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Ben Bradshaw (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-bradshaw-9366a04/) is an experienced brand and marketing leader in energy and cleantech. He helps progressive businesses in the Energy Transition create a standout brand, and marketing that powers profitable and sustainable growth. He has 25 years' experience as a marketer in the UK energy & cleantech sectors and particular strengths in marcomms, brand, strategy, planning, insight for B2C, B2B, corporations or start-ups. Ben has held Head of Marketing positions transforming brands and building teams - with a passion for sustainability, brand and culture. He is now seeking his next senior marketing role with an ambitious pioneer in the clean energy sector. Transcript Mark Reed-Edwards: Welcome to this special episode of Confessions of a Marketer. I'm Mark Reed-Edwards. It's been a while, but we're back with this mini series of shows I've dubbed the Talent Showcase. These episodes will focus on people in marketing, communications, PR, and allied fields who are looking for the next opportunity. My guests will share their stories, successes, and how they can help their next employer or client. We have about five episodes lined up and today I'm joined by Ben Bradshaw. Ben is an experienced brand and marketing leader in energy and clean tech. He helps progressive businesses in the energy transition create a standout brand and marketing that powers profitable and sustainable growth. He has 25 years experience as a marketer in the UK energy and clean tech sectors and particular strengths in marcomms, brand, strategy, planning, insight for B2C, B2B corporations or startups. Ben has held head of marketing positions, transforming brands and building teams with a passion for sustainability, brand and culture. He's now seeking his next senior marketing role with an ambitious pioneer in the clean tech sector. Ben, welcome. Ben Bradshaw: Oh, well, good to meet you, Mark. Thank you very much for inviting me on the show. Mark: Yeah, it's great to have you here. So can you tell me about yourself, your background and career path beyond what I just shared with the audience? Ben: Yeah, sure. So as you said, I've been in the energy industry—UK-based—for over 25 years and I've got a personal passion in sustainability and got a career in marketing. Really I've brought those two interests of mine to create a career to support the growth of renewable, sustainability, clean technology. So we're talking about EV charging, solar panels, battery storage. And I'm really excited about the opportunity here because it's growing massively. And I, I was really involved in sustainability from the start from my environmental engineering over almost 30 years ago now. And I've already dedicated a career in supporting businesses to further their brand and to develop marketing to really grow, take up an interest in these new products and services. And I've worked in the last four years in early stage businesses, startups, establishing a marketing function a brand and a team within those businesses that are rapidly growing for the first time. So, really, for me, it's looking at my next opportunity. It'll be in the space of energy and clean technology. And I'm looking for head of marketing positions. And really helping those businesses power growth, whether they're early stage startups scale ups, or established corporations who are diversifying into sustainability services. Mark: And you're based in the UK. Ben: I'm based in the UK, I'm based in Nottingham but the hybrid working arrangement now means that where I could work is broadened out. Mark: So what is one of your most important career accomplishments, do you think? Ben: Well, I mean, I've been in the energy industry in the UK for, as I said, over 25 years and seen huge change moving from it being, you know, just gas and electricity powered by fossil fuels, all the way to, now, renewable energy and growth in that space. I've also seen huge change in terms of consolidations. And that was one of the areas that I got involved in. So, I was working for Powergen. It was one of the largest energy suppliers in the UK. And the global energy provider, E. ON, bought out Powergen as a route to access the UK market. I led the strategy and the rebranding from Powergen to E.ON and really supported the growth of the E. ON brand via a gradual transition strategy moving from Powergen, a household name back in 2006 and in three years rebranded to E. ON and move from a 10 percent awareness of, Of of of Eon to a 65 percent brand awareness in three years, supported, of course, by investment into the brand TV -led campaigns the sponsorship of the F. A. Cup and new products. And I was really delighted to be involved in that three year strategy and leading it to success. Mark: So thinking about all that, and my introduction to you earlier, what do you think you can offer your next employer or client? Ben: Well, I think it comes down to about four things, really. And there's quite a lot within each of the four. One is powering growth. When I say growth, I'm talking about really using marketing and branding to engender more engagement and more interest into the product or the brand. And that drives inquiries, that drives interest, that drives revenue growth, and ultimately profit. So that's the first thing, driving growth. The second one's really, and again, about driving growth, but probably more so on, in the medium to long term. This is about setting a standout brand, defining a strategy, an identity, for the brand that allows that business to grow, particularly understanding the needs and interests of the target audience and really, and really building that. But it also supports the engagement and motivation of all the employees as well, of course. The third one is related to growth, but it's the commercial performance. It's making sure that the marketing is delivering the return on investment it needs to, making sure there's the investment needed into the brand, and demonstrating how that's delivering a return, whether it's in the short term, or medium, or long. And then the final point, I think I mentioned it, was really developing a culture. Brand is such a, an all pervasive notion that impacts not just customers, but also employees, investors. Partners and particularly for early stage businesses, getting that right and defining the right culture to enable that growth and ensuring there's alignment between the brand, the culture and the customer experience. Because ultimately a great promise can be great, but it's got to be delivered through the entire process. So those four things kind of characterize the things I'll be looking to offer my next employer. Mark: Yeah, that's a great list and I think you've shared your background really well here and, Ben, I really want to thank you for joining me and I hope this this little time that we had together will help you find your next gig. Ben: Absolutely. And if anyone is interested to get in touch, I'm on LinkedIn. Be more than happy to respond to any messages and take it from there. Mark: Thanks, Ben. I'm Mark Reed Edwards. Join me on the next Confessions of a Marketer. Ben: Thanks, Mark.

Peter van Hardenberg talks about Industrialists vs. Academics, Ink&Switch's evolution over time, the Hollywood Model, internal lab infrastructure, and more! Peter is the lab director and CEO of Ink&Switch, a private, creator oriented, computing research lab.  References Ink&Switch (and their many publications) The Hollywood Model in R&D Idea Machines Episode with Adam Wiggins Paul Erdós Transcript Peter Van Hardenberg [00:01:21] Ben: Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Peter van Hardenbergh. Peter is the lab director and CEO of Inkin switch. Private creator oriented, competing research lab. I talked to Adam Wiggins, one of inkind switches founders, [00:01:35] way back in episode number four. It's amazing to see the progress they've made as an organization. They've built up an incredible community of fellow travelers and consistently released research reports that gesture at possibilities for competing that are orthogonal to the current hype cycles. Peter frequently destroys my complacency with his ability to step outside the way that research has normally done and ask, how should we be operating, given our constraints and goals. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Peter. Would you break down your distinction between academics and industrialists [00:02:08] Peter: Okay. Academics are people whose incentive structure is connected to the institutional rewards of the publishing industry, right? You, you publish papers. And you get tenure and like, it's a, it's, it's not so cynical or reductive, but like fundamentally the time cycles are long, right? Like you have to finish work according to when, you know, submission deadlines for a conference are, you know, you're [00:02:35] working on something now. You might come back to it next quarter or next year or in five years, right? Whereas when you're in industry, you're connected to users, you're connected to people at the end of the day who need to touch and hold and use the thing. And you know, you have to get money from them to keep going. And so you have a very different perspective on like time and money and space and what's possible. And the real challenge in terms of connecting these two, you know, I didn't invent the idea of pace layers, right? They, they operate at different pace layers. Academia is often intergenerational, right? Whereas industry is like, you have to make enough money every quarter. To keep the bank account from going below zero or everybody goes home, [00:03:17] Ben: Right. Did. Was it Stuart Brand who invented pace [00:03:22] Peter: believe it was Stewart Brand. Pace layers. Yeah. [00:03:25] Ben: That actually I, I'd never put these two them together, but the, the idea I, I, I think about impedance mismatches between [00:03:35] organizations a lot. And that really sort of like clicks with pace layers Exactly. Right. Where it's like [00:03:39] Peter: Yeah, absolutely. And, and I think in a big way what we're doing at, Ink& Switch on some level is trying to provide like synchro mesh between academia and industry, right? Because they, the academics are moving on a time scale and with an ambition that's hard for industry to match, right? But also, Academics. Often I think in computer science are like, have a shortage of good understanding about what the real problems people are facing in the world today are. They're not disinterested. [00:04:07] Ben: just computer [00:04:08] Peter: Those communication channels don't exist cuz they don't speak the same language, they don't use the same terminology, they don't go to the same conferences, they don't read the same publications. Right. [00:04:18] Ben: Yeah. [00:04:18] Peter: so vice versa, you know, we find things in industry that are problems and then it's like you go read the papers and talk to some scientists. I was like, oh dang. Like. We know how to solve this. It's just nobody's built it. [00:04:31] Ben: Yeah. [00:04:32] Peter: Or more accurately it would be to say [00:04:35] there's a pretty good hunch here about something that might work, and maybe we can connect the two ends of this together. [00:04:42] Ben: Yeah. Often, I, I think of it as someone, someone has, it is a quote unquote solved problem, but there are a lot of quote unquote, implementation details and those implementation details require a year of work. [00:04:56] Peter: yeah, a year or many years? Or an entire startup, or a whole career or two? Yeah. And, and speaking of, Ink&Switch, I don't know if we've ever talked about, so a switch has been around for more than half a decade, right? [00:05:14] Peter: Yeah, seven or eight years now, I think I could probably get the exact number, but yeah, about that. [00:05:19] Ben: And. I think I don't have a good idea in my head over that time. What, what has changed about in, can switches, conception of itself and like how you do things. Like what is, what are some of the biggest things that have have changed over that time?[00:05:35] [00:05:35] Peter: So I think a lot of it could be summarized as professionalization. But I, I'll give a little brief history and can switch began because the. You know, original members of the lab wanted to do a startup that was Adam James and Orion, but they recognized that they didn't, they weren't happy with computing and where computers were, and they knew that they wanted to make something that would be a tool that would help people who were solving the world's problems work better. That's kinda a vague one, but You know, they were like, well, we're not physicists, we're not social scientists. You know, we can't solve climate change or radicalization directly, or you know, the journalism crisis or whatever, but maybe we can build tools, right? We know how to make software tools. Let's build tools for the people who are solving the problems. Because right now a lot of those systems they rely on are getting like steadily worse every day. And I think they still are like the move to the cloud disempowerment of the individual, like, you [00:06:35] know, surveillance technology, distraction technology. And Tristan Harris is out there now. Like hammering on some of these points. But there's just a lot of things that are like slow and fragile and bad and not fun to work with and lose your, you know, lose your work product. You know, [00:06:51] Ben: Yeah, software as a service more generally. [00:06:54] Peter: Yeah. And like, there's definitely advantages. It's not like, you know, people are rational actors, but something was lost. And so the idea was well go do a bit of research, figure out what the shape of the company is, and then just start a company and, you know, get it all solved and move on. And I think the biggest difference, at least, you know, aside from scale and like actual knowledge is just kind of the dawning realization at some point that like there won't really be an end state to this problem. Like this isn't a thing that's transitional where you kind of come in and you do some research for a bit, and then we figure out the answer and like fold up the card table and move on to the next thing. It's like, oh no, this, this thing's gotta stick around because these problems aren't gonna [00:07:35] go away. And when we get through this round of problems, we already see what the next round are. And that's probably gonna go on for longer than any of us will be working. And so the vision now, at least from my perspective as the current lab director, is much more like, how can I get this thing to a place where it can sustain for 10 years, for 50 years, however long it takes, and you know, to become a place that. Has a culture that can sustain, you know, grow and change as new people come in. But that can sustain operations indefinitely. [00:08:07] Ben: Yeah. And, and so to circle back to the. The, the jumping off point for this, which is sort of since, since it began, what have been some of the biggest changes of how you operate? How you, or just like the, the model more generally or, or things that you were [00:08:30] Peter: Yeah, so the beginning was very informal, but, so maybe I'll skip over the first like [00:08:35] little period where it was just sort of like, Finding our footing. But around the time when I joined, we were just four or five people. And we did one project, all of us together at a time, and we just sort of like, someone would write a proposal for what we should do next, and then we would argue about like whether it was the right next thing. And, you know, eventually we would pick a thing and then we would go and do that project and we would bring in some contractors and we called it the Hollywood model. We still call it the Hollywood model. Because it was sort of structured like a movie production. We would bring in, you know, to our little core team, we'd bring in a couple specialists, you know, the equivalent of a director of photography or like a, you know, a casting director or whatever, and you bring in the people that you need to accomplish the task. Oh, we don't know how to do Bluetooth on the web. Okay. Find a Bluetooth person. Oh, there's a bunch of crypto stuff, cryptography stuff. Just be clear on this upcoming project, we better find somebody who knows, you know, the ins and outs of like, which cryptography algorithms to use or [00:09:35] what, how to build stuff in C Sharp for Windows platform or Surface, whatever the, the project was over time. You know, we got pretty good at that and I think one of the biggest changes, sort of after we kind of figured out how to actually do work was the realization that. Writing about the work not only gave us a lot of leverage in terms of our sort of visibility in the community and our ability to attract talent, but also the more we put into the writing, the more we learned about the research and that the process of, you know, we would do something and then write a little internal report and then move on. But the process of taking the work that we do, And making it legible to the outside world and explaining why we did it and what it means and how it fits into the bigger picture. That actually like being very diligent and thorough in documenting all of that greatly increases our own understanding of what we did.[00:10:35] And that was like a really pleasant and interesting surprise. I think one of my sort of concerns as lab director is that we got really good at that and we write all these like, Obscenely long essays that people claim to read. You know, hacker News comments on extensively without reading. But I think a lot about, you know, I always worry about the orthodoxy of doing the same thing too much and whether we're sort of falling into patterns, so we're always tinkering with new kind of project systems or new ways of working or new kinds of collaborations. And so yeah, that's ongoing. But this, this. The key elements of our system are we bring together a team that has both longer term people with domain contexts about the research, any required specialists who understand like interesting or important technical aspects of the work. And then we have a specific set of goals to accomplish [00:11:35] with a very strict time box. And then when it's done, we write and we put it down. And I think this avoids number of the real pitfalls in more open-ended research. It has its own shortcomings, right? But one of the big pitfalls that avoids is the kind of like meandering off and losing sight of what you're doing. And you can get great results from that in kind of a general research context. But we're very much an industrial research context. We're trying to connect real problems to specific directions to solve them. And so the time box kind of creates the fear of death. You're like, well, I don't wanna run outta time and not have anything to show for it. So you really get focused on trying to deliver things. Now sometimes that's at the cost, like the breadth or ambition of a solution to a particular thing, but I think it helps us really keep moving forward. [00:12:21] Ben: Yeah, and, and you no longer have everybody in the lab working on the same projects, right. [00:12:28] Peter: Yeah. So today, at any given time, The sort of population of the lab fluctuates between sort of [00:12:35] like eight and 15 people, depending on, you know, whether we have a bunch of projects in full swing or you know, how you count contractors. But we usually, at the moment we have sort of three tracks of research that we're doing. And those are local first software Programmable Inc. And Malleable software. [00:12:54] Ben: Nice. And so I, I actually have questions both about the, the write-ups that you do and the Hollywood model and so on, on the Hollywood model. Do you think that I, I, and this is like, do you think that the, the Hollywood model working in, in a. Industrial Research lab is particular to software in the sense that I feel like the software industry, people change jobs fairly frequently. Contracting is really common. Contractors are fairly fluid and. [00:13:32] Peter: You mean in terms of being able to staff and source people?[00:13:35] [00:13:35] Ben: Yeah, and people take, like, take these long sabbaticals, right? Where it's like, it's not uncommon in the software industry for someone to, to take six months between jobs. [00:13:45] Peter: I think it's very hard for me to generalize about the properties of other fields, so I want to try and be cautious in my evaluation here. What I would say is that, I think the general principle of having a smaller core of longer term people who think and gain a lot of context about a problem and pairing them up with people who have fresh ideas and relevant expertise, does not require you to have any particular industry structure. Right. There are lots of ways of solving this problem. Go to a research, another research organization and write a paper with someone from [00:14:35] an adjacent field. If you're in academia, right? If you're in a company, you can do a partnership you know, hire, you know, I think a lot of fields of science have much longer cycles, right? If you're doing material science, you know, takes a long time to build test apparatus and to formulate chemistries. Like [00:14:52] Ben: Yeah. [00:14:52] Peter: someone for several years, right? Like, That's fine. Get a detach detachment from another part of the company and bring someone as a secondment. Like I think that the general principle though, of putting together a mixture of longer and shorter term people with the right set of skills, yes, we solve it a particular way in our domain. But I don't think that that's software u unique to software. [00:15:17] Ben: Would, would it be overreaching to map that onto professors and postdocs and grad students where you have the professor who is the, the person who's been working on the, the program for a long time has all the context and then you have postdocs and grad students [00:15:35] coming through the lab. [00:15:38] Peter: Again, I need to be thoughtful about. How I evaluate fields that I'm less experienced with, but both my parents went through grad school and I've certainly gotten to know a number of academics. My sense of the relationship between professors and or sort of PhD, yeah, I guess professors and their PhD students, is that it's much more likely that the PhD students are given sort of a piece of the professor's vision to execute. [00:16:08] Ben: Yeah. [00:16:09] Peter: And that that is more about scaling the research interests of the professor. And I don't mean this in like a negative way but I think it's quite different [00:16:21] Ben: different. [00:16:22] Peter: than like how DARPA works or how I can switch works with our research tracks in that it's, I it's a bit more prescriptive and it's a bit more of like a mentor-mentee kind of relationship as [00:16:33] Ben: Yeah. More training.[00:16:35] [00:16:35] Peter: Yeah. And you know, that's, that's great. I mean, postdocs are a little different again, but I think, I think that's different than say how DARPA works or like other institutional research groups. [00:16:49] Ben: Yeah. Okay. I, I wanted to see how, how far I could stretch the, stretch [00:16:55] Peter: in academia there's famous stories about Adosh who would. Turn up on your doorstep you know, with a suitcase and a bottle of amphetamines and say, my, my brain is open, or something to that effect. And then you'd co-author a paper and pay his room and board until you found someone else to send him to.   I think that's closer in the sense that, right, like, here's this like, great problem solver with a lot of like domain skills and he would parachute into a place where someone was working on something interesting and help them make a breakthrough with it. [00:17:25] Ben: Yeah. I think the, the thing that I want to figure out, just, you know, long, longer term is how to. Make those [00:17:35] short term collaborations happen when with, with like, I, I I think it's like, like there's some, there's some coy intention like in, in the sense of like Robert Kos around like organizational boundaries when you have people coming in and doing things in a temporary sense. [00:17:55] Peter: Yeah, academia is actually pretty good at this, right? With like paper co-authors. I mean, again, this is like the, the pace layers thing. When you have a whole bunch of people organized in an industry and a company around a particular outcome, You tend to have like very specific goals and commitments and you're, you're trying to execute against those and it's much harder to get that kind of like more fluid movement between domains. [00:18:18] Ben: Yeah, and [00:18:21] Peter: That's why I left working in companies, right? Cause like I have run engineering processes and built products and teams and it's like someone comes to me with a really good idea and I'm like, oh, it's potentially very interesting, but like, [00:18:33] Ben: but We [00:18:34] Peter: We got [00:18:35] customers who have outages who are gonna leave if we don't fix the thing, we've got users falling out of our funnel. Cause we don't do basic stuff like you just, you really have a lot of work to do to make the thing go [00:18:49] Ben: Yeah. [00:18:49] Peter: business. And you know, my experience of research labs within businesses is that they're almost universally unsuccessful. There are exceptions, but I think they're more coincidental than, than designed. [00:19:03] Ben: Yeah. And I, I think less and less successful over time is, is my observation that. [00:19:11] Peter: Interesting. [00:19:12] Ben: Yeah, there's a, there's a great paper that I will send you called like, what is the name? Oh, the the Changing Structure of American Innovation by She Aurora. I actually did a podcast with him because I like the paper so much. that that I, I think, yeah, exactly. And so going back to your, your amazing [00:19:35] write-ups, you all have clearly invested quite a chunk of, of time and resources into some amount of like internal infrastructure for making those really good. And I wanted to get a sense of like, how do you decide when it's worth investing in internal infrastructure for a lab? [00:19:58] Peter: Ooh. Ah, that's a fun question. Least at In and Switch. It's always been like sort of demand driven. I wish I could claim to be more strategic about it, but like we had all these essays, they were actually all hand coded HTML at one point. You know, real, real indie cred there. But it was a real pain when you needed to fix something or change something. Cause you had to go and, you know, edit all this H T M L. So at some point we were doing a smaller project and I built like a Hugo Templating thing [00:20:35] just to do some lab notes and I faked it. And I guess this is actually a, maybe a somewhat common thing, which is you do one in a one-off way. And then if it's promising, you invest more in it. [00:20:46] Ben: Yeah. [00:20:46] Peter: And it ended up being a bigger project to build a full-on. I mean, it's not really a cms, it's sort of a cms, it's a, it's a templating system that produces static HT m l. It's what all our essays come out of. But there's also a lot of work in a big investment in just like design and styling. And frankly, I think that one of the things that in can switch apart from other. People who do similar work in the space is that we really put a lot of work into the presentation of our work. You know, going beyond, like we write very carefully, but we also care a lot about like, picking good colors, making sure that text hyphenates well, that it, you know, that the the screencast has the right dimensions and, you know, all that little detail work and. It's expensive [00:21:35] in time and money to do, but I think it's, I think the results speak for themselves. I think it's worth it. [00:21:47] Ben: Yeah. I, and I mean, if, if the ultimate goal is to influence what people do and what they think, which I suspect is, is at least some amount of the goal then communicating it. [00:22:00] Peter: It's much easier to change somebody's mind than to build an entire company. [00:22:05] Ben: Yes. Well, [00:22:06] Peter: you wanna, if you wanna max, it depends. Well, you don't have to change everybody's mind, right? Like changing an individual person's mind might be impossible. But if you can put the right ideas out there in the right way to make them legible, then you'll change the right. Hopefully you'll change somebody's mind and it will be the right somebody. [00:22:23] Ben: yeah. No, that is, that is definitely true. And another thing that I am. Always obscenely obsessed, exceedingly impressed by that. In Switch. [00:22:35] Does is your sort of thoughtfulness around how you structure your community and sort of tap into it. Would you be willing to sort of like, walk me through how you think about that and like how you have sort of the, the different layers of, of kind of involvement? [00:22:53] Peter: Okay. I mean, sort of the, maybe I'll work from, from the inside out cuz that's sort of the history of it. So in the beginning there was just sort of the people who started the lab. And over time they recruited me and, and Mark Mcg again and you know, some of our other folk to come and, and sign on for this crazy thing. And we started working with these wonderful, like contractors off and on and and so the initial sort of group was quite small and quite insular and we didn't publish anything. And what we found was that. Once we started, you know, just that alone, the act of bringing people in and working with them started to create the beginning of a [00:23:35] community because people would come into a project with us, they'd infect us with some of their ideas, we'd infect them with some of ours. And so you started to have this little bit of shared context with your past collaborators. And because we have this mix of like longer term people who stick with the lab and other people who come and go, You start to start to build up this, this pool of people who you share ideas and language with. And over time we started publishing our work and we began having what we call workshops where we just invite people to come and talk about their work at Ink and Switch. And by at, I mean like now it's on a discord. Back in the day it was a Skype or a Zoom call or whatever. And the rule back then in the early days was like, if you want to come to the talk. You have to have given a talk or have worked at the lab. And so it was like very good signal to noise ratio in attendance cuz the only people who would be on the zoom call would be [00:24:35] people who you knew were grappling with those problems. For real, no looky lose, no, no audience, right? And over time it just, there were too many really good, interesting people who are doing the work. To fit in all those workshops and actually scheduling workshops is quite tiring and takes a lot of energy. And so over time we sort of started to expand this community a little further. And sort of now our principle is you know, if you're doing the work, you're welcome to come to the workshops. And we invite some people to do workshops sometimes, but that's now we have this sort of like small private chat group of like really interesting folk. And it's not open to the public generally because again, we, I don't want to have an audience, right? I want it to practitioner's space. And so over time, those people have been really influential on us as well. And having that little inner [00:25:35] circle, and it's a few hundred people now of people who, you know, like if you have a question to ask about something tricky. There's probably somebody in there who has tried it, but more significantly, like the answer will come from somebody who has tried it, not from somebody who will call you an idiot for trying or who will, right, like you, you avoid all the, don't read the comments problems because the sort of like, if anybody was like that, I would probably ask them to leave, but we've been fortunate that we haven't had any of that kind of stuff in the community. I will say though, I think I struggle a lot because I think. It's hard to be both exclusive and inclusive. Right, but exclusive community deliberately in the sense that I want it to be a practitioner's space and one where people can be wrong and it's not too performative, like there's not investors watching or your, your user base or whatever. [00:26:32] Ben: Yeah. [00:26:32] Peter: at the same time, [00:26:33] Ben: strangers. [00:26:34] Peter: [00:26:35] inclusive space where we have people who are earlier in their career or. From non-traditional backgrounds, you know, either academically or culturally or so on and so forth. And it takes constant work to be like networking out and meeting new people and like inviting them into this space. So it's always an area to, to keep working on. At some point, I think we will want to open the aperture further, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a delicate thing to build a community. [00:27:07] Ben: Yeah, I mean the, the, frankly, the reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to figure out the same things and you have done it better than basically anybody else that I've seen. This is, this is maybe getting too down into the weeds. But why did you decide that discourse or discord was the right tool for it? And the, the reason that I ask is that I personally hate sort of [00:27:35] streaming walls of texts, and I find it very hard to, to seriously discuss ideas in, in that format. [00:27:43] Peter: Yeah, I think async, I mean, I'm an old school like mailing list guy. On some level I think it's just a pragmatic thing. We use Discord for our internal like day-to-day operations like. Hey, did you see the pr? You know, oh, we gotta call in an hour with so-and-so, whatever. And then we had a bunch of people in that community and then, you know, we started having the workshops and inviting more people. So we created a space in that same discord where. You know, people didn't have to get pinged when we had a lab call and we didn't want 'em turning up on the zoom anyway. And so it wasn't so much like a deliberate decision to be that space. I think there's a huge opportunity to do better and you know, frankly, what's there is [00:28:35] not as designed or as deliberate as I would like. It's more consequence of Organic growth over time and just like continuing to do a little bit here and there than like sort of an optimum outcome. And it could, there, there's a lot of opportunity to do better. Like we should have newsletters, there should be more, you know, artifacts of past conversations with better organizations. But like all of that stuff takes time and energy. And we are about a small little research lab. So many people you know, [00:29:06] Ben: I, I absolutely hear you on that. I think the, the, the tension that I, I see is that people, I think like texting, like sort of stream of texts. Slack and, and discord type things. And, and so there's, there's the question of like, what can you get people to do versus like, what creates the, the right conversation environment?[00:29:35] And, and maybe that's just like a matter of curation and like standard setting. [00:29:42] Peter: Yeah, I don't know. We've had our, our rabbit trails and like derailed conversations over the years, but I think, you know, if you had a forum, nobody would go there. [00:29:51] Ben: Yeah. [00:29:52] Peter: like, and you could do a mailing list, but I don't know, maybe we could do a mailing list. That would be a nice a nice form, I think. But people have to get something out of a community to put things into it and you know, you have to make, if you want to have a forum or, or an asynchronous posting place, you know, the thing is people are already in Discord or slack. [00:30:12] Ben: exactly. [00:30:13] Peter: something else, you have to push against the stream. Now, actually, maybe one interesting anecdote is I did experiment for a while with, like, discord has sort of a forum post feature. They added a while back [00:30:25] Ben: Oh [00:30:25] Peter: added it. Nobody used it. So eventually I, I turned it off again. Maybe, maybe it just needs revisiting, but it surprised me that it wasn't adopted, I guess is what [00:30:35] I would say. [00:30:36] Ben: Yeah. I mean, I think it, I think the problem is it takes more work. It's very easy to just dash off a thought. [00:30:45] Peter: Yeah, but I think if you have the right community, then. Those thoughts are likely to have been considered and the people who reply will speak from knowledge [00:30:55] Ben: Yeah. [00:30:56] Peter: and then it's not so bad, right? [00:30:59] Ben: it's [00:30:59] Peter: The problem is with Hacker News or whatever where like, or Reddit or any of these open communities like you, you know, the person who's most likely to reply is not the person who's most helpful to apply. [00:31:11] Ben: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. And sort of switching tracks yet again, how so one, remind me how long your, your projects are, like how long, how big are the, is the time box. [00:31:28] Peter: the implementation phase for a standard income switch Hollywood project, which I can now call them standard, I think, cuz we've done like, [00:31:35] Ooh, let me look. 25 or so over the years. Let's see, what's my project count number at? I have a little. Tracker. Yeah, I think it's 25 today. So we've done about 20 some non-trivial number of these 10 to 12 weeks of implementation is sort of the core of the project, and the idea is that when you hit that start date, at the beginning of that, you should have the team assembled. You should know what you're building, you should know why you're building it, and you should know what done looks like. Now it's research, so inevitably. You know, you get two weeks in and then you take a hard left and like, you know, but that, that we write what's called the brief upfront, which is like, what is the research question we are trying to answer by funding this work and how do we think this project will answer it? Now, your actual implementation might change, or you might discover targets of opportunity along the way. But the idea is that by like having a, a narrow time box, like a, a team [00:32:35] that has a clear understanding of what you're trying to accomplish. And like the right set of people on board who already have all the like necessary skills. You can execute really hard for like that 10 to 12 weeks and get quite far in that time. Now, that's not the whole project though. There's usually a month or two upfront of what we call pre-infusion, kind of coming from the espresso idea that like you make better espresso if you take a little time at low pressure first to get ready with the shot, and so we'll do. You know, and duration varies here, but there's a period before that where we're making technical choices. Are we building this for the web or is this going on iPad? Are we gonna do this with rust and web assembly, or is this type script is this, are we buying Microsoft Surface tablets for this as we're like the ink behavior, right? So all those decisions we try and make up front. So when you hit the execution phase, you're ready to go. Do we need, what kind of designer do we want to include in this project? And who's available, you know? All of that stuff. We [00:33:35] try and square away before we get to the execution phase. [00:33:38] Ben: right. [00:33:38] Peter: when the end of the execution phase, it's like we try to be very strict with like last day pencils down and try to also reserve like the last week or two for like polish and cleanup and sort of getting things. So it's really two to two and a half, sometimes three months is like actually the time you have to do the work. And then after that, essays can take between like two months and a year or two. To produce finally. But we try to have a dr. We try to have a good first draft within a month after the end of the project. And again, this isn't a process that's like probably not optimal, but basically someone on the team winds up being the lead writer and we should be more deliberate about that. But usually the project lead for a given project ends up being the essay writer. And they write a first draft with input and collaboration from the rest of the group. And then people around [00:34:35] the lab read it and go, this doesn't make any sense at all. Like, what? What do you do? And you know, to, to varying degrees. And then it's sort of okay, right? Once you've got that kind of feedback, then you go back and you restructured and go, oh, I need to explain this part more. You know, oh, these findings don't actually cover the stuff that other people at the lab thought was interesting from the work or whatever. And then that goes through, you know, an increasing sort of, you know, standard of writing stuff, right? You send it out to some more people and then you send it to a bigger group. And you know, we send it to people who are in the field that whose input we respect. And then we take their edits and we debate which ones to take. And then eventually it goes in the HTML template. And then there's a long process of like hiring an external copy editor and building nice quality figures and re-recording all your crappy screencasts to be like, Really crisp with nice lighting and good, you know, pacing and, you know, then finally at the end of all of that, we publish. [00:35:33] Ben: Nice. And [00:35:35] how did you settle on the, the 10 to 12 weeks as the right size, time box? [00:35:42] Peter: Oh, it's it's it's, it's clearly rationally optimal. [00:35:46] Ben: Ah, of course, [00:35:47] Peter: No, I'm kidding. It's totally just, it became a habit. I mean, I think. Like I, I can give an intuitive argument and we've, we've experimented a bit. You know, two weeks is not long enough to really get into anything, [00:36:02] Ben: right. [00:36:02] Peter: and the year is too long. There's too much, too much opportunity to get lost along the way. There's no, you go too long with no real deadline pressure. It's very easy to kind of wander off into the woods. And bear in mind that like the total project duration is really more like six months, right? And so where we kind of landed is also that we often have like grad students or you know, people who are between other contracts or things. It's much easier to get people for three months than for eight months. And if I feel like [00:36:35] just intuitively, if I, if someone came to you with an eight month project, I'd be, I'm almost positive that I would be able to split it into two, three month projects and we'd be able to like find a good break point somewhere in the middle. And then write about that and do another one. And it's like, this is sort of a like bigger or smaller than a bread box argument, but like, you know, a month is too little and six months feels too long. So two to four months feels about right. In terms of letting you really get into, yeah, you can really get into the meat of a problem. You can try a few different approaches. You can pick your favorite and then spend a bit of time like analyzing it and like working out the kinks. And then you can like write it up. [00:37:17] Ben: Thanks. [00:37:18] Peter: But you know, there have been things that are not, that haven't fit in that, and we're doing some stuff right now that has, you know, we've had a, like six month long pre-infusion going this year already on some ink stuff. So it's not a universal rule, but like that's the, that's the [00:37:33] Ben: Yeah. No, I [00:37:35] appreciate that intuition [00:37:36] Peter: and I think it also, it ties into being software again, right? Like again, if you have to go and weld things and like [00:37:43] Ben: yeah, exactly. [00:37:44] Peter: You know, [00:37:44] Ben: let let some bacteria grow. [00:37:46] Peter: or like, you know, the, it's very much a domain specific answer. [00:37:51] Ben: Yeah. Something that I wish people talked about more was like, like characteristic time scales of different domains. And I, I think that's software, I mean, software is obviously shorter, but it'd be interesting to, to sort of dig down and be like, okay, like what, what actually is it? So the, the, the last question I'd love to ask is, To what extent does everybody in the lab know what's, what everybody else is working on? Like. [00:38:23] Peter: So we use two tools for that. We could do a better job of this. Every Monday the whole lab gets together for half an hour only. [00:38:35] And basically says what they're doing. Like, what are you up to this week? Oh, we're trying to like, you know, figure out what's going on with that you know, stylist shaped problem we were talking about at the last demo, or, oh, we're, you know, we're in essay writing mode. We've got a, we're hoping to get the first draft done this week, or, you know, just whatever high level kind of objectives the team has. And then I was asked the question like, well, Do you expect to have anything for show and tell on Friday and every week on Friday we have show and tell or every other week. Talk a bit more about that and at show and tell. It's like whatever you've got that you want input on or just a deadline for you can share. Made some benchmark showing that this code is now a hundred times faster. Great. Like bring it to show and tell. Got that like tricky you know, user interaction, running real smooth. Bring it to show and tell, built a whole new prototype of a new kind of [00:39:35] like notetaking app. Awesome. Like come and see. And different folks and different projects have taken different approaches to this. What has been most effective, I'm told by a bunch of people in their opinion now is like, kind of approaching it. Like a little mini conference talk. I personally actually air more on the side of like a more casual and informal thing. And, and those can be good too. Just from like a personal alignment like getting things done. Perspective. What I've heard from people doing research who want to get useful feedback is that when they go in having sort of like rehearsed how to explain what they're doing, then how to show what they've done and then what kind of feedback they want. That not only do they get really good feedback, but also that process of making sure that the demo you're gonna do will actually run smoothly and be legible to the rest of the group [00:40:35] forces you. Again, just like the writing, it forces you to think about what you're doing and why you made certain choices and think about which ones people are gonna find dubious and tell them to either ignore that cuz it was a stand-in or let's talk about that cuz it's interesting. And like that, that that little cycle is really good. And that tends to be, people often come every two weeks for that [00:40:59] Ben: Yeah. [00:41:01] Peter: within when they're in active sort of mode. And so not always, but like two weeks feels about like the right cadence to, to have something. And sometimes people will come and say like, I got nothing this week. Like, let's do it next week. It's fine. And the other thing we do with that time is we alternate what we call zoom outs because they're on Zoom and I have no, no sense of humor I guess. But they're based on, they're based on the old you and your research hamming paper with where the idea is that like, at least for a little while, every week [00:41:35] we all get together and talk about something. Bigger picture that's not tied to any of our individual projects. Sometimes we read a paper together, sometimes we talk about like an interesting project somebody saw, you know, in the world. Sometimes it's skills sharing. Sometimes it's you know, just like, here's how I make coffee or something, right? Like, You know, just anything that is bigger picture or out of the day-to-day philosophical stuff. We've read Illich and, and Ursula Franklin. People love. [00:42:10] Ben: I like that a lot. And I, I think one thing that, that didn't, that, that I'm still wondering about is like, On, on sort of a technical level are, are there things that some peop some parts of the lab that are working on that other parts of the lab don't get, like they, they know, oh, like this person's working on [00:42:35] inks, but they kind of have no idea how inks actually work? Or is it something where like everybody in the lab can have a fairly detailed technical discussion with, with anybody else [00:42:45] Peter: Oh no. I mean, okay, so there are interesting interdependencies. So some projects will consume the output of past projects or build on past projects. And that's interesting cuz it can create almost like a. Industry style production dependencies where like one team wants to go be doing some research. The local first people are trying to work on a project. Somebody else is using auto merge and they have bugs and it's like, oh but again, this is why we have those Monday sort of like conversations. Right? But I think the teams are all quite independent. Like they have their own GitHub repositories. They make their own technology decisions. They use different programming languages. They, they build on different stacks, right? Like the Ink team is often building for iPad because that's the only place we can compile like [00:43:35] ink rendering code to get low enough latency to get the experiences we want. We've given up on the browser, we can't do it, but like, The local first group for various reasons has abandoned electron and all of these like run times and mostly just build stuff for the web now because it actually works and you spend all, spend way less calories trying to make the damn thing go if you don't have to fight xcode and all that kind of stuff. And again, so it really varies, but, and people choose different things at different times, but no, it's not like we are doing code review for each other or like. Getting into the guts. It's much more high level. Like, you know, why did you make that, you know, what is your programming model for this canvas you're working on? How does you know, how does this thing relate to that thing? Why is, you know, why does that layout horizontally? It feels hard to, to parse the way you've shown that to, you know, whatever. [00:44:30] Ben: Okay, cool. That, that makes sense. I just, I, the, the, the reason I ask [00:44:35] is I am just always thinking about how how related do projects inside of a single organization need to be for, like, is, is there sort of like an optimum amount of relatedness? [00:44:50] Peter: I view them all as the aspects of the same thing, and I think that that's, that's an important. Thing we didn't talk about. The goal of income switch is to give rise to a new kind of computing that is more user-centric, that's more productive, that's more creative in like a very raw sense that we want people to be able to think better thoughts, to produce better ideas, to make better art, and that computers can help them with that in ways that they aren't and in fact are [00:45:21] Ben: Yeah. [00:45:25] Peter: whether you're working on ink, Or local first software or malleable software media canvases or whatever domain you are working in. It [00:45:35] is the same thing. It is an ingredient. It is an aspect, it is a dimension of one problem. And so some, in some sense, all of this adds together to make something, whether it's one thing or a hundred things, whether it takes five years or 50 years, you know, that's, we're all going to the same place together. But on many different paths and at different speeds and with different confidence, right? And so in the small, the these things can be totally unrelated, but in the large, they all are part of one mission. And so when you say, how do you bring these things under one roof, when should they be under different roofs? It's like, well, when someone comes to me with a project idea, I ask, do we need this to get to where we're going? [00:46:23] Ben: Yeah, [00:46:24] Peter: And if we don't need it, then we probably don't have time to work on it because there's so much to do. And you know, there's a certain openness to experimentation and, [00:46:35] and uncertainty there. But that, that's the rubric that I use as the lab director is this, is this on the critical path of the revolution?  

This week we sit down with event organizer, Ben Brainard to discuss the Shasta Gravel Hugger. Founded in 2020, this March event in Northern California has proven to be a great season opener for many gravel cyclists. Episode Sponsor:  Hammerhead Karoo 2 Support the Podcast Join The Ridership  Automated Transcription, please excuse the typos: [00:00:00] Craig Dalton: Hello, and welcome to the gravel ride podcast, where we go deep on the sport of gravel cycling through in-depth interviews with product designers, event organizers and athletes. Who are pioneering the sport I'm your host, Craig Dalton, a lifelong cyclist who discovered gravel cycling back in 2016 and made all the mistakes you don't need to make. I approach each episode as a beginner down, unlock all the knowledge you need to become a great gravel cyclist. This week on the show. We welcome Ben Bernard, the founder of the Shasta gravel hugger event in Northern California taking place in March each year for the last four years. It's become a real great early season option. For those of you looking to test your metal in the early parts of the year and not able to go out to some of the Midwest gravel races, like the mid south. Ben has a real interesting approach to the race. He's got a great area to play with around Mount Shasta. If you've never been there before, it's a real amazing. Landmark. In the region, if you're driving, say from San Francisco up to Oregon, you pass through the town of Mount Shasta and then around on the north side of the mountain and the views are absolutely spectacular. I've got a number of friends from Marin county who love this event and have been up on a number of occasions. As Ben will describe the weather sometimes plays a factor in the event and really dramatically affects your choice of equipment for this early season race. Before we jump in i need to thank this week sponsor hammerhead and the hammerhead caru to computer this ad read for my friends at hammerhead is very timely. As I literally just got in my inbox, my email for my latest. Software update. The hammerhead crew. Two's the most advanced GPS cycling computer available today. With industry leading mapping navigation and routing capabilities. That set us apart from other GPS options. So you can explore with confidence and on the go flexibility. That keeps getting underscored every single time I get one of these software updates, because I know the team at hammerhead are a listening. And be working and pushing out responses. So I love that about the crew to the crew too. If you don't know, it's got a touch screen display that's intuitive and responsive and full color. So your navigation experience is more like a smartphone than that, of a typical GPS device. You can see your data more clearly than ever. While also withstanding rugged conditions since it's water and scratch resistance. I've talked about the hammerheads climber feature with predictive path technology before. It allows you to visualize and prepare for upcoming gradient changes in real time. With or without the root loaded. I love this when going to gravel events, because I'm someone who just, I like to know if I'm going to sit in and grind or whether I should try to power over something. Because it's a short climb. This is all available in real time on the crew too. That's why I trust it as my head unit this year and I will do so again, next year. Hammerhead has been previously named bicycling magazines, editor choice, award. In the GPS cycling category. So you don't need to take my word for it. For a limited time, our listeners can get a free heart rate monitor strap with the purchase of a hammerhead crew to simply visit hammerhead.io right now. And use the promo code, the gravel ride at checkout. Someone in the ridership mentioned to me that the way to get the e-commerce system work is go ahead and put the hammerhead crew two in your cart first. And then add the heart rate monitor, and that coupon code, the gravel ride. After the fact to make sure you don't run into any hiccups. And hopefully. You can get a new hammerhead to computer in front of you for your next year's riding endeavors. With all that said let's jump right into my conversation with ben [00:04:04] Craig: Ben. Welcome to the gravel ride podcast. Cast [00:04:07] Ben: Thanks for having me. It's, it's an honor. [00:04:09] Craig: I'm excited. I, you know, Shasta being not dramatically far away from my, from where I live and certainly a place that I've been before, ever since I started seeing the Shasta gravel hugger on the calendar. I've been excited to talk to you cuz it's a beautiful area and I wanna learn, learn more about the event. [00:04:27] Ben: Excellent. You got it. It is a beautiful area. I've just loved going, riding my bike down there, especially in the winter, as I've said before this time of year it is, it is perfect. We got great smooth roads and the weather is usually pretty stinking good except for on race day. Yeah. I wanna [00:04:43] Craig: step back and talk about that a little bit later. But before we get get into the race itself, why don't we just learn a little bit about yourself? How did you find your way into that region? How'd you find your way to gravel cycling? . [00:04:55] Ben: Yeah, I've been in the valley here for I guess about 22 years. The Rogue Valley that is, so I'm, I'm north of where the race is by about a 45 minute drive. You know, like most people work brought us here. And then I got immersed in, in work for several years and, and finally when that led up a little bit, Picked up my bike about, you know, from, from a young age I was riding bikes, but, but not racing bikes. And about 12 years ago I started racing and then slowly found my way into gravel and then yeah, eventually promotion. It's crazy. So, [00:05:34] Craig: so to set the context for our listeners, I've been up to Shasta, I've been north of Shasta. On my way to Bend, I think is what normally I go by Shasta and, and, and continue up that road. It's a pretty rural part of Northern California. So can you des just sort of describe the area and maybe paint a picture for, you know, what brings people there? What's the sort of the economic engine of the region, et cetera. [00:05:59] Ben: Yeah, I would say timber is what developed this area. And, and so, so that's the main thing. We've seen less and less timber. I. In this area, you know, the mills have kind of dwindled down to where there's, you know, one big one or something. And, and so I would say now this particular area is recreation is a big, a big thing. And then secondary would be tourism yeah, tourism. And, and I just slipped me, what was the, the other one I was gonna say. But but yeah, it's a beautiful area and it's a great place to visit. . Yeah, [00:06:33] Craig: certainly Mount Shasta. I guess I first became aware of it because of the mountain at Mount Shasta and the desire to climb it and go up. It, it's just sort of, it's an attainable, quote unquote mountaineering experience for a lot of people. And I know they've got, you know, a great outfitter right there in, in, in downtown Mount Shasta to help you get up the mountain. And that's where I first got exposed to it and mm-hmm. , it was clear. Obviously there's a lot of wilderness around that area. I stopped there once on my mountain bike on the way home from Ben to explore a little bit, but just kind of got the, the tip of the iceberg for what the terrain is around there. When you think about like where you live now and around Shasta itself, how would you describe the, the, the gravel biking terrain that. [00:07:18] Ben: Yeah. Oh man. We have so many gravel roads. So, you know, I live just over the border in Oregon in the rogue Valley. And our gravel roads are for the most part, very pristine, like very well developed gravel roads. The problem we have around here is they almost all go up the side of a mountain. And so, , they're great roads to ride in the summer, but in the wintertime, you're gonna, you're gonna bump into, into snow pretty early on and get turned around a lot of the time. And so that's what led me to, to going down into the Shasta area because I, I can ride these awesome gravel roads the strata Bianchi roads and, and, and stay below, let's say 3000 feet most of the time. And that way I, I can, I can stay outta the. Interesting. [00:08:06] Craig: Yeah, that it, it didn't dawn on me that actually Shasta would have better weather than where you are. [00:08:13] Ben: Yeah, it's, I would say it has a few more sunny days in this area. I mean, I could, I could have drizzle here, go up over the Siskiyou, pass in, into Siskiyou County and, and voila, it's a sunny day. It's, yeah, it's quite a bit about the weather in the wintertime, especially. . [00:08:30] Craig: Interesting. So you mentioned you sort of rediscovered the bicycle about a dozen years ago, and eventually during that path you started riding off road. Was that by virtue of the fact that there's just so many dirt roads around where you [00:08:42] Ben: were? Yeah, well, I, I would say that I found gravel and dirt roads from a good friend Tom Neland, who started putting on the honey badge Arise, which are, are are pretty fun event around here. A free event. And he's the one that introduced me to the gravel roads in the Mount Shasta area. So I had, I had an old Hardtail mountain bike that I used for commuting, and they had some, I don't know, two inch slicks on it or something like that. 26 er. And, and I went to one of his honey Badger rides, which they kind of focus. unique courses and, and gravel. And and that's how I found the gravel bike. And from there it was just riding cross bikes. And I actually been, I, geez, I guess three or four years that I've been racing gravel pretty seriously. I mean, as. as a primary source for, for my events that I attend. And, but I got my first gravel bike this last year. It's right here behind me. But most of the roads around here are so nice that a cross bike is absolutely fine. I mean, if you don't need to go beyond 30 fives [00:09:48] Craig: usually. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a, a quite a big leap between finding a love of riding gravel bikes and riding on dirt roads to creating an event. , what made you decide to take that leap? And remind me when the first Shaster gravel hugger event was? [00:10:06] Ben: The first event was in 2000, March of 2000. So, it's four years. This next year will be our fourth year of putting, no, [00:10:14] Craig: 2020, sorry. Yeah, 2020 was the first [00:10:16] Ben: one. Yeah. Yeah. 2020. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. And it's grown steadily ever since. [00:10:21] Craig: and was the first one. Did you just sort of put it out there, Hey, come one, come all, or did you put a little organization, a lot of organization behind it? [00:10:30] Ben: Yeah. You know, in 2020 there were some, some big rides, obviously some big races, and, and I was drawn to those events and so I'm like, well, geez, we have these beautiful roads here. You know, we need an. In this region, they're, of which they're, you'd have to go to Bend to get a gravel race or, or, or, or the Grasshopper series in Northern California, which are still several hours south of here. And so, so yeah, I just decided that these, these roads kind of reminded me of the strata Bianca Roads, these beautiful white crush granite roads. , wanted to mimic the, the Strata Bianchi and the Peru Bay. That was the original plan, but we had a couple promoters around here and they like to put on events and, and, and like small little local events, and I wanted to try to make this more of a regional national type of event. And so I figured. Someone that had the passion for, and the vision for this particular type of a race probably should be at the helm. And so I decided, you know, the whole, I guess I'll do it myself kind of a thing. And, and it, it must take off. So it's great. And did you, was it [00:11:40] Craig: always sitting in early March as the time it was held? [00:11:44] Ben: Yeah. I originally had plans to, to call it strata something, you know, mimicking the strata Bianchi roads. But eventually I just didn't want the conflict with that particular race. And it's on the same exact day as strata Bianchi. And so we kind of, I wanted to put it early in the year because as we all know, as the summer goes on, the race counter gets more and more competi. This particular week is one week ahead of Midsouth. I did not want to try to go up against the Midsouth. If I'm trying to be a a national type race, then, then, then you wouldn't automatically go up against Midsouth. Yeah. And so I kind of placed it on the calendar right here for those two reasons originally. And, and then the third thing is when, when I was training riding turbos in, in the, in the winter. , I wanted to get out and do an early event. You know, like even if you're just, you know, doing some base work or something like that, you still kind of want to go out and test yourself and, and, and this is perfect. It, it, it fit into how it, it fit in exactly to a spot that I would want a race personally. Yeah. So, yeah. That's kind of, that [00:12:51] Craig: makes a lot of sense how either there, yeah. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Like I know any Wouldbe race organizer at this point, there's gravel events throughout the. And to your point, like if you want to create an event that can occupy a little bit more of a national profile and kind of be a destination, that early season spot is one that's open and granted, not everybody's gonna have the wherewithal to go to Mid-South, but it certainly has the name and. The recognition and sponsors that is gonna draw a lot of athletes and not head going head-to-head with it, but also similarly for recreational athletes. Providing that early season goal and opportunity I think makes a ton of sense with that March date. As I've seen pictures over the years. , you have experienced some dramatic weather. Can you kind of describe kind of the, you know, just the many different personalities the course can have based on the weather conditions? [00:13:49] Ben: Yeah. Like I've said, this area has fantastic weather in the wintertime, but we have been, I don't blessed cursed. I don't know what, but we. all three years that we've had the race so far, we've had snow on course at some point, you know, and so year number one was probably the worst year if you ask me. It was cold, it was raining at the start, and then by the time we got to the highest point of the race, there was snow on the ground. So you dig back in the photos of, of that first race and, and it, and it was pretty sloppy and, and and. The next year we had snow overnight, but it was a beautiful sunny day and it just created these just in incredible pitchers. The course was good except for, you know, the infamous Jeep Trail, which which was just saturated actually, and so it, it, it didn't have a chance to dry out, but But these roads, for the most part, with the exception of this Jeep Road, east Louis Jeep Road, that seems to be pretty famous in this race. The roads hold up to all kinds of weather, so well the majority of 'em are gonna be just if you get some rain in the week ahead. They are faster than most pavement roads. So they're big, wide open county maintained gravel roads that are really smooth. Most of the. [00:15:07] Craig: Yeah, I was, when I was on the Shasta Gravel hugger website, I was looking at the tire recommendations as I often do for, for travel events. And you made mention like totally capable in a, in a dry ish road, gravel day 30 twos to 37. You're, you're, you're all good. Mm-hmm. . But if it's actually wet on the course, all of a sudden it's a different. [00:15:29] Ben: Yeah. We have, we've had road bikes do well, so Luke lamp party came up here and raced on a road bike with, he could stuff some 30 millimeters in there. And it was one of the years it was super wet. Could he have been higher than third place with, with a proper gravel bike? Possibly that particular year, but like last year, I would say that. He, he might have been able to win it on a, on a road bike. And that's the fun thing about this particular race, like we call it gravel and it, it, it attracts a lot of people, but it is almost half pavement. So. It is a real, I try to do the build up the sectors. And the reason we have sectors is because there's gravel sections. And then of course we have, you know, maybe, I think our longest one's like a 12 mile section of pavement. And, and so yeah, picking the right tires is, is huge. And, and if you can get away with running some 32 millimeter slicks, like I write it a lot. my cross bike with, with kind of a road ish wheel on 'em, and, and it does fine. So yeah, let's dig [00:16:34] Craig: into the courses that are available to riders now for the 2023 edition. What, what course options do you have? [00:16:41] Ben: Yeah, our big one is called the Full Hug and it's a hundred miles and it has about 4,500 feet of climbing in it. I wanna. And then we have the half hug. I kind of like the bro hug. It's like it's half, half that. It's, it's a hundred kilometers. It is just a, just I think 65 miles with about 4,000 feet of climbing. So it's, it's close. Most of the climbing's in the second half of the, of the race. And then brand new this year, we are adding a more social. Loop, which is gonna be 35 miles. And, and we have also added an e-bike, which is something that's brand new for me to include an e-bike option in, in, in the [00:17:21] Craig: race. So, interesting. And it sounds like, from what you were saying before in our tire discussion, from a technical perspective, no one should be too nervous about what they're gonna get into up there. [00:17:32] Ben: Yeah. I mean, we have one high speed descent. Might, would definitely make you wish you had some different tires on if you're, if you went small. But all aid, all ages, all levels. We'd be fine. Just, you know, you gotta be careful. People can recognize when, when it's getting dangerous and slow down, so, yeah. Yeah, for the most part, roads are [00:17:51] Craig: fantastic. And then are you providing aid stations out there on the course for the riders? [00:17:56] Ben: Yeah, so we have, last year we had two main aid stations and then a third. Third was just in an emergency aid station that wasn't quite stocked as much close to the end in case someone was crashing and boning or something like that. Most people didn't stop at that one, but yeah, fully supported. We encourage everyone to use our aid stations as opposed to try to seek outside help along along the way. You know, we try to discourage and make it fair enough for everybody if they don't have a, a dad to hand water bottles up in random spots. So we encourage everyone to, if they do want something special from, from a teammate or a family member, then do it in our, in our speed zones. [00:18:35] Craig: Yeah. When you think about how you're promoting the event and the types of athletes that you're trying to attract, Are you categorizing this as a full throttle race? You know, if there's a spectrum between like hardcore race and gravel ride, where are you trying to sit? And I realize that you could answer that differently for the 10% at the front of the race versus the rest of us. But I'd just be interested to kind of get your thought process on how you're, you're categorizing it. [00:19:01] Ben: Yeah, I mean, I would, I, I'd categorize it as a race, like, yeah, we're chip timed, we are keeping track of different age groups, so yeah, full on race. But it, it falls into the, the gravel theme of you know, the molet, you know, we have let the racers race and then if anyone wants to, you know, just go out there and knock off a, a big, long day, then. We'd love to have them too, so, so yeah. It's, yeah, it's, it's definitely a, a party for some and, and, But we always try to maintain that there's a race going on and we try to promote the race piece of it too. Because, you know, we're trying to attract these big professional racers to come, which will, you know, create excitement for the everyday person to come and see how they stack up against people. So it's been fun. [00:19:52] Craig: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if I look back over the last few years, for whatever reason, whatever you've done, the timing, the location, the ethos you have managed to attract, Several or dozens of elite riders to come and chest their metal there in March. [00:20:08] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Originally, you know, it's an interesting story. So you're number two. So you're number one is, was the start of covid. So we're in March of 2000 2020, excuse me. And. And there's some grumbling about Covid of course. And then we pretty much shut down, right? And then there was hardly any races that year. And then the next year is like in the early spring it felt like, okay, things are starting to, to open up and, and a county like Siski I don't know. They, they would kind of, I just think they kind of poo-pooed the, the co covid thing in that area, the maj majority of people. And, and so they were welcoming of us trying to do something that year. And so year number two, we really quickly threw it together and And the funny story is that I noticed that Pete Stetner was, was liking some of my Instagram posts. And so I'm like, huh. So we shot Pete a quick message and he's like, yeah, I'm, I'm open that week and I'd love, love to come, kind of a thing. And, and . And so I would say he was the start of the, the professionals showing up to the race. And then we were able to leverage that Pete, you know, hey, Pete's coming and you know, we got Jacob Rath Raey come down from, from the Portland area. So we had a couple of pros in year number two. And then in year number two, the women's field was, was even probably more stacked top to bottom. There was, I think only 13 of the, the women's pros, but we had Clara Hansinger, we had Maude Farrell, and then of course Moe Wilson. That was, that was our, our, our, our podium with ma taking the wind. Mo second and Clara Haunting are third. So, so yeah, it, it's definitely. The interest of the, the regional pros. And then last year Adam, Rob, you know, he's coming all the way over from Quebec, but he just wanted one, an event and one that wasn't in, in snow and winter. And so he came out here and, and yeah, we got Brennan words coming up from, from the Marin County and, and, and had a great showdown last year with some really strong writers. Yeah. [00:22:13] Craig: Yeah. It's, it's been, it's been fun to watch the kind of growth, and I, I think you'll continue to see people get attracted to it. Again, it's just good part of the calendar. Mm-hmm. , clearly it's got enough ca like enough quality terrain and racers up there to make it a, a worthwhile early season test of your fitness. [00:22:32] Ben: Yeah, exactly. This next year though, the calendar has become quite a bit more competitive on my, my day because Belgian Waffle Wright has. That they are gonna be holding a, an event in Arizona on the same weekend. So the, so now the work is for me to try to, you know, attract these, these pros to come to my event over, over heading to Arizona, which, I mean, March in Arizona sounds pretty good to me but but yeah, [00:23:00] Craig: yeah, yeah. I think there's room for, you know, if you put on great events, , there's room for multiple events on the same day at the end of the day. Mm-hmm. , there's people looking for different things. I think you also mentioned over email some, some initiatives that you've put forth and maybe some changes in how you're kind of rolling people out during the day. Do you wanna talk about some of those 20, 23 initiatives? [00:23:21] Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, there's. There's been some chatter amongst the, the female racers. Now a lot of them like to see how they stack up, up, up against the men, but there's also been a decent amount of chatter about how unsafe it is for them to try to be going out there and competing in these, these massive, this mass participation events that that have a ton of guys that they're trying to jockey with. And so this next year if as long as we get enough in the field to make it worthwhile, we are going to ship the women off 15, 15 minutes ahead of the men's race so that they don't have to go deal with that first sector and the chaos associated with that. They will, we'll also be able to give them a chance to, to kind of highlight the women and, and announce who's here and who's competing and, and, and give their sponsors a sh a shout out and. and then, then we send them off and then we can go about bringing the guys up 15 minutes later. And then, you know, I just ahead [00:24:21] Craig: a follow up question on that, Ben, when you, when you think about that first sector, is there elevation, is there technicality? What do you imagine happening during those first 15 minutes that allow the women to sort of have a sense of more autonomous racing for that portion? [00:24:37] Ben: Yeah, so the first sector is, is I, I wanna say it's about six miles. It's relatively flat. The first, the first quarter of a mile last year was in relatively loose gravel, and then it got pretty nice and smooth after that. So, so the first quarter of a mile it was, it was pretty chaotic. It was pretty dusty, and, and it was definitely, If you weren't in the preferred two lines, you know, you are out in some, some loose gravel and so, so yeah, I, it made for a hairy first couple of minutes of the race and, and the race ha at that point was already on. I, I think the original attack with with Adam and Br Brennan was right before they went onto that sector, so it was already full race mode. So yeah, it was extremely hectic. [00:25:26] Craig: Yeah, it's interesting. And before I ask this next question, I wanna state, I don't know the right answer to this mm-hmm. and I think. Over time, it's gonna evolve, and it may even be on an event by event basis, but as the women are, are set out 15 minutes ahead and granted it will give them a clean look at that first sector and the ability for some women to attack one another and perhaps to kind of stretch out the field. At some point the front end of the men's race is going to start interacting with those female athletes out front. And I don't know if you've gotten this feedback from the women. As the, as the elite men start to come through, obviously there's gonna be women who have fitness who attempt to glom onto some wheels and, and kind of get caught up in the momentum of the men's peloton. How do you kind of imagine that playing out? [00:26:16] Ben: That's a great question. And I think, I think it's one that I'm gonna look, I'm gonna probably look to a few of our, our professional ladies that are coming in to help guide me on that. So, so the big question is like, do we do. tell them like, Hey, don't jump on wheels. This you're in your own little race. Or, or like year number two, when we had wave starts they just were able to jump on whatever they wanted to. And, and so I, I don't know the answer to that question, but we as. By the time we roll off on race day, I hope to have a, a very clear explanation to all the racers about what we're, what we hope to see out there. [00:26:58] Craig: Yeah, I think that's a good, that's a good approach. I mean, obviously like the women should be leading this conversation about what makes sense, I suspect, but don't know that, you know, they will think it's fair game to grab wheels. Like it's, it's implausible that over a hundred mile day mm-hmm. . Racers are gonna work with racers. That's just sort of the nature of bike racing, right? So it's hard to imagine everybody's saying like, okay, we all agree cause it's just gonna be super hard to police. But I just think it's interesting and I, again, like I've, I've seen a number of races attempt this approach where they're giving a 15 minute head start. We've obviously seen the co-mingled starts. We've seen lots of different derivatives of this, and I do think that as a community, as we put these offers out there, it's just important to be open and say like, Hey, we don't know what the right solution is. But potentially after the year of 2023, at a bunch of these tests, if you will, going out and getting feedback from women, we'll arrive at something that makes sense, that still has that community feel, but elevates the safety, elevates the ability for the sport to high. Female athletes as much as oftentimes the ma male athletes get [00:28:15] Ben: highlighted. Exactly. That's been, that's definitely been my initiative for the, for the last several years is, is to try to, to, to give these ladies a, a chance, I mean, . We originally had ideas of doing a, a reverse discrimination prize purse because, you know, women's cycling has been so underfunded or, you know, the rewards or or prize money was, was so minuscule compared to, to the men's races that, that that we wanted to like highlight that as, as one of the things, we have a prize purse for the women only. but with permitting in California, that's not allowed. , you can't have discriminatory prize purses anymore, which is great for, for women across all the different events. But but yeah, we're trying to highlight these ladies and, and probably some of 'em have a harder time, you know, making the same kind of sponsorship money as, as a, a guy of similar skills. So, [00:29:07] Craig: yeah. Yeah, it's certainly an interesting problem and I think the important thing is, people are talking about it. And again, that the, the women who are involved are having the lion share of opinion and we can just use their opinions as guidance as it relates to the race in its entirety. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. And so, how large of a field do you typically see at the Shasta Gravel hogger hugger? [00:29:30] Ben: Yeah, so last year we had 400 people take the sign up for the race, and then we had about 335, I wanna say that actually went across our start line. So yeah, I mean that's kind of, that's kind of where we were last year. We, we have grown every single year that we've been in existence, so hopefully, you know, we can see something north of 500 this year. [00:29:52] Craig: And great. When, when we, I mean we've talked through what to exper, what to expect in terms of the course terrain and what type of equipment you'd like to see people ride at the end of the event. What does that experience look like if someone's making time to spend their weekend up with you at, in Shasta, what, what expectations should they have after the race? [00:30:12] Ben: Yeah, we definitely wanna try to bring the party to the after. After the race. So yeah, we have a burrito truck last year and most likely they'll be back again this year. So nice big burrito to finish off the day. Beer and and then of course, everyone telling their war stories, so. people hung, hung around until dark last year. And so yeah, there's a, there's a nice little after party. Last year we had a band the brothers Reid, and they absolutely killed it. But I found like most people weren't paying attention to the band. They were. Telling their war stories. And so probably not gonna bring a band back. We'll just be playing, you know, some good music in the background and, and let the racers chat about what they, what happened out there, . Nice. [00:30:56] Craig: And so give the listener a few benchmarks. So if you were coming from San Francisco, for example, how, how long does it take to get up to Shasta or if you're coming from somewhere in Oregon? [00:31:05] Ben: Yeah, I, I mean, you can get, I think it's about four hours from Portland down. And then similar from, from the Bay Area maybe a little bit less because there's 45 minutes, I guess to here. But so yeah, it's, it's, it's a pretty easy drive. I wouldn't suggest doing it before a 9:00 AM start, but you probably could from the Bay Area if you were got up nice and early. [00:31:28] Craig: Yeah, I was gonna ask that. Are people typically staying overnight in Shasta, the nights before? [00:31:32] Ben: Yeah. The, there's Yreka is the closest town with hotels. That's only about a 10 minute drive or probably even less than that. And there's plenty of hotel rooms there. A lot of people stay in weed and Mount Shasta, which Are also great places, but I wanna say 25 to 40 miles away. Okay. 25 to weed. So, so yeah, there's more like rental properties. If you're like doing a VRBO or Airbnb or something like that, there's more in the Mount Shasta area. That tends to be a little more of a, of a recreation type town. So, so there's, yeah, there's plenty of options. But the thing, one of the things that we've. Every year so far is in the parking lot. Next to the, the start finish line is, is plenty of room and we've allowed camping on site. So if you van camping, RV camping, if you can get your, if you can get your rig in there and, and not get stuck, then, then and then yeah, it's have at it free. Yeah. [00:32:29] Craig: For a hot second there. I just had in my mind, oh, it's in Mount Shas. The mountain of Shasta is obviously covers a vast area, and certainly, yeah, again, remembering my, my, my trips up to Oregon. Once you get past Shasta and Shasta, the town, and on the other side of the mountain, amazing, spectacular views of Mount Shasta through that valley. [00:32:51] Ben: Yeah, we we're kind of, we're, we're almost all north of Mount Shasta, so I mean, we, we go down and we touch weed, which would, I would kind of say is like the southern part of the Shasta Valley. And then Mount Shasta would be further south and more like on the side of the mountain. And so if you want the great views of the mountain, then the North, north Valley is where you want to be. And we. . Oh, just so many. Incredible. If the, if the mountain is out as they like to say, it's, it's absolutely stunning from many, many different spots on on the course. Some, some have even said it's distracting. It's, it's so, It's so beautiful. [00:33:32] Craig: So yeah. Yeah, I would agree. It's one of the like the beautiful things about driving through that valley, which often seems like a, it takes forever, but the nice thing is you've got that amazing mountain view the entire time. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, I'm super glad to finally get you on the show, Ben, to talk about this event. I love the sounds of it. I love that area. Like I totally recommend it from a, a visual perspective and everything you've talked about, the writing makes me believe that it is a great early season event. [00:33:59] Ben: Yeah, I sure hope so. And, and hope to see this thing continue to grow through, through the next couple of years. So hope to make some nice announcements here soon about cool people that are attending. So people are starting to finalize their. Schedules for this next year and, and yeah, hope to make some announcements. Right [00:34:17] Craig: on. And I'll throw the gravel hugger.com link in the show notes so people know how to find you. But they can also just search Shasta gravel hugger and they'll get to the right location. [00:34:27] Ben: Absolutely. Super easy. Yep. And if you wanna find out a little bit about what the race is We have a race recap on YouTube. You can also just google Shasta gravel hugger on YouTube and, and there's a 20 minute recap of what happened last year and we hope to do something similar this next, next year to, to kind of give everyone a feel of what, how the race goes. So, [00:34:49] Craig: awesome. Thanks, man. [00:34:51] Craig Dalton: That's going to do it for this week's edition of the gravel rod podcast. Big thanks to our sponsor hammerhead and the hammerhead kuru. To computer. And huge thanks to ben for coming on i've been curious about the shasta gravel hugger for awhile and was happy to learn more about At The event. I'll put all the appropriate links in the show notes. So you can go find and check out that video on YouTube that Ben was mentioning. If you're interested in connecting with me or other riders in the area, please join the ridership. That's www.theridership.com. It's a free online cycling community, open to anybody and filled with gravel cyclists from around the world. If you're interested in able to support the podcast. You can visit, buy me a coffee.com/the gravel ride. Any contribution or support is greatly appreciated. Or if you have a moment, ratings and reviews are hugely appreciated. And really help with our discoverability. Until next time. Here's to finding some dirt under your wheels  

Leasing is one of the hardest aspects of property management. What if you had a way to offload some or all of your tasks related to leasing? Today, property management growth expert Jason Hull chats with Ben from Sunroom. This service allows property managers to offload leasing to leasing professionals who care about property managers, owners, and tenants. You'll Learn… [01:26] Offloading Leasing: What is Sunroom? [09:01] ShowMojo, Tenant Turner, vs. Sunroom, oh my! [016:35] Better ways to do Property Showings [020:23] How Sunroom Vets Tenants Better [24:21] Integrating with Other PM Software  [31:30] Net Promoter Scores for Property Management and Leasing [37:12] Learning to LET GO as a PM Entrepreneur Tweetables “Some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real, and you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better.” “We have a lot of egos as entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time, and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this better.” “Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money.” “One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Ben: So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that.   [00:00:22] Jason Hull: Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the # DoorGrowShow. So if you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you're crazy for doing it. You think they're crazy for not bebecause you realize that property management is the ultimate, high trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the bs, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I'm your host property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.    [00:01:19] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, welcome to the #DoorGrowShow.    [00:01:24] Ben: Thanks for having me, Jason.    [00:01:26] Jason Hull: Good to have you. So Ben, why don't we start by you giving us a little bit of your background, qualify yourself. You've done some cool stuff and I'm in the market where you did some of this cool stuff. We just realized in the green room that we're practically neighbors in Austin, market downtown, and I'm up in Round Rock. Ben, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got into the, I guess technology space.   [00:01:49] Ben: Yeah, sure. Yeah, definitely. First of all, I mean we-- me and my co-founder Zach, we started working on Sunroom in right around 2017. And, the way that we had originally had the idea was, just being a renter for a decade and having a lot of interesting experiences trying to look for a place to lease. But prior to starting Sunroom, Zach and I had started a company called Favor Delivery, which is a small little delivery company here in Texas that grew to become the market leader in delivery. And we sold to H-E-B in early 2018.    [00:02:27] Jason Hull: And for people that aren't familiar with H-E-B, because I moved from California just before the pandemic because I wanted to get away from California and the taxes and it's poor political culture. But anyway, so I moved here, Austin and H-E-B was all over the place. I'm like, what a weird name. What is this place? But it's one of the, like America's top grocery chains. It's consistently rated as like one of the biggest and the best. So for those that are not in Texas, they are probably not familiar with H-E-B, but H-E-B is the, like one of the leading grocery stores, and it dominates everything.    [00:03:05] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:03:06] Jason Hull: I'm sure in grocery sales, it beats out Walmart, like it beats out any of the stuff that I'd heard about before and I'd never heard of H-E-B. And they offer delivery service.    [00:03:15] Ben: Yeah. H-E-B is an impressive company. And the crazy thing is they've been around for 115 years.   [00:03:21] Ben: Wow.    [00:03:21] Ben: They are the top employer in Texas. And when they acquired us, it was the only acquisition they've ever had in their history as a company. And even crazier than that, when we combined workforces at the time, we had the largest workforce of independent contractors. We grew to, now they're at a hundred thousand delivery drivers in Texas.    [00:03:44] Ben: Oh, wow.    [00:03:44] Ben: And H-E-B had a similar amount of employees. So when we combined workforces, it just became this really massive workforce supporting grocery and delivery of all foods. So yeah, it was a cool marriage that we had there.   [00:04:00] Jason Hull: Very cool. Yeah. Very cool. That's interesting history. So I've seen the Favor name when I'm doing delivery from H-E-B, so I was like what's this relationship?    [00:04:11] Ben: Yeah. So I can elaborate a little bit more too about, how we picked Sunroom. We had, like I said, I mean my co-founder Zach and I, we're actually best friends from high school and so we go way back. I think what you were saying about you wanting to support property manager entrepreneurs, I think that's a good mission because I just tip my hat off to any entrepreneurs who get any businesses working because we definitely know how hard that is. But anyways, our journey towards Sunroom was just having a lot of, I would call interesting experiences as a renter. And then we started calling-- once we were interested in the rental space-- we started making a lot of phone calls to, different rental listings. And we started asking the agents and property managers, "Hey, why are you doing this?" "why are you doing these leases?" And, we kept hearing the same thing, which was like, "oh, we don't-- I don't really want to be doing this lease. I'm just doing this lease. I'm helping this investor client buy more homes and so now I'm looped into to renting this place." And every once in a while you'd come across a property manager who really loved leasing, but a lot of the property managers we talked to too would be like, "yeah, I'm really focused on growing my door count. And these things are just something we have to do to get more properties in the door." And Zach and I saw that as an opportunity of: wow. No wonder why the experience is not that great for renters. A lot of the folks who are doing these leasing are not that excited about doing it. And so then that's how we started working on Sunroom.    [00:05:29] Jason Hull: Cool. So let's talk about then what-- you talked about the problem that you saw in the marketplace and experience wasn't super good, but a lot of owners and maybe even property managers aren't even super excited about taking care of the tenant experience. So it's not like their highest priority. Like, "I want to get more doors, I want to have more properties managed," so they're like, "what's my competitive advantage?" So when they're picking tools and software, they're usually-- they're trying to figure out: "how do I get some sort of leg up on the competition," so to speak, or "how can this lower my operational cost?" and these kind of things. One of the biggest time sucks for a property management company is dealing with prospective tenants.    [00:06:13] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:14] Jason Hull: These are not people that are paying them and they call them the most, and--   [00:06:17] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:06:18] Jason Hull: --This is like the "garbage of phone calls," I've heard one of my guests call it.   [00:06:21] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:06:22] Jason Hull: So tell me about what does Sunroom do and how does it do it, and what's the benefit.    [00:06:27] Ben: Yeah, sure. So what we do is we partner with property management companies and become their leasing arm. So if you're a newer property management company, you're focused on growing doors and you just mainly want to focus on that, right? One of the most important things is you got to get leasing. If you don't get leasing, you're not going to lease the doors quickly, which then your owner investors are not going to be happy about that. And also I would argue equally as important is that renter does have a great experience because, that is really the beginning of your relationship with them, and what we've noticed of working with a lot of different property managers is that, when the renter goes into the home and they're really happy with their experience that led up to that point, they're a lot more-- how do I put this? They're a lot more quiet when they get into the home, right? They're just happy overall, which is going to reduce your maintenance requests and honestly going to make it more likely that they renew the next year, right? because that is just really first, and I would just say first impressions are, everything in life a lot of times.    [00:07:27] Ben: And so I think, leasing really is that first impression for that property manager. To come back around to what we do, yeah, we partner with the property management companies and make it so that they don't even need to have any leasing agents on staff. And we can really do the entire process of getting the home leased. But at the same time, we give the property manager the power over key decisions, right? Things like actually approving the applications, that's still going to be up to the property manager to make sure they choose the right applicant. And obviously if they want to use their lease that they prefer, there's all different ways that we allow them to customize what they want their leasing experience to be like. But at the end of the day, we're really doing the legwork for them and we have a combination of people and tech to do that.    [00:08:12] Ben: Got it. So    [00:08:14] Jason Hull: this combination of people and tech... are you able to do this in every market or is this like a local thing that needs to be done    [00:08:21] Ben: locally?    [00:08:23] Ben: Yeah, great question.   [00:08:24] Ben: So we started out just doing this in Austin and have partnered with several different property managers here. In town. But now we're expanding across the us. And I believe we're up to seven different markets at the moment. But pretty rapidly expanding to cover more markets.   [00:08:41] Ben: Got it. What's    [00:08:42] Jason Hull: the biggest limitation in expansion for those that you don't cover yet?    [00:08:46] Ben: We call ourselves a leasing only brokerage, so we're actually-- we're a real estate brokerage in each of these states. And so that's a blocker to getting set up in a lot of these places is actually establishing our brokerage in each one of these states.   [00:08:59] Ben: Got it.    [00:09:00] Jason Hull: Okay. Cool. I think a lot of property managers, they're aware of certain pools like ShowMojo and Tenant Turner and Rently and Knock Rentals and Turbo Tenant, so how does Sunroom differentiate from all these tools and these systems are already out there?   [00:09:20] Ben: Yeah, so some of those systems and tools you mentioned, I do think those-- they do improve the renter experience and at the same time. They do make it so that it's a little less work for the property manager to lease those properties. But at the end of the day, if you're a property management owner you're still going to need a leasing agent on your team. Or you're going to have to overextend the property manager that you have in order to use those, utilize those tools. Sunroom just takes it the next step where we have similar tools and systems. Obviously I'm biased, but I would argue they're better than those, but--   [00:09:55] Ben: You should argue that.    [00:09:57] Ben: We take it a step further. You don't even really need to have a leasing agent on staff in order to really execute everything you need to do for leasing. Whereas all these other tools or systems they're definitely completely reliant on still having somebody there behind the scenes catching the errors or all all the holes in those systems. And, if anybody has tried to. Integrate those different systems and tools, what they'll find is that they were built in a way that they had a focused goal. And there's a lot of different holes in that system. And I'm sure as operators see that, I think that's a big difference with what we're building, is that what we build, we actually use to operate. And so we're able to see all the different gaps and holes that those systems leave. And really between our systems and our team, we're able to fill in the gaps that those systems leave out.   [00:10:46] Jason Hull: All right. So I think people listening by now are like, "the wheels are turning a little bit," and they're like, "okay, how's this actually play out?" So could you walk us through step by step what-- how this process works with the property manager and the tenant from beginning to    [00:11:01] Ben: finish? Yeah, sure. So it usually starts within one of the property managers, property management softwares, right?   [00:11:09] Ben: We see commonly property managers are using App Folio or Buildium, so let's use App Folio for example. You have a property manager on your team that you have a home where the renter didn't renew. And it's a property that you're going to need to get leased. At that moment, if you were partnered with us, you would open up the Sunroom portal. We would already essentially have that home synced within our system. Because we're able to really pull data from App Folio and the Buildiums of the world. From there, they just really submit the property to us and say, "Hey, this home's coming up for lease." we would normally already have all of their settings. As a part of our onboarding, we're going to get them all set up in our system. So things like knowing what their tenant criteria is. Things like knowing when is this home actually available? When would you like us to touch the property? And then as soon as they submit the property to us, we actually will go out and touch the property. So we have boots on the ground. Those boots on the ground are going to get professional photography. They're going to set up a self showing lock system if that's what the property manager would like to. And then we're going to actually install a yard sign as well. And, we take pictures to really document everything that we do there. And then, we'll take it a step further, we'll get the marketing description written and then we'll get it listed online, and we do that entire process in an average about 48 hours.    [00:12:28] Ben: Nice.    [00:12:29] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah, that's very cool. So you actually have people come out-- swarm of people, and they get all this stuff done, right? In the description, getting it listed, doing all this stuff. Okay.    [00:12:39] Jason Hull: Yeah,    [00:12:40] Ben: and that's where our background in Favor obviously comes into play is that, I think if you think about Favor, there's a great consumer experience where the customer can order food, but then there's all these boots on the ground that actually go get the food and make sure that all happens in a timely manner. Leasing is similar in the sense that you need to have a great consumer experience for the renter to be able to see what they're shopping for and do the things they they need to do to see if they want to, lease that property. But then you're going to need boots on the ground to actually, handle the listing side of things.   [00:13:09] Ben: Very cool.    [00:13:10] Jason Hull: So is this totally Uber-like in that you're just pulling anybody in, or I'm sure you have criteria for the photographers and for all these different people that you're bringing in to do these    [00:13:22] Ben: little pieces.    [00:13:23] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. We don't just hire any random person. I'd say it's definitely not Uber-like in that I think, we use-- it's technology enabled so that we can do those things quickly and can measure how fast we do them, right? I think just the fact that we know we get those properties set up in an average of 48 hours, I think is...    [00:13:42] Ben: Yeah.   [00:13:42] Ben: ...more than your average property manager would know, but we know that the tasks we're doing are tech enabled, but no we care a lot about those people that we choose and we try to find folks that have a lot of experience with real estate photography and then we teach them the other aspects of what we're trying to get done at that property.   [00:14:00] Jason Hull: Awesome. Yeah. Very cool. When a property is going to become vacant, are they able to leverage a system or does it have to be totally empty and rent ready and everything    [00:14:11] Ben: else?    [00:14:12] Ben: No. So yeah, no, they're able to use the system. It sounds like you're asking about pre-leasing.    [00:14:19] Ben: Yeah.   [00:14:20] Ben: Okay. Yes, pre-leasing can be really important I think in some markets. Yeah, that's definitely something we support. And let's say it's tenant occupied and we need to act and do an escorted showing, we have different agents on the ground that we partner with that are some of the most active in the area touring homes and renters. And so we'll tap into that network to do some.   [00:14:40] Jason Hull: Got it. Okay. Now what if they want get the property listed, they want to get photos, but there's a bunch of ugly furniture in there and ugly stuff. Do you guys let maybe-- BoxBrownie I've had on the show before-- digital editors and they're like, removing all this    [00:14:55] Ben: stuff?   [00:14:55] Ben: Yeah.    [00:14:56] Ben: Take the photos.   [00:14:56] Ben: Yeah, we do have digital editing in that regard, but depending on the degree of how much that home is messed up. That's also something that we do is that if we go out to a home and we think it's not show ready we'll document that and share it back with the property manager. And I think we've seen property managers really love that aspect of what we do because oftentimes they have a tough time holding the make ready folks accountable or let's say they're doing a renovation on the property. In particular, I can't tell you how many times that a property manager said, "Oh yeah, this was supposed to be done. And then when we went out there we were able to collect evidence that it wasn't right. That's also part of our system is that if the home is not actually ready to be marketed, and then, we're going to gather that information, share it back with the property manager, and then essentially remind them until that's resolved and as soon as it's resolved, then we can make the listing active. But it's a pretty valuable system and checks and balances that we have in place there.    [00:15:55] Jason Hull: Got it. So you'll communicate with them. Then the property manager can send out maintenance, get things taken care of, dealt with, and then report back to you and you're checking in with them, "Hey, is this ready yet? Is this ready yet?" And then they're like, "we got it ready." And then...    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: exactly.    [00:16:08] Jason Hull: Proceed.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: Exactly.    [00:16:10] Jason Hull: So you've sent up the people, you've got the photos, you got like maybe a lockbox on, you got the yard sign, you've got the description. It's posted online. It's probably pushed out to multiple channels.   [00:16:19] Jason Hull: That's right.    [00:16:20] Jason Hull: Then next come the showings, right? And scheduling and all this. So how does that work and are you doing one-off showings? Are you doing open house model? What would it be found to be the most efficient? What comes next?    [00:16:35] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So what we do is we usually set these properties up with a self showing system, and then renters are able to go tour the properties seven days a week from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and, we also have, a support team available those same hours, so 84 hours, we're ready to quickly text back any renters or answer any phone calls if, folks are having a tough time actually, accessing the home for any particular reason. Our system is really good. I'd say renters have a really good experience touring homes. Like any system, we're dealing with real world stuff. Sometimes maybe it could be a really humid day and maybe the maybe the door frame swells a bit or something, right? So maybe the door gets a little stuck. So the renter needs a little help to understand how to get in. Those are all things that I think us, having support team there available to talk to them and actually pick up the phone. I think is a really important thing. So that's just one of the many ways that we support tours. But I'd say one of the most important pieces of tours is actually collecting that tour feedback and sharing it with the owner after the fact. And so we have a really great system in place for that as well where a lot of renters will leave feedback just right within the place that they tour. And then we're actually able to take that feedback and then give it to display it on a webpage where then the property manager is able to share that webpage directly with their owner so they can actually watch the tours that are coming in and the tour feedback in real time. And we white label that for them. So you can imagine as a property manager, you just share this white label page with your logo and the owner's able to get a bird's eye view of how their home is performing on the market.    [00:18:21] Ben: Got it.    [00:18:22] Jason Hull: So could this be a scenario that the owner says, "I don't need to do this," and like the property manager says, "you need to do this. Like it'll get you more rent. People will have an issue with this place if you don't fix this or change this," and the owner's like, "no." And then they say, "look at the page, here's the white label page. It's got our brand, our logo, XYZ property management, and it says like, consistently feedback. Like the floor is too gross, or whatever."   [00:18:47] Ben: Yeah, "I would rent this home, but does it come with a fridge?" Just one way I've seen owners trying to cut some costs is like not putting refrigerators in the home. And then they see, three out of the five renters that tour the home mentioned "Hey, there's no fridge."    [00:19:00] Ben: "have to buy a fridge and I'll go somewhere else."   [00:19:03] Ben: Yeah, exactly. And that page really helps the property manager make their case to the owner and also show to them like, "Hey, we really are showing this property and this really is what the renters are saying.   [00:19:14] Ben: Cool.    [00:19:15] Jason Hull: Yeah, that's really cool. I like the feedback loops. So then, what's the next steps? You're doing showings, you're doing tours. Then I guess people are being pushed to apply when they're doing these tours by the system?    [00:19:27] Ben: Yeah, so we have a system, both to pre-qualify renters and to actually have them apply. As soon as they apply we're able to display those applications to the property manager. And we use the same page that we use to display tour feedback and also tracking the tours and the leads and everything. We use that same page then to actually show the applications to the property managers and to their owners. Because I know every property manager seems to have a different deal with each owner, right? Some of 'em, they want to run the application past their owner beforehand, or sometimes they're just the ones reviewing it. But either way, we display that information there so that both the property manager and the owner, are able to review the application before they decide to approve or not.   [00:20:14] Ben: Got it. So    [00:20:14] Jason Hull: they can either show this white label page that has the list of all the applicants or could they just say, "here's the one we recommend," and show that person's information?   [00:20:22] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:20:23] Ben: Yeah. It's usually the latter. Because it's trying to make it simpler. Yeah. It's usually just showing the one that they recommend. And at that point, we would've already done all of the vetting for that application. Even the manual steps of doing a verification of rental history, for example or a verification of employment. And we've actually seen just our application processing service. We've seen that to be so popular that we actually broke that out as something that a property manager could partner with us just on application processing, and that's also cool because we have a lot of tech to catch fraudulent renters. I'm sure you've probably heard about how fraud is on the rise especially with us entering recession. And I think it's just more likely that renters are going to try to fake pay stubs. Even some go as far as trying to fake their identity in different ways to try to get approved for a home that really are beyond their means. And so we've really, we've invested a lot into our application processing system. Doing things like being able to get their pay stubs directly from their payroll provider instead of having a way for them to upload their pay stubs, which could be photoshopped or something like that.    [00:21:35] Ben: Yeah.    [00:21:35] Ben: And then let's say a renter doesn't even have a job, or let's say a renter's, a self-employed or something, we have a way of actually pulling bank statements directly from their bank, instead of just receiving those bank statements and getting it uploaded. All that tech helps to really reduce the amount of fraud. And as for property managers as well, it's less work to actually investigate all those documents.   [00:21:59] Jason Hull: That's just technology and stuff a property manager can't do directly. They don't have the ability to pull directly from the bank their pay stubs, and it's not going to say, "here, let me give you my login to my bank account," and to pull directly from the employer. They don't usually have that ability really effectively either. There needs to be technology involved.   [00:22:18] Ben: Yeah.    [00:22:19] Ben: So we--   [00:22:20] Ben: --so what    [00:22:20] Jason Hull: about--    [00:22:20] Ben: oh, go ahead.    [00:22:20] Ben: I was just going to say, yeah, we recognize that you know most of what we've been talking about here is called our full service leasing, right? Where we actually become the leasing arm. But let's say, you've got leasing agents on your team and you think they're rock stars. You're happy with what's going on with your leasing. We could plug in and just do the application processing. We call that service, we call that Sunscreen, is what we call it. The idea is the quirky tagline that I came up with is, "Don't get burned by bad renters."   [00:22:47] Jason Hull: I like it. Little bit of sunscreen.    [00:22:51] Ben: Yeah, exactly.   [00:22:52] Ben: Okay.    [00:22:53] Jason Hull: So one of the questions I think some people will be asking is, what about pets? It's like a whole nother beast. Outside, inside pets and running pets and having pets, all this kind of stuff. Property managers tend to do best if they just convince owners to do pets. You're going to get more tenants, you're going to get more money. How do you deal with the pet side of    [00:23:11] Ben: things?    [00:23:12] Ben: Yeah, so at this point I'm sure most property managers have heard of pet screening.com. I think they're a great company. And so we actually integrate their data into our system. So if you're already signed up for pet screening.com. You can provide the pet screening.com login, and then we're able to pull that information into the application packet. So it's something that the owner and the property manager can consider as a part of the overall application. And, obviously pet screening.com does a really good job verifying things like our emotional support animal documentation. Is that legit? There's fraud around ESA documents. And that's just one of the pieces that they do. But yeah, that's something that we recommend whenever anyone is accepting pets.   [00:23:57] Ben: Very    [00:23:58] Jason Hull: cool. I like pet screening.com that I've had them on the show. I had another company that may be interesting to integrate with too on the show called our pet policy.com and they take things a step further on the protection side of things after the screening. So they go step beyond. So that might be interesting for you to take a look at integrating with as well.    [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:24:20] Jason Hull: Ourpetpolicy.com, they seem like a good group of people over there as well. So real quick, going back, you had mentioned AppFolio, Buildium, do you integrate with Rent Manager? Do you integrate with I don't know, there's some other things and some of these tools    [00:24:35] that    [00:24:35] Ben: people are using?   [00:24:37] Ben: Yeah. Great question. So it's pretty easy for us to get key information plugged into these softwares. And the reason is when someone partners with us, if you think about it, we really need to touch that property management software right when the home is when the home's coming up for lease, right? It needs to be listed. And then once the home gets leased, that's when that information needs to get back in the property management software again. So usually the way that our structure is, it doesn't really matter too much, which property management software you're. The system would be the same, where you would essentially create a user for us.   [00:25:15] Ben: So then once the home is getting leased, we know who's signing the lease. We're going to get their information set up within whatever property management software you use and make sure that it's set up for ongoing rent payments and things like that. It essentially, if you're using a property management software, but then you're going to use someone for leasing. But then once the home gets leased, it's going to be as if you had leased it through those other systems. And it's seamless in that way.    [00:25:39] Ben: Yeah. Very cool. So    [00:25:40] Jason Hull: you're PM    [00:25:41] Ben: software agnostic.    [00:25:42] Ben: Exactly. Yes. That's a much more succinct way of saying it. Thanks.   [00:25:47] Jason Hull: So that just means I've been doing this probably a long time. All right. So you've, you mentioned your solution. You've got the sunscreen that can be, pulled out just separately or if they're using the full leasing service. You've done the pre-qualification, you've got the applicant they can send over the white label thing to the owner. If the owner's like, "I really need to see what info you got." And you've tested out their pay stubs and their bank--   [00:26:11] Jason Hull: right    [00:26:12] Jason Hull: --stuff, and you've maybe connected the pet screening.com. What happens next? You've got    [00:26:17] Ben: a good applic--    [00:26:18] Ben: Yes. Yeah, so the property manager, the owner accepts the application. And at that point, we're going to reach out to the renter, say, "congrats, you've been accepted. Please now pay the security deposit." And as soon as they pay security deposit, then the owner or the property manager is able to connect their bank account, and that money will just automatically get deposited in whatever account that you specify. And then from a lease perspective, from really from the beginning of the process, we would've asked that you provide the preferred lease that you would like for us to use. We're going to get that lease drafted up and we're going to send it over to both the renter and the property manager. For some property managers, they like to review one last time before it gets sent to the renter. So we can fulfill that ask. And then the lease is going to get signed. And as soon as the lease gets signed, we will then dispatch our people back out to the property, do one final walkthrough, and also remove our yard sign and remove any other things that we had, any lock boxes or things like that we got setup. But we do one thing where we will leave a combo lockbox out at the property so that we can facilitate the renter actually moving in. So that's really the final and last step for our system, is facilitating to the renter actually getting the keys so that they have a smooth move in. And then the last step after all of that is we're going to survey the renter and make sure they had a great experience through the whole the whole leasing process.   [00:27:51] Jason Hull: And what's-- before we move on, because I'm curious like what difference you're noticing with these surveys, but let's say they don't accept somebody. What's the process? What happens to the rejects, so to speak? The tenants that didn't pass because a lot of times they're following up and bugging the property manager, "Hey, did you accept me? What's going on?" This sort of thing. What do you do?    [00:28:11] Ben: Yeah. So first of all, we shield the property manager from having to deal with all of that stuff. And I think for the position we're in, I think the natural thing is I think we would do what any other good property manager would do. We'd see if there's any other listings within that property manager that the renter would qualify for. First and foremost, we're going to recommend that of " There are these other listings for the same property manager" or, " do you like that?" And if the renter is not interested in any of those homes, then I think we would look broader to other listings that that are amongst our partners and say, "Hey, renter, maybe it would be better if you lease this property."   [00:28:48] Jason Hull: Yeah. That helps get the other properties filled. That's great.    [00:28:53] Ben: Yeah.    [00:28:53] Ben: Okay.    [00:28:53] Ben: And the renter's really happy too, because they don't have to pay an application fee again, so they're able to reuse their application.    [00:29:00] Jason Hull: Nice. Now what if you have two property managers in the same market and you get an applicant for one, are they completely segregated from being able to apply it to the other, or if they're in the Sunroom system,    [00:29:13] Ben: they can...   [00:29:14] Ben: Great question. Yeah. So we don't want to restrict where renters can apply, right? because that just doesn't make sense. But we have come across the scenario, it's been rare where renters have applied to multiple properties. And so what's really cool about our system is that we have a little disclaimer for the property manager where they can see, "hey, this renter's actually applied for multiple properties," and that way it's clear to them of " Hey, look, this renter is serious about your property, they are, they're hedging their bets," which, that's a common scenario especially in a hot market is if property managers are collecting multiple applicants on a single property, you can bet that the renters-- they know that. And so they're also applying to multiple properties. So I think we do our best to try to mitigate those scenarios. And I think one of the best ways to mitigate those scenarios is really just processing applications quickly and then, and working to get the renter and answer quickly around if they're accepted or denied. And, in most cases, I think renters are willing to tell you which one's their first choice. And so if you're able to process the application really quickly and drive it to decision, it doesn't happen too often where the owner comes back and wants to accept the renter and they've already decided to go somewhere else. It does occasionally, we try to mitigate that.    [00:30:28] Ben: Got it.    [00:30:28] Jason Hull: Okay, cool. So going back to the other path, I'm actually drawing this all out. I've got like a flow    [00:30:34] Ben: chart going on here.    [00:30:36] Ben: Sounds good. Keep    [00:30:37] Jason Hull: track.    [00:30:38] Jason Hull: So you surveyed the renter at the end, like you've got somebody in the property.    [00:30:43] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:43] Jason Hull: They've got a lockbox there. I think that's very cool. They can just go and "Can I move in on this day?" "Yep, here's the lockbox. You've got a code or however it works." And they can go get in.    [00:30:52] Jason Hull: Yeah.   [00:30:52] Jason Hull: And you don't have to show up. They can be there with their new U-Haul when they need to be there. That's super annoying, I think for property managers sometimes. And then afterwards you survey the renter. So I'm curious about the results of this. What's been the shift that people have noticed in the experience? This is why you started this in the beginning. You weren't having a great experience. Some people probably were like, "Drive to our office and you might get a key." Some people are like, "we can meet you maybe this day." It was like a mess. So what sort of feedback are you seeing on these surveys and what sort of shift are property management companies that are working with you noticing with your process versus trying to do this on their    [00:31:30] Ben: own?   [00:31:30] Ben: Yeah, great question. We collect what I would I consider a very important metric and I'm curious if it's come up before in this podcast. It's something called a net promoter score. Yeah. Have you discussed that before? I'm happy to--   [00:31:44] Ben: we    [00:31:44] Jason Hull: haven't really focused on that. But yeah, I think a lot of people are familiar. So net promoter score is when it says "on a scale of maybe zero to 10 or one to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company?" So a lot of people see this, the quick survey on software, different things like this.    [00:32:00] Ben: Yeah, that's right. And so when the net promoter score rank actually comes out, the scale is actually a minus a hundred to a plus 100. You could Google about how that works, but you're right. As a renter, what we would be asking them is, "how likely are you to recommend leasing a property to a friend through Sunroom or through x property management company?" And what we found is we just have a really good net promoter score. So if you could google this around, but the average net promoter score amongst property managers is a seven. And that's not on the zero to 10 scale. That's on the minus a hundred to the plus 100 scale, and. For the renters who lease a property through us, we have a 52 net promoter score.    [00:32:42] Ben: Nice.    [00:32:43] Ben: Yeah. So it's like what I said at the very beginning these renters are just a lot happier when they get in the home. For the property managers, they're seeing less really noisy renters when they first move in. I think that's a common thing that property managers are used to is that when a renter first moves in, that can be when they're talking the most or they're the noisiest. And so I think just anecdotally, property managers have said that, "Hey, these renters are just happier. They're just not causing as much commotion when they first move. And some of that has to do with our process too, right? Allowing renters to even self tour homes, it's a no pressure thing where they're able to really understand what they're buying before they move in. So I believe that helps as well.    [00:33:24] Jason Hull: This is the nerd in me coming out. So there's this really book called _Innovating Analytics_. And they put out this idea, basically the idea of the next generation of net promoter. They have used a lot of data to showcase and it's a little dry, but there's a lot of data to showcase the fundamental flaws of net promoter score, which is, has advantages over doing nothing, right? But then they talk about a new sort of score, which is the word of mouth index. And so we've incorporated that a bit into our business. It basically asks a second question, "how likely are you to discourage others from utilizing that?" Because what they found, just because somebody is not a true promoter, as they categorize them on the high end, like they choose like maybe a seven, eight, or nine or something, does not mean they're actually going to go hurt your business. And so a lot of big companies, they found were spending a lot of money to try and mitigate the people and pay attention to people and help the people they thought were detractors or people that would hurt their business when most of them really wouldn't. Just because it was a two or a three. They found that does not necessarily mean they're actually going to go actively try and destroy your business or hurt you. They just aren't going to tell people about it, because some people just don't want to talk about other businesses. Right? . So then asking a secondary question, how likely are you to tell others not to use this business or whatever. Then it gives you the true people to focus on mitigating or solving challenges for. Really interesting idea, but then they talk about the challenge of mainlining, where if they answer one question one way, first question, they'll answer it the same way, but it's backwards. Because they're just in the mode of answering questions like a zombie and they'll do it the wrong way or read it the wrong way. We've even seen this, so you have to put some questions in between and so it just complicates. But it's a really interesting book. You and I can geek out sometime and show you how I built this out so that it would work effectively, but it helps us identify which people are actually detractors that we need to take care of and focus on, and which people, they never rate anything positively and they're just, but they're quiet, which is fine.    [00:35:25] Jason Hull: Oh that's    [00:35:25] Ben: fascinating. I'll have to check that out.   [00:35:28] Jason Hull: I know, it's pretty nerdy. So_ Innovating Analytics_ is by Larry Freed F R E E D which is an interesting book. Cool. We've asked a lot of questions. You've explained the process. I think we've covered how it works unless we missed anything. But what else do people, property managers coming to you, what other concerns or things could we address here on the podcast before we wrap that they might have? Or what are the big FAQ questions that they ask before they're willing to explore giving up the leasing arm their business?    [00:36:00] Ben: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of the questions just evolve around how they can still control the process. And so we've invested an incredible amount into giving them those controls, right? Like I think the key is, the way we look at it is look like we're going to be the best at doing this leasing legwork. It's all we do. And we've built technology to really hold ourselves accountable to really high standards. But at the end of the day, like we still want you to have control over who's the right tenant for this property? Or, "how would you like the that application process to go?" For example. And I think we've worked hard to streamline the areas and that, we just realized, hey, this is the best way to do this. But also we recognize that hey, these property managers, they have pride to process for a reason, right, for their particular market that might be the right thing to do. And so we've invested a lot in creating different settings and things like that, that can make it so that they get to use it the way they would like.    [00:37:03] Ben: Cool. So it's    [00:37:04] Jason Hull: really a lot of the big concerns are just about the flexibility. "Do I have to go all in and use everything that you offer?"   [00:37:10] Jason Hull: Right.   [00:37:11] Jason Hull: "Or can I do, some of this and maybe I'll give up pieces later--" because some of y'all entrepreneurs are control freaks. Let's be real.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: Yes.    [00:37:18] Jason Hull: And you need to let go of some of this stuff and let somebody else do it a little bit better. We have a lot of egos, entrepreneurs. We think our way is the best way all the time and we need to see that maybe somebody else could do this    [00:37:31] Ben: better.    [00:37:31] Ben: But we've also, from    [00:37:32] Jason Hull: experience--   [00:37:33] Jason Hull: I'm guessing you're going to say that Sunroom probably does it better than what most property managers are doing.    [00:37:39] Ben: Better NPS scores?    [00:37:41] Ben: Yeah. I would just say that, some of the property managers that we've seen are the most excited to partner with us are definitely probably the ones listening to your podcast or it's the ones that want to grow. And, we have some great examples of that, right? There's one property manager that we started working with in Austin a couple years ago, and they started with 300 doors. And now I believe they're up to 800 doors. And so by them being able to just, focus on other things, they were able to grow pretty quickly. And because we recognize this and we're starting to set up in these new markets, we actually just this week launched a new program specifically for trying to find these property management companies that are really focused on growth. And so we actually launched this new growth program. That we just put on our website where property managers can apply for the program. And essentially this program if we accept them will actually give them-- and they partner with us-- we'll give them $10,000 to grow their business. And they can, they could use that money for-- or I'd say up to 10,000-- they can use that money for helping them grow. And really the only terms of it is that you're willing to partner with us on leasing to do that. And so we have different ideas of really how to use that money to grow. I know a lot of entrepreneurs already have those ideas and so that's why we yeah, we set up this new program.   [00:39:02] Jason Hull: Awesome. We should chat because we're really good at growing property management companies and yeah, I think there would be a good-- there. We'll chat later. We've also negotiated with most of the top vendors where we've got a hit list, but a lot of the top vendors we're negotiating best in class discounts just for our mastermind members.   [00:39:21] Ben: There you go.    [00:39:21] Jason Hull: So maybe that's something you and I can do with the Sunroom as well. So    [00:39:25] Jason Hull: Yeah .   [00:39:26] Jason Hull: If you're open, that's--   [00:39:27] Jason Hull: yeah. Cool.    [00:39:28] Jason Hull: We've got some big players on board already for some of these things, but I think it'd be really cool to see this is something new and I think it's innovative and it seems really exciting. So we'll we'll chat afterwards, cool. Is there anything else you want people to know before we go and if The last thing maybe is how do they find you? And how do they get in touch and how do they start working with Sunroom?    [00:39:49] Ben: Yeah. Just go to our website, Sunroomleasing.com. Fill out a little form. Be happy to have, someone from our sales team reach out and have a conversation and kind of explain more of these details about what we do. I'm an engineer at heart, so I think for some people, maybe I went into too much detail. But at the same time, knowing I've talked to a lot of property managers they love the details. If you want even more details yeah, go to our website, sunroomleasing.com. Reach out to us and someone from our sales team would love to dig into those details with you.    [00:40:18] Jason Hull: Perfect. I think the last big question everybody would have is be, is going to be what does it cost? Is this affordable? Can we do this? That sort of question. So--   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: yeah.   [00:40:29] Jason Hull: Anything to say about that?    [00:40:31] Ben: Yeah, so we're going to charge, similar to what I would say like other leasing agents would. So we're going to charge like a percentage of first month's rent. That percentage of first month's rent that we charge. It's going to be different depending on the market and depending on what kind of volume that you have. Normally, the way we are setting this up is that we usually make it so that the property manager can still make good money on leasing while still utilizing us for all of it. Property managers can charge a percentage of first month's rent to their owners. That could be different by market. We're usually going to charge, call it 10- 20% less than that so that they're able to still make money on the leasing, but still know that they have a best in class service for that happening. And so that's just for full service. For Sunscreen, that's actually free for property managers to use. And we just charge the renter an application fee. And so that's really the easiest way. If we said a lot of stuff today, people are like, "wow that's a little scary to adopt that big of a, have a company owning leasing." a great way to start to just build a relationship with us and start seeing what we could do would be to start utilizing our application processing system, which, really, it's going to be a really a low risk thing. Even if want to test out having us do one application on one listing or something, we'd be happy to do that.   [00:41:48] Ben: That's the    [00:41:49] Jason Hull: gateway drug. A little bit of Sunscreen, and then you're going to be like, "I want a whole room. I want the Sunroom now."   [00:41:54] Jason Hull: There you go. There you go.    [00:41:55] Jason Hull: "I don't want to deal with this anymore. I'm tired of putting the Sunscreen on. Yeah. Okay.    [00:41:59] Jason Hull: There you go.    [00:42:00] Jason Hull: Cool.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: Yeah.    [00:42:01] Jason Hull: All right. Ben, it's been great having you on the show. Check out Sunroomleasing.com and then if you come up with some major developments or big shifts or changes, we'd love to have you back on the show. So thanks for being    [00:42:12] Ben: here.    [00:42:13] Ben: Thanks so much, Jason. And yeah, we'll have to meet up in Austin sometime.    [00:42:16] Ben: All right.    [00:42:18] Jason Hull: All right. Cool. Thanks, Ben.    [00:42:20] Jason Hull: Alright. Everybody, if you've been listening to this, we appreciate you listening to our podcast. We would really appreciate it if you left us a review in exchange. If you got value from this, that would mean a lot to us at DoorGrow and my team. We have been innovating and creating a lot of new stuff at DoorGrow. We've got some really cool stuff coming out. So if you have not been familiar with DoorGrow for a while, we've got some really cool things coming down that we are working on. You should get connected to do a sales call. Check us out at doorgrow.com. Reach out to us. You can reach out to us on any social media. And we would love to connect with you and share with you. We just released the DoorGrow Code, which is the first roadmap that really showcases how to go from zero to a thousand doors in as short of time period as possible. It shows you which things you need to do at which stage, at which door levels, and what questions you have, what major problems you have at each stage, and what you need to do in order to do things in the right order to get to the next level.   [00:43:22] Jason Hull: So if you've been at a similar door count for the last year or maybe two years or three years, maybe even kind feeling stuck or maybe even backsliding a little bit because of property selling off or whatever. We have clients that are adding a lot of doors. Andrew Rocha just chimed in on one of our mastermind calls. He's one of our clients. He added like 50 doors in the last month. We've got clients. One of our clients added 310 doors in a year. We've got another client that added a hundred in gosh, they've doubled their doors. Like we've got clients that are growing really rapidly and they're not spending any money on advertising. I want you to be clear, like our methods are not focused on SEO, pay per click, content marketing, pay-per-lead lead services, social media marketing. Our methods are what really work in the marketplace, and most of them are zero cost, like they cost nothing. It just costs time and effort, and it actually takes less time and less effort than doing cold lead marketing like seo, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, or pay per lead services that exist in the property management space. So I highly recommend you check this out if you're wanting to grow. And we are now helping really significantly. We've built out the best systems and processes and we've been stacking the best coaches in the industry. If you've heard of certain coaches in the industry, we might have them on as experts in our program. We'll be announcing more of that later, but we've got some of the best in the industry that we've brought on as coaches. So it's not the Jason Show. I've got an amazing team of people coaching and we have systems for operations. We have systems for process. We have systems for sales, and our clients are crushing it. Nobody in the marketplace is doing all that DoorGrow's doing or can compete with us. And so if you think you know DoorGrow and you've looked at us or judged us in the past, it might be time to take a new look because your competitors might be working with us or they might work with us, and you're going to wish that it had been you.   [00:45:33] Jason Hull: So until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye everyone.    [00:45:37] Jason Hull: You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead content, social direct mail, and they still struggle to grow!    [00:46:05] Jason Hull: At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today's episode on our blog doorgrow.com, and to get notified of future events and news subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow Hacking your business and your life.

Ben and Mia, young zombies in love, search for the perfect xmas present in a world of the walking dead.    Cast List Mia - Brenda Dau Ben - Derek M. Koch                 of Mail Order Zombie Geek - Glen Hallstrom Tick - Frankenvox Chuck - Bob Noble Andy - Reynaud LeBoeuf Doris - Julie Hoverson Sheri - Crystal Thomson Ted - J. Spyder Isaacson Voicebox - Beverly Poole Fred & Bob - Big Anklevich           & Rish Outfield           of Dunesteef Audio Magazine Ben's Double - Danar Hoverson Mia's Double - Julie Hoverson Other zombies:  Al Aseoche, Jacquie Duckworth, Reynaud LeBoeuf, Jack Hosley, Sidney Williams, Glen Hallstrom, Bob Noble, Brian Weingartner, Ferguson and family, Robyn Keyes, Kim Poole, Michael Hudson. Music by Jason Shaw (Audionautix.com) Show theme:  Kevin MacLeod (Incompetech.com) Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock "What kind of a place is it? Why it's an apartment on the wrong side of town, can't you tell?" ******************************************************************************************** GIFT OF THE ZOMBI   Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] Mia, zombie (20s) dating Ben Ben, zombie (20s) dating Mia Ted, zombie (30s), Mia's horny neighbor Andy, henpecked zombie (40s) Doris, Andy's wife (40s) Geek, a broker (30s) Sheri, a lovelorn friend (20s) Tick, an unscrupulous intact (human, 30s) Fred, a zombie (any) Bob, another zombie (any) Chuck, overseer zombie (any) Voicebox - mechanical translator   ALL ZOMBIES (unless noted as exceptions, below) have dual vocal tracks - the "zombie-voice" track, which is unintelligible, but vaguely mirrors the normal voice and events, and the "mind voice" (sounds like a voiceover), which is how they sound to each other.  /n = normal"mind voice" /z = "zombie voice" There are places where we only hear the zoombie voice.   Exceptions:  DORIS has no "mind voice", just incoherent shrieks GEEK only has a zombie voice, but he is clearly understandable, if still zombie-like TICK is human, and has no zombie-voice.   NOTE:  The zombie apocalypse has come and been dealt with more or less.  Zombies might still attack humans, if they see them, but humans tend to live in the walled cities and have become somewhat mythological to the zombies outside.  Zombies still are self-aware, but they think and speak so very slowly that they are difficult for humans to understand.  Conversely, to a zombie, humans seem to speak incredibly fast - almost incomprehensibly so.  That's why humans developed the voicebox to take what they say and slow it down enough for a zombie to understand. OLIVIA      Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a crumbling apartment building, can't you tell?  MUSIC SCENE 1.     MIA'S APARTMENT SOUND      WIND-UP ALARM GOES OFF SOUND     FLIES IN THE B/G THROUGHOUT MIA/Z     [distant moan of awakening, which continues, sporadically,  punctuating the narrative] MIA/n     I hate Mondays.  SOUND     ALARM SLAPPED OFF TABLE, STOPS RINGING SOUND     STUMBLING FOOTSTEPS MUSIC     VAGUE WARPED CHRISTMAS CAROL PLAYS SOMEWHERE MIA/n     It doesn't help that it's two days til Christmas and I haven't got Ben his present. MIA/z     [roar of anger] SOUND      SOMETHING CRASHES TO FLOOR, GLASS BREAKS. MIA/N     The holidays just bring out the worst in me. SOUND     DOOR OPENS, FOOTSTEPS CONTINUE MIA/N     [sigh] Checking my stitches in the mirror - nice to see nothing weird happened in the night.  I love the hot pink against my pale skin.  [beat] I know I'm swimming against the tide, but I still like to look nice, even when no one else gives a hang.  They're welcome to run around unwashed, in raggedy-ass clothes, just leaves more Prada for me. SOUND     SPRAY CAN PSSHT, FLIES STOP, TINY DROPPING NOISES MIA/n     A little spray - no water, that's just asking for mold - and I'm ready to face the day. SOUND     [under the next] SHAMBLING FOOTSTEPS OUT OF BATHROOM AGAIN, STRUGGLES FEET INTO SHOES, NOW SHAMBLING FEET ARE IN HEELS.  MIA/n     Ben's gift is the big problem.  I know what I want to get him, but it won't come cheap.  There just aren't that many floating around out there. MUSIC       SCENE 2.     OUTSIDE SOUND     NO TRAFFIC. JUST BIRDS, SHAMBLING FOOTSTEPS, OR OCCASIONAL BREAKING THINGS. SOUND     STRUGGLE WITH OBJECTS, THINGS FALL AWAY BEN/z     [moans, fighting his way to his feet] BEN/n     [hungover sounding] Wow, what did I do last night?  BEN/z     [shake head noise] BEN/n     Oh, crap - Mia'll be expecting me-- SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET SPEED UP BEN/n     For all her persnickityness, Mia is totally the greatest babe around, and I am sooo lucky that I'm the one she's into.  I figured for the longest time that she was just slumming with a grot like me - right up until we really did it.  Went whole hog and did the handfast.  It's like always having a piece of her with me.  [note:  in this case, the handfast was actually trading hands.  zombies can buy and sell body parts and trade them with one another] ANDY/z     [morning] BEN/z     [yo!  How's it going?] ANDY/z     [falling moan, ending in a squeal] BEN/n     Don't I know it!  Man, if ever a guy was whipped, Andy is the poster boy.  He's gonna catch hell for not getting home to Doris last night.  Almost tempting to stay and see the fray, but meeting Mia is the only thing on my maggoty little mind right now. MUSIC   SCENE 3.     MIA'S STAIRCASE SOUND     BODY FALLS DOWN STAIRS, FOLLOWED BY THE CLATTER OF A SHOE. MIA/z     [distraught moan] MIA/n     Darn stair carpet.  Darn heels.  SOUND     FEELING AROUND FOR THE SHOE AND PUTTING IT BACK ON MIA/n     Alas, vanity doesn't come cheap.  Ben loves my little foibles.  He understands why it matters so much to me, to be beautiful for him.  Looking back at my pink stitches, almost tripping as I crane my neck to see, I wonder whether he will like them as much as I do. SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET IN HEELS AGAIN, ANOTHER SET OF FEET COMES ON TED/z     [moan approaches, vaguely suggestive] MIA/z     [dismissive moan] MIA/n     Not today, Ted.  I don't have time for any of your nonsense. TED/z     [moan ending in a squeak/question] MIA/n     I'm with Ben, Ted.  You know that.  I'm not giving up what I have with him.  He has my hand, and my promise.  He even has my heart ... just in the old-fashioned way. TED/z     [mournful and pissed moan] MIA/n     Yeah, yeah, yeah - if you were the last one on earth, maybe. MIA/z     [roar/moan as she brushes him aside] SOUND     STUMBLING FEET QUICKLY TO DOOR, SLAMS OPEN, TUMBLES THROUGH MIA/z     [roar of triumph] MIA/N     First time!! [made it on the first try!]  This is gonna be a great day! MUSIC   SCENE 4.     OUTSIDE, NEAR BEN ANDY/z     [cursing groan] ANDY/n     Come on, Ben.  Doris likes you!  If I say you needed my help, she'll buy it! BEN/z     [dismissive groan] SOUND     SHAMBLING FEET MOVING AWAY, STUMBLING AFTER ANDY/z     [dude] ANDY/N     Dude!  Come on-- DORIS/z     [distant strident squeal] ANDY/n     Oh, crap! SOUND     SOMETHING WET SPLATS ON PAVEMENT, THEN DISTANT FEET APPROACHING ANDY/z     [strange gurgling warble] ANDY/n     [sigh] I lose more tongues that way. DORIS/z     [strident squeal, closer] MUSIC   SCENE 5.     OUTSIDE NEAR MIA'S BUILDING SOUND     HIGH HEEL SHAMBLE MIA/z     [low moan] GEEK/z     [he speaks clear enough to understand, but still zombie-like] [hey, fingers!] MIA/z     [quizzical] MIA/n     Yeah, what's it to you? GEEK/z     [you got any to spare?] MIA/n     No!  I like mine right where they are. GEEK/z     [get you a good price.  Fingers are always top value.] MIA/z     [sharp moan of anger] MIA/n     Look - these five are my boyfriend's, and this one says-- MIA/z     [fuck you] GEEK/z     [you'll be back [louder] they always come back!!] MIA/n     Damn parts brokers - [jealous] always have the best tongues. MUSIC   SCENE 6.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE [note:  throughout the rest of the show, unless otherwise noted, appropriate zombie noises play under] MIA     [calling]  Hey babycakes! BEN     [off]  Yo sweet thang! SOUND     PLODDING FOOTSTEPS COME TOGETHER MIA     Mm.  Missed you! BEN     Double that. SOUND     DISGUSTING SLOPPY LICKY KISSY NOISES MIA     [mild slurp, then hot]  You are such a good kisser.  BEN     Don't know how I'd get up each day without you to look forward to. MIA     [giggles]  BEN     Let's walk.  Want to show you something. MIA     Oh?  Well, I've got a little time before hitting the old treadmill. BEN     You know I'd support you if I could-- MIA     I like looking after my own needs.  [flirting] Leaves you to look after my wants. BEN     Ooh! MUSIC   SCENE 7.     OUTSIDE, NEAR STORE SOUND     PLODDING FEET MIA     I should have worn more convenient shoes. BEN     Sorry!  Almost there. MIA     What is...it...?  [awe]  Oh! BEN     I thought you might say that.  Just saw them.  Of course, they're not cheap. MIA     [drooling -- zombie noises under get really slobbery] Patent leather, thigh high - oh, I'd never have to take them off! BEN     The heels aren't too high, are they? MIA     [sigh of ecstasy]  I love stacks... MUSIC   SCENE 8.     OUTSIDE, Later BEN     [bummed] I was right, she loved the boots. ANDY     And how much did you say they were? BEN     More than I've had in living memory. ANDY     At any one time? BEN     EVER.  ANDY     Woah.  Well, suppose you can hit the mills like the rest of us schmoes - if you're truly that desperate. BEN     [scoff noise]  The mills?  It'd take me ten years - and they'd probably sell by then. ANDY     What, then?  Go out snatching?  That's pretty much your only other option. BEN     [sighs]  I thought I might ask around, see what I could borrow-- ANDY     Woah, there!  You know Doris holds the purse strings! BEN     If I was going to snatch anyone, I'd snatch her - she's got enough body for three. ANDY     [musing] You know...  That's not a bad idea. BEN     [disturbed] Serious? ANDY     Nah.  I'd fall apart without her keeping me moving.  I guess that's love. BEN     [agreeing hmph] MUSIC   SCENE 9.     TREADMILLS SOUND     HEAVY WHIRRING NOISE UNDER.  DISTANT NORMAL STREET SOUNDS MIA     Hey! OTHER ZOMBIES     [Morning!] [nice to see you!] [Mia!  Looking good!] SOUND     MANY PLODDING FEET MIA     Hey Chuck!  Got a space? CHUCK     For you?  Always, babe.  Wanna lose the heels first? MIA     Brought my work shoes.  Just need a moment at the bench. CHUCK     I'd offer to help, but...[chuckles]  Thank god for velcro, eh? MIA     Hah!  I have all my fingers. CHUCK     [chuckles] Coulda fooled me - [teasing] That looks like your fellow's hand...? MIA     [chuckles]  Jealous? MUSIC   SCENE 10.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE [note - Ben has zombie noises under, geek does not - he always sounds like a zombie trying to talk] GEEK     [Psst.] BEN     What? GEEK     [heard you were having some money troubles.] BEN     What's it to you? GEEK     [I might be able to help you with that.] BEN     I don't think so.  I don't have anything I feel like selling. GEEK     [You got some extra fingers.  An entire hand that looks... spare] BEN     No way. Man!  That's - that's Mia's hand!  I should smack you with it just for suggesting that! GEEK     [Hey!  I don't want no trouble!  I'm just a businessman!] BEN     [spits out the word] Businessman.  You're a parts broker.  GEEK     [Yeah, and we both know you come to me when you need something, then you spit on me when I try to help you out.] SOUND     SHUFFLING FEET START TO LEAVE BEN     Wait. GEEK     [what?] BEN     What - what's in high demand? GEEK     [What?] BEN     I mean, if I was... going to sell something ...just if... what would you be [reluctant, forcing the words out] paying the best prices for? GEEK     [[chuckles] See?  When you need me--] BEN     Cut the crap and tell me. GEEK     [Appendages are always good.  Fingers, noses, ears.  And soft parts, like tongues and, uh.... [suggestive] you know.]  BEN     [gulp] GEEK     [Toes not so much - most just get by without - unless you have a complete foot somewhere - those are collectible, but only in pristine condition.  Eyes are pretty good, and you hardly need two.]  BEN     What about parts that - aren't mine? GEEK     [Stolen parts?  What makes you think I trade dirty?] BEN     Your type always does. GEEK     [[pissed again] My type?  My type?  I think you just talked yourself out of a good deal, pal.] BEN     Shit, I-- GEEK     [incoherent roar, as he leaves] MUSIC   SCENE 11.     TREADMILL AMB - underlying zombies moans, many many plodding feet MIA     [no specific moaning for this speech] Being on the treadmill gives you plenty of time to think.  You stare at the back of the guy in front of you and wonder what's going through his head.  Ben doesn't like the nine to five, but I figure - heck, you gotta do something, and if you feel the urge to walk, might as well get paid for it, right? SOUND     SOMEONE CLIMBS ON THE TREADMILL [vocals have zombie noises under again] TED     Hey Mia! MIA     [sigh] Hi Ted. TED     Funny running into you here.  Shove over? MIA     Right.  Like I don't do this every day.  No room. SHERI     Hey Mia! [warm] Hey Ted. TED     [dismissive] Sheri. [wheedling] Come on, Mia, squeeze in a little.  There's space next to you if you make room. MIA     Sorry, Ted [she's not].  Been saving that for... Sheri. SHERI     Huh? TED     Sheri won't mind - will you? SHERI     I - I guess not... MIA     Oh, no Ted.  We have girl talking to do.  Bye-bye.  Hop up Sheri. TED     Fine.  See you at end of shift? MIA     [muttered] Not if I see you first.  SOUND     TED FLOPS OFF MIA     [up]  I don't know what you see in him, Sher. SHERI     Neither do I.  Pheromones I guess. MIA     Well, he does smell. SHERI     [on an ecstatic sigh] Yes. MIA     [ugh]  Hey, Sher, I gotta problem. SHERI     Oh?  [horrified] You didn't... break up with Ben? MIA     No!  Why would you say that? SHERI     Nothing. MIA     Did you hear something, or are you just worried that Ted might somehow luck out and catch me on the rebound? SHERI     Um.  The second one. MIA     Kinda thought so.  O-K, passing over your insecurity, can we discuss my problem? SHERI     [relieved] Sure! MIA     I found the perfect present for Ben, and I don't know how I'm gonna afford it.  SHERI     You mean...um...what you said he's missing? MIA     Yeah.  All his fleshy parts haven't lasted so well - I keep telling him that sleeping rough isn't good for him, but he hates being cooped up.  Says being nibbled on by rats is preferable to a cage. SHERI     You live in a cage? MIA     He means an apartment.  SHERI     Oh.  Well, I'm sure he looks fine without one.  You see plenty of missing ones out there every day. [NOTE:  they're discussing noses, but it makes it sound like something more suggestive] MIA     I know, but he would - well, from things he's said, he would actually LIKE one.  Make him feel like a new man.  I thought I might get him one of those artificial ones - you know, cast in plastic?  In a skin tone, though - not one of those weird colored ones. SHERI     They're all the rage with the trendoids these days, the neon ones.  I guess they figure if it's gonna look fakey, might as well make a statement.  And some of them get freakishly big. MIA     Well, I found a place to get something real high quality.  Won't look fake at all.  They'll even tint it to match his skin.  And it won't rot or fall off.  Guaranteed to last.  Not even a nibble. SHERI     It won't make him smell any better. MIA     No, but I get the feeling he would be more secure in our relationship if he - well - if he fit more the image he thinks I'd go for. SHERI     Someone with all their parts? MIA     Oh, heck.  I'd love Ben with or without any number of parts, but he seems to think I'd like him better if he actually had a nose. SHERI     [hmm]  I could maybe loan you a little-- MIA     No, this guy charges a bunch.  I'm actually tempted to sell a part or two - something I don't use, or not so much, you know? SHERI     Don't go there.  Starts out simple, a finger here, an ear there, and then - voila!  You end up checking people in at work like "Chuck, the torso" - stuck in admin cuz you got no limbs left.  Or worse - that guy who talks out his neck since he woke up one morning and his head was gone. MIA     [sigh] You're probably right.  MUSIC   SCENE 12.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE AMB     SLIGHT ECHO - AND A DRIP SOMEWHERE SOUND     FLOPPY STEPS IN WATER [note     Tick speaks slowly and has no zombie echo, Ben sounds completely zombie - no voice over - for this scene TICK     You looking for me? BEN     [gasp] [what?] SOUND     STUMBLE FLOPPY STEPS IN WATER TICK     Don't bother - just stand still. BEN     [you're a - an intact?] TICK     And you're a dead lump of shit, but maybe we can help each other. BEN     [moan of acceptance] TICK     Good.  Now stay quiet while I tell you what we're doing here. BEN     [slurpy gasp] TICK     That's disgusting.  But I need a heap like you to front for me.  I have some... parts... to be disposed of, but I can't just wander into maggotville myself.  BEN     [Why me?] TICK     My source says you're tough and desperate.  And stupid. BEN     [stifled annoyed noise] TICK     So maybe he's wrong.  BEN     [I am desperate] TICK     [snort]  Fine.  Here's the deal - I don't give a flying fluck about your crappy corpse cash.  On the other hand, I like having folks - dead or alive - who owe me. BEN     [What you need from me?] TICK     I'll tell you when it comes up.  Right now, I just need this bag of ... parts to vanish.  BEN     [It's illegal.] TICK     [cajoling] They're nice and fresh.  [impatient] Fine.  Clock is ticking.  Tick tock.  Tick tock.  You even remember what "time" is, maggot? BEN     [It's almost Christmas.  [beat] I'll do it.] MUSIC   SCENE 13.     TREADMILL SOUND     TREADMILL, FEET PLODDING SHERI     You ever wonder what they do over there? MIA     [lost in a daze] Hmm?  Over the wall? SHERI      Yeah.  The [awed whisper] In-tacts? MIA     Don't know.  Don't care.  Except for when they come over here and drag off my friends, I say leave them alone.  SHERI     But you do believe in them, don't you? MIA     Believe in them?  What's to believe - we see them marching on the wall, and they're the ones who shell out for us to walk on this damn treadmill day and night.  They're as real as ... as... shoes.  SHERI     Some say we all came from in-tacts, way back when. MIA     [lightly sarcastic] Yes, and a wasp nest in your head is a sign of good luck and not just poor hygiene.  I swear Sheri, you'll believe anything. SHERI     You believe they carry people off, though? MIA     Well, yeah - we've all seen that.  They appear from nowhere, in those dark helmets and suits, and by the time you catch your breath, someone's vanished. SHERI     [awed] I saw one once. MIA     A kidnapping? SHERI     An in-tact. MIA     [half-teasing, half worried] You know, they say if you mentioned them three times, they'll appear out of thin air. SHERI     [agreeing, distant] They are really fast. MIA     [exasperated] Sheri!  Don't-- SHERI     I did, though!  I really saw one.  Not just in a suit and helmet like they usually are, but one right... up... close. MIA     [sighs, feels her pain]  Tell me about it? SHERI     It was a guy, I think, and the funny part is he looked so much like a regular person.  Just that he was so fast and he was - well - he had everything.  His skin was perfect, no holes or anything, and it was this warm rosy color.  I... yearned to touch him, but when I reached out, he turned and ran away.  MIA     [uncertain] That...must have been ....weird. SHERI     [almost teary] It was like I saw an angel, and it saw something horrible in me. MIA     Oh, Sheri-- SHERI     Maybe that's why Ted won't love me?  Because I'm horrible inside? MIA     Aw, Sheri.  [reassuring] We're all horrible inside.  And if anyone's seen an angel here and not realized it, Ted's the one.  He sees you every day and misses out every time he turns his back. SHERI     [sniff sniff] MUSIC   SCENE 14.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE SOUND     BAG PASSED WITH A SQUISH GEEK     [you sure you don't want any of them?] BEN     [upset] I... don't need any girl parts, thanks. GEEK     [Squeamish?  All you had to do was lug a bunch of fresh merchandise here to my humble workshop.] BEN     I've never.... felt... they were so [disgusted] warm. GEEK     [Fresher just means it'll last longer.  Nothing more.  You want your pay or not?] BEN     [down] Yeah. MUSIC   SCENE 15.     TREADMILL SHERI     --you know that guy Sam I was dating? MIA     [worn down] Yeah? SHERI     And how he was always mouthing off about-- SOUND     WHISTLE, END OF SHIFT MIA     [heartfelt] Oh yesss!  What a relief! SHERI     [not getting it] Yeah!  Let's go somewhere - I was in the middle of telling you about Sam. MIA     [almost panicky] Nah, save it for next time - I have to meet up with Ben. SHERI     It's so great to have someone to talk to while we walk - Tomorrow, same time? MIA     [transparently lying] Sure!  Oh, no - wait - I promised I would do this thing with Ben tomorrow. SHERI     What thing? MIA     [panicky, trying to cover] You mean I didn't mention the thing? I--uh-- SOUND     DISTANT ZOMBIE NOISES AND SCREAMS SHERI     What the--? MIA     Come on! SOUND     SLOW PLODDING.  LARGE GROUP OF ZOMBIES GATHERING MUSIC   SCENE 16.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE SOUND      SLOW PLODDING, ONE SET OF FEET ANDY     [distant] Ben!  Ben! BEN     [sigh] SOUND     PLODDING STOPS BEN     Yeah? SOUND     ANDY'S FEET APPROACH ANDY     [panicky] Ben, man, am I glad to see you - it's Doris!  Jeez, she slipped and I think something's broken! BEN     [muttered] Lucky you. [up] What do you mean? ANDY     Her leg - it snapped and now she can't get up!  What am I gonna do, Ben? BEN     Andy, Doris is such a-- ANDY     I know I know.  She gives me hell and treats me like a dog, but what can I do, Ben, I love her!  You gotta help me.  I'll do anything! BEN     Let me take a look. MUSIC   SCENE 17.     ALTERCATION SOUND     LOTS OF SHAMBLING FEET, MOANS MIA     What happened? SHERI     Where's everyone going? FRED     It's one of the overseers! MIA     An in-tact?  What happened? BOB     I seen the whole thing!  He fell off the wall and someone made a grab fer him! SHERI     Oh no! FRED     Oh, yeah!  He's somewhere in the middle of the dogpile there. MIA     Isn't anyone helping? BOB     What are you, some kind of pervert?  This is an [spits out the word] In-tact.  [excited] They're tearing him apart! MIA     We should get out of here! SHERI     B-but - They're gonna kill him! MIA     [sad] I know, and there's nothing we can do about it.  And we want to be out of here before they bring out the big guns. SOUND     DRAGGING, SHUFFLING AWAY FROM THE FRACAS SHERI     But what if he's that same one I saw before? MIA     By now - you probably wouldn't know him.  MUSIC   SCENE 18.     ANDY'S PLACE DORIS     [squeals piteously] BEN     Yep, that's a bad one.  Twisted all up like this. ANDY     Can't we do anything? BEN     I'm no reconstructor.  Maybe some duct tape and a stick? DORIS      [Squeals angrily] ANDY     He's just trying to help, honeybuunny. BEN     Yeah, chill honeybunny. DORIS     [squeals again, sort, sharp, warning.] ANDY     [quiet] You gotta help me, Ben - you're the only one I can turn to! BEN     Jeez Andy... [sigh]  You'll pay me back? ANDY     You know I'm good for it!  Soon as that leg's on, we'll both hit the treads every day til we cover it. BEN     [down] Sure.  I-- ANDY     Yes? BEN     [muttered] I didn't like the way it felt anyway.  [up] Here.  SOUND     PACKAGE CHANGES SLOPPY HANDS ANDY     What - is it? BEN     Enough to get her fixed up - you might go ahead and get her a new tongue while you're at it. ANDY     [very quiet] Oh.  No.  Let's not go completely overboard... MUSIC   SCENE 19.     OUTSIDE, LATER, TOGETHER SOUND     OUTSIDE. SHUFFLING FEET APPROACH MIA     There you are - I was beginning to worry. SOUND     BODY FALLS TO THE GROUND "ben relaxes" BEN     [oof, then] It's been a really... weird day. SOUND     BODY FALLS TO THE GROUND "mia relaxes" MIA     [oof, then agreeing] Tell me about it. BEN     [muttered] I would if I could. MIA     Hmm? BEN     Nah.  Doris broke her leg and Andy needed help with getting her fixed up. MIA     They better get her a good big leg.  She goes through so darn many. BEN     Really? It's happened before? MIA     Every couple of years.  I think the last time was before you showed up here. BEN     I am such a sucker. MIA     Whenever you start thinking like that, just look at Andy.  That'd make anyone feel superior. BEN     You always know just the right thing to say. MIA     Can't help it.  We're in tune.  BEN     Yeah, I guess we are.  About Christmas-- MIA     Don't worry - I love the boots! BEN     Oh, the boots... MIA     But only if you can afford them.  If you can't, I might be able to get them myself.  [sexy] You still get to enjoy them, though. BEN     [grim] I'll get them-- MIA     [sorry] I was just teasing. BEN     Don't worry.  [softening]  Like I said, it's been a really strange day. MUSIC   SCENE 20.     SEWER AGAIN TICK     [really fast] Yeah what? BEN     [slow gasp] TICK     [fast] crap. [deliberately going slower, down to normal speed]  What do you want? BEN     Geek said you have another job? TICK     Not so much a job as a favor. BEN     Need money. TICK     What happened to the packet I gave you before?  Never mind - don't want to know.  [speeding up a bit] Look.  I'm not some magic money tree. BEN     Oh. TICK     [slowing again]  See right now, you owe me a favor - but I can be gracious about it.  You give me what I need, and I will advance you what you need against the next job I give you.  Sound good? BEN     [carefully articulating] You pay now for next job if I do favor? TICK     There you go.  [quick] not so damn stupid after all. MUSIC   SCENE 21.     MIA'S APARTMENT SOUND     ALARM CLOCK SOUND      KNOCKED OFF TABLE MIA     [just like at beginning]  I hate Mondays. SOUND     DOORBELL RINGS MIA     Huh? MIA/Z     coming! SOUND     BAREFOOT SHUFFLE SOUND      DOORBELL RINGS AGAIN, QUICKLY AND REPEATEDLY MIA/Z     Hold your damn horses! SOUND      DOORKNOB FUMBLES, DOOR IS SLAMMED OPEN. SOUND     BODY FALLS MIA/Z     [annoyed] hey! SOUND     FEET MOVE QUICKLY INTO APARTMENT, SLAM DOOR MIA/Z     [scared] Who are you--? SOUND     SUPER-QUICK WHISPERED VOICES IN BACKGROUND VOICEBOX     [mechanical voice]  You were at the altercation near the wall yesterday. MIA/z     uhhh VOICEBOX     Yes or no.  We ask yes or no questions.  Answer yes or no. MIA/z     yesss. VOICEBOX     Did you take part-- MIA/z     NO! VOICEBOX     Did you see any of those who did? MIA/z     [uncertain] no. VOICEBOX     There was another female with you.  Did it see anything? MIA     Sheri? MIA/z     No. VOICEBOX     Please identify this female. MIA/z     No. VOICEBOX     That was not a question.  Identify the female that was with you. MIA     Yeah, right. MIA/z     [incoherent moan] VOICEBOX     Speak clearly. MIA/z     Naaame isss [incoherent moan] VOICEBOX     We are prepared to remove parts if you do not cooperate.  SOUND     STRUGGLE, KNIFE SNICKS OPEN MIA/z     ohh! MIA     No!  that's Ben's! [the hand they're threatening] VOICEBOX     Last chance.  The name. MIA/z     Naaame isss shhh-jerry  VOICEBOX     Jerry? MIA/z     [reluctantly agreeing] Uh-huh. VOICEBOX     Good.  [commanding, disgusted] Let it go. SOUND     BODY FLUNG TO FLOOR MIA/z     [moans unhappily] SOUND     FEET MARCH CRISPLY AWAY MUSIC   SCENE 22.     SEWER BEN     You want WHAT? TICK     Not like you'll miss it. BEN     I-I don't-- TICK     Hey, take it or leave it.  You owe me, but not like I'm gonna wrestle you down and steal it from you.  I got people - and your kind - who can do that for me. BEN     When you need? TICK     [irritated, speeding up] What do you mean when?  You think I don't mean now? [like the crack of doom, slowly and clearly] Now! BEN     Now... TICK     Tick-tock. BEN     [moans uncertainly, then glumly] yeah... MUSIC   SCENE 23.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE MIA/z      [muffled whispered moans] MIA      Psst! SHERI     Mia?  What's with the getup? MIA      Get over here! SOUND     SHUFFLING SHERI/z     [whiny querulous moan] SHERI     What? MIA      Ok, no one can see us-- SHERI     You look like a clown. MIA      Shh!  Sheri, have any of the overseers [gulps] "talked" to you? SHERI     In-tacts?  No! MIA      They found me.  They'll find you.  They want to know who killed that - in-tact - yesterday in the riot. SHERI     Gary?  Why? MIA      No-no-no-no!  I don't WANT to know who did it!  They're asking, and they threatened to cut... off-- [sob] Th-they threatened me!  SHERI     [still not understanding it] Why? MIA      They want to get the one who did it, I suppose!  They'll come after you! SHERI     How will they know to come for me? MIA      [evasive] Well - how did - how did they know to come for me? SHERI     Oh! MIA      So now you're warned - stay away from the treadmill! SHERI     [annoyed moan] MIA     Well, I wanted to warn you.  SOUND     MIA STARTS TO WALK AWAY, STRANGELY LIMPING SHERI     What's wrong?  Mia?  You're limping. MIA     Nothing.  Figured if I can't make the treadmill for a while, I'd need something to live on. SOUND     STUMBLING FEET APPROACH SHERI and MIA     [gasping moans] FRED     [gasp]  Oh, hey!  Don't tell anyone I'm here. MIA      They found you too? FRED     I - I heard they're coming - how'd you know? SHERI     We saw it happen. FRED     Woah!  You better hide.  Least for a while.  They're taking folks again. MUSIC   SCENE 24.     MIA'S APARTMENT  BEN     Mia? SOUND     TAPPING ON DOOR, DOOR CREAKS OPEN BEN     [worried now]  Mia? TED     [off, questioning moan] BEN     You Ted? TED     yeah [affirmative moan, voice getting clearer] BEN     Where the hell's Mia? TED     She took some stuff and left.  What's it to you? SOUND     SHUFFLE TURN BEN     I'm Ben. TED     Ugh!  What the hell does she see in you? MUSIC   SCENE 25.     OUTSIDE, ELSEWHERE MIA     [off a bit]  Ben? BEN     [phantom of the opera cringing noise] What? MIA     Ben - I'm over here. BEN     Mia - don't look. MIA     [almost laughing] What? BEN     Please. MIA     All right.  I'll close my eyes. BEN     Thanks.  SOUND     SHUFFLING STEPS TO MIA BEN     Why are you hiding? MIA     I saw something - there are in-tacts maybe looking for me.  I don't know. BEN     They're just full of surprises, aren't they? MIA     Are they? SOUND     MOMENT OF JUST PLODDING ALONG TOGETHER BEN     Helluva way to spend the holidays. MIA     It is Christmas, isn't it?  [beat]  Can I look now? BEN     No!  [short barking laugh]  I - I know it's silly for me to be vain, but, uh - I lost something. MIA     I got you something! BEN     Don't turn around-- Ohhhh. [disappointed] MIA     [concerned] What happened? BEN     Some guy named Gary needed a new face.  MIA     [concerned for him] I hope you got something good for it. BEN     Actually I did.  Take off your shoes. MIA     [more panicked than should be] No! BEN     Don't worry - I'll carry them for you. MIA     No - I...  I kind of needed to make a trade too.  BEN     Your leg--? MIA     I guess feet with toes are sort of collectable. BEN     Oh.  I hope ... [chuckles]  I hope you got something good for it. MIA     [laughs a bit]  SOUND     STICKY SOUND AS SHE STROKES HIS RAW FLESH MIA     At least you kept your lips.  BEN     Are you kidding?  Had to keep those - they're my best feature. MIA     Well, here's a new one, but I don't know how it will go on - you might have to wait until you have a place to hang it again. SOUND     PACKAGE UNWRAPS, OPENS BEN     It's beautiful. MIA     It's latex.  It won't rot or get chewed on by rats.  I think I got the right color, but now - BEN     It's a fine nose. MIA     Not too big?  I mean, I never saw you with-- BEN     It's perfect. MIA     We should get going.  If they're still after me, we'll have to ... find some place else to-- BEN     Waitaminute.  Now you have to open yours. MIA     Oh, you--! SOUND     UNWRAPPING OF PAPER MIA     The patent leather! BEN     Yeah.  You know, maybe you could brace and stuff them-- MIA     It's just the one foot. BEN     Ok, stuff the one, and still walk on it. MIA     Not if we're going a long way - I don't want these puppies to get worn out on any stupid road trip.  [ecstatic intake of breath]  This is the best Christmas ever! BEN     You know?  I think you're right...  Here, take my hand. MIA     [teasing sweetly] That's my hand. BEN     Come on.  [grunt to help her up] MIA     Which way? [their voices, along with their moaning and plodding footsteps, begin to slowly fade out] BEN     A wise man once said "the sun never sets on those who ride into it".  [the quote is from the end of Shock Treatment] MIA     Which wise man was that? BEN     Um.... MIA     Are we talking like "three wise men" kind of wise man? BEN     Um - no.  I think it was... Richard O'Brien. MIA     Who? BEN     You know, the time warp guy. MIA     Oh, man - I haven't been to THAT movie in months. CLOSER  "The Gift of the Magi" is a famous story by O. Henry where a newlywed couple (around 1900) each sell something to buy the other a present - He sells his watch to get her a fancy hair comb and she sells her long hair to get him a new watch fob.  The entire story is inspired by this.    

WDAV and the Fair Play Music Equity Initiative continue the second season of NoteWorthy virtual concerts with R&B artist Nia J joined by flutist Jill O’Neill and violist Ben Geller. We speak to the trio about how well they bonded as a group, and how the addition of the classical instruments helped “breathe some life back” into the singer-songwriter’s music. Nia J Ben Geller Jill O'Neill Transcript Frank Dominguez : This is Frank Dominguez for WDAV’s Piedmont Arts. On Wednesday, August 24 at 7:30 PM, WDAV continues its second season of NoteWorthy virtual concerts presented in partnership with the FAIR PLAY Music Equity Initiative. The series brings together gifted Black and brown artists from the Charlotte music scene with classical musicians for some genre blending and community building. This time, we’re teaming R&B singer-songwriter Nia J with flutist Jill O’Neill and violist Ben Geller. The trio joins me now via Zoom. Thanks, everyone! Jill O’Neill : Thanks for having us. Nia J : Yeah, excited to be here. Frank : Nia, R&B is a category of music that's really as broad and varied as classical music in terms of its range of sounds and artists. So who are some of the musicians, from R&B or otherwise, who have had an influence on your music? Nia : I would say Jhené Aiko comes to mind. I really like her harmonies and the really melodic tunes that she is able to achieve. And just that it’s really peaceful. I like for my music to be tranquil and have that really peaceful state. I really like Daniel Caesar as well. Same thing as far as harmonies - I really like the way that he writes. Both completely different artists, but those are two that come to mind when I think of R&B artists that inspire me. Frank : And if I were asking you to describe what R&B means to you, how would you talk about that? Nia : I don’t know, it's kind of limitless right now! There's no sound that is unique to it at the moment, everyone's taking their own direction with it. I think it gets back to the lyrics. The lyrics are really soulful, I think the message is usually pretty powerful. And I like the contemporary stance that a lot of artists are taking, where we're fusing different genres into it. Frank : Jill, you are a flute professor at Winthrop University and you teach Music Appreciation, but in addition, your resume also includes the Charlotte School of Rock and courses in the History of Rock and Roll. How did you come by this eclectic streak? Jill : It actually doesn't seem eclectic to me, I don't know why it does to everybody else. (Laughs) You know, I grew up listening to heavy metal and punk and being a kid in the 80’s. Yes, I play a very… solit(ary), shall I say, girly instrument. Most of my teachers were men when I was a kid. (The flute) is seen as that frilly, fluffy, pretty, very vocal instrument, but that actually is very unlike me as a human and as a musician. When I have to play flute, I really have to bring myself into Nia’s way of thinking. I really have to calm myself down and try to contain it. Because that’s not the kind of music I really listen to and the two bands that I played with, it’s not pretty flute music. It’s kind of heavy, loud, grinding… and that’s just the kind of person I am. So, when I’m playing drums, I actually sometimes feel more like myself. But the flute is my life. I started playing piccolo when I was six, so of course, everybody insisted that I gravitate towards the flute as well, so I played both. And alto flute and bass flute. But that’s just one very small part of me. I think as a teacher, that’s what I bring to the table, because I make sure that all my students can do everything. I always say, “the more you do, the more marketable you are, so don’t pigeonhole yourself!” Frank : Great point. Ben, most of WDAV’s listeners are used to seeing you in evening wear at concerts by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra. What is the appeal for you personally about stepping outside your usual circle and collaborating with Nia J on this project? Ben Geller : Well, it's… that pigeonholing that Jill was talking about, that’s more of my life. I think when I was younger, I had broader interests, and as I got older, I wanted to focus more and more, and eventually orchestral viola kind of took over my life. Not to say I don't love it, but I miss doing more out of the box stuff. And playing in the orchestra does get you a decent amount of variety. We play all kinds of classical music and modern stuff. But being a directly contributing partner to a project like this was… I mean, I love that. Nia’s got such a unique voice, a beautiful voice, and great songwriting. And working with another colleague in Jill, who brings this whole varied background… this was so much fun. I wish we could do this all of the time, always. Jill : Hear that, Nia? (Laughs) Hint! Ben : Stand by. Nia : Taking the hint. Frank : That's really great to see the obvious bond that has formed between the three of you. Nia, I'm interested in your creative process for writing songs. Are you thinking about the audience and their expectations of you, or are you perhaps more driven by your own experiences and emotions? How does it work for you? Nia : I think anytime I try to start with the audience, it just doesn't work. So usually, it's best if I think about how I'm feeling and experiences that I'd like to share, and usually I get lucky and those experiences can be related to by others and people who are listening. So I just try to be authentic in why I'm writing and taking from my experiences and then just hoping that people will connect. Frank : Jill, I have another question for you. And given that you demonstrated you're not the stereotypical flutist that some people might have in mind, how did you go about working with Nia? What form did the collaboration take? Jill : You know what, it was really easy. She had sent Ben and I her music quite some time before we got together, and Ben and I just kind of had - immediately, I mean, we’ve known each other and played with each other for a long time - we just had a sense of what each song needed from us. So that's why I ended up just grabbing a whole bunch of different instruments before I left because we had no idea what was going to come of rehearsals. It was a neat kind of hodgepodge of listen to a tune, grab a different instrument, try something… substitute one instrument for another, until we just found it. I don't think that's a secret. I think that's the way most people write music. So it was fun for us to have that beautiful base of stuff that she had already written. It made our jobs really easy, don’t you think, Ben? (Laughs) It really wasn’t taxing for us. We did have to decide a few times, and Nia was really prominent in the conversations, about how much of the music do we keep and add us on to, versus trying to have us recreate that. It wasn’t an easy task when Ben and I felt like, “Oh my God, we have to play flute and viola. How are we going to make her music sound (right)?” That was really scary. Until she had this look on her face, like “No, you don’t have to do that. You can do anything you want.” And as soon as we realized that, it was on. I mean, we just kind of went crazy. And when Ben got out his mandolin, Nia just looked at me like, “Yeah. This is going. This is what we want.” Frank : Ben, how about you? What was the transition to playing music in this sort of milieu? Easy, or difficult, or how did you manage it? Ben : You know, viola is a backup instrument. We don’t… it's not always “spotlight” for us, for sure. So thinking about it in this vein was a little bit (of) where I live, in how to best support a good clear melody. And viola didn’t always make sense, so I happen to have this wonderful mandolin that I love and don't play enough of, and it seemed to fit on a few of Nia’s songs, so we kept using it. Frank : One definite message I'm getting from this is that there's a lot more to the contemporary classical musician than first meets the eye and than I think the average audience member might realize, not only in terms of your training and background but your interests and the ways you express yourself. Nia, when you were getting ready for this NoteWorthy concert, did you have any role in playing… in terms of choosing the instruments or the musicians who would be performing with you? Nia : I wasn't really picky. They asked what types of instruments (I’d like), and I’m like, “I don’t know!” It’s been a while since I’ve worked with classical musicians. I did choir, and we always performed alongside classical musicians, but that was in high school, so I’m like, “Whatever you think sounds like it will fit with my music.” I was randomly paired with Jill and Ben, and it was great because Jill… the first day that we rehearsed, she brought like fifty different instruments. So it was nice that we could experiment, as they were saying, and just play around to see what worked and what didn’t. I had no idea what route I would take with it. Frank : I’m going to give you the last word, Nia, and ask you what stands out for you as the most memorable part of working with Jill and Ben specifically as classically trained musicians? What did that combination bring to the songs you had written and have been performing? Nia : I think they definitely helped breathe some life back into the music. After performing the same songs over and over again, sometimes you lose touch with them. So working with Jill and Ben helped me reconnect with them in a way that I hope the audience will see when they watch the performance. And just who they are as people, too. I’ve grown really fond of you guys, and getting to work together was awesome. I’m just really grateful to have gotten to meet both of them. Frank : My guests have been R&B singer-songwriter Nia J and flutist Jill O’Neill, as well as violist Ben Geller. On Wednesday, August 24th at 7:30 PM, you can hear them perform when WDAV continues the second season of NoteWorthy virtual concerts, presented in partnership with the FAIR PLAY Music Equity Initiative. The series brings together gifted Black and brown artists from the Charlotte music scene with classical musicians for some genre blending and community building music. And you can watch WDAV’s YouTube channel to catch the video or WDAV’s Facebook page. You can also get more information about the artists and the series from noteworthyclassical.org. Thank you, everyone, for speaking with me. Jill : Thanks, Frank. Ben : Thanks for having us, Frank. Nia : Thanks! Frank : For WDAV’s Piedmont Arts, I’m Frank Dominguez.

Marlo: This may be the coolest thing we have found at CES this year. So the Bzigo is a well, in fact, I’m gonna let Ben describe this to you, but it’s an amazing product that a lot of people are gonna take advantage of. So, Hey, Ben, welcome to the Tech Ranch. Ben: Thanks […] The post Mosquito Free Room with Bzigo appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

About Ben KehoeBen Kehoe is a Cloud Robotics Research Scientist at iRobot and an AWS Serverless Hero. As a serverless practitioner, Ben focuses on enabling rapid, secure-by-design development of business value by using managed services and ephemeral compute (like FaaS). Ben also seeks to amplify voices from dev, ops, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs.Twitter: @ben11kehoeMedium: ben11kehoeGitHub: benkehoeLinkedIn: ben11kehoeiRobot: www.irobot.comWatch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/B0QChfAGvB0 This episode is sponsored by CBT Nuggets and Lumigo.TranscriptJeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly.Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Marshburn.Jeremy: And this is Serverless Chats. And this is a momentous occasion on Serverless Chats because we are welcoming in Rebecca Marshburn as an official co-host of Serverless Chats.Rebecca: I'm pretty excited to be here. Thanks so much, Jeremy.Jeremy: So for those of you that have been listening for hopefully a long time, and we've done over 100 episodes. And I don't know, Rebecca, do I look tired? I feel tired.Rebecca: I've never seen you look tired.Jeremy: Okay. Well, I feel tired because we've done a lot of these episodes and we've published a new episode every single week for the last 107 weeks, I think at this point. And so what we're going to do is with you coming on as a new co-host, we're going to take a break over the summer. We're going to revamp. We're going to do some work. We're going to put together some great content. And then we're going to come back on, I think it's August 30th with a new episode and a whole new show. Again, it's going to be about serverless, but what we're thinking is ... And, Rebecca, I would love to hear your thoughts on this as I come at things from a very technical angle, because I'm an overly technical person, but there's so much more to serverless. There's so many other sides to it that I think that bringing in more perspectives and really being able to interview these guests and have a different perspective I think is going to be really helpful. I don't know what your thoughts are on that.Rebecca: Yeah. I love the tech side of things. I am not as deep in the technicalities of tech and I come at it I think from a way of loving the stories behind how people got there and perhaps who they worked with to get there, the ideas of collaboration and community because nothing happens in a vacuum and there's so much stuff happening and sharing knowledge and education and uplifting each other. And so I'm super excited to be here and super excited that one of the first episodes I get to work on with you is with Ben Kehoe because he's all about both the technicalities of tech, and also it's actually on his Twitter, a new compassionate tech values around humility, and inclusion, and cooperation, and learning, and being a mentor. So couldn't have a better guest to join you in the Serverless Chats community and being here for this.Jeremy: I totally agree. And I am looking forward to this. I'm excited. I do want the listeners to know we are testing in production, right? So we haven't run any unit tests, no integration tests. I mean, this is straight test in production.Rebecca: That's the best practice, right? Total best practice to test in production.Jeremy: Best practice. Right. Exactly.Rebecca: Straight to production, always test in production.Jeremy: Push code to the cloud. Here we go.Rebecca: Right away.Jeremy: Right. So if it's a little bit choppy, we'd love your feedback though. The listeners can be our observability tool and give us some feedback and we can ... And hopefully continue to make the show better. So speaking of Ben Kehoe, for those of you who don't know Ben Kehoe, I'm going to let him introduce himself, but I have always been a big fan of his. He was very, very early in the serverless space. I read all his blogs very early on. He was an early AWS Serverless Hero. So joining us today is Ben Kehoe. He is a cloud robotics research scientist at iRobot, as I said, an AWS Serverless Hero. Ben, welcome to the show.Ben: Thanks for having me. And I'm excited to be a guinea pig for this new exciting format.Rebecca: So many observability tools watching you be a guinea pig too. There's lots of layers to this.Jeremy: Amazing. All right. So Ben, why don't you tell the listeners for those that don't know you a little bit about yourself and what you do with serverless?Ben: Yeah. So I mean, as with all software, software is people, right? It's like Soylent Green. And so I'm really excited for this format being about the greater things that technology really involves in how we create it and set it up. And serverless is about removing the things that don't matter so that you can focus on the things that do matter.Jeremy: Right.Ben: So I've been interested in that since I learned about it. And at the time saw that I could build things without running servers, without needing to deal with the scaling of stuff. I've been working on that at iRobot for over five years now. As you said early on in serverless at the first serverless con organized by A Cloud Guru, now plural sites.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And yeah. And it's been really exciting to see it grow into the large-scale community that it is today and all of the ways in which community are built like this podcast.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. I love everything that you've done. I love the analogies you've used. I mean, you've always gone down this road of how do you explain serverless in a way to show really the adoption of it and how people can take that on. Serverless is a ladder. Some of these other things that you would ... I guess the analogies you use were always great and always helped me. And of course, I don't think we've ever really come to a good definition of serverless, but we're not talking about that today. But ...Ben: There isn't one.Jeremy: There isn't one, which is also a really good point. So yeah. So welcome to the show. And again, like I said, testing in production here. So, Rebecca, jump in when you have questions and we'll beat up Ben from both sides on this, but, really ...Rebecca: We're going to have Ben from both sides.Jeremy: There you go. We'll embrace him from both sides. There you go.Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.Jeremy: So one of the things though that, Ben, you have also been very outspoken on which I absolutely love, because I'm in very much closely aligned on this topic here. But is about infrastructure as code. And so let's start just quickly. I mean, I think a lot of people know or I think people working in the cloud know what infrastructure as code is, but I also think there's a lot of people who don't. So let's just take a quick second, explain what infrastructure as code is and what we mean by that.Ben: Sure. To my mind, infrastructure as code is about having a definition of the state of your infrastructure that you want to see in the cloud. So rather than using operations directly to modify that state, you have a unified definition of some kind. I actually think infrastructure is now the wrong word with serverless. It used to be with servers, you could manage your fleet of servers separate from the software that you were deploying onto the servers. And so infrastructure being the structure below made sense. But now as your code is intimately entwined in the rest of your resources, I tend to think of resource graph definitions rather than infrastructure as code. It's a less convenient term, but I think it's worth understanding the distinction or the difference in perspective.Jeremy: Yeah. No, and I totally get that. I mean, I remember even early days of cloud when we were using the Chefs and the Puppets and things like that, that we were just deploying the actual infrastructure itself. And sometimes you deploy software as part of that, but it was supporting software. It was the stuff that ran in the runtime and some of those and some configurations, but yeah, but the application code that was a whole separate process, and now with serverless, it seems like you're deploying all those things at the same time.Ben: Yeah. There's no way to pick it apart.Jeremy: Right. Right.Rebecca: Ben, there's something that I've always really admired about you and that is how strongly you hold your opinions. You're fervent about them, but it's also because they're based on this thorough nature of investigation and debate and challenging different people and yourself to think about things in different ways. And I know that the rest of this episode is going to be full with a lot of opinions. And so before we even get there, I'm curious if you can share a little bit about how you end up arriving at these, right? And holding them so steady.Ben: It's a good question. Well, I hope that I'm not inflexible in these strong opinions that I hold. I mean, it's one of those strong opinions loosely held kind of things that new information can change how you think about things. But I do try and do as much thinking as possible so that there's less new information that I have to encounter to change an opinion.Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah.Ben: Yeah. I think I tend to try and think about how people ... But again, because it's always people. How people interact with the technology, how people behave, how organizations behave, and then how technology fits into that. Because sometimes we talk about technology in a vacuum and it's really not. Technology that works for one context doesn't work for another. I mean, a lot of my strong opinions are that there is no one right answer kind of a thing, or here's a framework for understanding how to think about this stuff. And then how that fits into a given person is just finding where they are in that more general space. Does that make sense? So it's less about finding out here's the one way to do things and more about finding what are the different options, how do you think about the different options that are out there.Rebecca: Yeah, totally makes sense. And I do want to compliment you. I do feel like you are very good at inviting new information in if people have it and then you're like, "Aha, I've already thought of that."Ben: I hope so. Yeah. I was going to say, there's always a balance between trying to think ahead so that when you discover something you're like, "Oh, that fits into what I thought." And the danger of that being that you're twisting the information to fit into your preexisting structures. I hope that I find a good balance there, but I don't have a principle way of determining that balance or knowing where you are in that it's good versus it's dangerous kind of spectrum.Jeremy: Right. So one of the opinions that you hold that I tend to agree with, I have some thoughts about some of the benefits, but I also really agree with the other piece of it. And this really has to do with the CDK and this idea of using CloudFormation or any sort of DSL, maybe Terraform, things like that, something that is more domain-specific, right? Or I guess declarative, right? As opposed to something that is imperative like the CDK. So just to get everybody on the same page here, what is the top reasons why you believe, or you think that DSL approach is better than that iterative approach or interpretive approach, I guess?Ben: Yeah. So I think we get caught up in the imperative versus declarative part of it. I do think that declarative has benefits that can be there, but the way that I think about it is with the CDK and infrastructure as code in general, I'm like mildly against imperative definitions of resources. And we can get into that part, but that's not my smallest objection to the CDK. I'm moderately against not being able to enforce deterministic builds. And the CDK program can do anything. Can use a random number generator and go out to the internet to go ask a question, right? It can do anything in that program and that means that you have no guarantees that what's coming out of it you're going to be able to repeat.So even if you check the source code in, you may not be able to go back to the same infrastructure that you had before. And you can if you're disciplined about it, but I like tools that help give you guardrails so that you don't have to be as disciplined. So that's my moderately against. My strongly against piece is I'm strongly against developer intent remaining client side. And this is not an inherent flaw in the CDK, is a choice that the CDK team has made to turn organizational dysfunction in AWS into ownership for their customers. And I don't think that's a good approach to take, but that's also fixable.So I think if we want to start with the imperative versus declarative thing, right? When I think about the developers expressing an intent, and I want that intent to flow entirely into the cloud so that developers can understand what's deployed in the cloud in terms of the things that they've written. The CDK takes this approach of flattening it down, flattening the richness of the program the developer has written into ... They think of it as assembly language. I think that is a misinterpretation of what's happening. The assembly language in the process is the imperative plan generated inside the CloudFormation engine that says, "Here's how I'm going to take this definition and turn it into an actual change in the cloud.Jeremy: Right.Ben: They're just translating between two definition formats in CDK scene. But it's a flattening process, it's a lossy process. So then when the developer goes to the Console or the API has to go say, "What's deployed here? What's going wrong? What do I need to fix?" None of it is framed in terms of the things that they wrote in their original language.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And I think that's the biggest problem, right? So drift detection is an important thing, right? What happened when someone went in through the Console? Went and tweaked some stuff to fix something, and now it's different from the definition that's in your source repository. And in CloudFormation, it can tell you that. But what I would want if I was running CDK is that it should produce another CDK program that represents the current state of the cloud with a meaningful file-level diff with my original program.Jeremy: Right. I'm just thinking this through, if I deploy something to CDK and I've got all these loops and they're generating functions and they're using some naming and all this kind of stuff, whatever, now it produces this output. And again, my naming of my functions might be some function that gets called to generate the names of the function. And so now I've got all of these functions named and I have to go in. There's no one-to-one map like you said, and I can imagine somebody who's not familiar with CloudFormation which is ultimately what CDK synthesizes and produces, if you're not familiar with what that output is and how that maps back to the constructs that you created, I can see that as being really difficult, especially for younger developers or developers who are just getting started in that.Ben: And the CDK really takes the attitude that it's going to hide those things from those developers rather than help them learn it. And so when they do have to dive into that, the CDK refers to it as an escape hatch.Jeremy: Yeah.Ben: And I think of escape hatches on submarines, where you go from being warm and dry and having air to breathe to being hundreds of feet below the sea, right? It's not the sort of thing you want to go through. Whereas some tools like Amplify talk about graduation. In Amplify they aim to help you understand the things that Amplify is doing for you, such that when you grow beyond what Amplify can provide you, you have the tools to do that, to take the thing that you built and then say, "Okay, I know enough now that I understand this and can add onto it in ways that Amplify can't help with."Jeremy: Right.Ben: Now, how successful they are in doing that is a separate question I think, but the attitude is there to say, "We're looking to help developers understand these things." Now the CDK could also if the CDK was a managed service, right? Would not need developers to understand those things. If you could take your program directly to the cloud and say, "Here's my program, go make this real." And when it made it real, you could interact with the cloud in an understanding where you could list your deployed constructs, right? That you can understand the program that you wrote when you're looking at the resources that are deployed all together in the cloud everywhere. That would be a thing where you don't need to learn CloudFormation.Jeremy: Right.Ben: Right? That's where you then end up in the imperative versus declarative part where, okay, there's some reasons that I think declarative is better. But the major thing is that disconnect that's currently built into the way that CDK works. And the reason that they're doing that is because CloudFormation is not moving fast enough, which is not always on the CloudFormation team. It's often on the service teams that aren't building the resources fast enough. And that's AWS's problem, AWS as an entire company, as an organization. And this one team is saying, "Well, we can fix that by doing all this client side."What that means is that the customers are then responsible for all the things that are happening on the client side. The reason that they can go fast is because the CDK team doesn't have ownership of it, which just means the ownership is being pushed on customers, right? The CDK deploys Lambda functions into your account that they don't tell you about that you're now responsible for. Right? Both the security and operations of. If there are security updates that the CDK team has to push out, you have to take action to update those things, right? That's ownership that's being pushed onto the customer to fix a lack of ACM certificate management, right?Jeremy: Right. Right.Ben: That is ACM not building the thing that's needed. And so AWS says, "Okay, great. We'll just make that the customer's problem."Jeremy: Right.Ben: And I don't agree with that approach.Rebecca: So I'm sure as an AWS Hero you certainly have pretty good, strong, open communication channels with a lot of different team members across teams. And I certainly know that they're listening to you and are at least hearing you, I should say, and watching you and they know how you feel about this. And so I'm curious how some of those conversations have gone. And some teams as compared to others at AWS are really, really good about opening their roadmap or at least saying, "Hey, we hear this, and here's our path to a solution or a success." And I'm curious if there's any light you can shed on whether or not those conversations have been fruitful in terms of actually being able to get somewhere in terms of customer and AWS terms, right? Customer obsession first.Ben: Yeah. Well, customer obsession can mean two things, right? Customer obsession can mean giving the customer what they want or it can mean giving the customer what they need and different AWS teams' approach fall differently on that scale. The reason that many of those things are not available in CloudFormation is that those teams are ... It could be under-resourced. They could have a larger majority of customer that want new features rather than infrastructure as code support. Because as much as we all like infrastructure as code, there are many, many organizations out there that are not there yet. And with the CDK in particular, I'm a relatively lone voice out there saying, "I don't think this ownership that's being pushed onto the customer is a good thing." And there are lots of developers who are eating up CDK saying, "I don't care."That's not something that's in their worry. And because the CDK has been enormously successful, right? It's fixing these problems that exists. And I don't begrudge them trying to fix those problems. I think it's a question of do those developers who are grabbing onto those things and taking them understand the full total cost of ownership that the CDK is bringing with it. And if they don't understand it, I think AWS has a responsibility to understand it and work with it to help those customers either understand it and deal with it, right? Which is where the CDK takes this approach, "Well, if you do get Ops, it's all fine." And that's somewhat true, but also many developers who can use the CDK do not control their CI/CD process. So there's all sorts of ways in which ... Yeah, so I think every team is trying to do the best that they can, right?They're all working hard and they all have ... Are pulled in many different directions by customers. And most of them are making, I think, the right choices given their incentives, right? Given what their customers are asking for. I think not all of them balance where customers ... meeting customers where they are versus leading them where they should, like where they need to go as well as I would like. But I think ... I had a conclusion to that. Oh, but I think that's always a debate as to where that balance is. And then the other thing when I talk about the CDK, that my ideal audience there is less AWS itself and more AWS customers ...Rebecca: Sure.Ben: ... to understand what they're getting into and therefore to demand better of AWS. Which is in general, I think, the approach that I take with AWS, is complaining about AWS in public, because I do have the ability to go to teams and say, "Hey, I want this thing," right? There are plenty of teams where I could just email them and say, "Hey, this feature could be nice", but I put it on Twitter because other people can see that and say, "Oh, that's something that I want or I don't think that's helpful," right? "I don't care about that," or, "I think it's the wrong thing to ask for," right? All of those things are better when it's not just me saying I think this is a good thing for AWS, but it being a conversation among the community differently.Rebecca: Yeah. I think in the spirit too of trying to publicize types of what might be best next for customers, you said total cost of ownership. Even though it might seem silly to ask this, I think oftentimes we say the words total cost of ownership, but there's actually many dimensions to total cost of ownership or TCO, right? And so I think it would be great if you could enumerate what you think of as total cost of ownership, because there might be dimensions along that matrices, matrix, that people haven't considered when they're actually thinking about total cost of ownership. They're like, "Yeah, yeah, I got it. Some Ops and some security stuff I have to do and some patches," but they might only be thinking of five dimensions when you're like, "Actually the framework is probably 10 to 12 to 14." And so if you could outline that a bit, what you mean when you think of a holistic total cost of ownership, I think that could be super helpful.Ben: I'm bad at enumeration. So I would miss out on dimensions that are obvious if I was attempting to do that. But I think a way that I can, I think effectively answer that question is to talk about some of the ways in which we misunderstand TCO. So I think it's important when working in an organization to think about the organization as a whole, not just your perspective and that your team's perspective in it. And so when you're working for the lowest TCO it's not what's the lowest cost of ownership for my team if that's pushing a larger burden onto another team. Now if it's reducing the burden on your team and only increasing the burden on another team a little bit, that can be a lower total cost of ownership overall. But it's also something that then feeds into things like political capital, right?Is that increased ownership that you're handing to that team something that they're going to be happy with, something that's not going to cause other problems down the line, right? Those are the sorts of things that fit into that calculus because it's not just about what ... Moving away from that topic for a second. I think about when we talk about how does this increase our velocity, right? There's the piece of, "Okay, well, if I can deploy to production faster, right? My feedback loop is faster and I can move faster." Right? But the other part of that equation is how many different threads can you be operating on and how long are those threads in time? So when you're trying to ship a feature, if you can ship it and then never look at it again, that means you have increased bandwidth in the future to take on other features to develop other new features.And so even if you think about, "It's going to take me longer to finish this particular feature," but then there's no maintenance for that feature, that can be a lower cost of ownership in time than, "I can ship it 50% faster, but then I'm going to periodically have to revisit it and that's going to disrupt my ability to ship other things," right? So this is where I had conversations recently about increasing use of Step Functions, right? And being able to replace Lambda functions with Step Functions express workflows because you never have to go back to those Lambdas and update dependencies in them because dependent bot has told you that you need to or a version of Python is getting deprecated, right? All of those things, just if you have your Amazon States Language however it's been defined, right?Once it's in there, you never have to touch it again if nothing else changes and that means, okay, great, that piece is now out of your work stream forever unless it needs to change. And that means that you have more bandwidth for future things, which serverless is about in general, right? Of say, "Okay, I don't have to deal with this scaling problems here. So those scaling things. Once I have an auto-scaling group, I don't have to go back and tweak it later." And so the same thing happens at the feature level if you build it in ways that allow you to do that. And so I think that's one of the places where when we focus on, okay, how fast is this getting me into production, it's okay, but how often do you have to revisit it ...Jeremy: Right. And so ... So you mentioned a couple of things in there, and not only in that question, but in the previous questions as you were talking about the CDK in general, and I am 100% behind you on this idea of deterministic builds because I want to know exactly what's being deployed. I want to be able to audit that and map that back. And you can audit, I mean, you could run CDK synth and then audit the CloudFormation and test against certain things. But if you are changing stuff, right? Then you have to understand not only the CDK but also the CloudFormation that it actually generates. But in terms of solving problems, some of the things that the CDK does really, really well, and this is something where I've always had this issue with just trying to use raw CloudFormation or Serverless Framework or SAM or any of these things is the fact that there's a lot of boilerplate that you often have to do.There's ways that companies want to do something specifically. I basically probably always need 1,400 lines of CloudFormation. And for every project I do, it's probably close to the same, and then add a little bit more to actually make it adaptive for my product. And so one thing that I love about the CDK is constructs. And I love this idea of being able to package these best practices for your company or these compliance requirements, excuse me, compliance requirements for your company, whatever it is, be able to package these and just hand them to developers. And so I'm just curious on your thoughts on that because that seems like a really good move in the right direction, but without the deterministic builds, without some of these other problems that you talked about, is there another solution to that that would be more declarative?Ben: Yeah. In theory, if the CDK was able to produce an artifact that represented all of the non-deterministic dependencies that it had, right? That allowed you to then store that artifacts as you'd come back and put that into the program and say, "I'm going to get out the same thing," but because the CDK doesn't control upstream of it, the code that the developers are writing, there isn't a way to do that. Right? So on the abstraction front, the constructs are super useful, right? CloudFormation now has modules which allow you to say, "Here's a template and I'm going to represent this as a CloudFormation type itself," right? So instead of saying that I need X different things, I'm going to say, "I packaged that all up here. It is as a type."Now, currently, modules can only be playing CloudFormation templates and there's a lot of constraints in what you can express inside a CloudFormation template. And I think the answer for me is ... What I want to see is more richness in the CloudFormation language, right? One of the things that people do in the CDK that's really helpful is say, "I need a copy of this in every AZ."Jeremy: Right.Ben: Right? There's so much boilerplate in server-based things. And CloudFormation can't do that, right? But if you imagine that it had a map function that allowed you to say, "For every AZ, stamp me out a copy of this little bit." And then that the CDK constructs allowed to translate. Instead of it doing all this generation only down to the L one piece, instead being able to say, "I'm going to translate this into more rich CloudFormation templates so that the CloudFormation template was as advanced as possible."Right? Then it could do things like say, "Oh, I know we need to do this in every AZ, I'm going to use this map function in the CloudFormation template rather than just stamping it out." Right? And so I think that's possible. Now, modules should also be able to be defined as CDK programs. Right? You should be able to register a construct as a CloudFormation tag.Jeremy: It would be pretty cool.Ben: There's no reason you shouldn't be able to. Yeah. Because I think the declarative versus imperative thing is, again, not the most important piece, it's how do we move ... It's shifting right in this case, right? That how do you shift what's happening with the developer further into the process of deployment so that more of their context is present? And so one of the things that the CDK does that's hard to replicate is have non-local effects. And this is both convenient and I think of code smell often.So you can pass a bucket resource from another stack into a piece of code in your CDK program that's creating a different stack and you say, "Oh great, I've got this Lambda function, it needs permissions to that bucket. So add permissions." And it's possible for the CDK programs to either be adding the permissions onto the IAM role of that function, or non-locally adding to that bucket's resource policy, which is weird, right? That you can be creating a stack and the thing that you do to that stack or resource or whatever is not happening there, it's happening elsewhere. I don't think that's a great approach, but it's certainly convenient to be able to do it in a lot of situations.Now, that's not representable within a module. A module is a contained piece of functionality that can't touch anything else. So things like SAM where you can add events onto a function that can go and create ... You create the API events on different functions and then SAM aggregates them and creates an API gateway for you. Right? If AWS serverless function was a module, it couldn't do that because you'd have these in different places and you couldn't aggregate something between all of them and put them in the top-level thing, right?This is what CloudFormation macros enable, but they don't have a... There's no proper interface to them, right? They don't define, "This is what I'm doing. This is the kind of resources I can create." There's none of that that would help you understand them. So they're infinitely flexible, but then also maybe less principled for that reason. So I think there are ways to evolve, but it's investment in the CloudFormation language that allows us to shift that burden from being a flattening inside client-side code from the developer and shifting it to be able to be represented in the cloud.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And I think from that standpoint too if we go back to the solving people's problems standpoint, that everything you explained there, they're loaded with nuances, it's loaded with gotchas, right? Like, "Oh, you can't do this, you can't do that." So that's just why I think the CDK is so popular because it's like you can do so much with it so quickly and it's very, very fast. And I think that trade-off, people are just willing to make it.Ben: Yes. And that's where they're willing to make it, do they fully understand the consequences of it? Then does AWS communicate those consequences well? Before I get into that question of, okay, you're a developer that's brand new to AWS and you've been tasked with standing up some Kubernetes cluster and you're like, "Great. I can use a CDK to do this." Something is malfunctioning. You're also tasked with the operations and something is malfunctioning. You go in through the Console and maybe figure out all the things that are out there are new to you because they're hidden inside L3 constructs, right?You're two levels down from where you were defining what you want, and then you find out what's wrong and you have no idea how to turn that into a change in your CDK program. So instead of going back and doing the thing that infrastructure as code is for, which is tweaking your program to go fix the problem, you go and you tweak it in the Console ...Jeremy: Right. Which you should never do.Ben: ... and you fix it that way. Right. Well, and that's the thing that I struggle with, with the CDK is how does the CDK help the developer who's in that situation? And I don't think they have a good story around that. Now, I don't know. I haven't talked with enough junior developers who are using the CDK about how often they get into that situation. Right? But I always say client-side code is not a replacement for a managed service because when it's client-side code, you still own the result.Jeremy: Right.Ben: If a particular CDK construct was a managed service in AWS, then all of the resources that would be created underneath AWS's problem to make work. And the interface that the developer has is the only level of ownership that they have. Fargate is this. Because you could do all the things that Fargate does with a CDK construct, right? Set up EC2, do all the things, and represent it as something that looks like Fargate in your CDK program. But every time your EC2 fleet is unhealthy that's your problem. With Fargate, that's AWS's problem. If we didn't have Fargate, that's essentially what CDK would be trying to do for ECS.And I think we all recognize that Fargate is very necessary and helpful in that case, right? And I just want that for all the things, right? Whenever I have an abstraction, if it's an abstraction that I understand, then I should have a way of zooming into it while not having to switch languages, right? So that's where you shouldn't dump me out the CloudFormation to understand what you're doing. You should help me understand the low-level things in the same language. And if it's not something that I need to understand, it should be a managed service. It shouldn't be a bunch of stuff that I still own that I haven't looked at.Jeremy: Makes sense. Got a question, Rebecca? Because I was waiting for you to jump in.Rebecca: No, but I was going to make a joke, but then the joke passed, and then I was like, "But should I still make it?" I was going to be like, "Yeah, but does the CDK let you test in production?" But that was a 32nd ago joke and then I was really wrestling with whether or not I should tell it, but I told it anyway, hopefully, someone gets a laugh.Ben: Yeah. I mean, there's the thing that Charity Majors says, right? Which is that everybody tests in production. Some people are lucky enough to have a development environment in production. No, sorry. I said that the wrong way. It's everybody has a test environment. Some people are lucky enough that it's not in production.Rebecca: Yeah. Swap that. Reverse it. Yeah.Ben: Yeah.Jeremy: All right. So speaking of talking to developers and getting feedback from them, so I actually put a question out on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and got a lot of really interesting reactions. And essentially I asked, "What do you love or hate about infrastructure as code?" And there were a lot of really interesting things here. I don't know, maybe it might be fun to go through a couple of these and get your thoughts on them. So this is probably not a great one to start with, but I thought it was interesting because this I think represents the frustration that a lot of us feel. And it was basically that they love that automation minimizes future work, right? But they hate that it makes life harder over time. And that pretty much every approach to infrastructure in, sorry, yeah, infrastructure in code at the present is flawed, right? So really there are no good solutions right now.Ben: Yeah. CloudFormation is still a pain to learn and deal with. If you're operating in certain IDEs, you can get tab completion.Jeremy: Right.Ben: If you go to CDK you get tab completion, which is, I think probably most of the value that developers want out of it and then the abstraction, and then all the other fancy things it does like pipelines, which again, should be a managed service. I do think that person is absolutely right to complain about how difficult it is. That there are many ways that it could be better. One of the things that I think about when I'm using tools is it's not inherently bad for a tool to have some friction to use it.Jeremy: Right.Ben: And this goes to another infrastructure as code tool that goes even further than the CDK and says, "You can define your Lambda code in line with your infrastructure definition." So this is fine with me. And there's some other ... I think Punchcard also lets you do some of this. Basically extracts out the bits of your code that you say, "This is a custom thing that glues together two things I'm defining in here and I'll make that a Lambda function for you." And for me, that is too little friction to defining a Lambda function.Because when I define a Lambda function, just going back to that bringing in ownership, every time I add a Lambda function, that's something that I own, that's something that I have to maintain, that I'm responsible for, that can go wrong. So if I'm thinking about, "Well, I could have API Gateway direct into DynamoDB, but it'd be nice if I could change some of these fields. And so I'm just going to drop in a little sprinkle of code, three lines of code in between here to do some transformation that I want." That is all of sudden an entire Lambda function you've brought into your infrastructure.Jeremy: Right. That's a good point.Ben: And so I want a little bit of friction to do that, to make me think about it, to make me say, "Oh, yeah, downstream of this decision that I am making, there are consequences that I would not otherwise think about if I'm just trying to accomplish the problem," right? Because I think developers, humans, in general, tend to be a bit shortsighted when you have a goal especially, and you're being pressured to complete that goal and you're like, "Okay, well I can complete it." The consequences for later are always a secondary concern.And so you can change your incentives in that moment to say, "Okay, well, this is going to guide me to say, "Ah, I don't really need this Lambda function in here. Then I'm better off in the long term while accomplishing that goal in the short term." So I do think that there is a place for tools making things difficult. That's not to say that the amount of difficult that infrastructure as code is today is at all reasonable, but I do think it's worth thinking about, right?I'd rather take on the pain of creating an ASL definition by hand for express workflow than the easier thing of writing Lambda code. Because I know the long-term consequences of that. Now, if that could be flipped where it was harder to write something that took more ownership, it'd be just easy to do, right? You'd always do the right thing. But I think it's always worth saying, "Can I do the harder thing now to pay off to pay off later?"Jeremy: And I always call those shortcuts "tomorrow-Jeremy's" problem. That's how I like to look at those.Ben: Yeah. Yes.Jeremy: And the funny thing about that too is I remember right when EventBridge came out and there was no CloudFormation support for a long time, which was super frustrating. But Serverless Framework, for example, implemented a custom resource in order to do that. And I remember looking at a clean stack and being like, "Why are there two Lambda functions there that I have no idea?" I'm like, "I didn't publish ..." I honestly thought my account was compromised that somebody had published a Lambda function in there because I'm like, "I didn't do that." And then it took me a while to realize, I'm like, "Oh, this is what this is." But if it is that easy to just create little transform functions here and there, I can imagine there being thousands of those in your account without anybody knowing that they even exist.Ben: Now, don't get me wrong. I would love to have the ability to drop in little transforms that did not involve Lambda functions. So in other words, I mean, the thing that VTL does for API Gateway, REST APIs but without it being VTL and being ... Because that's hard and then also restricted in what you can do, right? It's not, "Oh, I can drop in arbitrary code in here." But enough to say, "Oh, I want to flip ... These fields should go from a key-value mapping to a list of key-value, right? In the way that it addresses inconsistent with how tags are defined across services, those kinds of things. Right? And you could drop that in any service, but once you've defined it, there's no maintenance for you, right?You're writing JavaScript. It's not actually a JavaScript engine underneath or something. It's just getting translated into some big multi-tenant fancy thing. And I have a hypothesis that that should be possible. You should be able to do it where you could even do it in the parsing of JSON, being able to do transforms without ever having to have the whole object in memory. And if we could get that then, "Oh, sure. Now I have sprinkled all over the place all of these little transforms." Now there's a little bit of overhead if the transform is defined correctly or not, right? But once it is, then it just works. And having all those little transforms everywhere is then fine, right? And that incentive to make it harder it doesn't need to be there because it's not bringing ownership with it.Rebecca: Yeah. It's almost like taking the idea of tomorrow-Jeremy's problem and actually switching it to say tomorrow-Jeremy's celebration where tomorrow-Jeremy gets to look back at past-Jeremy and be like, "Nice. Thank you for making that decision past-Jeremy." Because I think we often do look at it in terms of tomorrow-Jeremy will think of this, we'll solve this problem rather than how do we approach it by saying, how do I make tomorrow-Jeremy thankful for it today-Jeremy? And that's a simple language, linguistic switch, but a hard switch to actually make decisions based on.Ben: Yeah. I don't think tomorrow-Ben is ever thankful for today-Ben. I think it's tomorrow-Ben is thankful for yesterday-Ben setting up the incentives correctly so that today-Ben will do the right thing for tomorrow-Ben. Right? When I think about people, I think it's easier to convince people to accept a change in their incentives than to convince them to fight against their incentives sustainably.Jeremy: Right. And I think developers and I'm guilty of this too, I mean, we make decisions based off of expediency. We want to get things done fast. And when you get stuck on that problem you're like, "You know what? I'm not going to figure it out. I'm just going to write a loop or I'm going to do whatever I can do just to make it work." Another if statement here, "Isn't going to hurt anybody." All right. So let's move to ... Sorry, go ahead.Ben: We shouldn't feel bad about that.Jeremy: You're right.Ben: I was going to say, we shouldn't feel bad about that. That's where I don't want tomorrow-Ben to have to be thankful for today-Ben, because that's the implication there is that today-Ben is fighting against his incentives to do good things for tomorrow-Ben. And if I don't need to have to get to that point where just the right path is the easiest path, right? Which means putting friction in the right places than today-Ben ... It's never a question of whether today-Ben is doing something that's worth being thankful for. It's just doing the job, right?Jeremy: Right. No, that makes sense. All right. I got another question here, I think falls under the category of service discovery, which I know is another topic that you love. So this person said, "I love IaC, but hate the fuzzy boundaries where certain software awkwardly fall. So like Istio and Prometheus and cert-manager. That they can be considered part of the infrastructure, but then it's awkward to deploy them when something like Terraform due to circular dependencies relating to K8s and things like that."So, I mean, I know that we don't have to get into the actual details of that, but I think that is an important aspect of infrastructure as code where best practices sometimes are deploy a stack that has your permanent resources and then deploy a stack that maybe has your more femoral or the ones that are going to be changing, the more mutable ones, maybe your Lambda functions and some of those sort of things. If you're using Terraform or you're using some of these other services as well, you do have that really awkward mix where you're trying to use outputs from one stack into another stack and trying to do all that. And really, I mean, there are some good tools that help with it, but I mean just overall thoughts on that.Ben: Well, we certainly need to demand better of AWS services when they design new things that they need to be designed so that infrastructure as code will work. So this is the S3 bucket notification problem. A very long time ago, S3 decided that they were going to put bucket notifications as part of the S3 bucket. Well, CloudFormation at that point decided that they were going to put bucket notifications as part of the bucket resource. And S3 decided that they were going to check permissions when the notification configuration is defined so that you have to have the permissions before you create the configuration.This creates a circular dependency when you're hooking it up to anything in CloudFormation because the dependency depends on the resource policy on an SNS topic, and SQS queue or a Lambda function depends on the bucket name if you're letting CloudFormation name the bucket, which is the best practice. Then bucket name has to exist, which means the resource has to have been created. But the notification depends on the thing that's notifying, which doesn't have the names and the resource policy doesn't exist so it all fails. And this is solved in a couple of different ways. One of which is name your bucket explicitly, again, not a good practice. Another is what SAM does, which says, "The Lambda function will say I will allow all S3 buckets to invoke me."So it has a star permission in it's resource policy. So then the notification will work. None of which is good or there's custom resources that get created, right? Now, if those resources have been designed with infrastructure as code as part of the process, then it would have been obvious, "Oh, you end up with a circular pendency. We need to split out bucket notifications as a separate resource." And not enough teams are doing this. Often they're constrained by the API that they develop first ...Jeremy: That's a good point.Ben: ... they come up with the API, which often makes sense for a Console experience that they desire. So this is where API Gateway has this whole thing where you create all the routes and the resources and the methods and everything, right? And then you say, "Great, deploy." And in the Console you only need one mutable working copy of that at a time, but it means that you can't create two deployments or update two stages in parallel through infrastructure as code and API Gateway because they both talk to this mutable working copy state and would overwrite each other.And if infrastructure as code had been on their list would have been, "Oh, if you have a definition of your API, you should be able to go straight to the deployment," right? And so trying to push that upstream, which to me is more important than infrastructure as code support at launch, but people are often like, "Oh, I want CloudFormation support at launch." But that often means that they get no feedback from customers on the design and therefore make it bad. KMS asymmetric keys should have been a different resource type so that you can easily tell which key types are in your template.Jeremy: Good point. Yeah.Ben: Right? So that you can use things like CloudFormation Guard more easily on those. Sure, you can control the properties or whatever, but you should be able to think in terms of, "I have a symmetric key or an asymmetric key in here." And they're treated completely separately because you use them completely differently, right? They don't get used to the same place.Jeremy: Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned the lacking support at launch because that was another complaint. That was quite prevalent in this thread here, was people complaining that they don't get that CloudFormation support right away. But I think you made a very good point where they do build the APIs first. And that's another thing. I don't know which question asked me or which one of these mentioned it, but there was a lot of anger over the fact that you go to the API docs or you go to the docs for AWS and it focuses on the Console and it focuses on the CLI and then it gives you the API stuff and very little mention of CloudFormation at all. And usually, you have to go to a whole separate set of docs to find the CloudFormation. And it really doesn't tie all the concepts together, right? So you get just a block of JSON or of YAML and you're like, "Am I supposed to know what everything does here?"Ben: Yeah. I assume that's data-driven. Right? And we exist in this bubble where everybody loves infrastructure as code.Jeremy: True.Ben: And that AWS has many more customers who set things up using Console, people who learn by doing it first through the Console. I assume that's true, if it's not, then the AWS has somehow gotten on the extremely wrong track. But I imagine that's how they find that they get the right engagement. Now maybe the CDK will change some of this, right? Maybe the amount of interest that is generating, we'll get it to the point where blogs get written with CDK programs being written there. I think that presents different problems about what that CDK program might hide from when you're learning about a service. But yeah, it's definitely not ... I wrote a blog for AWS and my first draft had it as CloudFormation and then we changed it to the Console. Right? And ...Jeremy: That must have hurt. Did you die a little inside when that happened?Ben: I mean, no, because they're definitely our users, right? That's the way in which they interact with data, with us and they should be able to learn from that, their company, right? Because again, developers are often not fully in control of this process.Jeremy: Right. That's a good point.Ben: And so they may not be able to say, "I want to update this through CloudFormation," right? Either because their organization says it or just because their team doesn't work that way. And I think AWS gets requests to prevent people from using the Console, but also to force people to use the Console. I know that at least one of them is possible in IAM. I don't remember which, because I've never encountered it, but I think it's possible to make people use the Console. I'm not sure, but I know that there are companies who want both, right? There are companies who say, "We don't want to let people use the API. We want to force them to use the Console." There are companies who say, "We don't want people using the Console at all. We want to force them to use the APIs."Jeremy: Interesting.Ben: Yeah. There's a lot of AWS customers, right? And there's every possible variety of organization and AWS should be serving all of them, right? They're all customers. And certainly, I want AWS to be leading the ones that are earlier in their cloud journey and on the serverless ladder to getting further but you can't leave them behind, I think it's important.Jeremy: So that people argument and those different levels and coming in at a different, I guess, level or comfortability with APIs versus infrastructure as code and so forth. There was another question or another comment on this that said, "I love the idea of committing everything that makes my solution to text and resurrect an entire solution out of nothing other than an account key. Loved the ability to compare versions and unit tests, every bit of my solution, and not having to remember that one weird setting if you're using the Console. But hate that it makes some people believe that any coder is now an infrastructure wizard."And I think this is a good point, right? And I don't 100% agree with it, but I think it's a good point that it basically ... Back to your point about creating these little transformations in Pulumi, you could do a lot of damage, I mean, good or bad, right? When you are using these tools. What are your thoughts on that? I mean, is this something where ... And again, the CDK makes it so easy for people to write these constructs pretty quickly and spin up tons of infrastructure without a lot of guard rails to protect them.Ben: So I think if we tweak the statement slightly, I think there's truth there, which isn't about the self-perception but about what they need to be. Right? That I think this is more about serverless than about infrastructure as code. Infrastructure as code is just saying that you can define it. Right? I think it's more about the resources that are in a particular definition that require that. My former colleague, Aaron Camera says, "Serverless means every developer is an architect" because you're not in that situation where the code you write goes onto something, you write the whole thing. Right?And so you do need to have those ... You do need to be an infrastructure wizard whether you're given the tools to do that and the education to do that, right? Not always, like if you're lucky. And the self-perception is again an even different thing, right? Especially if coders think that there's nothing to be learned ... If programmers, software developers, think that there's nothing to be learned from the folks who traditionally define the infrastructure, which is Ops, right? They think, "Those people have nothing to teach me because now I can do all the things that they did." Well, you can create the things that they created and it does not mean that you're as good at it ...Jeremy: Or responsible for monitoring it too. Right.Ben: ... and have the ... Right. The monitoring, the experience of saying these are the things that will come back to bite you that are obvious, right? This is how much ownership you're getting into. There's very much a long-standing problem there of devaluing Ops as a function and as a career. And for my money when I look at serverless, I think serverless is also making the software development easier because there's so much less software you need to write. You need to write less software that deals with the hard parts of these architectures, the scaling, the distributed computing problems.You still have this, your big computing problems, but you're considering them functionally rather than coding things that address them, right? And so I see a lot of operations folks who come into serverless learn or learn a new programming language or just upscale, right? They're writing Python scripts to control stuff and then they learn more about Python to be able to do software development in it. And then they bring all of that Ops experience and expertise into it and look at something and say, "Oh, I'd much rather have step functions here than something where I'm running code for it because I know how much my script break and those kinds of things when an API changes or ... I have to update it or whatever it is."And I think that's something that Tom McLaughlin talks about having come from an outside ground into serverless. And so I think there's definitely a challenge there in both directions, right? That Ops needs to learn more about software development to be more engaged in that process. Software development does need to learn much more about infrastructure and is also at this risk of approaching it from, "I know the syntax, but not the semantics, sort of thing." Right? We can create ...Jeremy: Just because I can doesn't mean I should.Ben: ... an infrastructure. Yeah.Rebecca: So Ben, as we're looping around this conversation and coming back to this idea that software is people and that really software should enable you to focus on the things that do matter. I'm wondering if you can perhaps think of, as pristine as possible, an example of when you saw this working, maybe it was while you've been at iRobot or a project that you worked on your own outside of that, but this moment where you saw software really working as it should, and that how it enabled you or your team to focus on the things that matter. If there's a concrete example that you can give when you see it working really well and what that looks like.Ben: Yeah. I mean, iRobot is a great example of this having been the company without need for software that scaled to consumer electronics volumes, right? Roomba volumes. And needing to build a IOT cloud application to run connected Roombas and being able to do that without having to gain that expertise. So without having to build a team that could deal with auto-scaling fleets of servers, all of those things was able to build up completely serverlessly. And so skip an entire level of organizational expertise, because that's just not necessary to accomplish those tasks anymore.Rebecca: It sounds quite nice.Ben: It's really great.Jeremy: Well, I have one more question here that I think could probably end up ... We could talk about for another hour. So I will only throw it out there and maybe you can give me a quick answer on this, but I actually had another Twitter thread on this not too long ago that addressed this very, very problem. And this is the idea of the feedback cycle on these infrastructure as code tools where oftentimes to deploy infrastructure changes, I mean, it just takes time. In many cases things can run in parallel, but as you said, there's race conditions and things like that, that sometimes things have to be ... They just have to be synchronous. So is this something where there are ways where you see in the future these mutations to your infrastructure or things like that potentially happening faster to get a better feedback cycle, or do you think that's just something that we're going to have to deal with for a while?Ben: Yeah, I think it's definitely a very extensive topic. I think there's a few things. One is that the deployment cycle needs to get shortened. And part of that I think is splitting dev deployments from prod deployments. In prod it's okay for it to take 30 seconds, right? Or a minute or however long because that's at the end of a CI/CD pipeline, right? There's other things that are happening as part of that. Now, you don't want that to be hours or whatever it is. Right? But it's okay for that to be proper and to fully manage exactly what's going on in a principled manner.When you're doing for development, it would be okay to, for example, change the Lambda code without going through CloudFormation to change the Lambda code, right? And this is what an architect does, is there's a notion of a dirty deploy which just packages up. Now, if your resource graph has changed, you do need to deploy again. Right? But if the only thing that's changing is your code, sure, you can go and say, "Update function code," on that Lambda directly and that's faster.But calling it a dirty deploy is I think important because that is not something that you want to do in prod, right? You don't want there to be drift between what the infrastructure as code service understands, but then you go further than that and imagine there's no reason that you actually have to do this whole zip file process. You could be R sinking the code directly, or you could be operating over SSH on the code remotely, right? There's many different ways in which the loop from I have a change in my Lambda code to that Lambda having that change could be even shorter than that, right?And for me, that's what it's really about. I don't think that local mocking is the answer. You and Brian Rue were talking about this recently. I mean, I agree with both of you. So I think about it as I want unit tests of my business logic, but my business logic doesn't deal with AWS services. So I want to unit test something that says, "Okay, I'm performing this change in something and that's entirely within my custom code." Right? It's not touching other services. It doesn't mean that I actually need adapters, right? I could be dealing with the native formats that I'm getting back from a given service, but I'm not actually making calls out of the code. I'm mocking out, "Well, here's what the response would look like."And so I think that's definitely necessary in the unit testing sense of saying, "Is my business logic correct? I can do that locally. But then is the wiring all correct?" Is something that should only happen in the cloud. There's no reason to mock API gateway into Lambda locally in my mind. You should just be dealing with the Lambda side of it in your local unit tests rather than trying to set up this multiple thing. Another part of the story is, okay, so these deploys have to happen faster, right? And then how do we help set up those end-to-end test and give you observability into it? Right? X-Ray helps, but until X-Ray can sort through all the services that you might use in the serverless architecture, can deal with how does it work in my Lambda function when it's batching from Kinesis or SQS into my function?So multiple traces are now being handled by one invocation, right? These are problems that aren't solved yet. Until we get that kind of inspection, it's going to be hard for us to feel as good about cloud development. And again, this is where I feel sometimes there's more friction there, but there's bigger payoff. Is one of those things where again, fighting against your incentives which is not the place that you want to be.Jeremy: I'm going to stop you before you disagree with me anymore. No, just kidding! So, Rebecca, you have any final thoughts or questions for Ben?Rebecca: No. I just want to say to both of you and to everyone listening that I hope your today self is celebrating your yesterday-self right now.Jeremy: Perfect. Well, Ben, thank you so much for joining us and being a guinea pig as we said on this new format that we are trying. Excellent guinea pig. Excellent.Rebecca: An excellent human too but also great guinea pig.Jeremy: Right. Right. Pretty much so. So if people want to find out more about you, read some of the stuff you're doing and working on, how do they do that?Ben: I'm on Twitter. That's the primary place. I'm on LinkedIn, I don't post much there. And then I write articles that show up on Medium.Rebecca: And just so everyone knows your Twitter handle I'll say it out loud too. It's @ben11kehoe, K-E-H-O-E, ben11kehoe.Jeremy: Right. Perfect. All right. Well, we will put all that in the show notes and hopefully people will like this new format. And again, we'd love your feedback on this, things that you'd like us to do in the future, any ideas you have. And of course, make sure you reach out to Ben. He's an amazing resource for serverless. So again, thank you for everything you do, and thank you for being on the show.Ben: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was great.Rebecca: Good to see you. Thank you.

If done correctly, a two-headed strategy of driving sales on Amazon and your native website could yield huge dividends. But what does that kind of strategy look like, and how can you create a scenario where one builds off of another?The answer lies in assortment and pathways into the brand experience. Ben Knox is a bit of an expert in this area and he’s here to share his expertise. Ben earned his stripes working on Red Bull’s ecommerce strategy, and now serves as the vice president of ecommerce and growth at Super Coffee. According to Ben, brands need to come up with an assortment strategy that allows customers to get what they want, when and where they want it, but also leads them back to the type of brand experience you want them to have. He also details how beneficial a subscription model can be, if done right. Plus, he gives some tips on how to get the most out of your texting strategies and what is going on in the wild west of customer acquisition.Main Takeaways:Assorted Assets: When you sell on Amazon, as well as natively on your website, you need to decide on an assortment strategy and how each site can build off each other. Whether that is only placing a select assortment of products on Amazon, or having a full assortment across channels, but offering more subscriptions and sales on your website, it’s crucial to have pathways back to your branded channels.Gotta Flex: If you offer subscriptions, you can only achieve true customer success if you offer flexibility. Even if it means that your customers can cancel a subscription ten minutes after they sign up, those are the kinds of options you need to offer. Doing so allows your customers to feel unburdened and that the experience is risk-free, which makes them more inclined to sign up.Text Me: There are benefits to separating your text strategies in order to maintain the relationship you want with your customers. Having separate text numbers for subscription management and branded content will help customers differentiate the experiences they are having and allow you to cultivate a true VIP experience with those who opt into the branded company channel.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back to Up Next In Commerce. This is your host Stephanie Postles, co-founder and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Ben Knox joining us. He's the Vice President of ecommerce and growth at Super Coffee. Ben, welcome.Ben:Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.Stephanie:I'm really excited to have you on. So, you have a very long background in ecommerce. I feel like you're a veteran when I was looking through your profile. And I was hoping you can start there and go into where you've been and how you got here.Ben:Absolutely. I think that's a great foundational question. I started my career at Red Bull at the headquarters in Los Angeles. And looking back on it, couldn't be more thankful of a place to start my career. Obviously, one of the most exciting and powerful brands that CPG has seen in the United States, if not worldwide over the past several decades. So learned a lot there. Started in brand marketing, rotated into corporate strategy, eventually distribution, before finding my way into a special project on ecommerce and at Red Bull at the time And even today, the entirety of ecommerce really relates to Amazon.Ben:For one reason or another, Red Bull only wants to sell merchandise and things like that in a direct consumer way. Everything else is for retail and Amazon would be considered there. So, that was my first experience in ecommerce was leading global Amazon strategy for Red Bull starting in the United States and then, exporting that to Western Europe which was a really exciting opportunity. Great way to learn ecommerce from really the best and brightest, Amazon. Spent a lot of time in Seattle, working with the vendor team there and the related marketing teams. But eventually was really interested in going deeper in particular on direct consumer, paid media, things like that. And so, found my only real opportunity to do that was to leave that great brand, leave the company and join what ended up being several other startups and companies since where I've gotten deeper.Stephanie:Cool. So what does your day to day look like at Super Coffee and what is Super Coffee?Ben:Yeah, absolutely. Super Coffee is an enhanced Coffee Company playing really in almost all consumer packaged goods coffee categories. So, we have bottled coffees, can coffees that really tastes like delicious frappuccinos but don't have any of the calories sugar or carbs and other added positive ingredients, functional ingredients for health. And we also sell similar super espresso product. It's like a double shot espresso, more portable, more on the go, less liquid, same performance.Ben:But also, as of last year, we've moved into ground coffee with added vitamins and antioxidants, k-cup coffee pods and then, previous to that we had been selling creamer, super creamer, similar profile, very decadent, indulgent, but high on health, low on sugar and calories and all that working together as one stop coffee shop for the health minded consumer.Stephanie:That's awesome. And then I saw... so the company was started by three brothers. Right? Was it when you were in college?Ben:Yeah, Jordan as the youngest brother, Jordan DeCicco and his brothers Jake and Jim, his two older brothers, founded the company together. Jordan actually formulated the first Super Coffee in his dorm room and enjoyed it himself and then was sharing it with his former basketball team players. He was a college athlete and got an insight that there's really nothing like this out there.Ben:They didn't enjoy... they enjoyed the flavor and the taste of Starbucks drinks and cafe drinks, but not the way it made them feel, nor the sugar and the calories. And they also liked the idea of energy drinks, but again, not great ingredient profiles and tons of sugar and those things too. So they didn't want to put that in their body and that's really why they started Super Coffee. And, like mentioned, Jordan formulated it in his dorm room for the first time, and then, slowly but surely convinced his brothers to join in on his mission of disrupting the coffee industry. And now, five, if not six years later, here we are and and it's really amazing what they've accomplished.Stephanie:Yeah, it's definitely huge progress. I saw that they were on Shark Tank back in 2017 and then, now recently, they received investment from like big NBA stars and NFL quarterbacks. And then, I think most recently, the company is valued at like 200 million in June or something which blows my mind for something that started in a dorm room. That's amazing.Ben:Yeah, let's not forget J.Lo and A-Rod are our investors and partners in the company and it's no big deal.Stephanie:No big deal, J-Lo. What is up, girl? So, obviously, this company is awesome, which is why you're there, what does your day to day look like as the VP of ecommerce and growth? What do you do?Ben:Yeah, it's varied. So overseeing the sales division of ecommerce so, the actual divisional P&L for Shopify, Amazon, and then, that long tail of third party online retailers. Thrive Market is really awesome standout, actually a new partner of ours, early this year and really great partners so far. So really excited to go deeper on that relationship. Walmart.com is in the mix there as well. So, that's from a sales, divisional responsibility. That's what we're working with. But then, also responsible for the 3PL, whose services all of our ecommerce order fulfillment, the 3PL also services our Amazon business, so is basically, [inaudible] and inbound logistics to Amazon for FBA. And they also do some managed services for us. On top of that, also responsible for overseeing all of our acquisition or retention marketing efforts to really drive both of those two strong horses.Stephanie:Cool. So, what is the breakout between selling on Amazon, selling on your site, selling on other websites, what does that breakout look like? Are you favoring one area right now? Has it changed in the last year?Ben:No, it's the... the really interesting thing about it for us and it's funny now, having done this with a few different brands, it's so brand specific, where your consumers desire to shop from you and for us, we really maintain a very consistent mix so what you might often see is a brand, start strip consumer, then they start moving into Amazon and customers just shift in to Amazon, because everybody has a Prime account these days. It's very easy, very dependable, great return policies, all that so there's a lot of trust there. You're already doing a lot of shopping there. So oftentimes, you'll just find your customer base moving to Amazon in that somewhat uncontrollable way.Ben:There's definitely things that you can do to maintain a more healthy mix. And I would say a lot of those, factors and criteria are in place at Super Coffee and so as a result, we maintain a really healthy mix, let's call it 60%, Shopify, 40%, Amazon, and both both scaling pretty consistently against each other and maintaining that mix and we expect that to continue this year.Stephanie:So what are some neat tricks with selling with Amazon because we've had a lot of smaller brands on here, DTC players who... we've, of course, talked about Amazon creating a white label version of their product and we've also had a couple people be like, there's nothing to worry about as long as your product is strong. How do you guys think about selling on Amazon? And what opportunities are there that maybe people are missing?Ben:Yeah. So, there's many ways to skin a cat there and again, it's very brand dependent on what's right for us. Our context is we really are a retail brand first. So we're now, I think, in over 30,000 outlets across the United States, approaching 60 to 65% ACV so we're getting pretty ubiquitously available. But obviously, nothing compared to a Red Bull that, at the time I left the company over 300,000 outlets, so you can stumble and buy a Red Bull no matter where you are.Ben:Super Coffee is a bit earlier in that lifecycle, but still predominantly retail brand. I think in relative to our category, we really want the consumer to be able to have perfect availability of our products and to be able to purchase our products, when, where, how often, from whom they like. And so from, this is leading into an assortment strategy, from an assortment perspective, maybe another brand might have only select assortment on Amazon and then, to get the full brand experience, you have to go to the website. So, that's a natural path toward toward direct consumer.Ben:There's other ways that we do it. However, we provide the best subscription experience and discount on our website. So, we actually offer subscription on a limited basis. And when we do only the 5% funding amount on Amazon, whereas our website is 15% and so, naturally loyalists, people who are really engaged with the brand will come over to us. And there's other things like special bundles and different content and things like that the website offers that Amazon simply can't.Stephanie:Are you oftentimes finding your customers on Amazon and then, speaking to them in a way that brings them to your website afterwards, top of funnel, they come there and then, you pull them in to create a loyal customer base and retain them?Ben:Yeah, there's a master design for that to occur. It's almost though in practice a bit of pushing a boulder uphill, in that people are demonstrating an intent to purchase somewhere, and there's something there, right? And so, if they are starting to buy on Amazon, that's really an Amazon customer, most likely and then, the factors that would drive somebody from Amazon to our website are a bit more natural and gradual per se. That being said, we do nurture that behavior but it's not a really aggressive, offensive strategy that I would say we've unlocked. Even though I would like to say that we've unlocked that as a massive arbitrage opportunity on the platform, we do find that people tend to stay where they start.Stephanie:Yeah. I mean, what would the ideal state look like to you, if you were to make it into the perfect funnel? How would you have it work, if you could just choose?Ben:Semi-limited assortment on Amazon, full assortment, full experience on the direct consumer website. And then, different mechanics and communication strategies in between that Amazon experience, that trial opportunity into the direct consumer experience. Again, slightly different for us, since we're beverage and consumable, or really on the go and post product, retail product, but a brand that's maybe less oriented in that way, could more aggressively attack that type of opportunity.Stephanie:Yeah. Cool. And how do you guys think about subscriptions? Because that was a thing that I feel like everyone wanted everyone to have subscriptions to their products? And then, I feel like a lot of people realize, okay, that's actually not best for our customers, because they don't need a subscription for whenever we have t-shirts or something so we are going to drop that from their offering. And now, it seems like it's making a comeback, but only with certain products. So how did you guys think about that as part of your customer retention strategy?Ben:Yeah, subscriptions for us are paramount, I would say. So, again, a very consumable product. Ideally, we are 50 to 100% of your coffee consumption, obviously, when you're on the go on the weekends, you're out with friends, things like that, pop into coffee shops, you can't avoid that, of course, but relative to... especially, from being at home and through the pandemic in the last nine months, we really want to be that one source coffee solution for you at home, irrespective of your on the go behaviors. And so, for that, subscription, works perfectly on that repeat purchase behavior.Ben:And it's great because you don't have to recruit or remind that shopper to come back and buy every single time they're running low. It's actually right... it's going to happen anyways. But then, we give them the opportunity to say, Hey, not right now, I'm not quite through my last order or we give them the opportunity to say, Hey, I blazed through that order. Let me get my next one, ASAP. So there's that opportunity to modulate on the consumer side of things, that makes it an ideal situation.Ben:I think the technology is not quite there yet to make that a perfect experience, that 30 day cadence is not always perfect for the amount of units in a case and the amount of units in a case is going to last you longer or less time than it would, me. So it's not perfect, but we are working on communication strategies and software and technology to help improve that subscription experience for our customers.Stephanie:Yeah, I think that flexibility is key, I even think about something like Stitch Fix where they say you can pause the orders, you can start it up again, you can take a vacation from it, whatever you need to do. And, I think that feels very risk free like you mean, I can just try it once and then, pause it for three months, and then, try it again? And it's just so different from how it was, I would even say a year ago, where it felt very, cut and dried, you're in it or not. You can get six months in or you can't have it at all, which shows so much has changed a lot.Ben:You're committed. Yeah, we offer ultimate flexibility. You can add a subscription to cart, checkout and then, go and log into your account and cancel that subscription, five minutes later and while that's not ideal, it's okay. That's okay. And really, it's more modeling less than, in a way, the function of subscription itself, we're modeling a loyalty program, in a sense. And so, if our subscription customers get 15%, every order, don't really care if they're actually on a subscription that auto bills them, or they're managing that bill on their own. So, we find ways to incentivize and give rewards and give backs regardless of the way that they are actually going about that.Stephanie:Yeah. That's cool. So, what are some of the biggest driving forces with the program that work well? Is it just the cost savings that usually attracts people and then, something else, once they're in it or what do those incentives look like?Ben:Yeah, it's the cost savings and then, the stated flexibility, the money back guarantee, things like that get them in and interested. Thereafter, one of the things that we invested in six or nine months ago, was basically text message based subscription management. And so essentially, three days before re-bill, an automated text will go out and say, hey, your order of, fill in the blank, is set to ship in three days, would you like to make any changes? Gives the opportunity to opt out, cancel, gives the opportunity to say, ship it right away. Thank God, you messaged me. I'm ready for it now.Ben:They can add products that are not even subscribable. So, they can add season or one time products to try, things that might not even be subscribable. They can modify quantity. They can do all kinds of stuff. It's just as easy as a text message back and forth. So, that's the experience that we're trying to create both at managing and an automatic and dynamic concierge experience for the customer. To really make that experience carefree, really feel like they have as much control as they want over the experience and to steer away from what you were mentioning, which is the old history of you opt into a subscription, you get a deal. And then, you try to go log in and cancel, you can't even figure out how to cancel the dang thing and that's not-Stephanie:Call our customer service representatives and [inaudible].Ben:My gosh, yeah. Email us or okay, that's crazy. So that's not the business that we're in. We're in it to spread positivity, create a great connection with our consumers because now, they're not just buying from us on our website. They're buying from us in stores and they have family members and friends and that kind of experience goes a long way and, the opposite experience also goes a long way.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. What did it look like after you implemented the SMS stuff? And then, all of a sudden, the customers can easily just be like, and cancel. What did the results look like? Was there anything surprising there?Ben:Yeah. So you'd think, okay, you're would go through the roof. And because you give somebody such an easy way to cancel, it's almost a fear mindset rather than an opportunity mindset and what it actually did for us is it didn't increase cancels, but it decreased cx inbound. So, it actually decreased our costs on the customer service, customer experience side of things, because customers could then, choose their own adventure, right? And self service.Ben:And, philosophically, we haven't gotten the data yet until a software, right? The customer has a great experience, doesn't have to email support, all of that back and forth, they're probably more likely to come back later because there's less thrash, less risk of a negative experience. So all in all, great from that perspective, and great from the perspective of allowing people to increase quantities, add new products, things like that. So AOB subscription has also increased.Stephanie:That's awesome. Is there anything else that you do in the text message arena where you're like, this is also working well, or another way that you communicate with your customers outside of just your orders coming up from a subscription standpoint?Ben:Yeah, we do. We do marketing blogs so to... the other part of our text message strategy, and I like calling it a text strategy, not an SMS strategy.Ben:It's pretty much what everybody calls it, but I even see it sometimes where companies or brands, call it that to consumers. And I see it printed on packaging or it's like, send us an SMS. I don't know if any consumer knows what an SMS is.Stephanie:Calling on a landline.Ben:Yeah. Exactly. So, relative to that, it's actually two separate softwares that power it, which we would like to synthesize over time. So two separate phone numbers that these communications come from. So, we let people know that this is your subscription phone number and then, this is the Super Coffee personality brand phone number. And on that second one, we really nurture that as a VIP audience and so, when we do a product launch, things like that, we let people know if they want early access to the new products or early access to, let's call it a Black Friday, Cyber Monday sale, or what have you, you're going to get a 24 hours heads up, to everybody else, to get that early access if you're opted into our text message database.Ben:And so, that's largely how we use it, get early access to things like that product launches, seasonal products and then, the occasional motivational marketing push, things like that that are more conversational, less, we're trying to sell you something. And, I think that's the direction that we want to continue to go deeper on, is driving personalization, driving value, as opposed to asking so much. I think that's something that the industry is striving for as well.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. It definitely is a tricky channel to where you see a lot of people doing it wrong. And I can see brands being hesitant to even try it out because they probably have experienced something not so great themselves. And they're like, I just don't want to get it wrong. Because I mean, I'm sure you get the random text where you're like, I don't need that coupon right now. I'm in bed, watching Bachelor, which, Ben, I know, you're doing the same thing. I just don't need that right now. It's unhelpful.Ben:There's this... I don't know, who invented it is probably decades, if not 100 years old but this concept of, I think Gary Vaynerchuk might have popularized it, but this concept of give twice, or give three times or five times before you ask for anything. So, it's all about that, giving value and that can be modeled through social media, that can be modeled through email marketing, and that certainly, I think, should be modeled in text messaging but it's tough as marketers or as business owners, business operators, as soon as you stop being consumer, sometimes it's hard not to become incentivized as the business owner and want to sell, sell, sell.Ben:I think sometimes as the business owner or the operator, it's easy to forget what it's like being a consumer and slip into that sales mindset. But I think it's important for us to all, empathize as much as possible with being on the other end and really think about what you would like to receive from a brand as opposed to just another sort of promo?Stephanie:Yeah, I definitely agree that as a business owner, seeing all this data, it's easy to slip into that mindset to, you people like that and, especially, if you're being measured by certain KPIs, and you're like, well, if I send out three random poems or jokes and my boss sees that, they're going to wonder what I'm doing and I can explain it versus my marketing message, which is very kosher and by the books, might not perform as well, but less explaining, just-Ben:Yeah, exactly. So, I think depending on where you are in your organization, or who's listening to this, doing this correctly could require a lot of education upward or throughout the organization. And it's tough, because it's a long term thing. And it's building trust with the consumer, but you also have to build trust internally, to give yourself that runway to operate like this. So there's no silver bullet here, but something to strive for, for sure.Stephanie:Yeah, I agree. So what do you see right now, when it comes to the customer acquisition landscape. What has so far 2021 looked like? Is it very different than prior years?Ben:Yeah, it's interesting, I think... two things happened last year and people started spending more time on the Internet and on their devices as a result of the pandemic. So in a way, there's now more reach, more impressions, for sure. And then, there is definitely a surge of people buying more heavily online in certain categories than they ever were before. But I think, we're moving toward the back end of that and reverting to a new mean or a new normal. And, now we've also had nine months for advertisers and brands to catch up to starting to sell and advertise on the internet. And so, there's a crowding from the brand side of things and certainly over the last... [inaudible] always but even now, in starting the year, things are just continuing to escalate and get more expensive on CPM and CPR basis.Ben:So putting increasing pressures on cost per acquisition, and overall customer acquisition costs for a brand new business that might have been previously very reliant on paid digital advertising to find new customers. And so, at least what we're focusing on is diversifying, not only just in channel, so testing obviously, other advertising channels to acquire customers. But diversifying away from paid and more into owned and earned and shared, obviously, longer term investments, things like Content Marketing blog, or let's say, diving deep and building an organic presence on TikTok, which is a buzzword and everyone's very interested in right now.Ben:Pinterest is another area. Pinterest is really the third search engine of the internet, I would say, behind Amazon and Google. So that's something that's been hiding in plain sight for a long time and strategies like that to nurture a healthier upper funnel and then, Paid may be more of converting, retargeting remarketing engine, than a prospecting engine is probably the best way forward. from our perspective currently.Stephanie:Yeah, and I think that's a really good viewpoint, especially when you think about what's happening around the privacy rules and what people have relied on for a long time when it came to Facebook ads and like what IOS is coming out with, it seems like a lot is changing but brands are going to have to rethink how they find new customers just like you're mentioning.Ben:100%.Stephanie:Crazy. So, when you're talking about, right now, there's also a lot of crowding from the brands who popped up, who either came online that weren't or a lot of brand new DTC companies that all started last year, a lot of them did, how do you think about making sure that Super Coffee shows its value in a way when there's a lot of other coffee players popping up and keto brands and butters that you add to your coffee, it feels like the space is getting very saturated. How do you know keep showcasing your value and why you're so different than a lot of other brands?Ben:Yeah. 100%. We tested so many different creative strategies, and this is... we'll talk about paid advertising for a second. Ultimately, we've come down to a few key creative formats or messaging strategies on the paid side that work really well for us. One that we continue to own is is a comparison style ad, which is putting us up against a really sort of delicious looking, we'll call it a Starbucks or a Dunkin Donuts cafe drink with foam and cream and swirl and things like that. And then, putting our product directly next to it, and saying, hey, everything about this... these two things are the same, actually, except for and then we flashed through the nutritional profile, the calories, the sugar, the carbs, that works really well. And, that's not only driving value for us, from an ecommerce perspective, but that's driving global value for us all the way, through the omni channel environment. So we're really happy about that type of communication and that creative strategy, very hard working. That side of things-Stephanie:It's hard too because you're instantly anchoring yourself to a brand that everyone already knows about. So you don't even have to explain, it tastes like this, it's got its own, you don't even have to worry about that when you anchor yourself to a larger brand like that.Ben:Exactly. It's interesting. It's a strategy that has being successfully used by the Magic Spoons of the World, maybe a bit easier, right? Because we've all known for a long time now that cereal is not good for us but we love it, right? I grew up on cereal. I'm from the Midwest and I subsisted off the cereal. So when I learned Magic Spoon came out and Catalina Crunch and different brands like this, it was like, no brainer. I'm ready to try that because I've been dying to eat cereal for a decade and I told myself I couldn't anymore. That's a great comparison.Ben:Ours, we were comparing it against a bottled product in the past. But less household penetration on those types of products, what we really found success in is actually comparing it to the cafe drinks, actually looks like they get an indulgent frappuccino from Starbucks and maybe less people actually, these days are getting frappuccinos than they did so it's moving toward that sterile example, as opposed to bottled or canned coffee drinks, we might still in a way not know that those are super unhealthy for us.Stephanie:What are some other creatives like that that you guys are leaning into?Ben:Yeah, otherwise, we really lean into UGC style creative, raw stuff, really focused on the product this year. So our product, we do have packaging that really distinguishes ourselves from the category, a lot of white in our packaging, we have that Angular slash to our packaging that really stands out. And what we found is really just a standard iPhone style photo, tightly cropped bottle or can is oriented such that the user can actually read it, if they're scanning through the feed. And, with some situational context that could feel like it's a real person, right? It could actually be real UGC, could be manufactured, etc.Ben:Either way, it gives that sense of, okay, I learned that this product in comparison to this other drink is a lot healthier for me. And then, okay, on my second impression from the brand, I'm seeing that this is actually a real thing that exists in the world. I can see myself holding and consuming this product. Let me click through and give it a try. So, that's the funnel, oversimplified, how we think about things currently but both of those creative styles have been very hard working for us historically.Stephanie:That's such an important shift. I've even seen personally like when I'm on Instagram or Tiktok, and I see people using something or they have something in their room, where I'm like, it's like my living room right now. But I don't remember thinking that way, a couple years ago, where I was looking for that more, I really want something to look formal and official. It's already the real deal if you spend a lot of money on it, where now I mean, our best performing ads for Mission are, I'll be walking around with the iPhone, doing the ad and that movement, and organic look does way better than anything that we've actually produced in a formal fashion.Ben:Totally. Yeah. People are turning off the advertising these days. The more polished it looks, the worse it performs, in a way, which is so ironic.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. So, what channels are you most excited to... I mean, I know you mentioned like TikTok and Pinterest but then, everyone's talking about TikTok, where are you guys zooming in on for this coming year that you're really excited about?Ben:Yeah, we started investing pretty heavily in podcast advertising, as of the start of the year. So we're advertising on shows like Armchair Expert and Pod Save America and Sibling Rivalry and a whole basket of great shows that have partners that represent our brand and are a great fit for our audience. So that's been going quite well. And that's exciting, because it's supportive of the total business, again, maybe moving from a singular ecommerce mindset to more of an omnichannel view on on the world and the market.Ben:So that's been great, we'll continue to invest there and work that into our ongoing marketing mix, a bit more upper funnel. And then, I think, yeah, as I mentioned, really thinking through a Content Marketing Strategy holistically as an upper funnel driver and obviously, there's different distribution channels, but really owning an editorial calendar, owning our perspective, leveraging our partners, and then, distributing that in the channels that are applicable, and really bringing all that to the world of Super Coffee to life, through our partners and through content, I think, is going to be our bleeding edge this year. And really write the ship relative to upper funnel, mid funnel, bottom funnel, and create that healthy balance that all of us are looking for in this industry.Stephanie:One thing I have been thinking about lately is how... in the next coming years, all these brands are turning into essentially, like media companies creating content, and everyone's going to be trying to pull the consumer back to their blogs, to their hubs, and it's like, instead of just going to Instagram feeds and seeing it on there, you're going to be pulling people back to your websites. I mean, how do you think about that landscape because it feels crazy, thinking about hundreds of brands going to be like, come back to my blog to see content that we're creating. And you have to kind of go in a million different places to find it.Ben:Yeah, I think it just puts an increasing pressure on, I will say quality, quality is in the eye of the beholder, right. So, it's, again, like we mentioned quality from designer or creative director of yesteryear is perfect, polished detail dialed whereas quality these days is on a YouTube channel or TikTok account and from a mobile phone and not really produced and published and polished. I think it's quality, it's relatability, it's authenticity and above and beyond all that, it's having something to say, that really speaks to somebody and makes them feel like they're engaging with a personality, engaging something that means something to them, that makes them feel a certain way. And so, it'll just put an increasing pressure on that confusing definition of quality for the consumer, to really create that connection and say, hey, it's worth subscribing to us directly, as opposed to all these other 100 brands that offer X, Y and Z to you. In order to do that, you're going to stay focused and attention on us and not the rest of them.Stephanie:Yeah, I think about the amount of newsletters that popped up last year where obviously, that whole industry is very much democratized. And now, anyone can make a newsletter and charge for it and I subscribed to quite a few of them. But then, now, I'm like, whoa, what'd I do? I mean, now they're coming in, I'm having to send them into different categories and filter them so you don't hit my inbox. And it makes me think that could be an eventual future for brands too, if you don't figure out how to write something, create something that someone is eager to open and actually wants to hear what you have to say and doesn't just drift over to a corporate create marketing message over time.Ben:Yes, exactly. It just all goes back to giving and creating value and it's dependent on the brand and the Tim Ferriss mindset, which is tools, tips, practices, all of that he gives his audience, that's why you go listen to Tim Ferriss. It's contextually different for a brand or for another personality in a podcast or what have you. So, it's all about knowing what you want to say, knowing what you have to give and share to the world and then, give it as much of that as possible.Stephanie:I agree. All right. Let's shift over to the Lightning Round and Lightning Round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. And, this is where I ask a question and you give an answer under 30 seconds.Ben:Wow. Okay. Exciting.Stephanie:What one thing from 2020 do you hope sticks around throughout 2021?Ben:Wow, not much.Stephanie:I know, that's a hard question.Ben:Well, I think, this is going to be a firm answer but a lot of people are of the belief that COVID accelerated transic technology, transic consumer behavior that would have otherwise taken 10 years to happen so, I think, as a digital marketer, as an ecommerce professional, I think thankful and excited for all the change relative to consumer behavior and online commerce that happened in 2020 and I don't think we are going backward on that so excited and thankful for it and excited for what's next.Stephanie:I like that. What's your favorite resource or resources to stay on top of, like the ecommerce industry as a whole?Ben:There's great podcast like yours. I'm not talking to other podcasts because I was on it, DTC podcasts, I think it's Pallet House labs and speaking to these others, they've got really great newsletters as well.Stephanie:Cool. Sounds good.Ben:[inaudible]. Yeah, they're killing it.Stephanie:What one thing do you not understand that you wish you did?Ben:I feel like I wish I understood almost...I don't feel like I understand anything, ever, in a way especially in this industry, everything is always changing and you would speak to somebody, you had such high confidence over something that you feel like you don't know anything about and that's just the constant feeling that you'll have and so, I think, always maintaining an extreme curiosity over things, continuous learning. You'll never know it all so I think that's in the DNA of somebody successful in this industry in ecommerce and digital is, that needs to be a big thing.Stephanie:Yeah. I agree. What's the last purchase you made online that you normally would not have, online prior to 2020?Ben:Well, I'm a new dog dad.Stephanie:Congrats. What's the dog's name and what kind of dog is it?Ben:Her name is Honey because she's so sweet and she's rescue pup, about six months old and we think she's a lab mixed with jindo which is a Korean breed.Stephanie:Okay. I'm like, I know what kind of dog that is.Ben:It's almost like a Siberian Husky that's more slender.Stephanie:Okay. So you bought that offline or you bought something for her online?Ben:I buy everything for her on the internet now. I never bought the pet category before in my life and certainly not online so that's opening me up to just a completely different world of industry and I think, the number one ecommerce category is vitamins and supplements, number two is pet supplies, number three might be pet food and over 50% of pet products are bought online so pet is the most endemic ecommerce category there is besides vitamins and supplements.Stephanie:Yeah. All right, Ben. Well, this whole conversation has been a blast, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your knowledge. Where can people find out more about you and Super Coffee?Ben:Yeah, Super Coffee is easy, drinksupercoffee.com or just type us in the search bar, Super Coffee in Google or Amazon, they'll find your way to us. Myself, really the only place I exist is on LinkedIn. That really means in any social profiles. I don't have a newsletter or a blog myself but feel free to find me on LinkedIn and make a connection and reach out and love to connect.Stephanie:Perfect. Thanks so much, Ben.Ben:No, thanks, Stephanie. It's been great.

Should You Only Trade The Major Forex Pairs?Podcast: #388: Should You Only Trade The Major Forex Pairs?In this video:00:22 – Joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry Markets01:05 – How safe are your funds?02:13 – Order types and hedging03:30 – Can EU traders work with Blueberry?03:56 – Can we get our money back if the broker goes bankrupt?05:18 – What happens when you get sudden fluctuations in the market?07:06 – Can some trades missed being filled?08:19 – What makes Blueberry Markets different?10:08 – Email me if you’d like to ask Blueberry Markets another questionAndrew Mitchem:Today, we're going to be answering your questions and the number one question that you want to ask a Forex broker. Let's get into it right now.Andrew Mitchem:Hey, traders, it's Andrew Mitchem here at the Forex Trading Coach with video and podcast number 389.Joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry MarketsNow, something a little bit different today. We're joined by Ben Clay at Blueberry Markets over in Australia. Hi there, Ben.Ben:Good day, Andrew. How are you?Andrew Mitchem:I'm fantastic and hope you are well too.Ben:Thanks, mate.Andrew Mitchem:Good. We've got something different. And last week, I asked a lot of questions to people and said, look, I want to know from you what's your most important thing that if you could ask a Forex broker directly and we had a lot of questions come through. What I've done, Ben, I've just listed the main important topics. And if we can, I'd like to ask you those questions and just get your feedback on that so we can help people when deciding who to look for for a Forex broker.Ben:Absolutely. Absolutely, mate.How safe are your funds?Andrew Mitchem:We'll start with this one is from a guy called Percy over in the United Arab Emirates. And Percy said, and this is a very common question. How safe is my money if the broker goes bankrupt, even if they're regulated?Ben:Very good question, Percy. It's one that I get asked very often as well, and is a question that you should be asking your broker, in my opinion. When it comes to any financial institution, there's risks no matter where you hold your funds. Even if it's in with the bank, there's always risks holding funds at any financial institution.Ben:However, in Australia, we're regulated by ASIC, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which enforced the Australian Client Money Laws. This is something that's been in place over the last 10 years or so, I believe, and very strict and diligent. Basically, it states that client's funds are segregated and kept separate from our daily operating funds, can't pay for staff wages, company losses, anything along those lines. But having said that, again, I cannot say the funds are 100% safe, but we are overly compliance here at Blueberry and follow these laws very closely to ensure that client funds are as safe as they possibly can be.Order types and hedgingAndrew Mitchem:Perfect. Thank you, Ben. Second question from Antonio over in Barcelona in Spain. Do you allow pending audit trading with expert advisors, robots? And do you also allow hedging?Ben:Oh, okay. We allow any expert advisors. That's no issues at all and they can place pending orders. We have the four basic types of buy limit, sell limit, buy stop, sell stop, and we do allow hedging. I actually would like to touch on that a little bit because hedging is something I think there's a little bit of misconception around where clients can hedge a trade and it's used as protection.Ben:

Jim Edwards (http://www.thejimedwardsmethod.com) and Stew Smith discuss developing big ideas and what advice for affiliate type of sales. There are many types of affiliate - which one do you want to be? Any advice for Ben: Thanks for accepting me in this group. Been building websites for years as just a hobby, but am now seeking the affiliate marketing path. Ordered copywriting secrets today and can't wait to get stuck in on it.See more great content on the Facebook page The Salescopy and Content Marketing Hacks Closed Group - https://www.facebook.com/groups/copyw... course learn more about salescopy at http://www.thejimedwardsmethod.com

https://abdjuwear.com/

Ben Wood leaves WJOB for Indy, after 3 years of service.

How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? Leads. But it’s impossible for property managers to pursue the blue ocean of 70% self-managed landlords. There's no way to contact them. Until now.  Today, I am talking to Ben Atkin of DoorsUp, a lead generation service for property management entrepreneurs. You’ll Learn... [02:30] Ben’s Background: Grew up surrounded by real estate, property management, and software.  [03:09] 50-unit Student Housing Apartment Complex: Managing students is difficult; Ben moved on to something less stressful and more lucrative.  [03:40] Bootstrap to the Core: Partnered with Coldwell Banker Premier and started property management company from scratch. [04:10] Daily Pre-occupation: How do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management?  [04:41] Database: How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout? How do you contact them?  [05:03] DoorsUp Prototype: Every person in market who owns rental properties and their contact information to track interactions and engagement. [06:20] Secret Sauce: DoorsUp gets information and people ready to sign-up.  [07:37] Grow Doors: Use DoorsUp to pick an area to pursue to contact owners and acquire more properties to manage. [14:20] Future for DoorsUp: Going to NARPM to add service areas.  [16:27] FAQ: Does this have all the data that I can find myself? Data is concise, filtered, and updated regularly to make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective.  [21:14] Bogged Down and Overwhelmed: Grew too fast and doesn’t want to be a property manager!  [22:15] My Thesis: Property management has a serious marketing problem. People cannot find a sustainable way to grow doors.  Tweetables Bootstrap to the Core: Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero Website.  We have a lot of data. Mining and handling data is our expertise. We’re marketing strategy agnostic. Property management has a serious marketing problem. Resources Ben Atkin's Personal Email DoorsUp Ben Atkin on LinkedIn Google Street View Grant Cardone National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Business Network International (BNI) Cole Realty Resource SmartZip  REDX  DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow hackers to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow hacker. DoorGrow hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not, because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. Today, I'm hanging out with Ben Atkin from a new startup, it sounds like, called DoorsUp. Ben, welcome. Ben: Thanks, Jason. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm just going to go ahead and say this and geek out out of the way. I've watched literally every single one of your podcast and I can jive so much with that intro. It seems like it's changed a little bit in the last. Did I notice that? You changed that intro to include a couple more things recently? Jason: I have made some subtle changes, yes. Ben: Subtle changes, okay. I love that. I'm really excited to be on this show. I'm just stoked to be here. Jason: Let's get into your background. You've got this startup called DoorsUp, which in my understanding is a lead gen service for property management entrepreneurs, so they can get more owners which sounds very in alignment with what we do to optimize companies so they can handle those leads, so they can effectively, organically, create that business. Tell us how did you get into this space? Give us some background on Ben. Who the heck are you? Ben: Yeah. It's a long long road. I'm a second generation real estate person as well as second generation software developer and software person. My dad has a real estate company, was a real estate developer. The most inopportune time to be a real estate developer in 2006-2007. I grew up surrounded by real estates, surrounded by property management, and also surrounded by software. Anyway, I got my start in actually having experiences in property management in college. I was managing a 50-unit student housing apartment complex. If anybody is familiar with student housing, they know that that is just a difficult job to manage students. 50 units is about 250 leases in student housing. I was looking for something a little bit more lucrative and a little less stressful. I found an opportunity in my local market with a Coldwell Banker property management franchise or Coldwell Banker Premier, partnered with that franchise, and started with a property management company from scratch. Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero website—nothing; we just started from the ground. Jason: Bootstrap. Ben: Bootstrap. Yeah, absolute to the core. I have very little experience in property management at that time even though I did my best at pretending that I did. That was our major problem was how do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management? That was my preoccupation daily because I wasn't being paid. You talk about bootstrap, I was living on savings trying to grow a property management company. That was my challenge. That was my problem. I remember speaking to my broker at this franchise. I waited at his office for about an hour. I was brainstorming with him. I said, "How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout?" It's not like there's this big database of everybody who owns rental property and a way to contact them. That's really was the impetus for what we developed and what we started to pursue. I leveraged a little bit of my connection with my dad and my brothers who were software engineers, I have a software engineering background a little bit, and we built the prototype of DoorsUp, which is exactly that. It's a database of every person in your market virtually who owns rental properties. A way to get their phone number, mailing address, and a way to track their interactions with them as you pursue them to engage with the property management services. Jason: I love it. It sounds like this is almost the equivalent of somebody doing all the manual work to go and find an owner occupied list, then start trying to direct mail to them, and doing all this so manually which works, which can work great to help them grow their business. But it’s a long game. People will try it once and feel like, "I did a mailer, I didn't get anything." But then I hear people that have played this game and they’ll say, "I have clients walk in all the time." They're holding a postcard they did 10 years ago and saying, "Hey, I'm ready, so sign up." Explain how this works. Where are you getting the information? Let's start there. Ben: Sure. I'm going to mention that it's a little bit part of our secret sauce. I don't know if I consider ourselves a big data company. That's kind of a word that people on software throw around to make themselves sound cool, in my opinion. But we have a lot of data. Hundreds of sources, public sources, that's really our expertise is in managing and handling data to be able to target these types of people. Like what you mentioned, let me just make this quick point, mailing to absentee owners is, in some ways, inefficient. How many second home owners who aren't interested in property management are you mailing to? In a market like mine where it's a lot of retirees and it's almost a vacation area, that would be completely ineffective because you'd sent out a thousand mailers and 700 of those would go to people who really have no interest or their daughters' living in that home or whatever. I'm just going to make that point that what we're doing is quite a bit more targeted, and hopefully, should save on expenses, marketing wise and other things. Jason: Explain how somebody could utilize the system growth in their business. Ben: It's a web based application. The first thing that a user would see as they login is they would see a map and filters on the side. They can pick an area that they like to pursue in trying to acquire more properties to manage. Let's say, they've got a neighborhood that they really love, they draw a box on the map, and then they add a couple more filters. Maybe they want to manage only properties that are the 2000s and newer properties, so they don't have to deal with maintenance issues. They hit filter parcels. They'll just see a whole bunch of pins drop on the map, hundreds of pins of rental properties that are algorithms, are big data approach as identified as rental properties. Not just as absentees parcels, but as rental properties. It's really rigorous in deciding what we display as rentals. That's the first step. They filter, they find the rental properties, they can view the properties from the street with Google Street View through our application. It's very easy to see if the property's run down. They can actually look at it from the satellite imagery. They click on the owners name and they click the lookup button. Our system does a whole bunch of secret sauce magic in the background, gives you a phone number, and the accurate mailing address of the owner. As well as information about if they own other rentals. That type of information that they can then pursue that person and try to engage them into a conversation about their property management services. That's the simplest way to explain it. Jason: They sign up for your service, they markout their geographic area, they get some pintabs, they can street view the property, then your system will crawl the magical interweb, pull in phone numbers, email addresses, or mailing address. Then the next step for them would basically, probably be to do some sort of a direct mail campaign, cold calling. Ben: Yeah. We're agnostic to whatever marketing strategy they want to take. We provide the information, we provide the data. They can be as creative as they need to in order to pursue that market. Call, mail, we don't have email addresses, that would be something that they get them on the phone and ask for an email address. Then start them in their sales funnel. A great way to distribute their content, things that you've helped them create, or others who've helped them create, or even knocking on people's doors. That sounds ridiculous in my mind; it sounds ridiculously inefficient. But if you knew that someone had 10 rental properties and those rentals properties were exactly what you wanted to manage, you can see exactly where the homeowner or where the landlord lives or where the rental owner lives, it might be worth dropping off some fudge at the doorstep of their home. That sounds ridiculous, but that's actually something that one of our [...] has done in the past. It's very differentiating as opposed to just this search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategy. It's a little bit closer to a human connection. Jason: Oh, yeah. Realtors still knock doors. Realtors still do this. Property managers have probably really tried to avoid doing that. I've got a client who's in commercial property management. One of the ways he would get clients is he would go bring a candle to their place. "I'm old fashioned here, so here's this candle." He would give a gift, a little gift. The secret is, he'll buy these at the dollar store. This isn't like an expensive thing. But some people are showing up with, I don't know, a bottle of wine or something. It's a dollar of candle and it probably meant something, it felt like something warm to them. I think it's all about connection.  Obviously, if they were really aggressive, they’ve listened to Grant Cardone's 10X, they're like gunho. They wanted to create some business. They just need the opportunities. They go into the system. They may have done a multichannel approach. They're like, "This is my dream list right here. I'm going to call them. I'm going to send them some material. I'm going to nail them on a regular basis. I'm going to go knock on their door." They will get the business. Ben: Here's the thing, like I said, we're marketing strategy agnostic. People are already doing wonderful things to get more doors. They're doing great things. They're setting up landlords seminars, they've got great content, they're trying to push them to these distribution channels, but one of the things that we can provide is a way to reach more and more people. As part of your mailer, send out an invitation to your seminar. It fits really well into the things that people are already doing. If you've got a digital marketing strategy, get somebody on the phone, and say, "We would love to just send you an information in an email about what we do." Just enroll them in an email nurturing campaign that you've already developed, that you've already got going. It seems like organic traffic is a little bit harder to get in our industry for the smaller guys and for some of the companies that are just starting out. They've got to put a little bit of effort into it to start getting those doors, getting the traction that they've got. Jason: Yeah. If we've got roughly 70% that are self-managing in the industry, there's tons of blue ocean. This just helps you to see where the fish are. If you can see them, you can go hunt. It's time. Love the idea. I think this is such a nice match-up between DoorGrow and what you do. I'll be really curious to give feedback to some of our clients on some of the strategies that we teach them if they have these opportunities that they can go after. It's really going to be cool. Ben, what’s sort of the future for DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah, good question. Like you mentioned in the beginning, we're very recently coming out of stealth mode or development mode. We launched just short of a month and a half ago. We’re constrained geographically right now where we can service. Having just barely launched, we are currently servicing customers in Utah and Nevada. I live in Utah, I live right in between Las Vegas and South Lake City, which are two large markets that we wanted to initially, prove the concept of the product and establish a customer base. We are going to be in NARPM, at the NARPM convention conference in October in Arizona. Is that right? It's in Arizona. Jason: Yeah. My assistant schedules it all for me. I just do what she tells me to do. I'll be there. Ben: We'll be there and that's where we hope to add, geographically, another service area. We're going to be growing that way, kind of state by state as we go. That will be determined by the traction we're able to get in different states that we're able to start servicing. If we can grab a couple of customers in one state, that would be enticing enough for us to go through that state and start servicing that area. There's an advantage for our customers right now. They're alone in these sea of data. They're the only people using it. That's a huge competitive advantage right now for the people using it, to be some of the first ones that are using it. As much as we're just coming out of beta and the user interface is not as polished as it should be or could be, but there's a huge advantage for those that are early customers that are starting to use the system and see some results. Jason: What are some of the most common questions that people are asking you about this? I would imagine one question that comes to mind is, "Does this have all the data that I can go find myself?" Or is it missing that? Ben: Right, good question. Essentially, people ask that question. They have a little bit of misunderstanding about what we do. That was an instinct that you had right at the beginning of our conversation is, it's similar to what people are doing which is they're going out sourcing their own data, sending out mail, or sending out stuff like that. That's a very rudimentary version of what we do. The answer to that question is, I guess, the data is so concise, so aggressively filtered, that makes your marketing very efficient, and enables you to do certain things that you never would have time or money to do otherwise. Now, campaign is being an excellent example. The sales cycle for property management is so long. We're not selling toothbrushes. If you ask somebody, "Hey, you want to buy this toothbrush?" They can say, "Yes," and it's done; the sale is done and the service is done. Property management has such a long sales cycle where you get somebody on the phone and you say, "I would love to manage your units." And they say, "Well, it's got a 12-18 month lease on it. I'm not interested unless it's vacant. 12 months from now, call me." I'm being able to keep track on that and being able to keep track of how many times you've mailed to somebody is another really important part of that process. It's integrated into the system right now. People are able to track their leads, they're able to keep track of how many times they've mailed to somebody, keep notes on phone calls that they've had. The other aspect of that is that the data updates. I don't know if you've ever spoken to somebody who has actually tried to implement a long-term mail campaign, but the data, six months out, has changed. People buy properties, they sell property. How do they correlate whether they've mailed to somebody already? Whether they've called somebody already? How do they just track that change over time to be able to spend their time with one person long enough for them to close them given that property management has such a long sales cycle? That's part of the advantage of using a system like ours to do your prospecting and data sourcing. We keep it up to date. The data is updated monthly. The phone numbers, you click the lookup button and it does lookup immediately right then. Very, very fresh data which you're not going to be able to find yourself. Who has time for that anyway? You're going to be managing 200 properties and you're going to be spending time in a big Excel spreadsheet trying to correlate [...]. Absolutely not. I saw as a huge way to be much more effective and to really spend my money where it's going to make the most effect, given that I knew that people have multiple units, and they were units I wanted to manage. I can pursue the market that I want rather than shotgunning a mail campaign or something out in the world and seeing if I got anything I wanted. Jason: Tell us a little bit about some of the early adopters. What sort of experience have they had? Is there a case study or an example you can share with us? Ben: I'll start with myself. I was the first case study. If we go back to that origin story of DoorsUp, I asked my broker, "Where do I find these people?" He said, "I have no idea. No one has any idea." We developed this raw prototype of the system. I got this report. It's so embarrassing to even look at now, it’s this ugly Excel spreadsheet, but it was our prototype. It was the name, phone number, and address of every person in my market who owned rental property. How many rentals they owned, the value of their portfolio, and the addresses of all of their rentals. It was ridiculous to me. To me, it felt like magic. I got straight down and called through that list. After wasting three months getting four or five units, in two months, we were managing about 45 units. I was just bogged down. It was crazy. We grew too fast. I discovered that I didn't want to be a property manager, so I went into software. Jason: Yeah. A lot of people were like, "Why don't you do it, Jason?" I'm like, "Then I can't help everybody else do well." Then, I'll be competing with everybody. I don't think anybody wants that. You're no longer doing that, but you had a really rapid growth initially. I love creating that problem for clients, by the way. I love when they come to me and they're like, "Man, my biggest problem is adding doors and getting doors." Then I say, "Great. Let's get you to problem number two which is how you deal with the growth. Now, you've got doors coming in and you're in pain because you have so much growth." I love creating that problem. Well, anything else they should know about this? If not, how can they get in touch? How can they find out more about DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah. I guess, I'll end with this thought, this is kind of the thesis behind DoorsUp. This is why we got into this space and try to solve this problem. My thesis is, essentially, that property management has a serious marketing problem. I listen to your show a lot and I feel like I didn't steal that idea from you—I sure hope I didn't—but you've taught me a lot about that, but I experienced that myself. People cannot find a sustainable, reliable way, to grow their door count. Profitability aside, that's important. That's very, very important, but top line revenue growth is the thing that we are focusing on helping people to. We don't have, in our industry, any sort of enabling data or service or company like other industries do. For example, if somebody in property management really wanted to spend all day everyday prospecting, if they wanted to do Grant Cardone 10X, they want to not talk to seven new landlords a week, they want to talk to 75 new landlords a week. How would they do that? They would go to Rotary Club and hope that a landlord was there. They would go to BNI, Business Network International, and hope that a landlord is there. Or they'll take a realtor to lunch and pray that he'll give him a referral. How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? They just need these leads. Whereas in real estate sales, real estate sales and other industries, we've got Cole Realty Resource, we've got SmartZip, we've got the REDX. We've got all these prospecting tools. Property management industry just does not have that, which has made it impossible for property managers to pursue this blue ocean, 70% of self-managed landlords. There's no way for them to contact them. They have no visibility into that market. Just from a very macro perspective, that's what we're trying to provide the industry. To be able to turn the focus from just closing hand razors, people who go on Google and raise their hands and say, "We want your service," to be able to aggressively pursue that market instead of just waiting for leads to come to them. That's what we see. That's my thesis is that there's a problem in property management that they need this data and we can provide it. We're still proving and testing that thesis. But we're very excited to get out there and be able to offer that to people. We've seen some success. If people want to contact me, there are plenty of ways on our website. You can go ahead and email me. My personal email address is ben.r.atkin@gmail.com. That's probably the easiest way to reach out to me personally. Though, I'm also tuned in on the website if you chat with us. It'll be an actual person who answers that. If you're in Utah and Nevada, go online, signup for a free trial. We’d love to have you start using the system. We do a two-week, 30 lead, free trial. Other than that, just reach out to me. I'd love to chat about it, and jive about property management, and see if we can help this industry grow from the 30% penetration to 40% or 50% or 60%. I see there needs to be some sort of change in order to be able to do that. Jason: Cool. Ben, where are you based out of? Ben: I'm in St. George, Utah. Just an hour North of Las Vegas, Nevada. Jason: Got it. I know where it is. I was born in Utah. Alright. We'll connect, I think that I have a lot of clients are at the point where they're ready to be able to leverage their service like this. I think a lot of property managers are not. I think a lot of them really are just not ready to leverage something like this, unfortunately. If that's the case, reach out to DoorGrow. Then they'll see if you're ready. "You're ready. You have the bandwidth to do these kind of things and grow your business. Let's get you connected to DoorsUp." I look forward to watching what you guys do, seeing the progress, and growth of your company. Ben: Thanks, it's a pleasure. Jason: Thanks for coming in this show. Ben: Hopefully, we'll see you at NARPM. Anybody else, hopefully, we'll see in there. Thanks! Jason: Alright. Very cool. If you are a property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to grow your business, and you want to grow without SEO, without pay-per-click, without content marketing, without social media marketing, without uncomfortable videos, without pay-per-lead services, and they're having phenomenal growth, they're easily adding in a year 100 doors to their business, they're adding $100,000 in revenue to their business annually and you want to do that, maybe you're one of these companies that, right now, is losing more doors than you're getting on right now because it's difficult to try to outpace the market when doors are selling off because the market's good with marketing then reach out to DoorGrow. Let's optimize your business, let's get you ready to use a service like this, and some other strategies, and tactics that we have, that can help you grow your business. Check us out at doorgrow.com. We would love to help you out. We want, like what I say in the intro, we want to impact this industry, and we're excited to find like-minded entrepreneurs like Ben and others that are helping to make this industry great. I think it has massive potential. I believe that property management industry can be as big as the real estate industry; I think it has the potential to really grow here in the US. Let's make that happen, everybody. Make sure, if you're a property management entrepreneur, you join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. Get inside the community. Connect with us. This is a group for property management business owners. Get with your tribe. Connect with us, and we'll probably see you in person at some of these NARPM events because I'm hitting as many as I can lately. Hopefully, I'll be connecting with you guys in person and inside the DoorGrow Club. Thanks everybody for tuning in to DoorGrow Show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Ben Carpel has purchased two of the largest listings from Quiet Light Brokerage in the last six years. One is a SaaS business, the other a publishing site. In this episode of the Quiet Light Podcast, Ben shares how he raised funds and beat out multiple offers in both transactions. In his pre-entrepreneurial life, Ben was an institutional investor. He sourced deals and made business investment decisions as part of a larger investment fund. At the time, he played no role in the management of the businesses purchased. Over time, Ben made the conscious decision to move into the digital space where owning and operating the company entirely would be his new role. He did this through raising funds, negotiating professionally, being likeable, thinking about others, and never over-promising and under-delivering. If you want to raise funds, be a better buyer for yourself, for your investors, and negotiate and win on competitive deals, this Podcast episode is perfect for you. Episode Highlights: [0.32] Who is Ben Carpel [3:40] Are the multiples higher or lower in the online space? [5:32] Three Steps to winning in multiple offers scenarios. [9:07] What two buyers stood out in Joe's own transaction. [11:04] What makes Ben a great buyer that sellers love to work with. [14:59] Why doing what's best for the seller is important. [16:10] Does being a “nice guy” help or hurt? [17:03] How to raise money. [20:09] Why being open and honest matters. [22:07] Get your “money” involved early on. [24:42] The upside of things going sideways. [26:14] Why managing communications is critical. [27:59] Don't do this…it kills relationships. [31:14] What will win in the long run. Transcription: Mark: Whenever we do these podcasts we'd like to have a nice clear hook that we want to kind of tempt listeners with. Something that you're going to learn, something that you're going to pull away from this episode and a real actionable item but sometimes it's really just good to sit down with a buyer who's been super experienced, has a proven track record of doing really really good work and have been successful in what they're doing and today we have that sort of a guest. Joe, you sat down with Ben … is it Carpal or Carpel or do we know? Joe: You know what I think I say I've been saying Carpal for years but it's Carpel. We'll let him pronounce it properly and just go with that instead. Mark: We really need to improve in this part of our podcasting career. We should stick to brokering. All the same Ben we won't rank as far as how much different buyers have bought from us but Ben is the definitely one of our top five all time buyers as far as what he's done through Quiet Light Brokerage. And you spent some time talking to him about how he's financing some of these deals, how he has been [inaudible 00:01:40.7] money and also just some of the things that we can pick up [inaudible 00:01:45.1] we can pick up from somebody who's done as much as he's done. Joe: Yeah if anyone out there listening is thinking about making an investment in a web based business they should listen to Ben's approach. Because it just makes me, the broker, want to work with him more and more and more. He's easy to work with. He's always trying to under promise and over deliver. He's continually giving updates. And he thinks first about the seller, trying to make the deal work for them. Naturally, it's got to work for him but he doesn't mind overpaying for a great business that has incredible growth opportunities. He comes from or came from years ago the larger investment banking world where he worked for a company Family Fund and they would buy larger manufacturing companies. He took a lot of what his mentor shared with him there and brought it over into his own world which is him working from his house and running two now multimillion dollar businesses. He's bought them both from me, purchased two or three others along the way but it works. He's got a system in place and a process in place and one of the most important, we'll touch on it, I won't give away too much but it's when he has money behind him, an investor he brings that investor into the mix early on. And with a business that he bought recently we had multiple offers and Ben made the choice to bring the investor in on the original conference calls with the seller and that sealed the deal and that's why he was chosen over the other two. Mark: That sounds great. Well, again I think these conversations are super useful for anyone that is interested and just kind of been a fly on the wall. For somebody that's been there done that and done that well. So why don't we go ahead and get to the interview and see what we can pick up? Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley at Quiet Light Brokerage and today I have got a very special guest. It's Ben Carpel. Ben is a buyer and he's actually bought two of my largest listings. One for just under nine million dollars, another by my math just under four-ish. But that's just my math; it all depends upon how you work it out. Ben thanks for joining us on the podcast. Ben: Thanks for having me Joe. I'm happy to be here. Joe: I'm glad you're here man. Hey, listen I would love for you to tell your story. Let these folks know who you are. Give them a little bit of background on yourself if you wouldn't mind. Ben: Perfect. The quick overview is a Midwest guy born in Minnesota actually where at Quiet Light is based, where Mark is based. And I grew up kind of in the investing world actually a little bit. So I was doing institutional investing. And what I mean by that is I was an investment professional. So I was a sourcing, negotiating, structuring, evaluating deals always though in the context of managing someone else's money. So myself, my former colleagues we are there to make investment decisions for investors in a fund, [inaudible 00:04:38.0] fund. And about six years ago now, seven or eight actually maybe closer to it I was at a place that invested in a lot of growth companies, a lot of growing businesses and small businesses and the trend I saw was it was entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes. And I knew Joe since I was a little kid like I knew I kind of wanted to always have that operator and that entrepreneurial role. I just didn't know when or how or when or why or what it was going to entail all those big questions. And I knew at a certain point it would happen so I kind of I guess really it was these digital acquisitions, the digital businesses that made my switch purely looking at investments into more okay now we have to deal with operations. So I wanted that, I wanted to seek out … we have customers to deal with, we have vendors and suppliers to deal with, we have strategy and marketing sales to think about. Whereas in an investment world you're thinking about that but you're more disconnected from than the actual operations in the business. So like I said about six years ago we were seeing … again a lot of people that had started businesses of all shapes and sizes, all different industries and I was inspired by that and I wanted to get into that. And I knew I think location independence especially now in 2018 is a big thing for a lot of us and I knew a web based or digital based businesses can be a path for that. Currently, I'm based in the West Coast but open to living and moving … we're all over, I mean I know a lot of your buyers come from all over the place and I think it's a big advantage that Quiet Light deals and box the table consistently. What I've seen, what we've been on, there's a location independence factor to it. So it's a big plus for me. You can kind of put roots where you need to be for your kids or your family or your friends. You can choose to live and work where you need to be. That's been the case of the businesses you and I have worked on together as well the one that's been sold. Well, my ramble just ended but the short version is former investor turned I guess operator via high quality Quiet Light deals. And I got the chance to put my investment skills to work and do the things I craved in sales and marketing and customers and vendors. Joe: That's interesting from your former investment world where you were the investor in an institutional sense did you find that the multiples were much higher than what you're looking at in this online world than with a deal in the operator space? Ben: Yes, very very much the case and it still persists to that day. So for the past decade, it's gone up and down a little bit depending on the broader economy and depending on supply and demand. But I can consistently say that when you're buying or when buyers and sellers are negotiating in the standpoint of maybe a traditional brick and mortar business such as a legit manufacturer or factory manufacturer if you will those multiples, or a distributor, or a wholesaler, a publisher whatever it may be they tend to be higher. And so what's great for buyers in this space and buyers looking at Quiet Light deals is they can … I would say affordable … relatively more affordably put their business acumen to work without having to invest in say real estate or the public stock market or private businesses at this fund level. So you can get a little bit … by definition, they're going to be smaller businesses and so there's more risk than buying into the S and P or an apartment building or whatnot but if you are really willing to put the work in and evaluate properly and operate properly I think the payoffs can be really attractive from a buyer perspective. And then from a seller perspective too I mean they're working with you guys and you're giving them sage advice, you're giving them a quality just advisement of what to do. It's a path now that you didn't use to be I think 10, 15 years ago especially. If you've created a digital business or an online business what are you going to do with that? How are you going to monetize it? But now Quiet Light becomes a path for sellers to exit something that might otherwise be a very illiquid investment. Joe: Got you. So with each of the transactions that you've purchased from Quiet Light and from me specifically Ben you've been in a situation where there have been multiple buyers. You've had to compete with other buyers that approached it and maybe pushed the value up against your offer. Ben: Yeah. Joe: Can you talk a little bit about how you approach making offers and putting structures together and how you work with the seller in terms of making the deal a win-win for both of you guys? Ben: For sure. That's a great question and as a buyer, you often don't know what the seller … the Quiet Light and the seller have all the cards and know what's going on but for me, I think it's two maybe three things. And the first is personality, the second is about just being upfront and clear managing expectations, and the third and is professionals. So I'll touch a little bit on those. So the personality I think in a situation where you and your clients are having two or three or five or 10 or how many bids at the end of the day the numbers are going to start to blend together a little bit but there's a big … I think it's beyond just the number on the paper. There's a reason a buyer chooses to look the seller and vice versa. There's a reason a seller looks in the buyer. Sometimes the personality fit is a big deal because it's this dance of going from two complete strangers you right there in the middle of managing everyone expectations and the end of the day it's two people having to work together in a transition for a few months and so you can't have two completely [inaudible 00:10:11.17] personalities. So I think a big … it's us being kind and considerate but as well as getting that same vibe from the seller too. So that's a big part of it. Second I talked about communication upfront. I think it's always been really important from the start to manage expectations and communicate even if it's disappointing blips of information here and there that we have to communicate. As you know Joe we've done these very stressful emotional sales and so for me what I've always done is to have empathy and put myself in the shoes of a seller and know what would they want to know, what do they … might be thinking. And as you know there have been times where in a stressful process we've had to deliver news that wasn't the greatest but the main thing is if we're communicating that and we're being clear about it I think that's a big positive for you and your clients to hear. And finally is the professionalism, I think that was I think a big part of what I learned from my … it's I'm grateful to my former bosses and colleagues in learning that skillset. It's not just a buyer trying to get the lowest possible price and extracting value and punishing a seller for … because every business out there is going to have positives and negatives and so I can't sit here and talk only about the negative in order to drive down price and value. I approach it as a professional it's like we're here to … everyone is incentivized to get a deal done, the seller, you, the buyer. And so for me, it's not about knocking down the flaws or the weaknesses of the business, it's about being professional and understanding and valuing what the seller has done and the hard work they've put in to get a business you're interested in. So it's the personality that kind of jives with that too but it's just being very clear, very communicative, very professional and not trying to take advantage of the seller. Because that's not what it's about at all if you have to pay market a little higher if that's the end of what gets the business to you end of the day you know that's what's going to be valued by you and your client. Joe: Yeah let me touch on this just for those buyers out there that are wondering how do you compete with an all cash fire? How do you compete with other buyers when there's multiple offers? Everything Ben just said is absolutely on target. And I'm going to talk about it as if I was a seller because I have been a seller. When I sold my business through Quiet Light in 2010 I had five or six conference calls with potential buyers and two stands out. One the guy was just a jerk. This is one that stands out. He was rude, he cut my business down, he didn't let me finish my sentences and I kept thinking “Why am I even on this call? If he makes me an offer I'm not selling him the business.” I wasn't going to do it. The other one that stood out was the person that started the call with “Hey man thanks for creating this product line. I've actually used similar products and it's made a huge difference in my life, thank you.” and then he went on. Actually one of the shortest conference calls that I had but he was professional. He was … you used the word kind. He was courteous and he actually ended up buying my business. And I was happy to do business with him. If he had offered me $10,000 less than the other guy I would have taken it. Ben: Yeah. Joe: Simple. Ben: I know. Joe: Because it's a choice, a lot of the time sellers have choices even when they have multiple offers. And I've been in another situation recently not as the seller but as the broker where I had two offers full price 2.3 million-ish and one was an SBA deal one was all cash. The seller chose the SBA deal even though he had to take a 10% note because he really liked that seller. He was going to keep the staff in place, he was going to run the business well, had a … just a good fit. The cash buyer he felt like he was going to be really hard in due diligence, really hard in transition and he just didn't have time for that in his life. So keep that in mind buyers because it's really important. Now, Ben, I want to talk … we've done two deals together and I don't want to talk about the … I don't want to reveal names here or anything like that so we could talk big picture stuff. You've heard me say it and I'm not blowing up your ego or anything like that. I don't think you need it but out of all the deals I've done … and I've done like 52, 53 million in total transactions now, you stand at the top in terms of professionalism, the way a buyer behaves and acts and I'm always winging people in your direction. There's a couple of others and strangely enough on the last deal we had like two all-time favorite buyers were making an offer. So it's really hard. It's you and the other guy, Matt. Matt, if you're listening you're right up there. But on the first deal, we were in a situation where we had multiple offers and it turned out that it was going to be much greater tax consequence to the seller than we realized initially because he had a sequel operation. Can you talk about what you did and how you pivoted to make that work for him if you recall? I know it was five years ago, four years ago can you remember the details? Ben: Yeah I remember that coming up I think towards the beginning, middle of the process and that's something that is often underrated and it's maybe this is an inflection point probably if you have a business as a seller that where you have to think about the tax implications of depending on the corporation but I think that's maybe on the scope of what we want to talk about today. But I remember for us it came down to just being willing to accommodate the seller's desires as it relates to the tax. So it was a little bit less favorable for us from the buy side but it's still got us the business. I mean at the end of the day again you're lining up offers, Joe and this seller is looking at everything and comparing everything. It's a competitive situation and tax can be a big part of that when it comes down to all the fees that come out and the taxes that come out there's a net cash. So for us, we were willing to say okay let's do something that benefits the seller because it's going to help nudge across. So from … you know as it relates to this, the structure that's going to be unique because when you're selling a business the business has been formed years ago there's not much you can do to look in the past but when that exit happens there's typically … it's a stock or an asset sale and is there the willingness on the other side of the Quiet Light table, is the buyer willing to work with you that maximizes the value. And for some buyers it may or may not make sense. I would say based on that transaction in the digital world as well as what I've seen in kind of that institutional world, typically more often than not if you're a seller and you're working with Joe buyers should be willing to come to the table in terms of needing what you would like and how you would like to structure that transaction. More often than not buyers will accommodate the seller, not always because there's sometimes going to be a unique quirk to a particular business. But again those are nuances that aren't even willing. And that's tax experts and legal experts that think about tail risk and stuff. Generally speaking of a buyer like myself or a digital buyer is going to be willing to work with you so it shouldn't be a big fear in the seller's mind I think. Joe: Yeah and I agree and as you said you work around the situation so that benefits both of you. There have been situations in the last six years where I've had a buyer in due diligence try to take advantage and discount the price because of a certain situation. Everything was 100% laid out exactly as it should have been, there were no surprises but they felt as though now that they have them under a lot of intent they're going to try to pivot and reduce the price and it's just not the way that we work. Everything is fully disclosed up front. And in your situation I specifically recall there was a change in the structure; it benefited the seller. It helped him out and you were okay with that. It might have cost you an extra dollar or two or a thousand or two whatever the number might have been but in the long run, it got you the deal. It closed the transaction and I believe it's worked out fairly well for you correct? Ben: Yeah exactly and when you look back at the tax and you calculated it it's something where if you're a bidder and you're a buyer and this is your goal to take over business and own a successful business this is a new show of the deals is the tax implications. So unless there's a particular quirk or nuance to a business because there's a liability or there's something unique about it I think it's best to work with Joe and his clients in doing what's best for the seller. This is a … it's again it's a big decision for them, it can be life changing, it's emotional more often than not and when it comes to these details they can matter. So yeah in the end as you just perfectly illustrated Joe that worked out best for him at the time and for us going forward. Joe: I just have to repeat some of this Ben because it's … I know I should be so obvious, for those listening, buyers this information is coming from someone that has spent over 10 million on transactions. It's not I made a $100,000 $200,000 purchase, each situation Ben has been in with me and with Quiet Light it's been multiple offer situations where he's negotiating up against someone else and has bought the business by being a nice guy. Ben: Yeah. Joe: And thinking not only about himself but about the seller as well and he's gotten the deal done. The first one worked out great. Let's talk about the second one because you are not even 30 days in at this point right? Ben: Correct. Yeah exactly. Joe: So this particular business and again I'm not going to name names, not going to talk multiples or anything like that but I want to talk deal structure on this one in terms of funding. Because we had a situation where it was going down one pass and then we had to pivot. Ben: Yeah. Joe: And I was comfortable with pivoting because it was you. You had set up an alternate path just in case this one doesn't go I've got this one ready. And it took a little bit longer but it worked out both for you and you know what the business is growing so fast that the seller got to keep a whole bunch more money because he got to keep it for an extra 30 days. But let's talk if you will a little bit about how you come up with funding. How do you structure a deal? Where do you get … unless you're sitting … are you sitting on millions and millions of money in your account? Ben: I wish, if I would we'd be doing this … I will love nothing more just to podcast all the time and do this all day long. Hopefully in the future but no I'm not. Joe: So you're using other people's money. Ben: In this case yeah. Joe: Where you … you know you learned about that from the investor world so let's talk about that with someone that is new to this and may have a few hundred thousand to invest and is looking to buy a five million dollars business. How the heck do they do that? How do you do that? Ben: Yeah so first and foremost guys if you hit that situation know that there's going to be some stress because you're managing expectations for Joe, for Joe's client, for the fund that's backing you, perhaps for a bank that's backing you in the fund. There's a lot of juggling. There's stress for Joe and the seller side and there's stress for you. So that's going to come up no matter what but how does that come about? You know just like almost anything private, it could be a real estate deal, it could be a restaurant or a bar, it could be a zone project, it could be a private business. There's … if there's I wouldn't say the word lucky but if you have a history with someone you know has capital behind them that puts you in a spot. But even beyond that you'd be surprised at the amount of just average guys … I was, I came up in and a pretty regular background and it shocked me out that there's a fair amount of people that just work hard and save their money and if you can tell a compelling story of why you should do a transaction with Quiet Light there is going to be a lot of support for you at that deal. But taking it back to the specific example that Joe and I worked on together the stress for me was … and you know I like to think and I as I said in the beginning of the call I like to have empathy. I like to have professionalism. And that means doing things with honor, so, for example, it was the capital of a former boss of mine they were very interested in the deal, full support. And from the start, they said okay don't show this to anyone else I want to back this deal. You work with Joe you've been the face of it. I want to put my capital work. That was it pretty much right Joe? It kind of … not only that but it wasn't just me, I also wanted to introduce that person to Joe and Joe's clients such that they had a face. Joe: And let me let me say right now, no names again; that sealed the deal for you. Again we had multiple offers in the situation and what you did was you brought in the money into the conference call with the seller. And so myself and the seller felt much more comfortable when you were bringing in other people's money that those people got on the call, asked really professional questions, were professional, had the same kind of demeanor you did. And we just really liked them. It just made a difference for us and liking who you're doing business with it kind of matters. Ben: That matters a lot, yeah. Joe: Because as you said there's a lot of stress, this is for the person that's selling the business it's often … can be a lifetime event sale and they've got other people that they're promising things to and taking care of and over promising and under delivering is never what people want to do. Ben: Exactly. Joe: You do that very well so that particular buyer, the money though it disappeared on us. Ben: It disappeared and the frustrating … the infinite frustration that I had to bear during the process and the recommendation of how to avoid that is perhaps a representative of what their money is. I knew from the start I could have made two or three or four called, this was my background and there would have been backing but I out of respect, out of honor when that person said Ben don't show this to anyone else I took them at their word I said fine. Knowing that in a rare event when rarities happen, it happened, they decided to back out. I was going to have to scramble and completely restart not only my process but Joe's time and his client's time. And that was going to be frustrating for them, it was going to be frustrating for me. Now I had confidence so I'd still be able to but I knew we'd lost a good six weeks of hard work from everyone's part. So the first thing yeah, the first piece of advice I have if you're using other people's money, if it's a rich uncle, if it's a rich fund, if it's cobbled three or four people I would say always the money man, the person with the account the big account get them in about there; have them meet the seller. As Joe said it makes a big difference rather than you just saying I'm an agent on behalf of someone else, I'm representative, I'm an executive on behalf of someone else; in this world, it makes a huge difference. The second piece of advice as Joe just said is if you're really serious and you are the guy passionate and wanted to do the deal it matters that you want to have your ducks in a row and potentially have a contingency plan as I did should that first fall through. Now like I said I had put my own self in the scramble due to how I do business and that was respecting them saying I'm not showing it to anyone else, we're going down this buyer path together and they backed out. They kind of put me … and as Joe you know they profusely apologized and felt bad for you, they felt bad for me, they felt bad for the seller. Joe: They were very professional. Ben: Yeah, they knew the implications of whatever analogy they want to use they knew the pile of what that they have put us all in. Joe: Yeah. Ben: But I think you sensed it, Joe and I think the seller sensed it that I was so determined for it to not abandon, not under deliver that I was doing … willing to do almost anything to make sure the deal would conclude and [inaudible 00:25:32.5] which it did. And it actually had a fairly favorable outcome because I was personally willing to give up a few things in terms of escrow, in terms of amount that they were a little bit more I would say not stripped down but more … their world was a little bit more maybe weighted to the buyer and I was more empathetic to Joe and Joe's client. So it ended up being a win. They had … Joe and Joe's client had … they waited an extra month but it ended up being worth it to them materially on a money perspective. So yeah the advice to buyer's is bring the money people on early, bring them to the table. Don't hide them there's no … you're not protecting their height, you know there's no upside to hiding it. Be upfront. Communicate the negative. When we had to do a three way call, it was Joe, myself, and my former colleague boss and they communicated that bad news but we had to. We just don't want to be sitting here as a buyer or a potential bidder having Joe and his client wonder what's going on. And then thirdly as a buyer, if you can and you really want that business again have that plan B have that plan C ready to go ready to pull the trigger should something bad in plan A happen. Joe: Yeah. The key thing with the outcome there in terms of communicating the negative and them calling … not just an e-mail but a call and you're on the line, they were in line and conveyed the message that things went sideways where they were they can't continue with the deal. The outcome, in the long run, is if you ever call me again and love another listing and ring them in I'm going to listen because they were professional. They called and I'd love to do business with them. I know and you know why they said no to this one, it wasn't their choice. They had to say no. There was logic behind it to a certain degree but it worked out. Again like you said we pivoted the next step was another person really with the purse strings in a sense and the first thing we did was what? We scheduled a conference call. Ben: Exactly. Joe: We had to instill confidence in the seller of the business that we're not just dragging our knuckles that the business you still of interest to you and to the other source of funding and so we had a call. We set new expectations and managed them well. You actually gave us at one point daily updates which I think must have been driving you nuts because sometimes there wasn't much to report. Ben: Yeah, sometimes there's not much … you guys you know these processes just happen and there's a process to them. There's not always a daily update. It's not like there's a daily sales report so sometimes you're kind of like okay this is the most minor thing I ever go put it but again buyers I recommend that communication and not just any communication but as a human being it's not just a transaction. So the vibe, the connection … it's the managing of expectations too; good and bad. You don't want to be in a situation … and of the first business we bought with Joe as I'm the operator of that business that's how I've chosen to run things. There's … we get dozens of emails a day from our customers who want a product feature, it's a software company so they want a product feature and always we're up front and we say we'll add it to the [inaudible 00:28:38.9] we'll add it to them both but we can't promise it a lot of the detail. And that's I think a big thing as a buyer, you don't want to over promise and under deliver because it's not just the client's time and their hopes and dreams but it's Joe's means. He is the gatekeeper, he is the advisor, he's the one who's been through this and advised so many big companies and so many professional sellers who have built unique business. You don't want to waste … as a buyer you do not want to waste Joe's time if you can. So managing … not just putting out an offer for everything you see, not just doing conference calls for everything you see, really waiting to make the right targeted strike for what's best for you so that you can judiciously use his time and his advice. And I think that's a big part is the managing of expectations. Joe: Yeah, the advice I always give is … to buyers, look at his many possible listings that you can so that you know the right fit when it comes along and if you can act quickly. You don't want to be in a situation where you're not, you're sort of looking part time and then you like one and then you have to go find funding for it. By the time you come back if it's a great business, it's going to be gone. The other thing you absolutely don't want to do is be in a situation like Ben said where you don't bring the money person forward if there's somebody else that's doing the funding. Even if you're doing an SBA deal and there's two of you putting the 10 or 15% down. We had a situation recently where that was the situation, multiple offers, these two partners were chosen and one of the partners was not on the initial conference call and decided to walk away because of one particular situation which was fully disclosed in the client interview. It's all there but he didn't bother looking in advance. So the broker is thinking to himself and he gave the guy advice he said look you can't have this happen you call me again and if you're making an offer and someone else is making an offer my sellers are going to say what do you know about the two of them? Ben: Yeah. Joe: The broker is going to have to say well I had a deal with these guys and they just walked away in due diligence, his partner flaked. Ben: Yeah. Joe: The partner is still around yes so you want to be making use of the advisor broker's time as well. As Ben said we're all busy, we all have a lot of clients to work with. We work with as many buyers as we do so it's probably more actually buyers and some of them like Ben is just going to rise to the surface. When Ben sends me an email and has an interest in a listing, I'm like ah man I love doing business with Ben, always works out great, sellers love him and you going to get more attention than somebody that might have walked away on a deal for some strange flaky reason. Ben: Yeah and that institutional lull that I came from originally, that same thing happens where it could be huge huge company but sometimes firms get a reputation for saying one thing and doing another and know that they become the shop where they're going to … in an LOI they say X Y and Z but you know at the end of the day it's going to turn out to be something less than X Y Z and it doesn't work out as well for the seller. And so that reputation sticks and I think from the sell side too. I think from a buyer what I can unilaterally say is both having closed on deals, bid on deals and looked but passed because it wasn't the right fit. And I say this not because we're just doing this podcast, but Quiet Light I think you know already has the best digital businesses and web based businesses out there that their reputation speaks for itself. Their ability to conduct, as a buyer too I've been talking about professionalism and what you need to do but it's a two sided coin. Sellers and the sell side needs to be doing the same and I've seen situations from other shops where there was not the most scrupulous behavior by the advisor the broker and it burns the buyers a little bit. So it's a two sided coin and some trust issue and at the end of the day we are all humans and the tiny mistakes are made may be here and there but it's honesty, it's communication, it's a big part of that. I use the word vibe but just the personality fit is what's going to get things done. I mean there's no reason to be cold and cagey and do what you can to get … extract value in this transaction. If the business is the right fit for you as a buyer you can pay 95% or 105% or whatever it is around that price and driving down the price and making the seller and Joe angry isn't going to win in the long run. What's going to win in the long run is you taking over that business and operating it with hard work and honesty and integrity and all the things that make the customers continue to be happy. That's if you overpay a little bit or you don't get them to drive down the price because you're not insulting them but it gets you the deal that's a very important consideration. Joe: I think we have to finish it on that right there Ben. That was the best advice I think of [inaudible 00:33:28.9] give potential buyers. Ben: Yeah. Joe: All right listen man, I appreciate your time, I know you're a busy guy thanks for sharing your time. I look forward … it might be another three or four years before we get into it again but I look forward to it. Thanks so much Ben. Ben: No. Yeah, thanks for your interest and your time too. And thanks for being again you're the great guy in this space. So I look forward to us working together in two, four years from now. Links: Ben's LinkedIn Profile Plan your own exit – get an initial valuation

Welcome to the Vivid Vision spotlights podcast. Rebekah Nault joins us to share her and her son's experience using Vivid Vision. Show Notes: 1:00 How did Rebekah find out about her son's binocular vision issues? 2:30 How Rebekah found about virtual reality vision therapy. 3:40 Conversations around the age of Rebekah's and Vivid Vision. 4:30 What changes has Rebekah noticed about her son since beginning VR vision therapy. 6:00 Was giving Vivid Vision a try a difficult decision? 7:30 How Vivid Vision impacted life at school and at home. 8:30 How can Vivid Vision improve in the future? 11:00 A young patient's perspective on Vivid Vision. 13:00 Why Ring Runner is Ben's favorite game. 12:30 What is Ben's least favorite Ben 14:00 What would be a dream game for Ben? Thanks for listening.

00:00:00 - When Ryan claims that lobsters are immortal, only one man can be relied upon to deliver the hard truths: Zen Faulkes! Zen breaks into the show to tell us all about this immortality meme and his efforts to combat it. Be sure to check out his blog NeuroDojo and his e-book Presentation Tips. 00:30:08 - Lobsters live in the drink, so we decide to have some. Moving his way through a gift given by Ryan, Patrick cracks open a Cropduster Mid-American IPA. Kelly enjoys a Cabernet Sauvingon from Bogle Vineyards, complete with Patrick's approval. And Ryan heartily enjoys his Petrus Aged Pale. 00:35:45 - Trailer Trash Talk has to tackle some troubling issues about animals in captivity after seeing the troubling footage in the trailer for the documentary Blackfish. 00:51:07 - Patrick presents a new study about how freshwater systems may have survived the K/T extinction better than the marine world. Take that dinosaurs! 01:10:27 - PaleoPOWs survive better in freshwater too, not that anyone bothered to ask. Patrick thanks Kevin D. for his generous donation. Thanks, Kevin! Ryan read an e-mail from Aaron D. suggesting we conduct an online pub quiz potentially titled Science... war off. All we need now is a 36-hour day. And Kelly rounds out the segment with a 5-star iTunes review left by the_HAL9000. I wonder if he knows Ben? Thanks for listening and be sure to check out the Brachiolope Media Network for more great science podcasts! Music for this week's show provided by: Furry Old Lobster - Jonathan Coulton Stairway To Heaven - Led ZeppelinBlack & Blue - Miike Snow How You Survived the War - The Weepies

Recorded on 01/02/12 for release on 01/10/13 0:00:25 INTRO Northwest Freethought Alliance Conference – Come see us live! Dustin was quoted in the Idaho Statesman 0:09:07 FEEDBACK Regarding the holidays More on “Do No Harm” from Ben Thanks to Paul and Brian for the kind words 0:17:00 THIS DAY IN HISTORY – January 10 1901 … Continue reading »