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Breaking Down Lori Vallow Daybell's Delusional Role As Her Own Attorney A Dead Man, a Doomsday Plan, and 47 Minutes of Silence Charles Vallow was shot twice inside a house he paid for. He lay dead on the floor for 47 minutes before anyone bothered to call 911. And now, the woman once married to him—Lori Vallow Daybell—is on trial for conspiring to make that happen. This isn't Idaho. It's Maricopa County, Arizona. But the woman at the center of the story is the same: convicted murderer, former beauty queen, five-time wife, and self-proclaimed spiritual warrior who believed people could become “zombies” possessed by evil spirits. In this trial, Lori isn't just the defendant—she's also her own attorney. Representing herself, cross-examining witnesses, and objecting to testimony as she fights charges that she orchestrated the murder of her estranged husband in 2019. According to prosecutors, Lori conspired with her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Charles so she could cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy and clear the way to marry Chad Daybell—an LDS fiction author and her apocalyptic soulmate. They say this wasn't spontaneous. It was a plan rooted in delusion and tied up in scripture. Days before the shooting, Lori texted Alex: “It's all coming to a head this week. I will be like Nephi, I am told, and so will you.” In LDS scripture, Nephi is known for killing a man because God commanded it. On the morning of July 11, 2019, Charles texted Lori's other brother, Adam, with a warning: “They're planning something.” Adam replied, “Absolutely.” Charles showed up at Lori's Chandler home to pick up their son, JJ. He never made it out alive. The first shot went through his chest and pierced his heart. He fell. Then, according to testimony and forensic evidence, a second shot was fired from above, traveling downward into the floor, where the bullet lodged in a baseboard across the room. Maricopa County firefighter Scott Cowden testified that when he arrived, Charles was already cold. No pulse, no breath, no attempt at CPR. Cowden, who teaches CPR for a living, said he knew right away no one had tried to save Charles. When he started compressions, he felt the telltale crunch of an untouched chest cavity. It's the grim equivalent of walking into a house and smelling smoke—you just know. What Cowden didn't see? Blood. Aside from the pooling around Charles's body, there was nothing. No trail down the hall. No mess in the kitchen. No bloody towels, napkins, or paper—despite Alex's claim that he'd been holding his bleeding head. Cowden said the paper towel Alex had was mostly clean. He also noticed Alex didn't look injured. Didn't act it either. He described him as calm, nonchalant. Sunglasses still perched on his head, perfectly balanced and unbothered—odd for someone who supposedly just wrestled with a former semi-pro baseball player. Then there's the silence. Lori left the house with JJ and Tylee, taking Charles's rental car. She went to Burger King, then Walgreens, then dropped JJ off at school. She spoke with Alex twice while out. Still, neither of them called for help until 47 minutes had passed. Lori told officers she fled the scene in fear. That Charles had come at her with a bat. That Alex had to step in. But investigators say the entire story was staged. In court, prosecutors pointed to Lori's motive: Charles had secretly changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy months earlier. Lori was out. His sister, Kay Woodcock, was in. After Charles's death, Lori called the insurance company—and only then learned she wasn't getting the money. She texted Chad Daybell: “He changed it in March. It was probably Ned before we got rid of him.” “Ned” was the name she gave the evil spirit she believed had overtaken Charles. Witnesses will testify that Lori claimed Charles was possessed and needed to be “cast out.” That she led a group of women in a spiritual exorcism. That she talked about drugging Charles with JJ's crushed pills. That Alex openly said he wanted Charles dead. One witness, Christina, said Lori brushed off her concerns by saying she was joking. A month later, Charles was dead. Now Lori sits in the courtroom—wearing a navy suit, flipping through notes, calling witnesses, and sparring with the prosecution. When firefighter Cowden testified that no CPR had been given, she pressed him. Asked whether cracking the sternum was guaranteed. Asked about blood patterns. Asked about technique. But Cowden didn't budge. He said everything he saw—everything he didn't see—told him no one had tried to save Charles. Another firefighter, Captain Kent Keller, backed him up. He described the scene as eerily tidy. Charles's body was in the middle of an empty room. No overturned furniture. No signs of chaos. Just a bat, a ball cap, and a dead man on the floor. Keller told the jury it looked like Charles had been dead for some time before they got there. Lividity and modeling had already set in. Blood had pooled beneath him. His pupils were fixed. And the detail that stuck with Keller? That everything about the room—the setup, the silence, the strange calm—just felt off. #LoriVallowDaybell #CharlesVallow #DoomsdayMom #TrueCrimePodcast Want to listen to ALL of our podcasts AD-FREE? Subscribe through APPLE PODCASTS, and try it for three days free: https://tinyurl.com/ycw626tj Follow Our Other Cases: https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com The latest on The Downfall of Diddy, The Trial of Karen Read, The Murder Of Maddie Soto, Catching the Long Island Serial Killer, Awaiting Admission: BTK's Unconfessed Crimes, Delphi Murders: Inside the Crime, Chad & Lori Daybell, The Murder of Ana Walshe, Alex Murdaugh, Bryan Kohberger, Lucy Letby, Kouri Richins, Malevolent Mormon Mommys, The Menendez Brothers: Quest For Justice, The Murder of Stephen Smith, The Murder of Madeline Kingsbury, The Murder Of Sandra Birchmore, and much more! Listen at https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com

Breaking Down Lori Vallow Daybell's Delusional Role As Her Own Attorney A Dead Man, a Doomsday Plan, and 47 Minutes of Silence Charles Vallow was shot twice inside a house he paid for. He lay dead on the floor for 47 minutes before anyone bothered to call 911. And now, the woman once married to him—Lori Vallow Daybell—is on trial for conspiring to make that happen. This isn't Idaho. It's Maricopa County, Arizona. But the woman at the center of the story is the same: convicted murderer, former beauty queen, five-time wife, and self-proclaimed spiritual warrior who believed people could become “zombies” possessed by evil spirits. In this trial, Lori isn't just the defendant—she's also her own attorney. Representing herself, cross-examining witnesses, and objecting to testimony as she fights charges that she orchestrated the murder of her estranged husband in 2019. According to prosecutors, Lori conspired with her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Charles so she could cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy and clear the way to marry Chad Daybell—an LDS fiction author and her apocalyptic soulmate. They say this wasn't spontaneous. It was a plan rooted in delusion and tied up in scripture. Days before the shooting, Lori texted Alex: “It's all coming to a head this week. I will be like Nephi, I am told, and so will you.” In LDS scripture, Nephi is known for killing a man because God commanded it. On the morning of July 11, 2019, Charles texted Lori's other brother, Adam, with a warning: “They're planning something.” Adam replied, “Absolutely.” Charles showed up at Lori's Chandler home to pick up their son, JJ. He never made it out alive. The first shot went through his chest and pierced his heart. He fell. Then, according to testimony and forensic evidence, a second shot was fired from above, traveling downward into the floor, where the bullet lodged in a baseboard across the room. Maricopa County firefighter Scott Cowden testified that when he arrived, Charles was already cold. No pulse, no breath, no attempt at CPR. Cowden, who teaches CPR for a living, said he knew right away no one had tried to save Charles. When he started compressions, he felt the telltale crunch of an untouched chest cavity. It's the grim equivalent of walking into a house and smelling smoke—you just know. What Cowden didn't see? Blood. Aside from the pooling around Charles's body, there was nothing. No trail down the hall. No mess in the kitchen. No bloody towels, napkins, or paper—despite Alex's claim that he'd been holding his bleeding head. Cowden said the paper towel Alex had was mostly clean. He also noticed Alex didn't look injured. Didn't act it either. He described him as calm, nonchalant. Sunglasses still perched on his head, perfectly balanced and unbothered—odd for someone who supposedly just wrestled with a former semi-pro baseball player. Then there's the silence. Lori left the house with JJ and Tylee, taking Charles's rental car. She went to Burger King, then Walgreens, then dropped JJ off at school. She spoke with Alex twice while out. Still, neither of them called for help until 47 minutes had passed. Lori told officers she fled the scene in fear. That Charles had come at her with a bat. That Alex had to step in. But investigators say the entire story was staged. In court, prosecutors pointed to Lori's motive: Charles had secretly changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy months earlier. Lori was out. His sister, Kay Woodcock, was in. After Charles's death, Lori called the insurance company—and only then learned she wasn't getting the money. She texted Chad Daybell: “He changed it in March. It was probably Ned before we got rid of him.” “Ned” was the name she gave the evil spirit she believed had overtaken Charles. Witnesses will testify that Lori claimed Charles was possessed and needed to be “cast out.” That she led a group of women in a spiritual exorcism. That she talked about drugging Charles with JJ's crushed pills. That Alex openly said he wanted Charles dead. One witness, Christina, said Lori brushed off her concerns by saying she was joking. A month later, Charles was dead. Now Lori sits in the courtroom—wearing a navy suit, flipping through notes, calling witnesses, and sparring with the prosecution. When firefighter Cowden testified that no CPR had been given, she pressed him. Asked whether cracking the sternum was guaranteed. Asked about blood patterns. Asked about technique. But Cowden didn't budge. He said everything he saw—everything he didn't see—told him no one had tried to save Charles. Another firefighter, Captain Kent Keller, backed him up. He described the scene as eerily tidy. Charles's body was in the middle of an empty room. No overturned furniture. No signs of chaos. Just a bat, a ball cap, and a dead man on the floor. Keller told the jury it looked like Charles had been dead for some time before they got there. Lividity and modeling had already set in. Blood had pooled beneath him. His pupils were fixed. And the detail that stuck with Keller? That everything about the room—the setup, the silence, the strange calm—just felt off. #LoriVallowDaybell #CharlesVallow #DoomsdayMom #TrueCrimePodcast Want to listen to ALL of our podcasts AD-FREE? Subscribe through APPLE PODCASTS, and try it for three days free: https://tinyurl.com/ycw626tj Follow Our Other Cases: https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com The latest on The Downfall of Diddy, The Trial of Karen Read, The Murder Of Maddie Soto, Catching the Long Island Serial Killer, Awaiting Admission: BTK's Unconfessed Crimes, Delphi Murders: Inside the Crime, Chad & Lori Daybell, The Murder of Ana Walshe, Alex Murdaugh, Bryan Kohberger, Lucy Letby, Kouri Richins, Malevolent Mormon Mommys, The Menendez Brothers: Quest For Justice, The Murder of Stephen Smith, The Murder of Madeline Kingsbury, The Murder Of Sandra Birchmore, and much more! Listen at https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com

A Dead Man, a Doomsday Plan, and 47 Minutes of Silence Charles Vallow was shot twice inside a house he paid for. He lay dead on the floor for 47 minutes before anyone bothered to call 911. And now, the woman once married to him—Lori Vallow Daybell—is on trial for conspiring to make that happen. This isn't Idaho. It's Maricopa County, Arizona. But the woman at the center of the story is the same: convicted murderer, former beauty queen, five-time wife, and self-proclaimed spiritual warrior who believed people could become “zombies” possessed by evil spirits. In this trial, Lori isn't just the defendant—she's also her own attorney. Representing herself, cross-examining witnesses, and objecting to testimony as she fights charges that she orchestrated the murder of her estranged husband in 2019. According to prosecutors, Lori conspired with her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Charles so she could cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy and clear the way to marry Chad Daybell—an LDS fiction author and her apocalyptic soulmate. They say this wasn't spontaneous. It was a plan rooted in delusion and tied up in scripture. Days before the shooting, Lori texted Alex: “It's all coming to a head this week. I will be like Nephi, I am told, and so will you.” In LDS scripture, Nephi is known for killing a man because God commanded it. On the morning of July 11, 2019, Charles texted Lori's other brother, Adam, with a warning: “They're planning something.” Adam replied, “Absolutely.” Charles showed up at Lori's Chandler home to pick up their son, JJ. He never made it out alive. The first shot went through his chest and pierced his heart. He fell. Then, according to testimony and forensic evidence, a second shot was fired from above, traveling downward into the floor, where the bullet lodged in a baseboard across the room. Maricopa County firefighter Scott Cowden testified that when he arrived, Charles was already cold. No pulse, no breath, no attempt at CPR. Cowden, who teaches CPR for a living, said he knew right away no one had tried to save Charles. When he started compressions, he felt the telltale crunch of an untouched chest cavity. It's the grim equivalent of walking into a house and smelling smoke—you just know. What Cowden didn't see? Blood. Aside from the pooling around Charles's body, there was nothing. No trail down the hall. No mess in the kitchen. No bloody towels, napkins, or paper—despite Alex's claim that he'd been holding his bleeding head. Cowden said the paper towel Alex had was mostly clean. He also noticed Alex didn't look injured. Didn't act it either. He described him as calm, nonchalant. Sunglasses still perched on his head, perfectly balanced and unbothered—odd for someone who supposedly just wrestled with a former semi-pro baseball player. Then there's the silence. Lori left the house with JJ and Tylee, taking Charles's rental car. She went to Burger King, then Walgreens, then dropped JJ off at school. She spoke with Alex twice while out. Still, neither of them called for help until 47 minutes had passed. Lori told officers she fled the scene in fear. That Charles had come at her with a bat. That Alex had to step in. But investigators say the entire story was staged. In court, prosecutors pointed to Lori's motive: Charles had secretly changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy months earlier. Lori was out. His sister, Kay Woodcock, was in. After Charles's death, Lori called the insurance company—and only then learned she wasn't getting the money. She texted Chad Daybell: “He changed it in March. It was probably Ned before we got rid of him.” “Ned” was the name she gave the evil spirit she believed had overtaken Charles. Witnesses will testify that Lori claimed Charles was possessed and needed to be “cast out.” That she led a group of women in a spiritual exorcism. That she talked about drugging Charles with JJ's crushed pills. That Alex openly said he wanted Charles dead. One witness, Christina, said Lori brushed off her concerns by saying she was joking. A month later, Charles was dead. Now Lori sits in the courtroom—wearing a navy suit, flipping through notes, calling witnesses, and sparring with the prosecution. When firefighter Cowden testified that no CPR had been given, she pressed him. Asked whether cracking the sternum was guaranteed. Asked about blood patterns. Asked about technique. But Cowden didn't budge. He said everything he saw—everything he didn't see—told him no one had tried to save Charles. Another firefighter, Captain Kent Keller, backed him up. He described the scene as eerily tidy. Charles's body was in the middle of an empty room. No overturned furniture. No signs of chaos. Just a bat, a ball cap, and a dead man on the floor. Keller told the jury it looked like Charles had been dead for some time before they got there. Lividity and modeling had already set in. Blood had pooled beneath him. His pupils were fixed. And the detail that stuck with Keller? That everything about the room—the setup, the silence, the strange calm—just felt off. #LoriVallowDaybell #CharlesVallow #DoomsdayMom #TrueCrimePodcast Want to listen to ALL of our podcasts AD-FREE? Subscribe through APPLE PODCASTS, and try it for three days free: https://tinyurl.com/ycw626tj Follow Our Other Cases: https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com The latest on The Downfall of Diddy, The Trial of Karen Read, The Murder Of Maddie Soto, Catching the Long Island Serial Killer, Awaiting Admission: BTK's Unconfessed Crimes, Delphi Murders: Inside the Crime, Chad & Lori Daybell, The Murder of Ana Walshe, Alex Murdaugh, Bryan Kohberger, Lucy Letby, Kouri Richins, Malevolent Mormon Mommys, The Menendez Brothers: Quest For Justice, The Murder of Stephen Smith, The Murder of Madeline Kingsbury, The Murder Of Sandra Birchmore, and much more! Listen at https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com

Breaking Down Lori Vallow Daybell's Delusional Role As Her Own Attorney A Dead Man, a Doomsday Plan, and 47 Minutes of Silence Charles Vallow was shot twice inside a house he paid for. He lay dead on the floor for 47 minutes before anyone bothered to call 911. And now, the woman once married to him—Lori Vallow Daybell—is on trial for conspiring to make that happen. This isn't Idaho. It's Maricopa County, Arizona. But the woman at the center of the story is the same: convicted murderer, former beauty queen, five-time wife, and self-proclaimed spiritual warrior who believed people could become “zombies” possessed by evil spirits. In this trial, Lori isn't just the defendant—she's also her own attorney. Representing herself, cross-examining witnesses, and objecting to testimony as she fights charges that she orchestrated the murder of her estranged husband in 2019. According to prosecutors, Lori conspired with her brother, Alex Cox, to kill Charles so she could cash in on a $1 million life insurance policy and clear the way to marry Chad Daybell—an LDS fiction author and her apocalyptic soulmate. They say this wasn't spontaneous. It was a plan rooted in delusion and tied up in scripture. Days before the shooting, Lori texted Alex: “It's all coming to a head this week. I will be like Nephi, I am told, and so will you.” In LDS scripture, Nephi is known for killing a man because God commanded it. On the morning of July 11, 2019, Charles texted Lori's other brother, Adam, with a warning: “They're planning something.” Adam replied, “Absolutely.” Charles showed up at Lori's Chandler home to pick up their son, JJ. He never made it out alive. The first shot went through his chest and pierced his heart. He fell. Then, according to testimony and forensic evidence, a second shot was fired from above, traveling downward into the floor, where the bullet lodged in a baseboard across the room. Maricopa County firefighter Scott Cowden testified that when he arrived, Charles was already cold. No pulse, no breath, no attempt at CPR. Cowden, who teaches CPR for a living, said he knew right away no one had tried to save Charles. When he started compressions, he felt the telltale crunch of an untouched chest cavity. It's the grim equivalent of walking into a house and smelling smoke—you just know. What Cowden didn't see? Blood. Aside from the pooling around Charles's body, there was nothing. No trail down the hall. No mess in the kitchen. No bloody towels, napkins, or paper—despite Alex's claim that he'd been holding his bleeding head. Cowden said the paper towel Alex had was mostly clean. He also noticed Alex didn't look injured. Didn't act it either. He described him as calm, nonchalant. Sunglasses still perched on his head, perfectly balanced and unbothered—odd for someone who supposedly just wrestled with a former semi-pro baseball player. Then there's the silence. Lori left the house with JJ and Tylee, taking Charles's rental car. She went to Burger King, then Walgreens, then dropped JJ off at school. She spoke with Alex twice while out. Still, neither of them called for help until 47 minutes had passed. Lori told officers she fled the scene in fear. That Charles had come at her with a bat. That Alex had to step in. But investigators say the entire story was staged. In court, prosecutors pointed to Lori's motive: Charles had secretly changed the beneficiary on his life insurance policy months earlier. Lori was out. His sister, Kay Woodcock, was in. After Charles's death, Lori called the insurance company—and only then learned she wasn't getting the money. She texted Chad Daybell: “He changed it in March. It was probably Ned before we got rid of him.” “Ned” was the name she gave the evil spirit she believed had overtaken Charles. Witnesses will testify that Lori claimed Charles was possessed and needed to be “cast out.” That she led a group of women in a spiritual exorcism. That she talked about drugging Charles with JJ's crushed pills. That Alex openly said he wanted Charles dead. One witness, Christina, said Lori brushed off her concerns by saying she was joking. A month later, Charles was dead. Now Lori sits in the courtroom—wearing a navy suit, flipping through notes, calling witnesses, and sparring with the prosecution. When firefighter Cowden testified that no CPR had been given, she pressed him. Asked whether cracking the sternum was guaranteed. Asked about blood patterns. Asked about technique. But Cowden didn't budge. He said everything he saw—everything he didn't see—told him no one had tried to save Charles. Another firefighter, Captain Kent Keller, backed him up. He described the scene as eerily tidy. Charles's body was in the middle of an empty room. No overturned furniture. No signs of chaos. Just a bat, a ball cap, and a dead man on the floor. Keller told the jury it looked like Charles had been dead for some time before they got there. Lividity and modeling had already set in. Blood had pooled beneath him. His pupils were fixed. And the detail that stuck with Keller? That everything about the room—the setup, the silence, the strange calm—just felt off. #LoriVallowDaybell #CharlesVallow #DoomsdayMom #TrueCrimePodcast Want to listen to ALL of our podcasts AD-FREE? Subscribe through APPLE PODCASTS, and try it for three days free: https://tinyurl.com/ycw626tj Follow Our Other Cases: https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com The latest on The Downfall of Diddy, The Trial of Karen Read, The Murder Of Maddie Soto, Catching the Long Island Serial Killer, Awaiting Admission: BTK's Unconfessed Crimes, Delphi Murders: Inside the Crime, Chad & Lori Daybell, The Murder of Ana Walshe, Alex Murdaugh, Bryan Kohberger, Lucy Letby, Kouri Richins, Malevolent Mormon Mommys, The Menendez Brothers: Quest For Justice, The Murder of Stephen Smith, The Murder of Madeline Kingsbury, The Murder Of Sandra Birchmore, and much more! Listen at https://www.truecrimetodaypod.com

Naomi and Alex zoom in on the Reform UK Party Conference and consider whether it is possible for Nigel Farage to professionalise the party and rid it of bigots - as he says he wants to do - and whether that makes it more or less dangerous to the health of our body politic. Plus a whistle-stop tour of other news, including the allegations agains Al Fayed and Harrods and the extraordinary scandal engulfing the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina. Plus - how to pack for a party conference! [TW rape and sexual assault.] We make all of our content universally available for free. But we do need your support to keep making it. Click here to back Quiet Riot on Ko-fi. Alex: “It's very hard to think there won't be a clash between those very big male egos at the centre of Reform UK. You have Richard Tice, ploughing in all the money, while getting none of the spotlight, Nigel Farage who has this overwhelming air of I-know-best, and then you have Lee Anderson - a recalcitrant blabbermouth who refuses to be reined in. At some point those big alphas will do bloody battle.” Naomi: “I sense that the mood is not going to be as jubilant as one would expect it to be, given it will be the first Labour Conference, post their landslide election win.” Naomi: “I hate packing for party conferences. And I am someone who likes packing.” Naomi's Guardian piece on the Canadian Reform Party's hostile takeover of the Conservatives, can be read here. Find us on Facebook and Twitter as @quietriotpod and on Bluesky. Email us at quietriotpod@gmail.com. Or visit our website www.quietriotpod.com. (We are working on threads and YouTube.) IF YOU CAN AFFORD TO CONTRIBUTE, PLEASE DO. Click here to back Quiet Riot on Ko-fi. With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell – in cahoots with Sandstone Global. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At DoorGrow, we love showing off the awesome entrepreneurial people we get to coach and work with every day. In today's episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with DoorGrow clients Jill Lyons and Alex Platt to talk about their journey in property management and with DoorGrow. You'll Learn [03:00] Starting a journey with coaching [07:26] Finding support as an entrepreneur [12:18] The path to success is hard work [16:54] Getting out of the business [19:28] The importance of good company culture [21:20] The impact of coaching Tweetables “Done is better than perfect.” “The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is.” “If you don't mind working, you don't set up boundaries.” “Just being open to the thought and the idea is enough to make it work.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. Ooh, like that one.  [00:00:07] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the #DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. [00:00:47] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win I'm your host, property management, growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show. [00:01:13] Our guests today... we've got Jill and Alex. Jill Lyons. Alex, what's your last name? Platt. Okay. I just know he's always with Jill, Alex. So we're really glad to have you on the show. And the topic of today's episode is like, we want to talk about your journey with DoorGrow because you've been with us for a little bit. So, why don't you introduce yourself and explain like kind of how you got into property management.  [00:01:39] Jill: Well, I must've taken an insane pill along the way, but I like it. My name is Jill Lyons and I own and I'm broker of Relaxed Realty Group in Sarasota, Florida. Currently we manage about 500 homes. We have like maybe 520 now and our rent roll, we just surpassed 800,000 this month, so I'm stoked and happy and proud. And you know, I love the business. There's never a day that's not that I feel like, "Oh my gosh, it's, you know, Monday." I never feel like that. So it's every day is a joy. Not every instant is a joy, but every day is a joy.  [00:02:12] Jason: So let's Alex, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what is your role?  [00:02:17] Alex: So, my name is Alex and I've worked with Jill here just over a year and a half, or going on almost two years when I got my real estate license. My wife started with Jill, Miranda, and she's been with Jill for what, 10 years now? Started with a business with her and I do the operations here. So operations and BDM.  [00:02:38] Jason: Awesome. Okay, cool.  [00:02:41] Jill: So he came from a customer service background with T Mobile for the last 10 years. It's great. Corporate's a great, but there's a lot more opportunity here and oh my God, he's great with people. Of course He's not " to brag about himself. So I'll brag about him. So he will put on multiple hats and do everything that whatever needs to be done.  [00:03:00] Jason: Cool. Yeah, you guys make a good team. We've enjoyed having you in the program. So why don't we start with what problem problems were you dealing with when you first came to DoorGrow? Like what challenges were going on?  [00:03:14] Jill: So I would say my strengths are that I love to sell and talk to people and help people. So, you know, that was naturally there and I grew the business with success with growing doors. And I was in a kind of a comfortable, I would say position as. Having a good amount of owners and properties, but I want to start exiting the business and it was just way too 'me centered,' you know, what do we do? What do we do with people coming to me? You know, I don't mind working. Like I say, so unfortunately, if you don't mind working, you don't set up boundaries, you don't set up corporate structures. My flow, there was nothing corporate about me. [00:03:49] If I wanted to step away, which I did this year, hired the operations manager, but I'm like, now what? And now what do you do? I'm an engineer by education. All I know how to do is build a spreadsheet and show people returns. So I was looking for ...I always believed in coaches. I've been coached since day one of my business. [00:04:07] So coaching is definitely something I believe in, but the coaching company I used was really just real estate working with buyers and sellers. So I hadn't ever got the property management business aspect of it and setting up the business and the structure. So when you watched one of your podcasts and listened to your podcast, and I liked what you had to say, so I-- "let's let them get us to that next level." [00:04:32] Jason: Watch the podcast, listen to the podcast, and now you're on the podcast.  [00:04:36] Jill: I know, I'm like, what do I have to offer? That's the first thing, I'm still listening and learning.  [00:04:42] Jason: You know, there's a lot of people listening out there that would dream of having 520 doors, having an amazing operator, having the operations running smoothly and being on your journey, stepping out of the business, like this, that's a dream for a lot of property managers. [00:04:58] They're still in the thick of the mud and wondering if there's a light at the end of the tunnel.  [00:05:03] Jill: So they don't believe that I'm going to step out.  [00:05:05] Alex: She's a workaholic. So, you know, it's a little bit of yin and yang.  [00:05:09] Jason: You know, entrepreneurs, it's a tough thing. I've known a few entrepreneurs that have like exited their business and then they were bored and they started another business. It happens. So entrepreneurs, we want to stay busy and we want to do the things we really enjoy doing. So you just have to find something you maybe enjoy doing more.  [00:05:29] Jill: I don't know. Yeah, no, I'm not closed to what's next, but I don't know. I'm still here.  [00:05:35] Jason: So let's chat about, and maybe this is a question for Alex. So Alex what did you see when you first came into the business? Some of the challenges in how to like support Jill and how to get her out of the operational stuff. And what challenges did you see that DoorGrow so far been able to help with?  [00:05:54] Alex: So luckily with your program we got to revamp everything. I mean, your Rapid Revamp was amazing. I mean, we got to go from rebuilding and rebranding our logo and everything. So I really enjoyed your class, especially with the whole cycle of suck, making sure that you're not holding onto those owners that are sucking up all your time and, you know, using. A lot of your resource when it comes down to it. I would say those were the biggest things and especially your systems that you have. I mean, I think the Flow is going to help a lot for us to map out each and every one of our procedures that we have on an operational standpoint.  [00:06:33] Jason: Okay. So for those listening, DoorGrow Flow, our process software, which is pretty cool. So the Rapid Revamp, I mean, and you guys made a lot of changes. Yes. Changed your pricing.  [00:06:43] Alex: We changed our name.  [00:06:44] Jill: You changed the name. I said I would never, ever do that!  [00:06:49] Sarah: She's like " I'm not rebranding." I'm like, "okay, we don't have to rebrand." And then she's like, "I think I'm going to rebrand." I was like, "wow! All right, let's do it."  [00:06:58] Jason: Everybody says they don't want to do it. But what I love about entrepreneurs is that if you show them how to make more money, they're pretty okay with it. They're pretty okay with making more money. So, and I think the training, we do a good job in converting people into wanting to make more money. "Here's how it'll make you more money if you do the right things with your branding." So website. Did we help with that?  [00:07:23] Alex: We're almost there. We're on the tail end of that portion of it.  [00:07:26] Jason: So for those that have not been exposed to DoorGrow. Maybe they're just listening to this podcast. They're like, "I don't know if these guys are legit. Kind of looks like some sort of one of these Influencer sort of guys," or I don't know what people think before they become a client but what would you say to those that are on the other side of the paywall and maybe struggling?  [00:07:51] Jill: For me, honestly, if I would have found this 10 years ago, it would have happened faster, my growth and where I am now would have happened faster and more organized. I kind of wing it and I'm the type that, you know, I don't want to spend any money unless a bunch of sitting in the bank. And I probably, if I would have opened up the bank and gotten the coaching and the programs from a property management company versus just from, you know, where I got my assistance from, which I had when I did buying and selling, which I hate it. So I kind of kept my things rather than going into property management coaching and training. It would have definitely made it faster and less painful, and I would say that's the biggest thing that I wish I would have found you sooner, but you know, you always find people when you're supposed to find them and entrepreneurs tend not to be, in my opinion, people that go to business school because they just want to do it. They jump in head first. There's no rhyme or reason to how we do it. So the organization is usually where we struggle the most. And just networking and having the beginning, I just went to Google and figured everything out on my own, rather than reaching out to an organization like yours, that's more specific for us and NARPM, which, you know connected me to other property managers and how are they doing it? And why did I have to create the wheel and do it all my way? I didn't even know that there was anything like this.  [00:09:16] Jason: Yeah. And you had been in NARPM for a while before joining DoorGrow.  [00:09:20] Jill: Yeah. I'm heavily involved in NARPM. I'm the president of our local chapter. So that definitely has made helped my business, and the connection and they have a lot of tools that have helped me significantly realize that it is a business and with systems. But but there isn't the sales support, you know, they don't have you, Jason. It's not energetic and make me go, "yes! I'm going to do it!" With you and with everybody around! You know, it's just like the connections.  [00:09:48] Jason: Yeah. I know you have both really enjoyed the operational pieces as well, and you've attended quite a few of our scale calls on Friday that Sarah runs. What what things have you taken away from on the operational side of things? [00:10:04] Jill: So what would you say, because you deal with that more? I kind of say, go do it.  [00:10:07] Alex: So, I take a lot of the way, honestly, you guys definitely on those calls go over a lot of different systems that are in other people's companies, to be honest. And we try to take piece by piece and just kind of make it our own when it comes to this. I think it's developing more of the systems that we have. As far as like a specific system, I think we talked about maintenance heavily. And the processes over how other companies do it and what we do with our maintenance. So it's kind of getting every pieces of everybody's input on that stuff to kind of lay out what maybe we should change, you know? [00:10:45] Jill: I will say that as far as operational, we were in pretty good shape with that. It's not technicalogical. So you have DoorGrow flow. I'm just talking with Errol tomorrow. So it's been on my list of things to do this whole year to set up flow and get that going so that it's more clear how we do things because when we have a new employee, I can't just hand them, "these are our thing," we have to manually tell them or give them a checklist, which doesn't really help. So, I have to hire Errol cause it stays on my list every single month and it hasn't been done. That's what I'm going to pass the buck on versus the website. I'd like to do the marketing. So we need to finish all of this by the end of the year. That's on our list. Does it check the list? We're at the last, getting to the last quarter. So you give us the tools. It's just setting it up. That takes a lot of time and concentration time. And Errol seemed to be I met him at DoorGrow live, you know, in Texas. And yeah, he was talking about processes and creating them. Like I talked about property management, so he's going to be our guy. I'll see how it goes.  [00:11:47] Alex: We have a lot in our heads, obviously. So, that's getting it all down to where if somebody needs to know something, it's much easier.  [00:11:56] Jason: Yeah we're planning on doing some more stuff with Errol Allen, who Jill's speaking with, and he's currently playing around with our DoorGrow flow software and testing it out as well. [00:12:05] So I think it's going to be a game changer for the market. So Sarah's had a lot of interaction, I think, with the two of you. What's been your perception of why they do so well as clients?  [00:12:18] Sarah: Oh, well, so there's a few things that I'd like to kind of. Point out and give you guys like major kudos on. First is, I think you're just open. Sometimes we have people who are very resistant. They're like, " that won't work," and "I'm not going to do it like this," and "I can't do this," and "that's not in my market," right? And I think the difference is just being open to the thought and the idea is enough to make it work because if you go into something and you think, "oh, this won't work," well, you're probably right. Then it's not going to work. But you guys are very open and you also, I love this about you guys, you take action. You just come in and you're like, "this is what we're going to do," and then you take action, you implement and you get it done. I think, to date, they are the fastest people who have completed everything in the Rapid Revamp. Like, they get a medal for that. Like, every time, they're like, "yep, we're done with this," I'm like, "oh, wow, okay!" They just get it done. It's like they just put their heads down. They know what they need to do. They put in the work and they get it done and then they go, "okay, great, we did that. What do we need now? Like what's the next thing that we can do to either like build on top of that or like take us to the next level? And I think you guys are really great at that. And I think you, you work very well together. You know, you balance each other out. You like ping well back and forth, back together, and I think that gives you the ability to move things along so quickly.  [00:13:44] Alex: It's great to have ideas that we can bounce off of each other and make it a solid process and get it out of the way and move on to the next one.  [00:13:52] Jill: Well, and I love a checklist. So you have a checklist. I want to see checks on there. I don't want to see them open. So I think that myself, I can be more reactionary property management. Our phone is always ringing. Things are always happening. You know, I can easily not get anything accomplished in a day and be busy the whole day. So with the Rapid Revamp it has me be on track along with handling the things that come on you know all day but I have to get my things done  [00:14:18] Alex: And the nice thing about your dashboard was the fact that you could assign things, we would take them and split them up and be like, "okay, you're going to do these and they're assigned to you" and then I could assign ones to me so we can you know, handle what we needed to.  [00:14:30] Jason: Cool. [00:14:31] Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. I think that was really awesome just to see you guys because every time I check in with you, you're like, "Oh, yeah, we're done with that already." Like, okay, let's see what's the next thing for you guys? And you already knew! You were never like, "Hey, I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing. Like, you just like stayed the course. And sometimes it's hard for entrepreneurs to do because there's so many shiny objects. There's so many of them, right? Like, "Hey, I'm coming in, I'm doing this one thing and that's it," and then along the way, there's like some other little thing that's like, "Hey, I need your attention." [00:15:04] And it's so tempting to go, "Ooh, but I could focus on that." Like, " let me just go over here for a second," and like, you guys just stayed the course. You like stay on point. And I think that's that's something I really have to give you guys like a huge compliment on because it's hard to do that. It's really difficult to do that. And you guys do it really well.  [00:15:25] Jill: Thank you.  [00:15:26] Jason: Yeah. And so you've interacted with several of our team members, right? It's not just the Jason show or the Jason and Sarah show. And I think that's what a lot of people think. Could you just comment a little bit on DoorGrow's team? You don't have to remember everybody's names, but yeah.  [00:15:43] Jill: Well the two that I've probably enjoyed the most is Clint. He's like the coolest surfer dude in the whole wide world, but he's sharp as a tack. You know, "we're just going to buy a $5 million company." He's the exact person to teach you how to be cool and do acquisitions and whatnot. [00:16:03] And that you can see why he's so successful because he's a joy to listen to.  [00:16:07] Jason: Yeah, he's fun.  [00:16:08] Jill: And ironically considering an acquisition in the middle of all listening to him and he took his time out, sent me a lot of information and questions I should ask and what due diligence I should do. So, I mean, his wealth of all the years that he's done that, enticed in a few documents was, I could have never created that. And then Roya, she's a ball of energy and I'm all into manifesting and all that. So, I mean, not many people you can feel through a computer screen with their energy, you know, that's heard of talent that she has.  [00:16:43] Jason: Yeah, she's our dangerously powerful mindset coach. And teaches the advanced sales stuff. [00:16:51] She's yeah she's had quite an impact. Yeah.  [00:16:54] Jill: Yeah. For sure.  [00:16:56] I went to DoorGrow live, which was fantastic to connect with everybody. But thanks to DoorGrow and Alex being also trained as a DoorGrow. I'm taking my first three week vacation in 10 years.  [00:17:08] Jason: That's amazing. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Your business will be in good hands with Alex and and we've got his back. So. For sure. So awesome. Yep. Property managers, if you're listening to this and you have not taken a significant vacation in the last five years, when's your turn? Maybe it's time to reach out and let us help you take- this is one of the most common things that we hear, especially this summer. [00:17:36] Lots of our clients are taking vacations like for the first time ever, or in the first time in a long time, or it's a longer vacation than they've been able to take.  [00:17:45] Sarah: Brandon and Mark, they took off the majority of July, both of them, took off the majority of July, and they're like, "things were fine, like things were okay," I'm like, "that's great, that's how it should work," and if we set it up that way, then things can work that way.  [00:18:01] Jason: For sure. Yeah, one of our mentors had this quote, I don't know where it came from, but he said, the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. Ooh, like that one. So Jill's working on making herself less valuable to the business. I've made DoorGrow less of the Jason show, and we've got all these amazing coaches and yeah, and that's the goal, right? We're able to provide more value and it allows us to be more free as entrepreneurs. To do the things that we really enjoy doing and eventually maybe to do nothing. If that's really the goal. I don't know. Jill, will have to find something to do. She's going to trap the world. She'll think we're not going to do nothing. Exactly. We're not going to do nothing. I don't think Jill knows what to do.  [00:18:43] Jill: We just want freedom to not always to be working.  [00:18:46] Jason: There you go. Yeah.  [00:18:48] Sarah: You can choose the things you do.  [00:18:50] Jill: Yeah.  [00:18:51] Jason: Well, we've really appreciated having you both in the program. You know, the, Sarah mentioned about you, but what I've noticed is Jill, you have this gift of positivity, it seems to rub off on everyone around you. We've really enjoyed having you in the program. Everyone's like, "Oh, we love Jill." All of our coaches and team members love Jill. And you can see Alex has like got a positive, you know, energy going on as well. And so you've created a really good culture on your team and in your business. And I don't know if it's always been that way, but I know that's something that's important to us at DoorGrow is making sure everybody has good culture with their business and with their team. So can you touch on culture just a little bit? [00:19:30] Jill: Well, I think connection and culture is the most important thing. If I don't have it here, how is a client going to want to be attracted to us? You know, how is that going to work? You know, if you don't have a positive look on the industry, the business... I mean, this is anybody that calls us is frustrated with property management and say, "here, we love to do property management." They're like, "I need you!" [00:19:51] you know, tenants and everybody gets to complain to us and we have to listen to them and, you know, do our job, but in these walls of this company, we don't have to do that. We can vent to each other. We can laugh. We don't complain. We more laugh about situations than we do complain. And I think I've been a good leader as far as that goes. But I think that also because I have that energy, I want to attract that energy. And so those people are, who are working here and stay.  [00:20:18] Jason: I love that. I mean, I think having a culture in which complaining is not the norm. I mean, it's easy to complain in property management. Right? And I'm sure there's a lot of you listening that are like, " I complain all the time. I complain every day," like reducing that complaining in the business and creating a culture where the team don't see that it's totally okay to just complain all the time. Because if you're complaining about your clients, they're going to feel that. They're not going to want to work with somebody that's, they know is just going to be complaining about them behind their back. [00:20:47] And so I think that's really powerful. And I think that there's a lot of joking in property management, and I think if you can't laugh about it, then you're just going to be hurt by it, and so...  [00:20:58] Jill: and the only way you make a lot of money is to do the things that nobody wants to do. [00:21:02] Jason: There you go. And they will pay you a pretty penny to do it. [00:21:05] Alex: Yeah, we don't have one person that dreads coming to work every day. That's for sure. Everybody's like, "oh shoot. It's monday. Let's go!"  [00:21:11] Jill: We're a little family.  [00:21:13] Jason: Awesome. Yeah, I love that. You have a good culture. So, cool well, anything else we should chat about? What are the biggest takeaways you feel like you've gotten from being part of working with DoorGrow for those listening? [00:21:28] Jill: I think first of all to make sure that I express my purpose to everybody, you know, start with the person.  [00:21:34] Jason: Has that changed your close rate? Has that changed how clients respond to you?  [00:21:39] Jill: Oh, just overall being brave enough to start with that, you know, I always assume they don't care, you know they're not calling for my me personally, but they are, you know, and some would get to know me on a personal level over time, but I never started the conversation with that. [00:21:54] I always started it with "I love property management" and I think they could feel our energy, but not deep down what my life purpose is. So, and how I could tie that back into having them become our client. But it gets a personal, it makes it a personal fit right away or not.  [00:22:11] Jason: Yeah. They either trust your motives and like them or they don't, but they, at least they know what your motives are. Otherwise they're just going to assume you just want their money.  [00:22:20] Jill: Yeah. The name change was a huge one. And then the third, I think final one for me is. When you did your stack deck and it wasn't like perfectly animated with all these designs and it looked great. And I'm fine with it. I stopped judging my marketing to have to be the caliber of Coca Cola. [00:22:40] I don't have designers out there. I don't want to spend design. So just produce it and get it out there and make it look kind of quirky and we're quirky anyway. So I don't know why I was thinking that we had to be this high level, corporate marketing program in order for it to work.  [00:22:54] Jason: I think done is better than perfect for sure. [00:22:57] That's one of my  [00:22:57] Alex: favorite things is like, no, just get it complete and then we'll move on and we'll get the next thing done.  [00:23:03] Jason: Yeah. Done makes money. And you've made a lot of changes. You've gotten a lot of things done that are going to help shore up leaks that make you a lot more money. And. Yeah. A lot of people get really caught up on things being so perfect. [00:23:14] They don't get as nearly as much done. So kudos to both of you for implementing and taking action. So, well, we appreciate you coming and hanging out with us here on the show. What do you feel like, what are some tangible results besides the brand? Revenue doors, any other shifts that you've seen in the business since joining? [00:23:33] Jill: Well, we've gotten rid of a lot of the properties. I had the guts to say to a couple owners, you know, "You have to either sell this property or find another manager because it's too much of a liability. And I'm scared to because X Y Z and so should you." And obviously it's a great time to sell last year. So this is the time get to get a better asset, 1031 exchange it, or let's you know, we need to drop it by the end of the year. I didn't, you know, say we're going to drop you on 30 days, but they, most of them, most of those as a consulting, they trust us and know us and they sold those properties. We have two that are closing this week, our last two that are closing and we had problems. Yeah, problems. So we've gotten rid of a lot of problems since the beginning and liability issues, you know, you know, liabilities. So that's that's, I think our biggest deal and it's allowed other doors to come in. [00:24:28] It's amazing what you let go just energetically things will fill its place. So door wise, I would say we're at about the same, but revenue has gone up 20%.  [00:24:38] Alex: We've been getting higher-end properties instead of, you know, things that were D class properties that we didn't want.  [00:24:44] Jason: Love it. 20 percent more revenue. Awesome, that does not suck.  [00:24:48] Sarah: And getting rid of the problem, right?  [00:24:55] Jason: Well, we appreciate you being clients and we're super excited to see your progression through the DoorGrow code, and this business I think that could easily be at a thousand doors in the next two to three years. It's totally doable, especially if you start doing some of the acquisition deals, like it's going to be really interesting once you get some of these systems in place, then you're ready to just scale like crazy. So excited to see what you do. All right. Well then we'll go ahead and wrap up. Appreciate you being on the show. [00:25:25] Thanks for hanging out with us, Alex and Jill. Thank you. Great.  [00:25:29] For those listening, if you want to be like Alex and Jill and make good decisions and grow your business in a healthy way, and maybe increase your revenue 20%. aNd clean up your portfolio and optimize your sales pipeline so you make more money, more easily reach out to DoorGrow. [00:25:45] We would love to take a look at your business and see if we can help you. The answer is: we can... most likely and see if you'd be a good fit for our program. You can check us out at doorgrow. com. There's a big pink button on the home page says "I want to grow." click that. Do the three steps there to see if you'd be a good candidate to work with us, and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone  [00:26:08] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:26:35] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Jasmine Control, a new hire at a shady governmental agency called The Department of Variance, went through an extended supernatural orientation that ended with her manager, Yellow Access, trying to meld the minds of every worker in the office. To save her friend Scarlet Jaunt from death at the hands of her new boss, Jasmine used her newly discovered psychic abilities to jump into the past, to a point where Scarlet was alive. She miscalculated, and now she's stuck in Scarlet's memories from 10 years ago. This season picks up with Jasmine, Scarlet, Violet, and Daryll visiting the woods to see a lunar eclipse after their senior year of high school, ten years prior to the events of season one. But something else is lurking in the woods with them. Something…midwestern. The friends will have to figure out what's going on and put a stop to it if they ever want to escape, and if Jasmine ever wants to return to her normal life. Check out our website for more info! Join our Patreon for early access! CREDITS: Cast of episode 1: Cody Heath, Jesse Syratt, Em Carlson, Tatiana Gefter, Dexter Howard, Lena Garcia. Art by NerdVolKurisu Written, scored, edited, and narrated by Rat Grimes. Transcripts available in episode notes at somewhereohio.com (CWs: alcohol, food, smoking, derealization) ___ TRANSCRIPT: ORANGE: It's just as Green said: the stairway to heaven is always moving. I figured I was on the first step when I heard the cat in the diner. I was heading to a little city in Michigan. I know, I know; “Orange Splice? In the field? Shouldn't you be behind a desk at the Commission signing off on quarterlies?” But on some cases I can't help myself. I can tell you that Red's disciplinary report's gonna have a lot of Orange in it. So this little city in Michigan, an industrial husk of a place. Full of slick palms and the poor souls wriggling between their fingers. I packed my bag and blew the joint. I slept in my rumbling hatchback on the way, and I ate and bathed as the great American trucker does. As I crested the overpass bend on the final leg of the drive, I saw a city blooming with rot. Squat brick piles wheezing into the streets, oily sunlight, cars bleeding rust into the earth. Plumes of gray hovered over the place, like cotton soaked with kerosene. One little spark and the whole thing could blow. Maybe we'd all be better off if it did. Maybe we're better off forgetting places like this. Scooping out what little's worth saving and dumping the rest. Writing them off as a loss–another failure in the long lineage of midwestern decline. Or maybe it's not that simple. I wasn't going to Deerland to set it ablaze, after all. I was being led there for something else. And so I rode up through the boiling roadkill highways of vulture county, past towns so small you could hear every single prayer on a quiet night. By antique malls decked with the heraldry of genocide. Under billboards letting you know you're fucked before you even get there: Hell is real, and it's about 25 miles that way. I was going up there to find Olivia, now designated Jasmine Control by the Department. First saw her face on a milk carton, and I didn't even know they still did that. Maybe they don't. I slid downstairs that morning in a haze, a little box of strawberry milk I'd bought from the grocer in my hand. The milk itself didn't last long. I turned the empty carton over in my hand, then unfolded and tore open the bottom. I held it up to my ear and listened for the ocean. *sounds as room ambience becomes waves and various sounds* ORANGE: I heard through and beyond the carton, through my wall and the early pink light outside, through misty pines and hundreds of miles of the big flat nothing. Through and before my life, and after too, and into a hip spot in Deerland, a coffeeshop on the corner that used to be three apartments. The tip jar on the counter was a glass milk jug filled with quarters and crumpled singles. And taped to the side was a photo and one word: MISSING—Olivia…Olivia. I exited the highway on the right, tires sizzling down the griddlehot blacktop of the narrow streets of Deerland, Michigan. I'd need somewhere to stay in this weather. Cruised a while and found a place overlooking a decaying mall: Hotel 7. One better than Motel 6, the owner assured me through a pushbroom mustache. One worse than Super 8, I thought. Next I needed food. I was wading through thick waves of exhaustion by then, rolling slowly but surely onward, bowled over by the blindfolds and needles of fate. On the way to my room, I stepped into a corridor dripping with window unit condensation and lined with posters. MISSING. A face repeated in nine squares. I shook my head and stared deep into the paper. GIRL MISSING. I got caught on the origin of the word, germanic, maybe dutch. Gone, disappeared, vanished, typically without a trace. To be absent. In absentia. Guilt without a face, death without a body. Holes in the ground, gaps in memory. The girl on the flyer opened her mouth and said something I couldn't hear. Her breath caught in the humid air, suspended green in the neon glow overhead. I fumbled with my lighter in my pocket. I flicked it on and patted my coat pockets. No pack. I hadn't had a smoke in two years. That'd change soon. High above, rising over the fire escape and ascending into the sick bruised sky, I saw two glowing spheres. The kid's breath vanished and so did I. Once again back at my kitchen table, soggy milk carton in my hand. If you were in my place, Green, what would you have done with your life? If you saw what was coming. Dive headfirst or take a dive? Deerland or Des Moines? After that first vision, I made the choice quicker than I'd like to admit. I dove, deep and breathless, into the variant night. Wait, let me back up. I'll tell you how it happened chronologically–ontologically–not how my brain stitched it together. See, in my head I had already been to Deerland via milky astral lanes, already tried the coffee and divined the lines in the sidewalks. I was three days ahead of myself. Psychic lag. Pages colored in without lines. I would be there in three days' time. I would seek out Olivia, this missing girl, and a creeping feeling told me there'd be more to it than that. More Departmental business, which meant more paperwork. Figured I might as well get packing, I was in for a long night. *** NARRATOR 1 (italics until Nyarrator/Narrator 2 shows up in ep 8 are Narrator 1, played by Rat): Jasmine looked around the jeep, trying to center herself. She was lightheaded, dizzy. She couldn't tell if it was a side effect of the binding agonist or if this situation was just too much for her mind to handle. Psionic nausea. OLIVIA: Is this how Green felt all the time? It was not. ASH: Look, Jasmine, you don't know me, but I'm going to help you however I can from the wire. I used to work for the Department, as well. Assigned name Ash Chorus, stationed with the Dead Letter Office, then the…the division of Fictobiology. I've been sort of…telling your story for you, as strange as that sounds. I may have gotten a few things wrong, but I think I captured the heart of it. And I will continue to do so. I only ask one thing of you, and recommend another: do not mention me to anyone, and do not tell the others what you've done. ALEX: Dude, who are you talking to? OLIVIA: Oh, it's just my mom making sure we got here okay. You know how she is. ALEX: I guess. We met a couple times, right? Whatever, we're almost at the clearing. This is gonna be epic. OLIVIA: Yeah, uhh “epic.” Hold on. *quieter, on phone with Ash* What the hell is going on? How do I get back to my time? ASH: I…I'm uncertain. What I do know is this: you're in a memory, not in the past. For the time being, dispense with any theorizing and stick to what we know for sure: you, Jasmine, are in a memory from a little over 10 years ago, and that goo you drank that let you do this has worn off.  Now you can't get out—a jaunt gone wrong—and you're just going to have to live through this memory, however long it lasts. OLIVIA: I guess that's why it was Scarlet's last resort when I was being chased. But still, she was dying, I had to do something! ASH: I know, I know. Keep your phone with you, and hold it to your ear if you need to talk to me. I'll help however I can in my limited capacity. Now hang up, you've been on the line too long and Scarlet's getting suspicious. OLIVIA: Okay, okay. *click, then quietly:* How did they know all that? The simplest explanation was that Ash Chorus was not real. They were as much a phantasm as this place, this metastatic memory structure. Like the larks, the butterflies, bigfoot. OLIVIA: They're…you're fictobiological. Sterling would have a heart attack. Wait, so you're like a cryptid or something? Can you tell me if Nessie's real? In a sense, Olivia was right. But now was not the time to speak with the air. Her compatriots were growing concerned. OLIVIA: Fine, I'll stop talking to the first fictional person I've ever heard. Normal world. Olivia recalled the advice of her father: the best way out is through. All she needed to do was live through this moment. This wasn't the past, and she had no way of altering what happened here. The only thing that could change was her mind. NADIA: Is she good? She's muttering and looks like she's gonna hurl. OLIVIA: Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Do you have anything to drink? DARYLL: Ch'yeah, dig this. Daryll took one hand off the jeep's wheel and leaned forward, reaching into a bag at Violet's–Nadia's–feet. He rifled around and pulled out a familiar blue and white can. He tossed one blindly into the back, and Jasmine fumbled the catch. Scarlet–Alex–snagged the can and cracked it open, taking a long sip before handing it to Jasmine and wiping the foam from her mouth. ALEX: Hope you like the bitter stuff. It was not the bitter stuff, it was gas station party fodder. OLIVIA: Ugh. I was thinking more like, water? Or Gatorade? *pause* Hey, wait. You're eightee—I mean we're 18! And we're in a car. With open containers. This is…this is bad. ALEX: Calm yourself, Liv, it's fiiine. We're basically in college now. Have you seriously never had *emphasized “A”* A beer? OLIVIA: I mean, I have, I like wine more, but— ALEX: Man, you're like 30 years old. Just let loose and enjoy the night. What, are you gonna tell my mom I brought some weed, too? Jesus. DARYLL: You are kinda harshing the mood here, Oli. OLIVIA: Whatever, but if we're going to do nicknames, can you not call me “Oli”? NADIA: Yeah, like who even is Oli? How about Livia? Via? DARYLL: “Vita means life” *Alex laughs* OLIVIA: How about this: we're going out in the woods, we're drinking illegally and, I assume, trespassing. So what if we had, like, codenames? ALEX: You remind me a lot of my cousin, Liv. He's five. *to the others* I don't know why we brought her, she just sometimes— OLIVIA, ignoring Scar: I'll be…hmmm…my shirt's yellow, so I'll be Jasmine. DARYLL: Aladdin, sick. OLIVIA: You can be Violet, Nadia, because you love purple and black. NADIA: I do. OLIVIA: And Scarlet for Alex, because. Hair. ALEX: Rude, fuck off. I dyed it for a reason, asshole. DARYLL, holding back a laugh: Nah, dude, it's pure gold. OLIVIA: And you, uhhh… DARYLL: Fuckface. NADIA: Ew ALEX: Fuckface Killer. OLIVIA: I was thinking something like— DARYLL: Vegeta! NADIA: No. ALEX: Nope. OLIVIA: What? DARYLL: You could just like…call me Daryll. OLIVIA: Ugh. Nevermind. I just thought it would be easier…forget it. The jeep's tires crunched and spun gravel as the four sped down unpaved roads through the trees. Hung overhead were dark boughs, holding the high heat of the night in their leaves. A ranger station hoved into view not far ahead. A small pickup rumbled in the driveway, its headlights illuminating the forest beyond the trail. DARYLL: Shit, shit, dump the open cans. Daryll threw the remaining beers into the backseat. Alex nestled the cans at her feet and covered them with a blanket. She fished in her pocket for the worst joint ever rolled and stuffed it in her sock. RANGER: How are you folks doing tonight? Daryll squinted against the light beaming at his face. DARYLL: Uhh, do you need my license? RANGER: No, I'm not a police officer. I'm just here to make sure you guys stay safe. DARYLL: Oh, yeah. Dumb. Sorry, sorry sir. RANGER: You wouldn't have any fireworks in there, would you? No sparklers or firecrackers? We been having trouble with some rowdy teens lately, almost started a forest fire last week. Wouldn't be you, would it? DARYLL: No, no. Not in here! We're not really firework people, you know? RANGER: And of course you wouldn't have any illicit substances, now would you? The ranger lifted her flashlight and shone it through the back windows. Alex winced and sat upright, Olivia put on a smile and waved. Nadia's eyes didn't leave her iphone. The ranger looked vaguely familiar to Olivia, but she couldn't place why. The ranger pressed her hand against her forehead and inhaled sharply. DARYLL: Y-you okay? RANGER: Ope, sorry, just a headache. Think we got a storm coming on, with the humidity and all. Messing with my sinuses. All the pollen doesn't help any. *pause* RANGER: I see you folks have a telescope. You all out here for the eclipse? DARYLL: Yeah we're looking for a place to set up the scope. RANGER: Gotcha. Well, the public gathering is back that way down the trail. You passed the parking lot about a mile back. Bout half mile ahead, the trail's off-limits after hours. Road's closed. So you folks ought to head back thataway. DARYLL: Oh, okay, sweet, thank you. We'll do that. RANGER: Enjoy the eclipse, then. And watch out for rain. DARYLL: Oh, we will for sure! I hate getting wet, so… RANGER, puzzled: Huh. All righty then. *ranger leaves* ALEX: That was hella close. DARYLL: Dude I sweat through my shirt. OLIVIA: We should probably drive back to the parking lot, then, right? DARYLL: No way, dude, we just had a clean getaway. We'll just have to find a place to ditch the Jeep. *jeep shuts off* DARYLL: Guess it'll be on foot from here. *** *chain shakes* OLIVIA: Says “no entry.” DARYLL: Olivia, try to keep up. That's why we're going there. Gonna be no one else around. ALEX: Don't be a narc, Liv. *sounds of footsteps, crunching gravel* ALEX: Oh, hey, this is the spot? NADIA: Gonna be kinda hard to see the eclipse from here, but whatever. DARYLL: Nah, it's up ahead still. Down the trail and across the stream. Then we'll be at the clearing. ALEX: Cool, come on Nadia. Want to like…walk together or whatever? Nadia had slipped on a pair of clunky headphones, nodding her head to some distorted guitars and guttural screams. A band of red spread across Alex's nose and cheeks. ALEX: Chhh, whatever, dude. Come on Liv, let's go. *** *blanket flaps, grassy footsteps: ALEX: You guys want a slim jim? Sour patch kids? DARYLL: Slim jim anybody? I got slim jims here! 2 for 5 or 3 for 5 or 4 for 5! OLIVIA: So this is just outside of…where again? DARYLL: The DL, duh? I guess you don't live in town, so. We're like 20 minutes out from your place, 30 minutes from Ohio. It's pure Michigan, baby. ALEX: I'm actually kind of…excited for this? NADIA: Probably the beer talking. ALEX: I had one sip before we had to toss ‘em. NADIA: I mean, it's cool and all. I'm mostly here for the hangs, though. OLIVIA: The weather's perfect for it. Clear sky, hot summer night. Where'd you get the telescope? I assume it's not yours, Alex. ALEX: Dude, it's your telescope. Are you sure we don't need to take you to urgent care or something? Right, her dad bought it for her sixteenth birthday. Had her initials on the case. OLIVIA: O.H.M… He set up a spot in the backyard for stargazing. She remembered the tall grass tickling her ankles, cicadas winding down their song in the cherry blossoms, condensation rolling down the side of a glass. The stray cat rubbing against her leg. She remembered the drawings of the constellations in her book. OLIVIA: Cygnus, Aquila, Heracles… She had snapped one of the tripod's legs when he left. He stopped by and taped it back together while she was at school. OLIVIA: Oh, yeah, didn't recognize it for…some reason. Nadia sat down first, reclining on her elbows and looking up through the sparse branches overhead. Olivia sat across from her on another blanket, and Daryll leaned against a wide trunk with a cold drink in hand. DARYLL: Which one is that? OLIVIA: The constellation? I think…the teapot? It might be part of Sagittarius. NADIA: It is. DARYLL: Oh, is it??  How would you even know? NADIA: Googled it, duhh. Alex looked over the three of them, equations spinning around in her head as she tried to calculate whether it would be too obvious to sit next to Nadia. She would've liked to, but then Liv and Daryll would be like ‘hey, why didn't you take the empty blanket, you nerd?' and then maybe Nadia would be weirded out. But if she sat on the empty blanket, then Daryll would have to choose one person to share a blanket with, and what if he sat with her? And— OLIVIA, quietly: Stop overthinking and go sit with Nadia. ALEX: Oh, haHA, yeah, totally. Sorry, I was just thinking about…basketball. *quietly, to herself* Basketball? That's the kind of game I've got?? Alex took her spot next to Nadia. She could hear Nadia's music bleeding through the foam pads of her headphones. She was sweating. But that was fine, right? It's hot out, people sweat. And it's not like she was sitting that close to Nadia. Oh god, was she sitting weirdly far away? Like she was trying to avoid Nadia? Alex took a deep breath and scooted a little closer. Nadia paid no attention to this or to much of anything that Alex was doing. She was locked in to the music. The crickets were humming in the tall grass nearby, spiders dangled and spun in the branches, tadpoles darted down a trickling stream. All was quiet, for a moment. OLIVIA: Wonder if it's about to happen. ALEX: It's uber dark out here. DARYLL: Yeah dude, moon's about to be gone-zo. ALEX: It's time already? DARYLL: Dude, this space shit owns. I can see the craters through this thing. OLIVIA: Ooh, let me see! ALEX: Whoa, you can see from here. There's just a little sliver. NADIA: Kinda makes me feel sick. Like knowing it's really out there, and we're here, small and alone. DARYLL: Aaaand it's gone. Complete darkness enveloped the group. The humid air clung heavy as wet gowns around them. The moon had vanished behind the shadow of the planet, and even the insects, birds, and Nadia's headphones hushed their songs in reverent silence. OLIVIA: Gosh, I forget how dark it can get out in the country. ALEX: You basically live in a farmhouse, dude. You're in “the country” all the time. OLIVIA: It's just…I'm in my room a lot I guess. Don't get out to see the stars much. ALEX: I see the taco bell drive through more often than stars. DARYLL: Fuuuuck, now I'm hungry. The gloom that surrounded them did not relent, even long past when the shadow should have given way back to the gentle glow of reflected light. OLIVIA: It should be back by now. ALEX: Give it a sec. OLIVIA: And where are the constellations? NADIA: The sky's like a black curtain. ALEX: Probably clouds. OLIVIA: No, it was clear when we got here. DARYLL: You think the moon's broken? Hey, try taking it out, blowing in it, and putting it back in again. Olivia could feel her pulse hammering in her throat. It was hot before, but the air was growing hotter, and the cool breeze that rustled the nettles and ivies was still. She was slick with perspiration, and the moisture in the air had her struggling for breath. Her eyes darted in every direction, looking for some landmark or image to anchor herself, but found nothing. In the total blackout, they could be anywhere: a basement, the bottom of the ocean. Or they could be nowhere, the great void between blasted stellar remains and dead planets. NADIA: It is weird, right? ALEX: Hey, uh, Olivia, check that telescope. Do you know what's going on? You're the space nerd, right? OLIVIA: There's nothing there. NADIA: What do you mean, “nothing there?” ALEX: Well, it's there we just can't see it, right? *silence* ALEX: …right? It must be coming, the thing that Scarlet and Violet—Alex and Nadia—saw all those years ago. OLIVIA: No, it can't be. Olivia knew, but they didn't know, couldn't know, that this would change them. NADIA: Oh, hey, there it is. ALEX: Finally! Hey, wait. What's…why is there… DARYLL: That's fucked up. That these next few hours would be the worst of their lives. OLIVIA: O-oh my god. There's…there's another. There are two of them, just hanging in the sky. Two moons. END

Guest: Alex, the Map NerdIn this episode, we're joined by Alex, the social media sensation known as the Map Nerd, who has taken the digital world by storm with his unique insights into maps and geography. From the bustling streets of Birmingham to the serene landscapes of Lille in Northern France, we journey through tales of passion, discovery, and the ever-evolving world of maps. Plus, don't miss our special audio postcard segment that brings the world closer to you.Episode Summary:Guest Spotlight: Alex, the Map Nerd, discusses his journey from a traditional career in entertainment to becoming a social media sensation with over half a million followers. He shares insights into the world of maps in the digital age, the power of social media in shaping map content, and the importance of engaging with a community of map enthusiasts.Notable Quotes from Alex:"It shows you when you really follow your passion. People start to notice.""People want to learn. They want to know something interesting. They don't just want to watch someone dancing or fall over.""We're in a new age of maps and geography and it's really exciting, but you also have to understand what people are intrigued by."Audio Postcard from Lille: Claire Astbury takes listeners on a virtual journey to Lille in Northern France. She highlights the city's rich history, its transformation as a tourist destination, and the fascinating "plan relief" or miniature model maps housed in the Palais des Beaux Arts. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Alex Gallego, CEO & Founder of Redpanda, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss his experience founding and scaling a successful data streaming company over the past 4 years. Alex explains how it's been a fun and humbling journey to go from being an engineer to being a founder, and how he's built a team he trusts to hand the production off to. Corey and Alex discuss the benefits and various applications of Redpanda's data streaming services, and Alex reveals why it was so important to him to focus on doing one thing really well when it comes to his product strategy. Alex also shares details on the Hack the Planet scholarship program he founded for individuals in underrepresented communities. About AlexAlex Gallego is the founder and CEO of Redpanda, the streaming data platform for developers. Alex has spent his career immersed in deeply technical environments, and is passionate about finding and building solutions to the challenges of modern data streaming. Prior to Redpanda, Alex was a principal engineer at Akamai, as well as co-founder and CTO of Concord.io, a high-performance stream-processing engine acquired by Akamai in 2016. He has also engineered software at Factset Research Systems, Forex Capital Markets and Yieldmo; and holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and cryptography from NYU. Links Referenced: Redpanda: https://redpanda.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/emaxerrno Redpanda community Slack: https://redpandacommunity.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-1xq6m0ucj-nI41I7dXWB13aQ2iKBDvDw Hack The Planet Scholarship: https://redpanda.com/scholarship TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Tired of slow database performance and bottlenecks on MySQL or PostgresSQL when using Amazon RDS or Aurora? How'd you like to reduce query response times by ninety percent? Better yet, how would you like to get me to pronounce database names correctly? Join customers like Zscaler, Intel, Booking.com, and others that use OtterTune's artificial intelligence to automatically optimize and keep their databases healthy. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn, and this promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Redpanda, which I'm thrilled about because I have a personal affinity for companies that have cartoon mascots in the form of animals and are willing to at least be slightly creative with them. My guest is Alex Gallego, the founder and CEO over at Redpanda. Alex, thanks for joining me.Alex: Corey, thanks for having me.Corey: So, I'm not asking about the animal; I'm talking about the company, which I imagine is a frequent source of disambiguation when you meet people at parties and they don't quite understand what it is that you do. And you folks are big in the data streaming space, but data streaming can mean an awful lot of things to an awful lot of people. What is it for you?Alex: Largely it's about enabling developers to build applications that can extract value of every single event, every click, every mouse movement, every transaction, every event that goes through your network. This is what Redpanda is about. It's like how do we help you make more money with every single event? How do we help you be more successful? And you know, happy to give examples in finance, or IoT, or oil and gas, if it's helpful for the audience, but really, to me, it's like, okay, if we can give you the framework in which you can build a new application that allows you to extract value out of data, every single event that's going through your network, to me, that's what a streaming is about. It large, it's you know, data contextualized with a timestamp and largely, a sort of a database of event streaming.Corey: One of the things that I find curious about the space is that usually, companies wind up going one of two directions when you're talking about data streaming. Either there, “Oh, just send it all to us and we'll take care of it for you,” or otherwise, it's a, great they more or less ship something that you've run in your own environment. In the olden days of data centers, that usually resembled a box of some sort. You're one of those interesting split-the-difference companies where you offer both models. Do you find that one of those tends to be seeing more adoption these days or that there's an increasing trend toward one direction or the other?Alex: Yeah. So, right now, I think that to me, the future of all these data-intensive products—whether you're a database or a streaming engine—will, because simply of cost of networks transferred between the hybrid clouds and your accounts, sending a gigabyte a second of data between, let's say, you know, your data center and a vendor, it's just so expensive that at some point, from just a cost perspective, like, running the infrastructure, it's in the millions of dollars. And so, running the data inside your VPC, it's sort of the next logical evolution of how we've used to consume services. And so, I actually think it's just the evolution: people would self-host because of costs and then they would use services because of operational simplicity. “I don't want to spend team skills and time building this. I want to pay a vendor.”And so, BYOC, to be honest—which is what we call this offering—it was about [laugh] sidestepping the costs and of being stuck in the hybrid clouds, whether it's Google or Amazon, where you're paying egress and ingress costs and it's just so expensive, in addition to this whole idea of data residency or data sovereignty and privacy. It's like, yeah, why not both? Like, if I'm an engineer, I want low latency and I don't want to pay you to transfer this thing to the next rack. I mean, my computer's probably, like, you know, a hundred feet away from my customer's computer. Like, why [laugh] way is that so complicated? So, you know, my view is that the future of data-intensive products will be in this form of where it—like, data planes are actually owned by companies, and then you offer that as a Software as a Service.Corey: One of the things that catches an awful lot of companies with telemetry use cases—or data streaming as another example of that—by surprise when they start building their own cloud-hosted offering is that they're suddenly seeing a lot more cross-AZ data charges than they would have potentially expected. And that's because unlike cross-region or the really expensive version of this with egress, it's a penny in and a penny out per gigabyte in most of AWS regions. Which means that that isn't also bound strictly to an AWS organization. So, you have customers co-located with you and you're starting to pay ingress charges on customers throwing their data over to you. And, on some level, the most economical solution for you is well, we're just going to put our listeners somewhere else far away so that we can just have them pay the steep egress fee but then we can just reflect it back to ourselves for free.And that's a terrible pattern, but it's a byproduct of the absolutely byzantine cross-AZ data transfer pricing, in fact, all of the data transfer pricing that is at least AWS tends to present. And it shapes the architectural decisions you make as a result.Alex: You know, as a user, it just didn't make sense. When we launched this product, the number of people that says like, “Why wouldn't your charge for, you know, effectively renting [unintelligible 00:05:14], and giving a markup to your customers?” That's we don't add any value on that, you know? I think people should really just pay us for the value that we create for them. And so, you know, for us competing with other companies is relatively easy.Competing with MSK is it's harder because MSK just has this, you know, muscle where they don't charge you for some particular network traffic between you. And so, it forces companies like us that are trying to be innovative in the data space to, like, put our services in that so that we can actually compete in the market. And so, it's a forcing function of the hybrid clouds having this strong muscle of being able to discount their services in a way that companies just simply don't have access to. And then, you know, it becomes—for the others—latency and sovereignty.Corey: This is the way that effectively all of AWS has first-party offerings of other things go. Replication traffic between AZs is not chargeable. And when I asked them about that, they say, “Oh, yeah. We just price that into the cost of the service.” I don't know that I necessarily buy that because if I try and run this sort of thing on top of EC2, it would cost me more than using their crappy implementation of it, just in data transfer alone for an awful lot of use cases.No third party can touch that level of cost-effectiveness and discounting. It really is probably the clearest example I can think of actual anti-competitive behavior in the market. But it's also complex enough to explain, to, you know, regulators that it doesn't make for exciting exposés and the basis for lawsuits. Yet. Hope springs eternal.Alex: [laugh]. You know—okay, so here is how—if someone is listening to this podcast and is, like, “Okay, well, what can I do?” For us, S3 is the answer. S3 is basically you need to be able to lean in into S3 as a way of replication across [AZ 00:06:56], you need to be able to lean into S3 to read data. And so actually, when I wrote, originally, Redpanda, you know, it's just like this C++ thing using [unintelligible 00:07:04], geared towards super low latency.When we moved it into the cloud, what we realized is, this is cost prohibitive to run either on EBS volumes or local disk. I have to tier all the storage into S3, so that I can use S3's cross-AZ network transfer, which is basically free, to be able to then bring a separate cluster on a different AZ, and then read from the bucket at zero cost. And so, you end up really—like, there are fundamental technical things that you have to do to just be able to compete in a way that's cost-effective for you. And so, in addition to just, like, the muscle that they can enforce on the companies is—it—there are deep implications of what it translates to at the technical level. Like, at the code level.Corey: In the cloud, more than almost anywhere else, it really does become apparent that cost and architecture are fundamentally the same thing. And I have a bit of an advantage here in that I've seen what you do deployed at least one customer of mine. It's fun. When you have a bunch of logos on your site, it's, “Hey, I recognize some of those.” And what I found interesting was the way that multiple people, when I spoke to them, described what it is that you do because some of them talked about it purely as a cost play, but other people were just as enthusiastic about it being a means of improving feature velocity and unlocking capabilities that they didn't otherwise have or couldn't have gotten to without a whole lot of custom work on their part. Which is it? How do you view what it is that you're bringing to market? Is it a cost play or is it a capability story?Alex: From our customer base, I would say 40% is—of our customer base—is about Redpanda enabling them to do things that they simply couldn't do before. An example is, we have, you know, a Fortune 100 company that they basically run their hedge trading strategy on top of Redpanda. And the reason for that is because we give them a five-millisecond average latency with predictable flight latencies, right? And so, for them, that predictability of Redpanda, you know, and sort of like the architecture that came about from trying to invent a new storage engine, allows them to throw away a bunch of in-house, you know, custom-built pub/sub messaging that, you know, basically gave them the same or worse latency. And so, for them, there's that.For others, I think in the IoT space, or if you have flying vehicles around the world, we have some logos that, you know, I just can't mention them. But they have this, like, flying computers around the world and they want to measure that. And so, like, the profile of the footprint, like, the mechanical footprint of being able to run on a single Pthread with a few megs of memory allows these new deployment models that, you know, simply, it's just, it's not possible with the alternatives where let's say you have to have, you know, like, a zookeeper on the schema registry and an HTTP proxy and a broker and all of these things. That simply just, it cannot run on a single Pthread with a few megs of memory, if you put any sort of workload into that. And so, it's like, the computational efficiencies simply enable new things that you couldn't do before. And that's probably 40%. And then the other, it's just… money was really cheap last year [laugh] or the year before and I think now it's less cheap [unintelligible 00:10:08] yeah.Corey: Yeah, I couldn't help but notice that in my own business, too. It turns out that not giving a shit about the AWS bill was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Who knew?Alex: [laugh]. Yeah, exactly. And now people [unintelligible 00:10:17], you know, the CIOs in particular, it's like, help. And so, that's really 60%, and our business has boomed since.Corey: Yeah, one thing that I find interesting is that you've been around for only four years. I know that's weird to say ‘only,' but time moves differently in tech. And you've started showing up in some very strange places that I would not have expected. You recently—somewhat recently; time is, of course, a flat circle—completed $100 million Series C, and I also saw you in places where I didn't expect to see you in the form of, last week, one of your large competitor's earnings calls, where they were asked by an analyst about an unnamed company that had raised $100 million Series C, and the CEO [unintelligible 00:11:00], “Oh, you're probably talking about Redpanda.” And then they gave an answer that was fine.I mean, no one is going to be on an earnings call and not be prepared for questions like that and to not have an answer ready to go. No one's going to say, “Well, we're doomed if it works,” because I think that businesses are more sophisticated than that. But it was an interesting shout-out in a place where you normally don't see competitors validate that you're doing something interesting by name-checking you.Alex: What was fundamentally interesting for me about that, is that I feel that as an investor, if you're putting you know, 2, 3, 4, or $500 million check into a public position of a company, you want to know, is this money simply going to make returns? That's basically what an investor cares about. And so, the reason for that question is, “Hey, there's a Series C startup company that now has a bunch of these Fortune 2000 logos,” and you know, when we talked to them, like, their customer [unintelligible 00:11:51] phenomena, like, why is that the case? And then, you know, our competitor was forced to name, you know, [laugh] a single win. That's as far as I remember it. We don't know of any additional customers that have switched to that.And so, I think when you have, like, you know, your win rate is above, whatever, 95%, 97% ratio, then I think, you know, they're just sort of forced to answer that. And in a way, I just think that they focus on different things. And for me, it was like, “Okay, developer, hands on keyboard, behind the terminal, how do I make you successful?” And that seems to have worked out enough to be mentioned in the earnings call.Corey: On some level, it's a little bit of a dog-and-pony show. I think that as companies had a certain point of scale, they feel that they need to validate what they're doing to investors at various points—which is always, on some level, of concern—and validate themselves to analysts, both financial—which, okay, whatever—and also, industry analysts, where they come with checklists that they believe is what customers want and is often a little bit off of the mark. But the validation that I think that matters, that actually determines whether or not something has legs is what your customers—you know, people paying you money for a thing—have to say and what they take away from what you're doing. And having seen in a couple of cases now myself, that usage of Redpanda has increased after initial proofs of concept and putting things on to it, I already sort of know the answer to this, but it seems that you also have a vibrant community of boosters for people who are thrilled to use the thing you're selling them.Alex: You know, Jumptraders recently posted that there was a use case in the new stack where they, like, put for the most mission-critical. So, for those of you that listening, Jumptraders is financial company, and they're super technical company. One of, like, the hardest things, they'll probably put your [unintelligible 00:13:35] your product through some of the most rigorous testing [unintelligible 00:13:38]. So, when you start doing some of these logos, it gives confidence. And actually, the majority of our developers that we get to partner with, it was really a friend telling a friend, for [laugh] the longest time, my marketing department was super, super small.And then what's been fun, some, like, really different use case was the one I mentioned about on this, like, flying vehicles around the world. They fly both in outer space and in airplanes. That was really fun. And then the large one is when you have workloads at, like, 14-and-a-half gigabytes per second, where the alternative of using something like Kinesis in the case of Lacework—which, you know, they wrote a new stack article about—would be so exorbitantly expensive. And so, in a way, I think that, you know, just trying to make the developers successful, really focusing, honestly, on the person who just has to make things work. We don't—by the time we get to the CIO, really the champion was the engineer who had to build an application. “I was just trying to figure it out the whack-a-mole of trying to debug alternative systems.”Corey: One of the, I think, seductive problems with your entire space is that no one decides day one that they're going to implement a data streaming solution for a very scaled-out, high-traffic site. The early adoption is always a small thing that you're in the process of building. And at that scale at that speed, it just doesn't feel like it's that hard of a problem because scale introduces its own unique series of challenges, but it's often one that people only really find out themselves when the simple thing that works in theory but not in production starts to cause problems internally. I used to work with someone who was a deeply passionate believer in Apache Kafka to a point where it almost became a problem, just because their answer to every problem—it almost didn't matter if it was, “How do we get more coffee this morning?”—Kafka would be the answer for all of it.And that's great, but it turned out, they became one of these people that borderline took on a product or a technology as their identity. So, anything that would potentially take a workload away from that, I got a lot of internal resistance. I'm wondering if you find that you're being brought in to replace existing systems or for completely greenfield stuff. And if the former, are you seeing a lot of internal resistance to people who have built a little niche for themselves?Alex: It's true, the people that have built a career, especially at large banks, were a pretty good fit for, you know, they actually get a team, they got a promotion cycle because they brought this technology and the technology sort of helped them make money. I personally tend to love to talk to these people. And there was a ca—to me, like, technically, let's talk about, like, deeply technical. Let me help you. That obviously doesn't scale because I can't have the same conversation with ten people.So, we do tend to see some of that. Actually, from our customers' standpoint, I would say that the large part of our customer base, you know, if I'm trying to put numbers, maybe 65%, I probably rip and replace of, you know, either upstream Apache Software or private companies or hosted services, et cetera. And so, I think you're right in saying, “Hey, that resistance,” they probably handled the [unintelligible 00:16:38], but what changed in the last year is that the CIO now stepped in and says, “I am going to fire all of you or you have to come up with a $10 million savings. Help me.” [laugh]. And so, you know, then really, my job is to help them look like a hero.It's like, “Hey, look, try it tested, benchmark it in your with your own workload, and if it saves you money, then use it.” That's been, you know, to sort of super helpful kind of on the macroeconomic environment. And then the last one is sometimes, you know, you do have to go with a greenfield, right? Like, someone has built a career, they want to gain confidence, they want to ask you questions, they want to trust you that you don't lose data, they want to make sure that you do say the things that you want to say. And so, sometimes it's about building trust and building that relationship.And developers are right. Like, there's a bunch of products out there. Like, why should I trust you? And so, a little easier time, probably now, that you know, with the CIOs wanting to cut costs, and now you have an excuse to go back to the executive team and say, “Look, I made you look smart. We get to [unintelligible 00:17:35], you know, our systems can scale to this.” That's easy. Or the second one is we do, you know, we'll start with some side use case or a greenfield. But both exists, and I would say 65% is probably rip-outs.Corey: One question, I love to, I wouldn't call it ambush, but definitely come up with, the catches some folks by surprise is one of the ways I like to sort out zealots from people who are focused on business problems. Do have an example of a data streaming workload for which Redpanda would not be a great fit?Alex: Yeah. Database-style queries are not a fit. And so, think that there was a streaming engine before there was trying to build a database on top of it, and, like—and probably it does work in some low volume of traffic, like, say 5, 10 megabytes per second, but when you get to actual large scale, it just it doesn't work. And it doesn't work because but what Redpanda is, it gives you two properties as a developer. You can add data to the end or you can truncate the head, right?And so, because those are your only two operations on the log, then you have to build this entire caching level to be able to give this database semantics. And so, do you know, I think for that the future isn't for us to build a database, just as an example, it's really to almost invert it. It's like, hey, what if we make our format an open format like Apache Iceberg and then bring in your favorite database? Like, bring in, you know, Snowflake or Athena or Trina or Spark or [unintelligible 00:18:54] or [unintelligible 00:18:55] or whatever the other [unintelligible 00:18:56] of great databases that are better than we are, and doing, you know, just MPP, right, like a massively parallelizable database, do that, and then the job for us, for [unintelligible 00:19:05], let me just structure your log in a way that allows you to query, right? And so, for us, when we announced the $100 million dollar Series C funding, it's like, I'm going to put the data in an iceberg format so you can go and query it with the other ten databases. And there are a better job than we are at that than we are.Corey: It's frankly, refreshing to see a vendor that knows where, okay, this is where we start and this is where we stop because it just seems that there's been an industry-wide push for a while now to oh, you built a component in a larger system that works super well. Now, expand to do everything else in the architectural diagram. And you suddenly have databases trying to be network transport layers and queues trying to be data warehouses, and it just doesn't work that way. It just it feels like oh, this is a terrible approach to solving this particular problem. And what's worse, from my mind, is that people who hadn't heard of you before look at you through this lens that does not put you in your best light, and, “Oh, this is a terrible database.” Well, it's not supposed to be one.Alex: [laugh].Corey: But it also—it puts them off as a result. Have you faced pressure to expand beyond your core competency from either investors or customers or analysts or, I don't know, the voices late at night that I hear and I assume everyone else does, too?Alex: Exactly. The 3 a.m. voice that I have to take my phone and take a voice note because it's like, I don't want to lose this idea. Totally. For us. I think there's pressures, like, hey, you built this great engine. Why don't you add, like, the latest, you know, soup de jour in systems was like a vector database.I was like, “This doesn't even make any sense.” For me, it's, I want to do one thing really well. And I generally call it internally, ‘the ring zero.' It's, if you think of the internet, right, like, as a computer, especially with this mode to what we talked about earlier in a BYOC, like, we could be the best ring zero, the best sort of like, you know, messaging platform for people to build real-time applications. And then that's the case and there's just so much low-hanging fruit for us.Like, the developer experience wasn't great for other systems, like, why don't we focus on the last mile, like, making that developer, you know, successful at doing this one thing as opposed to be an average and a bunch of other a hundred products? And until we feel, honestly, that we've done a phenomenal job at that—I think we still have some roadmap to get there—I don't want to expand. And, like, if there's pressure, my answer is, like… look, the market is big enough. We don't have to do it. We're still, you know, growing.I think it's obviously not trivial and I'm kind of trivializing a bunch of problems from a business perspective. I'm not trying to degrade anyone else. But for us, it's just being focused. This is what we do well. And bring every other technology that makes you successful. I don't really care. I just want to make this part well.Corey: I think that that is something that's under-appreciated. I feel like I should get over at one point to something that's been nagging at the back of my mind. Some would call it a personal attack and I suppose I'll let them, but what I find interesting is your background. Historically, you were a distributed systems engineer at very large scale. And you apparently wrote the first version of Redpanda yourself in—was it C or C++?Alex: C++.Corey: Yeah. And now you are the CEO of a company that is clearly doing very well. Have you gotten the hell out of production yet? The reason I ask this is I have worked in a number of companies where the founder was also the initial engineer and then they invariably treated main as their feature branch and the rest of us all had to work around them to keep them from, you know, destroying everything we were trying to build around us, due to missing context. In other words, how annoyed with you are your engineers on any given afternoon?Alex: [laugh]. Yeah. I would say that as a company builder now, if I may say that, is the team is probably the thing I'm the most proud of. They're just so talented, such good [unintelligible 00:22:47] of humans. And so—group of humans—I stopped coding about two years ago, roughly.So, the company is four-and-a-half years old, really the first two-and-a-half years old, the first one, two years, definitely, I was personally putting in, like, tons and tons of hours working on the code. It was a ton of fun. To me, one of the most rewarding technical projects I've ever had a chance to do. I still read pull requests, though, just so that when I have a conversation with a technical leader, I don't be, like, I have no clue how the transactions work. So, I still have to read the code, but I don't write any more code and my heart was a little broken when my dev prod team removed my write access to the GitHub repo.We got SOC2 compliance, and they're like, “You can't have access to being an admin on Google domains, and you're no longer able to write into main.” And so, I think as a—I don't know, maybe my identity—myself identity is that of a builder, and I think as long as I personally feel like I'm building, today, it's not code, but you know, is the company and [unintelligible 00:23:41] sort of culture, then I feel okay [laugh]. But yeah, I no longer write code. And the last story on that, is this—an engineer of ours, his name is [Stefan 00:23:51], he's like, “Hey, so Alex wrote this semaphore”—this was actually two days ago—and so they posted a video, and I commented, I was like, “Hey, this was the context of semaphore. I'm sorry for this bug I caused.” But yeah, at least I still remember some context for them.Corey: What's fun is watching things continue to outpace and outgrow you. I mean, one of the hard parts of building a company is the realization that every person you hire for a thing that's now getting off of your plate is better at that thing than you are. It's a constant experience of being humbled. And at some point, things wind up outpacing you to the point where, at least in my case, I've been on calls with customers and I explained how we did some things and how it worked and had to be corrected by my team of, “Well. That used to be true, however…” like, “Oh, dear Lord. I'm falling behind.” And that's always been a weird feeling for me.Alex: Totally. You know, it's the feeling of being—before I think I became a CEO, I was a highly comped  engineer and did a competent, to the extent that it allowed me to build this product. And then you start doing all of these things and you're incompetent, obviously, by definition because you haven't done those things and so there's like that discomfort [laugh]. But I have to get it done because no one else wants to do, whatever, like say, like, you know, rev ops or marketing or whatever.And then you find somebody who's great and you're like, oh my God, I was like, I was so poor tactically at doing this thing. And it's definitely humbling every day. And it's almost it's, like, gosh, you're just—this year was kind of this role where you're just, like, mediocre at, like, a whole lot of things as a company, but you're the only person that has to do the job because you have the context and you just have to go and do it. And so, it's definitely humbling. And in some ways, I'm learning, so for me today, it's still a lot of fun to learn.Corey: This is a little more in the weeds, I suppose, but I always love to ask people these questions. Because I used to be naive, which meant that I had hope and I saw a brighter future in technology. I now know that was all a lie. But I used to believe that out there was some company whose internal infrastructure for what they'd built was glorious and it would be amazing. And I knew I would never work there, nor what I want to, because when everything's running perfectly, all I can really do is mess that up; there's no way to win and a bunch of ways to lose.But I found that place doesn't exist. Every time I talk to someone about how they built the thing that they built and I ask them, “If you were starting over from scratch, what would you do differently?” The answer often distills down to, “Oh, everything.” Because it's an organically evolving system that oh, yeah, everything's easier the second time. At least you get to find new failure modes go in that way. When you look back at how you designed it originally, are there any missteps that you could have saved yourself a whole lot of grief by not making the first time?Alex: Gosh, so many things. But if I were to give Hollywood highlights on these things, something that [unintelligible 00:26:35] is, does well is exposing these high-level data types of, like, streams, and lists and maps and et cetera. And I was like, “Well, why couldn't streams offer this as a first-class citizen?” And we got some things well which I think would still do, like the whole [thread recorder 00:26:49] could—like, the fundamentals of the engine I will still do the same. But, you know, exposing new programming models earlier in the life of the product, I think would have allowed us to capture even more wildly different use cases.But now we kind of have this production engine, we have to support Fortune 2000, so you know, it's kind of like a very delicate evolution of the product. Definitely would have changed—I would have added, like, custom data types upfront, I would have pushed a little harder on I think WebAssembly than we did originally. Man, I could just go on for—like, [added detail 00:27:21], I would definitely have changed things. Like, I would have pressed on the first—on the version of the cloud that we talked about early on, that as the first deployment mode. If we go back through the stack of all of the products you had, it's funny, like, 11 products that are surfaced to the customers to, like, business lines, I would change fundamental things about just [laugh], you know, everything else. I think that's maybe the curse of the expert. Like, you know, you could always find improvements.Corey: Oh, always. I still look back at my career before starting this place when I was working in a bunch of finance companies, and—I'll never forget this; it was over a decade ago—we were building out our architecture in AWS, and doing a deal with a large finance company. And they said, “Cool, where's your data center?” And I said, “Oh, it's AWS.” And they said, “Ha ha ha ha. Where's your data center?”And that was oh, okay, great. Now, it feels like if that's their reaction, they have not kept pace with the times. It feels it is easier to go to a lot of very serious enterprises with very serious businesses and serious workload concerns attendant to those and not get laughed out of the room because you didn't wind up doing a multi-million dollar data center build out that, with an eye toward making it look as enterprise-y as possible.Alex: Yeah. Okay, so here's, I think, maybe something a little bit controversial. I think that's true. People are moving to the cloud, and I don't think that that idea, especially when we go when we talk to banks, is true. They're like, “Hey, I have this contract with one of the hybrid clouds.”—you know, it's usually with two of them, and then you're like—“This is my workload. I want to spend $70 million or $100 million. Who could give me the biggest discount?” And then you kind of shop it around.But what we are seeing is that effectively, the data transfer costs are so expensive and running this for so much this large volume of traffic is still so, so expensive, that there is an inverse [unintelligible 00:29:09] to host from some category of the workload where you don't have dynamism. Actually hosted in your data center is, like, a huge boom in terms of cost efficiencies for the companies, especially where we are and especially in finances—you mentioned that—if you're trying to trade and you have this, like, steady state line from nine to five, whatever, eight to four, whenever the markets open, it's actually relatively cost-efficient because you can measure hey, look, you know, the New York Stock Exchange is 1.5 gigabytes per second at market close. Like, I could provision my hardware to beat this. And like, it'll be that I don't need this dynamism that the cloud gives me.And so yeah, it's kind of fascinating that for us because we offered the self-hosted Redpanda which can adapt to super low latencies with kernel parameter tuning, and the cloud due to the tiered storage, we talked about S3 being [unintelligible 00:29:52] to, so it's been really fun to participate in deployments where we have both. And you couldn't—they couldn't look more different. I mean, it's almost looks like two companies.Corey: One last question before we wind up calling it an episode. I think I saw something fly by on Twitter a while back as I slowly returned to the platform—no, I'm not calling it X—something you're doing involving a scholarship. Can you tell me a bit more about that?Alex: Yeah. So, you know, I'm a Latino CEO, first generation in the States, and some of the things that I felt really frustrated with, growing up that, like, I feel fortunate because I got to [unintelligible 00:30:25] that is that, you know, people were just—that look like me are probably given some bullshit QA jobs, so like, you know, behemoth job, I think, for a bank. And so, I wanted to change that. And so, we give money and mentorship to people and we release all of the intellectual property. And so, we mentor someone—actually, anyone from underrepresented backgrounds—for three months.We give then, like, 1200 bucks a month—or 1500, I can't remember—mentorship from our top principal level engineers that have worked at Amazon and Google and Facebook and basically the world's top companies. And so, they meet with them one hour a week, we give them money, they could sit in the couch if they want to. No one has to [unintelligible 00:31:06]. And all we're trying to do is, like, “Hey, if you are part of this group, go and try to build something super hard.” [laugh].And often their minds, which is great, and they're like, “I want to build an OpenAI competitor in three months, and here's the week-by-week progress.” Or, “I want to build a new storage engine, new database in three months.” And that's the kind of people that we want to help, these like, super ambitious, that just hasn't had a chance to be mentored by some of the world's best engineers. And I just want to help them. Like, we—this is a non-scalable project. I meet with them once a week. I don't want to have a team of, like, ten people.Like, to me, I feel like their most valuable thing I could do is to give them my time and to help them mentor. I was like, “Hey, let's think about this problem. Let's decompose this. How do you think about this?” And then bring you the best engineers that I, you know, that work for—with me, and let me help you think about problems differently and give you some money.And we just don't care how you use the time or the money; we just want people to work on hard problems. So, it's active. It runs once a year, and if anyone is listening to this, if you want to send it to your friends, we'd love to have that application. It's for anyone in the world, too, as long as we can send the person a check [laugh]. You know, my head of finance is not going to walk to a Moneygram—which we have done in the past—but other than that, as long as you have a bank account that we can send the check to, you should be able to apply.Corey: That is a compelling offer, particularly in the current macro environment that we find ourselves faced in. We'll definitely put a link to that into the [show notes 00:32:32]. I really want to thank you for taking the time to, I guess, get me up to speed on what it is you're doing. If people want to learn more where's the best place for them to go?Alex: On Twitter, my handle is @emaxerrno, which stands for the largest error in the kernel. I felt like that was apt for my handle. So, that's one. Feel free to find me on the community Slack. There's a Slack button on the website redpanda.com on the top right. I'm always there if you want to DM me. Feel free to stop by. And yeah, thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.Corey: Likewise. I look forward to the next time. Alex Gallego, CEO and founder at Redpanda. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that I will almost certainly never read because they have not figured out how to get data from one place to another.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Alex Sezer is helping other do business better by transforming their culture. Always a high achiever, Alex led the Texas A&M football team as captain and scaled multiple business in his 20s. Today, Alex shares how he learned the value of hard work, his calling to preach, and the season of doubting his faith that helped shape him along the way. Ales also shares how he knew it was time to leave his fancy job and start something new which is a fascinating look inside his experience. Then, we talk about how to create a culture wherever you find yourself.  Alex's story reminds us that culture is what we create through our treatement of other. Listen to Alex's story in your favorite podcast app now! Stories Alex shared: Growing up in Orange, TX in a pastor's family How the Lord came through to get a scholarship to play football How his grandfather and father influenced him Giving his life to Christ at 13 Falling in love with the Lord and reading the Bible voraciously Studying preachers like Dr. Tony Evans and H.B. Charles Jr. Getting involved in apologetics in college What God showed him through apologetics Getting into the SEC to play football Learning the value of hard work Going to work for a consulting firm Deciding to get into real estate How God speaks to him and how he knew it was time to leave his job Questioning his foundation How to build a positive culture Great quotes from Alex: It's hard when you feel it but nothing in your world looks like it. Everything we are blessed to steward should be If Jesus was here in the flesh, he'd probably be a content creator. Resources we mentioned: Alex's website On Preaching: Personal & Pastoral Insights for the Preparation & Practice of Preaching by H.B. Charles Jr. Related episodes: Os Guinness and Carpe Diem Redeemed Chris Staron Calls for Truce to the Culture War Felicia Song and Digital Discipleship The post Alex Sezer and Creating Culture appeared first on Eric Nevins.

The summer season can bring about changes in routines and schedules, making it tempting to take a break or become less consistent with your podcast. However, staying consistent during the summer is just as important as any other time of the year.   Kristin welcomes guest Alex Sanfilippo. Alex is the founder of PodMatch, an entrepreneur, podcast host, and business coach known for his work in the digital marketing and podcasting industry. Alex shares his invaluable knowledge and expertise on the importance of staying consistent and strategic during the summer season.    Kristin and Alex dive into: The importance of maintaining a regular release schedule, by doing so, you keep your audience interested and prevent them from losing interest or seeking alternative podcasts. The in's and out's of batching content and adapting your batching strategy to fit your content type, audience, and when batching can become a downfall.  The incredible value in automating, delegating, and eliminating and what that looks like in podcasting.   While podcasting during the summer can be challenging, it's important to remember that these obstacles are temporary. By adjusting your schedule, planning, and finding ways to adapt your content to the season, you can overcome these challenges and continue providing engaging episodes to your audience.   Quotes from today's episode:   “It's really hard to get this machine moving again once you stop it”- Alex “Give yourself the freedom to only podcast”- Alex  “It goes beyond motivation and it goes to purpose”- Kristin   Where to find Alex: Learn more about Alex from his website https://alexsanfilippo.com/ Check out his incredible tools at https://podpros.com/ Follow him on Instagram @ajsanfilippo Want more? Grab a spot in Podcast Bootcamp From Idea to Launch: grab your spot Want to launch your podcast by Fall 2023? Click here for more information. Have a question? Reach out to Kristin Join our FB Community: https://www.facebook.com/groups/wholisticpodcasting/ Connect on IG: @kristinfieldschadwick  

About AlexAlex Su is a lawyer who's currently the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, the #1 contract lifecycle management technology company that's backed by Accel, Sequoia, Y Combinator, and other leading investors. Prior to joining Ironclad, Alex sold cloud software to legal departments and law firms on behalf of early stage startups. Alex maintains an active presence on social media, with over 180,000 followers across Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and TikTok. Links Referenced: Ironclad: https://ironcladapp.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-su/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/heyitsalexsu Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/heyitsalexsu/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@legaltechbro TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate. Is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other; which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability: it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: I come bearing ill tidings. Developers are responsible for more than ever these days. Not just the code that they write, but also the containers and the cloud infrastructure that their apps run on. Because serverless means it's still somebody's problem. And a big part of that responsibility is app security from code to cloud. And that's where our friend Snyk comes in. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are - Finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, Repos, and Pipelines. Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like code pipeline, EKS, ECR, and more! As well as things you're actually likely to be using. Deploy on AWS, secure with Snyk. Learn more at Snyk.co/scream That's S-N-Y-K.co/screamCorey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I've been off the beaten path from the traditional people building things in cloud by the sweat of their brow and the snark on their Twitters. I'm joined today by Alex Su, who's the Head of Community Development at Ironclad, and also relatively well-renowned on the TikToks, as the kids say. Alex, thank you for joining me.Alex: Thank you so much for having me on the show.Corey: It's always been an interesting experience because I joined TikTok about six months or so ago, due to an escalatingly poor series of life choices that continue to fail me, and I have never felt older in my life. But your videos consistently tend to show up there. You are @legaltechbro, which sounds like wow, I hate all of those things, and yet your content is on fire.How long have you been doing the public dance thing, for lack of a better term? I don't even know what they call it. I know how to talk about Twitter. I know how to talk about LinkedIn—sad. LinkedIn is sad—but TikTok is still something I'm trying to wrap my ancient brain around.Alex: Yeah, I felt out of place when I first made my first TikTok. And by the way, I'm known for making funny skits. I have actually never danced. I've always wanted to, but I don't think I have that… that talent. I started posting TikToks in, I will call it—let's call it the fall of 2020. So, after the pandemic.Before that, I had been posting consistently on LinkedIn for, gosh, ever since 2016, when I got into legal tech. And during the pandemic, I tried a bunch of different things including making funny skits. I'd seen something somewhere online if somebody's making fun of the doctor life. And so, I thought, hey, I could do that for legal too. And so, I made one with iMovie. You know, I recorded it on Zoom.And then people started telling me, “Hey, you should get on this thing called TikTok.” And so, I resisted it for a while because I was like, “This is not for me.” But at some point, I said, “I'll try this out. The editing seems pretty easy.” So, I made a couple of videos poking fun at the life of a law firm lawyer or a lawyer working for a corporate legal department.And on my fourth video, I went massively viral. Like, unexpected went viral, like, millions of—I think two million or so views. And I found myself with a following. So, I thought, “Hey, I guess this is what I'm doing now.” And so, it's been, I don't know, a year-and-a-half since then, and I've been continuously posting these skits.Corey: It's like they say the worst thing can happen when you go into a casino and play for the first time is you win.Alex: [laugh].Corey: You get that dopamine hit, and suddenly, well now, guess what you're doing for the rest of your life? There you go. It sounds like it worked out for you in a lot of fun ways. Your skits about big law of life definitely track. My wife used to work in that space, and we didn't meet till she was leaving that job because who has time to date in those environments?But I distinctly remember one of our early dates, we went out to meet a bunch of her soon-to-be-former coworkers at something like eight or nine o'clock in Los Angeles on a Friday night. And at the end of it, we went back to one of our places, and they went back to work. Because that is the lifestyle, apparently, of being in big law. I don't have the baseline prerequisites to get into law school, to let alone get the JD and then go to work in big law, and looking at that lifestyle, it's, “Yeah, you know, I don't think that's for me.” Of course, I say that, and then three days later, I was doing a middle of the night wake up because the pager went off.Like, “Oh, are you a doctor?” And the pager is like, “Holy shit. This SSL certificate expires in 30 days.” It's, yeah. Again, life has been fun, but it's always been one of those things that was sort of, I guess, held in awe. And you're putting a very human face on it.Alex: Yeah. You know, I never expected to be in big law either, Corey. Like, I was never good at school, but as I got older, I found a way to talk my way into, like, a good school. I hustled my way into a job at a firm that I never imagined I could get a job at. But once I got in, that's when I was like, “Okay, I don't feel like I fit in.”And so, I struggled but I still you know grinded it out. I stayed at the job for a couple of years. And I left because I was like, “This is not right for me.” But I never imagined that all of those experiences in big law ended up being the source material for my content, like, eight years after I'd left. So, I'm very thankful that I had that experience even if it wasn't a good fit for me. [laugh].Corey: And on some level, it feels like, “Where do you get your material from?” It's, “Oh, the terrible things that happened to me. Why do you ask?”Alex: That's basically it. And people ask me, they say, you know, “You haven't worked in that environment for eight years. It's probably different now, right?” Well, no. You know, the legal industry is not like the tech industry. Like, things move very slowly there.The jokes that made people laugh back then, you know, 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, people still laugh at today because it's the same way things have always worked. So, again, I'm very thankful that that's been the case. And, you know, I feel like, the reason why my content is popular is because a lot of people can resonate with it. Things that a lot of people don't really talk about publicly, about the lifestyle, the culture, how things work in a large firm, but I make jokes about it, so people feel comfortable laughing about it, or commenting and sharing.Corey: I want to get into that a little bit because when you start seeing someone pop up again and again and again on TikTok, you're one of those, “Okay, I should stalk this person and figure out what the hell their story is.” And I didn't have to look very far in your case because you're very transparent about it. You're the head of community development at a company called Ironclad, and that one threw me for a little bit of a loop. So, let's start with the easy question, I suppose. What is Ironclad?Alex: We're a digital contracting technology that helps accelerate business contracts. Companies deal with contracts of all types; a lot of times it gets bogged down in legal review. We just help with that process to make that process move faster. And I never expected I'd be in this space. You know, I always thought I was going to be a trial lawyer.But I left that world, you know, maybe six years ago to go into the legal technology space, and I quickly saw that contracts was kind of a growing challenge, contracting, whether it's for sales or for procurement. So, I found myself as a salesperson in legal tech selling, first e-discovery software, and then contracting software. And then I found my way to Ironclad as part of the community team, really to talk about how we can help, but also speaking up about the challenges of the legal profession, of working at a law firm or at a legal department. So, I feel like it's all been the culmination of all my experiences, both in law and technology.Corey: In the world in which I've worked, half of my consulting work has been helping our clients negotiate their large-scale AWS contracts and the other half is architectural nonsense of, “Hey, if you make these small changes, that cuts your bill in half. Maybe consider doing them.” But something that I've learned that is almost an industry-wide and universal truism, is that you want to keep the salespeople and the lawyers relatively separate just due to the absolute polar opposites of incentives. Salespeople are incentivized to sell anything that holds still long enough or they can outrun, whereas lawyers are incentivized to protect the company from risk. No, is the easy answer and everything else is risk that has to be managed. You are one of those very rare folks who has operated successfully and well by blending the two. How the hell did that happen?Alex: I'm not sure to this day how it happened. But I think part of the reason why I left law in the first place was because I don't think I fit in. I think there's a lot of good about having a law degree and being part of the legal profession, but I just wanted to be around people, I wanted to work with people, I didn't want to always worry about things. And so, that led me to technology sales, which took me to the other extreme. And so, you know, I carried a sales quota for five years and that was such an interesting experience to see where—to both sell technology, but also to see where legal fit into that process.And so, I think by having the legal training, but also having been part of a sales team, that's given me appreciation for what both teams do. And I think they're often at tension with one another, but they're both there to serve the greater goals of the company, whether it's to generate revenue or protect against risk.Corey: I think that there's also a certain affinity that you may have—I'm just spitballing wildly—one of the things that sales folks and attorneys tend to have in common is that in the public imagination, as those roles are not, shall we call it, universally beloved. There tend to be a fair number of well, jokes, in which case, both sides of that tend to be on the receiving end. I mean, at some level, all you have to do is become an IRS auditor and you've got the holy trifecta working for you.Alex: [laugh]. I don't know why I gravitated to these professions, but I do think that it's partly because both of these roles hold a significant amount of power. And if you look at just contracting in general, a salesperson at a company, they're really the driver of the sales process. Like, if there's no sale to be made, there's no contract. On the flip side, the law person, the lawyer, knows everything about what's inside of the contract.They understand the legal terms, the jargon, and so they hold an immense amount of power over advising people on what's going to happen. And so, I think sometimes, salespeople and legal people take it too far and either spend too much time reviewing a contract and lording it over the business folks, or maybe the salesperson is too blase about getting a deal done and maybe bypasses legal and doesn't go through the right processes. By the way, Corey, these are jokes that I make in my TikToks all the time and they always go viral because it's so relatable to people. But yeah, that's probably why people always make jokes about lawyers and salespeople. There's probably some element of ridiculing people with a significant amount of power within a company to determine these transactions.Corey: Do you find that you have a better affinity for the folks doing contract work on the seller side or the buyer side? Something they don't tell you when you run companies is, yeah, you're going to spend a lot of time working on contracts, not just when selling things, but also when buying things and going back and forth. Aspects of what you're talking about so far in this conversation have resonated, I guess, with both sides of that for me. What do you have the affinity for?Alex: I think on the sales side, just because of my experience, you know, I think when you go through a transaction and you're trying to convince someone to doing something, and this is probably why I wanted to go to law school in the first place. Like I watched those movies, right? I watched A Few Good Men and I thought I'd be standing up in court convincing a jury of something. Little did I know that that sort of interest [crosstalk 00:10:55]—Corey: Like, Perry Mason breakthrough moment.Alex: That moment where—the gotcha moment, right? I found that in sales. And so, it was really a thrill to be able to, like, talk to someone, listen to them, and then kind of convince them that, based on what challenges they're facing, for them to buy some technology. I love that. And I think that was again, tied to why I went to law school in the first place.I didn't even know sales was a possible profession because I grew up in an immigrant community that was like, you just go to school, and that'll lead to your career. But there's a lot of different careers that are super interesting that don't require formal schooling, or at least the seven years of schooling you need for law. So, I always identify with the sales side. And maybe that's just how I am, but obviously, the folks who deal with the buy side, it's a pretty important job, too.Corey: There's a lot of surprise when I start talking to folks in the engineering world. First, they're in for a rough awakening at times when they learn exactly how much qualified enterprise salespeople can make. But also because being a lawyer without, you know, the appropriate credentials to tie into that, you're going to have a bad time. There are regulatory requirements imposed on lawyers, whereas to be a salesperson, forget the law degree, forget the bachelor's, forget the high school diploma, all you really need to be able to do from an academic credential standpoint is show up.The rest of it is, can you actually sell? Can you have the conversations that convince people to see the outcome that benefits everyone? And I don't know what that it's possible, or advised necessarily, to be able to find a way to teach that in some formalized way. It almost feels like folks either have that spark or they don't. Do you think it's one of those things that can be taught? Do you think it's something that people have to have a pre-existing affinity for?Alex: It's both, right, because part of it is some people will just—they don't have the personality to really sell. It's also like their interest; they don't want to do that. But what I found that's interesting is that what I thought would make a good salesperson didn't end up being true when I looked at the most effective sellers. Like, in my head, I thought, “Oh, this is somebody who's very boisterous, very extroverted,” but I found that in my experience in B2B SaaS that the most effective sellers are very, very much active listeners. They're not the people showing up and talking at you. They are asking you about your day-to-day asking about processes, understanding the context of your situation, before making a small suggestion about what you might want to do.I was very impressed the first time I saw one of these enterprise sellers who was just so good at that. Like, I saw him, and he looked nothing like what I imagined an effective sales guy to look like. And he was really kind and he just, kind of, just talked to me, like, I was a human being, and listened to my answers. So, I do think that there is some element of nature, your talent when it comes to that, but it can also be trained because I think a lot of folks who have sales talent, they don't realize that they could be good at it. They think that they've got to be this extroverted, happy hour, partying, storyteller, where —Corey: The Type A personality that interrupts people as they're having the conversation.Alex: Yeah, yeah.Corey: Yeah.Alex: So anyways, I think that's why it's a mix of both.Corey: The conversations that I've learned the most from when I'm talking to prospects and clients have been when I asked the quote-unquote, dumb question that I already know the answer to, and then I shut up and I listen. And wow, I did not expect that answer. And when you dig a little further, you realize there's nuance that—at least in my case—that I've completely missed to the entire problem space. I think that is really one of the key differentiators to my mind, that separate people who are good at this role from folks who just misunderstand what the role is based upon mass media, or in other cases—same problem with lawyers—the worst examples, in some cases, of the profession. The pushy used car salesperson or the lawyer they see advertising on the back of a bus for personal injury cases. The world is far more nuanced than that.Alex: Absolutely. And I think you hit the nail on the head when you said, you know, you ask those questions and let them talk. Because that's an entire process within the sales process. It's called discovery, and you're really asking questions to understand the person's situation. More broadly, though, I think pitching at people doesn't seem to work as well as understanding the situation.And you know, I've kind of done that with my content, my TikToks because, you know, if you look at LinkedIn, a lot of people in our space, they're always prescribing solutions, giving advice, posting content about teaching people things. I don't do that. As a marketer, what I do is I talk about the problems and create discussions. So, I'll create a funny video—Corey: I think you're teaching a whole generation that maybe law school isn't what they want to be doing, after all there is that.Alex: There is that. There is that. It's a mix of things. But one of the things I think I focus on is talking about the challenges of working with a sales team if you're an in-house lawyer. And I don't prescribe technology, I don't prescribe Ironclad, I don't say this is what you need to do, but by having people talk about it, they realize, right—and I think this is why the videos are popular—as opposed to me coming out and saying, “I think you need technology because of XYZ.” I think, like, facilitating the conversation of the problem space, that leads people to naturally say, “Hey, I might need something. What do you guys do, by the way?”Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friend EnterpriseDB. EnterpriseDB has been powering enterprise applications with PostgreSQL for 15 years. And now EnterpriseDB has you covered wherever you deploy PostgreSQL on-premises, private cloud, and they just announced a fully-managed service on AWS and Azure called BigAnimal, all one word. Don't leave managing your database to your cloud vendor because they're too busy launching another half-dozen managed databases to focus on any one of them that they didn't build themselves. Instead, work with the experts over at EnterpriseDB. They can save you time and money, they can even help you migrate legacy applications—including Oracle—to the cloud. To learn more, try BigAnimal for free. Go to biganimal.com/snark, and tell them Corey sent you.Corey: It sounds ridiculous for me to say that, “Oh, here's my entire business strategy: step one, I shitpost on the internet about cloud computing; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out to talk about their AWS bills.” But it's also true. Is that the pattern that you go through: step one, shitpost on TikTok; step two, magic happens here; and step three people reach out asking to learn more about what your company does? Or is there more nuance to do it?Alex: I'm still figuring out this whole thing myself, but I will say shitposting is incredibly effective. Because I'm active on Twitter. Twitter is where I start my shitposts. TikTok, I also shitpost, but in video format, I think the number one thing to do is figure out what resonates with people, whether it's the whole contracting thing or if it's frustrations about law school. Once you create something that's compelling, the conversation gets going and you start learning about what people are thinking.And I think that what I'm trying to figure out is how that can lead to a deeper conversation that can lead to a business transaction or lead to a sale. I haven't figured it out, right, but I didn't know that when I started creating content that spoke to people when I was a quota-carrying salesperson, people reached out to me for demo requests, for sales conversations. There is something that is happening in this quote-unquote, “Dark funnel,” that I'm sure you're very familiar with. There's something that's happening that I'm trying to understand, and I'm starting to see.Corey: This is probably a good thing to the zero in on a bit because to most people's understanding of the sales process, it would seem that you going out and making something of a sensation out of yourself on the internet, well what are you doing that for? That's not sales work? How is that sales? That's just basically getting distracted and going to do something fun. Shouldn't you be picking up the phone and cold calling people or mass-emailing folks who don't want to hear from you because you trick them into having a badge scanned somewhere? I don't necessarily think that is accurate. How do you see the interplay of what you do and sales?Alex: When you're selling something like makeup or clothing, it's a pretty transactional process. You create a video; people will buy, right? That's B2C. In B2B, it's a much more complex processes. There's so many touchpoints. The start of a sales conversation and when they actually buy may take six months, 12 months, years. And so, there's got to be a lot of touch points in between.I remember when I was starting out in my content journey, I had this veteran enterprise sales leader, like, your classic, like, CRO. He said to me, “Hey, Alex, your content's very funny, but shouldn't you be making cold calls and emails? Like, why are you spending your time doing this?” And I said, “Hey, listen, do you notice that I'm actually sourcing more outbound sales calls than any other sales rep? Like, have you noticed that?”And he's like, “Actually, yeah, I did notice that. You know, how are you doing it?” And I was like, “Do you not see that these two are tied? These are not people I just started calling. They are people who have seen my content over time. And this is how it works.”And so, I think that the B2B world is starting to wise up to this. I think, for example, Ironclad is leading the way on creating a community team to create those conversations, but plenty of B2B companies are doing the same thing. And so, I think by inserting themselves in a conversation—a two-way conversation—during that process, that's become incredibly effective, far more so than, like, cold-calling a lawyer or a developer who doesn't want to be bothered by some pushy salesperson.Corey: Busy, expensive professionals generally don't want to spend all their time doing that. The cold outreach emails that drive me nuts are, “Hey, can we talk for half an hour?” Yeah, I don't tend to think in terms of billable hours because that's not how I do anything that I do, but there is an internal rate that I used to benchmark and it's what you want me just reach into my pocket and give you how much money for a random opportunity to pitch me on something that you haven't even qualified whether I need or not? It's like, asking people for time is worse, in some ways, than asking for money because they can always make more money, but no one can make more time.Alex: Right, right. That's absolutely right.Corey: It's the lack of awareness of understanding the needs and motivations of your target market. One thing that I found that really aided me back when I was working for other folks was trying to find a company or a management structure that understood and appreciated this. Easy example, when I was setting out as an independent consultant after a few months I'd been doing this and people started to hear about me. But you know, it turns out that there are challenges to running a business that are not recommended for most people. And I debated, do I take a job somewhere else?So, I interviewed at a few places, and I was talking to one company that's active in the cloud costing space at the time and they wanted me to come aboard. But discussions broke down because they thought I was, quote, “More interested in thought leadership than I was and actually fixing the bills themselves.” And looking at this now, four years later or so, yeah, they were right. And amazing how that whole thing played out, but that the lack of vision around, there's an opportunity here, if we can chase it, at least in the places I was at, was relatively hard to come by. Did you luck out in finding a role that works for you in this way or did you basically have to forge it for yourself from the sweat of your brow and the strength of your TikTok account?Alex: It was uphill at first, but eventually, I got lucky. And you know, part of it was engineered luck. And I'll explain what I mean. When I first started out doing this, I didn't expect this to lead to any jobs. I just thought it would support my sales career.Over time, as the content got more popular, I never wanted to do anything else because I was like, I don't want to be a marketer. I'm not a—I don't know anything about demand gen. All I know is how to make funny videos that get people talking. The interesting that happened was that these videos created this awareness, this energy in our space, in the legal space. And it wasn't long before Ironclad found me.And you know, Ironclad has always been big on community, has always done things like—like, our CEO, our founder, he said that he used to host these dinners, never talking about Ironclad, but just kind of talking about law school and law with potential clients. And it would lead to business. Like, it's almost the same concept of, like, not pushing sales on people. And so, Ironclad has always had that in its DNA. And one of our investors, our board members, Jessica Lee from Sequoia, she is a huge believer in community.I mean, she was the CEO of another company that leveraged community, and so there's this community element all throughout the DNA of Ironclad. Now, had I not put myself out there with this content, I may not have been discovered by Ironclad. But they saw me, they found me, and they said, “We don't think about these things like many other companies. We really want to invest in this function.” And so, it's almost like when you put yourself out there, yes, sometimes some people will say, “What are you doing? Like, this makes no sense. Like, stop doing that.” But there's going to be some true believers who come out and seek you out and find you.And that's been my experience here, like, at Ironclad. Like, people were like, “When you go there, are they going to censor you? Is your content going to be less edgy?” No. Like, they pulled me aside multiple times and said, “Keep being yourself. This is what we want.” And I think that is so special and unique. And part of it is very much lucky, but it's also when you put yourself out there kind of in a big way, like-minded people will seek you out as well.Corey: I take the position that part of marketing, part of the core of marketing, is you've got to have an opinion. But as soon as you have an opinion, people are going to disagree with you. They're going to, effectively, forget the human on the other side of it and start taking you for a drag on social media and whatnot. So, the default reaction a lot of people have is oh, I shouldn't venture opinions forward.No. People are always going to dislike you for something and you may as well have it be for who you are and what you want to be doing rather than who you're pretending to be. That's always been my approach. For me, the failure mode was not someone on Twitter is going to get mad about what I wrote. No one's going to read it. That's the failure mode. And the way to avoid that is make it interesting.Alex: That is a hundred percent relatable to me because I think when I was younger, I was scared. I did worry that I would get in trouble for what I posted. But I realized these people I was worried about, they weren't going to help me anyways. These are not people who are going to seek me out and help me but then say, “Oh, I saw your content, so now I can't help you.” They were not going to help me anyways.But by being authentic to myself and putting things out there, I attracted my own tribe of people who have helped me, right? A lot of my early results from content came not because I reached my target customers; it was because somebody resonated with what I put out there and they carried my message and said, “Hey, you should talk to Alex.” Something special happens when you kind of put yourself out there and say an opinion or share a perspective that not everyone agrees with because that tribe you build ends up helping you a lot. And meanwhile, these other people that might not like it, they probably weren't going to help you either.Corey: I maintain that one of the most valuable commodities in the universe is attention. And so, often there's so much information overload that's competing for our attention every minute of every day that trying to blend in with the rest of it feels like the exact wrong approach. I'm not a large company here. I don't have a full marketing department to wind up doing ad buys, and complicated campaigns, and train a team of attacking interns to wind up tackling people to scan their badges at conferences. I've got to work with what I've got.So, the goal I've always had is trigger the Rolodex moment where someone hears about a problem in the AWS billing space—ideally—and, “Oh, my God, you need to talk to Corey about that.” And it worked, for better or worse. And a lot of it was getting lucky, let's be very clear here, and people doing me favors that they had no reason to do and I'll never be able to repay. But being able to be in that space really is what made the difference. Now, the downside, of course, when you start doing that is, how do you go back to what happened before?If you decide okay, well, it's been a fun run for you and Ironclad. And yeah, TikTok. Turns out that is, in fact, for kids; time to go somewhere else. Like, I don't know that you would fit into your old type of job.Alex: Yeah. No, I wouldn't. But very early on, I realized, I said, “If I'm going to find meaningful work, it's okay to be wrong.” And when I went to big law, I realized this is not right for me. That's okay. I'm just not going to get another big law job.And so, when people ask me, “Hey, now that you've put yourself out there, you probably can't get a job at a big firm anymore.” And that's okay to me because I wasn't going to go back anyways. But what I have found, Corey, is that there's this other universe of people, whether it's a entrepreneur, smaller businesses, technology companies, they would be interested in working with me. And so, by being myself, I may have blocked out a certain level of opportunities or a safety net, but now I'm kind of in this other world where I feel very confident that I won't have trouble finding a job. So, I feel very lucky to have that, but that's why I also don't worry about the possibility of not going back.Corey: Yeah, I've never had to think about the idea of, well, what if I go have to get a job again? Because at that point, it means well, it's time to let every one at the company who is depending on the go, and that's the bigger obstacle because, let's be honest, I'm a white guy in tech, and I look like it. My failure mode is basically a board seat and a book deal because of inherent bias in the system.Alex: [laugh]. Oh, my god.Corey: That's the outcome that, for me personally, I will be just fine. It's the other people took a chance on me. I'm terrified of letting them down. So far, knock on wood, I haven't said anything too offensive in public is going to wind up there. That's also not generally my style.But it is the… it is something that has weighed on me that has kept me from I guess, thinking about what would my next job be? I'm convinced this is the last job I'll ever have, if for no other reason that I've made myself utterly unemployable.Alex: [laugh]. Well, I think many of us aspire to find that perfect intersection of what you love doing and what pays the bills. Sounds like you've found it, I really do feel like I found it, too. I never imagined I'd be doing what I do now. Which is also sometimes hard to describe.I'm not making TikToks for a living; I'm just on the community team, doing events—I'm getting to work with people. I'm basically doing the things that I wanted to do that led me to quit that job many years ago, that big law job many years ago. So, I feel very blessed and for anybody who's, like, looking for that type of path, I do think that at some point, you do need to kind of shed the safety nets because if you always hang on to the safety nets, whether it's a big tech job or a big law job, there's going to be elements of that that don't fit in with your personality, and you're never going to be able to find that if you kind of stay there. But if you venture out—and, you know, I admire you for what you've done; it sounds like you're very successful at what you do and get to do what you love every day—I think great things can happen.Corey: Yeah, I get to insult Amazon for a living. It's what I love. It's what I would do if I weren't being paid. So, here we are. Yeah—Alex: [laugh].Corey: I have no sense of self-preservation. It's kind of awesome.Alex: I love it.Corey: But you're right. It's… there's something to be said for finding the thing that winds up resonating with you and what you want to be doing.Alex: It really does. And you know, I think when I first made the move to technology, to sales, there was no career path. I thought I would—maybe I thought I might be a VP of Sales. But the thing is, when you put yourself out there, the opportunities that show up might not be the ones that you had always seen from the beginning. Like if you ask a lawyer, like, “What can I do if I don't practice law?” They're going to give you these generic answers. “Work here. Work there. Work for that company. I've seen a lot of people do this.”But once you put yourself out there in the wilderness, these opportunities arise. And I've been very lucky. I mean, I never imagined I'd be a TikTokker. And by the way, I also make memes on Twitter. Couldn't imagine I'd be doing that either. I learned, like, Mematic, these tools. Like, you know, like, I'm immersed in this internet culture now.Corey: It is bizarre to me and I never saw it coming either. For better or worse, though, here we are, stuck at it.Alex: [laugh].Corey: I really want to thank you for taking so much time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about what you're up to and follow along for the laughs, if nothing else, where's the best place for them to find you?Alex: The best way to find me is on LinkedIn; just look up Alex Su. But I'm around and on lots of social media platforms. You can find me on Twitter, on Instagram, and on TikTok, although I might be a little bit embarrassed of what I put on TikTok. I put some crazy gnarly stuff out there. But yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best place to find me.Corey: And we will put links to all of it in the show notes, and let people wind up making their own decisions. Thanks so much for your time, Alex. I really appreciate it.Alex: Corey, thank you so much for having me. This was so much fun.Corey: Alex Su, Head of Community Development at Ironclad. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry insipid comment talking about how unprofessional everything we talked about is that you will not be able to post for the next six months because it'll be hung up in legal review.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Alex Peckham New Zealand's Premier Cidermaker With wit and charm and dashing good looks Alex Peckham charmed all who had the pleasure of meeting him. The fact that he produced exemplary ciders was merely a side bonus. I met Alex for the first and only time in Baltimore Maryland in 2018. We were both attending that American Cider Association's annual trade conference CiderCon. I posted that episode in Season 3 of Cider Chat on episode 139. Since that time, Peckhams has continued to expand its cider offerings in both bottles and cans. It is a must have brand from this beautiful region of the world. Alex Peckham CiderCon 2018 Alex Peckham passed away due to a malignant brain tumor in April of 2022. He was 59 years old. The tumor had been diagnosed 3 months earlier. He had a a lot of life yet to live and is deeply missed by so many in cider world. In this Chat with Alex It is my hope dear listeners of Cider Chat that this episode may encourage you to visit the Southern Hemisphere whose growing season is much different than what we find in the North. I hope it will help you plan a trip to New Zealand and taste the cuisine, meet the people and drink their fine cider. Peckham's was never opened to the public, but that shouldn't deter you to seek out its cider now. And interesting coincidence I have reworked a bit of the news in this episode to update from the original airing in 2018. Interestingly at that time I was offering a cider tour to France. Caroline Peckham, Alex's beloved wife, wrote to me at the time of episode 139's airing, "Wow! We listened to your podcast last night and it was awesome - thank you so much! We loved how you went through the cidermaking year in the Southern Hemisphere - really helps people get a handle on the process and brings it to life.   Only downside was that we are now both so envious of your trip to Normandy!  My mother is French and I spent some time in Brittany when younger, eating galettes and drinking cider, so I know what a treat you are in for." In this episode 316, I am once again offering a tour to both Normandy and Brittany. After two years of pandemic shut downs, it is time to return. Reservations go live next week at the https://ciderchat.com/totallyciderfrance/  We have come full circle.   The highlights in this episode with Alex When is New Zealand's Apple Blossom season? How long is New Zealand's growing season? When do they make cider? Alex also shares tips on how he makes cider working with both cultured and wild yeast. Alex is full of cider knowledge and an absolutely delightful man with wit and insight that helps make this chat a must listen.  Who knew that hares could be such a problem in the orchard? Alex and Caroline Peckham New Zealand's Cidermaking Seasons January - Summer time in New Zealand Thinning, cleaning and clearing of the orchard as the trees are fully laden with apple February - Picking Cider Apples: Knotted Cornell Muscadet de Dieppe March Kingston Black Kingston Brown April into June Apple harvest continues June Apple pressing begins July Wassail Pruning of apple trees August - September Pruning continues September - October The south island of New Zealand experiences a long blossom time that runs through these two months November Baby apples are growing on the trees December The heat is back on as this region of the world is heading full steam into summer Peckham's Ciders Classic range - which have cider with fruit Good fruit, moderate sweetness with balanced acid, tiny bit of bitterness and astringency Special Release Ciders - one a month special blends High component of wild fermentation Contact Peckham's Cider Website: https://www.peckhams.co.nz/ eMail: ac@peckhams.co.nz No Tasting Room at this site Mentions in this Chat French Cider Tour | Normandy and Brittany September 18th-24th, 2022 2018 Totally Cider Tour at Domaine Dupont Support these Sponsors of Cider Chat so they can continue to support this podcast and help you make great cider! Fermentis - Yeast and Fermentation Solutions for Cidermakers Sraml - Food Processing and Cidermaking equipment specialist Help Support Cider Chat Please donate today. Help keep the chat thriving! Find this episode and all episodes at the page for Cider Chat's podcasts. Listen also at iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher (for Android), iHeartRadio , Spotify and wherever you love to listen to podcasts. Follow on Cider Chat's blog, social media and podcast Twitter @ciderchat Instagram: @ciderchatciderville Cider Chat FaceBook Page Cider Chat YouTube

How many times have you considered going into short term rentals as a property manager? Short-term and vacation rentals are enticing, but they can also be an intimidating niche for newcomers.  Today's guest is Alex Jarbo, short-term rental developer and manager and CEO of Sargon Investments.He is the host of the Youtube Channel called Alex Builds where he teaches the ins and outs of short-term development and management. You'll Learn… [01:08] Starting out in the Short-Term Rental World [08:04] Useful Tools for Managing Short-Term Rentals [12:13] Virtual Guidebooks: Providing a Unique Experience to Guests [15:42] Dealing with Common Issues in Short-Term Rentals [18:32] Some Extra Tips from Pro Short-Term Rental Manager Alex [23:06] The Shifts in the Industry Since COVID [25:34] Where to go to Learn More! Tweetables “And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard.” “It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to, say, something like a normal condo or something.” “I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction.” “I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no. It's not. Invest and manage both.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Alex: I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both. [00:00:06] Jason: Alright, welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the #DoorGrowShow! If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships and residual income.  [00:00:44] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and the business owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host, property management growth expert Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:08] And today's guest is Alex, Alex Jarbo. Am I saying your last name right?  [00:01:13] Alex: Yup. [00:01:14] Jason: I did? Okay. I didn't know if it was like a soft, "h" sounding 'j' or something. So Alex, welcome to the show. You have a company called Sargon investments. You do a lot of cool Airbnb stuff. So I'm really excited to have you on as a guest. I think the Airbnb market is of interest to a lot of my clients and a lot of property managers. It's heating up. There's more interest growing. So, maybe to get started: tell us a little bit about your background and how you kind of got into dealing with rental properties. [00:01:48] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So I was originally, I served about four and a half years in the Marine Corps. And then I had gotten to a point where I just wanted to branch out and sort of do my own thing outside of the military. So, got out, and then the day I got out of the military, I actually moved down to where I live here in Asheville. Prior to that, I spent a couple months trying to figure out like where I wanted to move. I'm originally from Detroit, Michigan. And I wanted to get into short-term rentals. That was sort of the niche that I had chosen inside real estate. So when I moved here, got my real estate license, helped some people purchase and sell properties, but I saw a lot of people purchasing short term rentals that would just come to me. [00:02:26] So I decided to purchase my first one or at least start to purchase my first one. And I originally wanted to use my VA loan and purchase like a duplex or a triplex, live in one, and rent the other couple out on Airbnb. But what I realized really quickly was that like it was just very difficult, even back then in 2017 to find good, cash flowing short-term rentals that weren't completely out of my budget at the time. So after maybe like three months of looking and getting outbid a lot, I decided to build my first short-term rental. And on top of a building I decided to take over the, uh, management. So that's where I decided to both start a development company and start a management company. And that one property turned into two, two turned into four that we're developing, and now we're developing 10 and then working on like a boutique resort. [00:03:13] But yeah, that's the sort of the short of where I'm at now is just focusing on putting together these like boutique resort developments. And then we self manage in house. [00:03:24] Jason: Awesome. So a lot of property managers listening might think "I would like to be an investor and maybe get some of my own." I know some of my clients dabble a little bit just in their own investments. Even if they manage long-term rentals, they want to get more into AirBNB. So why don't we approach that topic first? Like getting into it, you do some things that are a little bit different than the typical Airbnb investor. And one of which being cabins. So I'm really curious about this idea of: why cabins? [00:03:59] Alex: So this is prior to COVID. My whole idea was like-- right now we invest in mountain communities, but every market has their own little area. And anytime I talk to someone they're like, "I don't know where to start investing." I was like, just start in your backyard. If you live in a Metro area, like a lot of areas, you're going to be renting out, like say condos, or you're going to be renting out apartments or something just cause you're in a busy metro city. I like to ask them like "where in your city or the market that you live in-- where do people like to take weekend vacations, maybe an hour to two away from you driving wise? [00:04:29] And that's sort of the market that I recommend people sort of go into. People are fine with driving say like 15- 20 minutes away from like a Metro city up to an hour in some cases. So like a good example of that is like people in New York, like New York city are going to travel maybe two hours. They're used to traveling two hours north to vacation, same thing with, say like in California on the west coast. People in San Diego are pretty used to going up to Big Bear Lake and taking that drive. Land prices are going to be cheaper.  [00:04:59] You can also host some like, not parties, but like bigger-- you can host more people in some of these larger cabins and you have more control on the design and that's sort of the thing we really focus on is focusing on developing unique cabins, whether it be a frames, really nice log cabins... we're, we're dabbling in like tree houses. It's just difficult to find like financing on those right now. The reason we gravitated towards cabins over something like purchasing a condo in a Metro city is we have more control over the design, which just plays into the marketing. It's easier to rent out these unique properties compared to say like something like a normal condo or something where it's a little bit more difficult to differentiate yourself to like the condo next door or something. [00:05:41] Jason: So it sounds like some of the key things you look at is proximity: like pick an area that's nearby. It needs to be something kind of where people take vacations and then novelty seems to be an aspect to this. Like cabins are a novel thing in the mountain area and making it somehow unique or different or stand out.  [00:05:59] Alex: Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, what I always like to say is: say, if you're not developing the property and you're coming into it, you want something unique about the property. I like the property to be an experience in itself on top of the city that the people are visiting for the attraction. So like, if you're looking at a market that has its attractions, but at the same time, it's like you sort of get rid of the seasonality part of it a little bit when the property itself is an experience in itself,  [00:06:24] Jason: Mmm, yeah, good point. The property kind of needs to be its own event or its own thing. Yeah. Cool. So let's shift gears and talk about property managers that might want to get into this game of targeting people. Like you have a portfolio or a small portfolio of investments that they can maybe get on as clients and what that might look like. And then maybe one of the things I think you're really good at is the technology. And so we could chat maybe a little bit about that.  [00:06:55] Alex: Yeah, for managers who are looking, before this, we were talking about like a lot of long-term managers are sort of starting to dabble in the short-term rental game. It sounds intimidating, but it's not as intimidating as it sounds. There's a lot of technology out there right now, plugins and then also CRMs that make the process pretty seamless. Depending on how many properties you have in the portfolio, you really don't need boots on the ground. It might in terms of like having a property manager in an area. Again, I would focus on one market at a time.  [00:07:25] But you can get away with a part-time maintenance person. The most important part is probably going to be your cleaning crew, and that's going to be up to you. There's pros and cons to either hiring your own, like managing the cleaning in-house or teaming up with a local cleaning crew in the area that can handle the cleaning stuff. Which again, the cleaning is definitely like-- I look at my cleaning crew as almost the manager of the properties themselves, because they're there at least twice a week or at least once a week, depending on what the booking looks like. So they see what needs to be replaced, what's damaged. If anything is damaged, they send me a picture directly, which I send directly to either Airbnb, VRBO, or wherever the property's listed.  [00:08:04] So the technology piece is going to be huge. And it, again, it's all dependent on how big you are. If you have 10 cabins, you can probably get away with, there are messaging plugins where it's like, I would say 80% of your messaging is automated. And then you can hire virtual assistants to sort of take over the other 20% of the messaging where it's like specific questions that are asked or say, if they're calling or something. [00:08:26] Jason: So the cleaning crew is almost your inspection crew. Like they're doing somewhat of an inspection as well, not just coming in and cleaning. So they're identifying issues, submitting things to your maintenance team or your system for maintenance. And then you need people that are managing that. And then you've got VAs that can help facilitate some of these things happening right? [00:08:48] Alex: Right. [00:08:49] Jason: What are some of the actual technological tools that you utilize that help you to systemize the business and make things simple for yourself?  [00:08:58] Alex: The first one is-- and I'll talk about maybe four or five tools here. The first one is going to be a tool and a company called StayFi. And I've talked about this tool so much now that I've recommended it to anyone looking to get into short-term rentals. StayFi is essentially a little disk that plugs in the back of the router. And what that does, is it email captures any guests that's using your internet. That 1. Protects you from if the guest is doing anything illegal on your internet, which might happen. But 2. It captures everyone's email in the cabin.  [00:09:29] So, you're essentially taking digital marketing principles and applying it to brick and mortar business, which is the short-term rental stuff. Which is a little difficult to do, but if you can master that part, you can essentially capture your customers. So StayFi. Imagine like you're walking into a Starbucks, you walk into an airport and you have to enter in your email address to be able to get access to the wifi. It's the same idea here, but it's geared towards short-term rentals.  [00:09:52] So from there we use MailChimp to push out marketing emails, but we push out maybe seasonal emails, like three or four emails a year just saying, "Hey," like "this season's coming up" or "Valentine's day is coming up. Would you like to book with us?" [00:10:04] Originally, when you're starting off, you can just put your Airbnb link directly in there. But as a manager who wants to build a bigger short-term rental business, you can use this to sort of take people off of Airbnb, VRBO where they book initially with the short-term rental sites, but then you can build a platform on the backend to sort of capture direct bookings where you're not paying both. The guest is not paying the processing fees. And then same thing with the host. You're saving money on that end where you're sort of-- you have more control over the guests, which is what we realized is very important.  [00:10:38] Jason: Yeah. So you're shifting from just traffic that's fed to you by Airbnb and you're taking that traffic so that it doesn't always have to come back through that and creating your own traffic. It's traffic you own now.  [00:10:50] And for those emails that you capture, do you have any, like, even anecdotal data or information on how many rebook at the same property? Is that common? [00:11:00] Alex: It is pretty common. I don't have exact numbers on that. But we do see a boost in booking say like a couple days after we've pushed the email out. Right now we're still working on building out the backend platform.  [00:11:13] We're just pushing them directly back through Airbnb right now. But like, companies like Airbnb and VRBO have metrics that show like, "Hey, this person has rebooked with you this many times." And then people who are looking to get into more of an advanced system, we use Streamline, or we're going to be using Streamline. vacation, rental software is top of the line where you can syndicate all the top short-term rental sites, and then it sort of syndicates all the messaging too that comes from the different sites. So you have one platform which I really recommend doing. Like, if someone is coming up to a manager and saying, "Hey, I want to take over your property. What can you do for me?" The first thing I recommend is always: are they just on one platform? If they're just on Airbnb, if they're just on VRBO, there's already room for growth there by just putting it on a couple other platforms or putting more eyes on your property. [00:12:00] Jason: Yeah. Very cool. So Streamline for syndication is one of the things. You mentioned MailChimp for getting emails out periodically do your list or some sort of newsletter. What other tools are you using to kind of simplify the business?  [00:12:13] Alex: Right now, a digital guidebook is very effective. We like to essentially plan-- I sort of stole this idea. My wife and I had a vacation in Taloon beach on a resort. And when we arrived, the resort had practically planned our trip for us, where it's like, "Hey, if you want to do a cave diving trip, this is this. If you want it, this is what your day would look like. If you wanted to go visit the pyramids, this is what your day is going to look like. If you just want a chill day and just want to go visit restaurants, this is what your day could look like."  [00:12:43] So we did the same thing there where we plan maybe three to four days. Like here we have like over a hundred breweries in the city, so we do like a brewery day. We do a hiking day. We do a waterfall chasing day, and it's like all that's in the digital guidebook where you could put links to different things in the digital guidebook. And it's just sent out. The link is sent out with the check-in instructions. Same thing with you can get with local restaurants or local providers and be like, "Hey, can you give me like a 10% discount, and then I'll put it in my digital guide book where the guests can use almost like a QR code where you can just generate a QR code. Yeah.  [00:13:15] Jason: So for the digital guidebook, is this just like a Google document or is this like..? [00:13:21] Alex: We use a company called Hostfully. And Hostfully is specifically a short-term rental, digital guidebook. [00:13:28] Jason: Host fully?  [00:13:30] Alex: Yeah, Hostfully. Host and then F U L L Y. Yeah.  [00:13:33] Jason: Okay. Great. [00:13:34] Alex: Pretty cheap too, man. It's like, I think it's like 15, $20 a month per property.  [00:13:38] Jason: Got it. And so what advantages does Hostfully give you over just throwing it in a Google document, for example?  [00:13:45] Alex: The templates are super easy to use. You can also track like how many people are actually looking at it. I mean, I would say the templates, and then also, Hostfully does have a backend system just like Streamline. So. Streamline I believe it's a minimum of 15 properties if you're just starting off. Hostfully I believe is like $25 a month per property. Where it's the same type of syndication CRM, where it pushes out to the other short-term rental sites. So you can sync those two together.  [00:14:11] Jason: Got it. Yeah. I had a software company on one of my previous episodes. They were showcasing TripAngle. Tripangle.com. And he was talking about how they like reduce all the fees, connected Airbnb and all this stuff. So. Pretty cool. It might be worth listeners checking out that and checking out tripangle.com. I think he had mentioned something about Streamline the last time I talked to this gentleman too. So, some connections. [00:14:37] Alex: Streamline's a company standard. It's been around before Airbnb. Before VRBO blew up too. People forget like short-term rentals is not a new idea. It's just the access Airbnb has made it so much easier and VRBO too. Short-term rentals have been around for a very long time where people have to pick up a phone and book So like, I mean, people aren't missing the boat on that. I talk to a couple of people a week then it's like, is it too late to invest in short term rentals? [00:15:04] Like, no, it's not. Invest and manage both. It's continuing to grow, especially with COVID like people sort of stepped away from hotels a little bit, and they're more comfortable driving out a little further out where it's like, would you rather pay an extra $1500 to stay an actual house compared to a hotel? And same thing with like some of the larger properties that we manage. It's like we have families instead of booking, maybe two or three hotel rooms, they're just going to book one house and it almost comes out to be the same price.  [00:15:31] Jason: Nice. Yeah. For large groups it's hard to beat, you know, if you're doing a family reunion or something like that. It's pretty difficult. You're talking a whole bunch of hotel rooms or you get a 10 bedroom house. So, [00:15:42] Alex: One thing going back to the tools that just came to mind. This has helped us a lot when it comes to-- cause we are in a very strict short-term rental market in terms of like laws and zoning and everything. And one of the things that's helped us a lot. And this can help a lot of the managers who are looking to get into the space is using a company called NoiseAware and stacking that with a company called Party Squasher. And we mainly use NoiseAware compared to Party Squasher. You can combine the two but NoiseAware sort of, it hears-- it doesn't listen to everything. It doesn't listen into conversations, but it monitors the decibel level inside of the property.  [00:16:17] So if the guests are being way too loud or screaming since you get their phone number at booking, even if it's through Airbnb or VRBO, they get an immediate text message "Hey, you're being too loud. Could you please like quiet down?" Or something like that. Maybe a little bit more tactful than that. But that's been a very powerful tool for us and especially approaching the county. It's like the biggest thing neighbors think about is like, oh my God, when they think Airbnb they think like, oh my God, there's gonna be just parties next door all the time. So.  [00:16:44] Jason: Right. Destroy the neighborhood.  [00:16:46] Alex: Right.  [00:16:47] Jason: So, yeah, that's pretty interesting. So they get a text message. Do they reply to this and do you see their messages? Or like, what the hell? You know,  [00:16:55] Alex: But what we do, there's like a whole list of things. So Stayfi, what I mentioned earlier also allows you to see how many devices are connected to the wifi. So. [00:17:06] Jason: Right, so if there's like a thousand, you know there's some rager going on. [00:17:09] Alex: Granted, you might have your laptop. Like one guest will have a phone, a laptop, So two, three devices, maybe an iPad too, a tablet. But if like the property sleeps six people and there's 30 people attached to the wifi. [00:17:21] We also have like an outdoor facing camera just at the driveway too. So say if we do get a say, cause we can set it up to where we get the noise notification as well. So from there, we just look at our cameras and say, oh, okay. There's 50 cars in the parking lot, and this place sleeps six people. And then from there, we can either text "Hey, like you're not supposed to have..." or we can reach out to Airbnb directly. We've never really dealt with that issue, but the systems are in place just to make sure. [00:17:48] Jason: And it's largely probably the screening process at the outset that you have in place to prevent that. Right. So you mentioned NoiseAware you couple it sometimes with Party Squasher, is that what you said?  [00:17:59] Alex: I personally haven't used it, but some other guests have recommended it to me. I haven't-- I have almost no experience in that, but I've seen it a lot mentioned on different short term rental podcasts and some of the books that I've read too. [00:18:10] Jason: Okay. Cool.  [00:18:11] Alex: I Don't know what it does on the backend but...  [00:18:13] Jason: Yeah, I don't either. Okay, cool. But it probably prevents parties, which is probably a big concern, like, parties happening, the NoiseAware and the Party Squasher. All right. Cool. Any other tools or systems that you utilize in managing your rentals to make sure things go smoothly. [00:18:32] Alex: Going back to the cleaning crew just a good line of communication is very important. Making sure that you are choosing a cleaning crew or cleaning company that can grow with you. A lot of the time, you don't want to be teaching your cleaning crew how to clean short-term rentals because what I realized initially, and just with the labor shortage that's happening right now is a lot of people, like my cleaning crew stopped taking on new clients, not new properties, just new clients. [00:18:58] It's difficult to try to switch the mindset of approaching a cleaner that takes care of properties. Say for just cleaning people's properties like our property manager or our cleaning crew specifically deals in short-term rentals, a company that is used to turning a property two, three times a week if need be.  [00:19:17] Another thing I'd recommend is-- it might affect your bottom line a little bit, but it might outweigh the amount of time that you put on a specific property. Because of COVID, we stopped taking on one day bookings, which we were taking a lot of, one day bookings prior to COVID and that sort of just came out of my cleaning crew couldn't handle the work from the one day bookings, but what I realized is looking back, we've been doing that for four or five months since we stopped taking one day bookings, a lot of our problems, a lot of our questions, a lot of our bandwidth was taken up by one day guests. And I sorta understand it's like a lot of the times they were just coming in at like, say 8, 9, 10 PM. And they have to check in at 10:00 AM the next day. They don't really get to enjoy the property too much. You get those late night texts a lot too, from the one day guests compared to a guest staying 3, 4, 5, sometimes a week with you. [00:20:10] Sometimes those are the quietest guests where you don't hear anything from them. Maybe a couple of questions here and there. But what I saw was a lot of my issues, a lot of my people requesting refunds or whatever was coming from one day guests. So for people who are already in the short-term rental space, I'd play around to see. And what I also realized too, was like, sometimes that one day guest will book in the center of the week on the Wednesday, which blocks someone from booking that entire week. So if someone's in the short term rental space play around with seeing, maybe just do it with one property and see how the property is affected.  [00:20:42] You might get a better tenant in there which is what we saw a better tenant by booking two, three days minimum compared to a one day. And what I also saw with if you're booking on Airbnb or VRBO, is the algorithm sort of adjusts based off that request of only accepting two or three-day bookings. They'll try to play with your schedule to show it to people who are only trying to book three days and sort of, like for most of our properties are fully booked up with no one day gaps in the schedule right now, after we've switched over from not taking one day bookings. [00:21:16] Jason: Yeah, that's interesting. I would imagine that would be really effective. Plus if you're able to get two and three day bookings to fill it up for the most part, you probably rather than a bunch of one days, you're probably between a one day and a three day. For example, you probably have similar operational costs. [00:21:34] Alex: That's been huge. And that's sort of just came that we discovered that by accident. Also, one of my mentors had told me, like we were operating for the first year, we were operating at like a hundred percent occupancy and he's like, "your prices aren't high enough. You shouldn't be at a hundred percent occupancy." And that rings true for any type of real estate asset. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent occupancy or hundred percent booked... [00:21:53] Jason: yeah. You haven't hit the limit yet on what you could get. [00:21:55] Alex: Right.  [00:21:56] Jason: If you're at a hundred percent,  [00:21:57] Alex: If it's multi family, self storage, whatever. It's like, if you're at a hundred percent, you got to raise your prices. [00:22:01] Jason: Yeah what's the occupancy rate you go for now instead of aiming for a hundred percent.  [00:22:07] Alex: So we raised our rates by 30%, if we can stick to the 85%, which is, I mean, if you look at like companies that look at like what to price your property as like rdna.co is probably another good a good tool for the audience that sort of helps you price out what the short-term rental will rent for rdna.co they look at if a property is anything over 75% that's looked at, like you're in a higher percentile compared to anything below that. [00:22:35] This is getting on the development side when we develop our properties, we underwrite them as long-term rentals. Just in case, if the zoning ever changed in the city, that it's an extra fail safe, it's an exit. That's worst case scenarios. If we have to book it out, has a long-term rental. It can cover the debt service and the expenses. If we need it.  [00:22:54] Jason: Smart. Yeah. I know when COVID hit, the short-term rental game got pretty damaged in the short term, right? And there was a lot of people like trying to shift and shuffle and get their properties into the long-term space.  [00:23:06] Alex: What I saw too is I had talked to someone. I realized that this was different. We use the term vacation rental and short-term rental pretty interchangeably, but sometimes people look at that as differently. If you're looking at the definitions of what I'm about to explain right now, vacation rentals is what I'm in right now. Sometimes short-term rentals can be looked at like 30 day plus stays, but not over six months. During COVID a lot of people were renting out to traveling nurses and they're still doing that is they're renting out to traveling nurses. Say you're not in a market where you have all these properties. You might be close to a very large hospital. [00:23:40] If you're close to a large hospital, you can go. There are short-term rental sites that are specifically geared towards nurses. And that's a lot of hosts sort of pivoted towards that during, when they weren't allowed to do short-term rentals. But the 30 day plus stay is a gray area. Almost all cities and counties cannot regulate short-term rentals for 30 days plus which is interesting. A lot of people are making good money just on that route.  [00:24:06] Jason: Yeah. I've talked to some property managers. One property manager mentioned that they do a lot of that extended stay it's in the short term sort of space, but they get a lot of people from overseas that are coming over that need a place to stay in the interim or they're coming for some sort of work thing, you know, they might be maybe from India coming to work for a tech firm or some of these things, and they need an extended place to stay for a few months while they're doing some sort of training, you know, things like that. And so, yeah, that can be a very profitable business. They're getting a lot more money than the standard rate on a property.  [00:24:43] Alex: And you had mentioned COVID. It'll be interesting to-- I've seen different projections on like once international travel really starts to pick up again. Prices or occupancy might drop, but it's going to be interesting to see, every market's going to be different, how that plays out because a lot of people did start using. They picked up Airbnb and VRBO during COVID where it's like, instead of staying in a hotel, they decided to book through Airbnb and VRBO for the first time. So it'd be interesting to see if those people, if the occupancy and the rates sort of stay the same once, international travel picks back up. [00:25:16] Jason: Yeah, that will be interesting. Well, cool. This has been really insightful and I'm sure those that are kind of dabbling or just getting into the short-term rental game will have picked up some cool ideas and some cool tips. Anything else that you think they might be interested in or that we could point out to property managers? [00:25:34] Alex: Yeah. I talk a lot about this stuff on my YouTube channel too. Alex Builds it's a little logo of a blue tree house. If they want to sort of dive deeper into the management side of it and the tool side they can check that out. And then also my website, Sargoninvestments.com they can, if they can't find that YouTube channel, they could find it through there too. [00:25:51] Jason: Awesome. Cool, Alex, I appreciate you coming on the show and thanks for sharing so many of your knowledge and insights, and I wish you continued success in your short-term game.  [00:26:03] Alex: Perfect. Thanks, Jason. [00:26:04] Jason: You bet. All right. Cool. Check him out on YouTube. He's got a cool little YouTube channel you know, going over investments short-term rentals. He talks about some cool ideas. Lending loans like how to play the game of short-term rentals. So check him out on YouTube. And for those that are interested in growing their property management business, be sure to check us out at doorgrow.com we're here to support you and your growth. We're especially really good at helping you not just add a bunch of doors without spending a bunch of money on marketing. [00:26:34] And we are helping. We have short-term rental clients, you know, in our program. Long-term rental clients are our most common target audience that we're helping build out their portfolio. But we also are helping on the operational side to be able to streamline the business and to become the entrepreneur that can run and have a team that makes your life easier so that you have more freedom, more fulfillment, more contribution, which means you're making a difference and doing things you really feel good about, and more support. And so if you feel like you're kind of scarce on those things, I call those the four reasons and you're really frustrated and you're banging your head against the wall with your team, then reach out. We can support you and help you in that. [00:27:17] You might be a really good candidate for our DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind which is really awesome. So anyway, check this out. And for those that are listening to this on iTunes or on YouTube, be sure to also join our free Facebook community, which you can get to by going to doorgrowclub.com and until next time to our mutual growth. Bye everyone. [00:27:42] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay per lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!  [00:28:09] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. [00:28:30] Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

This episode of the Live Better Seller Better Podcast features Alex Newmann, Founder of Newmann Consulting and mentor to companies and tech startups. The prospecting playbook involves a series of steps but all begins in the right mindset of prioritizing and understanding your goals.Once you have this down, you can move to the more tactical steps like taking a deep dive in understanding who your customer is and what keeps them up at night. One way to get your messaging right is by recording your calls so you can look back on them and determine what you do right and wrong.And finally, lead with emotion and not the benefits of your product. Make sure to reach out to your customers using a variety of channels and to understand which channels work best and to utilize those extensively. And don't ever forget the power of personalization!SHOW NOTESHIGHLIGHTSUnderstand your goals, deal sizes, and sales cycles to make and exceed quotaTime and energy management: Prioritize tasks and learn to say noUnderstand what drives your ideal customerRecord your conversations with your customersLead with emotion and have a multi-channel approach for the askAB test and do it one at a timeQUOTESAlex: "Help me understand what my personal goals are, let me understand what is it going to take in order to get there. So average deal size, number of deals that it's going to take, not the median of the deals, the average deal size."Alex: "When you understand that formulaic way to hit your goals, then you have specific priorities that are set in order to be able to achieve those things that are inside of your control. When you break them down into a weekly or monthly basis, you can go and say, alright, those priorities need to be accomplished either weekly or monthly."Alex: "It's the emotional thing that are just banging their heads against, that's what you want to understand. You understand your customers and prospecting, literally, all the doors just got swung wide open. It makes your messaging, it makes your plans, it makes your channel, it makes every single thing now attainable because you actually have an understanding of what you're trying to do." Alex: "Understanding the channels in which the buyers of that specific offering need to be, that is part of figuring it out. If the company's been around for a little while, take a look at it and see what are other people doing to be successful. Look at the top sales reps. Look at the historical top performers."You can find out more about Alex in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexnewmann/Website: https://www.alexnewmann.com/

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, delighted to introduce to you, who don't know, Mr. Alex Murphy, CEO and Founder of JobSync. JobSync is a technology partner that can help to speed up the application process and improve the candidate experience, notably with marketplaces and job boards, and its very cool technology, which is trying to connect two worlds, marketplaces and ATSes. I'll let Alex explain it a lot better than me. But we'll talk about job board and about Facebook and how the sourcing world is changing. Alex, welcome to the show. Alex: Max, thanks for having me. Much appreciated. Max: So, did I represent what JobSync does decently or you want to take another stab at it? Alex: No, I think you did. I mean, we are, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to help companies, specifically employers, create more efficient recruiting processes, right. So, it sounds fairly generic, most of us are trying to do that. The way we go about trying to do that is we are connecting the various systems that they use in the recruitment and talent acquisition process. So, as you said, between job boards and applicant tracking systems, this means enabling the candidates to apply while they're on the job site. So, whether that's on Indeed, and Indeed Apply, ZipRecruiter, Zip Apply, or anywhere where they may be, to use the applications natively on those job board platforms or job board marketplaces, and to not have to leave, but for the employer to still get all the questions that they need to have answered in that application, and then delivered directly into the applicant tracking system, just within a few seconds. And then the recruiter can start the recruitment process immediately, as opposed to waiting for some period of time or recognizing and seeing a huge fall off. So, the end of the day, we're helping companies get more out of the recruitment advertising spend than they were previously. Max: And to put a visual on it, I mean, I'm thinking back to the days when I was a jobseeker, I was unemployed, a long time ago, and I would go to job boards like Monster, and I would have applied to 10, 20 jobs a day because, you know, I needed a job. And in that context, I would, of course, be more likely to complete an application if I didn't have to bounce around from website to website. And so, I think job boards have now recognized that and this is what you're describing with the Indeed Apply, Zip Apply, and others. That's the candidate experience improvement in a nutshell, right? Alex: Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's a lot of talk about candidate experience, there's actually an award, right, the Candidate Experience Awards, the candies. And what that's really gets that side of the world kind of gets hyper focused on is what is the experience like after I apply? And unfortunately, for a long period of time, there hasn't been enough focus on the applicant experience. Right? What is the experience before I apply? Or will I even apply? An interesting kind of side note, a recruiting benefit that we have is we talk about in our job ads for when we're recruiting new people that come work with us, we talk about fixing this application experience. And we're speaking to the people that are literally going through this really bad application experience, at which point, they get really excited about being part of the solution to this problem, because pretty much every job seeker has had this experience where they are on a job site, they leave the job site to go to apply to a job. They're viewing the job for a second time because they already viewed it on the job site. They view it on the company's career site. They're then redirected to the applicant tracking system, they probably been presented with two different places where they had to sign up for some newsletter, join a talent community, they finally get to the applicant tracking system. They click Apply for the third time. And now they're presented with a login form. And they're kind of like, what is this? A login form? I haven't created an account. And that's an immediate path for that candidate to leave and go to TikTok and start watching videos, right? Like nobody wants to go through that experience at all. And so, when we communicate to prospective candidates ourselves about fixing that, it resonates pretty highly because everybody is having that same really terrible experience as an applicant. Max: Talent acquisition is always running behind on a smooth experience, but yeah. Of course, in 2022, where everything goes so fast, and you can get everything done and delivered to your home in just a couple of clicks, you would want that application to be just the same, if not better. And well, before we talk about the market, Alex, how did you end up creating JobSync to begin with? It's an insider's trick to activate JobSync in a booming marketplace, kind of working at the frontier of different tech giants. So, you need to be an insider to do what you're doing. So, I gotta ask you how you ended up in that area. Alex: So, I have a co-founder, John Bell, he was the founder and CEO of a company called Boxwood Technology that he sold in 2014. Boxwood, was a job board software platform primarily for associations, they had over a thousand associations and he had started that back in the 90s. And I actually credit John, I think, with the real observation about what happened between I'll say 2002 and 2012, which was the experience for applying to jobs changed fundamentally. In 2002, virtually all applications online took place on job boards, and the application was delivered by email to a recruiter, and in the early 2000s, and then kind of really taking hold by about 2006 and 2007 in the US market, in particular, with respect to the EEOC questions, companies started to require the application process to take place on their ATS. And what John observed was this massive decline in conversion rates, and what used to be 40% conversion rates or better, meaning, if 100 people viewed my job posting 40 People would apply, had tanked to sub 10%. And in a lot of cases, with really arduous applicant tracking systems, that conversion rate might be 1%. So, one out of 100 people would apply. And so, he observed that. In parallel, I had been job.com as a co-founder there in the early 2000s, was at Beyond for eight years, as part of the traffic and business development teams, was observing the same thing happening as from the operator side, that the product that we're selling is deteriorating, right, like we are not able to generate the applicants that we once were. So, fast forward, and I left Beyond John started a company, and we brought a bunch of different ideas together in 2019 around creating this integration platform that was focused on connecting the job boards and applicant tracking systems to make it so that we could emulate the application on the job board that was taking place on the ATS, so as to improve conversion rates, and on Indeed, their data shows that you get a 4X increase, meaning 400% improvement in applications. That's like a 400% improvement in your recruitment when you return on ad spend. That has massive implications in terms of not just your ROI, which is great, but really, at the end of the day, the thing that you're really getting more of is you're getting access to candidates that would otherwise drop out, which typically are going to be the most sought-after candidates. And so not only…Max: Candidates like me, 20 years ago, they need a job. So, they're going to apply to a number of positions, right? I mean, those are not bad candidates, they're hungry candidates. Alex: They are in what I would say though, is that, you know, there's a lot of things that are odd in the world, right, and you could say that they're bad, right. So, like, people that have been out of work and kind of, you know, you can call it like a gap shaming or what have you. What I will say is this, though, is that if you are looking for somebody in a position that requires some level of experience and expertise, then those candidates, those people are the ones that are generally the most difficult to get at, most difficult to find, and the most difficult to actually get to follow through, right? Like, they're not as motivated to go apply right now. Right? Like, the thing that pushes them over the edge is they had a bad interaction with their boss. I like to say, like, the moment when somebody is most likely to apply is when they walk out the door of their boss, and the boss just gave them a lot of grief, right? [overlap]Max: …around, indeed, and they'd be like, screw this place. And they'll go look for a couple of options. But they don't feel like spending 20 minutes going through application forms, creating a username, profile, password, all that. Alex: That's exactly right. I call it the subway application, you need to be able to complete the application in the time that it takes for the train to come into the station, Wi-Fi turns on, I get a job, I see it, click Apply, and before the train leaves the station, I need to be able to finish it. Right? So, that means that…Max: I thought we're talking about Subway sandwiches, but that takes about the same amount of time, I guess.Alex: Yeah, no doubt. I imagine they probably does, so.Max: Okay. I love that native applied concept, and I've been promoting it to my customers for years on social media saying, if, in your case, we're talking about a disgruntled employee who is spending a little bit of time on Indeed, exploring what could be. That's not a very captive audience. But even less captive audience would be somebody who's just browsing TikTok or browsing Facebook, they see an ad, they click on it. I mean, those guys, they certainly don't have, you know, they don't have the mindset, they're not in the right frame of mind to start applying for a job for 25 minutes, because they were just kind of like having fun, killing time. So, it makes sense to keep the experience as native as possible for those even more. And so, as a historian of the space, Alex, you're saying that the space kind of moved in the late 90s, right, and 2008 or so when everybody moved everything to the ATS and completion rates dropped considerably, are you saying that we're shifting back now, that the share of applications that are completed without the ATS is increasing? Alex: It is. So, you know, I think that what's happening is you're seeing, like, course corrections, so to speak, right? And there's a little bit of maybe call it something like the Goldilocks zone, right? So, we write about this where, you know, there's this concept of a quick apply, which might be like the name, email and CV of a person. And when a recruiter calls that person, if they can even call them, because often it doesn't have a phone number. So, they email them and they say, Hey, would you like to set up an interview? They get nothing, right? Or maybe they get an interview scheduled, but the person doesn't show up, right? So why is ghosting up? Why? I don't understand why did ghosting go up? Well, the person doesn't even know what they apply to. Because they had to just check a box, they may have checked 20 boxes and hit submit. Right? So, is there enough interest? I like to think back. Like, let's not just go back to 2002, let's go back to 1986. The level of effort to apply to a job: you open the newspaper, you had to find the fax number, you had to send that, you had to write out your cover letter, and you had to make that resume perfect and you had to print it and then you had to get to a fax machine, as most people didn't have fax machines. You had to sneak into the office and get it through the fax machine before somebody else saw you putting a fax through to somebody else, right? Like the level of effort was really, really high. And that meant that when you got a phone call, you reply. And today you can send out 4000 applications with a click of a button, remarkably different. On the other end of the spectrum in 2008, the recruiter said, Okay, now we have the power. And what that meant to them was I'm just going to ask you every question that I would ever need to ask and force you to spend 35 minutes going through this application. And people have just gotten fed up with it, right? They're not willing to go through it. The answer is that there's something proper in between. Five questions, seven questions, on a drop-down, simple screening questions actually can decipher, is this something that you should be interested in? We want to talk to people to come work for us that are interested in being part of a startup, being part of building a company, which means that there isn't a lot of structure yet defined, because we are defining it as we go along, right, that proverbial build the airplane in flight. So, if somebody wants lots of structure, and we can discern that in a screening question, then we can we can help save everybody time and pain and anguish, right? And every company in every job has a set of screening questions that should be asked to ascertain is this a good position for you or not? And that type of experience, I think, will go a long, long way to helping everybody get at what it is ultimately that they want, which is to have, you know, really worthwhile conversations for both candidate and recruiter. Max: It's crazy sometimes that it feels like the different partners in the space are fighting for eyeballs and for the time of the candidates, you know, and like job boards, or protecting their candidates from spending time in other platforms, and vice versa, when it's to no one's advantage to hold the candidate up. We just kind of want to get through those applications as fast as possible and give people quick answers. And I think what you're doing is going to help a lot of time save, a lot of savings for the candidates when they needed most, which is when they're looking for a job. We spoke a little bit before recording about the recent announcement of Facebook jobs and your read on this situation. For our listeners who don't know, Facebook Jobs has invested for the last few years in a marketplace where millions of people have logged in and applied for jobs all over the world. And I know they generated a lot of traffic for us in different parts of the world, from Brazil to the Philippines and to the US. But that marketplaces are getting shut down, unfortunately, for all that free traffic that it was generating. But perhaps there's a silver lining with that announcement. Alex, you were saying that this initiatives maybe solidified Facebook as a great place to source? Alex: Yeah, well, I mean, I think so. First and foremost, I'll just say for the record, I think it's unfortunate that they've made the decision that they made. They introduced the Facebook jobs marketplace as a response to what their users were doing, which was they were searching for jobs in the search bar within Facebook. And they were having a really bad experience. And so, the idea that the jobs marketplace would go away means, you know, without seeing what it's going to look like on the other side, I would imagine that it's going to go back to being a bad experience. So, that's too bad. The silver lining sort to speak, as you put it, in my opinion, is there now are hundreds of thousands of companies out there that recognize that Facebook has people that go look for work, and that should be a no brainer to most people, right? Like recruitment advertising should go wherever the people are, right? We are trying to reach people where people are. And people are on Facebook, they're on Tik Tok, they're on Snapchat, they're on Reddit, they're on YouTube, just like they're on job boards as well. But they're on these social platforms at a much greater investment of time, if you will, than they are on the others. The question is, can you do something to pull them in to engage with your recruitment ad, right, and this is where you were talking earlier about having that kind of more native experience. The person has to leave Facebook, right, and a tremendous amount of the activity on Facebook is happening on the mobile app, right? If they're supposed to leave Facebook in order to engage with your brand and to become, I'll say, a lead or an applicant, then the likelihood that they do so is really, really low. And so perhaps there are companies that recognize, okay, I should take my brand and go to where the candidate is, and then engage with them where they are, rather than trying to force them to come back to me. And if they do that, then there's a lot winning strategies. And you guys are one of the leaders, if not the leader, in recruitment at reaching people through Facebook ads, and really activating that audience and getting them to turn into applicants and employees, right, because at the end of the day, 9 out of 10, people are active on Facebook in some way, shape or form, Simply as a matter of reaching them with the right message at the right time in the right place, which is often that timing thing for…Max: I love about the Facebook job was the fact that the timing was there, right, because somebody will not go into the marketplace, if they're not looking for a job. And advertisers on Facebook don't have the option of targeting specifically job seekers, like, there's no tag for that. And I was, you know, I think advertisers would really benefit from getting that data points. But it's a sensitive data that I suppose Facebook couldn't extract or couldn't share with its advertisers. But it's still, you know, the most rich advertising platform of all in terms of targeting. I mean, you can target any job title in any location, and all kinds of other psychographics that can correlate well with your talent pool. But, when people hire there, they say, Well, I'm only hiring one or 2% of, you know, the clicks, the leads that I generate. So, it's really a bad quality, I can't, I can't manage, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it, right? If it's 1%, but the cost is, you know, is 1% of what a cost for a lead is in Indeed, then that's fine, as long as you've automated the front of the funnel. I think the cost per lead needs to be broken down into what a lead means. And I suppose what you do is you're going to take those job board leads, and then they maybe have two or three different stages of how qualified they are. Right? Alex: Yeah, so I think, you know, just for one other thing that's really important in there is, you're reaching people that you otherwise wouldn't reach. Right? I mean, if you're, you know, think about like somebody like a nurse, right? How many nurses are there on Indeed, right now, eight, like, worldwide, like, it's not, there aren't a lot, nurses don't really need to work very hard to go get a new job. Most of them are leaving their jobs. And you know, that's like its own tragedy all on its own at the moment. But I can tell you that a lot of them are on Facebook, looking at what people say, thinking a lot of different things about what that conversation looks like. And if you have an ad talking about, you know, we pay you full time, but you work 30 hours, I'm making something up. Right? We have mental health facilities, we limit you to six-hour shifts, we have, you know, half an hour breaks every two hours or whatever, like, I'm just totally making stuff up. Max: We have a cocktail room in the back. Alex: Exactly, right, exactly. We do shots at the start of the shift. You know, whatever your benefits are. Those things are speaking to that person where they are when they're just trying to kind of unwind. And that's a way to pull them in, invite them in, to engage in a dialogue. And if you try to get them to go answer 42 questions on your, your 25-minute application, that's going to fail, right. But if you say, you know, we'd love to just chat for 10 minutes, when you've got time, if you're interested in looking for a new opportunity, that's the kind of thing that pulls that, you know, pulls up on that thread, if you will, and gets them to come engage. And all of a sudden, they start to engage, now you're in a dialogue, that's a discussion, that's how you convert. And that's the kind of thing I think that the presence of Facebook jobs for the last five years, for better or worse, and it leaving, at least hopefully, some people saw that Facebook brings value. I always love this story, our first customer, their first hire was a data scientist off of Facebook. Right? It's like, you'll say who's on Facebook. I'm like everybody, every person type, every personality type, every job type everywhere in the world, there is representation on Facebook. It doesn't mean every person's on Facebook, but every type of person, every type of role can be filled with the right ad presented the right person right time on there. And that's true across all social platforms. Max: Tw billion monthly active users, two billion plus. So, if you can't find your candidate there, then might as well forget about it. Alex: Right? Well, in all likelihood, the candidate probably doesn't exist, right? Like you have to go train and hire right? And so always love those stories, right, where it's like looking for somebody that has more experience than the technology has been around, right? We had a joke about iOS developer job in 2012, that the minimum requirements were 10 years' experience of iOS development. iOS have been around for five and a half years. So, it's like, that's probably not a realistic expectation. Max: Open your talent pools to people with less experience and more desire. And you'll see small miracles happen. Alex: That's right.Max: I'd like to ask Alex to drive some of the listeners to check out JobSync. What are the quantifiable problems that you are solving for them? I believe it's the conversion rate from job board to application? That'd be one of the, if you have a low conversion rates, and single digit, like you were saying, that that would be one area where they should reach out to you. Are there other, yeah, does that describe it well and how do they get ahold of you? Alex: Yeah, so first off, if you go to jobsync.io, you know, come and see us, I'm active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is amurphy59. I think, you know, at the end of the day, the thing that we're solving for is when your recruiting team is doing a lot of manual effort, or conducting a lot of manual effort in order to run your recruitment programs. And that's not just limited by the way to job boards and ATSes, right, it could be with any of the other systems up and down inside the stack. So, we connect to your text messaging platform or your career events platform or your assessment platform, and automate the messaging in between, so that your recruit recruitment teams are not having to manually do that work. I'd say that the number one metric that we kind of think about the most is really around reducing time to hire. So, you know, the consistent metric across all of our customers, when they start with us, they're really struggling to get applicants into their job postings at enough scale to take that job posting to an extended offer and into an actual start. And by putting our program in place, you get a lot more efficiency across the spectrum, you get more efficiency out of your ads, and your recruitment team, you get exposure to better candidates. And those three things combined means that you're going to reach you know, a slate of candidates or your kind of final five that you might want to take to final interview and offer much more quickly than you would otherwise. Max: I think that that will connect with a lot of people. Non-job-related question, but one that I asked everyone on the show is a personal hiring mistake that you have made, so that our listeners can draw from that experience and avoid making the same mistake. Can you think back to somebody you hired and it didn't work out and you messed up somehow and you're able to kind of, you know, mea culpa on your mistakes, so that we don't commit the same one again? Your eyes are glazing over, you're seeing ghosts. Alex: I am actually, it's like a roomful of them, right. I mean, we all make a gazillion mistakes over time. I would have to say that my number one mistake that I've made in the past, and I can say that we actually had the opposite experience recently, was set up a process to screen people out because there are minimum thresholds, right, saying this is our standard and that needs to be our standard and I want to believe in what the person on the other side of the conversation is saying to me and they didn't pass a check in the assessment process, and I let the person pass, and then that came back to bite me pretty hard. So, I would say, adhering to a process that you predefined is really the way I counter that. And I would say the mistake was not sticking to the process that I had predefined.Max: You were bending the rules that you were setting yourself, for yourself?Alex: That's exactly right. Yeah. So, we just recently went through this where we set what the standard was, and the person came through and had all sorts of good reasons why things didn't work out, and why he was underneath of the bar. And we said, look, this is just the way it's going to be, it's a really high profile, really important position, and we stuck to our guns. And so, I feel really good about it having made that mistake in the past. Max: I sense that there's something about job hopping that may upset you was that related? You're looking for people, job hoppers. Alex: I'm perfectly fine with job hopping. I mean, I think that, you know, a lot of the things that are memes today around, you know, call it Twitter conversations. You know, if a person left three jobs in the last nine months, you know, I want to understand what is it that's making you make a bad decision about whether or not you should go work someplace, we should spend an extra couple of weeks making sure that you get to know everything about us, right, set your expectations on what life's like here before you come. Because the last thing in the world that I want you to do is to come and leave. But, you know, I think it's really important that we all look at that the people that join our teams, they're here, like, a) to make a paycheck, b) they want to make an impact and make a difference. But the impact-difference piece is about growing themselves in their career to set themselves up for their next gig. I'm not ignorant to that, that's been my background, my life, right, that should be everybody's life. I want them to get the best of what they're gonna do next, and if they've been hopping jobs, something happened there, I wanna understand it. But it certainly isn't a glaring red flag, in fact, it means that they're gonna stand up for themselves and that they're gonna leave. I'd rather have that person than somebody who's gonna stick around and kind of create chaos in the background for 8 years. Max: It's more of a red flag if somebody stayed in the same job for 10 years without changing them.Alex: Yeah, if somebody's been in the same exact role for 8 years, are you really ambitious? For our company, you probably' wouldn't be a good fit because our world is gonna change 16 times in the next four years. So, it's about finding that right fit. At the end of the day, that's tough, and we all make mistakes in the process. I like to look at it as just one big gigantic conversation, certainly in our stage.Max: Great. Well, amurphy59 is the LinkedIn handle, if you wanna continue that gigantic conversation with Alex. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about the industry. Thanks, Alex. Alex: Thanks, Max, appreciate it. Max: That was Alex Murphy ofJobsync and some interesting perspective on how the pendulum is swinging from marketplace and job boards to the ATS's is where should the candidates spend the most time and how do we adapt to the changing candidate behavior? And the changing ecosystem that they live in.Hope you got something from this interview I certainly did. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe. 

What if you could perform beyond the limitations of your own voice? Anne is joined by special guest Alex Serdiuk for a bonus Voice and Ai episode. They discuss Respeecher's speech-to-speech technology, the limitations of your natural voice, and how a synthesized voice is similar to a printing press. The future isn't just on its way - the future is here - and creative possibilities are endless when human voices and technology work together... Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast for another episode of the AI and Voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring you special guest Alex Serdiuk. Alex is the founder and CEO of Respeecher, an AI speech-to-speech based company that creates voice cloning for content creators. Respeecher's technology was the first synthetic speech adopted by big Hollywood productions starting around 2019. And their primary focus is in improving the voice cloning technology in many directions, including the tech democratization to let sound professionals and creators have access to it. And as a voice talent, we love that. So Alex, thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure having you. Alex: Hey Anne, everyone. It's so great to be here. Thank you for having me. Anne: Yes. So I have so many questions. You're a relatively young company founded in 2018, correct? Alex: Yes. That's correct, yes. Anne: Yeah. So, but you seem to have come a really long way in a very short amount of time. So if you don't mind, tell us a little bit about your company and how you got started. Alex: Yeah, actually for us, it felt like a very long amount of time, like eternity. But yeah, we started a bit earlier than 2018 with the idea we were playing around for several years. So we actually participated in one hackathon in Kiev, in Ukraine, and everyone were picking this ideas of applying deep learning AI, quite sophisticated machine learning techniques to do something with visuals, to do something with pictures. And we thought that would be cool to try doing something with speech, and that's harder task because we are much picky about the stuff we hear, unlike the stuff we see. And we ended up winning that hackathon with a very simple prototype of voice conversion technology that allowed one voice sound like another voice. Then we started to play around with the technology, started to speak to some folks we thought who could be our first clients, if you start this company. And they told us that it's all about quality. So if you talk about high quality voice cloning, it should be really high. So it should be indistinguishable for listener, whether it's synthesized or not. And given that we are quite picky about the sounds that we spot all the tiny little artifacts in sound the task has been challenging. So we launched the company in 2018 and took us about a year to get to the level where it could actually be of interest to some big sound engineers in Hollywood. And since then we've been improving the technology in several directions, usability, quality of the sound, speed, all that stuff. We try to make better on constant basis. Anne: Got it, got it. So, all right. What might seem like a simple question, because I think a lot of us in the voice industry, we've heard about text-to-speech. And as a matter of fact, we've been doing it for a very long time, you know, TTS projects. But now speech-to-speech is different. And so tell us exactly what is the difference between text-to-speech and speech-to-speech. Alex: Yeah. The differences in input, right? So when you use text-to-speech, you type words, and there is some AI that tries to make those words sound like they were spoken by human. The thing is there are two, in my opinion, holistic problems with text-to-speech. And that's one of the reasons why we do speech-to-speech. The first holistic problem would it text-to-speech be so limited to language models, to vocabularies. So if you want to try something different from what is in the vocabulary, it would fail. So if you try to pronounce some unusual name or street address, text-to-speech doesn't know where to take it from. That's one problem. The second one would be emotional control. And this one is huge. So text-to-speech can offer you few emotions, right? It can sound excited or sad, but that's it. And we humans are best in terms of producing emotions as we use our vocal apparatus. And we are the best in terms of being guided, how to produce emotions. So if you try to imagine very sophisticated text-to-speech that would allow you to have all these triggers our vocal apparatus has from the day we were born, that would be a very comprehensive tool. That would be extremely hard to use. It would be just simpler to say it in the exact way you want to say it. And that's where it's speech-to-speech comes in. So the idea of speech-to-speech is to enable a human speaking. The voice of another human is speaking in another timbre and all the emotions, all the inflections, all this stuff is being taken from source speaker. That means that you act, but you remove this boundary of being attached to the vocal apparatus, you were born with, the voice you have at the particular moment of your life. You can sound very different and that would be natural because emotions, inflections, acting would be yours. The timbre would be different. Anne: So then you require an actor to be a model for whatever voice that gets applied to? Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. We heavily rely on the actors. Anne: So then I would think that it's a different process because what I'm familiar with in terms of synthetic voices is that we record a whole bunch of prompts and then there becomes this voice that's created from that. And your technology basically has a source voice, is that correct, that is the actor? And then you can apply any different voice to that voice model? And so for every script, you would have an actor speaking those words, and then you would be able to apply any voice to that? Alex: Yeah, that's right. So basically our model compares voices. So it compares your voice to another voice you want to sound like, and it understands the difference between your timbre and the timbre you want to sound alike. And then after model learned those differences, you can actually feed their recordings in your voice. And those recordings would be converted into the voice of your desire. Anne: So then let's talk about the target voice, first of all. Is that something that let's say when you have different target voices, if I want it to be a target voice, I would say, how do I create that target voice? Is that similar to how most people create their synthetic voices? Meaning I record a series of prompts, and it becomes part of the data model, and then a voice is created, and then that is how you create your target voices? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. It's similar to text-to-speech. So basically you would need to record your voice in very good condition for some time, though speech-to-speech requirements are all over usually than text-to-speech. You don't need to go in studio and spend like hours. Say on a particular script, we can take existing recordings of your voice. And that would be enough. We just need observations of your voice saying different things in different emotions so model would learn it and then it's good to go. Anne: Interesting. So then it's basically your model, which is the actor, would be any good either audio example that you have of acting, but it doesn't have to be the exact script? Alex: Correct. Anne: Is that correct? Okay. Alex: Yeah. That they can read a lullaby for their baby or whatever. And in many of our projects, in many of our film projects, we had to deal with old recordings because we used to do a lot of de-aging or resurrecting projects. And that's cool about speech-to-speech that we can take existing recordings in quite a small amount. So currently we require like 40 minutes, but in plenty of projects, we had to deal with much less data. Anne: Wow. So then, so this is an additional layer that you do. So not only do you create the target voices in a traditional like text-to-speech kind of way where you're creating the synthetic voice, but you're also creating that speech-to-speech model, which is the acting. And that, again, like you're saying, doesn't necessarily have to be the same script that you want to be repeated. Let's say there's a new movie out, and you want to have a particular target voice on it. Would the actor model have to go in and say all the lines first so that the speech-to-speech target could kind of, I guess, mimic it or reiterate it? Alex: Yeah. So the -- the way how our system works, we would on the first stage, on the training stage, we would need just examples of a target voice, someone we impersonate, and source voice, a voice actor who would be doing impersonation. And we don't care much about what is the content, what are the spoken words? So it could consist of the content that needs to be converted further for the movie, but it could be something different. But then once the model is trained, you can say exact lines in the exact performance that are needed for the movie. And that would be converted into a target voice within minutes. Anne: Got it. That's pretty impressive. What are the applications that you see for your speech-to-speech software? Alex: Yeah, we've been focused on very high quality content because what's special about our technology, it can produce very high quality results, not just because of sound quality itself, quality of the sound files, but also because of the control you would have over emotional content. So you can make it sound exactly as you want it to sound. We've been applying our technology for films, animation, TV series, where we helped content creators get voices they cannot get in any other way. Like we did some work for Mandalorian season two, where we helped with making the voice, synthesizing the voice of young Mark Hamill, young Luke Skywalker -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- who appeared in the very last scene. And you cannot get this voice anymore. You have recordings of 40 years old, but the voice of Mark Hamill is drastically different -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- from what he had 40 years ago. Anne: 40 years ago. Alex: That would be one application. We did some resurrection projects. One of them audience might have heard of would be Super Bowl opening where Vince Lombardi came and said some encouraging things about all the challenges our society needs to go through in this quite, quite hard time. Anne: I remember that. Alex: Yeah, that was a powerful piece we did together with NFL Digital Domain, 72 and Sunny. And the idea was to resurrect the voice of this person. We also did one cool project in resurrection where we made quite famous announcer -- not just announcer, but basketball commentator in Puerto Rico, who died 20 years ago, to voiceover the whole game in August, when -- Anne: Wow. Alex: -- Puerto Rico made it to Olympics. Anne: Wow. Alex: And that was huge for us because we were focused on short form content for quite a while. Our technology has been heavy and we required a lot of take. And that might have been one of the first projects when we had like our own health (?) of voiceover in one take that had to be converted overnight for putting on TV the next day. And it worked out. So it sounded good. And recordings for target voice for Manolo were extremely bad. So it was quite, quite complicated, but it turned out to be working, and Telemundo put it on stream. Anne: Wow. So then that's very impressive. Now it's also very scary, not just for me as a voice actor, but I'm thinking for the consumer, right, who's listening to the voice. So what sort of steps are taken to, I guess, notify the listener that maybe, especially if you're resurrecting voices. I would imagine that there's gotta be some sort of a protocol where you're allowing people or letting people know that this voice is resurrected or like, what are your thoughts on that? Alex: Yeah. I mean, we basically build some guiding principles, guiding ethics principles from the very beginning when we started. And the first thing we always ask our prospective clients, when they want to do a project, whether they have permission or going to obtain one from owner of the voice they're going to clone. And in case if that person would be deceased, we would require permission from their relatives or estate or if that's a president, from president library, from company or individual that owns the right. And that would be the very first step. Then we actually need to be sure that the project is not controversial in general, because it might be not wrong to do something with permission. But if it's very attached to politics or were a controversial content, even with permission, we can just say no, because there is a lot of fear to this technology -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- in general and -- Anne: And deep fakes, I'm thinking. Right? Alex: And deep fakes. Yeah. And the thing is, I mean, the technology itself is neither good or bad. It's just an instrument like a Photoshop, like hammer, like printing press. The thing is that we used to be scared of something new. And our goal is to showcase exciting, cool projects, creative opportunities, opportunities for voice actors using this technology without some bad projects to be in the news, because bad news travels so far, right? Everyone's heard about this end Tony Bourdain project that is -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- very controversial. Right? Anne: Yes. Alex: But I guess much less people heard about the amazing work we did for Mandalorian -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- even though Mandalorian is the biggest TV series of 2020. Anne: That's very true. That's very true. So then maybe you can answer this question. As a voice actor, what are the opportunities for me, as a voice actor -- number one, I like that you have an ethics statement on your website, and that you say that you are not allowing any deceptive uses of the technology. But number one, how can voice actors use this to let's say enhance our opportunities? And also how are you protecting the voice actor from any type of misuse or deepfakes or ethics? Alex: Yeah, I mean, in terms of protection, we do have quite strict protocols that are required from us when we've work with biggest Hollywood studios, right? So have data security and stuff in place. In terms of opportunities, look, let's think about this technology from the point of view that the technology itself removes limitation you have. You -- you've been attached to your voice, and you're attached to your voice you have in particular moment of your life. So you can act, you can, you can work only with the particular vocal timbre you have been born with, right? The technology allows you to sound very different. So you can sound like 70 years old woman, or like 12 years old kid. And it would sound like 12 years old kid or 70 years old woman in terms of naturalness. The thing is you would, you would act those voices. And that means that, in my opinion, in future, the distribution of load between voice actors could be significantly improved in future. Because when voice actor is being hired, they're hired for two things, their ability to act and their vocal timbre, the unique timbre they have. And now we can remove the timbre part from equation, and voice actors would be hired because their ability to perform. And that's amazing because some voice actors who meet very high demand for their particular vocal timbre can give this timbre, can license this timbre to other voice actors who can use it with their approval. But also the voice actors who cannot get jobs just because their vocal timbre does not match this particular character can actually get these jobs because they can sound like, like a different person. Anne: So then they would buy a license for that target person? Is that correct? How does that work? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. I mean, our company has been focused on like one-off projects for quite a while because the technology has been heavy, but this year we launched what we call a voice marketplace, and that would be a self-serve product. There -- it's been a roller coaster for us to make this heavy technology we used to operate manually the work in self-serve mode. But voice marketplace is out and it works. And it's really cool piece of technology where we try to democratize access to such a fine tool, to smaller creators and to voice actors. And the idea of the voice marketplace that as user of the voice marketplace, you can speak in 40, more than 40 different vocal timbres we created there for you. And we actually hired people. We paid them money. We got their release and consent to use their voice in the voice marketplace. And those voices we have in the voice marketplace so far belong to average people because the most important part is this -- Anne: The timbre. Alex: -- timbre. Yeah. But acting could be done by user -- Anne: Interesting. Alex: -- and that means that you can sound exactly like any of those voices we have in the system and just utilize opportunities in terms of acting and performance, instead of being limited to the vocal timbre you own. So that's one way how -- Anne: Got it. Alex: -- voice actors can benefit from this technology right now. Anne: So then I can have an account in your marketplace, and then I can purchase additional timbres. Is that correct? Alex: Yeah, that's correct. And you can get access to all the voices we have on the voice marketplace, try it out, but that's like a starting point. Anne: Interesting. Alex: We started with some like average voices, but in future, we want to add other voices, professional voices, because I mean, when system has not seen some particular emotions like singing, or crying, or whispering, it performs suboptimal, right? And people who are not professionally trained to be voice actors cannot produce many emotions. And that means for getting very high quality and professional voices in the output, you would want to see in target voices some professional voices. Anne: Yes. Alex: We want to invite voice actors in future as well as we want to get licensing deals with some famous voices and even voices from the past. Anne: Sure. Alex: But the thing is this kind of improvement to the voice marketplace as a product requires us to build two more layers. The first one would be approval layer. So as target voice, when you supply your voice to the system, you should feel secure that your voice is not used for something that you feel is inappropriate. Anne: Sure. Alex: So you need to be able to approve the content that is being created -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- with your voice or approve the user, the company, or the individual who want to use your voice. That's first thing. The second layer would be building compensation model -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- because there should be economics there's built on usage. Anne: Sure. Alex: It shouldn't be just one time licensing deal. Anne: Right. Alex: And those layers, they require some time to be built as well as some attention. And they should work very properly because it should be trusted. Anne: Yes. And I do believe that for a voice talent, if they were a target voice or the source voice, I think they would want to number one, it should be a permission-based model. Or they would want that. Also they would want fair compensation. And I, I agree with you saying that that compensation would be on a per job basis because there is, you know, the way that we determine usage now, if we're doing a McDonald's commercial, right, we have a certain time that we can use that. And we aren't able to use our voice for a competitor. So I think on a per job usage basis is wise, and that is going to be, from what I understand -- I mean, especially for you, because you're doing the AI development, right, and the products. And so now also to have a marketplace, that's a whole other ball game. So kudos to you for wanting to build that marketplace and to do it in a fair and ethical way. So when any of us go onto your website or marketplace, and we are, let's say recording on it or inputting our voice or sending you files, what is your policy in terms of who owns that voice? Alex: Yeah. Voice is owned by the person who, whose voice it is. Right? And there is quite clear legislation around that. So that's your IP and you own it. And without your permission, your voice cannot be used for something you have not authorized. So your recordings as a source speaker belong only to you. Recordings of converted speech, you get them. So you own the recordings of converted speech, if you're, if you use our voice marketplace on paid basis and that's quite clear and fair. Anne: Great. Okay. So how, going back to the ethics where you say that we don't allow any misuse of our technology, how do you actually prevent anybody from misusing your technology? Alex: Yeah. I mean, on example of the voice marketplace, you can not introduce any target voice, right? You cannot just put their voice of Donald Trump and try to say something in his voice because system does not allow it. Anne: Okay. Alex: And we do not have any public API or even non public API that would allow users or our partners to create target voices themselves. In those cases, when you need a particular voice to be cloned, always need to go through us. And we would require permission. And we actually require written permission, or in cases when we've worked with big and legit studios, we can put it on their shoulders. So they would need to get the permission themselves. The second part of protecting our technology from misuse is actually bringing awareness about existence of this technology. And we did plenty of projects that were focused more -- mostly on bringing awareness like Nixon project we did in 2019 with MIT. And the whole idea of the project was to make Richard Nixon say the speech that was written in case if moon landing (?) goes wrong, actually showcase what modern technologies can do to change our understanding of history. And this educational part is extremely important because we all understand that this type of very fine technology could -- would fall in wrong hands in the future -- Anne: Absolutely. Alex: -- and that's in quite foreseeable future. And the thing is we can protect ourselves only being aware that voice can be manipulated. Anne: Yes. Alex: Like if we're aware that something that is typed in the newspaper could not be true. Though. Our grandparents or grand-grandparents used to believe in everything that was typed. So that's, that's about how we treat the information we receive. And that's about awareness. Another thing we work on is to create a watermark, and the idea of watermark -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- the watermark to be able to tell Respeecher generated content from any other content. That's been quite complex and hard task because with our technology, you can generate a very small file and to put there a legit watermark, you will need to have this balance of watermark being not hearable -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- but being not easily removable. Anne: Right. Alex: And keeping this balance in very short chunks is quite hard task, but I hope in next year, we would release the watermark. Another thing we are doing, we are actually working in several communities that are designed with the idea of building detection of synthetic speech algorithms that would detect synthetic speech or synthetic images. And we are providing our samples, we are providing our recordings that sound very indistinguishable in order to improve those algorithms. And the idea is those algorithms should be created and adopted as soon as possible, and big platforms -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- that distribute content like YouTube or Facebook should have this stuff embedded there. So it would just notify people that this recording or this video might have been manipulated. And that's quite important thing to do. Anne: I agree, especially after hearing samples on your webpage, how really good your technology is, because it is encapsulating like the emotion. And I can only imagine for us, it makes us like doubly scared. You know, text-to-speech, synthetic voices is already scary, but this is an extra kind of step where it sounds so real that -- and especially how can you tell? Let's say that, you know, somehow my voice gets out there, or somehow the model of what I said gets out there, and how do I know that I approved that and allowed that to happen or allowed that usage? So I think it's great that yes, you should get those models out there and that watermarking out there as soon as possible on all platforms. Because I also think for us to be able to give the permission and to know where our voice is being used and for the people listening, they need to know that what they're listening to may not be human or may be altered. So good stuff. Alex: Yeah. That's correct. Anne: Yeah. Alex: However, I want to contradict you a bit about letting viewers of the film be obligatorily notified about synthetic speech being part of that. I mean, viewers are not notified about effects, about postproduction that has been made to speech. And you can think about some cases -- Anne: True. Alex: -- when our stuff is more like a postproduction technique, like we de-age some voice. So an actor acts themselves, but they sound younger, right? It's nothing bad with this use case and you don't obligatory need to have like a huge notification -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- on the center of the screen that -- Anne: Right. Alex: -- this audio has been manipulated. Because if you think about dinosaurs in Jurassic park, you don't have -- Anne: Yeah. Alex: -- and you don't expect to have those -- Anne: Sure. Alex: -- notifications that this creature does not exist, or Terminator, or like that's a creative part of things. And in cases, if it used in postproduction or as a creative tool, it shouldn't be there in my opinion. But in cases when it's, it might consist of controversial content, it my consist of alternative history content, when someone like Anthony Bourdain never actually say these lines, even if he wrote it himself, the notification should be in place. Because in such cases, we always encourage our clients and documentary creators to be very straightforward and tell their listeners that voice has been modified. Synthesized. Anne: Excellent point, excellent point. Thank you for that. Wow. So this has just been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for educating us and talking about your product. Respeecher. How can BOSSes get in touch with you if they're interested to find out more, or maybe try it out, or maybe be a voice, how can they get in touch with you? Alex: Yeah, so you just basically go to our website, respeecher.com, and you can hear a lot of examples, read our blog, read our ethics statements, look some projects we finished, and we can actually talk about, because there are plenty of projects that have delayed PR rights for us. And you can easily try voice marketplace. You can try the same core technology that we are using for Hollywood for your needs. And we would really appreciate the feedback because voice marketplace is something quite new for us -- Anne: Yes. Alex: -- but we want this to be a very good creative tool and tool that would let voice actors do what they do best, act, without being limited to their timbre, and creators be focused on creative opportunities without being limited to necessity of finding a particular vocal timbre. And sometime it's very hard to find. Anne: Wow. Well, thank you so very much for joining me today. I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allowed me to connect with Alex today. You can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week, and I'll see you next week. Thanks so much, Alex. Alex: Thank you, Anne. Anne: Bye-Bye. Alex: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. 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Welcome to Life in the Leadership Lane where I am talking to leaders making a difference in the workplace and in our communities. How did they get to where they are and what are they doing to stay there! Buckle up and get ready to accelerate in the Leadership Lane! This week, I am talking with Alex De La Garza, GMS-T, Senior Manager Mobility at Indeed and Austin Relocation Council Board Member. How did Alex get started in her career? What led her to the world of HR and Mobility? When did Alex “find her lane” in her career? How important have mentors been for Alex on her journey? Why does Alex love Mondays? What does Alex share about feedback? What does Alex share about leadership? What does Alex share about small moments? What does Alex share about supporting D & I for women? What does Alex share about the great resignation? What is a leadership practice Alex shares that helps in her every day? What advice does Alex share about that has helped her and now shares with others? …and more as we spend “Time to Accelerate” with a few more questions. Interview resources: Favorite quote(s) from Alex: “It drives me every day to know that I can help someone have an easier time moving.” “Ask for what you want” Connect with Alex on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsanchezinternational/ Visit Indeed https://www.indeed.com/ Learn more about Austin Relocation Council http://www.austinrelocationcouncil.org/ Learn more about WorldwideERC https://www.worldwideerc.org/ Check out Bruce's books · NEW Life in the Leadership Lane Moving Leaders to Inspire and Change the Workplace · “Find Your Lane Change your GPS, Change your Career (“Book Authority” Best Books) · “Milemarkers” A 5 Year Journey …helping you record daily highlights to keep you on track. Subscribe to Bruce's Blog “Move to Inspire” https://brucewaller.com/blog-2/ Connect with Bruce on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/brucewaller/ Connect with Bruce on Twitter https://twitter.com/BruceWaller Connect with Bruce on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/bruceww300/ Connect with Bruce on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/brucewwaller Do you need relocation support for your next household goods or commercial office move across the US? Reach out to Bruce or visit Armstrong Relocation https://www.armstrongrelocation.com/ Visit www.brucewaller.com for more information on Life in the Leadership Lane podcast and more!

If you look on Twitter or do a quick Google search, you'll find a ton of chatter about the foolproof DTC playbook. Everyone has ideas about the surefire ways that young DTC brands should be setting themselves up for success. Alex Kubo is here to tell you that those playbooks aren't as written in stone as you might think. Alex is the VP of ecommerce and digital marketing at Burrow, a DTC furniture brand, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he explained how and why the Burrow team threw out the playbook when certain aspects of it fell flat. For example, Alex talks about the lessons they learned about the signals that pricing sends, and why it's critical to put the right price on your product to attract the right customer even if that means pricing higher than the playbook says. Alex also dives into what it means to actually be customer centric and how Burrow stays in constant communication with customers. Plus, we discuss why marketing toward buying events or using a spray and pray strategy across a dozen channels is about as useful as setting your money on fire. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Sending The Right Signals: How you price your product or service is one of the most significant ways you signal to customers who you are as a brand and what value you bring. If you price too low, you risk being lumped in with brands that don't necessarily fit with the type of products or value you bring to the table.More Than Words: Saying you are customer-centric and actually being customer-centric are two very different things. To be truly customer-centric requires regularly talking to and learning from your customers and then building experiences and products based on those conversations. You can't just assume you know what customers want, you have to do the work to find out.A Horse of a Different Color: There are best practices and guidelines that many companies follow to get themselves off the ground. Sometimes those playbooks work, but in other cases, you have to toss out what everyone says is the right strategy and go in a new direction. Whether that's in your social strategy, your pricing, or how you're getting feedback from customers, don't be afraid to buck tradition and do something different.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome to Up Next In Commerce. I'm your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at mission.org. Today on the show, we have Alex Kubo joining us, who currently serves as the VP of E-Commerce and Digital Marketing at Burrow. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks, Stephanie. Excited to be here.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm very excited to have you here. It was cool reading a bit about Burrow's background and starting at Y Combinator, and I was thinking it might be fun to start there, back in 2016. What did it look like starting the company, and then we can get into today?Alex:Totally. So, I was fortunate that I actually met the two co-founders of Burrow while were on the same business school program in Philadelphia. And back in the fall of 2015, actually, Kabeer and Stephen, the two co-founders and my classmates were both furnishing their apartments as they moved into Philadelphia for the program, and they had two very distinct but related experiences. Kabeer purchased a sofa from West Elm in Philly, and it wasn't going to arrive for about 12 to 16 weeks, which I think, nowadays, people are pretty used to seeing those timelines, but Originally, it was like, "Whoa, this is not Amazon." And so, Kabeer actually used the cart, the dolly in his apartment building and rolled it to West Elm, and picked up a floor model and brought it home, because the lead time was going to be longer than his first semester, so obviously, that was not going to be a great experience.Alex:Stephen went the classic IKEA route, right, where you don't come in to grad school with a ton of money and need to furnish your space quickly. And so he did that, and then ultimately, it's a waste down the road, right? IKEA furniture, you can't move because of the quality of the materials and that sort of thing.Stephanie:[crosstalk]. Yeah.Alex:Yeah. So, the question ultimately became, why can't you have that higher end quality that you might find at a West Elm, or Pottery Barn, or Crate and Barrel, but the convenience, the modern day conveniences that Amazon has made the default expectation of consumers, so fast, and free shipping, and easy delivery process, and be able to modularize that design so that you can set it up and not have to deal with like the IKEA hex key or any of these really cumbersome assembly processes? And so, that concept was born. And out of that came a series of product innovation that ultimately, Stephen and Kabeer got into Y Combinator with just a pitch deck and no product and used that accelerator to develop the product, to prototype the product, and ship it.Alex:A funny little anecdote is that from the time they incorporated the company to the time they shipped their first product was shorter than the period of time that West Elm quoted Kabeer to ship his first couch.Stephanie:Oh, wow. That's great.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:And what were you doing when they were going through Y Combinator?Alex:I was actually working on my own concept in the health and fitness space and ended up calling time on it right towards the end of the summer because of a number of challenges that I was having on my end, and joined up with Stephen and Kabeer to help build out the demand side of the business. And I had a relatively intimate knowledge of the business and where they were at because we were in all the same classes working on our own businesses. And I had helped them tangentially with sourcing components during our first year of the program, because I have a background in mechanical engineering and they didn't have any background in physical hardware. And so, there was already the groundwork for relationship. And then I was trying to move my own discipline into more of a consumer facing and ground level marketing and product marketing role, so it actually made a lot of sense.Alex:So, we set it up as a brief relationship to make sure that the working relationship was there, which it turned out very quickly, it was. So, I have been tasked or had been tasked with basically just building demand and ran with it since.Stephanie:So, since then, what does the world look like now compared to when you started and you were building up demand? I mean, I'm sure you guys were trying out Facebook and all the traditional platforms that everyone's like, "Every brand should be on Instagram and Facebook, and if you're not here, where are you?" What did it look like then and now?Alex:So, now it's a much more disciplined and much more properly positioned business than it was in the beginning. Two critical mistakes that were good healthy mistakes to make in the early days were, number one, brand positioning and product positioning. We had this idea in our head that... and sort of the classic Warby Parker pricing story of like, they wanted to price it $45, but their advisors and professors advised them not to do that because it would signal the wrong value to the customer. We had a similar experience where, for some reason in our heads, we had to price our couch under $1,000. And we made that decision because we wanted to be hyper competitive on price and make it the default, obvious solution.Alex:The problem that we failed to acknowledge is that consumers nowadays have very limited time to understand the differences and nuances between products. They're not stupid, they're not lazy, but they do have very limited time. And so, you have to be very clear and explicit with them, and part of that is signaling. And one of the most powerful parts of marketing that I think is most often overlooked is a focus on pricing and what that does from a positioning standpoint.Alex:When a lot of shoppers were seeing our product under $1,000 and the fact that it shipped in boxes, which we were very forward with, because we focus so much on the attributes of the product and less on the experience around it, which is another step in our evolution, that people immediately equated those two things, low price and ships in boxes, with a more expensive version of IKEA. So, then it was us talking to IKEA shoppers, and you're not going to convince an IKEA shopper to spend another 300, $400 on a sofa, right? What you need to do is talk to the West Elm shopper, the Pottery Barn shopper, the Crate and Barrel shopper.Alex:So, we actually, for a number reasons, increased prices in late 2017, about half a year after we launched.Stephanie:How much did you increase them by?Alex:Originally, the sofa was priced at 950. By the way, much different cogs, profile as well, at that point. We increased the price to 1,095 to start. So, it was a pretty meaningful difference on a percentage basis, and especially when you talk about margins.Alex:Interestingly enough, everything you learned in microeconomics about the relationship with the supply and demand curves went out the window, because we increased the price and demand shot through the roof.Stephanie:Wow. Did you get it in front of new people? What else were you doing to get it-Alex:I mean, we were doing a lot of the same things in terms of building full funnel architecture on paid social and paid search and that sort of thing, and again, applying a lot of those early D2C playbook type approaches, which ultimately turned out to not be the best approach for us. But nothing changed substantially from a marketing perspective. We were still reaching a lot of the same people, it's just that we were now signaling to those people that we belonged in the comparison set with a higher quality piece of furniture. That helps also, because a lot of our value props, it's much easier to convince somebody who has shopped at one of these higher end brands and had to wait super long or had to go to a showroom and deal with a frustrating shopping experience with this overbearing sales associate, pay for shipping, and ultimately, have to be home to get a piece of furniture delivered, and either take a day off from work. Again, much different world back then than it was today.Alex:But it's much easier to talk to those kinds of people who've experienced those pain points and tell them, "I'm going to take all of that pain away," than it is to talk to somebody who's never experienced those pain points and doesn't need the higher quality piece of furniture, again, the IKEA shopper, and talk to them about all these future pain points that they've never experienced but that we can help them avoid. That's maybe one of the biggest lessons learned, is that people do not think much about the future. They're often very, very focused on the present. And so, as much as you want to talk about why you should go to the doctor every year, why should you should go to the dentist every six months, it's like, people are not going to react until they have a problem.Alex:So, we've experimented a bunch with what is the leading value prop. So, we talked to consumers, and one of the ones that we talked about very early was this concept of modularity and how, when you move into your next apartment, you can just purchase another seat instead of buying a whole new sofa to accommodate the new space, or rearrange the existing configuration that you have to fit the new space requirements. Problem is, people are not thinking about that. They don't really care. They can't think that far in advance of two to three to four years down the road when moving into the next apartment. And so, we've deprioritized that in terms of communication and lead with other things that are more immediate, like fast and free shipping.Stephanie:Yeah. Got it. So, you're mentioning earlier that the D2C playbook didn't work for you guys, where now, even these days, you can search that and you'll find a bunch of the playbooks and people are still saying like, "This is what you need to do to be successful." What were some other things that you did back then that you completely reversed and you were like, "This doesn't work for us"?Alex:Yeah. So, I think, first, was not acknowledging how complex and lengthy the shopping journey is for a piece of furniture online. Obviously, it's a big investment, it's also mutually exclusive with something else, your home, right? Let alone the high price, you're not going to just buy another couch when you have an existing one in your home, right? You need to think about getting that out or you have to do it right at the right moment with a moving event or something like that.Alex:So, the first thing that we had to realize is that what we can't do is architect our funnel around existing attribution technology or just rely on optimizing towards purchase events in digital channels. What we had to do is to look upstream and find correlations and causation between different upstream, midstream, and bottom stream events to really architect a healthy full funnel. And so, most of our campaigns are not architected towards purchase events, they're architected towards or optimized towards something more upstream.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for a couple examples.Alex:Yeah. I guess one interesting one that we've learned over time is there's a pretty clear correlation between add to cart and purchase, and the cart abandonment rate is relatively steady. We do things over time, obviously, to improve that, but it's not something that fluctuates wildly over time. And so, one of the things we can do is just optimize towards an add to cart versus a purchase.Alex:The other benefit of that is it often can happen in the first session. So, when you see a lot of the privacy restrictions right now and a lot of the issues with cookies going away and that sort of thing, it helps us. We've actually always been architected to bear that burden a little bit better than some of our other D2C peers.Alex:And then the other thing, besides the purchase journey, was also that we were just doing way too many things at once. We had, and we still have today, a very lean team. The difference between now and then is that back then, we thought the best approach was to spray as wide as we possibly could and activate 10 to 15 channels with me managing all of them, by the way, and not doing a good job.Stephanie:It sounds very chaotic and not fun.Alex:Yeah. Not at all, not at all. And only until we really peeled back and just focused on a handful of things and did them really, really well, that's when we actually started churning results, but more importantly, honestly, that's when we started actually learning what was working. Because previously, we were just spending a lot of money, we were generating sales, but we didn't really have a clear idea of where they were coming from, again, because the purchase journey was so complex, right? It wasn't a problem that we could solve by just putting an attribution layer in somewhere. We had to really hyper focus on one or two things and do them really, really well.Alex:The concept of growth in the past has generally been focused on the top line. And what that means, often, for a lot of companies, is to just go into as many different channels and try to tap into as many different demographics as you possibly can and then find out what's working and what's not working. I think the issue is that the broader investment community has wisened up to that, right, and they're holding us more accountable on a unit economics and customer economics level, versus just month over month top line growth, which in reality, it's just a vanity metric, right?Alex:So, it is more favorable to take a more disciplined approach, albeit potentially slower top line growth, to really uncover those median sites that you can actually build a solid foundation on and grow a real, scalable, profitable company on versus just something that's just, scaling wildly at the top one but in reality it's just lighting money on fire.Stephanie:So, for a higher priced product like Burrow and a longer buying cycle, what platforms would you advise other brands to look at and optimize for and which ones would you pull back from?Alex:Yeah. So, I think if you acknowledge that it is, there are a lot of things that people have to learn about the product, a lot of things that people have to get comfortable with and confident in the purchase. You think that a lot of these shorter form mediums, like paid social, paid search, right? It's just a quick second and a half interaction with an ad, they're not going to be as effective for a product like ours, and that's true. What we have indexed up on are things that are more storytelling mediums. So, the earliest insight into this was we partnered with a small podcast in late 2017, and it's sort of one of those micro ones, it's not on a network, and just talks about fantasy football. And we just got introduced to the gentleman that runs it, and did a small test, and the results were incredible.Alex:Part of what we've learned over time from that point, rapidly scaled the podcast program for us is that it's highly dependent on the host, and the reason that it's highly dependent on a host is because the efficacy of that channel comes from the quality of the storytelling. And that is really what benefits our brand, is that if we go and we send a podcast host a product and they have the same amazing experience that our customers have, they can talk about it in a much more authentic way, but also, a much more individual way. We've actually matured to not providing very detailed scripts to a lot of our podcasts hosts and just telling them to talk about what has been most exciting for you, and that really brings out the energy in the advocacy for the brand from the host. So, I'd say it's really about focusing on storytelling mediums. So, I lumped other video, long form video into that as well. A little bit less of authenticity, but also helps communicate a lot of these little value props that add up to the major value proposition.Stephanie:So, the other thing that comes to mind is branded content. I mean, I'm thinking about something like Formula One where now the results are out, everyone knows it worked really well for them. It was very, I would think, pretty organic, didn't feel like it was just a brand push. How are you guys thinking about other kinds of content like this?Alex:I don't know if we're at the stage yet where we can start thinking about that sort of thing. I think that Formula One is a great example of taking two powerhouses and linking them together where the sum is greater than or the whole is greater than the some of the parts. So, we're thinking a little bit less about something like that and creating more on a micro scale, I would say, brand and content.Alex:So, when you talk about something like the influencer arena, I am probably the biggest advocate against using influencers in the context that they are used today. And first of all, just to clarify, a true influencer is not somebody that says, "I'm an influencer" on their Instagram profile description, right? A true influencer is somebody that can speak to a community and elicit a response, and often, within a specific category, right? So, I'm not going to give a beauty "influencer" a furniture product and expect him or her to have an outsized impact on the sales.Stephanie:Stephanie:So, you'd focus on the niche influencer who might only have 1,500 followers or something, which is something I think I talked about early on this show, of going through the comments of Instagrammers and seeing, are the people in there asking, "Where can I buy that? Where did you get that from?" Or are they just like, "That's great. Cool. I love that." What kind of engagement are you getting will show if that person has influential power over their community or not.Alex:Totally, totally. And obviously, it's going to vary by a vertical too. This is sort of an extreme example, right? Again, going back to the very considered purchase, even our ability to measure the impact of that is going to be super limited. So, we've actually leaned into the influencer community for, more so is, partnering with actually photography influencers. One of the bottlenecks and problems with our vertical is that our products are very large and our photo shoots and video shoots require massive studios and massive crews that are very, very expensive. Meanwhile, all of these people out there that can already take great pictures and already have really interesting homes need furniture. And so, we can often partner with them in a much more economically scalable way to get a huge diversity and huge volume of content created that can showcase different styles, different aesthetics, different home types, and different personalities, and just build this library of content instead of having to book homes ourselves and go through the whole production process.Alex:So, we've actually been doing that for a while just purely based on economic reasons. But it's interesting to see that now, I think there's going to be a massive shift towards organic for a number of other reasons. When you talk about a lot of the privacy regulations that are going on right now, over the last 10 years, the control of the voice or the conversation has shifted towards the consumer and towards the user. You see like case examples of this with like GameStop, for example. The retail investor just had a massive impact on the market from such a small player, right? Because the control of the conversation momentum is shifting away from the brands that have the big budgets and towards the customers that have the voice, the authentic following.Stephanie:That's the influencer of the year right there.Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:And Reddit. And that's probably where all the other influencers are, an area that I haven't even thought to go, but we've had guests come on previously where Reddit is how they figured out how to build their business, which I haven't even thought to go there. Alex:Totally, totally. I mean, it makes total sense, right? It's experts that are talking because they're passionate about what they're talking about, right, not because they have a vested interest or they are trying to make money off of it, then that's where you get that authentic content from and the actual truth.Stephanie:So, how do you go about incentivizing that or structuring it so it can come in? Because I'm sure a lot of brands are like, "I want my customers to talk about me and take pictures and do all the things," and then they just sit there and nothing comes in. So, what are you doing behind the scenes to make that happen?Alex:So, it's less about focusing so much effort on trying to elicit that response just by trying to elicit it and more about really focusing on that product innovation and that experience that will naturally have that effect on people, right? You don't want somebody to talk about your product in a positive way because you're paying them to talk about it in a positive way, you want them to really advocate, because that means that not only are they talking on the channel that you want them to talk about it, they're also having side conversations. And when people come over to their homes and they're asking, "Wow, where did you get that beautiful sofa from?" They are talking not just about, "Oh, I got it from Burrow," they're also saying like, "And it happens to have these stain resistant fabrics, and it has all of these great other materials, and it was modular, and it was super easy to get it delivered and get it set up." And that's what you really want to go off of.Alex:So, I would say the biggest focus should be on nailing that product innovation and nailing that customer experience, and that's how you can count on that customer conversation to be generated rather than trying to chase down your customers and get them to talk about it in a less authentic way.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. I think that the days when people on Amazon are like, "I got paid for this review," or something, those will be gone very soon, because I don't know about you, but every time I go through a threat and I see that, I'm like, "Don't trust you, don't trust you." I just want to see the normal person who's reviewing it at their own goodwill, or not, maybe they're mad, but I want that. I don't want someone saying, "I got a free product for this review." That just seems like those days are gone.Alex:Yeah, totally, totally.Stephanie:So, the other thing I want to talk about is product development. I saw that your co-founder and CEO said, "Every single product we've ever launched has exceeded expectations and projections, and that's a testament to our customer-centric research-driven design process," which I want to dive into that and hear. I'm sure many brands are like, "I want every single product of mine to be a success, and I want to expand my skews." So, how do you guys go about designing and crafting new products?Alex:Well, I think one thing that we should clear up is the concept of customer centricity is used so broadly and inauthentically, I think. A lot of brands will claim customer centricity and they'll think that they're being customer centric because that's who their customer is and they just need to make money off of them, and so they'll say that they're thinking about all their needs. The problem is they're not actually talking to the customers, they're assuming on behalf of the customers that they know what that customer needs. Or they're just testing messaging, which is fine. That's been the traditional approach of, "Okay, if I play up this feature or this benefit versus this feature or this benefit, and this one does better, that's what the customer must want," right? But it almost becomes a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy there.Alex:We take it to a much deeper level, not just with our customer community but also our lead community, all of our email subscribers that have yet to join and make an actual purchase with us, and actually going to them and asking them very specific and lengthy questions. I remember the first time we sent out a customer survey about one of the next products that we were going to launch and just wanted to get their input on like, "Is this the right product?" Number one, and B, "What are those little things that really bother you about this product?" And did a ton of just open ended response analysis based on that.Alex:The biggest surprise for me from that was the response rate. For a quiz or rather survey that took probably a solid 10 to 15 minutes of someone's time to go through and really complete in depth, which they did, the response rate was astounding. And that opened our eyes to, "Wow, this needs to become a regular occurrence within our work stream."Stephanie:How quickly were you sending this to them? Was it a week after they got their product and are trying to set it up, or what did that look like?Alex:Well, there's a couple different ones. So, what we have is a couple different touch points that are automated or triggered based on somebody actually making their first purchase with us. So, we had, obviously, a post purchase survey right away, which I think is one of the most underappreciated and can be most impactful survey points that people do, or brands do, rather. We also have an NPS survey, which going back to how do you elicit a response from customers and activate customers, NPS is going to be your biggest indicator of how much of that is happening in the background. And that is actually backed up by an element on the post purchase survey where we ask, "Were you were referred by a friend? Does that friend own Burrow furniture, or do they not, or do not know?" And that can also give us a really solid indication of the impact.Alex:So, beyond the triggered survey points, we also do intermittent studies, and it's almost on a monthly cadence now, of either focuses on new categories in general, or we've already identified the category, we've already identified the specific product and we're trying to nail down colors, color combinations, finishes, specific features, doing conjoint analyses on like, what is most important to this set of consumer? I mean, we've really taken it to a super, super deep level.Stephanie:Have there been any products that you launch based off consumer feedback or maybe early launches where it's like, "Oh, they led us astray with that one"? Because I'd be like, "I want a fluorescent pink couch." And then I'd be like, "Oh, I had a little too much wine that night. Sorry about that."Alex:Yeah. Fortunately, we're pretty good at statistics and we can identify outliers and not get swayed by them too much. There actually have not been. And I think it speaks volumes for this concept of authentic customer centricity where... and you can also cross-compare between the customer set and the subscriber set, right? The subscribers are a great audience because they have not purchased anything from you, or at least the subscribers that are not customers, and there's a reason why, right? Versus the customers, they did find something that you offered already and they've already bought into the brand, and they're responding to you because they're still engaged. And so, that's one set of needs that you need to fulfill.Alex:And then there's the other set of needs, and oftentimes, there's a good amount of overlap, which is great for us, and oftentimes, there's not, and that's when we need to make choices around what does that offering look like and who are we really chasing with that?Stephanie:Yep. The other thing I think you mentioned in the past was around how you start thinking about zoning and mapping out what else a person needs in their room, which means like, "Oh, brilliant, okay, if someone got a couch, a little swivel chair, and obviously, they need pillows." And I want to hear, did that method work, and how have you expanded that since you first started trying it I think maybe a year and a half ago or so?Alex:It did, totally. I mean, you take one concrete example of this is with the advent of coffee tables for us. We first launched the sofa and then we launched our first line of coffee tables, and those were specifically designed dimensionally to work best with the sofa styles that were selling the most volumetrically. So, we knew that there was a high rate of match, right, between them. It wasn't like we were designing for something that we were only selling like 5% of our assortment or something like that.Alex:Where that took another level is in 2019, we launched the corner sectional, and then arrangements and configurations started getting a lot more varied and a lot more... opened up actually, additional demographics as well, with more suburban, satellite city homes with larger room spans. And that opened up a new category, and so what we had to do is to figure out, "Okay, well, if you have a five-seat corner sectional, none of our coffee tables really make sense for that. And so, how do we create a coffee table that works perfectly in that configuration for that customer specifically?" So, that's when you saw in late 2020, we released our Kettle and Signal collections, which are more of a round geometry versus a rectangular geometry. And that happens to work really well with things like a Double Chaise Long King Sofa, where the chaise is wrapped nicely around the round coffee table, or the corner sectional, it creates a really nice conversation pit type feeling.Alex:So, it is very much about understanding how our pieces interact. And then the next level that is, what are the types of rooms that people are using it in? What are the actual dimensions of those rooms? And what logically, could somebody need the most, given that room design and size?Stephanie:It seems like a lot of brands are missing that right now, because oftentimes, I mean, whether it's furniture or a lot of other things, I'm like, "Where is that matching dresser set? Or where is the pillow that goes with that?" And it feels like having to go around and look in different places and trying to find it myself, I'm like, "Why am I doing the work? I just want a kit which is like, 'Here's all the five things that match together.'" But why is that so hard? I don't get why can't brands do that?Alex:I think one of the biggest examples of this is that company brand list that skyrocketed, but they were launching things in such unrelated categories that there was no bond between them. And companies nowadays need to think a lot more about lifetime value than they had to necessarily, in the past. Acquisition cost is growing, and they can no longer just rely on first purchase profitability in order to sustainably scale their business, and they need to think about building a relationship with the customer. And that often comes from creating relationship and being the default brand or site to go back to when they may have that next need and finding that perfect accompanying piece, right? Versus just like you buy cleaning detergent from the company, and you come back and, oh, they're offering soccer balls or something.Stephanie:Pillows.Alex:Yeah, it's like, "Okay, well, that doesn't make sense."Stephanie:Yeah. Which makes me think, I mean, it seems like the world is headed towards a more curated world right now. Maybe back in the day, I would go to a Wayfair or something like that and I'd be like, "Cool, I'm fine with scrolling, scrolling," five years later, still scrolling and looking for what I want. It doesn't seem like consumers want that anymore. So, how do you see the consumer journey and preference adjusting now where maybe a couple years ago, that would be totally fine?Alex:Yeah. I think it's almost a byproduct of the ease of standing up a company nowadays. It is exponentially easier to start a company, a direct to consumer company than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago. So, because of that, the market has just blown up in terms of the number of companies. And so, the paralysis of choice has shifted from like going to an old school Sears or Macy's and just having like a million different options, or as you put it, like a Wayfair, and just tens of millions of options, to now having to build a relationship with a brand and trust that that brand is making the right decisions. And so, that's why we offer a very select assortment of fabric colors, leg finishes, arm styles. In reality, we can house tens of component skews and offer tens of thousands of combinations to the customer, but what's ultimately the most important thing is that we do it in a way that is still a very simple and clean experience for the customer so that they get that sense of they're creating their own product, but not to the extent of being overwhelmed.Alex:I think of myself on old school furniture sites and staring at the screen from two inches away trying to figure out the difference between this gray and that gray, and I'm like... and then you request swatches from them and they come 10 weeks later.Stephanie:Yeah. I've recently been through that experience. It's not great.Alex:Yeah. No, it's not fun.Stephanie:They arrived and I'm like, "What was I trying to buy, again?" [crosstalk]. I mean, it seems like you guys could also have a very localized approach where, like you mentioned earlier, if someone is looking from a very suburban area, like my hometown in Maryland, where my expectations there would have probably been to have a huge wraparound couch, I've got this big living room, versus being in San Francisco or Austin, where now it's like a little bit more limited space, and what can I fit in these small areas? [crosstalk] think about that?Alex:I mean, the first step there that we're taking, it's more from a content driven approach. So, that goes back or loops back to the way that we're treating influencers and leaning into the photography community and the different styles and aesthetics that they have. Because what we are creating are based products. They are beautiful but they don't belong in an architectural [inaudible] editor's home, right? They're not the one-off piece that you design and custom build for 15 grand or something.Alex:And what's beautiful about that is that they stand up to any environment that you're putting them in, whether it's a very eclectic like Austin ranch style home, or the fourth floor walk up apartment in New York, or a more sprawling home in Houston or another geography like that. And leaning in with more of that stylistic approach than necessarily sub-segmenting, "Oh, we're only going to show love seats to this geography, or we're only going to show these massive sprawling corner sectionals to this other geography," because people still have varying needs, a lot of people have multiple rooms. So, we don't want to limit, necessarily, the assortment, but we are trying to diversify constantly the styles and aesthetics that our products are showcased in.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. So, for the last big point, I wanted to talk about the industry as a whole, like the D2C industry, commerce, what kind of things are you seeing or preparing for behind the scenes for what's to come?Alex:I mean, we could talk about the elephant in the room, which is-Stephanie:Let's talk about it. Yeah, let's do it. I haven't really talked too much about that, because it's been so up in the air, and when's it going to go through? It's more official now, so let's do it.Alex:Oh, yeah, it's official. This is a tough thing, and I think it's a reckoning for a lot of these companies, again, where it's been so easy to start a company and just go on Facebook, and you'll generate some sales, and go to a VC and you'll show 100% month over month growth, and they'll throw a bunch of cash at you. That's changing, and I'm thankful for it as much as I curse the fact that we don't have this GPS anymore, I'm very thankful that we don't, because it's forcing us to mature as marketers. And we're fortunate also that we've had to embrace this appreciation for marketing 101 and really lean into principles and not just trust what the ad platform are telling us, because it's a whole shopping journey.Alex:So, we've built a very healthy, full funnel approach proactively, even without any of this talk about these privacy regulations. That has helped us create something that can stand up in the face of this. There are a lot of companies that have not done that, they've not invested in really understanding marketing 101 and how to build a healthy full funnel without having that very granular level of insight or having automatic triggers in their campaigns and stuff. So, I think that is the most important thing, is like there is a day of reckoning for marketers everywhere in the D2C space to take a step back and really appreciate the principles of marketing and evaluate your program architecture overall and make sure that it's in a healthy state, and not just because your add to cart rates or your conversion rates are really high from this one campaign in this one ad unit, but really, overall, how is your program operating? Where are the weak points and how can you supplement those?Stephanie:Yeah. So, if you were starting over day one today, what kind of things would you look at? What metrics would you look at? What kind of things would you put in place to start building up that healthy funnel?Alex:Yeah. I think we would look at... I'm trying to think if I didn't have all the information that I have today, but I think what you would look at is the abandonment rate through the funnel, right? Of the people who click through to your site, how many of them end up viewing a product? Of those people, how many of them end up adding it? Of those people, how many of them end up actually proceeding to step one of checkout, step two, step three, step four? And find out what that makeup looks like.Alex:And obviously, you're going to spend a lot of time on conversion rate optimization and trying to improve the outputs of each step of that funnel. But that paints a picture of, okay, how broad do you have to invest at the top of that funnel if your ultimate target at the bottom of the funnel is X? And what does that reach look like? And what are the best mediums to do that to actually elicit a response and get people onto your site or into your store or signing up for whatever service you provide? So, that, I think, is what I would take as step one.Alex:The other one is, I would just consider, for the vertical that you're in and the product that you're trying to sell, how much of a story do you need to tell? And that will help inform how much you will need to invest in more storytelling mediums than more immediate click to buy type mediums. Also, how visual is your product? That will tell you how much you have to be content driven versus leaning into things like search or audio formats or anything like that. And that can really help govern your channel choices.Alex:And then the last thing is just, don't fall into the trap of doing too many things at once. There's always something to be said to acknowledging the resources that you have and trying to build a architecture that is best for that set of resources, not just the one that happens to be doing really well for the other portfolio company that your VC backer is constantly in your ear about, you have to focus on what is going to work for your company, your vertical, your customers specifically.Stephanie:Yep, yeah, I love all that. Is there or are there any tools right now that you're very excited about that are either new or just time tested, you're like, "We're going to keep using these forever because they do wonders for our marketing efforts"?Alex:I think a lot of it is less about tools and more about information sources. So, we've partnered with a number of different companies over time to do things like customer enrichment and really understand our customers to a deeper level, again, going back to that concept of customer centricity, not just talking to them directly, but also learning much, much more about them. And I think one of the biggest traps that a lot of companies fall into is they think of their customer as an average customer, and the problem is they're failing to acknowledge that customers are not one monotonous group, they are a system of clusters and cohorts. And what you really have to do is understand what is unique and important about each of these clusters and then create a messaging architecture, channel architecture, product offering that really speaks to each of those clusters individually.Alex:So, from a tools perspective, it's more about these data enrichment, customer data enrichment type platforms, and then using those to create these clusters and cohorts and really understand those customers. Again, for us, an attribution platform, not super helpful because of the complexity and both mix of offline and online activity that it takes to get to the purchase point. Much more about really understanding the customer and then applying a marketing 101 approach to it.Stephanie:Cool. Yeah, that's great. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer.Alex:Oh, boy.Stephanie:Ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:Oh, boy. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:Shoot. Where do I start? I think I would like to understand more about the global supply chain. I think over the last six months to a year maybe, we've seen, very intimately, the impacts of a broken or strained supply chain, and I think that there's a huge opportunity for D2C companies to innovate on the supply chain side. We focus so much on how do we innovate on the customer side that we focus so much less on the supply side of the business. So, I think that is where... and it will become increasingly important for marketers and supply ops to be speaking and working very much hand in hand to grow a company together. So, I do wish I had more of that background.Stephanie:Yeah, that's great. And you guys just raised around, and I think that money, a part of it, was to focus on international supply chain effort, right? Figuring that out better.Alex:Yes, totally.Stephanie:So, you're already right in the right spot, the right time. You'll have to let everyone else know the insight. You have to come back and tell us what you learn next year.Alex:Yes, definitely.Stephanie:What's up next on your reading list or podcast list?Alex:There's actually a couple books I think that I want to reread. I'm one of those weird people that really likes to read technical books, and so there's a couple of conversations we're having right now about pricing in this book called Power Pricing that I love to read. There's also one by a gentleman named Douglas Holt called Cultural Strategy that I think is one of the most foundational and important books, especially for the world today. And again, how the customer controls the conversation, and understanding how to position your company and your messaging around cultural movements and ride momentum versus trying to create that momentum yourself as you have in the past. The last one is Shoe Dog, actually.Stephanie:Yes, such a good book.Alex:Amazing book. This would now be, I think, my third time reading it, but it is a way to, I think... A lot of people have been talking about languishing right now and the fact that we've been in this environment for so long and we're yearning for that personal interaction, and so tired of being in the sedentary and fixed on a digital screen environment. And I think Shoe Dog can help reignite a lot of that passion, right? Because it's like, "Wow, this multi-billion dollar company started at such a microscopic level." And it really helps you understand the power and the capability you have as an individual to create something like that and can help really reignite that passion.Stephanie:Yeah, that's one of my favorite books. Actually, we have a podcast called The Story that tells the unknown backstory of people who change the world, and we highlighted him in one of the episodes because we were like, "The story is too good not to tell, and tell, and tell until everyone hears it, and gets motivated and starts their thing today."Alex:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:That's awesome. I feel like they need a movie out or something. Do they have one?Alex:I'm sure there will be. I'm sure there will be.Stephanie:There has to be one. Too good of a story not to. What's one thing you're secretly curious about? [crosstalk].Alex:TikTok, I think.Stephanie:Are you all on there?Alex:We are not. From a demographic perspective, in the past, I would say a year and a half, it hasn't made sense. The program is continuing to grow, the demographic adoption is continuing to expand, and so I am interested in what it looks like going forward. I think it is also a challenging medium for a lot of brands that are really attached to high production quality content, because what scales the best on that platform is very lo-fi content, very organic and authentic content. And it creates this shift for a lot of companies in the way that they think about creative. So, I'm curious in that we are actively learning about our potential approach to that channel, but also curious about how does that platform and program evolve over time. I've not heard great things about the ad platform that they've built so far, which is partially why we've been hesitant to really go after the channel, but that will evolve. They will crack that code. And what that looks like, I don't know, but I'm certainly curious.Stephanie:Yeah. We've definitely heard 50-50 on TikTok, some brands saying it works wonders, but they're the ones creating their own content, maybe not an ad partner programs. I also think from a consumer standpoint, how it's going to evolve, because at least me personally, I think I got signed out and I couldn't remember my password-Alex:Oh, no.Stephanie:... and I just never signed back in. I'm like, "I'm not sure I really like it then, or maybe I know that just scrolling is not good for me."Alex:Yeah. That was me with Clubhouse, actually.Stephanie:Oh, same.Alex:I loved Clubhouse for the first seven days and was on it constantly and I have not been back on it for [crosstalk].Stephanie:Yeah. I think it got crowded. I mean, now it's just so busy, so many people talking about so many things, it didn't feel curated. I started feeling like that to me too where it was 50-50 of like, "I like these videos, and next nine, I don't like." I think there has to be curation to keep at least us involved, it sounds like.Alex:Yeah, totally. I mean, honestly, that's what happened with the podcast world too, right? It became everybody launched their own podcast, and then there's so much content. The biggest problem with podcasts now is discovery. The only way you learn about what to listen to is through your friends.Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:And so, that concept of discovery is such a challenge for podcasts right now, and I think that's what Clubhouse is going through at 1,000 times faster through the learning cycle.Stephanie:Yeah. I think the next couple of years will be interesting, because I mean, they've been talking about discovery issues back to even when I worked at Google, figuring out Google podcasts, and that was an issue back in 2017. So, why hasn't this been solved yet? It should be so much easier.Alex:Yeah.Stephanie:All right. Well, Alex, it's been awesome having you on the show, such a fun conversation. Where can people find out more about you and Burrow?Alex:Burrow.com would be the easiest place.Stephanie:What about you? Are you on LinkedIn? What if people want to talk to you?Alex:I am. LinkedIn. Alex Kubo. I'm not sure if you can actually search me and find me, but I'm sure you could.Stephanie:I'll find you. Don't worry. All right. Thanks so much, Alex.Alex:Thank you so much, Stephanie.

Get excited for Aries season! And make sure to live your life in the first part of this month because when the monster moon comes on April 26, who knows what will happen! Susan Miller herself can't even tell us what to expect.   In this episode, Laura and Alex continue to be confused about Susan's posting habits (she was on time again and it wasn't even an April Fools' Day prank) and work through their fears about the ominous monster moon in Scorpio that will bring unexpected and unwelcome obstacles and changes to all of the signs. They discuss Susan's note to her readers, geezers versus geysers, Scorpio hate, and of course, all of Susan's practical advice for getting through the monster moon and the pandemic.  Horoscope highlights for each sign can be found at the following timestamps:  Aries: 6:46 Taurus: 11:30 Gemini: 15:44 Cancer: 17:41 Leo: 19:29 Virgo: 21:36 Libra: 22:35 Scorpio: 23:32 Sagittarius: 29:19 Capricorn: 30:52 Aquarius: 33:16 Pisces: 35:12 Practical advice from Susan Miller: 36:25 Share your own thoughts on Susan Miller's Astrology Zone with us (and let us know about your experience with the monster moon!) by emailing astrologyzoned@gmail.com. Links: Order “If You Really Love Me, Throw Me off the Mountain,” by Erin Clark, a strong and powerful Aries woman: https://www.erinclarkwriter.com (https://www.erinclarkwriter.com) Help Laura reach the full potential of her Susan Miller legacy by buying her romance novels: http://lauralovelybooks.com (http://Lauralovelybooks.com) Listen to Laura's other podcasts, The Mermaid Podcast and You're Doing Great, at: http://mermaidpodcast.com (http://mermaidpodcast.com) and http://fairybossmother.com (http://fairybossmother.com) TRANSCRIPT:  Laura: Hello, everybody! Welcome to April 2021. We made it this far! Yay! Alex: Hi everyone. Hi Laura! Laura: Oh, hi Alex! Alex: How are you doing? Laura: I think I'm okay but then I read our horoscopes and now I have some concerns for something, but you know, I think we'll get through. We'll talk about why we're scared, but also I feel like we've lived through so much already that maybe I shouldn't be so scared, but I don't know, I got nervous. Alex: The fact that we have lived through so much and we're scared though maybe says something. Laura: Maybe it says something. Yeah, yeah. Well let's get into, as usual, when Susan Miller released the horoscopes for April. Again, another surprise. Another surprise, she released them on April 1. Wow. And I think, you know, last month in March we were so shocked because she released them a day early and that was really out of character and now it was just on time. So you and I agree that that while we don't like it and we're perturbed by her promptness— Alex: Extremely Laura: Extremely—we are just going to now keep track of like this streak and see how long it goes and also if we ever get an answer about why it's after 25 years she's suddenly become prompt with her horoscopes. It's a mystery. Alex: Right, so it's like a challenge. Susan, can you keep this up? But also why? Laura: Also why? Yeah we don't know why is it happening. Alex: Why are you doing this to us? Laura: Yeah why you're doing this, what's changed about your process, what's going on. But she released them on time. It was April 1. I had just gotten my second dose of the vaccine and I was really out of it so it took me a few days to read. But now we have and I think we should start off with the note from Susan Miller. Alex: Yes, so she starts off the note by saying: April will be a good, cheerful, and productive month until we get to the monster full moon in Scorpio on April 26. I know. And then she wrote: I know I am writing this on April 1, April Fool's Day, and I wish I were pranking you. This full moon will be no joke. Laura: Oh no, but see I got scared. Alex: It's incredibly ominous but also I was wondering if she like crafted this and she was like, Oh, this is

Interacting with customers requires a level of finesse and talent that is beautiful when done well, and a tough sight when done poorly. There is give and take, and you have to flow through various movements and ups and downs to reach a satisfying end result. It’s like a dance. A tango if you will. At least, that’s how the folks over at LivePerson see it. Alex Spinelli is the CTO and EVP of product, technology, and operations at LivePerson, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, he broke down what that dance should look like, and how A.I. is taking the lead.  As Alex explains, LivePerson is a set of tools, technologies and platforms that enable businesses to have conversations with customers through messaging channels, and to detect where customers may be getting stuck or frustrated. Then, with a small immediate intervention, LivePerson’s A.I. routes that customer to a human who can make the buying process easier. It is a way to get to a better end result more often, and it works. Businesses using LivePerson have seen double-digit-percentage-point improvement in conversions and higher NPS scores than ever. But the power of A.I. doesn’t end there, and Alex dives deep into where we are headed with A.I. as a tool in retail, including the blended in-person and virtual experiences that seem to be overlapping more than ever before. And Alex gets into the nitty-gritty of the ethics behind A.I. and how everyone will have to be more involved going forward when it comes to defining their limits, wants, and needs. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Joining Forces: The future of A.I. in the ecommerce space is in the way brands can join together an A.I. experience with a human-based one. The way brands should be looking at A.I. is as a conversation-starter and a tool that can solve transactional problems, but when a deeper conversation is needed, it should be able to usher customers through a seamless transition to a real person who can build a relationship, form trust, solve problems, and ensure that the customer experience is a good one the has a positive end result.Let’s Get Ethical!: With any new technology, there are ethical questions that have to be addressed. This is especially true when dealing with A.I. Not only do you have to take into account the repercussions that A.I. will have on the labor force, but you also have to consider how A.I. is being trained, what kind of biases are being programmed into the model, and how and when to start and stop collecting data to build bigger and better A.I. models.  Blend It Up: As we move further into the fourth industrial revolution, we are beginning to see more blending of virtual, digital, and physical experiences. Conversational technology will begin to follow us into physical stores and A.I., along with more targeting-types of technology, will be used in and out of stores.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, CEO at Mission.org. Today we have Alex Spinelli joining the show. He's the CTO at LivePerson. Alex, welcome.Alex:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation.Stephanie:Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on. So I was looking through your background. And I was hoping we could kind of start with your days at Alexa, because I feel like there's probably a lot of good juicy stories there and I want to hear a bit about what was your role there? What did you do there? And then we can jump into the big topic around AI and your current product?Alex:Sure, sure. I led what we call the Alexa OS. And what that was, or is today, is really the core software platform that powers the Alexa experience, the brain. It included things like personalization, speaker recognition, so Alexa knows who's talking to her. And then all of the APIs and technologies, dialogue management, they really power the whole experience and allowed both internal developers at Amazon and skill builders, so skills are like apps for Alexa, to go and build those experiences. So it was really the cloud operating system for Alexa.Stephanie:So what drew you to that field and industry?Alex:Yeah, so I've always been pretty connected to AI, natural language, even going back to, I have a lot of roots in news, something I was pretty passionate about, in news technology. So at Thomson Reuters, for example, where I lead technology for news, both for real time news, algorithmic trading, and then also all the Reuters news properties and journalists, the tools that journalists use, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how do people consume information, how they read information, and how can digital and computers really help us find the most important things, gain insight from information, gain insight from data.Alex:So then I kind of took a little bit of a hiatus from news, and when I joined Amazon, I was leading search. So the whole experience for browsing and discovering the right product for you, and trying to optimize that, make it easier. And one of the things that was really interesting is, I started to see the limitations of these very flat experiences, search pages, web pages and apps. And people started to try to have a conversation with Amazon search. So they'd ask questions in search, is this product compatible with this one? What's the best gift for my daughter who's graduating high school? And all these interesting questions, and the experience often fell down. So we actually started looking at what we called query understanding and natural search and all these interesting things where we wanted to help people get answers to their questions and have a dialogue with the search experience.Alex:And I thought it was pretty hard. In the sort of traditional, I put in a query, I get a set of results, that interface just didn't work really well. Alexa at the time was just kind of quirky little device that was just launching at Amazon very early days, I actually had one, I was part of the early beta testing. And I said, "God, I want to be part of that. That actually is starting to recreate the way we're going to interact with our digital lives and we're going to use natural language. And I guess the rest is history. I think when I joined there was 20 or 30 people in the team. And again, it was this quirky little device that people were like, "What the hell is this thing? Is this going to be big?" And yeah, in six months, we sold millions of devices, and I was growing a team, and we were adding all kinds of new features and capabilities. And it was pretty much a rocket ship, which was pretty fun.Stephanie:That's awesome. I have Alexas throughout the house. I've always wondered though, how to get past that hurdle of, like when you're talking with someone, you are very free flowing and you'll ask any kind of questions. And I feel like oftentimes, with Alexa or any speaker that you would talk into, you're like, "Ah, ah, what can I ask? I don't know what to say. I don't know how to phrase it." And it feels like there's still a bit of a hurdle with a lot of conversational speakers to get past the getting you help kind of with anything, and being able to query things in a million different ways, so that you're not like me, where you're just like, "And I'm stumped and now I'm just going to open up the app on my phone and resort to the old way of doing things."Alex:Yes. So it's interesting, because that same challenge is what actually led me to LivePerson. So when I met my current boss, he was explaining what LivePerson was doing, which was really a messaging platform for customer service and sales. And he said, "Listen, we're really interested in taking things to the next level with AI." And my first response was, "I'm good. I'm at the hottest product on the planet." And Rob and I had known each other for years from New York and we had conversations earlier. I said, "I'm good."Alex:He said, "Well listen, there's an opportunity to take what you're doing at Amazon, creating these natural experiences, but actually democratize it and do it for companies all around the world, large and small, and really help consumers interact in a new way." And it kind of stuck with me. And I started, we had more and more conversations, and I ended up joining. And I think the key differentiation that you're seeing is, I think the smart speakers in that whole space, they aren very transactional, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:They've kind of started to center around entertainment, home entertainment, smart home. And they are still fundamentally very, very, I ask for something, I get the result, I ask for something, I get the result. And what we're trying to do here, because we're working for all different businesses and companies, is allow you to have a full-fledged conversation to build a relationship with the things that are important to you in your life, your bank, your healthcare company, your insurance company — Industries that tech and AI have tended to ignore, like, "Those are big, boring, you can't change them." And I think the problem is we've kind of leaned into these proxies of relationship building, apps, well, you can't build a... You and I are having a conversation. I didn't send you the A.L.E.X. app and say, "Here, you can get any answer to any question, you can click and browse and tap and search, and you'll get..."Alex:You didn't send me your app. We're having a dialogue and a conversation. What's crazy is businesses have put the app, they've actually done that crazy thing. They've said, "Oh, no, don't talk to us. Don't have a conversation with us here, use our app, use our website." And what we want to do is actually do exactly what you described, have that fluid conversation, build a real relationship. And the key for us, and this is where I think the smart speakers fall down, is humans have to be involved as well. So you can't get stuck. The AI is not going to be able to solve every dialogue.Alex:So the way we look at the world is the AI as a kind of concierge in many ways, and begins and initiates the dialogue and conversation for simple things like play music, do this, do that, AI can do it. But then when you really need to have a more meaningful conversation, we want to connect you with the right person. And Alexa can't do that, because just the scale wouldn't work. It's just for Amazon, where I think when you start thinking about democratizing AI, we can actually start to do that and make it a useful tool, not just for the consumer, but also for the employees of the business.Stephanie:Yep. I mean, now it seems like it's the perfect time too, because I think through the past five years or so, and it seems like we've kind of gone through a period where everything had to be optimized, you don't want to have support centers, you've got bots everywhere, you can do drop shipping now, you don't need brands, you don't need... Just white label products, we went through this phase, and now we're kind of coming out on the other side where people are like, "I don't really want to talk just to a bot, I want to talk to a person. If I instantly want to call, I want to be able to have someone there. And it seems like now consumers' expectations have changed where it's like we're a little bit there, we were getting used to just, "Okay, I'll just talk to the chat and see if it fixes it." And now it seems like expectations are so much higher than they even were just a couple years ago.Alex:I think part of that is this digital was growing due to convenience, right?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:We were buying large bulk things. We were buying simple things. We were buying more toothpaste, more batteries, more this, more that. And as we started to need to use digital, and now in the pandemic, obviously, need to, have to, no other way, for all the things in our life. Yeah, we want to actually connect those things to values, our values, right? So the brands matter. The business matters, what does that brand stand for? What are the values that they stand behind? So I do think you're right, I think the need for developing a real relationship is important.Alex:And if you look at, actually it's interesting, banks, telcos, all these kind of big, stodgy, old businesses, or at least we used to think of them that way, or kind of were perceived that way, they kind of lost their differentiation, right? A banking app is a banking app is a banking app, they all look the same, feel the same, act the same. But not all banks are the same, they have different values, they have different missions.Alex:And without being able to talk and have a conversation, you don't get to connect your values to where you're putting your money. So I think that's the shift. I think people now care. They're spending all their dollars in the digital world, by and large. Even the restaurants, who's delivering? Is it Postmates? Is it Uber? Is it Grubhub? It matters. We want to support the right business who has the values that we share. So yeah, I think it's really important. A connection is super important.Stephanie:Yep. I also think a lot about retail. A lot of people probably do miss those experiences of going in stores and having someone there to ask questions to, and now that just needs to be mimicked more in the digital space where people are like, "Well, I can't," or maybe they can start to now, but for a while there, you couldn't go in and have your normal conversations and ask where things were. I mean, I go all the time, and I'll be like, "What kind of wine do you like? Just tell me what you like. I'll buy whatever you tell me because I don't know." And I miss that. And I was looking for that. But oftentimes it was lacking in the digital world. So-Alex:Yeah, so I think developing the tools to allow the... Brands are made of people, and enabling people to actually come through the digital world and connect is exactly what you're saying. Yeah, we thrive that human experience. I mean, we desire that human experience.Stephanie:Yeah. So tell me a little bit deeper about what is LivePerson? Because I'm hearing it is like it's essentially conversational AI for any industry, it's not just focused on commerce, it can be banking, it can be anywhere, is that the right way to think about it? Or maybe I'll let you describe it better.Alex:Yeah, so at our core, at our roots, it's a set of tools, technologies, platforms, that enable you as a business to actually have conversations with your customers through messaging channels. So this is the way we've all started to interact with one another. My daughter and I don't talk on the phone as much, it's all messaging, but I can talk to her all day long, right? Because it's asynchronous, it's on my time, it's on her time, she can be in class, I can be in this meeting, we can start a conversation and continue it. So the core offering is letting businesses do that. So giving those interactions back to the consumer on their schedule. And then we start to layer on a lot of intelligence.Alex:So a lot of those conversations can be led by an AI to gather information, to do the simple things, to actually help you with, what's your name, what's your account number, what's your size, reset my password, pay my bill, lots of things that really become kind of very rote. And then you start to really get more and more advanced in enabling you to shop, enabling you to buy, enabling you to transact. And the whole platform lets you never get stuck. So you can have a conversation, it can be part of an automation, you can be looking at a product, you can be asking questions to a bot about the size, color, compatibility, etc. And then when you get stuck, we can actually detect that and route you immediately to a person, a real human being that can help you. And we call that the tango. So it's this-Stephanie:I like that.Alex:... beautiful dance that allows us to go back and forth. And that's really, I think, where we excel. And then just from a technical perspective, we wrap all of that with a set of analytics and tools that even if you're a small business, you can use to look at the health of those conversations, how's it going? Is it making you money? Is it costing you more? How's your customer satisfaction? And those kinds of things. So it's a pretty full suite of tools to build a new kind of customer experience.Stephanie:That's awesome. So what kind of results do you see? Especially around commerce, when it comes to, like you said, you're doing the tango, you're sending them over to a customer service person. What would you see, otherwise? I'm sure losing that customer and not converting to a sale, are there any metrics that you guys have that you can share?Alex:Yeah, so it definitely is industry dependent and customer dependent. And we tend not to share direct customer numbers. But this is why I joined, the results are crazy. And so when Rob and I were talking about me joining LivePerson, he said that, "We're kind of onto something where we see costs go down, customer satisfaction go up, NPS go up, conversion rates go up, and agent turnover, or sales agent turnover go down." And I said, "There's no way all those metrics can be moving in the positive direction." Usually, there's trade offs. But right now, that's what we're seeing.Alex:So we do see conversion rates for conversations to be often double digit percentages better than experiences that didn't have. So if you were interacting in an app or a website, and we detect that you might be stuck, you might be jumping back and forth between pages, we'll actually offer like, "Hey, it looks like you might be having... Do you have a question? Do you have a problem?" And then we'll have that dialogue and that conversation.Alex:And that might be a tangoed conversation mixed and matched between an AI and a human. And we see conversion rates of those dialogues, again, double digit percent. There's a large big box retailer whose conversion rates typically exceed over 15% when a conversation is initiated. And a typical conversion rate on web shopping is single digits, mid to 5%, 6%. So significant increases when you actually connect and have a dialogue are pretty common for us.Stephanie:Wow, that's cool. So if I'm a brand-Alex:Yeah, it's pretty powerful.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, it sounds amazing. It sounds like, why wouldn't someone use something like this? If I'm a brand, and I'm thinking about setting this up, would you be tapping into my customer support people who are trained my way and then you're like, you train the AI, you got the questions in there, the answers, you kind of map all that out, you've got your database, and then you're constantly learning, I'm assuming, from what people are saying and what's actually helpful. And then, when you go into the tango mode, it goes over to your customer service people, or how does that work?Alex:So our tooling, mostly, is used directly by the brand. So you're a brand, our technology sits inside, I mean it's SaaS base technology, but it sits inside your contact center. Actually, the way we typically will train AI, it's actually pretty cool, you have human conversations first, and you don't need many. So you actually start to have human to human conversations. And then just in a few weeks, we can actually collect enough data to go and build the best intents. So intent is, as you're having a natural language discussion and an AI is detecting what you need. So an intent is the thing that you want, I want to pay a bill, I want to buy that product. Is this product compatible? Does this come with batteries? Whatever have you. Those are all intents.Alex:So those intents are basically derived from your real customer conversations. So the accuracy ends up being very high. And we've actually built the whole series of proprietary data models that are very industry specific. So in retail, in airlines, in banking, in insurance, we can actually have some really high accurate recognition. And again, those intents can be recognized for human conversations, so that we can tell the agent exactly what's going on and what this person needs. And then they're also used to go and build those AI driven experiences.Alex:And the goal is, can we take all the mundane repeatable stuff away from the agents? So the agents are really closing the sale, they're really helping tough problems. And this is why you see agent satisfaction go up, because they're not doing the rote, same, same, same, same conversations, all that's done by the AI. And then the agents actually having a kind of much more high bandwidth interaction.Stephanie:Like doing the creative work, where they can think and solve- [crosstalk]Alex:Exactly.Stephanie:... problems. And I mean, I think it comes back to, for a while there, everyone's like, "AI is going to take our jobs." It's like, "No, it's augmenting your jobs. And it's doing the things that you probably don't want to do anyways. But now you just get to work on higher level things," I would think.Alex:We do see that. And it's interesting, we see the wait times... So rather than waiting for 30 minutes, you actually wait for very little time. And then that agent can actually spend the time and energy to have a, just like you said, a much more creative high bandwidth conversation. So we don't see this, "Yeah, take..." It's changing jobs, it's augmenting jobs, it does require some new training, for sure. But at least right now, it's not this job killer, it actually opens up the world for new jobs. We actually are converting agents to data annotators.Alex:So agents in real time can actually go and label conversations and data to improve the AI. So it's actually advancing their roles in some ways. Again, I'm not going to be naïve, there will come a time where automation and those kinds of things do impact jobs at scale. I think we as responsible business people need to think about what's the next thing, right? And what's the next set of opportunities. So I'm hopeful in general, we are pretty hopeful and positive on where we can get to, but I think we have to kind of wade in very open eyed and make sure we do the right thing as we go forward.Stephanie:Yeah, so when thinking about doing the right thing, I think it'd be good to get a little lay of the land of the AI field in general, because I feel like it's had a pretty bumpy couple of years, just I mean, so many headlines were made around unintended consequences of using AI models, labeling things incorrectly. There's just been a lot out there. So what does it look like now? And especially in the world of commerce, how do we think about, where is AI even being utilized properly, or misused? And where could it be in a couple years? Or where should it be?Alex:The biggest challenge with AI is bias. And I'll explain what that means. So some of the bias is deliberate, some is not deliberate, or intentional and unintentional. So AI is only as good as the data. So what AI is, at the end of the day, it's a tool that allows you to look at lots and lots of data, examples. And then you build a model, mathematical model, statistical model, that makes certain assumptions based on the examples. And so if you were trying to make an AI service that would recognize oranges, this is when I used to meet people in person at South by Southwest to give a talk, I put this big, gnarly looking orange on the screen. It was not orange, it was mostly white and moldy and green. And I'd asked the audience, "Who knows what this is?" And 95% of people would raise their hand, I'd say, "What is it?"Alex:And everyone knew it was an orange. No one saw an orange [inaudible] anything like that. Unless you went on vacation and left an orange on your counter for like three weeks, then you maybe have seen an orange like that. But everyone instantly recognized it, right? So really what's happening is very similar to AI, you've seen thousands of oranges in your life. So there's a bunch of features of an orange, little dimples, the skin, the [inaudible] possible colors, it's round. And your brain immediately matched that image to this archetype of an orange, even though you've never seen an orange that looks like that. That's really what AI is doing. So if you have a bad data set, if you showed a young kid, many, many different images of things that weren't oranges, but you told them it was an orange, right?Alex:When that image would pop, they might not recognize it, they might not be able to tell what it was, or they might misrecognize something else and call it an orange. So the data under AI can inherently have bias by where we collect it from. So if we're trying to collect data to recognize a certain type of person, or a certain type of behavior, or a certain type of language, if we don't have a representative data set from the right populations, the AI is going to be biased, it's going to be biased based on that data set. Or if humans label that data, and those humans come from a certain one kind of homogenous background, they might label the data with their own biases. Again, that could be unintentional, but everyone brings their own unconscious biases with them.Alex:Or lastly, engineers, when they build AI models have their own biases, too. They think certain things are important and other things are unimportant. Simple kind of innocuous examples, if you're building a trading system, and you thought the weather really had an importance on stock prices, so that engineer would build weather as being a heavily weighted variable, that's a bias. So the key actually is recognizing all the ways that biases can creep in and creating some standards, and then really having the tools and process in your company to actually recognize those, and ask the question, and make sure that you're doing all the things that you need to do to eliminate that. That bias is what we've seen in some of these horror stories around AI.Alex:And it was kind of rushing headlong into it and not really thinking deeply about it. So there's actually some great organizations that... We actually took the EqualAI pledge as a company. So there's a nonprofit called EqualAI, that is working with industries to try to eliminate bias in AI. Or I should probably rephrase, not eliminate, but really try to mitigate. I don't know if we'll ever be able to fully mitigate-Stephanie:Or eliminate.Alex:Eliminate, sorry, yep. It's just super important, and it's actually the right thing. It's good for your business. It's good for your employees, it's just something we have to do, ethical use of any new powerful tool, no matter what it is, you have to actually consider those things. So I think that's the key challenge right now. And I think we're still in the early, early days of really grappling with it.Stephanie:Yeah, I mean, it seems like too, right now, a lot of models will have to be thrown away because they were all trained on a set of consumers that are still there, but now there's all these new consumers who's come on the market that were never shopping online before, never doing their grocery shopping online. And we had a really good guest from Stitch Fix, she was the VP of data science there. And she was like, the way that the older generation, who's now trying out Stitch Fix, wants to talk with us is very different than how we were talking with millennials. And so you have to start rethinking about, do I keep my model and adjust it? Do I just throw it out and start over? And it seems like a tricky point now, because you just had this big inflow of new consumers that you never really were talking with before last year.Alex:Yeah, I have a 14-year old. And it's been an interesting journey as most of his communication has really moved online, and the words and terminology and no cap and sus and all these funny terms. They need to be built in to model. So your VP at Stitch Fix is 100% correct. And we need to go and deal with that. And I don't know if it's about throwing away, I think it's more about augmenting and building on top of. The good news is the influx is a big number of people coming, and those large numbers can actually improve the models pretty quickly, if the number that you're starting with was smaller. But it's something we actually, because we live and breathe natural language, we actually have to stay on top of really, really regularly. And yeah, this is going to be the perennial challenge. This is where actually that, remember I talked about I'm transforming agent roles?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Alex:So one of the things that we've looked at and we've just actually released this, it's pretty cool, is the agents, as they're having conversations, can label the intents and they can actually improve intents, and they can actually retag intents and all this kind of stuff. And so we believe, and this is where I think we are changing roles, not eliminating, the agents know your products, they know your language, they know the markets you're operating in, they talk to your customers every day, and they're the ones that are going to be best positioned to kind of add and augment those models, so it's actually really important to have them as part of that process.Stephanie:Oh, that's really interesting, that they can do that now. And I could see it being really helpful too, because I have heard that oftentimes, models can also, like you said, train themselves and turn into a black box where it's like they keep ingesting the wrong data, wrong data, and then you build up maybe algorithms that, I remember at certain companies I used to work at, you kind of didn't know what was in there, at a certain point, you're like, "I don't know how it's working. I don't know why it's working this way." How much data do you need? Is there ever a point where you're like, "That's enough, let's stop. Only collect it this many times." Because right now, it feels like we're in a world of like, just get as much as you can and ingest as much as you can. Which seems like it could maybe have unintended consequences.Alex:Agreed. But explainability is still a big problem with AI. So there's a startup for folks out there listening, create some technology that offers introspection and explainability to large machine learn models. It's not a solved problem. And I don't have a good answer, actually, when do you have enough, when don't you have enough? I think you need to constantly benchmark, constantly look at your accuracy, and have all the protections in place that you are looking for that bias, you are looking for those negative consequences. And that's hard work. That's not like putting some technology gaps in place and a threshold, that's really having a dialogue internally, asking the questions, turning over rocks, what could be the negative consequences here? It's kind of active management right now, and it really needs to be baked into your kind of culture, that it's something that you focus on.Stephanie:Yeah, definitely agree there. So what kind of opportunities do you see? Where do you think conversational commerce should be in the next one to three years? Or what do you think is going to start happening?Alex:So I think the big opportunity right now is actually the topic of our chat is more commerce, like real shopping, real purchasing, real buying, I think conversational commerce, primarily over the last number of years, has been sort of sat in that care, support, follow up space. And now because digital is a necessity, not a convenience, we're starting to see, like I said before, all the little breakage and the flat experiences. So I think the big opportunities are around how can we really help people discover?Alex:So discovery is really hard. With Alexa, for example, you don't know what Alexa can do and can't do, and those kinds of [inaudible]. Discovery is that still a big challenge. Huge opportunity there. It's how do you stitch conversations together with discovery? And to me, that's all about actually modeling the behaviors that we would have in real life. So we're going to go back to stores, we're going to go back to malls, they're going to be changed up, they're going to be very different. I think we're going to see conversations in the digital world follow us in and try to fill in the gaps and start to really help us in a much more kind of blended way. So there's something called the Fourth Industrial Revolution, if you really want to geek out. It's this-Stephanie:Oh, yeah, we've talked about this before-Alex:Oh, cool. Yeah.Stephanie:... on a lot of our other podcasts.Alex:It's this blending of the virtual and physical. Yeah. So I think the big opportunities are in real commerce, and how do we start to blend the physical and the virtual? So we see, for example, especially during COVID, blending conversations with curbside pickup, I'm ready, I'm here, are you here? I want to add this, can you get me... So really trying to fill in all those gaps in those interactions and exchanges. So I think that's where a lot of the kind of next stage plays, is we're going to see conversations start to power a lot more of our transactions and commercial activities, and starting to blend together that physical and virtual, that's where we're spending a lot of our time.Stephanie:That's cool. I mean, so what kind of tech advancements are needed, because I'm even thinking about that Fourth Industrial Revolution and blending that, and okay, if you're walking to a store, I mean, I know there was a while there where store owners were hesitant to even install the beacons so that you would know who's coming in your store. And there was a lot of hangups when it came to retail that didn't allow the digital world to interact with them, because you had to have hardware infrastructure changes, there was a lot needed there. So what kind of things are needed for that advancement to take place?Alex:Yeah, well, a bunch of things. I mean, these things have basically become supercomputers, right? These are more powerful than even the biggest machines 10, 15 years ago. So they're going to take on more and more of the processing. I think image recognition, big space. And then I think a lot of that starts to wrap together the privacy concerns, so giving control back to the consumer about what data I share and when based on my needs and what I want to do. So that's where I think you're going to see a lot of technology advancement is, yes, beacons. Yes, image recognition. Yes, the kind of blending of conversations and in person and then live and all these kinds of things and trying to, like I said, stitch that experience together.Alex:But if I were, again, entrepreneurs out there and technology companies, I would look at those for sure, but I think we also have this kind of renewed interest in privacy and what targeting is. And we can do a whole soapbox, if you want, on the evils of free social media and the hyper targeting, I think there needs to be legislation to almost eliminate some of that, because what we've allowed companies to do is extreme content and extreme information can find audiences now, because the audience is basically free, they just [inaudible]. So I think trying to really understand who I share my data with, why I share my data with, and I'm sharing it only for the purpose that I want, is another whole area of technology that we need to focus on. These are the things at least we're working on, that we feel pretty passionate about.Alex:And then in terms of very specific technologies, I think the combination of conversations with location and image recognition, are going to start to be really interesting, right? Because I'm going to be looking at something, I want to verify something, I want to validate something with a conversation and a dialogue. And a lot of it's going to be dependent about where I am. So we're trying to figure out how those intersect in the right way.Stephanie:Yeah. How do you approach it in a way that garners trust from the consumer? Because I feel like there's been a lot of times, even me personally, if I know I'm talking to a computer, I'm like, "Nope, I'm good." Because I've had so many bad experiences, or I've mentioned it a couple times, you call in to like Verizon, it's like... Pretending to type, like... And you're like, "This is so fake, and I don't like this." And then they can't even help me either. So how do you go about it in a way that informs the person that you're not really talking to a person right now, but still keeps them incentivized to want to try and work that method, if they've kind of been burned in the past?Alex:I think there's two topics there. One, both of them, we have pretty strong opinions about. First, an AI should always identify itself as AI and not try to pretend it's a human. I actually think we'll see legislation on that. Because I think it's bad. And I think a couple of things, even their practical issues with it too, you speak differently than you do to human than you do to an AI or a bot. And it's better if you know for everybody, it's actually better even for the AI builder to know that you know because the model is going to be different, interestingly. So there's actually a real practical reason. But I think there's a lot of ethical reasons, is I should know who I'm speaking to, and what I'm speaking to. That's one.Alex:Two, I think that the gatekeepers, the Facebooks of the world, that want to kind of screen everyone and operate as these Uber, Uber marketplaces that they control the traffic flow, I think we as consumers are going to start to have very negative... I mean, we've started in terms of perception. But I think there's going to be a continued backlash on that. And I think you want to know that if you're into dealing with Verizon, you want to deal with Verizon, you want to deal with this company, you want to deal directly with that company. So, again, we feel really strongly about that, we don't sell data, we work on behalf of the brand, there's no targeting, there's no selling data, there's no advertising.Alex:So I think we're going to see a return to kind of truer commercial relationships. Now, we've benefited, we've gotten all this free stuff by selling our behaviors, we don't sell our data, by the way, we sell our behaviors, right? We sell behavioral changes to Facebooks and Googles of the world. And I think we're going to stop doing that. And I think we have to stop, we have to pay for the things that would give us value, and then we know what we're paying for and we understand how our data is going to be used. And I think that's really, really important. And I think we're going to see a shift over the next year or two, for sure. For sure, in terms of what people want.Stephanie:Yeah, so a lot of brands are probably hearing this and are nervous because of all the changes that are happening with Facebook and privacy rules. And many of them have been very reliant on search ads and Facebook. So what do you see customer acquisition looking like if you kind of can't rely or maybe shouldn't rely on those channels, and now people are maybe opting out of sharing all their data, even though it's still pretty hard to opt out. It's like, you either accept it or [crosstalk] look at a website. Like, "Okay, I guess I'll just accept." But how do you see it working for brands where it's like, "Well, most of my traffic was coming from Facebook. And now that's not really the world we're going to be living in." Is that kind of targeting and traffic and customer acquisition?Alex:Yeah, I mean, there's still going to be these aggregate places, I think they're not going to be eliminated. So our view is moving from a stream and target the stuff at me to enabling people to express their desires, their intents. And then businesses honestly, basically, applying for, "Hey, here's something that based on what you've asked for, we may have." And so I think the user acquisition, I don't have the answer to, if I did, I'd probably start that company, or we would be doing it here at LivePerson, but I think that there will be kind of a flipping the model on its head a bit, right?Alex:So rather than this idea of, I can have some type of content, because I think the ills that we've seen have come from this model, I can have some kind of content, I want to get 50,000 people for a very, very, very low cost, I can go and target those 50,000 people, who don't know about me and who I think have a proclivity to me, and I can go get them. So that was good for small business in some ways, right?Stephanie:Yeah.Alex:You can actually build businesses online. It's bad for lots of other reasons. It's also as a consumer, that you're being introduced to something that... Like the whole serendipity introduction is neat when you're on Etsy, because you know what it is [inaudible], it's not neat when it could be anything. So I think we're going to start to ask consumers to express their needs, and like, what do you want? What are you looking for? Can you define kind of your ecosystem of things that you like and appreciate? And then we're going to ask your permission to actually bring others too. And you're going to set standards, like, "I really only want to hear from companies that have certain social stances, or I only want to hear from companies that have certain environmental stances."Alex:So I think it's really all about empowering the consumer to kind of define, it's a little more work, and I think that's the thing that's going to be interesting to see. Because I think we as consumers have gotten very lazy, it's just like, "I want to scroll and you're going to send me stuff." I think we're going to have to be asking consumers for a little bit more work to define those things and tell us more, so that we can give them things that are much more open, honest and transparent.n again, I don't know what the format it's going to look like, right now-Stephanie:I'm thinking of a whole new browser right now. Just need a whole new browser that operates in that way, because right now it's like, where do you get all those ads and everything? It's from your own Chrome, you're on Safari. But it seems like you need a whole new world for it to operate in that way.Alex:So we're actually experimenting with, call it a messenger, but I wouldn't kind of categorize it that way, that it is intent driven. So you define, I'm looking for X, Y and Z, almost think of the kind of anti Alexa in some ways where it's not just this transactional thing, I want to play this music and turn this thing on, it's much more, I'm looking for this, I need this. And you understand the ecosystem of services and providers that actually can come together, all permission based, all about transparency. Early days, kind of experimenting and thinking it through, and talking to a lot of partners and companies also, because I don't think we're alone. I think many, many folks think there needs to be a change here, and we need to figure it out together.Stephanie:Yep. So we've had a debate on the show a couple of times about this whole trend of shopping on the edge, which to me seems like kind of where you guys are headed up, like being able to have conversations kind of wherever you are. How are you thinking about where people are shopping now? Do you see it moving to being on Instagram, being within Facebook Messenger, being on Tik Tok and being able to have those conversations there from the brand and selling on those platforms, and less about driving directly to one single website, or just on Amazon?Alex:So I do think this idea of the destination starts to fade. I do think that brands will be able to speak to you wherever you are, right? Again, I think it needs to be permission based. I think it needs to be based on your intent. But I do think brand... It's funny. I mean, the idea that you don't have a website sounds insane, right? If you're a company, but what was a website 20 years ago? Nobody had a website really. The brand found you where you were, you saw the store, you looked in different magazines, you saw them on different television channels advertise. It was a much more organic process.Alex:And these gatekeepers have become very, very dominant. And again, I think if that changes where we're not willing to give away our behaviors anymore, or sell our behaviors anymore, then I do think you'll start to see brands engage in ways across all the places you live and breathe. Again, should be permission based, for sure. So I do think this shopping on the edge is kind of funny because isn't that where we all did years ago?Stephanie:Yeah, but now we're back. In the digital world though.Alex:Exactly. But that's where we're going to... The Fourth Industrial Revolution kind of back again is like, I think all these things start to blend together and we don't want, we don't want these kind of singular locations and gatekeepers, I think we're going to start to see different properties have different purposes based on what we're in the mood for, what we need. It's interesting, I think the biggest thing that I would leave you with, and leave listeners to, is digital was convenient. It is now a necessity. There's not more meaningful things that can shape change in terms of the format of an experience and the business models. And I don't think we're going to go back, I don't think we're going to go back to what was before, there's going to be something new, and that [inaudible] is what's really going to drive a lot of it. So I think you're going to have to as a brand be where people are.Stephanie:Yeah, which sounds chaotic for me.Alex:And this idea that people are... It sounds chaotic, but I actually think it democratizes things, I actually think it means that we can eliminate some of these gatekeepers who make billions and billions of dollars on our behaviors, which I think would be a good thing in the world.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question and you have 30 seconds or less to answer. Are you ready, Alex?Alex:Sure.Stephanie:All right. First one, what one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Alex:So I'm sorry to repeat, but the fact that digital is now a necessity, I think is going to have one of the biggest impacts, for sure.Stephanie:That's all right. You're allowed to repeat on this show. You can do whatever you want. Let's see, what is something that you believe that many people don't agree with you on?Alex:I'm hopeful. I do a lot of these podcasts, I get a lot of scary questions. I don't go there, you're not going to get me there. I think-Stephanie:[crosstalk]Alex:No. No, you didn't. You didn't. This has been fun and positive, which is great. I really enjoyed it. I'm hopeful about the future, I actually think AI is going to be a powerful tool of change, positive change. I don't think it's going to kill everyone's jobs. I actually think we're going to find new ways to make it augment and enhance us in ways we don't even expect. So I guess in the AI space, in Big Tech space, I spend a lot of time talking, I hear a lot of fear and the sky is falling. And I guess I don't think that way. I think I'm pretty uplifted and positive about what the future is to come.Stephanie:I love that. I'm on the same page. Normally-Alex:Good, yeah, I can get that.Stephanie:... [crosstalk] all that stuff. Yeah, you can get us on a space. What's one thing you don't understand today that you wish you did?Alex:I don't understand, and I think about it all the time and debate it all the time, and I'm not going to go all political on you, I don't understand the device of this right now, that we can't find ways to communicate and talk and debate real issues to find solutions. We like to divide. And I'm kind of confused by it, to be honest.Stephanie:Do you ever just look back at your news and media days and be like, "That's the stem of it, a lot of it." Like the targeting and the way articles are written. Oh, man.Alex:Yeah, I don't know. I think it's easy to go blame the media. I'm not saying you're doing that. I don't know. I don't know. Are we at peak Western civilization and there's always a crest in your fall? Maybe, that could be it. And I'm part of that problem, probably. I don't know. But I'm confused by it. It's something- [crosstalk]Stephanie:I'd like to see that change. That would be nice to see, [inaudible] everyone just come together in love, like the yellow debate, in a friendly manner. That would be nice.Alex:Yeah. And I think we'll get through it. So I am still positive about the future, I think. But I'm confused by the current state of it.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. Same. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about? And who would your first guest be?Alex:If I were to have a podcast, it would probably be a little bit far from tech. It would be about how we bring magic back into our lives.Stephanie:Oh, I like that.Alex:Yes.Stephanie:You need the Alex Spinelli show.Alex:A little journey I'm on. Yeah, the little journey I'm on. I started going to Burning Man a number of years ago, and there's just an infectiousness of [inaudible] in wonder and magic and art, and dancing in the desert, into your life. And I think more people need to dance in the desert at sunrise.Stephanie:I love that. That's great. All right. And then the last thing, what's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Alex:The nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. I have a pretty amazing group of friends and family, so I got a lot of nice things done for me.Stephanie:You're a lucky dude.Alex:I am lucky. I really do appreciate it. I think my wife marrying me is probably the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me. It changed my life and it's been wonderful.Stephanie:Go her.Alex:She's amazing.Stephanie:We've had a couple of guys say that on the show, which is so sweet. I'm always like, "I hope your wife listens to this then."Alex:I'm lucky. She's amazing.Stephanie:That's awesome. Well, Alex, it's been such a pleasure having you on. Yeah, I love the conversation. Where can people find out more about you and LivePerson?Alex:Yeah, I think you start on liveperson.com. And there's plenty on me on LinkedIn and our various social media. So I look forward to it.Stephanie:That sounds great. Thanks so much.Alex:Yeah. You got it. Thank you.

In this episode I'm answering listener questions…ask me anything! The questions I answer in this episode are: What kind of laptop to you use? —Ellen What was the coding school that rejected you in episode 48? —Karl Do you think you'd ever start a new podcast, maybe focusing more on financial independence with a few updates on your coding? —Erica What life is like in general for someone living abroad? Do you ever get home sick or was it easy to meet new people? —Erica What was/has been your favorite part of living abroad? Would you like to make the move permanent or just a few years? —Erica Any podcast recommendations? I know you mentioned Second Career Devs and I'm now a big fan of that. Not even just coding ones, but what are some others you enjoy? And what made you start the podcast vs just blogging? —Erica What is your perception of the job market for entry level frontend web development jobs? —Alex It's my current plan to build a solid portfolio and apply for jobs online, but I wonder if that route has become so competitive that it's not a realistic way to land a job anymore. As you said, it's so saturated on Upwork that they turned you down(?!) —Alex I know that meet-ups/networking is important, but it's hard to prioritize that stuff since it would take up a lot of time that I could use to work on my coding skills. How do you decide how to prioritize these two aspects of the job hunting process? —Alex In pursuing financial independence, for us self supporting folk, is coding the best route? Also, is there any threshold to transition completely to a self learning or school route or just to keep at it an hour or so a day? —Krista If you had $1000 to spend, what would be your top resources? I have tried Udemy (Colt Steele and others), FCC, Learn XYZ the Hard Way, Treehouse, Udacity, community college, and am struggling with information overload… —Krista It seems that web dev, computer science, mobile, data, and security are really all their own things. Is it best to be a generalist or only focus on one? —Krista Any idea on how long to really be job ready at the hour plus a day? Is it really like Gladwell's 10,000 hours or Norvig's 10 years? —Krista With limited time, is it best to do tutorials/learn or just go build? —Krista This episode was originally published 26 June, 2018.

GEORGE:   All right, guys. Welcome back to another episode of the did George show, where I make up intros off the top of my head, because people are amazing and I'm stoked to have them. And today's guest is somebody that I've wanted to interview for probably five years, except I didn't have a podcast nor reason to talk to him.And then we became best friends overnight. And so I'm excited beyond belief to have somebody that I look up to. I've considered a mentor through his teachings and what he's done. He stands for absolutely everything that is ethical entrepreneurship, caring about human beings, making a difference, building legacy businesses, and tolerance absolute zero bullshit will doing any of it. Well, Also leading by example, you know, that magic thing that we don't see a lot of on the internet where it's do, as I say, not as I do, because I don't want you to see what I do. Well, Alex Charfen is here today, CEO Charfen. He has built massively successful companies, navigated some of the biggest downturns of our world and my lifetime, and always come out on top with a smile on his face, grounded in the values that are important to him, his family, and leads by example.And so without further ado, Alex, welcome to the show. ALEX:   Thanks George. That was one of the best intros I've ever gotten. And that was awesome. GEORGE:   I feel like M and M and eight mile on Sunday mornings at 8:00 AM before I have my coffeeALEX:  I want that on my phone so I can play it each morning. Before I start workingGEORGE:   We'll send you the audio clip and then we can do it like the rock used to do as alarm codes, right? Like get up. And he yells at you. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm super, super excited to have you, man. I'm honored. This has been a long time coming and before we get into the deep, deep, deep stuff for the show, whatever, you know, navigating turns, we're going to end up in today. The first question that I always ask everybody to set context, the humanizes, and you have a lot of these, so feel free to take creative freedom with this one.What is the biggest mistake that you've ever made in business? And what was the lesson that you took away from  it?ALEX: That's like trying to like walk into an Amazon warehouse and say, which is the best box. Cause there's so many options. You know, George when I consider mistakes in business, so many of them, I don't look at them as mistakes anymore because. I've learned from them to find where I am now.I feel like almost every mistake, every huge challenge that I created has, has actually taught me something and moved me forward. And I think the one place where I would say that. That there were actual mistakes that I regret. And, and, and here's why I regret them. I don't regret the learning from them, but the mistakes that I made were with people when I was younger, especially there was a tremendous amount of collateral damage and the businesses that I ran. I was one of those people, not any more or not at all anymore, but I was one of those people that if I was going to separate with somebody, I actually had to break them, break the relations.I had to make it okay with me.  I had to make it so that it was so horrible that like we can never talk again. And when I look back at some of the separations that I had where people were either terminated or left, the companies that I ran, I feel like those are some of the biggest, the mistakes I made.And, and, you know, if I could go back and do it over again? I would, I would, you know, I would tell my younger self that you don't have to completely destroy a relationship to put it on pause. And you don't know, I have to completely demonize somebody to have them leave your company. Like those are all natural things that happened in the world.And  today with contrast,when somebody leaves our organization now, or when somebody decides to go to another opportunity, doesn't happen often anymore. But when it does. It's totally different. You know, I've actually, I've, I've led several several employess because of COVID and some other reasons we've actually let a few people go.And it's interesting cause I've remained connected with them. We connect every once in a while, you know, we talk. And so having that experience of being able to work with somebody and then continue the relationship, even though it's no longer a working relationship, it has been extraordinary. And when I was young, I did not even allow space for that. And I think that was, this longterm mistake, honestly, that comes from a childhood of trauma and a childhood of bullying and a childhood of really challenging relationships where I didn't understand how to navigate them. And I brought that forward into my business career. That's the biggest reason.GEORGE: And there's so much gold in there. This is why we get along. So for some context guys, when Alex and I reconnected, we got on zoom for a half an hour and then were like, we need an hour that we need three hours. Now let's just keep talking all day every day because I was like, I was like, sorry, Katie, you can have them back now. I'm like, I'm getting my very much dopamine hit and I'm not gonna deny this, that I wanted this. Like, this was very much my drug today. And I'm okay with this one, right? This is one of those, like, I can go seek it as I need, you know, Alex, one of the things that I think is so imperative and we talked about this, but you and I have so many similarities in this.Is that in the beginning, right? Is this collateral damage? Right? I got feedback that there were trails of dead bodies behind every success. And there were two sides of it for me that were tough. Number one is I never celebrated, right. There was no space because it was never good enough. Right. And so that took from everybody and made it.And then really, I think, as an entrepreneur and a self-aware entrepreneur, and you talk about this as like evolutionary hunters and the way that you do this, I think it was your EPT, your entrepreneurial personality types. You know, one of the things that I think is so amazing as entrepreneurs is that  we're driven for change.We want things to be better, but I think what the razors edges or the tight rope that we like to ride a unicycle down from is to come from when we go down the middle. And there's that part of us as entrepreneurs we're down there, the middle, all the one side was insecurity ego. It doesn't matter.It's never enough I'll sacrifice anything and then we've spent our life at this point, working towards self-awareness. You love, compassion, empathy, relationship, even you just said.I didn't think this was possible a couple of years ago. Like, wait, somebody can leave my organization and be better than when they got there.And we still have a relationship, like can still text. We can talk, right? Like this isn't, you know, purgatory exile, like we're going back in Mayan culture. So, what are some of the things? Cause you have like five core values at your company. You guys stand for humans. Like you stand for change, you stand for being, but I know that this is prevalent everywhere.And I had one of my mentors at a very young age Allen out.  Alex told me that and I learned this as a Marine, too. Like my job wasn't to keep people underneath me. My job was to get myself fired and get them better than me. And there's a point where. You know, they have to leave the coop and they have to grow.But I think the biggest distinction is it was talked about in there world, but really it's our, our growth as a human, like on our side, like the self-awareness side. So what are some of the things that you do that you focus on? Like you help companies with operations, with culture, with flow, with team and people like, how do you go about that?And what are some of the things that you keep to keep your keel in the water as you navigate that? ALEX: Oh, man. There's that question, George.GEORGE: So that's the point. Now I can drink my coffee over here and go to town. Yeah. Where did you go? ALEX: George, I think in order to answer that question, I kind of have to take a step back and, and talk about where, where, like, I've come from.If you want to know how things are kept in motion now, I think we have to first draw, contrast as to how things were before. Yes, sir. When I look at when I was younger and well into my twenties I experienced a tremendous amount of trauma and I had the same, like this is, this came up in our, we just had a three day event with 200 companies around the world and it came up this week.I started, I taught, I talk openly about trauma and how it drives us in the present. And I often tell our clients until you are ready to work through your trauma, you are destined to create, or, and you will only continue to create trauma. Cause it's a pattern for people, hurt people. And that's really how it works.You know, when I look at somebody who's causing havoc in the world, what I see as somebody who's severely traumatizedand acting through those things. And so for me, when I was 26 years old, I went through a really severe breakup. I'm 47 now and at the time to do okay. I actually was, um, I was uncomfortable enough that the only time I felt comfortable in it was when I was drinking.The only time I really fell asleep and stayed asleep was when I was. Kind of loaded and I wasn't used to having those feelings like I had when I was younger. I had definitely I,  was no lack of time in bars or drinking and entertaining and doing those things. But I hit this period where it almost became a necessity and not almost it became a necessity and it was severely challenging to go through that.And. My mom was a therapist in California and I was talking to her about it. I had tried cognitive behavioral therapy. I don't know if you've tried this too. You go in like, I don't, I don't want to demonize all cognitive behavioral therapy, but for me, CBT was so hard because you go in, you spill your guts and the person across the room.I see. How does that make you feel? And then you spill your guts more and then they say, I see, how does that make you feel? And then you spend more. And by the third time they say, I see you, how does that make you feel? I actually responded one time to a therapist. It makes me feel like I want to get up, knock you out because you're not helping me.I feel like you're just, this is frustrating. , I feel agitated and yeah. Triggered and all that stuff. And so I stopped doing that. And I remember calling my mom and she said, there'd be called EMDR. And, it's eye movement, desensitization and reprogramming. It'sa very weird sounding therapy, but it's actually amazing.I, you know, George, it's interesting that you were in the military and we, we talked so much about trauma because even back then, when I was 26, I had some friends that had been in the teams. And, they were VR for Navy seals. Yep. It was actually this huge experiment in the military to see if EMDR would help with the offloading of  trauma and return to service.And they were getting incredible results with it. So for me that growth process has been understanding my trauma. Understanding where so much of my reactivity and almost automatic behaviors came from. And, and so much of a processing, what had happened to me has now allowed me to become more present and aware and you know, it's interesting, George.I used to think that I was so present and so aware when I was in my twenties and now I look back and it's like the funniest thing in the world because I was so detached and , not even feeling my feelings and understanding what was going on. I didn't even know how to interpret what was happening.And then I thought I did so much better in my thirties and I'm like, you know, nailed it. And then I look back and I'm like, no, I just had a better understanding, but I was still working through so much of it. And finally, I feel like in about the past 10 years in years, I've gone into another year of really being able to release things and process things and, and work through things.And that's been a combination of a ton of breath  work. Breath work, I think has been one of the most effective things that I've done a tremendous amount of EMDR therapy and, and going back to then as needed, not like just when it's acute, but when I feel stuck or when I feel like I have writing blocks or anything like that.And then, really a lot of self exploration and a lot of and if you wanted to put a layer on all of that, It's process, structure and routine. And it's you say that this is what a day is like the process structure and routine that allows you to grow a business, grow your life, have what you want in your life.But for most of my life, I fought process, structure and routine more than anything else. Oh yeah. I had that, that, that impression that like, as an entrepreneur, What makes you successful is being whatever you want, anytime that you want. And so I held onto that myth, that illusion, that totally illusory place, it does not exist where you can be a successful entrepreneur and just wake up and do whatever the heck you want every day.It doesn't really work. I mean, you might be able to be a yeah, no, , there's not a situation where it works. And so. Um, I think the biggest shift for me has been committing to process, structure and routine, like up to and including even on a Sunday this morning, I got up, did my morning planning, went through my morning routine.Like I do every other day, sat down in a line with my family. It's like now it's an edict. It's not an option anymore. Cause I know that's where my strength. And really that's where my be present and productive and persuasive and influential. That's what it comes from.GEORGE: Totally. There's so much in that And I want to, I want to nail some, so people have heard me talk about EMDR before. Um, but I glance over it.  Cause very rarely am I across from somebody who I'm like, Oh, you too. Right. Like, Oh, I, I remember, like I remember we did CBT and my wife actually walked us out. She was with me cause I was trying to process childhood trauma stacked on military trauma, stacked on battle entrepreneurial trauma.And she's like, this is not going to help you this like ALEX: 70 creative relationshipGEORGE: Oh yeah. Oh you, Oh, you, you re like, I mean, it's like a trauma definition, right? Like you open the book and the generic and it was a picture of every instance of my life. How they all exacerbated each other in different scenes.Yeah, right. Like, yeah. It was like, it was like almost like a storyboard for a movie at this point. AndI remember one EMDR appointment and I came out my wife's like, you're a different person, like one appointment, one appointment. And I think you nailed something too. And I think what's so important, Alex.And this is like the undertone of what you're talking about. And if anybody hasn't caught this yet, this success as an entrepreneur on the outside, comes from the commitment to the work on the inside. A hundred percent and it is a daily and I mean, daily committed practice to come in. And like EMDR for me was two years of, I think once or twice a week.And then it was like a once a year if needed. And now I just texted him and like just texting him, like gets me back into like where I need to go but I think, I think it's so important, like to reach the levels. When we talk about this, the two things that being number one is this commitment to self.Right. And like, it's what you teach now. It's the discipline, the intentionality, the process, the structure, everything that you're doing, but also the awareness of what it really means to be an entrepreneur and what we're doing.  And you hit this and we live in a world right now where it's like, Oh, laptop, lifestyle, and boom, boom, boom.And yeah, you do whatever you want. I'm like, that's not what it's like. That Instagram life is not real. And entrepreneurship is amazing. It is the most freeing, powerful job, you know, whatever business opportunity on the planet. But within that, we also have to create our own containers and structure to make it that efficient.If not, it's just a new form of addiction to hide from the traumas and the pain that we've never worked on. no question. And I think, I think, and for you, like you say, yo, you're in your forties, I'm like, I became aware yesterday of things I was doing that I wasn't aware of. , I think it's this process and awareness, but I think it was like last year, maybe after the birth of my son, where I was like looking at it and I was like, Oh, you mean that?Like my name can't carry everything. And I say something and magically a million dollars appears like, why? Like, I don't understand, like, why didn't my launch crush? Like why don't my Facebook ads work? And nobody else's does, like, why don't they just work? Cause I deserve them to work. Right? Like there was this.There was this thing that like I had to be aware of and process through and eat some humble pie. And so there's so many golden nuggets that you said. Um, and, and the first question I asked you was like, how do you know, operate forward and this point, and you nailed it. But I think one more thing I want to unpack before we even get there is in the very beginning, when I asked you what was the biggest mistake or lesson, you said something so subtle, but so empowering statement to where you are. And you said the challenges I created. Not the challenges that happen to me, not the challenges that somehow magically fell on my plate, like the challenges I created and there's this level of ownership that we do in breath, in work, in life, in modalities that puts us in this situation of awareness and the ability to shift something.But I see a whole lot of time and we both coach entrepreneurs a whole lot of like, I don't know why this happened and this happened and they did this to me and they did this to me and it's like an advocation of responsibility and it was so subtle when you said it, but it's so powerful to hear you talk about it.Can you unpack that a little bit of like the difference between, you know, my business partner failed and walked away versus like I created this challenge.ALEX:   Yeah, no question George. So. Years ago. I read this book. I think I can't remember who it was by, but I think it might've been Mark Victor Hansen. I think it was called the millionaire messenger.And it was a book that you read in two directions. So very interesting book where it had kind of a nonfiction and a fiction book together. I don't remember a ton about that book. I remember on one page, they had this graphic and it was the word responsibility with a line and underneath it blame and then underneath it said live above the line.And I remember that I actually have that on my well now with a couple of other equations that we've created as a company. But that responsibility over blame. I remember when I read it, I saw it and it was so 19. I'm like, no, you can blame. You can still like, yeah, you don't have to take responsibility for everything.And that was a journey that was probably a few years of like really working through that and understanding it. And then I remember one day it just clicked, you know, as honorable the faster we realized that we are for everything and we can take responsibility for everything. The faster we start to actually control our lives, create our destiny and be able to go in the direction that we want.I used to be the same as most people when I was younger and I had my business. You know, 911 happened for about eight weeks before. One of our biggest events when I owned a huge events company in Latin America. And I remember it happening and having the feelings of like, how could this happen to us?How insanely selfish and egotistical was the statement. 911 happened to us. Like, as I say it right now, I actually get kind of sick feeling in my stomach that I ever thought that way. But I remember actually saying it out loud and not even feeling like not feeling the. Body reactions and negative feelings, you should feel of making a statement that egotistical, which in retrospect shows me just how separated I was from my true self, just how detached I was.And as entrepreneurs what we work with our members on is responsibility over blame. Like how do you live in a world where you take responsibility for everything that's going on? And I have people, especially in today's timeframe, say things like, Oh, well, you can't be responsible for COVID.Sure you can be responsible for your reactions. You can be responsible for how you show up. You can be responsible for what you're going to allow and not allow into your mind. You can be responsible for how you lived through this situation. And, you know, I always tell people the bigger, the crisis, the bigger, the opportunity there's going to be more self billionaires made in this timeframe that at any other timeframe in the human history, And anyone who wants to argue that?Just go look, it's all ready. Oh, ready? We're all. We're only six or seven months in and look at the hundreds of billions of dollars of company value that has been added to the companies that we're well positioned and ready to go forward. And I think for us that's one of the things that are not for us, for me.That's one of the things that's really shifted for me is that now, regardless of what it is, I take responsibility and I put this on Facebook the other day. One of the observations that finally got through I've learned so much of what I understand in business and so much of what I know about relationships and how to create momentum as an entrepreneur has been observational.And one of the observations that has become crystal clear over time is that the more successful and entrepreneur. The more quickly, they turn every obstacle into an opportunity. The more quickly they turn every crisis into an opportunity. I've been around people that regardless of what's going on, they're just constantly shifting to housing and opportunity.How is this an opportunity? Most negative thing in their entire life. How can I create something better out of this? How do I grow from this? How do I move from this and that? You know, not that I'm a hundred percent there. I don't think, I don't know that I ever will be, but I'm so much closer to seeing everything as an opportunity.Than I ever was before. And so when Covid hit, I actually had somebody text me after one of my lives. And they're like, Hey man, it sounds like you're hearing the crisis sign. I'm like, Oh dude, that is not the impression I want to give. I'm not sharing it on. But I am fully conscious that this is the biggest opportunity a lot of us have had, and we should admit that to ourselves and get ready for it and go out and change the world because the world needs us now more than it ever  has.GEORGE:   totally.I think too, and you nailed this and, Oh man, there's so much here and you, and I think we might've been separated at birth at this point, which is so. Yeah, no, no, it was, it was like, and for those of you wondering like only like 32 people or so have my phone number and Alex doesn't give his out connected years ago.Never really talked to him. We both realized we both had our numbers in our phones,  totally.I think too, and you nailed this and, Oh man, there's so much here and you, and I think we might've been separated at birth at this point, which is so. Yeah, no, no, it was, it was like, and for those of you wondering like only like 32 people or so have my phone number and Alex doesn't give his out connected years ago.and we were like, okay, there's a reason. And the timing and everything. And what you said, Alex, Uh, it's about the pursuit of turning things into opportunities, not the perfection of what it looks like.And I think as an entrepreneur for me, you know, cause my ego needs some love at this point in this moment. So I'm going to make a statement, you know, because I'm learning so much in this time. But when I think about it, for me, one of the things that I really fell in love with after processing the belief around it was that there is no finish line, but it's what I choose to do every day about it.And. You know, there were parts of COVID like I lost over a million dollars under contract. I lost two companies and 70 grand a month in MRR in basically like 60 days. And I'm like still on paper. I'm in financially. One of the hardest places I've ever been in. And I'm the happiest and clearest I've ever been.And it wasn't an overnight, it was a, I feel like, crap, what am I going to do today? I feel like crap, what am I going to focus on today? And instead of it taking six months or three years, eight years of depression, it took like a week and it was, I feel this way. I acknowledge how I feel. That's not going to change.What am I going to do about it then that created the opportunity for opportunity. Like it created the ability to see the opportunity. Yes. It's like when we sit in these rooms as entrepreneurs, consider it a virtual room of made of Rome, a metaphorical room, whatever you want to call it. I say this all the time, you know, from breath work and the therapy trauma that I've done in the work that I've done in personal defense.And it's like the worst thing you can stay as stock. We are evolutionary creatures. We are supposed to evolve. We are supposed to move forward. And you know, I heard this the other day and it's like, you want to know what anxiety is? It's unused energy move. Yeah. And I was like, Whoa, like I've been doing it for years, but it was this simple thing.But then when I think about the compartment of entrepreneurship, what is anxiety, I'm like it's stagnation in our biggest enemy, which is our brain. It knows our fears. It knows our insecurities. It knows our habits. It knows our addictions. And yet we think we can out convince it that somehow we're going to feel better about it.Where, what you talk about this is how I feel. I'm aware. This is how I feel. Breath gets you there. Cold therapy gets you there. Movement gets you there. Okay. If this is how I feel, I have two choices. I can either succumb to this feeling and surrender and die, or I can acknowledge it, which that this feeling is here.And I can take a step in a different direction. And it's something that like I've been obsessing about, like on a different level of obsession. And it's probably had one of the most profound effects on everything in my life. And, you know, financially to gain will come and it has already, but even outside of that, like the happiness, the joy, and go back to deployments.Like I remember like I'll never forget. I hit some, all I'm about to cry. I hit Somalia. When I was 19 years old, I just turned 20 and I spent 13 months in my life and probably one of the worst places on this planet. And I'll never forget, like, seeing people wrapped in carpets on the side of the road, cause they couldn't afford to throw them out of them, burning dead by.And I was like, I was like, I'm not a tough guy. I want to go home. I didn't have a home to go to, like I left trauma to get there. And like I remember for 13 months I was like, get me out of here. Like I can't be here. I don't know habit. I didn't have that choice. So luckily I found a few people that mentored me and I found waits and I found, you know, certain therapies and things that I could do, but I'm just, I just remembered, like if I say came to any of that, I would have died.Like I would have just died. I would have just stopped moving the whole world crashed and crushed on me and it wouldn't have gotten me anywhere. And it took me a long time to be able to talk about it, some of these things and to process them in for me, what I struggle with sometimes is that like, what I saw is like 1% of what some of my friends saw.Like 1% and I can't even imagine, you know, what that was there, but I think the biggest thing that I always took away from everything, and I thank the Marine Corps for this is like, I wasn't given the chance to stop. I wasn't. It was like, Hey, and like we say this, like, Oh, they don't want you to feel, no, they do.They don't really totally do, but they don't want you to stop. And it's this thing of like this pursuit for full word and growth and movement as we go. And so, you know, with what you're saying, The one thing that I wanted to hit and this is a really big one and this is so subtle, but when I did personal film, I was getting coached and they were teaching the distinction versus responsibility.Victim versus responsible victim versus responsible, right. They really push the boundary on the belief of this, right? Like a hundred percent responsible, a hundred percent of the time. And it was this interesting thing because we would get in trouble for saying, I take responsibility. And I was like, I don't get it.I'm taking they're like, you can't take it. You never didn't eat. There was no point in which you never had it. ALEX:   There's no point in what you gave it up. And so you can't take it backGEORGE: You just feel like it did. And this distinction, like, it probably took me 10 years to understand, because there's so many times in business, right.Or as a consultant or with a student, or even in my own business, I like, Oh, I'll take it. And then I have to be like, Oh wait, no way. That was mine. The whole time. Yeah. And it's like this embodiment of it that is powerful. Like when we think about it. And so I didn't, I've never, I've never talked about a lot of the stuff that I, I experienced, like from a mindset perspective, they don't think I've ever been in the point to like really, um, process us.But you know what I love about you, Alex, and what I, you, you have this childlike curiosity and excitement mast with this tight container of structure that basically guaranteed success. ALEX: Thank you, but I appreciate thatGEORGE: Like, um, yeah, like I'm surprised I'm not walking around in diapers is my son's out of them. Like at that level of management. Cause there's times I feel like that, but you know, with that, I think what's so important and so powerful from like what I noticed with you. It's like when you get self-aware right.So you were talking about basically being, self-aware identifying what's here, understanding that we're responsible understanding that, you know, results equals opportunity depending on how we choose to see it. What I also love about that is that as you do this work on yourself, that awareness gives you a tool to see possibility versus resistance, right?And again, gives you the ability to react or not to react, to respond on a diamond pivot. Because there's no insecurity ridden. And I think about the times as an entrepreneur or where I was stuck and it was stocked because I had a belief that I was supposed to look a certain way, or it was supposed to be a certain way.And here's the news, flash entrepreneurship is basically a guaranteed. It's not going to look like you think it is every day of every moment for the rest of your life. Right. It's a commitment to chaos and it, and it's navigating that. And so in your, in your journey, and, and you've been in this game a long time, I mean, you, I don't even remember this specific you got, but like single-handedly denting the real estate crash market recovery and, you know, building like half a billion dollar businesses and I'm over here doing it for everybody else, but myself.And I'm a self jab on that one, but Oh, well, George, I've done some of that  myself too.ALEX:  I've you know, and, and I just, I don't want to, I don't want to like leave you on the hook there as a coach, as a consultant. One of the things that I'm now dealing with at 47 is that I've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs build businesses bigger than I have.And, and I, you know, I really like year before last, I sat down with Katie and I'm like, you know, Katie. I've done this too many times for other people this time, the business plan has to include us doing it for  ourself.and this is, this is like my realization really in just like the past 24 to 30 months.And when the reason we restarted this company from scratch was energetic, not legal or anything else. It was, we wanted to shut everything down and start over. Cause this is going to be different. Yeah. And so July of 2017, Katie and I hit the reset button, shut everything down, went down to no team members started from zero, and this is the business that we're going to create the success out of that. just like, we help other peopleGEORGE:  I'm  for those of you listening, if you can't tell, like I've been an Alex fan boy for a long time, but like out of, out of respect, like out of like genuine, pure. Respect because there's these things like we, Alex, and I joke a lot.We talk about the state of the industry that we're in. We're probably going to unpack that in a little while, but yeah. You know, like people don't even pretend to be like snakes in the grass anymore. They're like, no, no, no, no. I don't care if the grass is there not, I want you to see me. And like, there's these people that walk it and they talk it and they believe it and they do it.And it's congruency. And Alex is one of those people, which I hide, we admire and respect. And I think it's an important point. Alex is an entrepreneur. I don't know about you, but you know, for me, I needed to build it for other people. To get those lessons, to have the awareness and understand why I was doing it to then be able to come in and be like, Oh, I still get to do it.And I think healed that part of me that didn't think I was good enough that I could only do it for other people. And also give myself a back door out of those daily routines and commitments and structure that would prove my core trauma wrong as a child. That I'm not good enough because that's really what it is like for me.If for me, it was like, Oh, it's so easy. I'll go, I'll diagnose your problems. I'll give you the things. I'll help you do it. I'll pour all my energy into you. Then you'll like me, and then I'll be good enough. And then at the same time I'm living on that dopamine and validation will also deny my own sovereignty of that.I can do this and I know this. And then the belief system there, and the pain that I had to experience was you do deserve this. You can have a bigger impact this way, but you're good enough. And, and that had to happen in silence. Yeah. You're worth it. Right. Like for me, my core wound is I'm not good enough.ALEX:  I'm having like so many different, like first, I just want you to know this is a very validating conversation. And when you operate at the level that you and I operate as entrepreneurs, they're not maybe not the level, but when you operate at the level of awareness that we operate up.You often become, you often get invalidated because the other people around you don't even understand the conversation. Right. You know, I think what you just said, that is so true for so much of my career. Now, in retrospect, it's only, you see this in retrospect, I was not in the pursuit of success for myself, cause I didn't feel worthy.And I actually felt like the people around me were so much better than I was. That I put all my energy into helping those people all my time in it.  Other people get become far more successful than I was because in so many ways I still felt like I was, you know, the, the short, you know, Mex, lat, Latin American accent, chubby kid in school.Cool. That everybody made fun of it. And I really, you know, when I was at, I did not have a lot of friends. I had a really challenging childhood. I wasn't good at relationships and all of that carried forward to the business world to the point where. But, it made me an incredible consultant because I wanted to help everybody so bad so that I would get validation and be okay and be worthy and not be that kid that I was running away from.And dude, Oh man, now I'm going to get emotional. And, um,as time went on, what I realized was, and what I am realizing is that I could honor that kid. And that I could actually love that child,and be okay with who I used to be and understand why I was the way I was and understand everything that I went through. And the more that I was able to process it and be aware of it.And the more I was able to let go of the common entrepreneurial belief that  other people had it worse than I was. You kind of said it earlier. It's like a habit for us. As soon as we claim any type of trauma, we almost, I have to let out this relief valve. Oh well, but it wasn't as bad for me. You know, there was other people who had them and it wasn't that bad for me and it, but I I'm just going to claim a little bit of it.Yep. And the reality is every entrepreneur I've ever worked with has trauma that needs to be explored and validated and understood so that they can show up in the world the way that they want to, and the excessive reactivity that we carry around with us and the feelings we carry around with us, you know, George's, it's, it's one of the things that drives us into pursuit because.Here. Here's where I am today in my career. I understand that the goal is not the goal. The goal is the journey. Yes, it really is. It's the process it's going through it because here's what I know as an entrepreneur, as I have this analogy or theory that we are evolutionary hunters and I call it an analogy.But to me, I really do think this is evolutionary fact. We are that small percentage of the population that gets up every morning. Can't turn the motor off. It's always running we can't relax. We don't sit right. And we have this innate motivation to go into the future, create a new reality, come back to the present and then demand.It becomes real, no matter what we put up with. But the reality is, is no matter what goal or outcome or whatever it is that we put out there, as we are crossing the finish line, it loses all importance to us. As we're approaching the finish line, we start going, does this really matter? And it's because if you think about, if we're evolutionary hunters, The goal was never  the hunt just keeps the tribe alive.The goal is you go back on the hunt. Yeah. The goal is you stay hunting. The goal is keep doing it over and over again. And there's food for everybody for the whole time that we needed. And so, you know, I look at it, I, I feel like we are programmed to be in pursuit, but not really finished. And so the whole goal is entrepreneurs is how do you keep.How do you keep creating that future? That is compelling enough and bright enough and exciting enough and engaging enough that you do what it takes to put yourself through the crucible. GEORGE: Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. When you said, and by the way, thank you for the accountability on the, uh, I had it way worse or they had it.ALEX: it twice this week in my own event. I said, and then, and I even pointed out like, Hey, I just use the release valve. I want everyone to know that that's like an unhealthy behavior of invalidating yourselfGEORGE: And it's basically saying, I don't believe in myself enough, or I'm not in my space or power enough to own the fact that this was my truth.Yeah. And, and what I'm looking for. And quite frankly, as everybody wants to get into the monitor, George, what I'm looking for is for you too, without realizing and liked me a little bit  more because I experienced that while also add vacating it and doing it in a very subtle manipulative way and not in a bad manipulative way at heart bins in our subconscious all the time.Um, but this is why I love having friends like Alex, we get to talk about these things. Um, And the real, the real stuff. Well, I think what's so important about the real stuff. Alex is like, we talk about this, right? And we were talking about like, why we did what we did and why we consult them, why we still consult.And what I love is looking back. Cause I love my process through all of it. Like I had to do that. I had to learn that I had to be there. I had to not get that check. They had to not pay me that million dollars. Like I had to have all that happen. And now looking at it too the other side of it for me is I never understood the consequences of doing it for everybody else.The amount of sacrifices and collateral damage I caused because I wanted everybody else to like me versus everybody else respect me. And it was like, I'll go to a dinner. I didn't need to be at that dinner. I'll go to an event. I didn't need to be at that event. I'll go to that meeting. That was not a meeting.Like there were all these like ego fests that were. You know, validation collection, dopamine collection causing collateral damage and the ones I think that we swore as entrepreneurs, that we were doing it  "right". Like I'm doing it for my family. I'm like, well now pretty sure. My three year old son, isn't going to be like, daddy, don't go to them zoo with me, or don't see me for three days because you go to this meeting because you want these people to like you versus do the work that it's there.And I think, you know, if I could give a gift to any entrepreneur, uh, it's the gift of awareness of the. The impact and the consequences, both positive and negative. That happened when we do advocate that sovereignty as entrepreneurs. And we, and we get into that because it took me a long time. And I think it's still a practice, but it's a practice that I've, I love at this point.Like I kind of love saying no at this point. Sure. Can you do now? Why we don't need to, like, we have a dinner meeting. I'm like, no, we can have a zoom meeting. I'm not leaving. Right. ALEX: Well, you get to the point where it's saying no, actually becomes the dopamine hit because you have, I mean, and this takes a while, so I don't want anyone listening, not to think that it's going to happen by Monday, but what happens is.When you stop abdicating the responsibility, you have to create the life you want. And you start actually, cause man, George, when you were just talking about going to the meeting and doing this and doing that you just described like most of my thirties,  if there's, if there was an attention, getting the opportunity, I was in that attention, getting an opportunity with a whole line of justification for it.If there was a time and I got tons of opportunities, if I could get up on it. Really important stage with famous people. Like I was there no matter what. And a lot of the time it was for nothing else than the ego hit. Like really, it didn't even really build our business and build notoriety, but it was just building an ego hit. And I, when I look back at so much of that need for approval that need for validation that need for confirmation as an entrepreneur, when you finally realized that is so much of the, almost the automatic programming that's running, the decisions you're making, when you can start backing out of that and rising to a level of intention, everything changes.I had this really confronting Meaning with a coach of mine. I had this coach a while ago named Kirk Dando, super talented two guy and, um, Kirk and I became friends. That's why he was working with me. Most of the work that he did was with privately funded companies where he took a percentage and he was like a non named board member in dozens of companies.And we became friends. So he, he started working with me and we did a few, one days and he did a 360 for me and came in and interviewed my team. And he was doing the delivery of the 360. And we were in the middle of like, what about my team and what I wanted to do and where I wanted to go. And he said, you know what, Alex.You don't have investors behind you. Let's just cut the BS, man. What's the most important thing in your world. And the reason he said you didn't have investors behind you is cause I had options. Most of his CEOs didn't have options. He said that he was like, you have options. Let's talk about this. I said, well, George, that's not George.I said, Kirk, that's easy. The most important thing in my world is Katie and my kids. And he goes, great. Let's take five minutes, get your calendar out and get your bank account out. And let's look at your spending time and spending money on Katie and your kids. And that way we can see if you're growing and you're the most important thing in your world.And I know he could see the blood drain out of my face. Cause at that point it was like getting called to the principal's office. I remember immediately thinking, Oh, there's no way my calendar or my bank account are going to show any type  of like allegiance or affiliation to my family. Because up to, and including in the time I was with Kirk, I had been pushing them aside to get all this stuff done.And here's, what's interesting that meaning changed things. I actually went back to my room and sat down with Katie and I'm like, Katie, Kirk asked me this question that kind of knocked me backwards and I shared it with her and we talked about it for a long time. And from that point forward, I started shifting and I started saying, I need to assign responsibility to the things that are important to me.I needed to put more time to things that are important to me. You know, and, and I, I started building process, structure and routine around what was important to me. It's structured have spend time with family structure to make sure I was connected with my daughters structure to make sure that Katie and I had the time that we needed, otherwise, everything else just competes and wins.And here's, what's interesting, George by demand. Yeah. Ending the space and time for myselfby making that the most important thing. Suddenly my decision making in business got infinitely better. And almost overnight, we started moving in the right direction rather than spinning our wheels and not having things happen.And this is the thing that always like for most people feels like an oxymoron. When you first started doing this, I was putting less time in, but getting more results because when you start throwing up the constraints that are important, you look at time differently and you spend it differently. When you start allocating time to where you should be, not what you know to where you actually, when I say should be when you started actually allocating time around.What you want your life to look like your business will shift in a way that it actually gets to be the business that you want. You start building an organization that you really want. You start doing the things that you want. And it's interesting today at 47, you know, we, we, like I said, we reset a few years ago.We're around a little, little over 2.1 or 2.2 million in recurring revenue, right? Yeah. Now we're building this company completely differently. I'm, I'm absolutely not responsible for delivering. I built myself out of a lot of the responsibilities. And today I have a  business that I love working with people that are like incredibly fun people to work with.And I'm more focused on people development than anything else right now. Cause that's where we're going to grow the nexttime in our business. But what's most important is I wake up every morning. I align with my kids. They hang out with me, they know what we do. We talk openly. There's a completely different dialogue in our house.And all of that, I think makes me not think all of that I know. Makes me the entrepreneur I actually want to be, and it actually allows me to start making decisions for the person I'm becoming instead of the person I'm running away from. Yeah. And I think for entrepreneurs, you know, I think that the same, I've heard the same, say, you know, make the decisions for the person you're becoming, not the person you are.And I'm like, that's not how it works for entrepreneurs. We either make decisions for the person we're becoming or the person we're running away from. We don't make decisions for the person. We never get to the place where you're making decisions in the moment because we don't live in the present. Nope.What that small percentage of the population that doesn't really even deal well with the no.GEORGE: That's why we have to practice breathALEX: That's what I, you know, what was I did it this morning. I did like, like three huge empty breath holds this morning and just like feeling the experience of whether my body was calling for oxygen or my mind.And where was it coming from and how does this make me react during the day? And, you know, I get up from breathwork sessions now I laid down on my floor and do a breathwork session. I actually feel like I'm in the present moment for a period of time. Yeah. It's interesting. You like get up and you're like, Whoa, the world is really intense if you're here, you know?GEORGE: Yeah. That's why I get up so early in the morning, like I used to get up at four 30 for my ego to show everybody I got up at four 30. Now I get up at three 30 now I get up at three 30, so nobody knows. And like, people think I'm nuts, but I was like, I wake up with my kids at six and when I was getting before 35, like my, I would get home, my son will be awake. My wife wanted to sleep in, but she'll be up. And I was like, am I doing this? And I was like, I'm doing this for the wrong reasons. Like if I get up at three 30, I get. Two and a half hours of alone time I'm home before my son wakes up, I'm done with my writing. I'm completely present for the day. I'm supporting my wife with what she wants based on her job and like her responsibilities.And I was like, yeah, that feels better. Like, and that's like, and like, by the way, I don't listen to music. I don't listen to podcasts. I work out in silence and I'd say five out of six times a week, I'm crying, I'm yelling, I'm looking at myself in the mirror. Like I'm a silver back gorilla and patting my chest and then crying two minutes later.Like I'm processing whatever's coming up in that moment you know, one of the things, yeah, ALEX:   Let's not run past that because that, what you just said is so crucial. So let me, let me tell you how I used to work out. Yeah. So what I would do is, and this is during my four 30 in the morning taking a picture, so I could prove to everybody that I did it.So when I was doing the four 30 in the morning, prove to everybody that you did it, it was get up at four 30 in the morning, drink coffee, then wait about 20 or 30 minutes, drink a pre-workout because the coffee wasn't enough. You need to back it up with a pre-workout. Then go into the gym, close the doors.And we had a gym in our home. We close the doors, put towels under the doors. And then put on like limp biscuit or something ridiculous where it's just screaming and raging and yelling, and then get myself into a state where I could lift weights and not feel it. So I would get myself into fight or flight and then fight for an hour and a half with my gym.And it was like going, you know, and, and I don't mean to use this term in a way that indicates that I don't understand what it is really like to go to war because I don't want to minimize anything. Guys. What guys like you and the people that you were around, did George. But I feel like I went to my own little private one in the gym every morning.Totally. And, and it was cause it was instead of feeling the feelings and moving through them, it was creating so much noise and so much pain that I could push the feelings away. Yep. And, you know, I, I remember at my biggest, I looked back, it was probably like seven or eight years ago. I was about 240 pounds and going on Fox news.And I remember like seeing myself in the suit, my shoulders didn't fit in the screen. I looked completely inflamed. My neck and my head were kind of one thing. And recently a person on my team found an old Wistia video on me on Fox. And she's like, man, I saw Alex on Fox news from a while ago. I'm so glad I worked for this Alex and not that guy. Just watching the videos. He could tell, like how, how accelerated and how angry and , how detached I was. And I think, yeah. So many entrepreneurs think that they're, they're doing this incredible thing, working out and getting themselves in shape. And then I watched the workouts on not online and I'm like, man, why that might not be going in the right direction.GEORGE: Workouts for me are a tool like breath and they didn't use to be, they used to be an escapism for me. Right. And trust me, I was doing three days. I taught a world record for standing box shop. I was a competitive CrossFit athlete. Like my numbers are stupid. Stupid right. I'm five, seven. I can dunk. There's like, it's not mind blowing.And I was also dead lifting like six, 15 squatting, like five 85. I weighed 170 pounds. Like it was gnarly. Nowhere does that help me be a better human to my family? Right. But my ego loved it. ALEX: Standing there practicing the jump box jumper.Oh yeah. At one point I went not being a runner to actually going out and winning races in Austin, winning five Ks, 10 Ks, like going out and getting first, second or third place. And if there was a Clydesdale division, I always wanted it. 7,000 person race. I was first placed in Clydesdale. I was 240 pounds and I was the first place in Clydesdale.Because I was willing to do whatever it took. I finished that race and threw up about seven or eight times. Cause I pushed my body so hard. I still got first place. That was all I cared about. But I look back now and I'm like, dude not only will you, not in your body, you weren't in Austin during that?GEORGE:  and then given more trauma and then came out without doing any of the work.And I remember my wife's like, you know, you should do personal development. Like I read books. That was my answer. Yeah. That didn't go well fast forward, eight years. And there we go. And now we're here we are now. Um, but yeah, I was, and then I had this like really big shift after my son was born where I realized like, wow, I can be in shape if I want, I can look, however I want, I can function however I want, but it's also a tool like it's an hour and a half a day or two hours a day that if I utilize it correctly, I can do it.I'll never forget. I was in the jungle with a shaman and, you know, lots of wise wisdom come from shamans to me.  You know, one of them was like talking about relationships happening for a reason season or lifetime. And then you know, then a personal development teacher looked at me one day scrolling, and I said, what are you pretending not to know?Which hit me like a ton of bricksand then somebody else is like, what are you trying to avoid feeling? And that was the one that got me and it was the feeling part. Right. And so then I like looked at my day and I was challenged by Shaman said, I want you to eliminate. Any music with lyrics for 30 days, just get rid of it, get rid of it.Okay, cool. And I would listen to like music, like upbeat music, like I wasn't into like bitches and hoes, like all that stuff. And you know, but I would listen to music, but I would listen to music that allowed me to be romantic about who I used to be, or pretend that something was going to shift for me by doing nothing.And it was programming my brain into like the stagnation. And I was like, okay, cool. And I remember it was one of the hardest things ever to not have the radio on, in the car because what did I have to be present? I had to be with whatever was coming up and then going to the gym. I was like, okay. Right.And I'm like, don't lift. And all of a sudden I lost a hundred pounds on lift because I didn't have anything to like put me into that sympathetic state. And it was crazy, crazy what happened. And then for a wild, like this adoption period, I started to fall in love with it. And then I realized that. When I was there, the days that I was present and grounded, I felt like in my body and like emotionally good, I was lifting like crazy.And then there were days that like, It hurt to do a warmup and then I would scream or I would cry or I would laugh or I be like, I don't want to be here today. And then I could never walk out the door, but I was literally in the moment experiencing my experience and my feelings and it kind of became therapy for me.I rank it out? Can I yank it out? And then, or where can I go plug into somebody else's world to avoid mine? Right. Right.And then it was like, I have more work to do. I have more work to do. I have more work to enlist and entrepreneurs, your list will never end. And that's why it's so important. Like when you talk about structure, Alex structure gives us the container because no matter what we do, we're going to fill it. So if you give yourself a 24 hour container, you're going to find ways to fill it.But if you give yourself a two hour container, you'll fill it, but you also have to fill it with the stuff that moves the needles, move the levers and eliminates the bullshit. And that's been one of those things for me that I think in what you do and there's this belief like this paradigm around entrepreneurship, right?Like I can do whatever I want. I can do whatever I want. And I was like, yes. And you have to realize that the moment you start being that is you lose the thing that built it and you end up right back where you started. ALEX: Yeah. Yeah. I love Maxwell's. You know, John, there's a lot of stuff that John Maxwell's put out that I just, that is so true.It's just truth. And he has this chart of  the more leadership responsibility you have, the less freedom you have. And it's this very confronting belief system that the more responsibility I take on as a leader the less freedom that you actually have. And what you're doing is you're exchanging that freedom for making a massive contribution.And I think that. People want to argue. I have entrepreneurs all the time. Like one argue that and debate it. Yeah. And I always like at the end of the day, if you'd want to debate it, you can. But the fact is right only going to slow you down over time. And man George, that was intense. What you just shared because I think it's probably seven or eight years ago.It's definitely living in this house. I know, because in my gym here, I have a huge sound system and I built it so that I could go down into the gym. So I didn't hear anything in the world. I didn't even hear the weights clanking together because that sound was so high. I probably haven't turned that on in six or seven years, because now I look at my workouts, totally different.My workouts used to be an escape. It used to be like, go in, check out, get all this stuff done, working out with your body and then come out. But really not a lot of recall or recollection of what happened. And I, and a lot of like feeling here, like I did something, but not really connecting to everything that happened in the gym.Yeah. Yeah. I love Maxwell's. You know, John, there's a lot of stuff that John Maxwell's put out that I just, that is so true.It's just truth. And he has this chart of  the more leadership responsibility you have, the less freedom you have. And it's this very confronting belief system that the more responsibility I take on as a leader the less freedom that you actually have. And what you're doing is you're exchanging that freedom for making a massive contribution.And I think that. People want to argue. I have entrepreneurs all the time. Like one argue that and debate it. Yeah. And I always like at the end of the day, if you'd want to debate it, you can. But the fact is right only going to slow you down over time. And man George, that was intense. What you just shared because I think it's probably seven or eight years ago.It's definitely living in this house. I know, because in my gym here, I have a huge sound system and I built it so that I could go down into the gym. So I didn't hear anything in the world. I didn't even hear the weights clanking together because that sound was so high. I probably haven't turned that on in six or seven years, because now I look at my workouts, totally different.My workouts used to be an escape. It used to be like, go in, check out, get all this stuff done, working out with your body and then come out. But really not a lot of recall or recollection of what happened. And I, and a lot of like feeling here, like I did something, but not really connecting to everything that happened in the gym.GEORGE: Like the guy over here covered in tattoos that had a blue Mohawk. When you met him, Right. Like that guyALEX:  Something like that. You know, it was like, I'm never going to be in a place of being traumatized again by a room I'm gonna walk in and have everyone back at, you know, take a step back and.Now, you know, when I go work out, one of the, I have for a workout is a dry erase pen. My whole gym is surrounded in mirrors and there are so often I will be in the middle of a set. And this is like the Cardinal sin of working out. You're like almost to the place where you're done and I'll just drop the weight it's and go write down everything that just came to me.Yeah. Because yeah. Now it's more important. The realization is more important than finishing this app. And the belief system, you know, the beliefs that I can work through and the processing that I do is so much more important than the weight that I'm lifting. And I remember there was a point in my life where if I had a workout where the next workout, I didn't do more. I couldn't deal. It was demoralized thousand percent out. I don't even feel it. I'm like, wow, that was a great workout. I lifted half the weights, but look at the whiteboardGEORGE:  Well, even, even the point of like stopping a set, like way to diminish seven reps of progress. RightALEX: It's like, man, I just threw it all away. Yeah. And you know, the, the, like the beliefs that we built when we're in the gym, the last set is where you earn over the last rep is where you earn it. So you're always chasing the last rep. Now I'm like, man, I don't want to lose this thought. GEORGE: Well, and then like really looking at what sets us apart as leaders.Right? Cause we're, we're when we say entrepreneurial, we're talking about leaders, we're talking about the small percentage of the world, right. That's willing to stand in a new belief system and I love the way that you described, like going into the future, but really. You know, when I wrote my personal mission statement for my life it's to stand with structure in the face of resistance to create possibility.Like, that's it. That's, that's what we do. And it's like, it's actually, the wind was when you made a commitment and you kept your word with integrity to get to the gym. You've already won. Everything at that point is bonus. Right? It's strengthening it's fortification it's reflection. It's you know, and like, yeah, if you have 30 pounds to lose and you do one wrap, like don't expect a result, but be aware of like, what's there, but it's really the intention that we put behind everything.And when you say it, right, you got up, yes. You create the structure and you commit to the routine and that's, it's the combination of those things. That is the wind. And you, I mean, I'm the same way, except for me right now, I realized. You know, in the last couple of years, I fell out of love with myself again, like at a deep, deep, deep level.And I was looking at it and I was working out crazy before lockdown. And I was like, okay, cool. And I was like, I'm posting videos every day. And I was like, looking back when it locked down and I didn't have a gym, we went up to the mountains and I was like, man, I really don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything.I don't want to do anything. And I literally was like, why. And I was like, because I can't, because I don't like why I'm doing it. And I don't know why I want to. And I gained a lot of weight again, and I fell in love with my dad bod, but I gained a dad bought first.  And then I looked at it and then I was playing with my son and I'm up here and I'm like, You know, this isn't what I want.And I was like, why? And I was like, I somehow fell out of love with myself, or this was an opportunity where I hadn't fully loved myself yet. Like, I hadn't loved where I was versus the guy with the big muscles or the tattoos, or could do this. Wait. So it was really interest because I started working out again and it feels different.It feels different. And then all of a sudden I wanted to get up here and it felt different and my workouts are very different. It felt different and I'm not humble, bragging. Like I just enjoy the process, but what's really interesting, Alex is I went through this point and I always wear like cutoff shirts.I won't take my shirt off. I still was struggling with self-consciousness and everything else. And then this, then I'm going to cry. But like 35 days ago, I went to the gym one morning and I was like, I'm not working out with a shirt on. I get to look at myself. Every moment of every rep every day. And every time I look in the mirror, I just get to tell myself I love myself.And it's a really interesting, because I started this challenge with my, with my business partner to lose weight, right. Like I was like, okay, I'm two 10, my fighting weights, like one 75. I want to be back there. 55 days of eating ma

#AskTheClub: "Would you consider cereal a soup?"

I sat down with my yogi Alex Schimmel from LifeTime Fitness here in Phoenix, AZ. Because I believe the health benefits of yoga are too important to ignore or at a minimum, spread the word, I had to have Alex on to share his knowledge with all of you, my listeners. If there is no other exercise you ever do, you MUST do yoga to stimulate every area of your body. It's amazing how using your own body weight in various poses, can make you really strong and get you in the best shape of your life. ********** Styles of Yoga taught at Life Time Fitness FIRE (HIIT)- Experience our new high-tempo format that blends intense anaerobic exercise with recovery periods ROOT (Fundamentals) - Start here and begin to understand yoga movement while holding the body in long basic poses SOL (Guided) - SOL is a guided yoga format that provides direction throughout from supportive teachers in a dynamic vinyasa format FLOW (Vinyasa) - Try our new guided practice where your teacher provides more deliberate cues throughout class SURRENDER (Yin) - Experience long connective tissue stretches and meditative breathing for greater breathing and self-acceptance BE (Meditation) - Develop a conscious, calm mind through meditation with a focus on breathing Alex's Links:"Inspire The F*ck Out of People" - eBook Presale Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theyogageneral/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexander.schimmel.5 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-schimmel-374484a/ Email: schimmelyoga@gmail.com Alex Schimmel - Life Time LifePower Yoga Boutique Manager LifePower Yoga Teacher Training Faculty LifePower Yoga Master Trainer https://youtu.be/vo_c_5pILKU ********** Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass ********** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review:I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe:Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Alex Schimmel: Joe: Ok. Today, my guest is Alex Schimmel. Alex and I met over at Lifetime Fitness in the Biltmore area. And Alex is the yoga manager over there. And I was super excited to take as many yoga classes as I could. And luckily, Alex is the person over there that we really fell in love with. The way he teaches is his demeanor, everything about what he does. So, Alex, I'm really excited to have you here. And thanks for taking the time to do this. Alex: Yeah, thanks for having me, Joe. A pleasure. Looking forward, Joe: Yeah. Alex: You get to know each other better. Joe: Yeah, man. So my first. What I want to do first is just get to where we are today in the sense of how you got into this. I would I would assume that, you know, you took yoga like me, and then it became more of a passion. And then you became a yogi. But what can you go to when you started? Why you did it? How long you did it? Before you decided to make the jump to be a yogi. And and then we'll go from there. Alex: Yeah, for sure. So I'll give the abbreviated version, because it could be pretty long, but so my mom's a yoga teacher, so I've had yoga in my life, like, forever. I remember being a young kid maybe like seven or eight years old, and my friends would be playing wild in my house. And my mom would like eat. Guide us through relaxation in my living room. Like, you know, just to get us to probably calm down is it's probably not just to show us yoga, but to help us chill out a little bit. And so I used to go to my mom's yoga classes and I was like a little kid. And then my teenage years kind of rebelled against it. I thought the yoga was something that just like women do. Just people my mom's age did. So I wasn't really too open to it. And then towards the end of high school, I started to just get more like into spirituality. I read some spiritual books as I was given a book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, by Deepak Chopra. And there's a lot of yoga philosophy in it. And it was things that I really like. It made sense to me. And it was the first time that because I wasn't really religious, I grew up Jewish, but not really like strong in religion. Alex: And those that that book and those spiritual teachings, it just it just resonated with me. And so that kind of open my eyes a little bit. And then I had an injury. I was a baseball player in college and I hurt my shoulder just playing like backyard football. And to kind of help heal that, I started to get into yoga, go to my mom's yoga classes again and. Soon after. I noticed that yoga was like. Not only did it make me feel better in my body, it also really helped me balance my schoolwork and just help me. Like I felt like it was just making my life better. And a lot of ways. And then my mom encouraged me to do this like two week teacher training. That was when I was like 19. I was my first teacher training. And that was really for my for my own knowledge. I wasn't really sharing it yet. But it was something that I knew enough where I could practice in my living room at home. And then fast forward a few years. My senior year of college actually got diagnosed with Crohn's disease. And Joe: Allow. Alex: I was a pretty tough, pretty tough time in my life. There was a lot of challenges. And yoga then became like instead of it just being an exercise, it really became my medicine. And to this day, it's still my best, my best medicine. So that was like that was the moment in my life where yoga was no longer just like a hobby or something. I did sometimes just like it's what I needed. And it became a daily way of living again, not just what I did on my map, but like a way that I live and honor all my relationships. And then after college, I graduated and I worked a sales job in New York City and really hustled and then did the grind for about a year. And it just was not a good mix for my health. And I realized, like, I was making a lot of money, but I wasn't fulfilled at all. And I I left that job. And then for the next, like three months, I traveled around to different yoga retreats and I did my first real two hundred hour teacher training. That was seven years ago now. And. And then once I got back from that, I was like, yeah, this is my. This is my path. It's my purpose. And I just kept going from that. Joe: That's really cool. And where did you take this training? Alex: Yes, it was it was so special. I did a. It was like a three week immersion and it was twenty five days in Isla Mujeres, Mexico. So it's a little island off the coast of Cancun. And it was like a super cool kind of rustic resort hotel retreat center. Like no TV's in the room. Very, very basic. But it was it was just like super blissful. And, you know, I feel really blessed and privileged. I was able to take that kind of trip to do my teacher training. I definitely, you know, empty my savings account and those, like, months of, like, wobbling around. But it was super special. And that training, it was way different than what I teach now. But it really taught me how to be a yogi. So it taught me not just how to teach yoga, but what it really means to to live a yoga lifestyle, what it really means to be good at yoga. And it was it was really powerful. Joe: Yeah, that's cool, and people talk about going to certain places to become a yogi, right? I mean, I guess I think like even myself, you think that people that do meditation and yoga and it stems out of like being in India or something like that. Right. Is that true or is that just another fallacy that Alex: Yeah, Joe: You know. Alex: I mean, yoga's origin, like, you know, the first the first time yoga was kind of found in any text or whatever it did, it did seem to originate from India, at least the yoga exercises. Right. The poses if you look at pretty much every spiritual tradition as far as like the philosophy goes. All of them are ways to practice yoga. So that's why some people can be really religious and they can practice yoga and they can become a better or more devout Christian or Jew or Muslim. So it's it's not like yoga is not a religion, but it is a spiritual practice. And a lot of those teachings are are universal, which I think is another reason that yoga is growing so much because they realize, like, wow, this kind of goes with what what I believe in. But as far as like historically. Yeah. And India's India's the the the birthplace of it. Joe: Kind of like the Mecca. Right. Alex: Yeah, yeah, it takes Joe: Ok. Alex: A lot of people go to India for four different paintings and stuff. There's I haven't been to India before. I think a lot of yogis kind of consider it like a rite of passage. You know, once you spent time in India, maybe you get a little more street cred and some. Joe: So that's the I so I was wondering, I guess my next question was going to be, had you gone to India yet? But it sounds like not yet, but I assume at some point maybe that's a goal. Alex: At some point, I mean, it's not like the top of my bucket list. There's a lot I love from Alan Watts and I think it's really applicable to that. He says the only Zen that you'll find at the mountaintop is the Zen that you bring with you. Joe: Yup. Alex: So like, you know, India sure, you can be immersed in a culture. And I think it's cool to learn about the history, but it doesn't necessarily make you a better yogi to spend time in India. You can you can find all those teachings. They're already they're already inside you, right? Joe: Sir. Alex: That's the idea. Like, whatever, you know, whatever yoga you find in India is probably yoga that you already have. Know, it just helps you kind of uncover it. So for some people, it becomes a life changing experience. And I've heard from other yogis that, you know, it didn't it didn't do so much for them. Joe: So let's bounce back to something that you said was was when you were in high school, you rebelled a little bit against it. Right. And it was based on the stigmatism that we all think about. There's these yoga people walking around, burning incense and walk around and samples and, you know, draped clothing or whatever. I don't know. Right. Alex: Maria. Joe: But I. But the purpose of this podcast for me is to inform people and to bring subjects like this, especially when I believe in it. Like, I wouldn't do this if if it was something I didn't believe in. I know how it's helped me. And I look forward to being there in your class. So I don't think enough people do yoga. And I think it's such an amazing thing to do if you can't do anything else. Like, if I have a day where I know I'm slammed and I can't go and pump a bunch of iron or whatever, and there's days where I'll do it before yoga and yoga is like the release of all of it right from me. But I would like you for me, it's like God if there's one thing you can do. Just do yoga. Alex: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think it's I think especially like the styles that that I've learned, you know, and I do feel really grateful that I've been taught the practices that I've been taught. It's really all encompassing. Like, there's some people that I know that practice just yoga and they are ripped. Strong human beings, if that's what you're going for. But then in addition to that, like in addition to the physical, you get the mental benefits of the focus and the memory and the kind of meditation aspect of it. And then I think also just moving your body and doing breath where there's an incredible emotional release. And to me, most importantly, it's it's a spiritual practice that you connect with your essence and who you really are. So, yeah, I think I think yoga is it's it's amazing to do. And I and I agree with you more people. It's growing for share. It's great. Becoming more and more mainstream. But there's still a lot of people, especially especially men, that would benefit, that would benefit from it. How long Joe: Yeah, Alex: Have you. How long have you been practicing? Joe: To be honest with you, when we got to Lifetime and started with you. That's the only time I had done it up to that point. And I think I might even said this to you is that we had the P90X disc right. From Tony Horton and that, that yoga program on that desk was pretty good. It put us through a lot of cool things, but I don't think I ever took a class until yours. Alex: Nice is awesome. Love it. You got them there. You guys been there almost every day, it seems Joe: Yeah, Alex: Like. Joe: Now I'm hooked. And so here's the thing that I want to convey about you, just to take kind of like my own little infomercial about you and the reason why it's it's such a great class and Joelle and loves it and Ashley loves it. And there's you have this combination about you that is like the perfect yoga instructor or I don't know what. Is that what you call it? Yoga instructor. What's the proper. Alex: I guess the guy's a teacher. Some people Joe: Ok. Alex: Say doctors I feel like instructors, correct? Teacher. Teachers connect. Joe: Perfect. OK. So to me, you encompass the perfect yoga teacher. Now I'm lucky that I found you as my first. And I didn't, you know, whatever. I didn't get tarnished by anything else. But you're, you're the tone of your voice. That's the first thing we all talked about when we got back, was like your. Your voice is like very soothing for the practice. And then you do ramp up really nicely through the class. And then it comes back down really nicely. The storytelling that happens intermittently throughout the class. So I encourage anyone to just go there and take one of your classes. I know that. I think. But you can only go. You can only do it if you're a member. All right. Alex: Yeah, I think that right now, with with everything that's going on, I don't think really guest, guest passes. Joe: That's right. Alex: But luckily for everybody and all your listeners, too, there's a lifetime app and you don't have to be a member to download the app. And there's recorded classes on there. And I was just in Minnesota, I just recorded like five classes. So probably in the next week or two. Everyone, if you have a if you have a phone, if you have an app and on YouTube, I believe you, you'll be able to take my classes online. It's not the same experience. I'll tell you about it really even. I made a post on my social media about it yesterday. It's different teaching to just a camera. Like I realized that I really feed off people's energy Joe: Yep. Alex: When I'm in class. And I think and this is a shift that's happened to me more lately when I teach now. I used to be like a big planner. I got a plan what I was going to say and what stories I would tell. And now I just go in there with maybe a loose idea of what I teach, but I just kind of let it flow like and I feel like the students that are in the class, in a way, bring bring what they need to hear out of me. So it feels really good when that happens. And it was just different, you know. There was no students to bring it out of me. So much so. So those online classes are a different experience, but yet still still good in a way. You can check me out. Joe: Yeah, that's perfect. So I'll make sure that in the show notes, I put the link to all of that so that everyone can get a taste. And then unfortunately, the reason I didn't want to do this episode with you is I don't want the class to get full. And then Alex: Oh, Joe: I can't get in it. So Alex: Yeah. Joe: I was this balance between I want to have Alex on and I don't want people to take my spot in the class. Alex: Make sure you get a spot to. Joe: So let me see what I had. Oh, so I want you to tell. I want you to tell a couple of stories that you've told. So I, I and I remember, too. So I want you to tell the water bucket story. If you don't mind. Alex: Ok, to that Joe: I think Alex: One. Joe: It's super cool. Alex: Yeah, so I love stories, first of all, I actually just wrote an e-book for teachers, leaders, speakers. It's called it's called "Inspire the Fuck Out of People." And. Joe: Awesome. Alex: And it's a book about it's really just a book about storytelling mostly and like themes. It's what I do a lot in my teaching. All of my students realize that, like, when you come to my class, it's going to be more than a physical. There's always gonna be there's not always a story, but there's something deeper. So I just I just wrote my book. I compiled, like, all my stories and everything together. So. So that's pretty cool. And I do love stories. And one of the things about storytelling that's really cool is, is we're wired for storytelling. That's how we like as it as through history. That's how we've communicated. And so our brains are actually wired and there's all kinds of research and studies that have been done. And one thing that's really cool is when you tell a story, your you and your audiences brains get sinks. So I kind of think about like Inception. Have you seen the movie Inception? Joe: I probably have and I don't read. I'm the worst at remembering that Alex: It's Joe: You'd Alex: A stupid. Joe: Be surprised how many times I purchased a movie on Netflix and 10 minutes into it and like, damn, that's $4.99 I just wasted because I already saw. Alex: So anyway, so it's just like the idea when you when you tell stories, you can you can like better plant seeds in your audiences mind. So it's a really powerful way to convey messages and meetings and deeper teachings. So that's where I look. What's one of the things I love about storytelling? So that that storytelling of the the water bearer. So it's a story that there's a water bear. And I think the story of the woman is in India. And every day she has to go and walk like two miles to get water for her family. And she carries this big pole on her back with two buckets on each side. And every day she fills up the buckets and or the pots. And when she gets back to her house or her family or whatever, one of the parts is always like a little bit down, like half empty because there's a crack in it and a cracked pot feels inadequate. Right. It feels like it's not enough. Very similar to how a lot of humans feel and different things, especially when we live in such a world of comparison and competition and starts to feel like upset. And tell us the woman, you know, I feel so bad. You work so hard, you know, to take this long walk. And I don't I don't carry my full weight. Right. I always, always let some water go. Norman says the tomorrow when we take the walk, just notice the beautiful flowers that are along the path. Alex: And so they take a walk in the pot sees all these beautiful flowers shining in the sun. And it's like, you know, temporary happiness school. Beautiful. They get home still, that pot is half empty and still is is upset. It's like, yeah, I noticed the flowers. But that doesn't I'm not full, you know. And the woman says to the pot, hey, I knew you had a crack. So every day I noticed that you were like dripping water out. So what I do is I planted seeds all along the path. And did you notice how there was only flowers on one side? So every day we take that walk. When you leave the water out, you're not leaking the water. You're watering these beautiful flowers. That makes my walk more beautiful. It makes my family happy when I can bring the bring the wildflowers home. And, yeah, it's just it's a really big reminder that we all have cracks. We all have things that we look at as flaws. And recently, I don't know. I heard this from from one of my teachers. But our our mess. Right. They got flaws can become our message and they can become our purpose. And a lot of times those things that we view maybe as as ugly or we hide from others can end up being the most inspiring thing that we have to offer the world. Joe: Yeah, yeah, it's it's so true. Man, this is part of why I started to share just some of the things that have gone on through my life. Just because I think you have to tell these things to let people know that they're not alone in in these struggles or these these turns in the roads or whatever might happen. It's like you were talking in class about I think you reference about, you know, getting knocked to our knees and getting back up. And it's when we're in certain poses and that you can feel the distress and that sensation. And, you know, my arms is doing the side planks today. And my arm was wobbling like crazy. And I like man and it's true in it. And it's it's the way you teach it and it's the metaphors that you bring up and and you never correct anyone in the class. You know, everyone smile. There's a slight hint like, no, raise your arms up, not for whatever. But it's it's it's you know, it's done in a very compassionate, gentle way. And that's what keeps me coming back. It's like I don't want to go to a class and not know the poses and be judged, you know. And I was lucky, like literally Tony Horton's disc taught me enough to at least initially walk into that class without feeling completely ridiculous, but. Alex: Confidence. Joe: Right. But the cool thing is that you have these classes online that people can learn. Some of these initial poses are what you call them. Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Joe: Ok, I got I don't want to say the wrong thing and go, oh, my God, it is. And then take your first class. If you do some of the basic things, you'll feel really comfortable. Right. Alex: Yeah, and I've I have begin people that have never taken yoga classes that come in and take take those flow classes that are hot and and challenging for sure. But, you know, one of the big things and one of the things that like let me rewind a little bit when I was first starting to get back into yoga that I didn't like is I would take classes that were very like alignment based where it was all like posture focused. And hopefully you get and when you take my class, it's not really about the pose. I like Joe: Correct, Absolutely. Alex: Most. OK. It's it's there and it's good to move your body, but it's it's not so important. So I use to take these classes in like the whole class would just be pretty much like you're doing it wrong. This has to be turned this way and this has to be done in this way. And I felt like it didn't make me feel empowered. It made me feel like I was just like not good and weak and that like that I really had to honor what the teacher was saying. And then I decided that I tried to teach. I want you to come in and realize, hey, if all you do is breathe for 60 minutes and that happens sometimes, it hasn't happened so much and more because it's a new community. Sometimes you just gotta come on to your mat and breathe and it doesn't matter anything else that you do. Like if that's what you mean. Beautiful. And the poses truly are secondary and they truly are just an opportunity to to have some awareness in your body. It's not about like perfecting the pose. And I really want people to know that not just for me, but for many yoga teacher, yoga teacher stressing or like or like marketing themselves on. I'm going to help you do this posture where you can get really good at poses if you if you practice my yoga. There's a there's a A out there. You know, I think that some people really like that. And I get it. For me, though, there's there's so much more. And like I say, in say in my classes, we don't practice. You're going to get good at yoga poses. We practice. You're going to get good at life. Joe: Yeah, man, it's it's so true. Like I said, I can't thank you enough for, you know, this the way you handled the classes and it's we're like we're signed up for as many as as many as we can take. I don't want to, like, dehydrate myself. Taking a high flow class every day. But, yeah, we keep signing up. We love it. So before you when you you took the training and to become a yoga and where. How did you teach and how did you get into. What did you do before you landed at lifetime. Alex: Yeah, that's a great question. So first of all, like when you do a teacher training, the kind of the introductory level is 200 hours. That's like that's the training and really 200 hours because yoga is so complex and deep and there's so much to it. Two hundred hours is like kindergarten, right. You get that that kindergarten degree and you definitely have a knowledge foundation. But then you have to become you have to continue to learn. You have to always be a student. And so for me, I finished my 200 hour. This was this was after I lived in York City. I moved back with my parents and I came home from that training and I convinced my parents to get rid of our couches in the living room and turn it into a little yoga studio. But a yoga studio at my house and I didn't I guess I didn't really feel that confident yet to apply. There was really only one yoga studio in my town and I didn't really feel that confident yet. But what I started to do is just have three classes at my house and I put it on Facebook and I invite people to come in sometimes and have three or sometimes five. A lot of times like one and a lot of times just no one would come because again, I was like new to my, you know, seven years ago even there wasn't a whole lot of people that were practicing yoga wasn't very popular where I was living in South Jersey. But I did that for like three months. And I probably had like three classes a week at my house and started sharing where I could. And then and then I felt ready to audition at a local studio and taught there. And then fast forward, like, you know, for my first year of teaching, I was teaching and probably like five or six different studios in South Jersey. They're all super spread out. Those times are I'll drive an hour to go teach a class Joe: Oh, Alex: And like, Joe: Gosh. Alex: You know, and when you're a brand new yoga teacher, you don't get paid a whole lot. So sometimes I would like, you know, drive an hour to teach a class for fifteen bucks. But if that wasn't what it was about, it's never been Joe: Right. Alex: About that Joe: Right. Alex: Night. I do feel like I've, I've been blessed and I am happy that I have an entrepreneurial mind where it's yoga. I live a good life. I'm very happy with with the lifestyle and able to live through it. But I was teaching for a while. And then what I really wanted to do was share yoga, like I wanted to share with as many people. That's been my my mission for a long time. I heard this somewhere that inspired me where they said something about like instead of focusing on being a millionaire, how about you influence a million people? So then I. So my goal for, like, I don't know, forever, when I heard that, I was like, OK, I want to be a billionaire. I want to have an impact on a billion people. That's a lot of people. And I know that the way to do that is to influence people that are influencers. So. So my my next kind of step in the process was I knew I wanted to lead teacher training. You know, I wanted to teach other people to teach yoga there. There I would have like an exponential growth on who I'm impacting. And I met someone actually out here in Arizona, which is funny, was way before I lived here. This was this is about five years ago, a little over five years ago. And they told me that they recommended a a three hundred hour teacher training. So that's like, you know, 200 hours, the kindergarten, 300 hours, like Joe: Hey. Alex: Maybe you got a high school little a little higher level. You go a little deeper in. And they told me to do this teacher training in Michigan with with my teacher, Johnny Quest. And I went there and it's funny, like the way I in life, I let things flow so. Right. That like that it felt very like just. It just made sense to me. So I didn't even do much research and I just went to this 300 hour training in Michigan. It was another immersion. It was like three weeks, three weeks straight. Joe: Wow. Alex: And when I was there, I realized that that training was the style that they teach at lifetime. And and that was. And then I was told when I was there about one of the other teachers that their friend was going to Grand Open. They were going to be the general manager of this club in South Jersey that happened to be like 40 minutes from my house. So when I get home from the training, I went to talk to the one of the managers there about just teaching that I was thinking, like, I you know, it's an hour away, 40 minutes away. Maybe I'll teach, like back to back classes. Let me see if it's worth it. And then, like, I show up one day and kind of just tell my story. And the woman who's a dear friend of mine now, she's like, well, we have a yoga manager. And you're hired like you're the you're our guy, you know, because I was the only person in that area that knew the style that Joe: Yes. Alex: We taught. So, yeah. So, again, fast forward a little bit. Got hired at that. That was my first lifetime. I was the yoga manager and we had like just a thriving community. Just incredible. You know, there would be we'd have classes where there would be 80 to 100 people in a Wednesday night. Joe: Oh, my Alex: Yeah. Joe: Gosh. Alex: Well, like, almost the whole floor was mats. You know, there'd be that maybe I would I would say it would it wasn't really a joke because it was true. I'd be like, if you don't know the person next to you, then you can have like two inches between your mats. If you do, another person next to your mats could be touching. So very different world than now. I don't think super to me people would be into that. But it was amazing. The energy was incredible. People made like lifelong friendships. And I was there for a while, kind of felt like I was without a teacher. So then, you know, and the universe provided me the next step where my teacher, Johnny, called me and said, hey, come to Michigan, learn from me, learn with me. There's no there's like we need a yoga manager at this lifetime, Michigan, when they're taught for a few years. Also, you know, is it amazing to be a part of that community because they had all really learned from my teacher. So it's just a really strong community. They just really got what we did. So a super cool. And then I got tired of the Michigan winter. So Joe: Yes. Alex: The last Joe: I don't Alex: Year Joe: Blame you. Alex: Last year, I was like I called my my boss who do directs Lifetime. I said, Terry, I need to know, like, what lifetimes are opening in the next year. And this built more. One was one of them. And, you know, I'd I'd come here on retreats. I'd led retreats in in Scottsdale, Phoenix, for three years, my first three years of teaching at lifetime. Not sure why Phoenix. Like, that's just just a synchronicity. I just happened Joe: Yeah. Alex: To have picked Scottsdale to come to you and I was again familiar with it. And now I'm here and I love it. Joe: That's awesome, man. That's a great story. Alex: Yeah, and I think that one of the things that's important about it, too, is like if you look from a from an external point of view, it might just look like, oh, like everything just fell into your lap. You're very lucky. And I don't believe it's luck. I believe that, first of all, it's blessed. I do feel very blessed in my life. My life, not my whole life hasn't been a blessing, but in a lot of ways and very blessed. And I recognize that. But also, I believe that when you are doing your work and yoga, get called Dharma, when you're doing like your soul's purpose. Doors are going to open up for you that you didn't even know existed. And and then, like the old paradigm is that you have to have, like, super hard work to live the life of your dreams. And the new paradigm is if you're on your path, your path. Right. That's important. Not what other people think Joe: So Alex: You should do Joe: Important. Alex: When you're on your path. It doesn't it doesn't feel like hard work. You know, I've had a lot of success teaching yoga. And I've been a student and I've put effort in and I've taken inspired action, but it's never felt like hard work. And I think it's. And I know it's because I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm doing my my life's work. Joe: Yeah, it's so awesome. And this is great because my audience, the listeners, this is what I preach when I don't have a guest like you on, you know, it's all about that. Even though I'm older, it's taking me all this time to finally say I just need to do the things that that speak to me, that make me happy, that make me want to wake up every day Alex: Neverson. Joe: And smile. Yeah. And so I've come to the game late, but I'm working on it, you know, and hopefully I have a few more years before I take a dirt nap and I can get a bunch of really cool stuff done. So we'll see. Alex: And really, too, like your neck, it's never too late to to to to move in the direction of your dreams and really realize, too, like it's it's not a destination. It doesn't matter how early you start. You don't eventually get to this place where you like up there. I don't care Joe: Right. Alex: Anymore because it's there's always there is always a path, a continuous journey. So it doesn't matter when you get on the path. But it's it's a beautiful thing that you've found it, you know, because for a lot of people, they don't find it till maybe they're laying in their death bed. Right. Joe: I know. Alex: A Joe: Yeah, Alex: Lot of Joe: And I. Alex: It takes lifetimes to find it. Joe: Right. And I've actually I've I've talked about this in some of the. I've done a couple where it's just me kind of spilling my heart saying you don't want to have regret, you don't want to lay me there. And, you know, you want to have it be where you feel like you really live an amazing life. And so you more people have control over this than they think. And the problem is they they don't think they have control over it. They're they're just they're letting their life become something that is being steered by other people, other things, whatever. And. And I think that's why this time with the corona virus happening, this wasn't just a localized thing. Right? It was the whole world shut down and it gave everyone the opportunity to sit back and reflect on what it is that they do and what's the next step for them. And if they got laid off or fired or whatever, you know, they might not have a job. So what do you want to do with your life? Right. So to me, this is it's a cool conversation because it's it's not just about yoga. Your frame of mind is in the same thing that I'm trying to convey to the people that listen to this podcast is that let's, you know, pick what you want to do and make yourself happy. You have control to engineer your own life to to live the fullest life that you can. So figure it out and start. Now, we're never gonna get a plan. I did a podcast on this. We're never gonna get a break like this again. Our lease? I don't think so. Not in our lifetime, where literally everything just halts. Alex: Right. And also a lot of people get it individually, right? Sometimes it comes as like a diagnosis or a we're getting fired or laid off, you know. But this is a collective where we have an opportunity as a collective to reflect on, like, how do we want to be not just on our individual life, but how do we want to live as a community, as a whole, as a collective? And I think also that's why a lot of things are coming to the surface. You know, a lot of the tension and seeing like injustices and starting to the fact that there's more awareness there. It's a beautiful thing. Weather doesn't matter. You know, there's there's a lot of different opinions on how it's been addressed. But we're going to see. And I really do believe this is like a new paradigm. Things are no longer hidden. And and we're seeing that and more and more and more and more ways, like even restaurants go to go to new restaurants. They almost always have like an open kitchen. Right. Like you Joe: Yeah. Alex: Go to because you can see the food being prepared. And that's how our whole life is starting to be, where it's there's there's nothing hidden anymore. And we don't want the hidden. So, like, whatever's been in the darkness where we're shining light on it. And it's it's arising. And like what you said. Yeah. It's so important to do what you love doing, to do what makes you feel good, because there's a lot of people that are even super and putting this in quotes against successful. Right. And usually that's like a monetary thing. That's kind of how our American dream Joe: Yeah. Alex: Then equated that are like super rich and just like so unhappy and numbing themselves. They're addicted to all kinds. All kinds of shit. Whatever it is that that, you know, everyone has different ways to numb themselves. But, you know, it's not just about money. It's not just about like working hard. It's about loving your life and living the truest version of your life. That's that's what's going to bring you the most fulfillment. Joe: Absolutely. You know what? And here's a good segue way, because you talk about community and how we're all thinking about the future together. Now it's really like a shot in the head for everyone saying what is going on and we've got to fix this. And and it's not just singular now. It's it's your your family. It's your community. It's everything. And when you were in yoga and you talk like that, can feel it in the room that everyone is is realizing that we have to make the right changes to move forward. And. And it just it's it's powerful. So this is a Segway to that really cool story you talked about with the kids lined up and the Alex: Oh yeah. Joe: Basket. Alex: The trive...yeah. So there's a there's. A phrase in African culture from certain tribes in Africa. And it's I don't know exactly how to pronounce it, I think it's Ubuntu, Ubuntu. And the idea that phrase means I am who I am because of who we all are together. So like we're a product of our environment. And an anthropologist went to this tribe in Africa that kind of lives by this ritual. And they didn't experiment where they lined up all their all the children. And in the distance, like 100 hundred yards away under a tree, they put a basket of fruit and candy and all kinds of sweet treats. And this this anthropologist explained the rules of the game. He said, when I say go, it's a race. And the first person there, they get the basket of treats. They get the basket of goods. So obviously, like some of the older kids have a big advantage, they're probably going to be a little faster. So you lines them all out and he says, "Ready? Go." And the kids, they didn't have any time to talk to each other beforehand. And as soon as he says go, they look at each other that turns had side reach out and grab each other's hand. And together they like kind of jog or skip to the basket and they get there at the same time and they shared all. Anthropologists ask one of the older girls in the tribe that that probably was was one of the fastest, fastest ones. And you said why you could add it all to yourself. Why do you do that? And she said, you want to. How can one of us be happy if the rest of us are sad? Joe: It was so powerful when you told that story as a wow. Alex: Yeah, I mean, when you get that story mixed with, like, intense, you know, physicality, transformation, that's another thing that's beautiful about yoga. What I love about this platform is when your physiology changes. So if you're doing some kind of activity, you're also more open and receptive on on all those dimensions. So then when you hear something like that, it really lands. It really impacts you Joe: Yeah. Alex: More than even just listening to this or listening to a podcast or something. It's a different level when you're getting your physical involved. Joe: Yes. Absolutely. Alex: Huge one too like that idea, because a lot of us and this is another, like old paradigm we're taught. How many times we hear it like the idea of survival of the fittest and it's a shark eat shark or Joe: Yeah, Alex: Dog eat dog world or starve. Joe: Yeah. Alex: You've got to be a shark. And you've got to know in order to be successful that you need to kind of push other people. There's there's people that you need to kind of push down for you to to rise up. And that's that's bullshit. Like that's gone. That maybe that's how it used to be. But that's not how this new world, this new paradigm that we're moving into is like now it can be rather than competition, it's collaboration or conscious competition where we can kind of grow together. There's Joe: Yeah. Alex: A quote that my teacher used, always used that all ships rise in a high tide. So collectively we're raising each other up or lifting each other up and there's enough abundance for everybody. And that's huge to understand and to really get to and believe because we believe it on an individual level, the collective starts to believe it and then we'll start to really see it in our lives that like there's enough work for all of us. Joe: Yeah, yeah, and that's why the classes are so strong in the sense of it's the it's the work out that you get and it's that all of the things that that you get out of the class, but it's you get this benefit of all of this positive energy that comes out of it. And it's just it's amazing. That's what I want to touch upon. All I want to know for people that don't understand yoga. And obviously it's new to me. But I. I just know the benefit. I can feel it. I can already twist certain ways that I couldn't twist a month ago. Whatever it is. But I want to educate the listeners who have been on the fence about taking a yoga class. What are the benefits that you can express of what yoga does and why it's so needed? Alex: There's there's a there's a lot of benefits, and it really happened in in a lot of different ways. So I'll talk about the four dimensions. I talked about that a lot in my trainings and stuff four dimensions, physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. And yoga has it's going to improve your life and in all of those physically. Is gonna help you feel good, right? Like moving your body and breathing deep. It's medicine for your body. And and and like, if we're honest with ourselves, we want to feel good. And there's enough shit that we do that kind of brings us into a state of not feeling great that this will help balance it out. Right. So if you'd like to party a little bit and drink or maybe, you know, indulge in some unhealthy food, that's fine. But this will help you. This will help you be balanced and and moving your body has it has a ton of benefits and moving. You're like just body weight is really good, too. So I know that a lot of people like my age. And when you're younger or really I should say, like men, men in general, we we think and we've kind of been programmed to think that in order to be. I don't know, appealing and sexy. And we need to lift a lot of weights. Right. And it's good to be strong for sure. But there's just so much wear and tear that comes from lifting heavy weights. Alex: And in most cases, like, we don't need that kind of strength. Right. Like like in our day to day life, we're not doing things well. So then it becomes not even that functional. But yoga, moving your own body, that's it. We're constantly doing and through those body weight movements. Not only is it going to build strength, but it's not going to, like, wear you down as much as I'm doing other other types of exercise. So that's a one big one physically is just feeling good in your body, going even deeper. Like I can tell you. So I have two autoimmune conditions. I've been diagnosed with Crohn's disease, which is intestinal inflammation. Kind of throws off my digestion and diabetes, so affects my blood sugar. When I practice yoga or really now I see it more now and I don't practice yoga because I do it frequently. If I don't practice yoga, my blood sugar is way higher. So it regulates my blood sugar. And there are studies that show it helps really everybody's blood sugar, which is good. But you have diabetes or not. It's good to have regulated blood sugar, helps your body just stay in and kind of balance. And and my digestion is better, too. And there's a lot of people that that have digestive problems. So just moving your body around and a lot of the forward folds and twists, it's like a massage for your digestive organs. So those are just like little benefits. Alex: And I'd say that each person you kind of have to experience it for yourself to really get to know. Right. Like I could tell you that honey is sweet and delicious, and I could talk about it all the time. How good honey is. If you never taste honey, you're not going to really understand. But when you really do it yourself, then you'll start to realize, like, well, yeah, I do feel better. So that's physical. Mental. It's gonna help you. I think the biggest one is it's going to help you be less reactive in your lives. So reactions are like, you know, someone cuts you off in traffic and you die. You start getting crazy and like fight or flight response, start getting angry. Or maybe it's with your partner that you live with where they say something that kind of pisses you off and you you just get super agitated right away. And there's no like, there's no. There is no cause from like the stimulus to the response. It's just right away that you're super reactive. And it's really powerful to be able to increase that space. So something happens, there's some kind of stimulus, and you're able to take a little bit more time to respond with with your whole being, not just like out of emotion or not just like out of anger or you're able to more intellectually, intelligently and emotionally respond. So I think that helps a lot. Joe: That's really interesting, too. I never thought of it that way. But to have that space between between what happens in your reaction is really cool. Alex: It's huge when you can when you've made that space even bigger, when that gap becomes bigger. That's really you talk about regret a little bit. Usually we only regret things when we react to them. When you have that space and you usually have a little more time before you respond to something, then you're probably not going to regret you're probably going to make a decision that's that's going to be best for it, for all parties involved. Definitely increases your ability to focus. Right. So if you want to be more proficient, efficient at work, if you want to be able to have better conversations, be a better communicator. Is going to help you with that, too. So mentally really powerful. And it just goes to improve your mood like movement and breath helps you feel better. So you're gonna be in a better state of mind when you're not when you're in a better state of mind, in a more elevated state. You're going to attract better things into your life. That's the best law of attraction and law of attraction. Is not this like hippy dippy, crazy thing that is real. And we're all doing it constantly. Right. We just aren't necessarily aware emotionally. Yoga is a great way to express it. So it's another thing with men like men were taught that to to be a strong man, we need to be stoic and we need to not really show emotion. Alex: And that takes it takes a big toll. Right. And that's why more men have like serious health conditions, because this is a popular saying mom like wellness practitioners, our issues are stored in our tissues. Right. So if we never release emotionally, then then then we have so much stress that we're just holding in and holding onto. I think also that's a big part of why I had a disease, why I got diagnosed, because I didn't have a healthy outlet to express the things I was feeling and some of the challenges that I went through. So. So yoga like moving your body, breathing. Kind of shaking things I talk about. Like shaking. That's a way that our bodies release. So that's a really powerful thing on an on an emotional level. And it just allows us to feel right. Like, most of the time we're numbing ourselves. Yoga is like the opposite. Like, go ahead and feel. You can feel angry. It's OK. You can feel happy. You can. You can. You know, there's a lot of people that practice yoga. And they they feel emotional, like they might cry or like feel like they're tearing up beautiful and you off to try to make sense of it, just like that's a release that had to happen. Joe: Yeah. Alex: And then finally, the good news is that. Joe: Not I don't know if it's it's exc. I was just going to say that you talk about the emotion part of it and how I even said to you after one of the classes, I couldn't keep tree pose, I couldn't keep it without falling out of the pose and losing my balance. And I found myself getting mad at myself a couple of times. And over the months I've learned to to just breathe and settle into it. And then it's it's become a better way of doing it for me. But I used to get mad at myself because I want I'm one of those people I got to do everything good or I suck, you know, and it's. Alex: You know, that man and I and having the awareness of it. That's a huge benefit of the practice. I say it a lot in my classes. How you do anything is how you do everything. Joe: Yeah. Alex: And, you know, this is an opportunity to become more aware of, like what happens when you struggle. Right. Do you get pissed at yourself? Do you start to have this negative self talk? Because all that does is bring you to a downward spiral. Right. So as you become more aware of it, you go into your yoga mat and you might do something that like, OK, you're going to struggle in it, but can you still stay, like, optimistic? Can you still keep your energy up even when you're struggling? And that's going to help you so much in other areas of your life and your relationships in your in your work, in your, you know, whatever it may be. So that's really powerful. And in the final dimension where you get benefits is the spiritual and spiritual true. That's a pretty, like, misunderstood term. Couple of things that that it means to me. One of the one of the most powerful emotions or traits, I guess, to feel is inspired and inspired is that word in spirit. So it's like when you're connected to soul, right? When you're connected to your true self. Because you don't have a soul. You are so right. Every single human being is Joe: Mm hmm. Alex: A school. We have a body. We have a mind. But we are we are soul. And when we're in that place of spirit and soul, we get out of our own way. And we start to realize that we are our biggest obstacles, like our ego. Right. That that part of us that maybe gets pissed when we're not doing so good or maybe gets offended or overthinks things like we get in our own. Our ego gets in our own way all the time because we just want to be loved and we want to be appreciated. We want to be like, you know, our ego wants to be the best and recognized as the best. And when we're in spirit, we don't care about that. Like when you're really inspired, all that shit goes away. And I think everyone's experienced it in some way where they're just in the flow of life. So, like, I'm a big athlete, I love playing sports and I've had moments in life. I'm just totally in the zone. Right. I know musicians and runners. They experience it, too. And in the zone is the same thing. You could change interchange that word with being in a state of meditation or being in it in a state of inspiration. In spirit. Joe: Yeah. And it was interesting because, again, talking about the practice of yoga. And I wanted to actually ask you, what do they call it, the practice of yoga. Alex: Yeah, I love that because it's not a performance and it's not a competition, right. And it helps you realize that it's not a destination. So if you if you're not performing yoga, there's no one that you're trying to impress with yoga. Social media. Maybe there's some other things about it, because you'll see a lot of these famous yoga accounts that just pose like pretty photos. But to me, that's not really what yoga is about. And yoga for four more more of the time that it's been around, as has not been about postures, it never really was about posture. It's just in the past few hundred years, poses became became what yoga is like known for. It's never a performance and it's never a destination. And, you know, one thing about practice is like you don't really need to label or judge it as good or bad just by putting the effort in. You get the results out. And I think that's a pretty powerful thing because most of the things we do in life, we're doing to, like, impress other people or to to perform something and almost everything that we do, we do to kind of impress other people or or get some kind of recognition and yoga. It's not about that. Just you come to your mat. We just practice certain things. And what you're really practicing in yoga, not getting good postures. You're really practicing strengthening the qualities of the mind that serve you right. So equanimity, having a balanced mind, non reactivity, kindness, compassion, enthusiasm, inspiration, like those qualities, the mind you're strengthening and then you're learning to weaken by just not giving energy to the qualities of the mind that that detract from you. So like competition and judgment and negative self talk, those things. So really, that's what you're practicing. You're practicing getting better at living your life. Joe: Yeah, awesome. I want to, if you can, and I don't know I don't know how deep you want to get into it, but I want to get a little deeper in the physical part of it, because I think that that's what's important for people to understand. I don't want them to think it's like to showing like I think the other benefits will come out of it if if they understand the health benefits in a physical nature of what it can do to them. And I know that where we're in certain poses and when we're in class and you're talking about how your toes are spread out when you're let's say you're in downward dog or your fingers are spread out. And it's and they talked about us all getting more down into the earth, like sitting on the floor during the day occasionally, like feeling more connected to the earth. Alex: Yeah. Joe: And and I know that when we do these poses and you talk about how you're pushing on your ankles and your fingers and your toes, and it's it's creating this circulation in the areas that normally aren't getting that kind of attention. Alex: For sure. Yes. Love it so. So let's start by saying, like, first of all, in in our Western culture, right. In America, there's something like one in four people have chronic illness. It might even be higher. It might actually be like one and two. But we live in a culture where a lot of people have disease and disease dis Joe: Yes. Alex: Ease. So the opposite of having ease in the body is dis-ease and the cause of most diseases. And this is really according to like all traditional medicine practices that have been around for thousands of years. Right. Way longer than our modern like pharmaceuticals and what we do here in our health care system. But like traditional Chinese medicin, Ayurveda which is the kind of sister science of yoga, traditional medicine that was practiced in the Middle East for thousands of years. It all says that the main cause of disease is stagnation. Right. Like when there's just stuck, when we're stuck, they're stuck. Energy, that's the reason that we get tension, everybody. That's the reason that our digestion kind of sucks. So yoga in the poses and we work in the yoga posture to bring sensation to every single part of our body and wherever there's sensation that that's that goes hand in hand with there being stimulation. Right. So that part of your body is stimulated. And if you just, like, took your arm and you stack smacked your arm a lot. Right. This is stimulation. It's going to start to turn red. That's increased circulation. So wherever you stimulate whatever part of your body you stimulate. There's more blood flow, more energy flow. And when everything is flowing, that's when we're at a at a greater place of of health. Better place of healing. And I love using the analogy of like a stagnant pond. Alex: Right. It's like very murky. It's it's kind of nasty. A lot of mosquitoes and bugs compare. And that's that's when we're stagnant. And if you think about it, probably a lot of people that we know well, maybe people that are listening to this right now. We spend hours a day sitting in a chair. So there's a lot of stagnant energy, a lot of blockages. Tips are so tight, our low backs are so tight. That's the pond. That's real stagnant energy. And then if you look at like a stream, it's very clear. It's smooth. It's flowing. That's the. That's what yoga helps helps us get like, more circulation in our body, more energy flowing in our body. A huge one. A huge benefit of the practice is you don't you'll see that you, like, don't need to be addicted to coffee and caffeine to have energy. Right. Like, you can find weight. Just breathe deep. You'll have more energy. Do some sun salutations, which is like a basic yoga warm up super D. D series of movements. You'll you'll have more energy. And that's a beautiful thing too, because it's really empowering. You start to realize, hey, I can take my healing into my own hands. I can take my energy and my efficiency into my own hands. So that's a big part of how the physical postures work, is bringing more stimulation and therefore circulation to every little party about. Joe: Yeah, I think it's really important, so I wanted to just kind of drill that home because again, I think that the the idea of what yoga is, is you have to experience it. Like you said you can. You can tell me all day that that honey is sweet. And if I don't taste it, I'll never know. Right. So I just I want to encourage the listeners to initially if they just want to watch you online in a training, but ultimately I don't care if it's at lifetime or. I do care. I don't want anybody at lifetime. I don't want that. Alex: Save you a spot. Joe: No but I encourage people to go in and when they're ready to go take a class, because I really think it's super important. Alex: And I'm glad you said that because that it is a little bit of a blind spot for me, because if you talk to people that are close to me, like you'll see like I love yoga for definitely more than just the physical practice, like the physical to me is like really a smaller benefit to all the other practices. Like I said you don't practice yoga to get good at poses. You practice, you're going to get good at life. But I also realize it's really important for people to realize that, like, the physical is usually the introductory. Right. Most people come to yoga because they want to feel better in their body. They want to be more flexible. They want to kind of like, you know, if they have low back pain, they want to they want to help take care of that. So I think it's important for me to realize that and talk to that, too. And really, if you come just for the physical, that's fine. You'll get everything else. That's how it works for most people. They come for the physical. They want to Joe: Yeah. Alex: Be more flexible. They want to, you know, open up their hips a little bit. And then they start to realize, like, wow, this is. Like, I didn't freak out when someone just cut me off. I used to have road rage. Whoa. This is like my yoga practice is helping. I breathe. I did deep. I took a deep breath. Instead of, like, maybe yelling at my partner or yelling at my kids when they kind of pissed me off. Like, I saw that there's a little more space between my response. You don't have to. You want to go to yoga for that. But you'll get the. Joe: Right. So on top of that, this is just more of a personal question. Do you meditate also? Alex: Yes. Joe: Ok. I just that was a selfish question because I've done it off and on. And I was just wondering if it's something that you do as part of your daily lifestyle. Alex: Sure. I mean, I've I've been inconsistent over the years where I'll go and be really consistent with we're going to fall off. But that's like the seated meditation practice. And I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions about what meditation is. I've had I can't tell you how many students I've had say I can't meditate. I can't get my mind to still to be still. I can't get my mind to calm down to any thoughts. And like, that's very natural. But that's that's part of being a human having a human mind. It's not about making your thoughts go away. The practice of meditation and this is ancient yoga philosophy. This is like that the eight limbs of yoga, which is a really foundational yoga philosophy teaching before you get to meditation, that kind of the precursor is is concentration. So when you're doing when you're meditating, what you're really doing is concentrating on one thing. And if your mind wanders, it's OK as part of the practice. But you just sucks instead of letting your mind go away off into the distance. You notice it wandering and you bring it back. You notice it wandering and you bring it back. So the practice is concentration. Meditation is not really a verb. It's more of a noun that you might get into. But just because you sit and sit for five minutes doesn't mean you're gonna get into that state of meditation where you're like in the zone. Alex: And that's not it's practice another you know, another thing like you want to judge it as like, oh, did I actually meditate or not just take if you. And I like to teach when I do like one to one coaching, I just teach. Hey, guys, this is like we're just gonna practice concentration and let me call it meditation. We're gonna practice concentration. And as you get better at concentration, you start to get into the zone. And some people, almost everyone meditate just in different ways. Like runners. You know, I've talked to some people, too, that work with or might you have like a concentration practice, ignite or meditate. And I was like, well, what do you do to kind of like get out of your own head like or like, you know, what do you do to kind of if you have a lot of thoughts going on it, like why I like to run when I'm running, I'm just like fully in the zone and not thinking too much. Perfect. That's your meditation. Some people meditate when they play basketball and they play music when they create art. So there's a lot of different ways to do it. And I think that's important to realize, too, to. Joe: Yeah, and it's funny because what yoga has helped me to do is to understand how poorly I was breathing because I'm definitely a breath holder type person like I. The tension from holding my breath for certain things. And so it's opened up the fact that I need to breathe deeper and longer. And it's all part and it's all these little benefits that you don't realize you're getting. And that's why I think it's so important. I wanted to have you on because of all of this, you know. Alex: Yoga changes your life does Joe: Yeah. Alex: If you commit to it. And it just it just works for everyone. The big thing is you have to find the right teacher, right? The right Joe: Yeah. Alex: To feel like I'm not everybody's teacher. I've had people that don't like the way I teach. They don't. I talk a lot to a lot of stories. Some people like that. Some people like more silence. You know, I play my music really loud. Some people like that. And that's fine. And I and I realized that, like, not everyone's going to like me. I think if people if I wanted everybody to like me, I'm probably doing something wrong. I'm sacrificing Joe: Yeah. Alex: My truth. But there's plenty of teachers. There's plenty of styles of yoga. So once you find your teacher and your style and your person, you dive in and and like, it'll it'll change your life. Joe: And you touched upon something there that I wanted to ask you, this is about the music and how. How do you think that Paris, with what we're all doing in that room and and how do you I would, knowing you

If you think back to just a few years ago, when someone asked you to name a company that delivered food, you’d probably only be able to name a few pizza joints or the local Chinese food place. But today, the world has shifted and online food delivery is a booming business. Last year alone, Grubhub sold $6 billion worth of food, and the company delivers more than 500,000 meals per day. So how did Grubhub enable this massive shift to digital meal purchasing? On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we welcomed Alex Weinstein, the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, and he explained to us exactly how the company has been able to become a market mover. From the initial education process to then focusing on customer retention, Alex and his team have been deep in the weeds of it all, and they have built a culture of experimentation, data analytics and a focus on ROI to stay ahead of the curve. Alex explains it all here.    3 Takeaways: Measurement and incrementality are important. You have to understand whether or not where you’re putting your dollars is making a difference, and sometimes the answer will surprise you True experimentation is necessary to create new methods of measurement, marketing strategies and growth opportunities. So the question you have to ask as a leader is how can you create incentives to allow people to take risks and learn? The time is now to learn about the newly-online customers that have trickled into your business due to COVID-19. In understanding their needs, you will be able to ensure retention and set yourself up for the new reality we live in For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Welcome to Up Next in Commerce. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of mission.org. Today, my stomach is rumbling, because we're talking all things Grubhub. Alex, welcome. Alex: Thank you for having me. Stephanie: Yeah, thanks so much for coming on the show. I just pulled up the app earlier to be like, "What should I have for lunch today?" Because it's 12:00, and it's time to order something. Alex: What did you end up ordering? Stephanie: I'm looking at pad Thai right now, we have a really good Thai place down the street. That's usually my go-to, but I started to get influenced by sushi, so if you have any advice, let me know. Alex: I don't know the restaurants in the area, but look for those that are well-rated, and look for deals. We have a ton of deals going on right now. Stephanie: Ooh, nice, that's perfect. You are the SVP of Growth at Grubhub, correct? Alex: That's right. Stephanie: I'd love to hear a little bit about your role there, and what brought you to Grubhub. Alex: Sure, sure, thank you. I've been at Grubhub for a little bit over three years. My responsibility is for the consumer business. That is, how do we get more new customers to try us out for the first time, and how do we get existing ones to order with us a little more often? And hopefully they'll return. Alex: This spans all aspects of marketing. We do a whole bunch of stuff in-house. I'd love to explore that a little bit later. But it also involves a lot of work cross-functionally, across the product. When I say product, I don't just mean our apps, but the totality of the experience that the customer has, from our apps to the delivery, to customer care, if that's ever necessary. Stephanie: Very cool. Previously, were you at, I think I saw Microsoft and eBay, or what did your past life before Grubhub look like? Alex: That's right, that's right. I actually am a very strange Head of Marketing. I'm a software engineer by training. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: I've written a bunch of code. I switched over to product management, and then darkness had me, and I somehow ended up in marketing. I indeed was at eBay before this, also for around about three years. Similar role, maybe a slightly more narrow role, focused on customer retention, marketing technologies. Stephanie: Very cool. I'm sure that was great help working at a marketplace, albeit not maybe a three-sided one, but still maybe a really helpful to transition to Grubhub with as your background? Alex: It very much was. I have to admit, I thought I knew marketplaces after eBay, then when I started Grubhub, I discovered so much complexity. Our business, exactly as you said, is a three side marketplace. Restaurants, food delivery drivers, and consumers. It is a hyper local business. People who live in Palo Alto whole heartedly don't care how many restaurants we have in San Jose, and how good our delivery network is in San Francisco, right? Alex: It has to be block by block, and we have to make sure that we have good restaurant selection there, good demand, and good supply of drivers. Otherwise, if the three sides aren't in alignment, bad things happen. Stephanie: Yeah, that seems like it would be really tricky to keep all that balanced. How have you found success keeping everything balanced? Like you said, it's so hyper local, I'm thinking there could be a driver over in Sunnyvale, and they're definitely not going to go to my local Thai place to pick up the order that I'm looking at. Alex: Yeah, this is where a lot of fun in this business comes from, and a lot of complexity in this business comes from. We have to be really good at predicting things, and predicting demand. And we have to be really good at engaging all sides of our marketplace so that drivers actually want to be online at the time when we want them to be online. Alex: Consumers end up placing additional orders if perhaps we have a little bit too much supply. Restaurateurs want to create deals. Basically, being able to influence three sides of the marketplace in a automated, personalized, hyper local way, is really the only way we can survive, right? This, to me, is super joyful, and super complicated, and where a lot of learning, personally, for me, has come from. Stephanie: Yeah, I'm sure every day it's adjusting a little bit more, and you keep have to kind of changing things up and experimenting a bit. How do I think about where Grubhub is at right now? To me, it seems like it's the market leader. How many meals are being delivered? How much is that in dollar-wise of food that's being sold? How do I think about that? Alex: We're a public company, all of those numbers are public. Quick summary for you. We deliver more than half a million meals a day. Last year, we delivered more than six billion dollars worth of food. Of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, the demand for food delivery has also increased. The expectation of all of our constituents, and of our community, all of us, have risen tremendously. Because, from something that restaurateurs really on for a portion of their revenue, they now rely on delivery as the majority of it. Alex: For consumers, where they would perhaps order delivery occasionally, now is the only way for them to order restaurant food. A lot of expectations on us have increased throughout these past couple of months, even though we already started from being quite a large company with high expectations. Stephanie: Yeah, have you had to adjust quickly with everything going on with COVID-19? What have you seen, other than increasing orders, and how have you had to pivot to meet the customers and meet the drivers in where they're at today? Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Well, most definitely, yes. First and foremost, we began by focusing on safety of all the participants of our marketplace, right? This began with our work on personal protective equipment for our drivers. We distributed hundreds of thousands of PPE sets for free for our drivers. We invested a bunch of work into enabling contactless delivery within our apps. Which, of course, is something that makes the entirety of the marketplace safer. Alex: We basically have to take our product roadmap, and, in many ways, revisit it fully, and focus on things our community demanded of us in that moment. Similarly, we had to do something like that with marketing, as well, because we had a certain strategy. You of course know that a lot of our effort is in making sure that consumers can get the best value on Grubhub. If you spend money on food delivery, your dollars will go the furthest on Grubhub. This really is our brand positioning. Alex: When COVID came, we had to take a pause, because this rewards positioning, or this value positioning, really had to take a step back, because consumer's interest... Sure, they were looking for deals, but they were looking to be safe, first and foremost. Secondly, they were looking to support their community. So we had to reposition a lot of our marketing work to make it so. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm thinking that could be a trend that stays around, even after everything's over, keeping that contactless delivery at least as an option, and thinking about how to actually prove you have the safety measures implemented, and you're tracking that every month. Are you all thinking about how to scale that and keep that for the long term, or is it more just a short term play until the pandemic's over? Alex: Couple thoughts for you. One is, I don't think that we're going to be looking at a pandemic being over and everything coming back to normal. I think we need to get used to the new normal, at least until the vaccine is here. Which means that people's lifestyles, their habits, will be fully adjusted by then. Alex: As such, it's not like we were developing a set of patches for three months, and then after that, we just turned those patches off. But also, there's meaningful, positives coming from this change, right? Like any crisis, it is both a danger and an opportunity. What we've discovered is this contactless delivery, for example, besides making everyone safe, it is actually making our network a tiny bit more efficient. The delivery driver does not need to engage with the consumer in-person. They can just drop it off, take a photo, and keep going, and keep working. Which shaves off a small amount, but in the grand scheme of more than half a million deliveries a day, this starts adding up. It helps our drivers earn more, and it helps our overall network be more efficient, which means food comes to consumers faster. Stephanie: Yep, yeah, that's definitely a good change. There's a lot of food delivery players in the market right now. How do you create an experience that's completely unique to Grubhub? Where people, they're like, "That's where I want to order through." Alex: All of this, in our minds, has to do with differentiation. And you're exactly right, maybe two or three years ago, where consumers didn't really know much about the food delivery category. A lot of what we had to do was to educate them about our existence, which is why a lot of our marketing, a lot of our product, was geared towards a first-time experience of someone who's never gotten anything delivered other than a pizza. Because really, that was the state of the world, right? You would ask an average consumer on the street, "Name a couple companies that deliver food," and they would name pizza brands. Stephanie: That would've been me a couple years ago, too. Alex: Totally. Stephanie: I'd be like, "Domino's." Alex: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Maybe Chinese food, if you've ever tried it. An average consumer didn't know that there's hundreds of restaurants that deliver to them, and that they can find them on Grubhub. So that was the focus of our messaging. Alex: Three months ago, even before COVID, if you asked an average consumer to name food delivery brands, they would name us, and maybe a handful of our competitors. In that environment, I'm prompted, right? This is unaided awareness. Not, "Have you ever heard of Grubhub?" But, "Name a food delivery brand." Alex: Our work switched from creating awareness to driving consideration. Helping consumers understand, what is it that they get if they buy from us versus perhaps one of our competitors? Last year, a lot of our focus has been on stating this extremely clearly and delivering on that experience quite precisely. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, it is all about value for us. Alex: Now that we're entering a bit of a new normal with COVID-19, we're beginning to come back to some of this foundational brand positioning. Talking about rewards and value. We have a TV spot that's actually launching today and tomorrow on national TV. We're one of the biggest spenders on TV in both the category. Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: Generally we're one of top 200 brands advertising on U.S. television that talks about rewards and value. You might be scratching your head and wondering, "Why in the hell is a digital first brand spending so much money on TV?" Stephanie: Yes, I was wondering. Tell me. Alex: It actually is kind of counterintuitive. We, maybe about three years back, we started scratching our heads and thinking, "Okay, if an average consumer doesn't really know what food delivery options are out there, how do we create that awareness? And how do we do that in a way that can confidently map the efficacy of our spend?" Because creation of awareness, let's face it, is the most expensive thing a company can do. Stephanie: Yep. Everyone wants it, but then actually implementing it, tracking it, and seeing how it did, seems a little tricky. Alex: It is so very tricky. Most mechanisms for doing this are actually kind of arcane, right? You do media consumption patterns, which, frankly is a large-scale survey that perhaps an agency would run and say, "Okay, New Yorkers, they absolutely do not watch any TV. They spend a bunch of time in the subway, true. And then they're all very much on digital." Alex: So, a brand that's trying to advertise in New York then would say, "Okay, television in New York, totally worthless. And our consumers are probably just like the average consumer in New York." That's kind of how the line of thinking typically goes. We, despite having a general applicability product, right? Everybody wants food delivery, right? Everybody from 18 to my mom, most definitely could benefit from food delivery. Alex: And yet, what we discover, is that the media consumption patterns of an average New Yorker are not the average media consumption patterns of our consumer. Moreover, what we discovered three years back was even though our intuition was that someone who orders food delivery online is most likely an early adopter of technology, and most likely a cord cutter, right? I mean, if you're about to order food online, you of course are ordering your socks from Amazon. You of course are watching shows on Hulu Plus without any commercials, as opposed to on cable TV, right? Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: Of course that intuitively made sense, which is why we've been spending a lot of money through digital video channels. That intuitively made sense. We stumbled upon a set of techniques that allowed us to, with confidence, compare the efficacy of our awareness spent between digital video and the digital awareness darlings of Hulu and YouTube and Facebook for some of the dimensions, here. What we've discovered is that the bull drought of digital first is actually not as efficient, not at all as efficient per dollar spent, comparing to the- Stephanie: Oh, interesting. Alex: ... boring, stodgy, nobody watches it, cable television. Stephanie: Is it because of the audience that's there, where the digital, like you were talking about, advertising to them, they may already know about you and it's an easier conversion, whereas the people who are keeping the TV running in the background all day, maybe actually need the ad right then and there where it can put a little inception on them and they can hear about it a couple times while they have the news on? Alex: Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons. Other reasons are that, just on a per impression basis, your digital video is dramatically more expensive. Even though I'm a nerd of machine learning, and I love personalization, I don't believe that personalization can cover a five X price difference. It can make something 50% better, but not five steps better. Stephanie: So how do you think about creating that culture of experimentation like you're talking about, where most companies right now are probably not focusing on TV campaigns? How do you think about putting a budget behind that and actually empowering a team to do that, where when I think about teams who are running with marketing budgets, or just budgets in general, it's very scary to not show a great ROI, because you either aren't going to get that budget again. It's a use it or lose it type of culture, it seems like every company operates that way. Maybe Grubhub doesn't, but how do you think about creating good incentives and a culture of experimentation to come up with some of those projects? Alex: I think a culture where you ask for confidence in measurement for your spend is a good culture. Where you ask for feedback loops is a helpful culture. Now, you can take this too far, and you can start trying to map everything to revenue or [inaudible 00:16:56], and that doesn't particularly help with upper funnel marketing campaigns. But, the other extreme isn't particularly better. I see a lot of marketing organizations end up in that spot, where we say, "We demand perfect measurement," from what they call performance marketing. Alex: And the brand marketing side, the one where vast majority of dollars actually have to be spent to create awareness, is not working to the same level of rigor, and the same level of intellectual honesty with measurement. To your question about how to actually create those frameworks for the team, a couple things come to mind. Alex: The first one is, trying to pursue incentive alignment. If people on your team genuinely believe that learning and optimality of investment for the entire team is how they get promoted, is what the company actually values, they will pursue exactly that. Let me give you- Stephanie: Let me hear an example. Alex: Yeah, let me give you a counter example. A counter example is what happens if you hire an agency to manage your Facebook spend. Have you ever heard an agency that managers Facebook spend come back to you and say, "Your Facebook spend is terribly inefficient. You should spend less on Facebook." Stephanie: Definitely never. Alex: Right? That's what their incentives are, they get a portion of your Facebook spend. The same exact thing happens for your TV agency. The same exact thing happens for someone who's managing your Google spend, right? If you have a bunch of outsourced agencies, each of which is responsible for one of your channels, their survival, their ability to feed their children, depends on you being able to spend more money on the channel that they're managing for you. Alex: Of course, they don't have an incentive to try to tell you, "Hey, take money from Google and put it into Facebook." They will personally suffer. A setup like this creates a true misalignment of incentives. Let me contrast that with, let's say, an in-source structure, or perhaps a structure where you have a larger performance agency that is able to reallocate dollars between Google and Facebook without personalty suffering. Alex: In a structure where you in-source, which is how we operate, you're able to create a shared destiny, and you're able to say, "Hey, person running Facebook. Your incentives are all about learning." So if you have a current level of performance, which is a certain level of incremental CAC, and a certain level of incremental LTV. Your goal is to improve that by this percentage over the course of next quarter. Alex: Find some way to do so through whatever experiments that you're able to run. One of the potential outcomes is an improvement in efficiency by reduction in spend. They're able to raise their hand and say, "Hey, I actually want to spend your dollars. Take away some of my budget, and reallocate it over to TV, because they can spend it better. I hear they have a way to spend at a lower incremental CAC than I can." Stephanie: Have you seen that in your culture so far, of people actually being like, "Hey, you can have this budget, move it over here"? It seems like a lot of times, people are personally tied to their budgets, and whoever has the bigger budget is the more powerful one, and I haven't often, at least in my previous days at other companies, I haven't seen people say, "Hey, you can have this budget and move it here." Alex: You are exactly right. A lot of our, I guess, legacy from many of our previous jobs, associates the size of the budget with the influence in the organization, most definitely. This is where the job of a leader really is to create the right incentives and to catch people doing something right. Alex: If you hire somebody off of a company that had that culture, of course, their initial inclination will not be to raise their hand and say, "Hey, my area isn't working so hot." You need to indoctrinate them, if that makes any sense, into a world where it's okay to raise their hand and do it. The way you do it is by upholding folks who do this, and pointing at them and saying, "This person is doing it right," and celebrating their successes. And celebrating their experiments, where, perhaps, they didn't see the immediate success, but they learned something. Alex: So, as a leader, I think you have a lot of power to create these incentives. As such, structure what your team actually holds as valuable versus not. If you point to enough examples like this, you'll actually end up transforming the culture, even for someone who comes in from an organization that wasn't like that. Stephanie: Yeah, it seems like it would also allow someone to wear multiple hats, and kind of become a polymath when it's like, "I don't just focus on Facebook ads, or I don't just focus on this kind of marketing." They get to experiment with a bunch of different areas. Have you seen that happen in your organization? Alex: Oh, most definitely. My paid social folks, just like everyone's, they were super focused on Facebook. What we discovered is them raising their hands and being very creative, and being some of the first folks who ever tried TikTok, for example. This was a little while back now, but we were one of the first handful of brands to invest a lot of money into TikTok, and do large scale experimentation with them. What we've discovered is if you're one of the first ones, there's very meaningful... Effectively, arbitrages to be had, where you're able to not only get a great deal, but shape the product to your liking. As such, get a temporary advantage over the rest of the market. Stephanie: That's fun. How did you think about creating your first campaign on TikTok? When your team presented this idea to you, were you like, "Yeah, let's do it," or were you a little hesitant? What was the first campaign you had go out there, versus what does that look like today? Are you still utilizing it? Alex: Oh my God, this is quite a story, to be honest with you. The team came to me and said, "So, we're thinking about doing TikTok." My reaction at the time was, "TikWhat?" They explained this to me and I read up a little bit about it. My immediate reaction is, "Okay, you are attempting to sell a luxury product." Let's face it, ordering delivery, you're still buying food from restaurants. It is a luxury product in many of the cases, right? To, "You're trying to sell that to people who have no disposable income of their own. The average customer of TikTok at the time just could not have their own credit card." Stephanie: Yeah, they have allowances, maybe. Alex: Right? Exactly. "Why in the world could this possibly work, you guys? Our average consumer is fairly affluent, and you're now trying to go into a different demo. How is that even remotely possible?" But, luckily, at that point, I had already observed that my team knows better than me, and that they have much, much better ideas than I do. Essentially, we just did a test. We did a small test, and we experimented in earnest. Surprise, surprise, they came back and they showed me the numbers, and they were meaningfully better than Facebook at the time. Stephanie: Wow. Alex: We ended up investing more. That was genuine, true learning. Not just for the organization, but frankly, for me. There's multiple possible explanations for why it ended up being so efficient, and I can go into some of them, but the thing that matters to me most is that the crew felt inspired to pursue something new. They felt passionate enough about it to structure a test when there was no framework, really, out there. And they were unafraid enough to basically tell me that I'm wrong, and that my intuition is off. Alex: That made me feel like the culture is actually right. The culture is exactly what I want it to be. The opposite of that, where you're going with the highest paid person's opinion, if that makes sense. Stephanie: Doesn't work. Alex: It doesn't work, because all of our intuitions, no matter how successful we've been previously, we are sometimes wrong. Why hire smart people if you don't trust them to try things? Stephanie: I think there's a good mix between trust your gut, but also don't trust it, because you could be wrong. Yeah, go with other people's ideas, as well. How do you think about those efficiencies that you're mentioning when you're exploring new channels like TikTok? Alex: Sure. To me, it's indeed about being open-minded and experimenting with new types of media, and being unafraid to try things that aren't immediately, obviously, going to work. A similar type of experiment happened with Snapchat a little bit earlier, where I also was convinced that this can't possibly work for the same reason. Luckily, I, again, was wrong. Alex: I guess a pattern of learning is what inspired me to basically create this incentive structure for the team, where they're unafraid to raise their hand and say, "Hey, the way we've been doing this before is really off." If you want, I'll tell you a story of a channel that's not really a channel that I guess formed my opinion on that topic. Stephanie: Yeah, let's hear it. Alex: This is a story of a couple marketers that were attempting to turn a specific city around. Alex: As we talked a little bit earlier, we can be doing super well in one city, and not well at all in another city, or in a corner of a city. A lot of what we do has to do with how do we turn a specific city or neighborhood around? This couple folks, their job was to turn a specific city around, and I was expecting them to come to me and say, "Hey, I'm going to take the budget that you've given me, and I'm going to buy some Google ads, and I'm going to buy some billboards, and maybe I'm going to buy some Facebook ads." Alex: What they did instead, these were two marketers. What they did instead was actually really curious. They experienced the product for themselves. They placed a couple of food delivery orders, and they came to me and they said, "Hey, I don't want to buy any ads," they said. "Instead, whenever I was placing the order for food, there really weren't enough food photos. I was ordering from restaurants that I hadn't ordered from before, and I don't really know if their pad thai looks good. I don't really know if their sushi is something that I want to try." Alex: They were in your position. They said, "Screw it, I'm not going to buy any ads. I'm instead going to hire some photographers to come into those restaurants and take the photos. Then after that, I'm going to measure the incremental impact of the added photography, and see if the efficacy of that is actually comparable or high enough, comparing to the efficacy of ad spend." Effectively saying, "I'm going to open a brand new marketing channel, and that marketing channel is going to be photos." Stephanie: Photography. Alex: I'm like, "Okay, let's just do it." Stephanie: A whole brand new, the vision, of Grubhub, just photography. Alex: Exactly, exactly. These two folks get on the phones, start calling photographers, start calling restaurant owners and scheduling appointments to have the photographers come in there. That becomes basically their job for the next two months. Alex: Then they organize a really [inaudible] visitors for these specific menu pages see the photos, and others don't. They do some serious math to try to say, "Hey, here's the incrementality in here, and here's the efficacy of the spend comparing to what Google ads would be, or Facebook ads would be." They discover that those photos are actually a better way to spend marketing dollars, than any actual marketing. Stephanie: Yeah. Alex: I, at that point, am kind of floored. I come to them, I'm like, "Okay, you guys are on fire, this is amazing. Let's take your thing and give it to operations and scale up this thing." They say, "No, no, you don't understand, you don't understand. This whole project sucked. We spent our entire days on the phone with restaurant owners, trying to schedule appointments. We are going to make it better." Alex: I'm like, "Wait, what's going on?" They say, "No, no, instead of scheduling appointments with the restaurant owners to take photos, we are going to rent Airbnbs and photo studios around town, then order food from the restaurants, bring it to those Airbnbs. Our food stylist is going to make it look good, and we're going to take photos." Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Alex: I'm like, "Wait, wait, what? What?" Stephanie: That's another level. Alex: Yeah. My immediate reaction from this is, "Have you ever seen delivered food? It does not look good." They obviously told me to go pound sand, as they should have, and they showed me the first photos from these experiments. Oh my God, those first photos look much better than anything taken in a restaurant, because food stylists are really good at their jobs. If you were able to control the lighting, you're able to take much better pictures. Alex: When they actually tried it, they discovered that instead of doing two photo shoots a day, the photographer, who's the most scarce and expensive part of the whole operation, is able to do 20 photos shoot a day. Stephanie: Wow, that's efficient, that's amazing. Alex: As you can imagine, at that point, my mind was completely blown. We indeed operationalized this with folks whose day job was operations, as opposed to marketing. This was the example of really learning what learning means. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You kind of picked the markets to do that in, or you kind of see a market not doing so well, and those are the ones that you focus on getting the good imagery for, versus allowing that... UGC content to work well in other markets, or how do you think approaching that? Because it seems like something that would be really hard to scale, ordering a bunch of things all the time from every market in the U.S. How do you think about creating those campaigns? Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With hundreds of thousands of restaurants on the platform, we indeed have constrained resources to do these photo shoots when we can. We can't do all of them next month. We had to be somewhat thoughtful on prioritizing things. A few things came to mind for being able to select the right restaurants to do this in sort of the right markets. Alex: First is, conversion. If consumers land on the menu, and end up buying stuff anyway. Well, that's cool, I guess they don't need the photos. If on the other hand, conversion isn't amazing, but the number of visitors to the menu page is super high, hey, this might be an opportunity to actually add some photos and improve that conversion. Alex: By digging into the data, and looking at where the majority of the incremental impact can be, we develop this framework for allocating this constrained resource, which ended up effectively being an investment of marketing dollars into a channel that's sort of marketing, but sort of not. Is it product? Is it operations? I have no idea. Stephanie: It's something, all the above. Alex: Right? Stephanie: How do you think about, you mentioned incrementality quite a bit. How do you think about that throughout your organization, when developing these experiments and seeing what works and what doesn't work? Alex: Sure. First, if you don't mind, allow me to define it as- Stephanie: Yes, please. Alex: Because I think that's super important. Incrementality, to me, is what would have happened anyway? If you didn't do your glorious marketing campaign, or this amazing product improvement that you just rolled out. This is a difficult question, because it's really attempting to attribute the entirety of this success, or entirety of what's happening during a campaign, to the campaign. Alex: Let me give you some intuition behind this, right? Let's say you go to, I don't know, gap.com or something like that. You see a banner in there that says, "10% off." Well, obvious, a lot of people are going to click that banner, and a lot of people are going to use that coupon to get 10% off of their transaction. The key question, though, is, what portion of those people would have transacted anyway? Stephanie: Yeah, they went there directly. They probably would have. Alex: Exactly, it's clearly not zero, because before you launched that awesome 10% off coupon, some people were buying jeans yesterday. Being able to, with confidence, judge what that incremental behavior is, and what is the incremental CAC, and incremental LTV, is super important. Simple back of the napkin as to how you judge this is, let's say yesterday, a hundred people bought those jeans. Today, 110 people bought those jeans. It's not a real AB test, obviously. But all 110 people used your 10% off coupon. You can wrongly suggest that all 110 converted because of your coupon, or you can look at the truth in the eye and realized 110 used the coupon, but 10 really only needed it. Stephanie: Do you think a lot of brands are missing this when they offer these discounts, and maybe unintended consequences that could come from it? I could see a lot of consumers, if they get used to you always having discounts, then they just wait. They're like, "I'm going to wait for that next 10% off coupon," then they don't have a buyer at all. Alex: Yeah, it is super dangerous. I do think that in some industries, there's exactly that happening, right? We know of the right times during the year to buy a TV, so we don't buy a TV until then. We know when the right time of the year to buy home improvement equipment, and we don't buy it until then. Exactly what you're describing is a real danger. Alex: It's not just a danger of delaying the purchase, it's a danger of create a permanently less profitable business. Imagine is, every Friday, Grubhub was to, let's say, give all our consumers three or five dollars off. Not only are Thursday orders going to be delayed, because our consumers are going to be like, "Hey, I don't really care when I get takeout. I'll cook one night and I'll get takeout the other night." They'll delay it until Friday, but those Friday orders are going to be less profitable. Alex: So we permanently teach our consumer base, if we take that route, to not only delay their orders, but to make them less profitable. That is a real issue and something you got to be super careful with, which is why you must measure incrementality. Stephanie: Yeah, especially right now. You see so many people discounting everything, it's kind of scary to think. How are you going to come back when your entire, everything on your store online, is 80% off? How do you come back from that? Alex: Most definitely. Now, if you have physical inventory, the opportunity cost is not zero. Right? Let's say if you're selling digital goods, for example, right? Let's say you're selling access to, let's say a song, or a book, right? Your fixed costs in that situation, your cost of an action, is terribly low, right? As opposed to if you have goods in the warehouse, and you aren't able to sell them, there's very meaningful fixed costs for you that you need to deal with. Alex: It might be, actually, quite reasonable to be running these high promotions, but if you are, you better be running it as a real AB test. You better be able to confidently say that this is the true incrementality of this 80% off coupon, and that's the true value that I'm getting out of it from both not needing to keep these products in the warehouse, but also from just sheer revenue from the consumer. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have a good platform or way that you've set up metrics and things like that to measure that incrementality in a way that's not really manual, and then you can just kind of see how the campaigns and what they're doing is performing against each other? Alex: Yeah. In lower funnel channels, it is actually fairly easy to set up a platform for this, and we have. There are tools that you can use for it, right? Google Optimize, for example, or Optimizely, right? We have a combination of in-house and these third party tools to do product experimentation, for example. Alex: For things like CRM, couponing in the apps, or issuing emails with coupons, or push notifications, really good experimentation platforms don't exist off the shelf. We had to do some math ourselves. Some of that math turned out to be fairly fine tuned to Grubhub's needs. Here's what I mean by this. We're an LTV business. It's not just about the immediate transaction, it's about what happens after that transaction. Stephanie: Yep. Alex: For example, if a consumer ends up converting at a higher rate, and then afterwards has a poor experience and doesn't come back, that actually is terrible, terrible, terrible. Your typical, immediate conversion optimization tool, would just look at the first part of this. Oh my God, they converted at a better rate, great, awesome, keep it. Stephanie: Yay. Yep. Alex: We had to build tools specifically designed to capture these long-term effects. We typically look at the results of these long-term activities over the context of a month, right? So we need to see what happens to consumers for a meaningful amount of time to have high confidence that it indeed is net beneficial or not. Alex: Of course, we're able to look at things fairly early, and if something's a terrible idea, we're able to kill it early. But, in order to be able to confidently say what is the impact on the LTVs, we had to build tools. These in-house tools for many CRM things that we do today. Stephanie: Got it. Alex: Even then, it's just for lower funnel. It's just for CRM and product. How do you judge the incrementality of TV versus billboards? That is a whole other, super complicated story. Stephanie: How do you think about the intersection between your CRM and your content management system and your actual commerce platform? How do you create a good environment where they all interact together, and people can see a holistic view of everything that's going on? Alex: Great question. I don't think I have a perfect answer for you, other than enabling as many work streams for experimentation as are possible. That is, allowing the CRM team to run experiments on their own, without involving a bunch of product people, without involving a bunch of finance and analytics people. Similarly, allowing the front end or pricing optimization team to run experiments on their own, and do very specific price optimization experiments just by themselves. Alex: The more work streams like this you have running in parallel, the more you're going to be able to learn, as an organization, per unit of time. Stephanie: That seems like a great answer to me. It also seems like you would get a lot of, you could have a customer with a negative experience, but it would be because of maybe the restaurant. It seems like you guys would have a lot of insights into maybe how to help restaurants improve, where it's like, hey, every time someone orders this thing of sushi, you always forget the wasabi, and man is that making people upset. Do you ever send that data back to restaurants to improve the products as in their food, or the customer experience, or anything like that? Alex: Most definitely, you hit the nail on the head. We are in a really unique position of knowing not just who the people were, or when they placed the orders at your restaurant, but knowing exactly what they ordered. We can see exactly that pattern, right? We can tell you that on Tuesday night, the reviews for people ordering sushi, are actually worse than on any other night. We can help you see that, so that you can train the person that's working on Tuesday night. Stephanie: [crosstalk 00:43:21]. Alex: These kind of insights... Yeah, totally. These kind of insights are exactly what we believe is what is something that we can uniquely provide to our restaurant partners, besides demand. Of course they come to us because they're interested in demand, particularly now. But we can do more, and we've been building a lot of systems specifically about that, that are effectively... you can think of this as recommendation systems in the grand scheme of the word of giving recommendations to the restaurants about how they can lend the totality of their business more efficiently. For example- Stephanie: It seems like that could be a whole different business for you guys to also operate. Alex: It's quite synergistic in our minds, right? If we're able to make our restaurants more successful, it actually makes us more successful, in turn. Because, those consumers who are placing orders and are not getting any wasabi with their sushi, they are ultimately not happy with Grubhub. We want them to have an amazing experience. Alex: Whether the restaurant wins just on Grubhub, or throughout the totality of their experience, because, let's face it, that restaurant might be serving other delivery platforms, and soon enough, hopefully, dine-in, as well. That retraining is going to help the restaurant across the board. We actually very much welcome that. That means that we're able to create the value not just for our platform, but for the restaurant, and increase the chance that this restaurant will, ultimately, be successful. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that's a really good point, especially as a lot of brands right now are shifting quickly to the world of Ecommerce and trying to figure out how to sell online. There's going to be a lot of new touch points that they maybe aren't anticipating that could actually hurt the consumer experience. If you've got the UPS guy throwing your box over the fence, and it's getting crush, there's a lot of things that actually, you maybe wouldn't even think of, as a brand, of, "That's not my job," when really, everything form start to finish to delivery and afterwards, and the follow-up, all of that's your job. And how do you think about controlling that experience with so many touch points? Alex: You are so right. The totality of this is their job. From the first ads that they see on TV, to what shows up when they look on SEM or on paid social and discover your brand there, too. The first purchase experience to the interaction with the UPS guy, to the interaction with customer service. All of that, in totality, is what the brand relationship really is, what the product really is. Alex: As marketers, we can't just care about that ads. As product people, we can't just care about the bits installed on the phone. They, in their separation, they don't particularly matter. As you saw from my story with the photos, that really was quite profound to me, right? We kept looking for a solve to get more customers and more sales through marketing, and that solve wasn't there at all. The most efficient solve was far outside. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, such a good reminder for all brands to think about that, like you said, totality of the process. Because you have a software engineering background, I feel like I'm allowed to ask you tech questions. I saw on your, you guys have a blog on Medium, or your engineering staff does. They were talking about how they were creating discount codes using crypto. It made me wonder, what other kind of technologies are y'all experimenting with, or seeing success, or how did you think about running the platform that Grubhub's built on now? Alex: Sure. A few things are super important. One is having a scalable platform that can withstand demand, and that can withstand massive spikes in demand. As luck would have it, most people in Chicago, want to get dinner approximately at the same time. Stephanie: Yes, who knew? Alex: Right. What a pain in the butt. We've been trying to convince them to maybe come a different... No. Stephanie: Come on, 3:00's your time, come on. Alex: Exactly, exactly. Your dinner delivery window. Which, of course, creates formidable demand. Not just on the services in the backend of our systems, but a formidable demand on our logistics network. A lot of our work goes into being able to spike in response to customer demand. Let me give you one intuitive example of this. Outside of COVID, before COVID, when rain would start during dinner hours, demand would massively spike. Alex: At that moment, we're supposed to magically materialize a lot of drivers on the road doing deliveries. Being able to do so, technically, and when I say magically materialize, I'm of course referring to creating incentives and creating appropriate communication channels with our drivers so that they actually want to get on the road. A lot of our engineering work has to do with how we were talking about in the beginning, balancing the three sites of the network, and being able to respond to either a massive spike in demand, or response to a set of orders that were placed in the specific part of the city on the logistics side. Alex: Or, respond to an onboarding of an enormous partner, like Shake Shack, or Sweet Green, or Taco Bell, with their own unique needs. Remember, we work with such a variety of restaurants, right? We do point of sale integrations with a variety of our enterprise customers, which of course means that we have to have nimble systems that are able to onboard those same customers. They have to be resilient, as well. So, a lot of our work has to do with both scale and being able to deal with these spikes. Stephanie: Got it. Any favorite pieces of tech that you guys are implementing or trying out right now to help with those large spikes in demand? Or where you guys think the future is headed that you're kind of preparing for? Alex: Favorite pieces of tech. Huh. Huh. I'm going to think marketing tech. Braze has been an outstanding tool for our marketing teams. What we've discovered is it effectively enabled a whole work stream of experimentation for our CRM teams. They're able to run pretty sophisticated experiments completely independently from engineering, which increase our velocity of experimentation. Stephanie: Hmm, that's awesome. I'll have to check that out. Cool. So to zoom out a little bit, 30,000 foot level, what kind of disruptions do you see coming in the world of Ecommerce? What's on your radar right now? It doesn't have to be for Grubhub, it can just be in general. Alex: I think that the disruption is already here, where over these past couple of months, we've seen the portion of online transactions, and portion of consumers who have tried buying things online just catapult through the roof. All of those new consumers, let's face it, my 90 year old grandmother is using Zoom now. All of those consumers are a new opportunity. They have very different expectations. They don't yet know much about your brand. Alex: Being able to understand this newly online wave, and heightened expectations of the consumers that already happen online, but perhaps not as active with your service, right? Those, I think, are super important. This to me takes us back to velocity of experimentation, being more important now than ever. That is, truly learning from your customers. Observing them, creating experiments, measuring, and getting a feedback loop from them, so that you're able to focus and find the one thing that you can improve to make the whole story better. Maybe photos. Maybe it's something else. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I love that. It definitely seems like with these new people coming online, you have to have a bunch of different tactics to meet them wherever they are. The ones that have been working for the past year, might only work for a subset of the people because you have 50% more people that you need to market to, or develop a platform for, and it's going to be very different with how you approach those new consumers than what you've been used to. Alex: Exactly. Stephanie: All right, so, we're about to jump into the lightning round. Any higher level thoughts, Alex, that you want to share before we do so? Alex: If you're able to structure your organizational incentives to focus on learning and feedback loops, I think now you're going to see an even bigger reward for it in the form of market share, in the form of growth, in the form of being able to adapt to the world around you and leapfrogging the competition. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. All right, so the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Sales Force Commerce Cloud. It's a fun and easy, quick round of questions where you have a minute or less to answer. Are you excited and ready, Alex? Alex: Very scared. Stephanie: Dun dun. All right, first one. If you are starting a podcast, what would it be about, and who would be your first guest? Alex: Whoa, what a fascinating question. What a fascinating question. I am obsessed with all things culture, and how do you actually create the right incentives for a technology/marketing organization? I love Simon Sinek. He is outright amazing. I learned a ton from reading him. I would probably to get him and if I can't, I'd get one of my former mentors in there, as a consolation prize. Stephanie: Oh, that sounds good. I would listen. I would be your first listener, and I would give you a five start review. Alex: Oh my gosh, thank you. Stephanie: You got me at least. What's up next on your reading list? Alex: Hmm, next on my reading list? I am reading Russian sci-fi novels these days, as a means of escaping from a tiny, one bedroom apartment. Stephanie: Any good ones that we should check out? Alex: I'm actually reading them in Russian, so I don't know- Stephanie: I was going to say, unless they're in Russian, then I don't know if I'll be able to read Russian quick enough to read it. Alex: Oopsie, oopsie, I do have a few people at my work who've been reading Tolstoy before the whole COVID situation started. I don't know if I'd recommend it now, Tolstoy does darkness extremely well. We have enough darkness around us now. Stephanie: That is true. Yeah, maybe not. Alright, well, what thing do you normally buy at a store that now you're just going to buy online after everything with COVID? Alex: What a great question. Only online now. Hmm. Stephanie: Tricky, tricky. Alex: I used to, actually a lot of my electronics. I used to come to the store and look at them and experiment with them. I have a feeling that I'm never doing that again. I used to come to a Best Buy and just try to look at different mice and monitors and all that. I got a new laptop and a new mouse online. I really like them, and I really like the experience. I was unafraid of returning them. That's it, online I go. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree, especially as a lot of these companies are making the return experience a lot more seamless. Yeah, I could completely see the same thing happening. Buy things, test it out, and send it back if you don't like it. Alex: I was just chatting with a colleague about this exact same thing with returns around fashion. I think there's a lot of innovation to be had with moving the fear in fashion through that. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree, except I could see them having to now to figure out a way to resell those items in a way that proves that they've been quarantined, disinfected, and yeah. I was just thinking about that the other day. Man, that's tricky, especially for second hand market places to try and prove to the customer that these items are clean and good to go, and you can buy them. Alex: I agree. Solvable, I think, but I agree. Stephanie: It is solvable. All right, so the last final question. What's up next for Ecommerce professionals? Alex: I think we're going through a time when from being on the early adopter, early majority demand for most of the brands. We've become the critical source of revenue for every single brand. If you think that your company was going through a digital transformation, and is now trying to make digital just a better channel, hold on to your seats, because it's not the only channel, and the majority channel. So, the demand for expertise in our area is increasing very rapidly, and the demand for learning in our area is also increasing rapidly. I think this is a wonderful time to be in Ecommerce. I think this is a wonderful time to be learning and doubling down on Ecommerce. I'm excited for all of us to be right at the center of this transformation. Stephanie: I love that, love the positivity, and yeah, it's definitely an exciting time to be alive and experiment and try new things. This has been a blast Alex, thanks so much for coming on the show. This is your second appearance on a Mission podcast, so yeah, we're so thankful that you came back and joined us again. Alex: Stephanie, thank you very much for inviting me. Stephanie: All right, talk to you later. Alex: Cheers.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So Alex, now we talked about what I would like to do in the future, what about you? Career-wise, let's start with that.Alex: I actually have absolutely no idea what I want to do as a career. I know I want to do something interesting and I want to do something fun. I've certainly, I think that I as a person am most suited to a service style industry or a hospitality something like that where I would be, I've had sort of dalliancesor ideas about cafes, cafe chains, certainly, I'd always wanted to I think maybe rival Starbucks would be lovely. I looked at restaurants. Restaurants didn't really appeal to me because you've got weird hours and when everyone is having fun you're not. What else? For me it's, I just like to be able to have something that was constantly enjoyable. I think, you know, what you said, dynamic you know.Maria: Exactly.Alex: You can have something that will be enjoyable and you can change it up every day and so on and so forth but as to what I specifically would do, I can't put a name to it. I'm not the only one in my family. My father has a CV that's four, sorry ten pages long. It's ten pages long. He's changed jobs I think twenty-six times, twenty-seven now, and he's just so I don't know. For me, I'd like to travel but I'd certainly want to have a home base. I can't go too far away from home.Maria: When you say home, would it be your present home-like Australia or would you...?Alex: Yeah, I've got to say I'm an Aussie, true blue Aussie. I've got a love of the country. It's my home. I have spent time overseas. I've lived a year and a half in Canada, a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in Asia sorry it's not a year and a half in Australia, a year and a half in America, so I've done a couple of other things and I've always come back and been why did I leave? What caused me to leave? So, yeah, I'm torn between doing things that are altruistic and selfish. Do I want to just work for me and get the money, the moolah, the cash, the green, or do I want to do something a bit more for everyone else and I don't know it's difficult to decide. How do I do both?Maria: So the future is open?Alex: It is open isn't it?

Business is simple. Good product, cash in the bank, steady cash flow, growing sales and profit margins.Dr. Ian Birkby and Alex Cairns discuss the simplicity of running a business well.Welcome to another edition of the marketing science podcast the podcast for sales and marketing professionals working within science engineering and health care don't forget to subscribe on Spotify iTunes or wherever he usually listen to podcasts my name is Frank Barker the head of marketing at eight zero network where you can also subscribe and I'm joined by not just one but two guests this week with Dr Ian Birkby, the CEO of AZoNetwork and Alex cans MD of Move Marketing, a full service B2B. marketing agency.Thanks Gents for joining us doing today, so without further ado I'd like to jump straight into the first question and draw your experience of being in the notable position of pre dating the digital era but also having the experience of working right through the digital era to the present day and seeing how do you see the change in marketing strategy for SMEs?Well, despite the fact the indicating that my working career services in the era of horses and carts Frankie I will give you my the best position on thatIAN: I think the key thing in terms of how it's changed since ninety five when Netscape came out and the internet era started, is the ability to measure what you achieve with your marketing efforts. So in the digital age it is relatively easy to measure the impact of the various campaigns and from that to calculate the return on your marketing investment - now I'd counter that by saying we are possibly getting to the stage where some people like to measure too many things and starting to get lost a little bit in the numbers but for me it's the ability to quantify the performance of the campaigns.Franky: Okay excellent, Alex so you've you're in a full service B2B. marketing agency having worked with both client and agency side for lots of multi nationals, so you've got a real mix of experience Ho have you seen the transition.Alex: I'll echo a lot what Ian says, data on 2 aspects - because we use a lot of data for market analysis; market research in the planning phase as well so not just the campaign data which is invaluable but also the research phase for the data in terms of putting together marketing plans that give you a one to three to five years focus.The other big change since 2000 is that we now have channels so it's not just a service, supply through digital channels which we can actually pick and choose from a makes amounts according to requirement so there's a lot more to you and almost test as they say something.Franky: Okay and having worked with lots of different clients for your agency what's the biggest challenge, what's the most common or the greatest challenges that you see that your clients having from a marketing perspective.Alex: I think it is the data interpretation and insight because it is a fantastic thing having all of the data of but it's not a given to know how to use it and spin into an achievable set of objectives and actions so that's when we get involved.That depth of our experience and expertise in how to use and interpret that data across multiple channels but a lot of the science industrial sectors don't specialise in understanding data and certainly statistics is obviously not the course specialismsExcellent so Ian using data and statistics as marketing challenges would you echo that?Absolutely I think you know from our perspective as a as a business we've invested heavily in building an analytics platform over the last six or seven years and prior to that we would say to our clients we've driven several thousand visitors to your site - they'd say great thanks very much but they couldn't attribute those visitors to specific actions in terms of products sales and market sector activity so yes if you can use that data to genuinely prove R. O. I. it's a massive plus point.Franky: All the way from campaign original source campaign all the way to revenue generating opportunity yesIan: I mean as you well know we quite often gets into this discussion about you know was it the last touch that really made the difference and if you're on the sales side of life you probably gonna say it was your involvement that all was actually not firsts %HESITATION campaign that first email campaign that was marked his responsibility so yeah always an interesting debate that will Frankie's you well know.Franky: Let's not get stuck into aligning sales and marketing just yet the whole point just in itself.Fantastic all right so in which ways does B2C vary to B2B in specifically reaching scientists and engineers how have you found that is different.Alex: Today certainly there are a lot more the applications the market for a lot more nature a lot more difficult to pinpointIts really trying to appeal to the types of individuals and job titles that you've got within its scientific and industrial sectors so everything to enhance the credibility or proof that products or a service works as without the case studies white papers and anything this credibility building on that side is usually a better way to go and they stop and it's much more much more different approach and be to say where you can really just pick up on a sounder craze that's going on around them I'm going to campaign on the box about us a little bit less considered in a little bit less than actually less scientific.Ian: I think maybe just to add to that one from getting the other factories with the with database quite often the price points are significantly bigger on the sales side please significantly longer. So to a certain extent if you're in the business of content marketing you need to be writing content that satisfies all stages of the buyers journey. Whereas in B2C you know if you've got a ten pound product you can put a note out on Instagram and you could probably sell it the same day where is but a lot of our customers the sales cycle can be six to nine months more involved.Okay so on that what is the longest sales cycle, the longest time you have seen a sale from initial point to close.If I go back to most manufacturing days when I was involved in the business of manufacturing ceramics we could be talking to a client for nine months before you get specifications correct, you have done some testing - for a lot of our clients if you are selling a million dollars with the kit you know a year's worth of discussion is not unusual.Franky: We ran a survey where fifty one percent of the managers said they had a sales cycle between three to twelve months and there's very few who have got less than three months and considerably more than that have got more than twelve months - you find the same Alex?Franky: It definitely makes everything from forecasting, business planning, cash flow makes lots of stuff much more difficult with long sales cycles.What are the key questions that SME science or engineering company should be asking when it comes to strategic planning, Alex?We typically take a five step approach in terms of how we walk a client through the planning process. So always starting with what they're actually trying to achieve in the first place that's most fundamental thing involved. Then taking a look at a market analysis researching what's actually going on in the market, understanding competitors, what their position statements are and the marketing techniques they use and how tat stacks up openly in the marketplace and figuring out value proposition a message sounds like an obvious one. You'd be surprised how many twenty thirty forty million pound plus turnover companies that I walked into the really have not got that value proposition or a couple key phrases. Then the fifth one is a little bit more involved obviously so it's really pulling a lot together through the available channels and budget and timescales and also setting smart objectives to sit alongside all of that.I know you've done some great work helping us with our own strategic planning as well so thank you So, next question: How has the internet levelled the playing field for David versus Goliath over the last twenty years?Ian: I got into this game with AZoNetwork in early two thousand and it was very different then.On the internet, you've got the same amount of screen space as a billion dollar market cap company. So one of the phrases adopted fairly early on was that it doesn't matter where you are found on the internet, it just matters that you are found - it became much easier as a small business to make a significant impact via the web than previously.It has passed over from kind of publisher to client, that end user, the company the manufacture. It's really just the expanse of channels but also the time that it takes to execute campaigns in the market - so twenty years ago it could have taken three to six months writing, planning a campaign which could be done in a morning these days.Franky: Do you have any benchmarks for how an SME science engineering company would define a marketing budget?Alex: There are standard industry benchmarks out there in terms of percentage of turnover that kind of thing but we typically shy away from not more the fundamentals of individual revenue lines for the company, profit lines, profit margins for products and what the channels available with us we try to make it more small bespoke.You can't really tell you when you call us at five or ten million pounds and over estimate engineering companies don't just tell you to nominal five or ten percent turnover inside dies the amount to spend %HESITATION marks in.It doesn't really fit for every every single every single kind so we tend to look at the big picture okay the competitive so they're up again so for example we go offline and we're just tossing starts with recently that they chose to compete against and two major multinational blue chips now it's not gonna be feasible to put in the same kind of purchases they will so looking on the much more Avenue case by case basis across four to five channels now we can actually get towards a level playing field among the big stuff in a level playing field against close it's become really be small about the white invest stocked up with Joe's wells announcing.Atlassian, when they started, I think for the first of six to eight years and they didn't really have a marketing budget for their product which was a collaboration tool for software developers.Predominately it was a low price point thirty dollars which sold by word of mouth in the in the development community so they had a very low sales and marketing budget.On the other hand, you've got outfits like uber for example with very big marketing budgets who are effectively buying business - how long can they continue to do that? It's an interesting business case study - So I think it really comes down to what is your products and what are you trying to achieve?What do you find is the appetite for risk in in marketing specifically from the sort of C. suite and how have people get being given license to try things?It's low to be brutally honest, when I was client side running very big blue chip budgets for some big international companies it was still quite low even ten fifteen years ago as wellThat's why strategic planning is so important from my perspective it gives some validation that the C Suite board of directors can actually sign off on. When you cn see the analysis and the data for will give us an investment for the opposite ways process without any kind of analysis or just kind of an off the cuff approach they're not going to really stop those kind of budgets – overall a low outside for absolute risk in these sectorsFranky: Do you see lots of companies using the data to justify the marketing spend or is it still a bit more gut feeling?I think it's becoming increasingly data focused - you still see some dumb comments that come out like a why are you going to this particular exhibition, well because our competitors are there. It doesn't really justify that activity. We're in an age where at least the Google Adwords has worked as part of the marketing spending on Google. I'd be a fool to sit here and say it doesn't work, it obviously does.However one of the things that we see with people setting up Adwords campaigns is that we did it eighteen months ago and it was Jack who's in the I. T. department… they just set and forget. They don't even realize that they're actually now wasting fifty percent of the budget on keywords which aren't delivering for them. So I think there's a there's a lot of slack in the marketing activity but businesses really need to recognize that the marketing is a value creator not a cost center and that's the sort of the old fashioned thinking that we need to move away from.Franky: Which specific KPIs would you use in a business context what's important to you for a marketing standpoint?I'm gonna focus on the business KPIs and say well you know what other business KPIs and then how does marketing fit into that so again I think when you're running a lot of business need a building a business and keep it as simple as possible you know when businesses start to go wrong is when people start to over complicate things so:Make sure you got a product that people want to buy. Make sure you've got enough cash in the bank to facilitate the activity and we are big fans of using a balanced scorecard approach so you can actually see you know the financial performance is going; everybody in the business has visibility on how much cash we have in the bank now, how much do we think we gonna have in six months.What is it costing us to acquire a customer etc. that sort of data. So you get everybody involved and obviously marketing feeds into this in terms of how many customers do we currently have? How are we growing those customers. What's the churn rate on those customers so for me it starts with the top down approach of business first and how does marketing fit into the economics.Any marketing specific KPIs that you'd be encouraging your clients to measure?Really it's fifty-fifty half is related to sales or profit, or sales of a certain product line. And then the other fifty percent is the raw marketing KPIs - so we'll typically have a list of say six to ten channels that we will work on for clients and so be different for every one of those.For something like a trade show for example it would simply be quite a high cost in terms of conversion of that lead into a sale compared to an email or webinar or even social media - so they're definitely very different ends of the spectrum and affects how we how we pitch those KPIs for themFranky: We use lots of different software in our martech stack what piece of software could you not live withoutfor me it would be the AZoIntel analytics platform that we built and developed over the last six or seven years. We also have built our content management system, email distribution and the whole platform that we now exist upon which is our own IP these are pieces of software that we couldn't really do without and within that, I think the ability to see who was engaging with our content, that content journey and how they're engaging with that content – that has been the bedrock of the growth of our business.so over that period of time I think all of the other aspects you know sequel server and you know the the adobe suite that you may use you can pretty much replace those with all the solutions so it's a very personal answer and I apologize for the immediate commercial plug on thatI think you're excused, for me personally it's about how the software interacts with each other. Because we are with small marketing departments as soon as you can automate certain tasks: your lead scoring for instance and lead distribution out to the sales team, it just frees up your morning.Rather than to get in and then this bottleneck of admin that needs doing. Having grown up using Salesforce and we've managed to get AZoIntel talking directly to Salesforce, we can just forget about it. I know that it happens on a fifteen minute sync, so it can happen when I'm asleep it can happen at a trade show, it's happening right now which is huge!Ian: One of the key points right here right now is going to be the use of AI in marketing. The ability to have automated transcription of meetings. The ability to work out you know which key words and phrases you should be using in content and how they're going to have the greatest impact.I was recently at the inbound show over in Boston and marketing technology and A. I. is starting to have a serious impact - It's going to have the most impact where it can automate fairly mundane, routine tasks. It has taken us several years to get to the stage where we start to get reasonable value out of Salesforce but it's because we managed to automate a lot of those manual activities.Franky: Absolutely, so what's your biggest challenge as a leader and what's are the biggest issues that you come up against in running a business?Ian: So to start on that one I think for me it's always been about getting the culture right getting the team working right - you could have one of the world's greatest products but if you've got a toxic culture within the business it's going to blow up at some stage.So you have to have a goal in life, you have to have the vision, you have to know where you going how are you going to get there and then your job is to explain that to people in simple terms. Illustrate what success is gonna look like, how they play a part in the team that's going to enable you to get that and just keep it simple. Trust is a big factor you know which plays into that team working…Staying true to your visionTrue to the vision - you know that's Simon Sinek analogy of leaders eat last, the days of the Victorian mill owners are well gone. I think the role of a leader in businesses is more of a facilitator. As I come to work, I want people to tell me what I can do to make them more productive at their jobs.Alex?Alex: It's a fast changing industry right now I mentioned that chart with the 7 thousand tech stack businesses on.You've got a very fast paced sector in terms of the different channels within it and the different approaches that you can take.It's really about the pace of change in the data that's available and not getting completely bombarded and washed over by that data but actually finding techniques and methodologies to do that as a team of marketers. It is about building a culture where you've got thinkers who can come up with the answers for both yourselves and the clients really.Franky: If you could give yourself one piece of marketing advice about me way back when in in twenty years ago when you're just starting out with a song when you're starting out with with my marketing or debateAlex: Don't believe the hype. Build the hype.Ian: If I could go back… I came out of the manufacturing industry background and on the back of that, I saw the internet could be really good for educating engineers, designers and scientists.So I thought to myself, I'll go into a totally new career which is a building websites. At the time I knew nothing about building websites and I was led by the nose by a team of developers and spent six figures on building a website that looked really pretty and was really interesting, but search engines were never going to find it so I wish I'd known about search engines back then and how significant they were so I would have definitely saved a few hundred grand by knowing that!all right fascinating.Well that ties in superbly with next week's subject matter where we'll be finding out how companies are adapting their paid search strategy in the current climate.Thank you both gentlemen for contributing today.Don't forget to subscribe in the usual places or at AZoNetwork.com we'll see you next week for a brand new edition of the marketing science podcast with Matt Rafferty the head of Paid Search here at AZoNetwork – We'll see you then See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Alex: So how do you feel about long-distance relationships?Maria: Not that good. I had two relationships by now and both of them ended after me going somewhere. First time I was in Denmark but like I lived on a school in another city and while I was there for four months like I think two months after I went home to him and broke up and then came back to the school and just didn't really care. And then the second time I went traveling and I missed him so much and I came back and realized that there was nothing left. I'd lost everything while I was away so I don't, after one month, after two months, I think it just doesn't work for me if it's not really special.Alex: Yeah, I guess you're kind of like me. I have to see the person.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Almost, you know, daily.Maria: Exactly and you can have conversations online and on the phone but if there's no, I don't know, it doesn't have to be much, just like be close, see each other in the eye.Alex: It's a big difference, yeah. I did a month when I went home to Australia away...Maria: This summer?Alex: Yeah, this recent summer and like Skype is just not enough. Do you know what I mean? You can see the person, you can talk to them, you know you can kiss the camera if you want but it's not...Maria: If you want.Alex: You know it's not the same but that's not to say I don't think, some people can do it.Maria: I figure if it's a very like if the relationship is very, it's very passionate or you've been going on for a long time because both of my relationships were under one year I think. The first one was one year and the second one was half a year. So if we're used to staying together then I think you can work it out. I'm just too impatient.Alex: Yeah, I guess under a year you haven't really learned to depend on the other person all the time.Maria: Exactly.Alex: Or...Maria: Still going by the passion and if you can't see the person every day or like whenever you want, then the passion just slowly fades.Alex: Yeah, agreed.Maria: But this is your first relationship right?Alex: Yes it is and I did one month when I went home away from the person and it was just...Maria: And that was the first time you ever went away from the person?Alex: Yeah and it was just aah horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible.Maria: I remember the first time I like traveled while my boyfriend was still at home and it was a week and I was devastated so it's if it's passionate it's...Alex: Well I did Christmas away from them when I went to Christmas, I did India for Christmas last year.Maria: OK.Alex: And two weeks was bad enough and then a month and I was just pulling my hair out, do you know? So.Maria: Yeah, it's hard.Alex: It, yeah, it certainly is.Maria: Yeah.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So do you believe in love at first sight?Alex: Yea, I think it does exist. I think you can have a sort of spark at first sight, but what I consider as love is a bit different to what that first kind of meeting would be. If you can having something like and then you think that person has a real possibility, I think that's what you mean by love at first sight, but you can't instantly love someone. It takes growth.Maria: That's true.Alex: It takes coming together, shared experiences and that sort of stuff but, you know, I think for some people, my parents actually met at a guitar concert and it was a total mistake. They thought, no, seriously, it was a total mistake. They thought that each other was in the same group and it turned out they were on separate groups and then things went from there. He proposed after five weeks.Maria: Wow.Alex: And actually had to, he proposed in front of the fax machine while his divorce was being finalized.Maria: Oh my God.Alex: To his first wife so...Maria: What a romantic story.Alex: So, and twenty years later you know, so it took one conversation in a guitar concert so I've seen it, you know, I guess that spark definitely exists in them.Maria: I guess if you call it attraction at first sight, it's way more fitting?Alex:Yeah.Maria: That's what I feel at least. I've seen, I have friends who experienced, like one of my friends at my university now, she experienced love at first sight, like she saw the guy and she thought that's the guy I want to marry. So I never tried anything like that but I heard it happen and I see it happening now because she's still way head over heels for this guy.Alex: I think if you decide the person that you're going to marry when you see them, you're a little bit insane.Maria: Well, insanity is a good point.Alex: I suppose.Maria: She is a little bit insane, yeah. She had a very sad love story beforehand. A guy she was in love with for two and a half years who knew but he didn't, I think they actually did date a little but he didn't want to be serious about it.Alex: Yeah.Maria: So I guess she's more, she wants it to be serious but I never tried. Like I think the people I've been in love with it has taken time and it's taken at least half a year before I've felt that there was more. Like I could be attracted to them but the love part, the really wanting to be with this person came later because I didn't want take, I didn't want to get serious at least immediately.Alex: Yeah, I think after that sort of six month puppy love stage where it's so new and exciting and you're learning all about the other person, that's when it starts to get like I think you start to feel the strong...Maria: But I mean also like if there was a guy I didn't even date but we were talking together for half a year and when we met, because it was internet, and he was in Holland and I was in Denmark so we met after half a year. We first met on a trip. So we met and then I could feel it grow but it took me half a year to slowly and safely just get to the point where I could actually feel something. It didn't work out but...Alex: Ah well, what can you do?Maria: Yeah, I tried.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So do you believe in love at first sight?Alex: Yea, I think it does exist. I think you can have a sort of spark at first sight, but what I consider as love is a bit different to what that first kind of meeting would be. If you can having something like and then you think that person has a real possibility, I think that's what you mean by love at first sight, but you can't instantly love someone. It takes growth.Maria: That's true.Alex: It takes coming together, shared experiences and that sort of stuff but, you know, I think for some people, my parents actually met at a guitar concert and it was a total mistake. They thought, no, seriously, it was a total mistake. They thought that each other was in the same group and it turned out they were on separate groups and then things went from there. He proposed after five weeks.Maria: Wow.Alex: And actually had to, he proposed in front of the fax machine while his divorce was being finalized.Maria: Oh my God.Alex: To his first wife so...Maria: What a romantic story.Alex: So, and twenty years later you know, so it took one conversation in a guitar concert so I've seen it, you know, I guess that spark definitely exists in them.Maria: I guess if you call it attraction at first sight, it's way more fitting?Alex:Yeah.Maria: That's what I feel at least. I've seen, I have friends who experienced, like one of my friends at my university now, she experienced love at first sight, like she saw the guy and she thought that's the guy I want to marry. So I never tried anything like that but I heard it happen and I see it happening now because she's still way head over heels for this guy.Alex: I think if you decide the person that you're going to marry when you see them, you're a little bit insane.Maria: Well, insanity is a good point.Alex: I suppose.Maria: She is a little bit insane, yeah. She had a very sad love story beforehand. A guy she was in love with for two and a half years who knew but he didn't, I think they actually did date a little but he didn't want to be serious about it.Alex: Yeah.Maria: So I guess she's more, she wants it to be serious but I never tried. Like I think the people I've been in love with it has taken time and it's taken at least half a year before I've felt that there was more. Like I could be attracted to them but the love part, the really wanting to be with this person came later because I didn't want take, I didn't want to get serious at least immediately.Alex: Yeah, I think after that sort of six month puppy love stage where it's so new and exciting and you're learning all about the other person, that's when it starts to get like I think you start to feel the strong...Maria: But I mean also like if there was a guy I didn't even date but we were talking together for half a year and when we met, because it was internet, and he was in Holland and I was in Denmark so we met after half a year. We first met on a trip. So we met and then I could feel it grow but it took me half a year to slowly and safely just get to the point where I could actually feel something. It didn't work out but...Alex: Ah well, what can you do?Maria: Yeah, I tried.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Maria: So do you believe in love at first sight?Alex: Yea, I think it does exist. I think you can have a sort of spark at first sight, but what I consider as love is a bit different to what that first kind of meeting would be. If you can having something like and then you think that person has a real possibility, I think that's what you mean by love at first sight, but you can't instantly love someone. It takes growth.Maria: That's true.Alex: It takes coming together, shared experiences and that sort of stuff but, you know, I think for some people, my parents actually met at a guitar concert and it was a total mistake. They thought, no, seriously, it was a total mistake. They thought that each other was in the same group and it turned out they were on separate groups and then things went from there. He proposed after five weeks.Maria: Wow.Alex: And actually had to, he proposed in front of the fax machine while his divorce was being finalized.Maria: Oh my God.Alex: To his first wife so...Maria: What a romantic story.Alex: So, and twenty years later you know, so it took one conversation in a guitar concert so I've seen it, you know, I guess that spark definitely exists in them.Maria: I guess if you call it attraction at first sight, it's way more fitting?Alex:Yeah.Maria: That's what I feel at least. I've seen, I have friends who experienced, like one of my friends at my university now, she experienced love at first sight, like she saw the guy and she thought that's the guy I want to marry. So I never tried anything like that but I heard it happen and I see it happening now because she's still way head over heels for this guy.Alex: I think if you decide the person that you're going to marry when you see them, you're a little bit insane.Maria: Well, insanity is a good point.Alex: I suppose.Maria: She is a little bit insane, yeah. She had a very sad love story beforehand. A guy she was in love with for two and a half years who knew but he didn't, I think they actually did date a little but he didn't want to be serious about it.Alex: Yeah.Maria: So I guess she's more, she wants it to be serious but I never tried. Like I think the people I've been in love with it has taken time and it's taken at least half a year before I've felt that there was more. Like I could be attracted to them but the love part, the really wanting to be with this person came later because I didn't want take, I didn't want to get serious at least immediately.Alex: Yeah, I think after that sort of six month puppy love stage where it's so new and exciting and you're learning all about the other person, that's when it starts to get like I think you start to feel the strong...Maria: But I mean also like if there was a guy I didn't even date but we were talking together for half a year and when we met, because it was internet, and he was in Holland and I was in Denmark so we met after half a year. We first met on a trip. So we met and then I could feel it grow but it took me half a year to slowly and safely just get to the point where I could actually feel something. It didn't work out but...Alex: Ah well, what can you do?Maria: Yeah, I tried.

The weekly #HumansFirst open and inclusive calls can all be found here -> https://humansfirst.club/events In addition, you can also find the online rally that is taking place and the 2-day retreat in the UK at th same link -> https://humansfirst.club/events - “This is a collective meditation (C-19 crisis) A taking away of all of the layers of how people have wanted us to see the world, how people have wanted to keep us in control, have wanted to maintain our tunnel vision. This has taken all those layers away” – 16.15 (Sam) - “It’s not just about the egoistic self, bottom line, finance and money, suddenly it becomes about humanity, the planet, how we are all together as one contributing for a better world” – 03.00 (Alex) - “It’s not about fighting people, it’s about fighting ideas. Ideas come up in people’s minds through conversations” – 10.35 (Sam) - “The focus is on not just public services, but basic services. The internet, supply chain for food etc” – 34.35 (Sam) - “Freedom to travel, being in contact - these little things we should be grateful for them” – 14.10 (Alex) - “Every individual can be a leverage point. Every individual needs to find their genius in order for them to be effective in fighting the war we need to fight, not against each other, but against our own undoing” – 05.45 (Sam) - “Collectively we need to shift the mindset. In every individual there is the potential to take away those layers that may you blind. Uncover that truth, and ignite whatever that is for the greater good” – 31.25 (Sam) Alexandra can be contacted via the following means: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-enke-4102b9107/ Bio: Alexandra Enke’s mission in life is to help leaders to ignite their unique genius and use it for the greater good. Born in Leipzig in Germany, she has lived around the world inc in Mexico, Colombia, Egypt, Austria, Italy, India, Switzerland & Thailand. Samantha can be contacted via the following means: LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samantha-suppiah/ Bio: "Samantha Suppiah is a sustainability strategist and chartered engineer in the field of urban design, architecture, and engineering. An independent consultant based in Southeast Asia, Samantha is interested in climate resilience and regenerative leadership." Mike can be found via the following means: Email - mike@mjvacanti.com LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mjvacanti/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/MJVacanti Web - https://humansfirst.club/ You can contact me via the following means: Email - garryturner0@hotmail.com LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/garryinterpersonalcatalyst/ Twitter - https://twitter.com/GarryIPCatalyst --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/valuevulnerability/message

Alex: Hello, my friends in financial services welcome back to the podcast this week I've got an equity release advisor. And wow, we've talked about loads of stuff, loads of tips from Stuart probably more tips per minute than you get from your marketing expert. And so I think one thing for us as a business when we've helped people advertise equity release is a lot of negative kinds of thoughts and opinions of how things were done before a lot of people that are in situations or heard of people in situations that are not good because of equity release. And I've seen Stewart sort of on a bit of a mission to try and he's very passionate about getting this message across that modern equity release is much better. There's just so much in this episode of like how to negotiate with the press. We talk a lot about videos. So Stuart messaged me and emailed me in June about videos and him starting that video journey. We talk a lot about that. It's just such an interesting story about partnerships as well about how to focus on marketing to get partnerships not just to get cold leads. So whether you do mortgages, life equity release, or don't even work in financial services, there's so much you can get out of this episode from a marketing perspective. So, I want to introduce you to Stuart. How is an equity release at fly advisor in Plymouth used to work in banking used to work in Debenhams went out on his own after sort of a long corporate career and it's really fascinating to see where he is at now. Hello, and welcome back to the lead generation for financial services podcast and I've got a very special guest on today. I have got Mr Stuart Powell. How are you doing today?Stuart: Hi, how are you? I’m very good. Thank you mate. Thanks for setting this up. Be nice to have a chat. Alex: Yeah, no, absolutely. I was just well, we just before we hit record, I was just pulling out an old email that you sent me and I couldn't remember the date of it. And I think I sent you an email on kind of pop my sort of email sequence about doing videos. In fact, I think it's Yeah, it's entitled, you have to make bad videos to make good videos.Stuart: Yeah.Alex: He said, you've inspired me after listening to this podcast. We now have a YouTube video and four videos on equity release. Stuart: Yeah, yes. Take a look. Give me some feedback. Alex: So that was June 2019. We're now January 2020. So what six months ago and now I'm seeing the videos that you're doing now and you've got like you see you're not hiring in a sort of production crew and things like what it looks like.Stuart: Oh, yeah, we got producers, directors, actors, we've got that now. Yeah, you know, I think where we were with the business around June and your podcast on, you know, try it. If it goes badly, that's good because you learn a lot and the rule and this is exactly what people want to see. So I think to start with Sammy, my office manager and I were at probably a simply biz seminar down in Cornwall somewhere and we were on a break, and we were just playing around with the laptop of mom now actually, and just recording a couple of videos out in the sunshine in their garden, and just talking about equity release and she was interviewing me and we were playing around and they were good enough to release but they kind of inspired me to give it more of a go and then I listened to your podcast and yeah, don't worry about it. If it's bad, just start somewhere. So yeah, I went into the office. Did I think about a five-minute video? And it got really good feedback even though it was grainy and wobbly but yeah, that's where it started. Yeah, June last year. Alex: Yeah. Wow. Okay. It's great. I love it because like, well, the thing is with having podcasts you don't get more ratio of feedback to listeners is very different to anything else. Because like on a podcast, there's no natural place to comment or anything. People have to take the time out to send you a message. So like when you're putting videos on YouTube is easy to comment and you put posts on Facebook, it's easy to come up with a podcast, there's nowhere to comment. So I only get the old kind of message pin when people do actually reach out and it normally is because they've done something so it's always like, brilliant to hear that something that we've done has kind of affected someone else. So it was really.Stuart: Yeah, no, that's good. I sent you a quick message to say thanks you've inspired me. Yeah, but I watched it and got some feedback on it. And I think the feedback was great. I love what you're doing not enough people are talking about equity release. Not enough people are trying to educate both clients or potential clients or other introduces as to why it's good for the older generation, but also why it's good for other financial services businesses to understand a little bit more about it. And I went online and went on YouTube and there's no one really being real online about equity release other than being lossy companies who and millions on production or they've got their remember to morph Sony heart and all that they.Alex: Oh yeah.Stuart: They've got those types of videos which are great. So I decided to probably shorten the videos a little bit. Because the feedback was great, I really like what you're talking about. But it's too much information in a five-minute video, why not 1-minute videos. So, so yeah, I thought, right, let's break them down and literally put something out on LinkedIn. were based in Plymouth. So put something on LinkedIn, then you will know any good videographers. And a guy called Luke Strata was recommended a couple of times and he and I met he came in the office and wow, what a setter. I mean, the cost wasn't too bad at all. But the camera equipment I know you've seen it on some of our LinkedIn vids. It looks like yeah, so being in next Hollywood blockbuster, this coffee breaks a lot.Alex: And if you're in a restaurant or a cafe and I was at Stewart's house, and they were at the tables, that's definitely a restaurant or a cafe or something. I was like, I'm in the wrong game from and if you can get a house like that.Stuart: Equity release, and you're fortunate And I know that you know that we're very near the home, which is the beautiful see parts of glimmer, the office and we go down there for a coffee sometimes and of course we're OSHA mortgages notion act to release and the cafes overlooks the ocean and you know in my brain it made sense but the cafe owner said yeah, yeah come down for the morning and then you know just to make sure you have some tea coffee and bacon buses and you can have the room for free and you know, he asked me about the buses I'm honest. Luke and I went down there Luke set up first and I came in and oh my god, he has taken over, probably half that blooming cafe. And yeah, it didn't seem like a great idea at the time I took the dog down and I don't you've seen the first video but the dogs and James Bond villain stroking the dog up on my lap. I read two minutes before the video started to shit right. So in the cafe as yes and customers are coming in for breakfast so yeah. Not quite as glamorous.Alex: Yeah.Stuart: Oh then a storm came so we were filming with the storm in the background so the beautiful ocean waves were quite as I expected but you know you laminate and you've got to do better to do it well.Alex: Well, that's brilliant. I love that so much has happened to me so much to actually put you off doing it and make it harder to work with it. Let it go baby is still peeling off and I've just found my replies to you because I yeah, I think I said yeah, so one thing I think I said was like, Don't worry about you don't need an excuse to make the video I think I was like, I think a lot of people do that they sort of when you're first doing videos, you feel natural. You need to explain why during the video. Yeah. I remember saying that as well. And then yeah, I think I said splitting it up into smaller, smaller ones. Stuart: Yeah, great. Alex: Yeah.Stuart: It was fine because the first step videos were very much okay. The clients out there don't understand about equity release. So let's tell them what the process is. Let's tell them why modern equity release is better than the old equity release. Let's tell them you know, the interest rates are lower than they've ever been. Let's tell them there's no negative equity guarantee on just about every product out there. So, you know, there's a real fear in my world is about equity release. So let's dispel some of the untruths. Let's tell people what the process actually is. And let's try and be a little bit more accessible. There are some really big companies out there doing equity release, you know, you have Vivos, Liverpool, Victoria, and there are some huge broker firms. I think the more local the more family-based business, such as ours is where local older people want to be where they want to be, you know, they want the products they want their people to be from where they're from, and understand a little bit about them and their world. Does that make sense?Alex: Yeah, no, that's exactly what we found when we've cuz we've run some x release ad campaigns on Facebook. Yeah. We've found when we've advertised the advisor, rather than a brand, and we've made it very personal, they work really well. And the cost per lead is slightly higher than what you typically get with mortgages. Yeah, we brought that down a bit. But the quality when that comes through when we're advertising the person. What we have found, though, like, you rightly say, a lot of fear, like every ad campaign, we've put out, there'll be loads of people saying this is a scam. Yeah, many of them and we don't, a lot of our clients aren't where we're trying to get. We're creating written content to dispel the myths but a lot of them don't want to do video. It would be great if we had with each comment rather than having to hide it. We could put a link out Oh, actually, if you check this, you can see the difference between what you think and what it actually is.Stuart: Yeah, you know, we played around with some men, we did some Facebook marketing last year and yes, absolutely right. The feedback you get is, you know, it's quite vitriolic. They don't hold back. But I was doing it to get that over the phone, but we've just experimented with it. And they kept deleting the comments and I'm like, No, no, no, no. If this is the comments we're getting, we need to address them. So I took over replying to the office as a scam or that you used to get things like oh, my dad took out 70,000 pounds and now he owes 180,000. And I remember one specifically who'd said but you know, you don't know the backstory, so it could have been his house was repossessed. So we need 70,000 pounds. Therefore 70,000 pounds is a great investment to keep your property or the other thing, and actually, this is what I found now, he has taken it out seven years ago, and the interest rate was 8%. So what actually happened there at the time, it may have been the right thing, but now it's not that a huge part of our education is well, we need to review it. You know, I was looking at stats the other day, and it's about 40% of the public are on a standard variable rate for their mortgage for equity release, 92% of the public have never reviewed their rates. Well, that guy went back to and said look really sorry to hear but the interest is accelerated so much more neck to release lets you pay some of the interest, all of the interest and the interest rates start from 2.8%. Why don't we review that and we reviewed it and got an array of just over 3%? So bring your critics on it. It was brilliant. Because of how many people read that?Alex: Yeah, fantastic. Stuart: Yeah, very not so much. And we try to use those case studies because that's the thing. It's, you know when we're talking about rates, when we're talking about the non-equity release being x, y, and Zed, it doesn't really mean a lot to people. But when we're saying this client came to us on an 8% interest rate, we managed to do it for three. This is how much money he saved each month, or this is how much less the interest is accruing by so. So yeah, definitely the case studies would be a tip I'd give any equity release advisors out there, you know, make it real. Use the examples you are doing for clients because that's what people want to see.Alex: That's amazing. I think you may have single-handedly helped, as I was gonna say, millions of people who don't have lots of light bulbs. Go Often in my brain, I'm sure and you're on it but I know we get a few people listening to the do equity release as well that are thinking Actually, I can use and you do well that's made me think of randomly. Have you ever seen suits theStuart: Yeah, Meghan Markel and all that.Alex: Yes. And it just reminded me of Harvey spectre saying when there's a gun pointed at you, you turn it around and you've turned that negative feedback into a positive by going into a colour, no-win situation of someone slagging you off on Facebook, into a new client, you've literally acted them, ensure.Stuart: It's good to do and you know, it's quite good for the soul because if you're putting yourself out there in any context, we started off talking about videos, but this is Facebook advertising yourself out there and people are actually not slacking off your company as such. But then you're in and you know, my Facebook has got all my friends on my family on and if people are actually seeing The industry I'm in, it's got a bad reputation, then that tells what I do. So I want people to understand the passion I have for actually getting people to understand that modern equity release actually is a very far cry from where it was five years ago, and actually is the right thing for a lot of people. It's not the right thing for a lot of people as well. Yes, they need to approach us so that we can, you know, with full integrity, sit down with them and go, actually, it is right for you, or Actually, no, let's phone your lender and just renegotiate your deal. You know, we've done that for a couple of clients where we'll come into the office, we'll look at release, and you know, they're in their late 50s. And I'm like, well, no equity release can't be right for you at your age, because we don't want to pay the interest and the amount you're learning when you get to the age you're probably going to get to is a huge chunk of the likely value of your property. So let's speak to your life. And see if they will let you continue on your interest-only mortgage, let's be about other options for you. And if none of those options work, actually, equity release might be right for you. But it has to be right for the person at the time, the wise people and says, actually, I think equity release might be suitable for you, but in five years, but in five to 10 years, so let's stay in touch over the next few years and see if your position changes. So I think integrity has to be a huge part of it, which is why we've got to get out there and talk to more people.Alex: Yeah, absolutely. I think just linking this back to video so if I put myself in. So my mom is 70.Stuart: Yeah.Alex: She wasn't elite mortgage-free debt-free. If she wasn't, and I am. I worked in a different industry and I didn't know about equity release, and I didn't know about any sort of financial services like that. I would be worried about my mom at her age sitting down with any kind of financial advisor without me being there? Yeah, because they watched too much rogue traders and stuff like that and you're very protective over your parents. So linking this back to Vivio I think the great thing about video for me, if I was looking at it for her, and I saw you doing all these videos and you come across the way you do, I would feel much more confident picking up the phone to you and saying, Can you sit down with my mom and talk to her about it? Because I've got to know you a little bit and like you say, integrity, and trust.Stuart: Yeah.Alex: Really, really important for me and I think there's a lot of people who are like me.Stuart: I totally agree. And, you know, I can hear myself saying this to clients and I've said it's a mom, dad that five years ago, I wouldn't have done equity release for my mom and dad. Today without a doubt. In fact, we're talking about at the moment I would get mum and dad to do it. And if someone can say that they would advise their parents to do something like, I think that's hugely rare of how they feel about it. And yeah, you're right that the videos do help because people see you, people get to know you a little bit and it's only a little bit isn't it because it's a one minute, but they see you, they see you with the dog, they see your family business, and that does grow some confidence. And we, you know, but it's only one part of many, I would say, you know, our reviews are fundamental to us. Both have good reviews and are vouched for and vouch for, I think a brilliant company, who have really helped our business grow with their reviews and the way they do things. I also think if you're looking for an equity release advisor for your family, or for you, your business to work with Got to be by referral. So who would someone recommend? And you know, are they a good company ethically? And that's tricky to work out. And are they a member of the equity release council? That's the one that I would look at, you know, the equity release Council have standards for our industry. If an advisor or a company is part of that to release counsel, actually, they're taking steps to almost certificate how reliable they are. So yeah, videos are important, Alex, but I think, as a part of several other issues that people should consider.Alex: Absolutely. Do you think the equity release counts or do enough to make people aware that they as a body should be you know, they are that stamp of authority because you go to a website and you see that there but I think a lot of consumers may not know what that means. Stuart: Excellent question. I had this conversation with the equity release Council, probably about six months ago, I was in contact with the chairman, the CEO and the marketing department. And it was good. I'd made the videos. And then I thought, well, let's connect to the risk councils website, see what videos they got? And check. No, no joking at all. I think the most up to date video was from 2016. And maybe 2017. I think they modernized recently and went to the marketing department. I said, Look, I don't understand. And we are trying to get across to people how modern equity release has changed how the products for everyone out there. But your videos are just not up to date. I've made some videos, how about I send them to you. And you have a look, why not use them on your website. And they've used to, I should have told you. Sorry, I haven't told you that.Alex: I think I mentioned something about the equity release count. So like you said, I got a mention in a blog or something. Stuart: They put two of the videos on their website and we've set up a YouTube channel with all of our videos and they learn this but I completely understand if they can't be seen to be promoting one company. And you know, my argument to that was no, I don't want you to. I want you to show the equity release advisers out there, what is possible, you make videos, and make them interesting, make them popular, and we'll publish yours too. They started off with it's become my famous video now. It's the Wendy Bohunan video and it's a lovely lady from Plymouth who first got in contact with me last year, who and she'd seen an advert I put up a local glossy Plymouth magazine that goes up to about $40,000 And she'd seen it and she saw the family. The family photo as I call it. My wife sent me the office manager and the dog and then said I'll, you know, bulk bloke with glasses looks like a nice chap. They think I'll get him around. So I wrote around to see her and she was in a bit of a safe state. That was a horrible phrase, but she was suffering and her son was bringing her food parcels. She told me, she was wearing a 199 Oxfam dress, or someone's bringing her food parcels each week and a half, pretty dilapidated, and she got a call while I was there, from someone chasing her for money. Fast forward six months. I went to see her just before Christmas, and she was wearing a nice outfit. She now treats herself to Marks and Spencers once a week her son doesn't bring food parcels. The property has had some improvements and she no longer gets phone calls from people. Because she took out equity release, that is it's mental health has improved as well, that is a kind of rags to riches story for me because it's real. And she blesses her. She was recorded by the local paper who got hold of the story and she gave a one-minute explanation of what had happened and it was super Android equity release council saw this and said we want to use that Stuart, it's, it's a great story as to how to release can help people in the right situation. So you have to cancel since then. I've opened up this to equity release advisors. So if you are an extreme supervisor and produce some good video footage or a good blog, they couldn't have it on that site. So yeah, a good little tip there.Alex: Lovely, brilliant. Perfect. So I want to find out the kind of like because you were we've been talking off the air, we were kind of mentioning your sort of retail background, and then you've done you were sort of your last sort of employee job was with Santander. Is that right?Stuart: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah. I spent seven years straight from uni with deponents. And loved it there. Yeah. through the various management roles. You know that a lot about people and service, then, yeah, just happened to get into banking and was doing branch management and mortgage supervisor roles, regional mortgage manager roles. And, and then actually, I thought I could do this and I could do it as a business and there are so many marketing things that I want to do that a big corporation looks at and goes, it's not really the brand is not really what we want to do. It's not really where we want to go and I thought, well, actually, a good friend of mine owned financial investment companies. Short financial planning. And I said to him, Look, you don't have any mortgages. And I know you don't want to do mortgages, how about I have a room in your lovely offices, and I start a mortgage company, you helped me by being my supervisor. And then we came from there. And that was, what, two and a half years ago. And last year, it changed and we wanted to rebrand. We felt that we were growing to such a size that we saw the alarm in the background. Really, we thought, yeah, it's time to go out on our own. I bought his shares off him. Then we rebranded the company in January last year, and have a look back we went directly authorized and the big thing has been all the marketing we do all the branding we do is up to us. We've got no one saying oh, no, that's not what we want to do. That's not how we want to do it. We would play in our own funnel. And, and that's really, really how we want to do things. So, yeah, as a great step for me. And as I look back on it, we're sort of done 10 years before. So yeah.Alex: Was it scary?Stuart: Hell yeah. Yeah. Because you go from a decent salary to knowing money is coming in. And I know, a lot of advisors out there. I've done similar and it is scary. My wife had to work a lot of hours to pay the bills, and what it's like there's a pipeline for business and it takes two-three months to come in. So yeah, the early days were scary. But then we grew as having a reputation. But we started off as a mortgage company, Alex, residential is only and we started getting more and more equity released inquiries, and I've done the exams. And I thought I love this. I love how life-changing equity releases. And it's a booming business. And it's a niche. So all of those things made me think, actually that's the direction I want the business to go.Alex: Yeah, fantastic. And what's the kind of the plans for the future then are you kind of thinking about this? I'm happy to sort of, as far as we are or want more advisors or you know, want to go national or want to keep it local? what's kind of in your Have you thought about it? Because we're sort of about a year over sort of Christmas. I was thinking about the next year, what you know, future and things like that.Stuart: Yeah, very much. So I think, probably about six months ago. I thought, right. Okay. So, and you notice like you get anyone gets to a stage with a business that actually this business takes over nicely. I do the things that I want, I can pick the kids up, I can drop them at school. I don't have to work weekends but don't want to or we can go to the next level. I think because I've started collaborating with a lot of businesses around the country. We've got some good institutions in London, Oxford, Bournemouth, Basingstoke, new Bri, actually, we want to expand the business. I want to be out there more and meeting new introduces. So we've got two new advisors who actually are just going through their CMPA now. They've got a week away in Bristol next week doing what the week after, and then they've got two months gap, and then they've got another week in Southampton. I think the second one is.Alex: Okay.Stuart: So yeah, we'll have three of us advisors, recruiting additional admin, but we want to grow organically. So one of the advisors has been our office manager, so that's Sammy, and other ones my wife, so it's still keeping it a very close-knit family business. Because, as I'm sure everyone out there knows, recruitment is really difficult. Getting the right person that fits in your ethos in your model in your business, given the service that you give is very difficult. Whether we go that way in the future, I don't know. But it's interesting because I've just been working on this in the last couple of weeks. What do we want the business to represent in 2020? Well, we want to continue the education we're doing around equity release. We want to continue the collaboration we're doing with Well, we've got solicitors, we've got accountants, we've got mortgage brokers, we've even got equity release advisers who don't really like doing it to lease sending us business and with commission sharing with them. Because you know, if you've got a mortgage business and your equity release qualified, but you don't do many equity releases, it's difficult to actually sit down with Brian, and go, these are your options because you're not up to speed with it. It's fast-moving, so yeah, we're working with groups like that. And that's what I want my role to be going forward. But last year, our best things we did were the things where we went to events, we ran events with our introduces with our partners. And I'll give a couple of examples. So far this year, we've got fine dining experience. We've got a gin tasting event, and we're going to horse racing, we're going to eat now but races and then they help for our partners and are introduced as where we say, thank you. We say thank you for introducing that business to us last year. And don't forget us this year. Because for us, having fun at work is really important. You know, in the past, I've had mental health issues and I've struggled getting up. So the balance of business is really important to me. So yeah that's what 2020 looks like.Alex: fantastically you have me at gin tasting I am I'm a huge draw to know what my may want to know my knees or regulation is.Stuart: Come on. Alex: Find a gene that I like more than sip Smith.Stuart: What's it called?Alex: Sip SmithStuart: I'm actually writing this down what flavour?Alex: Well it's like a London dry gin. There's nothing fancy about it. Stuart: Yeah. Alex: Every gin that I try. Alex: Yeah.Stuart: It's like it's good, but it's not quite. So my solution is to find a gene that I like better than sip Smith.Alex: Oh, you have to try and then do a lemon drizzle lemonade just have the normal the green one. It's got a swan on it. I'm on like, it's one of the gin is on my things like I'm I think I'm known for having beard glasses. Loving and drinking gin is like the key thingsStuart: So I've just written down green with swan. So.Alex: Yeah, I'm after that. Well, if you love Sip Man, then you'd have enjoyed the research that I was doing last week of places in Devon, that have good gin events. And one of them and I'm not making this up, we've got the National Marine Aquarium in clover. Alex: Right.Stuart: They got an event coming up in a few Saturdays time called Gins with Finn. I'm honestly not making that up. They somehow have managed to get the National Marine Aquarium and the gym company together, and they didn't know what to call it. So it's an evening event where they've got a company with several different gyms and obviously the sharks and the various animals they've got in the tanks are the fins. So yeah, you might have to come up with four gins with fins, Alex.Alex: Well, the other thing I love is a good pun. I absolutely love it. So that sounds like it. My event well it's a full house.Stuart: Yeah.Alex: Oh, my so I'm gonna touch for a second I'm not gonna pass away this year but my funeral should be called gin's event.Stuart: Yeah. People will be pleased to hear we've actually decided against that one as Baba has 143 different gins and now teaches you how to make them and part of the event is you get your first three as part of the deal. So yeah, I think we've got. I think 12 of our introducers and partners come into that one. So yeah, it's all part of it. It's yeah, enjoy business, enjoy collaborating and let's make up days fun, I think is the key.Alex: Absolutely. Well, we've got a I was just looking at my podcast schedule and there was a guy we recorded with Adam King who, so when yours goes live, his would have already been on the thing he talks about is partnerships. That is massive for him so yeah it just makes sense doesn't it getting those right partnerships where it's kind of a win-win for you and for them even like you say people that are qualified in an equity release but do it as an add on? Stuart: Yeah, absolutely. Alex: Getting with the right people and yeah, and the thing coming like bringing it back to the video that is building rapport but it's meeting people in person builds rapport more than ever. Giving them free Jin builds a lot more report is all about for me like relationships are like having a good life. I just think I like doing business with people that I like.Stuart: Yeah.Alex: So and then doing like videos is getting to know them a little bit first, but then that's why we do our events in peace where I can meet a lot of people that listen to the podcast and things like that, and then that builds our relationship. Even more. And that's just the same across any business especially I think if you're giving financial advice. Stuart: It is a nail on the head, I think. Yeah, the videos when we started them in June and then through July and August, we released one a week of a series of educational ones and the ones we just started releasing all the why, as a sister, accountant, mortgage broker, etc. Should you work with us? So yeah, the second one will come out this week, and then we're doing them weekly. But the last set of videos, actually, yeah, you've just made me think of a guy contacted me on LinkedIn and said, I want to collaborate with you. You know, you could really do a lot of equity release. You see a lot of clients. I haven't got the confidence to do it at the moment. So yeah, can you see my client will like I'm sending them completed on Monday, the client completed on Monday and I'm sending him a check for just over 6,000 pounds this week, but actually check is so 1980s However I send him the funds as soon as I received them. So yeah, that the collaboration thing can be lucrative and he hasn't done any of the work or taken any of the risks on that, other than he has a good relationship with the client who now has helped her three daughters out one was struggling with our business one was struggling to pay a mortgage. And the third one was just delighted that her two sisters were struggling. Now she wasn't obvious but the other way we'll be fair to divide the money equally three ways. So the third child got the same as the two others who really needed it. So yeah, it's a good story about how videos can lead to increased collaboration and how that can help a business because how does that guy who sent the client to me know how does his client feel about him now that we've helped her solve a problem. Exactly.Stuart: Exactly. Thank you so much for introducing me to Stuart. Exactly. It's brilliant. It is like it is a win-win. And so yeah, no, I think we spend a lot of time naturally in our businesses thinking I want to find new business myself, and when I'm on a market myself, just to get new business, but actually marketing to get collaborators and partnerships as well is, you know, coming massively.Stuart: Yeah, yeah. And it's something that I cottoned on to later on last year because any marketing you do for clients is actually hard work. And it needs to be very consistent. You need to do a lot of it. And finding the right niche is really tricky. Whether that is you know, because obviously, my niche is, well, probably age 65 to 75 owns my own property. But has a need for a lump sum or income, whether that be to improve their lives, whether it be to invite them, improve their family's lives, whether that be to reduce their inheritance tax liability, and they're perhaps not easy niches to find in a marketing campaign. But when you're collaborating with people who, you know will write as, as an example, whether they're a solicitor or just a will writer firm, one of the questions they ask someone when they're writing Well, do you own your own property? Oh, yes. And we're writers that say to me that the phrase we hear most is where asset rich but cash poor. And, you know, I know someone who may be able to help you with that. Let me introduce you to Stuart. And he can talk to you about being asset rich and a little bit less cash poor. So yeah, it's those collaborations and when someone finds a client for you, the relationship is virtually almost there. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Stuart: Whereas when you find the client, you have to build the relationship. So yeah, the collaboration pieces are where the future is Alex? It really is. That's a huge part of our business for 2020. And I would suggest for people out there, it should be part of this.Alex: You've been dropping value bombs all the way through this Stuart. Exactly. We've needed for 40 minutes. I can't believe it. Stuart: Wow. Alex: This is what I love. So the podcast, but amazing is nearly when it will be a year old by the time we published this.Stuart: Okay. Alex: We would have only had this conversation if I had started it. And what I love about talking to advisors is that I learn more from your perspective as well. But yes, you know, we only generally only do the marketing stuff we don't deal with the end consumer. So for me, I get loads of different ideas from, from having people like yourself on. So I've really enjoyed chatting with you. I love your enthusiasm for everything. It's really refreshing. Is there anything we haven't talked about? That could help anyone listening? Do you think?Stuart: Yeah, the only thing that I think that I was thinking about? Obviously you, you invited me to this last week and I'm thinking about well if I was listening to a podcast, what would I want to hear that we focused a lot on video and I think the video is, is kind of the symbol of what we as advisors need to do. And what I mean by that is, the video was try something outside of your box, or something out of your comfort zone. Well, in the last six months, I've been trying things out of my comfort zone, and things like contacting that journalist in the Daily Mail, who's done an article about your industry and saying really interested in your article? A couple of things that disagree with that data? How about you ask me for a comment next time. I'm going to the local press and saying, Okay, what do your readers know about equity release? What do they know about investments? Whatever your niche is, what do they know? They will try to get you to do an advertorial and pay for it. But yeah, maybe that's the right thing for you to do. That morial is how I've grown my business in Plymouth. I think my advertorial now a lot of the local newspapers are online as well. And one of the 2400 videos that I referenced earlier on that got over 6000 hits from people online. So yeah, it's trying things that are a little bit different, be open to ideas. The last one I'll say is next Saturday, I think it's the 25th we've got an advertorial appearing in The National paper in the times and national paper, and I would never have considered going national, even a year ago. But the company phoned me up. And obviously, it's a selling space advertising marketing company to say, you know, we've got a quarter-page advertorial. It's 8000 pounds. Okay, can I have two? No, no, no way. As you know, I'm a small business. There's no way we can afford anything like that. But I'm interested in the concept, talk to me about it. And he sent me the article. I hadn't looked at it. And then I said, 8000 ridiculous. And you had three and a half thousand. I said, Wow, there's a discount for you. And I said I'm really interested, when's the deadline? And he told me when the deadline was and I said, Well, I need to have a think about it. I need to have a chat with the directors on their new director. I need to have a think about it. And he came back to me: The date for deadlines ledger What are your thoughts? I said I want to do that. But what's your very best price? 1500 pounds we're going to 1.2 million homes I'm really scared now Alex. NET today because we were just trying things a little bit out of the box. We're prepared to negotiate, we want to build relationships. He wants us to advertise in the future. And I think Yeah, what's a 8,000, 1500 pound discount that's a pretty good discount so if you're out there and dealing with agencies and papers, kids sticking to your guns negotiate to be a bit cheeky and wow, you can find yourself in positions you possibly think it would be.Alex: That's fantastic, or you will have to let me know how that goes on LinkedIn because I will. I'll add it to the outro of because it will be by the time we get this published so that all you'll kind of know what's happened with our Stuart: Yes, yeah.Alex: We'll do it with a bit of time travelling. Stuart this has blown me away genuinely, the amount of value you've given. I'm really excited to get this live and share it with everyone. And it's been great to hear what 2019 has been viewed and I'm really excited to like, I don't want to wish my time away but I'm really excited to see where you are this time next year.Alex: Yeah, no it's gonna be exciting in May and yeah, I really appreciate you. You asked me to come on this because the value bombs thing I've never even heard of. But yeah, I like coming up with new ways of doing things. And I really enjoy sharing those ideas. Because, you know, we know active release advisors in this country is my enemy or my competition. The enemy in the competition is people who are saying that equity release isn't right for people and by us why it's right for people and as educated people, we will you know, what is that lovely phrase? A rising tide lifts all ships. And that is what we're trying to do here.Alex: Fantastic. Love it. Love it so much. So awesome way to end this, Stuart. I really appreciate your time. Let's definitely do this again next year if not in kind of six months.Stuart: Great.Alex: All right, Stuart. Thanks again.Stuart: Yeah, all right. Thanks again, mate.Alex: There we have it. That was my chat with Stuart, an absolutely great guy. He's the first equity release advisor to be featured on my new podcast, the equity release podcast, which will be out now as well. It's kind of out I'm recording this on the week of it launching. So by the time this is live, it will definitely be out. So check that out if you haven't already. And I will see you next time. And in fact, I'm recording this a bit early. And I'm a little bit worried about the outbreak of the coronavirus kind of outbreak affecting a lot of events. So as I record this now, our event is going ahead. And this should be published on the 23rd a couple of days before our event. So hopefully fingers crossed touchwood I'll see you in a couple of days if you come in. If, if it's not happening, and I haven't had the chance to re-edit this podcast episode, that's a bit confusing but hopefully I will be seeing you in a couple of days. See you there.

Ross and online teacher trainer Alex Li talk about some of the biggest differences between teaching offline and online, common mistakes teachers make teaching online and their favorite online teaching activities.Ross Thorburn: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the TEFL Training Institute Podcast. I'm Ross Thorburn. Again, this week, we are doing something coronavirus‑related. We're talking about teaching language online. We've got dos and don'ts for those of you who are now making the transition from teaching offline to teaching online.To help us with that this week we have my friend and former colleague, Alex Li. Alex, for the last year‑and‑a‑half or so, has been a trainer, training teachers to teach online.In this episode, Alex and I will go through some of the differences between teaching English online compared to offline, some of the opportunities and a lot of common mistakes that teachers tend to make.More and more schools, it seems like, across the world are switching their classes to online for the time being. If that's you, listen on. We've got some great tips for you. Enjoy the interview.Ross: All right, let's start. Alex, thanks for joining us and doing this.Alex Li: Yeah.Ross: This is also the first podcast I've ever done while wearing a face mask.Alex: [laughs]Ross: We're obviously doing this because lots of teachers now are making the transition, we don't know for how long, from teaching offline to online. You did that yourself, obviously. You used to be a teacher offline, and then you started working in an online company.Maybe we can start off by talking about some of the differences. What first struck you as being some of the differences between teaching online and teaching offline?Alex: That would be personalization. Personally, I didn't do that when I was an offline teacher for young learners. Frankly, I don't know 80 percent of my students that much, while the rest of 20 percent I've probably talked to them after class. For one‑on‑one class, that gives teachers those opportunities to know their students more.Ross: When we are teaching kids offline, you're right. Usually, as a teacher, you don't learn that much about them. As soon as you're teaching students in their own homes, the setting gives you the opportunity to talk about so much more, doesn't it?Alex: Yeah. As you said, in a brick‑and‑mortar classroom where everybody's in the same place and the same city, if you ask how's the weather that would be pretty dull, because everybody knows that. After five students, they will be like, "Oh teacher, I know..."Ross: [laughs]Alex: ..."it's sunny."Ross: Or you have to pretend and make up like it's snowing...Alex: You show your flash cards.Ross: ...maybe when you're living in Africa and it snows. Online, there's all these natural information gaps. The teacher and the student are always going to be in different places...Alex: That's true.Ross: ...often in different cities or different countries, there's so many opportunities there to contrast and compare what's going on in the two locations.Alex: That can happen throughout the class. You can do it at the beginning as we talk about weather. You can also talk about certain target language.Ross: I remember when I was an offline teacher, and I used to teach kids. I remember sometimes trying to get kids to bring in something into the class, to do a show‑and‑tell type thing.One time it was like, "Bring in a photo of somewhere that you've been on holiday." Always, like two students would remember and the other 14 wouldn't. It would never work very well.I feel this is one of the other huge opportunities for teaching online. Students have all this stuff around them, especially for low levels. For example, if you're teaching clothes, the student can open their wardrobe and, for example, bring out their favorite clothes.You can show the students your favorite clothes as well. There's so many opportunities for personalization that you would never get if you were doing it offline.Alex: Yeah. I think you mentioned one good thing or one good model, is that the teacher gets to show the student if we are talking about clothes, his or her clothes first if it's a lower level. That's something I noticed some teachers are not doing online.Teachers have got to keep in mind that you're teaching one‑on‑one. You're still teaching, and giving appropriate model is important and essential.Ross: Offline, if you've got a class of 15 students, you might pick the strongest student to come to the front and demo that for the rest of the class. If you've only got one student, there's no opportunity to do that. What do you have to do instead? As the teacher, you have to model both parts.That's one of the biggest differences maybe, between teaching groups offline and teaching one‑to‑one online. The teacher has to take on so many different roles compared to teaching offline. For example, if you're doing group work or pair work or something offline.You put the students in pairs, and the students are conversation partners to each other. The teacher, you're still kind of in this teachery role where you're going around and monitoring. As soon as you go online, you've got to switch into a different role of being this...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...conversation partner. That's quite difficult to actually do.Alex: Yeah, that's true. Some teachers ignore that part. There's no other kids in this classroom, so they ask their student to read both parts if we are having a dialogue.Ross: I wonder why that happens if the teacher just thinks like, "Oh, I'm going to get my student to talk as much as possible?"Alex: Or they just think that those students need to read before anything.Ross: Another thing that teachers are influenced by is increasing the amount of student's talking time in the class. That's one way to do that, is to get students to play both parts of a dialogue. I feel you're losing so much in terms of it being a natural or authentic conversation. It's much better for the teacher to assume one of the roles in the dialogue.Alex: Exactly. As a teacher, if you're talking about a lower‑level student, you can select the part that is easier for him or her to read. After he or she turns into an intermediate student, you can have him or her pick the role he or she wants. That's the way personalization occurs.Ross: You could do the same role‑play twice. You guys could just switch roles halfway through. Like if it's someone asking for directions first of all, the teacher provides the answers. Then you can switch it around and give the student in the more challenging role after they've seen a model.Those are all things that teachers would do naturally offline, giving a stronger student the more challenging role in a role play. I guess you have to be the strong student if you're the teacher during those activities. [laughs]Another common problem we see a lot online is teachers getting students to read whatever is on the screen out loud. Often, it's just a page of a course book, or something. I've seen teachers that even ask the students to read the title of the page. [laughs]Alex: And the instructions.Ross: And the instructions, right. What are some of the problems with that?Alex: It's not effective. The instruction is not the target language. I get it why they would do that. They probably think that they read it. They probably can't understand the instructions. The more they read it, the more they will get to know what's going on, but actually no.Ross: It doesn't work like that. If I'm asked to read something out loud, I always find I don't know what I've just read. I'm so focused on getting the science right that I don't actually process the meaning. With those, it's better to get the student to read it silently, which is also just much more natural.You don't see people [laughs] walking around with their phones or reading things out loud. We read in our heads most of the time. Or the teacher reads it out loud for their student to listen, and they can follow along.We started talking about the materials. Another issue with teaching online that doesn't happen so much offline is that teachers will tend to use every page, if we can call it that, of a lesson of the course book. We often online call it the "courseware." They'll go through it in order rather than jump around.It's interesting, because I noticed myself doing this with having the same book on my Kindle versus having the paper copy. I find that on the paper copy, it's so much easier to flick through and read chapters out of order. On a Kindle, I find I don't do that as much. I go through it in order.Teachers teaching online will tend to do the same thing of follow every page rather than what you might do in a course book, which is skip some activities or you might do the last activity first, that kind of thing.Alex: I don't know. Maybe somebody told them that, "You've got to finish the courseware." They just feel like, "Oh, by finish, you probably mean I need to complete each page."I once had a survey with some teachers, some call‑ins. They were like, "I didn't finish those activities. I didn't finish all those pages. Is that OK?"Ross: [laughs]Alex: I actually observed this teacher's class. She was doing fine. You can see that she's got some preparation. First and foremost, she identified what to teach, what the teaching objectives are. She did that, but she didn't complete the pages. Some teachers who are listening might not notice that.Ross: It's like offline teaching where the main thing is, "Teach the students. Don't teach the plan." You're totally right. A lot of teachers feel like, "My job here is to get to the end of these pages on this PowerPoint," rather than to help the students learn something or achieve something.Up until now we've mainly been talking about speaking, but I wanted to touch on writing for a moment. This is definitely one of my pet hates online, is teachers asking students to write something using the mouse. It's not a useful skill to practice.Alex: [laughs]Ross: Writing using a mouse and writing using a pen ‑‑ I mean, just try it ‑‑ they're very, very different. I can write quite well with a pen. I cannot write well with a mouse.Alex: I really show my respect for those teachers who can write perfectly with a mouse.Ross: [laughs] Perfectly with a mouse.Alex: If your student has this learning need which is to practice their handwriting, you can ask them to prepare a notepad. They can write there, and they can show you.Ross: Something else that I rarely see online is teachers or students actually moving the camera. Most people, when they're teaching online, they're using a laptop.Usually, the screen, it's on a hinge. It's pretty easy for the teacher or the student move the screen down. You could write, and the other person would be able to see what you're doing. I feel for teaching writing online, it's pretty challenging.Alex: We can agree that the priority of teaching online would be speaking and listening.Ross: Maybe we could talk about some activities that we think work particularly well. I can start out. One of the activities I've seen that works really well is a creative activity where you get the student to make something. The teacher has to do the typing, and the student has to do the telling.You've almost got the student describing the creative thing that they want, and the teacher drawing and filling things in. One of the examples I've seen work quite well is a shopping mall. Here's a floor plan of a shopping mall. The teacher asks the student, "What shops do you want in the shopping mall? What do you want them to be called?"The student has to say them, and the teacher types them in. You got a lot of communication happening in that activity, but also the student ends up being quite motivated.Alex: You're creating something.Ross: Absolutely. The teacher has to understand what the student is saying. If the teacher doesn't and makes a mistake with writing something, often the student's very quick to correct their teacher...Alex: [laughs]Ross: ...which is great because you're getting a lot of real communication happening there.Alex: I have two personal favorites kind of related to teaching texts. After you go through all those comprehension questions the courseware offers you, if you still have time, if we're talking about Bloom's Taxonomy, higher audio thinking skills at the level of evaluation, you can ask your student what are their perspective of the character?How do they think of this character? Ask why afterwards. You don't want to sound so much like what the courseware would offer. You can start with your own model. There is a stereotype going on, which is Chinese students, they are reluctant to express their opinions. This can be something to model.You can have different views on something, on somebody. It's OK. We're not judging somebody.Ross: [laughs]Alex: We're just expressing our opinions. Another one is for those classes there are texts about different cultures. Some students might be unfamiliar with those. After going through the text, say the setting is in Brazil and it's about carnival, then you can change it to the setting of Chinese New Year.That would be something that they can relate to. Back to Bloom's Taxonomy, you're creating something different with your student.Ross: With that second example there you're also taking advantage of that real information gap. If you're a teacher and you've not been to the same country as your student, you're probably not going to know very much about the culture. It's a real motivation for the teacher to be genuinely listening to what the student's saying and for the student to genuinely communicate with the teacher.Again there, we've got that thing of the teacher taking on another role, being the conversation partner and not just prompting the student to try out some target language but actually communicate something that the teacher wants to listen to.Alex: A suggestion for teachers would be to ask questions that they don't have answers to.Ross: Again everyone, that was Alex Li. If you enjoyed that, go to our website, www.tefltraininginstitute.com for more podcasts. If you really enjoyed it, please give us a good rating on iTunes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again next time. Goodbye.

Hello, and welcome back to the lead generation for financial services podcast. This week we have got an old friend, Jodie Stevenson. Almost a year ago when we had our first podcast interview and that went to be the number one downloaded episode of last year.For every enquiry, she gets the leads, CRM, check for notifications and will schedule a chat with her client. And to make sure that she's on top of everything she uses a blank sheet of paper and knows exactly the template and just writes everything and gets it organised. She does that for every client until she runs out of paper. Recently she bought a notepad by Rocket Book. It is reusable, can automatically scan, upload to dropbox, digitally file, and then wipe clean and use again. And again.And if you happen to look for something like a file created 6 months ago, Rocket Book can easily find it for you and locates it in your dropbox file.Cost is £34.99. They've done microwavable one as well where you write in it and put it in the microwave and it will erase everything. It's a huge impact environmentally and it helps save a lot of waste.Transcription:Alex: Hello there, welcome back. And we've got an old friend with us. This week, we're catching up with Jodie Stevenson and it was pretty much a year to the date that we had our first podcast interview. And it went on to be the number one downloaded episode of last year, and of all time, so people talk about her a lot, actually, when they've, I think it's one of the kind of the earlier episodes that people sort of pick up on because it's one of the first mortgage brokers that we interviewed, and they've come on to become the most popular episodes. So I really enjoyed catching up with Jodie. So let's dive straight in. Hello, and welcome back to the lead generation for financial services podcast and I can't quite believe it's been a whole year since we last caught up with the one and only Jodie Stevenson. How's it going?Jodie: Thank God it's one and only. I can hear my mom saying that, thank God.Alex: We were just saying, how was it? You were like, no, it's nobody You know, it could have been a year but it has.Jodie: But then we were talking about things like, what things have had like you're like, a quarter of a person that you were then you were last year.Alex: We haven't got a video either away. But yeah.Jodie: Now you're super skinny. Don't worry, though. I'm still fat and consistent for the world. got consistent and but yeah, no, it's, that's great. There's actually been a lot of things that have really happened. So if you actually like, pile up the achievements that both of us have had in the last year. Actually, that makes sense. It's probably like a decade's worth of achievement. So yeah.Alex: It's funny, isn't it? Because you like them day by day, week or week, month or month thing you know, I haven't really done a lot. I've really improved a lot if anyone needs to literally think about doing a 360 and see Oh, this time last year I was doing this, you know, what.Jodie: Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, I taught a human to walk this year, which is, technically he taught himself. I'm taking the credit. And if he was walking funny, I wouldn't be taking any other credit for it. But like, yeah, like he's actually like, he's doing the real things. Like he's really doing things this year. Like he's, he's learning words. And oddly, he's learned the word jacket. It's one of his jackets, he calls me Jodie instead of mom, which is awesome. Yeah, so shouts Daddy, and Jodie, I'm like, thank you very much.Alex: Excellent, excellent show you love that. Because I remember obviously we had theWow, it's just a sad thing. Obviously, we had the dogs barking.Jodie: Oh yeah, Thrasher and Baker. Oh yeah, yeah. Oh, that happened in a bowl we got em. So they went to live with another Basset and Mum, basically, because we were part of a really good dog network. And so they went to live with this lady who's got like four others and they are just they are so happy. I don't even think the fact they're like maybe because yeah, they live on a farm now and there are loads of dogs there and they absolutely love it. And so yeah, that was a yeah, that was sad but i think i think we could be kind of at the point with you could hear how chaotic it was in the background. They were just like, they were just like, let's go for a walk. Let's go here and I was like no. And so yeah,Alex: It is. Yeah, having a child, a human is a lot I wouldn't have been able to do with pets.Jodie: Yeah, but pets that I had created my own problem with the pets because it was too small of a house, too big of dogs, and not enough boundaries between anyone you know, the dog slept in bed with me and it just wasn't, you know, it was a recipe for disaster. And luckily they've gone somewhere where they are even further mollycoddled than they were with me. So they're there, they're even better off now. I think that's really it's a really big lesson as an adult when you make a decision that's going to hurt you and only hurt you, but it's going to help someone else. So the dogs were going to be better off. I was going to be sad. And I had to make that decision and be like, Okay, well, I guess I'll just be sad then because they're gonna be happier. Real adult learning. So yeah, it was super sad like I was gutted about it, but I think it was the right thing for them.Alex: I know, absolutely. Do you know what I was just looking up while you're telling me that, so I thought I better just check because I knew yours was a very popular sewed for a while it was the second most downloaded? But you want to know something quite exciting that it was the number one downloaded episode of all time.Jodie: Really? That's amazing. That's awesome. Yeah, you know, it's my dulcet tones. It's my lovely calming accent that ASMR of mortgage advisers.Alex: Say well, I would like to say part of the credit of doing something super exciting with the title of like a mortgage broker generating their own leads doing blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'd like to take a little bit of credit for that.Jodie: That's okay. You can.Alex: I'll take 30% of the credit. Jodie: Yeah. Alex: That's the number one so you'd be there. So David Thompson. So Gary was seventh, and then you don't talk to a second, Me and Tom doing an episode were third. We should have been first you know, that's an absolute disgrace. You got ash, Ash ball and fourth. So what was interesting actually the top, the top five are not if you take out me and Tom, the top five are all brokers. Jodie: Okay, cool. Alex: So now, you know we've had a lot of marketing experts on dishing out marketing advice. One thing I've learned over this year is that actually getting people like yourself and hearing your stories is what people are interested in. Jodie: Yeah, what do you know what though it's something that I found throughout my life and we had at the bank, we have people who would come and work for us. And you were like, university graduates and they'd come in on a graduate course or something, they'd come straight into management. And the rest of the bank was just like, nope, don't I don't want to know anything this person's got to say because you haven't lived this life. You haven't come from the ground up. And this, you know, it puts there's a lot in it. There really is I can sit there and say, Look, I know how to market for mortgage advisers because I am a mortgage advisor. Alex: Yeah.Jodie: I'm marking all myself. And this works rather than someone you know, just coming in and saying, This is what and we could probably be doing exactly the same thing. Alex: Yeah., no, absolutely, absolutely. I think it's, it's being it's easy to put someone to be like, um, you know, Jodie is a broker she's doing that what you know, why can't I and then maybe they think if there's someone who's not worked in it, and it's easy for them? Yeah. It's just easier to make a connection with people that are like you. So. Yeah, that's awesome. And then you had you, as supposed you are the only one as well that we got on that was doing Google Ads themselves. I don't think I spoke to any of the brokers that have been doing Google Ads themselves so are you still on your radar? He's still doing that. Is that anything else overtaking it, or Is that still the number one.Jodie: Now, I mean, I obviously had a baby. So there was a period of time where I wound it down. And I've continued to supply leads. So I still had a handful of loyal clients who just kind of kept buying from me over that period, but I stopped taking any of my leads. And so for about six months, I kind of just backed off from it, and then came back in sort of the back end of last year, I think a little one's gone to nursery now. So yeah, I'm kind of back in it now. And, and it's, it's a blend again. So obviously the network that I'm with b2b, they provide me with leads. And, and I also have my Google AdWords, which, and they're just two very different types of leads. And they all have different conversion rates, and they all work but I don't think you should ever turn a lead source away and you know, if If you can, as long as you are meticulously recording how many times you did everything to in that lead, you know, did I pick the phone up and dial them? How many times did I literally put my hand to my phone? And because then you can figure out how much putting your hand on a phone makes you might be 74 P. But, we can take it right back to that.Alex: Absolutely. I think I saw there was someone a broker showing me their screen and it was like one of their self-employed brokers had only logged two calls. They were saying that this I've not been able to get out as person but it was like two calls a week apart both before 5 pm. And it was like they were I can't remember how long after it was the lead initially dropped. But it was they were reporting it but not doing enough. And I think there's a case of people not being as meticulous as you are with that. I'm not chasing it enough.Jodie: Wow. I would as always, I'm going to be going against the grain here. No, I don't have the needs. I didn't do it, man, I don't do it. Look, if you want a mortgage, I'm going to touch. Here's my number. I if they put in an inquiry, I mean I would the b2b, b2b have their own structure, which is you know that you make an X number of calls, and we have a system that sends them texts, etc. And those ones, you know, that's, that's James's method, and I use that. But for my own needs I when the lead lands, I try within 10 minutes and firing them it's straight off the bat. So I go straight in and I call him because speed stones and it always will and a lot of the times they answer the phone and go oh, oh, didn't expect you to ring me that fast. And I'm like, exactly. I give them a ring straight away. And the chances are they are still sat by the computer. And so they get that one call and then and then I'm never in the zone. And then if they don't answer, I send them a text and I say, Hey, it's me from this company. I'm bringing about your mortgage when good, that's all I do. That's it. I can't find them again. Nope, I bring them at the moment and then I send them a text and that's it.Alex: Do you mind sharing what percentage of contact right there is like what percentage of like, no contact is that you know.Jodie: my contact rate is I have this down the other day I've actually I'm mentoring someone at the moment. So I'm more in my own KPIs than I ever have.Alex: While you're looking at apps are gonna it's like two very different things going on because If you are buying leads or if you're marketing in a way that you're not building any rapport you've you've only got that quick window because they'll forget about you. But if you're marketing and people know you quite well and they've bought into already then you can wait. So I don't think everyone I always think older minute coders are always like you say within 10 minutes.Jodie: Oh, I love that.Alex: Yeah, well little phrase for you.Jodie: YeahAlex: While you're looking at apps are gonna it's like two very different things going on because If you are buying leads or if you're marketing in a way that you're not building any rapport you've you've only got that quick window because they'll forget about you. But if you're marketing and people know you quite well and they've bought into already then you can wait. So I don't think everyone I always think minute older minute coders are always like you say within 10 minutes so I love that. Well, little phrase for you. Yeah. It because it literally is because they'll because if they because there's a lot of things that are important to people at that moment, like mortgages, especially protection that is important at the minute and then once the laptop gets close, I will it was important 10 minutes ago it's not important now because this is happening. So you miss if you miss that window, I think you're missing out. A big one. But it just depends on a case by a case like how well are you have you? Like, do people know you for that one thing and they've already decided that only gonna deal with you.Jodie: No, my leads have no idea who I am mainly, my leads are very much advertised on an in a cold no company we are a company, we can find you the things you would like as your details to have a call and, and so yeah, just give them a ring or give them a quick call. And then I'll send them a text and send them an email. So send them a text and an email. And if they don't come back to me, you didn't want it that much.Alex: Yeah, I wonder though, I'd be so interested to see the numbers like because you're you've got personality, definitely. If people got to know you a little bit beforeJodie: I leave a voicemail, I do leave a voicemail. So maybe that's why I get a lot of callbacks and I get a lot of texts back.Alex: And I think people prefer to communicate in the text.Jodie: 100% of the day. I do.Alex: Yeah, I think my big thing for us this year is to give the end-user the person that wants the mortgage, give them as wide of options as possible to communicate. And not just say, it's only a callback, you have to have a goal, but it's like, how do you prefer to us to get back to that email? Whatsapp? Facebook Messenger? Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Text, phone, and then let them just I think there's a lot of leads being missed, because people are going through and there, and there, yeah, I need a mortgage or I need advice. I've got this situation, and then the only they'll fill all the details out, and the only option is a callback and they'll sort of agree to it and then they'll think but whereas if it's something like WhatsApp, then they don't have to set that timeout to have a call because no one wants to be sold to and the broker can go away if they've done a fact find on the website. If you've collected all that information, why maybe go back to them with something and then build-up to the call.Alex: Yeah, exactly. I something like I think it's a month ago. And I needed to do something with my energy supplier. And I logged in and there was like to write live chat or like live chat, but I always forget it's open. You know, when you open it, and then you just walk off, just forget you have live chat open.Jodie: I’m so confident. I'm terrible with it. So, it clicks on this live chat thing. And it was like, Oh, do you want to just Whatsapp? I was like, Oh, yeah. So Whatsapp. And it just opened a WhatsApp chat with my provider. And then they just kind of got back to me throughout the day. Alex: Yeah. So as a broker, like whether you've got advisors working for you or not, and some people don't want to give them Oh, by the way, you can get a prepaid SIM and you can have WhatsApp away. So you can have all your WhatsApp communications open on a browser window to the on as you and it's so much more organized than email as well when I'm doing a whole sort of project on facilitating WhatsApp Web for clients. We've been looking at WhatsApp chatbot as well, which is not as good as the Facebook Messenger stuff. But again, if people want to do it, we're on it because if we can get as much info on if someone and then the only thing is one, someone said their network won't allow WhatsApp communication despite it being the safest. And I could say I covered which network it was where they were like they ban any communication whatsoever knowing that WhatsApp is more secure than email. That's bonkers. But either way Yeah, that's definitely on our mind because I think a lot of people just don't want to have a phone call.Alex: See, very I'm sort of taking over this episode. So what so what else? So are you doing more of the commercial stuff on your ads before? Exactly it was commercial mortgages pretty much that you were doing last year my rightJodie: Yeah, yup. So my advert saw more commercials but I do get a lot of isolettes through it as well. And yeah, but mostly it's battleaxe for so it's a limited company and Alex: That does seem to be a very popular minute obviously with all the sort of tax changes and stuff. Yeah. How are you finding it like demand this from this time last year to now the B-word is kind of semi sorted is that affected anything or our market like?Jodie: I would say that pre-Christmas which normally December is my salon and the month where I don't do anything, and January is just like I'm continuing to not do much. Outrageous this December was, I mean, right up until Christmas Eve I was still dealing with clients and taking and taking upset on Christmas Eve. Crazy.Alex: We saw one on Christmas Day.Jodie: No..Alex: One every Christmas Day, there’s always one.Jodie: I don't even think I'll pick my phone up on Christmas day it's just yeahAlex: Yeah everyone's different so people get bored and they're like but yeah I mean I was cooking on Christmas Day literally in a second but yeah that that did happen.Jodie: yeah now I've been really busy and really really busy and very much and that's kind of what my year is about this year is understanding how to manage the famine and the feast know get tons of leads in and when you're very quiet and then you know talking to me building it all up and then they kind of all slowly come back in and then you end up with like if anything you end up with too many inquiries because then you've gone too many people coming back and it's kind of I'm trying to figure out what that nice even let's take this many leads a day constantly rather than taking you to know 40 leads a day for two weeks, nothing for another three weeks. So that's what my plan is this year is to find my sweet spot.Alex: of literally the number of leads per week per day. Jodie: Yeah, yeah.Alex: And what was taking the most time for you, when you're sort of dealing with inquiries? Where could it like, Is it like,Jodie: what's that? Sorry, packaging cases? And okay, so that's always the most time-consuming part. And in any mortgage, getting the leads is fine, cuz everything's automatic. And it's also CRM, and it's perfect. And the notification comes through on my phone, I click a button and get it's great. And, but then once and I have a chat with a client, and that's fine, and I don't. Do you follow me on Instagram? Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And did you see the space paper that I got delivered yesterday?Alex: Oh, God doesn't know if I've been on the last couple of days.Jodie: So whenever I get an inquiry, I have a blank sheet of paper. And I know exactly the template of my fact find a blank sheet of paper and I just write, write all and it's all organized, you know, left side for Mr Right side to miss it, and it kind of all ends up looking like a fact find. And so I do that sheet of paper for every client, and then I write on that until really, I've run out of paper and it becomes a client file. And then I take paper, clip it in, and then they become a file. And yeah, well, that is pretty, you can imagine I've got like 60 notebooks piled up next, which is crazy. And so I've actually bought a notepad by rocket book. And it's a reusable notepad. Alex: What. Jodie: Yeah, so you write in it. And then you get your phone, you get the rocket dog app, you scan it over, and it uploads it into Dropbox into a file, wherever you can put file names on it, and everything, and then just wipe the page clean and start again.Alex: Oh my God.Jodie: It's like actual paper and so yeah, that I'm hoping that's gonna save me a bunch of time because now it's got handwriting detection as well. So all my notes now get uploaded into a file. So when a client rings me back in six months time and says hey you know Mr Donovan, I can just open my rocket dog file and go Donovan and it will find that note pad that page of my notepad and go that's that client it might just say Donovan, ah avoid you know, but it will be and that'll be on the new anywhere I am. I can just click it'll be in my Dropbox and I can just search for that name anywhere I don't need my notepads anymore. And because it will all be on this. This Dropbox so I thinkAlex: Then 34.99 I'm just on the road getting a rocket book. Why not? Not mega expensive.Jodie: Yeah, and the efforts are hilarious. I mean, you'll really enjoy him. It's just two guys in there like, they're just having a blast making these books clearly they've done a microwavable one as well where you write in it and then put it in the microwave, and it just erases everything. And but that has a shelf life. And, and something I'm really conscious of at the minute is the impact that I'm having, you know, environmentally. There's a lot of paper in my job. So I'm kind of wherever I can, I'm avoiding a paper. Because everything else in my life pretty much I know I doesn't really have minimal impact with most of the things I use are usable things in most of my life but then in this just reams and reams of paper that I'm printing, I feel terrible.Alex: It's literally my desk at the minute. I've got these A3 papers where we spent sort of between Christmas and New Year like coming up with different ideas days for campaigns and what can be doing better and I've literally got a flood of these A3 bits of paper that I could have done in this. If they do an A3 version. I'm all over, I might get the small one anyway because I do use it like my notebooks.Jodie: What size is a4? So A3 is quite bigger than A4Alex: Yeah.Jodie: I think A4 is probably the biggest that they do but you could open both pages because it's 32 pages.Alex: YeahJodie: Maybe you could open both and just have it on there but you know if you do it small and then just blow it up.Alex: Yeah, well, it's my birthday coming up and the misses were like, what can I want I can kind of get you sort of you never want anything and anything you want you but I could just send you this thing.Jodie: Do it because honestly, I was saying that is such a good present for people. And it's the last one is the one I got and it when it gets delivered. It looks like a bag of space food because it comes in the old space bag. I feel very modern, very.Alex: Yeah. I love it with these things I always get annoyed that I didn't invent it myself.Jodie: Yeah, my dad, my dad has invented everything before anyone else did. And, every time a product comes out, he'll remind me of the conversation we've had four years ago where he invented that and he's right, you know, we have and I say, well, maybe it should actually do one of those.Alex: Yeah. Oh well, I used to work at an agency and this guy called Kazu came like a freelance designer and he just comes in, he sort of lives in our office. We used to work together and our old boss used to say that he invented Facebook before Facebook Like all the time.Jodie: Oh, I bet he didAlex: It’s in his head, but then never did the difference. Zuckerberg did something about it. That's the…Jodie: I think I invented iPhones and I definitely think I did. I had all the passion for an iPhone, in my mind. Alex: Yeah. Jodie: But it just was the translation that I just, you know, probably by the time they came, you know, when I'm thinking of and they were probably 10 years in development anyway. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Jodie: So though they'll be imprinted in our fingers soon.Alex: Really? Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, other than digital notebooks, what else is new?Jodie: So yeah, my digital notebook is very new. I'm mentoring somebody.Alex: I was gonna say you mentioned it earlier. Yeah.Jodie: I believe she found me on your podcast.Alex: Well, do you know that happens a lot. This podcast doesn't cost me a lot of money. It cost me time. I don't make anything from it. But I seem to have made like other people. Like some really good so there's like, lots of like, pretty much every guest I've had on saying so and got in touch. We'd like to do this. Amazing. That's great. It's brilliant that I always find it bonkers that people actually listen. And they still listen. And people actually do stuff out of it. So that is.Jodie: I probably get one or two messages a month that say, Hey, I heard your podcast episode. And I'd love to have a chat with you about what you do. I'd love to buy some leads off. Alex: Amazing. Jodie: Yeah. One or two a month at least.Alex: Well, I was just looking at when I looked at your episode stats, I was like, Oh, this has had eight downloads in the last week. And I was like, well, that's like one at one a, obviously, more than one a day and it was over a year old. Least not being advertised. People are picking it out. So yeah, I mean, that is amazing. Amazing to hear. And then I say I didn't get anything out of it. I mean, we get inquiries all the time. I don't ask everyone where they come from. But that's cool. So how's that mentoring? Say what's in terms of the minute you mentoring them on, are they on like everything or just marketing? Just Google Or literally the whole, the whole.Jodie: So initially it was a marketing job really, that she just wanted something to learn. And as we kind of got talking, it just kind of organically became, we were both in a really similar position actually in our lives and her kind of wants to be in the same sustainable situation that I'm in where we can have our children and be the mums that we want to be and run a business that we want to run without having to sell Aloe Vera. Or, you know, these ridiculous shapes that people sell or anything like that. It's just a true Korea and true business. Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And which is lovely to see that people look at me and think, you know, that that's an aspirational and Korea, which is, you know, it's great. So she approached me and I said, Look, you know, I'd love to expand outwards and as well not just physically but potentially for my business. Well, but yeah, let's, you know, let's, let's do it and let's just kind of cobble through it together. And so that's kind of where we're at. She's taken a leap of faith on me and I have to leap of faith on her and we're just trying to figure out how that works. And so that's where we're at. I'm kind of guiding her through how I set up myself. And then we would slowly integrate her into her own being our own broker. And eventually, she's just been doing it a few months now. We've had Christmas, so it's been a little, you know, nonstarter over Christmas, but she's doing amazing, she's got 10s of thousands of pounds in the pipeline, which is crazy. And you know, not all of that is going to go anywhere. But you know, even if I think we've said like, you know, roughly she probably roughly banks to bank seven grand. And I would say, out of everything that she's had through, which is just gorgeous in it, you know, take this leap into like a totally new field and then get in a big pipeline like that. AndAlex: What I love about 99% of the brokers 99.99% brokers I know and speak to also just get as much satisfaction out of like, genuinely helping people as well and they and they and they get rewarded for it. It's like what it's like, I'm almost jealous of the rewards that you guys get from helping people as well as what you get in return. It feels quite a unique kind of job that it's kind of a must to be satisfying.Jodie: Yeah, it really is and do they want and I needed it as well. I really needed it because I started to doubt my own hipe last year and you know, when you have a kid you lose your identity completely for a period of time. And I came back and was like, right i mean obviously I have my group that was on your podcast which is still it still exists but it's just because I didn't know how to help these people and you know they were all asking me and I was like I don't know just how do I do this I'm a parent and how do I do it? How do I do it? And I know me and you know conversations about that and definitely minute old minute cold is, you know, plays on my mind with these people. And so when this really naturally just progressed into something and mentor wise, I was really happy because I was like, Okay, I can do this. And, and I can help and even if all I do is just give her the tools and then send her on her way and Alex: Yeah.Jodie: Because it is, I'm growing as a person, whilst I'm helping her grow as a person. And, and it might be that she goes off and does it without, you know without me in the future and that's, that's fine. And it's just something that I think I've, I've needed to do and it's a big learning for me as well.Alex: I think as well as you learn from teaching as well, she always won't feel giving advice to someone else to do something you sort of like, I find that when we're trying to I always feel like I'm looking at stuff more. So I'm not trying to help myself, I'm trying to help other people as well. So it gives me that extra edge so we've obviously got we've got the pressure of clients that pay us and we've got we've got to deliver for them otherwise we lose them and you know, lose house and family can't eat and things like that, but also that extra edge of wanting to help other people that what they do well or not And affect me, but it always finds, since doing the podcast and doing videos and things like that, that it gives it I've probably pushed myself to learn more to help share that kind of accent.Jodie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, I, I would have, I would have said I was very, you know, very efficient at my job. And I knew I knew exactly what to do, but actually, I just knew exactly what to not do. I knew what to avoid. I knew what I knew. And I knew I knew how to avoid the stuff I didn't know. And with this new, new starter, she's kind of expanded and been like, Oh, well, I'm looking at loads of stuff over here. And I'm like, Oh, no, I don't play in that court. But what I have to do now, so I've, you know, started doing that as well and funnily and, you know, growth, growth is, it's up and down and sideways. It's everywhere because I've had a really great opportunity as well as my father in law and my mother in law and Actually, I've started on the path to working for me as well. And right, so they're going to become mortgage brokers and buy their own rights, which is lovely. But also my dad is coming to work for me as well. And he's had a background like you had a family that had worked in. He's got some experience in it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Yes. So he was a senior financial adviser for the bank that I worked for. And my sister was an advisor as well. And she's had a baby and she's going back to work in January, self-employed as well, which is lovely. And so we're all kind of doing it self employed. But yeah, my dad's come in to work with me as well. Which is great because he's the guy who kind of coached me and made me the person that I am. And now I kind of get to give a little bit back to him, but he loves me and he's going to help me from above and you No, it's going to, it's going to go everywhere. And it's going to be really nice. And it's going to build a really nice little company.Alex: Family literally a family business literallyJodie: Literally a family business. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, my partner Matt, and he's always been like a rock in my company anyway. And when I have these, you know, packaging nightmares where I've got just, you know, reams and reams and reams of applications that I've got to fill in. He's just incredible. You just get straight on the computer and he's like, scans him in and, and does it all for me anyway, so I've always had him helping me. And even if sometimes it's just he just goes out with our thoughts. Leave Hello. Yeah.Alex: Yeah. Jodie: And so it's always been great and hands-on, but it's so nice that we're getting everyone else is kind of getting involved in it as well. And it's fantastic. Yes, it's lovely. It's quite a nice little family that we've got now. Really a family.Alex: Really Yeah. And I think just going back to what you said about Like growth being up down sideways my business mental talks about competitive with like climbing Everest is like the night before they go to sleep they climb up and then they have to climb back down again to like a climatized so it's always talking about the growth of that you're up and then you've got sometimes you've got to go back down to be able to push forwards again parallel so it's nobody can build a business with cute like continued growth will kill you.Jodie: Yeah absolutely. Isn't linear it's not you know.Alex: Yeah it's a graph, this graph should have these peaks where you drop down and then you that gives you the ability to then push back up again. So yes one thing is you always want like a month I always want growth, growth, growth, but the one thing he thought he taught me about was that it is normal and healthy to have no backs and I'm pushing on from there.Jodie: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's amazing what you can really beat yourself up on mean on AdWords I can, I can have a week where I look at my fingers and you know, they're costing me three times as much as they did on, you know, the month before and I will really panic. And I'll go Stop, stop the ads. And you know, it's just your instinct is to stop at that point but no, no, you need to stop because there's a reason why they're coming through at this. You know, it's because people really really want it or people you know, there's a lot of competition or whatever, but it always evens out. It always evens out over the course of a year and you always end up at the same cost per click. So there's a reason it's an average, you know, you're gonna have some weeks where it's half of your normal one that you just can't look in like that you've got to set boundaries and be like, I'm only gonna, I'm only gonna worry about it. If over the course of three months, my average cost is going up and then I'll worry andAlex: Yeah.Jodie: But even then don't leave it another three months.Alex: Yeah, exactly. Is that easy? Again, because when we do it like that with Google Ads absolute minefield in terms of like, we've got one company where the cost per click can range from like quid to four quid depending on the time of day and when other people are bidding and things like that. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: There are so many sorts of and it's difficult when if there are brokers with a small budget as well, those impacts will be felt bigger than one whether someone's spending like 50 grand a month compared some of the spending 500 pounds those ups and downs have felt much bigger with the smaller budgets definitely.Jodie: Absolutely.Alex: Have you ever kind of looked at the thought about SEO being on page one top of page one for those keywords bidding on.Jodie: You mean organically?Alex: Yeah, organically. Yeah. Is it ever like, do you have SEO remorse as in like this time last year, if there was an if you knew what to do, there was a plan in place, and you could have executed it and by now a year later, you could have been position one.Jodie: I don't know, I've never really, I've never really seen the benefit of you know what, I am the person who scrolls past the ads and goes to the organic number one result, but I feel like that's the same as buying an ad anyway now, because people just strategically do things to make themselves the number one result, but it's not. It's not really, you know when you go shopping online, and it organizes things, you know, and you can do it from price low to high or whatever, whatever the default is never price low to high, its price, whatever is gonna make me the company more money. And they do it that way. So it's, you know, I don't necessarily believe personally, that the value of being number one, organically has the value that it used to. I think it just means that you're very good at SEO.Alex: Oh, yeah. Jodie: Just means you're good at getting number one on Google. Alex: Yeah, absolutely. What we find with a lot of our clients, the reduction in the cost to acquire a new client if they're getting free traffic from Google is is is the biggest one the biggest factors inJodie: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. In that sense, yes, definitely that it would be a cheaper option. But just for me, I feel like I didn't know that my audience is ready.Alex: What you’re doing now is work and I don't want your eye off the ball. So there's a lot of things in life like, don't if you've got something that is working, that's profitable unless you're obviously like, where you were their way or now. You don't want to change it. Yeah, I was just kind of interesting. If we're, if because you're getting those leads from Google, whether that was on your mind.Jodie: It is nice to know, it would definitely be nice to know. And, and, and I certainly, I certainly would be open to looking at it and seeing But I'm still in the same position that I was in before, which I know is always your favourite thing to hear from me. I don't need any more leads at the minute. I have to turn the machine off frequently. Alex: If you if we were to talk this time next year, and you didn't have to have the machine on at all, and they were all just coming in.Jodie: Oh, yeah. Yeah. be great.Alex: Yeah. So that was my I have a question. I should have asked that beginning. But ya know, it's interesting. And that's where a lot of we have all kinds of ads running literally, bar, no bar, none. All of them but they were the ones that are getting those. We work on SEO for all of our clients because of getting that free trial. And Google's great because it's people are like, well, like we said earlier about catching them within that 10 minutes. They're in the zone. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Like Facebook, LinkedIn once you're there when they are in the zone and it's They haven't made the decision to go out and look for something. Yes. You've got to be even quicker with the social ads to get them But yeah, I think we're finding Google gives the best quality and if you can get it free so obviously it reduced like the possibilities cray LAUGHINGJodie: You had a podcast with Joe Mani.Alex: The thing I haven't asked because it's we have your name is coming up on my thing is Joe Mani but Joe Mani is that a self-inflicted?Jodie: Yeah hundred per cent you know what? funny because it's difficult to nickname my name because it isn't really you can't really other than Steve Oh, yeah, all coffee bit. Oh calling me like, which I don't like Joe Go. Yeah, exactly. So it has to be something. So after a while, it just became, I just used to put myself on board, you know, couldn't fit Jody on it. So I'd write j and then we'll do like $1 sign. So I was. So yeah, it's definitely a self-made Monica and that does not need to stick. Nobody knew that nickname mom. But just to go back to what you said about LinkedIn, and LinkedIn, such a funny little place at the minute. And I mean, I've turned my notifications off because it's too much, people, I don't know who in their right mind thinks that anyone is going to read a near eight paragraph-long message from a brand new connection. Either like, Hey, how are you insert name here, comma, I would really like to talk to you about insert profession here. Let me tell you a little bit about what it is that I do. It was 25 paragraphs about it and I'm like Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I just never read it.Alex: I agreed at the no who's speaking to a guy the other day. And they're kind of like an agency that does that can't that I outreach but in a very different way. And he was like talking about getting them to strike up a conversation like asking a question or something to start a conversation rather than just doing a whole sales blurb is like running up to someone in the street and just shouting about your business for like, 10 minutes.Jodie: Yeah, exactly. And I way prefer, like, I've had a lot of impact on a lot of my favourite messages on LinkedIn, or people who've listened to your podcast, and they will message me with something. And, and I'll, it always makes me laugh. It'll always be something funny in the message. It'll be like, Hey, I heard you on the podcast. And then they'll just say something hilarious. Along the lines, I think because I give a sense of like and look for a laugh. And they'll always always have a laugh. And even if all we do is just say, uh, you know, I'll say thank you very much. And I'll see Say that I mean, uh, you know, I mean a deadly baffle for number one. So please be free to download it 400 times.Alex: As much as we've done it. Jodie: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'll send you all your five pounds in a minute. So we're at and, but well, you know, we'll have a laugh and we'll have fun and that's what I think that's what LinkedIn should be is a place to find like-minded business people to do business with. And to Hulu, and not to get too caught up on being everyone's cup of tea. Alex: Exactly, that's Yeah, if you're vanilla, like the, someone was asking me about, Tony, have you seen Gary Vaynerchuk?Jodie: Yeah, I love Gary Vaynerchuk.Alex: Yeah, but he is Marmite, you know. That's why if he was vanilla and trying to get everyone to like him, he wouldn't have the following that he has. So Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Pretty extreme example, obviously. But yeah. Like being yourself is.Jodie: Yeah, I'm a marmite well, hundred percent a marmite. And people literally do like me or they do not like me. And it's and you know what, I used to really struggle with that but now I'm just like, that's fine. There are plenty more people in the world and I like to be alone. I like to warm people up a bit I am a little bit of a troll by nature and I do like to sort of tickle people a bit, particularly on LinkedIn. And somebody put something at Christmas. I hate the boastful nature of Christmas. And I don't think people talk about the presence that golfing kids run said. And so I was on LinkedIn at some point. And this guy was like, What do you get the guy who has everything, and I think I responded with haemorrhoid cream. And if you say you've got everything, have you got a spare tenner?Alex: Yeah, brilliant.Jodie: Yeah. You know, I like to sort of make fun of people a bit but I think Yeah, LinkedIn has got to change to become a bit more. I think you've got to be aggressive with who you let in your circle on LinkedIn.Alex: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I've really filtered.Jodie: Yeah, remove connections, remove connections. Yeah. Are you within a geographical distance of me that we can do business if not remove connection?Alex: Absolutely. I think it is a great platform and I'm slowly being marmite like I don't I put a photo on I think was yesterday and I've got I got bought two notepads for Christmas one says the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other thought of this as a warning Bantam merchant, proper cringe but I just took a photo and said I've got a really important meeting with a top dog Fs company but which notepad I never would have done that before because it's like, oh, I should be professional or not have a but then I think I've made more a double business got more friends out of LinkedIn and connections from being myself and not worrying about not being too professional or worrying about or not worried about anything actually other than just being sad.Jodie: Just don't do it. It's, you've got to you've just got to be yourself. I mean, you really have to just be yourself. My favourite people in the financial industry are you. I can smell I can sniff out a metalhead in a crowded room. I just know him. I know the people who you know they've got like a slipknot tattoo, I just know it. And I like a Rolodex of metal you know metal aficionados who are in the financial industry, and that's one that they're my people. So I love those people. And but then also people who, who have a criminally, you know, offensive sense of humour. That's, that's Matt der max. People so if I find a particularly funny person who also listens to, you know the same sort of music as me, you know that's a relationship for us. So if you're out there and you want to be my BDM please message me on LinkedIn and if you want to talk slipknot and deals let's do it let's I'm in the market for it.Alex: I'm really looking forward to someone opening a message or connection requests or doing some sort of reference or, or something like if you get that please do a screenshot and send.Jodie: I will put it on a T-shirt. Promise. Alex: Yeah, brilliant. We have been chatting for 50 of your English minutes Wow. Wow, it was like three.Jodie: It really does. Alex: What have we not discussed?Jodie: I think pretty much it and we've done exactly what I've been taught not to do there with it. We haven't done politics or what is it politics and religion not covered? That's good.Alex: We could do that next year. Yeah. Jodie: Okay. Yeah, definitely.Alex: It's so good to catch up with you. I can't believe it's been a year. It. It's absolutely bonkers. Yeah. And it's great that people are still listening to your original one. Still getting in touch with you. I can't believe I've been involved in something that makes that happen. I find that bonkers.Jodie: It's not the first situation that's gone viral for me. And I'm sure it won't be the last. Alex: Yeah, what was, go on spill it.Jodie: I'm not going to give you my medical records. No, I'm joking. And no, I put a few in. I often go viral actually. And I did it. I did a bit of a famous post about mediums A while ago and my disdain for the role of BDM. Right. I've always said, I stand by it. I don't think it's a role that that is relevant. I don't think it's a helpful role. For mortgage advisors when it's one person I think it's unfair on the person. I used to hate BDM but now I hate whoever makes a BDM do their job. I hate them. It's and it's not sustainable. It's not sustainable. You just need a call center that deals with those. But yeah, I did them almost like an X factor of BDMs. Once I put up that I don't like BDMsms and I refuse to use them. I actually completely refuse to use them now. I did have a few people who were like, let me prove you wrong Let me prove you right like so and so and a few of them did. Yeah, pretty much funny Penny Paul. But yeah, I got I ended up with quite a few connections through that who appreciated my angle which is Look, I want to know now the answer to my question, not seven o'clock at night when you've got home from I've been 16 coffees all day when you finally Got to read your emails. Like, the deal is with someone else at that point. It's, you know, it's crazy. But yeah, that was another thing that went a bit viral as well.Alex: Fantastic. So, if people haven't heard the first episode I'm following you know, I'm following you on Instagram. Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Where? Where? Where is that? Where's the BDM slugging going on?Jodie: Oh, it's on LinkedIn. Oh yeah, LinkedIn it's a really old post now I think and what it did it did get some traction and but yeah, you can find it on LinkedIn my Instagram is not a professional arena in any capacity it's just me but maybe yeah, maybe that's what I should do. Maybe I should start an Instagram for work. ItAlex: It should be one on one in one on the same.Jodie: Do you think?Alex: I think people buy from people.Jodie: I still talk a lot as a business on my Instagram, I just it's not like a business Instagram.Alex: I do not use my company Facebook page, my company LinkedIn, my company anything is all via me. And I get more out of it.Jodie: Yeah, I think I think that's the I think it's the way to go. And I do definitely talk about I always throw, you know, one or two posts a month up on my stories. Just saying no, don't forget, don't get life insurance. Don't forget mortgages don't get addressed. And, and I always get a couple of leads off of that. And even sometimes it's just people saying, Oh, I'm really interested. And we just have a chat. And then I'll come back to me a little later and we'll talk about it but yeah, yeah, I think you're right. I think you should keep it all as one brand.Alex: Nice. Love it. Awesome. I can't believe we're with them. I think we need to do it closer than a year. We need to catch up when I need to kind of get you drunk. You belong to one of our events as well so people can meet you in real life.Jodie: Wow definitely, definitely. I would love to do that and get the winter over with so I can come out as my winter cocoon. And yeah, but definitely Yeah, just invite me along I think you went to Did you go to u printer?Alex: Yeah, yeah it didn't just go It was on the stage.Jodie: Exactly. I think I need to go.Alex: It is an amazing event.Jodie: Yeah.Alex: Really good. Jodie: I should definitely make it to some sort of physical social interaction at some point in my life and stop the piano. Avoid at the end of the phone.Alex: We've got our events in March there's gonna be a load of brokers there in the lovely Peterborough March the 26th. I will send you a link.Jodie: March is pretty clear for me. So where I could probably squeeze you in. I’ll try my best.Alex: I will. Fantastic, awesome. All right, cool. Well, let's do that let's meet properly in March.Jodie: Yeah. Alex: Let's speak again soon. And I'm loving that you get in the family involved and things are growing and I like your partner helping you out with every I was like visualizing oh no exactly what it's like having a kid ourselves. But yeah sounds like it sounds amazing and I'm glad everything's still going really well for you.Jodie: Yes Yeah it's great. It's all a learning curve and to sayAlex: Oh god yeah Jodie: We’ll see, you never know listen if you know God but this is me on record now all of you all my family members are as fireable as anyone else and I like my coffee with sugar in it.Alex: I'm going to use that clip to promote this episode.Jodie: I love it.Alex: Fantastic. What an amazing note to leave on. Thank you so much for spending your time with us again, as amazing. And let's see if you can be the number one episode of 2020 as well. That'd be pretty cool. All right, thanks very much. Bye-bye.Jodie: See you later. Bye.Alex: And there we have it. There's my chat with Jody Stevenson. It is so good. catching up with her. And it sounds like businesses growing was great that she's kind of getting people involved now it's becoming a proper family business. So that is awesome. So she's got a lot of work to do to see if we can get her as the number one download episode of 2020. We'll see we've had a lot of amazing ones. some incredible ones coming up too as well. So don't forget our event, March 26. Only a few weeks away now I literally got a couple of tickets left. It'd be great to see you there. If you need any more information, go to the lead engineer, click on the conference tab, or details, their agendas all kind of finalize all speakers are on there. We've got loads going on. I will see you next time.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Alex: So, you know how we were talking about restaurants? What's your favorite restaurant?Danny: I guess my favorite restaurant is going to be this one an in the small town near where I live on the coast. It's called Kotora, and it's an udon restaurant.Alex: Udon. What's udon?Danny: Udon is a kind of thick flour noodle. And the udon itself is noodles in a soup, so it's noodle soup with a really delicious broth. I think maybe they make it out of fish and soy sauce and perhaps meat, so you get this really delicious broth with these really great noodles in it.Alex: I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.Danny: Well, that's not even the best part. The best part is you get to pick various toppings for your udon. You can get fried shrimp or fried vegetables, or you can get my favorite which is where they take an egg and crack it over right towards the end of the cooking and just barely cook it in there, and they do that with chicken. They have like chicken and noodles and they crack the egg over it.Alex: Chicken and egg in the same noodle broth?Danny: Yeah, in the same bowl.Alex: That's interesting.Danny: Yeah, it's like one big happy family.Alex: Mother and child! So what does the restaurant look like? What's the decor?Danny: Well, it's this really small restaurant. I think the owners actually live above it in the apartment, so it's this tiny place but like I said, it's in Japan, so it's a very, very traditional and Japanese. You walk in and there's this little hallway of the paper screen doors, and on the left there are a couple of actual sit-down tables but mostly the restaurant has all these raised floors with tatami mats.Alex: Tatami mats? Now, I've heard of them. What are they?Danny: Well, a tatami mat is a mat made out of reeds, and they just put them on the floors instead of having maybe a hardwood floor, or carpeting or something like that. It seems to make the floors a little bit softer and cushier.Alex: So you actually sit on the floor to eat?Danny: So yeah, you sit on the raised floor on these little mats and you have these really low tables, and you get to sit off in your own room that's been sectioned off by these paper doors.Alex: It sounds wonderfully Japanese.Danny: Oh, it is. It's very cute and then if you want you can also sit at the bar and you can watch them make the udon noodles. It's so much fun.Alex: Sounds very traditional.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Alex: So, you know how we were talking about restaurants? What's your favorite restaurant?Danny: I guess my favorite restaurant is going to be this one an in the small town near where I live on the coast. It's called Kotora, and it's an udon restaurant.Alex: Udon. What's udon?Danny: Udon is a kind of thick flour noodle. And the udon itself is noodles in a soup, so it's noodle soup with a really delicious broth. I think maybe they make it out of fish and soy sauce and perhaps meat, so you get this really delicious broth with these really great noodles in it.Alex: I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.Danny: Well, that's not even the best part. The best part is you get to pick various toppings for your udon. You can get fried shrimp or fried vegetables, or you can get my favorite which is where they take an egg and crack it over right towards the end of the cooking and just barely cook it in there, and they do that with chicken. They have like chicken and noodles and they crack the egg over it.Alex: Chicken and egg in the same noodle broth?Danny: Yeah, in the same bowl.Alex: That's interesting.Danny: Yeah, it's like one big happy family.Alex: Mother and child! So what does the restaurant look like? What's the decor?Danny: Well, it's this really small restaurant. I think the owners actually live above it in the apartment, so it's this tiny place but like I said, it's in Japan, so it's a very, very traditional and Japanese. You walk in and there's this little hallway of the paper screen doors, and on the left there are a couple of actual sit-down tables but mostly the restaurant has all these raised floors with tatami mats.Alex: Tatami mats? Now, I've heard of them. What are they?Danny: Well, a tatami mat is a mat made out of reeds, and they just put them on the floors instead of having maybe a hardwood floor, or carpeting or something like that. It seems to make the floors a little bit softer and cushier.Alex: So you actually sit on the floor to eat?Danny: So yeah, you sit on the raised floor on these little mats and you have these really low tables, and you get to sit off in your own room that's been sectioned off by these paper doors.Alex: It sounds wonderfully Japanese.Danny: Oh, it is. It's very cute and then if you want you can also sit at the bar and you can watch them make the udon noodles. It's so much fun.Alex: Sounds very traditional.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Alex: So, you know how we were talking about restaurants? What's your favorite restaurant?Danny: I guess my favorite restaurant is going to be this one an in the small town near where I live on the coast. It's called Kotora, and it's an udon restaurant.Alex: Udon. What's udon?Danny: Udon is a kind of thick flour noodle. And the udon itself is noodles in a soup, so it's noodle soup with a really delicious broth. I think maybe they make it out of fish and soy sauce and perhaps meat, so you get this really delicious broth with these really great noodles in it.Alex: I'm getting hungry just thinking about it.Danny: Well, that's not even the best part. The best part is you get to pick various toppings for your udon. You can get fried shrimp or fried vegetables, or you can get my favorite which is where they take an egg and crack it over right towards the end of the cooking and just barely cook it in there, and they do that with chicken. They have like chicken and noodles and they crack the egg over it.Alex: Chicken and egg in the same noodle broth?Danny: Yeah, in the same bowl.Alex: That's interesting.Danny: Yeah, it's like one big happy family.Alex: Mother and child! So what does the restaurant look like? What's the decor?Danny: Well, it's this really small restaurant. I think the owners actually live above it in the apartment, so it's this tiny place but like I said, it's in Japan, so it's a very, very traditional and Japanese. You walk in and there's this little hallway of the paper screen doors, and on the left there are a couple of actual sit-down tables but mostly the restaurant has all these raised floors with tatami mats.Alex: Tatami mats? Now, I've heard of them. What are they?Danny: Well, a tatami mat is a mat made out of reeds, and they just put them on the floors instead of having maybe a hardwood floor, or carpeting or something like that. It seems to make the floors a little bit softer and cushier.Alex: So you actually sit on the floor to eat?Danny: So yeah, you sit on the raised floor on these little mats and you have these really low tables, and you get to sit off in your own room that's been sectioned off by these paper doors.Alex: It sounds wonderfully Japanese.Danny: Oh, it is. It's very cute and then if you want you can also sit at the bar and you can watch them make the udon noodles. It's so much fun.Alex: Sounds very traditional.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Danny: So, we've been talking a lot about food. Do you have a favorite restaurant?Alex: Yeah, I do. I haven't been there for years, but it's still my favorite. It's called The Little SnailDanny: The Little Snail.Alex: And it's a French restaurant, and it's in this small coastal fishing village down the coast. It's kind of funny because it's a great restaurant and you kind of expect it to be in a big city. It has really good French food, but it's in the middle of nowhere.Danny: So, what's the decoration like then? What does it look like?Alex: It's cute. It's very cute. I haven't been in many restaurants in France but it's kind of what I imagine a French restaurant would look like, you know like , there's just a few things hanging on the walls and very simple decor, and it's just kind of cozy like a country town.Danny: Cozy! Sounds nice. But how's the service?Alex: Oh, it's okay. You won't starve. They don't have lots of staff, so it can get quite busy and you're gonna have to wait a while, but you know, when the food arrives, it is so good that you do not care.Danny: Really? What's the food like then?Alex: Ah, well, I just love French food. It's my favorite cuisine and I usually can't afford to eat it however, but if do you like traditional French food, it is great.Danny: Traditional French food? What's that like?Alex: Well, usually I get some kind of meat dish, maybe a quail or kind of another bird or something, and there's usually a really delicious sauce that might be made from wine or cream and herbs and that sort of thing.Danny: Sounds really nice.Alex: It is really good. It's delicious.Danny: So you said you can't really afford to eat French food. What are the prices like ?Alex:Well, the Little Snail is good compared to a French restaurant that you get in a big city.Danny: Really?Alex: Two people could eat there and have a really fantastic French meal for maybe about eight dollars, which is as I said, really good French restaurant.Danny: Really?Alex: That's for two.Danny: For two?Alex: Yeah.Danny: So is there anything special with the place?Alex: Actually we used to go there when I was working. We would go on these business trips and my boss would take me and my other coworker there on the Friday night as a kind of thanks-for-working-hard reward. And we always used to have, I think it's called ------ I've forgotten. My French is terrible, but it's this amazing dessert, which is kind of made with pastry, and has a sweet kind of custard creme inside.Danny: Everyone loves custard. Sound deliciousAlex: It's really good. I can't wait to get back there.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Danny: So, we've been talking a lot about food. Do you have a favorite restaurant?Alex: Yeah, I do. I haven't been there for years, but it's still my favorite. It's called The Little SnailDanny: The Little Snail.Alex: And it's a French restaurant, and it's in this small coastal fishing village down the coast. It's kind of funny because it's a great restaurant and you kind of expect it to be in a big city. It has really good French food, but it's in the middle of nowhere.Danny: So, what's the decoration like then? What does it look like?Alex: It's cute. It's very cute. I haven't been in many restaurants in France but it's kind of what I imagine a French restaurant would look like, you know like , there's just a few things hanging on the walls and very simple decor, and it's just kind of cozy like a country town.Danny: Cozy! Sounds nice. But how's the service?Alex: Oh, it's okay. You won't starve. They don't have lots of staff, so it can get quite busy and you're gonna have to wait a while, but you know, when the food arrives, it is so good that you do not care.Danny: Really? What's the food like then?Alex: Ah, well, I just love French food. It's my favorite cuisine and I usually can't afford to eat it however, but if do you like traditional French food, it is great.Danny: Traditional French food? What's that like?Alex: Well, usually I get some kind of meat dish, maybe a quail or kind of another bird or something, and there's usually a really delicious sauce that might be made from wine or cream and herbs and that sort of thing.Danny: Sounds really nice.Alex: It is really good. It's delicious.Danny: So you said you can't really afford to eat French food. What are the prices like ?Alex:Well, the Little Snail is good compared to a French restaurant that you get in a big city.Danny: Really?Alex: Two people could eat there and have a really fantastic French meal for maybe about eight dollars, which is as I said, really good French restaurant.Danny: Really?Alex: That's for two.Danny: For two?Alex: Yeah.Danny: So is there anything special with the place?Alex: Actually we used to go there when I was working. We would go on these business trips and my boss would take me and my other coworker there on the Friday night as a kind of thanks-for-working-hard reward. And we always used to have, I think it's called ------ I've forgotten. My French is terrible, but it's this amazing dessert, which is kind of made with pastry, and has a sweet kind of custard creme inside.Danny: Everyone loves custard. Sound deliciousAlex: It's really good. I can't wait to get back there.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Danny: So, we've been talking a lot about food. Do you have a favorite restaurant?Alex: Yeah, I do. I haven't been there for years, but it's still my favorite. It's called The Little SnailDanny: The Little Snail.Alex: And it's a French restaurant, and it's in this small coastal fishing village down the coast. It's kind of funny because it's a great restaurant and you kind of expect it to be in a big city. It has really good French food, but it's in the middle of nowhere.Danny: So, what's the decoration like then? What does it look like?Alex: It's cute. It's very cute. I haven't been in many restaurants in France but it's kind of what I imagine a French restaurant would look like, you know like , there's just a few things hanging on the walls and very simple decor, and it's just kind of cozy like a country town.Danny: Cozy! Sounds nice. But how's the service?Alex: Oh, it's okay. You won't starve. They don't have lots of staff, so it can get quite busy and you're gonna have to wait a while, but you know, when the food arrives, it is so good that you do not care.Danny: Really? What's the food like then?Alex: Ah, well, I just love French food. It's my favorite cuisine and I usually can't afford to eat it however, but if do you like traditional French food, it is great.Danny: Traditional French food? What's that like?Alex: Well, usually I get some kind of meat dish, maybe a quail or kind of another bird or something, and there's usually a really delicious sauce that might be made from wine or cream and herbs and that sort of thing.Danny: Sounds really nice.Alex: It is really good. It's delicious.Danny: So you said you can't really afford to eat French food. What are the prices like ?Alex:Well, the Little Snail is good compared to a French restaurant that you get in a big city.Danny: Really?Alex: Two people could eat there and have a really fantastic French meal for maybe about eight dollars, which is as I said, really good French restaurant.Danny: Really?Alex: That's for two.Danny: For two?Alex: Yeah.Danny: So is there anything special with the place?Alex: Actually we used to go there when I was working. We would go on these business trips and my boss would take me and my other coworker there on the Friday night as a kind of thanks-for-working-hard reward. And we always used to have, I think it's called ------ I've forgotten. My French is terrible, but it's this amazing dessert, which is kind of made with pastry, and has a sweet kind of custard creme inside.Danny: Everyone loves custard. Sound deliciousAlex: It's really good. I can't wait to get back there.

Have you ever thought about going back to school to pursue your alternative career? With Javier Carlin Are you burned out with your current healthcare career? Do you feel unappreciated and frustrated? This video is for you! Alex and Javier talk about feeling more accomplished and satisfied on the “other side.” In this episode of AHC: 01:20 – Introduction of Alex Engar 02:00 – Is there truth to finding an alternative career path? 02:30 – Are you frustrated with your profession? 03:10 – This is for people who feel burned out, feel they’re not sure that they made the right career choice and looking for another path but don’t know what is out there. 05:20 – FACT: Most PTs are burned out, constrained, exhausted following the standard career path 06:10 – Alex grew sick of things and stumbled into digital marketing 08:00 – Should I go back to school to find another career path? 08:20 – (Javier to Alex) Who do you listen to? 09:30 – Accept the reality that there are different ways of doing things in life. 14:00 – Freedom lies on the other side of a difficult situation – Greg Todd 19:15 – (Alex) It is better on the other side. 23:50 – Start to ask yourself these questions if you want to start a different path. 26:25 – Phases that you go through with the progression. 28:50 – Serving people give you the opportunity to better their lives. 29:20 – Imperfect action always beats perfect in action.

A cup of coffee Uma xícara de café How about a cup of coffee? Que tal uma xícara de café ? White with two sugars, please. Branco com dois açúcares , por favor. Oh dear, I haven't got any milk. Oh querido , eu não tenho (nenhum) leite . No problem. Black coffee's fine. Não tem problema . Café preto está ótimo . Here you are. Aqui está. Thanks very much. Muito obrigado . Exercise How about a cup of tea? Que tal uma xícara de chá ? White with one sugar, please. Branco com um açúcar, por favor . Tea's fine. O chá esta ótimo . We haven't got any milk. Nós não temos (nenhum) leite . Thanks very much. Muito obrigado . xxx How is your job going? Como vai o seu emprego? Alex What is it like working with sick people all day, Alex? Como é é trabalhar o dia todo com pessoas doentes, Alex? It's difficult, because many patients need a lot of care. É difícil, porque muitos pacientes precisam de muitos cuidados. Ah, you give them medicine and maybe change bandages? Ah, você da a eles remédios e talvez até troque curativos? And we have to write everything on charts for the doctors. E nós temos que escrever tudo nos relatórios para os médicos. Anything else? Alguma coisa mais? We help people get ready for tests. Nós ajudamos as pessoas a se preparar para os exames. Sometimes they are pretty nervous. As vezes eles estão bem nervosos. Sounds like a stressfull job. Parece ser um trabalho estressante. Yeah. But a really enjoy it. É. Mas eu realmente curto bastante. I feel good doing this. Eu me sinto bem fazendo isso. I love helping people. Eu adoro ajudar as pessoas. And they always thank me. E eles sempre me agradecem. Well, good for you. Bem, bom para você. xxx Instructions Come on! VAmos! Is there a problem, sir? Please don't hit the machine again. Algum problema senhor. Por favor não bata na máquina outra vez. But this machine isn't working! My money'sin the machine, and so is my candy bar! Mas esta máquina não esta funcionando. Meu dinheiro está na máquina, e também minha barra de chocolate. Press 'reject coins'. There you go. Four quarters, two dimes, and a nickel. Pressione "rejeitar moedas". Aí está. Quatro moedas de 25 duas de 10 e uma de 5. The machine only takes quarters. A máquina só aceita as de 25. Do you have a quarter? Você tem uma moeda de 25 Sure. There you go. Sim. aqui está. What about my candy bar! e a minha barra de chocolate Don't worry. Put the coins in the slot. Não se preocupe. Coloque as moedas na abertura But it isn't working. Mas não está funcionando. Put them in. then select the candy.What do you want? Coloque-as e então selecione o chocolate. O que você quer? A chocolate bar. Uma barra de chocolate. OK. Chocolate bar. t hat's ...C I. Ok. Barra de chocolate. É a C Press C then 4. There you go. Pressione C depois 4. Aí está. Thanks. Obrigado. You re welcome. De nada. Edgar: Hey! Phis is a nut chocolate liar! I don't like nuts! xxx Are you going to go out tonight? Você "esta indo sair" esta noite? No I'm going to stay home and read a book. Não eu (vou) ficar (estar) em casa e ler um livro. What are you going to do? O que você vai fazer? I'm going to go to my brother's house. Eu vou para a casa do meu irmão. We're going to watch a football game on TV. Nós vamos assistir um jogo de futebol americano na TV. Are you going to go out tonight. Você vai sair esta noite? No I'm going to stay home and read a book. Não eu (vou) ficar (estar) em casa e ler um livro. What are you going to do? O que você vai fazer? I'm going to go to my brother's house. Eu vou para a casa do meu irmão. We're going to watch a football game on TV. Nós vamos assistir um jogo de futebol americano na TV. What you going to do on Sunday? O que você vai fazer no domingo? On Sunday I'm going to rest. No domingo eu vou descansar. I'm going to be at the beach with my sister. Eu vou estar na praia com a minha irmã. Which beach are you going to? Para qual praia você vai? We're g

Hi everyone! We’re back with another Indie Wednesday here at One Movie Punch. Every Wednesday, I’ll be reviewing an independent or microbudget movie that doesn’t get a lot of attention. Sometimes that means we find a diamond in the rough. Sometimes that means we learn the real and/or perceived limits on filmmaking. But we’ll always be discovering something new, even if that means looking at an older subject. Today film is 2018’s SANDOW, written and directed by Alexander Cooper, who I had the pleasure to sit down with to discuss the film. Instead of including trailer segments, I’ll be running the full trailer prior to the review, then adding segments from our interview throughout the review. The full interview will be available on our Patreon feed, where we talk about his first film as producer, PARALLEL, and a little bit about Rambo. Head over to patreon.com/onemoviepunch if you want to hear the interview before it disappears behind the pay wall, and sign up to contribute at any level. All contributions go to paying our expenses and will help us grow with our audience. Subscribe to stay current with the latest releases. Contribute at Patreon for exclusive content. Connect with us over social media to continue the conversation. Here we go! ///// > ///// Today’s movie is SANDOW (2018), the epic historical drama directed by Alexander Cooper and written for the screen in collaboration with Gerard Muarez. The film follows the life of the famous strongman, Eugen Sandow (Timo Kervinen), as seen through the eyes of his pupil, Launceston Elliott (Alexander Cooper). We’re introduced to Sandow’s hopes and dreams, their fulfillment, and the often-sordid life that followed, particularly with his wife Blanche (Tiffany Ellen-Robinson). No spoilers. In our full interview, I mention how recently I reviewed a film called BE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (Episode #657), which covered not only Alice Guy-Blaché, but the rise of the fledgling film industry in Paris and the Eastern United States at the turn of the century. While Guy-Blaché was experimenting with telling stories with film, however, other filmmakers were busy capturing the wonders of the world, much like the YouTube videos of today. And one of the most famous films captured in those early days by Thomas Edison was circus strongman Eugen Sandow, the subject of today’s film. SANDOW takes a very sweeping look at Eugen Sandow, a combination biopic and documentary, from his early years dreaming of being something greater than himself, all the way to his grave at Putney Vale. He wasn’t just a circus and vaudevillian strongman, but also pioneered many major industries of today, including fitness clubs/gyms, athletic supplements, and even a form of professional wrestling, aimed more towards showmanship than actual fighting. And while we get a taste of all of that, we’re also getting a dramatized version of his larger story. ALEX: “Yeah, SANDOW is not an accurate portrayal of what would have happened in his life, but it's more like a, it's a bit of a philosophical musing on a historical figure who has had a huge impact. The whole thing about SANDOW really came from... it was an article I read on the Internet about forgotten newsmakers. I had this sort of image in my mind when I read his story and what a superstar he was. He's known by people but forgotten by most. It was a fascinating story and I found these images of these traveling circus strongmen, and I thought, these were kind of like rock stars before rock stars came about. And I thought, 'Wow! What a thing! These guys were going around with circuses and putting on shows and this was before, like, Arnie was flexing his muscles in Hollywood.'” The further we go back in history, the harder it is to really know what is and isn’t true about historical figures. History is often written by the victors, but it’s mostly captured by historians and re-presented by artists in multiple media. In the case of Eugen Sandow, many single aspects or major accomplishments could be enough for an entire movie, or perhaps an entire series about his life. Even in a sweeping drama like SANDOW, choices have to be made. ALEX: “There's all sorts of rumors and stuff. You don't... I don't know what is actually true, but you know, whether he's bisexual or had relations with men and women, and all sorts of things, which could be true. I just don't know. In this story, I didn't really delve into that. There was a lot of other stuff going on that we don't really go into. In the original script we explored a bit more into that about having this admirer who’s a man and their friendship. Yeah, we didn't really go down that path in the end.” SANDOW covers a great deal of the main character’s life, focused around three major themes. First and foremost, the film is concerned with Sandow’s motivations and accomplishments, which drive Sandow throughout his entire life. Second, it covers his tumultuous relationship with his very forgiving wife Blanche, who tends to suffer Sandow’s bad behavior despite enjoying the fame and fortune that comes with his life. And finally, the story is narrated by Launceston Elliott, who brings his particular perspective to Sandow’s entire story. ALEX: “It became a personal thing to me, because, like, my father wasn't a bodybuilder. He was another kind of builder. He liked to build properties. And he passed away five years. He had blood cancer. That was kind of this idea I had about incorporating some of my experiences into telling Sandow's story, because Sandow was the father of bodybuilding and I had this idea about this father/son kind of relation between Launceston Elliott and Sandow. He would watch Sandow and he could see his flaws and things that made him who he was, more deeply than anyone else. I wanted to play that role. I felt that I had some insight into Sandow the character, so I didn't look for anyone else for that." Rich subject material and an epic story are not enough, however. In addition to some excellent costumes and well-chosen sets, we also get a good cast for the characters. Timo Kervinen, the Big Finn, plays Eugen Sandow, and while not being a dead ringer for Sandow, does have the same physique and attitude. Tiffany Ellen-Robinson plays Blanche very well, maintaining a consistent, frustrated demeanor, with awesome costumes. SANDOW was made for a budget of $25,000. It’s pretty amazing how far that can stretch, especially for a sweeping epic. Cooper used both existing locations, in particular a Yorkshire house rented and utilized to the fullest, along with constructed sets for locations unavailable without expensive permitting and permissions, a throwback to the constructed sets of Sandow’s time. It can give a patchwork feel to the entire film, but not in an unlikeable way. It’s also not surprising when things might go wrong for that amount of money. The major complaint about SANDOW is the sound editing, which begins to fall apart towards the end of the film. Whole scenes struggle with sound syncing, which combined with some sound capture in the more metropolitan areas picking up anachronistic noises, like modern horns and bells. You don’t realize just how important the sound can be until it’s not there properly. So, I had to ask about it and here’s the story. ALEX: “What happened was, when the editor, who was in America, he had another job coming in which he wanted to do more than this one, and he kind of tossed it aside and uncompleted. The picture was edited, but the sound was not all synced, so it was only partially synced. I got this thing back and I was disappointed. But then I found a local editor who had done sound work for big companies, like the BBC and things, and they said they would be able to do this, but then when they did the job, they left it in, it was unsatisfactory state. It was less good than it is now. I found a sound mixer in Sweden and he did the bet he could to get it as good as he could. It is a shame to me, but I suppose you live and learn." For those that remember, a similar issue happened with ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS (Episode #597), except related to special effects. Work conflicts happen a lot in independent cinema, particularly if folks are donating their time, or have tight schedules. It gives the last third or so of SANDOW the feeling like you’re listening to a great interview over a crappy connection – the content is great, but the presentation suffers a lot. Cooper recognized that as well. ALEX: “If I knew what I knew now, I would have somehow got a professional sound mixer involved from the outset. I took this to Cannes film market afterwards to try to find distribution deals. There, I did meet a professional sound mixer, and what I would have done is I would have budgeted that into the overall sum, and so, probably cost about $5,000 or $10,000 more. Overall, the total product would have been better on the sound front.” The sound might struggle towards the end, but the overall film is still punching well above its weight class with a $25,000 budget. The strength of the other elements will make some viewers, this one included, wish the film was made for $25 million instead of $25,000, but SANDOW can be appreciated for what it is. Fans of historical epics, and forgiving of microbudget cinema, should definitely check out this film, along with anyone fascinated by Eugen Sandow and the many industries he spawned. Rotten Tomatoes: NR Metacritic: NR One Movie Punch: 5.1/10 SANDOW (2018) is not rated and is currently playing on YouTube. Check the show notes for links. SANDOW: youtu.be/00xSymzq0Ms PARALLEL: youtu.be/sXworTZe3kE YOUTUBE: youtube.com/channel/UC19QsHne9k5k5aWg8Rm5M_A/

Sightseeing Turismo Guide book. (Livro) Guia. Entrance ticket. Bilhete de entrada. Opening time. Horário de abertura. Bank holliday. Feriado bancário. Free entrance. Entrada gratuita. Guided tour. Visita guiada. Do you open this afternoon? Você abre esta tarde? Yes, but we close at four o'clock. Sim, mas (nós) fechamos as quatro horas. Do you have wheelchair access. Vocês tem acesso para cadeira de rodas. Yes. There is a lift over there. Sim. Há um elevador bem ali. Thank you. I'd like four entrance tickets. Obrigado. Eu gostaria de quatro (bilhetes) entrada. Here you are. Aqui estão. The guide book is free. O livro guia é grátis. Yes, but we close at four o'clock. Sim, mas nós fechamos as quatro horas. Yes. There is a lift over there. Sim. Há um elevador bem ali. Here you are. Aqui está. The guide book is free. O livro guia é grátis. What time do you open? close? A que horas você(s) abre(m)fecha(m)? Where are the toilets? Onde ficam os toaletes? Is there wheelchair access? Há acesso para cadeira de rodas? Sorry, the museum is closed. Sinto muito, o museu está fechado. Yes, but we close early. Sim, mas nós fechamos cedo. Sorry, the museum is closed. Sinto muito, o museu está fechado. Do you open on tuesdays? Você (s) abre(m) às terças-feiras? Yes, but we close early. Sim, mas nós fechamos cedo. At what time? A que horas? xxx At the airport No aeroporto Check in. Check in. Departures. Partidas. Arrivals. Chegadas. Customs. Alfândega. Passport control. Controle de passaporte. Terminal. Terminal. Gate. Portão. Flight number. Número do voo. Is the flight to New York on time? O voo para Nova Iorque está no horário? I can't find my baggage. Eu não consigo encontrar a minha bagagem. The flight to Sidney is delayed. O voo para Sidney está atrasado. Good evening sir, can I help you? Boa noite senhor, posso ajudar? Yes sir. Sim senhor. Good evening sir, can I help you? Boa noite senhor, posso ajudr? Is the flight to Paris on time? O voo para Paris está no horário? Yes sir. Sim senhor. Which gate does it live from? De que portão ele parte? Check in desk. Balcão de check in. Ticket. Passagem. Passporte. passaporte Suitcase. Mala. Hand luggage. Bagagem de mão. Trolley carrinho. xxx How is your job going? Como vai o seu emprego? Alex What is it like working with sick people all day, Alex? Como é é trabalhar o dia todo com pessoas doentes, Alex? It's difficult, because many patients need a lot of care. É difícil, porque muitos pacientes precisam de muitos cuidados. Ah, you give them medicine and maybe change bandages? Ah, você da a eles remédios e talvez até troque curativos? And we have to write everything on charts for the doctors. E nós temos que escrever tudo nos relatórios para os médicos. Anything else? Alguma coisa mais? We help people get ready for tests. Nós ajudamos as pessoas a se preparar para os exames. Sometimes they are pretty nervous. As vezes eles estão bem nervosos. Sounds like a stressfull job. Parece ser um trabalho estressante. Yeah. But a really enjoy it. É. Mas eu realmente curto bastante. I feel good doing this. Eu me sinto bem fazendo isso. I love helping people. Eu adoro ajudar as pessoas. And they always thank me. E eles sempre me agradecem. Well, good for you. Bem, bom para você. xxx I'm hungry. Eu estou com fome. Let's go to McDonald's. Vamos ao Mc Donald's. Yes, why not? Sim, porque não? I'm hungry. Eu estou com fome. Let's call the waiter. Vamos chamar o garçon. That's a good idea. Essa é uma boa idéia. I'm hungry. Eu estou com fome. Let's see the menu. Vamos olhar o cardápio. That's a good idea. Essa é uma boa idéia. I'm hungry. Eu estou com fome. Let's eat a hamburguer. Vamos comer um Hamburguer. That sounds good. Isso soa bem. Waiter, please bring me a cup of coffee. Garçon, por favor traga-me uma xícara de café. Waiter, please bring me a cup of tea. Garçon, por favor traga-me uma xícara de chá. Waiter, please bring me a botlle of

Firefighters need to train like any other professional, and their training usually involves setting a mock set ablaze – which, as you might imagine, would be costly to reset. Enter RiVR, who are using 360 video and photogrammetry to recreate these practice blazes digitally. CEO Alex Harvey and Alan have a heated discussion on the topic. Alan: Hey, everyone, my name is Alan Smithon, your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today we have Alex Harvey, CEO and creative director at RiVR, a virtual reality training and visualization company based in the UK. RiVR harnesses the power of VR and photogrammetry technology to create interactive, immersive training experiences. They’re currently working with the UK Home Office, UK Fire Service, Police Service and the Department of Defense in the US. Their ultimate goal is to enhance the way humans learn (I love that). Alex has a deep understanding of the games industry, having worked on commissions for the likes of Codemasters, the BBC, and Ford Motor Company. He’s obsessed with harnessing the latest A/V technology to make the real world differences that we all need. He gets to work with incredibly talented people to make this happen, and to quote him, “I love the feelings and memories we can evoke in VR when technology, creativity, and innovation collide.” I love that quote. RiVR’s exhibited at six different VR shows this year, including CES Vegas, and their technology has been reported on by the BBC. To learn more about RiVR, you can visit rivr.uk. Alex, welcome to the show, my friend. Alex: Hi, Alan. Nice to meet you. Nice to speak again. Alan: Yeah. We’ve been kind of back and forth on LinkedIn, and emails, and it’s really finally great to sit down and have a conversation with you. Alex: It is such a busy world, and it’s great to chat in person. Alan: Listen, let’s dive right into this. Explain to us what RiVR is and how it’s making a difference. Alex: RiVR is “Reality in Virtual Reality.” We’ve been creating VR experiences now for probably nearer to three years with the production company, starting back in 2014, but we started obviously with 360 video doing things for Thomson Holidays — you experience what it’s like to be on a cruise ship, or be on a plane. That was three years ago. Then we started moving into the room-scale photogrammetry world, with very much a significant push at RiVR for training, and using photorealism to make sure that the users of our experiences are completely immersed. I often say to people, “I want you to feel like you’re in the world, and not in a Simpsons cartoon world.” It is very much pushing photogrammetry and photo realism into VR. You know, there’s a lot of people doing photogrammetry now, but two, three years ago? It was only of the likes of– Alan: That was you and Simon! Alex: Yeah! [laughs] Me, Simon and Realities.IO. They were the guys that were pushing it. And it really felt like when I saw those early experiences of Realities.IO and Simon’s stuff, it felt like I was inside a video, but not quite? I want to try and be inside video content. I think that– Alan: Let me kind of unpack this fruit for people listening. So, what Alex and his team do is they go into a space, and they will take hundreds of photographs — if not thousands of photographs — of the space, and they’ll convert that into a game engine-based experience, where you can actually walk around. Now, what I think is really mind-blowing about what you guys have done at RiVR is, not only do you create the environment, but then you take specific parts of the environment — for

Firefighters need to train like any other professional, and their training usually involves setting a mock set ablaze – which, as you might imagine, would be costly to reset. Enter RiVR, who are using 360 video and photogrammetry to recreate these practice blazes digitally. CEO Alex Harvey and Alan have a heated discussion on the topic. Alan: Hey, everyone, my name is Alan Smithon, your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today we have Alex Harvey, CEO and creative director at RiVR, a virtual reality training and visualization company based in the UK. RiVR harnesses the power of VR and photogrammetry technology to create interactive, immersive training experiences. They’re currently working with the UK Home Office, UK Fire Service, Police Service and the Department of Defense in the US. Their ultimate goal is to enhance the way humans learn (I love that). Alex has a deep understanding of the games industry, having worked on commissions for the likes of Codemasters, the BBC, and Ford Motor Company. He’s obsessed with harnessing the latest A/V technology to make the real world differences that we all need. He gets to work with incredibly talented people to make this happen, and to quote him, “I love the feelings and memories we can evoke in VR when technology, creativity, and innovation collide.” I love that quote. RiVR’s exhibited at six different VR shows this year, including CES Vegas, and their technology has been reported on by the BBC. To learn more about RiVR, you can visit rivr.uk. Alex, welcome to the show, my friend. Alex: Hi, Alan. Nice to meet you. Nice to speak again. Alan: Yeah. We’ve been kind of back and forth on LinkedIn, and emails, and it’s really finally great to sit down and have a conversation with you. Alex: It is such a busy world, and it’s great to chat in person. Alan: Listen, let’s dive right into this. Explain to us what RiVR is and how it’s making a difference. Alex: RiVR is “Reality in Virtual Reality.” We’ve been creating VR experiences now for probably nearer to three years with the production company, starting back in 2014, but we started obviously with 360 video doing things for Thomson Holidays — you experience what it’s like to be on a cruise ship, or be on a plane. That was three years ago. Then we started moving into the room-scale photogrammetry world, with very much a significant push at RiVR for training, and using photorealism to make sure that the users of our experiences are completely immersed. I often say to people, “I want you to feel like you’re in the world, and not in a Simpsons cartoon world.” It is very much pushing photogrammetry and photo realism into VR. You know, there’s a lot of people doing photogrammetry now, but two, three years ago? It was only of the likes of– Alan: That was you and Simon! Alex: Yeah! [laughs] Me, Simon and Realities.IO. They were the guys that were pushing it. And it really felt like when I saw those early experiences of Realities.IO and Simon’s stuff, it felt like I was inside a video, but not quite? I want to try and be inside video content. I think that– Alan: Let me kind of unpack this fruit for people listening. So, what Alex and his team do is they go into a space, and they will take hundreds of photographs — if not thousands of photographs — of the space, and they’ll convert that into a game engine-based experience, where you can actually walk around. Now, what I think is really mind-blowing about what you guys have done at RiVR is, not only do you create the environment, but then you take specific parts of the environment — for

How does Alex Berman consistently get sales appointments and land deals with billion dollar brands? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Experiment27 Chairman Alex Berman pulls back the curtain on the email strategy he uses to close deals with Fortune 500 companies. From identifying your target audience, to developing an offer and writing cold emails, Alex goes into detail on his campaign blueprint and shares how both he and his clients have used it to win business. Highlights from my conversation with Alex include: If you want to get in front of big brands, Alex recommends that you start by identifying industries where you've had strong performance or a great track record. Then develop a "no brainer offer" for other businesses in that industry. Alex says that enterprise level companies want to see that you've done work with other companies of their size and in their industry. If you can nail those two things, then cracking into big companies becomes much easier. If you don't have a relevant track record, he suggests going after a smaller company in that industry and then gradually working your way up in company size.  Once you have identified the industry you are targeting and you have your no brainer offer, the next step is to build a landing page for it. Alex recommends creating four different variations of the landing page and testing to see which performs best. When it comes time to email the target audience, use a short subject line. Alex says "Quick question" performs best for him. The first sentence of the email is then a custom compliment aimed at the recipient (the emails are one-to-one). Alex has found that adding this in produces 10X the responses. That is then followed by a one sentence case study highlighting work you've done for a similar company in the same industry, and a pitch to meet with the recipient. Start by testing different subject lines with small audiences of 50 to 100 people to see which ones work best. The goal is to get a subject line that has an open rate of 80% or greater. Alex generally strives for a 4% meeting book rate (so, four meetings or every 100 emails sent). Alex likes to test different times for sending emails, but has found in general that Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday at 10 am works best. The strategy that Alex uses works best for companies that sell a product or service valued at $1,000 or more. Below that, Alex says that a company is better off using Facebook ads. The biggest mistakes that companies make when implementing this strategy are outsourcing it, not customizing the emails correctly, and giving up too soon. It can take several tries at testing to land on a really powerful subject line and offer, and the best marketers are the ones that stick with it. Resources from this episode: Visit the Experiment27 website Subscribe to Alex Berman's YouTube channel Check out Alex's Email 10k course Listen to the podcast to get the details on Alex's email campaign blueprint and learn how to use it to close deals with your target prospects. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Alex Berman who is the chairman of Experiment27. Welcome, Alex. Alex Berman (Guest): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Alex and Kathleen recording this episode together . Kathleen: Yeah you know, I was intrigued to read your background and your profile. It talks about how you help clients get meetings with billion dollar brands. So like, land the big whales, if you will, and I'm really excited to talk to you about that, but before we dig into it, will you just give my listeners a little bit of background on who you are, what you do, and what Experiment27 is? About Alex Berman and Experiment27 Alex: Sure. So Experiment27 is part of a bigger holding company that I run. X27 does "done for you" lead generation. So we help companies match with billion dollar brands, but then we also have Email 10K which is of course where people it for it, or they can do it themselves following the course, and there's also consulting for advanced entrepreneurs, but we just kind of help them with lead generation. So basically, if it has something to do with lead generation in the business to business space, that is my specialty. We've been doing this for almost a decade now, and also I run a YouTube channel where we have I think over 28,000 subs, and all we do is post about free business to business sales training. Kathleen: Oh, I love it. And how did you get to be such an expert in lead gen? Alex: A lot of trial and error. It's the same thing that we talk about ... I mean, it's like any marketing channel where the first time you try lead gen, the first I tried it I tried it all wrong. I was spamming a lot of people. I didn't have the offer down, and what I learned is by sending in small batches and by customizing the messages, it allows you to get a lot more feedback quicker, and if you're able to get feedback quicker, you're able to improve the emails constantly. So the main thing that I teach is it's an iterative process of testing a campaign, sending it out there, seeing what the results are, improving it, and then getting a new list of leads that hasn't seen the previous campaign and testing that optimized campaign with email, and then continuing to improve that over and over again. And what that allows you to do is, one, you can get a bunch of sales with cold email which is really cool, but the other thing it does is it really strengthens your offer. So when you do use inbound, you use social media, you use YouTube like we do, it makes the offer that much more likely to convert. Designing Marketing Campaigns That Target Billion Dollar Brands Kathleen: Hm. So walk me through this. If I am a marketer, and I come to you, and I say, "I'm looking to reach people at these huge companies," the billion dollar brands that you talk about, those can be hard target markets to crack into. Walk me through your process from beginning to end if you're going to do this for me. Alex: Sure. So if you're an established company, the first thing I'm going to do is ask what case studies you have and what sort of companies you've worked with in the past. And from there, what I want to do is try to find patterns. So for instance, a lot of our clients are software as a service businesses or services businesses where, let's say, you had a good case study with a potato chip company like a consumer packaged goods company. Then what we're going to do is create an offer just around that company. I call it a no-brainer offer, and what we want to do is come up with an offer that is so good that people can't say no. For instance, for lead generation which is what I sell, it might be something like we're gonna book ten meetings in the next week with people in your ideal customer base, or we're going to give you the money back. Something like that is what we really want to nail down in an ideal situation, and you could do it across ditches like video production we help some people. Usually it's coming up with either a video idea that they like or their money back or coming up with a list of what the video is going to be like bullet points, an outline. From there, once you have the no-brainer offer, it's writing that in a way that highlights the case study, and we could talk about this in a second what to actually put in that email because it's very similar to what we put in Facebook ads when we do that too. But once you have that no-brainer offer and you frame it in a way that is extremely niche specific, then you test it in the market and see what they say. What I've found is with enterprise companies, what they want to see is ... they want to see you've done work with the companies of their size, and they want to see that you've done work with companies that are very similar, as similar as possible, to them. If you can nail those two things, then you're all set to scale the enterprise. If not, I would not approach someone like a Fortune 500 but instead go after people that are $5+ million in revenue, and then try to get one of those smaller case studies that you can then leverage to get these large enterprises. How To Get Started Kathleen: Okay, so that was going to be my question which is, obviously everybody's got to start somewhere. So, it sounds like what you're saying is you start within the same industry or product service, vertical, but you just start with a smaller firm. Correct? Alex: Exactly. So one mistake that a lot of companies make, even big enterprises, is they don't have marketing that's specific for one vertical. So for instance, let's say you're running a software as a service business and you're crushing it with live events, and you're also crushing it with CPG, or you're also crushing it with retail. They will be sending all three of those customers to the exact same funnel, they exact same website. So one of the things that we focus on is not only separating the marketing, so we'll have three different websites for each of those, or one different website for each one of those verticals. Kathleen: A full website, not just a landing page? Alex: Well, a landing page is basically a website. Kathleen: Or a microsite, a microsite. Okay. Alex: It's like a microsite, it's a one or two page site. Usually it's just a headline, some kind of testimonial, some case studies, and then the contact form. Maybe a breakdown of the services. But yeah, and then it's not just coming up with that, but it's coming up with three or four of those options and then testing all four in the market, seeing which one gets the best response, and then only at that point doubling and tripling down on the marketing. Because a lot of entrepreneurs, they have a theory for what their customer looks like, or they have a theory, even if they've been running a business 10-15 years, they kind of know who their customers are, but they actually haven't done a real analysis and figured out one, who are the customers that will be most successful when using this, and then two, who are the customers that I actually make the most money from? And it's cool to do that analysis and then also compare it to which one of these offers actually gets people to buy most often, and then hopefully you find an overlap there. If not, you need to do more research. Developing An Email Outreach Strategy Kathleen: Okay, so you craft the offer, you develop your case study, and then you're sending ... it sounds like you're starting with an initial email. Is that right? Alex: Yeah. It's normally a short email. We can breakdown what the email says if you want. Kathleen: Yeah, let's do it. I love to get as specific as possible. Alex: Okay. So the first thing that I like to test is the subject line. Normally I'll just say if people are writing their first email from scratch, I would say just go with "quick question" because I've sent over 2 million emails now, and that one still outperforms cross niche. So the highest chance to get an open rate is with "quick question." So sending that as a subject line's good. Then what we do is the first sentence of the email is a custom compliment towards the person's business, and this is not something you can outsource, this is not something that you can kind of fake, especially at the enterprise level. It needs to be a custom compliment, and it sounds something like, "Hey Kathleen, really love your Inbound Success Podcast. Long time listener. Love the interview you did with Alex Berman." Just something like that. Or if it's someone at Sony like, "Hey," director of marketing name, "congrats on the Q4 growth. Loved the latest earnings report." You know, just something that's very specific to their business, and what that does is it gets them to keep reading the next part which is the one sentence case study which usually goes like ... Let's say you are talking to Sony, and you worked with ... Who's a competitor to Sony? Like Hitachi. So that custom compliment. So, "Hey, I really love what you're doing with Sony. Love the Q4 growth. We just wrapped a project with Hitachi where we optimized their entire backend, and we were able to generate a 14% increase in," I don't know like new user engagement or whatever you guys did. "We'd love to do the same for Sony. Are you around for a quick call later this week? Let me know, and I can send over a couple times." Kathleen: You know, and I can serve as a testimonial to the fact that this approach works because all right, I'm going to actually read the email that you sent pitching me for the podcast which totally follows your formula. So the subject line was "Huge fan," and you said, "Hey, Kathleen. Just listened to your interview with Sangram Vajre from Terminus, and I was really impressed with the idea of using AI to fit data and automatically build landing pages and ABM campaigns for prospects." That was the initial compliment line, and then you said, "It would be incredible to come on your show as a guest. I run a YouTube channel with over 23,000 subscribers and have been on more than 100 podcasts including," and then you listed some out. So totally following the format you just described which is awesome. I love that you practice what you preach, and it worked, and I got back to you and said, "Yes!" So there you have it. Alex: Yeah. We practice what we preach because every other way is inefficient. Like okay, what I found is when we started doing the personal lines, when we started doing that we got a ten times increase. I know it takes more time. That might have taken four or five minutes. Like I had to look up that podcast episode, we had to listen to part of the episode and figure out what it was, and then after we booked, I did check out the actual episode so I wasn't lying. That all takes time, for sure, but the response boost is worth it, and the conversion rate increase which you might not even see when you send the emails out, but you'll see it like three, four months later. The number of people that work with you or get you on their podcast or whatever from an email like that is much higher than one of these generic cold emails that people are sending out. Kathleen: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned ... I love that you have this formulaic approach. I mean, it's formulaic, but it's like customized formulaic I would say. It's a blueprint more so than a copy and paste. So you apply this blueprint to the email, and you mentioned sending it out to a smaller group in the beginning. So define small. Alex: Small would be anywhere from ... So you want to make sure you get enough data. I would say a minimum of 50 people, a maximum of 100 people with a pitch like this. And what you want to test is a few things. So for instance, what was the subject line that you just read? Kathleen: Huge fan. Alex: Huge fan, okay. So huge fan might have been iteration number four or five, and the first thing that we're looking for is, and by the way this is all broken down in our course, Email 10K, email10k.com. What we want to do is you want to find the subject line that gets over an 80% open rate. So for instance, for podcasts if you open that, that's amazing. Quick question might have gotten under 80% so that was optimized out. When we were sending to breweries, actually the one that won when we were doing ... It was digital marketing for breweries in the United States, it was a beer emoji, and when we were sending to the entertainment companies like Netflix and TV Land and stuff like that, what was booking meetings was, "I was born to work with HBO," or "I was born to work with your company." Benchmarking Success Alex: So that is found through ... Yeah, just hardcore testing. 100 at a time. That's the first thing you're looking for is ... Well two things you're looking for, one is are people opening the email? You want at least an 80% open rate before you even touch anything else, and then two, are the emails any good? Meaning if you get a super high bounce rate then you're going to want to change the way you're finding leads. Kathleen: Now quick clarifying question on that. So you're testing these subject lines. Are you testing simultaneously different subject lines with different small audiences, or are you testing sequentially? Like, you send one, it doesn't work, you send another one? Alex: Sequentially's usually enough. Because the numbers that we're talking about ... So what you want is an 80% open rate. You want at least a 4% meeting book rate. So every 100 emails, you're getting 4 people signed up. So when you're dealing with numbers like that, it's a little easier to see when things are failing or they're succeeding. You'll be able to see pretty quick because you're either going to get a 14% open rate or like a 30%, or it's going to be 90. Right? And that's ... You're really going for those major win emails. Kathleen: All right. So it sounds like shorter subject lines work really well also. Alex: It completely depends on the niche. What I've found is in some niches, yeah, "quick question" works really well, shorter subject lines work really well, and that's because your custom compliment can be seen. If you look at Gmail or even Outlook, you'll see the subject line, and then you'll see that first line of the email. So if you have even just "Quick Q," which also works pretty well, they see that subject line, but then they also see the first line of the email before they open. So a good first line also will improve open rates. Testing Email Copy Kathleen: Yeah, that makes sense. So all right, you test this out, you land on a good subject line. You already have the body copy within the email written. Are you testing that as well? Alex: Yeah. So the main thing I want to make sure first is the subject line gets over 80% before we touch anything to do with the body. I would stick to the exact template that we talked about earlier. That's the baseline template, and then from there if 80% of the people are opening, and you're getting ... Usually it's about 20% reply or less, then we're rewriting the body of the email. Usually it's messing around with the case studies or messing around with the personalized compliments. A lot of people when they first start the compliments, they either go too far in one direction. So for instance, if I was sending this email to you and I had pointed out something specific about the Terminus podcast and written this long paragraph to you, the chances that that would work, especially to an enterprise level company, would be very level. But what people are trying to find and what we're trying to find is you want a compliment that's short enough but it's not super creepy. Like, you don't want it to look like you did a crazy amount of research. Kathleen: Yeah, you're stalking them. Alex: Yeah, exactly. But you also don't want it to be too generic. So part of it is finding that balance. How Long To Run Email Tests Kathleen: Now how long do you wait after you send those initial emails out to kind of close the test? Because obviously, I don't know, in my experience I find that some people look at their email right away, and then for other people it could be a day or two, and they might still open it. What's the right amount of time for that? Alex: After seeing hundreds of these campaigns, it's kind of evolved a little bit because I don't want it to say ... Like, the gut feeling is we should wait a couple days on our tests. What I've found is when a campaign works, it works so well that you can tell after like three or four hours. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: Especially if you're sending at the right times. For instance, the best time I've found actually is a couple hours before this. It's like Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 10:00AM Eastern time is usually the best because it overlaps early morning Pacific, and then the other best time is later in the afternoon. So like 3:00 Pacific so you hit like 3:00-4:00PM Pacific. Kathleen: Okay. Alex: But if you're sending on those times, you should be able to see opens and engages. And then the other thing I'll do sometimes with replies is, and this is a little bit of an advanced tactic, but if someone does reply to your email and you're trying to follow up, you can see when they reply and then queue your followups to go out whenever they're checking their emails. Kathleen: Yeah, there's actually a great platform that we've used called Seventh Sense that does that for you which is pretty cool. It just tracks email open times, and then it develops a personal send time for everybody in your database. It's like magic. Alex: Yeah no, it's sick. Because I just sent 50 followups the other day, and it was crazy. Some people only do emails at like 3:00AM Pacific, or maybe they'll do emails at like midnight. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. Alex: You just can't tell. Kathleen: So if you have such a short amount of turnaround time that's necessary to conclude a test, it sounds like you can go through this entire process within a week. Alex: You can, and one of the things that I talk to new entrepreneurs about is especially when you're starting your business or if you have a business for a while and you're trying to find what market is worth investing in for your inbound, I would run 10-20 tests. Just even test different offers and different positions within that. Like before you even deal with optimizing or making sure the subject line works or whatever, stick to that basic template of "quick question" and write an email, and then write 10 different emails for 10 different offers. Like maybe one is selling your company like you only work with chip manufacturers. Or only work with software as a service startups, whatever. Just doing what we talked about with the case studies. Because what I've found is one of those ten, or even two of those ten, are going to blow away all the other tests, and then you only focus on those two. Kathleen: And then you just slightly change the contents to adjust for different industries and roll it out? Alex: The ... Yeah, you change the one sentence case study. So we just worked with this company, and we did this thing. Following Up On The Initial Email Send Kathleen: Okay, great. So I love this format. So is there something that comes after the email iterations, or is that it? That brings in the meetings? Alex: That brings in the ... So there are followups on top of it. One, and I broke all of these down in the course, but one is just like, "Hey, I'm sure you're busy and wanted to make sure this didn't get buried." That's a couple days later. Then the third one is, I call it like the big win. So something like, "Hey, we just had a big win working with this solar manufacturer we did that ..." like basically a second one sentence case study, and then asking them for another call like, "Hey, we'd love to talk. If you're around ..." I always try to end emails with question marks, too. Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: "Would you mind if I sent over a few times for a quick call?" is how I'll usually end them. Or I'll just say, "Let's talk?" Alex's Results Kathleen: Great. You teach this method, you've done this with different clients. Talk me through what kinds of results you've seen, and is it specific to a certain type of business or industry or company size? Alex: Is it specific ... So anyone that sells to people that check their emails. That's ... This is what I like to think about, so- Kathleen: A narrow target audience. Alex: It's narrow ... Well so if you think about it though like some businesses aren't good for this. So for instance what I found is loans or mortgages aren't really good because with those you just have to hit so many people that Facebook ads is a better thing. Used cars is also not a good niche for this. But most of the B2B. Anyone that's selling to manufacturers or anyone that works in an office. Things like that are best for this sort of thing. Revenue size I've found does not matter. We've met with most of the Fortune 500 for our clients and for ourselves, and we've met with smaller ... Like everyone from local businesses up to billion dollar brands this is good for. I try to avoid companies under $5 million in revenue because I mean, I like dealing with people that can actually afford this service. I don't like dealing with local businesses. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. But I guess a local business could presumably take your class or if they heard this they could test out executing it for themselves. They could DIY. Alex: Yeah, for sure. Okay, so what businesses are benefiting from this? Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: I thought you were talking about what businesses are worth selling to. Kathleen: Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yes. Okay, got you. Yes. Alex: So what businesses are benefiting from this? It's usually any sort of business that has a higher ticket. Because this sort of thing like we're talking about, we're personalizing the emails. Every single email, it takes a decent amount of time. So I would say if your cost is under $1,000 per user, it's probably not worth doing this. You should probably do like Facebook ads or something. But if you're selling a service, like my background is selling mobile apps to the enterprise so we're used to selling $100,000 apps, or like $200,000 applications, websites, that sort of stuff, or even a lot of our clients will sell like $25,000 packages, $30,000 packages. Cold email is perfect for those. Kathleen: Great. Okay. So considered purchases, if you will. High dollar value sales. Alex: High dollar value sales, and sometimes they're not considered. I mean, you get the right no-brainer offer. Our initial marketing reviews were $8,500, and we would sell those after a couple weeks, and then that would just go into the retainers. It all depends on the type of client you're going after. Right? Because like for Sony, or for Home Depot or whoever, like $8,500 is very small. Kathleen: Yeah, that is not a considered purchase for them. Very good point. So talk me through the results that your clients are seeing with this, and how long does it take to see those results? Alex: So if you get an email right off the bat ... I actually just saw something in our private Facebook group this morning, some guy sold ... his name was Mark O, he sold $4,500 and then $4,000 off a month like two days after starting, but that's when everything goes perfectly if you get the offer right. If you're willing to put in the time and you're willing to test and you're willing to be wrong 9, 10, 11 times and just keep going back and iterating, I mean it could work pretty quick. It 100% depends on how fast you are, how intuitive you are with the data, and then how much you're willing to actually put into it because a lot of people, they find cold emailing extremely boring, and I did too until ... I had to purposely reframe each email as, "Okay, this email's worth $3. This email's worth $5," like whatever, like I had to reframe it just to get myself to actually work because it is super tedious work. Kathleen: Yeah, but it sounds like it gets easier over time. Alex: It does, and it gets faster. And once you have an offer, it's much better. The hardest part and the thing where you can get stuck for months at a time is trying to find the way that your business should be positioned to get massive amounts of money, and I know it sounds kind of weird, but it's like there is a way to frame any business where it becomes a no-brainer for clients, and then everything else becomes easy. And if you're not at that point where it feels easy and things are like going, until you've been there it's hard to describe it, but there's ... And you'll see it once you get it. There's such a difference between a business that works and a business that just kind of works. Kathleen: Hm. Interesting. Well I love it. 10x improvements like you were talking about are certainly attractive, and the fact that you can do all of this in a week is also very attractive. It's just it sounds like it's really just a matter of time and elbow grease. Alex: Yeah, and if you compare it to something like Facebook ads, like we run Facebook ads as well, and it's a similar strategy where you're filming 10-20 ads and putting budget behind all of them. Those actually take time to get the data in, and it costs money. Right, if you compare it to something like cold email, all that costs is time which for some people is money, but if you're a new entrepreneur and you're not charging like $700 an hour, it's not that much money. Common Mistakes Businesses Make When Targeting Big Brands Kathleen: Yeah. Now what do you see as the most common mistakes that people make when trying to do this? Alex: First most common mistake is they think they can outsource it all, and they don't want to do the customization. I recommend against that, especially in this initial ... the hardest phase, the research phase. Once you have something that works, you can scale pretty easy. They try to outsource too early, too. They customize in the wrong way. A lot of our clients are ... well actually, not a lot of our clients. Some of our clients are international. And so English isn't the greatest for them. Even if they come from like Germany or some Western country. So framing that compliment in a way that doesn't come off as like too crazy is actually something that I struggle with a lot with our coaching clients. That's number two. And then number three would be giving up too soon. And actually giving up too soon/settling too soon. Because you might try three tests, and like test one and test two book zero meetings, and then test three books two meetings. Then you might be like, "oh, I'm going to put my entire business onto test three," when really if you had tested like four or five more times, you might have sent an email that got eight meetings. Kathleen: Yeah. How do you know when to stop testing? Alex: So I would never stop testing. I know even with our ... so with the course part of our business, we spend 30% of our revenue on research and development. So just testing new ads and doing all that stuff outside of scale. I would never stop testing. It's always surprising. What we saw our add to cart cost go from $100 to $6 this week just by testing a new series of ads. Kathleen: Wow. That's crazy. Alex: Right? You can only get those improvements by constantly throwing stuff out there and seeing what works. Kathleen: Yeah. Very cool. And I love how specific you've been just in terms of sharing guidance on the actual wording of subject lines that works and the wording of some of the emails. It's really helpful. If somebody wants to try this, how do you recommend narrowing down your list? Because a lot of the people I know ... You said send it to 50 or 100 people. A lot of the people I know have lists that are much larger than that. Is it just literally a matter of, "All right, I'm going to export this list of 10,000 people, and I'm just going to take the first 100," or is there some other way ... Do you start with like a certain subpopulation? Alex: So what I would do is if you have an inbound list, I would actually ignore it for now. So you have marketing that works for your inbound list, right? Keep that going. What I would actually do is go over to Upwork or go over to LinkedIn and just start making lists of your ideal clients. I would send 100 cold. I would make a list of these people cold instead of going through the people that are subscribed. Because what you want is you test with the cold traffic where you can quickly iterate, and then once you have something that's working with those cold people, then you can take it back to your main list, and you know it'll work versus burning your main list on an offer that may or may not be okay. Kathleen: Do you have any concerns around if somebody does that, jeopardizing their sender score just because people hitting spam or what have you? Alex: Yeah, so normally ... And actually if you "Alex Berman how to avoid the spam box," on YouTube, I broke it down. But normally I'll recommend starting with a brand new domain for cold email, and then you warm it up over like two weeks. You subscribe to some newsletters, you make it seem like a normal email, and actually I would have a different domain for your cold emails, a different domain for your inbound like your email list emails, and a third domain ... actually even a third and fourth domain. Like third domain for cold ad traffic lists, right just in case, because spam is an issue there. And even a fourth domain for just customer communication. That way you protect everything. You keep it all super segmented. Kathleen: Does that get really confusing? Alex: Not for me. I mean, for our ads we've got like alex@X27.io, like alex@X27Marketing.com is our other list. alex@Experiment27.com. It's all pretty easy. Kathleen: And I'm assuming they all redirect at some point to...? Alex: They all redirect ... Yeah they all go to my normal inbox. Kathleen: Okay, got you. Very helpful. All right. Alex: It's a good way to protect your sender score there. Because what you'll also do is a lot of times if you want to test a bunch of different cold email campaigns also, you might, and what I make people consider a lot is you might want to buy a domain for each one of these different niches as well, and then that domain will just redirect to a website that's specific for that niche. The Impact of GDPR Kathleen: Do you worry at all with European like GDPR rules and the increasing focus on doing something similar in the US, do you worry at all that that approach is going to get tougher to use because cold emailing will begin to become disallowed essentially under regulations? Alex: If it's illegal, I recommend not doing it. What I've found is there's always a place for a personalized compliment. The personalizing the emails thing is ... that's what increases our response rate, and it's also what takes it out of the spammy territory. We're not sending messages to 10,000 people. We're not robocalling. It's nothing crazy like that. But I would ... Yeah, if you're in like ... Especially if you're in Europe or the UK or Canada or Australia, definitely consult a lawyer before working with someone like us or doing anything related to this. Kathleen: Yeah, it is getting- Alex: As far as I know, in America it's totally good so far except for maybe California is a little iffy right now. Kathleen: Yeah, definitely. Definitely. But it's interesting the direction everything's heading. It'll be interesting to see where it goes. Okay. Well- Alex: It will be, but it's not like these go away. You can use these same strategies ... Once you get this testing strategy down, you can use it for Facebook ads, you can use it for cold LinkedIn messages. You can use it for text messages. You can use it at events just like testing your elevator pitch at events. It's all the same kind of thing. Just taking words and trying to test the way that you're phrasing things to find ... it's almost unlocking a lock. You want to find a way of wording your business that gets people to buy. How To Learn More About Alex's Strategy Kathleen: Yeah. I love all of this. You've mentioned a couple things like you have a course and you have a YouTube channel. Can you say a few words about if somebody's intrigued and wants to learn more, where they can go to find more information? Alex: Sure. If you want us to do this for you, I would actually just start at the YouTube channel, AlexBerman.com will go right to the YouTube channel, and if you do want to learn this kind of stuff, it's Email10K.com, that's the course. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Okay, love it. Now, we can't finish up this interview without me asking you the two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one being we talk a lot about inbound marketing on this podcast. Is there a particular person or company that you think is really just killing it right now with inbound? Alex: Really killing it with inbound. I'm actually not ... I haven't been impressed with very many people when it comes to inbound. Even the greats, I don't know if they're testing or what they're doing, but I see a lot of weird stuff. Kathleen: Oh yeah? Alex: Who have I really ... I actually like Russell Brunson, what he's been doing with his ad strategies, and he runs a SaaS. It doesn't even seem like it. He's selling a software as a service, but he's selling it like an info product. There's some real next level stuff that Russell Brunson's doing. Kathleen: Oh, I'll have to check him out, and I will share his name and the link to his stuff in the show notes. Alex: He does a two week free trial, and then it's only like $150 a month for his software, and somehow he's been able to frame his thing in a way where it appeals to B2B, it appeals to entrepreneurs, and it appeals to ... He's going after like people that are selling multilevel marketing. He's got everything down in terms of how he's framing his thing. Kathleen: Interesting. I can't wait to check that one out. Second question, the biggest kind of complaint I hear from marketers is that digital is changing so quickly. There's so much to keep up with. It's like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated on latest developments? Alex: So this sounds kind of counterintuitive, but what I've found is if you stick to the basics and you just try to get like those fundamentals right, everything comes into play. So for instance, when I was getting into Facebook ads, all I had to do was take the offer that I knew worked and put it in general targeting, and then the Facebook AI figured out what it was because we knew the offer worked. Same with YouTube videos. We just have to create content, and it'll find an audience because our offer system. So I think if you create a product that people want, and you phrase it in a way that is very hard to say no to, you'll win, and it doesn't matter if you're at an event or if cold emails get banned, or like cold calling doesn't work anymore. None of that will matter if you can crack that, and then number two is just go where your customers are. I've gotten a surprising amount of work off of Instagram recently. Like to the point where I barely even use LinkedIn anymore. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: But that just comes down to who my target audience is, right? I'm going after younger people now, especially for this course offer, and they're mostly on Instagram versus when I was going after office workers ... Actually, all the office workers are on email versus any of the other social media channels. So I honestly, I don't worry about that at all. Kathleen: That's great. You have figured something out, then, because the vast majority of the other folks I talk to stress about it a lot, so there's definitely a lesson to be learned on the approach that you're taking. Alex: Ooo, okay. So I actually did figure this out. So if you want to figure out where your clients are, write a super targeted Facebook ad and put like $100 in it, and what'll happen is you put no targeting in. The way that Facebook works now is they'll find buyers, and what I've found there is not only will they find out who your ideal buyer is, for instance one of our ads is targeting ... it's converting really good with women between ages 25-65+ which is crazy, and then one of our other ads is only for men which is great, but the main thing that I've found was if you go to placements, it'll tell you exactly where your ads are converting. So for instance, some of our ads do really well on Facebook. Actually, one of my consulting clients was only selling on Instagram. Like hard pitching Instagram, and when we did this ad test we found out a bunch of his people were on Facebook, and he went out and did the same cold pitching on Facebook, and it was like 10-20 minutes, and he already had a bunch of leads coming in. So that's another easy way to find it out. Kathleen: Yeah, you know it's interesting you bring that up because I found that too that paid ads in general are the fastest way to test messaging because you instantly can see what's working and what's not. Alex: Yeah, exactly. You can test messaging there, you can test placements, and then the way that Facebook ... Facebook's getting so smart in terms of their machine learning. So it'll give you data you didn't even know you had. The ad that I wrote, I had no idea it would appeal ... The one that hits women, I think it was getting add to carts for like $10 for $1,000 course which is crazy, but for men it was $16 with the same ad. So I had no idea. Kathleen: Which is still reasonable, but $10's better than $16 every day. Alex: Exactly. Especially when you're comparing it to ... I was at $100 before. Kathleen: Oh, that's great. Alex: But no, you have no idea. It's only the machine learning that taught me that this type of ad works for this market. Kathleen: Yeah, it's crazy what Facebook can do now. It's a little scary sometimes, but it's also really cool. Alex: Yeah. How To Connect With Alex Kathleen: Great. Well if somebody wants to connect with you, has a question, wants to learn more, how can they reach out to you? Alex: Best way to talk to me is to grab the course, Email10K.com. I'm in the Facebook group right now. It's unlimited consulting. If you do just want to like, talk for free, I would go to the YouTube channel. AlexBerman.com will go there. And just leave a comment. I'm usually in there. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: Okay. Great. I'll put those links in the show notes, and if you're listening and you liked what you heard or you learned something new, of course I would really appreciate it if you would leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts. That goes a long way to getting the podcast in front of other listeners like yourself who could find value, and if you know somebody doing kickass Inbound marketing work, tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, Alex. Alex: Thanks.

In this episode, we discuss: Family law matters can be resolved amicably through mediation The process of divorce does not need to be economically devastating Mediation provides an opportunity to minimize your children’s exposure to the divorce process   Rhonda: Thank you so much for joining us for another episode. I am so excited to be able to introduce you today to Alex Jacobson. She is the founder of Jacobson Mediation Group out of the Greater Chicago area and she's a former divorce lawyer turned divorce mediator. What a mouthful that is. Thank you so much for joining us today. Alex: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Rhonda: Well, let's talk a little bit about what prompted you to move in the direction of building your practice around mediation. Give us a little backstory on what led you to where you're at today. Alex: Certainly, so I was a divorce lawyer for the past 12 years. I practiced at one of the premier divorce firms in Chicago doing all matters related to divorce and matrimonial issues, so that included child custody, property division, child support, spousal support, premarital agreement, postnuptial agreements, all the above. And as my practice grew, it became increasingly apparent that even in the highest complex situation, matters can be resolved outside of the courtroom. And I just found that after practicing at that level, that once you are in the courtroom, you really can't unring that bell. Once people start slinging the mud, it's difficult to go back to co-parenting or to reach an agreement that is reasonable for both parties. And once the judgment is imposed upon you by a judge, it may or may not meet the needs of your family. It may or may not be narrowly tailored to the needs of your family. And so, I just simply found that alternative dispute resolution was just a better way to resolve these types of cases. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, talk to us a little bit about, I mean obviously, there's a lot of different ways that mediation can be used throughout the divorce process. Are you, tell us a little bit about what you're seeing as far as trends? Are people moving in the direction of mediation only? Meaning you've got that neutral third party who is facilitating the conversation between the parties? Or are you, and or are you also seeing where people have attorneys and then they're utilizing mediators to be able to close the gap on our particular issue? Alex: So, I'm seeing both, in fact, depending on the issues that are being addressed. So in the first instance, I would, I would say that parenting issues often can be resolved with the parties without their attorneys being present because quite simply they are the key people that know what their children need and how to craft an agreement that meets the needs of their children, their extracurriculars, the extent that their child has a special need. They are the two people and the two people primarily who know what those needs are and who can speak to those issues and in the best way. When it comes to financial issues, they're oftentimes one or both parties who really are not equipped to handle the financial issues on her own and really look to their attorneys to provide them with the guidance that they need. And my role is to facilitate the discussion and help navigate that conversation. Alex: And, and whether attorneys are involved also depends on what phase in the case mediation comes in. So for example, cases may or may not begin sort of with a bang and there are some temporary issues that need to be resolved immediately. So, who's going to pick up Tommy from soccer practice? Who's going to pay for school tuition this month? Who's going pay the mortgage bill? These are immediate issues that the people need a band-aid for immediately while they're working on a more global resolution of all the issues in the case. So those immediate issues may be addressed with just the parties present without attorneys involved. And then once everyone has done their discovery and they're prepared to address all the issues in the divorce case, that is when the attorneys may come in and participate in the process. Rhonda: So I love one of the things that you said, I just want to touch on, because I see this in the women that I'm working with, which is, there are some of those immediate things that do need to be resolved or taken care of the day-to-day stuff. Like you said, who's going to pick up so-and-so from soccer practice and let's talk about who's going to pay the bills, you know, or which bills they're going to pay. So, if somebody is listening today and they're feeling frustrated because they perhaps feel like, you know, people aren't listening to them like, hey well we'll get to that later, we'll get to that later. Cause I mean the divorce process in and of itself, there are certain kind of key milestones and sometimes those things don't get talked about traditionally until later. What are some of the things that women could say, "Hey listen, this is an important concern or issue for me," so they can really get or bend the ear of their attorney and or mediator? Alex: Well, I mean and certainly in Chicago and I believe in many other courts, all parenting issues must be mediated before a judge will provide a hearing or a trial date. And judges also it's permissive for them to send financial matters. So, I would impress upon these women to, or anybody, to seek the opportunity, typically in mediation from the outset. So, they can address the immediate issues without going through the periods of frustration, without having them be resolved. And you know, the uncertainty is really unnerving for all people and quite frankly, that spills over to the children. And so, it's best for everybody involved if you can avoid that uncertainty and sort of assign these tasks as the process is going along. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, let's transition into talking about a couple of key things related to mediation. And the first thing that I know that you wanted to share was around the fact that family matters can be resolved through mediation. So, talk to us a little bit about that. I know we've kind of highlighted that a little, but let's take a little bit deeper. From your experience, and now the good news is you kind of have been on both sides of the litigation side and now you've moved into more of the mediation side. You know, talk to us about how those are, how some of those things are getting resolved. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, there are very few cases in the family law realm that are so clearly black and white and there are many shades of gray. And it's just a matter of appealing to what's important to the two people who are crafting the agreement. And even people, we're, we're taping this on a Monday. So even people who couldn't agree that today is Monday after working through the issues in their particular case, can ultimately reach an agreement that it's Monday. It's possible and it's possible to do it in an amicable way. It's possible to do it in a way that, through the process or sitting in the same room together or alternatively they're sitting in separate rooms together and the mediator is shuttling between them and, going through all of the terms that need to be addressed in a way that is productive with, avoiding the mudslinging and it's, and it truly is possible. Rhonda: Yeah. So, what role would you say, I mean, so the parties, right? I mean, if they're using mediation as their primary method, need to be organized and come to the table with, completing assignments or conversations or whatever that the mediator’s kind of helping them to kind of work through. Who is kind of identifying the agenda? I mean, so the, for the people that are considering going through mediation, what kinds of things should they doing to make sure that they're as prepared as possible for those mediation meetings? Alex: Certainly, that's a very good point. I mean, the mediation can only be as productive as the party preparation for the process. So, at the outset, I as a mediator find out what issues are being discussed, whether it's only parenting issues, whether it's financial and parenting issues. And in order to make the process most productive, the parties need to complete their financial affidavits. They need to know what their income situations are, what their, what their other spouse's income situations are, what assets exist, what are their expenses, what are their expenses now, and what are their expenses likely to be in the next few years. I mean, the goal is to anticipate as many possible contingencies as you can so you can address them in agreement, in the agreement to avoid litigation down the road. So, I set the agenda, I give the homework and timelines for the homework to be completed in order for the process to be the most productive possible. Rhonda: Yeah, I love that. And I think, just having some clarity right, on you whose role is helpful through this process because people don't know what they don't know. Right? They don't know what they don't know and if they've never been through that course before, and/or if they're considering mediation as an option then I think those are some of the things that are helpful for them to know. Alex: Certainly, and, and knowledge is power, and knowledge is being more informed certainly allows somebody to participate in a more meaningful way in the process. And that's critically important, especially for a spouse who, may not have been well versed in the finances of a family prior to the process beginning. And look, there is no shame in that. I mean, when you're living together and you're married, there's a division of labor in the home and the fact that one parent may not have been responsible for paying the bills or knowing what their savings, where their savings was even located, let alone how much existed. That's, that's a normal arrangement in a, in a family. And that by virtue of a divorce, you know, changes. Everybody needs to be informed. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I have said on many of the previous podcast recordings the formula for having financial confidence is the knowledge plus the experience because you can't have one without the other. Right? And so, if they maybe have the knowledge but don't have the experience, that may impact their confidence. But as they go through this process and ask questions and they take an interest, hey, you know what? You can gain the knowledge; you can gain the experience. Ultimately at the end you're going to come out having more confidence as you step into that role because not only will you be forced to do it, I guess is the bottom line. I mean, whether you want to or not, you're going to have to step up and, and take ownership of the finances. And so, we can use that divorce process as a great way for women to navigate through that and kind of gear up for having to take some of those things over on their own. Alex: Right. Absolutely. And I would also point out that for the most part, mediation is a voluntary process. So, whereas in litigation, you might be in a circumstance where you feel like one party may feel like they're being shielded from obtaining the necessary information to be informed. And in mediation, the documents are being produced voluntarily. The financial information is being exchanged voluntarily so that everybody is armed and prepared to participate in the process. And you avoid that. Ideally, you're avoiding the feeling of being in the dark. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, let's move on to talk about, I always say divorce isn't free. So, the question becomes how people want to spend dollars to go through the process. And one of the things that you had mentioned was that divorce does not have to be just economically devastating for people. And so, talk to us a little bit about that. Alex: Certainly. So, I mean, when you're in the courtroom a whole host of things happen. At a minimum, each party is more likely than not represented by counsel. There are court appearances that are meaningful and court appearances that are less meaningful, but nevertheless you're incurring fees for all of them. Court appearances can be delayed, they can be canceled, they can, and every single time your attorneys need to prepare and get up to speed in order to, to be productive in, in the courtroom. In the context of mediation, you are streamlining that process. You may or may not have your attorneys present. Everybody is prepared to proceed on a set day. And ideally because the process is being streamlined, you are avoiding significant fees that would, that are associated with the litigation process. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I know that, you know, depending on what part of the country people are in, the range in which the divorce process on average, the cost on average, the duration on average. Again, we've got some national statistics around that, but each state or region or area may have may differentiate a little bit amongst you know, those areas. But on average, you know, the average cost for divorce is $15,000 and the average duration is a year. So that much we know. Alex: Which is absolutely wild. I mean, I could have a case referred to me, this week have their task list set out for the next two weeks, have mediation session the following week. And when it's all said and done, if we've reached anywhere, but you know, north of $3,500 to $4,000 just for the mediator, I would be shocked. You can wrap it up within. And that doesn't include attorney's fees to the extent that attorneys are being involved. But I mean, you can see that the process can be so slimmed down in a, in a major, major way. Rhonda: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Alex: And by the way, you know, there's also a range of mediators’ fees. You know, certainly in Chicago there are former judges that are doing this that can command, you know, a significantly higher rate and they're tending to cases where perhaps their hourly rate doesn't necessarily factor into the analysis. Mediation isn't just, isn't just for wealthy people. And there are plenty of other professionals. I, for example, practiced for 12 years, I have significant experience, but I'm not commanding the hourly rate that a former judge does. Rhonda: Yeah, absolutely. Well, and I think too, it's for people to look at the different options and ask themselves a couple of questions. So, like as I'm working with clients and coaching them through, ultimately, it's up to them and in working with the attorney or mediator to figure out what process is best. But I can take them through a simple exercise that says, okay, here's pro se, here's mediation, here's litigation, here's collaborative. Let's just talk about the definition of each of those and then what are the pros and cons? What do you see as the pro or con of each of these areas? And what ends up happening is they come out of there and like, okay, I have a little more clarity on what really seems to resonate with me knowing my husband and how he might respond, what seems like the best option. Rhonda: And then they can start kind of exploring that because they have a lot of choices on what they feel like might be best. Now they're also, I think there's value in getting input from the professionals as well. But to be able to take some time and just think through all those options I think is good. And for some people, you know, it isn't as much about the finances. Sometimes it is. I mean it just; each situation is so different. But I think being able to look at, look at the options, I believe that women always make good decisions when they have all the information. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: And so, there's somewhat I would call kind of pre-divorce work that women can be just kind of thinking through, taking some time to ponder to see if this is a good fit for them or not. You know, so that's why I love doing these types of having these types of conversations specifically around the different options of the process. So, I appreciate your input on that as well. Alex: Certainly. Rhonda: So, the other thing that I want to chat with you about is the fact that mediation can be a good way to minimize children's exposure to the divorce process. So, I find this really fascinating and I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this talking point. Alex: Certainly. So you know, when there is a parenting issue, and I'm obviously speaking from my experience with the, with Cook County in Chicago, but it's almost immediate that if the parties are unable to resolve whatever the parenting issues are in mediation, that a judge will uniformly appoint a child's representative who's an attorney that's going to represent the needs of the child. That child's representative is and will then the children will be involved in the process. He or she will interview them, will observe them with each parent. We'll make recommendations to the court, and his or her interaction with the child may not just be on one occasion. It may be on multiple occasions, depending on what the issues are. Alex: And again, talk about, you can't unring that bell. I mean, once your kids are being interviewed by professionals and, and then by, by the way, if that doesn't result in an agreement, there may be, a child custody evaluation that's performed by a mental health professional and that involves multiple interviews with your child. And I think that, for the most part, what people can agree on is that they don't want their children involved in the process because it's not good for anybody. And in mediation you can avoid all of that. Rhonda: That, that's awesome. And I think obviously, I mean there may be times when people can't agree, and they are going to have to maybe go and utilize some of those other processes that that the court system has in place. But I love, you know, for people to be able to consider mediation for the reason that you just mentioned because I think of all the things that they can agree on, wanting the best for their kids is usually an easy one. Alex: Right. And the, the fact is that people are getting divorced, so they are not necessarily speaking in a kind way to each other. It's not necessarily a productive mode of communication between each other. And oftentimes they just need somebody, a third party to help them navigate the conversation. And that's what the mediator's there for. Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's, that's really great. Well, we have covered a lot of ground in a really short period of time and as we wrap up our time together, I always end with two things. One is a quote and the other is a client success story. So, go ahead and share with us your favorite quote. Alex: So, I recently read this, the quote is, "Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won." Rhonda: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Alex: It resonates and in a very significant way for me, I have, once people come down to earth, and realize that they're getting divorced or have accepted it or are ready to move forward with the process in a productive way and, and are not looking to sabotage their spouse or really just want to reach a resolution and focus it, focus on it as a problem to be solved, that's when they're able to reach a, a meaningful agreement, a lasting agreement that will serve the needs of their family going forward. Rhonda: Yeah. Oh my gosh, I love that. Oh, and it takes, I mean, divorce is emotional, right? And I think there's certainly a time to deal with the emotions, but it helps really to just kind of frame what the goal is. Right? And so, that's a great quote. All right, so let's end with the client’s success story. Alex: Certainly. So there's, there's really nothing so magical about it other than the fact that for these two individuals, they had been in the litigation process for over a year and had been engaging in discovery that was not relevant to their case, multiple court appearances that was really just causing more and more of a rift between them rather than bringing them together to reach an agreement. And one of them had been referred to me as a mediator. The other interviewed me and we sat down together at about nine o'clock in the morning and by two o'clock had reached a comprehensive agreement on everything that needed to be addressed in their marital settlement agreement. Alex: When we concluded for the day, the husband looked at the wife and, and said to her, "That is the most productive conversation we've had in over five years." And, it really, I believe, set the tone for how these two individuals are going to be able to move forward in a productive way as divorced parents and co-parents effectively. And, and it was just a very positive way to, to start down with new road for them, for their new normal. Rhonda: I love it. I love it. I think that it also depends too on finding the right mediator, right? Being the mediator is not an easy job. Alex: Definitely not. Rhonda: I've sat in on plenty of mediations. I'm like, okay, they, you know, the mediator's got to be the tough cookie in the room, right? Because you must hold people accountable and encourage them to have those conversations. Think outside the box, get people talking, manage emotions. I mean, there's a lot to it. And so I think that's a fantastic success story. And just again, giving people the opportunity to say it. Listen, there may be times when you get to a point where, yeah, it's time to mediate and get everybody in the same room and make sure you've got the right mediator and hash things out and leave there with a result. Right? Some clarity, some concrete solutions. And I love the fact that, yeah, love the fact, that they were able to leave there feeling a lot more positive. Alex: So yeah, it was great success. Rhonda: Yay. I love it. Well, I want to thank you so much, Alex, for your time today. Alex: Certainly, thank you for having me. Rhonda: And I want to encourage people to check out Alex's contact information in the show notes, as well as the transcribed audio notes, and hopefully as people are listening to this, we've given them some really great things to think about as far as the direction that they may want to go as they're navigating through their divorce process.   QUOTE: “Focus on divorce as a problem to solve instead of a battle to be won.”   CONTACT INFORMATION: Alex Jacobson Founder Jacobson Mediation Group 212 West Superior Street, Suite 203 Chicago, IL 60654 ajacobson@jacobsonmediationgroup.com (312) 877-5092 LinkedIn | Facebook   Visit the Women’s Financial Wellness Center for a full directory listing of experts. Be sure to reach out if you would like to connect personally with the Women’s Financial Wellness Center. You can visit our website or grab a complimentary 30-minute consult.   Leaving a positive podcast review is hugely important: they help the podcast get discovered by new people. 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Alex Charfen is one of the very select few coaches I continually plug into...    I have wanted to get this individual on here for quite some time, and Alex Charfen has been one of the reasons why my stuff is blowing up so much.    I have learned that I need to listen to less people, and I'm very, very picky on those that I choose to dive deeply with…   So for marketing and sales, I've really dove deep with Russell, (obviously) and you all know that.    For systems and business systems, I've dove very deeply with Alex Charfen... he's the other coach that I pay a lot to and listen to as well.    ...and I have other various ones that are very carefully selected... and I don't listen to ANYBODY else!    I'm extremely careful about the content that I consume - so that I can spend most of my time just moving, rather than gathering MORE information…   ... which I don't think many of us need more of.    So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to understand more of why Alex Charfen, for me, has been so key…   So I asked him to come on the show and to teach a little bit more about the systems that all businesses need, regardless of whatever you're in.    A lot of these are the systems that a brand new entrepreneur needs when they finally get that revenue coming in.    ...and then there are systems that he creates for those who have an existing business and are ready to scale.    Alex answers the questions…     How do you know if you should be scaling or not?        What are the five reasons why most companies fail to scale?     If you guys like this interview, please reach out to him, (he did not need to do this) and say “Thank You!”    At the very end, we have a special little thing for you, and so we're excited!    Boom, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen, welcome back to Sales Funnel Radio - we're really excited to have you guys here.    I'm with one of my good friends, who's become an amazing friend and definitely a mentor... I would call and consider him a brother as well.    I want to introduce everybody to Alex Charfen.   Before I really bring Alex on, I just want you all to understand, Alex Charfen was one of the guys that helped me understand why I am who I am... and that, it’s okay… and helped me lean into that.    I talk to you a lot about leaning into your obstacles, leaning into those things that have been crappy in your life…    … because they end up becoming your superpower.    You all know my story of going to the first Funnel Hacking Live, Alex Charfen was one of the first speakers, and I took so many notes…    I ran back home, I showed my wife and she goes "That's why you act the way you do?" And I was like "YES, it's because of this guy!”    He had a crazy deep gravelly voice and I loved it. He was the man!" ...and I'm so excited to bring him on the show here:   Guys, please welcome Alex Charfen, “How you doing, man?”   ALEX: Steve, it is so good to be here with you, man. Thank you, and I echo your sentiments completely, and I consider you a brother as well, man.   STEVE: Oh thank you so much, thank you so much.    You know it was like two weeks ago;  me and my wife were chatting about your material and going on through it, and she goes "Oh yeah, I have to remember this is how your brain kind of works."    I was like, "Really naturally, yeah! You should really know that" so we'll go back through your stuff.   You know, I've got that Capitalist Pig shirt that I wear all the time, but I really want one that just says, "Charfen will explain," or something like that, you know what I mean?    That should be the next shirt…   So much of what I do in this world just is NOT explainable without you.   ALEX: Yeah, it's unique, you know, Stephen…    I think when you characterize it that way, so much of what you do is different than what anybody in the world would ever expect... and that's what I've found from the day I met you.    I think I walked up to you and said something like:    "Hey man, I think we should talk. You're a really unique entrepreneur and I don't think you understand just how unique."   STEVE: I remember you said that.   ALEX: Or something like that.   STEVE: Yeah I remember, and I felt like, you know in the Matrix when he's talking to that lady with the spoon bend... I felt like I was talking to her, and I was like:    "What does he see in me? What are you looking at?" You know, and "Please dissect me!"    So anyway, I really am pumped for you to be here and just massive incredible love.    You have to understand, your name; it's NOT just a noun, it’s a verb in my vocabulary.    People are like "How did you do that?” "I just Charfenized it, baby!"    I say ‘Charfenation’ all the time.    I was hanging out with the other ‘Charfenites.’    I'm going over the ‘Charfenation.’    "How did you do that?" “Oh, I ‘Charfenized’ it, baby!”   Anyways, you're very much a verb in my vocabulary, and with my family... so it's really quite an honor to have you on, it really is.   ALEX: Thank you Stephen, it's an honor to be here man, this is awesome.   STEVE: This is really cool. Well hey, I wanna just start right out and just, I wanted to ask…    My audience has heard a lot about you. I've talked about you a lot because there’s so much that ‘veI learned.   Just recently, I was going through some of my old notes, from two years ago, from one of your events, and I was like "Gosh, you're so right, this is so cool!"    It really has created additional leverage for what I'm trying to do.   It works, it's real, and I want everyone to listen to this and listen to what Alex has to say here.   Understand that *this* is how I've been doing what I’m doing.   I learned marketing and a lot of sales from Russell... but how to have a life, systemize, and make my business an asset from Alex Charfen.    So, anyway, could you just tell us how you got into this? 'Cause I know you weren't always…   I mean I call  it entrepreneurial optimization, I mean it's really what you do - it's not just the systems, but like:    I'm wearing glasses now   I'm drinking more water than I ever have in my life    I'm doing all sorts of stuff I never would do, because of you    How did you get into this?   ALEX: - You know Stephen, I think if the question is, "How did I become an entrepreneur?”    I didn't find entrepreneurship, it found me.    This was really the only thing I ever felt comfortable doing in my life.    Ever since I was a little kid, I was always the kid that was different than everybody else, crazy socially awkward, like what you see today…    I don't try to be socially awkward, it's just natural.    I was always different than the other kids   I didn't really get along   I had trouble in school   All the systems in the world told me I was broken.    … and then, when I was eight years old, my family went through kind of a financial downturn; my father lost a company.    He didn't go bankrupt, but he went really close, and to make money for the family we were selling stuff in a swap meet on the weekends.    I remember going to the swap meet for the first time and standing behind a folding card table, and a woman walked up, and I sold her a pen that had an LCD clock in it…    (Like that was big time for 1981 or whatever or '78 or '79, or whatever it was).   Stephen I can remember thinking at that moment, "Holy crap, I'm good at this. This is something I'm NOT terrible at."    … because up until that point, I really hadn't found anything where it was like, "Hey, that was good."  It was always’ "Almost got it, kid. You don't suck as bad as you did yesterday."    I was the kid who consistently got *MOST IMPROVED* all the time, 'cause it's the award you give to ‘the kid who sucked the worst!’   And when that woman walked up, it was like "Hey, this is something I can do over and over again."    And the more that I worked with my Dad, and the more that I experienced business, I loved it.   The world is so random, but when you get into the world of business there are rules.   …. there's an outcome.    People are in it together, and you actually have to work together to accomplish and achieve.   …  if everybody cares about the outcome, it'll happen.    And so *this* is where I feel comfortable.    You know, it's funny, when I was a kid I used to create businesses, create business plans,  write out time cards and all this other stuff, and as an adult, I thought that was like ‘the weirdest thing.’    I would reflect back and think like, "Man, I was such a weird kid."    Now, that's exactly what my daughters do.    My daughter this morning was at the kitchen table for three hours writing out a schematic for a water park she wants to build one day.   STEVE: Wow!   ALEX: And you are who you are, and I think, from the very beginning, this is who I've been.   STEVE: That's amazing, and when did you decide to make a business around this and go actually help other entrepreneurs, like myself, who need these systems?   ALEX: Well, the business that I have today, we started…    So let me give you a little brief history.   So in my twenties, I was a consultant, and you know, a lot of people ask about that.    I did some consulting at a very high level at the Fortune 500 level...    I built a very large business that almost killed me.    And so I can tell the story really good...    I can give you all the highlights and make it sound great:   $250,000,000 company   I've worked with Fuji and TDK and Memorex and Logitech, and all international business.    Or I can tell you the other side of that coin…    I had a $250,000,000 company   I made less than $2,000,000 a year    my margins were razor thin   I had a bleeding ulcer   I was probably over 300 pounds    STEVE: Wow.   ALEX: And so when I got out of that business, I wanted to do something completely different.    So in my early thirties, I got into real estate, and we were taken out by the real estate market in 2007.    Cadey and I introduced our first information product, and that's how we got into this world.   We created a product called the Certified Distressed Property Expert Designation.    In 2007 we were bankrupt, we introduced our product at the end of the year:  In 2008 we did $500,000 in sales   The next year we did $7,000,000   The next year we did $10,000,000   Over the course of the life of that product, we did about $70,000,000    We went from bankruptcy to liquid millionaires in a year.    In 2013, the US Treasury came to our office and did a broadcast with us, where they said that, according to their research…    Our company had pulled forward the foreclosure crisis five to seven years   ….so it was intense.   STEVE: Oh, yeah...   ALEX: Really intense!   And what happened was, right around 2011…    A lot of our clients who were buying our product wanted help growing their business; so I took all of the stuff that I used to use as a consultant; the systems and structure Cadey and I used to run our business, and we started training it.    And so since 2011, we've been training it in classes/ courses.   In 2017, we started the products that we have today. So now we have :   An entry-level coaching program called Billionaire Code Accelerator - for people who are doing over 300k a year   A high-level coaching program called The Billionaire Code Grow and Scale - for people doing over 3,000,000 a year.    STEVE: That's awesome! That's so cool.   ALEX: Yeah it is the most fun I've ever had, Stephen…   It's like every day, I wake up and here's what I get to do:    I get to play in this playground with game-changing entrepreneurs that are starting businesses that are doing things that are just unreal.    ...and our systems, our structures are kind of the backbone for how they're doing things.    So on a daily basis, me and everyone on my team, wake up knowing that we are helping the game-changers change the world, and we recruit people who want to do that…    We recruit for people who are passionate about our mission…   Everyone on my team feels like their life's mission is being fulfilled through being in this business right now.    It's the greatest thing I've ever done.   STEVE: That's incredible, and I can tell everyone else who's listening and watching this now, it's exactly as he says it.    I think I've been to three of your events now, and they have just been life-changing.    I go through and it gives structure to the idea, but then, also, how I behave against the idea. So I can actually go in and breathe; I can live.    I watched my Dad create this awesome company when I was a young boy, but it took him too.   But everyone does that, it's super natural - so you to go in and…    Remove the entrepreneur   Create systems    Create processes and procedures, and people that actually push forward their vision even further.   ... it's incredible.    I know it's not magical, but it feels magical, to me! I'm like "Oh my gosh!"    I've actually had a tab open with your course open for like the last month and I'll just dive into another video, and I'm like "Oh my gosh! Back to the drawing board, that was so good!"    And I go back to it again and again and again... it's just always up, everybody who's listening to me, it's always up.    That's really what's teaching me how to run a company, rather than ‘me’ being the company, and I've loved that.    *Just so powerful*    I wanted to ask you kind of a key question here, and it's a question that I get asked a lot...    People come through my programs, I'll help them make money. They go and make a lot of cash, and it's awesome... but then after that, like what do you do?   What are the first systems that you find that new entrepreneurs with a sizeable amount of cash should actually go create first?    What are those first few moves?   ALEX: You know I think I definitely want to share a couple of systems Stephen, but first, I want to just share a thought process. ..and this is a tough thought process for most entrepreneurs to take on, and it's interesting 'cause I've watched you go through this shift too, right? '   Cause at the beginning, (and I just want everyone to know)...    When I met Stephen Larsen, he was ready to take on the entire world solo!   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Like all alone, right?    And here's the thought process…    After you start making money, the next thing to ask yourself is:    How do I sustain this?    How do I make it real?    How do I make it last a long time?   How do I make it so that I'm not the only driver here?   when you get to the point where the momentum you're creating on your own isn't enough, and believe me, we all get there...    Like I know that if you're watching me, watching Stephen, you're one of those entrepreneurs... and in the back of your mind, you have this crazy voice that has always told you:    You're meant for more   You're gonna do more   You're gonna change the world   You're gonna make a massive impact   ... and if you've always felt that, then there's a shift you have to make in your thinking.    Because here's the issue for people like us; I call it the Entrepreneurs Dilemma.    For people like us…    We need far more help than the average person to reach our full destination, but any request for help or support that we have to make, leaves us feeling vulnerable and exposed.    Stephen, you with me?   STEVE: Yes, yes, yes, yes, 100%!   ALEX: And so here's the shift…   We have to realize that if we're gonna change the world, that is a group activity, and leadership's a contact sport.    So we have to wake up to the fact that when we start to:    Build a team   Create a structure   Pour into the people around us    Invest in those people   Make them important   Build relationships with them   …. we will build the company that we have always wanted.    That's the only way it's ever been done.  The myth of the solopreneur who's changed the world is a myth - it's a joke.   STEVE: So true   ALEX: It's one of the most damaging things out there in the entrepreneurial world today.    Because the fact is…    Show me anyone that looks like they changed the world on their own, and I will show you a massive team behind them.   STEVE: So true!    There's this idea that gets pushed around now, and it's like, “I'm gonna go and be this person that does all this stuff. I'm the gift to the world...”   ...and it's like “Okay….” but you can't do that on your own.    In the last six months, I have begun to experience and feel burn-out.   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: I have never in my life experienced that, and it's been hard.  The only way I've been able to create leverage is by listening to what you say and create those teams.   ALEX: Yeah. Well then, Stephen, that's the thing…    Here's the deal I want everybody to understand this:   If you're an entrepreneur, you have a job, and that job is to…    Stay out of burn-out   Lower pressure and noise in your life   Increase the protection and support that you have around you.    Because if you don't work with that equation to constantly lower the noise and increase the support, lower the noise, increase the support…    Here's what ends up happening…     You are in an equation that doesn't work.    … and it's not like anyone can come and argue against me here because this is like gravity.    This is like you know the facts of life, this is like taxes. We're all gonna pay 'em. There's no way to argue against this, you're going to lose.    And so in that situation, as an entrepreneur, you have to be really cautious about doing too much yourself, and about loading yourself up, because here's our instinct…    (You know you have this, I have this, we all have it.)    If there's something to be done, the first thought we have is, “How do I just get it done without telling anyone else,” right? Oh yeah!   STEVE: Yeah   ALEX: And it's like "I'm gonna conquer!"   STEVE: Freedom baby!   ALEX: We forget that humans are tribal animals, man.    We are all terrible at most things. Let's get real…    If you're good at a lot of things then you have a liability because you're not gonna be able to choose what you shouldn't do.    I'm very fortunate, I suck at most everything, and that's like an honest reality.    Anyone on my team will tell you like "Oh man, don't let Alex fill out a form, use the calendar, "send emails. We keep him out of all of our systems."    Seriously my team actually knows when I have a password for a system and they monitor me using it, 'cause I'm so bad at that stuff.    But on that same token, I know what I'm good at.    I'm good at vision    I'm good at where we're gonna go   I'm good at putting the frameworks together    I'm good at assembling a team   … and by doing those things, we can grow a massive organization and have a massive impact.   So for every entrepreneur, the key is to figure out what you're good at and do that to the exception of everything else   ... and it's the hardest thing you'll ever do as an entrepreneur.    Here's why…   The second you start doing that you feel like you're being egotistical. You feel like you're being self-serving.    But here's the fact:    When you drive your business to get easier for you it will grow like crazy.   But driving your business to get easier for you will feel like you're doing the wrong thing.    It happens all the time.   There's a discussion right now on our Facebook group, one of the CEOs in our group made a post, and I'm paraphrasing, but she said something like :   "As I offload and reduce discomfort and get a team around me, I'm feeling less and less significant, am I doing this right?"   And my answer was "Yes! You're absolutely doing this right. That's exactly how it's gonna feel!"    Because we need to attach significance to the total contribution, NOT to your day-to-day activities.   STEVE: Mmmm, that's powerful.    You know it's funny I was It reminds me of …   You know when I first got to ClickFunnels, it was just he and I. There wasn't like a copywriter, a videographer... it was just he and I!    So we did every single role in getting these funnels out, occasionally there was an exception where he'd go "Oh someone's really good at X, Y, and Z,"  but then, by the time I left...   ALEX: - Probably design or something… but everything else was you guys?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right! I knew enough Indesign and Photoshop, I was the one doing it most of the time... and doing first copy rounds, and it like, it was nuts!    But by the time I left, it was funny because he had started implementing these types of things.    I remember watching him during these funnel launches just laying on the floor, bored out of his mind.    I've never seen him like that in my life, and he was almost going to a state of depression. He was like "I'm not needed in my own thing now. Ah no-one needs me anymore."    It's a funny thing to realize, we're just the orchestrators. We don't play all the instruments.   ALEX: We shouldn't, we shouldn't.    And so, you know, back to your question about what systems should an entrepreneur start looking at?   Now, I'm gonna talk high level, and I wanna share...    You and I are really close friends, and I wanna share the most critical content we have for entrepreneurs with your group.   STEVE: I appreciate that.   ALEX: This is what we normally share internally once somebody joins our program…    We share the five things that keep companies from scaling.    The reality is, there are really five things that keep companies that should scale, from scaling.    And here's what I mean ‘companies that should scale…’    You know, if you go talk to most consultants, venture capitalists, investment bankers, accountants, lawyers, whatever, they'll give you this laundry list of why companies don't scale:    They didn't have enough money   They didn't have the right people   They didn't do all of these things   The reality is, if you look at most companies that should scale, there are five clear reasons why they don't…    So let me share them with you, but let me give you this caveat…    Here's what I mean by "should scale..."    If you've got a market    If you're capable of selling   If you could do more    If you know you're leaving money on the table   …. you should be scaling.   If those things aren't there for you right now, go resolve that and then start scaling.  Far too many people try and scale before they actually have all the steps in place.    Then you just build infrastructure that does nothing.   So let me tell you what the five things are...    #1: So number one, first and foremost, absolutely most crucial, is…      Most businesses don't have any type of strategic plan.     So as a result, there's no go-forward strategy, and here's what happens in a business when you don't have a go-forward strategy.    If you don't know where you're going, neither does your team   ... neither does anybody around you   And so you will, by virtue of math, become the biggest bottleneck in the company.    Here's why…    If there's no forward plan where all of us can point at and go get it and help you chase it down, every time we want to know what to do we have to ask you, and we have to go to you... and it's a death of a thousand paper cuts.    You're literally in a place where you're:    Telling people what to do   Checking that it got done   Telling them what to do again.    And if you've ever been in that situation as an entrepreneur, you know that somebody only has to ask you twice before you're ready to flip out and lose it.    Am I right Stephen?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, usually once.   ALEX: Once, right, right, but by the second time you're like "Are you kidding me?"    And so the way we get past that is we create a clear strategic plan, we share it with our entire team…   ... and if the team knows where they're going, here's what happens.    I want you to understand something about the people coming to work for you.  If you're in a small business, you're hiring entrepreneurs.   I know that there's this saying in the market, "You're either an entrepreneur or you work for one."    I call complete and total BS - don't even bring that crap around me.   STEVE: Yeah!   ALEX:    Every person on my team is an incredibly talented, hyper-motivated, world-changing entrepreneur, they just choose to be part of a team.   And so you're gonna hire entrepreneurs, and the way you keep entrepreneurs absolutely and totally focused and excited, is you show them what they're hunting, you give them the kill.    You say:    Here's our plan   This is what we're doing   This is how you win.    And if you hire the right people, they will walk over hot glass to get to that destination for you.   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: But if they don't know where it is, you're gonna demotivate them and completely de-leverage them.    So number one, you have to have a strategic plan.    In my experience, less than 1% of businesses do. Also, less than 1% of businesses ever hit $100,000,000. In fact only 3% ever hit 1,000,000.   STEVE: Jesus. ALEX: So when you look at that, it's not 1% of businesses that hit 100,000,000, 0.01% of businesses ever hit 100,000,000,  and the reason is...    Most businesses don't know where they're going.    And Stephen, by you having the tools to build a strategic plan in your business, hasn't it changed how you approach things?   STEVE: Oh gosh, you guys remember when I tell you those stories of I left my job...    I created 200 grand of revenue really quick but there were no systems   I was the…    Support guy    Fulfillment guy   Sales guy.    I did every role, and I voluntarily, very painfully, had to turn down revenue to go build these structures.    And I want you all to know, it was Alex Charfen's stuff that helped me go in and actually set those systems in place... and so, please understand my affinity for this man and what he does.   About halfway through the year, I was only at like 300 - 400 grand, which is pretty good, but that last huge sprint came in because of the things that Alex Charfen and his team were teaching me.    All those planning things that I use, and all the things that I've just lightly mentioned, they've all come from Alex Charfen, and it helped scale me.   ALEX: That's awesome Stephen... Man, that makes me so proud.   This is so cool! Like there's only one Stephen Larsen in the world, and I told you that the first day I met you…    I'm like, "Dude you are completely and totally unique and I think I can help you build the company you really want."   STEVE: Yeah, you said   ALEX: And for us to be sitting here, and for you to say that, I got chills Stephen, that's so awesome. Thank you, man!   STEVE: Oh man, I'm so jazzed about what we do, but it's because of what you teach I'm like "I can do it... "    The first time I ever saw Stephen at an event, I did not leave the event until I'd cornered him and told him what I needed to tell him... because I knew you were gonna be exactly that type of person.    ...and here's why it's so important to me, Stephen.    I could tell the first time I saw you,  that you were gonna have a massive effect on the world.    But here's what I know about entrepreneurs; you're gonna have the biggest effect on the people closest to you - the people who are most proximal, your team.   And when I see an entrepreneur like you Stephen, I'm like:    "Man, if that guy builds a team he's gonna change hundreds of lives internally in his company. They're gonna change millions of lives externally, and I know those hundreds of people will build your legacy."    And when I see somebody like you, I'm like, “Man! That is the path, let me show you how to do this.”    The fact that it's working, is like, “Ah, it makes me so excited every day.”    This is why I get up out of bed every morning and do what I do.     STEVE: Ah, it's so fun man, feeling's mutual. You walked up, it was from that FHAT event that you were at.   ALEX: Ah ha.   STEVE: And you walked up and said, "There's a huge company in you and I don't think you know it, and I'm gonna help you pull it out of you."    I remember when you said that, I was so scared. I was like, "There's no way that this is real! I know who you are, are you kidding me?"    It freaked me out, and I had to own my own vision for a while. It actually took me a while to practice that.    Anyway, so much has gone on in mental clarity and development from what you've taught, not just these systems and things around, it's really cool.   ALEX: - So let's give the second one, Stephen   STEVE: Yeah, sorry, sorry.    ALEX: oh don't apologize, shit I love this part.    So first you have a strategic plan…    #2: Second, the thing that you need to have is      A system to communicate that plan.        Let me tell you something about us as entrepreneurs…    We think we're good communicators, but we're lying to ourselves.    The fact is, we are haphazard and emotional, and we're pumped one second and we're not the next, and we're all over the place…    Here's what happens…    When we have a team that has to deal with a personality like ours, and there's NOT a system for communication, it's random and haphazard and overwhelming... and it comes from all angles, and they're waiting for word from on high. Here's the fact, if you're the entrepreneur in charge, you're the MOST important person in the building all the time.    You're the most important person on the team, in the tribe, in the group, and they're all waiting to see what you say.    And if they're waiting for days and nothing's happened, they start thinking:    Is something wrong?    Did something go bad?    Did we do something wrong?    So you need a system.   As an example:    My team knows every Monday at 4:00, we're all gonna be on a weekly meeting together.  They also know every day at 9:27 a.m. we're gonna be on a daily huddle, and I'll be there.    They know that once a month we're gonna have a meeting where we show our strategic plan.    They know once a month we're gonna have a meeting where they all get the results.    So they all know when they're gonna communicate with me and how.    From the first day you're on our team there's a system that  controls how you hear from me.    Not just me pumping stuff out there haphazardly.    As a result, my team knows they're gonna hear from me, they trust it and here's what happens.    I set the expectations, I meet the expectations, we create trust. I create trust with my team every time I do that.    And here's the fact:   If your team trusts you, you get way more out of them.   If your team trusts you, they will do more for you.    If your team trusts you, you'll get discretionary effort   ... which means when they're driving, when they're showering, when they're doing something else, they're gonna be thinking about your business.  Why?    ...because it gives them momentum.    So if you have a strategic plan and a system to communicate it, you're ahead of 99% of companies out there.   And Stephen, same thing for you with the system, the structure?    Like…    We all fight structure, but once you put it in place, isn't it incredible?   STEVE: Oh, it's amazing! Stuff's getting done right now, that we set in place once. and then, I'll be like "Oh, podcast episode just launched,!Oh, what day is it? Oh, that's sweet! Everyone just put it out, all right, cool!"   ALEX: Right, I remember when I started getting messages like, "Hey, I love the new podcast!" And I'm like "Oh, we put a podcast out? Nice!"       STEVE: I didn't do that, what are you talking about?   ALEX: So you have  #1: a strategic plan, then #2: a system to communicate.    #3: Here's the third one, now this is BIG, really big, and most business owners just, they don't look at this ever and it's the biggest struggle is, or one of the biggest struggles is;      You have to have a system to consistently document the right processes in your business.     And by documentation, I mean having:    A flowchart   A process document   A checklist   Something that shows you how the important things in your business are done over and over again.    For example:    If you walk into a McDonald's, and you look above the fry cooker, there is a process to cook fries above that fry cooker.    Anything that happens in that McDonald's, there's a process for literally every single thing, including:    Unlocking the door   Turning off the alarm   Sweeping the floor   That's why there's a consistent experience at McDonald's; I'm not saying it's a good experience, I'm saying it's consistent.   In most businesses, in most entrepreneurial businesses, there's no process.    In fact, it's even scarier than that...    The process lives either in the owner's head or in an individual's head - so you lose a person, you lose the company.    You lose a person, you lose a big chunk of what you're doing.   STEVE: Hmm.   ALEX: So you have to have a system in a business to consistently evaluate what processes are in the company, and then on a monthly and weekly basis document the right ones.    The way that I would suggest you start, is you look at your customer experience:    What is the customer experience in your company?   What process documentation do you have to back it up to make sure that is completely consistent?    If you do that, you're gonna beat most people out there...   99% of entrepreneurial companies have little to nothing documented in any type of process.   STEVE: They're just shooting in random spots 24/7.   ALEX: Or they're doing stuff like, "Here's how we do our customer on-boarding…”    I trained Suzy   Suzy trained Annie   Annie trained Bob     John does it now   ...and you're like "Oh, cool! Let's go and see what John's doing?"    Well, John's doing nothing close to what Suzy and Bob and everybody else was originally doing, and so you have these degrading processes in your business.    And here's what happens…    When you look at entrepreneurial businesses, they tend to…    Go up in revenue   Come back down in revenue   Go up in revenue   Come back down.    If you're inside those companies, hundreds of times like I have been, here's what I can tell you…    Revenue goes up as the process is working, and then when it breaks, it comes back down.    *PERIOD*    That's why businesses don't continue to go forward - there are processes breaking in the business.    Whether it's marketing, sales, delivery, whatever it is there's a process breaking.    When you document your proceses, you make them bulletproof.    So in our business, we actually use:    Lucidchart Flowcharts   Sheets in Google Sheets    A new product called Process Street  -  a distributed, automated process document system, which is incredible.    So we have all of our processes in Process Street, and we have a distributed team around the world.   We have somebody in Ireland who can do their part of the process, as soon as they hit the last button it transfers to somebody here in the US who can do their part of the process.   STEVE: That's awesome.   ALEX:    Documenting your processes + Putting them in place = Game-changing   STEVE: Holy cow, okay I wrote that down.    I'm taking tons of notes so everyone knows, I hope they are as well…. And I'm not sharing! ;-) Process.st is the company, and we are so happy with it because... Stephen, here's what I want everyone to know,...   Cadey and I have had five businesses get over $10,000,000 a year, and all five of them ran them with paper checklists.   This is the first time we have automated checklists in Process Street.    The last information products business that we had, we literally had three-ring binders that we would carry around the office and check stuff off.    Having a three-ring binder with a process was so much better than having somebody trying to do it from memory.    Now with Process Street, we can distribute that three-ring binder, and I can get reporting on who's doing what.   STEVE: That's amazing.    Yeah, I've actually seen the three-ring binder and I've thought, "Holy crap, that really is how he's doing it.”    You would teach it and then I watched you actually do it.. 'cause you would record your stand up meeting calls in the morning   ALEX: Yeah.   STEVE: And I was, "Oh my gosh, that's so cool! I'm NOT doing that, interesting."    Then I’d go back and take notes and start it.   ALEX: And then implement.    Well, and you know, there's this phrase in the entrepreneurial world. Ah... I kind of get a little triggered, right!   STEVE: Let it out, baby!   ALEX: You know the thing that people say from stage:   "Here's what I want all of you to know. All you have to do is stop working in your business and start working on your business."    And I'm always like:    "Oh, good, thanks. Thanks for solving it all for us dude, that was awesome. You just solved all my problems with that really cliched BS thing that everybody tells entrepreneurs."     When I was in my twenties, my instant thought was like, "How do I get on stage to punch that guy in the face?"    And my then my second thought was like, "What a load of crap!  If I don't work in the business nobody's answering the phones, sucker."    Like, what's going on here? I don't know how to make that change.    And so the way you make that change is…    Working on the business means documenting processes.    By making it:    Clear   Repeatable   Real   And so you have…    A strategic plan that everyone understands   A communication system everyone knows is gonna happen    A system for documenting processes so everyone can repeat what's going on with your clients   #4: The next step,(and this is BIG), is..    A consistent system for identifying, documenting, and then prioritizing the right project in the business.   STEVE: Ah, this changed my life. *HARDCORE*   ALEX: Whoa, Stephen, you know how game-changing this is because, here's the problem in most businesses…    Projects are selected emotionally.    Period, I can't tell you that they're done any other way - they're emotional.    You go to an event and somebody says "I'm doing this thing," and then, the next day, you're doing that thing.    You listen to a podcast or you hear a webinar, and the person says "Hey, I added this thing to my business," and the next day, you're trying to do that thing.    In our business, if I have a really great idea that I want to implement today…    If I'm like, "Man, this is a really high sense of urgency, we should get this implemented."    It'll probably be somewhere around 45 days, and I'm totally okay with that.    That's the timing it should be in my business.    Now if there's an emergency we're gonna fix it that day, but if I'm like, "Hey, I see an opportunity here with something," it's probably a 45-day event…    Why?    I have a team and a structure, and a plan, and we have a system that's moving forward. We're already hitting our numbers, why would I mess with anything?    I actually protect what's going on in the business   I add things gently   I add things carefully   I make sure my team's into it too    I make sure we have consensus    In just in the last 60 days, we've gone from two million recurring to two point three million recurring,   STEVE: That's awesome!   ALEX: So why would I mess with what we're doing?   STEVE: Yeah.   ALEX: Yeah, so when somebody's like "Hey Alex, I got this "great idea for your business." I'm like "Awesome, get in line."    And we'll put it into our system to see if we want to actually do this…   Because the fact is…    If you're getting sold as an entrepreneur on what your next project should be, you're probably in the wrong place.    STEVE: Yeah, that's fascinating. I really agree with that.    It was your planning system for figuring out which projects, I still do it.    Top of every three months and it has guided everything we do.    And while I do follow a few rabbits and I'm practicing bringing it back in, we still largely follow the plan as to what the business needs, and that's ‘grow and scale’ rather than this impulse of like:    "Yeah, oh shiny object, shiny object, "that looks good, that looks good!"    And it's been that discipline, that's the other thing that's always up is my waterfall...   ALEX: Yeah, yeah, always! I mean mine's up right now. I mean I could share it right now.   And the reason is I always have my strategic plan pulled up in front of me, I'm looking at it every single day.    I'm asking myself:   Is the team doing what we need to do here?   How do I support people more?    How do I help them do this more?   Because when you look at our strategic plan, here's what it's made up of.    Our one-year outcomes   Our client-centric mission - which is our Superbowl, our hall of fame, the long term   The 90-day projects we're focusing on right now    What we're doing this month to hit those targets . So that waterfall of long term, to one year, to 90 days, to 30 days, I can see it all on one document and it tells me EXACTLY where I should be supporting the team and what we're getting done.    And so here's what happens…   I went to an event a couple of weeks ago, and I had an idea that was like "Oh man, we have to do this."    Then I come back to the office, I look at the waterfall and I'm like "What do I want to kill in order to do this thing over here?"    And you know what the evaluation was? *NOTHING* I'm not going to take anything off this, that would be crazy.   There's no way I'm gonna go to my team and say, "Hey guys, in addition to all the other stuff you're committed to, here's a hot potato."    I just backed down and I waited till the next time we had a planning meeting and I said, "Hey, there's this thing I think we should do."    We evaluated it   It went into the system   It went into the plan    There is very little knee-jerk reaction in our company because we are going so fast in a forward direction, that for me to challenge that in any way it has to be game-changing at a different level - so it rarely even happens.   STEVE: Yeah, black-ops right? Call them black-ops?   ALEX: Black-ops.   STEVE: No black-ops!   ALEX: No black-ops, baby!  If it's NOT on the plan, you don't do it... or it's black-ops.    And usually, the biggest creators of black-ops are guys like Stephen and I.    So my team has an open license to tell me if I'm doing black-ops.    They will actually call me out in a huddle, in a meeting, they'll be like "Ah, this sounds like black-ops," and then we'll make a note, we'll put it in a parking lot and do it later.    STEVE: Oh, that's so cool, okay.   ALEX: Yeah,  that's one of the most important things you can do when you have a team Stephen…    You train your team to criticize you and then you congratulate them when they do.   STEVE: That's really cool, then they have a license to actually flex their brain instead of feeling like they're in a box.   ALEX: Absolutely. You know I heard a story once about Larry Page, who runs Google,   He was in a meeting and he really strongly stated a point. and one of the team members got emotional about it and started yelling at him.    She was like, "I think you're wrong and this is why you're wrong," and Page was smiling…   Afterward, she asked somebody "Hey why was he smiling?"    ‘Cause she backed him down, and he actually said "You know what, I think this deserves more investigation. Let's do this."    She walked out and she was shaking and all adrenalized up, she had just yelled at the CEO of Google, like, “What the heck's gonna happen to me?”   She turned to somebody next to her, and was like "He was smiling, is that because he's gonna come down hard on me?"    And the person was like, "No, he was smiling because you confronted him, he loves it, he wants it.”    He knows that if people aren't confronting him, he's in a bad place.   So I look at it in my team and I'm like, "Hey, if my team's not challenging me a little bit, then we're all just marching behind a duck."    You know, I don't wanna have ducklings behind me. I want people who are saying:    Hey, this might work   This might not work   We might have a better idea   So you give your team license to criticize and license to call you on stuff.   STEVE:  Gosh, I love that.   #5: So here's the fifth one...    So we have:    Strategic plan   Communication system   Selecting and documenting the right processes   Selecting and achieving the right projects,   ….and then, this is *BIG*   Finding the right people     It's NOT just finding the right people, its…    Evaluating the company   Understanding what the company needs right now    What can you offload that is going to create the most momentum, not just for you, but for the team, for everything that you're doing together?    What is the position that you need to put in place next - so that the company moves forward the fastest?    And unfortunately, just like everything else I've named, planning, projects, process, all of those... people also become emotional.    An entrepreneur wakes up one morning and says, "I'm doing too much, I'm gonna hire an assistant."    Then they have the assistant sit next to them for three weeks, and they wonder why this doesn't work out?    It's because you had the thought to get help, (which by the way I congratulate you on), but there was no process there to actually make it work.    And so here's the process you need…   Evaluate what's going on in the company   Understand what the company needs   Turn it into a job description    Then you use it to recruit   You do tons of interviewing   You drive it until you have three people that you can select from    You hire one of them and then you do at least a 90-day onboarding, high-intensity onboarding.    When I'm onboarding an executive team member, I meet with them every day for the first month, three times a week for the second month, and two times a week for the third month.    People tell me, "Hey man, doesn't that "feel like overkill?"    I'm like:    You don't understand what it means to have an executive team. Your job is to build relationships with those people.    You want to know how you build relationships?    There's one commodity that builds relationships. One!    *TIME* - that's it.    And so when I'm onboarding, when I'm bringing somebody on, (whether it's on my executive team or anywhere in the business), somebody is doing that high-intensity onboarding with them…    Up close and personal every single day for the first 30 days making sure we have no drift.    And so, when you have a system to select the right people, bring them on and then onboard them the right way…    Here's what you avoid, (and Stephen this is like, Ah, this statistic drives me crazy)...    In corporate America, I know because I used to be a consultant there.    In corporate America, they would say things like, "Well we just hired so-and-so in that position so they'll probably be productive in four to six months."   The first time I heard that I was like "Did he just say four to six months? Does he mean four to six days, or does he really mean four to six months?"    Because in my business, even way back then), if I had to wait four months for somebody to be productive I would have been, “They're gone”!   STEVE: Yeah, yeah, they're gone!   ALEX: And so in our business, we actually have this experience right now.    We recently brought on somebody else, a new person to help us in marketing, and with our onboarding process, he was actually achieving products within the first five days of his first week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: And that's how it should be.    You want somebody to come in, be effective and start contributing and creating momentum.    Because here's what will happen…    As an entrepreneur, if you're wired anything like I am, (and I know Stephen is), if you have somebody on your team that starts to feel like they're not carrying their own weight, you won't sleep.    You won't sleep, it will rip you apart, Stephen am I right?   STEVE: Yeah! ALEX: It will destroy you…    And so here's the question though…   Are they not carrying their own weight because:   They're lazy? They don't want to?   They aren't the right person?    Or is it because it's not clear what they’re doing?   STEVE: They have no idea what they're doing. They don't have confidence...I didn't help them!    ALEX: Right, 'cause here's the thing.    Your team needs three things in order to ultimately be effective and to be the type of team you want.    And here's what I mean by that…    As an entrepreneur here's what you want, you want a team that just does stuff and asks permission later.    You want a team that achieves and lets you know how things worked out.    That's it!  I just know this is how entrepreneurs work.    You want people who make really good decisions.    You want people who move things forward.    You want people who don't stand around waiting for stuff.    And if you want to have a team that actually moves things forward as an entrepreneur…    You gotta spend the time with them and let 'em know what your ethos is, and let 'em know how you make decisions…   That's how you duplicate decision making.   STEVE: Hm, gosh I love that. Okay, so…   Strategic plan   System to communicate   System to document processes that can be shared inside the whole biz    Documenting projects and the ones you're gonna work on   Finding the right people   ...and I actually personally just went through your onboarding training and it's so awesome!    'Cause it goes through and it's like this, you basically create a runway for 'em, right?   And if they don't land, don't worry you've got parachutes and there are jumpy cords all over the place...   - you're doing everything you can to help 'em win fast and lots of small tiny wins that build that confidence, and I was like:    "That is brilliant. 'Cause that is not the way you're taught anywhere else.”   ALEX: So Stephen, check this out, man.    We recently fell out of the lucky tree on recruiting and we hired this guy named Greg Duby and he is, ah, amazing.    He's like, he's just one of the most exciting guys I've ever worked with because he's so solid and so centered, and just so good at what he does.    Greg is a former nuclear propulsion tech in the Navy, so you know what that is, that's the guy who rides the bomb around in the submarine, okay?   STEVE: Yeah, that's amazing!   ALEX: Yeah, you have to have advanced degrees in Physics, advanced degrees in Math.   He's literally a rocket scientist.    So he worked in the Navy, then he worked at NASA, then he worked for some of the larger consulting firms out there…    I mean, he's done incredible stuff in his career.    He's just one of the most solid people I've ever worked with, and within about two or three weeks into our company, in one of our daily huddles, we said, "Who got caught being awesome?"    It's where we call each other out, and he said:    You know, I just wanna call this company out for being awesome.   “ I've been here for three weeks, I've never had an experience like this getting on-boarded anywhere...    I'm up and running, I'm excited. I feel like I'm really part of the team. I feel like I've worked here forever and I'm three weeks in."    And this is somebody who worked at some of the best consulting firms in the world, NASA and the Navy!    And our little tiny company has impressed him so much because we did onboarding because he knew what he was supposed to do.    And as a result, Greg, I think we're about three months in with him, and dude, there are projects that I thought were gonna take a year or two that are getting done this week.   STEVE: That's so cool!   ALEX: It's crazy.   STEVE: It's just a completely different way to do it. One thing I hated in the military, I love the military, but you know, some things that are rough and that is that there are no clear guidelines on how to win ahead of time.   The way you're instructed is by hitting barriers and then you get punished for it, and you're like:    "Just tell me ahead of time and I wouldn't do it! But all right, let's do more push-ups."    Anyway...   ALEX: Something tells me you did a lot of push-ups, Steve!   STEVE: I just want to say thank you so much for being on here.    I asked for 30 minutes and you just completely over-delivered, and I just really want to say thank you to you.    My audience already knows very well of you.    Where can people go to learn more about you but specifically also get your help inside the business?   ALEX: So the best place to learn more about us is to go to our podcast.    I publish a podcast four days a week, which is essentially a one-on-one conversation with an entrepreneur growing a business.    And the way that I create each one of those episodes is when a question or issue comes up in our coaching groups, I create an episode around it, we distribute it to the group.    But then also we distribute it to anybody who's listening, so you can get the same coaching that I'm giving my high-level clients right on our podcast…    It's called Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type, and you can check it out at momentumpodcast.com.    And then, if you want to understand more about our products, about our coaching groups you can go to our website charfen.com, but better is to just reach out to me or to one of my team members through Facebook.    The easiest thing, is just reach out to me, and I'll connect you with the right person in our company, and we'll go through a process with you to help you understand if we can help you.    You know Stephen, we're pretty neat, we don't sell everybody. We actually get on the phone with a lot of people who we sell later, but we won't sell you unless it's time.    We know exactly what solutions we provide, and if you have those issues and they link up, then we'll work together... but we go through a personal inventory in order to help you do that.    So if anybody's interested in getting on a call with a member of my team, you can also shortcut the entire process by going to billionairecode.com…    Answer a few questions and you can just set up a call link and you'll be on a call with one of my team members and they'll help you qualify and understand where you are.    And just so you know, we don't do sales calls, they are all consulting calls.    When you get on a call with my team, you won't ever feel like you're being sold, you'll feel like you're being helped.   STEVE: Which is exactly what I have felt when I started doing that as well.    Just so you all know he's very serious about that - that's very real.    I always feel like I'm being helped by anyone on his team.    ...and come to find out later, "Oh that was the sales guy!"    ...You know what I mean?    They dare to go in and actually they want to change the world and they're very serious about it.    So thank you so much, appreciate it.    Check out Billionaire Code.    The Momentum podcast is a goldmine, it is one of those gems on the internet that is actually worth all of your time and attention.    Thanks so much for being on here, Alex, I really appreciate you and love you, and thank you for being on here.   ALEX: Stephen, dude, this has been an honor.    I hope to be able to get invited back again, and as a Sales Funnel Radio listener, this is really cool. I appreciate you, man!   STEVE: Thanks, I appreciate it!    Hey, awesome episode right?    Hey, once I figured out the simple patterns and formulas that make this game work, I had a new problem…    Back when I eventually left my job and launched my personal business, I sold about $200,000 of product in around three months-ish…    And while I thought I was King Kong, a new problem started.    I was the business, there weren't any systems...   I was support   I was fulfillment    I was the one in charge of getting the ads around   I was the sales department    I was the marketing department    And I knew I wouldn't survive it alone…    Better yet, I knew I'd never seen a rich solopreneur.    This game takes a team.    Contrast that to now, and my company does tons of stuff that I don't know how to do...    What changed?    His name is Alex Charfen, check him out at charfenrocks.com.     So I usually don't bring tons of people on Sales Funnel Radio, but you should know that his programs, combined with my marketing skills, are why my business is killing it in revenue today, and NOT killing me personally.    Alex Charfen's programs and training have been life-changing for me and my family... and taught me who I really am and what I'm meant to be.    So when you're ready to build an actual business, an actual asset and NOT just make this another job…    When you're ready to keep the role of entrepreneur but learn the role of CEO, go get started with Alex Charfen at charfenrocks.com. That's C-H-A-R-F-E-N rocks.com.

Alex Lyon from Avask Tax Advisors works with over 2,000 eCommerce and FBA clients. Her role is to help them understand, register for, manage and comply with VAT registrations and payments. Did you know that when selling online in Europe the taxes (VAT) are included in the purchase price? Did you know if you don't increase your list price your margins shrink by the VAT amount? Did you know that if you have a UK company there is a minimum total revenue threshold amount you can reach before you have to collect VAT? Did you know the biggest mistake made by US companies is not registering for VAT, but that you can sell on Amazon prior to having the registration number? If you answered “no” to at least one of the above questions…and plan to expand to Europe, hearing Alex's explanation of the VAT process could be critical to your expansion success.   Episode Highlights: The biggest mistake Alex sees is not registering for VAT, and it is costly! You can sell before being registered, but it'll cost you if you don't increase your prices to account for VAT. You do not have to set up a foreign corporation to sell in Europe, regardless of your overseas location: i.e. US, Singapore, etc. You only collect in countries you are shipping from (there is a caveat). Amazon does not show VAT charges separately in your seller account. The PanEU program makes sense for some, most only register in the UK and Germany. If you don't pay VAT…your Amazon account will be suspended and/or closed (eventually). “Import VAT” is charged on the inventory shipped into the country and paid immediately. “Sales VAT” is charged on the retail price of your goods, and paid quarterly. The UK and Germany are the two largest markets for selling online in the EU. The UK is the easiest to expand to from the US because of language and the challenges of shipping to Germany. Wiring VAT payments can take 4-5 days and a currency account in Europe shortens the wire times. Using an intermediary bank, or currency account, can save 1-3% in exchange rate fees. With Avask, the costs to register for VAT in the UK is about $200 USD, and then about $1200 USD per year. Caveat to costs: “Distance Selling Thresholds”, if met, require more than $1200 per year because VAT is required in countries you do not store inventory in. Transcription: Mark: Good morning Joe. How are you? Joe: I'm good Mark. How are you? Mark: I'm hanging in there. I'm enjoying the weather lately and getting outdoors a little bit not working as hard but we're still recording podcasts. And you recorded one on an interesting topic and something that I think more and more people are having to face that have Amazon businesses and that's some of the tax implications going overseas. Joe: Yes. Actually, anybody who has a physical products business that wants to sell in Europe and it's on value added taxes, oh my God not exciting at all. But did you know real quickly that you know obviously here in the States you buy something and then the tax is added? When you buy something online, or in Europe, UK, Germany, France, Italy, etcetera the price is built into…I'm sorry the taxes are built into the price. So if it's 120$ the item might be 100 but the taxes are 20. And a lot of buyers that ex…by sellers that expand overseas don't quite understand that concept initially and they could immediately start losing margin by not increasing the prices for the value added taxes. A great conversation it was with Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors they have over 2,000 FBA clients and e-commerce clients throughout the world that sell and need value added tax compliance so really informative stuff. And anybody that's considering expanding overseas should absolutely listen to this because it's not that complicated once you listen to what she says. Mark: What are the consequences if somebody is not taking care of the value added tax? Do you know by any chance? Joe: Yeah absolutely. So they're very-very compliant over there. It's not gray like it is here in the States, its black and white. So the problem is that if you sell in let's say the UK and you're not registered, you're going to be determined. Amazon has to share the information with I think it's the HMRC. They have to by law; they share the details of everybody that sells on Amazon. So the HMRC has access to your sales information and therefore can force you to pay the value added taxes that you should have collected. If you didn't collect it you're going to pay for that out of your pocket simple as that. So you've got two choices: pay for it out of your pocket and lose that 15 to 20% margin and probably make no money at all or walk away and be banned from selling in in Europe on Amazon. Mark: That's significant. I think moving across the ocean to selling in different countries is a huge opportunity for anyone. Buying an e-commerce business that wants to ship overseas that you need to start taking advantage of that opportunity but you also have to go through some of the understanding of what sort of regulations are in play. I think this you know isn't…this is not exactly an exciting topic but you know and I think it's a really important topic for anyone to listen to, to possibly unlock an opportunity that your competitors are not taking advantage of. Joe: Yeah and before we say let's jump into it let me just say this that I've seen explosive growth with people moving and expanding their products to the EEO, explosive growth in particular France. I mean the UK and Germany. And the cost associated with it using someone like AVASK and they're not the only ones who do it, it's not all that expensive. You're looking at maybe 1500 $ to get the ball rolling and get it done right. And you can you can start selling immediately as long as you're registering and then you pay from the date you started selling. It's really not that complicated. There's a lot to it but it's really-really important that if you're going to sell overseas which I think everybody should if they have real growth plans that they listen to the whole podcast. Mark: All right with that I will say let's jump into it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got to Alex Lyon from AVASK Tax Advisors with me. She's an expert on VAT which I believe is value added tax. Something a lot of folks trying to expand their e-commerce businesses over to the UK and beyond really need some help on. So Alex welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Alex: Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Hi everyone. Yeah as Joe has mentioned my name is Alex. I am Indirect Tax Client Manager of AVASK. So I've been working here for three years now just helping e-commerce sellers expand over into Europe. So we've got over 2,000 Amazon sellers that we work with. UK companies also companies based all over the world as well. So yeah that's been us. Joe: That's fantastic. Are they all FBA clients (Fulfilled By Amazon) or do they you know sell off FBA as well (off Amazon) with their own e-commerce businesses? Alex: It varies so a high majority of people are FBA sellers just because it's a lot easier to hand everything over to Amazon and kind of let them do fulfillment. But there are quite a large number of Amazon Sellers as well such as shipment from your own country which obviously makes a lot of things easier in terms of the VAT because you don't have to actually declare the sales in Europe because you're not fulfilling from his countries. So yeah it's kind of a majority FBA but we do have MFM sellers as well. Joe: Okay, good. Good. Good. So let's talk about the basics, get things straight here for our listeners because a lot of people here in the states are expanding their Amazon.com accounts beyond Amazon into the European countries and seeing explosive growth. But the big mystery is how to set up the VAT's and how to find an agency like yours to handle it most of the costs associated with it are. So you can start am I getting it right is it Value Added Tax and tell us how it works? Alex: Correct. Yes, it's value added tax. It's the same principle across the European countries but they have different rights and different filing frequencies. The easiest way to explain it would be that it's similar to the sales tax you have in the US. But the main difference would be the way which you include it within the price of your product. So this is kind of the biggest hurdle where people fall over on where they don't actually include the VAT amount within the price of the product which means that you're not actually collecting the VAT from your customer but you still have to pay it to the revenue. So you're essentially paying it out from your pocket if you don't include it. So in the US for someone like myself when I come over I don't realize it works like this when I go to the checkout in sell sites because I didn't know and I'm kind of how…where is this amount coming from. Whereas in the UK you don't know that it's already there in the price of the product so yes its essentially the same as the sales tax but it's more hidden. Joe: So Amazon is collecting that 20% for units built into the purchase price of the product. So if it's 100 $ if the VAT is 20% for instance, 20% is something set aside to pay your VAT…your taxes? Alex: Yes. Joe: Okay. Alex: So you need to list in on Amazon for the straight 120. Amazon won't do that for you. Joe: Okay and do a lot of people make that mistake where they just list their business without bumping it for the value added tax? Alex: Yeah there's a large number of that do. Without getting kind of proper advice on how VAT actually works. So it is…see it's hard enough to in taxes in your own country let alone I'm kind of working out how to do it in a foreign country. So yeah that's a big hurdle where quite a lot of people fall over on. Joe: Okay. So you're located in the UK. AVASK is located in the UK. But I think I saw offices around in different parts of the world, is that right? Alex: Yes that's right. So we've got an office in London and I'm on based on in Winchester which is about an hour south of London. And then we've also got offices in Shenzhen and LA. We try to come over to the US as much as possible as well just because oversea it's kind of US sellers that we've [inaudible 00:08:19.0] work with. So yeah we try and get over to the events as much as possible as well and get that travelling. Joe: So the vast majority of clients as you said are US based clients and they start selling and Amazon.com and then expanded to the European countries? Alex: Yeah, definitely. Amazon is oversea, it's huge in America and it's just kind of been taking off here in Europe as well. So it's a massive market in Europe and I think if you're product is successful and you've been able to make it successive there in the US then there's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't also be able to do in Europe. Joe: Okay. So let's say I own an Amazon.com account, I want to reach out to you what…and I want to sell in the European countries, step one two three can you walk us through that? Alex: Yup sure. So step one is to work out where you're going to be shipping your products from. So most people go with the UK or Germany just because they're the biggest markets, UK is obviously a lot easier because you don't have to translate any of your products. So whichever country you decide you're going to fulfill from you then have to get a VAT number in that country and also an EORI number for all of your shipments. So those two numbers you have to have those before you make a shipment. If you make a shipment without those numbers you're going to get charged import VAT and then you won't necessarily be able to reclaim that back whereas you would if you have the numbers. So that's very important. In terms of the registration process, engaging a UK agent is really helpful because you've got someone who can communicate with tax authorities on your behalf. And that also means that we know exactly what documents are needed for each of the registration. We'll process all of that for you. Once the application has been submitted and you're waiting for the numbers to come through at that point you should start getting your listings up. Working out some shipping quotes and kind of working out all the details on actually how you're going to get your product there and what the listings are going to look like. Joe: Okay. And I just had a conversation with someone that is buying an Amazon business and they were confused about when the VAT was going to be applied. Is it to the amount of products being shipped into the country or is it the amount that's sold? Alex: It's both. So if you're doing FBA you're making a box shipment to an Amazon warehouse. That box shipment you're going to have to declare at customs. So any shipment that's out into a warehouse is going to have import VAT at UK customs charged on it that's assuming of course that your shipment has come from outside of Europe, so most people ship from China or from the US. So import VAT is going to be charged on the cost of your goods. When you put together a commercial invoice of that shipment, that's the amount of the import fees then we charge on also with freight charges and things. Joe: And then what time do they pay that import VAT, when it arrives? Alex: Yeah correct so usually depending on what shipping company you'll go for usually they'll pay it for you and invoice it back to you. But they still have to do your kind of clearance number to create a shipment. Joe: And then do they have to…then they collect that VAT when it sells and they keep it or is it a different…are we talking about two different things? The import VAT versus the VAT that's charged to the customer on the Amazon account is that two different things or it's the same? Alex: It's the same tax but it's computed in different ways. So import VAT is non-cost whereas VAT on your sales is on the retail price of your goods. And they're also kind of declared differently so with the VAT when you [inaudible 00:11:35.18] you pay that in your VAT within each quarter. You don't pay that immediately when you make the sale. Whereas the import VAT, you pay it immediately at customs. And the way that those kind of…they tie in together although they're separately you…it's within your VAT return. So you do your VAT filing every quarter. So every three months you declare the amount of sales you made and then obviously you're declaring the VAT that's due on your sales and then any import VAT that you pay you can get that refunded and it's used as a credit within your VAT return. Joe: And how easy is it within the Amazon seller account to see that money that you've collected and have it match up against what you're going to owe? Or is it not as black and white as I think it would be or is it really relatively easy? Alex: It's gotten a lot better, to be honest. And so Amazon have got a specific VAT report that you can now download so you can see the breakdown. But in terms of the actual…when your customer purchases an item they won't be able to see the breakdown of VAT and the amount that's going to the amount that's going to the revenue. Another kind of stumbling block where a few Amazon sellers fall over where they don't get the kind of proper…do the proper research before is that's that although Amazon take their fees from the money you receive in terms of your sales, the VAT is [inaudible 00:12:49.6] on the total sales price. You can't deduct Amazon fees and then the amount that you actually receive from Amazon is what you pay VAT on it's the total amount that you're costumer is paying you pay VAT on. Joe: Why is there any calculation at all that the seller does? Doesn't Amazon calculate it for you it seems like they would since they know the exact sales? Alex: Yes so, unfortunately, it doesn't work like that. You have to include it. You have to price your product you have to do your pricing matrix. If you're expecting to move due your pricing and then Amazon add the VAT on it…that's not going to happen. You have to make sure you're including them. Joe: Well then I was thinking in terms of Amazon that in your pricing you would say this is my price and then this is my VAT amount it's not done that way you just simply mark it up to 120$ if it's a 100$ item. Alex: Yeah, exactly. Mark out straight away. And you can tell Amazon with the VAT calculation service you can let them know if you've got any kind of reduce rated or zero rated items which will reflect on the actual sales report. But it's not going to affect what your actual retail price is on Amazon and what it's listed as. Joe: Okay. Let's talk about volume. Here in the States, there's a lot of question about when should I start collecting sales taxes and [inaudible 00:13:58.6] and all these different [inaudible 00:13:59.8] unfortunately not black and white yet. It's still very-very gray. I had a situation where I listed a business for sale and asked about collecting VAT and he said well I'm not…I haven't hit that threshold yet in the UK. And I think it was a UK corporation as well, can you talk about thresholds and when and if you have to collect. In different [inaudible 00:14:21.4] what if you're a UK corporation or a Hong Kong Corporation if you're someone at the LOC or corporation here in the States? Alex: Okay, so if you have a company that's incorporated anywhere apart from the UK then you have to register for VAT immediately so that's sale number one whether it's going to have 1$, 10$, or 100$ it's straight away so no threshold whatsoever, you have to be registered. If however, you have a UK company there's a threshold of 85,000 Pounds and that's in terms of a turnover over a 12 month loaning period. So if you hit that within three months you have to be registered if you hit that in 11 months you have to be registered but that's just for a UK company. So if you've got an overseas entity you have to register straight to it there's no threshold. Joe: As far as buyers go, when you and I talked about this and have conversations with buyers when they buy an Amazon account that has a European component to it there's always questions about TMI not going to be collecting during a certain period of time, how do we sign up, how do we get that registered, what kind of danger I'm going to be in. I think you said the other day in a call separately in preparation for this that you can start pricing your products right away while you register and you're not going to…you're not going to lose any grounds or sales while you're registering and then paying VAT down the road a bit. Can you talk about that again a little bit so that…and talk about it from a buyer for perspective. If say someone is buying an Amazon account and taking it over and would reach out to you to register how do they ensure that they're collecting from day one of ownership and that they're not going to…not get themselves in a little bit of trouble? Alex: Well, first of all, I want to make sure, well check whether the Amazon account has already previously been charging VAT. So what we've discussed in terms of the pricing, obviously if you're taking over an Amazon account you're buying that account. And if they haven't been including VAT in the prices, you obviously then need to…the first kind of goal is to straight away go ahead and increase everything by that 20%. Joe: Let me just jump in here for a sec. So that's a consideration when someone…this is for the buyers that are listening, correct me here Alex if I'm wrong but when someone's buying an account and the owner has UK corporation, if they're below that annual threshold of 85,000 Pounds in revenue they're not charging VAT. But if I buy it and I'm not a UK corporation I immediately have to increase the prices in order to collect VAT or leave it alone and I'm going to lose 20% of my sales to the VAT. Is that correct? Alex: That's correct. Yes, so you because you're an overseas company you have to charge VAT on your sales even though they haven't been charged previously. Joe: Okay really critical for buyers to understand that when it's a UK corporation. Okay sorry to interrupt please continue. Alex: Okay so once you have then kind of taken over the company you can actually back date a registration. So say I'm talking over…I'm buying an Amazon account under my US company from a UK company we'll stick to that example. From the 1st of May you know going through the whole process it's taken a couple weeks to actually get everything set up. When if it got to the 1st of June and you still hadn't registered you can then back date that to the 1st of May. So as soon as you know that you're going to be buying the Amazon Seller Central, I would make sure that you're charging VAT to your customers because although you may not be registered you can backdate the registration. And it means that you have to pay VAT in all sales you make previous even though at that actual moment in time you weren't registered but you're back dating registration. Joe: Okay just to summarize. Don't change a thing in terms of prices assuming it's a…let's go with back to the it's a non UK entity so that they're a US entity buying a US entity but they have a UK account to it. If they're charging 120$ now and they're collecting VAT you don't have to change prices at all. Alex: Correct. Joe: You're going to register with a firm like yours and then when it's time to pay for the first time you're already collecting those and you'll go back dating and calculate what's due. Alex: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Joe: And how often do you pay? I think you said was it quarterly? Alex: Yes quarterly so every three months yeah. Joe: And is it the same every three months? Is it the beginning of the 15th of the next quarter is when you have to pay the taxes or is it depends upon when you register? Alex: So you got one month and seven days to actually do the filing and make the payment. As you can fall into different stagger groups in VAT quarters so it's not necessarily you are January to March you can be February to April or March to May. So there's three kind of different groups of VAT filings you could fall into. Your VAT advisor should obviously let you know and would be contacting you when everything's due. In terms of the frequency yeah it is quarterly. Joe: Listen, Alex, as you can see I'm an old guy, got some gray hair here. I fell asleep in accounting class in college. I honest to God I did fell asleep, the next class came in and I think I've told the story again so I won't go to much detail. I don't like this stuff. I don't like this level of detail because of what I do for a living it's absolutely critical as an entrepreneur and know how important it is. Do I have to really…if I'm the guy that's buying an FBA business and it's got European components to it, how much do I have to really know or can I just rely on you guys to do the work for me? Alex: You can definitely rely on us to kind of advice you and let you know. But it is…I do think it's good to know kind of the basics of what you're doing. In terms of Amazon, you've got two different programs so European Fulfillment Network or Pan-European Program. Pan-European Program is great you get to move your stock around to seven different countries [inaudible 00:20:03.1] you're stock is close that your costumers time are positive reasons to do that. But if you just kind of turn that on on your Amazon Seller Central and you'd haven't done any prior research, you won't know that you then actually have to get [inaudible 00:20:17.6] registered in seven countries. You have to do filings maybe month in more than half of these countries. So everything that you do in terms of where your stock is located, where your sales are going will have an impact on your VAT registration, your VAT applications within Europe. So yes it's good you should have [inaudible 00:20:36.6] in there. We'd let you know but don't be completely ignorant to what you're doing and where your stock is going. Joe: Hey it sounds like you just touched on being able to shift from seven different countries in a penny you…there's a lot of potential savings in terms of the shipping costs and fulfillment costs that you're closer to the customer. But you talked earlier I think that if you've got your inventory in the UK or Germany in the two biggest centers that you register for VAT in those countries what if your inventory is spread around seven different countries so you're closer to the customers do you then have to register in all of those countries? Alex: You do. Yeah, as soon as your stock is in that country and you can sell in from there you have to be VAT registered in that country. So VAT is basically payable to the country and is being done close at supply. So if your stock is in a Czech Republic warehouse the place of supply VAT sale when it's going from the Czech Republic to the customer in Italy is going to be in Czech Republic. So being VAT registered in the UK is completely useless. Joe: Okay. Alex: So yeah- Joe: Very much like nexus here in the States if there's 15 Amazon centers theory is that if you have 15 different locations of inventory you have nexus in those states and that's where you collect sales taxes. Not as formal as where you are. Tell us about the biggest hurdles and biggest mistakes that you've seen people make…well that you have in been bringing people to the European countries and selling an FBA. What things are really obvious? What mistakes are really common that people can avoid? Alex: So first one is to not get registered at all. So with that threshold, quite a few people get confused that the 85,000 threshold is applicable to them; sounds really appealing and really lovely so they just don't register full stop. And then when you do get registered you just do it from today's date because [inaudible 00:22:27.3] realize but now I know that I'm going to do it from today. There's a huge amount of compliant checks going on with the revenue in the UK. They are hurdling through every single Amazon account and doing tax investigations. You know we've had to help clients where we're going all the way back to 2012 when the legislation came in that they have to register. So that's kind of six years of taxes you're going to have to go back and pay and if you don't your Amazon can get shut down. So the first kind of hurdle is actually getting registered. It's kind of what you'd think is the most simplest part just to do the application. Joe: Six years of VAT taxes you've had people in that situation? Alex: Yeah. Joe: I would think that in some situations people will just throw their hands up in the air, close the account, and walk away, and not pay the taxes. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Is that something where if you're a US resident where you're going to be found and have to pay those taxes in some way shape or form? Alex: Well you spent a nice six years building up your Amazon account. You've got all of your reviews you know you've built up that kind of brand in the UK so to kind of just throw your hands up and walk away is a big thing to do in the first place. Because even if you opened up a new Amazon account you're not going to have all of those reviews and obviously the name of you as a director of that company when you do a VAT application in the UK you have to state that information and you have to kind of give all of those details of yourself anyway and yeah so you'll have- Joe: So if you're going to walk away there walk in away forever. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Unless they cheat and get around the system somewhere. Alex: Exactly and unfortunately like in the US…so as not like in the US there's now amnesty in the UK so if you think that you're going to be negotiating and kind of say that oh I'll make sure to pay everything going forward so I'll pay a percentage you wouldn't get that and you also have to pay mass penalty as well so it do not kind of sound all that great if you haven't done the right thing to start with. Joe: Okay. So I've talked to a lot of Amazon sellers. I've seen their financials. Some people tell me you know I've done the analysis Joe and it's just not worth the effort for me to sell in Germany and Italy in France and in the UK. It's just not worth it. And I think they're completely and utterly wrong because I've seen the explosive growth. You've got 2,000 FBA clients. What country are you seeing people get the most bang for their buck? What's growing rapidly over there and what country should they pay attention to the most? Alex: UK and Germany definitely. They're just the two biggest markets. France is…does follow very closely but yeah 100% they're the biggest. Joe: Okay. And the easiest of those two might be the UK because you don't have to do translation? Alex: Yeah, exactly. And I'm shipping direct into the UK is a lot easier than it is shipping to Germany. Joe: Okay. Okay. There are a lot of concerns about money laundering. I've heard people talk about this and how complicated it is and on the German side and German FBA accounts. Am I just hearing people with sort of the chicken little mentality that the sky is falling and being really paranoid or is there something to that? Alex: I think sales in Germany in terms of my money laundering and everything is all going through Amazon. So amazon are collecting the funds and sending it to you. You don't need for some representation in Germany so payments go directly to the tax authorities whereas in France you've got to pay to your French advisor and then it goes to the tax authorities so yeah I'm not sure of what grounds. Joe: Do you even know who Chicken Little is or what that theory…okay, I see you just- Alex: No sorry. Joe: Okay. It's a cartoon character here in the States disguised- Alex: Okay [crosstalk 00:25:55.9] Joe: I used that terminology when there's so many people online talking about all the horrible things that can happen when you're own an Amazon seller account as opposed to the reality of how many great things are happening and it's changing people's lives. Alex: I think that's like when you go to a restaurant or you go anywhere, you're more likely to leave a bad review if you've had a bad experience whereas if you've had agood review you probably leave any review at all. I do notice that happen. Joe: A hundred percent, you're absolutely right. One of the things that I see often and I know you guys are AVASK tax advisor so I want to talk about that advisory part and the tax part. But one of the things that I see happen is that sometimes when sellers expand overseas they just take the easy route and they'd let Amazon handle making deposits directly to their US bank account. Whereas other people that take a little bit of time, do some research, still use World's First Bank or somebody else to be that intermediary and the money will go there at a lower exchange rate saving them tens in…tens of thousands of dollars annually. Do you find that to be the case, do you would advise folks to do that and if so what world banks do you suggest they use or look at or is that a service that you provide as well? Alex: Yeah, definitely. So if you kind of first of all from a VAT paying perspective there's…most people have to pay via wire transfer. And if you're getting kind of close to the payment deadline it can take for to five working days for that payment to clear with HMRC. They then if any payment is received late they will give you a surcharge with subtentiative liability and that can go up to 15 cents. So if you've got a currency account located here in Europe the time that it takes for the funds to actually clear and consider the payment to be made is a lot quicker. So that is a big benefit of getting a bank account over here even just a currency account. Joe: Can you define what a currency account is and how it differentiates from a bank account, please? Alex: So it has kind of all the benefits of a bank account and they're very similar but I don't think I mean don't 100% take my word for this. Obviously, it's better to speak to a currency account provider. But you can't hold large amounts of funds in that account. It's kind of like an intermediary way. You're basically doing a transfer and a transfer to your local account. You can't also do things like direct debits and buy out checks and things like that. Joe: Okay. And as I understand it just for people listening that currency account I think Amazon, for instance, may charge you if you are a…may charge you 4% currency exchange. Whereas the currency account you may only be charged 2%. And so you might be…and these are ballpark numbers so you're saving 2% on whatever amount of money is flowing through that. And if it's a million dollars, you do the math on that. If it's 10,000 $ you do the math on that. So I see a lot of people do that as well. That's what a currency account is right? Alex: Yeah. And especially with kind of making payments in Europe in terms of VAT you're going to be transferring your money from Amazon to the US and then back so the UK again so you're kind of transferring it a couple of times and to make that payment. So if you want to incorporate a UK company [inaudible 00:29:08.3] you could have get an actual high street UK bank account which is obviously a benefit of that UK company. You could just kind of grow the funds and leave it in a high street bank account in UK. Joe: Well, let's talk about that for a minute. Maybe I should have asked this at the very beginning and listeners I apologize because this is a question I get offset. You know I'm expanding to the UK, I'm expanding to Germany do I have to set up a UK business with a UK address or German company? Do I have to set those up or can I simply be a US based company selling products overseas? Can you explain, you've got 2,000 clients what are they doing? What do you recommend? Alex: You do not have to incorporate a UK company. It's the majority of people use their overseas company just because it is a lot easier and has less administration in terms of the accounts that you are drawing up each year. It's all just falling onto one company. You've got your CPA in the US. He's doing everything for you. You don't have to hire a CPA equivalent in the UK so ask accountants to do your [inaudible 00:30:03.9] paying your kind of all those tax due filings. In terms of what's actually best is really hard for me to say because it is on a case by case basis. It's you know do you want to build a brand, do you want a UK bank account, do you want to take advantage of the VAT threshold, there's so many factors. It's not one, it's one size fits all, unfortunately. Joe: Okay but the simple answer is for anybody listening if you're US based with a US bank account a US corporation, you do not have to set up a European company a UK company or in Germany that's misinformation. You don't have to do that. You can register for VAT and start collecting and paying and still have your one CPA here in the US. Is that correct? Alex: Yes. Joe: Good. Of your 2,000 plus or minus clients, what are their sizes? I mean you have you got people that are doing you know a million, two million dollars a month in revenue and those that are just doing five or 10,000 $ a month? How does it range and how does it flash out [inaudible 00:31:01.5] so we just know more about you guys. Alex: Yeah, exactly that range I don't [inaudible 00:31:05.4] information but- Joe: Maybe I should have said a half a million a month. Alex: Yeah there's a huge range there is. And that's for the UK companies and also overseas companies. You know we've got a lot of Chinese clients as well. We've got kind of a whole Chinese department [inaudible 00:31:20.6]. So yeah the range is massive. We can help you whatever size. Joe: Okay. Let's say that I'm doing a quarter of a million dollars a month here in the States and I decide I want to expand overseas and I'm going to start with UK and Germany. Aside from my inventory costs and getting the product there, what are my costs for someone like you in setting up VAT and getting registered and compliant and all that stuff? Alex: Well it depends which country you're going for. If it's just one if it's selling- Joe: Say I'm gonna start with two. I'm going to start with the UK, actually I'm just gonna go with one. Let's go with UK. Alex: Okay 150 Pound registration one up fee and then 870 Pounds a year annual compliance and that doesn't depend on turnover. So whatever your turnover is it's the same. Joe: That's pretty cheap, if I'm doing a quarter million a month, 150 Euros a couple of hundred bucks tops and then maybe a thousand US dollars a year simple as that. Who calculates what my VAT is owed each month? Is it me and my CPA or is that part of your 870 5,000- Alex: Yeah we do that. We calculate everything. And you can give us limited access to your seller central we'll go in and download all the reports directly. You don't have to be a part of that process. Your sole responsibility is to make the payment. Joe: Can I just have you make the payment for me if you have access to funds or you just tell me what to pay and I pay it? Alex: No we don't do that. We will tell you what to pay and then you have to make the payment yeah. Joe: This is…okay I'm a little [inaudible 00:32:47.2] I haven't talked to anybody about pricing but to me, this is so incredibly fair and reasonable. Are you guys…is this the standard fees? I mean this is normal cost or you're really expensive or really cheap? What's the situation? Alex: I think that's about average. We pride ourselves over the service that we give kind of in comparison to the actual fees to other providers and things. We don't get too hung up on what the actual charges are in terms of that. What I would say though, I don't want to be [inaudible 00:33:16.2] in terms of that 870. Because if your turnover was in the millions you will be breaching distance selling thresholds to all of the European countries. Joe: You'll be what? Say that again. Alex: Breaching distance selling thresholds, we haven't spoken about that so- Joe: Distance selling threshold. Alex: We'll go into that really quickly. So if you've got all of your stock in a UK company…country sorry company the UK country, UK warehouse and is going to customers in Germany. So UK from a warehouse going to a customer in Germany, if their sales go over a certain threshold to Germany you then have to register to VAT in Germany even though you're not fulfilling from that country. Joe: Okay. Alex: Makes sense? Joe: Yeah, all right. This is the part where Joe doesn't love this level of detail but thank you for that. Alex: It's just that I don't want to be misleading in terms of 870 Pounds you know whatever your turnover is because that's all UK fee. If your turnover is massive you will have an obligation to register in other countries as well. Joe: And if the turnover is massive to probably going to be shipping from those countries to save that fulfillment cost anyway. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Joe: And that's something that they would do the math on and you guys may help them with. Alex: Yeah. Joe: Okay we're running out of time. We're about 30 minutes in which is actually a bit long but this is a fascinating subject, a critical one, and I'm sure some people just they fell asleep because it's also not their favorite which is a shame. Because the number one thing people can do to make their business more valuable is get the books right. Get the details like this absolutely correct. It's going to help with the transition of the business as well as well as the value. Alex thank you so much. Any last thoughts that you can share with people listening? Whether they're buying and selling in terms of what they should do and how they should do it other than just do it and do it right. Alex: I honestly I would just say to speak to someone you know we do free consultations [inaudible 00:35:07.0] if you just give us a call then we can just run through everything with you. There's you know all though we've covered a lot in half an hour it's a lot of information, there are still some things that haven't been mentioned so yeah I would just speak so when I mention we've got all the information for before you completely just jump start in. Joe: Okay. Well, we'll make sure that all of your contact information is in the show notes. Alex: All right. Joe: But for those listening that can't see them there it's AVASK tax advisors that's A-V-A-S-K tax advisors and they do free consultations. I think it's really important as a buyer or seller if you're planning on selling over in the UK. Alex thanks so much for your time today I really appreciate it. Alex: Okay thanks. Thanks, everyone. Links: Alexandra Lyon Indirect Tax Client Manager Skype: alex.avask Email: alex@avaskgroup.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.0537 https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandragrant4/ https://www.avaskaccounting.co.uk/   James Shayler International VAT Technical Officer Skype: james.shayler16 Email: james@avasktax.com T: +1.213.330.4904; +1.213.256.053

Join QuantumDigital’s CMO Eric Cosway as he interviews Alex Bruno, owner of RE/MAX 5-Star Realty in Florida. Alex is a top producer who also works with banks, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Alex is HUD-certified, and has a strong network of home buyers and investors.   Eric: Alex, welcome to the podcast.   Alex: Hello. How are you doing?   Eric: So, it sounds like RE/MAX 5-Star has been around since 2016. What led you to want to start the business, or create a franchise for yourself?   Alex: Actually, over the years, I thought it was important based on the experience that I got in real estate. I wanted to have an office with a little bit of a different perspective, and being a buyer’s and listing agent for many years, I understand how difficult it is to be an agent. I wanted to facilitate the tools and the support for the agents the way that I would like to have it myself. I wanted to be able to answer their questions, and at the same time provide the tools that they need. I didn’t want to be the office that was open for 30-40 years. Things change over the years. The real estate market changed. The real estate agent’s needs changed. The buyers changed. Everything is completely different. And more and more the market keeps changing every year. We need to make adjustments constantly.   Eric: Is your primary focus on buyers in Hollywood, Florida? Or do you do both buyers and sellers?   Alex: I work with buyers and sellers, and I work on South Florida, not just only on Hollywood. From Miami Beach to Pompano Beach, we are open to working with different cities.   Eric: Was that area impacted by the hurricane this past summer? Last couple of months?   Alex: Absolutely. Yes. And we’re still seeing the damages around.   Eric: How did that impact you? You’re right there in the center of it. You have a staff. Not only were you affected, but I’m sure the business was impacted as well.   Alex: First of all, it’s something that is out of our control. We need to take it the way it is, and try to make the best of it. So, we need to just continue life because it was definitely a huge impact for real estate, and also properties they were supposed to close. They have to be re-inspected again, and appraised again. Some of the sales fall apart, but we need to continue. When the market crashed in 2007, life continued. And you have to keep going. And there were always buyers. We were a little spoiled, some of the agent. Deals were so easy, then they were no longer that easy. We need to work harder. But everything is possible, and we need to adapt to the times.   Eric: You came into the real estate business in 2007. How was that first year for you as a Realtor?   Alex: It was a little sad. A lot of people were very depressed. It was like the end of the world. It was a commotion—many people taking time off, going away. Other ones struggling to figure out how to react to these major changes. And I personally think it was easier for me because I was not that spoiled. I was new. So, I figured out there are always buyers. People are going to keep buying homes and selling homes. This is not the end of the world. Maybe the end of a good market, but there were always FHA buyers. Much better buyers than before. Real buyers that can afford these houses. Because, after the market crashed, lenders were more conscious about the capability of a buyer to purchase a home. You keep going, and you have to adapt to the situation.   Eric: Is there something specific about a buyer that you’ve learned—the one or two things a buyer always needs that you just know what to do, and just handle a buyer so they’re fully happy and satisfied with all the work you do?   Alex: One of the most important is to listen to them, and try to build in your mind and try to understand what the needs are for they buyer. Try to put time into that buyer to show them that you want to work with them. Because it’s a very competitive market. Here in Florida, a lot of people have real estate licenses. So, everybody knows a friend, or a neighbor, or a coworker that has a real estate license. But, not everyone is dedicated to this career. A lot of people think it’s easy, but it’s not that easy. What you need to do is just listen to the buyer, and try to work on what they are asking. And be available. That is one of the most important things; build a criteria for the buyer, and try to work on finding what they are looking for.   Eric: I read your customer reviews, and I have to tell you, they’re excellent. Here are the common terms when people talked about you. They said you were responsive. Always calls back. Knowledgeable. Trustworthy. Honest. Knows the area extremely well. Is available 24/7. So, does that surprise you, or is that just who you are—your DNA?   Alex: It’s who I try to be all the time for my clients. I think it’s important for all these points to be met—to have a happy client, and to eventually get more referrals and more business. To be dedicated for this job.   Eric: Tell me about the dedication in this job. You have a team of 8 people, is that correct?   Alex: Approximately, yes. With the photographers, yeah.   Eric: Are you active 7 days a week being a team lead, or can you now delegate some of those responsibilities off?   Alex: I delegate, but as a team leader you have to keep pushing to make sure that you keep the standards.   Eric: WHen it’s really tough, what do you tell your team? How do you motivate your team to keep moving?   Alex: There are many sources, and some of the sources we learn from the old school. You have to go back to what used to work before, in order to add what works now. In order to get buyer’s and seller’s business—even in the tough times—you have to do a hundred things. It’s not like one thing is going to give you the business. If you have multiple options, most likely you’re going to have better results. Prospectings, For Sale By Owners, campaigns, expired campaigns… those are the old school. Open Houses—a lot of people don’t believe in open houses. Some people don’t believe in broker’s Open Houses. You have to try everything. And believe me you have more chances, you’re going to succeed with better results.   Eric: Sounds like technology has impacted your business. Has it made things easier for you? Has it given better exposure to your buyers and sellers? How do you leverage technology as a broker?   Alex: Technology makes smarter buyers. The buyers know how to look. And it makes it more risky for the agents, because you get a chance of losing a buyer going directly with a listing agent, or going a different route with another agent. The information is more available. You just Google the address, and you can get all the information regarding that property. It definitely helps us also to be able to locate a property the buyer is asking for immediately through our phones. But at the same time, we need to keep the quality of the work going, to keep that buyer, being more proactive about finding what they’re looking for. Because they buyer will be looking for those properties, too. So, you’re working with a buyer… a smarter buyer.   Eric: Now that there’s so much content available to buyers to be smart buyers, has that forced your game and your agents games up to be even more on top of the market than you might normally be?   Alex: I don’t think so. It’s just that we need to adapt to the changes and grow with the changes.   Eric: Are you a team that adopts new technology? Or are you a tad more service, belly-to-belly, a little more old fashioned in the way you approach your buyers and sellers?   Alex: It’s a bunch of things together, and we have to keep moving forward with technology, and adopting new trends, new programs, new marketing—different types of marketing that probably didn’t exist 10 years ago—and try to be creative for your business. That way, you can stand in the market as an agent.   Eric: You mentioned your referrals. Is that mainly how you drive business today?   Alex: Referrals are very important. And also, if you work for an international company, your exposure is even more. But referrals is one of the things that really helps your business. It’s on the top of the list, definitely.   Eric: There are obviously some benefits being a franchise, but in your market what are the big 2 or 3 benefits of having that RE/MAX brand behind you?   Alex: When I was exploring the possibility of buying a franchise, I met with multiple companies. And the RE/MAX platform was clean and easy for the agent. And at the same time—one of the most important things for me, especially referrals—is seeing how big it is. In 100 countries, plus. And have 110,000 agents around the world. That makes you feel safe. It’s a company that keeps growing, that gives you the tools to be successful. And that is exactly what I was looking for. I was not looking about quantity of agents per square feet. Everybody has different perspectives of somebody who opens a franchise. I think that those were very important points to make a decision to continue being part of RE/MAX.   Eric: Let’s change course a little bit. You have a background in interior design. You’re from Uruguay. Tell us about how interior design informs you, or helps you in your career in real estate.   Alex: I didn’t finish the career on interior design, so I didn’t get a license for it. But, it definitely helped me to help sellers, or give them advice on how to present the home to be sold faster, for more money. Seeing, from a different perspective, the home from the buyer’s side, and being able to tell just the sellers what they should do to accomplish that.   Eric: It sounds like a really complementary skill to what you’re doing day to day.   Alex: Honestly, I love my job. And I definitely put my heart on every transaction. It doesn’t matter how much the sales price is. Every transaction means a lot for me. The important thing is to make it happen, and have a good presentation, a good description of the property. You need to put a little bit of your heart on every property that you list. Going the extra mile for the client.   Eric: Well, you’re definitely passionate about your career. What would be the other things you’re passionate about?   Alex: My family, honestly. It’s the most important thing in my life. And also my country—even though I was born in Uruguay—I have the American dream, and I love this country. I’m proud of being an American citizen. And my career.   Eric: Alex, what a pleasure speaking with you today. I know being a team lead, and being a broker with all the responsibilities, your time is very limited so it’s precious. I want to to thank you for your time. I hope you found it informative. We certainly did.   Alex: Absolutely. And I want to help other agents who don’t see the light sometimes of this business. And a lot of people who feel limited, because maybe they are foreign people, or they feel different… this is a job where you can can shine. And not because you’re pretty, or you drive a nice car. You can shine for talent.   Eric: Congratulations! You’ve done a very nice job. Alex: Thank you!

Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: Charles and Alex Matchneer have a great discussion that centers around routing in Ember.js: what they want to see in a router, what problems it solves, what's wrong with the routing solutions we currently have, and what the ideal future looks like in respect to routing. Resources: Episode 067: ember-concurrency with Alex Matchneer Cordova ember-rideshare react-router Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #86. My name is Charles Lowell, your developer here at the Frontside and podcast host-in-training. I'm flying solo today. It's been a while but that's okay because I've got a really fantastic guest on. Actually, we debated this at the beginning of the show, whether this was the third or the fourth time he's actually been on but no times are too many so hello, Alex Matchneer. Welcome back to the podcast. ALEX: Thank you. It's great to be back. CHARLES: You're still at the same place that you were the last time. ALEX: Yeah. Still working at FutureProof Retail. I'm still working on bunch of mobile ember-cordova apps and that's definitely occupying on my time. CHARLES: Nice. Because FutureProof Retail has a large hardware component and we were doing a series on IoT, we were originally going to have you on the show to actually talk about that experience of what it's like to be a part of a startup and develop software that's going to be running on a bunch of devices and the unique set of problems that poses. But in the pre-show, we decided to scrap that because there's actually a topic that we're both very interested in and you've been heavily involved in lately and might be a really interesting preview as to what's coming in the Ember community and at large. Today we're actually going to go back to talking about the same subject that we talked about in our first podcast, which is routing: what we want to see in a router, what problems does it solve, what's wrong with the routing solutions that we have today. Talk about what that beautiful, ideal future that we want to live in looks like with respect to routing. You've been thinking about this a lot lately. What have you been thinking? ALEX: I'm an Ember core team emeritus and back when I was on it and I'm a lot more active, I did a lot of work on the router, particularly with how it handles asynchronously loading data when you click on links and go to different sections of your app. I spend a lot of time over the last three or four years figuring out the nice patterns for what you actually want to use if you're building out lots of Ember apps. Then kind of around that time, right after landing some cool stuff and some not cool such us query params, which has been a challenging aspect, I start working at this company FutureProof Retail that is like 90% of the Ember work that I do there is in mobile apps. We use Cordova so we're basically running these apps inside a web view, inside either iOS or Android so that we can stay with the technologies we are most familiar with, such as JavaScript and CSS and HTML and build apps using that. We can use Ember to do that. What I found was that I couldn't really apply a lot of the same patterns, all these nice conventions that Ember router gives you. I couldn't really find a way to map that onto what I need to build in mobile apps and there's a few different reasons. I got really busy with the startup, just trying to build these things and kind of went off the happy path where I really just couldn't find a way to make it look like an Ember app. One of the nice things about the whole points of convention over configuration as this sort of Ember and Rails philosophy is that, one of the benefits is that if you know Ember and know Rails, you can drop into someone else's apps as long they're following these basic conventions and immediately know how to be productive and know how it's structured, know how to make a change to it and have it maintain a convention and not just have everybody who's using some framework build these totally different apps from each other that have no shared conventions and whatnot. Everyone is supposed to be able to learn from each other, grow with each other as long as they stay with these conventions. I couldn't really find out how to stay within Ember conventions and build this mobile apps. For a long time, I just didn't really contribute too much to the Ember router at all. I kind of fell out of touch with how most people are using it because most people are building these desktop-centric apps and here I am working on these mobile apps after three years. CHARLES: What are some of the specific use cases that were just impossible to, or not impossible but presented a challenge? ALEX: The first one is which is I think is actually one of the easier problems to solve but still some challenging is that you want something that's called stack routing or stack navigation in a mobile app, which is if you're actually building a native iOS app or an Android app, they both have different names for how they provide you this. But you're thinking of things in terms of stacks. In Android, you might open another activity, which is a full frame of a page in your app and you can push it and then when you press the back button, which is built in in Android phones, it'll pop that off the stack and take you back to where you were. In iOS, they give you a UI navigation controller and let you push and pop view controllers and that is how they want you to think about these applications. That is contrasting to what Ember makes you think about, which is go and define your static hierarchy of all the different places that you can be in an app. But with stack-based navigation, you don't necessarily know upfront all the different orderings of which frames are going to be pushed onto what and you might have situations where you want to be able to dynamically push, say an 'Add a Credit Card' page to where you are and maybe it depends on some data that's been loaded at some lower level in the stack and you can't model that as nested routes in the way that you might think about it in classic Ember apps. It's a different structure -- CHARLES: Now, when you say lower in the stack, I'm curious, if you're entered in aren't you... Oh, you mean... I see, previously in the stack. Okay, so lower in the stack so you're thinking like your current position is at the top of the stack. ALEX: Right, yeah. CHARLES: I see. Now, let me just clarify this in my own head. Your Ember routing structure is ultimately realizes a static tree but at any moment, you are entered into one path through that tree so you do have something resembling a stack. It's just is it the pathways that the ways that you can actually get nodes onto the top of the stack is you're limited because that can't be dynamic. ALEX: Yeah, but even then, it's hard to describe what the difference is but the kind of stack that you're thinking of in terms of the classic Ember router map is more like you're in these different substates than you are different frames that you've pushed onto your -- CHARLES: There's a finite and fully enumerated set of next states. ALEX: Right. To be very concrete, if you have a post route and then a post show route and then a comments route under that and these are all nested in a row, then if you're in the comments route, you are in a kind of hierarchical stack that might have loaded the post that you're looking at and maybe the post call-to-action above that and the comments for that but you're still in one thing. You've just expressed that one thing in terms of these substates so that every other state that's in the parent state can share the same data loading. That's different from saying, "I'm on this page and now, I want to push another page on it and maybe tap some of the data that has been loaded on previous pages." That's more of a navigation stack in a hierarchical substates stack. CHARLES: Is the difference then, the data dependency? Because if you think of the Ember classic where you got the static tree, at least theoretically all of the data in the leaf nodes depends on the data that's above. It's not just being able to dynamically push stuff onto the new stack but it's also saying, you want to be able to push stuff that might have no dependency on the stuff further up and it doesn't need to be re-rendered if stuff further up the stack changes. ALEX: Correct. CHARLES: But sometimes it might. ALEX: Right so there are a lot of corner cases that come out if you try to model this new way that a lot of corner cases have been thought out of if everything matched nicely to this hierarchical substate classic Ember stack but not for navigation. If you want to do something that's stacked routing-based, I've had a few different approaches. At our company, we maintain a suite of different apps that are sort of retailer or grocery-centric and the first one we did, which is more popular flagship one is Mobile Checkout, which is an app that lets you going to stores, scan items with your phone and checkout and skip the cashier line, which is great if there's huge lines and you just want to buy a little handful of things or maybe in your shopping cart. But that is like any other mobile app is really conducive to this step navigation approach. Then we had to make a few apps after that such as like another app that is [inaudible] do a manual check then ordering app and other of handful things that you can imagine is might be used on a grocery store. I took the opportunity to like, "I don't really like how the routing turn out the main mobile checkout shopper apps so let's try different things." If you approaches, at least have their pros and cons without really feeling you're solving the problem and one is to maintain your own in-memory stack of where you were, every link to you, you might recall where you were and then use that logic in addition to what's in a URL to decide what transitions to make, which to use Liquid Fire for that. But already, there's these weird growing questions like, "Why are you even using the URL? Is it helping you at all?" That was the main issue with the main app that we did. The other approach was to try and not even use any of the 'router.map' stuff at all. I use the router.map to basically just create one wildcard route. You can use normal Ember to use it like '*half' and that basically collects the rest of the URL as a param that you can use to do whatever you want with. I was using that to basically pass to another, which is internally used by Ember to do the stack-based parsing like grab a little bit of the URL and then parse the param for that then grab another. Every time you could see your stack in the URL. That has its benefits but the worst part about it is that it's getting further away from Ember so any add on that you might want to use at Internet of Things in terms of which route you're in and has conventions like that you just can't use. I can't think of a good example at the top my head but it's like the further you get away from those norms, the less the Ember system can help you and on your own building your own framework. This is all to say that I think I have enough experience at this point to bring home some of the things to Ember and I'm excited to get back into contributing to Ember with this one particular thing that I'm focusing on now, which is... I don't even know what to call it. It's like -- CHARLES: What does it do? The route stuff? ALEX: It's route stuff. Actually, let me get into the other... That's what is tricky about stack routing and tricky to sort of, if you already have to go through a mental hurdle with thinking of the Ember router and as a stack of states or substates and you train your brain to think that way, it's really hard to take yourself out of it and realize that what you're trying to build with like a classic mobile navigation is almost looks like the same thing but it's really different. The other challenging problem, which is specific to our particular app is that you wouldn't think of it as a very heavily server-driven app but if you're writing an application that at any point can get a message from the server like, "Hey, your status has changed," and that state is heavily coupled to navigation of where you're allowed to be in your apps for the state of some certain model, then you're going to have a really hard time, I'd say in modeling an Ember. I have a really hard time convincing people of this until they've actually tried to do it themselves, which is why I'm going off and just building things showing people. CHARLES: You don't have to convince me because I think one of the biggest problems is the router is like the one non-reactive piece of Ember, which is unfortunate because it's essentially, what is the equivalent of the Redux store in a Redux application, where it's the state that drives literally the entire application and yet, any type of non-hash change driven updates, you have to manually manage. Every time that we've done it, it's been a problem and depends on what data, at that point you have to be very thoughtful because, at least from the highest level, if there's damage to a piece of the tree higher up, you need to realize those effects of that damage or that change all the way down the tree. ALEX: Exactly. That is a great way of putting it. This is maybe a good time to mention this thing called ember-rideshare. I've had a really hard time describing these problems to people so I figured what I would do is write this blog a few months back, a little article called ember-rideshare. It's just a given name to the kind of app that still really hard to write in Ember. It's a mobile app. It involves stack routing but the other part is really difficult about it is this problem of the router being in a silo. It is reactive but it's only reactive to that URL. Other things changes, they need to, like you said come in and patch up something else about the router in case you add some URL that is no longer able to present some model of whose status changed. That's an article on a blog that I can probably link to in show notes or something. When I talk about ember-rideshare, imagine using Ember to build Uber or Lyft and it's got just the slightest bit of the whole thing. The whole point of the app is to coordinate your client-side request of I want to ride with the server going off and doing a bunch of things and finding a nearby driver, displaying you bunch of driver locations and it'll show up. Then finally, find you a driver. It's a constant communication. Throughout that point, you can sort of imagine modeling all the different screens as routes but the routes that are actually allowed to see at any given time are heavily dependent on what is the current state of the user's current ride. But you shouldn't be able to go to a route that says like 'cancel ride request,' if you haven't requested a ride in a million of these other things. If you're an Ember developer and you think that's an easy problem to solve, you're probably thinking, "I would use before model hook when I'm entering that route to check the state of the model," and if it doesn't make sense for the route of entering, I want to transition elsewhere. That's fine. That's good if you're doing an app if the user is the one deciding where to navigate to. But then when you're on a route like that and then the server tells you that your ride is done, you can't still be on that route so you've got to have some kind of validations that is like, "This is no longer a valid route to be in. Is the user still in this route?" CHARLES: "Where am I going?" ALEX: Yeah. Before model doesn't really help you. It's this one-shot discrete event and you just can't capture all the different things. The ember-rideshare describes some of these problems a little bit more detail but that's the main issue with it. Like you said, what is actually missing about the router? Maybe it's reactive but it's only reactive to the URL, what about all these other things that are happening into your app? I think there's a handful of APIs in Ember that they're great but they're kind of siloed off in a way. If you want to make two different kinds of worlds meet, you've got to write a bunch of your own code yourself or you just have to do mentally going back and forth and being like, "I did this, so I can't use this kind of API." I did a lot of work on the Named Blocks RFC, which previously there is silos between if you're passing blocks to a component versus data, you've got to think about them differently and all the ways that you might forward that data to a different internal component, if you want to build these composable, reasonable internals, you got to be kind of split-brain about it. I feel the same way about how the Ember router works. It's only good at dealing with stuff that has to do with the URL and you're on your own, if you needed to react to data changing. That's what I'm trying to fix. Does that correlate with your experience of working on Ember stuff as well? CHARLES: Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. I think we've come to a consensus of the problem statement. I am curious to see a big separate query params. I'm going to throw that wildcard out there or maybe we should save it for later. ALEX: Yeah, I definitely going to come back to it. If I say all this cool stuff and I still don't have a solution to that, then what am I talking about? CHARLES: Right. ALEX: Which to be honest, I haven't thought of every single possible thing. I'm doing the thing where I talk about it on a podcast that everyone can guilt me into really finishing it. I actually really think that I'm going to finish it. I'm very confident in stuff I'm working on. I'm very excited to bring it to people but it is not all 100% fleshed out and I definitely appreciate anyone's help to those interested, understands the nature of the problem and wants to help me work on some of this stuff and like that, in Ember community Slack or wherever. CHARLES: Yeah, I'm really excited to hear it and see in what ways we might be able to contribute. ALEX: Basically, the goal is to find some underlying primitives that can model the current behavior without mistake because obviously, we can introduce something that's going to break into Ember apps. Basically, to recognize that the URL is something that goes through multiple passes of transformation, to eventually become the thing that displays stuff on your screen, from the very foundation of it, and this is the actual mini-course of what Ember router does internally because it involves a few different libraries and maybe this is a re-hash from the podcast that I did with you guys but -- CHARLES: Can I just say that there are some things that the Ember router really does right, that are fantastic? One of those things is it baked in to every single piece of data. It doesn't do the stack but in that tree that it models, every single node in that tree abstracts away the asynchrony of that node. I think that's absolutely huge so you get both the dependency enumerated like these are the things that I need to marshal the data to render myself and it's implicit that it might take some time. I might need to draw on a couple of different things to actually assemble this data so the asynchronous nature is modeled up front and it's implicit and it's there every single time, which turns out to be the right thing. The sampling that I've missed has been an excruciating void in all the other routing solutions that I've tried outside of the Ember community is that they just punt over asynchrony to you. You deal with it, not our problem and it's like, "Actually, that is the problem." Anyway... ALEX: That's a great point because if the router doesn't help you with any of this stuff at all, then it basically means that every one of your pages that you might want to render after the fact, probably has to have some loading logic like if data is loading, show us spinner. Otherwise, here's all the data -- CHARLES: Yeah, if something happen wrong. ALEX: Right and sometimes that is actually what you want to do. Sometimes you want to do these skeletal in UIs that looked like the page that's about to display but the date isn't there yet so everything is, regardless going to be wrapped in these 'if' statements, 'else' statements. I worked in ember-concurrency and some people are using that to basically move more of that loading into controllers, that's fine. If that's what you're actually trying to do and that's what you're opting into, that's a perfectly reasonable solution but most of times, chances are you're entering a route and you don't want to have to teach the entire template tree underneath it that has to handle all these different states. There's these nice ideas that work in some cases and I'd like to make them work in more cases than Ember helps with and a whole loading all the promises and the model hooks and absolutely going into the loading state are really cool primitives that Ember is going to do for you. The other frameworks, they don't try to be opinionated. They won't do any of that for you. Sounds like you ran into that with some of your React stuff? CHARLES: Yeah. I definitely did. There's just not much help when you actually want to model asynchrony. You can do it. It's pretty easy. You just implement the right hooks or model a series of actions, either with a Saga or Epic, if you're using redux-observable. But again, you have to assemble it by hand and you have to generate those abstractions by hand and you just want to have them at hand already and not have to worry about that. But the advantage, though is that generally those ones that you do have at hand or that you generate are fully reactive. If new information comes that's germane to that particular leaf in the tree or that particular note in the tree, there's no difference between the initial state and the update state. Whereas, in Ember, you got your first shot and then that data is now at rest. ALEX: Right. I definitely have been looking at React router, in particularly v4. I think it's all contentious for people to see it at first but being able to put things like in your render function, you can say, "If this data is present, something that's going to be past and be a prop or something," then show a loading spinner or otherwise, start matching these subroutes. That's really cool. That's expense that you can't look at essential map of all the states of your router can be in but that's also a real problem and if you can demonstrates that the state world is not in a separate silo than the routing world. CHARLES: With great power comes a lot of bugs. You do run into a lot of things where you have rogue matching. You have random things that are inside your view tree that are matching against the route and they just render and you have to be very careful because it's almost the difference between blacklisting and whitelisting. I see what you're saying. It could be confusing. ALEX: Yeah. I think it's definitely a tradeoff. I think if I had something like a match, I might have been able to maybe arrive at a stack routing solution a little earlier. I'm not sure about that. It's definitely something that could be handled by React router. I think one of things that React and React routers better at in general is that everything is, more or less a component that is more easily swappable or something else here. You're not going to have as many of those silos and I really do think, it went through a lot of churn and maybe, some people had trouble, maybe a lot of people, I don't know had trouble kind of following all the major versions. But I think React router Version 4 is pretty damn cool. I think there's a fullest realization of that kind of modular mindset. CHARLES: I think the biggest problem I have with it, though is it requires the view tree to model your routing structure. That bothers me. I feel like you could do the exact same thing. You could have a way to express your routes, not necessarily with a separate routing file. I supposed you could do it with JSX or something but actually have it be kind of orthogonal to your view tree. The way you can model this dynamically updating thing that can match against anything and maybe, even express it all in one place. Although once you get a big tree, it could be hard to control that. The part that I've come into most conflict and maybe who knows, maybe I just haven't used it enough, we've only got one application that we're using the router V4 on. But the fact that it's actually in the view tree, it bothers me. It's in the state objects. It's hard to adapt to Redux because that state is opaque. It's the routers controlling it and I would it to be not have to pass through React components but just be like, give me the firehose of the router state. ALEX: Right. I love what you're saying. If I'm going to bring this stuff to Ember, I can't suddenly make it work like matching within the view tree. That's not what I'm working at or proposing here. All the stuff is basically to empower that firehose to respond to more things that can drives views and respond to them in a live way, not like a one-shot async validation, only when you enter. CHARLES: Maybe this is what the problem that you're trying to solve and one of the things it's really nice to be able to match against anything inside the view tree is that Ember's rendering process of a route is very opaque. The process, by which an outlet gets connected, that's not something that you really have much visibility into. Is that a good statement of the problem? ALEX: That's definitely part of it. You definitely have to go to the documents. I think it's telling that -- CHARLES: I've never done it. I don't really know how that works and I've written a lot of Ember code. ALEX: How what works? CHARLES: How the route gets rendered, like the mechanics around, which I understand how the route object actually, you makes the decision to render its template and do all that stuff. I know it as a user but I don't know the mechanics and I wouldn't know how to extend it. ALEX: I'm not sure if the stuff I'd work on but it immediately make some of that stuff more clear. One of the goal or constraints is to really try and break down the silos. Whatever I'm about to propose bringing to Ember, I want it also be something that would be useful, possibly at the component or template or controller level, rather than just being this thing that lives only in the router's weird black box of logic that occasionally calls hooks that everyone knows about. CHARLES: Right. In a sense, I'd say that they both suffer from that same problem. I'm curious to hear about the firehose. ALEX: To actually get into what I think you're building here, we can dance around it all day and then we -- CHARLES: Just save it for the last 30 seconds of the podcast. That way there could be no -- ALEX: We're swapping JS for React router V4. Bye! It's basically this. What's happening today is that you have a URL, it's going to be parsed in a way that you've tied it to via the router map file, which every Ember app has the place to go to see all the different places that you can navigate to an Ember app, which is great. You basically taught Ember how to break your long URL string into these usable bits and that's going to give you an array of these things that internally who cares what they're called but they're called handler infos and they basically say, "The first element of this array is named application. Every Ember app has one. It doesn't have any params." The next one, it starts getting into what your URL actually is. Maybe it corresponds to the '/post' portion of the URL so that's going to be named 'post,' and that doesn't have any extra params either. Then there's this thing that is post show or something like that. That has a dynamic param because that's the part of the URL as like the '/123' and that corresponds to the post ID. It's basically, if you like thinking of things in terms of transformations or observables or mapping and functional transformations, that's taking a URL and turning it into an array of these useful POJOs of information. The goal is to keep transforming that into something eventually has enough data to display and templates and whatnot. In this giant black box of the Ember router, it's going through those transformations and then it's going to go through this long series of using these params and this useful array of POJO information, start hitting hooks on people's routes to load data. Hit before model after model, redirect all these things to give tasteful names to all the tons of validations and checks that you might want to do. You do cool things in your before model hooks, check if the current user is actually an admin to prevent them from going into any '/admin' subroute. That's a really cool place to go and it's also a great convention. If you're new in Ember app, you realize you can't go on this route. It should sort of click in your head and that sounds like they've got one of these redirect hooks to ensure that you're not going anywhere you're not supposed to go. All these things are really still to this day, extremely strong, well-designed, it went through many passes of review before it landed. I think they cater to a certain kinds of user-driven clicking around apps but they are extremely strong to this day. I think the only thing that's missing is the smell. That example I gave like checking if the user is an admin, it's a bit of a smell that is not reactive. It's a hook. If it passes, great. You're in the route. It's not going to keep on checking that. What I want to do is basically, either in addition to or as an alternative to specifying these one-off model hooks or these hooks that you, not only really just fire one time, have essentially what is an async computed property or an async validation that is upfront about things it depends on. Ember is going to be smart enough to constantly reevaluate these things as stuff changes. It can depend on not just URLs or URL parameters but it can also depend on data. If you're thinking about ember-rideshare, which again is the imaginary Ember app that it's essentially Lyft or Uber, if you have a current ride model loaded somewhere, maybe by a parent route or maybe it's some sort of service, you should be able to specify it like an async property or validation that says, "I depend on ride.state," and for all these subroutes, you would want to say that, either upon entry or any point in the future, if the state ever changes to something that I don't know how to handle that go to some default route. That would be already, particularly in my app, which is a subset of a different kind of ember-rideshare app, that would be a huge help because the only other alternative is to build a sibling-central coordinator to the router that isn't the router but has to sort of agree with it and then, every one of these frames that you might push onto the navigation stack, they have to do some little chunk of code and then invoke this logic and be like, "Did the state change? Go where you're supposed to go," and they have to do that logic. It would be, I think a great win for conventions as it has if it's a benefit to make people shout out their states in advance to empower them to shout out also their data constraints in advance so that you get things like automatic redirects and things change, I think that would be huge. I know that would immediately benefit off of it and I think it would fall in the same kind of problem solving that they worked on like Ember-related stuff which people don't realize how big a problem is until they see there's a better way of doing stuff. I think with that being there -- CHARLES: As an example, let's say that you're an admin and then all of a sudden, you got fired and there's an event that comes from a server that's this person is no longer an admin and it wipes out the Ember data store and then redirect you outside of the admin route or something like that. ALEX: Yeah, that's a perfect example. To be pedantic, I think a lot of people do hard refreshes between login/sign-off stuff but if you have it all in your Ember app, that would just happen automatically. You'd still want the ability to have more graceful transitions because one of the tricky things about having stuff driven by data is that you have this giant matrix of like, "If I'm in this state and this event happens, how do I handle it? How do I make it look well-designed to the user?" But you're not going to be able to hit every one of those constraints so to just have some basic logic that's just like, "Oops, something happened," you're not an admin so we move you to the sign-in page. For in those cases, we haven't fully filled in all those leaks. I think it would be a huge win and you can just progressively decorate things according to the common flows that people take through your app. CHARLES: You know, I'm just imagining this. Model promise, for example would be some computed property, then how would you enumerate your dependencies? Just do the mechanism that we have now? Or are you imagining something entirely new? ALEX: I don't have a strong opinion on it because the moment I start saying what that specific syntax is, more people will agree on what's missing and what we need to have, regardless and be like, "I don't like it." I'm leaning toward something inspired by a lot of my learnings from observables, which is actually we talked about last time. The whole thing about observables is that there's almost limitless flexibility as to if you're in observable, it can take that event. It has been another observable based on that thing. If a URL changes and you're listening to that via observable description, inside that, you could kick off another observable of Ajax request based on that URL and it doesn't make you enumerate all these things upfront. I think there is going to be a compromise between that. I think when you get into these kinds of problems, you run into stuff like Relay, which is familiar with -- CHARLES: I haven't used Relay. ALEX: Just the idea of dynamically collecting all of your dependencies upfront before hitting the server and asking for specific chunks of data that you need, it's a very promising idea. There's cases of just dynamicism where the data comes back from the server, then you realized that you need this other piece of data and there's no way you could have collected upfront, unless you statically wrote it upfront. I expect to find that with this approach that there's going to be some stuff where you just have to be more upfront about it. But I had a cool little strike the other day on auto-computed properties and I'll also link to that. It's a different way of running computer properties where you don't have to specify your depending keys upfront but your getter function gets passed a getter function itself. CHARLES: It's past the dependencies? ALEX: Not even that. Imagine writing a computer property and the first [inaudible] is a function that you can call to get a property off of this but also track that you've got that property. If it ever changes, it'll invalidate again. That means if you're implementing a [inaudible] in computer property, you don't have to write first name twice, both in your dependent keys and in the actual getter in your function, which I think is kind of cool. I'm trying to make that pattern work for this data loading thing so that you don't have to have this huge verbose thing. You just lift this stuff in one place. I've sensed that the magic will probably break down in some complicated cases but that's what I'm trying to run with because I think it's pretty cool and succinct and sort of the natural evolution of what people think of as computer properties. The other major constraint and this is also what we're talking about because it's one of the best kept secrets about the router or it's one of these things that everyone's benefiting from without realizing it, is that if a transition occurs in the router, everything in the router is going to be a possibly long asynchronous chain of operations that it collects all the data that it needs for the new routes to display. In that time, if something happens, if some hook comes along and has an exception, it can load data from the servers. If something happens then it just says 'transition.abort,' that's going to stop whatever transition is in place and you're going to stay exactly where you were and if you're not stuck in a partial transition state, that's pretty awesome. That's basically database atomic transaction semantics that people have been benefiting from if they've been using Ember for years at this point. But again, it suffers a problem being locked away in the router. That is a cool concept. You should be able to specify like I intend this change of the state this way and if I gave you something that is logically inconsistent or can't be fulfilled, don't leave me in a weird half-assed state that I need to somehow fix and know how to fix all the different places, where I might be kicking off this transaction. I'm trying desperately to preserve those semantics when data comes into it. One of the hardest things to do is and honestly, can be one of the hardest sells for people who are used to thinking about Ember is there's an issue of if you imagine whatever API we're talking about, it's probably going to live on the route. Some kind of hook that might be called resolve or something else, like what is the value of this context object that every function has? Is it a route? It's tempting to want to do that and maybe, that will end up winning but winning out is the best API to get people to use. The thing to realize is that there is no consistent value of this. This implies that there's a state of the world and you're looking at it and currently, these things have these values. But in the transaction phase, there is no stable 'this object' and you can wind up with some weird surprises. I know because, not actually these days but particularly, when a lot of the stuff landed and people started trying to do weird things and these transaction hooks, there's just like, "Why can't I grab the controller? The property isn't what I expected?" Honestly, all the stuff that is gross about query params because of this fundamental violation. You have something that pretends to be a property that is there today but is still driving this asynchronous thing that could fail. CHARLES: I kind of viewed this as playing an off-note in the jazz thing like you only want to reserve using this, unless you're the Miles Davis of JavaScript, don't use this. ALEX: And by Miles Davis, you just mean like the god of concurrency that's incorrect race-condition-y code. CHARLES: Right, so it's just like you've got the right reason and you can spot the one-in-a-million case, where it's appropriate. You can spot it in an instant. ALEX: Exactly. I'm not that person and I don't know too many people who are and that's not the API you want to land. I'm trying to, maybe wean people off on dependency on this because the way we've gotten around it in the past is to use again, is more discrete, get the value functions called 'get model' and 'get params.' These are all very in-depth stuff if you're pretty experience Ember developer but it's a way of getting a value from one of these parent routes when you're inside a transition and the rest the world can't see it but you can because you call this hook at the right time. It's super gross because it's just a method on a route that anyone can call in any given time, whether you're inside this transaction or not. The branching logic of, "Should I look up the data from the transaction object?" because once valid, I should have get the current value of a loaded route. It's really gross to me and it causes real problems that confuse people and causes them to write issues because they've given an API that makes them feel good about treating these things as stable objects. CHARLES: I'm trying to imagine now, just like a spike in my head. I know you don't want to get too into syntax but essentially, modeling the route tree as a set of observables, where essentially, instead of returning a promise from your model, you're just mapping an observable off of some combination of the URL state or what are the other streams of state you want to merge to realize that route. But what I'm not seeing, which I'm sure you also have the answer is the original problem, which was stack routing. What we've been talking about is making the router fully reactive like this fully reactive tree that's always on. But that problem seems almost orthogonal to the stock routing problem. ALEX: It is. It's been very tempting to combine them. Why it is such a hard problem? Because you've got navigation stack, which almost to this route hierarchy stack that [inaudible] about but they're separate so you can't really apply the same lessons. Then you've got stack routing, which is you want the ability for routes to while they're loading, reference data that is dynamically available to them. I don't have a solid answer but I would say, the one thing that I think is going to help is that you have a few options for what you want to stash how you want to represent a URL or where you want to stash your hierarchy. Actually just track it in-memory and if you refresh the page, it'd be like, "I depend on some data that I expected to be there but it's not. It transition elsewhere," which is not a great developer experience. You could want to be able to make changes and refresh the page and continue where you left off. Otherwise, URLs aren't actually used by mobile app users. But the other place that you could possibly put the navigation where event stack is in a query param because that can be fully dynamic and you can just sort of manage every single page. The most current page you've pop is just some top-level route but you're tracking the state on the side. I think if you solve the problem of being able to depend on things that aren't the URL or go through a more complex transition than what the router gives you by default, I think it would be possible to treat that query param or that thing you're stashing in in-memory as another source of data. The other thing that I want to try and make sure that this new API has is really treated dependency injection where you specify all the things that you need and you don't really care from a route's perspective where they come from. I think if you had that, that would solve a lot of problems with stack routing and where it gets data from. To be very specific, today if you were in that post '1, 2, 3' comments route and you needed to access the post model from within the comments route, you would probably do this model for post. Basically you're naming not just the model that you need. You're naming the route that you know provides it upfront, which I think is that. Actually, the real reason it's kind of the smell is that, if you ever need to change the nesting, maybe you need to introduce another level or you want to nest all that under an admin route. Then suddenly, you're asking for the wrong route name. You're not really sure all the different things you need to update if you ever change the nesting of your router. There's solutions like relative URLs that a lot of people thrown around but I think -- CHARLES: To go back in the observable world and specifically, the redux-observable world, it's like a simple map. You're just mapping down off of a global prop, you've got some tree of state and you're just mapping off... What was that like? A model hook and you're just mapping down off of that? Wherever that state lives, you're mapping to it and now you kind of slicing off your little garden hose off of the firehose. But still one huge -- ALEX: I've tried to apply observables to this problem. I don't think I've never seen the observable analogue of is this idea of dependency and injection. To model something as a stream that transforms over time, that's proven to be very useful but to sort of say, "I am an observable that expects these objects given to me," I'm not really sure what that API would look. CHARLES: I would say, just as a straw man perhaps, you have this dependency that it's a well-known location. It's a well-known name. With dependency [inaudible] in classic, it's like, "I depend on the off service. This thing called 'service:off' or whatever. Imagine that you have some pool of state and there's some key called ‘service.off' there and as long as I'm just basically basing my stream, the first thing I do is map off of this and maybe map off of another key and then combined those into a single stream, then I can be sure that I have those things at all times. If they change, my mapping function or my transformation function is going to get evaluated again. Does that make sense? ALEX: Yes, I think we should [inaudible] C without code or something. CHARLES: And maybe I'm thinking about it wrongheadedly but that would be a simple mechanism. ALEX: Could you run by me one more time --? CHARLES: Yeah. Let's say that we've got some authentication service that you want to depend on like you want to inject on it. You want to inject that dependency so why can't you base your stream off of that key? You have observable map, for example. The list of transformations that you would have to do to peel off multiple keys, I'm sure you could write helpers for it. But basically, probably if you're going to be wanting to inject multiple dependencies will -- ALEX: The problem is this. Basically, if you want to write your resolved observable, if this thing based on observables, remember that there is no this in a route because of the transactional reasons of what we've talked about earlier, what are you getting that from? You need to have something passed into you, to be like 'context.get observable blah.' CHARLES: I would just assume that it's implicit. I was thinking a bit basically, the simplest case would just be an observable that was basically taken off of the entire global state or whatever of the router or what have you. The way the redux-observable works is every single epic is what they call them is just a transformation on the global stream. Usually, the first thing that happens is they map down to the local context so the -- ALEX: Like a path? CHARLES: They have a helper like action of type, blah. You only see a subset of the actions that get maps to the Redux store. I think it's redux independent but at least in theory, every single epic is basically going off of the entire global state but the first in reality, what the first thing that happens is you're like, "I am only interested in this subset of the state," so you do a map off of the global state down to your local scope and then you work from there. In fact if you had the convention around that, you could even make that part implicit. It's like I return an observable that it's only seeing the stream of local states. ALEX: That makes sense if there's sort of canonical state of the world but what you're doing when you're transitioning into a route is trying to feel out another state in an asynchronous manner. Redux is the action causes state to change, now the state is this. But the action for type thing, I think that makes sense if you are subscribing to the world global action on this one store when you're constructing this new tentative, may not actually become the store, you're depending on values. What we need in our API is something that depends on values that are from a tentative store. CHARLES: It's similar so in redux-observable, you're mapping actions to actions and you're not necessarily mapping actions here. You want to get state into the equation. ALEX: Yeah and it's so almost observables. It's just this twist of transaction dependency injection. It sounds really over-engineered but the thing is it exists in Ember today and if it exists in a less siloed way, I would certainly benefit on it. I think everyone else would too. CHARLES: Okay. With that hand wave... ALEX: Oh, I didn't mean for that to come as a hand wave. CHARLES: No, no, no. I'm kidding because I think we actually have a lot more to talk about here and we're running out of time. One of the thing that I want to ask is, talking about redux-observable, talking about redux and stuff, have you given any thought as to what this might look as a library that everybody could use? ALEX: I basically have something that's using Ember CLI only because it's so easy to just use it as a sketch pad and get test passing but everything I'm building so far is just ES6 class syntax that can be transpiled in it to whatever. I'm actually realizing, there's a lot of overlap between some of the primitives that are involved and Glimmer so it may or may not have a pass that uses references for tracking when things change until no one to invalidate and refire these async hooks. But either way, I'm going to make sure it lives in the JS usable world and not just Ember's special object model end. CHARLES: Right. Those interfaces are pretty narrow. The things that implement those interfaces are huge and complex but the way, at least I understand it, isn't the reference interfaces themselves -- ALEX: They're really simple, yeah. CHARLES: -- Really simple. It could almost be copied and pasted and not have much maintenance overhead in there. Here's a question and this is probably getting too far into the weeds. Can you not model a transaction as an observable? Essentially, with a flatMap, you would merge in some observable into the chain that was basically a transaction of all the other observables from which it is composed. ALEX: You know, a transaction as it builds up all the new state over time could be part of the main tree and if there is an active transition, then that's future potential state that the world might become and it could be modeled as a leg of the Redux state. I think you could theoretically do that. Definitely worth a try. I don't think I would benefit too much from doing it now and I think this could be a premature optimization but I think there would be just quite a bit of intermediate object collection to express that. I think theoretically it works but how it's going to physically map to Ember in the near future, it would be harder [inaudible] in a way. There's actually a lot of stuff that is very redux-y that again, a lot of Ember people don't maybe know about because it's internal but the way that Ember [inaudible], I think since Edward brought some of his learnings of Liquid Fire back to core Ember, there's this concept of outlet state, which describes -- I'm not an expert on it -- what's rendered where and then each outlet gets a chunk. Like you said, a little piece of the firehose or garden hose, pulled off the main thing so it can just focus on the one piece of state. Those are simple objects that produce this part of this transformation process. That's kind of redux-y in the way that everything just gets a new POJO and stuff changes but it's not strictly redux, obviously and probably won't become that just because it's already good enough on its own. CHARLES: Yeah. I think it's actually good at this point to be hand wavy because the most important thing is to be non-committal about the syntax, like you said because that's when the bikeshedding begins and now it's not the phase. The phase is to come to some agreement about what is that we would love to see. ALEX: Basically, the thing is this. I think people need to realize that Ember won the bet that the URL is an important thing to build apps around and if you have a state that's representable in URL, that state should go in the URL so you can send links around and not break the web and have an app that works that's built on half-assed routing. The only thing I'm proposing is going to make that go away. It's just that there is already this giant world of stuff that's not expressible in Ember today because it is driven by state. If you make that as easy to express and as upfront to express, I think you can have shared conventions versus what everyone is building these apps that I have to do, which is to make a sort of separate router of state-aware stuff and not have to make those two things agree with each other because it's really hard. CHARLES: Right. At that point, you're writing your own framework. Maybe this is the next big thing because I feel like Ember usually has the best stuff way, way, way, way before. Now, we're finally getting to a point where everybody seems to realize that having a CLI is absolutely critical to the developer's experience and most frameworks aren't taken seriously until they've achieved that. It was the same thing with a router back in the day. I'm wondering what that next thing is. ALEX: I don't know. I don't think this is going to be it. I just think it's a good progression. I think a way forward that progress is still a pretty legit central structure to build apps around and just would be welcomed. CHARLES: When are you going to be done? ALEX: About two or three days. I don't know. I think I'm basically going to be continuing to get feedback like the way that a lot of that original router stuff came back or it's just like constantly hit people with real examples, Ember twiddles, things are just like, "Oh, yeah. That thing. That's a cool pattern. That sucks in my app. I didn't realize that until I saw this example." These things that really teach people why this is necessary because that's going to get people's urge to be like, "Well, you could just do..." Oh, you can't because the thing that's hard to explain. It's going to be a lot of that regardless and I hope that will kick off in the next few weeks. CHARLES: And the focus of that is going to be the ember-rideshare application. ALEX: I think that's a good one. This is one that everyone's familiar with. CHARLES: Have you already kind of implemented in it, like this kind of Frankenstein-ish, like this is the kind of histrionics that you have to go through in order to implement the style of routing or the style of application using today's Ember? Or have you started to begin experimentation with these new concepts and try to build out better ways of doing it? ALEX: I'm not strictly extracting it from one app. It's sort of combined. Like I said, the few different apps that we had were an opportunity to be like, "This sporadic stuff is hard." The main route recognizer approach was an example to try different stack routing pattern. But the thing that sort of working on is drawing from three different apps and slightly different takes on it. Basically, I have something that is close to being testable in one of my main apps that will be a great chance to validate if all the stuff is as nice as I think it is going to be. CHARLES: Okay. If the people want to get in touch with you, to help to contribute to the conversation or just publicly guilt you into moving faster towards it, how would they get in touch with you? ALEX: I'm at @Machty on Twitter and GitHub and also, the Ember community Slack. I think I'm going to try to get people to talk about this on channel called Dev Dx Router where it's focused on development stuff all around the router. This is kind of funny because I'm talking about this thing that I've only had maybe, 12 people take a look at and comment on and begins these conversations. I think maybe some people are going to hear this and be like, "What are you talking about?" but if it gets people -- CHARLES: No, no, no. You know, the best conversations seemed to be organized around you, man. I'm just trying to think of some of the best development conversations that I've had in 2017 and you were definitely, I would say the one who fomented them. It starts with 12 people but then, if enough people take interest and be like, "Wow, yeah. Oh, man. I didn't even know that was a problem. This would be a cool way of doing it." They have a tendency to balloon and some fizzle out and some end up with real results. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. ALEX: I appreciate it and likewise, you're definitely one of the best people to talk about this stuff with. CHARLES: Well, I hope other people will love listening to our conversation. With that, we'll head on out. Thank you everybody if you've made it this far. As always, you can get in touch with us at @TheFrontside on Twitter or just send an email to Contact@Frontside.io. We will talk to you next week.

Transformation Tuesdays was inspired by the CD "The Jesus Question" by Matthew Kelly. Deacon Jimmy Ghiglione and Aaron Emig recap the Gospel from the prior Sunday and give action steps and resources to transform our lives for that week every Tuesday at 2:10 p.m. at Morris Hall from Ss. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Collinsville, IL. Deacon Jimmy: Therefore, the simple meaning of the parable is we need to “Be Good Soil.” Generally good soil does not become good soil all on its own. Good soil receives help. The farmer cultivates it, fertilizes it, makes sure it receives nutrients and water that will help the seed grow. The things that are good for it. Let’s think of God as the farmer. We are the soil. The seed is His word, His teachings, His commandments. But God doesn’t just sow the seed, and leave us (the soil) alone, expecting us to nurture the seed ourselves. He nurtures us. He waters us. He feeds us. He gives us all kinds of help to be the very best soil that we can be. Grant: In Jesus’ parable, a sower scatters seed all over the field. Birds eat some seed. Some seeds spring up then die under the sun. Some seeds are choked by thorns. And some seeds produce rich fruit. Last summer, I was visiting cousins who live in the Chicago suburbs and decided to check out a Sunday service at a nearby nondenominational church, Harvest Bible Chapel. I went inside a building that looked like an old warehouse and sat in an auditorium they called their “worship space.” For an entire hour, a live band blasted Contemporary Christian music. It was so loud that I couldn't talk to the person sitting next to me if I had wanted to. It was a great concert and really got my blood pumping, but it gave me no spiritual insights or growth. After an hour of the concert, I left and went to Mass at St. Theresa’s, the parish that we normally go to when we’re visiting. Everything about St. Theresa’s and the Mass was the complete opposite of Harvest Bible Chapel. Their sanctuary has stations of the cross on the walls, an area with candles and a statue of Mary, and a large crucifix at the front. I especially noticed that day how deliberately paced and how reverent the Mass was. The readings poured out the Scriptures to me, and the homily gave me new insights. And the Eucharist brought Christ to me in the deepest way possible. I was able to receive His body and blood. My experience at Harvest Bible Chapel made me feel like a seed that would spring up quickly then die under the sun. It was an emotional, exciting experience--but one that didn’t last long or mean much. My experience at Mass made me feel like a seed that could bear rich fruit, because I was being watered and cared for in the right way by the Scripture readings and the Eucharist. Aaron Emig: What type of sower are you? Trust me most of my life I have been 1, 2 or 3 but always striving for number 4… Deacon Jimmy: If God calls us to be good soil, and He does, then we have to accept his caring for the soil, in whatever form that may be. We have to accept His Justice and His Forgiveness. We have to accept His Correction and His Compassion. We have to accept God’s Laws and His Love. Our Loving Lord will cultivate us and enable us all to bring his loving presence into the world. We can be the good soil because God asks us to be, and enables us to be. Alex: It's easy to worship God and be thankful to him when things are going really well, and we should. However, we need to stay focused and have faith even when things aren't going well for us. Have to "pray when it rains as well as when it shines." Being a disciple of Jesus is not simply a matter of feeling joyful emotions. Emotions fade. Christ never does. And so, we must not either. It's important to ask God for the strength to persevere daily. Aaron Emig: Wisdom Words of the Week are…“The Law of Karma is also called the Law of Cause and Effect, Action and Reaction and: as you sow, so shall you reap.” ~Sham Hinduja

Alex Matchneer: @machty | FutureProof Retail Show Notes: 01:07 - The Introduction of ember-concurrency 02:15 - What is ember-concurrency? What are the problems it solves? 05:37 - Why not use observables or other alternatives? 09:49 - Could observables be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? 12:16 - Simple Made Easy 14:23 - Coming Soon to ember-concurrency 16:04 - Communicating Changes in State; Glimmer Reference Primitives 23:09 - Using References 29:31 - Submitting RFCs; Adding Pipelines 32:10 - Pipeline Use Cases Resources: ember-concurrency The Frontside Podcast Episode 007: The Ember Router with Alex Matchneer The Frontside Podcast Episode 019: Origin Stories with Tom Dale and Alex Matchneer Introduction to ember-concurrency by Alex Matchneer from Global Ember Meetup RxJS Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy Glimmer.js redux-saga Lauren Tan's RFC: Cancellable task pipelines Railway Oriented Programming Apache Kafka Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 67. My name is Charles Lowell, a developer here at The Frontside and podcast host-in-training. With me today also is Elrick Ryan, a developer here at The Frontside. Hello, Elrick. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on, Charles. CHARLES: Now, we have with us today someone who we love to have on the show. Everybody probably already know him. I know the first time I actually heard about him was when we had him on the podcast the first time, I was like, "Who the hell is this guy?" But since then, he's become one of my favorite developers, just with all of the things that he's done, from Router.js to more recently ember-concurrency. We have Alex Matchneer on the program. ALEX: Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. CHARLES: Hey, Alex and you know what? I pronounced your name right this time. First time out of the gate. Boom! ALEX: Nice. Which one did you go with? Matchnear? Matchner? [Laughter] ALEX: I really actually don't even know which ones correct anymore. CHARLES: Was it about a year ago that you first introduced ember-concurrency? ALEX: Yeah, I had a really embarrassing introduction of it at an Ember Meetup in January before it was really done and I just kind of botched it and didn't really introduce why it was even solving problems. Then a month later, I had some time to refine it, driven by the feel of that embarrassment. I guess around February of last year, it's been pretty much in its present state. CHARLES: I remember when it came out. I must've seen the non-botched version because I remember hitting the ground running with it and being able to refactor all of this code. I definitely know that I got the honed version because you provided in that initial blog post a whole host of examples like what are the symptoms, what are the cases where it solves and then before presenting the solution. I think that was great because I didn't even realize that I had a lot of pain. I didn't realize that at all. I didn't realize I had a problem but then you were very, very elegantly packaged the problem with the solution which is always great because otherwise, it's just complaining. Maybe we should talk a little bit about -- I don't think we've officially talked about -- ember-concurrency. Even though it's been out for quite a while, the way that you model these concurrent processes using the stack is just pretty incredible. Do you want to just very briefly touch on what the problem is and what have lead you to this solution? ALEX: Sure. It's a little bit difficult to sort of succinctly say what ember-concurrency is because it kind of hits them like five different separate but kind of related but not really pain points. At its core, it's just like a task primitive and it's definitely not the first library to ever introduce that the JavaScript, I think particularly when the generator function syntax was introduced into the spec, I think a few years back. Dave Herman who's also known as, I think a Little Calculist. I think he works on the TC39. I always get those groups a little confused in my head but he introduced a task.js library that let you use the generator function syntax and then lets you yield Promises to sort of pause where you were in that task and then continue when it resolved. It had some support for cancellation. It played well with Promises and I brought that to Ember in a way that fit really nicely with Ember more than it probably does or will with other frameworks like React or Vue. By bringing it to Ember, basically if you're implementing any feature that involves async, if it's a button that needs to show that it's been clicked while you're waiting for some response to come back from the server, instead of using Promises, instead of using actions, here's an ember-concurrency task. It makes it easier to express that operation you're trying to do and it makes it really easy to drive your UI with state that comes from the state of that operation -- Is the test still running? Is your form still submitting? -- Rather than having to manage a bunch of mutable flags and properties on a component or state yourself and likely get it wrong. CHARLES: Right. Essentially asynchronous processes is like a state machine and before, we were kind of managing that state machine by hand but I think what's so brilliant about this task-oriented programming, I guess is maybe a way to put it because I really think that some of these ideas are universal and not specific to ember-concurrency. But it almost like it uses the stack, just your normal programming stack to track where you are inside of a process, rather than what it felt like what we were doing before, which was managing this state machine by hand, if that makes any sense. ALEX: It does make sense a lot of sense. A lot of people ask me, if you're going to go into sort of async territory, why aren't you using something like RxJS? Rx is observables and kind of popularized by the Netflix crowd who did a bunch of presentations on them. It's super popular these days. But one of the things I really like about RxJS or at least one of the realizations I had is that I think you're still building a state machine. You're just expressing it using different primitives. In Rx, you're still building a state machine but in Rx, they make you think about it in terms of streams and events firing over time. In ember-concurrency, also you're still building a state machine but you're using the generator function syntax and the call stack like you mentioned as another way of expressing that state machine but with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. I was actually talking to someone about ember-concurrency just a few days ago and they were saying the same thing, "Why not use observables," and at least from my perspective, maybe I didn't quite understand the question because I feel like observables are kind of only one of the concerns that ember-concurrency addresses. I'm curious when people talk about alternatives to ember-concurrency and put observables forward, maybe I don't understand it because I usually think you might be able to use observables to register the currently executing task state and every time it changes, emit a new state and is then observed by your observable subscribers. But modeling the actual process using observables does seem weird to me because with observables, they seem like very purely functional and not heavily stateful. I don't really have that much experience with it. What's meant by using observables as an alternative? Maybe we can get more into those like how you would construct a stream or something like that? ALEX: I think the canonical Rx example of something that's elegantly expressed in Rx that would be really hard to do in just normal JavaScript, if you weren't able to use observables, is that typeahead search where as you type characters into a text field, it's already beginning to hit the server and see what you might be searching for so it can drive the state of some drop down menu. That's probably the most popular example out there because one of the things it demonstrates is that if you want to debounce, you want to allow for the user to stop typing for like 200 milliseconds before it actually hits the servers so you don't overwhelm your server, then just add a debounce operator. You've basically transformed a stream of keyboard events into that text field into something that only kicks off after it hasn't gotten an event for 200 milliseconds. If you already had a working prototype in vanilla JS and you had to debounce it, you've got to move a bunch of stuff around, you've got extract something into a function, you've got to deal with cancellation. But all those things are kind of pretty elegantly built into Rx and if you can train yourself to think in terms of streams of events, that inspires you to think about where else you could apply that in your app. I think a lot of people have felt that it's like winning, most powerful abstraction that you could think about. That's why things like cycle.js are a thing or redux-observable or just anybody working with observables in the Netflix territory. I personally find [inaudible]. If you're going to express certain processes, Rx is the way to go but it has drawbacks which is it is really hard to learn. It took me a very long time and I'm pretty good at it but if you're going to adopt Rx in your code base, then a new developer comes on, it's going to be a pretty long time. In my experience, sharing some of the Rx code I've written with fellow very talented developer, it takes a really long time to explain how to invert your thinking and think of things in terms of events. If you can get to that point, more power to you but what I found with ember-concurrency stuff is you don't have to completely invert your thinking and think of everything in terms of events and streams of events. You can use this task primitive which feels really pretty close to the code you're already writing but gives you a lot of the safety guarantees and just makes it really easy to use this derived state to drive templates. Rx is a powerful paradigm and sometimes you need that sort of event-driven push based model but I think when people wonder why aren't you just using observables, they haven't really grasped how easy and familiar it is to use task and get it right on the first try and with a lot less code. CHARLES: Right. You're able to leverage the fact that I understand what a JavaScript function looks like and the sequencing is implicit by just the order in which you were numerate the steps, right? ALEX: Right. Because I think that Rich Hickey of Clojure popularized the divide between simple versus easy and Simple Made Easy is one of his popular talks that everyone should probably -- CHARLES: It's a great talk. Yeah. ELRICK: Do you see an area where observables could be used in conjunction with ember-concurrency? ALEX: It's kind of. It's been hard for me to find that use case. Probably, there's a handful of use cases where maybe it's a little awkward to think about to have something that would be elegantly handled in Rx would be model using tasks but it really hasn't struck me enough in some of the apps that I'm building, to really try and flesh that out. CHARLES: I would be curious to see a side by side comparisons. I build a lot of auto completes using ember-concurrency. I built a lot of asynchronous processes using ember-concurrency. What would that look like using nothing but Rx and just be able to have it on the left-hand side of the paper, then Rx on the right hand side of the paper are easy. ALEX: I'd be very surprised if you could find an Rx example that is less code than the task equivalent because as much as I think the autocomplete example is the best canonical example of Rx, once you actually start making something that's production-ready, you want to start driving the button state while it's running or to show a loading indicator. When you start deriving other observables off of the source observable which is the user typing into the text field, you start having to worry about, "I'm dealing with a cold observable. If I create another stream based on it, it might double subscribe and I might kick off two things. I actually want to use a published.ref version of the stuff." To actually get away from a toy example into something that's actually production-ready, requires a lot of code. From my own conversations with the people working on Rx, there's a lot of people that are working on it and they're pragmatic about it and don't think that you have to be just purist functional all the way. But when they actually ship production code, they usually resort to using like the do operator. With Rx observables, which is basically an escape hatch to let you do mutations and side effects in what is supposed to be this monadic functional thing. If the paradigm is breaking that quickly to do production code, I'd wonder if maybe there is something better out there. I just kind of keep that in mind but I'd definitely think there should be a bake-off or comparison of how you do things in both the task paradigm and observable paradigm but I think you'd find that in most cases, just do a lot more with a task, with a lot less code. CHARLES: I want to go back to the point you were about to make about Simple Made Easy. ALEX: On the divide, ember-concurrency is very easy. I still choose easy. In the case of reservable, I'm constantly choosing easy over simple and then it always helps me out because I've made that decision. I think most people inspired by Rich Hickey from the Clojure community, would look at ember-concurrency and be like, "At a task that combines derive state and does five different things seems kind of gross. Why don't you just use observables," and the result of that if you follow it through is that you end up writing a bunch of observable code that is a mess in streams and going in different directions and you've written something that's really hard to understand, even if it's seasons Rx developers looking at the code. It's just very easy to write things that are tangled. CHARLES: It's always good to have simplicity but also a system that simple without ease, I think is far less useful because like I said, it's always going to be a tradeoff between simple and easy but the problem is if your system is too simple, then it means that you're shouldering your day-to-day programming task or shouldering the complexity and you have this emergent complexity that you just can't shake because your primitives are just too simple. You could be programming in assembly language or something like that. That's really simple. You need to be able to construct simple primitives on top of simple primitives so for your immediate need, you have something that is both simple and easy, if that's ever possible. Certainly, ember-concurrency is easy and I think it just means there's maybe work to do in trying to tease apart the different concerns because like you said, there are five. But in real complex systems, there are five bajillions, maybe teasing apart those individual concerns that is composed out of simple primitives. I'm sure you've thought about that a little bit of how do I separate this and make these tasks compose a little bit better and things like that. ALEX: This is a nice segue because it might tie into some of the work that's going to be going into ember-concurrency in the next few months. A big theme of EmberConf is actually, a lot of people are joking that it should just be called GlimmerConf because a lot of it was talking about how Glimmer is going to be this composable subset of Ember, like Glimmer is going to be the rendering layer and then there might be a Glimmer router and a bunch of these Glimmer components that once you npm install them, you get Ember. Glimmers is a chance to think about Ember as a bunch of components working together under a really nice rendering layer. There's definitely some interest in bringing ember-concurrency in thinking what is so-called Glimmer-concurrency going to look like. Part of thinking about that is going to mean teasing apart some of these details as you were just saying. I don't have a lot of specifics to give right now, just that there is a lot of interest in making sure at the very early on, there is some sort of Glimmer-concurrency equivalent. Generally speaking, as part of that process is the question of how do we bring these magical ember-concurrency parameters to just Node or just vanilla JavaScript in general. Perhaps you could use these kinds of tasks on a server and in other environments. I think there's some questions of the way the ember-concurrency bundles together derived state with the actual tasks runner, are you actually going to use that derived state in the server setting? I think some of these pieces are going to have to come apart a little bit. I don't have very concrete ideas for how that's all going to look in the end. Just that I have faith that it will happen pretty easily and the result of it is going to be something that fits pretty nicely into Glimmer as well. CHARLES: Yeah, I hope so. It certainly seems like one of the core issues right because Glimmer-concurrency really should be universal. It should be some -- I don't want to prescribe your work for you -- ALEX: I don't mind. CHARLES: That wouldn't be cool. I mean, Glimmer is very stripped down. You have a very little bit on top of a raw JavaScript environment so if you're going to go there, it'll makes sense. What is this concurrent process builder look like using nothing but JavaScript? It seems like one of the hardest problems is to disentangle it from Ember object because the way that it currently computes that derive state is very intertwined with Ember object. You know the details of this more than I do but it seems like that's one of the biggest challenges is how do you communicate those changes in state without using that? That what I was thinking, it would be a good case for using observable for ember-concurrency, although not for probably the reason that people are thinking, which is for task composition and stuff but I'm very curious. ALEX: Likely the first stab at that direction would probably be using something similar, if not exactly these Glimmer reference primitives. Maybe it is worth talking about that. References are one of the core primitives that's used by Glimmer and it represents a value that might change over time and it's a value that can be lazily gotten, whereas observables, you have something that's firing events every time something changes and it makes the whole pipeline process it right then and there. With references, when something changes, you just tell the world like something's dirty. Then at a later time, maybe when in a request animation frame or some point where it actually makes sense to get the latest values, then it goes through and finds out everything that changes, does a single rerender. What it means is that you don't have the observe recode that's firing every time some value has changed. It's one of the guiding abstractions in Glimmer that makes it possible for it to be so fast and performant. It is very likely that a vanilla version of what ember-concurrency does uses references because those are already separate from the Ember object model and actually are used today in conjunction with Ember object model with the Glimmer that works with Ember today. I think that's probably, to me a first step. Clearly the reference attraction has worked wonders for Glimmer. I prefer to probably use that than observables and the push-based. CHARLES: Observables or something else. That is really, really interesting because there's nothing like vanilla JavaScript programming these days, like the equivalent of a Haskell thunk where you're just passing these things around but you're not actually using them until you actually want to pull a value. At that point, you kick off the whole chain of computation required to get that one value that you need. But it immediately brings to mind and I don't know if this is of concern to you but I was very, very enamored of Ember objects back in the day, in 2012. I was like, "Wow, this is amazing. This solves every problem that I've had." It has been a great companion and I've built some really great stuff on top of it. But now it's definitely turned into baggage. I think it's baggage for libraries that I've written and we're talking about it in the context of it being baggage here and being making it more available to the JavaScript community so I worry a little bit about Glimmer references. Would they possibly turn into something like that and could you counteract that by maybe trying to evangelize them to the wider JavaScript community like, "Here's a new reactive primitive," so that we don't end up in an eddy of the JavaScript community, do you think there's value in trying to say, "There should be some standard in the same way of observable, which is an emerging standard is for eager reactivity, have some lazy reactivity standard," or maybe it's too early for that. That might be a way of future-proofing or getting insurance for the future so you can say, "We can confidently build systems on top of this primitive." ALEX: If the worry is something based on Glimmer reference as it's going to turn into the same baggage or [inaudible] or whatever, that maybe Ember object has turned into some apps, some applications, some libraries. I'm not sure. I guess I don't really see that happening and I know that it's already gotten some validation from some of the people that have worked on Rx. In fact, a very useful primitives for certain kinds of workloads. As much as evangelism certainly helps. It's already off to a much better start than this all-powerful, god object that you can only interact with if you're using .get and .set functions. It's very lightweight. What I'm trying to say here is that there's UI workloads and then there's server-driven workloads and using Rx for both cases means that Rx suffers as a library because in the UI workload, you want something like references where you want to let a bunch of things change and then update stuff in one pass just a tick later or later in the micro task queue. But in Rx, they make you think about things in event-driven way, which might make sense for servers and stream processing but it's ugly when you want to actually build UIs with it. I think if we pay due respect to the fact these workloads are pretty different, I think the reference is way better of an abstraction for things that are UI-centric. They're simple and their performant and I think it's often much better foot than Ember object which is kind of bloated and huge and very hard to optimize. CHARLES: Right. I like that because you have to be precise with the server side things but ironically, with the references, you only care about the state at the point at which you observe it -- when the user observes it, not when the code observes it. The user observes stuff with every animation frame and there can be any number of intermediate states that you can just throw away and you don't care about. You don't need to compute them. I think what you're saying is Rx forces you to compute them. ALEX: Right and you wouldn't use a Glimmer reference for something if you're trying to batch. But in the end, keep all of the events that were fired on all the change events. You wouldn't use references because you're losing all that information until you do that poll and you get the latest value. But 99% of the time, when you're building UIs, that's what you want to use. CHARLES: Are Glimmer reference is their own standalone library or do they currently bundled with Glimmer? ALEX: I'm not sure. If they are not now, I believe the intention is for them to be at their separate repo. I was talking to Kris Selden at EmberConf and I got the impression that the intent, it might not be there now and if I want to start extracting ember-concurrency stuff into vanilla JS, I'd probably want to use a reference-ish thing, if not the official one from Glimmer. CHARLES: I know we talked about this so then, how will you able to use these lazy references to compute tasks state? How that might work or play out? ALEX: The fundamental problem right now is that everything in ember-concurrency is so glued to the Ember object model. What that means is that all ember-concurrency has to do is broadcast so the changes has happened to the state of a certain task so that you can, maybe put a loading spinner up on your template. All it has to do is use object.set and then the built in computed property observer change detection that is in Ember object model. It's going to sort of propagate these changes but that's a bunch of heavy Ember stuff that is going to exist and a lighter weight Glimmer or vanilla JS context. Instead of using .sets and expecting that the thing you're setting it on is a big, heavy Ember object model, you could just use references. Then whoever wants to get a reference to whether a task is running or not, it is running reference. Then just using the standard Glimmer abstractions. At the Glimmer-concurrency task runner, it would just basically kick those references and anyone who has one of those references can flush and get the latest value at some later point in time and then update the UI based on that. Already, as a maintainer at ember-concurrency, I see all the pieces work with that and I could probably just start working on that today. But there's just a handful of other things that I want to align with the vision of Glimmer and Glimmer-concurrency before I start working on that. ELRICK: What would be the referency equivalent in just plain JavaScript outside of Glimmer that you would use to build this on top of --? CHARLES: Like what would the API look like? If you're like, "I don't have a Glimmer. I don't have anything. I'm just --?" ELRICK: Yeah, you just have plain JavaScript. What would be the primitive that you will build this on top of? ALEX: Whether we use a standalone Glimmer references library or this separate reference thing, then I would use the term based on something Kris Selden said. In the end, the APIs is going to be pretty similar between those two but if one thing is requires, as far as I understand it, you've got to set up where in an event loop, your response is something that's changed and then you schedule at a later request animation frame, to actually do the rendering based on that. In order to use something like references, it implies that you've got to flush at a later tick or flush at a later call back. If you've got that in whatever app you're working on, it should be pretty easy to figure out where references fit in. CHARLES: I see, so you would basically say like new task, give it your task class or whatever -- I'm just making stuff up -- then you would just schedule, do a request animation frame and then just pull the task state or something like that? Or a new task reference or something like that? ALEX: You might have some function that's schedule render pass, if not yet scheduled. Then if it hasn't been scheduled, then use requests animation frame. If you call that function again, it's going to no op until that requests animation frame happened. CHARLES: Could you explain that again? ALEX: Sure. If you're actually thinking of a really low level vanilla JavaScript to your app, in the browser or something and you were just using references, then you probably have something where the thing that kicks off the reference or dirties the reference in some way, also run some function called 'schedule rerender', if one hasn't already been scheduled or something less verbose. That would just make sure that some request animation frame has been scheduled. When it flushes, then it will get all the changes but if more references are dirty at that mean time, it won't schedule additional request animation frames. I don't know, that's kind of blue-skying but that's when -- CHARLES: Right. Here's the other things, you see like being able to integrated with a third-party state management solution like Redux or something. Basically, I've got my ember-concurrency tasks and their state is then reflected inside a Redux store. How might that work, if at all? Or was that a crazy idea? ALEX: I don't know. I played around with Redux toy examples and Redux community and Ember is only stronger by the day. I'm not entirely sure how all those pieces fit together because in Redux, they really want you to propagate all of your state changes using the reducer in that single global atom. A lot of people asked me about redux-sagas, which is another generator function-driven way of firing these state mutating actions over some async operation and this is hugely popular but I don't think they have any concept of the derived state that I've been trying to do with ember-concurrency of just being able to ask a task if it's running. You can't just do that. You've got to reflect that into the global atom -- the global store --somehow and to be honest, I don't really know if that's fundamentally at odds with the Redux model, to take something like Ember or Glimmer-concurrency and make it work that way. But ideally, you wouldn't have to forward all that state into the global atom. You just be able to reference that task object. CHARLES: If the task object itself is immutable, it would have seemed like fairly trivial, like you could generate programmatically the reducer required to do that. If you had the state encapsulated, you could come and say, "Now, there's a new state here." It seems like you would be able to adapt that but you would need to be able to react to any time if that state changed to fire and action in the Redux store or fire the Redux action. ALEX: Actually, this will be an easier question to answer because in the Ember community Slack, there's a Redux channel and I know everyone there is already starting to talk about how are references, how is Glimmer is going to, how can we kind of tie these things to Redux and I think when they have some solutions lined up, a lot of the stuff that will be in so-called glimmer-concurrency will just fit in nicely. If they've got nice models for tying references to the state atom, if you will, then it's going to work with the new way. CHARLES: Okay, cool. One of the things that I wanted to talk about was a proposal that Lauren Tan, who put on to the ember-concurrency issues list, although it's an RFC. Are you accepting RFCs now for ember-concurrency? ALEX: I'm not pompous enough to have a separate RFCs repo. Issue approaches perfectly humble for me. CHARLES: But is this the first RFC or have there been a bunch of ember-concurrency RFCs? ALEX: There's been a few. It's definitely great that Ember have standardize on this boilerplate RFC model that everyone can fit their proposal into because it means that all the add-ons that people really like and really want to invest in, they get these high-quality RFCs versus like, "Hey man. It kind of nice if you can just like, have a pipeline." [Laughter] ALEX: Just because Ember invested in that process, the whole add-on community benefits from it and it's great. There's been a few RFCs that are like that. I'm not sure how many of them have made it but I've seen a few that are in that format but this one's definitely one of the nicer ones and a lot of effort was put into it and it looks really nice. ELRICK: I'm not familiar with the RFC. What was the brief overview of what was proposed? ALEX: Lauren was basically proposing that we add concept of pipelines, which is if you have a series of tasks that are stepping the pipeline of operations, then we should standardize that and then define all the steps in the pipeline so rather than having each step in the pipeline, call the next step in the pipeline. They just return some their portion of that work and then the pipeline infrastructure will automatically run the next step in that pipeline. CHARLES: It seems like also then you can derive state about the entire pipeline, rather than just the individual task. You have to manage that a little bit by hand. But the other thing, I guess I would add is it seems like if you're going to go with pipelines, rather than being a simple list, you might want to think about it as being a tree because can you have pipelines that are composed of sub-pipelines, so to speak? ALEX: Yeah. I believe the answer is yes. I'm not sure if it's spelled out in this RFC but really a pipeline just fits the task interface so if there's a task-ish thing or taskable object that you declare as a step of a pipeline or sub-pipeline, it should just work. I'm not sure if there's more work that needs to be done in spelling that out but that seems baked into it. There's a lot of due consideration for making sure these things compose really well and it's already in a really good state. CHARLES: Yeah. What are some of the use cases where you might want to use a pipeline? I'm sure, everyone who's been writing concurrent tasks has probably been maintaining their own pipeline so what is it that you're doing and how is this going to save your time and money? ALEX: Let's use the example that I've actually used in EmberConf, which is something based on my own app, which is in my app, you have to geolocate and find nearby stores that you could walk into and that process is four async steps in a row. One is getting your geolocation coordinates and then the next step is passing those the store, getting values and the third step is maybe some additional validation or just setting a timer so that your animations or any of these little async things that you have to do. But it's really a sequential operation where each time, fetch your geolocation or get it out of a cache and then step to the next thing, then the next thing. It looks okay as I have it in my production app code but it still feels a little gross that you can just look at this thing and be like, "What is the sequence of steps here?" You have to actually get the implementation of each task to see what happens next and where will it go after that. Basically, with ember-concurrency in general, there's a lot of opportunities for finding more conventions for building apps. I don't even know if we really talk about this so far but derived state is part of it. But generally speaking before ember-concurrency, there wasn't as much opportunity, I guess for some of these conventions for building these pretty standard UI flows without feeling that you're just building your own thing every single time, with chains of Promises and your own improvise cancellation scheme and all these things. I see pipelines as a next step. Well, we're pre-building lots of pipelines in our apps. We have these processes that go through these multiple steps and right now, the best we can do is set a bunch of Boolean variables and the derived state that comes with ember-concurrency helps but with pipelines, there's even more and it also structures your thinking so that if something like pipelines catches on, hopefully as an Ember developer, you'll see them in a few different places and already have that tool in how to visualize a problem, visualize a component, visualize the async flow. CHARLES: If I spent my entire morning reading the talk that Lauren referenced in RFC, which was the Railway Oriented Programming, which I think, maybe not quite but basically a visual explanation of a Maybe monad or the Either monad or whatever it's called. One of the greatest explanations of why monads are helpful and through explanation using like the Maybe, where you can have a computation that could have more than one result, either success or failure and how do I take these functions and compose them with functions that might always succeed or might not have a return value or whatever and show the tracks that move through a computation and be able to normalize every function to have the same number of tracks. I realized, I'm getting into the description of it without actually having the visuals in front of it so I'm just going to stop myself and say everybody go read it. It'll take you 35 minutes but it will eliminate so much like the chatter that you've been hearing in the background for a couple years. ALEX: I used to tell people that they should learn Rx because regardless of me liking the task primitive a little bit better, it's great. It just scrambles your brain and reorganize your thought processes and it's such an interesting library to learn. CHARLES: All right. I like it. I'm going to go learn Rx. ALEX: I've been getting, on the server side, the sort of Kafka-based architecture, Apache Kafka. Particularly, they've released some libraries in maybe the last year or so. It's a very Rx-familiar feeling library for composing new data and new aggregates and joins between different topics and streams of events. It just seems like they're at the forefront of solving these really hard problems in a very conventional way. You get into some of that stuff and you'll find that you're doing a lot of server side processing with step that just feels a lot like Rx and I find it very interesting. I haven't actually build anything with it yet but it is likely in my future and anybody that's into the event-driven model should definitely know what people are working on in this Kafka-streams world. CHARLES: That is cool. It's so interesting to see how all the problems that you encounter on working on the server side, you will encounter on the client and vice versa. You can build up a huge corpus of knowledge on one side of the API divide and you'd be surprised that if you were to go work on the other side for a time, you'll be able to leverage 99% of that knowledge. That's fantastic. I would love to get into Kafka but unfortunately, I think we're going to have to save that for another time. That's another one of those words like... I don't know. Is Kafka descended from Storm or something like that? Is it a similar concept? I remember everybody was big on Storm. ALEX: I think Storm process the events and decides what to do with them. Kafka is really just a giant storage that plugs into something, I think like Storm or [inaudible] or any of these things that actually process the events. CHARLES: Yeah, it's all Kubernetes to me. ALEX: Yeah. CHARLES: All righty. Well, with that, I think we'll wrap it up. Thank you so much, Alex for coming to talk to us. It's always enlightening. I love your approach to programming. I love how deeply you think about problems and how humble you are in approaching them because they are big. ALEX: Well, thank you. It's great to be on here. It's fun. CHARLES: All right, everybody. Take care. Bye Elrick, bye Alex.

On this eggnog-flavored episode, I'm joined by one of my favorite artists, the brilliant and prolific Alex Pardee. We share some of our favorite Christmas memories, including Santa's toy counterfeiting ring, sweaty Christmas carolers, boys wanting girl toys, dolls made out of produce, facial road rash, tall Tiny Tims and the death of Santa. If you miss this episode, YULE regret it (I'm so sorry). Visuals Did you know that Santa made the Dungeons & Dragons Fortress of Fangs playset just for Alex? It's true. I karate chopped everything in a 10 mile radius the year I got my Fisher Price Miss Piggy puppet. Alex with his Valterra Zombie board before going pro. They don't call it The Nightmare for nothing. This poser Nash skateboard nearly killed me. Extras Want to ruin Christmas for the kiddies, tell them that Santa Claus is dead. I recount the time I wanted to be Jacob Marley. Credits Opening Song: These Are The Quotes From Our Favorite 80's Movies by The Bouncing Souls Closing Song: Have A Holly Jolly X-Mas by Crom-Tech