Podcasts about chuck no

This episode the guys talk about the banning of kendrick lamar's new album, the banning of mang tomas in the US and Chuck No-rice. Follow our patreon for our BTS videos, candid videos and Un-Tuli Pod! : https://patreon.com/thecheatcoders Check out our merch, previous episodes and more on our website: https://cheatcoders.shop Follow us on all social media: @thecheatcoders

On this episode of The Chris and Amanda Show, we each share 3 new songs for each other to react to and rate! How will Chris react to Michael Buble's "Lost"? Will Amanda like Me First and Gimme Gimme's version of "Country Roads" and will Reggie and the Full Effect's "Congratulations Smack + Katy" become Amanda's new favorite song?  You'll have to tune in and find out how they both rated these songs!  Amanda's List: Tracy Lawrence "Paint Me a Birmingham" Sara Bareilles "Many the Miles" Michael Buble "Lost" Chris's List: Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies "Country Roads" Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! "All Star" Reggie and the Full Effect "Congratulations Smack + Katy" *This show was originally recorded on Fireside Listen to The Chris and Amanda Show 2021 Playlist -https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6nU1z0TmP4o9jKrlonfSCu?si=08add8dcdd794d1c To watch the video version of this episode go to https://youtu.be/JfiUP7UwENs *Connect with us at -https://campsite.bio/thechrisandamandashow *Listen to the show LIVE on Monday's at 2:25pm Support the show over at Buy Me A Coffee and join our membership group for exclusive content! Join our Mailing List to stay updated on all things TC&AS Follow us on Instagram  Honorable Mentions - https://www.songfacts.com/ Support of Show Sponsor - Coffee with Kerry Podcast        --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/songswapshowdown/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/songswapshowdown/support

Thanks for taking FNF Unplugged along during your summer travels! While things are back to normal- or at least the new normal across most of the country, there's certainly no slowdown at the local or national level. In this episode, FNF's Chuck Cain shares a market update, the latest news on potential enforcement actions that could impact title & settlement agents, and how to stay connected with your referral partners in this virtual world.

Cette semaine l'incroyable Chuck Noël et l'incomparable Mike Ouellet. 2 pour un 1 les chums alors peu importe comment tu sens là, tu devrais instantanément être heureux. On jase de radio tout en vous offrant un contenu que personne d'autre ne vous aura jamais offert, that's it! Tout est dit! Ça faique ct'un go!nbsp;

A weekly look at the newest comics on shelves, as well as ALL the related news involving your favorite superheroes. We also dive into Video games and technology. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/talkgeekly/support

In today's part two of two Chuck is talking once again to Mike Nunez about his tips for being a successful buyer. We first heard about Mike's nine tips for a successful acquisition, and today he delves into the types of things he looks for in a business he is considering for purchase. We're also diving deep into one tip that Mike shared on part one of this two-part series. Finally, Mike also shares some great efficiency tools he's loving these days. Episode Highlights: What Mike looks for when buying a business. What he brings to the business with his own expertise. Examples of things that stand out to Mike in a listing. Advertising account criteria he checks for in a potential new business. Goals and intentions he has and the opportunities he looks for when on the hunt for a business. The importance of keeping criteria lists. Tips for content sites looking for affiliates. Certain synergies to look for in a search. Lessons Mike has learned through his acquisitions. Tools Mike is using and recommending these days. Transcription: Mark: Chuck in the last podcast episode that we had we had Mike Nuñez on. He offered nine very actionable tips on how to be a very good buyer; how to be a buyer that can win deals by having the right disposition. And I know you guys talked; you guys are friends, you live close to each other there in Florida and all that. So you guys are friends and naturally, your conversations are long but also Mike's got a ton of content to share with us and you guys got into a second episode. What can we expect from the second episode with Mike Nuñez? Chuck: Yeah, so let's start off by saying if you haven't watched the first one or listen to it make sure you do because it kind of leads into this. On this one, we talked about what are the types of things that he's looking for as a buyer and you should be able to get some stuff out of that to help you figure out maybe some ideas for the types of things you're looking for. We also talked about; there was like one tip that we gave that he gave us somebody at Rhodium conference a year or two ago and it gave that guy a 25% boost in his revenue like overnight. So that was a nice little take away there and then at the end of the call, one of the things I always like to do is just ask for any special tools or things that he uses so he gives us a list of additional tools he uses so a pretty little bonus at the end. Mark: Fantastic. Mike is a great guy. I'm super glad that he was able to come back on the podcast. Let's get right into it. Chuck: All right welcome back everybody this is Chuck Mullins here with Quiet Light Brokerage and this is part two of a two-part segment with Mike Nuñez. Welcome, Mike; welcome back. Mike: Thank you, Chuck. Thanks for being accepting of my long-windedness. Chuck: No, I think we had a lot of great stuff in the last one. If anybody didn't get a chance to watch it you might want to go back and watch that one first. What did we end up on; nine super-secret tips? Mike: They go to 9, yeah 9 super-secrets. Chuck: 8 or 9 super-secret tips of how to be a great buyer which Mike Nuñez is a great buyer. Now we wanted to segway in and Mike wanted to make sure that everybody know that he's not wearing, or he is wearing the same suit but only because we're recording these back to back because the last one went pretty long. So you still look great Mike. For anybody who didn't watch the last one, Mike purchased a custom-tailored suit business from us so this is probably why he's wearing the suit because I've never seen him wear a suit before he had purchased that business. So he's definitely stepped up his wardrobe game since then. So today we wanted to talk about what you're looking for when you buy a business and maybe some of the lessons you've learned along the way. So again maybe let's start off; before we jump into that just give a brief introduction for anybody who didn't watch the first part of the series about you. Mike: Well, so I think it's important if you're listening to this one you probably should listen to the first one first because it does set up a lot of the things that we're going to talk about here. But for those that just don't listen, I've been in internet marketing for about 20 years now. I spent most of it working for an agency or owning an agency. I worked for Google for four years in their paid, search division. And so today I own a company called AffiliateManager.com that manages affiliate programs as well as the performance company which manages paid search for companies as well. So that's the super brief synopsis. Chuck: Perfect. So let's jump into what is it that you look for when you're buying a business? Always people come to me and they; Chuck what kind of business should I buy? And I say okay well what are your interests, what are you good at? So I think you probably you're looking…well, let me just let you tell what are you looking for. Mike: Yeah, so I think it's important to say what I look for or what we look for; so I do have a pretty solid team around me but what we look for is going to be very different than what somebody else looks for. And so please take that with a grain of salt; everything that I'm going to say today and I think is important for everyone to just recognize, just be self-aware what is it that you are incredibly good at? If you're good at sales go find a company that has an incredible product and but they're bad at sales and you plug yourself in and you now have an incredible business overall. Or if you're fantastic at operations go find a company that's selling like crazy but their operations just can't keep up with all the offers and plug yourself in there and that's going to work. I like to say that real opportunity is at the intersection of two different expertise or two different types of expertise. So for me, it's online business and online marketing and I'm not so great at everything else. So I'm not an operations person, I'm not a finance person so I don't look for companies that are lacking in those areas. I look for companies that are strong in those areas and that are; I don't want to say lacking because I think that's potentially disrespectful to either the people that I purchased businesses from or will in the future but it's more where I see opportunity where they wouldn't know unless they worked at Google for several years or they wouldn't know unless they've been in online marketing for 20 years or they never had an affiliate program. They never thought about it and we're incredible at it. So plugging what we are really good at into things that maybe they've tried that they're above average at because you have to be above average if you're going to own an online business but they've spread themselves so thin that they couldn't be an expert at just one thing. Another nice side effect that I've seen with buying these businesses, some of the previous owners they just worked so long and hard in the business that when you're so down in the weeds like that it's hard to pull yourself out and kind of take a 40,000-foot view picture. When acquiring a company it's almost a natural thing that happens along the way and you start to say okay let me take a step back and look at this not so closely; so close I can't tell exactly what this is and what's going on. And then as you start to peel that back and say okay this is something that the previous owner did, is this something that I need to take over, do I bring the value? The previous owner either maybe they enjoyed it, maybe they liked it, or maybe they were really good at it but I'm not and so the answer there is who else within the company can take that over. And I got to say that's probably one of the biggest benefits of purchasing an online company not only for the buyer but for the seller that they're able to peel themselves out and all the while that's the transition of okay these are the daily duties that this person does and this is who can take that over. So the new buyer; so myself as an example can go focus on what we're good at. So with that caveat to what it is that you're asking some of the things that I look for and I think just another quick note on this; this is an ever-evolving list, just because I've written this today doesn't mean that there's not more to come. Every time we go through a business or every time actually we have a call we run into an issue with the current business. I say okay that sounds like an opportunity that when we purchase the next business that we need to look at and say can we help there. So some of these are super simple and most listeners might say oh well that that's kind of common sense. Well, it's not always common sense. Somebody on this call is going to really or somebody listening to this podcast is going to really benefit from it but I listed because it's things that I want to make sure that I go and check every time that we're looking at a business. So, for example, we are like I said really good at online marketing specifically affiliate marketing and paid search. So we'll go look do they have an affiliate program? Are they overpaying? Are they not paying out commission based off of the influence that each affiliate had on that actual transaction? It's actually super interesting to see how much people overpay for things. And even more interesting to see when they're underpaying affiliate. So for example affiliates, they are business just like you, just like me and they want to maximize their revenue for their inventory. A lot of people get stuck and they look oh my competitor pays 5% commission, that's what I'm going to go pay. But a really good affiliate is equivalent to an upper-funnel page search keyword. And if you're paying a two to one for an upper funnel page search keyword; let's use my custom suit business, if I'm willing to get a two to one for the keyword custom suits or men's custom suits, if I'm willing to take a two to one return on ad spend for that I should be willing to pay an affiliate who is upper funnel; who's educating customers about me, I should be willing to pay them a 50% commission because they're upper funnel. Chuck: Alright so that makes a lot of sense to use something that you do on a day to day basis with your main business to look to acquire a company. So can you give some examples of specifically what something you might look for is? Mike: Sure. I'll give two examples one of where we succeeded at this and one where we failed but then you use that failure to learn and regroup. So the first business that we acquired we identified that there was a significant amount of overspent. It wasn't the previous owner's fault. They had hired an agency who was just; they were doing good. I would give them a six out of 10. But within 20, 30 minutes we can evaluate a Google Ads account and say we can save this account 10, $15,000 a month. Chuck: And you were talking about like an Ad Words account as opposed to affiliate stuff? Mike: Correct. Yeah, a Google Ads account that maybe this ad, the Google Ads accounts is spending 50, 60, $70,000 a month and if we can look in there and say we can save 10, 15, 20,000 on this and still get the same level of sales based off of our expertise we're adding 1 to $200,000 straight to the bottom line; straight to EBITDA and we did exactly that. We actually just finished reviewing January through October and we actually generated more sales than the same period last year and we spent I think it was $160,000 less to do so in that period. Chuck: It kind of goes against the thought of ad expenses are going up, right? There's more and more competition every day for ads so people think that but yet you're able to cut ad spend and make more money with it. Mike: That's 100% correct. You have to know what you're doing. There are very, very few good paid search companies out there. And I know because I used to work with a lot of them when I was at Google. Kevin who's on our team; his job was to go out and train agencies on how to appropriately use Google Ad Words. Pat who's the mastermind on our team has been doing Google paid search since Yahoo or as Yahoo started before Google was in existence. So it's just such a level of expertise that we have on our team overall that we can go and then apply and get these level of savings overall. And again it's straight to the bottom line and we take that money; the first acquisition was partly done via an SBA loan and the savings that we've got doesn't quite cover the SBA loan but it's about 75% of it. It's almost like we acquired the company for the price of the down payment and a much smaller SBA loan so to speak. So that's got to be our number one criteria; same thing with an affiliate program again with the first acquisition they weren't doing attribution based commissioning. It was a smaller effect on the overall business. We probably saved somewhere between 30 and 40,000 for the entire year on that one. So it's again a much smaller effect but that's a part-time person. That's an initiative that we can go fund now because we're saving 30 to 40 grand that we wouldn't have to spend otherwise. Chuck: So let's call out specifically there what it is you're looking for. So Mike looks at a company, requests access to their ad account, and then Mike looks for what? Mike: So in their ad account I'm looking at are they using negative keywords appropriately, what bidding algorithm are they using on Google, what matching types are they using, are they using segmentation correctly. And this is all super 40,000-foot level things but as Pat, our behind the scenes masterminds like to say, a poorly run paid search program is typically death by a thousand paper cuts. It's not one of these things. It's a thousand of these things that we meticulously go and identify, find, correct, and improve. Chuck: Alright so you will go into an account, you see all these things and they're doing everything right does that mean okay it's a great company I'm not looking to buy this one; like are you specifically, if there's not something you can fix you're not going to acquire it? Mike: Yeah, that's a fun question. The good news is for me at least I've never seen one. That's good. And to be fair I've seen; when we are getting an RFPN for the agency business I've seen two or three that were so well run that we tell them we can't help, they're doing an amazing job. You're going to look to us for growth in three or four months and we're not going to deliver because your current company is doing fantastic so don't leave them. But when acquiring a business and the research that I do before making an offer I have not yet come across that. If that were the case yes it's not a kiss of death but it is a factor in whether or not we feel like we should purchase the business because we know that there's so many out there that do it so poorly. Investing; I know I'm not teaching anybody on the call anything new with this but investing is where's the next best place to spend your dollar? And if they're doing a bad job with paid search that's a good place for me to spend my dollar because I know we can fix that. If they're doing an incredible job well there's probably a better place for me to go spend my dollar. Chuck: Sure. And I don't think it's a negative thing for you to say nope I'm just going to move on to the next one they're doing everything right. Like you're looking for specific things in order to want to acquire and like you said you've only got so many dollars to spend. You need to place it where it's going to do the most good for you. And if somebody else is doing everything right like that's not your area of expertise to grow the business. Maybe again they're not doing sales well and that's not what you're specifically looking at so sales is where the person that is going to end up ultimately acquiring the business is good at. And there's also people who maybe they don't have necessarily an expertise at something and they're just looking for an overall good run business that can keep chugging away for the years to come. And that's not a negative like just because you don't have some really specialized thing that you're good it doesn't mean that buying a business would necessarily be a bad idea for you. Mike: Yeah it's one of those things begin with the end in mind, right? And if the if your end goal is that you want a super stable business but it's not going to grow because everything is so well optimized and you're willing to pay the same multiple for it and you just want to kind of run that business day to day as is without expectation of growth then that's it. And there are people that want that. I would even consider a business like that if it was strictly almost a lifestyle business. But the businesses that we're buying; our goal, our intention is to take this 15 million dollar company and turn it into a 25, 50, 100 million dollar company and so there has to be opportunity when we're purchasing and the bigger the opportunity that we identify that we can do so fairly quickly with what we have the more we're willing to pay for it and the more we're willing to compete for it overall. Chuck: So we were talking recently we had lunch and you said that you recently discovered something with one of your businesses that was something you know I'm going to start looking for that and it revolved around shipping. Do you remember what we were talking about? Mike: Oh yes I have it. It's on my list. And that's funny and that's yet another reason to have a list right, right? Chuck: Right. Mike: And so as we're talking like; I know I'm not alone in this, right? I know you're like this Chuck. I'm sure you, the person listening to this right now is the same way. And I'll wake up in the middle of night and I feel like sometimes not thinking about things or telling yourself think about this in the back of my mind and you'll solve problems; like I'll get things out there just to solve them. I'll wake up in the middle and be like that's the answer to this and literally I'll roll over, I'll pick up my phone, and I'll just type a note to myself and say this is the answer and I'll go back to sleep. And the one that you're talking about is we have a warehouse for both of the business but the one that we're talking about now has a warehouse, a large warehouse; tens of thousands of square feet, I'm not sure exactly how big it is but we were getting fined by the shipping company because the dimensions of our packaging was incorrect. And so as we printed out the shipping labels for it, it was off maybe by an inch or whatever it was. And so when we send it to FedEx who was our shipping carrier and they would measure it we would be off by however much and they would actually fine us and so it added to tens of thousands of dollars in fines that we are receiving; not shipping costs, fines because our dimensions were wrong. And so for less than $10,000, we purchased a dim scanner and basically eliminated that. That dim scanner pays itself in one to two months and then from that point forward we now recovered yet another 20, $30,000 back. So you see the recurring theme here; paid search, this is how much we can save by doing it better, affiliate, this is how much we can save by doing it better, shipping, this is how much we can save by doing it better and then here's the freaking key. Like this is the thing though; don't just sit on that. And again I guess this depends on your goal. If your goal is to just absolute squeeze every penny out of these companies that you want then go and do it. My goal is growth and to turn these companies into large companies so that one day I may list with Chuck and get a great multiple on these companies. But take those dollars that you're taking and now do all of the things on the list; in that plan and the things that the previous owner said I could never afford, I could never get to, I can never pay somebody to do it. Now you found the funds to go and actually do those things. Use that money to fund that growth. Again I'll refer to Pat who runs our paid search; he calls that feed the winners starve the losers, so just taking the wasted money and putting it back into reinvest on growth and winning. Chuck: So with the shipping fines that you discovered how long have you been running this business; it's been a year and a half? Mike: A year and a half, yeah. Chuck: And you just discovered it now. Is there something that you are having; we don't know what we don't know, right? So we don't know what to look for. Is this something that you could have identified on day one to have seen even more value? Mike: Yeah, thanks for pointing it out Chuck. It's always painful to look back and say oh we could have made an additional 30 to 50 grand in the last 12 months if we just would have found this. Chuck: And this is probably not a common problem, right? But it's something you're going to look for in the future. Where would they have identified that; what due diligence would you have done in order to have seen that? Mike: Yeah, looking at the shipping invoices and seeing exactly what those are. And there are some pretty cool companies out there that will A) look at that for you and B) they'll actually monitor your shipping and make sure that it arrives on time. There's one called Late Shipment it's I think the one that we use; LateShipment.com and if FedEx doesn't deliver within the agreed-upon time; the one to two days, they'll actually refund; we get a refund on that shipping cost. So that's another example if they're not using; if you send out a million dollars or if you pay a million dollars in shipping costs every year and I think I know ours is above a million but I'll just use that, so a million dollars, if you can recoup 2, 3, 4% that's 20, 30, $40,000 back in your pocket that just appeared out of nowhere. So that's another one on my list. So are they using a dim scanner? Are they getting fined for this? Are they using LateShipment.com and getting a refund on anything that's late? Again stacking up this $160,000 in savings in paid search, $40,000 in savings in affiliate, 30 to 50,000 in dim scanner, late shipment another 30 to $40,000 just stacking and stacking and stacking. Another one is credit card fees; are they using a good credit card process? Have they negotiated their rates since they grew from zero to 15 million dollars in sales? And if they haven't that's an opportunity like just a one or two; what do they call them? Bits I think is what they call it but it could mean a huge difference in your overall company. Just one or two bits is 15 to $30,000 on a 15 million dollar business. Chuck: And so in your defense, I think on the shipping thing the company that you purchased did have one of those companies in place that were looking at the delayed shipments but that company wasn't looking at the penalties you were receiving. Mike: That's right. Chuck: So even if somebody is using a company that is monitoring the late shipping and getting those refunds they may not be looking at the fees which is strange. You think they'd be doing it but they weren't. Something I've heard you say at conferences when looking at it from a different type of business, so right now we're kind of talking about e-commerce but you also work with people who are doing content sites and their affiliates with other people. So what's your number one tip if you purchased a content site that makes money off affiliates; what's your number one tip for those people? Mike: Go ask for a raise. Chuck: What does that mean? Mike: Go to the affiliate management; either the advertiser or the affiliate management company who's managing them and say I want to make more. And there's many ways that you can position that. One is if you're a content site just know that my affiliate company, AffiliateManager.com is always looking for more content sites. We want to bring that value to our clients and you are in a position; it's a content site's market, let me put it that way. We all want what you have and some make the mistake of because they've been beat down and offered 1, 2, 3, 5, 10% commissions in the past day they just turn away affiliate marketing. Don't do that. You're leaving money on the table. If you find a good advertiser or a good affiliate management company that knows what they're doing and they know that this content site is upper funnel and bringing incremental business to the table they're going to be willing to pay for that and they might pay 20%, 25%, 30%. One of our clients pays 100%. Another one pays up to $150 for an acquisition and they might make zero on it. So it's just one of those things where you have to go and be willing to ask for a raise. And again a good affiliate management company they're going to look at the incremental value, we; not to get too much into us because I know this is more about acquisition but we actually have an attribution tool that we built because it didn't exist that shows where in the clickstream each of these sites are. And if it's a content site going back to your point and we look at their overall numbers and 70% of the time they're the first touch for anybody who's making a purchase on your site, yes we want that incremental traffic and sales coming from that content site. So to you content sites out there you are in a position of desire. We all want to work with you more and go and ask for raises. Somebody who recognizes your value is going to very much be willing to pay it. And if they're not go find somebody else; they're going to be willing to pay it. You are valuable. Chuck: And just to give an example of something like that. I've got a number of content sites and one of them the affiliates that I was getting paid from is a Canadian company and they send me a Canadian check. So every time I cash the Canadian check I get hit with like a 10 or $20 cashing fee. And it's just like annoying and it's small amount of money but it's annoying so I emailed them and I said hey can you just like PayPal me the money or wire me the money or do something else because I want to get ahold of the $10 fee every time I cash your check and they go oh how about we just double what we pay you? Okay, that'll work. So they really are willing; if they see the value in what you're providing them they are willing to pay more, so just a nice little tip there from Mike Nuñez. Mike: Yeah. And there was a guy Greg; I won't say his last name at Rhodium one year and I said that at a table and one year later he came back and said by that one tip that you just said because he was a content site or is a content site, I have grown my revenue by 25%. All I did; I didn't do anything else but go back and ask for a raise and the revenue on my site grew 25%. Chuck: Amazing. Mike: Free, yeah. Chuck: Alright, so we've talked about shipping, we've talked about affiliate, we've talked about ads, is there anything else specifically that you're looking for when you're acquiring? Mike: Yeah if they're not on Amazon I think that's a pretty obvious one. If they are on Amazon and either doing a poor job or no job at Amazon ads; Amazon ads I probably the biggest opportunity right now for everyone that sells on Amazon. Chuck: And this is kind of new to you in the last couple of years, right? Mike: Yeah. Well, I mean it didn't really exist a couple of years ago or it was very nascent. So it's still one of those things like if you remember Google back in the day when clicks used to be available for a penny or five cents and such. Chuck: Yeah man they sent me a refrigerator. I had spent so much money I got a Google refrigerator. Mike: So I'm not saying that pen that clicks are available for a penny on Amazon but if you incorporate the right system and how to manage it you can gross it; like I'll give you physical numbers year over year in November even those Cyber Monday fell outside of November this year. We grew Amazon sales on that outdoor brand by 50% using Amazon ads. So it's another example of having expertise in this paid search world and finding opportunities within it. Amazon ads; I think maybe that's super-secret number 10. I think we've gotten away from the super secrets but maybe super-secret number 10 and it's probably one of the most powerful ones I see right now available for people. Chuck: So what else are you looking for? Mike: So besides being on Amazon and Amazon ads, me personally I'm looking for a strong operational foundation because I'm not an expert at that. I'm not good at that but thankfully the businesses that I purchase have that. I'm looking for a barrier to entry like how replicatable is this business and what is the barrier that people have to get through? And this is a little bit less quantifiable but this is just a general do I want to be involved in this business; how hard is it for somebody who's just as good at paid search as me or Amazon or whatever, if they just got a hold of my supplier could they replicate this and do I want that? And if the answer is it's too easy then I move on. Is it a learnable industry? One of the things I was worried about with the custom suit company was maybe before purchasing it I wasn't as sharp a dresser, Chuck. Maybe my wardrobe might have consisted of free conference t-shirts but I was worried about that and… Chuck: You're pulling it off still. Mike: Thank you. And once I got into it I learned no this is a learnable industry. I can do this and it's worked great since then. Is it Amazon resistant? And I know that's a little counter to saying are they on Amazon. Is Amazon going to move into that space? Are they going to want to replicate what it is that you're doing? And on the outdoor brand, it's more of we joined to them; we couldn't beat them so we joined them and a good 50, 60% of our sales are on Amazon on that brand. On the suit brand, we're looking to sell accessories; expand our brand awareness because you can't sell custom suits on Amazon and it's unlikely that Amazon is going to get into that realm. So we're thinking how can we use Amazon to expand our brand awareness, generate some confidence in the brand, and yet not have to; since we're not able to send custom suits and sell custom suits on Amazon directly so is Amazon a threat to the business is something that we look at overall. Inventory management optimization; so leveraging just in time inventory because anybody that's involved in an inventory-based business knows that a lot of times your profit can go straight back into purchasing additional inventory. And if you want to realize any profits before you sell the business you've got have inventory optimization. Is the current ownership leveraging that inventory optimization? Are there conversion rate optimization opportunities; have they ever even tried it before? I just had a call today for the suit company and this is going to be ultra-specific but it is an indicator of what we've done. We launched a new cart in early November and we just ran the numbers and today on desktop for new customers we have doubled our conversion rate which anybody knows that the lifeblood of a business is acquiring new customers. So to do that is pretty amazing. Now on mobile, it was pretty static but we've also generated significant amounts of more traffic on mobile to the suit company. So that's a little bit misleading to say that it's exactly the same. Well anybody who knows conversion rate optimization and knows how traffic works; if you increase traffic the quality is potentially a little bit lower and so the fact that we slightly beat our previous conversion rate on mobile is a huge win. So are there conversion rate optimization to opportunities in the acquisition? Here's one that you know is near and dear to my heart, Chuck. What is the current platform; are they on Net Suite, on Shopify, on Magento? Because the one thing I never ever recommend is changing platforms. So can you accomplish all of the things on your list that you want to do on the platform? We use Net Suite as one of them and it is extremely difficult to get changes done but we are not moving. So it's just something that I think everybody should really consider. Or are you on an archaic platform like at Yahoo stores; something that's not being updated anymore and there's seven people in the world that can code to Yahoo stores? Now you're beholden to them. You have to pay exorbitant rates for their development because they're the only one that knows it as opposed to a Shopify or a Magento that developers are plenty. Chuck: If you're on Yahoo shout out to Rob Snell, look him up if you need help with your Yahoo business. Mike: There you go. See I didn't even mean that. That helps. And I think the last thing; us particularly we enjoy custom products, so custom made suits is a really good example or even for the branded products; things that other people makes, turning them into custom products. We really think that that's a good market to be and again slightly more defensible against an Amazon. And then finally this is my last on my company acquisition algorithm that I'll share today just I know we're limited on time is what synergies can you participate in? So if you listen to the last call you heard me talking about a brand that we made an offer on that it was a full price offer, quick close, no due diligence because it was a trusted brand. And before Chuck chimes in, he recommends that you never do that but the reason why we wanted that brand is because it was geared towards outdoor enthusiasts and we have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of outdoor enthusiasts that come to our website every day. So looking for synergistic brands that are out there to acquire and diversify the income and now not only sell other people's brands but also sell your own brand; white labeling things like that, finding things with opportunities like that, that's the last opportunity that we're looking for in our algorithm. Chuck: Awesome. Alright, so now let's maybe move into what some of the lessons you've learned from the various acquisitions you've done. And you had acquired some stuff before Quiet Light as well. Mike: Yeah. So I think a lot of them are listed on what I just said but I will say there's; because every time I learn a lesson to me it's an opportunity for the next acquisition. So again I will buy another business on Net Suite but I wouldn't have bought the first one knowing what I know now about Net Suite. But now that we've had to learn it, now that we've had to; our developer is familiar with it now and can make the changes that we need and want, now I'll buy another one. And so to me there's an opportunity there, right? It's harder for people to do that than it is for me. It's yet another level of expertise. So that's one thing is a lot of the lessons are kind of listed already in that but there's one I would say recently and again it's with the custom suit business, don't get so caught up in your own expertise. Again we are really, really good at paid search and one of the reasons why is because we're so return focused. A mistake that we made with the custom suit business is we went straight for a return. If a dollar didn't turn into five; I'll just use that as an example, we didn't spend it. And because of that, we saw sales drop. And I talked to the previous owner about it and said hey we're seeing this, why? And he's like well yes cross-device tracking is good however it doesn't capture everything. And mobile devices; think about who buys suits these days, and it's somebody with a mobile life. It's a lawyer that's always in the courtroom. It's a doctor that's always walking about. It's a financial person that's not necessarily sitting at their desk, they're going to meeting after meeting after meeting and where are they searching up for their next suit? Well, it's probably their mobile device. They find it and then they go on the desktop and they go on and they purchase it. And we had pulled back pretty significantly on the mobile spend because the conversion rate just wasn't as good. And so that's one example of us kind of getting in our own way. But to our credit, we were able to kind of step back and say okay we learned a lesson here, let's get better at it and change our approach. And since then that's when we now had some of our best days that we've ever had. So I like to think of it as a lot of these owners or the previous owners they had levels of expertise; they were doing something right and so it's our job as experts that are better at it to take the lessons that they've learned and apply our expertise to it to just throw some gasoline on it. Chuck: Alright Mike so one of the ways I like to usually end these things is just to ask if you have any kind of tools that you use on a regular basis; just some things that can either help with productivity, it could even be outside of work. One example the other day I was kind of upset about it because you ordered the chicken sandwich from Popeye's through Uber Eats so that you didn't have to wait in line and you didn't bother sending me one. That's a great little life hack. So what else do you have? Do you have any tools that you might recommend or any other little things? Mike: I did the same thing with Amazon two years ago when they were operating like the one-hour delivery and we had a hurricane coming to Florida and I just ordered all the bottled water and had it delivered while everybody else is fighting each other at the store. But now that secret's out. That's no longer an advantage but yeah some tools that I like that we use; so for Google Ads, I'll say if you're using things like maximize for clicks run we prefer an enhanced CPC bidding algorithm or a target CPA. We always test to see which one's better. Prioritization, I love Air Table. I got to give a shout out to my business partner Daniel for that. Air Table is a prioritization tool and basically, it can help identify what is the easiest to implement to get the most impactful change that you can make. And so it just really helps to prioritize what it is that you're doing and the changes that you're making to the company because obviously, we all want to make the biggest impact as quickly as possible. I love Grammarly for sending emails so that I don't sound silly. Chuck: That one saves me all the time. Mike: It's so good. I haven't used their pro version but even just the regular version is fantastic. For the affiliate management company, I got to give a shout out to Mail Shake. We love Mail Shake. We use that very often. It's a terrific tool. I love Moz. So the Moz toolbar is something that I use a lot. And then I think we use a lot of the things everybody else uses like the Evernotes and Google apps and things like that. So I think the first ones that were probably some of the others may not have heard them. Chuck: Awesome. Well, I think everybody who's been listening appreciates your time. I'd love to have you back at another time. We can talk about some more stuff once you've hit that next goal of purchase through us we'll talk about that one. But again thank you for the time today and we'll talk to you again soon. Mike: Thanks, Chuck. Links and Resources: Affiliate Manager

Some of the most popular episodes we've aired have been with guests who have experienced the buying or selling process firsthand. Today's guest has acquired several businesses and is genuinely good at the acquisition process. In part one of a two-part series, Chuck is talking to Mike Nunez about his various acquisitions and his 9 super secret to tips to being a great buyer. Mike has been in the online marketing space since 1999. After gaining experience in affiliate marketing, he launched Affiliate Manager with his brother while he continued to work full time for Google. More recently, Mike has purchased several e-commerce businesses from Quiet Light. We'll hear about how Mike is becoming one of our top buyers, how he's realizing his dreams, and that one last goal he may just reach. Episode Highlights: What it means to be a good buyer. What values the seller looks for aside from the monetary value. Ways to put the seller at ease by focusing on what is important to them. The importance of having a plan in your approach to the seller. How to accept and value of the previous owner's advice during the transition. Why you should avoid poor positioned questions when working with the seller. The buyer needs to find what he wants – the fit has to be right for the buyer too. Finding the component that will help make the business yours and not focus solely on the money piece. The relationship of trust in your broker is also a key factor in being a good buyer or seller. Transcription: Mark: Some of the most popular podcasts that we've put out here at Quiet Light Brokerage are the episodes where we get the chance to interview either a seller or a buyer on their background or their journey of going through a buying an online business. And Chuck I know you had a good friend of ours, a good friend of Quiet Light Brokerage's and a previous podcast guest as well, Mike Nuñez on because he's acquired a couple of businesses from us and more specifically from you in the recent months. How did that discussion go? Chuck: Yeah it went great. Mike is what I would consider probably one of our best buyers. The way he's able to get on a phone call and just talk to people, and sometimes I use the word tactics throughout the call. I don't feel like when he's doing it he's being tactical, I feel like he's just a very genuinely friendly guy who is just really good. His experience is that he's been in internet marketing for 20 years I've been in it for 24 so he's almost up there with me. Mark: He worked at Google so he's got that on you. Chuck: Yeah, he worked at Google for four years in the paid search department. So he talks a lot about on this one so I ended up having to split this up into two podcasts because it was just going so long. So the first one we talked about his nine super-secret tips to being a great buyer and there was a lot of really actionable stuff in there that I think everybody is going to be able to get a lot out of. Mark: Guys that's awesome and you talk about the difference between tactics and just being a good guy and look they can blend together, right? I mean Mike isn't the type of conniving guy saying here's what I'm going to do, I'm going to say this phrase and that phrase to make sure somebody absolutely loves me and then I'm going to be able to get an additional 20% off. That's not the way he works. He is just generally a good guy. He helps a lot. He's got that help first mentality. We preach this all the time and Joe is the one that coined a lot of these phrases which is nice buyers tend to do better. And it's just really, really true that sometimes we need tips on how to do it. This is why Dale Carnegie wrote the famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People just to give us some actionable tips to be like how do you actually encounter people in a business environment in a way that will benefit you. And if you read the book you find out that a lot of it is; well it starts with that right disposition and who you are. And Mike is a good person. I love that you broke this out into nine tips. Are you able to give me any preview of any of the nine tips or do you not remember them offhand? Chuck: Yeah. So one of the questions is around positioning the way you ask questions I think it's a really good tip. I won't get into all the details but you'll see it in the video. Mark: Okay, so not just going out there and hammering people with questions in a very kind of combatant way but I'm sure Mike has a very unique approach to that. Chuck: Well, Mark I just said I'm not going to get into the details. Don't try to pressure me. Mark: Alright. You know what I was talking to Joe the other day and he's like do you listen to the podcasts, Mark? And I said no, I don't because I hear enough of you Joe I don't want to hear more of you and he records all the episodes. So he said your intros are getting to be too long so let's cut it out. Let's get to it. Chuck: Hey everybody today on the call we have Mike Nuñez. Welcome, Mike. Mike: Thank you, Chuck, it's great to be here. Chuck: So people may have heard your name before because we mentioned you quite frequently on the podcast. And the reason we mentioned you so frequently is because you're what I would consider my number one buyer. I think probably one of Quiet Light's top buyers and not from a monetary perspective. You do purchase a lot of businesses, you purchase a lot of large businesses from us but more so just from your personality; the way you interact with clients on phone calls like whenever I'm telling somebody how to be a good buyer I'm always in my head thinking what does Mike do and then I'm telling them what Mike does in order to be a good buyer. Because we're friends and I know you outside of Quiet Light but like I really do mean that. Like you are really a great buyer and you're easy to talk to. And if anybody's watching the video today they're going to notice that you look somewhat like a sports commentator with that headset on and you've got a suit and tie and the suit and tie isn't the normal way I see Mike but one of the businesses he purchased was a custom-tailored suit business so I guess he's got to rep that brand now. Mike: That's right. Chuck: But maybe you could tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Mike: Oh great. I'm happy to. And first, let me say thank you. That was super just kind of you to say. I always whenever I have any of these phone calls I just take an approach of what I want to hear and recognizing that these business owners have been working on this; their babies, right? And you just have to be careful as you ask questions because we all want to know where the opportunity is and I'm sure we'll talk much more about that here but we want to know where the opportunity is and the way that you find that is by asking questions. But it's a very fine line between asking questions and becoming insulting and so you just have to walk that fine line. But there's absolutely a way to do it and there's a way to lead these sellers into that and realizing that you're both kind of on the same team. But again; well I think we're getting ahead of ourselves or at least I am so I'll tell you a little bit about me to start this off. I've been in online marketing since 1999, I was in college at the time and I know that dates myself a little bit. The first job was in lead generation, online marketing. I moved in to travel doing affiliate marketing and travel. I eventually launched my own affiliate marketing business along with my brother that's still going today so its AffiliateManager.com. Last year we merged with a company called Rhino Fish to create the performance company which is our page search division. Overall that marketing company is about 22 people. We have 3 former Googlers myself included on that staff. So we're quite good at both affiliate marketing and paid search. I like to say so. We also have two other businesses or I have two other businesses; one is an outdoor equipment seller that I purchased from Quiet Light, another is a custom made to measure suit company that I purchased from Quiet Light as well. So overall I'm about 20 years down it hurts to say experience in online marketing and business and online businesses in general and it's been a really fun journey. I always like to say Chuck my dream used to be I want to be able to work from anywhere and now I'm there. The new dream is that I want to not have to work. So someday I'll realize that second dream. Chuck: I don't like to hear that because I think the term not working would be not buying additional businesses and you're one short away from a special goal that I; I told him if you bought a certain number that I would buy him a specific thing. So he's just shy of that goal. Mike: Yeah it's just without getting into too many details like we're talking about less than what is it 4% on millions of dollars that I'm short. Chuck: But I set this goal early on, right? So it's your fault that you haven't reached it. If you have just paid a little bit more in that last acquisition you would have hit that goal. Mike: We need to round up Chuck. That's what I'm saying. We need to just round up and I should hit that threshold. Chuck: I'll remember that on the next acquisition. We'll just round up. Mike: Right. Yeah. Only when it's in my favor, please. Chuck: So part of the reason I wanted to have you on the call today was one just to talk about maybe some tips or just maybe even not tips but just discussing what it is to be a good buyer. But then also from your perspective what it is you're looking at when you're looking to buy businesses. I know you have a specific criteria that you're looking for and your criteria is different than other people's. And I wanted to also maybe talk about some lessons you've learned along the way. So I guess to kick it off maybe let's just dive in a little bit about being a good buyer. So I would start off just by saying that you know I talked to a lot of people; constantly I'm on the phone and people are always asking me what it is to be a good buyer? And some people I talked to think that in order to be a good buyer it's about being aggressive in trying to negotiate. And maybe they're not thinking that as being a good buyer but they want to try to get the best deal by doing that and they'll say negative things about people's businesses. And you take a very different approach than that. So I think you already addressed it a little bit but maybe you want to dive into maybe the approach you take to negotiating and to speaking with others. Mike: Sure. I think it's important context to say both of the businesses that I've purchased from you Chuck and Quiet Light had multiple offers, were very much generating a lot of interest and so there were multiple potential buyers. And I don't want to say we were the lowest offer. I don't think we were. I know in both cases we weren't the highest offer either. Chuck: Yeah just maybe to add a little context before you dive into further, one of the; I think actually both of them said I wanted to sell to Mike. So they're talking to multiple people and they said get Mike up to this number I want to sell to him. Even though that number was lower than what some of the other potential buyers were offering. Mike: Yeah. Chuck: So I think that speaks a lot to you. Mike: Thank you again, Chuck. But I would say that therein lies the quote-unquote the secret which is money is valuable, right? They want money. If you're nowhere near what they're asking or if you're nowhere near what their magic number is, the rest of this conversation goes away. Let's put that aside. I think Quiet Light does an incredible job overall of valuing companies fairly and appropriately. And you know that walking in. So if you know that walking in okay this is a fairly and appropriately valued business now it's a matter of percentage points maybe either way and in either direction of that. The purpose of the call, at least the initial call is to identify; one of the purposes of the call is to identify what value is this seller seeking beyond the dollars because the dollars are going to fall within a certain range. So a good example for the suit business is the seller really cared about his people. He really cared about his co-workers that he's had for the last however many years; almost 10 years that have put in their blood, their sweat, their tears into this. And he wanted to know that they were going to be okay. And I think actually in the ranking of why I won the business even though I had a lower offer than other people had, that's probably number one is just feeling comfortable about that the new owner is going to come in and take care of the people that were there. And I made no promises. Let me say that. I didn't say I promise I'm not going to let anybody go or I promise; I said no, I promise I'm going to be fair and appropriate with everybody and evaluate everybody based on performance. And he was confident knowing that he had hired stellar people. And it was part of what was so attractive about the business is he had incredible people that were already working there so it made it even more attractive for us. So I think that was number one for him. Second I think there was a sense of patriotism maybe. So this is a European company. It was based in Europe. It's in a European country. And this European country is kind of known for textiles and for creating things and such. And so I think one of the other buyers; and again there's multiple people in here that you're kind of competing against and so you got to think of like a pros and cons checklist and I'm being compared to each one of these other potential buyers in their pros and cons checklist. One of the other potential buyers wanted to move the production out of Europe and into China. There's nothing wrong with that if that's where their connections are if that's where their factories are and such; great. That's where they want to move their production, good for them. However this particular seller wanted to keep production because of his pride for his country, because of his desire to benefit his country, he wanted to keep production in his home country. I didn't have any alternative contacts in China or in any other potential production areas and so I felt like that was important to them and so I made it known. And I think a lot of, and I think it's the second thing is kind of just listening on the calls. Maybe that's super-secret number two is listening and hearing what's important to them and asking that question okay let's move money aside what's important to you in the future of this company? And another good example of that is potential branding or taking care of the customers. I know this may sound a little bit cliché but this is their baby, right? They've grown this baby. They've watched this baby grow. They've poured their love, their sweat, their tears, their hours. The seller of the custom suit company is an example. I remember him saying like I can't remember the last time I took a vacation. He just poured everything he possibly had into this company. And so when you're that invested overall they just kind of feel a comfort level that the new owner is going to come in and do right by what they've built. They just don't want to see it go away and it's they've already got their cash at that point and they still care. And I will say one positive side effect and please know that this is partly or mostly; not even partly, mostly because of the owner and this is one of the criteria; we can talk more about this later, but one of the criteria that I look at is an owner that cares and they're selling for potentially a different reason other than they don't care about the business anymore. I think those are the ones that kind of phone it in afterwards. The two owners of the businesses that I've purchased are still very much invested. One of them still works full time in the company and works as hard today as when he owned it. And I am very appreciative for that. Same thing for the custom suit company, he chimes in all the time. Like hey, this is how we did things, this is how we did it. It's so helpful in the transition of a company to have the context of somebody who built this business from the ground up. And I think the super-secret number three there is when somebody is on your side, let them be. Both of their intentions aren't to harm the business in any way. They want to see it grow. And even though in both instances there's been times where we didn't quite agree on how to take things to the next level, we absolutely welcomed their feedback and sometimes they were right. Sometimes we were right. Kind of checking your pride and moving it to the side for a second when you're good at something and allowing them to tell you, yes I know you're good at this, let me tell you how what you're doing applies specifically to the business that you're purchasing from me. It's a really important lesson in the growth of the business which might be a good segway Chuck if it's okay with you to start talking about the lessons learned for some of the businesses or did you want more on…? Chuck: Before we move on you mentioned that both of the owners of the businesses were kind of still somewhat involved in the company. Is that something you're specifically looking for or was that just a happenstance of you buying a good quality business that had an owner that actually cared about the business? Mike: So in neither instance was it a requirement beforehand that the owner would stay on with the business post-acquisition. The first acquisition, the owner requested it. They said hey I see the plan and I didn't intend to call out these super-secrets but let's call it the super-secret number four is have a plan. Don't just walk in and say hey I'd like to buy your business. In that instance, I just so happened to be in London and as I'm trying to buy this business the owner of the business lived in an island off of the coast of Morocco. I had a free weekend while I was in London and I flew over and met with him and his wonderful wife and they were gracious. They took me to dinner. I insisted but they wouldn't let me treat for dinner. I think they were just thankful that I flew to go visit them and talk about the business; so just again that personal connection there. So while it wasn't a requirement that they stay with the business post-acquisition I'm always open to it if they're open to it. And I started talking about the plan; having the plan and being able to approach them. In both instances they got excited. One of them and I'll try to talk vague because I don't want to say anything about either one of them that they wouldn't want me to share. But one of them said when I said why are you selling it they said well I'm almost running out of ideas. Like I don't know what the next thing to do is. I don't know where to take this next and how to make it grow. And so for me, it's a choice of whether we stay at the level that we are now and continue happily down that path. Or do I allow my baby to grow by giving it to somebody who's going to take it to that next level? And so to be able to show them okay not only can we take it to next level here's how; yes, you recognize we have the experience before this on how to get this to that next level but here let me lay out the plan in front of you. And all throughout the while of reviewing the business and going to the website I have a checklist and I'll go over some of the points with you later today, here's all the opportunities that we think that we can have. And based off of those opportunities that's how we create the plan. And then we plug that into our for lack of a better word, our company acquisition algorithm to say okay is this worthwhile? And based off of the competitive advantages that we have with this business can we offer a little more? Do we need to offer a little less? Like where do we think that we're going to fit into this overall picture? So I feel like I didn't fully answer your question. The answer is no we don't require the owners to stay on post-acquisition. We are completely open to it. We prefer it. In both instances, they're both quite engaged overall. And just to reiterate the point maybe super-secret number five is if somebody wants to be on your side let them be. And in this instance, both the previous owners want to be on our side. They want to give us the feedback. We 100% remain open to receiving that feedback even if it's counter to what we want to achieve we'll at least receive it. I have a philosophy that you're not entitled to have a point if you can't justify it. And so if they come to me and say hey I think you're doing this incorrectly or I don't think you're doing this right. I tell myself okay, here's an expert that's owned this business for a long time, they feel strongly enough to come to me and say I think you're doing this incorrectly. I feel strongly that I'm doing it this way. But feeling trolling isn't good enough. I need to go pull data, go look at numbers, go say why are we doing it this way. And then I go back to them and say okay here's the reason why we're doing this way and they can poke holes in it or say no you know what that looks good. I wish I would have known that when I had the business. So I think that answers your question, Chuck. Chuck: Yeah I think so. And maybe secret; what number are we on, number six? Mike: I think we're on number six now. Chuck: Okay, so I would say super-secret number six, what you kind of just alluded to and what you didn't is you know when in school like high school or whatever and the teacher is like oh there's no such thing as a dumb question. There 100% is such a thing as a dumb question when you're talking to a seller. I would say super-secret number six is be prepared when you get on a call, be dedicated to the call that you're on, don't be in a car with a lot of background noise. Be at a desk, be in one place, do some research, if there's an interview to watch, watch the interview with the seller, read the package, ask intelligent questions about the business. It's okay to ask something that's already been addressed in the package if you want some additional information but show that you've actually researched the business because constantly when I'm talking to my sellers and we get off a phone call they're like that guy is not serious, don't connect me with him again. They want to know that you're serious and a way to show that you're serious is to have done some research ahead of time and ask intelligent questions about the business. And that's something that you definitely do. Mike: Thanks, Chuck. And I think that goes with having a plan. Like I don't have the time, I know you don't have the time, I don't have the time, I'm sure the sellers don't have the time to just sit there and answer questions that for somebody who clearly isn't prepared for the call it's a horrible signal to the seller that you're not serious about this that even if you do have the cash, even if all other things fall into place you're not going to be an organized person handling their business moving forward. So it's just an awful signal to send upfront. And I think one of the other things that you said; I don't want to say that there's bad questions, there's unprepared questions. Chuck: There are bad questions. I've had them on my calls. Mike: Okay. Chuck: And I know you're; Mike again this gets back to Mike being a super nice guy and doesn't want to; there are dumb questions and I've had many of them on my calls. Mike: I'm still going to stay that there's poorly positioned questions. And one of them might be hey Chuck I feel like this is a really dumb question and so forgive me for asking what's going to seem like a dumb question but it's just weighing on me and I need to ask it. That's a well-positioned dumb question. Another really good example of that is starting a call. I have a big belief and maybe this might be in one of the other super- secrets but we'll call it super-secret number seven, are we on seven now? So super-secret number seven, figure out what they want and give it to them. And again part of that is money but that's the beauty of working with a broker especially Quiet Light, that part's already figured out. That's almost done. They've declared that this is the multiple that they want now it's up to you to figure out does that fit within your company acquisition algorithm. Can I afford this based off of all of these criteria? And again I'll go through some of those in a little bit. Move that aside and now figure out what do they want. Do they want to stay on with the business? Do they want to hand it over to somebody who's going to keep the work within their country or somebody who isn't going to start selling poorly made products to their customer base that they've built up over time? Figure out what they want and give it to them. It's the best negotiation technique. If you walk into a call or a negotiation and you're trying to think how can I squeeze every dime out of this person on the other side of this phone call; I mean good luck to you, you may win or you may not. I have the philosophy of; I took a course from the Wharton School of Business one time and we talked about negotiation and one of the things we talked about was the difference between an average hitter in baseball and a Hall of Fame hitter in baseball is one in nine hits. If you can get one more hit in nine at-bats, that's the difference between average and Hall of Fame. The same thing with negotiation, if you can get one more hit in nine at-bats it's potentially a huge difference in the overall success that you're going to have. So same thing here, and so I approach the call as hey let's figure this out together and I'm listening the entire time trying to figure out what's important to the person on the other side of the call. Also, another; super-secret number eight is going to be disarming the call. It doesn't have to be this contentious conversation where I'm battling you for information. That's not the case. I start out almost every call and you can attest to this Chuck, and by the way, I've purchased a couple. I've probably had maybe less than 10 but several phone calls with people. Some of them after the call I decide this is not the right fit for me. I can't give them what they want so I just walk away and I go on to the next business. Other ones I've made offers for and maybe somebody else was giving something that they wanted and I didn't get that. But the two that I've got I'm very happy with thus far. But when I start the call I say hey I need to ask some questions and some of these questions might come across the wrong way. They may seem offensive or it may seem like I'm trying to prod or I'm trying to poke, all I'm looking for is opportunity. What opportunity exists in your business? And I'm trying to use it to go justify pulling this money out of other places and spending it and handing it over to you. So I'm looking for your help in bridging that gap here. And so when you position it that way and say help me get there it's amazing how they almost start to fall over themselves to tell you all of the potential opportunities in the business beyond what they've already written into the marketing package. And I'll even call that out. I've read the marketing package. I see that you see that this is an opportunity, this is an opportunity, this is an opportunity, based off of some research that I've done I think that this might be an opportunity. Is there a reason why you haven't attacked that market? Is there a reason why you haven't advertised on this channel? Is there a reason why this or this or that? And after you've position that I'm looking for opportunity, I want to make this happen, help me get there, usually they're quite open and willing to volunteer that information. So I'll call that super-secret number eight. Chuck: Yup, number eight. I can see the headline of this interview now; eight super-secrets of Mike Nuñez. We've got to get it to like 9 or 10 maybe. So yeah I think that those are some really good tactics. And I hate to use the word tactic because I don't feel like it's a tactic. I guess it is but like that's just your normal personality and maybe some people don't have it. But I think one of the major takeaways there is don't be super aggressive with a seller. Like the businesses we sell at Quiet Light, they're generally speaking super high quality with owners that care. It's not we generally; like sometimes we do but often it's not people that are just starting a business to flip, to flip, to flip. These are people who started a business because it's something they're passionate about and they're ready to move on for one reason or another and they want to pass on the torch to somebody who cares. And when you come in aggressive and if you try to beat down their business or things like that, that doesn't work. Maybe if you're working on a 100 million dollar deal and you got to like get in there and be super aggressive like that doesn't work with what we're doing at all. Mike: I just have to add to that Chuck because I think it's like if it works you should be worried. If it works it's probably not the right business. Like that's not; feel free to take this out Chuck if I shouldn't or can't talk about this but in the last offer I made I did not get the business. I made an offer but in our call, I recognized that what they were looking for was a quick close and a short close. They wanted to make sure that it closed. They wanted to do it quickly. And that was beyond the dollars and it was very fairly priced already, beyond the dollars that's what was important to them. And so for the caller just to give you an example of how much I personally trust after physically spending millions of dollars with Quiet Light already I made an offer, all cash so that they knew that this was going to close. I offered close at your convenience. And third I offered no due diligence. Now I wouldn't recommend that for everybody and all things. Chuck: I don't recommend that either. Do not offer to close. This is a certain special deal with a person that is a known entity that was trusted. You should always do your due diligence. Don't listen to Mike. Don't rely on us to do due diligence. It is your job to do the due diligence. Mike: 100% that was my decision that I was aware of this company, the numbers were small enough where even if this was a complete disaster it wouldn't be a disaster for me. But it was a complete cash offer, it was a complete quick close and I offer that with the hope that that was the value that they were looking for that was not a cash value that would allow them to choose me because they had; I mean I don't even know how many Chuck. Chuck: There were nine offers on the deal and you were; because of that they wanted to sell that component to you but the other offer was just so much; it was more money, the guy was willing to do a quick close as well so it just beats you out. They wanted to sell it to you. The other guy was just; it was a better offer with the other person. Mike: Understood. And so I got close right with the untangible non-monetary aspects of the offer.; it got me super close, right? I almost got that extra hit and that nine tenth bat. So just a good example of listening to what they want, trying to give it to them, and it's going to save you dollars in the long run. And the fact that they were considering me sounds like even though my offer was lower; yet again that seems to be the MO here overall. And by the way, I made a full price offer so it wasn't even like I made an under offer. I made a full price offer but somebody beat the full price offer and I'm still under consideration. Chuck: And just to let maybe another super-secret number nine; this isn't Mike's this is mine so I think that's like two of the nine. Listen to the broker. If I'm telling you something there's a reason I'm telling you it. Like when I say this is going to sell for at or above asking, it's probably going to sell for at or above asking. I'm not just trying to increase the price, right? I do represent the seller and I'm trying to do my best to get as much value for the seller but I'm not going to do that by lying. I'm going, to be honest. There's things I can't say to you. If you say well what's the other asking price is or what's the other offers, I can't tell you that but I will try to lead you in the direction of making an offer that's going to be accepted. Don't think that we're just; if I tell you there's multiple offers, there are multiple offers. I'm not just B-S-ing you. And we get it all the time where I tell people there's multiple offers put your best highest final offer in and then yeah okay asking price and I'm like put your best offer like I'm just telling you and then it goes for above asking and then the person is mad oh why didn't you tell me? I would've put a higher offer. And it's like I did tell you; I told you to put your best offer in. Like I don't want you to stretch, I don't want you to put an offer that makes you uncomfortable but you need to put your best offer in if you want to win this business. Mike: So I just want to say to that people have been kind of beat down and trained to not be trusting especially to brokerages. And at the risk of sounding like a Quiet Light commercial, it's just not the case with Quiet Light. And is it okay with you if I tell the story of how I found Quiet Light and why I just trust you guys implicitly? Chuck: I'm not sure of the story but please do tell it. Mike: I've had the affiliate manager and the performance company; the affiliate managed business overall since 2002. I started it with my brother and we built up the business. And in 2015 my brother passed away. He passed away fairly unexpectedly. And I was working at Google at the time and I had a decision to make; do I leave Google and come back to Affiliate Manager or do I sell the company? And so through some mutual contacts, I was referred over to Mark and Joe. This was before Chuck was there so I totally would've went to Chuck. But I went to Mark and Joe and just talked about the business and they asked me just great questions and they asked me for the P&L and they asked me what does the growth rate look like over the last few years. And we had been growing at like a 50%; no I'm sorry 100% rate year over year. We had doubled every year for the previous three years from '13, '14, and ‘15. And this is in January 2016 that I'm talking to Mark and Joe. And they even though this would have been a multimillion-dollar deal to sell that company; and I'm sure they do many, many multimillion-dollar deals which makes it easier to; I don't want to say turn it away but to give this advice. Chuck: So I will stop you there before I was with Quiet Light which was I've been about three years they weren't doing a lot of multimillion-dollar deals. So at that time a million, two, or three million dollars was a lot. It's just been in the last few years that we've really got up to where we're selling some of these really large businesses. Mike: So that makes it even more impressive, right? And I just remember this phone call with Mark and Joe so clearly where they said Mike when you sell this we'd love to be the brokerage for you. This is the wrong decision to sell right now. If you keep growing at this rate you will get what you want. Because of that conversation; I talked to other brokers who are ready to list my business or promising me the world and because of that especially now knowing that it would have been a very high multimillion-dollar deal for them and that they weren't doing as many at that time, for them to turn away that commission just gave me a level of trust with them that this is the company that I'm going to do business with. I am not comparing myself to Warren Buffett, Chuck. Not in the least. But one thing that he does that I love is he makes things easy and he; I don't want to say he takes shortcuts but he has built-in shortcuts. He can go from looking at a potential deal to executing a deal very quickly. And I don't know how he does it but my interpretation of how he does it is he identifies businesses and companies that he feels confident and he trusts. And so to me the implicit trust that I get from working with Quiet Light is a shortcut. To me, it gets me from here to this point. My comfort level right off the bat knowing that Quiet Light is not going to take a company that's shady or take a company that doesn't have solid P&L numbers or things of that effect, it's just such a comfort level. And if my comfort level was at a 90 pre these two deals because of what Mark and Joe did when they told me go continue to grow your business. It's at 100 now that I've actually purchased two companies and both of them are better than what I had expected. Now granted I'll take some credit for that that I've done the due diligence on it; I hired Centurica actually for both due diligences. We did the due diligence and we got into the company. Both of them feel; were over a year in on the first one, we're almost a year on the second one and both are solid. Both are growing. We just ran the numbers and after a little bit of a rocky start with the suit one because of some of the changes that we were making and that's what happens but we are now; November is our biggest month and we were up 30%. If you shift to include cyber Monday because everybody is obviously one of our biggest days. Chuck: How long have you owned that company? Mike: Since April of this year. So to go from there we beat our biggest day previously in the company not once, not twice, but three times by over 25%. So to beat your previous biggest day which was Black Friday; I'm sorry Cyber Monday last year, we beat it Black Friday this year, we beat it the Sunday after Black Friday this year, and we beat it again on Cyber Monday this year. So we literally doubled Black Friday. So it's been amazing. And again if my comfort level was a 90, it's 100 because of that. Like I'm not walking into a business that's a money pit or that has craters I didn't expect or potholes that I didn't expect. So I think that's just super important overall. Chuck: Awesome. So we're running a little long on this call, we've got a ton to talk about. So would you be interested in having this become a two-part segment where we'll end it here and then we'll keep going but we'll put that as a part two, to be continued? Mike: Yeah. But in case people are watching this on video just know that we cut it into two parts. I didn't wear the same suit on two different days. Chuck: We'll make a quick wardrobe change. Mike: Okay, I'll go change my jacket. Chuck: No. Mike: But that's fine. Yes, I'm happy to do that. Chuck: Alright. So, everybody, Mike Nuñez thank you for the interview today. And for everybody watching stay tuned. Next, we will discuss some of the lessons you've learned and what you're looking for when you purchase a business. So, for now, bye everybody and thank you, Mike, for joining us. Mike: Thanks for having me. Links and Resources: Affiliate Manager

 The Good Life (Part 1) - Chuck ColsonThe Good Life (Part 2) - Chuck ColsonFamilyLife Today® Radio TranscriptReferences to conferences, resources, or other special promotions may be obsolete. The Good LifeDay 2 o 2 Guest:                        Chuck Colson  From the Series:      A Life Well-Lived________________________________________________________________ Bob:                Do the truth claims of Christianity make rational, logical, reasonable sense?  Chuck Colson says they do. Chuck:            I've gotten so convinced of the truth of the biblical worldview as applied in life against any other worldview, and I'm convinced if I could argue the case that the biblical worldview is the only one that conforms to reality, that I would win that case, hands down, intellectually – by reason, by arguments, by logic.  But that doesn't get you to God.  As a matter of fact, sometimes the more you know, the tougher it gets. Bob:                This is FamilyLife Today for Tuesday, August 30th.  Our host is the president of FamilyLife, Dennis Rainey, and I'm Bob Lepine.  What can we do or say that will persuade a watching world of the reality of who Christ is?                         And welcome to FamilyLife Today, thanks for joining us.  You know, the guest we have with us this week – I don't know – in fact, I'm curious – it's obvious, as you read through what he's written, that he's been influenced by C.S. Lewis and by Francis Shaffer, and I just wonder who wins the battle there – Lewis versus Shaffer?  Who has had more influence in Chuck Colson's life – C.S. Lewis or Francis Shaffer? Chuck:            I would hate to answer that question, Bob, because both of them have had a huge influence on my life.  Lewis would probably, however, if I had to chose between the two, would be number one because it was his arguments in "Mere Christianity," that persuaded me that Christianity is rational, reasonable, sustainable, as a matter of fact, nothing else makes sense.  And so you'll see a lot of Lewis through this book.                         In terms of my theology, Shaffer; and, before him, Abraham Kiper, influenced my perspective on Scripture and the relationship of the church and Scripture to the world.  So in two different areas, I am profoundly grateful to those three men. Bob:                Was Shaffer still alive when you came to faith? Chuck:            Oh, yes, I knew him.  Oh, sure, I went to LeBrie [ph] and visited with him at his invitation.  We spent a day together.  It was a wonderful time.  He was a very humble man, and then I visited with him a number of times when he came to the States and was at speeches and conferences.  I was at his funeral, the first person to come in and view the body, as a matter of fact, when he laying in his living room. Bob:                I kind of just jumped in.  I guess most of our listeners probably know our guest. Dennis:          I think they recognized the voice of Chuck Colson.  Chuck, welcome back to FamilyLife Today.   Chuck:            Thanks, Dennis, nice to be with you. Dennis:          Chuck has written a book called "The Good Life," and you don't have to turn but a couple of pages before you read a quote by Pascal, who said, "The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason." Chuck:            Blaise Pascal is one of the most interesting men ever, and his writings have affected me greatly, as well, particularly his Pensees.  But Pascal died in his late thirties, and was the inventor of the computer.  He did the first crude calculating device. Bob:                This isn't some Al Gore thing you're just making up? Chuck:            No, no, this isn't Al Gore inventing the unit.  Blaise Pascal, 300 years ago, came up with the concept that has become the computer.  He was also a great philosopher and great Christian.  What he's basically saying is that reason is a gift of God, and we can use reason to pursue with our minds facts and truth, and the more we look for the facts and truth about life, we will eventually get to the point where we realize reason takes us only so far. Dennis:          Right. Chuck:            And the more we reason – and that's what I do in this book – the more we reason, we get to the place where we have to end up in faith. Dennis:          You tell a story at the beginning of your book that beautifully illustrates that.  It's about your daughter, Emily, who is a single parent raising an autistic child, Max.   Chuck:            Yes, she's a great heroine to me, and Max is the most lovable kid in the world.  And I tell the story of why I wrote this book, basically, this book is to try to show people how the world works and how they fit into it, and it's to be non-threatening.  It's a book for seekers.  That's why it relies on reason for the first two-thirds of the book before it gets to Scripture and faith, because I want to draw people in.                         But one thing about autism, as most people perhaps are aware, everything has to be orderly in just perfect arrangement for an autistic child.  When Max comes to our house – he's 14, he's getting to be a big kid. Emily does a wonderful job managing him.  When he comes to our house, he checks where all the pictures are.  Are they all on the wall, in the same place?  Does the stove work the same way?  Has anything changed?  And then as long as he knows everything is okay, he's at peace.                         Well, one night we had a visitor come to the house, and it was unexpected, and he brought a Christmas gift for me, and when he came in the house, Max started to get agitated, and you could see he was going to have what euphemistically called a "meltdown," and they go out of control, they have a tantrum.  So Emily grabbed a pad and sat down with Max and drew pictures.  She's a good artist.  She drew little box pictures like a comic strip.  And she would say, "This man knocking on the door, he's a friend of Grandpa's, they go fishing together," and then she'd draw a little sign of a fishing boat, and then "They work together, and it's Christmas, and he's brought this gift."  She drew the picture.                          Suddenly, Max understood how his little world at that moment worked, and he calmed down immediately.  And what I'm doing in this book is drawing a picture for people the same way Emily drew a picture for Max of how the world works.  What things are true, what things aren't true, what can you find about life, and most of which is through paradoxes.  What can you find out that's true about life, and then figure out how you fit in.  And, of course, the ultimate question is what is true?  Is there truth, and is it knowable?                         The second half of the book is devoted to that question which, to me, is one that we Christians desperately need to understand how you make that case and then make it with our friends.  And, particularly, get your kids to understand there is truth, and it is knowable, and here is how it's knowable before they go to college or before they leave the home, because the first thing they'll be assaulted with is the statement, "There is no truth." Bob:                Do you remember when Timothy McVeigh was executed, and he read, as his final statement in life, the poem, "Invictus," which ends with I am the captain of my own destiny.  Do you think most people think that that is what life is all about? Chuck:            Well, I think a lot of people would say that, because I would have said that before I was converted, and that's a statement of pride.  In the case of Timothy McVeigh, it was insufferable arrogance.  He was captain of his own ship, master of his own destiny, he could control life.  That was Nietzche – the world of power.  You can will yourself to this position.                         A lot of people imbibe that because they think that's what they're supposed to think.  Deep down inside, no, they cry like a baby inside, because they know they need other people, they know they need things.  One of the great studies I cited in this book was down at Dartmouth, and it discovered that human beings are wired, literally, the way we are genetically disposed – the way our brains work, we are wired to connect.  In other words, we don't live alone.  We live in community, we live with family, we live with friends, we live in a nation. And, secondly, we're wired for God.  We are actually searching for a meaningful relationship with the One who created us.  Whether we acknowledge it or not, and most people out of pride won't acknowledge it, just like I wouldn't.  But, oh, I was so desperately hungry, and as soon as I let those defenses go, that guard go down, that night in the driveway in that flood of tears – sure, it came to me.                           So I'm trying to walk people through that same question in this book. Dennis:          Reason can only take us so far; faith is what finishes the connection between the human soul and God. Chuck:            Exactly. Dennis:          And what you've attempted to do is exhort us to come to the truth.  One of the things I want you to comment on – you just alluded to it briefly a few moments ago – you say that today there is no such thing as reality or, capital T, Truth, in our culture today.  And I think, for the average mom and dad who are raising kids, I don't think they realize, Chuck, what a battleground this is around truth. Chuck:            This is the battleground.  This is the battleground.  Is there any reality, is there any ultimate reality … Dennis:          Or is it just opinion? Chuck:            Yes, it is just your preference versus my preference, and that's what they're being taught in college.  They're sawing off the branch on which they sit, and so what I'm trying to show in this book is that there is reality, there has to be reality, we know there is, we know there are certain things that conform to the way they truly are, which is the classical definition of truth.  The job is to find it.  But, Dennis, you hit the nail on the head – you get to the point where you can prove it. I've gotten so convinced of the truth of the biblical worldview as applied in life against any other worldview, that my great dream, as I write in "The Good Life," my great dream is someday to be able to stand in the Supreme Court – every lawyers dream – and argue His case in the Supreme Court.  And I'm convinced if I could argue the case that the biblical worldview is the only one that conforms to reality, that I would win that case, hands down, intellectually – by reason, by arguments, by logic.  But that doesn't get you to God.  As a matter of fact, sometimes the more you know, the tougher it gets.  That's why the last chapter of this book is about faith as the step we have to take.  And people say, "Well, I can't profess faith because I have doubts."  Good.  If you didn't have doubts, faith wouldn't be required.  If God were as obvious as the tree in the yard, you wouldn't have to have faith. Dennis:          You know, it's interesting to hear you say that, because you're a very bright, intellectual man – well-educated.  You continue to study the world religions throughout the scope of your life, and yet as you move toward the last phase of your life, you are more convinced not less. Chuck:            I remember many years ago hearing Malcolm Muggeridge – I don't know how many of our listeners will remember that name, but he was a great writer, a great journalist, who converted late in life.  And he said, "I'm more convinced of the reality of Jesus Christ than I am of my own reality."  And he was a colorful guy – white hair going all over the place, and he'd always have a wonderful chuckle.  I was with him once for tea, and he was talking about this, and I thought, "Well, he's an old man." At that point, he was the same age I am now.  And I said this is a bit of hyperbole.  You know, it isn't. I'm convinced that the logos means all the intelligence, all that can be – but to the Greeks, everything that could be known or is known.  But the logos basically programs the little computers in the billions of cells we have within us called DNA, which has information like 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica four times over is the information in one of the DNAs that program ourselves.  Bill Gates, he's never designed as sophisticated software as the DNA.                         And I think the logos programs that.  I think we are kept alive by God because He – the spiritual world – and a British physicist converted and has written books about this – the spiritual world actually animates the physical world.  So I think it's right.  I think we're more convinced of the reality of Christ than unreality.  And the more I study the more convinced I get. Bob:                As a dad trying to raise kids who will pursue the good life, as you've defined it there, in a culture that is increasingly trying to point them in other directions – I'll tell you how I became aware of the struggle that I was in the midst of.  A year ago, when the issue of gay marriage was in the news, one of my children was asked to write a paper on it at school, and I could tell there was a real wrestle between the desire to be compassionate and the desire to be truthful, and I thought, "Where is this going to end up?"  And I really do wonder where it's going to end up in the culture – not just with my kids but with all of our kids.  How can we, today, point our kids in this direction? Chuck:            Well, I think this is, of course, a great question, Bob, and I was just talking with a fellow this morning about that very question.  First of all, you've got to explain to them that there is an order to life.  I mean, life does work a certain way.  And sin is nothing but, as Neal Plantinga, the great theologian at Calvin Seminary says, "Sin is nothing but folly," foolishness, because it's like walking into a room blindfolded, and you don't know where you're going to hit the furniture.  You've got to know how the world is organized in order to live rationally.                         And your daughter writing that paper is going to have a natural tendency to say, "Well, if these people are disposed this way, why should we tell them they can't behave this way?"  And if she were to answer that question in her paper saying, "Well, I feel sorry for these people, but the Bible says it's a sin."  She wouldn't absolutely make any points at all with her classmates or anyone else, because they'd say, "Well, that's what the Bible says.  You live by the Bible, I don't live by the Bible."                           What you have to say is there's a natural order to life.  Life works a certain way.  Sex is for procreation.  That's why we have that capacity.  It doesn't work in homosexual sex.  They cannot perform a natural act.  It is unnatural, whether you like to use that word or not, it is.  There is a natural order in life; there is a natural law.  This was C.S. Lewis's great argument that had such an effect on me when he talked about this natural law and people know it, and they've known it through every culture in every generation.  We know the world works a certain way, which is the very point I've been trying to make in here.  We know the world works a certain way, and our job is to live our lives in accordance with what works, otherwise we're dumb, we're stupid, because Neal Plantinga puts it very graphically – "When you don't live the way the world works, it's like spitting into the wind or coloring outside the lines or cutting across the grain of the universe."  So it's just good sense to figure out.                           Now, the relationship between a man and a woman in marriage is the way you perpetuate the human race.  You raise children in an environment where character can be cultivated and learned.  It's never taught, it's learned.  And you can't do that if the relationship doesn't conform to the way the world works.  If everybody were homosexual there wouldn't be any children.  So you can't tell me that it's normative.  It isn't normative, it can't be normative by definition.                         And I make the natural order arguments, which, over the years, Catholics are much better at than we are.  Evangelicals always use the Bible because it is our primary source of knowledge, obviously, but it won't wash with people.  The natural order argument is very, very important. Bob:                So that's where we've got to point our kids. Chuck:            That's where we point our kids – explaining the reality of the way the world works. Dennis:          You conclude your book talking about how the good life ultimately ends in death, which can result in new life.  And throughout the book, you use illustrations of people who illustrate the good life positively and negatively, and as you talk about the end of a matter; that is, death, you use two illustrations.  One is a funeral you and I attended where Bill Bright was honored for his life; and another illustration you use was a funeral neither of us attended, because there was none – John Ehrlichman, a Watergate figure.  Just quickly contrast John's life with Bill's life.  Chuck:            Well, John Ehrlichman, I went back to see – when he invited me to when he was in a nursing home in Atlanta, everything had collapsed in his life.  He'd been through three marriages, his family abandoned him, he had nothing.  He was penniless and powerless – once one of the most powerful men in the world.  And he wanted to see me because the doctor had told him he had renal failure.  He was on kidney dialysis.  A doctor told him that he could get a shot of morphine and put himself out of the misery.                         I was shocked.  I spent an hour talking about the dignity of life and the meaning of life.  I don't know whether it sank in or not.  A friend of mine went back and prayed with him and hopefully he received Christ.  I'd like to think he did before he died.  But he died alone in the nursing home with nobody around him, having given up on life.  I can't think of a more despairing story.  And I tell it as a tragic story because he was such a good man until the collapse came in his life, and we said earlier what happens to you doesn't matter, it's how you react to what happens to you.  Well, he reacted badly to what happened to him in the fall of Watergate.                         Contrast that with Bill Bright.  I remember being with you at the funeral, Dennis, and what a great experience that was, what a joyous day that was for Bill's celebration of his life.  But, Bill, when he learned he had pulmonary fibrosis, which is one of the most difficult ways to die, you're slowly suffocating, and it's agonizing death, and the doctor told him how bad it was going to be, and Bill said, "Praise the Lord, this is what God wants."                          Throughout that two, three-year period that Bill knew he was dying, maybe the most productive period in his ministry.  He wrote all kinds of things, did videos.  I'd go see him in his apartment, and he had the oxygen strapped to him, and he never was without a smile and always giving me ideas and "Here's something you can do in the ministry, Chuck."  He was an extraordinary man.  And when he died, Vonette was with him, and whispered to him, "It's all right," and he turned his head, and he died peacefully.                         John Paul II, the pope, gave the world a similar lesson in how to die in the midst of suffering, constantly issuing statements saying, "Suffering will be redeemed," and Christians have to know that suffering will be redeemed, and we have to know if you're going to live the good life, it contemplates a good death.  It contemplates facing it with equanimity, because you know you're going to be with the Lord, and dying with grace to the extent you can.  And, obviously, some people are in terrible pain.  But Bill Bright set the gold standard for me. Dennis:          He really did.  He showed us how to live and how to die. Chuck:            And how to die, yep. Dennis:          There may be a man or a woman listening to this broadcast, perhaps a boy or a girl, who goes, "You know what?  It's time for me to have that faith experience that you talked about where you had to pull the car off to the side of the road and receive Christ."  Would you explain to them what they need to do?  Just at their point where they are right now – how they can connect with God and know they're forgiven all their sins. Chuck:            It's maddeningly simple, and the problem with it is that people think, "There's got to be more to that.  I've got to do some good works, I've got to do something to show that I'm a good person.  I'm really not.  My life is a mess right now.  I'll clean up my life first before I come to God."  Wrong.  You can't clean up your life, you're incapable of cleaning up your life, and God doesn't want you to even try.  What He wants you to do is surrender – the humblest possible surrender.  Get rid of your pride, which is the great enemy, and simply say, "Lord Jesus, I want You in my life.  Forgive me of my sins."  Let Him worry about cleaning them up.  When I came to Him, I had a ton of sins, and there were some He could immediately erase, there were some he had to work on with me for a while, and that's part of the process of sanctification.  It's a joint process between us and between God.                         But what it takes is a simple act of faith, recognizing that your doubts are a good thing.  I loved what you said about Tom Skinner [ph], that was a marvelous quote.  Your doubts are good things, because if you didn't have doubts, you wouldn't take God seriously.  You wouldn't need God.  We need Him because He settles the question for us, and He's made it so easy for just us to turn to Him as long as we are generally repentant and ask Him to come in and take our lives. Dennis:          And He'll take us at our word at that point and make us a new creation in Christ. Chuck:            You know, people say, "Does God answer prayers?"  He answers the prayer of every single person who says, "Jesus, take me." Bob:                And that puts you on the path for a good life. Dennis:          It does, it does. Chuck:            It is the good life. Dennis:          Yeah, it is.  Chuck, I want to thank you for being on FamilyLife Today.  And, you know, someday I hope you get a chance to go to the Supreme Court and argue … Chuck:            … argue that case … Dennis:          … argue for Jesus Christ and why Christianity should be the worldview of every living human being.  Bob:                I'm just afraid you'd still get a five to four against in that verdict.  With this Court I would get it exactly right. Chuck:            Thanks for being, God bless you guys. Bob:                We've got copies of your book available in our FamilyLife Resource Center.  Again, the book is called "The Good Life," and I want to encourage our listeners – it makes the case – you don't need to hear the arguments before the Supreme Court.  The book lays out the case, and it's pretty clear, and, in fact, it's pretty tough to refute.  I think you can give this book to somebody who doesn't know Christ and just say, "I'd be interested in your thoughts as you read through this," and it could spark quite a dialog.                          Again, we've got copies in the FamilyLife Resource Center.  Go to our website, FamilyLife.com, click the "Go" button at the bottom of the screen, and that will take you right to a page where you can get more information about Chuck Colson's book, "The Good Life."                         We also have the book that was instrumental in you coming to faith in Christ, and that's the book by C.S. Lewis called "Mere Christianity," which is another apologetic for the reasonableness of Christianity – a classic book.  If you're interested in ordering both Chuck's book and "Mere Christianity," we'll send you at no additional cost the CD audio of our conversation this week with Chuck Colson.                         Again, the website is FamilyLife.com.  Click the "Go" button at the bottom of the screen, and that will take you right to the page where you can get more information about these resources, or you can order online, if you'd like.  If it's easier, you can call 1-800-FLTODAY, and there is someone on our team waiting to help you with an order.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY.                         And let me say a special word of thanks to those folks who have gotten in touch with us over the last several weeks, Dennis, and have made a donation to FamilyLife Today.  We're listener-supported, and we depend on donations to keep FamilyLife Today on this station and on stations all across the country.  We hope that folks who donate to our ministry have first been faithful in donating to their local church.  That ought to be your first giving priority.  But in recent weeks, as some of our listeners have been aware that we are ending our fiscal year, and that summertime is coming to a close, we've had folks calling not only to make a donation but to challenge others to make a donation as well.                         We've heard from a lot of listeners who have attended one of our Weekend to Remember conferences, and they called not only to donate to FamilyLife Today but also to challenge other people who have benefited from the Weekend to Remember to make a donation.  And we've heard from folks who have taken the resources that we created or even recommended this radio program to friends and have seen God use this in their lives.  They've called to make a donation and wanted to challenge others to do the same.                         So we're hoping that you will consider meeting that challenge and maybe issue a challenge of your own.  If you've not made a donation to FamilyLife Today in recent days, you can do that online at FamilyLife.com or you can call 1-800-FLTODAY to make a donation.  Again, it's 1-800-F-as-in-family, L-as-in-life, and then the word TODAY or go online and donate at FamilyLife.com.                         Well, tomorrow Lisa Bevere is going to join us, and we're going to talk about why it is that women wind up losing when they give in to pressure from men.  She'll share some of her own story and some warnings for women.  I hope you can be back with us for that.                         I want to thank our engineer today, Keith Lynch, and our entire broadcast production team.  On behalf of our host, Dennis Rainey, I'm Bob Lepine.  We'll see you back tomorrow for another edition of FamilyLife Today.                          FamilyLife Today is a production of FamilyLife of Little Rock, Arkansas, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ.  ______________________________________________________________________ We are so happy to provide these transcripts to you.  However, there is a cost to transcribe, create, and produce them for our website.  If you've benefited from the broadcast transcripts, would   you consider donating today to help defray the costs?         Copyright © FamilyLife.  All rights reserved.       www.FamilyLife.com

Today we welcome Chuck (iii) Mullins, we are talking with him about his background, experience, his algorithm knowledge, ask him our rapid-fire questions, and pick his brain about the business. Chuck built his first profitable website back in 1996 when he was an impressionable 18 years old. He studied computer software engineering in college, which taught him the skills to analyze search results and implement strategies. Throughout his career of developing, managing, consulting, and investing in internet-based companies, Chuck has developed a keen ability to spot opportunities and develop strategies that lead to growth and profitability. Episode Highlights: Chuck's background, entrepreneurial experience, and success stories Web-based business ups-and-downs The difference in long-term cash flow from web-based businesses and get-rich-quick cash businesses Chuck's favorite web niches Chuck's favorite audience member (who is also a buyer) Websites that are more/less desirable The importance of knowing your Profit and Loss Biggest mistake buyers can make Best practices for buyers and sellers The importance of understanding the business and doing your research Quiet Light's vision and how we can help you Transcription: Mark: Joe, one of my favorite things about working with team Quiet Light is some of the camaraderie that we have with each other. The fact that we get to tease each other a little bit, egg each other on, but also help each other out; talk about deals, collaborate on our transactions because everybody at Quiet Light has so much entrepreneurial experience that it's like having this built in board of advisors for every single thing that we do. And one thing I think you and I need to do a better job of; I know we've had each of the advisors on Quiet Light at the Quiet Light Podcast. I think we need to bring them on a bit more so that others can enjoy some of the experience that they have. You had Chuck on recently and grilled him a little bit in this episode. Joe: I did. I want people to get to know Chuck for the fun experienced entrepreneur that he is. And so I mixed it up a little bit. I had some fun with him we did some rapid-fire questions. I intentionally; just let me get this upfront and out there for the audience. I intentionally mispronounced somebody's name. I butchered it intentionally. Again I did it seven or eight episodes ago and I got some email saying I think the person you're trying to find is so and so. I did it again. Mark: Same person? Joe: Same person; yeah, if he's listening. Mark: He needs to start listening to the podcast especially my episodes because frankly, I've got a leg up on you. Joe: You have overtaken me for the most popular episode on the Quiet Light Podcast. I will overcome that because I've got some great ones planned coming in here soon. Chuck is a fascinating individual. I've known Chuck for a long time and he's really, really smart when it comes to his entrepreneurial acumen. It's almost annoying to be honest because with a model that we have at Quiet Light Brokerage; we don't have employees, right? No one's an employee of Quiet Light Brokerage. We have a lot of entrepreneurs who work together in sort of a collective group. Well, one of the benefits to that is all the advice and feedback I'm able to get from people. And one of the most annoying things is all the feedback and advice I get from everyone. And sometimes; Chuck especially, Chuck is so thorough. What's the term he gives to himself? Whatever it is he just hyper focuses on the most minute little detail and I fear asking questions sometimes because of the level of detail that he's going to give to me in terms of what I have to fix and correct in a document that I'm creating. Mark: But at the end of the day even though sometimes it can be overwhelming like come on you think I'm doing everything wrong evidently because I keep getting his feedback, it's always on point. And I don't think I've ever received feedback from them where I look at it and say this is not worth considering or looking at; so a smart, smart guy. I'm looking forward to it. What are some of the things that you discussed in this episode? Joe: Well we talked about some of; he's got almost three years brokering now and over 20 years as an entrepreneur now. And he talked about some of his experiences; the pros and cons of A. being an entrepreneur, some of the things that he's found that certain buyers do better than anyone else, and how he wants new buyers to adopt that style, and then the biggest mistakes that someone's selling their business can make as well. And it's fascinating as I just said he's got 20 plus years as an entrepreneur. I'm in the same boat. You're in the same boat. So collectively the team at Quiet Light I'd say what 250 years of entrepreneurial experience that we share with our team with our clients and I think it's fascinating. Chuck is just the tip of the iceberg here in terms of the experience. So it's exciting to share this with him and we had a lot of fun. So that's the key to this one. Mark: Fantastic, well let's get to it. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage on the Quiet Light Podcast. And today we have the most special guest. His name is Chucky. Now that's not what we call him. It's Chuck. I use his personal email address. I'm not going to tell you at what you can all haul in the mail anyway. You know his e-mail address its Chuck@QuietLightBrokerage. Chuck Mullins, welcome back to the Quiet Light Podcast. Chuck: Thank you, sir. Thank you. For any that's specific it's actually Charles Clifford Mullins III. That's my D-I-I-I. Joe: You know I am from New England I can't talk with a British accent; it's something about us. Chuck: Well I can't either. Joe: Alright. Well listen you know the routine. Normally on the podcast we ask people to give their own background; who they are, what they're all about so that we're not sounding like we're reading from a script which we don't. We wing these things. You know that. Our audience knows that. But before we get into that I want to ask you a series of rapid-fire questions; the first one so that people understand and establish your experience here at Quiet Light Brokerage, how long have you been brokering at Quiet Light Brokerage? Chuck: About two and a half; almost three years. Joe: Almost three years. Okay. So let's start with…I've got a total of six questions. Number one; and you've got to give me a quick answer. Number one, who's your favorite broker? Chuck: Joe Valley. Joe: Good, good, good. Alright, if you were stranded on an island with me, Brad Wayland, and Jason Yellowitz and a rash floated by and they would only carry three of us; there's four altogether, who would you leave behind and why? Chuck: Jason Yellowitz, because he would be able to burn his stacks of cash to stay warm. Joe: And he carries it with him, is that what you're saying? Chuck: Inaudible[00:06:25.8] Joe: Jason I know you all listen to the podcast so everybody make fun of Jason. That's your job here. Alright, this is a really important question. Who is the better podcast me or Andy Youderainan; I mean in Andrew Youderian? Chuck: I would have to go with Mark. Joe: You are… Chuck: Hello? Isn't it you that people come up to the Booze and ask for or is it Mark that they come up and ask for? Joe: That's me. It's me. Mark doesn't go to Booze. Alright, sid you know Walker Diabel wrote a book; and a best seller book? Chuck: Have you heard about the second book that he wrote? Joe: No. He wrote a second book? Chuck: Yes. If you go to WalkerDiebel.guru you can check out the second one that hasn't been released yet. Joe: Okay, Alright. So this is a tough question. This is not a trick question. I want to know if you can answer this one. What's the name of Walker's book? Chuck: Buy Then Build. Joe: You got it. Okay. Alright. Chuck: How can you not get it? I've heard it at every conversation. Every conference I go to there's these three books that are just floating around that conference and I'm like wait a second how did that get there? Joe: And it's the bottom of every one of his e-mail signatures. One of these days you're going to dig way back into the archives when he was actually an actor and find a clip and we're going to change his email signature line somehow some way. Alright, so as you know historically Quiet Light Brokerage does not recruit brokers. I have conversations three or four times a week these days with people who want to join the team. But we, for the most part, don't recruit. We have as you know or Mark has as you know recruited a few starting with Amanda back in the day. She was the first. And I think Brad was also recruited. And yourself was also recruited. Of all of the brokers that Mark recruited; last question by the way, what was his best decision? Chuck: Probably Brad. He's been killing it man. Joe: Man and give yourself some credit Chuck. Come on. Anybody but you would probably be the politically correct answer but essentially you just threw Amanda under the bus. But fortunately Amanda doesn't really listen to our own podcast either. Alright, enough of this nonsense; let's talk about you and your experience. I know all about you but for the audience members, Chuck has been on the podcast before Mark had him on when he first joined the team two and a half years ago, three years ago. And the focus of that podcast was a tiny little bit about Chuck but mostly about Chuck's due diligence experience. And I think you had a list of was it 25 due diligence tools? Chuck: Who can remember? Joe: Yeah, a lot. And it's all; if you Google Quiet Light Podcast, Chuck Mullins, due diligence you'll find it. It'd be at the top of the Google search engine and it's great stuff. And I learned a lot when I did it. But I would say I refer most people out for due diligence; buyers that is to our friend Chris Yates at Centurica. They do a great job. Well, let's talk a little bit about who you are and your life experience and a little bit of your brokering experience now that you're three years into Quiet Light. So who the heck are you? Tell us about your entrepreneurial experience. I know that you started way back when you were in college, right? Chuck: Yeah. I graduated high school in ‘96 and I always wanted a computer but we couldn't afford one. So finally for college I needed a computer so I got a computer and started a free website on it's like Angel Fire or Tripod or one of these things way back in '96. And I remember just putting up some content and that is an online library for college students. And I remember somebody offered me like 10 bucks at some point to put a link on my website. I'm like $10 awesome, I'm making money and then somebody offers me like a hundred bucks and I'm like what $100? So then I was; this is before I even had a domain so it was like AngelFire/blahblahblah. I started thinking about okay we'll buy a domain and back then they were like thirty-five bucks. I was talking to my mom and I'm like mom I'd buy a domain and she's like you're crazy you shouldn't buy you know like you're just wasting your money and why are you spending all this time in front of the computer and then it just started growing and then somebody offered me a thousand bucks. And before you know it I was making about sixteen grand a month off of advertising back in the ‘90s. Joe: In college, right? Chuck: In college; yeah, and so I was just… Joe: That's a lot of Jägermeister. Chuck: And the Internet bubble ended up bursting in like the 2000, 2001 and all that money like dried up overnight. So I was like okay now what? So I had to figure out how to pivot and myself and two other guys; we had different businesses. We all pooled together and started a membership site. The first month with our membership site we made like 60 grand. It was just like mind-blowing like oh my God we're in college. I didn't have keggers I had like full bottle; like full bar parties. Joe: Everybody wanted to be your friend, right? Chuck: It was fun and we'd stay at like the Ritz Carlton for Mardi Gras and like just do crazy things. We rented like a ski chalet; it was like a 15 bedroom house on the slopes and I forget where it was bit we then brought all of like; we had affiliates at the time, all our affiliates to come and ski with us and so we had a great time. And at some point, I was making a lot of money and I didn't really know what to do with it all. I was definitely wasting my fair share of it. Actually kind of going back, my mom, the whole thing with her telling me I shouldn't start the business and this and that in 2003 I think it was about my mom and sister cars for Christmas. Joe: I wrote that down when you said it because I knew that. You told me the story about Christmas and your mom went outside and there was a big ribbon on a brand new car. I guess she's happy you bought that domain name, after all, isn't she? Chuck: Yeah. Yeah for sure and I do not usually tell that story so maybe we'll have to edit that out. Joe: No. No editing. Tell the story. Chuck: I made two giant boxes and I had my mom like a box of some keys and she sees them and it had Lincoln in it which I had a navigator at the time and she's like oh it's a scavenger hunt he put his keys in here and she walks outside and sees this giant box and just like; my mom doesn't curse and she goes oh shit and she runs outside gets ready to tear into the box. And I said wait, mom, hold on hold on there's a card on there you've taught me better; open the card. And so she opens it and it says to my sister and my mom is like inaudible[00:12:57.1] my mom's like…well my sister is like to me? And again I wiggle the keys in front of my sister's face and she's like what?! So she runs and dives in and my mom looks at me like what this like WTF and I'm like you're over there. Then she starts walking and then sees it like buried on the other side of the house in a big box and like runs over and dives in. We're in Georgia at that time at a family house and it was cold and she didn't have shoes on. It was a great time. I've got the video. One day I'll have to share with somebody but I don't know that I want to share it. Joe: What a great experience and a great thing to do for your mother and your sister did. Did your mother get the nicer car or was it equal to both? Chuck: I was actually going to buy them the exact same car and then I was talking to my sister trying to like make sure that it was the kind of she would want and I said well what do you think Mom would like? And she said well my favorite car is a Sequoia and I ended up; my mom a Lincoln Aviator and my mom's Sequoia. They're about the same price. I think my sister was a little more but I did get some grief about that. Also the night before or a couple of nights before we went to Walmart and I bought every single piece of cheesy add on part you could get and added it to the car. So I got like a fuzzy steering wheel cover, dice, a little light-up things that go on the rims, and just totally like made the car look as ridiculous as possible and told them in order to get it they'd have to drive it with that stuff on it. Joe: That's hilarious. So for anybody that's listening instead of watching if you look at my chin and Chuck's chin you'll see some gray; there're probably a little more on mine than his of course. His is more his cheek mine's dead on center of my chin that's because of age and life experience. So you had some amazing times Chuck out of college making more money in a month than most people in this country do in a year; all web-based business experience. It's not always wonderful though. Chuck: No, absolutely not. Yeah, entrepreneurship is ups and downs. We've gotten hit by Google so many times I couldn't even tell you. And most of them were just algorithmic. But I have on one of my big businesses, we had about 12 that were all doing the same thing and one of my partners had used the same email address in our Webmaster Tools account and somebody from the spam team I guess noticed and went in and just manually penalized all of our businesses. I think except for two because those were the only two that didn't have those email addresses. And just overnight it's like poof gone and it's just like oh it's heartbreaking. At least when it's the algorithmic type of penalties it's easy to kind of; well maybe not easy but you're going to recover from that. The manual penalties, we hired somebody who used to work in the spam team. They told us what to do. We did it. We just haven't been able to recover from that on those other sites. Joe: Yeah I know it's always hard. Google algorithm updates I think are getting a little better, a little easier to handle and manage I think ultimately. I always used to say this actually if you do the right thing the way Google tells you to do it, ultimately it's not going to hurt you; the algorithm updates. And I guarantee there are people out there shaking their head no right now because a good friend of mine, he built a great business, a great, great content site, and sold it and there was a an update recently. And the buyer, another great entrepreneur bought it and did have some negative impact. What they both know is that sometimes when Google casts a wide net some of the wrong sites get caught up in it and over time that does get corrected but it does sting initially, doesn't it? Chuck: Yeah. And I will say like the reason we got caught up in a lot of the updates wasn't because we were doing the things that Google tells you to do. We were gaining the system and we deservedly got caught for doing those things and we would adjust our technique and then regain. So like one of our sites had like 100,000 pieces of unique content that we were in Google index for like 30 million pages. Joe: Wow. Chuck: So like how does one do that? Joe: How does one do that? Good Lord. Chuck: Trickery. Joe: Well the grey in your chin has matured you to the point that I think you're beyond the trickery because you look at the long term cash flow and benefits of owning an online business now it's not just a quick cash anymore. At least that's the way I look at it; you too? Chuck: Yeah, absolutely. And you're talking about like the algorithm updates and I feel like there's been so many and that most of the really garbage sites have probably gotten taken out by now. I feel like, and maybe I'm wrong but now it's more of like just tweaking the knobs a little bit. So unless you're in one of these like fringe business models I tend to believe and I could be 100% wrong but I tend to believe that most of the major algorithm updates have been already done and then now they're going after I guess like medical websites and things like that. Joe: Yeah. The updates are far further I'm sure in between and in many cases not as severe. Alright so I'm going to throw a question at you. I don't know if I told you this story or not or if you've heard it. Some of the audience members might have heard it so I'm going to just test your algorithm update knowledge. And if you answer within two seconds then I know you heard the story. So I bought a business, I sold my business in November 2010; yada, yada, yada. People have heard this a million times, or at least tens of hundreds of thousands of times if they've listened to every episode and keep downloading everything. No we haven't done 100,000 episodes that's totally inaccurate. I can't do math by the way apparently. Alright so I bought a content site. I sold a great site. The content was amazing. And then I bought a piece of junk. I had 42 amazing days. I bought it March 1st, 2012. I had maybe 3 or 4 keywords on the first page of Google and then boom they fell to the bottom of page 1 and then page 2 and they were gone and I lost over a quarter-million dollars in the course of twelve months. What happened? What algorithm update was that? It was; again I bought it March 1st, 2012; I had forty-two amazing days. Chuck: Panda. Penguin. Joe: Penguin. Alright, you're close. We're going to have to throw that quiz out there. Everybody in the audience wouldn't throw that quiz out there for a price. Chuck's wearing a beautiful Quiet Like Brokerage…is that a polo shirt? Chuck: Yeah. Joe: We need to get some of those packaged up and give away prizes for that kind of stuff. Alright let's jump on to your Quiet Light Brokerage life; your entrepreneurial life, amazing ups and downs, a lot of great ups and you did some good things for family and friends. The downs, we learn from them and we try to take those lessons and make sure that we are really bringing great listings to market so the buyers are making good safe investments and the sellers of those investments can move on with peace of mind to their next adventures whether that's another business or retirement. In your history of transactions here at Quiet Light, is there any particular niche that you gravitate towards and enjoy more than another because as you said a ton of content and affiliate experience, but I think some of your larger deals have been physical product e-commerce sites. But is there anything that stands out for you? Chuck: Yeah I mean so my heart is in like membership sites. I love recurring revenue. I think everybody does and that's why the multiples are higher because of that recurring revenue and the predictability. So I would say that that's kind of where I'd like to be but my biggest sales have been around physical products inaudible[00:20:53.3] an outdoor sporting equipment one that was great. One that I really love that I sold like six months ago was a company that did custom-tailored suits. That thing it's like awesome. Who doesn't want to say they have a business that sells custom-tailored suits? Like it's just; I think it's got the cool factor. Joe: That's the amazing thing about what you do and what we do at Quiet Light is that we come to this role with a lifetime of experience that; I was talking with Walker and Brad about this recently that we didn't know it but all of our entrepreneurial life was preparing us for this role. And now we get to experience so many cool different business models. You come to this role with a ton of membership experience but custom-tailored suits and you're like that's the coolest thing. Who doesn't want to say they own a custom-tailored suit business? I need to buy a custom-tailored suit. I know who bought it and I can reach out to him. I know who he is too. Speaking of that I do want to ask a random question although its timing is not very random and you have to answer this. There's only one answer to this. This buyer listens to the podcast and he comments and he tells us about us sometimes when he's riding his bike. So do you have a favorite audience member that also happens to be a buyer? Yes or no? You have to say yes and you have to say his name now because he's a… Chuck: Sure. Mike Nuñez. Joe: There you go; Mike Nuñez, this is just a shout out to you. Thanks for listening Mike. Chuck: Well I'll tell you it shouldn't just be a shout out to him. If anybody wants to know how to be a good buyer and how to buy businesses they should talk to Mike Nuñez because he is 100% the absolute best buyer I have. And not like just in a sense of like the actual acquisition of the company. When he gets on a phone call and talks to the sellers he makes them feel like they are the only person in the world; the most important person like he's just so smooth and he's not doing it as like a ploy or a gimmick. He's just a nice guy and he really appreciates these people and the businesses they've created. And it's just he's really good on a call. Joe: It's the unknown secret that we tell all the time to buyers. Look, when it's a great business it's a great opportunity. There are going to be multiple buyers. And it's not always the most money or the most cash that gets the letter of intent. In some cases, it's the buyer that the seller likes the most. And being likable on those conference calls is critically important. Mike does it very well. Chuck: And one of my businesses; actually I think two of them that Mike purchased, the sellers actually said like I want to sell to him. Make him buy this. It doesn't matter; I mean within reason, right? The price; but they were willing to take less than somebody else because they liked him so much. Joe: Oh boy. Now if Mike's listening and he paid full price now he's going to be like inaudible[00:23:49.1]. Chuck: That is the problem because of course I did make him pay more than the other people but they were willing to take less. And what's funny is one of my sellers told him as much oh like I would have taken less from you and I'm like don't say that to him. Joe: In his heart, he was willing to take less but his checkbook and his head was willing to take the highest bidder as long as it was Mike Nunez. That's the key. In your experience both as an entrepreneur and as an adviser here at Quiet Light you've seen a lot of businesses that have come up for first they reach out to us for a valuation, they start thinking about an exit sometimes the day before they want to exit, sometimes months or a year or so in advance. What do you see being the biggest thing; most consistent thing that those particular entrepreneurs do wrong time and time again that there's just if there's one thing you could just like shout into the microphone right now to everyone listening even though some of them are doing it right, what are the majority of folks not doing that that you want them to do to bring more value to their business? Chuck: Silence question. Joe: Yeah it was a long one. I kept rambling on in my sentences because I could see you thinking. Chuck: Yeah. Joe: Maybe I should have asked a little more. Chuck: What's weird about at Quiet Light is we actually get so many great businesses to sell. People bring us quality things. So what are some of the bad things people do? Joe: Let me just get some stats behind that though; because it's true what we bring to market, it's great stuff. But the reality is Chuck if you look at my numbers I've closed 105, 106 transactions in seven years. People say well that's not very many but in order to close those transactions; I've ballparked the math and I've talked to 2,500 entrepreneurs. That's 2,500 valuation calls. Your stats are similar. What is that consistent theme that if you could speak to somebody that someday may sell their business what should they be doing? Chuck: Sure. So when we talk about like specific like product-level things like when people are just selling random shots keys that aren't unique in any way; those are really difficult to sell. When you have an actual unique product that's got some sort of a brand to it that's not easily knock off-able that there's a moat around it like that makes it so much more desirable to people and so much more valuable. One of the things I also see probably is just P & L's; having clean P & L's. Oftentimes people's profit and loss statements are just a complete mess. They'll lump, they want to save; I was just thinking about a specific one, but you see people are just lumping things in because they know they had a cost but they don't really know when it was or where it was and they just kind of guesstimate things and put them in the wrong ones. So then you'll see like really lumpy P & L's. And we always try to work with people to flatten those out and figure out where the real costs are. So that often takes a lot of time to just figure out what the true P & L is on a business. And for doing add backs; what's a real add back? We fight with people a lot on what's a real add back versus something they think they should be adding back. Joe: Yeah I want to just step in and shout out that there's no question I think that preparing your business for sale is the number one thing that people don't do. They decide to sell as I say instead of planning to sell. That means they work their tail off. They launch this business. They work like crazy against all odds. They succeed. And it's producing solid revenue and profit for them. And they just burn the candle at both ends and then the candle starts to burn out. And they're emotionally tired, they're frustrated, they're exhausted, and they wake up one morning I'm just not into this. I'm going to sell. I didn't know I could sell but it just occurred to me. I'm done. I'm calling Chuck Mullins. And at that point because they're tired; because they're emotionally worn out they need to sell because trends will go down. They won't do the things that they need to do to keep the business growing and strong and in great shape for somebody else to take over. And so at that point you get those P & L's and you're like yeah Excel is not really accounting software. Ideally Quick Books and Xero or one of the other so that we can run a historical P & L and do year over year trend analysis and look at the metrics. All that is really hard and then there's the commingling. So I'm going to just mention a podcast; not ours, somebody else's. EcomCrewPodcast247. Chuck as you know I sold Mike Jackness' business ColorIt last spring. And Mike is a bright guy. Mike knew exactly what to do as most people in this audience do. They know what to do. And the mindset that Mike had was simply I'll get to it someday. What happens is you end up chasing too many rabbits and that someday comes when you get exhausted and in his case, he had four brands under one LLC and three of them were really not sellable at the time that we decide to list the business. So what does that do? You've got four brands all in one LLC, tax returns commingled, and you're only selling one brand. What does that eliminate? Chuck: SBA financing. Joe: SBA financing; exactly. Is it required to get an SBA loan? No it's not to sell a business; absolutely not. We sold multimillion-dollar businesses without an SBA loan. But what it does do is it casts a broader net; buyers. And even some of those buyers; I've had it. Have you had buyers that have more than enough money to stroke a check for a multi-million dollar business but they use SBA? Chuck: Absolutely why not leverage if you can? Joe: Yeah, so that's I'd say number one. I'm in total agreement on the documentation. We always talk about that the risk, growth, transferability, and documentation; gets your numbers right, get those P & L's in great shape and it's going to help you learn about your business and set goals and then that passion may get reignited and you may do more in the business and grow it and have a bigger exit someday down the road. It's not that I don't love it when somebody calls me and says I'd like a valuation and part of that is okay, what's your timeframe, when are you ready to sell, right now. Not that I don't mind that; I love that if everything's in great shape. It's just tougher to sell it when it's not. They get a lower value, right? Chuck: Yup, absolutely. Having those four pillars and the clean books it makes a big difference. Joe: It really does. I think I'm in total agreement. Buyers or sellers of businesses, get your documents in great shape. The best way to do that, just call, email inquiries@QuietLightBrokerage.com, Chuck@QuietLightBrokerage.com. Reach out. It's a service that we provide. I mean what do we do Chuck? We help, help, help, and then keep helping, right? Chuck: Build value. Joe: Build the value. It's my; I've got a mentor that I talked to long and hard about all my business opportunities and in this particular one as we chatted about the model and what we do here at Quiet Light he's like well it just sounds like you're giving away all your knowledge for free in hopes that maybe they'll work with you. And I' like that's exactly right. We help first and we're entrepreneurs so there are times that we wish we got good advice and we were too young to listen or there was nobody around to talk to about it. And now we share that when it comes to business values and planning an exit. The number one thing you can do is just reach out to somebody. It's free. Talk to Chuck, he's got a ton of experience. Chuck: I'll tell you kind of in my entrepreneurial days if I wasn't going to be an entrepreneur I always wanted to be a consultant and help other people. And I never had like the actual desire to go out and build a portfolio and charge people to help them grow their business. But like you said I've been do this since '96. I've met so many businesses; a lot of focus on optimization and SEO and just so many things. And one of the things I actually like about is giving unsolicited advice. So when I'm on all these valuation calls I'm constantly asking people like oh have you tried this, have you thought about this? So even if they're not ready to sell I'm often giving people advice on how to increase their business. And even when I do have listings like I think of one and particularly like I give him so many ideas and then he did those and the business just kept growing. That actually came to bite me because the business grew so much that we ended up pulling it off the market after getting multiple full-price offers because it just had grown so much and he wanted to just wait a little bit and we're going to actually getting ready to relist that here soon. Joe: It's a good problem, right? I mean I've been in situations that you say it bit you but ultimately this is a long term play for us; it's building relationships and that person respects and appreciates you obviously because he's coming back for some of your entrepreneurial life experience and it's benefited them financially. It's going to grow the business and ultimately they're going to get a bigger value and tell people about what you did. So that was a little bit more about the sellers and the things that they can do and then number one I think we both agree, plan that exit; call somebody, e-mail somebody, get a valuation. It's not going to hurt. What about buyers; biggest mistakes that buyers can make? Chuck: Disrespecting somebody's business. So getting on a call and like; I'm trying to think of a of a PC term that I could use that's not a profanity, just talking smack about somebody's business, trying to negotiate them down in price, and like trash-talking the business. That doesn't work. At least not at this size but maybe it works when you're dealing with a couple hundred million dollar business or something. I don't know. But at these levels, people care about their businesses at least the ones we sell. Inaudible[00:33:38.9] and when you talk smack like… Joe: It's personal even at the 15 to 20 million mark. Mark just closed one just under 15 million. It's owned by an individual. When you're talking about a hundred million, yes somebody is up there at the top like their shareholders and the CEOs and COOs and all that and big-time attorneys are in there negotiating. It's not you're talking to the guy across the table that actually built it and owns it for the most part, right? So he cares about it. Chuck: He worries about it like he's had the baby. I mean you wouldn't believe how many people I've talked to; sellers that cry on the phone about their business like it happens a lot. People are deeply invested emotionally in their business. When somebody comes in and disrespects it for no reason other than they're trying to negotiate, it doesn't go well. You need to be nice. That's what Mike does so well. And I want to keep talking about Mike. Well like… Joe: Should we talk about Walker again? Chuck: He's about people and he's nice. Joe: Let's talk about Walker again then. Actually you're absolutely right. I remember being at the Rhodium Weekend Conference before you were a member of the team here at Quiet Light. Now he's up presenting and talking and I could swear in that environment and I used the word that begins with an A and ends with an E; figure it out, folks. Everybody's got one. And what's the secret to being a great buyer? And I said don't be one; as simple as that. I can see you out there in the audience shaking your head up and down. And that's exactly right. Mike is very nice, very kind. When I sold my business I had people that were well I remember one, in particular, ripping my business to shreds on a conference call; initial call and I'm like why am I even talking to this guy. I'm not selling it to him even if he gives me an offer over asking. And then, strangely enough, the last call, the person that ended up buying my business first thing he said is thanks for creating such a great site. Your products have helped people exactly like me. By the way I took stuff like this and I ran the Boston Marathon actually the Chicago Marathon last month and it's because of products like yours and I said cool. It was actually a really short call; 20-minute call. I didn't ask any great questions I had going on. That was really nice but I don't see he's buying my business and he almost; he bought it almost full price offer. Chuck: I'll tell you what you just mentioned something that is often overlooked. When you get on these calls don't just wing it; do some research, educate yourself before the call, and ask the right questions. It's so important. So many times I get on a call and the seller or the buyer doesn't ask any decent questions and the seller just writes them off and says let's not take any more calls from that person. They weren't serious. So make sure that you understand the business and you're asking good questions that a good buyer would ask, right? Joe: Yeah. They don't have to be the most intelligent questions the seller has ever heard but that you've done your research and you care. I mean yeah Chuck you put there together a great package and all the great questions are in there. They just have to dig into them and digest it a little bit and ask the same question in their voice and see if you get the same or similar answer from the client on it. I think that's great. I think you're absolutely right. Too many times there has been a few buyers that they're not prepared for. You can hear them walking down the street getting in the car and it just feels like a complete and utter waste of everyone's time including the person who's making the call and asking the questions. Okay, is there anything else; before we wrap up is there anything else you'd like to say about Walker Diebel? Chuck: Visit WalkerDiebel.guru to check out his new book that's coming out in a couple of months. Joe: Let's do this; actually everybody do is too. Go to IMDB and look up Walker Diebel the actor and watch some of the movies he's been in. Add a review, let's see if we can boost that one-star rating up to one and a half. Chuck: Inaudible[00:37:37.6] tomatoes maybe. Joe: Alright Chuck, you're a good man. I appreciate you coming on. We'll wrap it up here with time. Any last thoughts for anybody out there thinking about selling their business or buying one; any last pearls of wisdom and I know I didn't prepare you but any last-minute pearls of wisdom? Chuck: Yeah. I would just say that reach out early. We're not here to be high pressure as far as trying to sign you to sell your business. We're here to lead with value. We're going to offer some hopefully some wisdom that's going to help you sell that business in the future. So don't think that like oh I don't want to reach out because I'm not going to sell it for six months or a year. Talk to us now. Let us help you get the business in shape to sell it later. Joe: Great advice. That's Chuck Mullins folks. We will be back in the next podcast. See you soon. Thanks, Chuck. Chuck: Bye-bye. Thanks.   Links and Resources: Chuck Mullins Chuck's LinkedIn Walker Deibel's IMDB

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Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: A.J. O’Neal This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please. 1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology. 2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now? 2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid! 3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too! 3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go? 3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit. 5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming? 6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer. The guest talks about his background in more detail. 15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities! 16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years. 19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby! 20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.) 21:03 – Chuck: Maybe? 21:07 – AJ continues. 27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time. 28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery! Rails has layers upon layers upon layers. AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more. 31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize. 31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms. 33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel? 33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China? 39:57 – Chuck. 40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards. 42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates. 42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you? 42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere! 43:55 – Chuck: Picks! 43:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AJ’s Twitter Chuck’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: A.J. JC Penny! Stafford Shirts Express for Men Chris Ferdinandi’s GOMAKETHINGS. COM Chuck Wordpress – Plugin KingSumo Getdrip.com Softcover.io

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: A.J. O’Neal This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please. 1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology. 2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now? 2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid! 3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too! 3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go? 3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit. 5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming? 6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer. The guest talks about his background in more detail. 15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities! 16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years. 19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby! 20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.) 21:03 – Chuck: Maybe? 21:07 – AJ continues. 27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time. 28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery! Rails has layers upon layers upon layers. AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more. 31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize. 31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms. 33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel? 33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China? 39:57 – Chuck. 40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards. 42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates. 42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you? 42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere! 43:55 – Chuck: Picks! 43:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AJ’s Twitter Chuck’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: A.J. JC Penny! Stafford Shirts Express for Men Chris Ferdinandi’s GOMAKETHINGS. COM Chuck Wordpress – Plugin KingSumo Getdrip.com Softcover.io

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: A.J. O’Neal This week on My JavaScript Story, Charles talks with A.J. O’Neal who is a panelist on My JavaScript Jabber usually, but today he is a guest! The guys talk about AJ’s background and past/current projects. Today’s topics include: JavaScript, Ruby, jQuery, Rails, Node, Python, and more. In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 1:23 – Chuck: Introduce yourself, please. 1:27 – AJ: I brief introduction: I am a quirky guy who is ADD and I love to figure out why/how things work. I like self-hosting or owning things in technology. 2:00 – Chuck: Where do you work now? 2:02 – AJ: I work in UTAH at Big Squid! 3:29 – AJ: I have my own company, too! 3:41 – Chuck: Yeah we’ve talked about that before. Where can we go? 3:54: AJ: We have 2 products that are both Node. Greenlock for Node.js is one of them! The other one is Telebit. 5:44 – Chuck: This interview is all about your background. How did you get into programming? 6:04 – AJ: I was in middle school but before that my grandmother was a secretary at the Pentagon. She worked on getting people paid and she wrote a program to assist these paychecks to be printed with fewer errors. Because of that she had a computer at home. I remember playing games on her computer. The guest talks about his background in more detail. 15:21 – Chuck: No it’s interesting! I’ve done a couple hundred interviews and they all say either: I went to school for it OR I did it for my free time. It’s interesting to see the similarities! 16:00 – AJ: Yep that’s pretty much how I got into it! I went on a church service mission to Albania and really didn’t do any computer work during those 2 years. 19:39 – Chuck: You went to BYU and your mission trip. A lot of that stuff I can relate to and identify with b/c I went to BYU and went on missions trip, too! And then you got into Ruby and that’s how we met was through Ruby! 20:25 – AJ: Yep that’s it. Then that’s when I learned about Node, too. There was a guy with a funny hate – do you remember that? (No.) 21:03 – Chuck: Maybe? 21:07 – AJ continues. 27:53 – Chuck: What made you make the transition? People come into and out of different technologies all the time. 28:18 – AJ: Yeah it started with me with jQuery! Rails has layers upon layers upon layers. AJ talks about different technologies their similarities/differences and mentions: JavaScript, Rails, Python, Node, Ruby, and much more. 31:05 – Chuck: Node went out of their way on certain platforms that Rails didn’t prioritize. 31:11 – AJ continues to talk about different technologies and platforms. 33:00 – Chuck: You get into Node and then at what point does this idea of a home-server and Node and everything start to come together? How much of this do you want to talk bout? At one point did they start to gel? 33:33 – AJ: It’s been a very long process and started back in high school. It started with me trying to think: How do I get this picture on my phone to my mom? I thought of uploading it to Flickr or could I do this or that? What about sending it to someone in China? 39:57 – Chuck. 40:01 – AJ continues and talks about libraries and certificate standards. 42:00 – AJ continues with the topic: certificates. 42:44 – Chuck: I am going to go to PICKS! Where can people find you? 42:55 – AJ: Twitter! Blog! GitHub! Anywhere! 43:55 – Chuck: Picks! 43:58 – Advertisement – Fresh Books! 30-Day Trial! END – Cache Fly Links: React Angular JavaScript Webpack.js Serverless jQuery Node AJ’s Twitter Chuck’s Twitter Sponsors: Cache Fly Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Picks: A.J. JC Penny! Stafford Shirts Express for Men Chris Ferdinandi’s GOMAKETHINGS. COM Chuck Wordpress – Plugin KingSumo Getdrip.com Softcover.io

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Joel Tanzi This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Joel Tanzi who is a software engineer who currently resides in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolis. He has a degree from KU in computer engineering. They discuss how Joel made a career change in his mid-thirties and hasn’t looked back since! Listen to today’s episode to hear more about Joel’s background and current projects!  In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:51 – Chuck: I am talking with Joel – introduce yourself, please! 1:00 – Joel: I am an Angular developer on the front end. I am employed with a company and working on a new app that has to do with security. I am building the front end to that product. I was studying computer engineering at KU, and Angular is my favorite. 2:00 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 2:04 – Joel: I have always been fascinated with computers. I struggled with mathematics and science in primary school and so I steered away from those topics; therefore my first degree is English literature. Then I fell intro IT support accidentally. Back in 2006 I went through my 2nd layoff in my career. My friend asked whether or not I would go back to school, so I did! I went to get my engineering degree and relocated to KU. It took 9 years to get my 2nd degree, because I was working fulltime. When I was graduating I talked to an instructor; he mentioned JavaScript at that time. It was exploding in the world at that time. Then I got my first job downtown Kansas City. I haven’t looked back ever since. Have you heard about Knockout? I don’t get the impression that Knockout is popular anymore? (Chuck: No it’s not popular anymore.) I learned Angular and what I like the most about it is that I love how flexible and robust it was/is. 6:32 – Chuck: You found JavaScript and then found Angular – first people to get to Ionic from Angular. How did you get to that point? 6:54 – Joel: Good question! I was fairly new to that job. People already had exposure to it throughout the team/team members. 7:57 – Chuck: How was your transition from Angular 1 to Angular 2? 8:04 – Joel: I was never married to it. I do think that Angular 2 was a major step-up for me and was an important change that needed to happen. It was based on the same concepts. 8:39 – Chuck: What work in Angular are you most proud of? 8:42 – Joel: I think the application I am working on now b/c it looks THE best! Among other things, too. I volunteer through an organization that puts together tech projects for local governments. I got involved with them b/c I wanted more real world experience. It revolves around city streetlights. 11:03 – Chuck: Yeah, Code for America I’ve heard before! Sounds neat! 11:18 – Joel: I would recommend it especially if you are trying to break-into the field. I think community outreach is honorable and it shows initiative. 12:06 – Chuck: Yeah I need to put this into my Get A Coder job 12:23 – Joel: I have met coders within this realm and it’s a great networking opportunity! 12:35 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 12:37 – Joel: WordPress development! 13:46 – Joel (continues): Most lawyers don’t have a website b/c they don’t want to dabble with the technology. 13:59 – Chuck: Cool! I think it’s important to note that your 1st degree was literature and you went back to school. For my mom she went back, too. Were you older than the other students? 14:35 – Joel: I have a lot of things that went my way, which I was very blessed. The law firm that I worked for they had a huge support for people getting their degrees. They also gave me the flex hours, too! I am glad that I had that set-up and I know I was extremely blessed to have that support. It’s hard for people to work fulltime and to go to school – it’s definitely a challenge! I am stoked about veterans getting into the coder field and people with diverse backgrounds into this field; it’s very neat! 18:23 – Chuck: How old were you when you made that career change? 18:36 – Joel: In my mid/late thirties! 18:39 – Chuck: People think that they CAN’T go back to school b/c they are too “old” – when that’s not the case! I encourage people to give it a shot.  19:33 – Joel: There is never a better time to get into this work than now. 20:39 – Chuck: Where can people find you online? 20:45 – Joel: At my website – Stringly Typed! My LinkedIn! 21:45 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Joel’s LinkedIn Stringly Typed Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Joel Tanzi Code America Operation Code RxJS Chuck Max Wood Mastodon HubSpot

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Joel Tanzi This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Joel Tanzi who is a software engineer who currently resides in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolis. He has a degree from KU in computer engineering. They discuss how Joel made a career change in his mid-thirties and hasn’t looked back since! Listen to today’s episode to hear more about Joel’s background and current projects!  In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:51 – Chuck: I am talking with Joel – introduce yourself, please! 1:00 – Joel: I am an Angular developer on the front end. I am employed with a company and working on a new app that has to do with security. I am building the front end to that product. I was studying computer engineering at KU, and Angular is my favorite. 2:00 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 2:04 – Joel: I have always been fascinated with computers. I struggled with mathematics and science in primary school and so I steered away from those topics; therefore my first degree is English literature. Then I fell intro IT support accidentally. Back in 2006 I went through my 2nd layoff in my career. My friend asked whether or not I would go back to school, so I did! I went to get my engineering degree and relocated to KU. It took 9 years to get my 2nd degree, because I was working fulltime. When I was graduating I talked to an instructor; he mentioned JavaScript at that time. It was exploding in the world at that time. Then I got my first job downtown Kansas City. I haven’t looked back ever since. Have you heard about Knockout? I don’t get the impression that Knockout is popular anymore? (Chuck: No it’s not popular anymore.) I learned Angular and what I like the most about it is that I love how flexible and robust it was/is. 6:32 – Chuck: You found JavaScript and then found Angular – first people to get to Ionic from Angular. How did you get to that point? 6:54 – Joel: Good question! I was fairly new to that job. People already had exposure to it throughout the team/team members. 7:57 – Chuck: How was your transition from Angular 1 to Angular 2? 8:04 – Joel: I was never married to it. I do think that Angular 2 was a major step-up for me and was an important change that needed to happen. It was based on the same concepts. 8:39 – Chuck: What work in Angular are you most proud of? 8:42 – Joel: I think the application I am working on now b/c it looks THE best! Among other things, too. I volunteer through an organization that puts together tech projects for local governments. I got involved with them b/c I wanted more real world experience. It revolves around city streetlights. 11:03 – Chuck: Yeah, Code for America I’ve heard before! Sounds neat! 11:18 – Joel: I would recommend it especially if you are trying to break-into the field. I think community outreach is honorable and it shows initiative. 12:06 – Chuck: Yeah I need to put this into my Get A Coder job 12:23 – Joel: I have met coders within this realm and it’s a great networking opportunity! 12:35 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 12:37 – Joel: WordPress development! 13:46 – Joel (continues): Most lawyers don’t have a website b/c they don’t want to dabble with the technology. 13:59 – Chuck: Cool! I think it’s important to note that your 1st degree was literature and you went back to school. For my mom she went back, too. Were you older than the other students? 14:35 – Joel: I have a lot of things that went my way, which I was very blessed. The law firm that I worked for they had a huge support for people getting their degrees. They also gave me the flex hours, too! I am glad that I had that set-up and I know I was extremely blessed to have that support. It’s hard for people to work fulltime and to go to school – it’s definitely a challenge! I am stoked about veterans getting into the coder field and people with diverse backgrounds into this field; it’s very neat! 18:23 – Chuck: How old were you when you made that career change? 18:36 – Joel: In my mid/late thirties! 18:39 – Chuck: People think that they CAN’T go back to school b/c they are too “old” – when that’s not the case! I encourage people to give it a shot.  19:33 – Joel: There is never a better time to get into this work than now. 20:39 – Chuck: Where can people find you online? 20:45 – Joel: At my website – Stringly Typed! My LinkedIn! 21:45 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Joel’s LinkedIn Stringly Typed Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Joel Tanzi Code America Operation Code RxJS Chuck Max Wood Mastodon HubSpot

Panel: Charles Max Wood Guest: Joel Tanzi This week on My Angular Story, Charles speaks with Joel Tanzi who is a software engineer who currently resides in the Kansas City, Missouri metropolis. He has a degree from KU in computer engineering. They discuss how Joel made a career change in his mid-thirties and hasn’t looked back since! Listen to today’s episode to hear more about Joel’s background and current projects!  In particular, we dive pretty deep on: 0:00 – Advertisement: Get A Coder Job! 0:51 – Chuck: I am talking with Joel – introduce yourself, please! 1:00 – Joel: I am an Angular developer on the front end. I am employed with a company and working on a new app that has to do with security. I am building the front end to that product. I was studying computer engineering at KU, and Angular is my favorite. 2:00 – Chuck: How did you get into programming? 2:04 – Joel: I have always been fascinated with computers. I struggled with mathematics and science in primary school and so I steered away from those topics; therefore my first degree is English literature. Then I fell intro IT support accidentally. Back in 2006 I went through my 2nd layoff in my career. My friend asked whether or not I would go back to school, so I did! I went to get my engineering degree and relocated to KU. It took 9 years to get my 2nd degree, because I was working fulltime. When I was graduating I talked to an instructor; he mentioned JavaScript at that time. It was exploding in the world at that time. Then I got my first job downtown Kansas City. I haven’t looked back ever since. Have you heard about Knockout? I don’t get the impression that Knockout is popular anymore? (Chuck: No it’s not popular anymore.) I learned Angular and what I like the most about it is that I love how flexible and robust it was/is. 6:32 – Chuck: You found JavaScript and then found Angular – first people to get to Ionic from Angular. How did you get to that point? 6:54 – Joel: Good question! I was fairly new to that job. People already had exposure to it throughout the team/team members. 7:57 – Chuck: How was your transition from Angular 1 to Angular 2? 8:04 – Joel: I was never married to it. I do think that Angular 2 was a major step-up for me and was an important change that needed to happen. It was based on the same concepts. 8:39 – Chuck: What work in Angular are you most proud of? 8:42 – Joel: I think the application I am working on now b/c it looks THE best! Among other things, too. I volunteer through an organization that puts together tech projects for local governments. I got involved with them b/c I wanted more real world experience. It revolves around city streetlights. 11:03 – Chuck: Yeah, Code for America I’ve heard before! Sounds neat! 11:18 – Joel: I would recommend it especially if you are trying to break-into the field. I think community outreach is honorable and it shows initiative. 12:06 – Chuck: Yeah I need to put this into my Get A Coder job 12:23 – Joel: I have met coders within this realm and it’s a great networking opportunity! 12:35 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 12:37 – Joel: WordPress development! 13:46 – Joel (continues): Most lawyers don’t have a website b/c they don’t want to dabble with the technology. 13:59 – Chuck: Cool! I think it’s important to note that your 1st degree was literature and you went back to school. For my mom she went back, too. Were you older than the other students? 14:35 – Joel: I have a lot of things that went my way, which I was very blessed. The law firm that I worked for they had a huge support for people getting their degrees. They also gave me the flex hours, too! I am glad that I had that set-up and I know I was extremely blessed to have that support. It’s hard for people to work fulltime and to go to school – it’s definitely a challenge! I am stoked about veterans getting into the coder field and people with diverse backgrounds into this field; it’s very neat! 18:23 – Chuck: How old were you when you made that career change? 18:36 – Joel: In my mid/late thirties! 18:39 – Chuck: People think that they CAN’T go back to school b/c they are too “old” – when that’s not the case! I encourage people to give it a shot.  19:33 – Joel: There is never a better time to get into this work than now. 20:39 – Chuck: Where can people find you online? 20:45 – Joel: At my website – Stringly Typed! My LinkedIn! 21:45 – Fresh Books! END – CacheFly Links: jQuery Angular JavaScript Vue React Chuck’s Twitter Chuck’s E-mail: chuck@devchat.tv Joel’s LinkedIn Stringly Typed Sponsors: Get A Coder Job Fresh Books Cache Fly Picks: Joel Tanzi Code America Operation Code RxJS Chuck Max Wood Mastodon HubSpot

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Panel: Aimee Knight AJ O’Neal Charles Max Wood Special Guest: PJ Evans In this episode, the panel talks with PJ Evans who is a course developer and an instructor through Manning’s course titled, “Node.js in Motion.” This course is great to learn the fundamentals of Node, which you can check out here! The panel and PJ talk about this course, his background, and current projects that PJ is working on. Check out today’s episode to hear more! Show Topics: 0:00 – Advertisement: KENDO UI 0:36 – Chuck: Welcome and our panel consists of Aimee, AJ, myself, and our special guest is PJ Evans. Tell us about yourself and your video course! NODE JS in Motion is the title of the course. Can you tell us more? 1:29 – PJ: It’s a fantastic course. 2:25 – Chuck: You built this course and there is a lot to talk about. 2:36 – Aimee: Let’s talk about Node and the current state.  2:50 – Chuck: Here’s the latest features, but let’s talk about where do you start with this course? How do you get going with Node? What do people need to know with Node? 3:20 – Aimee. 3:24 – PJ talks about Node and his course! 4:02 – PJ: The biggest headache with Node is the... 4:13 – Chuck. 4:19 – PJ: I am sure a lot of the listeners are familiar with callback hell. 4:50 – Aimee: Let’s talk about the complexities of module support in Node! 5:10 – PJ: It’s a horrible mess. 5:17 – Aimee: Maybe not the tech details but let’s talk about WHAT the problem is? 5:31 – PJ: You are talking about Proper Native ES6 right? They are arguing about how to implement it.  6:11 – PJ: My advice is (if you are a professional) is to stick with the LT6 program. No matter how tensing those new features are! 6:46 – Aimee: It could be outdated but they had to come back and say that there were tons of complexities and we have to figure out how to get there. 7:06 – PJ: They haven’t found an elegant way to do it. 7:15 – Panel: If it’s a standard why talk about it? Seriously – if this is a standard why not implement THE standard? 7:38 – PJ. 8:11 – Panel. 8:17 – Aimee: I would love to talk about this, though! 8:24 – Chuck: I want to talk about the course, please. 8:30 – PJ. 8:54 – Chuck: We will keep an eye on it. 9:05 – PJ. 9:16 – PJ: How is it on the browser-side? 9:33 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:41 – Chuck: I don’t know how complete the forms are. 9:49 – Aimee: I don’t want to misspeak. 9:56 – PJ: I just found the page that I wanted and they are calling it the .MJS or aka the Michael Jackson Script. You can do an import from... Some people think it’s FINE and others think that it’s a TERRIBLE idea. 10:42 – Chuck: “It sounds like it’s a real THRILLER!” 10:52 – Panel. 11:25 – Panel: When you start calling things the Michael Jackson Solution you know things aren’t well. 11:44 – Aimee: Just to clarify for users... 11:57 – Chuck: I want to point us towards the course: NODE.JS. Chuck asks two questions. 12:34 – PJ: The concepts aren’t changing, but the information is changing incredibly fast. The fundamentals are fairly settled. 13:22 – Chuck: What are those things? 13:28 – PJ talks about how he structured the course and he talks about the specifics. 15:33 – Chuck: Most of my backend stuff is done in Ruby. Aimee and AJ do more Java then I do. 15:55 – Panel: I think there is something to understanding how different Node is. I think that Node is a very fast moving train. Node has a safe place and that it’s good for people to know about this space. 16:34 – Aimee: Not everyone learns this way, but for me I like to understand WHY I would want to use Node and not another tool. For me, this talk in the show notes really helped me a lot. That’s the core and the nature of NODE. 17:21 – PJ: Yes, absolutely. Understanding the event loop and that’s aimed more towards people from other back ends. Right from the beginning we go over that detail: Here is how it works, we give them examples, and more. 18:08 – Aimee: You can do more than just create APIs. Aimee mentions Vanilla Node. 18:50 – PJ: To get into frameworks we do a 3-line server. We cover express, and also Sequelize ORM. 19:45 – Advertisement – Sentry.io 20:43 – Chuck: I never used Pug. 20:45 – PJ: PUG used to be called JADE. 20:56 – Aimee. 21:14 – PJ: Express does that for you and I agree with you. I advocate a non-scripted approach, I like when frameworks have a light touch. 22:05 – Aimee: That’s what I liked about it. No offense, Chuck, but for me I didn’t like NOT knowing a lot of what was not happening under the hood. I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, but I wanted to build at a lower level. 22:40 – PJ: I had the same experience. I wanted to figure out why something wasn’t working. 23:24 – Panel: I had a friend who used Rails...he was cautious to make a switch. This past year he was blown away with how much simpler it was and how fast things were. 24:05 – Aimee: I feel like if you want to learn JavaScript then Node might be easier on the frontend. 24:21 – Chuck: No pun intended. No, but I agree. I like about Rails is that you had well-understood patterns. But the flipside is that you have abstractions... To a certain degree: what did I do wrong? And you didn’t follow the pattern properly. 25:57 – Panel: With Node you get a little bit of both. To me it’s a more simple approach, but the downside is that you have 100’s of 1,000’s of modules that almost identical things. When you start reaching out to NPM that... 26:29 – PJ: Yes the module system of NPM is the best/worst thing about NODE. I don’t have an answer, honestly. There is a great article written that made me turn white. Here is the article! 28:12 – Panel: The same thing happened with the ESLint. That was the very problem that he was describing in the article. 28:50 – PJ: Yep, I put that in the chat there – go ahead and read it! It’s not a problem that’s specific to Node, there are others. It’s the way we do things now. 29:23 – Chuck: We have the NODE Security project. A lot of stuff go into NPM everyday. 29:43 – PJ: We cover those things in the course. 29:53 – Chuck: It’s the reality. Is there a place that people get stuck? 30:00 – PJ answers the question. 30:23 – Aimee. 30:55 – PJ: I am coding very similar to my PHP days. 31:20 – Aimee. 32:02 – PJ: To finish off my point, I hope people don’t loose sight. 32:18 – Aimee. 32:20 – PJ: I am working on a project that has thousands of requests for... 32:53 – Chuck: Anything you WANTED to put into the course, but didn’t have time to? 33:05 – PJ: You can get pretty technical. It’s not an advanced course, and it won’t turn you into a rock star. This is all about confidence building. It’s to understand the fundamentals. It’s a runtime of 6 hours and 40 minutes – you aren’t just watching a video. You have a transcript, too, running off on the side. You can sit there and type it out w/o leaving – so it’s a very interactive course. 34:26 – Chuck: You get people over the hump. What do you think people need to know to be successful with Node? 34:38 – PJ answers the question. PJ: I think it’s a lot of practice and the student to go off and be curious on their own terms. 35:13 – Chuck: You talked about callbacks – I am thinking that one is there to manage the other? 35:31 – PJ answers the question. PJ: You do what works for you – pick your style – do it as long as people can follow you. Take the analogy of building a bridge. 36:53 – Chuck: What are you working on now? 37:00 – PJ: Educational tool called SCHOOL PLANNER launched in Ireland, so teachers can do their lesson planning for the year and being built with Express. Google Classroom and Google Calendar. 39:01 – PJ talks about Pi and 4wd. See links below. 40:09 – Node can be used all over the place! 40:16  - Chuck: Yes, the same can be said for other languages. Yes, Node is in the same space. 40:31 – PJ: Yep! 40:33 – Chuck: If people want to find you online where can they find you? 40:45 – PJ: Twitter! Blog! 41:04 – Picks! 41:05 – Advertisement – eBook: Get a coder job! Links: JavaScript jQuery React Elixir Elm Vue ESLint Node.js Node Security Project Node Security Project - Medium Manning Publications: Course by PJ Evans PUG JSConf EU – talk with Philip Roberts Medium Article by David Gilbertson Hackster.io – Pi Car Pi Moroni Holding a Program in One’s Head PJ Evans’ Twitter Sponsors: Kendo UI Sentry Cache Fly Get a Coder Job Picks: Aimee Paul Graham - Blog AJ Rust Charles Tweet Mash-up The Diabetes Code PJ Music - Max Richter

Padre Chuck-No espacio-020418 by St. Lawrence

Padre Chuck-No es Nuestra Vina-100817 by St. Lawrence

Episode 117 “Its Just Atoms!” 2:00 We’re Live! John talks about trying to write a thousand words a day. Josh shares his daily writing strategy to get content or emails logged. Josh shares that he uses the Strides app to help him track his daily habits. John talks about going to back to the KabanFlow for daily tasks.  9:00 Josh shares how he has reached 2 to 3 thousand words a day. Josh talks about experimenting with creating video, and how he has to plan the video ahead of time rather than creating it “on the fly.” John talks about editing verses getting comfortable with creating on the fly. Josh shows new his selfie stick for video production.  16:00 Chuck shares his A/V gear and ideas  on how he records video. Josh and John disagree with the quality of bluetooth, in regards to Apple getting rid of headphone jack.  19:00 Chuck talks about his experience with bluetooth headsets. John and Derick talk about offending people intentional and unintentional. Chuck mentions we need to have common sense about these situations.  27:00 John says that mental energy expenditure is somewhat equal to physical energy expenditure. So stay off Facebook first thing in the morning. Chuck talks about feeling like crap about not meeting a goal and how that had a huge mental tax on him.  33:00 Derick shows off is Star Trek Data t-shirt. Josh talks about making another attempt with Google AdWords. Josh talks about how Google is getting beat up by Facebook as far as marketing strategies. Josh talks about being flagged by Google again.  Josh talks about how someone reaffirmed the usage of emails contact lists and pop-ups.  42:00 John and Josh discuss their opt-in form and formula to get their audience to buy.   John talks about the bounce rate from the home page, and those who ‘stick around’ the website.  50:00 Here is more talk on metrics on the websites and conversion rates. John talks about trying different strategies with changing the pop-ups and using retargeting pixels. Josh talks about how Google and Facebook could ban you with the use one pop-up in this kind of situation. Josh talks about his idea on how to use retargeting pixels.  1:00:00 Josh talks more about crossing the lines and getting banned from Google. Derick talks about changing to a standard pop-up and not talking about hating ad blockers. John talks about his dislike for display ads.  1:09:00 Josh says display ads are the tail end of the 80/20 curve. Josh talks about how they need a particular feature in Thrive. John talks about when they could maximize on the pop-ups.   John talks about the low traffic from Hacker News and Reddit.  1:19:00 Josh mentions their business was on fire or how sales are tanking. Josh has been doing reviews of everything trying to find a solution. Josh talks about how a perfect storm hit with five different issues happening a once. But they fixed it and turn things around, but only for a day or two. Josh is still puzzled.  Chuck talks about how he is getting and influx of traffic at Dev Chat TV.  1:28:00 Chuck talks about failing on delivering products on several projects. Chuck shares that he may have to reimburse 2k for an undelivered project. EntreProgrammers talk about how Chuck should repay the money on move on.  1:32:00 John talks about  how he is still waiting on the decorator to detail his home. John talks about ordering a new stand up desk with AI. 1:38:00 Derick talks about getting 3 subscribers at full price, one bundle sale, and nothing sense then. So a bit of a downturn. Derick is not exactly sure what pieces he needs to work on the turn things around. Derick says he needs one subscriber a month to make is monthly income.  1:42:00 John suggest that Derick should go to Twitter. Derick is not sure where his sales are coming from. Josh says that foot or cold traffic is a possibility. Derick has just hired Josh to help fix the sales funnel or some issues on the sales page. Josh says he may just need a ‘guarantee’ on the check-out page.  1:51:00 On a positive note Derick’s YouTube channel is growing. Thoughts of the Week John - It’s just atoms!  Josh - The ups and downs do not go away…its apart of the game.  Derick -  Understand yourself and take care of yourself.    Chuck - No matter how deep in the well your are, you can still find your way out. 

A Mix Of 2013,14 & 15 Soca Music To Warm Up To Caribana 2015 Coming Up! Please Share And Hope You Enjoy! #NoApology IG: djjasonchuck FB: djjasonchuck

Panel David J. Soler (twitter blog) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Reuven Lerner (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:04 - David J. Soler Introduction Relationship Marketing & Sales Podcast davidjsoler.com 01:54 - Building Relationships and Getting Referrals Trust, Likability, Credibility + Value (TLC+V) Handwritten, Personal Notes 13:39 - Trust Integrity Reputation Consistency 23:52 - Unconventional Marketing ‘Wow' Factor Before, During, and After Items of Value 30:11 - Referrals 32:10 - Meet Your Clients 34:31 - Appreciation and Encouragement 36:37 - Relationships Over Business Picks Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money by Rabbi Daniel Lappin (Curtis) Ladda Buttons (Curtis) Freelancing Rules of Thumb (Eric) Apple Developer: for WWDC Videos (Jeff) Mac Pro (Jeff) httpie (Reuven) Reversing PDF Documents (Reuven) Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson (Chuck) The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy (David) Next Week Freelancers Show: LinkedIn with Wayne Breitbarth Transcript DAVID: Are we live on the show? Are we broadcasting...or just setting up? CHUCK: I'm just doing some quick sound checks and then we'll get going... DAVID: Okay, great! CHUCK: Which is just me watching the volume meter while everybody talks. So, go ahead. REUVEN: Ohh! Is that what secretly happens? [laughter] REUVEN: And here I thought you're just trying to get us to be friendly. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 66 of The Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Good morning! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: Jeff Schoolcraft. JEFF: What's up! CHUCK: Reuven Lerner is trying to connect. I guess the wiring in Atlantic Ocean got cut; somebody wrong it over or something. I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week, we have a special guest and that's David J. Soler. DAVID: Hello everybody! Thanks for having me! CHUCK: No problem. Do you want to introduce yourself really quickly? DAVID: Sure! My name is David J. Soler, I am the host of the Relationship Marketing and Sales Podcast. You can learn more about me at davidjsoler.com. I am here to share and answer new questions that I can that you guys want to ask! CHUCK: Awesome! Now, I know David because we're in the same Mastermind Group, so we talk twice a month and he has helped me with quite a bit of marketing stuff. The thing that really kind of got me excited about getting you on the call besides your podcast, which is awesome, you've had some great guests, too. I think my favorite is the one with David Siteman Garland. DAVID: Yeah, it was blast. He's just a real smart guy, online entrepreneur, and just lot of great helpful tips. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's been a blast to interview people like him. CHUCK: Yeah. Anyway, you did something that was a little bit kind of outside the box that got me thinking, so I thought we'd bring that on and have you talk to us a little bit about some of the, I guess, less conventional things that you do. What you did was you sent 'Thank You' cards out to everybody in our Mastermind Group. I have to say, I don't usually get Pay-Per-Mail unless it's Pay-Per-Mail that says, "You owe us money." [David chuckles] CHUCK: So, I thought that was interesting! I was just wondering, what other ideas or techniques or ways of coming up with things like that, that we could do in our freelancing businesses to kind of make a  connection? DAVID: Sure, definitely! Well, the thing about it and approach that I'm trying to take you say unconventional, really,

Panel David J. Soler (twitter blog) Curtis McHale (twitter github blog) Eric Davis (twitter github blog) Jeff Schoolcraft (twitter github blog) Reuven Lerner (twitter github blog) Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up) Discussion 01:04 - David J. Soler Introduction Relationship Marketing & Sales Podcast davidjsoler.com 01:54 - Building Relationships and Getting Referrals Trust, Likability, Credibility + Value (TLC+V) Handwritten, Personal Notes 13:39 - Trust Integrity Reputation Consistency 23:52 - Unconventional Marketing ‘Wow’ Factor Before, During, and After Items of Value 30:11 - Referrals 32:10 - Meet Your Clients 34:31 - Appreciation and Encouragement 36:37 - Relationships Over Business Picks Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money by Rabbi Daniel Lappin (Curtis) Ladda Buttons (Curtis) Freelancing Rules of Thumb (Eric) Apple Developer: for WWDC Videos (Jeff) Mac Pro (Jeff) httpie (Reuven) Reversing PDF Documents (Reuven) Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing by Elisabeth Hendrickson (Chuck) The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy (David) Next Week Freelancers Show: LinkedIn with Wayne Breitbarth Transcript DAVID: Are we live on the show? Are we broadcasting...or just setting up? CHUCK: I'm just doing some quick sound checks and then we'll get going... DAVID: Okay, great! CHUCK: Which is just me watching the volume meter while everybody talks. So, go ahead. REUVEN: Ohh! Is that what secretly happens? [laughter] REUVEN: And here I thought you're just trying to get us to be friendly. [Hosting and bandwidth provided by the Blue Box Group. Check them out at bluebox.net.] CHUCK: Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 66 of The Freelancers Show! This week on our panel, we have Curtis McHale. CURTIS: Good morning! CHUCK: Eric Davis. ERIC: Hello! CHUCK: Jeff Schoolcraft. JEFF: What's up! CHUCK: Reuven Lerner is trying to connect. I guess the wiring in Atlantic Ocean got cut; somebody wrong it over or something. I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. This week, we have a special guest and that's David J. Soler. DAVID: Hello everybody! Thanks for having me! CHUCK: No problem. Do you want to introduce yourself really quickly? DAVID: Sure! My name is David J. Soler, I am the host of the Relationship Marketing and Sales Podcast. You can learn more about me at davidjsoler.com. I am here to share and answer new questions that I can that you guys want to ask! CHUCK: Awesome! Now, I know David because we're in the same Mastermind Group, so we talk twice a month and he has helped me with quite a bit of marketing stuff. The thing that really kind of got me excited about getting you on the call besides your podcast, which is awesome, you've had some great guests, too. I think my favorite is the one with David Siteman Garland. DAVID: Yeah, it was blast. He's just a real smart guy, online entrepreneur, and just lot of great helpful tips. I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's been a blast to interview people like him. CHUCK: Yeah. Anyway, you did something that was a little bit kind of outside the box that got me thinking, so I thought we'd bring that on and have you talk to us a little bit about some of the, I guess, less conventional things that you do. What you did was you sent 'Thank You' cards out to everybody in our Mastermind Group. I have to say, I don't usually get Pay-Per-Mail unless it's Pay-Per-Mail that says, "You owe us money." [David chuckles] CHUCK: So, I thought that was interesting! I was just wondering, what other ideas or techniques or ways of coming up with things like that, that we could do in our freelancing businesses to kind of make a  connection? DAVID: Sure, definitely! Well, the thing about it and approach that I'm trying to take you say unconventional, really,