the average American's retirement accounts; via a self-directed IRA. In this episode, Kevin and Scott discuss the self-directed IRA as a vehicle for average investors to purchase real estate using their IRA funds; converting their traditional IRA into a structure that is allowed to invest in assets outside the confines of the stock market. HIGHLIGHTS: [6:58] What is Scott's Background? [9:23] Why are self-directed IRAs rare? What can you do with one? [15:35] Pros & Cons of investing in RE through an IRA structure. [21:32] What's the advantages of working with Advanta? [24:48] How to raise capital from self-directed IRA account holders. [32:01] Closing thoughts. Recommended Resources:  Accredited Investors, you're invited to Join the Cashflow Investor Club to learn how you can partner with Kevin Bupp on current and upcoming opportunities to create passive cash flow and build wealth. Join the Club! If you're a high net worth investor with capital to deploy in the next 12 months and you want to build passive income and wealth with a trusted partner, go to InvestWithKB.com for opportunities to invest in real estate projects alongside Kevin and his team.  Looking for the ultimate guide to passive investing? Grab a copy of my latest book, The Cash Flow Investor at KevinBupp.com.  Tap into a wealth of free information on Commercial Real Estate Investing by listening to past podcast episodes at KevinBupp.com/Podcast. Learn more about Kevin's investment company and opportunities for Lifetime Cashflow at sunrisecapitalinvestors.com.

Wycliffe Ingoi from Advanta Seeds, delivering farming solutions and technology to farmers spanning across 84 countries, highlights why seed quality is so important and how ultimately investing in quality seed will produce a higher yield, serve to protect farmers during a time of climate change and support the development of go-to market strategies. We also explore how governments, providers, farmers and indeed consumers can work together to try to solve the problems of food production.

On this episode, Ami Kassar interviews Elisabeth Garson, Executive Creative Director of Steel Owl, about her creative journey, her favorite projects, and what she is working on now. Elisabeth is an Executive Creative Director and an Experience Producer that builds interactive brand experiences, and develops gamification for corporate training (learn as you play). She's given dozens of lectures on experiential design, advertising, escape rooms and more. She authored two industry books and is the owner of Steel Owl Productions, with the award-winning game room, Escape The 1980s. Her current work blends interactive, off-screen experiences with advertising and learning. In 2015, she founded Steel Owl Productions, a company that works with brands looking to promote or train via real-life experiences. She's developed interactive experiences for the museum industry, training industry and Fortune 500 companies. Prior to Steel Owl Productions, Garson worked in Advertising for 20 years as a Creative Director. Her clients included large companies (Comcast, Advanta, The Franklin Mint), medium sized businesses and start-ups. From craft beer…to cable TV — her creative work explored consumer experience, from the perspective of targeted audience research. This knowledge acted as the primary building block for the Steel Owl business model, including game development, company branding, and puzzles to create player engagement. In addition, she created several Philadelphia events including the sold-out “Dating Game Live” (set up like the 1980s show) and a sold out “Happening Event” where participants purchased tickets to something that was happening (but they didn't know what it was). She was the co-creator of an independent short film that created outlandish experiences for unsuspecting deliverymen. She also the developed The Philadelphia Arts Market concept for the City of Philadelphia, which is still in process of development, and on-hold for the moment. Over the years, Garson's endeavors have attracted press from The Philadelphia Inquirer, CBS 3, NBC 10, ABC 6, KYW News Radio, Time Magazine and dozens of others. Recorded 08/26/2022.

I have had my head down working on some big things since RapidStart CRM growth exploded, and it has been a while since you heard from me. Well, I'm getting back to it with a follow-up chat with Charles Lamanna who recently took over for James Phillips as head of Business Applications for Microsoft. This was my fourth chat with Charles, and it was interesting to back listen to them in order. It really gives you a sense of where Microsoft has come. I managed to catch him in his office having just wrapped up their year-end. Enjoy! If you want to listen to my chats with Charles in order, The first one was October of 2018, the second one was September of 2019, the third one was March of 2020. Transcript Below: Steve: Welcome to the Steve Has a Chat Podcast. Where I call someone out of the blue with a record button on, and hope to have an unscripted conversation about Microsoft business applications. Let's see how it goes. Enjoy. Charles: Hey, this is Charles Lamanna. Steve: Charles. Steve Mordue. How are you doing? Charles: Good. Great to hear from you, Steve. It's been a long time. Steve: It has been a while. Have you got some time for a chat? Charles: For you, anytime. Steve: I appreciate it. Well, I guess the big news for you obviously is putting on the big boy hat, huh? Charles: Yes. I moved up an extra floor in the Advanta building in the Microsoft Campus. Steve: Oh did you? Charles: No, I'm just kidding. But metaphorically speaking at least. Because for folks that don't know, James Phillips leaving in March of this year, I kinda stepped in across all aspects of business applications of Microsoft. And, over the last four years, I've gotten to know the place, know the people, know the business and I'm super excited about the opportunity. And I think the future has never been brighter for business at Microsoft. Steve: Well, I never got the feeling that James held you back, or any of the folks on your team back, but he certainly, we have to give him a lot of credit for really taking this thing to a whole nother level. You weren't here before, I don't think, at least with the business apps, but it was really run by morons before he took over. And he completely turned that thing around and turned it in a whole nother business. And now with you taking over, I'm expecting that to continue. I don't know if there's been some things that have been in your bag that you've wanted to do that James was keeping you from, that you're going to pull out, or if you're just going to continue the path, or what's your thinking now that you've got that gavel? Charles: So definitely not held back. I would say I was super fortunate I worked for James for, I think seven, eight years in total. So I was able to learn a bunch and he was without a doubt, the most supportive manager I've ever had in my career, in terms of both enabling and clearing paths for what we wanted to do from a vision and dreaming perspective. And if it weren't for his support, things like Power Apps would have never gotten off the ground. So, definitely. And I think as we go to the future, we have this amazing foundation. I mean, BizApps is a major and key component and pillar of the Microsoft Cloud. Charles: 10 years ago, you probably would've thought that impossible. Right. To have Dynamics and Power Platform alongside Azure and Office. Now that we're here, let's go take it to the next level. And that's the push, and it's continuing a lot of the great innovation we've already done from a data-first, AI-first approach. Kind of sprinkling in some more collaboration with teams, and really revisiting the end-user experience, the platform, to go increasingly modernize and scale it and make sure that all our components from CRM, to ERP, to Power Platform work great together. Steve: I don't think it could have achieved that status with Dynamics 365 alone. It really took the Power Platform coming into being, I think, to give it the breadth that it needed to be able to get there. With Dynamics 365, we didn't have apps for users to do small things, there was no way it was going to permeate an organization the way the Power Apps do. Charles: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. I say two things are interesting. The first is, Power Platform has allowed us to help more users and more customers with business process transformation, which is what BizApps are all about. Right? Steve: Yeah. Charles: How do you make your sales processes better, your financial processes better, and Power Platform really turbocharged that. And that earned us credibility in a lot of those departments and with a lot of those users, and we have some great data about every user who adopts Power Platform is significantly more likely to adopt Dynamics within the next year or two. So we see that symbiosis working in a way which is incredibly customer-friendly, and it helps our business. Second thing is Power Platform has even helped us reimagine parts of the Dynamics apps themselves. And I think probably two of the best examples are the connectors, which are key to the Power Platform. Charles: You see the connectors starting to show up inside all these Dynamics apps, like Customer Insights uses Power Query for data ingestion, or Viva Sales even connects to Salesforce. So there's this amazing interoperability that we have, and also enabling the end-user. Our team built Viva Sales, even though it's not in the Dynamics or Power Platform brand. But it's this idea of having an integrated experience in Office for sellers, built on connectors and built on the Office integration. So it's changed the way you think about some products, and it's also helped us go expand our user base. Steve: Yeah. I saw I was on a PGI call with that yesterday. Very, very cool stuff. At the last PAC meeting, I was supposed to be on the Viva Sales round table, but I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds boring. I think I'm going to go to this one." And I really, I went to the wrong one, I missed a good one. But you know where I am, right? I'm on the platform. Charles: Yep. Steve: And we're exploding. Our app is continuing to grow on the platform as a low-cost simpler alternative to Dynamics 365 for companies that aren't ready for that. And I'm always bugging you about, "Hey, that cool new feature you guys got in the first-party. When are we going to get that at the platform level? So ISVs, and people that are just building their own stuff from scratch, could take advantage of some of the syncs." We got the Outlook app a while ago, we've been getting some things. And when I saw Viva Sales, that was probably my only disappointment was that, at least as I understand it, it's hardwired to Dynamics or hardwired to Salesforce. And I get that trying to play those two against each other, but it's leaving guys like me out in the cold. Charles: Well, I'd say for Viva Sales, the intent is to support any CRM, and I really do mean that generally. And even customers, because there are customers out there that we talked to today who have homegrown CRMs, they coded 15 years ago. They have a whole dev team still working on it. The idea is to support interoperability with your account records, your lead records, your opportunity records, standard pipeline data. And to do that in a way which works through the connector. So today it'll earn V1, it'll only be Dynamics in Salesforce, but the intent is to make that be a general purpose adapter. And you could have a RapidStart CRM connector, which shows up and supports the contacts the way we want, and it would be connectable. That's not going to happen in the next three months, but that's the ambition. Steve: I can call you in four. Charles: I go down and said... What was that, in four Months? Steve: I can call you in four months. Charles: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I might not pick up the phone then in four months, no I'm just kidding. Because even talking about, if people are even on Seibal. We should be able to support them with their sales. Because the idea is, you shouldn't have to transform the seller experience at the same pace that you transform your core CRM, your core system of record, and that's just the way the world's moving. Steve: Well, I love the idea that one of the challenges that CRM has always had, of course, is user adoption. It's one more place they need to go to do something. Outlook app helped with that, getting data into CRM without them having to actually go to it. It seems like yet another way for people to engage with their CRM without actually realizing they're engaging with their CRM. Charles: Exactly. Yeah. It's almost like ambient... Yeah for sure. Sorry. Yeah. I say it's almost like ambient CRM basically. How do you make it so that, instead of the user goes to your CRM, the CRM goes to the user where they are. And the outlook app was the beginnings of that. Some of the Team's integrations we've done are the beginnings of that. And that Viva Sales and that whole Viva idea is how do you elevate it? So anywhere you go, your CRM data is accessible without you having to go to a different user interface. Steve: Very cool. Very cool. So I ask you every time we get on a call about exciting features that are coming up. And in particular, maybe even some features that have launched, that didn't take off the way you thought they would and people are just missing something. We have this problem with our app sometimes, people don't understand and so they don't move forward, and it would be perfect for them. And I'm sure there's lots of features and capabilities that you guys broke a sweat building, and know in your heart, this would be awesome, but people don't seem to be getting that. What's a good example of one of those? Charles: I'd say a product which we've had a capability, where we've had a lot of customer usage from a small number of customers, but very deeply and with huge impact, and we wish were with more customers, is probably Conversation Intelligence. I'm not sure if you've seen that around the Sales app, and where that actually will sit in inside of say a phone call or a meeting and help you generate action items, and summaries, and coaching, and help you understand sentiment, and listening and talk ratio. We've used that internally at Microsoft with great success. So our digital sales reps and the folks who work our phones, they are diehard fans. We have this amazing video we released a couple months ago where we actually went out and interviewed these digital sales reps and their managers, and they just were going on and on about how great it is. Charles: And that's rare where you hear that about a piece of technology for a seller. And we have a few other external customers that have gone through that same journey, where they have a thousand digital reps, 2000 digital reps using this and just in love with it. But it's not as pervasive as we thought it would be at this point. And it's one of those things where, it's a product discovery, and easing people into the capability, because then you got to go out of your way to enable it and configure it. So we're doing work now to simplify it, and make it more accessible to more users. And we're doing that partly through Viva Sales, like conversation intelligence, the major capability of Viva Sales. Charles: And the second thing is also, there's even some culture aspects to it. Because if you use it, it's generating transcripts and recordings of a call, and not everyone's necessarily super comfortable with that. So we're even working about how do you enable more features without having to record the call, and how do you enable capabilities without having to get a transcript? Or how do you make it more natural to say, "Hey, I have a sales co-pilot thing. Are you okay if I enable it?" So there's a lot of interesting things, it's never just a technology problem. It's also a discovery and a, I'd say, change culture management problem. Steve: Yeah. I think that's been the challenge with anything AI really. A lot of people, it seem to think it might be a little too futuristic. They look at the benefit and think that's really cool, but they have no idea how to get it. And AI just in general, doesn't feel that approachable to people, even though in certain cases, it's extremely approachable. You don't have to do anything, it's approaching you. So it's a learning curve, you got to wait until my generation dies off and then you guys will see. Charles: I don't have as myopic of you, as you Steve. But I would say that, the big thing that we have to do is, there's been this evolution of AI where the AI is going to be something that automates away what humans do. And what we've realized is, AI is not even remotely close to being able to do that. But what AI can do, is it can turbocharge the people that use it. And so what we're trying to do is, how do we go expose these AI capabilities in a way where you or anyone else who uses them feels so much more productive. And just like when you first got the ability to use PC or a spreadsheet, you're like, "How did I exist before?" We're hoping we'll get to the point where, once you start using some of these AI assistive capabilities, like we've done in Conversation Intelligence, you'll be like, "How did I ever do a customer call before? And I had to take notes on paper while listening as opposed to having the AI take notes for me?" Yeah, exactly. Steve: I'm terrible about that. I'll be chicken scratching over here while I'm talking to people, and then we get off the phone I look at and I can't understand a word I wrote. Charles: Yeah. I like post-it notes next to my desk where I'm always writing stuff down. Steve: Yeah. So what else cool's coming on the horizon that we should be... That sounds like the Conversational Intelligence has been around. Sounds like Viva Sales is going to really bring that to the masses, so that one's on a path. What are some other new things that we should pay attention to that you're able to talk about? Charles: Yeah. Another one of my favorite things, which we've started to reveal some capabilities going back to last Ignite, so November of 2021. And we have some big announcements planned for the second half of 2022, is the new Contact Center related capabilities inside of Dynamics Customer Service. We have Omnichannel, we announced integrated voice, the Nuance acquisition closed, and the Nuance contact center AI team joined my group to align with customer service and contact center. So there's a lot of really exciting innovation happening there. And I'm really excited about the potential to make it super easy to get a comprehensive customer engagement story, without having to wire up eight different pieces of technology and do a ton of different complex integrations. So that's a place where there's a lot of innovation, there's new capabilities, Omnichannel, Power Virtual Agent, even the same type of conversation intelligence applied to support cases, Nuance for their Gatekeeper, which is identity and authentication verification based on voice and biometrics. Charles: There's a lot of cool stuff in that space. And that's one of the places where so many of the customers we work with are trying to improve the customer experience, and to go reduce costs. So I say that's a place where we've had a lot of exciting announcements over the last six to nine months, and we have a whole bunch more planned for the next six to nine months. So I say, stay tuned. And I won't say more than that to avoid getting in trouble by leaking information. But I just say, that's a place to really pay close attention. Steve: Who knew call centers could be cool? Charles: Yeah, exactly. Who would have thought that I'd be talking about contact centers, and how it's the next generation or next frontier of AI applications in 2022. Steve: Oh, well. Well I do have to thank you guys for the low-code advances you've continued to make in that platform. It actually allowed us to launch a, I think we're the first ones to try this, a new Service as a Subscription. Which includes awesome includes deployment, customization, training, everything except development code, which as you know today in so many of these projects, there's so little, if any of that. Charles: Yeah. Steve: Just a few years ago, if you tried to offer something like this, it really would be little more than a support agreement. But now, we're deploying, we're building, we're customizing, we're building entire things for customers all on a monthly subscription. It's an interesting concept, and hopefully I don't go broke, but... Charles: But you know what, it's fascinating. I literally was talking about this with the Power Platform team this morning. About a future where we'll have more partners who are able to sell a comprehensive service agreement, which includes the cloud hosting licenses, but also some incremental custom development and also ongoing maintenance and support. And it'll be almost this whole new industry, which will push a lot of innovation to the edges of the ecosystem, right? Steve: Yep. Charles: Not built by Microsoft, built by partners who really understand particular regions, particular industries, or particular segments. Like y'all are targeting a space where we're not trying to go take Dynamics, CRM, and go bring it down there. You can go build a world-class experience on top of our platform and provide a very much all-in-one, which exactly serves the needs of that audience and that market. And we can stay focused on building the super horizontal platform, which has great performance, great usability, incredible power, those types of things. Steve: Yeah, it sounds great. I'm glad that we had the same idea you guys did. I'll let you know, in a few months, if it was a smart one. Time will tell. Charles: Yes. Yeah. Steve: So, how are the rest of the team doing? It seems like some folks have moved around a little bit in the org, who's moved where? Charles: Yeah. So one of the big things we've been really focused on the engineering side, for the engineering organization, is bringing together strength from a product perspective that target the same type of user. And for example, we have a new customer experience platform team underneath Lori Lamkin, who leads all of our Dynamic Sales apps. So the Core Sales and Viva Sales, as well as commerce, as well as marketing, as well as customer insights. And it's very much focused on revenue generation, customer journeys, customer experiences. And what's great is by bringing those assets together, we have a great answer for B2B customers, as well as B2C. Like if you want to have self service, no touch eCommerce experience with lightweight telesales, you can do that all with those sets of applications. If you want to do a high relationship, high touch B2B sales process, you can do all of that. You're not going to use commerce, but you're probably going to use customer insights and sales, and maybe a little bit of account-based marketing. So we brought together these things, which are solving similar problems under a single leader. And that way the engineering teams can go back and forth between these different places to finish out full end-to-end customer journeys. And so that's a big area that we've spent a lot of time on, and that's a place where it's really the biggest and fastest growing category for us in the Dynamics 365 application portfolio. So that's one interesting example. Jeff Comstock, folks may know him. He's been around Dynamics 365 for a while. He continues customer service, he leads omnichannel, he's done some of this great expansion around the contact center for us. Ray Smith leads our supply chain team. So that includes things like more supply chain. Steve: So Ray moved? Charles: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He by way of acquisition to SAP then moved. He worked in Dynamic Sales for a bit, where people may have known him. And now the supply chain, and really helping us be this new data driven, AI powered, supply chain story for core supply chain execution. Then we also had some exciting announcements around process advisor and the minor acquisition to help turbocharge that. Or Georg Glantschnig who leads our finance room of the house. And basically we call the room of the house, is the collection of products which focus on serving the CFO and the finance department. And that includes the Suplari acquisition, which we had done a couple years ago, as well as the Core Dynamics, 365 finance, HR, and project operations products. Charles: So you can see how we started to build these critical paths around particular departments and particular lines of businesses with our products. And in addition to that, we also of course have Power Platform to support all of it. So it's amazing to see these things come together and converge. And we've been on this incredible run of innovation around Dynamics. I was counting it earlier this year, 29 different products in Dynamics, and really coalesced around these specific areas where we have a lot of energy, and also very well understood. I'd say synergies between the products that we have. So I'd say exciting times. Very exciting times. Steve: Customers are starting to understand it better also. Business Applications was the same thing for a long time. Then it spent the last five years reinventing itself every month, and new things exploding out of Advanta. And I think a lot of customers were having trouble just keeping up with... It's like little whackamole for them. And it takes a little time for customers to absorb what's happening, and what it's for, or what it does, and then to adopt it. And we're seeing that now. We used to have to go out and promote Power Apps to people who didn't understand what this was, or why it was. And now it's the opposite. They always come to us, looking for Power Apps, looking at those sorts of things. So that understanding seems to have finally permeated down to the customer level. But boy, it took a while. Charles: Yeah. It warms my heart. And I would say one of my favorite books is by Jim Collins, 'Good to great.' I always recommend it to folks on my team to read it. And he talks about this idea of the flywheel. It takes time to get a flywheel spinning, for the first period of time it looks like it's barely moving, but then eventually it's going super fast and it's just a blur. And you need to be consistent, and convicted, and believe in the strategy and the approach. And what's amazing about BizApps is for the last four years, we've been on the same mission, the same vision, the same ambition. And we just spend all the folks in advance at turning that flywheel, turning that flywheel. And it's started to reach that blur phase where it's spinning so fast, you can't even see it. Charles: And this, this all started years and years ago with a ton of work, but we're really at that magical moment where customers know what Power Platform is. Customers know that Microsoft gets customer experience and customer engagement. They know that Microsoft can help them optimize their supply chain. And what the good news is once that thing is going, it really builds upon itself, and I think it'll only continue that momentum further. And my favorite story is, I used to always do these executive briefings at Microsoft where we have executives come in from our customers to Redmond and we have a briefing center. It's very nice. And I would always say, let me talk about Power Apps and low-code. Charles: And everybody gives me a blank stare like, "What the heck is Power Apps? What the heck is low-code?" I go in those meetings now, and people know what Power Apps is, and they know the low-code strategy. And the only question is, "how?". Not, "should I?" Or "if?" "How do I do it with you, Microsoft?" And so different from three years ago. So anyway, so you're exactly right. A long winded answer, but I'd say it's exciting to see all of these things come together, and the benefits of just consistently repeating a message that resonates with customers. Steve: I would say at least three quarters of my customer calls today, they're bringing up right out of the gate, "We don't want any development. We want to do everything low-code, no code." So this is coming from the customer side where we used to have to explain to them what low-code, no code meant. Now they're coming demanding, "I only want low-code, no code." I think that they've come to this realization that, while low-code, no code might not be easy enough for your mom to do, it doesn't require a developer, and code does require developer. And once you've got this little blob of code in your environment, it's a black box for you. And so they don't want any of these black boxes. They want everything to be accessible. Steve: Use your knowledge to build us something complex out of low-code, but then I can still go back in there later and manipulate it, adjust it myself, or our team. So they have absolutely bought into that. And I know we originally, a lot of us partners were concerned early on that this was going to reduce the workload for partners, while our workload is more than it has ever been. Although the developers on the bench don't stay as busy as they used to. We've completely pivoted the team from developer heavy to now, we haven't even got a good title for them. A citizen developer doesn't sound right. We tell customers that, but citizen developers is what we've got so... Charles: This guy we found on the street, or gal found on the street, we just asked them to start building out. But no, it makes sense. There is almost this new role which is, it's not just pure coding expertise, it's technical development concept expertise. But even more importantly is business process and solution expertise. And that fusion of those two skill sets, that's the magic. That's what makes it special, because you understand it. Steve: Yeah. The challenge that we have with this brand new model that we just launched, because, first of all, being the first one out there is not always good because people have no idea what you're talking about. They're trying to compare it to other things. But we've got this little caveat that it's all you can eat, everything, except development code. And trying to define what that is hasn't been easy, and you get these customers coming in, "Oh, we're going to need a lot of customization. So this isn't going to work for us." And so you may need a lot of customizations, but you don't need any "development code". Charles: Yeah. Steve: And getting them to grasp that development code and customization are not synonymous, not even close. Charles: Exactly. Steve: Development code is a very small component today of customization. And once I think that they understand that, then we'll probably see more partners coming into a model like this. Because it makes a lot of sense for customers, makes a lot of sense for partners. Charles: Yeah. And if you go look at building solutions that last a decade, this is to your point, code is this little black box opaque thing, which is hard to maintain over time. If it's no code, low-code, it's easy to open it up and reconfigure as business requirements change. And it's how you build solutions that last. And I think we're getting to the phase with business software where customers are expecting to make long term technology bets. You're not going to replace your CRM every five years from now on. It's like building manufacturing plants and warehouses. These are big investments that you need to be able to amortize over a long time, to justify. And so I think to your point, no code doesn't mean no flexibility, no customization, also doesn't mean no agility. It just means you're doing it in a different way. Couldn't say it better myself. Steve: All right. Cool. Hey, listen, I'm going to let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day here when I caught you, to chat with me about this stuff, always fun talking to you Charles. I'm going to call you in four months and ask you about Viva Sales for the platform. Charles: Sounds good. Sounds good. Steve: I've got you on record there. Charles: So really appreciate you taking the time, giving me a ring, Steve. Hope you have a great rest of the summer. Steve: All right, man. Have a good one. Charles: Yep. You too.  

Bruno Simonetti responsable comercial para el Cono Sur Advanta

Hodilo by se vám mít výplatu místo patnáctého prostě kdykoliv chcete? Díky technologiím je to dnes již u zaměstnavatelů, kteří implementovali Advanto možné. Zvídavého posluchače jistě napadne, že tato služba konkuruje spotřebitelským úvěrům, které mají často vysoké úroky a musí určitě tedy něco stát. U Advanta žádný úrok nenajdete. Na čem vydělávají, prozradil Martin Fortelný, co-founder tohoto českého FinTechu, v této epizodě našeho podcastu. Kromě business modelu jsme samozřejmě probrali také další zajímavosti, jako jsou vznik Advanta, jeho praktický průběh implementace do podniku, typické uživatele, plány do budoucna a mnohé další.

The Investor Relations Real Estate Podcast Episode 22 - What Can I Invest In With My Self Directed IRA? Host: Jonny Cattani Guest: Scott MaurerProducer: April MunsonJonny Cattani is joined by Scott Maurer to discuss: Retirement investment options Self directed IRAs401KSolo 401KScott Maurer is the Director of Business Development for Advanta IRA, a nationwide self-directed IRA administrator. Scott has worked for Advanta since 2006, helping thousands of people invest in alternative assets (mainly real estate) using their IRAs and old 401ks. Scott is a frequent speaker and lecturer on the topic of self-directed IRAs and has also appeared on many real estate and investment podcasts. Scott is also an attorney and a member of The Florida Bar, although he does not give legal advice to Advanta clients.Linked material referenced during the show: Book: To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Mockingbird-Harper-Lee/dp/0446310786Connect with Scott!Website: www.AdvantaIRa.comEmail: smaurer@advantaira.comPhone: 727-581-9853, et. 1123Connect with Jonny!Cattani Capital Group: https://cattanicapitalgroup.com/Invest with us: invest@cattanicapitalgroup.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cattani-53159b179/Johnny's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jonnycattani/IRR Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theirrpodcast/TikTok:https://www.tiktok.com/@jonnycattani?lang=enYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCljEz4pq_paQ9keABhJzt0AFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.cattani.1

Gaspar Sanchez Cores - Advanta

How Biden's New Legislation Will Shape Real Estate Investing with Special Guest: Alex Perny! You won't want to miss this episode of the Vinney and Beau show where we will dive deep into the new potential changes coming to the real estate world! Our guest, Alex Perny, Has worked with Advanta since 2012 Alex Perny is a 8 year veteran of Self-Directed IRAs and alternative assets. Throughout his tenure with Advanta he has worked with clients on over 1,200 different deals ranging from single family homes, multi-family partnerships, private securities, and mortgage lending. His specialty knowledge and industry experiences enable him to educate clients and investors on self-directed IRAs and just how powerful these tax advantaged accounts can be. Invest NOW with Vinney, Learn NOW from Vinney! Book your FREE Strategy Call NOW! Go to this link: https://calendly.com/jonroosen/ Check out Mr. Vinney Smile Chopra at: https://vinneychopra.com/ Invest Passively in Senior Housing: https://seniorlivinginvesting.co/ Contact Me Here For more info: https://vinneychopra.com/contact-vinney/  vinney@vinneychopra.com

The tax reform that's supposed to affect only the rich will have negative consequences on the retirement accounts of millions of people. Dive into this episode as Alex Perny goes through the highest points of the proposed legislation. Key takeaways to listen for Is this tax bill coming after Roth IRA Conversions? Investments that your IRA won't be able to make How this bill will affect middle-class people Resources in this episode Summary of the proposed tax provisions released by the House Ways and Means Committee Contact your representatives in the Congress Contact your representatives in the Senate A sample letter you may find useful in drafting your own letter or email to your representatives To see the full version of the resources above, click here. About Alex Perny Since 2012, Alex Perny has dedicated his time at Advanta to helping clients realize their goals of growing their retirement funds by investing in alternative assets through tax-sheltered accounts. When Alex started working at Advanta IRA, he worked directly with clients processing their investments. Through the years, his role has evolved, and now Alex leverages his experience to educate clients who want to invest in alternative assets by self-directing their accounts. Connect with Alex Website: www.advantaira.com Connect with Us Want to learn more about real estate investing? Visit Integrity Holdings Group to sign up for our 7 Day Passive Real Estate Investing Course (it's free)!

Peter Torrellas is the vice president and partner for Digital Cities and Infrastructure at Siemens Advanta, the digital transformation consultancy and professional services arm of the global technology powerhouse. In this role, he leads a team of diverse innovators and visionaries in consulting,  professional services, solutions, and software development to enable the vision of our public and private sector clients on their digital journeys.

We welcome Power Platform expertise in the form of Two Alex! Alex Dupler and Alex Powers both work at Microsoft. The organization they work for and their first names aren't the only thing that these two share! They also both have a lot of experience with and passion for the Power Platform. Alex Powers is a member of the Power BI Customer Advisory Team (PBICAT), and Alex Dupler is a Program Manager focused on BI & Data Infrastructure. These guys know data! Follow Two Alex: Alex Dupler Twitter Alex Powers Twitter Two Alex Youtube Channel References in this Episode: Raw Data with Brad and Kai from Agree Media Episode Timeline: 7:00 - The woes of Stack Ranking, Data storage options, more fun with names! 22:00 - What draws you to data?, The value (and drawbacks) of Excel, and the path to Power BI 36:40 - Two Alex-similarities and differences, Rob tells a story of someone crossing him, and one of Rob's favorites-the art of using BI to drive action 59:00 - When BI and IT collide, the 2 Alex's non-traditional BI path, the value of being an expert even if you aren't THE expert 1:16:00 - Two Alex LOVE helping people, is there value to documentation?, knowing the Business portion of Business Intelligence 1:37:00 - Advertising performance discussion Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Today's guests are Alex Powers and Alex Dupler, collectively known as Two Alex. They're both Microsoft employees in very different roles, but both have their feet rooted firmly in the power platform. You might be familiar with their YouTube show. I interact with them primarily on Twitter and a little bit on Reddit. And this is the first time I've had really any conversation of length with Alex Powers. And it's the first time I've had any conversation at all with Alex Dupler. And no surprise here, really, really cool people. We had a lot of fun, really dynamic and inspiring, interesting conversation that wound through a number of topics, including some show favorites, like non-traditional backgrounds, and closing the action loop, and imposter syndrome. We talk about how years ago Alex Powers wrote a review of my book that called out the intermission in the book and how, what a delight that was at the time to read. Rob Collie (00:00:57): And that leads to a conversation about how we're always essentially at our own little intermission in our expertise curve. You're always in the middle somewhere. And if we started doing metrics on this podcast, you'd probably find that this one ranked very highly in opinions expressed per minute. Ooh. What could he mean? Let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:21): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:01:25): This is the Raw Data By P3 Adaptive podcast. With your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:01:49): Welcome to the show. Alex Powers and Alex Dupler. How are you today, gentlemen? Alex Dupler (00:01:54): I'm doing great. It's great to chat with you. Alex Powers (00:01:56): Rob, back-to-back meetings. I'm glad that Luke found us some time here. I was so hesitant about this podcast, just cause I love listening to it. I was like, "I don't know, should I do it? Should I do it? Should I do it?" Rob Collie (00:02:08): The answer is yes, you should do it. Alex Powers (00:02:10): I appreciate Alex D and Rob just pulling us all together. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:13): We've already backstage a little bit been laughing about this. So let's bring it out to the front stage. The two of you combined, what do we refer to you as? Are you the Two Alex's? Or something different? Alex Dupler (00:02:23): So we learned separately from our wives that the correct pluralization is two Alex. Rob Collie (00:02:30): See, I just don't buy this. I still think Alex's. I mean, we could get really funky and say, Alexi. Tom LaRock (00:02:36): I was going to say, that's what I think. Yeah, Alexa, Rob Collie (00:02:39): But I mean, think of it this way. There's fish, and that's plural. But even there, there's still fishes, which refers to different species of fish. Yes. I think. Is that what it is? Alex Powers (00:02:51): Yeah, that's right. Fishy. Yes. Rob Collie (00:02:53): I don't know. So the two Alex, are you guys seriously going to go by that now? Is that going to be the new thing, or? Alex Dupler (00:02:58): Well, the YouTube channel is called Two Alex. Rob Collie (00:03:01): How'd the two of you come to know one another? Is it just like, oh, we're both working in data and we're both named Alex. So you're like, you see each other from across the room and your eyes meet across the internet? Alex Powers (00:03:10): I would say across the internet, for sure there. Just because he's up in Redmond, I'm kind of located in St. Louis, Missouri. From there it was kind of this, I think natural, just both being active in the community. Alex D you can keep me honest there, I'm sure we were connecting on Twitter a little bit there before, definitely in the subreddits. One of my earliest memories of was, Hey, this thing isn't folding. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's Power Query. I've got to tackle this. I've got to answer this question. Reddit is where I hang out at. I would say from there that's when we really started coming chat more and more, but Alex D I'll let you kind of tell your side of the story. Alex Dupler (00:03:43): Yeah. Yeah. My recollection is that the first time we interacted with each other, where it wasn't just some random poster on Reddit, was side conversations on Microsoft teams within Microsoft. There's some internal discussions where salespeople can get their question answered and sometimes the questions are interesting. And so, yeah we had some side conversations. Plus back then, when Alex wasn't on the product team, he didn't always have full visibility into the roadmap. And so we would chat on the side about what we would do with the roadmap. Not that we would do a better job, just a different job. Rob Collie (00:04:19): Yeah, I get you. Yeah, I understand. I understand. What are the two of your roles at Microsoft today? Alex Dupler (00:04:25): I work for Microsoft advertising. We're the organization that sells the ads that go on Bing, as well as some partner websites like Yahoo search and AOL search and stuff like that. And I work in the business function of the sales org. So I do BI for a sales team. And it just happens to be at Microsoft, and that influences the technologies that we use. IPM are like data warehouse and big cube stuff. Rob Collie (00:04:50): Cool. We're going to have to circle back to that for sure. And Alex P what are you up to these days? Alex Powers (00:04:56): Yep. So senior program manager on the Power BI customer advisory team, so PBI CAT for maybe those out in the community. I'm called as kind of that last bastion of hope sometimes, where I'm not very close to the solution, not close to the architecture, just come in and fix it. Where Alex D, he owns the solution, he owns the finished product. That's a line of visibility that I completely lose in my day to day. But you get variety, you get to do different things. Some days it's maybe a DAX challenge, next day I'm writing C#. The next day, I'm writing kind of new report, kind of clicky, clicky, draggy droppy experiences. So a vast rich tapestry of Power BI. Rob Collie (00:05:32): So you're on the CAT team with a number of people that have already been on the show, right? Adam Saxton, Casper, Chris Webb. You're part of that crew? Alex Powers (00:05:41): Yep. Rob Collie (00:05:41): I hear that that crew continues to expand, it's like this great gravitational attractor. It's like just hoovering all of these people. Let's just have it on the record. Does the Power BI CAT team have ambitions of world takeover? Alex Powers (00:05:53): Every day. And I think what you're seeing right now is a lot of formality. Community contributors, experts, decades of experience. They're now turning into bosses, they're now turning into managers. So they're getting further away from the technology and kind of now being people managers. I'm enjoying our livestream here because Rob is laughing. He's like, oh, I know that exact feeling. Rob Collie (00:06:14): I do. I do, right. I got a request today from some media outlet to interview me for Power BI tips. And I'm like, gosh folks, I'm probably not that person. You want to talk about strategy, okay, that's different. But I have gotten further and further. I still build some Power BI stuff for sure, for my own purposes. But I don't have that day to day, like, this is my life. That's not how my day goes anymore. I'm back to the management game after years of being out of it. Yeah. Growing a company tends to keep you out of the actual hands-dirty data trenches that started the whole thing. Alex Dupler (00:06:52): Well, if you ever start stack ranking, that's when it's going to be time to sell it. Rob Collie (00:06:56): True story, stack ranking was the reason why I actually stopped being a manager at Microsoft. At one point, I just said, I'm done applying the system for you. I was sick of it. And I understand it's gone now. I found out the hard way that stepping back from a management position didn't just relieve me of that stack ranking thing that I found immoral and uncool. It also took me out of a lot of the important conversations. I just didn't have nearly the input or influence that I had before. And that was hard. If I was still at Microsoft today, my career at Microsoft would still have suffered like a multi-year setback because of this era where I just said, I'm done. I know that at this point, the whole stack rank thing has been gone for a long time, but it was still a number of years later after I left that it still persisted. No, we're never going to do that. We're never going to play lifeboat with human beings. I mean, it really sucked, right? Basically, if you built a really good team, either by recruiting or by development or both, you were punished for it. Alex Dupler (00:08:04): Yeah. Apply this to Alex's team. You want to stack rank Chris Webb and Casper and Adam? Tom LaRock (00:08:09): I will. I'll do it. Rob Collie (00:08:11): Which one of them gets told that they had a terrible year? Right? Tom LaRock (00:08:16): I'd be happy to do it. Rob Collie (00:08:20): Hey, listen. As long as we put that kind of phenomenal power in the hands of a benevolent tyrant, like Tom, it's perfectly safe. What could go wrong? Alex Dupler (00:08:29): That is what they said about solar winds. Tom LaRock (00:08:34): My first criteria, having known them for many years, is Jaeger consumption. So we'll just start with that and work our way down the stack. Rob Collie (00:08:44): Which way are we going to sort that list though? We sort it largest to smallest, or smallest to largest? I mean, I could see that list being sorted either way. Tom LaRock (00:08:50): We'll try it both ways and see how it shakes out. Rob Collie (00:08:53): Yeah. I mean, it could be like a honeypot, right? Put some Jaeger out there, see who goes for it? You're getting the 3.0. We won't be doing any of that, thankfully. Now, Alex P, you were previously in a different role, right? Alex Powers (00:09:10): Yes. So, here at Microsoft less than two years, came in through the premier field engineer side to support, really had a blast there kind of proactive engagements training, probably train like 4,000 Tableau users on the Power BI. So just like the grind of doing it day in, day out, talking about the product, I just absolutely loved that. Transitioned to kind of field sales roles. There it's competitor competes, a lot of disinformation where they're saying, well, Power BI can never do this. What do you mean it can't do that? Here's an article. Here's me, kind of the whizzbang demo. That's probably where I got my hyperlink chops for those that kind of know me on the community. Alex Powers (00:09:44): This is the good and bad of the pandemic is like, Hey, we're making some career advancements, we're working long hours, whatever else it may be. A lot of my goal whiteboard over here was, Hey, I want to be on the Power BI CAT team. Had that visibility, just kind of did those grinding over the fall and winter months when we're all stuck inside. But I'm sorry, Thomas. I don't know how good I would be at the Jaeger thing, just because I don't have that peer connection. I haven't met my coworkers. So that's tough for a lot of people that I think are just making career jumps during the pandemic right now. Rob Collie (00:10:16): Yeah. I mean, it's weird. I live in a completely altered reality where we've been a hundred percent remote, I've been a hundred percent remote for 11 years. Probably more closer to 12, actually. Our company was a hundred percent remote from the beginning, basically out of necessity. To me, it's shocking how many people who've been at this company for a long time have never met each other face to face. We did a gathering, a team gathering in 2019. We didn't do one in 2020. I don't remember why we didn't do that. We haven't done one this year, either. We're hoping to maybe do one in 2022. We've hired so many people in the last year that there's like half the company that I haven't ever been in person with. Alex Powers (00:11:02): It's tough. Rob Collie (00:11:03): It's different, isn't it? Alex Powers (00:11:04): Yeah. I think it was like the good meme the other day where it's like, Hey, here's your company culture, it's just like an empty cubicle. And it's like, well, people don't even have that anymore. It's just, here's your new job, here's your new email. Log in, welcome to the company. Great friend of mine, Mark Beedle, I know kind of joined T3 adaptive. I love that he's like, this is where I want to be. I think of the P3 of the past, where you take the group, I think, up to Seattle or some of the different areas. And then it was like, oh wow, they're all getting together and having fun. You know, I tried applying for the job, but unfortunately your Excel file was corrupt and I couldn't pass the test. Rob Collie (00:11:36): Oh, I see. I see how this [crosstalk 00:11:38]. Alex Powers (00:11:38): Yeah, what happened with that, Rob? Rob Collie (00:11:39): I don't know, man. Alex Powers (00:11:40): That's really what I wanted to corner you on today. Rob Collie (00:11:43): That might've been part of the test, Alex. Alex Powers (00:11:45): I literally thought it was, that responded that way. I was like, I don't know if they're testing me with a corrupted file. Alex Dupler (00:11:50): Yeah. You need to have mastered the Open XML format of the Excel file, and be able to track down the corruption in the Power Query. Rob Collie (00:12:00): I saw a joke or a meme on some social media a couple of years ago about cast iron, the hipsters with their cast iron and how you have to take care of it and everything like that. And then after you're done with that, you have to dry it in the sun for 24 hours. And someone goes, 24 hours? And they go, yeah, if you're not willing to go to the Arctic, you don't deserve cast iron. So it's like that kind of test. Yeah. Alex Dupler (00:12:23): We beat the crap out of our cast iron, it's just fine. Rob Collie (00:12:26): Okay. And now Alex Dupler. You're working in BI in the advertising wing, within Bing but also the affiliated networks like Yahoo and things like that. And so you mentioned that you're in charge of the data warehouse and you're in charge of, you said big cube. Alex Dupler (00:12:42): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:43): For a year I worked on Bing, and maybe this is a completely different dataset than what you actually end up caring about, but the state of the world back then was there was this giant distributed commodity hardware database system, data storage system called Cosmos. Alex Dupler (00:12:58): Yep. Rob Collie (00:12:58): One of the world's foremost write-only data stores. It was amazing at storing data. You could never get anything useful out of it. There was only one person in the entire organization, named Jamie Buckley, who was capable of actually running queries against this thing. And so if you wanted any information whatsoever about what searches were being run and things like that, yeah sure, you could try to write a query against this thing. And what would happen is you'd get syntax error after syntax error after syntax error, and then eventually you kick off a query and it wouldn't give you any errors. And you're like sweet. And it would run and run and run and you go away and you'd come back like a day and a half later and then you'd get a runtime error. Alex Dupler (00:13:38): Yeah. And when it works, you get a CSV. And so we still have that. I think when I was getting trained on it, which they said it had something like 5% of the world's data in it. Cause it's not just Bing, it's X-Box and a whole bunch of stuff. It's this really cool exabyte scale thing. But nobody knows how to use it, partially because it uses scope scripts, which the only commercial product they've ever been used in is the ATLS gen one analytics feature, which was not a successful product and is being deprecated. And so you can't hire people that know how to use it, there's just like a bunch of vendors that have learned it. And I can't write it either. Also, I don't know if this was your experience, but the engineers are allergic to writing documentation. It's got these petabyte sized tables with 400 columns and there'll be a data dictionary and it doesn't have any descriptions of any of the columns. Rob Collie (00:14:33): This does match my experience, yes. Alex Dupler (00:14:35): So we use that some, we also have other partners. I mean, it's a huge organization. We just missed getting touted in the quarterly earnings as having crossed $10 billion for the last fiscal year. I think the public number is like 9.95 or 9.5 billion. Yeah so it's a real business, even though the market share is pretty small. It turns out advertising is just a really, really good business. So we take a bunch of data out of there, and then also from partners that take data in there, and put it all in Databricks and make it available to folks that way. And we love Databricks because our analysts, they can come with whatever skills they have, and they can be successful on day one. Because they don't have to learn SCOPE or KQL or whatever. Alex Dupler (00:15:22): They can write Python, they can write R, they can write SQL, there's a cube so they can do Power BI, they can do Excel. They can do whatever they want, all in the same data. Now, if they want to do things that are super fancy, they may have a hard time using the cube. So they got to write something. Rob Collie (00:15:41): Yeah. Alex Dupler (00:15:42): But if you're a PM owning a project, you can drag and drop in that cube all day long and have a good time. And then the other thing that we like about the setup we have is, with the data in Data Lake, our partners that have their own generous Azure budgets, they're not running queries against our server. Whereas if we put it in Synapse or SQL, when they want to query our data, we're paying for this compute. But here they just mount it onto their own compute system, and they pay for it. And that's great. We like when other people pay to use our data. Rob Collie (00:16:15): So it's funny, I actually expected that the answer to the question was going to be, oh no, no, we fixed all that. That original system is completely straightened out, it's got a much more human friendly interface. But it turns out that you just have other systems that are human friendly. And those things have to... on the order of one-time investments to figure out how to populate those things from the great Oracle that is Cosmos. Alex Dupler (00:16:41): Yeah that's largely true. I mean, in Cosmos, they've implemented the ATLS APIs. So you can mount data in Cosmos directly to a Spark engine and do stuff that way, if you want. Yeah. Basically that's how they've done things. You will not be surprised to learn that Microsoft likes to reuse names. Maybe you've seen this phenomenon before in the word power, but yeah. Cosmos, the internal exabyte scale data platform is not the same as Cosmos DB, the Azure product, which is for, I couldn't even describe it. It's for, like, everything. Rob Collie (00:17:19): Yeah. I mean, there's only so many cool nouns. And furthermore, the set of cool nouns in the world is further refined by the ones that computer scientists gravitate to. So you end up with a really small population of words. And the chances... It's like the pigeonhole principle from math, right? You need 450 names, you only have 300 words. So you're screwed. And so you end up with things like the word dashboard being repurposed to mean something kind of niche in Power BI. That's one that I wish we could get a do-over on. And you know, I'm a sinner. I named some things poorly in my day. I'll give you an example. When PowerPivot V1, and actually several versions of PowerPivot, at least in 2010, there were those two drop zones, extra drop zones in the pivot table field list, for slicers. Rob Collie (00:18:11): Cause Amir insisted that we make slicer layout really easy as opposed to tedious. So we had these extra drop zones, and one drop zone put the slicers down the left-hand side of the pivot table and one put them across the top of the pivot table. What did I name those two zones? Horizontal and vertical slicers. For years after that, when I taught that product to classes, they go, oh, what does a horizontal slicer do that's different than a vertical slicer? And I just sit there with my head in my hands like, it should have been left and top, Rob. Why did you... Previous Rob, why were you so nerdy and stupid at the same time? Left and top. Alex Dupler (00:18:48): Well you see, in an indimensional cube, there are some things that are horizontal and some things that are vertical. Once you understand what the tubal is, it'll all make sense. Rob Collie (00:18:59): Yes. So let's go back to basics and... Yeah, no. It's just left and top. Yep. These are what you call own goals. Can't make these things up. It's even funnier, by that point in my career when I made that mistake, I was already kind of like this rabid high priest of naming. Like, we should be better. And here I was in the course of delivering those sermons, just committing tremendous sins out the back of the church. It's just like. Alex Dupler (00:19:31): Yeah, it turns out we should be better in, oh crap, I got an hour before this presentation, what am I going to call this thing? Those are two overlapping states of being. Rob Collie (00:19:41): You know, people's hearts are in the right place. So I still think that the two of you probably might've gravitated toward each other just a little bit, maybe like 1% more, because of the shared first name. Can I be allowed like an extra 1% gravity on this? Alex Powers (00:19:54): 99. I mean, a lot of Alex's within Microsoft that are doing Power BI, we've all kind of banded together. Rob Collie (00:19:59): There's like an Alex crew? Alex Powers (00:20:01): Hell yeah. Big time. There's multiple Two Alex's, too. Rob Collie (00:20:04): As we've established, once you get above like three or four Alex, it's suddenly Alex's. That's when it becomes plural. Alex Dupler (00:20:10): There are at least two Alex's working at Microsoft in the Power BI ecosystem that are smarter than either of us. Rob Collie (00:20:17): Well I mean, going back to something we were talking about earlier, every single person, every single consultant at P3 is a hell of a lot better at Power BI than I ever was. I can't even argue that it's like, oh, I'm off my peak. It's not that at all. They were always going to be much, much better. It's very humbling. Like in the real sense of the word, when you sort of get put in your place. Alex Powers (00:20:40): Is this like a time thing, Rob? Cause I feel it too. It's like the early days, Power Pivot and Power Query were something like, I'm digging, I'm learning all of these things. And then like everything else is kind of passing me by and it's like, yeah I'll catch up to that at some point. And I see the wild stuff that people are doing nowadays, like, I don't know what nights and weekends they're spending learning this product, but I'm working twice as hard and I'm still not catching up. Alex Dupler (00:21:00): Yeah. I was watching the other demo the other day. And he was talking about how you should have your report and your data model in two separate PBIX's. This was Mike Carlo. It was a great demo. But then he was like, and to make this really easy, what we're going to do is we're going to edit the PBIX. And I was like, hold on a second. You can't do that. That's not allowed. Rob Collie (00:21:22): [crosstalk 00:21:22] Like actually hacking the file? Like he got into the file structure? Alex Dupler (00:21:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:21:26): I do love me some file hacking. For me, I think it's not necessarily a question of time. It's actually that the universe has returned to its default state with respect to me. Which is, the whole time I worked at Microsoft, in all the years I was on the engineering teams, I worked with plenty of people who were super technical, but also enthusiastically technical. When VB.Net came out, and ASP.NET, I had some colleagues that just dove into that. They loved it, it was the most amazing thing. And I just could never... I was still at that point going like, okay, well I learned how to write my VBA, and I'm sticking with it. That's where the frontier of my coding, actual procedural coding, is still VBA six. Rob Collie (00:22:09): For some reason, DAX and data modeling, as technical tools go, DAX and data modeling really, really spoke to me. Like I freaking loved it and still do, still do to this day. And Excel formulas are kind of the same thing, right? This is the handful of exceptional technologies that really seem to appeal to my nervous system, and none of the others do. And by the way, M is another example that does not appeal to me at all. Alex Powers (00:22:38): I am the opposite. I love M. Rob Collie (00:22:39): Really? You love M? Alex Powers (00:22:40): I love, love, love. Hell yeah. Rob Collie (00:22:42): You're not my species then, you're something completely different. Alex Dupler (00:22:47): So I think one of the big things that drew me to data modeling, so there's a lot of constraints. And with programming, it's like, there's such an open world. Like the only programming I could ever really get my head around was VBA. That's where I started. You didn't have to have a big, complicated object model. There was just Excel. That was your object model. And it made everything so much easier. And you're like, okay, well, what I'm trying to do is move these cells to those cells. And with data modeling, especially in Power BI, it's like, well, I need one column for these relationships. And I need these relationships to flow in one direction. The constraints make it a much more manageable problem, but also opens up room for more creativity. Rob Collie (00:23:30): I agree. And also VBA comes with a macro recorder, the world's greatest set of training wheels. It's like, if I want to build an app from scratch, I can't like act out like pantomime what the app will do, and have something spit out code for it. Alex Dupler (00:23:48): Draw some stick fingers in Figma and just drag them around, and get some code from that. Rob Collie (00:23:51): Yeah. It's like, mock up the UI in Balsamiq or something, or Vizio, and then start mashing on the screen with your finger and say, okay. And then speaking out loud, what should happen at that... there's no macro recording for actual software developers. Alex Dupler (00:24:04): I think we got to tell Charles that, that's what he's got to do with his AI driven power apps development. Rob Collie (00:24:09): Yeah. It's we need to turn this into a LARPing thing, right? You just act out the application in the real world with these cameras... Holo lens. There it is. We've solved the world's problems. Take that for low code development. Alex Powers (00:24:26): Well, I like how Power Automate's now watching your points and clicks, and generating flows for you. Rob Collie (00:24:32): See, I didn't know that it did that. Alex Powers (00:24:33): Oh yeah. You're training the machine. You don't even have to write the code anymore. It's like, oh, automation is here. It's really here now. Rob Collie (00:24:41): It's always a feel good moment to meet a fellow VBA 6-er. The world used to be lousy with us. We were just everywhere. It's kind of a dying art. Office has got this new JavaScript API, Office Scripts. That's incredible. Again, in theory. I haven't touched it, because it's not reaching out and grabbing me by the eyeballs. I'm tempted though. It's sort of like, oh, a new VBA six and they have a macro recorder and I'm like, okay, maybe, maybe. This might be the way I learn JavaScript someday, is Office Scripts. Alex Dupler (00:25:09): Yeah, that sounds like how I'd learn it, except Excel is dead to me. I mean, I use Excel for note taking and PM stuff, but data work, I don't use it. Because first of all, Power Query is the way to go. And in Excel, when you have Power Query over, you can't save the Excel file. Rob Collie (00:25:28): Really? Alex Dupler (00:25:29): Yeah, Power Query takes a lock, like a lot of the old school windows. And you can't get back to the main- Rob Collie (00:25:34): Modal window. Alex Dupler (00:25:35): Yeah. So you can't save, you can't refer back to the data. You can't open stuff. And it's not like Excel ever crashes when you're working with lots of data. So saving, it's not that important. And if you want to say, first you have to evaluate your queries or set them to disable load. But if you've already loaded some, if you do something to disable load, it destroys the cells. I just said, I'll do it all in Power BI. No more Excel. Not because there's anything wrong with Excel. It's just that that user experience was just so unacceptable to me. I lost so many hours of work. Tom LaRock (00:26:10): Wait, what do you mean, not that there's something wrong... Clearly there's something wrong with Excel. Alex Dupler (00:26:14): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:26:15): Alex, you're cut from a cloth that I understand very well. Your sarcastic cynicism is, ooh, it speaks to me. Yeah, we've come to the right place. Even I, team Excel guy, I am really on team Excel. I haven't written any DAX in the Excel environment in several years. It's all Power BI, all the time now. Alex Dupler (00:26:38): The other big thing is why would you want to write DAX in an environment that you can't schedule to refresh? Unless you don't have pro licenses, like... Alex Powers (00:26:47): Hold on, let me challenge you now. Here we go, this is a little taste of Two Alex. So I love Ken Puls, where he's saying, Hey, I don't want the heavy weight of Power BI. If I can do as much as possible within Excel, be it Power Query or even Power Pivot. I would agree that. Alex Powers (00:27:03): Be it kind of power query or even power pivot. I would agree that the development experience is severely lacking. That's not to say that the power BI side is the best in the world, obviously Dax studio, et cetera. But I would much rather take a lightweight application over a heavy one every day and then just import that data model into power BI when I'm ready. Rob Collie (00:27:19): To me, the primary value of these technologies in Excel is as an on-ramp to the power BI universe for the authors. Tomorrow's power BI authors are today living in Excel. And the reason, I've said this multiple times on this podcast of multiple different people at Microsoft, but the reason why I'm, I don't want to use like the passive aggressive version of the word disappointed. Let's use the completely neutral version of the word disappointed. The reason why I'm disappointed that there isn't more investment there is because that is the gateway drug, and as a universe, as a community, like we really need to care about bringing those new people on. And that's where they're going to come to. To tell those same people, "No, put Excel down and start learning this in a completely new environment," their immune systems reject that because they've been sold a million times on the idea that something's going to replace Excel. They know better by now. Rob Collie (00:28:23): But no one in that category, like the V lookup and pivot route, none of them resist the idea of there being crazy, powerful new versions and features of the things that they're already doing. You get them 48 hours into that new world, and they're more than happy to switch to the power BI environment. They're excited about it. Those same people who would have rejected it 48 hours before. You got to take them on that path and this thing not getting the love that I think it deserves, I understand it's from the perspective of our real production environment is the power BI environment. I get that. But the on-ramp, they are doing some things about that, even things that I didn't know, because they're targeted at people who don't know about this stuff and I already do. Brian, when he was on the podcast, was talking about how they're using machine learning, advanced clippy generation seven, to detect the people who should be interested in this stuff and sort of pointing them to power BI. And there actually was really good uptake of that. That feature didn't fire for me because I don't use V Lookup or regular pivot tables anymore. Alex Dupler (00:29:23): That's almost exactly the journey that I went on. Like many of your guests, I did not go to school for power BI. I actually, I went to school for chemistry and I worked as a chemist for a couple of years. I was doing lab work and I was very bad at lab work. I mean, I understood the chemistry, but I would break glassware that was expensive and stuff like that. Which when you make $15 an hour, breaking expensive glassware is a good way to get in trouble. So I was like "Okay, well I grew up in a very computer centric family. Maybe I can do some of this Excel stuff." And so I was doing visual basic, and we were doing some dashboards, like operational reporting. And I had Excel in this company. I loved the people there, but it was not a successful business. We had maybe a hundred thousand dollars in revenue per employee with high CapEx, because we had these big, expensive instruments that we had to buy and chemicals and all sorts of stuff, lots of HVAC. So there was not enough money to pay people to live in Seattle, so every office license was a battle. Alex Powers (00:30:31): Wow. Alex Dupler (00:30:31): I was looking at, okay, what can I do with Excel 2007, because we had some of that I think we had enough licenses, but it didn't really check. So we didn't really pay too much attention. But then I was like wanting to use power query because I had sort of discovered it was easier, but I couldn't. So I was like, "Okay, how do I get this macro to run as a service so that I can refresh these dashboards on these dowels that we bought second hand?" Rob Collie (00:31:01): You know, if it weren't for the a hundred thousand dollars of revenue per employee, at a certain point, that story sounded like season two of Breaking Bad. The HVAC, the cap ex, oh you mean a hundred thousand dollars per employee per week? Okay. Alex Dupler (00:31:18): No, no, no, per year. Rob Collie (00:31:19): Then it's meth. Alex Dupler (00:31:20): Yeah, no. So this is the environmental testing industry. And the way it works is your tests have to be defensible to the EPA. So the EPA puts up a spec and says the test needs to be done this way. And when it's done, it has these parameters in terms of statistical reusability. And that means that one lab's product is a commodity compared to the other lab's product. And so you can't get outside profits. All you can do is compete on service and price. And if you take a high CapEx business and bolted to professional services, you're not going to get good margins. Rob Collie (00:31:59): Unintended consequences of everything, right? Alex Dupler (00:32:01): Yeah. I mean, Rob, can you imagine your business, if you are charging professional services business model, but you bolted on a whole, huge amount of consumable costs to every delivery? Rob Collie (00:32:14): Yeah. It sounds like we can safely not choose the wine in front of me. Alex Dupler (00:32:19): That's how I first encountered the 2017 standalone web, maybe it was 2016. The first time power BI was split out. I was doing office 365 admins and I got like a push notification. I was like, "This is cool." And I built some stuff and I showed it to my manager and he was like, "That's cool. How much is it?" "$10 a month." "Nope, can't afford it." And that's when I started looking for jobs anywhere where they had good Excel people. Rob Collie (00:32:46): Yeah, and to put that in perspective, this is the punchline to many jokes when people ask us how much it is. We go, "It's $10 a month per user." We all just start laughing. Like, "Oh my God, it's like stealing. It's so cheap." Alex Dupler (00:32:58): I didn't even have that many users. Rob Collie (00:33:02): I mean, this might be $30 a month. You know, like, nope. Alex Dupler (00:33:06): No. Rob Collie (00:33:07): It's like when we first moved to Cleveland back in the day, it was right in the middle of the financial crisis. We were looking at real estate and everything. And there were houses for sale in Cleveland for $10,000, like $10,000. And I started laughing. I'm like, imagine the deal going down. This house has been on the market for 180 days at $10,000. And you come in and say, "Look, I've got a cash offer. I'm willing to pay asking price. But the grill out back? You need to leave it." And the owner's like, "Mmmmm." Alex Dupler (00:33:43): My wife's best friend lives in Cleveland and they recently bought a house. And so we looked at a bunch of Zillow listings. I'm like, "Oh man, we could pay cash. Move next door." And they're sort of north of the Cleveland Clinic, that super nice neighborhood up in there. I was like, "Oh yeah, we could buy a very nice house, but our family is not there." Also, have you looked at the weather? It's not Seattle. Rob Collie (00:34:05): No, it's not Seattle, but I'll tell you what, here's an interesting description of statistics. When we moved to Cleveland, it wasn't because we wanted to, it was because basically my kids had been taken to Cleveland and so we're trying to console ourselves. We're like, "Okay, well, okay. It's going to be colder. There's going to be snow. Okay, okay. But at least it isn't going to be as overcast." And then we looked it up and Cleveland has more overcast days per year than Seattle. So we were like, "Damn, that sucks." However, it turns out that the definition of overcast days is very, very, very important. Because like an overcast day in Cleveland is like 75% of the sky is covered by clouds. That's an overcast day. At no point in time ever is Cleveland under a one mile thick, oppressive blanket that starves you, where you don't even have any idea where the sun is in the sky. So number of days is one of those misleading statistics. Total amount of oppressive cloud cover needs to be a different statistic. Trust me, there's more sun in Cleveland on an ongoing basis than there is in Seattle. Those winter and fall months, man, those are rough. Alex Dupler (00:35:16): That's not the part that bothers me. I was born and raised in Seattle. It's the shoveling your driveway in March, that part of it. Rob Collie (00:35:24): You could just be the delinquents that we were and just get a four wheel drive vehicle and say, "Screw it." Alex Powers (00:35:31): You don't shovel in March. After February, you don't shovel. It's in my contract. I don't shovel after March 1st. That's it. Because it's going to melt. Alex Dupler (00:35:40): Eventually. Alex Powers (00:35:40): It'll melt by the end of the month. Rob Collie (00:35:43): By the end of the month. Alex Powers (00:35:44): By the end of the month, it'll be gone. The rainstorm's coming. Sunshine's going to happen. I ain't shoveling. No, I put that in my contract years ago. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Cleveland's where I learned the rule, we do not adopt dogs that require walking. Alex Powers (00:35:58): Yes. Rob Collie (00:35:58): They need to be able to go out in the backyard and come back in. I fell so many times on ice. I eventually got, they're like crampons essentially. Alex Dupler (00:36:06): Yak tracks? Rob Collie (00:36:08): Yak tracks, that's what they are. Yak tracks or something else. You can't intentionally slip on yak tracks. It's crazy. But without them, just any day now broken hip. Alex Dupler (00:36:19): Our friends that lived there, they just got a golden retriever. We met the puppy when we were visiting with them this summer. Very cute, but I think they have some of those walks in their future. Rob Collie (00:36:29): So you start looking for a job, that's what led you into Mount Redmond? Alex Dupler (00:36:34): Yeah, I literally went looking for jobs good with Excel in Seattle. I found a contract position into Microsoft, making sure that the salespeople were assigned to the right customers and got paid on the right quota because advertising the agency model, it makes that much more complicated. Because we were in this model where we'd try and keep all the customers of an agency with the same salesperson which makes a lot of sense, especially when you're the underdog and you have relatively few sales resources, you get more leverage. But customer's change agencies all the time, have no respect for our compensation cycles, and so it was quite the nightmare. Rob Collie (00:37:15): Yeah, I love that. Like, so here's how we'll define the world for our benefit, "Oh world, you did not get the message. World, please don't change. Don't have your own things going on." Yep, that sounds like a software engineering problem from the nineties back before the industry kind of got wiser. So you start talking about the show. It seems like with a format like that, it's got to wander, which is what our show does too, by the way. So what are some of the most entertaining or valuable corners that you found yourself wandering into over time? Alex Powers (00:37:48): I'm still excited with our first episode where we talked about kind of beyond the desktop where it's no longer just development in [inaudible 00:37:56] desktop. It now almost takes like five different applications to build something at scale, which is like a good and bad thing. Well, you're getting more tools, seeing new things faster, more performing, et cetera, but why do I need 10 tools? Can we solve that within the desktop application? And we just had a really good conversation, a lot of attendees there, providing their own thoughts. And it kind of comes back to like this overwhelming feeling of learning power BI it's. Like I have to learn 20 new things all the time, learning, learning, learning. It's just never ending. That was my key episode. Alex Dupler (00:38:26): I agree. I mean, I think that's been the central theme of the whole show. I mean, we did that first episode and then we've talked, we've had the same conversation about these tools in so many different contexts. What are the different ways to do dev ops in power BI? What are different ways to measure how you're doing in terms of the effectiveness of your models? And so all of that is sort of external to the desktop application. Alex Powers (00:38:52): I think the best part, too, is that we're not from these traditional backgrounds of 20 years of BI or 20 years of kind of dev ops. We're learning this real time, sharing our experiences of, Rob, I think you call us power users or business users that find these tools, that get empowered by this technology. That is the seat in which we sit in. Hey, I found Excel 2010 power query add in 2013, 2016. I'm fighting with my IT admins. Can you please just upgrade to the next monthly release that will solve all my problems? Where Alex D is on the other series fighting tooth and nail for a 2007 license. It's kind of funny to hear that conversation. Rob Collie (00:39:32): $10 a month. We need those charity commercials like Sally Struthers used to do. This is Alex Dupler. For $10 a month, less than the price of a cup of coffee, you could get him an O 365 license. Alex Dupler (00:39:50): Yeah. So we ended up getting some E3 licenses and some E1 licenses, which meant I could work in power query, not using my personal license, but using the company's license. And then when I tried to share it with my coworkers, they only had E1. They couldn't use desktop. They had to use power query online or Excel online. And there was no power query online. And so even once we sort of modernized, we installed like a windows server 2012 and it was already 2015 and I was okay, this is our modernization. Alex Powers (00:40:26): So Rob, I'm going to steal one of your quotes here if you don't mind. Rob Collie (00:40:30): No, please do. We have an open source quote license at P3. Alex Powers (00:40:35): Well, I'll buy you a 2007 Excel license too, if I have to. Rob Collie (00:40:39): Fantastic. Alex Powers (00:40:39): But one of the items you had said a long time ago, I believe it was either in your book or maybe some of the video recordings you used to do in the studio with a nice button up shirt. You said, "There are two types of people when it comes to technology, those who can see the possibilities and bring about change and those who are about to be affected by it." And I always look at this and I look at things like had kind of talked about with the Excel users who haven't even gotten to this experience yet. There is still somebody out there today that is using Excel 2007 and their employer or their this, their that, or whatever their situation they're red is like, "I just see this little rectangle. It hasn't changed. Why do you want me to go invest in any of this stuff?" Like how often are you still seeing this? Rob Collie (00:41:17): Anecdotally in our public classes, which I haven't taught in a while, I've taught one as recently as let's say two years ago. And when I taught public classes for P3, I still stubbornly insisted on using the Excel version of this stuff to teach. Again, because of that onboarding effect. Alex Powers (00:41:34): Yep. Rob Collie (00:41:34): I think I was the only one left at our company that was still stubbornly doing that and I wasn't bothering to argue with others and whatever. So I did this for years, probably the first one of those classes I taught would have been like in 2011. So fighting with different versions of Excel, all the different students showed up with, for a long time, that was like a quarter of the class. The instructions for the class were very clear, show up with this version or don't bother. And they'd show up and no, they had a version, didn't even have power pivot and couldn't get power pivot. And so it was so bad for a while, we would bring spare laptops. If we traveled to another city, we'd be lugging spare laptops with us and they'd just be there ready to go like the hot swap with a student. That problem really went away though. I reached the point where I'd survey everybody at the beginning of class, "What version of Excel are you on," or whatever. And everyone, every single person in the class would be on the basically some version of recent 365. Rob Collie (00:42:32): I really do think that the person who's trapped on 2007 or hell even 2010 or 2013, they're out there, but they are really a tiny, tiny fraction of the world now. Whereas that used to be an overwhelming problem. So it's really testament to how successful O 365. Alex Powers (00:42:52): I would agree. Rob Collie (00:42:53): It's like, I was kind of like cynically betting against it forever, like the tortoise and the hare. Like I woke up one day and that's the world. The world is O 365. I think everyone's on the modern, not everyone, but it rounds to everyone, is on the modern wave of the tools. But they're still shocked when I show them, when we show them, "Did you know that this is in here?" And they're just like, "What?" Alex Powers (00:43:19): How is that in here? Rob Collie (00:43:20): They get angry because they start to realize how much of their life they have lost by not being told. Alex Powers (00:43:27): What I was always seeing was people had to live in two worlds. Like I went to some of the Excel boot camps, Michael Alexander, absolutely transformed on my personal laptop. I'm having the best time of my life in these three-day boot camps. I'm loving, loving, loving. At the very end though, I have to go back to work on Monday. I saw what could be, and I'm now back to what is. And it's just very difficult to kind of live in that middle space. For those that are still out there and listening to this, Hey, look at your surroundings. Hopefully Office 365 is coming within your organization. But if not, kind of like Alex D's story, I just went looked somewhere else. I saw the future that was coming, and I bet it all myself and I went for it. And I think that me and him both kind of share those stories, too. Alex Dupler (00:44:08): Inside of Microsoft, in my little corner of the Microsoft that most people in Microsoft don't even know about, I put together a class that I've given a couple of times, Modern Excel for Managers. And basically I would just show them power query and X Lookup. We didn't even talk about Dax. But just to like get them thinking like, "Hey, if you're doing some annoying thing in Excel, maybe there's a couple ways to make it a little bit better. Maybe you've never even seen the formula bar before." I had one person that I worked with who I was like, I didn't handle it very well at first. But she was like, "Can you add these numbers together for me?" And I was like, "Yeah." Alex Powers (00:44:52): Just a standard Excel formula bar? Is that what you're talking about? Alex Dupler (00:44:55): She was like, "Can you show me the difference between these two numbers?" "I can do that for you, but here, let me come over here and show you something." Rob Collie (00:45:04): So there was another program manager on being, because I was such an Excel, I'd come from the Excel team, I'm such an Excel zealot, that all someone had to do was say that they needed Excel help and I was there. Alex Powers (00:45:17): Oh yeah. Rob Collie (00:45:18): This person, they developed a habit of having me do all of their Excel work for them. This is one of my peers. And then of course passing off the work as their own. Fine, I wasn't that career minded, really. Six months after this is when I volunteered to no longer be a manager. So climbing the corporate ladder wasn't some voracious appetite of mine. So, okay, fine, fine. I knew what was happening, but I was still okay because the Excel problems were so fun. Keep them coming. Then one day this person asked me for Excel help. And there were these two columns of numbers. And this person had subtracted column two from column one to create column three and then added up column three to get the difference. Alex Powers (00:46:04): I'm waiting for the reveal, because there's a big story here and I'm loving it right. Rob Collie (00:46:09): I said, "Well, you know, you could have just summed column one and column two, and then taken the difference between the two sums." And they said, "But wouldn't the answer be different?" There was this moment of silence. I'm looking. I'm looking at them. They're looking at me. I'm looking at them. They're looking at me. At that moment, they realized that they couldn't use me anymore because I was now dangerous. I now knew that they didn't know math. They didn't just not know spreadsheets, they didn't know math. They were exposed. This person is now an executive at Google. Tom LaRock (00:46:48): This person being the executive at Google. I have no doubt probably doesn't know math. However, as somebody who uses technology and knows that data can be dirty and whatnot, I would actually, if it was me Rob, I would say do it both ways and make sure the answers match. Because you know what? We both seen it where it didn't work out. Rob Collie (00:47:10): That's true. But like when you see all the numbers in front of you, you physically see them all. You've got access. There's nothing hidden going on here. Oh, by the way, Tom, what's your degree in again? Tom LaRock (00:47:21): I have a master's in mathematics from Washington State University. Rob Collie (00:47:23): Masters, yep. Yeah, the masters in math is what allows Tom to say, "I'm not sure." Tom LaRock (00:47:29): Now hold on. Hold on. We've seen it. We've seen it. Rob Collie (00:47:35): There's a name for this. It's like the distributive property or associative property or something. There's some property that we learned in middle school. Tom LaRock (00:47:41): See, that's math with paper and pencil. Now we're talking about using Excel for math. So the tool, there could be something like, "Hey wait," and that's why we tell you, "well, just do it both ways." Even Wayne Winston would probably say, "Yeah, well have two columns. They should match. If they don't match..." Rob Collie (00:47:58): No, no he would not, not in this particular case. Tom LaRock (00:48:01): You're right. He wouldn't. Rob Collie (00:48:02): Every time I tell this story, someone always sort of like takes a sympathetic stance towards the antagonist and I end up feeling like a heel. Tom LaRock (00:48:09): You shouldn't. You shouldn't. Rob Collie (00:48:12): But come on. Tom LaRock (00:48:15): I'm with you. I have no doubt that they don't know math because I come across the same people. I do. Rob Collie (00:48:22): It's think it's the intersection of all of those things, That I was being used the whole time. Tom LaRock (00:48:27): Yes. Rob Collie (00:48:29): Which I had kind of made my peace with. But then on top of that, this incredibly aggressive ladder climber, the kind of person who really was kind of like willing to climb over the bodies of their colleagues. There's something delicious about, even though I was the rube in the whole story up until a certain point. I was being taken advantage of and I knew it. But even me in that situation, there was that moment of just like jaw dropping dumbstruck, like just looking at this person going, "Oh my God, you did not do that." Alex Powers (00:49:09): I'm going to lift us up from the depths here of career and everything else. I thought you were going to take us into that they didn't use cell references, which I've seen people type in column A plus column B's value in an equals. And it's like, "Well, why didn't you just do A1 plus B1?" Mind was blown. So I love that those moments still exist and you find them out in the wild every once in a while. And it's not massive warehouse MPP processing, et cetera, et cetera, that everyone's like, "Oh, this is the," I call it the BI bubble. Everyone's out here living in the BI bubble, writing C sharp, doing tabular and coding, blah, blah, blah. People are still excited about the very simple things that technology can achieve for them. Alex Dupler (00:49:56): My in-laws, they own a brewery in Rinton and they make great beer. I offered to help my mother-in-law with some of her bookkeeping that she does on inventory. And she was showing me how she was doing it. And she was like, "Okay, I get these numbers in Excel. And then I get out my calculator." And I was like, "Okay, let me show you how you can do this differently." And I showed her. She was like, "No, no, that's going to be too hard. I'm going to stick with the calculator." And I was like, "Okay, that's fine." Alex Powers (00:50:20): I still get the, "I don't trust Excel, so I double check with the calculator." Rob Collie (00:50:25): My first exposure to that, I was in college. I was working for a construction management firm that was building the new chemistry building on Vanderbilt campus and I was working in the management trailer. I was sort of all purpose ... we called me the lackey. I would just do whatever anybody needed. Sometimes I'd go out in the building and take measurements for things or whatever. But most of the time, I was just doing paperwork and stuff. They turned over the spreadsheet for this latest change order to the project to Vanderbilt management. And the price tag, it was an Excel spreadsheet and it had a column of values that were summed and there was a number at the bottom of it. And I remember the guy Tony who worked for Vanderbilt going, "Well, someone's going to have to double check these numbers. We can't just pay this contract." And my boss was just looking at him going, "Come on. That's what the spreadsheet is for is for doing that." And Tony's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. But still, I mean, we can't just pay this number." I can understand that stance a little better, anyway, I just looked like a giant meany. But remember. This was someone who was taking advantage of me. Alex Powers (00:51:36): I agree. I agree. Alex Dupler (00:51:38): One of the things that I wanted to touch on in this conversation, something you've brought up a lot, which is going from BI to taking action within the report. And I got to tell you, this concept terrifies me. As a BIPM, I'm terrified of it. And I totally agree that the value is there, but in the BI space, we are really bad at testing. And if I think about how going from, Hey, I've got a report and these are the numbers to someone's going to click a button and it's going to change something in a system of record, the level of quality and testing goes up and I think really threatens the quick solution thing that you've also talked about is your bread and butter of like, Hey, we're going to do this really fast and it's going to blow your mind. But if I got to throw all that testing in there to make sure I don't blow up your source system instead, I don't know how those two things coexist. Rob Collie (00:52:39): Yeah. that's a fair point. I mean, for a moment there, when you were saying the taking action part and this terrifies you, before I understood the subtleties of your point, I was going to make the joke like, "Oh, you want this to be like the psychic hotline. It's for entertainment purposes only. Please don't use this report to take any action." Alex Dupler (00:52:57): It does make my job easier, I will admit, but it is a little bit more nuanced than that. Rob Collie (00:53:02): Okay, okay, fine. So anyway, I still managed to sneak the joke in there without ... it's not a joke at your expense because your point is different. Okay, there's escalating versions of this with escalating versions of responsibility and test implications and things like that. So you can just start with report design and working backwards from the types of action, your constituents, the users of your report. In classes what I would teach this concept on the end of the last day, as sort of like a religious sermon. I would encourage people to think of the users of their reports as each one of them sitting in front of like some gigantic cartoonish bat computer looking thing with these giant oversized 1960s, pop art colored buttons and they're labeled things like "open more stores" or "adjust hours of locations" or "increase head count, reduce head count" or "change product mix" or whatever. It's actually kind of interesting, when you imagine e ... Rob Collie (00:54:03): ... mixed or whatever, right? It's actually interesting when you imagine it that way to give it that physical manifestation, it actually becomes a little bit easier, for me anyway, to imagine what these people can do, because every role in a company really has a finite number of actions that they can take. Now, finite in terms of their categories of actions. It's certainly infinite when you get into the details of what are you going to do. And if you start to think of them from that perspective and you think, okay, what I should do is build reports that advise them or at least are helping inform them as to which control they should touch on their dashboard and directionally which way they should move it. Rob Collie (00:54:45): And it sounds like not that important of a trick, not that powerful of a trick, but if you actually apply that methodology faithfully, you end up with a vastly different portfolio of reports that you have built. Even I, very often, don't live up to my own principle in this regard. Because it's so easy. It's so seductively easy. It's the path of least resistance to grab all the data, load it up, make the model, that's fun, and then it's like flowing downhill. It's just like, oh, this is the easy and fun part, right? And then inevitably, you just start slapping together some reports. And those reports, in some ways, are just exposing the coolness of what you've built. Rob Collie (00:55:29): Now, that still leads to some very, very useful things. That's mind-blowingly better than what you ended up with in the old dark ages of Excel or even traditional BI. But I mean, oh my God, we were just talking about it on the last podcast. Some of the things that I have seen in the world that were supposed to be helping people make decisions were better described as their opponents in the process. This report was something that you had to fight to figure out what you should do at your dashboard. Rob Collie (00:55:59): So even before we start with any sort of actual software integration and taking action and things like that, that's a really, I think, important religion to develop. And again, when you're at your best, your absolute gold medal in the Olympics celebrated by the world best, maybe 30% of your output will live up to this. You just can't, you can't execute that way all the time. It's really, really hard. But it's software development. You are building software when you're building reports. You should have the same sort of mindset, if you can, as the Power BI team has when they sit down to design a new feature in their software. Alex Dupler (00:56:38): I totally agree. One of the questions I've been asking a lot, because I've been working on reports for the salespeople to take to the customers is, what is the conversation you're going to have with the customer? Not, what is the metric, but how does this fit into the conversation? And part of this is because my superpower and my career is going and building tools for the thing I used to do. And I think a lot of BI people come from that, where they were in the business and they were doing a thing, they just started making the reports for that thing. And somewhere along the line, they either work away from it for too long or they solve those problems. They had to learn how to make reports for something they haven't done for years. And I think that's a difficult transition and one I've been going through. Alex Dupler (00:57:26): But yeah, learning how to ask questions of the user, because they're not just going to tell you... what they tell you isn't what they need. You have to learn how to learn from what they say, what they actually want. Rob Collie (00:57:42): Yeah, it's a fine art. And by the way, when you've been in "BI", building the same reports for a long time, generally speaking, looking backwards anyway, those reports also sucked because they were constrained by what was possible at the time. And so they were never very ambitious. And most of those reports amounted to... A lot of times they just amounted to the data dump import that's used for something else. It's just, again, it's the opponent. It's better than nothing, but it's meager, meager help. And suddenly you're given this brand new tool set that's capable of so much more. Rob Collie (00:58:22): And unfortunately what I see a lot of times, when you give Power BI to an IT department, they go, "Oh hot damn, the new SSRS." This is the new reporting services. We're going to use it like reporting services. Load that big one flat wide table and pigeonhole it as visualization. It's just like, "Come on." Alex Powers (00:58:45): I'm telling you my favorite DAX is always written from the IT department. It's just written like a massive sequel statement, 400 lines. None of it makes any sense. It's like, "Can we just calculate, maybe another table here or there." Alex Dupler (00:58:59): The folks coming from the IT department, the one thing they do have going for them is that they did learn to format their code. Sometimes people coming from the Excel world, they learned that they can't format their code. And so I'm not sure that I would agree that the worst DAX comes from the IT department. Because you take a DAX statement and you take all the formatting out, and you've just made it 10 times worse. Alex Powers (00:59:21): From readability, yeah, I would agree. Rob Collie (00:59:24): I gave a talk one time where I asked the trick question of, what's the number one programming language in the world? And

Kai Roberts Fu of Magnus Media Group Video Production & Lynn Liedle with Advanta Clean. Website(s): https://www.magnusmediavideo.com/ https://www.advantaclean.com/

Gaspara Sánchez Cores - Advanta

Scott is an attorney and a graduate of the University of Florida Law School. Scott started his career with Advanta IRA in 2006. His experience with various investment types and their unique processes makes him an invaluable asset. Scott holds the designation of Certified IRA Services Professional (CISP) and leads engaging seminars and webinars that educate the public on the intricacies of self-directed IRAs.   If you like what you hear be sure to like, share, subscribe! Podcast- Mindful Multi-Family show Instagram- Chris_Salerno_ Youtube Channel- Chris Salerno

Digital transformation is spurring innovation and new business models across virtually all areas of the energy and utility sectors. As the pace of change speeds up, utilities rely on the expertise of technology leaders to make key system and architecture decisions that deliver future data insights and services. In this podcast Bram Murawski, a senior solution manager within Siemens Advanta and Chris Potter, a Siemens Solutions Architect speak openly about the trends driving digital transformation today.You will learn:Current status of technology adoption in the energy sectorDrivers influencing the adoption of data hubs and data lakes in EuropeDemystifying the differences between data hubs, data lakes and data warehousesData-driven use casesChallenges, opportunities and tips implementing data hubs and data lakes Related reading:“You should not have to worry about where it is and how to access it,” Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg said of composable data. It is not a single tool but rather the set of tools put together into a solution. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3980938/data-hubs-data-lakes-and-data-warehouses-how-they-are-di https://venturebeat.com/2021/05/07/gartner-says-composable-data-and-analytics-key-to-digital-transformation/Composable data and analytics initiatives might uncover new ways of packaging data as part of a service or product. These could be built using low-code and no-code tools like those found in the Utilihive Platform.Utilihive offers the foundation for composable data and analytics allowing for easy access and sharing across distributed data environments. https://www.greenbird.com/utilihive Acknowledgements:Song: www.Bensound.comMusic Info: Corporate Ambient - AShamaluevMusic.Music Link: https://www.ashamaluevmusic.com/corporate-music

Kyberbezpečnost v průmyslových firmách na jedné straně komplikují zastaralá zařízení, pro která neexistují bezpečnostní updaty. Na druhé straně to ale firmám hraje do karet: útoky jsou dnes stavěny spíš na nové technologie, říká v podcastu serveru Lupa.cz Jozef Mareš, odborník na kybernetickou bezpečnost ve společnosti Siemens Advanta. Mluví také o důsledcích home-office na bezpečnost, o chybách při kyberbezpečnostních školeních zaměstnanců nebo o aktuální zranitelnosti v Microsoft Exchange.

Welcome to Authentic Leadership for Everyday People, the podcast that investigates the connection between effective leadership and authenticity. Kathy Dyer has decades of experience managing large global firms and serves on a number of corporate and non-for-profit boards. Kathy talks about how she developed and cultivated her leadership style throughout the years, lessons she's learned from key mentors and the importance of being well-rounded. Finally, Kathy talks about the work she's done at CARE, shares her passion for travel and provides advice and best practices to listeners on how to hone and develop their leadership skills.  Key Takeaways: 01:07 – Dino introduces today's guest, Katharin Dyer, who joins the show to discuss lessons she's learned throughout her career, including an abrupt exit from Advanta  07:38 – Katharin speaks to how her leadership style has been rooted in courage  11:06 – What authenticity means to Katharin and mentors who have shaped who Katharin has become  14:54 – Katharin shares what success means to her and how she measures it  17:17 – Katharin speaks to the work she does with CARE and lessons she's carried over into her business career  22:03 – Katharin defines her leadership style and identifies which traits she looks for in other leaders  25:19 – Katharin recalls a personal crisis she faced and how it shaped her as a leader  27:32 – Advice Katharin would give to listeners on leadership  30:49 – Katharin talks about her how her passion of travel has influenced her personally and professionally  32:28 – A key business phrase that Katharin absolutely hates 34:09 – Katharin shares some food for your soul  38:08 – Dino leaves the audience with ‘Can't Chase a Train,' a song written and performed by Susan Cattaneo    Tweetable Quotes: “In my case, it was to really find myself that I could always act with courage. And the courage might be to talk about things that aren't easy to talk about whether it's giving someone feedback or speaking truth to power or speaking up at a time when if you don't there will be bad consequences for others later.” (08:15) “People invested in me in my career. And, it's just so easy and gratifying to know that you might invest in others and because of it there may be a skip in their step or wind at their back.” (12:05) “Success for me is really two things: Has my tenure in a role resulted in progress for the business? Has it resulted in progress for the people I have been entrusted with?” (15:10) “I think it's important to be a whole person, not perhaps just narrow and focused on a career or an industry.” (18:49) “In a leader I look for energy. I look for ambition. I look for integrity. And, importantly – consistent with this whole conversation – I look for what I call, ‘whole people.' Yes, I want people who are good at their jobs, but it is my belief that people are more effective and seen as a role model and an aspirational leader to their team if there are multiple dimensions.” (24:11) “I think good leaders master feedback in an advocacy mode. So learn to give feedback so that people want it from you and are not dreading it from you.” (27:51) “How many times have you heard an organization say, ‘Our mission is to exceed our customers' expectations?' Do you know what that means to me? That organization has punted on strategy. The hard work is to actually do the work to set the proper expectations and meet them.” (32:49) Links Mentioned: Dino's Email https://www.instagram.com/al4edp/ (Dino's Instagram) https://twitter.com/al4edp (Dino's Twitter) https://authenticleadershipforeverydaypeople.com/ (Authentic Leadership for Everyday People Website) https://www.facebook.com/al4ep/?ref=page_internal (Authentic Leadership for Everyday People Facebook) https://www.care.org/ (CARE) https://www.last.fm/music/Susan+Cattaneo/_/Can%27t+Chase+a+Train (‘Can't Chase a Train') This...

西门子携手唐人神集团，共同打造未来生猪产业链中国人好吃久矣。川鲁粤闽、苏浙湘徽，八方美食齐聚中国人的餐桌。其中，有一种食材始终地位独特，“虏获”了大多数人的胃，那就是：猪肉。中国人对猪肉的喜爱自古有之。北宋文豪苏东坡就难逃猪肉“诱惑”，堪称“打造猪肉IP的初代网红”。相传他不仅“钻研”出东坡肉，还饶有兴趣地作诗记录下烹饪方法，《猪肉颂》就此诞生——“待他自熟莫催他，火候足时他自美。”几百年后的今天，猪肉仍是许多中国人饮食结构中的重要组成部分，生猪市场规模高达万亿元。生猪产业链主要以生猪养殖业为中心，涉及饲料加工、兽药疫苗、屠宰、食品加工、物流、零售、餐饮等诸多领域。在欣欣向荣的产业发展背后，中国的生猪产业链也存在着特有的痛点和难点，比如回报率低、抗风险能力较差、价格周期性波动较明显等等。此外，由于涉及大量散户养殖，管理机制相对复杂、低效，因此较之更容易指标量化的制造业，生猪产业的数字化转型之路任重道远。不过，有一家企业却已在数字化领域乘风破浪、一马当先。作为中国生猪全产业链经营的领跑者，唐人神集团是首批农业产业化国家重点龙头企业。2019年，集团发布了“TRS313追梦工程”，希望在下一个猪年（2031辛亥猪年）使销售收入达到1000亿元，并实现成为“全球卓越的农牧食品全产业链企业”的宏伟目标。唐人神集团——中国生猪全产业链经营领跑者在这一背景下，唐人神集团与西门子携手追梦，开启“舌尖上”的数字化之旅。唐人神集团董事长、创始人陶一山指出，依托于双方的合作，集团将在未来全力打造产业链、发展模式和技术三大核心竞争力，推进千亿工程项目。而这一切都将经由数字化变为现实。自2019年项目启动以来，西门子Advanta咨询团队与唐人神项目组多次前往生猪养殖猪场进行实地调研。为保证生猪养殖的安全健康，所有人员在进入猪场前需要隔离三天。在此期间，双方在偏僻的隔离点同吃同住、共同研讨。虽然食宿条件相对简陋，但深入、密切的沟通也让项目得以高效推进。唐人神集团推动生猪养殖的自动化、数字化、标准化发展。一百七十余年的技术与管理经验以及在数字化领域的深厚积淀，让西门子有信心也有能力来支持唐人神集团追梦。西门子帮助客户有效拆解战略目标，梳理价值链体系，并通过流程再造与数字化应用相结合的路径，分批分次地将愿景落地。首先是流程再造。项目组基于现有系统，通过优先改变既定流程来解决一部分客户痛点。以产品价值流当中的产品退出机制为例，以往唐人神集团的产品品类众多，其中有些产品销量较低，但仍旧占用着管理资源和销售资源。西门子帮助客户重新定义了产品的退出机制，包括重新定义退出流程，定期评估每个产品的销量并确定阈值，当某些批次的销量低至阈值则可以考虑退出。此外，西门子也妥善规划项目节奏，将替代性产品有序推向市场，在保证效益的同时有效规避风险。其次是数字化运营。西门子帮助唐人神集团定制了数字化应用蓝图，包括打通现有的信息流和数据流，消除企业信息孤岛。此外，由西门子开发的两个灯塔应用——“饲料销售管理驾驶舱”和“养殖生产成本看板”实现示范性落地。过去，各个部门每天以表格的形式将相关数据收集整理，再层层传递至管理层。如今，这些数据被统一提取出来，以形象直观的形式展现在控制看板上，帮助管理层轻松追溯所需信息。这大幅度提升了企业的运营和管理效率。由西门子开发的“饲料销售管理驾驶舱”，以销量热力图、异常告警等方式为客户实现数据可视化和透明化。（注：图中数据为模拟数据）再则是构建现代化人才培养体系并引进项目制。项目团队以西门子丰富的现代化人才培养经验为基础，对唐人神集团现有人才培养体系进行优化，包括引入人才预备队项目，并重新确定了“唐人神大学”的战略定位，改进了相关课程设计与培训内容。同时，项目团队为集团内部的各级员工都定制了分类、分层次的培训体系。此外，唐人神集团学习西门子的工作和管理方式，在内部推广项目管理制。大家通过打造典型项目总结出成功经验，并把这些经验以有效的方式在集团内部复制和推广。双方的通力合作为唐人神集团带来了可喜的变化。集团在2020年上半年的净利润已超去年全年净利润的2倍以上。西门子始终相信，企业的数字化转型之路需要“量体裁衣”，使其真正服务于企业的发展战略并切实创造价值。未来，西门子也将继续陪伴唐人神的转型之路，共同品尝数字化的 “好味道” ！

西门子携手唐人神集团，共同打造未来生猪产业链中国人好吃久矣。川鲁粤闽、苏浙湘徽，八方美食齐聚中国人的餐桌。其中，有一种食材始终地位独特，“虏获”了大多数人的胃，那就是：猪肉。中国人对猪肉的喜爱自古有之。北宋文豪苏东坡就难逃猪肉“诱惑”，堪称“打造猪肉IP的初代网红”。相传他不仅“钻研”出东坡肉，还饶有兴趣地作诗记录下烹饪方法，《猪肉颂》就此诞生——“待他自熟莫催他，火候足时他自美。”几百年后的今天，猪肉仍是许多中国人饮食结构中的重要组成部分，生猪市场规模高达万亿元。生猪产业链主要以生猪养殖业为中心，涉及饲料加工、兽药疫苗、屠宰、食品加工、物流、零售、餐饮等诸多领域。在欣欣向荣的产业发展背后，中国的生猪产业链也存在着特有的痛点和难点，比如回报率低、抗风险能力较差、价格周期性波动较明显等等。此外，由于涉及大量散户养殖，管理机制相对复杂、低效，因此较之更容易指标量化的制造业，生猪产业的数字化转型之路任重道远。不过，有一家企业却已在数字化领域乘风破浪、一马当先。作为中国生猪全产业链经营的领跑者，唐人神集团是首批农业产业化国家重点龙头企业。2019年，集团发布了“TRS313追梦工程”，希望在下一个猪年（2031辛亥猪年）使销售收入达到1000亿元，并实现成为“全球卓越的农牧食品全产业链企业”的宏伟目标。唐人神集团——中国生猪全产业链经营领跑者在这一背景下，唐人神集团与西门子携手追梦，开启“舌尖上”的数字化之旅。唐人神集团董事长、创始人陶一山指出，依托于双方的合作，集团将在未来全力打造产业链、发展模式和技术三大核心竞争力，推进千亿工程项目。而这一切都将经由数字化变为现实。自2019年项目启动以来，西门子Advanta咨询团队与唐人神项目组多次前往生猪养殖猪场进行实地调研。为保证生猪养殖的安全健康，所有人员在进入猪场前需要隔离三天。在此期间，双方在偏僻的隔离点同吃同住、共同研讨。虽然食宿条件相对简陋，但深入、密切的沟通也让项目得以高效推进。唐人神集团推动生猪养殖的自动化、数字化、标准化发展。一百七十余年的技术与管理经验以及在数字化领域的深厚积淀，让西门子有信心也有能力来支持唐人神集团追梦。西门子帮助客户有效拆解战略目标，梳理价值链体系，并通过流程再造与数字化应用相结合的路径，分批分次地将愿景落地。首先是流程再造。项目组基于现有系统，通过优先改变既定流程来解决一部分客户痛点。以产品价值流当中的产品退出机制为例，以往唐人神集团的产品品类众多，其中有些产品销量较低，但仍旧占用着管理资源和销售资源。西门子帮助客户重新定义了产品的退出机制，包括重新定义退出流程，定期评估每个产品的销量并确定阈值，当某些批次的销量低至阈值则可以考虑退出。此外，西门子也妥善规划项目节奏，将替代性产品有序推向市场，在保证效益的同时有效规避风险。其次是数字化运营。西门子帮助唐人神集团定制了数字化应用蓝图，包括打通现有的信息流和数据流，消除企业信息孤岛。此外，由西门子开发的两个灯塔应用——“饲料销售管理驾驶舱”和“养殖生产成本看板”实现示范性落地。过去，各个部门每天以表格的形式将相关数据收集整理，再层层传递至管理层。如今，这些数据被统一提取出来，以形象直观的形式展现在控制看板上，帮助管理层轻松追溯所需信息。这大幅度提升了企业的运营和管理效率。由西门子开发的“饲料销售管理驾驶舱”，以销量热力图、异常告警等方式为客户实现数据可视化和透明化。（注：图中数据为模拟数据）再则是构建现代化人才培养体系并引进项目制。项目团队以西门子丰富的现代化人才培养经验为基础，对唐人神集团现有人才培养体系进行优化，包括引入人才预备队项目，并重新确定了“唐人神大学”的战略定位，改进了相关课程设计与培训内容。同时，项目团队为集团内部的各级员工都定制了分类、分层次的培训体系。此外，唐人神集团学习西门子的工作和管理方式，在内部推广项目管理制。大家通过打造典型项目总结出成功经验，并把这些经验以有效的方式在集团内部复制和推广。双方的通力合作为唐人神集团带来了可喜的变化。集团在2020年上半年的净利润已超去年全年净利润的2倍以上。西门子始终相信，企业的数字化转型之路需要“量体裁衣”，使其真正服务于企业的发展战略并切实创造价值。未来，西门子也将继续陪伴唐人神的转型之路，共同品尝数字化的 “好味道” ！

El sorgo es una de las vedettes de esta campaña. Es el cultivo que más ha aumentado su superficie, casi duplicándose respecto al año anterior. Por sus características nutricionales y su aptitudes agronómicas, el sorgo es un recurso muy importante en la oferta forrajera de un establecimiento ganadero. Pero para un correcto aprovechamiento, resulta clave conocer los requerimientos nutricionales de cada categoría de animales, así como las diversas prácticas posibles para la confección de los alimento. En este sentido, el silo de sorgo es un jugador importante para elevar los rendimientos de kilos de carne por hectárea, pero para obtener los máximos beneficios debe ir acompañado con una alta eficiencia en el manejo de los procesos de producción del cultivo y en la confección, conservación y utilización de este recurso. La gran diversidad de biotipos presentes en el mercado de semillas de sorgo puede complejizar la elección del híbrido indicado. Advanta, uno de los semilleros líderes en sorgo, pone foco en la investigación de cada biotipo para asegurar una correcta recomendación de cada uno. Recientemente, en el marco de Acción Ganadera, un espacio de capacitación para técnicos, productores y asesores ganaderos dentro de Agroactiva, Advanta presentó los diferentes indicadores a considerar para aumentar la eficiencia productiva en un establecimiento mixto, es decir, aquellos que están dedicados a la producción agrícola y ganadera en forma simultánea. En primer lugar, la elección debe considerar la relación grano/planta del cultivo Esto dependerá fundamentalmente de los requerimientos nutricionales de cada rodeo. El segundo aspecto para tener en cuenta para confeccionar un buen silo es la correcta confección y conservación de este. Estos dos puntos son claves para asegurar la calidad de la reserva forrajera. Aunque el forraje es el principal destino del sorgo, hay una gran cantidad de variedades que permiten usos alternativos, como la producción de biocombustibles, energía y harinas. En esta entrevista, Tomás Sundbland - Gerente de Desarrollo para las Américas en Advanta Semillas - nos cuenta por qué el sorgo es la vedette de esta campaña.

Scott Maurer is the Director of Business Development for Advanta IRA, a nationwide self-directed IRA administrator. Scott has worked for Advanta since 2006, helping thousands of people invest in alternative assets (mainly real estate) using their IRAs and old 401ks.   Learn More About Scott Maurer Here:  Website: AdvantaIRA.com Email: smaurer@advantaira.com Facebook: facebook.com/AdvantaIRA Twitter: Twitter.com/AdvantaIRA Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UCEE4_cMUgKC9g9t61vjPo_A Phone: 800-425-0653 ext. 1123 What do you want to hear/see more of and less of? What question do you always wish I would ask but I never do? Connect with the Global Investors Show, Charles Carillo, and Harborside Partners: ◾ Setup a FREE 30 Minute Strategy Call with Charles: schedulecharles.com/  ◾ Global Investors Web Page: charleskcarillo.com/global-investors-podcast/ .◾ Join Our Email Newsletter: http://bit.ly/32pehL0 ◾ Foreign Investing in US Real Estate Facebook Group: facebook.com/groups/ForeignInvestingInUSRealEstate/

“A self-directed IRA just means that it's a retirement account. It's a tax-deferred retirement account where you can control exactly what you want to invest in rather than being limited by a bank or a brokerage firm.” - Scott MaurerWe’re switching things up just a little bit this week and talking about one funding stream in particular for your real estate investments. My guest works with many of my current clients and helps them to better understand how a “self-directed IRA” can help them invest in passive real estate deals like multifamily properties.As a Certified IRA Services Professional and the director of business development at Advanta IRA, (and a lawyer by degree) Scott Maurer, also spends much of his time educating others on the ins-and-outs of self-directed IRAs and on what Advanta can do to help them make the right decisions when it comes to the IRS code. Scott joins me today to discuss some of those rules and explains how investing with a self-directed IRA is a great tax-free investing option.To learn more about how you can start creating wealth through multifamily real estate investing, visit us at LegacyBloom.com.

“A self-directed IRA just means that it’s a retirement account. It’s a tax-deferred retirement account where you can control exactly what you want to invest in rather than being limited by a bank or a brokerage firm.” – Scott MaurerWe’re switching things up just a little bit this week and talking about one funding stream in particular for your real estate investments. My guest works with many of my current clients and helps them to better understand how a “self-directed IRA” can help them invest in passive real estate deals like multifamily properties.As a Certified IRA Services Professional and the director of business development at Advanta IRA, (and a lawyer by degree) Scott Maurer, also spends much of his time educating others on the ins-and-outs of self-directed IRAs and on what Advanta can do to help them make the right decisions when it comes to the IRS code. Scott joins me today to discuss some of those rules and explains how investing with a self-directed IRA is a great tax-free investing option.To learn more about how you can start creating wealth through multifamily real estate investing, visit us at LegacyBloom.com.50 Shades of Wealth – Confessions of a Real Estate Investorhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/50-shades-of-wealth-confessions-of-a-real-estate-investor/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/scott-maurer-how-to-invest-in-real-estate-tax-free-with-a-self-directed-ira

“A self-directed IRA just means that it’s a retirement account. It’s a tax-deferred retirement account where you can control exactly what you want to invest in rather than being limited by a bank or a brokerage firm.” – Scott MaurerWe’re switching things up just a little bit this week and talking about one funding stream in particular for your real estate investments. My guest works with many of my current clients and helps them to better understand how a “self-directed IRA” can help them invest in passive real estate deals like multifamily properties.As a Certified IRA Services Professional and the director of business development at Advanta IRA, (and a lawyer by degree) Scott Maurer, also spends much of his time educating others on the ins-and-outs of self-directed IRAs and on what Advanta can do to help them make the right decisions when it comes to the IRS code. Scott joins me today to discuss some of those rules and explains how investing with a self-directed IRA is a great tax-free investing option.To learn more about how you can start creating wealth through multifamily real estate investing, visit us at LegacyBloom.com.50 Shades of Wealth – Confessions of a Real Estate Investorhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/50-shades-of-wealth-confessions-of-a-real-estate-investor/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/scott-maurer-how-to-invest-in-real-estate-tax-free-with-a-self-directed-ira

In this episode of UPL Insights, we’re asking if new technologies developed in Argentina could offer a new route to food security for farmers and families across the African continent. Florent Clair is joined by Pedro Pardo to discuss the work that UPL is leading with Sorghum and how the many uses of this staple crop could turn transform the potential for Africa’s breadbasket over the next decade. You can read more about UPL and Advanta’s work with Sorghum here: http://advantaus.com/products-services/grain-sorghum-hybrids/ To know more about us follow us on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/upl_global/ Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/UPLGlobal/ Twitter : https://twitter.com/UPLLtd

添加微信"siemensfm1847"，加入听友群，发现更多精彩！咨询西门子业务，请拨打400-616-2020西门子Advanta今天在2020全球人工智能产品应用博览会上同期举办了中国生态伙伴峰会，并在峰会上宣布携手能科科技股份有限公司、厦门乐石科技有限公司、烟台数动网络科技有限公司、苏州金融租赁股份有限公司、唐人神集团股份有限公司等十余家企业共同启动“工业互联网生态合作计划”。该计划旨在倡导多元主体开放创新、合作共享、平等参与的全新合作模式，将西门子Advanta与不同行业数字化转型先行者携手共创的成功经验推广至更多企业，助力推动中国企业转型升级。唐人神集团作为生态合作伙伴首批代表，与西门子（中国）有限公司执行副总裁、西门子 Advanta中国区总经理朱骁洵交换合作协议。数字化转型已经成为中国企业实现可持续发展和构建长久竞争力的必然选择。基于在数字化技术和行业专长方面的丰富经验和诸多成功实践，西门子希望携手更多合作伙伴，探索企业转型的全新商业模式，成为各行业企业与数字化转型的‘连接器'。借助新的生态合作模式，我们致力于汇聚更多元化的行业最佳实践、资源和人才，形成产业转型升级的‘乘数效应'，驱动中国企业数字化转型的规模化落地。朱骁洵西门子（中国）有限公司执行副总裁西门子 Advanta中国区总经理目前，西门子Advanta已经携手遍布医疗、金融租赁、智能家居、智慧农业、能源管理、IT科技等领域的众多企业成功实现数字化转型。这些成功案例将为生态圈的价值共享奠定基础。西门子Advanta在华启动生态合作计划，助力推动产业数字化转型。在医疗领域，西门子Advanta与西门子医疗和医学影像人工智能企业汇医慧影合作，在疫情期间向湖北黄冈方舱医院交付了首个“黎明岛”CT方舱解决方案。在金融租赁领域，西门子Advanta携手苏州金融租赁股份有限公司，借助数据中台技术搭建了租赁物智能管理平台，通过实时抓取和分析数据，让运营人员足不出户就可以了解租赁物的真实状态。在智能家居领域，西门子Advanta与西门子家居电气合作打造SieNeuro智能家居系统，实现对照明、窗帘、空调、电视等家居设备的本地或远程控制。此外，通过“工业互联网生态合作计划”，西门子Advanta将为生态合作伙伴提供从咨询到实施的数字化转型创新解决方案，包括数字化转型评估工具箱、工业互联网架构设计、数据中台、知识中台、物联网数据处理技术、工厂数字化升级和模拟仿真技术等，以前沿科技赋能产业数字化转型。“工业互联网生态合作计划”正式启动。在2020全球人工智能产品应用博览会上，西门子与清华大学经济与管理学院（清华经管学院）联合展示了双方在2020年4月共同启动的“数字化企业领军项目”。该项目依托清华经管学院的前沿管理思想及理论体系和西门子在工业相关领域的百年积淀及数字化领先实践，致力于培养学员成为具备宏观视野和战略思维、掌握创新能力和系统方法、并能践行数字化转型的企业领袖。此外，西门子还展示了数据中台、工业人工智能、基于“数字化双胞胎”的楼宇解决方案、互联城市解决方案和综合能源管理系统等前沿技术及创新解决方案，为生态合作伙伴赋能。

添加微信"siemensfm1847"，加入听友群，发现更多精彩！咨询西门子业务，请拨打400-616-2020西门子Advanta今天在2020全球人工智能产品应用博览会上同期举办了中国生态伙伴峰会，并在峰会上宣布携手能科科技股份有限公司、厦门乐石科技有限公司、烟台数动网络科技有限公司、苏州金融租赁股份有限公司、唐人神集团股份有限公司等十余家企业共同启动“工业互联网生态合作计划”。该计划旨在倡导多元主体开放创新、合作共享、平等参与的全新合作模式，将西门子Advanta与不同行业数字化转型先行者携手共创的成功经验推广至更多企业，助力推动中国企业转型升级。唐人神集团作为生态合作伙伴首批代表，与西门子（中国）有限公司执行副总裁、西门子 Advanta中国区总经理朱骁洵交换合作协议。数字化转型已经成为中国企业实现可持续发展和构建长久竞争力的必然选择。基于在数字化技术和行业专长方面的丰富经验和诸多成功实践，西门子希望携手更多合作伙伴，探索企业转型的全新商业模式，成为各行业企业与数字化转型的‘连接器'。借助新的生态合作模式，我们致力于汇聚更多元化的行业最佳实践、资源和人才，形成产业转型升级的‘乘数效应'，驱动中国企业数字化转型的规模化落地。朱骁洵西门子（中国）有限公司执行副总裁西门子 Advanta中国区总经理目前，西门子Advanta已经携手遍布医疗、金融租赁、智能家居、智慧农业、能源管理、IT科技等领域的众多企业成功实现数字化转型。这些成功案例将为生态圈的价值共享奠定基础。西门子Advanta在华启动生态合作计划，助力推动产业数字化转型。在医疗领域，西门子Advanta与西门子医疗和医学影像人工智能企业汇医慧影合作，在疫情期间向湖北黄冈方舱医院交付了首个“黎明岛”CT方舱解决方案。在金融租赁领域，西门子Advanta携手苏州金融租赁股份有限公司，借助数据中台技术搭建了租赁物智能管理平台，通过实时抓取和分析数据，让运营人员足不出户就可以了解租赁物的真实状态。在智能家居领域，西门子Advanta与西门子家居电气合作打造SieNeuro智能家居系统，实现对照明、窗帘、空调、电视等家居设备的本地或远程控制。此外，通过“工业互联网生态合作计划”，西门子Advanta将为生态合作伙伴提供从咨询到实施的数字化转型创新解决方案，包括数字化转型评估工具箱、工业互联网架构设计、数据中台、知识中台、物联网数据处理技术、工厂数字化升级和模拟仿真技术等，以前沿科技赋能产业数字化转型。“工业互联网生态合作计划”正式启动。在2020全球人工智能产品应用博览会上，西门子与清华大学经济与管理学院（清华经管学院）联合展示了双方在2020年4月共同启动的“数字化企业领军项目”。该项目依托清华经管学院的前沿管理思想及理论体系和西门子在工业相关领域的百年积淀及数字化领先实践，致力于培养学员成为具备宏观视野和战略思维、掌握创新能力和系统方法、并能践行数字化转型的企业领袖。此外，西门子还展示了数据中台、工业人工智能、基于“数字化双胞胎”的楼宇解决方案、互联城市解决方案和综合能源管理系统等前沿技术及创新解决方案，为生态合作伙伴赋能。

Scott Maurer is the Director of Business Development for Advanta IRA, a nationwide self-directed IRA administrator. Scott has worked for Advanta since 2006, helping thousands of people invest in alternative assets (mainly real estate) using their IRAs and old 401ks. Tune in to learn more about self-directed IRA's

On this week’s episode of Sorghum Smart Talk, we visit with Sorghum Checkoff Crop Improvement Director Justin Weinhiemer, Ph.D.,  about new herbicide tolerance technologies in sorghum followed by Advanta’s North America Business Director Barry Lubbers who  talks about their product -- igrowth™. In this two-part episode, we discuss Sorghum Checkoff efforts to bring this new technology to growers, and we dive deeper into Advanta’s seed product launched this summer. To learn more about the technologies, stewardship and what you can expect from Advanta in the future, listen in to this week’s episode!

In this podcast, Jim talks to Clay Malcolm of Advanta IRA about investing in real estate with your IRA. This is not just great podcast for real estate investors…. This is also very valuable learning opportunity for those of you who have a 401k with a company you are no longer with. Two things he likes about Advanta IRA: customer service and speed of transactions What the typical, first investment with a self-directed IRA looks like The scenario of a private money loan What about the “gap” between deals? Some of the things you can do with a self-directed IRA What you can do if you are no longer with the company where you had your 401k How to move your 401k money to Advanta. It’s easy at advantaira.com How long can it take to move your 401k to an IRA You’ve found a great real estate opportunity. What’s next? Using your money to make an offer What does Clay mean when he says to “think of your IRA as a remote-control version of yourself as an investor” How to collect rent on an IRA invested property   Advanta IRA: 470.695.0620  Questions about self-directed IRAs? Contact Clay at cmalcolm@advantaira.com   Follow on Jim on: Instagram  Facebook Twitter

I’m excited to share this episode of the Mother’s Quest Podcast with someone I deeply admire and whose recent book “Spiral: A Catalyst for Innovation and Expansion” was a revelation to me... speaker, author, thought leader, homeschooling mother, and CEO of the renewable energy start-up muGrid Analytics, Amy Simpkins. Before a self-described identity crisis brought her to the work she’s doing today, Amy was quite literally on the path to becoming an astronaut. After pursuing a degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and a masters in Astronautical Engineering from USC, she began a 10-year tenure as an aspiring Spacecraft Systems Architect designing, integrating, and operating spacecraft at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company. How she determined she no longer wanted to become an astronaut and the power of being truly seen by someone else, which led to her becoming a coach, are just a few of the topics we explore during our conversation.  I first came to know Amy when I was facilitating a virtual “Power Circle” for the organization Emerging Women and Amy was a participant. Right away, I knew she was someone special, as she brought the insight of an engineer’s brain, a poet’s heart, and an alchemist’s life journey to every session.  Using her unique gifts, Amy lights the way for so many of us with how she explains and embodies the iterative spiral path to life, motherhood, and entrepreneurship. And in this conversation, as we explored her wisdom and lessons learned along all the E.P.I.C. guideposts, it felt like we revealed together the creative genius, a quality she most admired in her mother, that is also inside of her.  I left feeling more at ease than when I arrived, noticing the places and ways that I can bring more integration and awareness about the spiral processes in my life, and committed to making space, as Amy challenged me to do, to put down my phone, and sit in the pause and exploration of a question in my life, rather than rushing to a solution.  I invite you to do the same right now...to push pause, really listen to this conversation, and create space for integration, curiosity, iteration, and creativity in your E.P.I.C. life. Much appreciation, P.S. Know someone who would love this conversation? Click forward now to pay this forward to a friend who may be interested. This Episode is Dedicated by: Olivia Parr-Rud Olivia pioneered the research in Predictive Analytics and Business Intelligence that led to the writing of her first book, Data Mining Cookbook, Modeling for Acquisition, Risk and Customer Relationship Management (Wiley 2001). Her passion for finding successful solutions for her clients inspired her research on leadership and corporate culture and the unveiling of the link between advances in technology and the increasing need for human and organizational development. Her findings are detailed in her second book, Business Intelligence Success Factors, Aligning for Success in a Global Economy (Wiley/SAS, 2009). In addition to public speaking, Olivia offers training and consulting in both predictive analytics and innovative leadership. Her clients include Cisco, Citizen’s Bank, Clorox, HP, IBM, Xerox, Providian Insurance, Wells Fargo, Fleet Bank, Advanta, Nationwide, and SAS. Olivia has a BA in Mathematics and an MS in Decision and Information Systems, with a concentration in Statistics. She is a certified Holacracy™ Practitioner. Holacracy™ is a set of structures and practices designed to build organizational adaptability and resilience. My Big ‘Why’ https://tinyurl.com/LOVENEWCOMPETITIVEEDGE LOVE@WORK: The Essential Guide to a Life of Inspired Purpose - A Silver Nautilus Book Award Winner LOVE@WORK Method: Practices and Tools for Stepping In Your Life of Inspired Purpose Radio Show: Quantum Business Insights – Emerging Perspectives on People, Process, & Profits Follow Olivia on Social Media: Facebook LinkedIn Twitter Medium   YouTube Instagram In This Episode We Talk About: The creative genius Amy admired in her mother Amy’s career quest to become an astronaut The spark moments that led Amy to move through an identity crisis and discover a new path  The power of truly being seen  Amy’s approach to homeschooling, exemplified by what happened when they ran over a snake in their driveway  Empowering your children to be decision-makers for themselves Doughnut Economics and Noblesse Oblige Amy and her husband’s work in renewable energy and how they are changing the world The importance of projects and making things real  What is a sensory deprivation or “float tank” and why Amy loves it  Iterative, Spiral Development and its phases, which map to natural cycles Putting your phone down to be more present and the power of staying in inquiry A favorite passage of mine in Amy’s book which illustrates how “integration” creates a unique ecosystem in our lives Mentioned from this Episode: Spiral: A Catalyst for Innovation and Expansion  Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth Ep 63: A Maker’s Journey to a Good Life with Jonathan Fields Emerging Women’s Power Circles Program This Week’s Challenge:  For this week’s challenge, Amy challenges us to invite more space and exploration for something that we are trying to find the solution for. She encourages us to put down our phones, invite in some meditation and mystery, and allow ourselves to be in a state of pause before rushing to resolution. Amy also shared about a float therapy tank experience she has done to quiet her mind and I decided to say “yes” to trying this as well. I’ve identified one to test out not far from my house and think this may be a great way to welcome in some pause. Learn More About Amy: Amy Simpkins is the speaker, author, facilitator, and thought leader in innovation for technology, entrepreneurs, and everybody.  She believes that innovation is for everyone and holds the key to both personal fulfillment and lasting global change. As an MIT-trained engineer, she spent 15 years as a spacecraft systems architect, someone who is responsible for holding the big picture vision for complex space exploration missions, ensuring that all components of the vision were well-integrated into a cohesive whole, and implementing that vision with flexibility and adaptability. She then takes those proven design methodologies and big-picture mindset, infuse them with a heaping side of intuition and soul, and put it all to work to help individuals and organizations bring innovative ideas into reality so they can change the world with their unique magic. Amy holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a Master of Science degree in Astronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California. She has designed, integrated, and flown spacecraft with Lockheed Martin, and she's also the CEO of the hot renewable energy startup, muGrid Analytics.  She lives with her amazing entrepreneurial husband and three rambunctious children in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains outside Denver, Colorado.  She's a messy chef, a world traveler, a taekwondo green belt, a vocal music minor, a homeschool mom, and a tough cookie in the Colorado backcountry. Check out Amy's amazing book here. Connect with Amy: hello@amysimpkins.com Amy Simpkins | Innovation Catalyst Twitter Instagram Facebook Announcements: Want More Reflection in Your Life? Book A Discovery Call Some key themes that emerge from this conversation with Amy Simpkins, is the power of reflection and the power of being seen. These are elements that I bring, not only to every podcast interview, but to my one-one-one coaching and Mother’s Quest Circle facilitation. If you’re seeking more space for pause and reflection in your life, I encourage you to reach out to me for a discovery call to learn how we might work together.  Visit mothersquest.as.me/discoverysession to schedule a time to talk.  Click here to book a discovery call  One Minute Mom Manifesto ⚡️Have you been feeling a nudge to say "yes" to create your Mother's Quest Manifesto? The official challenge and giveaway may be over, but the invitation and content is always there for you to create your #oneminutemommanifesto  Here are some easy steps you can follow...

My fellow MVP, good friend and co-collaborator on PowerISV, Mark Smith (aka @nz365guy) is on a "Shock and Awe" campaign that opens with the phrase: "Dynamics 365 is Dead!". But is it? The House that D365 Built At the recently concluded MVP Summit, Mark had the opportunity to lob his "D365 is Dead" grenade at Charles Lamanna for reaction. Charles seemed legitimately puzzled by the thought, and simply replied that "D365 pays for the entire Business Applications Team and Advanta campus".  So... not dead. Uprising I think we are a long way from knowing if Mark's assertion will prove correct. What sometimes gets missed, is the second part of his proclamation "... long live the Power Platform". Clearly Mark is placing his bet that the fairly new ability for users and developers to build apps directly on the platform, will eclipse the long-standing App offerings from Microsoft, that are built on the same platform. Zero-Sum Game? If anyone should be agreeing with Mark on this one, you would think it would be me. After all, we were one of the first ISVs to shift our applications from above the first-party apps, to under them. Our focus is 100% around building on the platform, avoiding the first-party apps entirely. We went "all-in" on the platform. Do I think this motion will overcome the First-Party apps? I do not. It is also not a goal or desire of mine. I don't see it as a zero sum game at all. A Fair Comparison? There is no possible way that my relatively small team is ever going to build a more sophisticated sales application, or any of the other first-party apps, on the platform. You are talking about a vast repository of development and refinement, created over a very long time, and the hits keep coming with AI and Mixed Reality, etc. I hear some people try and compare on price in a sales conversation, that the platform license is a third of the cost of the plan! As though they discovered a coupon to get the same thing for 66% off. But, they are far from the same thing. Customers? Clearly, sales of Dynamics 365 Apps are growing significantly YoY, and customers are not buffoons. Many have complex needs that can only be practically met by the power of the first-party applications. Is a partner really going to build their own Connected Field Service app on the platform? Force.com did not eliminate Salesforce's Sales, Service or Marketing clouds, in fact, it was the opposite. The Opposite? The real genius of Microsoft releasing a platform license, was to grow the entire pie exponentially. As opposed to taking away from the first-party apps, I think apps built on the platform, by partners, ISVs or Citizens, will actually drive more first-party app sales. This is happening through two movements. Movement One I don't have actual figures, but anecdotally, from my own experience, I think it's fair to say, that well over 50% of all organizations, from SMB through Enterprise, are still using Outlook and Speadsheets. Most organizations have not even made the move to a legitimate Business Process Application of any kind, and instead torture Excel. I worked with one Fortune 40 company that was using Outlook as a CRM for a 15,000 person sales force. Does this company have the need and budget for a sophisticated application like Dynamics 365? Obviously. Would it transform their business? Clearly. Are they eager and ready to jump into an enterprise-grade solution? Often not. Could a simple business application be built on the platform, that would be significantly better than Outlook and Excel? Absolutely. Is that a net new customer for Microsoft that they would not have gained otherwise? No Doubt. Should I continue asking and answering my own questions? I think not. Movement Two The Microsoft Bizapps ISV community is growing, maybe not as fast as they would like, but the momentum is there. Many ISV solutions were built on top of, or depended on items in, the First-Party applications. These would be the ones that fall into Guggs' patterns of "Extend" or "Connect". Many of these offered significant enhancements to the D365 Apps, others built their own end-to-end features on top of the first-party apps because that is what they had. So the second movement I see, is for certain ISVs to decouple their dependencies, and relaunch underneath the First-Party apps. This reduces the license cost to their customers, greatly expanding their addressable market, which again grows the whole pie. If a solution does not need anything from the First-Party apps, there is no need to price limit your market by sitting on top of it, if it is not necessary. Addressable Market Both of the above movements, will significantly expand the total addressable market by a factor of [insert big number here] . Will they siphon off some potential first-party sales? Sure, but they will also introduce a ton of customers to the Microsoft Business Applications Platform. A customer who starts with some departmental need filled by a custom PowerApp, and has a good experience, leads to more investigation by the customer. I have directly witnessed, with our own entry-level solutions, customers who then moved onto to add the full first-party Sales, Marketing and AI applications. This was not going to happen without an easy entry point. In fact, I feel comfortable saying that close to 100% of our customers, would not be using Microsoft Business Applications at all, were it not for the options we made available to them. How can Microsoft Accelerate these Movements? I know that the Bizapps leadership gets it. I know that the PMs who have P&L responsibility for the First-Party apps, do not get it. Right now, there are only two barriers to explosive growth. The first is artificial, first-party protection schemes. The second is prioritization of the tools and programs required for these motions to flourish. I also know that both of these barriers will be coming down very soon.

Without access to a high net worth individual or family office, are you out of options to syndicate real estate deals? Not quite. In fact, Scott Maurer of Advanta IRA knows of a method to solicit funding from the untapped trillions locked away in the average American's retirement accounts; via a self-directed IRA. In this episode, Kevin and Scott discuss the self-directed IRA as a vehicle for average investors to purchase real estate using their IRA funds; converting their traditional IRA into a structure that is allowed to invest in assets outside the confines of the stock market. HIGHLIGHTS: [6:58] What is Scott's Background? [9:23] Why are self-directed IRAs rare? What can you do with one? [15:35] Pros & Cons of investing in RE through an IRA structure. [21:32] What's the advantages of working with Advanta? [24:48] How to raise capital from self-directed IRA account holders. [32:01] Closing thoughts. Job Opportunities with my Team: Click Here Recommended Resources: Check out our company and our partnership opportunities by visiting SunriseCapitalInvestors.com Would you like to partner with us on future MHP deals, call 844-CASH-FLW to learn more or click here to schedule a time on our calendar. Grab a free copy of our book “The 21 Biggest Mistakes Investors Make When Purchasing their First Mobile Home Park…and how to avoid them click here Visit Advanta IRA's website Review and Subscribe

This week I speak with Larissa Green who is the Education Director at Advanta IRA.  Advanta is a Self Directed IRA Administrator whose primary mission is to be a custodian of records for those who choose to have a self-directed IRA. A Self Directed Retirement Account allows the account holder to control their own retirement plan via the self-direction model.  In short, with a SDIRA you can pick what your account invests in.  The list of things you cannot invest in is very short and usually tied to some types of currency, antiquities, and insurance products/investments.  Everything else is pretty much fair game (as long as it's not illegal). During this episode, we discuss lots of creative examples that people have invested in over the years to grow even tiny balance IRA’s into respectable amounts.  By self-directing your retirement funds you eliminate lots of fees and commissions that are common to stockbrokers and financial planner supervised investments.  Imagine the possibilities of what you could do with all that extra money? Another huge benefit is that companies like Advanta keep us compliant with IRS regulations and also help monitor the progress and valuations of our investment accounts.  Additionally, they help keep us in check by providing a baked in system of check and balances that are required in order for your funds to be dispursed. This episode is a goldmine of information so buckle up, grab a notebook and enjoy! Want to brainstorm with me on ideas to supercharge YOUR Self Directed IRA?  Let’s get on call and discuss tons of creative investment strategies available to you in addition to what is considered common in Real Estate.  Use the opportunity to get on a call with me to boost that low balance to one that will soon be able to invest in bigger deals, while maintaining control over every penny the whole time!  You can book a slot on my calendar at http://CashFlowGuys.com/AskTyler

  Alex W. ‘Pete’ Hart is the Chairman of the Board of Verifone Systems a credit card terminal payment systems company and financial services industry veteran.    With a 50-year distinguished track record of leadership in the financial services industry, Pete has acted as a consultant specializing in emerging payment and distribution systems. His particular focus is e-commerce and its impact on the consumer banking industry. Pete was the former CEO of Advanta Corporation, a diversified financial services company and the President and Chief Executive Officer of MasterCard International. While at MasterCard, he served as Chairman of the Board of Maestro International, the global debit-system, and was a member of the board of directors of Europay International. He was a key member of the Silicon Valley Bancshares Board of Directors starting in 2001 and also became the Chairman of the Board of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Financial Group. Prior to joining MasterCard, Pete spent 10 years at First Interstate Bancorp, the 17-state multi-bank holding company which is now part of Wells Fargo. While with First Interstate, he became the founding chairman of the board of the CIRRUS System, which is now the world’s largest network of shared automated teller machines. Pete’s distinguished career also includes various positions with the First National Bank of Chicago and BancOhio. He has served on numerous board of directors such as Lending Club; Fair Isaac Corporation a predictive software company; Global Payments, Inc., a payment services company;eHarmony.com; Mitek a mobile capture deposits company, Actrade Financial Technologies; Sanchez Computer Associates; HNC Software; Retek Inc.; Shopping.com;  US Encode;  and Sequal Technologies, Inc. He has also been an advisor to many companies including Tempo Payments, NoLie MRI, Cimbal Technologies, Dealtime, Humetix, and Orbiscom. Hart graduated from Harvard University in 1962. He completed studies at the graduate school of Bank Marketing at the University of Colorado and the graduate program for Data Processing Management at Harvard Business School. Pete was and has worked as an independent consultant to the financial services industry since 1997. He served as Chief Executive Officer of Advanta Corporation, a public diversified financial services company from 1995 to 1997, where he had previously served as Executive Vice Chairman from 1994 to 1995. Prior to joining Advanta, he was President and Chief Executive Officer of MasterCard International, a worldwide payment service provider from 1994 to 1998.   I first came into contact with Pete back in 1995 after I had graduated from law school, passed the bar I was looking to become counsel to credit card bank Advanta.    he was also captain of the Harvard football team of 1961 so we are talking to a true leader. Pete says, when it comes to success it is a matter of “being able to do the things I like to do with the people I like doing them with and feeling as if I am being paid acceptable beyond that there is not a whole lot to it“ You can learn more about Pete and what he does on his company website at www.verifone.com and connect with him on LinkedIn. Happy listening! Verifone Systems was created back in 1981 by William ‘Bill’ Melton.  The Verifone story is extremely inspirational and every business startup and entrepreneur learn from the founder and executives of the company.