Podcasts about because brian

Imagine discovering that the key to understanding people's true intentions lies in their facial features. Now, picture being able to decode these nonverbal cues and gain deep insight into their personalities and behaviors. What if this skill not only transformed your personal relationships but also gave you a strategic advantage in sales and negotiations? Uncover the secrets of face reading with Brian Gaulke, a master in decoding facial features. On this episode of The Kathryn For Real podcast we delve into the unexpected power of nonverbal communication and unlock the hidden truths behind every smile, frown, and raised eyebrow.  My special guest is Brian Gaulke. Brian is a people problem solver and expert in decoding facial features. He shares his journey of learning nonverbal communication techniques. From his early career experiences to his fascination with personal development books, Brian's unconventional path to mastering face reading provides valuable insights into the impact of body language on interpersonal dynamics. Brian says that anyone can acquire these skills, debunking the myth that it's an innate talent. Because Brian is using visual images to explain some of the techniques, I thought this would be a great time to start uploading my podcast videos to my Youtube channel. You can watch Brian's episode now! About Brian Introducing Brian Galke, also known as “The People Problem Solver,” a dynamic speaker and expert in improving communication skills. Brian's journey began as an Introverted/Extroverted professional grappling with social anxiety. Recognizing the critical importance of effective communication in achieving success, he embarked on a deliberate path of self-improvement. Drawing from diverse experiences in retail, the service industry, and Helpdesk roles, Brian strategically positioned himself in environments where he could hone his interpersonal skills. With each role, he diligently cultivated subtle techniques to engage with others more effectively. The turning point in Brian's journey came when learned how to Decode Facial Features. This newfound ability to revolutionized his interactions, both personally and professionally. This commitment to personal growth paid off handsomely, propelling Brian through nine promotions—from his humble beginnings as an introverted Helpdesk employee to his illustrious tenure as Regional Vice President of Sales with a staggering $40M book of business under his belt.  Eager to share his transformative insights with the world, Brian transitioned from the corporate arena to become an esteemed speaker and educator. He graces stages alongside luminaries such as Janine Driver, Brad Lea, Steve Sims, Greg Reid, and Alex Hormozi, empowering audiences with the invaluable skill set that transformed his own life.

Merry Christmas! Brian Zahnd is back on the show to discuss his Christmas devotional The Anticipated Christ. We talk about why he's "trying to be religious," the difference between Christmas and Advent, the book of Isaiah, the Magnificat, what nonviolence has to do with Advent, the current Israel–Hamas war, and more.We also spend a few minutes at the end just riffing on music. Why? Because Brian loves music and created an unconventional Advent playlist to go along with the book. And after our conversation, he created another one inspired by this episode! We strongly recommend rocking out to them while cooking Christmas dinner.Here's a couple more links to things mentioned in the episode:Eggnog recipeSpiritual, Not ReligiousThe beverage we taste in this episode is ... eggnog. With some Eagle Rare, if you're so inclined.You can find the transcript for this episode here.Content note: this episode contains some mild profanity.=====Join the Post-Evangelical Collective Leading in New and Emerging Spaces Cohort with Brian McLaren, Feb. 15-16, 2024.=====Want to support us?The best way is to subscribe to our Patreon. Annual memberships are available for a 10% discount.If you'd rather make a one-time donation, you can contribute through our PayPal. Other important info: Rate & review us on Apple & Spotify Follow us on social media at @PPWBPodcast Watch & comment on YouTube Email us at pastorandphilosopher@gmail.com Cheers!

Listen, there are just four storylines of significance now that Sarah is cast to the side. She just roves through a few other storylines saying things like, "at least you didn't sleep with a priest!" Carrie is sleeping with her secret psychologist, but so is Hillary! Carrie confronts them, and the doctor says she is crazy and since Hillary is Carrie's power of attorney (I'm sorry, what?) - she is going to be committed to Faircrest, which could also be thought of as Pity Me Pines. Is she going to be involuntarily locked up for sleeping with her psychologist who was manipulating her and she didn't know was a psychologist? Sure, but at least she didn't sleep with a priest. Linda turns down a great ad campaign so that she can try out for a movie, causing Hillary to break character and plainly say, "you don't know how to act." But, she gets the part and has to rehearse lines about being in an abusive relationship with Eric, formerly her abusive relationship partner. It's awkward and uncomfortable, but at least she didn't sleep with a priest. Julie and Craig get together, after he literally takes her against her will out of the model house into his apartment down the beach. But he leaves the door open and says she can leave, but that he won't be coming after her. She sleeps with her kidnapper, giving in to her desire, literally rewarding the worst behavior imaginable. But hey, at least she didn't sleep with a priest. Monique and Adam are broken up because he found Grayson, his ex-wife. He breaks into her hotel room when he finds out she is in there with another man. Holds him at gun point, only to find out it wasn't Grayson, causing him to deliver the line, "It's not Grayson you stupid bastard!" He goes to Monique and says he wants to be with her since his wife is gone, and she cancels her plans to move to New York to be with her boyfriend now that his first choice is gone. Is it settling? Sure, but at least she didn't sleep with a priest. Finally, Cynthia. Oh, sweet Cynthia. The stalker issues are pretty intense. Police can't arrest him because he didn't break any laws. Hilarity ensues as the stalker keeps coming up in their space, causing Brian to beat on him like he's a rug and it's Sunday in Germany. As in, beating on him outside with a stick. But the stick is his hand. Look, I can't explain it. Because Brian attacked the stalker, the judge says, "Mr. Thompson had not violated my restraining order when you violated him." That line lands differently in 2022 than 1995 but whatev. So fine, Cynthia and Brian decide to intentionally drive the stalker crazy, so they have romantic passionate sex in front of the open windows. Did they infuriate a dangerous stalker? Yes, but hey, at least she didn't sleep with a priest. Y'all really should be watching this show. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/melroseplacecast/message

In this episode, we hear from Brian Valparaiso as he shares his experience racing Ironman St. George just a few weeks ago. Brian is married, has two adult children, and works full-time while balancing Ironman training.Brian shares that he signed up for Ironman St. George after completing Ironman 70.3 St. George in 2021 so he got in before the decision was made to use this as the World Championship this year. We spend a few minutes talking about his team, his coach, and the access that he has living in Southern California. Brian talks us through the week before the race. He gives some insight into his packing strategy and what he was able to experience in the time leading up to race day.Because Brian finished the race only 2 weeks prior to the recording, I took advantage of the opportunity to ask him to talk us through his experience step by step while it was still fresh in his mind.We talk through the swim, the bike, and the run. Since Brian had completed Ironman 70.3 St. George last year, he was able to compare the 2 courses for us. He also shares his nutrition plan.We round out our conversation talking about bikes and Brian shares what he has on the schedule for the rest of the year.

Because Brian needed some time to recover after last week's shocking revelations, we're throwing it back to January 6th, the day of the Capitol Riot, for a minisode about kung fu kangaroos. We're discussing the absolutely terrible movie, Warriors of Virtue, in which a kid with a bum leg travels through a portal in the sewers and winds up the center of a horrible attempt to crib moves from the Ninja Turtles.

Welcome back to Movies For Life with our first kind of bonus episode! Because Brian cheated in choosing his Forever Favorites and had a tie with BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, today we are covering that movie in a standalone episode. It's a discussion about a movie that lives in the hearts of so many 80s and 90s kids, the absolute comedy classic - 1984's GHOSTBUSTERS! Listen as Brian and Michele both show their love and reverence for the film, and basically spend much of the episode just quoting it to each other! We hope you enjoy, and don't worry! There will still be another new episode next week! Follow the hosts and the show on Twitter: Movies For Life podcast: @MovieLifePod Brian Keiper: @BrianDKeiper Michele Eggen: @micheleneggen

Today’s drink is the Moscow Mule, which contains ginger beer, lime, and vodka. But not bitters. Because Brian forgot the bitters.2 ounces Vodka (we used Reyka)½ ounce fresh lime juice / wedges6 ounces ginger beer (we used Fever Tree, which Brian deemed “fancy”)Brian stirred it up with a swizzle spoon in traditional copper mule mugs with ice.Chryssy tells us about her fondness for the NYT Modern Love column and all its accoutrements (including the Amazon Prime specials, Podcast, and Tiny Love Stories). She then dives into one of the pieces, which includes a link to research on building intimacy.Of course, B and C talk through a few of the questions to find out if they like one another more or less by the end of the conversation. You can guess how that goes – or listen in to find out.Here's the link to the questions on today’s show, in case you’d like to try them out with your partner or potential partner. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/style/36-questions-that-lead-to-love.htmlOn today’s Down and Dirty, the duo brings in a third with special guest Heather from “How To Do Life!” A lively conversation ensues about our therapy histories and how participating in therapy helped – or didn’t – in our past and current relationships. Everyone takes turns asking one another deeply personal questions that maybe aren’t necessarily made for radio, which makes them even better for radio.Next week is our last episode in the DIVORCE arc of Season 1. Then, we move onto DATING. Stay tuned.Until next time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today's episode is another show about incredible exits. We got the chance to speak with Brian Lejeune and Janine Do. They chat with us about their intensely difficult exit and the challenges they faced. Tune in to hear our chat with Brian and Janine about their experiences as entrepreneurs. Topics: Brian's typical entrepreneurial journey. How Janine's parents influenced her career. When they started to see sales. Why you shouldn't get stuck on branding on packaging. Why there are no excuses for working less. When to consider the exit process. Why Mastermind groups are important. How much Brian and Janine made on their exit. Logic over emotion. How their level-headed nature was key to their success. Their emotional response to their exit. Transcription: Mark:       All right Joe, I know that Jason Yellowitz sold your business. I actually sold Jason's business before he came on board as a broker at Quiet Light Brokerage. I often referred to the story of selling Jason's business to potential sellers to explain that sometimes when you're in the process of selling and getting closer to that closing date, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And that happened with Jason's business. His business that he was selling these baby gates and dog gates. It had the worst three day period of sales in its history and of course, the buyers started freaking out; understandably so. This happens with deals sometimes when you're in that due diligence period where all of a sudden all hell breaks loose and you kind of have to figure out what's going on. I know you just went through an incredibly painful exit with a client who had that sort of scenario but it worked out. Joe:          Yeah, and it wasn't painful for me necessarily because I'm at arm's length so it was okay but, Janine, I think stopped eating at one point. It was that incredibly painful. I remember I was at eCommerceFuel down in Fort Worth this year and we were about to close and something went wrong. And I don't want to give the details away here in the intro because you've got to listen to this. What could have gone wrong; went wrong and to the nth level; this is like deal killer, account close, things are over kind of gone wrong but Brian and Janine; the owners of the business, remained level-headed. Even though, like when I called him from the ECF event trying to cheer him up and like, hey, how's it going today? We got over this hurdle and I could hear it in his voice something else happened. Like he was kicked when he was down on this second hurdle that we had to get over and it was incredibly painful. That aside, these two are incredible people. They are pharmacists by trade. Janine has her PhD and she comes from a family with six children, five of the six have Ph.D. They're immigrants. They lived in the projects in Roxbury, Massachusetts and it's just an incredible story all around; incredible story, incredible exit, incredibly painful with light at the end of the tunnel. And they're actually now under LOI buying another business so it's a full story. They launched another brand, another business before they closed this transaction and so they're already generating another income stream and now they found an opportunity where they're under LOI buying another business. And that's really within 60 days of closing the last transaction so it's an incredible story all around. Mark:       That's fantastic. Let's get to it. Joe:          Hey, folks. Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and we've got another Incredible Exits episode here. We've got Brian and Janine Lejeune on the call. Welcome, guys. How are you? Janine:    Good. How are you, Joe? Brian:      Very good, Joe. Joe:          Now, listen, we normally call this Incredible Exits but I want to change that for this episode. We'll call it the Incredibly Painful Exit for you guys because there were certain components of it that were incredibly challenging and painful. And I think at one point, Janine, you might have stopped eating if Brian was telling the truth. Janine:    I stopped eating and I stopped sleeping. Joe:          Well, good. Let's get a little bit background on you first. You guys are both pharmacists by training, I believe, right? Brian:      That's right, yeah. Janine:    I'm the one with a doctorate degree though; he's only got like a normal degree. Joe:          So I need to call you Dr. Janine? Janine:    Yes. Joe:          Dr. J, how about that? Brian:      There's just more responsibility that comes with that. I keep telling her on the plane when they if there's a doctor in the house. Joe:          It's a Ph.D., right? Janine:    Yeah. Joe:          So I have a father in law that has his PhD and he said it just stands for piled higher and deeper. Janine:    Yeah, that sounds about right? Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    [INAUDIBLE 00:05:28.7] loan debts when I graduated. Joe:          200? Janine:    200,000 yeah. Joe:          How incredibly painful, have you paid that off with the sale of your business? Janine:    We're going to. But right now with the stock market doing some fun stuff we're putting some money there. Joe:          Cool. Good for you. All right, well, let's get the background and Brian, let's start with you. Because honestly, Janine's story is much more interesting so I just want to get yours out of the way. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          What's your story background; the business history, offline business, and then online, I believe, right? Brian:      Yeah, so pretty typical in the entrepreneurial journey. I'm kind of been dabbling in a lot of things for a lot of years. I went to college, came out, and became a pharmacist. So that was the path I took but even in college, I'm kind of always entrepreneurial and just always looking for other opportunities. I think about maybe two years into pharmacy I started saying, okay, I don't think this is quite what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I started looking at businesses; looking at local businesses. I bought my first business when I was about 26, 27 years old and it was a tanning salon. I knew absolutely nothing about the industry. I was honestly just looking for a business. It was five minutes from my house. I learned as much as I could from it and kind of grew it to a really nice level where I was actually able to leave pharmacy completely. And I left pharmacy for about seven, eight years, and in that span opened up other salons, pulled some partners in, did some distributorship. I did a lot of like brick and mortar type stores; bought some, sold some, but have never sold them at the correct time. Always kind of passed its peak like oh, we should sell or something's going wrong with a partner and always getting out not at the ideal… Joe:          A little too late. Brian:      Yeah, so that was a big thing that looking at what we did that was my one goal. Like, let's do this at the right time. You never know when the perfect time is, but you just don't want to do it the wrong time. Joe:          True. When did you jump into the online space? Brian:      Online in terms of jumping in probably not until like 2014, but a lot of little things here and there; trying to start blogs, trying to sell things on eBay or whatever. But that was very, very small. It was always kind of like, oh, what can I do next? What can I do next? But 2014, 2015 I kind of found the Amazon space… Joe:          Was it before or after the young lady sitting beside you, the two of you met? Brian:      Yeah, so before. But honestly, I owe a lot to her because I didn't really get super deep into it until she came along for sure. Joe:          Well, she does have her Ph.D. She's a lot smarter than you are. Janine:    I'm obviously smarter. Brian:      It just takes me a little longer maybe. Joe:          Let's hear a little of your background, Janine. And do me a favor and just tell everybody about the generation before you because I think you've got a fascinating family story as well. Janine:    Yeah, sure. So my family came here in 1989. My dad was 35 years old at that time; seven kids, pregnant wife, no money, no English whatsoever. Joe:          What country did you come from? Janine:    We came from Vietnam. Joe:          Okay. Janine:    Yeah, So he fought with the American soldiers during the Vietnam War. He was of course against the communist people so they put him in jail. Things were just getting pretty rough for us back there and we got the opportunity to come to this country and he decided to take the chance. So he came in at '89.  He was 35. He's making minimum wage, raising a family of probably more even seven kids in random age; so fetus to, I think 17 or 18 years old, maybe even a little younger than that. Joe:          Any idea how much money the family had when you came to the country? Janine:    Oh, yeah, nothing. Not even like a ring that's worth anything. Besides the clothes on our backs, we've got nothing more. My mom didn't own anything that was worth anything. No heirloom ring or just nothing like that. So we rely a lot on government help at the time. We spent 10 to 12 years in the projects. Joe:          In what city? Janine:    In Roxbury. Joe:          In Roxbury. Okay, I spent some time up on Mission Hill myself. Janine:    Well, you know the police station and radio station? Joe:          Sure. Janine:    So I was five minutes walking distance from the police station. That's like the highest crime-ridden place you can think of in Massachusetts. Joe:          Wow. Janine:    That's where I grew up. Joe:          And you did this and managed to have how many PhDs in your family now with all the siblings that you have? Janine:    Oh, so we have a dentist, four pharmacies, three bachelor degrees, and one masters; so [INAUDIBLE 00:10:27.4] more than one. Joe:          A true incredible American success story. That's incredible. No excuses to my kids are now your kids that are second, third, fourth, fifth-generation Americans that don't want to do the hard work that you guys did. Janine:    Well, it's tough to teach them and I don't know how to impart the same wisdom on them that my father did for us. But when I was little he used to tell me if we see someone who was homeless on the street he was like do you see that? If you don't do good in school, that's where you're going to end up and it freaked me out. And I actually believed him. I actually believe him so we are always doing that in school; every one of us. So I was top in my classes on like grade school. Joe:          Wow. And you still married Brian? That's amazing. Janine:    Yeah, and I don't know how this [INAUDIBLE 00:11:15.4] tricked me into in. Joe:          All right folks, I know these guys pretty well at this point. We've gone through a lot together so, yes, I like to give them both a hard time because they give it back to me as well. All right, so your online entrepreneurial journey; and you were obviously a pharmacist. You have a PhD but at some point, you and Brian met. Did you already have online businesses before you met Brian or did you jump into the space when you guys met? Janine:    Yeah. So since I was like 16. My parents opened a restaurant and that's when things kind of got better for my family. And so I saw the opportunity of having a business would mean. I mean, literally, he opened a restaurant and two years later he was out of the projects. He bought a house. He bought this brand new Lexus. Somebody has always want to fall on time. So from that, I see the incredible opportunity of owning a business but I also saw how much it consumed my parents. So they were always there. That's all they talked about and they're literally there; sometimes my dad is there at four in the morning to make this broth that takes six hours to cook. So I see how much it consumed them. So I saw the opportunity in business but didn't like the brick and mortar aspect of it. They were always gone. They were always there. So I stumbled on eBay when I was 18 years old in college. So this is 2002. I was struggling with money, so I looked around my room; whatever was worth selling, I put on eBay. Whatever I can get, like ten bucks I would do it because; you know a college student, typical story. That's kind of how I got into the whole online space and I just never left. I saw the opportunity. I was trying all kinds of things over the next 15 years. I did a feel at marketing. I tried selling cellphones. I tried selling used sports shoes. I did affiliate marketing; just all kinds of things and they made me a decent side income but just not enough to replace a full-time job. And then when I became a pharmacist making over 100K a year, it became harder to justify that $20 or $30 I'm making on the side business. And then I met this guy who told me about FBA. I didn't know anything about it. It was the first time I heard of the word private label. I have no idea what that meant so he explain it to me. We bought ASM. I think you had ASM3. So we got that and that's how our journey began. Brian:      It was that private label route that really kind of changed things. Both of us were always selling other people's products or always looking for that next thing to sell whereas it was like, okay we can develop our own brand. And I had sort of done this in the tanning salon world where like we were private labeling back in early 2000s a line of skincare that we would bring into the salon. And then we started doing tanning beds and we basically brought some tanning beds in from Italy. We put our own name on them and we started selling them to other salons. So I've kind of been familiar with it but the Amazon thing really opened my eyes to kind of like okay, we can do something really big. The volume is incredible. Get a good product, get a good brand, and just try to blow it up and fortunately, it worked out. Joe:          And you learned both the initial stuff through ASM3 I think you said it was. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          That's a while ago, right? Brian:      Spot on. Joe:          Several years ago and many variations since then. If somebody is new coming into the space and let's say they're a pharmacist working and listening to this podcast right now, what would you suggest they listen to; courses that they take, masterminds that they join, anything that you can recommend? Janine:    I think the most important thing is to take action. There are a lot of courses out there right now and I remember I heard one of the guys spoke on stage and he was like; so this is speaking to the ASM crowd who all paid and all wanted to be there and he said, I know 95% of you here today aren't going to take action. I sat there and I thought to myself, that's so weird. Who the hell spends that kind of money and that kind of time to go there and not take action? I thought there's no way that that's true because I knew that there's no chance in hell that I wouldn't be taking action. But then over the years, I learned that he was right. People just aren't taking action. They buy these courses and then their brand is kind of like they took it off as some I did it, kind of the same thing with when someone signed up for gym membership in their brand [INAUDIBLE 00:15:42.9] release of you actually going to the gym, even though you didn't and all you did was bought the membership. It's like a psychological experiment I read about so much will buy courses and in their brain is checked off as, hey, I did it. The most important thing is just really to take action. Joe:          No matter which course, whatever it is just take some action. Figure it out, get started, and learn from that experience. Okay. So the business that we worked together on that you sold through Quiet Light is in the electronic space. Is this the largest business that you had gotten off the ground and launched? Brian:      Yes, definitely. Joe:          Okay. All right, let's talk about that process a little bit. When did you first launch this particular business? Brian:      So that would have been the last quarter of 2016. Joe:          And did you use any particular tools to research the niche; like a Jungle Scout or a Helium10 or anything like that? Brian:      Helium10 at that time. Joe:          Okay, do you recall how much your initial order was; how much you spent on the first batch of products? Janine:    1,000 units so that would have been… Brian:      About $10,000. Joe:          Did you have the money in the bank for that or did you have debt and use a credit card; what was your financial situation then? Janine:    Well, at the time I was working overtime whenever I could so I literally sat there and mapped out how many hours can I work overtime and how many hours did I work and all that money gets put into the business. Because I could justify to myself that I'm not risking my “own money”, this is extra money. So I was starting over. I was doing like sidestep. I was doing all kinds of crazy things. It was like the second order that I had to use credit card and some of these loans. Joe:          How long did it take between; well, let's actually back up, when you got the first 10,000 units… Janine:    1,000 units. Joe:          1,000 units, $10,000, how quickly did things take off for you? When did you start to see sales and then how quickly did you go? Janine:    It just started selling. Brian:      Yeah, that one started selling really good but it's a little bit unfair to call it like that's when we started, because both of us had products before that time that we're marginally successful in the sense that they would sell but neither one of us could make the products profitable. So we got to decent volumes of we could sell 15, 20, 25 a day type of thing but spending more on PPC than we were getting in and it never kind of went over that hump, whereas with the electronic product that actually Janine launched, it was up to 20, 30 units a day almost immediately. So it was kind of we got sat there and we're looking, okay, what do we do next? And she was trying to figure out because there wasn't a big bank account that had all this money ready to go to invest. So she says, okay, I think if I buy a thousand now and then I save up and I buy a thousand, and she had literally a whole path of what she wanted to do. And we sat there… Janine:    At an ice cream shop. Brian:      We're at an ice cream shop and I said, no, that's not how you do it. You need a hundred thousand dollars. We need to do a big order. Like that's it. This product is going to work. You could see it. It just didn't take a lot of effort. It got bigger and bigger every day. And then it was loans and credit cards and scrounging. Janine:    I thought he was insane. Joe:          He won that argument? He won the argument of more like spend a hundred… Janine:    You know I'm sitting there and I'm like where are you going to get a hundred thousand dollars; like what kind of overtimes do you think I can work? And at that point, I'd already quit my job but I knew that he was right. And this is why our partnership works really, really well. He already knows how the business road works whereas I'm kind of new to it. And this is whether you run a brick and mortar like a tanning salon or online, the principles are the same; the cash flow principles, how to allocate money, how to leverage debt. Those principles don't change no matter what business you're in. And I agree with him, even though it never occurred we would do it. He brought it up and I thought he was right. So I literally spent one day because when you apply for a loan, credit cards will know about it and they're more like three reject to you. So I had one day off of work. I sat there and applied to every single credit card that I could think of and applied to every single loan that I could think of and I scrounged around between credit cards, new credit cards, and a cash loan I was able to come up with a hundred thousand dollars. Joe:          Wow. You actually pulled the trigger and raised a hundred thousand too. So we have a lot of people that say, how do we raise capital? How do I buy a business and raise capital? You just found a hundred thousand dollars through cabbage and multiple credit cards just like that. Brian:      And I kind of told her, I said money is not the hard part. That's the easy part. I think we can all figure out a way to get money, whether it's borrowing from family if you have to or credit cards, whatever. The hard part was done like she found the product. Joe:          She found the product so getting to the point where you buy product. Brian:      Getting the money was always easier. Joe:          Okay, that's interesting. I'm mentoring some students at a local college here and they had a hard time finding money to incorporate. And they need to listen to this podcast and do what you guys did. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          I said to them, I said look around, just sell something, you need to do it. Come on. Brian;        And I think a lot of people get stuck on I have to set up this first, I need a corporation, I need a logo, I need business cards. And all of that is way overrated. I think people use that as sort of a stalling mechanism. They need to get things set up, they need to be ready and it's not true. It's sell something first and figure out the other stuff after. Janine:    Yeah, I think I was at a million dollars before I had a corporation before I was properly set up, before like a lot of things. I don't even have a domain, I didn't even have a .com. I know you e-mail sequined, I know e-mail list, I didn't have a brand, didn't have a Shopify present, I didn't have any business card. I know a lot of people to keep asking me for one and our packaging was literally this box that had that background on, had a bunch of textbooks, and then on sit Cinderella on it. It looks like someone just kind of like threw something together… Brian:      It was just the stock box from the manufacturer. Joe:          And just for the record, Cinderella had absolutely nothing to do with the product folks. Janine:    Nothing at all. Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    My point is sometimes you get stuck on these things. Oh, I have to get the packaging right, I have to design this, I have to design that, I have to get a domain, I have to brand register and all these things. I didn't do any of them until I'm already well over a million. Brian:      All of it is important but if you get stuck on doing that before you actually have something to sell… Joe:          You have to get out of the game. Brian:      Long path, exactly. Joe:          I'm curious. You had said you'd each tried multiple things and you didn't get past 15 or 20 units a day. Were they all in the same Seller Account as this one or separate Seller Accounts? How did you manage that aspect of it? We'd always recommend separate brands for separate seller accounts. Brian:      Yeah, so at that time we both had our own seller accounts. But then the one that we ended up building with was the one she had set up. And there were multiple products in there and they were… Janine:    Totally unrelated. Brian:      Totally unrelated. A lot of like; it became like test products so like we finally found the one that stuck and then that became the brand and sort of just slowly fades out. Joe:          And the rest faded away. Brian:      Yup. Joe:          Okay, so the biggest challenge you would say is actually finding the right product and getting it to work, and don't let yourself get stuck in the gate trying to get to be perfectly set up before. Janine:    Yeah. That and also, I don't want to our story to make people feel like, oh, I need a hundred thousand dollars or, oh, I need 10 grand otherwise I can't get started. That's totally not true. If I hadn't had four products that failed, if I hadn't had four products where I spent all my time; all the things I learned; photography, how to talk to freelancers, going to Fiverr.com to hire people, how to write a good listing, how to use Helium10, how to use all kinds of software; I learned all of that but all of those products that cost me like a dollar, a dollar 20 cents. I only started with a few hundred bucks. That's when I learned all of those skills so when the right product comes along, I'm ready to go. And I think that's contributed a lot of our success. I imagine if my very first product was a successful product maybe I wasn't ready for it and maybe we wouldn't have gone the trajectory that we were. So even if you have 200 bucks to buy something that cost a dollar or two and you may not make money on it, do it. Joe:          Education; right, you're learning along the way. Janine:    That 200 bucks is worth it. Joe:          Okay, so lots of failure or enough failure or mediocre success before you head to the home run; the seven-figure eventual exit, so to speak. So you found a way to raise money, not an issue for you, as the business continued to grow were there challenges with cash flow management trying to keep up with more and more inventory demands? Well, you don't have a job any anymore Janine, you have an income. Talk to me about those challenges and how you overcame them. Brian:      Yeah, there were definitely challenges but it became; so she had left her job, I was still working for about a year. I left in the end of 2018 so now neither one of us are working in pharmacy but during 2018 when the real growth really started to happen, it was always a struggle to order enough to grow because we're growing 30%, 40%, 50% month over month. It wasn't slowing down so it was always trying to stay one step ahead with inventory. We use Amazon lending extensively. So, I mean, we started with the smallest. They offered a thousand-dollar lone, we took it, and then every time we paid it off, the loan got bigger and bigger. Joe:          Do you always have to wait for them to offer or is there a way that you could… Brian:      Yeah, and as far as I know, the offer is the offer. There's no getting anymore. Joe:          So you take it, pay it off and then you're going to get a… Janine:    Yeah it was really stupid. The first loan for a thousand dollars I would have done anything for us. We were already doing; I can't remember the exact number, but at least maybe 50 or 60 grand or maybe even a lot more than that. So I remember looking at it and thinking to myself, what the hell is this going to do? Why is Amazon giving us such a cheap ass loan like a thousand bucks? But we took it and it went to 10 grand, it went to 70, and it went to 300,000, 500,000. It ended up over 800,000. It just gets bigger and bigger. Joe:          Wow. Janine:    So if you get an offer even if it's 500 bucks or $100, take it. Brian:      Yeah, and they're short term loans so they're expensive to have on your books, but it allowed us to fund the inventory and fund the growth, and it worked out well. Like going back there would be no other way to grow the company too. So when we sold it was almost at five million a year. Joe:          Okay, let's get to the niche itself and the incredible painful exit as opposed to just incredible. It's incredible, no question about it. The whole story is amazing and inspiring and hopefully, it's going to get people in that starting gate to getting out of it and taking some actions; looking around the room and selling whatever they have to, working more hours. I mean, when I was a kid, I was complaining that I didn't have enough money. That was kind of to the millionaire next door, the best friend of my parents. I never know that they are, but they were. And I worked for the company and instead of staying I'm like [INAUDIBLE 00:27:34.5] where I said at some point I was in the room complaining I think probably as my parents were playing Chinese checkers which they do. And he said, just stop your whining. There's plenty of work. Just go work more hours. There are lots to do. Work more hours. And that's exactly what you did Janine. You do the math on how to work more hours so that you can fund that $10,000 purchase. So no excuses, people, if you want to be an entrepreneur, that's what you got to do. All right. So why the electronics space? It's a space that we talk about in terms of risk and that's risk of obsolescence and again, it took me a long time to learn to pronounce that but it means that there's a fear that the product will be outdated someday in the future with changes in updates. So why the electronic space, what attracted you to that? Brian:      I don't think there was a lot of thought as to that we want to go into electronics. So it just came from product research and finding a good volume product that didn't seem to have a ton of competition that seemed to be somewhat new in the marketplace with already a lot of volume. So it kind of checked all the boxes that we're looking for. Also, there's a lot of training and there's a lot of categories, there's a lot of products, there's a lot of things that they tell everybody to avoid. We tend to; especially now that we've developed a better skill set around this and we have more confidence… Janine:    We do the opposite. Brian;        Yeah, we do the opposite a lot of times. Don't always avoid because guess what? I mean, the space is already crowded but the things that everyone is not avoiding, everyone's in those. So the ones that they say don't avoid and maybe it's an oversized, maybe it's electronics. If it still seems like a good opportunity, go for it. Joe:          Take it. Brian:      Yeah, I don't like to use like a definitely do not do this. Joe:          All right, so launched in 2016, 20 million in revenue before you ever incorporated, at what point from your experience selling too late; at what point did you say to yourself, okay, we're going to exit this. We're going to talk to me, talk to Joe, talk to somebody, and learn about the process of selling the business. How long was it and how far in advance do you think other people should consider the exit process or the training or planning, as it's called? Janine:    Well, they always say they won, right? Joe:          Nobody ever does that. Brian:      No. Janine:    No, no one does. Brian:      I think as soon as you know that you have a business. So, I mean, it can't be day one because maybe that's never going to go anywhere but as soon as you sort of maybe feel traction, you've kind of built the brand, it's still growing, and you see like an upside to it maybe start planning. Definitely from the day one keep your books good. That was a major thing. Joe:          Remind me, did you use QuickBooks or Xero? Brian:      We used QuickBooks. Joe:          And did you outsource to a bookkeeper eventually or do you do that yourself? Brian:      Eventually. So we're doing it. I was doing it myself and then when we sat down with you, that was kind of one of the things you helped us with. Joe:          Okay. Brian:      So we used CapForge and they were awesome. So they went back and had to recast all the books to the accrual method. So that was a little long, tedious, painful. Joe:          Yup. Brian:      It's probably more expensive doing it that way than to just keeping it correctly from the start. But, yeah, I think just planning is always better, of course. So as soon as you think you have a business, I think you should at least have it on your radar because who knows? I mean, we're all in this to make money. You own a business to make money and if selling it is going to make you money, that should be part of your plan. Joe:          Yeah, so one of the things; I would just try to shift everybody's mindset. Everybody's always called it plan to sell your business the day that you started exit planning, flip it, and call it training because you're learning. You're constantly learning by your failures and in launching new products until you hit that right last one that launched a seven-figure exit. Think about the exit planning as training as well. If you're going to run a marathon, you've got to train for it or you're never going to get out of the gate. You've got to learn about the process. You're listening to this podcast so that's a great start. Get a valuation. Look at other listings and how they're valued and how the packages are put together. Train as much as you can. Don't make it your sole focus and your mission, but make it part of your overall business plan and operating your business so that you can eventually exit before you get burned out and things turn the wrong way and it's too late to exit at a strong value. Janine:    I think the idea was initially planted in our heads when we had our initial conversation with Ezra on our mastermind group. And then that brings me to another point, the importance of having a mastermind. Brian and I are always a part of masterminds. Sometimes we're in two different masterminds. Right now I'm in three different masterminds, but having a group of people that you can talk to is like super-duper important. So Ezra we talked to him, he planted the idea in our head. We connected with you to get the initial phone call with you. I love that you were not fishy at all. It was just very informative, very casual when we got to talk with you. And we got off that day and we decided, yeah, we're going to do this. But it took us six months to get everything set up; all the books probably correct but it's never too late. Brian:      And like you said about an education, going through the process, I think allows you to learn how to run the business better anyways. So even if you were to keep it, you should be in a better position after going through it. Joe:          I agree 100%. Brian:      Even going through the sale there were things that we learned. So during due diligence, it's like you get asked a question or someone else organizes information in a different way and you say to yourself, oh, I wish we did that before. But now guess what? We'd do it next time. So our next business, we set up a little differently because of things we learned by being exposed to the process. Joe:          Right. Did you make more money on the exit than you made while you were running the business? Brian:      Yes. Joe:          50% of all the money you ever made, 90%? Brian:      Cash flow is a funny thing. So there was a lot of money flowing through our business but in terms of what you end up with yeah, I definitely think the exit; I don't know what percentage, but yeah, a big amount of what we actually ended up with was from the sale. Joe:          Total earnings. Janine:    Every month I'm like where's our money? Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    We had Like 300,000 to 400,000 monthly sales so I was like where's all that money? Brian:      Yeah, we'd laugh as we'd wire money. We're like the Chinese they're taking all our money. I'm like why do you keep sending it to them but yeah. Janine:    So the exit is when the cash came down and it definitely… Joe:          And it comes at a lower tax bracket too. Brian:      It does which is incredible. Joe:          Very, very helpful. All right, let's talk about the painful part of the exit. So we were a couple of days away from signing an asset purchase agreement with your buyer. The CFO of the company bought your product and his wife plugged it in and it started to smoke and catch on fire. Janine:    I don't think it caught fire, it just smoked. Joe:          Just a smoke; okay a minor technicality. Brian:      Yeah, and not a few days before it closed it was literally… Janine:    The day of. Brian:      The day of that we were supposed to close. Yeah. Joe:          When details in your life are incredibly painful, you remember them very, very well. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          You guys can remember exactly where you were when you got that e-mail or phone call, I imagine, as well. But we overcame that. We were able to sort of get over that hurdle; get around that hurdle. Can you address how that was overcome? Brian:      Yeah, the exact how so we had a lot of confidence in our product and in our business and we didn't feel that the buyer had that same confidence. And I think that's normal, right? So they don't know exactly what they're getting. There's always going to be maybe some reservations, especially like you were talking to electronic product obsolescence, safety hazards type of thing. But we had kind of built it, we had huge volume, and, of course, we had problems along the way that we were always able to overcome and solve. And every time we overcame them and solve them, the company just continued to grow and grow and grow. So all that I felt was like, I just need them to believe in the product. And we kind of really structured the deal to make them feel a little bit more comfortable. We were willing to take a little bit more of the risk on some contingent payments but we're completely willing and confident do that because we kind of know where I think this product will go. And the company that bought it I think can grow it way beyond where we would. So we just needed to kind of instill into them that we're confident so we'll take some more risk and I think it worked out. I think it was a really good negotiation. Joe:          Yeah, I think they've done well with it. They started to grow it immediately after closing. And with COVID more people are staying home and more people are buying that particular product anyway so it's a double whammy for them. So what would you did was shifted some of the risk into contingent payments, meaning that you got paid three months out if things were stable or six months out on another payment. And you also shared some statistics, too, though, in terms of the total number of complaints you had in that regard. Brian:      Right. Joe:          And then I think they did a little research in terms of looking at other similar products in similar categories and seeing that complaints were pretty similar and in some cases even higher. Janine:    Even major brands had the same problems. Apple, Google, and Samsung that fiasco with the cell phones like [INAUDIBLE 00:37:55.6] with the batteries exploding on airplanes or something, it's not unique to our products. Brian:      Right, and I think that's what we just needed to kind of work through to make them feel more comfortable. Joe:          And you did it with logic and level emotion. You didn't go off the rails, you didn't scream and shout, you didn't… Janine:    Well I did. Joe:          Well you did that with Brian, you didn't do it with the buyer. Brian:      Yeah, I'm very patient and I don't give up and I knew that it could be solved and it was something we could overcome. I was confident that we could... Janine:    I thought it was over. Brian:      Yes. Janine:    Honestly, I wasn't eating. I thought it was over and this guy is very level headed. He sat on his computer, thought about it, sent out an email negotiating, and they accepted it. Joe:          They did. They love the logical approach and that you put some risk on you. At the end of the day, you're still going to get paid out but you said, okay, look, I'm going to take some risk just to prove to you that this is not an issue, But the next problem, wow, it's almost one that you could never be able to overcome. So I remember I was at eCommerceFuel down in Fort Worth and I took my phone and checked in with you, Brian, and I'm like hey man how are you doing? You were like, yeah, I'm not so good. I'm not so good. I'm like come on, we're getting close. We're almost there. He's like, well, we just got hit with an IP infringement and all the ASINs are down or all the top ASINs are down. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          So someone else ended up getting issued a utility patent on… Brian:      Design patent. Joe:          Design patent on the primary SKU; you're hero SKU essentially because you had pretty much a hero SKU here. How did that feel? Janine:    So this happened on the same day that we were supposed to sign; again like we can't even make this up. I remember waking up that morning to an e-mail from the buyers saying hey I'm looking forward to closing today at two o'clock or something like that. Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    And I saw my other e-mails from Amazon that was sent at five o'clock that morning to tell us our ASINs are down. That literally happened within seven hours the same day. Brian:      Yeah, so it was sort of like we got this other problem behind us. We're feeling good and literally the business; I mean this couldn't have been any worse because it went basically to zero. And they took down every SKU except for I think two or something like that and they weren't top-selling SKUs. So I think we went from like $12,000 a day to about a thousand dollars a day overnight and no path to see it being fixed. Joe:          None, whatsoever; it was a patent issued by the US government. Janine, did you say those emails came in from your buyer and from Amazon within about seven minutes of each other? Janine:    Seven hours. Joe:          Seven hours of each other. So seven hours and the loss of seven figures; pretty painful. You're pretty down and basically like you got kicked somewhere that would hurt really bad. Brian, I'm talking to you. But again, levelheadedness, you reached out to your Chinese manufacturer. You looked at the dates, you looked at the history, you looked at whether or not this is patent was issued legitimately or fraudulently; meaning the guy didn't fully share everything with the US government; the US TPL that he should have. What did you find when you did all that research? Brian:      So he had sort of, after the fact, applied for a patent. So we had the product selling in the marketplace first, but there were others so it was shortly after us where there was maybe five or six of us all selling similar designs, same exact product. It never even really crossed our mind that it was a patentable thing because we didn't design it. We purchased it as a private label thing, had our logos put on it, did the packaging, yada, yada, yada. So did this other buyer, so did lots of other buyers. About a year; so after we're already over a million dollars, he applied for design patent. The path he took was… Janine:    Sketchy. Brian:      Yeah, a little bit devious; claiming rights to something that he really didn't have rights to that was prior on this space but none of that sort of matters in the Amazon world because he did actually get granted the patent and Amazon is not going to rule on whether or not that pattern is valid or not. One thing that I did quickly was contacted some of our other competitors. So almost immediately I think we emailed… Janine:    They were also taken down. Brian:      Yeah, so we tried to reach out to our competitor that took us down, but then got no response. And I reached out to other competitors and we kind of all worked together. We're all doing our own research. We all had our own lawyers. And I think that little pact that we formed, in the end, helped as well. Because it was a lot of us working together, even though we're competitors, we kind of all had had one thing to solve. And yeah three weeks; I mean, this was a lot worse than the first thing so this one actually took a lot of time. Janine:    14 days. Joe:          It appeared by all imagination as something completely insurmountable. Brian:      Right. Joe:          But you did, you banded together with your competitors. You also reached out to your manufacturer to reach out to them and put a little pressure on them as well. And you eventually got in touch with the patent holder. I'm cutting this short a little bit and telling the whole story because it's long, folks and it was painful. A lot of e-mails back and forth, a lot of negotiations, a lot of okay, I'll think about this and I'll get back to you and then not hearing back for days on end. Brian:      And I got on the phone with them. I actually was able to speak to them and tried to work it out as just two businesses competing in the same world. It didn't seem like it was going anywhere. It wasn't working, but it did. Finally, cool heads prevailed. Joe:          And so at one point, that conversation led to, okay, I will allow Amazon to put your stuff back up and that's good. So your stuff was back up and selling on Amazon, but your buyer really wasn't willing to close because that issue was still out there, that this person had the patent and they could shut you down at any time. We worked with a buyer who was very good about being patient, understanding, and all this. A lot of buyers would have just walked away. In this situation, they hung out. They hung around. They trusted you guys. They saw the commitment you were willing to put in by putting some risk on your side. And they said see if you can work it out. We're good. And one of the other things that you did is you said, look, we will backdate this asset purchase agreement. Let's go ahead and get the APA signed contingent on getting a mutual release of the ability to sell the product now and forever on any platform and being able to transfer control of that right to sell the product as well but backdate it. I think we ended up closing in March, but we backdated you said effective, I think January 31st as far as the asset purchase agreement. So you are essentially managing the business, not taking any money out of it, and if we were able to close the transaction, you essentially had ended up managing it for the buyers for 45 days or so. So, again, you're putting yourself out there saying, look, we're here, we're going to fix this and it's yours as of that date back there but we're going to run it until this problem is solved and we did. We ended up with a mutual release letter. There was the strangest possible clause in a legally binding contract I've ever seen. We won't go into the exact details, but the buyer's attorney said, I don't think this is enforceable. And I said, really?! Absolutely just a little clause that this person needed to make himself feel better perhaps in the afterlife and we don't know if you could enforce that in the afterlife or not. But the key is that that you worked with him closely to accommodate his personal needs and your own personal needs and you got through it. You remained level headed. And at the end of the day, you wound up with a seven-figure exit. I want to know how you felt not when we finally got that release letter but I want to know how it felt when that first wire eventually hit your account. Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    It couldn't have; so right now we're going through COVID-19, I don't know if you remember, but on March 17 was when the stock market dropped by 20%. The whole country woke up and the stock market was down like 20% or more and that was the same day we got our seven-figure finally hitting our bank. Brian:      Yup, this couldn't have closed at a better time. I mean it put us in such a good position. Obviously, we'd been waiting for it for a long time so it was a relief but timing was just incredible. Joe:          Although the buyers seen a spike in sales because of… Brian:      I mean, we, of course, follow it very closely. Janine:    Oh my God I font know how they are doing it. Brian:      I think they're up over 100%. I mean, they're growing. It's awesome. They're growing the way we thought they would. They have the capital behind it. They've got a good, strong team to put behind it. So, I mean, we know… Joe:          Are you excited for them. Are you glad; you just said it's awesome, are you...? Brian:      Oh, it's so awesome. Yeah. Joe:          Right. So, folks, that's the mentality that will get you a better value and a better deal and a better transaction. Because Brian and Janine ran this business and created something that would be great for a buyer to take over. And a buyer saw that took it over, and now it's up over a hundred percent. Yes, COVID is having an impact but even without COVID, it would be up substantially. That is absolutely the right mindset to have. Brian:      Yeah [INAUDIBLE 00:48:35.2] Like that brand even if we potentially could grow it to, say, 10, 20, 30 million dollar brand, I honestly don't think we wanted to. Like that wasn't our goal. We didn't want to have to leverage ourselves to get there. Take the extra time. Janine:    Things were getting scary. Brian:      Yeah, like we built the business to be kind of a lifestyle brand. We travel all the time. We have a lot of flexibility. In order to take it to the next level, we knew that we'd have to sacrifice a lot on that. Janine:    Probably more people or more agencies, things that would mean that we need to spend more time on it and that wasn't our goal. Brian:      Right, so to see them be able to do that, of course, we would love it. We'd still feel that same pride that it was ours and we built it. She was always like this is my baby I don't want to give it up. Janine:    It was my baby. Brian:      But you know you kick the baby out of the house eventually. Joe:          You have a new baby. It's got seven figures. Brian:      Yeah. Janine:    And we are in the process trying to buy another one. Joe:          Right. Yeah, so you guys did something smart that is interesting. When we were; was it Blue Ribbon? Yeah, we were at Blue Ribbon Mastermind in St. Pete and you had already; we hadn't closed on this yet, we were still working out the details and you had already launched another product on Amazon. Brian:      Yeah. Joe:          On a separate seller account you launched something new. And I think at that point you're already up to 20 or 30 sales a day which I think is brilliant. This business model that you're in has you be able to build, sell, repeat, build, sell, repeat, and continue to do it with the skillset that you have. So I think it's fantastic. It's the exitpreneur process; you all know about the book. It's a little plug for my book but it's brilliant. I'm so excited and pleased for you guys. It's been a privilege, honestly, getting to know you, spending some time with you out in Seattle. I mean, you got to meet my son. We had lunch together with Bronson and then getting to spend more time down in the Blue Ribbon Mastermind. Congratulations. It was fantastic what you guys have done and I hope that people hearing the story from both your angles and approaches will inspire some of them to look around the room and sell something others to have the hutzpah that you had to raise $100,000 because you knew you had a winner; pretty incredible all around. Any last thoughts or words of wisdom that either of you would like to share with potential listeners, both buyers and sellers of online businesses? Janine:    Well, Amazon is kind of like a world where we are kind of secretive about what our product is. Some of us won't even divulge what our category is. And it's like that for a reason but it doesn't mean you can't have a Mastermind, it doesn't mean you can't network with people. And that was one of the most important things that we did. And also going to the process that we did with IP infringement made me realize, you know what? We're not companies competing against each other; we were all families, we have kids, we have a mortgage. All of us are the same so a lot of these black hat strategies where you're kind of doing something to get a competitive edge by sort of burning that person; you know, really just don't do it, because, at the end of the day, you're hurting a person who's probably just like you married with kids, probably with a student loan or a mortgage; you don't know. And I think we got through to the patent holder with our issue because we made him see that and he's also a family guy; a religious man, of course. And I think getting to know them and seeing that we're just another family just like him that's how we got through to him. Brian:      And some of his actions were when we got on the phone, we were actually able to talk about this. I couldn't so much fault him exactly for what he did, because we're all business people. We're all kind of doing things to get an edge and that's what he felt. He felt he needed to get an edge. It's almost hard to fault him for that but it was making him realize that hey, we're not some Fortune 500 company. We're just like you. We're working out of our house. We have a family. This is our business. Joe:          And at the end of the day, he saw that because… Brian:      He did. Yeah, so we have… Janine:    We were lucky. Joe:          Yeah, you took care of each other as competitors and rivals and gave each other the opportunity to continue to grow in business. Janine:    Yeah. Amazon is so big. There's room for everyone. Joe:          Agreed. Brian:      Yeah, there definitely is. Joe:          Guys, I feel like I could honestly talk with you for another hour and a half. Maybe we'll have you back on with your next incredible exit but thank you so much for sharing your story and giving me the opportunity to work with you. Brian:      Thank you, Joe. Janine:    Thank you, Joe.   Resources: Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com

Brian Lawson and his brother left their jobs in engineering, IT, and software development to found WebMO (Web Marketing Optimizer), a digital marketing agency. From the beginning, they focused on optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, not just studying digital marketing tactics, strategies, and analysis, but digging into the “behind the scenes” mechanics. Today, WebMO is heavily data-driven, does everything digital marketing, and serves a large number of diverse and predominantly small-businesses nationwide. WebMO's “super-detailed” understanding of Google Analytics, conversion tracking, visitor engagement metrics, and the conversion heuristic enables the agency to fully understand clients' market spaces. Over the years, the agency built their own analytical tools. The combination of three major Google data points – Google Analytics, a company's Google Search Console data, and the data compiled in a company's Google my Business listing – provides a clear understanding of a company's “true space in the market.” Education is the beginning of WebMO's relationship with its clients. Brian loves to break down complicated technical concepts. He is used to speaking to groups of people, and loves running free workshops to help business owners understand complex concepts. As a result of this proactive training, WebMO became a Google Partner. When Google introduced the Grow with Google program, which encourages small business organizations, chambers of commerce, public libraries, agencies, and other organizations to participate in live feed educational workshops, WebMO was on board. Because of the huge number of people who have gone through WebMO's workshops, Google recognizes the agency as a “high impact partner.”  Education on how Google works, Brian says, “is absolutely critical.” After defining a client's market space, the agency evaluates the client's unique situation, and then makes recommendations. Because Brian's agency works with smaller companies with smaller budgets, “testing” the market and quantifying the response works well. Instead of spending thousands of dollars for a huge campaign, the clients may spend a few hundred. WebMO is then able to quickly show them the ROI on that investment. Brian says, “If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap.” Covid-19 changed the agency's operations. Although WebMO has been unable to meet with clients in person, it continues its educational outreach through weekly updates. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Yelp are constantly tweaking their policies . . . WebMO is working to keep clients aware of these changes. One of Brian's more recent presentations covered “how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this [Covid-19] situation is having on your business.” Brian explains that Covid-19 has affected businesses in several different ways. Companies that provide such things as bartending services for parties are devastated. For other companies, like air conditioning repair companies and plumbers, it's business as usual. For the last category, exemplified by companies that sell cleaning supplies, provide in-home nanny services, and medical professionals who are still working, traffic has gone “off the charts.” In addition to having its own clients, WebMO partners with agencies that need an invisible number cruncher. When asked what he would have done differently when he started his agency, Brian said, he should have been “a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most.” He seems to be doing that now. Brian can be reached on his agency's website at: www.web-mo.com Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Brian Lawson, Owner and Co-founder of WebMO, based in Tucson, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast. BRIAN: Hey, thanks, Rob. I appreciate you having me on. ROB: Brian, it's great to have you. Why don't you start off by telling us about WebMO and what makes WebMO great? BRIAN: Awesome. We are, as you mentioned, a Tucson, Arizona based digital marketing agency. I've always introduced our company as being a little different than quite a few others in our space because of our backgrounds. The co-founders, myself and my brother, come from a much different background than the typical marketing agency background. A lot of times people that provide the types of services that we provide, like websites and digital marketing and SEO and Google and YouTube and Facebook and all that, tend to come from either the design world or sometimes a traditional marketing background. Our backgrounds were in engineering, IT, software development, all those things. So, from the very beginning, we started approaching all of these digital marketing tactics and strategies and analysis with a much greater emphasis on the machinery, the real techy stuff that's lingering behind the scenes. You think about Google as one example; Google's a company that has 20,000 engineers and 300 designers. So, taking that real math-based, almost “super nerd” approach, if you want to think about it that way, is a good way to approach it given the kind of issues we're dealing with. We tend to be – again, compared to most – a little more data-driven, a little more analytical. We definitely tend to be sometimes a little skeptical of other things that some others in our industry are saying. That gave us the foundation for a very unique and somewhat successful agency. ROB: It sounds like that would also shape the sort of client who comes to you and resonates with you. What sort of clients are drawn to and resonate with this approach? BRIAN: We have a pretty large variety of clients, which thankfully serves us well when things in the market go up or down. We don't really specialize in any one kind. We have some larger end clients that pretty much just engage our services purely for the data analysis part of what we do. We're one of the few agencies who have a complete understanding of all the things going on with Google Analytics and conversion tracking and embracing some of the math that's in our industry, like visitor engagement metrics or the conversion heuristic. We really get super detailed on that. But interestingly, that overall idea is also very appealing to a small business. If you're a house painter and you've been through multiple agencies so far and no one's really been able to figure it out, when they hear that story, it's like, “Whoa, these guys are super into this stuff and they're really technical and analytical.” In a way, it gives that client a reason to believe that maybe this time will be different. Our industry, digital marketing, is old enough now to where most businesses out there have had at least one or two or more experiences with other efforts, and most of them haven't been exactly what they were hoping for. So as an agency – and I would say this to any agency – one of the things you have to really get out there for a client is a reason to believe that this time, things will be different. For us, it's that. It's our unique value proposition, that idea that we're going to take a closer look at the data, but because we have this deep level of understanding of how this stuff works, we're going to find a way to get things happening that maybe weren't happening before. Now, on top of that, I also happen to be a business owner, and I have been a business owner for 30 years, so when I'm talking to another business owner, it's like, “Oh yeah, you get it. You understand.” So a lot of our clients – I'd say the majority of them – definitely fall into the small business category, with a few exceptions being some of those higher end companies that want to bring us in for the analytics side of things. ROB: Very interesting. What sort of toolkit do you bring to bear on that analytics problem? I think people look at tools all the time, and often having right thinking is much more important than the tools, but having good execution is also helpful along those lines. What's your go-to? BRIAN: We've actually done a lot of in-house compilation things, if you want to think about it that way. We're very heavy on the technical side. We have a team of 23 people total, very heavy on the techy side. A lot of developers and programmers. Because of our background being software developers/app developers, we really didn't have to rely on finding third party solutions to do most of what we do. We were able to grow them from the ground up. One example is, for instance, if you're trying to analyze a company's visibility. Let's say you've got a local PC repair guy, whatever, and they want to really understand how they're doing online. We rejected this idea of rank reports way before everyone else did. Even when we entered into this business probably close to 10 years ago, we immediately looked at that model and said, “This doesn't make any sense.” Clients were getting these reports that said “Hey, you're #3 on this term and #6 on that term,” and it all seemed so useless, honestly. Clients were already saying it was useless because they were looking at these reports and saying, “Whatever. Yeah, you found that I'm #3 if I type this exact phrase or whatever; what good does that do me? What do I get? Am I going to get a prize for this? What's the reward?” So we almost right out of the gate rejected that model and said rank reports are about useless, especially when it comes to local visibility. We started creating our own analysis tools that combined, at the time – and now more than ever, in today's market – the three major data points in Google, which is the data that's being accumulated, of course, in Google Analytics, your Google Search Console data, and all the data that's being compiled in your Google My Business listing. The only way to get a really accurate understanding of your true space in the market is with all three of those data points being combined. And then taking it a step further – and again, just putting your mind in a small business owner's frame of mind, they say, “Yeah, I get that I have traffic and I understand that all these people are finding me on these different words and phrases, but again, what does it really mean?” So we'll look at a market and say, “You are in Phoenix, Arizona; there are 50,000 searches per month, roughly, for people looking for plumbing repair. As a business, you, Mr. Plumber, are visible about 33,000 of those times.” Like I said, compiling all this data. That's the starting point: understanding your percentage of market share as opposed to just saying, “Hey, you're showing up in the third spot on this particular search term.” Then it just goes from there. If you're going to have any chance of getting a client or winning a new customer, they have to be able to at least see. As a business owner – and of course, we teach them this – the very first question you should be asking is, “How ubiquitous am I? If there's 50,000 people searching per month, how often am I one of those people that at least appears in front of somebody's eyeballs?” That's just one example. ROB: Absolutely, that makes sense. You talked a little bit about your technical background and your co-founder, your brother's background, coming into starting this business. But in particular, what was it that made you decide to start this business when you did? How did you go from the technical background to “I am going to start a digital marketing agency”? BRIAN: It's interesting. A couple things. We're serial entrepreneurs, as most business owners tend to be. From early on, from about the early '90s, about 1991, we had started an IT services company that was pretty much helping businesses with, at the time, the very confusing world of internal LANs and inter-office communication and computer networking and all that, and then branching into internet configuration and everything else. So, I had a very deep, good long list of local businesses that trusted us for pretty much everything technical. This buildup started happening probably around 2009-2010 with clients saying to us, “Hey, you guys are awesome in helping with all this other stuff, but I can't find anybody that can explain this to me or help me with this.” Almost getting dragged into it from that standpoint. We were thinking, “That's interesting, but let's put a pin in it.” Meanwhile, again as serial entrepreneurs, we did a tech startup. It was a home-based internet security product. I won't get into a lot of detail, but we had the old venture capital funding and all that, and we had developed a marketing strategy for that online. And it was good, using a combination of SEO and Google search ads and all the other things. We had it really cooking. After some investors came in, they basically said, “Hey, you guys are engineers. You guys are probably really good at communicating what you know about your product, but you're not marketers. You don't know what you're doing there. Let's hand that over to this agency” – it was in New York City, one of the bigger agencies out there. “Let's let them take care of that part.” We're like, eh, okay, let's see what happens. Sure enough, we watched what they did and we were doing it better. Our results, everything about it was far exceeding what one of the top agencies in the country was doing. So of course, the little lightbulbs go off in our heads, thinking, as soon as this current tech startup is behind us, between the demand that we're seeing from the boots on the ground, all the people out there that were literally begging us to help them, and combining that with the affirmation that we were truly, truly good at this stuff, our course was set. That was about 10 years ago. ROB: It's interesting how oftentimes through that experience in another business, you find out – sometimes it can be wanderlust and you just try to do something different, but in this case you were able to find something that you could do differently and successfully. If I rewind the conversation a little bit, you were talking about some of these rather complex things. I think if you ask a client sometimes to pick an attribution strategy in Google Analytics, their eyes glaze over. It sounds like you have the strength and knowledge to be able to prescribe that for them pretty well. But marketing also requires going one step further when you're working for a client and helping them understand. How do you think about helping these owners understand something like attribution when you get to something like beyond first click, last click, even attribution, and you're trying to tell somebody that an ad gave them 20% of a lead? I think it'd be pretty confusing. How do you think about getting those concepts through to clients? BRIAN: That's a great question. Early on, we really embraced this idea of the client relationship model, starting with education. I'll come back to that in a second, but really making sure that our client is truly educated. We weren't oblivious to the fact that, for the most part, in our industry, the number one reason why clients drift away is because they make a comment that says something like, “I didn't know what they were doing.” They honestly didn't understand what was happening. So first is education. Then it's evaluation of their specific situation. Only after that we make specific recommendations as to what they should be doing. The education side – as it turns out, I love talking about this stuff. I'm a passionate advocate for the entire model of digital marketing. I love getting in front of groups of people and explaining these things. Because of my background working with businesses on the IT side, I spent many, many times in boardrooms and in front of employees from companies, really breaking down very complicated technical things into little anecdotes and analogies and fun ways to think about stuff. So I was always very capable of doing that, and I really truly enjoyed it. We got way ahead of the curve on that and early on started doing workshops, just free education workshops that would be designed to get business owners understanding this stuff. Because they're dying for information. Even today, even though our industry is a little bit more mature, still so many business owners are quite oblivious. They really don't understand even the basics, let alone some of the more complex concepts like you mentioned. So we hopped on that train big time, and interestingly, it led us – because we're also what's considered a Google Partner; we have a Google Partnership status, and about 3 or 4 years ago, Google introduced this program called Grow with Google, where they were encouraging small business organizations, chamber of commerce, public libraries, or whatever to allow Google to do these live feed education workshops. At the time, since we were a partner, they were opening it up to agencies as well, so we started becoming involved in that. We did that so much that we became the only agency, at least in the state of Arizona, that Google recognized as one of its high impact partners. That was strictly because of the sheer number of people that have gone through our workshops. I know that's sort of a long roundabout way to answer your question, but yeah, education on that stuff is absolutely critical. There's also another element as well. There's getting a client to the point to know enough to know that they'll never truly understand it, and then they basically have faith in you at that point. They say, “Okay, I get that it's really complicated. I don't think I fully understand it, but I'm fully convinced that you understand it, and as long as at the end of the day I'm seeing results and I see that you're attentive, that's really the key.” ROB: As we were chatting before we started recording, that background you have in doing this education has really helped in the moment that we're in. We are in the middle of this coronavirus national shutdown, everybody work from home situation. How are you adapting your agency to operate in this new, fully remote environment? What parts of that do you think you might stick with even once we're all back together in person more often? BRIAN: That's a great question. Like we were talking about, I love the live workshop. I thrive in that environment where I can be interactive with people and gauge – if I'm saying something that's flying right over their heads, I can usually pick that up. So the challenge, for all of us really – and this doesn't just go for workshops; it goes for meetings, it goes for everything that we're doing right now – is to try to find a way to offset that disconnect. Like we talked about before, there's no substitute for that live connection. That being said, I think there are also some opportunities right now. I think that as of today – I feel like we're still, sadly, in the early stages of this; we're hopefully maybe a third of the way through, who knows – but I think after we settle into the new normal and people realize that, “Okay, I'm going to be here a while. I can't, even if I wanted to in some cases, be as productive as I was before because I can't do meetings, I can't do this, whatever. I'm stuck at home, not even driving” – I mean, for some people, an hour or two of their day just opened up because they don't have to drive cars. Again, for business owners and for those that are truly entrepreneurial, I think they are going to shift over to this mindset of saying, “You know what? With all this free time, I'm going to use it to make things better. I'm going to finally understand this thing I never really understood before. I'm going to figure out how to program my TV.” Whatever is on their list of things. From a business standpoint, they might actually be more interested in circling back to saying, “When I come out of this, I've always wanted to try Facebook ads, but I don't know how to do it.” So I think there will be an increase in the number of people that are at least interested in listening to or participating in some form of webinar or podcast. I don't think we're there yet; I think people are still in the “I've just got to figure out how to work remotely.” But once that settles in, I think there might actually be some opportunity. Back to your question. We were doing a pretty steady series of live events. We've obviously switched those over to all webinars. Even in the month of April that we're in right now, we've allocated every Thursday morning from 9 to 10 a.m. – we're just doing updates. There's so much information coming out in waves from Google and Facebook and LinkedIn and Instagram and Yelp, and they're all offering money this and credits for that and changing their policies. So, we're allocating that time just to get everyone up to date. But then we're also layering in really interesting topics. Like I think the one we're doing tomorrow is how to look at Google Trends to truly understand the impact that this situation is having on your business. This is something anybody can do. You don't have to have this high level of analytical skills to go to Google Search Trends and see whether or not people are searching more often for this, less often for that, or about the same. Once you're looking at that data and saying, “Interesting. People are no longer searching for this; however, they really are searching for that now,” that actually might help you course correct and maybe adapt your strategies a little bit. So yeah, we're still 100% all-in on the education side. Obviously switching over to webinar, for better or for worse, and then hopefully getting back to the normal mode once all of this is behind us. ROB: Are there any interesting examples of the Google Trends shifts you've seen on behalf of clients that you might be able to share? BRIAN: Absolutely. People ask me, “How are you guys doing?” We have such a diverse number of clients that we're really seeing all three scenarios. We're seeing some that are just devastated, sadly. We have clients that specialize in providing bartender services for parties and events, and of course, they're wiped out. Their entire book of business from now through May no longer exists. Our guidance to them is saying all the people that had these events are going to have to reschedule, so even though you're not finding people that are looking to do it right now, you might find them later. We have some that are seeing no impact whatsoever. If you're looking at AC repair or plumbing repair – pipes and air conditioning systems have absolutely no respect for the stay at home orders. If they're going to break, they're going to break. They're not going to wait until everything's normal, so there's no reason why there'd be less search on that, and there isn't. If anything, we're probably going to start to see a sudden uptick of that. People are home more often, and if you're in a state like Arizona where it's going to get into the upper 80s this week, they're going to be putting stresses on systems that they didn't really have to before with their kids at home and working from home. So I would expect they may grow a little bit. The third category of businesses that we work with are actually seeing increases. We have businesses that sell office cleaning supplies. We have businesses that offer nanny services for people that come to their homes and watch their kids. Again, there's a lot of people that have to go to work. All the people in the medical industry. So there's an example of a huge uptick. Their website traffic and the amount of leads they're getting is off the charts. So we really are in an interesting situation where we get to see all three of those scenarios playing out. ROB: That's an interesting mix, and probably encouraging to have that combination of some clients that are needing you a little bit more while some of those other clients maybe need a little bit less while they figure out this time. BRIAN: Right. It's almost like having a stock portfolio. [laughs] It's good to have diversity. You've got your winners and you've got some of them that aren't so good. ROB: When you think about your experience in building WebMO – and it sounds like you have some experience from building prior businesses as well – what are some things you would do differently if you were starting WebMO from scratch that you've learned? BRIAN: That's a good question. I saw that previously, and it's always hard for a business owner to do that, when you see yourself as being like “I've got this figured out.” But I would say in the early years, we found our lane. We found this lane and we were very committed to sticking to it. We were like, “We don't want to build websites, we don't want to do social media, we don't want to get into this, we don't want to get into that.” We were very much specializing in really optimizing organic visibility/SEO and doing Google search ads, because we had that down. We mastered those two things. We were probably a little more reluctant than we could've been to just open up and be more responsive to what the market was asking for. There was probably a few years where we just said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Again, hindsight is 20/20. I don't know, maybe it was better to do that. But today, through growing and evolving or whatever, I think the lesson with most small business owners is you have to listen to the market. You have to provide what your client wants, ultimately. You can't be too stubborn about saying, “No, no, this is all you need.” But on the other hand, you can't be running around like a crazy person saying yes to everything and getting into areas that are outside your expertise. I would've probably gone a little sooner into getting more into a lot of the other stuff that we do. Now currently, we do stuff across the board. Of course, we build websites, and we have campaigns running on everything from Spotify to obviously all the social media platforms and LinkedIn and direct email campaigns. You name it, we probably do it, if it's in digital marketing. I probably would've been a little more open to doing that sooner if I could roll back time for a few years. But again, you can't really second guess it too much when you like where you're at currently. We're very happy with where the business is now. It's always tough to say – but if I had done that too soon and I hadn't really mastered it, maybe it would've done more harm than good. It is a tough question, but that's probably about the closest I can get. Just being a little quicker to respond to where our clients were probably needing us most. That would probably be it. ROB: Are there any new directions that you think you might be getting pulled in, but you're not quite sure yet? BRIAN: There's certain things that I've just never been a big advocate of when it comes to marketing in general. There's certain tactics that I'm not probably ever going to be convinced to do. Things like spam. We're never going to tell a client, “You should be blasting spam out to people's inboxes.” Sending advertisements to people's text messages is to me crossing a line that I just will never feel comfortable doing. Yeah, you know you're going to get email solicitations from people you don't know; you accept that. You know you've got to see commercials when you watch TV. You know you're going to see ads on websites. You know if you're a Facebook user, you're going to see advertisements. But texts to me are our one safe space where we can be sheltered from getting bombarded with ads. We've had clients before say, “Hey, what about these?” and I'm just like, “I don't think so.” I think I'd still be reluctant to do something that I know, anecdotally, people in general just really, really don't like. Even if there's a possible ROI on it, there's probably some areas where I wouldn't feel comfortable taking my clients. ROB: I absolutely understand that, and I totally agree with you about crossing those lines. It's interesting what you mentioned on being pulled toward social earlier and resisting it. In a way, one of the things I end up seeing as I have these conversations is a lot of the people who got really good early at doing the core search ads and that sort of thing stayed away from social when it was fluffy and then came back into it when it wasn't “Hey, let me make a nice organic post that goes viral and gets a lot of activity,” but “Oh my goodness, Facebook ads is becoming sophisticated, and look at these tools we can bring to bear.” I think there may be a theme there. Also the case in email. I think a lot of clients weren't ready to use email intelligently for a while. BRIAN: I would say that's exactly correct, and that almost mirrors precisely how we approached it. I didn't like social media management because of that very reason. It was fluffy, like you said. There wasn't a lot of ways to calculate an ROI. There wasn't as much engineering and math and science behind it. It was way too obvious what you were doing and not doing from a client's perspective. There wasn't anything you could bring to the table other than really clever writing skills. It just didn't go to our core value. It's like, we're math guys, we're science guys; how in the world does that apply to making a clever, quippy little Facebook post? But then, like you mentioned, things got a lot more interesting when some of these more sophisticated targeting tools – that's about the same time we started hopping into it, because then there was a value add. That's the thing. As an agency, as a business owner, or whatever, if you're not doing something that's adding value that's obvious, your lifespan with them is going to be limited. I always explain that with any transaction. You have this perception of value that the client or the customer sees, and if they see the cost being at about the same level – there's a value, there's what you're getting, and then there's the cost that they're paying for it – if that is out of balance, if they feel like “I'm paying too much because they're not doing this,” then it's going to be trouble. The problem that we ran into, and a lot of people ran into with social media management, is that it's so obvious what you're doing. There's no secret. They're looking at your posts, and for better or for worse, they're saying, “That's it? My 16-year-old could do that. I'm paying $1,000 a month. I could just hire a part-time person and have them do it all the time.” So it's really hard to explain or to get across to somebody that what you're doing is something that you're uniquely qualified to do, that somebody else couldn't do as well. About that time when ads became a little more sophisticated or whatever, it fit into – one of our core, principal beliefs is this idea that there are no expert marketers, only experienced marketers and expert testers. So, we started embracing this idea that every single strategy out there is probably worthy of testing. If you're looking at Facebook, if you're looking at Instagram, if you're looking at Spotify, whatever, you don't have to buy into this idea that you spend thousands of dollars and do it whether it's working or not. You just have to take a testing mentality and say, “I'll try it. I'll throw a few hundred bucks at this.” And if you're working with somebody like ourselves, who's very good at analyzing data, with a relatively small budget we can drill right down and say, “There you go. That little budget that you ran for 2 months, here's precisely what it got you. We may have run across the tactic that will work.” On the other hand, some things don't work. It's marketing, right? You're going through your ideas; some things are going to work, some things are going to fail. If it's going to fail, fail fast and fail cheap. That is the beauty of digital marketing. You don't have to necessarily do an ad buy that you're committed to for 6 months. You can actually try a small budget test. I know that was a long circle around, but that mindset of adopting this idea that our job is just to test things for our clients – we just need to execute tests – that then opened up everything. Everything from Yelp to LinkedIn to Bing and YouTube and whatever. That's what got us into that, after that first wave of pure social media management abated a little bit. ROB: That seems like a great principle to carry forward, this idea that you might not say no to something you don't believe is effective; you can test it, and you can even probably keep testing it as long as you are changing something and you're not just in a rut of experimental nothingness. BRIAN: Exactly. That idea of A/B split testing everything from your landing pages or conversion pages to your ad copy – again, the beauty of digital marketing comes back to data. If you have data, you can literally look at it and say, “That ad got a 3% click-through rate and led to this sort of visitor engagement when they got to my website. This ad had a 4% conversion rate, but had lower visitor engagement.” Okay, that's some great information. It's very unique that way. It's extremely hard, if not impossible, to get that level of detail on traditional marketing methods. Radio, TV, billboards, magazines – there's basic things you can do, maybe track phone calls, but the unique thing is you can't get into the mind of somebody watching a TV ad and see how they're reacting to it. When they come to your website or a landing page, based on all the math that we are able to apply to this, you can really understand the people that are there that appear to be engaged, the visitor engagement metric. It's pretty common in our industry. It's exciting to me. I'm super passionate about it. This is the kind of thing where I teach people this in a workshop and a lightbulb goes off. They're like, “That makes sense!” You can actually get a better understanding of if your marketing is even moving generally in the right direction. ROB: You definitely know your numbers, Brian. When people want to find you and WebMO, where should they look you up? BRIAN: You can just go to www.web-mo.com. That's our website. Or you can just type “WebMO Tucson” or “WebMO” Arizona, “WebMO.” You're going to find a few references to us out there. We do work with clients all over the country. We're based in Arizona, but we are definitely nationwide in terms of the clients we work with. We love to partner with other types of agencies. We have a lot of partnerships with website designers, traditional marketing agencies, where we provide these services behind the scenes and basically make you look awesome because we're back there crunching all these numbers and generating all this great data and reports. Meanwhile, you're talking to your client and saying, “Hey, look what we did!” Sot hats a good way to initiate the conversation. Sign up for a workshop. Ask for a free report where we can obviously analyze your market. There's lots of actionable steps once you get to the website. ROB: Excellent. Thank you so much, Brian. Best wishes to you and WebMO going forward. We'll look for you online. Enjoy. BRIAN: Thanks, Rob. I appreciate the time. Stay healthy and safe and all that good stuff. ROB: Indeed. Take care, Brian. Thanks. BRIAN: Thanks. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Sampling a dozen Christmas beers as we talk holiday beer history and traditions Christmas is a wonderful time for beers.  As the temperatures dip brewers release a variety of spiced stouts, piney IPAs, and Belgium sends out some amazing offerings.  This is definitely one of our favorite episodes we do each year.  The premise is pretty simple, we sample a dozen Christmas beers and pick our favorites.  Along the way we discuss some of the history and traditions of holiday brews, share what we like to see in a Christmas beer, and learn about a 12th century law that required households to brew a beer for Christmas. (Credit to larsblog for the story on 12th century Norwegian brewing laws.) Sampling through all these brews in an hour is a bit of a task for two people so we invited our friend Brij Patel from Sprayberry Bottle Shop to help us out.  Sprayberry offers an awesome selection of craft beer, whiskeys, and wine and has placed in our Best of Georgia Beer competition every year.  If you're near Marietta, GA make sure to stop in and check them out. Because Brian struggles with counting while sober our 12 Beers of Christmas became 13, which we found out as we got the bottles together for the last round of tasting.  Way to go, Brian. Our 12 13 Beers of Christmas 21st Amendment Fireside Chat  (Winter Ale) Abita Christmas Ale  (Winter Ale) Bell's Christmas Ale (Scotch Ale) Anchor Merry Christmas & Happy New Year (Our Special Ale) (2019)  (Winter Warmer) Brasserie d'Achouffe N'Ice Chouffe  (Winter Ale) Corsendonk Christmas Ale  (Winter Ale) Delirium Noël  (Winter Warmer) Samuel Adams White Christmas  (Witbier) Prairie Christmas Bomb!  (Stout - American Imperial / Double)  Sierra Nevada Celebration Fresh Hop IPA 2019  (IPA - American) Shiner Holiday Cheer  (Dunkelweizen) Slaapmutske / Kerstmutske Christmas Nightcap  (Winter Ale) St. Bernardus Christmas Ale  (Winter Ale)   Craft Beer News A Brewery Was Forced To Change A Beer Label Depicting Reindeer Kama Sutra The Brewers Association Has Released Their Year In Beer for 2019 In 12th Century Norway, It Was Illegal To Not Brew A Beer For Christmas More to Listen To Check out some of our other great episodes: The 12 Beers of Christmas 2018 Big Game Craft Beer Showdown

We are joined this week by another phenomenal Brian Gubernick. Brian operates a mega team with some of the heaviest hitters in KW and their expansion branches span the whole country. Brian shares not only his story but the lessons he's learned along the way. As well as what he believes, from his experience, agents need to be focusing on every day. Because Brian made some amazing book recommendations we'd like to share an awesome chance to get unlimited books for 6months for just $30 through Kindle. Just head to kindle.messyempire.com and just remember by purchasing through our affiliate links you are helping to support the show! --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/messyempire/message

  October 14th, 2019  |  The Hockey Betting Podcast It is Thanksgiving Day in Canada and Brian Blessing and Cam Stewart break down all of the NHL action for Monday, October 14, 2019. There are four matinees on the Monday schedule so the action gets started early. There is only one team that is listed as a big favorite, as the Boston Bruins are nearly a 2-1 favorite against Anaheim. All of the other six games on the NHL schedule for Thursday are close to a pick. Listen to this week’s episode of The Hockey Betting Podcast to get all of Brian and Cam’s predictions. Monday, October 14th, 2019 NHL Betting Odds * Opener           Teams           Time   5.5
 Florida Panthers -110 
New Jersey Devils 1:05 PM   -118
 St. Louis Blues 5.5 New York Islanders 1:05 PM   -135 Minnesota Wild 6.0 Ottawa Senators 1:05 PM   5.5
 Anaheim Ducks -190 Boston Bruins 1:05 PM   -105 Dallas Stars 5.5 
Buffalo Sabres 3:05 PM   6.5 Colorado Avalanche -129 Washington Capitals 5:05 PM   6.5
 Edmonton Oilers -110 Chicago Blackhawks 8:35 PM * Odds at the time the podcast was recorded Brian thinks the Florida Panthers are the best bet on the board for the Thursday NHL schedule and Cam agrees. The Panthers are a short price in this road game against the Devils and it is a great way to start the Canada holiday. The Blues are a slight favorite against the Islanders and Brian and Cam have a small lean on this one. Listen to this week’s podcast to get their prediction. The Minnesota Wild are road favorites at Ottawa in another matinee game. Cam doesn’t like the side, but he does like the total. Listen to this week’s episode of The Hockey Betting Podcast to get Cam’s prediction. Brian and Cam like a low scoring game between the Ducks and Bruins in one of the matinee games for Monday. The Dallas Stars visit the Buffalo Sabres and Cam has a play on the side and Brian likes the total. Make sure to listen to The Hockey Betting Podcast to get their predictions. The Colorado Avalanche are starting a long road trip in Washington and the Avs are a slight underdog. Brian likes Colorado at the plus price in this one. The late game on Monday has the Edmonton Oilers visiting the Chicago Blackhawks with the NHL odds listed as a pick. Brian likes this game to go over the total and Cam agrees. Because Brian and Cam like so many games to go over on Monday, they are looking at playing the Grand Salami over the total. Tuesday, October 15th, 2019 NHL Betting Odds * Opener Teams Time   6.0 Minnesota Wild -210 
Toronto Maple Leafs 7:08 PM   -140
 Tampa Bay Lightning 6.5 Montreal Canadiens 7:05 PM   6.0 Arizona Coyotes -140 
Winnipeg Jets 8:05 PM   6.5
 Philadelphia Flyers -175 Calgary Flames 9:05 PM   6.5
 Nashville Predators -150 Vegas Golden Knights 10:05 PM   6.0
 Detroit Red Wings -160 
Vancouver Canucks 10:08 PM   -155
 Carolina Hurricanes 6.5 
Los Angeles Kings 10:35 PM * Odds at the time the podcast was recorded Brian and Cam take a quick glance to the Tuesday schedule with Cam leaning to the Arizona Coyotes at the Winnipeg Jets. Make sure to listen to this week’s episode of The Hockey Betting Podcast to get the full breakdown of all of the action on Monday and some insight into teams and even a few comments on player props.

Brian McCarthy is one of those guys who instantly puts a smile on your face and is always thinking about how he can give away value to others.   He also happens to be a talented copywriter who's worked with big marketers like Ramit Sethi, John Morrow, T. Harv Eker, Art of Charm, James Schramko, and more.   While his client portfolio is impressive, what we're really interested in learning from him is HOW he's providing huge value to these clients.   Because Brian's carved out a fascinating vertical for himself by specializing in writing case studies.   Now, these case studies go far beyond sticking a vanity badge full of testimonials on your website…   …. Brian's case studies are specifically designed to drive revenue, and grow your business. We'll let him tell you all about it. Check it out the episode below.   Episode Highlights   How Brian learned to develop high-profile launch copy for some of the world's best marketing brands What made him decide to start turning down lucrative launch deals to focus on case studies The biggest mistakes people make when writing case study material How Brian manages to create great content for his own business, even when his client roster is full The hardest part about being a full-time writer How to know when you're "good enough" to charge what you really want to earn  

Ep #45: You may have a thousand followers on your social media, ten thousand, hundred thousand or more, but the number doesn’t really matter till you have an engaged community. There is a big difference between having the number of followers that don’t really care about what you do and what you post and the fans of you and your content. In this episode, Brian Fanzo shares how to turn your social media followers into your fans. Brian inspires, motivates and educates businesses on how to leverage emerging technologies and digital marketing to stand out from the noise and reach the millennial and generation Z consumers.  He has a diverse background working for the Department of Defense in cyber security, then as a technology evangelist at a booming cloud computing startup and is currently the founder of iSocialFanz which has helped launch digital and influencer strategies with the world’s most iconic brands like Dell EMC, Adobe, IBM, UFC, Applebees and SAP. Time Stamped Show Notes: [00:22] About the episode and Brian Fanzo [02:01] Brian shares his journey from working in the cyber security company for the US government to falling in love with social media and collaboration [04:32] His experience of being an entrepreneur [06:38] Brian’s secret to being able to grow his community [08:26] The difference between social media follower and a fan [09:59] It doesn’t really matter how many followers you have what matters the most is the ability to impact people’s life [11:06] Because Brian hated writing he started to get into video, but got overwhelmed with the technical stuff, so he ended up with podcasting [11:58] What content he produces [12:57] How he repurposes his content and multiply his reach of people [15:40] How Brian manage this huge amount of work [17:37] For being productive he sets the timer and has to finish the work before the timer goes off [19:45] How to engage with your followers on social media [21:39] How to document your life in 10-20 seconds for channels like Instagram Stories [23:35] Posting on social media give people the access to things they can’t get [24:29] Share with people who you really are even if there are downs in life and you cry [25:34] Build so well relationship with the community that when the time will come you can monetize it without direct selling [28:22] How Brian got invited to speak at the conference because people followed him for a year and liked his content and value he gives to people [29:22] How Brian grew his social media followings at the beginning by caring, sharing and collaborating [32:08] Spend time investing in people and engaging with them on social media platforms [32:59] It’s non-necessary to have a large email list to monetize what you do if you have an engaged community [35:59] Be yourself. There is no need to stand out where everyone else. Be where your community is [36:24] Collaboration is the key if you want to turn your social media followers into your fans [38:41] Where to find Brian online  [39:22] For the show notes go to IntNetworkPlus.com and subscribe to the Marketing for Creatives show Let’s get in touch: What topics do you want us to talk about in the next episodes? Who should I interview? Let me know on Instagram Did you get new insights? Please leave a short review on iTunes Get more marketing tips on intnetworkplus.com Follow on Instagram @MarinaBarayeva Follow on Twitter @MarinaBarayeva

Is your game broken? How do you even know? What does broken even mean? But before all that, we need to talk about The Good Place again. Because Brian and Scott finished season one and oh boy howdy. Oh, and Star Wars: Rebels. And a listener question that more or less takes over the show. Kick back and enjoy. … Continue reading →

Episode 28: Queen - A Kind of Magic (1986) Part 1 With Sarah back from her travels, the two hosts shift their musical direction slightly and focus their attention on a band very beloved by them both: Queen. While by no means a New Wave or synth-pop act, Queen's output in the 1980s did tend more towards the pop segment of the music spectrum, and the album up for discussion is a strong example of that-- it's the 1986 release, "A Kind of Magic." Because Brian and Sarah are so eager to finally talk about not only one of their very favorite bands, but also the first album they became familiar with by that band, they find themselves with a lot to say. So once again, their long-windedness has necessitated that side one of this album be broken up into two episodes. Part 1: Background "A Kind of Magic" is Queen's twelfth studio album, and it very easily could not have happened, if it weren't for two things: a particular day in July 1985 and the viewing of about twenty minutes of a film under production. The hosts discuss Queen's reluctance to produce another soundtrack album and the steps they took to ensure "A Kind of Magic" would stand as an album in its own right. Brian and Sarah also address the fact that the album has two different producers, each of whom tended to work with different halves of the band. They also bring up the international success the album had upon its release. Part 2: Personal History Brian starts off by listing the Queen 45s he owned as a youth, and then goes on to explain what got him to take a deeper interest in the band, several years later. By that time, Brian and Sarah were already dating, so Sarah's history with this album is associated with Brian playing it throughout their college years. Part 3: Track by Track Every song on the first side of this album was released as a single, at least somewhere in the world. And accordingly, almost every song also has a video associated with it. Brian and Sarah get especially caught up in talking about the first track and its video. Because they've already talked a lot about the background of the album and their personal history with both it and the band, this episode concludes after the discussion of "One Vision." One Vision (That's it!  Sorry!  More next episode!) See the video we discuss here: One Vision Read more at http://permanentrecordpodcast.com/ Visit us at https://www.facebook.com/permrecordpodcast Follow us at https://twitter.com/permrecordpod

Happy Superhero Friday! This week we welcome back the Mad Scientist and guarantee we'll either better your life or waste your time, but we sincerely hope to do both. We've got more on the Nintendo Switch, we'll dive into some music and gadgets of the week, and we'll also talk about variety. In This Episode The Mad Scientist returrrrnsss! More about Nintendo Switch ...of the Weeks! Variety is the spice of life Bad Lip Reading: The Force Awakens More of the Same You've heard the adage, "variety is the spice of life"? Because Brian brings it up and expresses his opinion on the matter, I thought it applicable to dive a little bit into the adage. Idioms are funny beasts; they become so much a part of our language, unfamiliar to foreigners or even untraceable in certain cases, that we don't often know where they come from or why they became so popular. This idiom comes from a poem called The Task by William Cowper. (If you're super interested, you can read the whole thing here.) The idealism extends back much further, but the phrase it this form is mostly attributed to William Cowper. Variety's the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavour. There is another interesting line shortly after this one, which says: "We have run through every change that fancy...and, studious of mutation still, discard a real elegance, a little used, for monstrous novelty and strange disguise." Weeding through the 19th Century verbiage, I interpret this quite simply; in our pursuit of spice, we discard things that are truly pleasing for something that is not so familiar. I'm terrible at trying new things. I love the things that are familiar and that I can rely on; after some reflection, I believe this is attributed to being disappointed by new things. I go back to what I know because even if it isn't a "real elegance", it is trusted and I know what I'm getting. With new things, unfamiliar things, I don't know what I'm getting. For me, variety is less important than trusting what I'm getting. That said, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having a healthy variety! Without people who take risks on new things, we would not have much of an economy, much less a society which innovates itself into the future. What I love about Cowper's poem, however, is that he shows us the good and bad of variety all in a couple lines. Variety's the very spice of life, but don't shed something that is familiar just because it isn't a novelty anymore. There's a lesson for me in this, too. Reading between the lines rather than explicitly stated in Cowper's poem, I believe he's trying to draw attention to a balance and discernment between what is new and what is familiar. Hold onto what is elegant, but the spice of life can be found in variety. Links Bad Lip Reading: Star Wars The Force Awakens Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (Trailer) Star Wars: The Last Jedi (Official Teaser)

It's Bonus Song Thursday! Because Brian was a little busy, Bill brings some well researched facts about Aimee Mann's cover of the Harry Nilsson song "One!" He talks about the history of the song as it made it's way from Nilsson to Three Dog Night to Mann to the Magnolia soundtrack! Additionally, Bill reads some listener emails about cool comic books about music and how we obviously inspired Jeff Tweedy as he pondered what to name the latest Wilco album!

Brian Regan and Danny Lobell sit down and discuss philosophy from Paul Feyerabend. Because Brian has a history of going against the grain of the world. He is clean in an industry that is known for being dirty. He dropped out of college and completed it later. He released a special completely live. All things not many people can do, Alex picked a philosopher who talked about thinking outside the box in science. The conversation also covers comedy talk and Brian's life outside of showbiz. This episode is brought to you by Stand Up! Records.

Because Brian still refuses to watch The Room, we are back this week with the worst ppv in WWE history and the final nail in ECW's coffin-the 2006 December to Dismember ppv. Call in LIVE at 718.766.4886 with your questions, comments, concerns or emotional outbursts

Because Brian still refuses to watch The Room, we are back this week with the worst ppv in WWE history and the final nail in ECW's coffin-the 2006 December to Dismember ppv. Call in LIVE at 718.766.4886 with your questions, comments, concerns or emotional outbursts