Podcasts about dave thank

In this episode of the IC-DISC Show, I sit down with Brian Schwam to discuss how Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISCs) can help businesses save on taxes. With over 35 years of experience, Brian shares how IC-DISC has evolved since 1972 and why it remains a valuable tool for U.S. exporters. He explains how businesses, particularly in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector, can take advantage of this incentive to improve their financial position. We walk through a hypothetical example to illustrate how an exporting business could benefit from IC-DISC. Brian explains how companies involved in manufacturing, repairing, or trading parts can qualify and why many eligible businesses overlook this opportunity. We also discuss the annual MRO conference in Atlanta, where industry professionals gather to share insights and best practices. This event highlights the ongoing impact of IC-DISC within the aerospace sector and beyond. Despite the clear benefits, many businesses hesitate to implement IC-DISC due to a lack of awareness or expertise. Brian talks about how our firm partners with CPA firms to integrate IC-DISCs into existing tax processes, making it easier for businesses to take advantage of these savings. He also highlights the underutilization of IC-DISC and why more companies should consider it as part of their tax strategy. We wrap up by discussing the upcoming MRO America's Conference in Atlanta, where exporting aviation maintenance companies can connect and learn more about IC-DISC applications. Whether you're new to IC-DISC or looking to refine your approach, this conversation provides useful insights for businesses considering this tax-saving opportunity.     SHOW HIGHLIGHTS In this episode, I discuss the intricacies and benefits of Interest Charge Domestic International Sales Corporations (IC-DISC) with tax attorney Brian Schwam, who has over 35 years of experience in the field. We explore the historical context of IC-DISC, including its origins in 1972 and the significant changes it underwent following international scrutiny and U.S. tax reforms, such as the 2003 Bush tax cuts and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Brian provides insights into how IC-DISC can serve as a valuable tax incentive for U.S. exporters, particularly those in the aerospace industry's Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul (MRO) sector. Through a detailed hypothetical example, we illustrate how companies can leverage IC-DISC to maximize export profits, highlighting specific benefits for pass-through entities and closely held C corporations. We address common apprehensions businesses face regarding IC-DISC implementation and discuss how collaboration with CPA firms can facilitate a seamless integration into existing tax processes. Despite the clear benefits, IC-DISC remains underutilized, and we emphasize the potential missed opportunities for businesses not taking advantage of this tax-saving strategy. The episode also covers upcoming industry events, such as the annual MRO conference in Atlanta and the ICDISC Alliance Conference, which offer valuable networking and professional growth opportunities.   Contact Details LinkedIn - Brian Schwam (https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-schwam-b6026a3/) LINKSShow Notes Be a Guest About IC-DISC Alliance About WTP Advisors GUEST Brian SchwamAbout Brian TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dave: Hey, brian, welcome to the podcast. Brian: Thanks, dave, good to be here. Dave: So where on planet Earth are you calling in from today? It's hard to tell by looking at your background. Brian: Outer space. I am in the sunny South Florida. Dave: Okay. Brian: Breezy, south Florida, okay. Dave: Now are you a native of Florida. Brian: I am not a native of Florida. I spent 50 years of my life in the upper Midwest in Wisconsin. Okay, I had to move to Sunbelt. Dave: Okay, Now were you educated in the Midwest then too. Brian: I was. I'm a proud alum of the University of Wisconsin, both for an undergraduate degree in accounting and also my JD from the law school Okay. Dave: So you've and I take it and I've known you a while, so I think that's been several decades ago that your career was started. Is that about right? Brian: Several would be a good good approximation. Yes, I've been at this for 38 years. I know it doesn't look like it, right, okay? Dave: And so, and how long have you been involved in ICDISC? Then Most of that time 38 years, oh, 38 years in ICDISC. Then most of that time, 38 years, oh, 38 years in the disc, wow, yeah. So how does that do you know? Do you have any way to quantify that? Like how many you know ICDISC returns you've, you know, signed or reviewed or prepared, or Boy, it's a big number, dave. Brian: It's probably five figures. Okay, probably, so you know, somewhere north of 10,000 for sure. Okay, over that time period. Dave: Well, and that is why I'm glad that you are one of the founding members of the IC Disc Alliance with me that when I had a chance to partner up with you and some of your team when we created the IC Disc Alliance, I was really excited because in my book I pretty much knew all the players in the IC Disc space and once the famous Neil Block retired after 50 years to me you were without peer in the IC Disc space. Brian: So I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years here in the ICDISC space, so I really enjoyed collaborating with you through the years. Dave: Thank, you for that, Dave. I hope to be able to follow Neil into that 50-year stratosphere. Yeah, that's big shoes to follow. So let's just talk a bit about the ICDISC. What the heck is it? Why does everyone use that silly acronym? Brian: Because what it really stands for is a mouthful. Dave: Okay. Brian: Discharged Domestic International Sales Corporation and that is what the ICDISC stands for, short right ICDISC. And I don't know if we'll get into. I'll get into what the IC stands for and everything. But basically this is an export incentive that's been in the Internal Revenue Code since 1972. Okay, in various forms. Initially it was an export incentive that just about any company could use, that was exporting goods that were manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. It came under some fire from our trading partners and in 1984, it was transformed into the ICDISC. It started out just as the DISC in 1972 for the Boston International Sales Corporation and it, like I said, came under scrutiny. Our trading partners said hey, you're a, you can't have an exemption from income because you're not. You know you tax things differently in your country. This flies in the face of the other incentives you give your taxpayers. So they changed it into the ICDIS, which made it into, instead of a permanent tax savings, at least on its face, into a temporary savings where, to the extent a taxpayer saved tax and deferred income from tax, they were required to pay an interest charge to the IRS on that deferred tax. Hence the IC. Dave: Okay, okay. Brian: That rate changes every year. It's based on the one-year average TBLO rate as of September 30th annually. And at the same time they instituted something called the Foreign Sales Corporation, which was widely used by thousands of companies, and that came under attack and eventually became the extraterritorial income exclusion which was immediately attacked and eventually, a couple of years later, it just went away. In the meantime, the disk floundered for quite a number of years. In fact, in the year 2000 there were only 787 disks in existence. Dave: Wow, it seems like a shockingly small number. Brian: Well, the tax laws weren't real conducive to benefiting from the disk at that time. Then, in 2003, the Bush tax cuts brought in the concept of qualified dividend income and it took the disk off of life support and really put it on robust territory for pass-through entities, because they could now, to the extent that they could qualify and we'll get into that, to the extent they could qualify and to the extent that they could benefit it provided a 20% rate benefit between ordinary income and qualified dividend income, so it was a significant savings. Now that's been whittled away over time, where it's been reduced here and there. Various tax law changes and probably the largest or the next biggest reduction came in in 2017 with the Trump tax bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced the rate on qualified income on non-qualified income. So it reduced the rate on S-corp income partnership income in an individual's tax return to a 29.6% level, and so now the spread between the qualified dividend rate and the ordinary rate just isn't as great as it used to be. It's approaching 6%. So where it used to be 20, then it went to 15, and now it's 6. But it's still a permanent savings for these past three entities and it's not something that they should ignore, because it can save significant taxes, depending upon the level of export activity. Dave: Okay, and now to be clear, depending on a company-specific fact pattern, that spread could be greater. Right For a pass-through. It could be as high as what like? Brian: 13% or so For a pass-through it could be as high as what like, 13% or so For a pass-through business. Dave: It could be as high as 13.2%, okay, but in general we see that it and it could even be somewhere between that, depending on. Brian: Anywhere in between 5.8 and 13.2. Dave: And our experience has been that most companies tend to gravitate more toward the lower end of the savings than the higher end. Brian: Yes. Dave: Yes, okay. Now what about for a C-Corp? Brian: C-Corp is a different animal. Okay, a C-Corp can't use an disc to pay deductible dividends to its owners if it's a closely held C corp. This is not something that a public company can benefit from. But if a closely held business C corp is paying dividends to its shareholders and would like to be able to deduct those payments, rather than not being able to deduct those payments, using an ICDIS can transform the dividend into a deductible dividend. Now, it doesn't save the shareholders any tax, because they're paying tax on the dividend regardless of where it comes from, but it would eliminate the corporate level tax on the C corporation, so that benefit could be as high as 21%. Dave: Okay. Brian: Okay, another manner in which certain C corporations use the disc is to fund bonuses for shareholders and key employees, and then that saves the shareholders 17% tax the difference between a tax on a wage and a tax on a dividend, qualified dividend. So that's a 17% savings for the shareholder. In that case the C-Corp doesn't save any tax. They're getting a deduction either way wages or commission to the disk. And now that I've mentioned the word commission, that's probably a good segue into how does a disk earn income? Yeah, and what is its income? So most discs are what we call commission discs. They earn a commission when a operating business that's related to that disc makes an export sale of qualified export property. So let's dig down into that first. What's qualified export property? Well, that's property that has been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US. So if I'm manufacturing in Mexico or Canada or China and I'm simply selling what I've made in those other countries, you know the disc is not something that's going to benefit that type of a business. Dave: Okay. Brian: It is there to spur US manufacturing, create US jobs, right in line with the America First proposition that's headlining Washington in 2025. Dave: Okay. Brian: So it should be on safe ground, everything that's going on there. So if a company has property that's been manufactured, produced, grown or extracted in the US and they sell it for export outside the United States and not to a US possession, then that sale can potentially generate an ICDIS commission that would be paid to the ICDIS. And keep in mind this ICDISC is not an entity that the outside world sees or understands or knows about. It's simply an entity that does business, if you will, internally with the operating company, so customers don't know about it. It's really transparent to the world. It's just there to help US exporters save tax. Dave: Okay, it's just there to help US exporters save tax. Okay, and the logistics of it. Like say a company has just for simple math, let's say they have $10 million of export, of qualified export revenue, and the ICDIS commission that's calculated to say 10% of that. Brian: Okay. Dave: So 10% of that would be a million dollars, and so walk me through kind of the that's correct and it accrues the deduction, assuming it's not a cash basis taxpayer. Brian: It accrues that deduction at the end of the year, the DISC accrues the income at the end of the year and then by statute the DISC does not pay income tax. So now we've gotten a deduction on one side, we have non-taxable income on the other side and then when the disc pays a dividend to its owners, that becomes a qualified dividend and is taxed at a lower rate. Dave: Okay, so then, effectively, that million dollars gets reclassified from being taxed at ordinary dividend rates to qualified dividend rates. Brian: From ordinary income rates to qualified dividend rates. Dave: yes, Yep, thank you for that. And where that shows up for a pass-through is going to be on the individual shareholders, k-1, right. That box up near the top that shows ordinary taxable income would basically go down. Let's say there was one shareholder, that number goes down by a million dollars. And then there's a box further down on the K-1 for qualified dividend income and that's where the number's being shifted to right. Brian: Right. Assuming the disc is owned by the operating company, which most of the time it is in the pass-through business context, then the ordinary income gets reduced on the K-1 and the dividend income will increase on the K-1, not necessarily in the same year, but that will be the result over time. Dave: And then that tax savings then will show up on the individual shareholders. 1040, right, because their ordinary income line is a million dollars less. The qualified dividend income line is a million dollars more, and that's where that arbitrage. Brian: They pay less tax if they're getting a distribution from the company to cover their taxes, which is often the case, the company doesn't have to distribute as much cash, therefore increasing the working capital of the business. Dave: Okay, well, thank you. Thank you for that. Now, what I want to drill down into a little more today is looking at the aerospace industry, specifically what's called the MRO space in aerospace. Do you know what MRO stands for? Brian: I believe, I do, I believe maintenance, repair and overhaul. Dave: That's my understanding as well. Brian: That's a significant area in the aviation space. Dave: yes, Okay, and I believe that there's a big conference in Atlanta in April with like something like 17,000 expected attendees. Brian: Yeah, just a small gathering. Dave: A small gathering. Brian: For sure. Yes, that's my understanding as well. In fact, I'll be there. Dave: Yeah, I believe we'll both be there, yeah we'll both be there A few of our colleagues. Brian: Yeah, so it's a one a year significant gathering of companies that operate in this MRO space, supporting airlines and other aviation companies, and basically MRO is important because it keeps planes able to fly. Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. Dave: Yeah, and we actually have a booth there. 1818 BC and it makes it sound like it's a date from a long time ago. But yeah, we'll be there and this will be our first year in attendance or exhibiting. And this has come from, in recent years, I'd say, a big ramp up in the number of MRO companies who we are helping with their IC disk. Is that right? Brian: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one of the sponsors of the conference was a company I was doing some work with and I asked them if he thought it would be a good idea for us to attend, and it was a resounding absolutely that he thought that we could meet a lot of companies that could benefit from this ICDISC similar to his company. Dave: Okay. What are the elements in the MRO space or the characteristics of the companies that make them a good fit for the ICDISC, because my understanding is it's probably only one out of a hundred of like all the registered corporations in the US are really a fit for the disc. Brian: Yeah, so it takes a specific fact pattern to really benefit. So the companies in the service side of the business so let's say they're carpet cleaners or something to that nature they're not going to be able to benefit from the disk. But let's say it's a repair center and airlines will ship in parts to the repair center because they've worn out and they need it. They need a replacement part so that they can fly this plane. So what happens is maybe the repair center takes their part and repairs it, but they previously repaired another part that's identical and then to the customer and that plane gets back in the air right away. So in that scenario, even though it's a different part that's going back out versus what was coming in, that type of activity qualifies as long as what they're doing qualifies as manufacturing and that repair is occurring in the US. Dave: Okay. Brian: Then that type of a company could definitely benefit Other companies. I don't want to use this term, but it's kind of like horse trading. Sometimes companies will buy a surplus of parts, knowing that eventually they're going to be used by somebody and they hang on to these parts, or they find them from somebody who says I don't want these parts anymore, I haven't been able to sell them. So they take a flyer, they take a risk and they buy these parts and they hang on to them and maybe they sell them at a significant profit and maybe they don't. But there's that space as well that can benefit from the disc, and there's some misconception out there that some of the companies that are similar to what I just described can't benefit from a disc, and so, for example, if parts are obtained outside the US, they stay outside the US. They stay outside the US and they're repaired, recertified and resold. Those aren't going to qualify for the ICBITS. But sometimes parts are acquired outside the US and they're brought into the US, they're repaired, put it back into inventory in the US and then sold for export, and that activity does qualify for the ICs, and so it's very important to know where this refurbishment or remanufacturing is taking place. Dave: Okay and yeah, and there's a US content piece to it, right, like if they buy a part from China and all they do is they just put a little lubricant on it and throw it in a box. Brian: that may not qualify and then they export it. The test is what's the customer's value when that part comes into the US. So if it's a burned out hot engine part, for example, yeah there's no value or very little value and it comes into the US, its customers value is close to zero. It gets repaired, it's going to easily meet the content test and it's easily going to be considered manufactured in the US. It's rare, I think, that we'll find that somebody will buy a new part from outside the US just to inventory it here for export. Dave: Okay, yeah, because there's that it's a 50% US content test, right which? Is also, I think confusing on the surface if you don't really dive down into the rules, right, I mean, the layperson may find it. Brian: How do you know what's 50% US content? Well, the cost of good, I mean. Think of it the other way. The foreign content can't be more than 50%. And the foreign content is the cost, the customs value when it was imported. So if I'm selling something for $100, I imported it for as much as $49.99. That's going to qualify as long as I did something, you know, remanufactured it once it got to the US and once it got to the plus, more often than not, I think the value of those things coming in because they're used and worn and damaged parts, they're going to have a low customs valuation where there'll be no problem meeting that content. Dave: Okay, I can see that. Well, I find and my listeners tell me they really like kind of case studies, little mini of case studies, little mini, you know, client case studies On an anonymous basis. Do you have an example or two of some of the types of companies we've worked with, just to give people a flavor of them and, again, you know, being anonymous to you know? What company it is, but just a sense of like the sense of the size of the company, what the benefit might have been. Brian: The size is sort of across the board, right. So some of them are someone on the smaller side. They might have export sales between $5 and $10 million, and then some of them might have export sales of $100 million. It all depends on the size of their business and the benefits are kind of all over the map. Because we don't just do a simple calculation of the benefits. And the reason we don't is because in this industry what we find is there's a lot of margin variability in the companies that are exporting, and then a transaction-by-transaction analysis of the disk commission is what makes the most sense. That allows us to benefit from the margin variability, allows them to benefit from a higher disk commission and obviously then they're going to save more tax. And in some cases the commission grows by 10x by using the T by T. Sometimes it's two or three x, sometimes it's. You know, I've seen you know where it would have been zero because there was an overall loss in the company, but we were able to get a significant discommission with a T by T approach. So it's hard to pinpoint an exact number, but generally speaking it's 15 to 20, you know the commission ends up being 15 to 20% of sales. And if you look at the statutes, one of the statutes says oh, the commission can be 4% of sales, and another implies that it could be anywhere from 4% to 10%, but we generally see in this industry at least 15% on average. It's significantly higher. Dave: Yeah, and I'd like to drill down into that because I tell, and based on my understanding, we may manage more IC disks than any other organization of the country. I mean we I think our number is somewhere north of 500 companies now that we're helping out, and when I'm having these conversations, you know. So I'm, as you know, I'm more focused on the sales side. You know, and you and your team are more focused kind of on the technical aspect of producing these returns, and what I tell people is that our real value isn't being able to produce an IC disk return. Our value is the incremental benefit that the transaction by transaction calculation yields. That the transaction by transaction calculation yields. Because you know just about any any cpa firm you know most of them their software includes the ic disk return. You know, if they just go do a four percent calculation, it's a, you know, reasonably straightforward calculation. But we find that you know they're capturing only a fraction of the total benefit. Brian: That's true, and while I've seen a good number of interesting looking disc returns, I tend to agree that if you follow the directions, anybody can probably prepare a disc return. We do that as well. That's not where we add the most value. Where we add the most value, adding the value comes in unlocking the highest commission possible so that the tax savings are as great as possible. Yeah, and a lot of businesses that are high margin I'm sorry, low margin high volume businesses. When you look at the disc, on its face it looks like oh, there's not much benefit here, we're only making 2% or 3% of sales on our bottom line. So our disc commission would be 2% or 3% of sales. But, like I said, with the transactional approach, if the commission approach is 15%, well now we've taken the company into a tax loss which could potentially save additional taxes for the owners over and above that 5.8%, because now we're offsetting that loss against other income wages, interest, et cetera and being taxed just on the qualified dividend income of the disc. And so you can't just look at the overall margin or overall profitability of the company and project what that, what it's going to look like, Because they vary all over the place. Dave: Based on this transactional approach, yeah, and I would like to talk a bit about. Oftentimes, when I'm talking to a company that's considering a disk, oftentimes they've never even heard of it. Their CPA firm may not have even mentioned the idea. And they'll say, and they'll ask me hey, does this mean my CPA, you know, screwed up by not telling me about it. In my response, you know I try to be generous and I explain it that, look, you know, in our experience only about one out of 100 companies are a candidate. And so let's just say you have a large local CPA firm and they have 100, you know midsize corporate clients. Statistically we find that only one of them, you know, would be a fit for the disk. And your experience may be a little different, you know, feel free to correct me. And so when you think about it from the CPA's perspective, if there's a special part of the tax code and they only have one client that benefits, it's a difficult economic dynamic for the CPA firm to invest in a whole team and expertise to serve one client, right? Isn't that like part of the challenge that the and I know you've worked at a number of large CPA firms Is my understanding correct? That's part of the problem is just their clientele. There aren't enough of them. That makes it worth doing yeah. Brian: Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization. I might phrase it a little bit differently. I mean, there are thousands of CPA firms and they're all excellent generalists. This is not an area where you can be a generalist. Cpa firms often outsource R&D, tax credit work, cost segregation work. This, to me, falls right in that same category. You don't want to dabble in this, and if you're not sure what you're doing, you can get you and your client in trouble. Have good intentions, but if you don't execute it properly, it can be more of a headache than it's worth. And so, like most people, I think people gravitate towards what they know and understand, and things that they don't know and understand can look and sound scary. Dave: Yeah. Brian: So it's like, oh my God, an IC disc. I've never heard of that. I'm not sure I can bring that to my client because I don't really know what I'm doing. Well, I wish I knew somebody I could call to him. He's not a competitor right who could help me through this and help my client through this, and so that's really one of the reasons why we exist, because, as you stated, you don't want it to be a competitor that you call, and so, because we are so hyper focused on what we do and we don't do the things that I'll call the cpa's generalists, that the generalists do, we're an excellent partner because we're not looking to take away anybody's tax return or any of the other type of work that the CPA might be doing for that client. We just want to play in our space. Dave: Yeah, sometimes I'm sorry. Sometimes you know clients or potential clients will say, yeah, but you know our CPA firm does. You know all of our work. It's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return yeah, but our CPA firm does all of our work, it's a one-stop shop thing and I'm afraid having you do the disc return and then doing the corporate return it's just going to be a nightmare for you all to coordinate your efforts. It just sounds like too much trouble. What would your response be to that? Brian: My response is I work with over 500 companies. Generally we do the disk work for those companies. The regular mainstream CPA does everything else. We coordinate our work with that CPA and it's never a problem. We say, look, we're going to need X number of days to turn this around, so please have a draft of the operating company return by a particular date, and then they work towards that date. They give us the return, we get data from the company and we turn the number around so they can finish their tax return and then we go ahead and finish the disc return and I would say 99.9% of the time it works like we're all part of the same thing. Dave: Yeah, because really the CPA they prepare that final draft corporate return. They then pull two numbers from the disk return that goes into the corporate return and then they're done, basically right. Brian: And they're done and they can go ahead and finish up their disk return, I mean their operating company return and their state returns and everything. And then we just have to get the disc return done. And sometimes you know they file their tax return in april and you know the disc returns aren't due till september. So one might say, oh, you could just sit on them until september. But you know, we try to get them done at the same time. Sure sure Everybody can rest easy. But I mean we think of ourselves as a bolt-on resource to that CPA firm while we're working with that and we work with probably 50 to 75 CPA firms around the country in that role- yeah. It works well. I mean, you can talk to any one of them about what it's like to work with us, and I'm sure you'd get a glowing recommendation for how we work with them and for their clients. Dave: Yeah, no, I'm with you. So, as we're nearing the end here, the other thing that people find interesting you'd mentioned in 2003, there were 700 IC disks under 1,000. Yeah, 787. And then, according, if my recollection is correct, the most recent IRS stats that updated that were published, I think, in 2010. And I believe in 2010, there were like 2000 disks. Brian: Yeah, something like 1926. Okay, To be exact, and that number I'm sure has grown dramatically since then. I would guess there's somewhere between eight and 10,000 disks out there now. Okay, yeah. Dave: Yeah, now what's interesting? This is what people find interesting. I believe there's about 50 million business organization, you know business entities in the country, and so let's just assume that's the number, 50 million. Brian: I mean it's tens of millions. Dave: I'm certain of that. For some reason, I think it's 50 million. Does that sound reasonable? Brian: It does so let's think it's 50 million, does that? Dave: sound reasonable. It does. So let's say it's 50 million and on your average, you know we find around one out of a hundred. You know, maybe one out of 200 companies are fit for the disc. So if we run through the math, you know one percent of 50 million, I believe, is 500, 000. You know approximate companies that we think would benefit from a disc. Yet most recent stats, there's only 2000, you know, and maybe it's 4,000, 6,000, you know. Even, let's say it's 10,000 that exists now. So if you divide 10,000 by 500,000, what is that? Like 2%, I think, of the projected eligible company actually have a disc yeah, and people can't. They always are surprised by that and I usually tell them it might. And tell me if your numbers are consistent. I say about 100. One out of 100 benefit or could benefit. The ones who could benefit 90 percent of them have never heard of the disc, maybe 95%, and the 5% of the 1% who have heard of it, even once they hear about it, they usually haven't implemented it. Brian: Right. Then there's a percent that have implemented it. They're not getting out of it what they can. Dave: Right right. Brian: So it's so. There's a lot of missed opportunities by taxpayers and everyone's always trying to save some taxes. It helps fun, you know. It might help hire another employee might help, you know, if the savings are moderate and it's 50, 6070, 1000 of tax savings that still could pay for an employee to come work at the company. Why do? Dave: you think that utilization is so low? I mean because it'd be shocking if only 2% of the companies who did research and development took advantage of the RMD tax credit. Brian: I think it's just not well known. I mean it's very esoteric, it's been in the tax code for ages and ages and it just doesn't you. You know, there were so many years where it just wasn't relevant when you think that it's not something people think about. And then if you know, if you're a small exporter and you're exporting a half a million dollars a year a million dollars a year unfortunately it probably doesn't benefit you to have a disc and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't benefit you to have a disk and so maybe someone will look at it whether that size and they're like, oh yeah, it doesn't work. And then they grow and they forget that it might work once they've grown. So once a company hits about three million of export sales really should look at it again, because that's where it starts to have economic relevance that's where it starts to have economic relevance. Dave: Do you think some of it could be that? I mean, in general, public companies don't use disks, right? Brian: They just simply don't. Dave: Okay, and so I've found that oftentimes small to mid-sized privately held companies receive a lot of their sophisticated business knowledge from their Fortune 500 suppliers or clients. You know they'll hear from them about something and you know, like the payroll protection program during COVID, you know I suspect some of those might have heard about that from you know some of their large customers. Maybe that's not a good example, but you know that could be another reason. Right, there's just a dearth of knowledge that the CPAs aren't focused on it because the economics don't make sense. The large sophisticated public suppliers and clients don't use it, so they don't hear about it from them. Right, it's not really in the news, it's just. It just kind of flies below the radar screen, doesn't it? Brian: It definitely does, and that's certainly a reason why it's not as utilized as it probably could be. Dave: Yeah, and it seems like you know most of our, you know virtually all of our clients come as a referral from either an existing client or an advisor who we've worked with other clients you know, like a CPA or attorney or banker. So yeah, it's just a yeah, even though you know the podcast is called the Icy Disc Show. I don't get the sense that I'm ever going to. You know, reach Joe Rogan's audience size. It just seems to kind of fly below the radar screen. Brian: Yeah, and the potential audience is probably a little smaller than Joe's. Dave: Probably Well. So the last thing, the other thing people tell me they're surprised about the first year of the disk return. When they set up a disk is to get everything done. And we tell them the disk return's ready and they say, super good, and e-file it for me, like the CPA does the corporate and personal returns. And what is our response when they tell us to go e-file it for them? Brian: The response is unfortunately, the IRS doesn't provide for e-filing of disk returns and we'll need to send you a paper return. You're going to need to sign it and file it with the IRS and the unfortunate thing there is gosh, I don't know what percent of the time, but it's a growing percentage of the time the IRS loses the return Right and then sends a notice saying, hey, we never filed or whatever. And some of these disk returns are quite large. The fact that they because when you do the transaction by transaction analysis, there's a lot of paper that gets produced and filed and it's shocking to me that the IRS would lose those what they do. Dave: So it's interesting what they do. So it's interesting. I like to say that not only does the ICDISC fly under the radar screen of most everything, it even, in some ways, it's almost like it flies under the radar screen of the IRS itself. Brian: Yeah, and they put some things in place with regard to the ICDISC in 1984 and have never changed it. For example, if you're in the situation where you have to pay interest on deferred tax, which often occurs. First of all, a lot of times taxpayers don't realize it and they don't do it. Secondly, if they do it. It's so antiquated that the instructions to the form where you calculate the interest it says please staple a check to this form and mail it in. I mean, who does that in 2020, right? Nobody. People, businesses prefer to do things electronically to avoid checks being stolen, fraudulent activity, so on and so forth. But here the IRS is saying staple a check to this form and mail it to Kansas City, missouri. Dave: Yeah, and I guess it kind of makes sense that you know if there's only a few thousand of these disks in existence. In the same way, you can't expect the CPA firms to make it a heavy focus, I suppose even the IRS. You know there's a hundred other tax incentives or a thousand other tax incentives that are more highly utilized that you know they maybe are spending their time on. Brian: Yeah, as I like to say, the people at the IRS that understood the disc were working there in the 70s and 80s, OK, and they're long retired. Yeah, and they're long retired. There's really not a lot of bodies at the IRS that understand the DISC and certainly when you're doing a transaction by transaction study and calculating the commission on each individual transaction, there's nobody there that understands that. Dave: Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? Nobody Well, and it's kind of the same thing outside the IRS, right? I mean I have this joke that nobody makes partner at a big four firm being the IC disk expert. Oh, that's true, so it even especially nowadays. Yeah, and so it seems like like the average age of IC disks experts is about the same as the average age of the average Fortran computer language programmer. It just seems like you know new people are not coming into the disk and there's just a dearth of knowledge all around. Brian: Right, right. And I myself learned COBOL, which is a choice between Fortran and COBOL, when I was in business school, both equally non-usable. Dave: Is it part of that? Because since the disk came on in 1972, it seems like since 1973, people have been talking about the IC disk going away. So is that maybe part of it? People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? Brian: Maybe part of it. People think, well, why should I learn something if it's going away? There's always been a fear that it's either going to go away or that there's a technical correction coming that the disk dividend is not a qualified dividend. But the bottom line is politically, I just don't see that happening. Dave: It stands for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation export sales for too many things that are positive for the US Job creation, export sales, us companies being more competitive in the global market. Brian: So it doesn't really lend itself to be repealed. What can be repealed are some of the tax rates. Some of the tax rates can change and that can change the benefits of the disc. The concept of the disc itself and what it stands for really is very consistent with our country. Dave: Yeah, wow, I can't believe how the time has flown by, brian. Is there anything else that you want to mention about the IC disc or the MRO industry? Brian: No, I can't think of anything specifically other than I'm looking forward to being there and meeting many of the attendees and other exhibitors that are there and spending some time with you and our colleagues in Atlanta. Dave: Yeah, it will be fun. So it's the ICDISC Alliance. If you want to look us up on the website for the conference or stop by 1818BC. We also have a LinkedIn page for the ICDISC Alliance, and so I'd love to meet with any of you who are going to be at the conference. Awesome, well, thank you very much for your time, Brian. This has been really useful. Brian: You're welcome. You're very welcome. Special Guest: Brian Schwam.

Deep fake voice recording using the voice actors hurts them! Today we get an opportunity to interview NAVA (National Association of Voice Actors), with a variety of guests with knowledge on various topics during this discussion, about how AI is affecting the field with deep fakes, fake youtube videos, and other derivative works from their voices. Lets get the bottom of how this actually affects the voice actor industry. Lets get into this great intertview! Thank you to NAVA: https://navavoices.org/ Sign the letter!: https://navavoices.org/synth-ai/ Thank you to Tim Friedlander Thank you to CIssy Jones Thank you to Dave Thank you to Andy Danish Thank you Carin Gilfry Thank you to Gordon Firemark Thank you to Zxerian Thank you to Toya VA Thank you to Ota And BIG thanks to Mike Pollack for making this all possible. Watch Toyatv on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/laketoyava?sr=a Follow Ota on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@OtakuParku?si=ZMBL3fnVpaUa7rMV Zxerians twitter: https://twitter.com/ForceFried Support the show and check out our Patreon! https://patreon.com/shreddit Check out our website for episode downloads and Lemon's music corner! https://Shredditor.com Watch us on Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/show/4HcQhPR3YYuUp0bycR6OKB Watch us on Itunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shreddit/id1580144913 Join the community on discord! https://discord.gg/4UBy3wKsyc Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shreddit_ Watch us be bad at games: https://www.twitch.tv/Shredditofficial Watch Lumia be a cool Vtuber: https://www.twitch.tv/lumiastargazer https://www.youtube.com/c/lumiaStargazer Edited by Ky Thumbnails by AlexyMillionArt Intro Music by vurb0001 https://vurbank.bandcamp.com/ #strike #voiceover #voiceacting

Deep fake voice recording using the voice actors hurts them! Today we get an opportunity to interview NAVA (National Association of Voice Actors), with a variety of guests with knowledge on various topics during this discussion, about how AI is affecting the field with deep fakes, fake youtube videos, and other derivative works from their voices. Lets get the bottom of how this actually affects the voice actor industry. Lets get into this great intertview! Thank you to NAVA: https://navavoices.org/ Sign the letter!: https://navavoices.org/synth-ai/ Thank you to Tim Friedlander Thank you to CIssy Jones Thank you to Dave Thank you to Andy Danish Thank you Carin Gilfry Thank you to Gordon Firemark Thank you to Zxerian And BIG thanks to Mike Pollack for making this all possible. Zxerians twitter: https://twitter.com/ForceFried Support the show and check out our Patreon! https://patreon.com/shreddit Check out our website for episode downloads and Lemon's music corner! https://Shredditor.com Watch us on Spotify! https://open.spotify.com/show/4HcQhPR3YYuUp0bycR6OKB Watch us on Itunes! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/shreddit/id1580144913 Join the community on discord! https://discord.gg/4UBy3wKsyc Twitter: https://twitter.com/Shreddit_ Watch us be bad at games: https://www.twitch.tv/Shredditofficial Watch Lumia be a cool Vtuber: https://www.twitch.tv/lumiastargazer https://www.youtube.com/c/lumiaStargazer Edited by NoNeedBruh Thumbnails by AlexyMillionArt Intro Music by vurb0001 https://vurbank.bandcamp.com/ #strike #voiceover #voiceacting

[00:03:47] NEWS [00:04:04] Report: West Sweden ATP at Isle of Man on Apr 9th 2021, Autopilot Refused to Disconnect [00:10:41] Alaska B739 at Seattle on Aug 22nd 2022, Engine Cowl Opened in Flight [00:14:16] Final Report - Runway excursion Incident Boeing 737-7H4 (WL) [00:28:38] FAA Moves Secondary Flight Deck Barrier Requirement Forward [00:32:27] Bald Eagle Onboard [00:39:45] GETTING TO KNOW US [01:09:59] COFFEE FUND [01:12:41] FEEDBACK [01:13:06] Adam - A Mind Reading Jet [01:23:27] Adam - Air Force vs. Navy Landing [01:26:41] Brian - Three Questions Total [01:45:25] Dave - Thank you! [01:48:43] Els Piloto - New Patron Introduction + Feedback [02:09:31] Jimmy - Runway Overrun Warning/Runway Overrun Protection (ROW/ROP) system [02:16:20] Kevin - Motorway Drivers on Lookout for Boeing 747 Being Driven Up Country [02:21:16] Marius - Roles of the Captains and FOs [02:25:29] Peter - Delta, Boeing and Airbus [02:29:57] Mahzuz - American Becomes Third Airline to Place Order for Boom Supersonic Jets [02:39:09] Dominic - Halibut Cove, Alaska - Air/Sea Rage [02:46:21] Rod - Lufthansa Emergency … on Not [02:55:17] Larry - Living in a Van Down on the River [02:57:04] Capt. Jeff - Dublin's New Runway VIDEO Don't see the video? Click this to watch it on YouTube! ABOUT RADIO ROGER “Radio Roger” Stern has been a TV and Radio reporter since he was a teenager. He's won an Emmy award for his coverage in the New York City Market. Currently you can hear his reporting in New York on radio station 1010 WINS, the number one all-news station in the nation. Nationally you can hear him anchor newscasts on the Fox News Radio Network and on Fox's Headlines 24-7 service on Sirius XM Radio. In addition Roger is a proud member of and contributor to the APG community. Give us your review in iTunes! I'm "airlinepilotguy" on Facebook, and "airlinepilotguy" on Twitter. feedback@airlinepilotguy.com airlinepilotguy.com "Appify" the Airline Pilot Guy website (http://airlinepilotguy.com) on your phone or tablet! ATC audio from http://LiveATC.net Intro/outro Music, Coffee Fund theme music by Geoff Smith thegeoffsmith.com Dr. Steph's intro music by Nevil Bounds Capt Nick's intro music by Kevin from Norway (aka Kevski) Doh De Oh by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Source: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100255 Artist: http://incompetech.com/ Copyright © AirlinePilotGuy 2022, All Rights Reserved Airline Pilot Guy Show by Jeff Nielsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

Marlo: Do you have safety concerns? Well, my friend Dave, might be able to help you a little bit. So welcome to the show. Dave. Dave: Thank you, Marla. appreciate being here. Thanks for having me. Marlo: Why are you at CES 2022. Dave: So we do have some connected products, say a smart pepper […] The post Personal Safety Products with Sabre appeared first on The Tech Ranch.

Introduction of the show Self into (Vlad) Self into (Dave) Thank you to the listeners  Thank you to the sponsors.  Giveaway - live drawing next episode January 5th.  End of episode questions Books Vlad Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt Dave Hampton Sides The E-Myth revisited Michael Gerber  Podcasts Cortex The Adventure Zone The MeatEater Podcast Career Advice VladContinue to Learn Dave Do things that make you uncomfortable - say yes and figure it out Watch out for yourself  Who should reach out? Vlad Dave If you want to solve tough problems - or you need help solving problemsWork with Service Providers and end users If you want to get your message out, Vlad and I are always looking to find ways to help the community. Looking for sponsors.  Discuss top guest shows of 2021? Jeff Winter  - 38 Max Krug - 33 Bobby Cole - 37 Jake Hall - 24 Zach Stank - Live show - 36 How did the year go for Dave? Discussion Key takeaways? How did the year go for Vlad?Discussion Key takeaways? Time off system Business systems / management Asking for projects / opportunities What are the plans/goals for 2022 for Dave? What are the plans/goals for 2022 for Vlad? Continue to expand SolisPLC. We're working on a credentialed course for the PLCnext platform. We're continuing to expand our tutorial database and will continue building the libraries for multiple vendors. We're also exploring to expand into troubleshooting and general manufacturing problem-finding type of content. Working on a data solution under Arc Data Labs - continue to expand the technology and find partners to test out the solution Unnamed second show starting early January.  Announcing the 2022 First Theme  Changes to the show - what we're going to do to make it better. 

Tis' the season to be thankful!  Special thanks to Russ, Andrew, Graham, and Jeanne!  We are grateful to the listeners who laugh with us, cry with us, and wake up with us every morning. Now it's our time to thank XTU Nation for being the best country music fans ever. Today, we're surprising some of our listeners to give them thanks! Make sure you keep your phone nearby, we might be giving you a call today!   

00:00:03.510 --> 00:00:51.510 Trevor Blondeel: Well Dave I was about to start a training session a couple of days ago, and with a group of manufacturing leaders and we're talking about the aware leader I’m all pumped up. And I got a call from my son about 15 minutes before he's 22 and he's going through some major challenges that I can't all explain here, but I can tell you, as a dad, I was shaken up, and it was difficult for me and my mindset to kind of get back on track. A lot of that comes down to just that resilience and what we practice ahead of time, but it was still hard and you Dave had had something in your life to change your mindset this week and tell us a little bit about that. 00:00:52.050 --> 00:02:30.000 Dave Baker: yeah, well you know I tell you. there's you know our guest today provided us this great quote which has helped me check this out mindset drives and shapes all that we do, how we engage with others and how we behave. In every moment and every situation and it's from the Arbinger Institute, and I saw that and read that, in the wake of having to put my best buddy down - man's best friend. On Monday, just a couple of days ago, and you talk about a heartbreaker it absolutely tore me up and quite honestly, it's not easy to talk about but. I have been doing my best, thus, far to just hold it together and that's, all I can do, but you're you know it's all about mindset and my mindset in this grieving process of losing him. It’s has been ebb and flow in the days that you know, since it's transpired and where I keep you know I fight self-pity, anger, restlessness you know just woe is me and what am I going to do it says, you know my if I don't check my mindset man, we go in dark places and I know you can't move forward, and I’ve found myself stuck and it's like check your mindset they where's your head at where is your head and 00:02:30.330 --> 00:03:23.610 Dave Baker: So, know just in time we've got Jacob Knight, our guest with us today, Jacob is all about mindset and we’re so excited to have Jacob with us today, he's the manager he's a leader at FC in the Florence South Carolina area he's he owns Jacob Knight, and he runs Straight Talk on LinkedIn, which is fantastic. It's a community of like-minded folks to sharing thoughts and inspiration so Jacob welcome and man, we can't wait to hear and learn how mindset has impacted you and your career and your personal life so let's jump in man, I mean tell us about this. 00:03:24.150 --> 00:05:00.510 Jacob Knight: yeah, first all day then Trevor, thank you for having me on the show I’ve listened to several episodes and really enjoyed the content and the material, so thank you for that also sorry to hear about your son Trevor going through some things in his life now and I’ll be hoping and praying that it'll strengthen him and helping him in the long run. You know Dave about you about your dog I was like you said man's best friend, I know it's tough and just let me say one thing on that I know you talk about mindset. doesn't always mean that you must pretend like something different happen or something ever happened, you have to do with what happened but deal with it in a positive way that'll get you out of that slump so sorry to hear about that as well. Again, thank you, but the mindset, and whenever you think about mindset, there's a lot of different things that may come to mind. Maybe just how you think about some particularly or to be a small scale or larger scale, but when I think about mindset, I just mean your general frame of mind, you know, whenever you get out of bed. Whenever you look at a task whenever you have an obstacle come your way you know what's the foundation. Of where you're coming from, and I think there are different levels to talk about, but I think at the end of the day, success is driven by having the right kind of mindset, as your foundational steppingstone. 00:05:00.540 --> 00:05:12.360 Dave Baker: So Jacob, as a dyed in the wool manufacturing born and bred, I mean, as I understand man, I love the story, where were when you started sweeping floors? 00:05:12.720 --> 00:06:40.050 Jacob Knight: that's right off the bat. I grew up you know southern in the country most of my family was I guess you'd call them entrepreneurs I didn't know what that word meant back then. We built houses wired houses was pushing was on total lumber did all these things from I think my dad kind of laughs about it. I was three years old, the first time I pull wire under the house, so I was doing that forever since I was born right come out when pulling while my GI joes under the House. Yeah, so you talk about the first large company that I, I was hired on to I’m still a teenager. Just at a high school and we're waiting on equipment to come in the facility, and you know we were asked to sweep the floor and I’ll tell you what I didn't know at the time, but you could really tell a lot about people whenever they were asked to do that task you had, I think I had 24 to 30 people in my group. And most people were pretty upset about it, but I didn't know it at the time, but in my mind, you know I thought hey I’m going to sweep the paint off the floor. I want to be the best floor sweeper into the plan and most people may have thought that look beneath them, which I still sweep the floors now and I don't mind if I get pretty doggone good at. 00:06:43.890 --> 00:07:11.760 Trevor Blondeel: yeah, it's funny those first impressions it's not necessarily. Of course, there are discussions around does this person has the hands, do they have just the mechanical mindset and that is a part. But if they don't and they're sweeping that floor like nobody's business and whatever they do they're just going to do it the best they can, and it's hard to turn people away like that right. 00:07:13.320 --> 00:08:45.240 Jacob Knight: But, if you look throughout you know my career that's definitely been the game changer for me and, if we look out in our society in our culture, yes, there may be a lot of things going on now. That isn't right per se, or maybe they've got this the odds are stacked against you, but I believe that you must have a successful mindset, even while you fight against those things because it's like you know negative breeds negativity you know, and you never really going to get out there slumping and pull ahead unless you have the right kind of mindset that's ownership taking responsibility. Taking you to know I’m going to own up to this I’m going to dig out of this hole, and I have 30 years kind of developed. Some of these characteristics some type of you know, mental strength that you need that doesn't cost you a penny, and I think that's a big thing about mindset is anybody can have the right mindset. You don't have to be rich or poor, or you know you can be anybody and I think that's the strength that you have with mindset is not a degree, you have to get it's something you can actually you know work up in your mind in it comes out in your attitude and your behavior. 00:08:45.870 --> 00:09:16.020 Dave Baker: So, Jacob you and you open the can of worms up and I’m going in all right I’m going to pull them out. What specifically for you, has been so impactful in keeping your mindset, where it is, I mean what do you do that others may learn from or might could benefit and learn what you do. Every day that impacts that. 00:09:16.500 --> 00:09:22.560 Jacob Knight: Okay, so a big question, and this could be a long answer. 00:09:28.680 --> 00:09:44.130 Jacob Knight: I’m going to just tell you kind of about my personal process I’m not saying everybody must have this but I’m just going to let you know kind of where I come from, and then maybe some things I’ve put together that I think or are crucial to have the right, having the right mindset. For me I had a process through life I ended up going to school later on in life after I’ve had had four children, and it was an obstacle, but it was well worth it very beneficial but had a lot of questions about my foundational like you know-how. How I thought about the world what is reality, what is no morality. All those types of type of questions you know what knowledge is, you know starting to get an hour's philosophy and my background is Christianity and probably some you know stoic philosophy, you know just where you know you put your nose down in an obstacle is the top of mine, since I’m kind of a mesh. If you think about it that way that's kind of my foundation that I have grown into, and I believe that's What helps me propel forward but there's some there's generalities there are some general rules if you want to call it that. I think are beneficial for the mindset I call them, and I can't take all this credit I got a great team I’ve worked with some great people in some companies and we've always participated and knowledge-sharing training. Building each other up - one of my big things is I share everything I know I don't keep any trade secrets or any secrets from anybody or anything so I’ve always poured myself out because that made me grow in the process, but having said that, just to I like to think of it in three categories one is the golden rule. And everybody basically knows what that is you know do unto others as you'd have them do unto you, but under that is more respect. You know it's this genuine respect for people, where I really believe people are valuable and I want to behave in such a way that shows respect to them. And I know there were there, how they're valuable in my worldview they're made in the image of God. I want to treat them right and I want to help them succeed and the other one is like an internal drive, so I got this one aspect where I believe it, I’m going to respect. Everybody the best that I can I’m going to give them respect right off the BAT and then it's a strong work ethic, you know you know I’m doing my work on to the Lord or you know you can think about hey I’m doing my work, you know. For me, so to speak for my betterment I’m not trying to impress somebody internally, instead of an external thing I’m not doing it just for $1 or just for a title. Passion and energy preparation, think about it, having a positive attitude, all these things and I’m saying doesn't cost you anything you know these are developed from within your mind. One is progress, moving forward, I want to keep getting better I need to be flexible; I need to be coachable I need to be able to learn and to grow, and those are the things I kind of put together. That, I believe everybody can benefit from, and I call them the golden rule the internal drive-in progress, and I think that and that's really not anything new you can go online and find a means or whatever you call them that have broken down. Types of mindsets that don't cost you anything but those are how well look at him. 00:13:50.880 --> 00:14:11.130 Trevor Blondeel: So, Jacob, you know I hear you and, yes, it's on the Internet, and those are good things we're talking manufacturing here we're making the same thing we got a routine. So, I get on calls and I see people and I’ll say they take up how you are doing and how do you respond when they say I’m living the dream. 00:14:17.280 --> 00:16:13.350 Jacob Knight: Pretty funny line and I even use it joking around because we've here so much you know we hear that phrase, a lot of times live in a dream, just to kind of take a step back right I’m going to go off of what you said, a second ago. You were saying that you know, in the manufacturing world how is it, how do we have this top of mind said. This, when you needed the most I mean whenever you're doing some a day in, day out you're punching a clock if you and I know you all have experienced this but morale you can lose it in a heartbeat. Morale can be lost and it's hard to build a good culture in manufacturing, I believe, and maybe I’m partial because this was in my blood, but culture and morale or everything, so this is the utmost importance in a job, where people can easily feel like they're stuck right. You feel like you're stuck, and I think that the plan that we put together is the path to get you unstuck so whenever somebody says something like that you know. Living the dream right I’ll kind of laugh about it, too, I may say I’m living in a dream or I’ve been busy but really was going on is you know some ways probably giving you some sort of clue that your own happiness. And they want to tell you that and play hey you know what was going on and going back to the story about losing you man's best friend Dave. You were saying it was hard to focus really if you were able to open up with somebody a lot of times that helps you clear out so usually whenever somebody has something to say I’ll say you know. I might laugh about it start where initially didn't ask that you know what's going on, tell me about it, you know what happened and then kind of sympathize and empathize with them a little bit and usually that does start to change the mood. 00:16:13.770 --> 00:16:29.820 Dave Baker: yeah, and I, you know, and Jacob appreciate you bringing that up and I’ll tell you twice this week, I was asked to go to dinner, and I said I mean I know the guy and I said honestly no I don't want to go, he said guess what they've come on we're going anyway. 00:16:31.050 --> 00:17:10.890 Dave Baker: And I’m telling you, it was the best thing I needed that and the second time, you know so buddy called me, and you know it's like hey. You know I don't feel like talking, I was totally transparent with him, I said dude I don't feel like talking. And he said all right well if you don't call me back and calling you again, so in my time I called him back, I did not want to, but I did anyway. Because I knew that that was, I needed to do that I just absolutely needed to do it and that helped keep me moving forward and that's us. 00:17:12.270 --> 00:17:47.880 Trevor Blondeel: And I referenced this a lot around women in manufacturing and how the numbers are not growing they've been stagnant, for a long time. That's definitely one thing that women can bring to manufacturing that sometimes males suck at which is living the dream. You know just laugh it off, but I’d love your response Jacob it's kind of like tell me more about that later, you know is that funny is a little sarcastic, or is that actually a call for help. Because I totally agree with you it's kind of like um what's underneath that. 00:17:48.150 --> 00:18:01.410 Dave Baker: But it could be a forced thing, and it could be real and that person truly is excited and on the top of their game living their dream, and so it can be anywhere In between there but yeah. 00:18:01.950 --> 00:18:46.710 Trevor Blondeel: So maybe the right responses tell me more because then you can understand, is it like Are they in their dream, or are they there and yeah, it's just one of those little things and I think it's what you said Jacob it's being that having the mindset of being open enough to be curious you know if you're in the right mindset, you can do that and. You know it's those little things that you do like I watched some Ted Talk; I remember it was like when you put your feet outside your bed, and you know the morning first thing you say is something greats going to happen today, I mean it can manufacturing is not something we talked about a lot but it's like you got to have something right and it's not going to make your day worse if you say something creates could happen. 00:18:48.870 --> 00:19:32.430 Jacob Knight: yeah, I mean you have to believe you'd have I’m more of a realist, but I don't let that stop me from being positive, you know as you know business owner business leader, you do have to be a realist you can't prove proceed, you know with unicorns you know hopping around and everything is going to be wonderful, but you can proceed all right here's the situation, what do we do about it, you know how do we change this, how can we, how do we get where we're going here's a little setback. But we know we're going to get through this look what we are to get through, you know remind yourself of where you've already come and then where you need to go and that's another great example of the right mindset propelling you forward. 00:19:32.820 --> 00:20:35.190 Trevor Blondeel: yeah, and I think that's what the listeners want to hear they don't want to hear that you have a perfect mindset, they want to hear that it's okay. To be upset, that's okay it doesn't mean on a positive person that actually makes you more authentic because it's like yeah this, this is not good right now and however, we know that it's not always going to be like this, you know it's just where we are right now, and we got to where we’ve got to own it like you said and sit with it and figure out the next thing but it's I think it's what I’m hearing from you is that it's like that bigger picture higher vision, I was talking to a manufacturing team this morning they're basically just saying they're kind of stuck I just there in that routine. But they really weren't working towards anything, so you know I like what how you describe that and it's like, however, that looks like to your plant or to your organization or to you as an individual, but where are you going and enjoy the process. 00:20:35.880 --> 00:21:24.570 Jacob Knight: And if you don't have the opportunity to create that vision. It may be easy for me to say that because I can somewhat create a vision, and everybody goes towards that but not everybody has it and I’ll say one thing you can do. Is if you're stuck, how can I add value to my friend, how can I add value to. My coworker and if you really work on adding value to other people you'll start to grow even if maybe your supervisor doesn't have the vision, you want to see maybe the company you're at. You feel like you're just going nowhere and is hopeless will start actively adding value to other people and your mindset will begin to change, maybe that company won't be there for you forever, but you'll start to develop the right type of mindset for success. 00:21:25.230 --> 00:21:34.290 Dave Baker: And the lens that you look through. This right is exactly how you're going to end up see seeing things and begin shaping your future. 00:21:35.550 --> 00:22:36.030 Jacob Knight: Yes, right and you brought up the lens so that it reminds me of my glasses analogy. A lot of times you know, life is like the weather, you get saying coming in, you as you get when you get it get hail you get tornado will no doubt this is going to be kind of rough but all these things are just flying around at you and a lot of times I think about mindset as a good pair of goggles a nice pair of glasses that allow you to see clearly even during these hard times. It’s not you paint some perfect picture some fake picture or fake analogy it doesn't have you know things done on the lenses but it's giving you a clear view so you can clearly see. look forward and math your goal now so mine says a lot like a good pair of goggles good glasses that keeps those keeps the dust of the world and it keeps those struggles from interfering with your vision, and it really helps you set your mind man forward. That's a good analogy that I like to use. 00:22:36.810 --> 00:22:58.020 Dave Baker: Then another one is its kind of like you know your mindset is kind of like your diet you've got a junk food diet or a healthy diet and between the two, I mean just like you know your mindset it directs your future it impacts, the result right it. 00:22:58.050 --> 00:23:36.960 Jacob Knight: 100% you have to have food to come in your body right or most of us do we have to have food to survive, you can fill it with junk, or you can fill it with something fairly nutrition, even if you're not perfect, but you're going to get healthier you're going to get stronger you're going to have a better quality of life if you eat the right things and that's a lot like mine, so if you have the right mindset. You will get better you will grow doesn't always mean your circumstances going to be perfect, but you'll be more happy or unhappy is a little you know shaky kind of work, but at the end of the day, everybody wants to be happy. Everybody wants to feel good. 00:23:38.430 --> 00:23:42.750 Trevor Blondeel: Nobody wakes up and says, I want to be unhappy today. Right, I don't think. 00:23:44.400 --> 00:25:09.120 Jacob Knight: I’ve met some people, though I’ve had some challenges I met some people that fit where that negative, but I’ll tell you one thing really quick. Actually, this person wasn't a negative person, but I was at an organization and we were having a meeting with an outside company had had to hit come in and they were asking. Why did y'all buy into this system that Jacob role after you've been here 25 years how could you buy into some new system, because I brought in lean manufacturing and thinking and all of these deals ideas that we have today talking about and they said this and I’m not bragging but this really touched my soul when I think about a lot, he said because I knew he cared because I knew we care was all might have been 25 years was okay with changing. The culture, because they knew that I care for them and that I was at least trying, you know what always successful I was at least trying to make their lives better and at least trying to benefit them in and that's a testimony I mean that's something that I go back to a lot, am I showing people did not care in my mind state, you know, am I, adding in such a way that people go home, and I say I got cares about me or see going home at night cousin me. 00:25:10.020 --> 00:26:01.560 Trevor Blondeel: And they say I’m going to steal this off one of our previous guests, but it's like can you and so but still, we see we work with different manufacturing groups, and we take some things for granted that well, of course, you're going to care for people but know that that's not it is it's this week's targets today's the target it's a quarterly budget. And one of the things that we take for granted, we talked about how we do, because one thing to wake up yourself with the mindset and, yes, lead by example and we know those things. But what's the, how do you build that into an organization and one of the things I heard you say Jacob was your daily huddle is the backbone of your team so like what, how is that what does that turn into the backbone. 00:26:02.580 --> 00:27:27.570 Jacob Knight: Thank you for bringing that up, let me say this that upfront organizations there. Since I worked with several now there are different routines that are better for different companies, maybe it's weekly maybe it's daily maybe it's multiple times a day. Depending on application location and all these things, but at the end of the day, that that daily huddle that that group, you get to look at everybody and you get to communicate you get to share whether it's about production schedules our birthdays that are coming up or the little team in his field on improvement ideas. All kinds of good things and I’m going to throw some matches that we won't even be able to finish this session, but it might give you some ideas for the future there's another level of the mindset. After you have this golden rule foundation, and all these rules are put forth in that daily huddle that's, why did they hope for years we use that hotel to preach entities these principles and all kinds of ways, but there's another level and that's got to do with our thinking growth mindset and servant leadership and that's how I believe, if you really implement those things after you have the solid foundation of mindset, I believe the organization really starts to make a lot of progress but I’ve kind of just dropped a bomb then well. 00:27:31.890 --> 00:29:19.530 Dave Baker: Hey that's fair and you know I want to go with just a little bit of time left to towards the end, I want to throw out this and that is Haywood. Have a friend of mine in manufacturing for years he worked third shift key words second shift he worked on assembly worked in machining I mean that guy was the most. Positive mindset individual and he was not in a position of power or authority, but he had great power in that anybody that came across his path. Was better than they were prior to right in the short term, in the long term, and Jacob, at the end of the day, man, we can preach, and we can teach all this stuff on leadership and mindset and stuff, but when the brass tacks at home it's people like Haywood that I knew that are the ones that make the difference, day in and day out, and how do you surround yourself? I mean it's like those glasses - the mindset goggles, right? You've got to put those on and keep them on and just drive and move forward. My you know my question to you, maybe bringing us home here would be you know for somebody that may feel stuck where their mindset is jacked up right now, you know what's their first move what would be the top three things that they could do in getting out of that Funk and good. 00:29:19.590 --> 00:30:16.980 Jacob Knight: Good question and I gave you the top three, but I’ll just tell some here at you. The first thing is a understand where you hidden you know where you're going, but the first thing I’m just going to reiterate is if you. Make it a point I’m going to add value to somebody else when I’m still I don't want to write it's like exercise it's like the eating right I don't want to do it. But I really truly believe, because you do have to believe I believe this is going to work or I believe Dave I trust Dave cares about me. And Dave’s telling me I need to give this a shot I’m going to give it a shot, even if I don't think it's going to work, and I think once somebody starts to add value to somebody else that I believe that that's your initial point is adding value and I’m going to leave it there because I think that's an important number one point. 00:30:18.870 --> 00:31:04.080 Trevor Blondeel: hey if you're focused on others, and you can add some value, you know there's a lot of studies around there of what that does to your serotonin your oxytocin levels, and that just you know just drives everything the universe, is a beautiful thing. And if we do that, we share that you do the right things, care for people it's going to help you when you hit those levels because we're all going to hit them. Whether we want to admit it or not, kind of going back to the mindset it's not about always being elected you said jack is not always about being positive. Sometimes it's just about recognizing it labeling it and knowing that got to trust the process, so this has been. 00:31:04.740 --> 00:31:16.830 Trevor Blondeel: It goes by so fast and yeah there's more to unpack on that may well have to do that later, but Jacob thank you so much for taking the time today another great episode for our listeners, and we appreciate you. 00:31:17.790 --> 00:31:26.130 Jacob Knight: yeah, thank you Dave Thank you Trevor appreciate the opportunity you know, look forward to hearing future episodes and, once again, thank you.

Some of the highlights of the show include:  The difference between cloud computing and cloud native. Why operations teams often struggle to keep up with development teams, and the problems that this creates for businesses. How Dave works with operations teams and trains them how to approach cloud native so they can keep up with developers, instead of being a drag on the organization.  Dave's philosophy on introducing processes, and why he prefers to use as few as possible for as long as possible and implement them only when problems arise.  Why executives should strive to keep developers happy, productive, and empowered.  Why operations teams need to stop thinking about themselves as people who merely complete ticket requests, and start viewing themselves as key enablers who help the organization move faster.  Viewing wait time as waste.  The importance of aligning operations and development teams, and having them work towards the same goal. This also requires using the same reporting structure.  Links: Company site: https://www.mangoteque.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmangot/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DaveMangot CIO Author page: https://www.cio.com/author/Dave-Mangot/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native podcast, where we explore how end users talk and think about the transition to Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures.Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native. I'm your host, Emily Omier, and today I am chatting with Dave Mangot. And Dave is a consultant who works with companies on improving their web operations. He has experience working with a variety of companies making the transition to cloud-native and in various stages of their cloud computing journey. So, Dave, my first question is, can you go into detail about, sort of, the nitty-gritty of what you do?Dave: Sure. I've spent my whole technical professional career mostly in Silicon Valley, after moving out to California from Maryland. And really, I got early into web operations working in Unix systems administration as a sysadmin, and then we all changed the names of all those things over the years from sysadmin to Technical Infrastructure Engineer, and then Site Reliability Engineer, and all the other fun stuff. But I've been involved in the DevOps movement, kind of, since the beginning, and I've been involved in cloud computing, kind of, since the beginning. And so I'm lucky enough in my day job to be able to work with companies on their, like you said, transitions into Cloud, but really I'm helping companies, at least for their cloud stuff, think about what does cloud computing even mean? What does it mean to operate in a cloud computing manner? It's one thing to say, “We're going to move all of our stuff from the data center into Cloud,” but most people you'll hear talk about lift and shift; does that really the best way? And obviously, it's not. I think most of the studies will prove that and things like the State of DevOps report, and those other things, but really love working with companies on, like, what is so unique about the Cloud, and what advantages does that give, and how do we think about these problems in order to be able to take the best advantage that we can?Emily: Dive into a little bit more. What is the difference between cloud computing and cloud-native? And where does some confusion sometimes seep in there?Dave: I think cloud-native is just really talking about the fact that something was designed specifically for running in a cloud computing environment. To me, I don't really get hung up on those differences because, ultimately, I don't think they matter all that much. You can take memcached, which was designed to run in the data center, and you can buy that as a service on AWS. So, does that mean because it wasn't designed for the Cloud from the beginning, that it's not going to work? No, you're buying that as a service from AWS. I think cloud-native is really referring to these tools that were designed with that as a first-class citizen. And there's times where that really matters. I remember, we did an analysis of the configuration management tools years back, and what would work best on AWS and things like that, and it was pretty obvious that some of those tools were not designed for the Cloud. They were not cloud-native. They really had this distinct feel that their cloud capabilities were bolted on much later, and it was clunky, and it was hard to work with, whereas some of the other tools, really felt like that was a very natural fit, like that was the way that they had been created. But ultimately, I think the differences aren't all that great, it just, really, matters how you're going to take advantage of those tools.Emily: And with the companies that you work with, what is the problem or problems that they are usually facing that lead them to hire you?Dave: Generally the question, or the statement, I guess, that I get from the CIOs and CTOs, and CEOs is, “My production web operations team can't keep up with my development teams.” And there's a lot of reasons why those kinds of things can happen, but with the dawn of all these cloud-native type things, which is pretty cool, like containers, and all this other stuff, and CI/CD is a big popular thing now, and all kinds of other stuff. What happens, tends to be is the developers are really able to take advantage of these things, and consume them, and use them because look at AWS. AWS is API, API, API. Make an API call for this, make an API call for that. And for developers, they're really comfortable in that environment. Making an API call is kind of a no brainer. And then a lot of the operations teams are struggling because that's not normal for them. Maybe they were used to clicking around in a VMware console, and now that's not a thing because everything's API, API, API. And so what happens is the development teams start to rocket ahead of the operations teams, and the operations teams are running around struggling to keep up because they're kind of in a brand new world that the developers are dragging them into, and they have to figure out how they're going to swim in that world. And so I tend to work with operations teams to help them get to a point where they're way more comfortable, and they're thinking about the problems differently, and they're really enabling development to go as quickly as development wants to go. Which, you know, that's going to be pretty fast, especially when you're working with cloud-native stuff. But I mean, kind of to the point earlier, we built—at one of the companies I worked at years ago—what I would say, like, a cloud environment in a data center, where everything was API first, and you didn't have to run around, and click in consoles, and try to find information, and manually specify things, and stuff like that; it just worked. Just like if you make a call for VM in AWS, an EC2 instance. And so, really, it's much more about the way that we look at the problems, then it is about where this thing happens to be located because obviously cloud-native is going to be Azure, it's going to be GCP, it's going to be all those things. There's not one way to do it specifically.Emily: What's the business pain that happens if the operations team can't keep up with the developers? What happens? Why is that bad?Dave: That's a great question. It really comes down to this idea of an impedance mismatch. If the operations teams can't keep up with the development teams, then the operations teams become a drag on the business. There's so much—if you read the state of DevOps reports that are put out by DORA research and—I guess, Google now, now that they bought it—but they show that these organizations that are able to go quickly: the organizations that are able to do deploys-on-demand, the organizations that are able to remediate outages faster, all those things play into your business's success. So, the businesses that can do that have higher market capitalization, they have happier employees, they have all kinds of fantastic business outcomes that come from those abilities, and so you don't want your operations team to be a drag on your organization because that speed of business, that ability to do things a lot more easily, let's even call it like a lot more cloud-native if you want, that has real market effects. That has real business performance impacts. And so, if you look at the DevOps way of looking at this—like I said, I've been pretty involved in the DevOps movement—really the DevOps is about all the different parts of the organization working together in concert to be able to make the organization a success. And the first way of DevOps, you're talking about systems thinking, you're looking at the overall flow of work through the system, and you want to optimize that because the faster we can get work flowing through the system, the faster we can deliver new features to our customers, bug fixes to our customers, all the things that our customers want, all the things that our customers love. And so if you're going to optimize flow of work through the system, you definitely don't want work slowing down inside the operations part of the system. That's bad for the business, and that's bad for your business outcomes.Emily: And how do you think companies realize that this is a problem? I mean, is it obvious or not?Dave: I think it's one of those things like I always talk to people about process right? When do we want to introduce process? a lot of startups are like, “We need more process here, we need more process there.” And my advice to everybody is always, use as little process as possible for as long as possible, and when you need that process, it will make itself known. The pain will be so obvious that you'll be like, “Okay, we can't do this anymore this way. We've run this all the way to the end, and now we have to change things, and now we have to introduce process here.” And I think that it becomes pretty obvious to certainly the companies that I work with. At one point where they're like, “This isn't working, I'm getting my development leadership coming to be saying ‘I'm waiting for this, I'm waiting for that. I'm waiting for this. I'm waiting for that. I don't have permission to do this. We're being blocked here.'” all the things that you don't want to be hearing from your development leaders because what they're expressing is their pain of being inhibited; their pain of being slowed down. And I think it's just, like, with the process thing, I think at some point, the pain becomes obvious enough that people say, “We have to do something.” I remember talking to one company, and I was like, “Well, what do you want out of this engagement? What's your end goal?” And they said, “We'd like it for our developers to show up every day and be really happy with the environment that they're working in.” And so, you can hear it there, right? Their developers are not happy. People are coming from other companies, and they're going to this company—and I certainly won't name who they are—but they're going to this company, and they're saying, “Hey, when I worked at this other place, I didn't have all this. I didn't have all these things stopping me. I didn't have all these things inhibiting me.” And so that's why, what I said in the beginning, it's things that I'm hearing from CEOs, and CTOs, and people in those positions because at some point that stuff is just bubbling up and bubbling up, and the amount of frustration just really makes itself known.Emily: Why do you think COOs care how happy their developers are?Dave: Well, I mean, there's tons of studies that show the happier your developers are, the more productive they are. I mean, look at the Google rework stuff about psychological safety. Google discovered after hiring a professional psychology researcher to determine who were their highest performing teams, their highest performing teams weren't the teams that had the most talented engineers; it wasn't the people who went to MIT; their highest performing teams weren't the ones who had the best boss, or the coolest scrum master, or anything like that. Their highest performing teams were the teams that had the most psychological safety. People who were able to operate in an environment where they felt free to talk about the things that maybe weren't going well, things that could be improved, crazy ideas they had to make improvements, stuff like that. And I don't think that you can be on a team that's unhappy and feel like there's a lot of psychological safety there. And so, I think those things are highly correlated to one another. So, I mean, obviously, the environment that's necessary for psychological safety goes far beyond whether or not my Kubernetes cluster is automatically deploying my Docker containers; that's certainly not the case. But I think it's important to recognize that if developers are in an environment where they feel empowered, and they're not being inhibited, and they can really focus on their work, and improving things, and making things better, that they're going to produce better work, and that's going to be better for companies and certainly their business outcomes.Emily: And bringing it back to cloud-native a little bit. Can you connect for me how a cloud-native type architecture helps bring operation teams up to speed or helps remove these roadblocks?Dave: Yeah. Well, I think it's a little bit of the reverse, right? I think that the successful operations teams are the ones who are enabling these cloud-native ways of looking at the world. I think there used to be this notion of, if you want something from operations, you open up a ticket, and then operations goes and they do the ticket, and then they come back to you and say, “It's done.” And then, this never-ending cycle of sending off something and then waiting, and then sending off something, and waiting. And in cloud-native environments, we don't have that. In cloud-native environments, people are empowered and enabled, to go off and deploy things, and test things, and remediate things, and do dark launching, and have feature flags, and all these other things that, even though we're moving quickly, we can do that safely. And I think that's part of the mind shift that has to happen for these operations teams, is they need to stop thinking about themselves as people who get things done, and they need to start thinking about themselves as people who are enabling the whole organization to go faster, easier, better. I always talked to my SREs—Site Reliability Engineers—who used to work for me, and I'd say, “You have two responsibilities and that's it. And this is, in order, your first responsibility is to keep the site up.” That sounds pretty normal, right? That's what most operations teams feel like they've been tasked with. And I'm like, “Your second responsibility is to keep the developers moving as fast as possible.” And so really, when you start taking that to heart, keeping developers moving as fast as possible, that's not closing tickets as fast as you can. That's not keeping the developer moving as fast as possible, that's enabling developers to have self-service tools, and have things where they want to get something done and it's very painless for them to do that. We used to launch EC2 instances at one of the companies I was working with, where we had gotten it down to a point where you just said what kind of machine you wanted, and then that was it; and you were done. And everything else got taken care of for you: all the DNS, all the security groups, routing, networking, DNS, like, everything was all taken care of, all the software was loaded. There wasn't anything to do but say what you wanted. And we actually were able to turn that tool over to the developers so they could launch all their own stuff. They didn't need us anymore. And I think that's really creating these cloud-native ideas. Certainly, a lot of that stuff is part of the cloud-native tooling, now. This was a few years ago, but really it's enabling the developers to go as fast as possible. We could have said, “Hey, you want a machine? Open up a ticket, and it's so easy for us to spin up a machine.” But we didn't do that. We took it to the next level, and we empowered them, and we allowed them to go quickly. And that's really the sort of mental shift that the operations teams have to make. How do we do that?Emily: I have to say, I have never been a developer, but whenever anyone talks about this process of submitting a ticket and waiting for it to get addressed, it just sounds like hell.Dave: Yeah. Well, if you look at it from a lean manufacturing, Toyota kind of thing, all that wait time is waste. In lean, they call that waste. It's a handoff: there's no work being accomplished during that time, and so it's waste in the system. And so Toyota is always trying to move towards—I can't remember they call. It, I think it was, like, one piece flow, or something like that where basically you want work to be happening at all times in the system, and you certainly don't want things sitting around. And so, developers don't want that either. Developers want to put things out there. They want to see, does this work? Does this not work? And when you enable developers to have that kind of power and have that ability to go really fast, there's all kinds of like things that we can enable for the business that help cost savings, better security, all kinds of stuff far beyond just simple, “Hey, here's more features. Here's more features.”Emily: How easy do you think it is for operations teams to sort of shift to think, like, “Our job is to make things as easy as possible for developers?”Dave: I don't think it's that hard, actually, mostly because if we're starting to look at things from a DevOps mindset, we're understanding that the whole goal is to optimize the entire system; it's not to optimize a single point in the system. And I always advocate that operations teams report up through the same reporting structure as the engineering teams do. The worst thing you can do is silo it off so all the operations teams report to the COO, and all the engineering teams report to the CTO. Like, that's awful because what you want to do is you want to align the outcome so that everybody's working towards the same goal, and now we can start to partner up together in order to be able to achieve those goals. And so, one of my favorite examples of this from, like, enabling the developers to go fast, and doing that in partnership with operations was, I worked at a company, and we had a storage system, and we were storing all this stuff in a database, and we were paying a lot of money to store all this data for our customers. And that's what the customers were paying us for, was to store their data. And so the developers had this idea that they wanted to try this other way of storing the data. And so, we worked with them—the operations teams work with them, “How do you want to do this? What kinds of things do you need? What's going to work best? Is this going to work best? Is that going to work best?” And we had a lot of collaboration, and, “Here's where we're going to launch these new things, and we're going to try them out. And this is how we're going to try them out.”And it wasn't a process that happened overnight: from beginning to end of this project, it probably took, I don't know, a year and a half or something like that, of iterating, and trying, and testing, and making sure it's safe, and all these other stuff. But in the end, we wound up shutting off the old database system and talking to the engineers about what that meant for the business. They said a conservative estimate would be that we saved the company 75 percent on storage costs. That's the conservative estimate. I mean, that's insane, right? 75 percent for their biggest cost. That was the biggest cost of the company, and we knocked it down by 75 percent, at minimum.And so this idea of enabling this cloud approach of going quickly, and taking advantage of all these resources, and moving fast without impediments, that can have some major impact. And it's not operations teams doing that; it's not development teams doing that; it's operations and development teams doing that together in partnership to achieve those pretty awesome business outcomes.Emily: In that particular case, who had the initial push? Who had this initial idea that let's figure out a better way to approach storage?Dave: Well, I mean, we got a challenge from the business. The business said, look at our costs. Look at what we're doing. Are there ways that we can improve this so that we can improve our profitability? And so it was a challenge. And I think the best thing about that is, it wasn't the business telling us how to do it; it wasn't people saying, here's what you should do. The business is saying, “If this is a problem, how do you solve it?” And then they, kind of, got out of our way and said, “Let the engineers do their engineering.” And I think that was kind of fantastic because the results were exactly what they wanted. But the business is going to look at the problems from a business perspective, and I think it's important that as engineers, we look at the problems from a business perspective as well. We're not showing up for work to have fun and play with computers. We're showing up at work to achieve an objective. That's why we get paid. If you want to hobby around with your computers, you can hobby around at home, but we're getting paid at work to achieve the goals of the business. And so, that was the way that they were looking at the problem, and that's the way that we wound up looking at the problem. Which is the correct way?Emily: Do you have any other notable examples that come to mind?Dave: Yeah, I mean, this idea of cloud and being able to go quickly, we had this one problem with that—actually, with that same database engine, which is hilarious, before we wound up replacing it, where we were upgrading the software from one version to another, and we're making a pretty big jump. And so, we spun up the new version of the software; we loaded the data on, and we started seeing how their performance was. And the performance was terrible. I mean, not just, we would have trouble with it; it was unusable. There was no way we could run the business with that level of performance. And we're like, “What happened? [laughs]. What did we do here?” And so, we went and looked in GitHub at the differences between the old version of the software, and the new version of software. And there was, like, 5000 commits that had happened between the old version and the new version. And so all we had to do was find out which of those 5000 commits was the problem. [laughs]. Which, that's a daunting task or whatever. But the operations team got down to it, and we built a bunch of tooling, and we started changing some things and making improvements so that we were able to spin up clusters of this software and run a full test suite to determine whether this problem still existed. And that was something we could do in 20 minutes. And so then we started doing what's called git bisecting, but we started searching in a certain kind of pattern, which I won't get into, for which of these—where was the problem? So, we would look, say in the middle, and then if the problem wasn't there in the middle, then we would look between the middle and the right. If it was there, then we would look between the middle and the left. And we kept doing this bisect, and within two days, we had found the exact commit that had caused the problem. And it was them subtracting, like, a nano from a milli, or something like that. But going back and talking to the CTO afterwards, I said, “You know, if we hadn't built these tools, and we hadn't had this ability to really iterate super quickly in the Cloud, what would you have done?” And he was like, “I have no idea.” He's like, “Maybe we would have spent a couple of days and then given up, maybe we would have just gone in a completely different direction.” But that ability to be able to work so effectively with these cloud tools, and so easily with these cloud tools, enabled us to do something that the business just would just not have had the opportunity to take advantage of at all. And so that was a major win for being able to have operations teams that think about these problems in a completely different way.Emily: It sounds like, in this particular company, the engineering teams and the business leaders were fairly well-aligned, and able to communicate pretty well about what the end goals are. How common do you find that is with your clients?Dave: I don't know. I think it's pretty variable. It depends on the organization. I think that is one of the things that I emphasize when I'm working with my clients is how important that alignment is. I sort of talked about it a little bit earlier, when I said you shouldn't have one group reporting to the CTO and another group reporting to the COO. But also, it's really important for leadership to be communicating this stuff in the proper way. One of the things I loved most about my experience working at Salesforce was, Marc Benioff was the CEO and he would publish what they call V2MOMs, which is like—oh boy, vision, values, metrics, obstacles, and measures, or something. I don't remember what the last thing was. But he would publish his V2MOM, which was basically his objectives for the next time period, whether it was quarterly, or yearly, I don't really remember. But then what would happen was the people that worked for him would look at his V2MOM, and they would write theirs about what they wanted to get accomplished, but showing how what they were doing was in support of what he wanted. And then the people below them would do the same thing. And the people below them would do the same thing. And what you were able to create was this incredible amount of alignment at a 16,000 person company, which is crazy, up and down the ladder so that everybody understands what they're doing, and how it fits into the larger picture, and what they're doing in support of the goals of the business, and the objectives of the business, and that goes all the way down to the most junior engineer. And I think having that kind of alignment is, I mean, it's obviously incredibly powerful. I mean, Salesforce is a rocket ship and has been for a long, long time. And Google does this for their OKRs, and that there was that thing that was popularized by Intel as well; there's a whole bunch of these things. But that alignment is phenomenal if you want to have a lasting, high performing organization.Emily: When you see companies that don't have that alignment, or even just, it seems like the engineering team maybe doesn't entirely understand where the business is going, or even the business doesn't understand what the engineering team is doing, what happens and where is the communication going wrong?Dave: I mean, you see the frustration. You see the fracturing. You see the silos. You see a lot of finger-pointing. I've definitely worked with some clients where the ops team hates the dev team; the dev team hates the ops team. I remember the dev team saying, “Ops doesn't actually want to do any work. They just want to invent stuff for themselves to work on. And that's how they want to spend their day.” And the ops team is saying, “The developers don't even understand anything about what we're doing, and they just want to go o—” you know, there's all these crazy, awful made up stories. And if you've ever read the book Crucial Conversations—they also have a course, or whatever—one of the things they talk about is you need to establish mutual purpose in order to have a difficult conversation. And I think that's really important for what we're talking about in the business: we need to establish mutual purpose, just we talked about with DevOps, there's only one goal. And the other thing that they say in that class, or in that book, is that when we are going to have a conversation with somebody that we are not getting along with, we invent a story that explains why they behave the way that they do, and every time we see something that validates that story, then it's even more evidence that that story is actually correct. The problem is, is it's a story. Like it's not real. It may seem real to us; it may feel real to us. But it's a story. It's something that we made up. And so, that's the kind of outcomes that you get when you have this fracturing, where you don't have this alignment up and down. You have people telling these stories like, “Operations doesn't want to do any real work. They just want to make stuff up for themselves to work on.” Which is, if you're not in that environment, if you're someone like you and me looking from the outside, that's absurd. But I can certainly see how you can make up a story that gets continually validated by what you see because you're looking for evidence that supports your story. That's part of what makes you think that you're right, is that you're always searching for this evidence. And so obviously, those are not going to be high performing organizations. That's why it's so important to get that kind of alignment.Emily: Going back to this idea of sort of moving to cloud-native, what do you think are some of the surprises or misconceptions that come up when teams are moving to more cloud-native approaches?Dave: I feel like my clients generally are not terribly surprised. I think by the time that someone's reaching out to me, they are feeling a lot of pain, and they know that things have to change, and they are looking for what are the ways that things have to change? I don't ever have to go into a client and convince them that they need to do it better. The clients that are coming to me, recognizing that they're having a problem, and so it's really just getting them to stop focusing on what we call an SRE toil, which is popularized by Google, which is—I don't remember the exact definition, but it's basically manual work that's devoid of enduring value, that's repetitive, it's automatable, it's just repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat: we're not making improvements anymore. And so once we start to have this Kaizen mindset, this idea of continual improvement at all times, instead of just trying to keep the business running, that starts to enable all this kinds of stuff. And that's why we talked about building things in sort of a cloud-native manner. We're talking about that ability to go fast. We're talking about that ability to enable things, and part of that is this idea of continual improvement; this idea of always making things better. A lot of this comes out of Agile as well. I always talk to people about their sprint retrospectives, and I say, “It's your opportunity to make your team better. It's your opportunity to make your environment better. It's your opportunity to make your company better.” And I was like, “The worst thing that you could do in Agile is if in January of last year, and in January of this year, your team is just as good as it was.” That's terrible. Your team needs to be much better than it was. And so enabling developers to go quickly and all that other stuff. And putting all those things in place is a big part of that.Emily: Anything else that you want to add about this topic that I didn't think to ask?Dave: I mean, I think embracing these principles is really important. I think that if you look at the companies who are trying to go fast, and don't embrace these principles, these cloud-native ideas, or just even these cloud computing ideas, it basically becomes technical debt that keeps building up, and building up, and building up. And everybody knows accumulating tons of technical debt is not going to help your organization to move faster; it's not going to help you achieve all those great business outcomes that you want to get out of the State of DevOps report. And so I've seen situations where they have not been able to make that transition into this way of looking at the world, and the environment becomes really fragile; it becomes really brittle; it becomes really hard to make changes, and the only way is to make changes is to double down on the technical debt, and accumulate more of it, to the point where eventually they wind up spinning up an entire team whose sole purpose is to try to undo the mess that's been created. And you don't want that. You don't want to allocate a team to start unpacking your technical debt. You'd rather just not accumulate that technical debt as you're going along. And so I think it's really crucial for businesses that want to be successful in the long term that they start to embrace these ideas early. And obviously, if I'm a startup and I want to embrace a lot of these cloud-native things, that's a lot easier than if I'm a well-established company. I, in my consulting practice, I don't really work with startups because they don't tend to have these problems. They don't tend to accumulate a lot of technical debt because they are founded with this idea of going quickly and being able to empower developers and enable people to go quick. To your point earlier, the companies that I'm working with are the ones who are making this transition, where they've been running in the data center, or maybe they built an environment in the Cloud, but it's just not operating the way that they expected, and they're paying ridiculous amounts of money [laughs] to run stuff in AWS, where we thought, “Hey, what's going on? This isn't supposed to be this way.” But startups have the ability to do this much easier because they're unencumbered. And then as they grow, and they start to introduce more process because that stuff is inevitable that we're going to need to do that, that's when these things become even more important that we make sure that we're keeping them in mind and we're doubling down on them, and we're not introducing lean waste into the system and stuff like that, that will ultimately catch up with us.Emily: It's so true. All right, just a couple more questions. What is your favorite engineering tool?Dave: Ah. I mean, I'm supposed to give some kind of DevOps-y, it's not about the tools answer, but this week I think it was, on Twitter, I saw somebody else put up a SmokePing graph. And most people are not going to have heard of SmokePing. I worked at multiple ISPs in my career already, so the networking stuff is important to me. But wow, I love a SmokePing graph. And it's basically just a bunch of pings that are sent to some target, and then they're graphed when they come back, but instead of saying, “I sent one ping, and I came back with 20 milliseconds,” it sends 20, and then it graphs them all at that time point, so you can actually see density. It's basically before everybody came up with the idea of heat maps, this was one of the original heat map tools, and I still run SmokePing in my house just to see the performance of my home network going out to different parts of the internet, and that's definitely my favorite tool.Emily: Where can listeners connect with you? Website?Dave: Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So, if people are interested in my business, I'm at mangoteque.com, M-A-N-G-O-T-E-Q-U-E. That was a fun name invented by Corey Quinn of The Duckbill Group and I loved it, and so I wound up using it. And they could also find me on LinkedIn obviously, or Twitter at @DaveMangot. M-A-N-G-O-T, and I post a lot on there about things that I've observed. I post a lot on there about DevOps. I post a lot on there about taking a scientific approach to a lot of the things we're doing, not just in terms of the scientific method, but like in terms of cognitive neuroscience, and things like that. And I also write a monthly column for CIO.com.Emily: Well, Dave, thank you so much for joining me.Dave: Thank you for having me, Emily, this was really fun.Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Business of Cloud Native podcast. Keep up with the latest on the podcast at thebusinessofcloudnative.com and subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We'll see you next time.This has been HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Dave Nobs is the Managing Director and Chief Growth Officer at Lavidge, a highly awarded, employee-owned, full-service advertising agency with ever broadening horizons. Lavidge started in traditional advertising in 1982, then added public relations in the 90s, digital marketing in the 2000s, and multicultural marketing about 5 years ago. A couple years later, the agency broke down the walls between what had been its divisional siloes. Subject matter experts now look at the totality of a client's issues holistically. Dave notes that the agency's work focuses on projects that meet client-specific and industry-specific benchmarks, most commonly tracked through brand awareness and sales. He explains that his agency strives to make a difference for clients, employees, and the community. Lavidge added multicultural marketing to address cross-cultural messaging needs in a state with a strong Hispanic presence . . . but multicultural marketing is not just about language differences. Dave says marketers serving a specific cultural market need to be aware of the different, and almost intangible. “tones,” strategies, and tactics needed for a client to gain credibility within that community. “Truth, inspiration, and action” drive the agency's projects:  Truth “happens” when the agency and a client collaborate to research issues, develop strategy, evaluate data and analytics, and go through the give-and-take-process of participating in focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, and experiential observation – and synthesize all that market and client information to understand what the client is “about,” and what the client “needs.” In the inspiration phase, the agency and the client work “hand-in-hand” on the marketing story, the design and art direction, and the feel of the narrative.  The action part includes media and channel placement and assessing responses and brand impression dynamics – getting the message to the masses and hearing their reply.  As Chief Growth Officer, Dave generates new business, grows existing client business, attends to agency marketing issues, and develops strategic client innovations. In this interview, he lists assets that he attributes to Lavidge's success:  An attitude of positivity  Daily communication with clients large and small The agency's focus on the client . . . and on using “every experience, tool, trend, skill and insight at our disposal to create immediate and lasting connections between brands and human beings.” Over the years, Lavidge has evolved to concentrate on a number of core verticals: healthcare, education, retail services, homebuilders, and sports. Dave discussed re-reading a Harvard Business Review article on how to market in a recession. The article's author asserted that tough economic times were “not the time to cut advertising.” Historically, brands increasing advertising during a downturn, while their competitors cut back, “can significantly improve market share and return on investment.” Dave reminds us that “It's also important to be aware of tonality . . . to be authentic . . . to be helpful” and highlighted several companies that are taking action to do just that. Dave is available on his company's website at: https://www.lavidge.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Dave Nobs, the Managing Director at Lavidge based in Phoenix, Arizona. Welcome to the podcast, Dave. DAVE: Thank you, Rob. It's a pleasure to be here. ROB: Fantastic to have you here, Dave. Why don't you explain to us where Lavidge really excels and what you're known for? DAVE: Sure. We are a full-service advertising, digital, public relations, and multicultural agency here in Phoenix. We've been in business since '82. We were founded in the '80s as an advertising agency, added PR in the '90s, digital in the 2000s, and then multicultural marketing about 5 years ago. We are one of the largest agencies in Arizona, and certainly one of a handful of full-service agencies, meaning all of our services are in-house under one roof. ROB: Perfect. You've been around for the addition of that multicultural line of business; what were some of the things you saw in the market that pulled you in that direction and caused you to commit to that line of business? DAVE: We're always looking at innovative client solutions, and multicultural marketing, particularly Hispanic marketing here in the Southwest, is particularly important to our clients. We started with McDonald's, which was a big client of ours, and then we added multicultural marketing to a number of our other clients, particularly in healthcare, like Banner Health, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and others just because it was a need that they have. Multicultural marketing is very different than general market in tone and some strategies and tactics specifically geared to accomplish results in that area. ROB: How in particular? What are some of the ways you would say in detail that things need to be different when you're speaking to that sort of audience? DAVE: I think different strategies and tactics resonate with the Hispanic market better than others. Obviously, digital is very important. Events, immersive/experiential marketing sometimes is more important than others. But really, for us, it's more a client solution than it is anything else, particularly for our clients that has that audience, and that's important for them. ROB: I would imagine a part of that is really almost subjective in the eyes of the person being marketed to. It's this overall sense I think we all have when someone knows and understands us versus where someone's intruding into our world but doesn't really belong at the party. Is there an intangible dimension to it, do you think? DAVE: I think that's accurate. ROB: Perfect. Tell us a little bit about how the agency started, if you can get into some of that, and then how you came into the picture as well. DAVE: Sure. As I mentioned, we were founded in '82. We have a staff of just over 70 people. We have $70 million in capitalized billings, and we're employee-owned. I believe we're the only agency in Arizona that's employee-owned. We're proud of the fact that we've been voted Best Place to Work eight times and the Top Agency in Arizona six times, Best Place to Work for Women, and just recently – this month, as a matter of fact – we were named AZ Big Media's No. 1 Advertising Agency for the ninth year in a row. We're very proud of that. For us, it's really about solving client problems with strategic thinking and sharp creative views that go well beyond producing ads. Our agency mantra is “be creative, work smart, and have fun.” We live and breathe that every day. ROB: With an agency that's been there for a while, and you said it's also employee-owned, how do you think about leadership transitions within that environment? Because 33 years, you didn't start the thing but you're running a lot of the show there now, and someone will supersede you. How does that work in that sort of environment? DAVE: Good question. My role is that of a Chief Growth Officer, so my focus is generating new business, growing existing client business, agency marketing, strategic client innovations. I've been here 10 years, and I'm part of a management team of eight people. If you can believe it, I'm the newbie. The rest of the management team members have been with Lavidge for more than 10 years. The industry has changed so much. It certainly has become more project focused. What we need to do, and what we're focused on, is really – our purpose is to make a difference for our clients, our employees, and in the community. Our beliefs are really around truth, inspiration, action. What I mean by that is for our clients – and we're very collaborative; we like to involve the client at every step of the process, from the outset of the campaign to the strategies and tactics to the implementation and to measuring the results. So when I mention our purpose, making a difference, we're looking for truth. You hear a lot in our industry about finding insights, but the truth for us is really strategy, research, the conversation with our clients, including the hard conversations, looking at the data, analytics, focus groups, interviews, consumer intercepts, the experience. All that we put into place to gather these insights. The next step for us is really the inspiration, which is the motivation, the motion, the design, the art direction, the experience, the usability, the feel – to tell those stories, because for us, like most agencies, it's all about storytelling. Then it's the action, getting the results that our clients need. That's looking at media, looking at the channels, looking at loyalty, all of the brand impressions, clicks, visits, awareness, decision, movement, all generating the results our clients are looking for. ROB: It sounds like quite a range of things to think about. I appreciate what you're saying about the insights and having some of those hard conversations around the insights. In some ways, coming into digital, even coming into PR before that, in some ways the numbers that you can present to a client have changed, but the bottom line of business in terms of doing well for your clients, doing well for the business, doing well for your employees – those haven't changed. What are some of the key numbers you see that are really relevant to clients today, that help them understand and help them come to grips with maybe a hard conversation? DAVE: That's a good question. Most of our clients – and this is historically true for the industry as well – are looking at two things at the end of the day, usually: brand awareness and sales. The trick is to develop programs that are specifically geared toward our clients' benchmarks. They're different by industry and they're different for each client. I think it's particularly important these days to develop tailor-made solutions because each client is different, each challenge is different. Oftentimes, there are different projects for some of our bigger clients, and they all have different metrics. ROB: Yeah, especially when the clients are significantly larger. It can make a difference. When it comes to Lavidge, is there any particular sweet spot for you in terms of industries and client size that you maybe see a cluster of clients around that helps develop some particular excellence in that area? DAVE: Some of our core vertical experience – healthcare, certainly we have a number of healthcare clients such as Blue Cross Blue Shield, Delta Dental, SimonMed, Sonora Quest, Banner. So healthcare is certainly a specialty of ours. Another one is education. Arizona State University is one of our larger clients. It's interesting – I say Arizona State University; it's really 12 or 14 different clients because we work with their enterprise marketing hub and all the different schools and divisions, such as Barrett Honors College, Thunderbird, Cronkite, the Alumni Council, the athletics department. It's a number of different clients under that one banner. So healthcare, education. Retail services is another core area of expertise for us. We do a lot of franchise marketing in the retail space. We worked with Massage Envy for years and years and years in virtually every year of marketing and communications. Re-Bath is another significant retail service client of ours. If I had to mention three, those would be it. Healthcare, education, retail services. We also do a lot with homebuilders. We've done a lot in the sports area as well. We're a full-service general market agency, but those are some of our core areas of expertise. ROB: Very interesting. It makes sense. Some of those are very familiar, although even with the educational focus, in some ways it maybe looks more like enterprise than ever before, because what you're describing to me sounds almost – you mentioned their marketing hub – it sounds like a center of excellence that any enterprise brand might have. Do you think they have had some inspiration from that world, or some learnings from the center of excellence approach? Or maybe even the enterprises learned from them. DAVE: Yeah, I believe so. For ASU, it's really all about innovation. They're proud to be named the most innovative university. Obviously Michael Crow, their president, deserves a great deal of the credit for that. But ASU, for us, that's a great example of our collaborative approach. We really do work hand-in-hand with them. It can get messy at times, and we like that because we think involving them, again, early in the process and working with them – daily communications, weekly status calls, monthly reporting – that helps generate best results as possible on their behalf. ROB: It's really interesting because you jammed through that cadence of the daily, weekly, monthly. A lot of times when we talk to even very successful agencies, especially because I think maybe people come from a creative place, they don't mention that sort of process. How do you, with I think you said around 70 some employees, think about establishing that as a standard? How do you communicate those standards of cadence and make sure they're listened to and followed throughout the organization? Because they come from a place of wisdom. DAVE: Right, and that's really our commitment to our clients because things change so often. Daily communication is vital – not only for our big accounts, but also for some of our smaller accounts. We have, like a lot of agencies, larger agency of record relationships, and then we also have standalone public relations clients or website clients or creative services clients. It's important, no matter how big or small they are, to communicate daily. Again, that's part of our commitment. Then the weekly calls keep everybody on track – not only us, but also our clients. Particularly helpful for the larger clients. One of the things that we like to do is have one point of contact for our clients so they're not making four different calls. They're calling one person who can marshal the internal resources that are needed. One of the things we did that I think is interesting, a couple years ago – we used to have a standalone advertising division, a standalone interactive division, a public relations division, a multicultural division. We broke down those walls and those silos a couple years ago and implemented a more unified approach. It's not about whether they're an advertising client or a PR client; it's much more about what that client needs. Does it need strategy? Does it need creative? Is it a user experience website/responsive design approach that's needed? Is it content? Is it social? Is it search? It could be a number of things, and it's really about answering clients' needs and offering one-stop client solutions on their behalf. ROB: When you made that transition, did they have an account manager in each of those divisions before and you were able to streamline that to one trusted point of contact? How did that realign when you made that switch? DAVE: It was actually fairly seamless. We had, obviously, experts in each one of those areas, and we had a head of advertising and a chief creative officer and the head of our interactive division. Breaking down those silos – we still have subject matter experts, but it's about bringing them to bear on our clients' behalf rather than looking at it division by division, if that makes sense. ROB: For sure. DAVE: The reason for that is we found that it's like – what's the old saying? Trying to force a square peg into a round hole. We were slotting different clients into different divisions, and that's not always the case. They could be primarily a public relations client, but they're going to need a website or they're going to need a special event or they're going to need print or digital magazine execution, video. It's really about being more client-service-focused than anything else. ROB: Dave, what are some things you've learned as a marketing agency leader that you might do differently if you were starting again 10 years ago, or even further back in your career? DAVE: That's a very good question, Rob. I think the one thing that I would've done differently is I would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way over the years, because I've been in the agency business – all my career has been spent on the agency side of the business. Talk about a glutton for punishment. [laughs] But I probably would have taken one of the client side opportunities that came my way. I think I would've liked to have that experience, sitting in the client's chair and having the final say and making decisions on which campaigns run and why. In fact, one of those opportunities was in your neighborhood, with Turner Broadcasting System, interestingly enough. ROB: Oh, interesting. It's very common, I think, for people to bounce from brand side to agency side, sometimes drifting over to the vendor side. I think there is value in that empathy. I'm sure you have had plenty of people on your team that have had that experience, right? DAVE: Yeah. I think it's useful. I also teach a sports marketing class at ASU at the Cronkite School, and that question comes up a lot with students, because of course, they're thinking primarily, in sports marketing, “I want to work for a league or a team,” and they don't really understand all the other avenues of career development, whether it be in an agency like ours or a corporate sponsor or some of the other suppliers that are involved in sports marketing. But I do always recommend having both experiences, and again, I would have probably done that differently, to answer your question. ROB: You can also see quite often how many agencies, some of their longest running clients come from the relationship you're talking about. You have a relationship with the university, and the university is also a client. It's not a quid pro quo, but it's a relationship business. Someone who spends 5 years inside Coca-Cola, 5 years inside Home Depot, 5 years inside Blue Cross is going to have some very longstanding relationships to pull on. Not to say that you don't have those from being a trusted agency partner for people; it's just in some cases, it's different because you may have a former agency you can't pull that client from the same way you can if you left the brand and you're on the agency side. DAVE: That's a good point. I remember when I was general manager of Rogers & Cowan in Los Angeles, which is the big entertainment publicity firm, we had a number of different divisions, like television, film, music, product placement, consumer, etc. It was interesting; I always talked to the CEO about how there were really, really expert people, but they were what we call an inch wide and a mile deep, meaning they knew everything in the world about music, but it was hard to transfer those skills to say consumer marketing or corporate communications. I think this is true of clients as well. They get so deep into their area of expertise. I think it's the role of the agency to really bring best practices and other solutions, perhaps from other industries, to the table to get them to thinking beyond just what works in a specific market. ROB: One thing I imagine that's probably relatively new for Lavidge, and you're learning a little bit, but maybe you also have some lessons to learn, is this thing that many of us are doing perhaps not by choice right now, which is working in distributed teams, working remotely. You can't even get in a room if you want to, or at least you probably shouldn't amidst this coronavirus/COVID-19 crisis. What are some things you're learning, especially since you mentioned these cadences that you had? Are you learning some different habits that are helpful for teams that are at a distance now? DAVE: That's a great question, particularly given the challenging times that are upon us. I think one overriding principle is to be determined in what you do and not be fearful. Despite the current circumstance, there are opportunities. I'm very proud of our agency, as an example, because we quickly, a couple weeks ago, switched over to working remotely. It's been seamless. We just had an all staff meeting on Wednesday that we did remotely, and it worked remarkably well. We're doing that for our client teams. So there are some opportunities. I think in general, one of the things that I'm seeing is that brands can use this opportunity to step up and take action. There seems to be a common thread around brand purpose. You hear a lot of words like “authentic,” “useful,” “helpful,” “purposeful,” but I think it's really about leveraging brand power for good. ROB: It's a good reminder. You mentioned “helpful,” and I think if we all take a step back as marketers and as people who are communicating into the lives of other people, we probably realize – we should always be helpful, but I think it can get a little bit hard to remember that sometimes. When people are just out there spending money, everything's fine, people are looking to buy stuff, I think we can lose some of that helpfulness and get a little bit flashier. I think we maybe realize right now, this is not the time to ask for stuff from people, but it's time to be helpful to them. DAVE: Yeah, no question. Just the other day I was rereading the Harvard Business Review, an article about how to market in a recession, and maintaining marketing spending is important. It's not the time to cut advertising. It's well documented that brands that increase advertising during a recession or a situation like this when their competitors are cutting back can significantly improve market share and return on investment. But your point is well taken. It's also important to remember tonality. It's important to be authentic. It's important to be helpful. You think about some of the recent examples, like Ford and Tesla are using their factories to make ventilators, or Anheuser-Busch are using their distilleries to make hand sanitizer. Just a couple of examples of being authentic, being useful, being helpful. ROB: For sure. In some cases, with Budweiser, with Anheuser-Busch, I'd imagine that's even coming to them a little bit at the expense of their actual business. Ford may not be needing to make as many trucks, but if my social feeds are anything to be believed, Anheuser-Busch and their competitors are doing pretty well right now. A lot of people seem to be buying their product and talking about it. [laughs] DAVE: That's right. That's very true. But again, I think it's really about their brand purpose. I imagine they are doing very well, but it's also about being helpful and being purposeful in what they're doing to consumers at large. ROB: Perfect. Dave, when you're looking ahead – you mentioned in this time, you see opportunity. This is a time to seize opportunity. This is certainly not a time to be shy right now. We all feel probably some moments when we want to just chill out and check our brains out, but when we're done with that, what are some things that are coming up for Lavidge that you're excited about? DAVE: I think we're very excited about a number of areas. In this particular situation, the coronavirus/COVID-19, crisis communication is obviously important. We're staying very busy in that area, public relations experts. Two other areas that we're looking at are certainly ecommerce, given the remote learning and the remote situations that both we and our clients are facing, and then cause marketing – again, really talking about what you and I were just discussing: brand purpose, connecting a brand purpose with their business goals and making sure they stand for something that their consumers care about. So those are three areas that we're looking at. Before this came upon us, we were also looking at a number of other areas. One was the rise of experiential marketing as a strategy to engage consumers, using branded experiences, live marketing, event marketing. The whole idea is creating a memorable impact on the consumer. Obviously, two other areas that our digital team has really focused on is increased artificial intelligence, in-depth information about what consumers want and how that can be personalized and how that can personalize the buying experience based on someone's preferences. And then one of the areas that I'm really interested in personally is the whole brand solving business challenges by engaging young consumers through their passion for e-sports, gaming, as an example. Those are the areas we're looking at. ROB: It's really fascinating because a lot of times a 30-some-year-old agency would be very steeped in things they've done, but it sounds like, especially with that leadership team that you have around you, this company has been through multiple downturns and has grown and is still one of the largest in Arizona. I can hear in your description of the things you were thinking about, the things you're thinking about now, it's intentional but it's not opportunistic. It is tied to things you've been dong, but it's not overly tied to the plan that you had, and you're still trying to push really hard to find some way to do branded experiences. There may be something that emerges from that, but you're not going to do a big brand activation in a physical place right now. DAVE: Correct. I do think, to your point, it's important to be flexible. I think that's one of the reasons we've been extremely successful for almost 40 years. We do have a number of client innovations that we've developed for our clients, whether it's introducing new services such as account-based marketing or programmatic digital media, but it's also about improving traditional marketing methods. Innovation is not just about coming up with new solutions, but it's also about improving marketing and advertising, digital, public relations, social, website design and development, etc. So I think innovation comes in two areas: both coming up with new solutions as well as improving solutions that you've employed for clients in the past. ROB: Excellent. Dave, when people want to find you and they want to find Lavidge, where should they look? DAVE: We are in the Biltmore area of Phoenix, which is right on Camelback very close to the Biltmore Hotel, if you know where that's at. Certainly centrally located. Again, we're a full service agency, and I think that's important. Not that we don't have standalone clients, but usually we like to think of ourselves as a one-stop client solution. Those services include strategy. We do a lot of branding work, a lot of corporate communications work. That includes market research and customer segmentation. And then we have our creative services, so that's TV, radio, print, digital advertising. We have our own in-house video production capability, so it's not just TV ads. We're doing a number of videos, whether it's corporate videos, product videos, training videos, only videos. Then our digital expertise is really in two areas. One side of it is the website design/development, microsites, landing pages, mobile apps. The other side of that is all forms of digital marketing – search, both paid and organic, email marketing, lead gen, lead nurturing, ecommerce that I mentioned before. We even do custom loyalty programs for some of our clients. That's helped by the fact that we have our own in-house analytics department as well. Then in the public relations area, it's both traditional corporate communications and product publicity, but also content. As a number of agencies do, we're doing more and more content creation/content management, whether that be videos, blogs, infographics, whitepapers, etc., and mapping that out to make sure it syncs with traditional public relations. It's nice to have all those client solutions, if you will, under one roof and available to our clients. Now, some of our clients are using all those services; some are using the services that are most needed for them. ROB: Got it. That's excellent, Dave. It looks like they should also probably, if they're looking for you online, go to lavidge.com. Is that right? DAVE: That's correct. Lavidge.com. You'll see on our website a lot of the information that I just talked through. You had asked about some of our core areas of expertise, and in three of those areas – there's more, but certainly using healthcare as an example, we did our own marketing report. We literally conducted research to determine which messages are most resonating with consumers, which marketing tactics are more successful than others. So we did a whole research study, which is available on our website. Additionally, that's reinforced by a number of whitepapers that were written by our subject matter experts, whether it be digital, creative, strategy, to really walk through and bring to life some of those findings. All of that is available on the website, Lavidge.com. ROB: Perfect. Thank you so much, Dave. It's been great to have you on the podcast, and I'm grateful for all you shared about the journey of Lavidge and how sustained that business has been in a really admirable way. DAVE: It's my pleasure, Rob. Thank you very much for the time. I enjoyed it. ROB: Take care. Thank you. DAVE: Thank you. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Ross and favorite guest Dave Weller talk about ethics in English education. What problems are caused by charging for teaching? What are the ethics of observing teachers? Is it fair to expect teachers to prepare for classes in their own time?Ross Thorburn: [laughs] Hurrah. Welcome to Dave Weller.Dave Weller: You just stole my thunder.Ross: [laughs] I know. What can I say? Regular listeners will understand the joke.Dave: Hello everybody.Ross: Welcome back, Dave.Dave: Thank you.Ross: Today, I thought we could talk about something that is much needed and often much lacking, which is ethics in English education.[laughter]Dave: A deep topic.Ross: Isn't it? I don't know about you, but I've definitely found that most of the schools that I've worked in, not always, but in some ways, been ethically lacking.It's something that we don't often talk about, maybe. Certainly, we've not talked about in this podcast before. It's something that teachers often talk about in teachers' rooms, right? With problems about the ethics of schools. I thought it would be interesting of us to debate here.Dave: Absolutely. People listening, it depends which context you're teaching in, but every teacher I've ever spoken to has a story or several stories to tell about unfairness, discrimination, prejudice. Definitely, there's issues in the industry with ethical behavior.Ross: Maybe, it's more important in teaching, for a lot of teachers that get into teaching, because it should be a net-positive profession. It might be different to some other higher-paying jobs that are more financially motivated, whereas teaching, very few people will get into it to make money, right?Dave: Oh, def.[laughter]Ross: Too late now.Dave: You can't.[laughter]Dave: Is it too late to change my...Ross: I think it is at this point, Dave. We want to play a little quote from David Brooks -- who's got a great book on this topic -- talking to Sam Harris.Sam Harris: What are the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues?David Brooks: The eulogy virtues and the resume virtues are things I, more or less, took from a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi in the mid-20th century. He said we have two sides of our nature.One side, which is about conquering the world and being majestic in it. Those are the resume virtues, the things that make us good at our job. Then the eulogy virtues are the internal side of ourselves, the things they say about us after we're dead, whether it's being courageous or honest, or capable of great love.We live in a culture that knows the eulogy virtues are more important. We all would rather be remembered for our character traits rather than our career, but we live in a culture that emphasizes the career parts. We're a lot more articulate about how to build a good career than how to build a good person.Our universities, in particular, are much more confident in talking about professional rise than a moral or spiritual rise.Ross: I would say that's probably also true in our industry, at least, in all the training courses I've worked on. I don't ever remember ethics or the ethics of education ever coming up on them. Obviously, we spend a lot of time talking about how to become a better teacher, but not better in terms of character, better in terms of ethics teacher.Dave: I would agree. It's interesting. I remember the old Greeks used to do several subjects like the triumvirate of rhetoric, logic, and ethics, because they saw it as inseparable from being able to lead a good life.Actually teaching ethics to the young citizens of the time was imperative. They would have thought it very strange not to do so. Yet, it's something missing. Well, I never got taught ethics. Probably why I am why I am now.[laughter]Ross: I thought we could start off with what are the ethics of charging people for education. Obviously, both you and I, pretty much our entire careers, we've worked a little bit in government schools at some point, but mainly it's been paying customers.What would you think are some of the ethical issues or problems there?Dave: Any ethical question, you have to look at all the variables behind it. You have to look at people's income, their wealth, what they are currently studying, government schools, their need, the company that's providing the education, its standards for their own teachers.I think that the context is inseparable. To say in general terms, it's quite tough.Ross: At least, I can see there being some advantages of having education in the private sphere rather than the public sphere. In theory at least, there should be more...In general, there should be more pressure on providers to deliver a better service, because you're getting all this pressure from your competitors.Dave: If government schools and services were perfect, there wouldn't be any need to have private education in the first place.Ross: I can see, maybe, the difficulty there. It's like who do you decide to sell to, or when do you decide not to sell things to people?I've had friends and colleagues who've worked especially with adults. People who they know can't afford an English course, or maybe they're working in a job where English is not going to benefit them very much, or they know that this person doesn't have the study skills. Most people are, maybe, encouraged to take out a large bank loan to pay for something.Dave: Even if the school or institution that's selling the courses, it depends if they do so ethically. If they have a different payment plan so you can pay monthly rather than in a yearly lump sum, which makes it more affordable. If they are offering to people who they think won't be able to complete it in time, or they have other pressures.Even how good their teaching is, which methodology do they follow? Is it up-to-date and evidence-based? If they follow an outdated system because it's easy to market, they'll definitely get more sales.Also, you need to look at the school's retention. What are their results? Can they show that they've helped learners to learn?Ross: You touched on something there, this idea of rewarding teachers for, for example, students signing on, re-signing contracts in private language schools, or demo conversions. Students come to a trial class and they've paid, or they've not paid.That, I think, is an interesting ethical question, of whether that is something that should be rewarded, obviously something that should be punished. Is that a good way of judging people?There is one side of that in that if your students have signed a year contract and they've stayed with you for a year, and they want to re-sign again. That probably does, in aggregate with a lot of people, say some positive things about you. Maybe, if they don't, it says some negative things about you.There's obviously another side to that as well. You're starting to judge teachers by how much money they're generating rather than how much learning they're generating.Dave: Precisely, because learning is such a long process. If a teacher is purely entertaining, they're going to get a very high re-sign rate. That doesn't mean learning happened.Learning is hard. You have to really think. You're perhaps frowning as you grasp a new concept. That is leading to a teacher not getting as high re-sign rate because the students don't want to think in class.The teacher could be technically brilliant and really adept at helping the students to learn. If that teacher is disincentivized from that behavior and think, "Well, actually I earn a decent salary. I enjoy where I'm living, and I want to stay." They could well change their behavior to increase whatever rate they might be being judged on, especially if it's a financial one.Ross: Then you can imagine that being a vicious circle as well, where you would promote the people that get those metrics rather than the metrics of learning, which are harder to measure. That reinforces that whole paradigm, doesn't it? That what we want is re-signs and money rather than learning.Dave: Precisely. This is a problem that I had years ago when I first became a DoS. Before all the technology that we're talking about, I was struggling with the idea of how to measure academic quality. It's really hard to do, because the only way you can do it, as far as I can see, is to directly observe it.We don't have any standard algorithm of what makes good teaching or what makes good learning, because it varies so much depending on the variables of the teacher and the students involved, that is only by direct observation you can see.It affects so many other business metrics within a school. It can affect sales. If you're doing class, you get referrals. It can affect your retention, your service department. You can measure it through the effect it has on other things, but that is a very tricky process and needs a lot of data.If you have a manager that's very business-focused, and you're an academic head, then trying to prove that becomes a real battle. I see that getting worse if the right things aren't measured. With online, with all the extra data coming in, people could well take the easy solution and make those simple correlations.Ross: It's like the old management saying, "What gets measured gets managed." It's a lot easier to measure re-signs or conversions than to measure learning, which is still a bit of an abstract idea and very, very difficult to actually assess.Dave: That's actually a Peter Drucker quote, and he has an extension to it which most people don't say, which is, "...but make sure you measure the right things."Ross: Ah.[laughter]Ross: Oh wow, there we go. Moving on, let's talk a bit about teachers. I know this is something that you wanted to talk about. Schools in general often ask teachers to do a lot of work, and preparation, and marking classes in their own time, right?Dave: If a school is upfront with how they pitch the job to teachers, then I think it's fine. I think a lot of schools don't mention what their expectations are of work upfront.They might say, "The job is this many hours per week for this salary." Then when the teacher starts work, they find out, "Oh, there are also office hours you have to attend. There are extracurricular activities you also have to be present for. There are team building activities which are compulsory." The list goes on. I'm sure [chuckles] our listeners can add a lot more to that.Suddenly, what was thought to be a 40-hour a week job turns into 60 or 70, when, as you say, you add in preparation, marking, and even the horrible situation where teachers are buying supplies from their own pocket as well.Ross: It's almost like schools are taking advantage of the good nature of teachers, of wanting to do good things for their students.I remember my dad, growing up, in my childhood, I remember him. So often the living room floor would be strewn with these cut-out bits of old exam papers which he was copying and pasting to turn into new tests for students that they hadn't had before.Maybe, teaching is different from other professions. Whereas if you're in sales or something and you're putting in many extra hours, you're probably doing that, partially at least, in the expectation that you're going to get more money. Whereas teaching doesn't have that.It's almost that the more you care about the students, the more time you're putting in, but you're not necessarily going to get any financial reward for that.Dave: There's a saying in England, in the NHS, they say it runs on goodwill. They do take advantage of the empathy that staff have. I do think that is very similar in the teaching profession as well.Ross: I also wanted to ask you about the idea of more and more surveillance in classrooms. When both you and I started teaching, there was very little oversight. Maybe, your DoS would come in and observe you. I don't know, for me once a year if I was lucky. Maybe, it could last.[laughter]Dave: That explains a lot, Ross.Ross: It does, doesn't it? Now in offline teaching you often have cameras in classrooms. Even more interestingly, in online teaching, you have not just cameras -- because obviously everything is on camera.Everything that you do in every single class can be watched back both by parents and the people measuring the quality of classes, and more and more companies investing in AI to monitor teacher behavior.Generally in public life, at least, people have a real aversion to facial recognition, whatever authority's using technology to track their behavior, their movements, and everything. I've not really heard anyone talking about this with teaching.I'm not sure if I was a teacher now, full-time, especially an online teacher, and I knew that everything I said was being recorded and monitored with AI. I'm not sure how comfortable I would be with that.Dave: First of all, the first thing that popped into my head there is the idea of privacy and intention. Privacy concerns from the students, and I'm assuming they would all sign waivers so that their recordings could be used and reused for training purposes, and shown to other people. That's where the intention comes in.If all this data is used with ethically-sound principles in mind, I can't see too much of an issue with it. If you're using it to improve their learning, to personalize resources, materials, and lessons, so they're better able to learn, then that is the positive side.Ross: It'll be interesting to see how that changes as the technology moves on and we get to a point when technology knows every single word you've said in every single class to every single student. There's a record of that. There's even a record of every single facial expression that you might have made in every single class. I think all that's coming.Dave: The immediate problem with that, though, is assuming good intentions. You could still run into pitfalls.If you have, say, the ability for AI to recognize engagement through facial expression --Will it be leaning forward in the chair, smiling, eye contact with the camera, however you judge those metrics? That's equated with a good class because they're engaged and more likely to re-sign. That's a business metric rather than a learning metric.A teacher's rewarded for that, then you could go back to the idea of edutainment. The teacher is encouraged to be entertaining rather than help the student to learn. Interestingly, that data could also be used in aggregate to see what really works and what really doesn't in teaching.That is very exciting, but it has this dark side which I think we need to be very careful of. I've not really heard any discussions or anywhere else about the potential pitfalls of this. It's really nice that you're raising people's awareness now.Ross: You heard it here first, folks. [laughs]Ross: Thanks for coming on again, Dave. Do you want to give the blog a quick plug?Dave: Sure. If you want to read more about these topics, then please visit www.barefootteflteacher.com.Ross: Great. Dave, thanks again for coming on.Dave: You're very welcome.

Why Students Don’t Like Language Class (With Dave Weller) - TranscriptionTracy Yu: Welcome back to our podcast, everybody. We've got our favorite guest. Can you guess who he is?Dave Weller: Hurrah!Tracy: [laughs] Let's welcome Dave Weller. Hey, Dave.Dave: Hi.Ross Thorburn: What are we talking about today?Dave: I think we decided to do something almost akin to a book review on Daniel Willingham's book on cognitive psychology and neuroscience, "Why Students Don't Like School."Ross: We're going to try and apply what we read and what we remembered. We're going to go further outside taxonomy...Dave: Oh, no.[laughter]Ross: ...and try and apply it to language teaching.Dave: The book is about neuroscientific principles. The blurb is, "A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom." He's picked nine very robust findings from the field of psychology. Now, I hope you've done your homework, and you've read the book as I have.Ross: I think it says a lot about us. Dave, for this, read the book twice. I read it once. Tracy read it...Tracy: The last 10 minutes.[laughter]Dave: All it means is Tracy is a very fast reader.Ross: [laughs]Dave: What we decided when we set ourselves this challenge was that it'd be really interesting to take a book that was designed with general education in mind and see how well we could transfer the principles across to language teaching.Ross: Absolutely. We often comment that there's not enough taken from general education and applied to the field of language learning.Dave: Hopefully is we'll find out that a lot of the principles can equally apply in the language classroom as in normal classrooms.Ross: Great.Dave: Ross, one of the things I liked from his introduction was talking about why teachers are naturally skeptical of theory. There is a big gap between theory and practice. Even mental processes aren't isolated in the classroom, whereas they are in research.A classic example he uses is that about drilling. In the lab where you isolate drilling and see the effect that it has on learning is wonderful. [laughs] The more you drill, the more you repeat, the more you learn.However, any teacher that steps into a classroom knows if you drill your learners for an hour straight, the drop in motivation is not going to make up for the effectiveness of that technique in learning. This is why that he's taken a very teacher‑centered view of research and only picked principles he thinks can be used effectively in the classroom.Ross: Whatever you do read in a book, you're passing it through your own filter of what you think is going to be personally useful for you. A lot is going to get filtered out. How about for this podcast, we pick out some of the main principles?He's got nine cognitive principles. They relate to things that happen in the classroom. How about we pick some of the most interesting ones? We can talk about how we feel language teachers might be able to apply those in their classes. Should we get started?Tracy: Yeah.Dave: With this one, the principle of that people are naturally curious, but they aren't naturally good thinkers. For me, when I read this, what struck me was how similar it is to the zone of proximal development, scaffolding, Lev Vygotsky idea.He talks about oftentimes we think about what the answers are that we want our students to get. If we're trying to say, "What's the answer to this grammar question? There's a word that means this. What's the word?" We should be trying to engage them with the questions and leading them to the answer.Ross: He says, "It's the question that peaks people's interest. Being told the answer, it doesn't do anything for you." Have you seen "The Prestige" before?Dave: I've downloaded it. You asked me that the other night, but I haven't watched it yet.Ross: In The Prestige, they talk about this. As a magician, if you do a magic trick, people are amazed by it. As soon as you show them how to do the trick, people are completely unimpressed by it.Dave: Maybe, that's one of the reasons that task‑based learning or test‑teach‑test lessons can work well, is because you put this question at the beginning. You put the hardest part first, putting students into a position where it is difficult for them. It gets them to think about it.It's the question that's interesting. Then it leads to the answer later on, whereas something like PBP, which we know gets a lot of bad press, doesn't put the question at the beginning.Tracy: That's something related to the teacher's role in the classroom. They're not just to spoon‑feeding the students. They have to make sure what kind of questions they can ask the students. They facilitate the learning.You don't want to mix the prompting questions which scaffold student learning with guessing what's in my mind.Dave: Totally agree. Yes, it's a good example from real life, Tracy. One of the things to be careful with this one though is to be careful the questions you pose aren't too hard as well as grading your language, grading your instructions.If you ask students a question and it's very specific, there's only one possible right answer, it's really difficult. They're beginner students, A1 level maybe, and you ask them, "So the past perfect continuous, when would you use this?" They immediately look up and go, "I don't know. There's no way I can know," and they immediately check out.Daniel Willingham says, "Respect students' cognitive limits. Don't overload them with information. Don't make the instructions or grade your language too much," is how I would interpret that for TEFL. Also, "Make sure the questions you ask them are within their ability to answer."Ross: How about we move on to another principle, then? My personal favorite, and probably yours as well, Dave, is, "Memory is the residue of thoughts."Dave: No, I hate that one. Leave that one out.[laughter]Tracy: Can you guys explain this a little bit?Dave: Yeah. From "Memory is a Residue of Thought," I think what Daniel Willingham is saying is that students remember what they think about. In your class, if they're thinking about your flashy warm‑up where you jumped up and down and screamed around like a monkey, then they're going to remember, "Hey, teacher screamed like a monkey today. That was really funny."That's what they'll tell their parents. Whereas if they do a task where they have to figure something out and talk to their friend about the best way to negotiate with somebody or the best way to get to the train station, and they're using English to do that, then that's what they'll remember.One of my biggest takeaways from the book is that he suggests that to review your lesson plan in terms of what the students will think about. Every task you have, every activity, every stage, put yourself in your learners' shoes, and imagine what they're going to think about as they're completing that.My suggestion on top of that would be, "Do the same thing for the language use." Look at your lesson plan, or imagine it. Think about it from your learner's point of view. What language would you use to complete that task?Ross: Something else I found interesting, it was a quote from him. He said, "Fold practice into more advanced skills," which got me thinking. The way I would apply that to the language classroom is when your students advance a little bit...Say they've moved up from present simple, and now they're doing past simple, just a cliched example. Instead of practicing just that skill of past simple, make sure they get a chance to use prior practice.Make sure they get a chance to use the skills and recycle a language from previous classes. When they're practicing past simple, they're also integrating present simple and the other things and the other vocabulary that they have learned.You don't just focus only on the target language for that particular lesson, but you bring in the other language that you used previously. I find a lot of teachers don't do that. They're so focused on the target language for that one lesson, they forget the previous lessons.Ross: That might be one of the reasons why extensive reading works so well, is because all of the forms and grammar that you might have learned previously are all going to be recycled in natural stories.That's maybe why also genuine tasks where you don't prescribe the language for the students to use in some sort of prior practice can also be beneficial because students will get to bring in language that they've used from previous lessons.For teachers, if you're using a great textbook that automatically recycles or has in it recycled language from previous units, that's great. Even if you don't, you can just pause in lessons and say, "What is there from previous lessons that we've learned that you could also use in this task or in this activity that could help you," and think about that when you're planning as well.Before we finish, I wanted to talk about the very last chapter of the book which is about helping teachers improve. He makes this nice distinction between experience and practicing. Teaching, like any other complex skill, must be practiced to be improved.It reminds me, I think the same author Rubinstein, the pianist, says something like, "I play the piano for nine hours a day, but I only practice for one." There's a nice difference there between what you're actually doing and then when you're making a deliberate effort to get better.One of the things is that teachers are very busy. It's very easy for all of your classes to just go by in a whirlwind, but if you can find the occasional class or the occasional thing to work on for an hour a week, in the long term, that can improve your teaching.Dave: Actually, he suggests a good method, which I'm very eager to adopt. To find another teacher he wants to improve, he says, "Perhaps watch a video of another teacher teach and comment together jointly on that so you gain each other's kind of levels and things you talk about."After you've done that almost bonding experience, then film yourself and swap it with the other person so then they comment on yours. Of course, be nice.Ross: A couple of other points on that. He says, "When you video yourself, spend time observing. Don't start by critiquing."Dave: I remember the first time I videoed myself or saw myself teaching. I was amazed at how many unconscious habits I had. I presented myself entirely differently than the way I thought I did. It's almost like watching a stranger teach.It was that difference in my expectation. The image I had in my head of myself teaching was clearly very different to that. You can only see that if you have that visceral experience, when you see yourself teach.Ross: The purpose of watching your partner teach is to help them reflect on their practice. Often, when people do peer observations, it's so easy to just say, "Oh, you did this wrong. You need to change this. This didn't work," but the purpose of it isn't to just throw out a few quick fixes. It's to get the person to engage in their own teaching and reflect.Tracy: Sometimes, I don't blame the teachers. Their experience is like that because they have been criticized from day one. Even if they did something nicely, still their trainer or their manager will just pick the area that they didn't do very well.Also, for a positive reinforcement, people are more likely to change their behavior if you tell them what they did really well. Then they could keep working on it rather than just starting from the negative aspects, and then you didn't do it very well.I don't blame the teacher sometimes because that's what they were told. That's how they train. That's how they experience. That requires the trainers to understand how to balance it and how you demonstrate this to your teachers from day one.Dave: Totally correct. I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Trace, by saying what would change the behavior of the teacher, because they can't. You need to take the tack if the teaching is very directed feedback and that will work, then do that.If they're unconfident, nervous, anxious, you need to tell them what they've been doing right as well. Don't change everything. Keep what good they have been doing and then tweak a little bit.Ross: If you've been convinced at all by the last 14 minutes that this book would be useful, it's by Daniel T. Willingham. It's called Why Students Don't Like School. It's subtitled "A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means to the classroom." I highly recommend it.Also, since we're on the topic of books and you're about to plan a lesson, I highly recommend...[laughter]Tracy: Wow, good. Nice segue.Ross: ..."Lesson Planning for Language Teachers ‑‑ Evidence‑Based Techniques for Busy Teachers" by...Tracy: By Dave Weller. Congratulations, Dave.Dave: Thank you.Tracy: Hope you guys enjoyed the podcast. See you next time.Transcription by CastingWords

Dave Woodward helped shape the entire affiliate program at ClickFunnels. He's a personal mentor, friend, and brother.   It's long overdue that I invite him to come on Sales Funnel Radio to share his wisdom...   I'm really pumped about this. Frankly, it's been in the planning for, like, seven months now…   I have wanted to get interview Dave Woodward  for a very, very long time.     If you guys don't know anything about him, he is one of the backbones of ClickFunnels...   … so you’re in for a treat.   I think it was October-ish 2018, just after the 30-Days Book went out. I was approached by ClickFunnels to write a chapter for a NEW book...   And, NEWS FLASH…   In case you’re slow to catch on ;-) this is me, announcing the release of the NEW Affiliate Bootcamp Book!   And of course, in true Steve Larsen fashion, I'm gonna over-deliver bonuses to the hilt, so you’ll wanna buy the book through my link…   THE NEW AFFILIATE BOOTCAMP BOOK   The book asks the question:   “How would you retire as a ClickFunnels affiliate in a hundred days?”   I spent pretty much all of my Christmas break writing my chapter.   ...it's NOT straight theory kinda stuff.   This is A LOT of the strategies I’ve used to crush it in affiliate contests.   So, I'm really excited about this.   For the 30-Days Book, I interviewed Russell…   For this one, I thought I would interview one of the backbones of Clickfunnels and the reason why:   Stuff gets done   There's an affiliate program that's run well.   The Dream 100 program is killin’ it.   ...and the name of that individual is Dave Woodward. He's a beast. He's the man...   Dave has become one of my favorite people on this planet, a mentor, a friend, a brother, and I look up to him like crazy.   I care dramatically what Dave Woodward thinks about me.   Maybe I shouldn't... I'm NOT supposed to say that, but it's true.   I really appreciate him, and everything he's done for me, and my family.   I am very, very excited, and completely, (in full transparency), extremely honored, to have our guest today.   This has been an interview I have been planning, and looking forward to, for a little over a year and a half now. I'm excited and to be completely honest, a little bit nervous.   I have tremendous respect for Dave Woodward. - tremendous respect.   If you guys don't know who Dave is, you should!   INTRODUCING DAVE WOODWARD   Dave is one of the cornerstones and keystones of all of ClickFunnels, and why it works…   ...please take that from a guy who sat across, and watched, and was very much a part of the intimate workings of what ClickFunnels is, and how it works.   Dave is one of the reasons why ClickFunnels is where it is.   He is one of the reasons why relationships are the way they are.   And,  in my honest opinion, the reason why Russell can even get his message out there…   I have a ton of respect for Dave and for what he does.   He has gone from a friend to an incredible mentor to me. I so appreciate and love him, and I'm very honored to interview him today.   Dave, thanks for being here.   DAVE: Well, I'm extremely honored, and I'm very nervous myself, so that makes two of us.   Thank you for allowing me to come on your show. I have such huge props for you, and I just admire all your work, and everything that you've done…   No one implements like you implement.   I love seeing it, you're such a role model to my kids, it's just fun, and I love seeing the impact that you're literally having across the entire world... so, it's an honor to be here. STEVE: Oh thank you very much, man. I'm glad to have ya.   Now a lot of people may not know….   Dave sits, literally across from his seat, he literally is looking into Russell's office - I mean he's like right there…   There's this tradition, (at least when I was there), it looked kinda like this…   So Dave and I, right, we're working, Melanie's there, we're getting our stuff done. Usually, there's some music going.   We're sitting around, and then all of a sudden Russell goes,”“UHHH!”   Which means…   “Get up and run to my desk.”   So Dave and I, would get up and run over to Russell's desk, and we'd basically watch the zeroes and ones God pour down wisdom into Russell's marketing brain…   https://media.giphy.com/media/3JSGn9bSDpzAFutb6W/giphy.gif ... and gold would just fall out. Dave and I, would both try to keep up, while at the same time validating, “Oh my gosh, that is a cool idea, better catch on to it...”   ... it's like really, really fun. One of the funnest environments. I miss it terribly.   Now, but a lot of people don’t know that you had a history with Russell and, pre-ClickFunnels. Right?   I mean, what were you doing before coming into ClickFunnels?   HOW DAVE MET RUSSELL   DAVE: I had my own marketing consulting agency for years.   In fact, I actually met Russell…   So, I come from the direct response marketing days…   Old Dan Kennedy, Bill Glazer, copywriting type of stuff... years and years and years ago.   And at the time I had a lot of clients who were in either the insurance, the health field, or else mortgages.   A lot of them were trying to figure out this whole online thing… (this is like 2007, 2008).   And it was that point where I thought, I gotta figure out this whole internet stuff. I've got too many clients who are wanting information about it.   I'd been on Russell's list, I'd been on other lists, and Russell was coming to do a seminar in affiliate marketing, not far from where I lived in Southern California…   So I thought, “Oh great, I'll just go, and go and listen there.”   I'm a huge believer of either working your way in, or buying your way in. And I've always preferred buying your way in, if it's at all available, it's faster. So it was Russell and Stu McLaren, and Russell got up and said:   "Hey, you know what? If you guys would like to take us out to lunch or dinner or anything, to just kinda pick our brains, go to the back and sign up."   I literally jumped out of my chair, ran to the back, and I signed up for EVERY breakfast, lunch, and dinner that Russell had.   I'm like, “The guy's either gonna hate me, or we're gonna become friends through this thing.”   I wanted to get to know him better, and so I literally signed up for EVERYTHING!   I'm sure when he first got it he was like, “Who in the world is this Dave Woodward guy? What have I gotten myself into?”   I can guarantee you, Russell would never do that now. You could never take him to lunch or dinner, but he was just getting started.   … and so we created a deep friendship.   I ended up setting up his 10th anniversary for Collette. They flew down to Southern California and went out to dinner, then flew to Catalina...   Russell is more than a friend, he's like a brother.   He's probably, in all honesty,  the closest friend I have aside from my wife.   There's nothing I wouldn't do for him.   Over the years, we've had the opportunity of doing a ton of different projects together, some in the real estate niche, some in the network marketing niche, some in the fitness niche.   Some made money, some lost money.   My very first product was with Russell - it was Legendary Marketers.   STEVE: No way.   DAVE: Yeah.   STEVE: Oh, I didn't know that was. Cool.   DAVE: And so, that was the very first product that I ever did...   Again it was one of those things where I saw, just his desire to help others grow, and, at whatever the cost. Just, just pour so much into people, and I was just drawn to him…   … and we've just literally become lifelong friends.   When we started ClickFunnels, I was still in Southern California. I was flying up here every other week, and Russell was like, “You just need to move up here..”   I'm like…   Dude, listen, we've been through a lot of things over the years, and NOT all of them have worked…   Before I uproot my family, I wanna actually make sure this whole ClickFunnels thing is actually gonna take off.   And then, as you can tell right now, it'll be three years this August.   So we moved up here after ClickFunnels was up and running for about a year and a half.   STEVE: I remember that. Only because it was like two months before, you flew in, that's when I moved my family up.   Russell was like, “You know Dave Woodward?” ...and I had just started seeing your majesty in the inner workings of ClickFunnels - all the stuff you're doing with Dream 100, the affiliate stuff…   … and Russell was like,  “He's gonna move on up,” and I was like, “No way, that's awesome.”   You moved up, and I kid you not…   We were already kind of naturally high energetic people, you, and I, and Russell, but the overall energy, it was like one plus one equals twelve when you came in!   I was like, “This is awesome,”...it's not a classic business office…   We were running around barefoot in t-shirts, shorts... music going all the time…   it's such a fun place to work and try to change the world also.   So, how did you end up doing stuff for Russell's people - the affiliate manager was your first role, right?   DAVE: Actually, no. I was in charge of all our business development. So one of the pieces of it was the affiliate plan.   STEVE: That's right, my bad.   DAVE: Yeah, so, what happened was, so …   My coming into ClickFunnels, (as far as, one of the things), we were at TNC, (we’ve just come back from TNC 10, so this must have been TNC, like five, or six), and it was ClickFunnels' first booth, at TNC, and they had put us in the far back corner…   I was like, “This just sucks. We can't do this. No one's gonna see us.”   Russell was actually speaking at TNC, and he was like, “Gosh, I just wish we had some way of getting attention to us, no one's gonna come to us…”   ...because it wasn't in the main ballroom…   He was like,  I wish we could just get some of those like showroom girls, you know, event girls, whatever it is.”   I'm like, “Dude, you're in my city. This is San Diego. I promise you, I will get you some girls.”   And sure enough, within about two hours, we had about five girls there, basically handing out t-shirts and directing people where to go...       And that's, I guess when Dillon and Todd were like, “We definitely need him more full-time than he is currently,” and that's how it started.   STEVE: Oh, man. Yeah, yeah. There have been multiple times where you've done stuff like that. Russell flies in, you fly in, you know.   Guys, Dave, Dave is the one that protects Russell emotionally when we travel as well. Multiple times, just protecting him.   Making sure, “Hey, we need to get somewhere,” or making sure Russell is where he needs to be, and protecting him from people who may be, respectfully, somewhat of a time suck.   There are just so many stories that are just popping into my head.   Oh my gosh…   You guys flew in once, and Russell didn't have any time to sell, or didn't get order forms, and you literally, in the lobby…   What's this story again? It's awesome.   DAVE: A friend of ours, basically in the health space, flew into Denver…   I love to sell, which is weird because for years I hated selling. It was like the worst thing in the world.   I would never, ever sell. I would never associate myself with selling...   … NEVER, dirty, bad!   But, I remember, we flew in, and I was sitting there talking to the promoter, and he basically said:   “Well, you know what, I thought we were gonna have more time. we ran over, we only really have about 25, 30 minutes, and you can't sell”   I'm like, “Dude, we flew all the way to Denver. We're not here NOT to sell.”   And he says, "No you really can't sell."   So I said, "Well, how much time do we have?" He said, "Well, you've only got 30 minutes."   I'm like, “Well we need at least 45.” He said, "Okay, 45 minutes."   I said, "If I just have a little tiny offer, would that be okay?" He said, "Yeah, but I don't want a full pitch." I'm like, “No problem.”   So I literally went into the little business center, and I created an order form on the computer they had there, (I'm sure it's so completely non-compliant)...   It was, honestly, just name, email, address, phone number, credit card - that's it.   It was printed off black and white and there was nothing fancy to it. I don't even know if they knew what they were buying.   But, just like Russell does, he was able to get up and he spoke... I could tell the promoter at the back was just getting antsy.   He's like, “You gotta hurry, you gotta hurry, gotta hurry.”   I'm like, “Russell let's just go a little bit faster.”   So, all of a sudden, he gets to the pitch.   He's like, “Listen, I don't have time to go through this, but you're gonna get this, this, this, this, and this…   ...and if you want, Dave's got some order forms, just take the order form and give them to us, and we'll process it.”   I literally had someone come back there and grab it out of my hand, write on it, and slap it down right in front of Russell on the stage.   Usually, we get table rushed at the back, but we had this massive podium rush. Everyone went to the front, and it was hilarious.   We out the room and we just laughed.   It's those types of moments, where I'm like, “No matter what it takes when you have an opportunity, we're gonna sell...”   And we sold, and it did very well.   STEVE: You guys knocked out the house, is what I heard. Just blew it out on a whim. I mean, come on! That's the kind of team that you guys are. It's just awesome.   Hey, so I wanted to ask a little bit about this Affiliate Book that's coming out - you have such unique eyes from where you are, and where you get to sit.   I know you get to work a lot with:   Biz Dev   Bringing in new Dream 100 people   All the affiliate stuff as well   … what is this New Affiliate Book, by the way?   DAVE: Oh, it is super, super cool… so this whole idea behind affiliate marketing ... First of all, for those of you who aren't familiar with affiliate marketing, it's probably the easiest way to get started online, because you don't have to have your own product.   You are literally promoting someone else's product.   And for us, they're promoting ClickFunnels.   We have a whole bunch of front end products because it's really hard to promote just a free trial -  one of those was 30days.com. Another one is OFA…   If you're not on OFA, my gosh, the One Funnel Away Challenge, Steven is just crushing it -  so you definitely need to be in that.   We had so much success with 30days.com - the idea behind that summit was, Russell went out to a lot of our Two Comma Club award-winning people, like Steven, and basically said:   “Hey, if you were to lose everything, and all you had was ClickFunnels, and your marketing know-how, what would you do in the next 30 days, to make money?”    ..and they put together a 540-page book, and it became a front-end for the One Funnel Away Challenge.   Well, as we were looking at that model, it became super, super successful, and we realized...   Steven actually helped build out Affiliate Bootcamp, which has been the primary product we've used to train our affiliates over the last year and a half, and we're at a point right now where we're trying to think…   If we were to update it, how would we do it best?   And we thought, instead of us doing it…   Why not reach out to the people who've been the most successful doing affiliate marketing inside of ClickFunnels, and have them tell their stories…   ... and use somewhat of the same premise as the 30 Day Book…   Not necessarily, if you lost everything and only had 30 days, but, “If you were to start over as an affiliate, what are the things that you would wanna do?”   What are the different things that would actually provide the greatest return in the shortest amount of time?   Because for a lot of affiliates, it's like, “Ah, I've got my own job, I don't have a whole bunch of time, ” and it was just fascinating.   Bailey Richert is the one who basically put it together for us, she went out, and interviewed 17 of our top affiliates…   I was literally talking to her today, and she goes, “You know, Dave, the 30days.com was really cool, but the real secret sauce was on the back end after you bought the product you got behind the scenes of their actual funnel…”   She said, "I don't know what it was with these affiliates? They literally gave every single thing on the front end."   So those people who actually get involved in our New Affiliate Launch, or Summit are going to get the very best of 17, (we may actually get to 20, but 17 right now), people who have literally been crushing it as an affiliate for ClickFunnels sharing EVERYTHING:   YouTube strategies   How to do an offer?   What is a bridge funnel?   How do you build a list?   How do you build a product that ties into your list to provide even greater value so that people fall in love with you, as well as the new product that you might be introducing them to?   So, the whole idea behind this is really to have a person create their own product/ business on the front-end without having to create all the products, (and everything else), on the back end...   … and NOT have to worry about the support.   So, I'm so excited about it...  because it’s literally going to be the BIGGEST game changer for us.   Currently, Steve, we have five people who have done over a million dollars in affiliate commission so far.   Five people who have hit the two comma club as an affiliate for ClickFunnels.   STEVE: Oh man.   DAVE: It's just insane.   You know, when we first started this thing, we came up with this idea of the dream car…   The idea behind it is, if you got a hundred people, we'd pay $500 for your lease or purchase of your dream car.   At 200 people, we'd pay $1,000.   I thought, “No one's ever gonna get to 200 people!”   ...and now we have people who have thousands of affiliates...   Thousands of ClickFunnels accounts because of it.   So the idea behind affiliate marketing:   It's the easiest way to get started online.   This new affiliate summit is literally gonna give you, truly, the step-by-step program from 17 of the top affiliates that we have.   They're gonna break down, NOT only just affiliate marketing, but how they actually get traffic, how do they actually build an offer, how they build a bridge page.   And you’ll actually see some of their actual bridge pages, as well.   We were sitting there trying to price this thing out, and I'm like, “You understand this is like a $500 product,” and Bailey's like, “Yeah, but summits only sell for like $47 to $67.”   And I'm like, “Oh my gosh, alright, we'll do it, whatever price.”   I don't know what price point we're gonna settle at  - somewhere between $47 and $97, I don't know...   But it's people like you, Stephen, who literally said, "Alright, let me show you exactly what it really takes. Let me go through and break it down step by step, how you actually can make tens of thousands of dollars a month, as an affiliate."   And I know we pay you a pretty hefty cheque, just in affiliate commission.   STEVE: Yeah, it's, uh ...   And what's funny everybody, is that it's kinda on the back-end of my business and it's just because of the strategy.   I gotta tell you, I loved writing the 30 Days chapter, but the affiliate chapter... oh my gosh, I took all of Christmas, like three or four days, to write that thing - it was beautiful.   DAVE: Well actually Bailey, (just between you and I), even though anyone who listens to this will now know it, Bailey actually said yours is the best one…   … honestly, because it was so detailed, Stephen.   The way you did it, she actually wants to lead with yours to set the stage for the other ones...   Because of the way you talked about:   Bridge Funnels   Offers   Bonuses   I mean, you were our top affiliate for 30days.com, and it was just crazy. And, I've seen you do that multiple times, even in our One Funnel Away Challenge.   And the crazy thing about the One Funnel Away Challenge was you came in dead last and didn't start until like three days left. It was crazy.   STEVE: That 10X Secrets thing...   DAVE: That's what it was.   And you were right in the middle of OfferMind, I think. Was that it?   STEVE: Yeah, yeah.   DAVE: And I was asking you to teach some of our speaker training, and you had no time. No time at all. And yet, to see you come in, and use this strategy that you now taught in that chapter, it was just brilliant to see.   The thing that I love most about the chapter that you wrote, is your chapter actually goes in through, literally, step by step…   It's how you teach -  you're so very methodical in teaching practical steps - literally, it's ‘paint by numbers.’ It's the easiest way you can do it…   I mean, step one, step two, step three.   And because you've been through it, you lived through it, and you started with nothing…   ...and NOW, you're one of our top affiliates!   It's just neat that you were so kind and so generous with spending as much time as you spent on that chapter.   It's probably going to be one of our leading chapters.   STEVE: Oh man, I appreciate that a lot.   Well,  what can somebody do ... What's a favorite way ... I mean, you have such a unique area that you get to see all these different affiliates…   If somebody’s new and doesn't have much of a following, what should they be doing if they want to become an affiliate?   DAVE: I think, it goes back to, probably your secret sauce, and that's publishing.   I think, honestly, and as much as people hate it, I think it’s one of the coolest things.   People wanna find someone they can connect to, so documenting your journey as an affiliate, is probably the best thing that you can do, because later you’re gonna be able to sell that journey.   And it may take a little bit of time, but if I was a brand new affiliate, just starting off, I would start publishing on a regular basis.   You could pick:   Dotcom Secrets   Expert Secrets   30 Days   ….I don't care which product you want.   I would literally go in, I would make it your own, I would teach what you learn, on a Facebook live, on an Instagram story, whatever it might be, and refer people to it:   “This is what I've learned.”   Because people love understanding the take a way that you got and seeing how that you're actually using that.   So, I think that's probably one of the things that I would look at.   Where MOST affiliates go wrong is, they think they're just gonna take the affiliate link and just promote it directly, and that's why I love your chapter… because you were so anti that.   You're like, “You can't do that! Let me show you what you can do.”   And I think, as an affiliate just getting started, just pick one thing…   And, again, as you mentioned before, just go all in on it. Study it. Make it your own.   And that way when you're teaching it, people are going, “Oh, that's how that works. Oh, okay, now I understand,” and then people can connect with that… and they'll love the journey as well.   STEVE: Oh man, that's awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time.   You know, I have such respect for you, and what you do, and just love your family -  my wife and I talk about you guys a lot.   We love your sons, they're all awesome and incredible - we just love your family and everything that you guys do.   And I really mean what I say,   I really believe that half the reason Russell can do what he does is that he’s got you in his corner, just fighting battles he didn't even know about.   You know what I mean?   Just going to bat, getting all the dirties away that are out there trying to take advantage, you know, stuff like that.   It's just this role that is like so, I don't even know, it's special. And it's fun to see it.   DAVE: Thank you.   STEVE: So I just, anyway. Any parting advice or words before we end up here?   DAVE: You know, for me, I think the one thing I would tell people is just don't give up.   I think the hardest part for affiliate marketing, or even for a lot of the online marketing is just, you have a dream out there, and you see it, and you want it so bad…   ... and yet things don't go exactly the way that you want.   You can joke around about this idea, being one funnel away, but you truly are…   You just don't know which funnel that's gonna be.   And so, I would just say:   If this is what you wanna do, don't let anything get in your way.   It's possible, things happen... it doesn't go as fast as you want, I'll let everyone understand, I'm totally transparent...   It never works as fast as you want   ,...but for those who stick it out, you get to this little corner and you literally hockey stick and life takes off for you.   I saw the same thing with you last year, where you got going and you’re putting forth all this effort, and all of a sudden you get to this little corner, and you literally hockey stick, and life just takes off for you.   And I think the problem is, most people aren't willing…   Again it's that, 99 yards does not a touchdown make…   You gotta be willing to go all the way   As long as you don't quit, and just realize that you're in that phase of learning…   There are two parts…    You have the:   Learning phase   Earning phase   Too often people wanna jump into the earning phase, without paying their dues in that learning phase.   If you'll spend the time in that learning phase, the money that will come later in life - it's just crazy. Astronomical.   STEVE: Oh, man. Well, thank you so much. You're a friend, a mentor, a brother, and just, I love and appreciate you. Thanks for being on.   Awesome episode, right?   Hey, bear with me for just a moment while I tell you about makeaffiliatesgreatagain.com.   Probably one of the most fragile phases of being an entrepreneur is that tender spot where you have just enough cash coming in to get excited, but expenses also increase a little while you take on new tools and new systems, new teams.   It can be heart pounding, and frankly, nerve-wracking.   Well, one of the ways I've kept ownership of my companies and NEVER picked up any debt or used any of our family finances to grow the business, was through affiliate marketing.   My first dollar online actually came from affiliate marketing, ONLY a few years ago.   So I often get asked the question:   “Steve, how can you have been bootstrapping this and scraping by so hard just a few years ago, but now have a business that makes millions in revenue?”   … that's a fair question.   So besides having kick butt products, when I've needed to get some extra cash for an expensive project, I have a very specific method of affiliate marketing that gets me paid to sell other people's products.   You wanna see how I do it? Just go to makeaffiliatesgreatagain.com.   ClickFunnels actually wants to know how I've been doing this as well…   So I just wrote a chapter in ClickFunnels new book called Affiliate Bootcamp... and if you wanna see my chapter, and be shown how I treat affiliate cash in my business, just go to makeaffiliatesgreatagain.com…   You'll get a bunch of other cool stuff from me - like, the actual Make Affiliates Great Again Funnel…   The one you're gonna see there - it’s pre-built - it’s awesome - and you can download it.   You also get my audio chapter on how I create affiliate offers. You get the actual video of me training my team on how to build Make Affiliates Great Again - it's crazy valuable.   Plus you also get several my other stage speeches.   How I launched my affiliate offers…   And you'll even get a discount ticket to OfferMind… + the Make Affiliates Great Again Mini-Course…   Is it okay if I over deliver???   If you want ALL that for free... plus other things, literally just sign up at makeaffiliatesgreatagain.com... and then, sign up for the New Affiliate Bootcamp through my affiliate link. Go figure.   My friends, get rich, give back.

Here's the Transcript of the Interview Hugh Ballou: Hey, it’s Hugh Ballou. Welcome to Orchestrating Success. I have a new friend, and man, we’ve connected on lots of different levels. I want to introduce my new friend, Dave Anderson. Dave, welcome to my podcast. Dave Anderson: Hugh, thank you for having me. I definitely appreciate it. Thank you so much for taking the time. Hugh: Oh yeah, you have been fighting traffic in Philly. I’m not far away. I am down in the middle part of Virginia, just moved from southwest up a little bit. Dave, I’m quite impressed with some of the things you have done in your life. Give my listeners a little glimpse into what is your secret sauce, your superpower, your special wisdom that you bring to leaders in your coaching and your work. Tell us where you got to where you are, a little bit about your background, and what it is that you do to help people be successful. Dave: I started my career at the age of nine, making me one of the youngest people ever to have a radio contract. I retired from the radio industry after working with Les Brown, Rickey Smiley, George Wallace, and a bunch of folks. I realized that there was only so much that I could do. It was time for me to get to that next level. That is when I decided to retire because through the course of my career, I found that people kept coming to me for advice. Salespeople would come and have me go close their sales calls for them. I’m like, I’m not getting a percentage of your commission. There is something wrong with this. I realized that I was making companies a whole lot of money, like millions upon millions of dollars, but I wasn’t getting 10% of this. I knew there was a better way. I decided to strike out on my own. I have written several bestselling books. My most successful book is called Pitch, Close, Upsell, Repeat. It breaks down my entire sales process. I would say my superpower is getting people out of their own way and into success using a combination of tough love and actionable information. That is what I do. I believe that the best way to make this country great is to focus on entrepreneurship, get back to growth, getting back to creating our own economies and building things that allow us to thrive, to spend time with our kids, to be with our families again as opposed to saying, “Oh, I hate my boss. My boss is a little 20-year-old snot who doesn’t know anything about anything. I know I could run this company, but I won’t ever have the opportunity.” I am pulling people out of their cubicle matrix into the reality of their greatness. That is what I do. Hugh: Whoa. That is a power-packed bunch of words. You let a few things slip in there. Your book, give us that title again so I can capture it on the notes. Dave: It’s called Pitch, Close, Upsell, Repeat. It’s my four-step process to sales success. If you want to dominate anything when it comes to your business, you need a great sales process. I think if you focus on those four things, you can do anything. When I write books, I write books to make sure that people can actually digest them. You can get it anywhere major books are sold. Any bookstore, Amazon, all that good stuff. It’s still on the bestseller list. It’s a great book. I am very proud of it because it makes the idea of sales not this scary thing, and it allows anyone, even shy people, to find techniques that are going to work for them in order to increase their revenue. Hugh: I love Garrison Keeler’s definition of shy people. He says shy people are people who are radically polite. Dave: I love that. Hugh: The book is Pitch, Close, Upsell, Repeat. Is it David Anderson or Dave Anderson? Dave: It says David. I decided to go by Dave a little bit later on after I wrote the book because there were a bunch of David Andersons as well as Dave Andersons, but still. There is only one Business Bully, and that’s me. It works for me. I’m not really caught up on names. I am caught up on the experience people have when they reach me. Hugh: Great. You’re an inspiration. It’s interesting. You and I are in different generations. I am an old boomer. What generation are you in? Dave: I am at the end of Gen X. I am a Gen Xer. Hugh: A Gen Xer? Dave: Yes, sir. Hugh: It’s amazing that we have so much in common as far as our vision of leadership and empowerment. You and I have had a few conversations, but I am smarter than I look. I figured that you got some real superpowers. That is why I invited you on this podcast today. I don’t know about you, but I got a lot of people who want to be on my show. Just yesterday I turned down 27 invitations of people who want to be on. You have cut through the noise. The Business Bully? Is that what you said? Dave: Yes, indeed. Hugh: That is the name of your podcast. Dave: Yes, it is. Hugh: What is that about? Dave: What it’s about is two things. I am a big believer in having a distinct message or what people like to call a unique selling proposition. I also believe that we are very polite and very politically correct, and I don’t believe in those things. I believe that people get really emotionally attached to their businesses, and they treat their businesses like their babies. I gave a talk in Baltimore a couple years back, and this one woman said, “My business is my baby.” I said, “Ma’am, do you have children?” She said, “Yes, I do.” I said, “Imagine that I’m a genie, and I can take your business and turn it into a child who has the same familial resemblance as the rest of your children.” She said, “Okay.” I said, “Now, I am going to ask you to choose which one of these children has to die: your daughter, your son, or your business? One of them has to go.” She said, “Shoot the business all day.” I said, “That’s why your business is not your baby. Get your feelings out of it, and let’s talk about what’s really ugly in your business so we can fix it. How can I heal you as a doctor if you don’t let me examine you or diagnose the problem, let alone get to the point where I can treat it? We have to get over this emotional attachment to a thing that can be built and destroyed like that.” I think that that is what it is. Someone on Facebook famously said, “I don’t like Dave Anderson because Dave Anderson is a business bully.” I went to the trademark office, and here we are. Hugh: Here you are. That is like turning it around, man. Dave: Absolutely. Hugh: That is fascinating. I want to alert our viewers to the fact that you are getting over being bashful. Dave: It’s a process. I’m struggling. Hugh: That’s another thing we have in common. You dropped another phrase in there, being politically correct. Oh my word, is that toxic or what, being politically correct? Speak more about that. Dave: It’s very toxic because you eliminate the ability to be honest. The reason that I cut through above most people is that you know where you stand with me. I told my wife, “Honey, if I unfortunately die before you, two things will happen. 1) You will have a great insurance check. 2) I am going to need you to put at the base of my urn—because I want to be cremated, I don’t want to waste money on a casket—‘Here are the remains of Dave Anderson. You always knew where you stood with him.’” There is no guessing. I am very black and white. I am very this or that. I am very yes or no. My favorite book says, “Let your yes mean yes and your no mean no.” There is no mistaking how I feel about something. But we don’t do that. We like to dance around and then go talk behind somebody’s back about how horrible their business is. No, I am going to tell you because that is going to free you. You might not like it. I don’t like tetnus shots. I don’t like rectal exams for prostates. I am sure you can relate to that. I just had my first; it wasn’t a pleasant experience, Hugh. You could have given somebody some insight, but I would rather know that I have a really bad PSA count. I would rather know that I have prostate cancer. I would rather not have the flu than walk around feeling good and living a beautiful lie. I think that’s what’s happening. We all are a bunch of beautiful liars instead of telling people the ugly truth in love. Hugh: I love it. You heard it right here on the Orchestrating Success podcast. Right here. We resonate on that as well. Your podcast is on iTunes and many other platforms. Where can people find more about you? Where is your website? Dave: My website is businessbullyshow.com. Just like it sounds. I have a T-shirt that says it. That is where you can find my podcast. That is where you can talk about advertising and see where my next events are, things of that nature. I also do discovery calls, and people can sign up for those by going to bit.ly/bullycall. I am all about being as transparent as possible. If you are on YouTube there is 2.4 million viewers who watch what I do. If you are on iTunes or Spotify or iHeartRadio, you can find me. I am just about being there. One thing I have realized, and I am sure way before the Internet happens because I was probably the first generation who had access to the Internet, you had to get out here and shake hands and kiss babies and campaign for business. A big part of it is that the tool has changed. That is what we need to do. Just get out here and be as present as we possibly can to help as many people as we possibly can. Hugh: You are passionate. It’s really hard to come back to what you said earlier, to be politically correct and honest. Be direct, be passionate. This podcast is called Orchestrating Success: Converting Your Passion to Profit. There is some substance underneath your passion. You got a direction. You have products. You’ve got value that you give people. I think it’s really important to move past the polite talk and to challenge people. You know what? You and I have talked about this before, but you’ve carefully screened people before you are willing to give them your time. Just because people give you money does not mean you have to engage with them. You are very careful in screening people and making sure it’s a good fit, which is very refreshing. You’re online and see so many people out there going, “Hire me, hire me, hire me, I’ll change your life.” Well, I’m sorry. That doesn’t work. We have to find people who are going to excel, who are really going to take value from what we have to offer. We are going to die someday. What are they going to say about us? What are we going to put on our tombstones or our little urn there? I want something profound. As we write, when I start working with people, I got this from my colleague Ed Bogle, he says, “What will they say at your funeral? What is your epitaph?” Dave, why do people need you? Dave: I think people need me because they are spending too much time listening to people who love them to death. Your mom is not going to tell you the truth because you come from her, and if she tells you that you fail, she is basically admitting to her failure. Your daddy just wants you to be happy and get out of his face so he can watch football. Your siblings don’t care one way or the other; they have their own problems and their own families. Your friends don’t mind you being well, but they don’t want you to do better than they are. So you have all these people around you who love you to death and don’t want to see you succeed, or they want you to succeed but they don’t know anyone in their family who has done that. My parents both were entrepreneurs to a certain extent. My father had a corner store with his brothers. My mom had a hair salon in Philadelphia. But my father was in law enforcement by trade, and my mother was a teacher by trade. I am one of the first full-time entrepreneurs of my generation in my family. I am the weirdo; I am the oddball. But if you go back three generations, my great-great-grandfather migrated here from India, and he opened himself up a barber shop. You have all of these different experiences, but people need me because I’m not going to lie to them. I don’t need your money. I don’t care about you emotionally. I’m married to a gorgeous woman. I have beautiful children. My mother loves me, and my father sits in an urn at my brother’s house. I’m good. I don’t need any more friends. I have the greatest friends anybody could ever imagine. So why am I doing this? Because I actually care. Sometimes, love does not show up with saying, “You know what? Here is a participation trophy just because you decided to suit up.” That’s not how this works. I am here to create champions. There is a champion inside of you that needs to be developed. I am not going to give you a trophy because you said, “Hey, I have a business. Come buy my stuff.” For what? Why should I part with my hard-earned money? Give me some reasons. That is why people need me. I am going to give you reasons to give your consumer base and your audience that you are so busy searching for and doing all the wrong things for, listening to these gurus. I am going to give you the tips to go get the audience that needs your service, that needs to see you, that needs for you to show up. I think passion needs to make a comeback. Passion is the new sexy. Hugh: Oh man. How do I call you every morning and get a shot in the arm? Wooo. Dave: You are going to have a sore arm after a while, brother. Hugh: A whole host of people who have checked in on Facebook, including our friend Joe who connected us. We record this podcast live for people listening on Orchestrating Success. We record it live at random, and people join us on Facebook. I’m blessed to be in this conversation with you, man. You have a manner about you that you connect with the listener with very specific points in very tangible information. Very tangible results face thinking. Let’s cut out the BS. Let’s get to the point. I like that. That is awesome. That is awesome. Who needs you? Why do they need you? Who is the best person to work with you? Dave: The best person to work with me is somebody who really is in one of two places. Either they are entrepreneurs currently but they’re struggling. Or they are at a certain level and can’t get past that. When I say entrepreneurs who are struggling, some of them have businesses that are doing well, or they have a little side hustle or hobby, but they haven’t figured out how to do that and break the chains of the cubicle matrix they are stuck in. I am here to show you how to realistically do this. I am not going to sit up here and do what most radical rebel coaches do and say, “Oh, go burn the boats. Go in there and quit today.” No, that’s stupid. You still have to eat. But if we have a six-month exit strategy where I am showing you, “This is where you ramp up your advertising. This is the message you need to convey. These are the types of videos you need to do. This is why, even though I don’t like Snapchat, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, any of these social media platforms, you need to be on them because you want to be where the people are.” I am here to show you these things that are my gifts. Listen, I don’t tell you how to be a fitness trainer. I am not a fitness trainer. Look at me, Hugh. I don’t know if you know this or not, but I like a sandwich. I live in cheesesteak land for a reason. It’s convenient to go grab one. I can pull one outside of my door and eat it right now. But what I am good at is identifying when you are making excuses and identifying how your unique selling proposition is going to change the lives of the people who hear it. That’s important. We need to understand that until we begin to get inside of ourselves, and what my good friend Les Brown calls our power voice, and have that resonate with people, people are going to lose. I’ll give you this. I get maybe a good 50 emails each week from people in South Africa, Amsterdam, Switzerland, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina saying, “I saw a video you did,” or “I heard a podcast you were on,” or “I saw this article about you, and I want to let you know that when I started doing some digging, you made me look at myself. Because of you, you helped me change my life.” But if I was arrogant, Hugh? What if I just sat back and said, “I am going to do the same thing I’ve been doing since I was nine years old. I am going to spin records and interview rappers. That is what I want to do.” If I did that, there would be a bunch of people who would not be living in their purpose. That would be selfish. It’s not about Hugh Ballou. It’s not about Dave Anderson, the Business Bully. It’s about who we are here to serve. Jesus wasn’t here for Jesus. Jesus was here for the people, for God to love the world. Moses was here to free slaves. David was here to kill Goliath and be king. You can’t do these things if you don’t show up. Martin Luther King, it wasn’t about the dream, it was about moving forward civil rights and debunking systemic white supremacy for black people and people of color and oppressed people in America. It’s not about the man; it’s about the message. It’s about making sure all the messengers who resonate with those particular messages can get out there. That’s why I’m here. Hugh: Wow. You know, you have this unique ability to focus on the essential messages. There is no noise in what you’re saying. It’s very strategic. I think people who qualify to work with you are quite blessed because you can impact their lives and then they can impact lots of other lives. It must be really satisfying to you to know that you impact a whole lot of people through the people that you empower. Am I right? Dave: Absolutely. My favorite client story is a woman named Kelly. I met Kelly at a business meeting. There were a bunch of entrepreneurs sitting around a round table, and I was asked to give some advice to these people. This woman says, “I have this business, but I am spending this money on this, that, and the other thing.” I don’t know what it is for you, Hugh, but my process, because I am working in my gifts, I black out. I will go on a stage and speak, and I will ask the presenter. Our friend Joe will tell you. I ask, “Was that good?” He’ll go, “Are you kidding me? Look at them. They’re happy.” I’m like, “What did I say?” He’s like, “What do you mean what did you say? You said this that and the other thing.” I’ll go back and watch the tape. Wow. It’s not me; it’s something inside of me that comes through me. I blacked out on this girl, and when I came to, my buddy tapped me on the shoulder and I broke out of whatever it was I was spitting at her. Her tears were just falling down her face; I felt so bad that I handed her a tissue. I said, “Look, I’m not here to hurt you, but I guarantee you that if you listen to me, you will make more money than you will ever make.” Sure enough, she went from having a business that was doing $800-900 a month to $10-20,000 a month selling lingerie for plus-size women. She did not realize her power. While that may seem like a very slow sub-niche of a niche market, there is a whole lot more women who are qualified as plus-size than there are who can fit in the Victoria’s Secret line. You have to have somebody come along and show you that. I did not come out of my mother’s womb knowing how to speak and tie my shoes. I learn those things. I am the son of a teacher, so I want to teach. I think that that’s impactful. When people get satisfied, when people are able to tell their bosses to jump off a bridge, they feel empowered. They are in control of themselves. They are not subject to all the many things that are out here in the world. They are able to really be free and breathe and spend time with their kids. I do what I do so I can take my kid to daycare and pick her up every day because I’ll be damned if either of my children don’t know that their daddy was there for them. That’s why I do this. I am not the only daddy or parent, I am not the only husband or wife out here who wants that for themselves. I am there to get those people, and those people will reach other people, and then at the end of the day, people will truly live in their purpose. That’s all I want out of life. I can die happy knowing that people have lived in their purpose because of some small thing I said or did. Hugh: Wow. I’ve clarified- I work with so many people who cannot articulate why people need them. You are very clear on your target market. You are very clear on the impact of your work. Those are what I find missing in a lot of thought leaders like you, people who are authors, coaches, consultants, speakers. There are a lot of people doing those things. Very few of those people can cut through to the chase like you’re doing right now. Do you realize how rare these gifts are? Dave: You know, I’m coming to that the longer I do this, the more I realize how rare it is. I am going to say this really quickly because this is your interview, not mine. There are a bunch of people out here who are frauds. There are a bunch of people who are snake salesmen or saleswomen. There are a bunch of people out here who are as fake as a $3 bill covered in honey mustard. I don’t know why people don’t do the research, but if you Google the Business Bully or Dave Anderson, you will find things. You will find that everything I am saying is true. I don’t have to lie because I don’t have good memory. I don’t. I know what it is that I do. The problem with this industry—Hugh, I am going to say it because you are too polite and kind, and maybe one day in a couple of years, I will be like you. But right now, I am full of fire and vinegar. The great thing about the Internet is that anybody can get on here and express themselves. The problem with the Internet is that anybody can come on here and express themselves. Any chucklehead can write a book and any dumb schmuck can build a website. Anybody can call themselves a coach. What happens is you and I, who are legitimate individuals, who actually give geometric and definitive results for our clients day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, get lumped in with the rest of these charlatans. Nobody wants to call them out. Hello, that day is over. I am calling you out when I see you. I don’t care. Most of you are not worth the paper you were printed on, and most of you ought to be ashamed of yourselves and should jump off a bridge immediately, with zero bungee cord, so that you can make room for those of us who are actually out here trying to impact people. I’m sorry. It’s not nice, but it’s the truth. Hugh: No, no. You don’t want to be polite. I’m sorry you think I’m polite because I’m not. I’m an equal opportunity offender. I’m just trying to be a good, faithful interviewer. But thank you. That’s a compliment. I do respect people. However, my favorite quote is by a Christian theologian, “Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” Dave: Amen. Hugh: I commonly do that in my keynotes. I like for people to be uncomfortable. That is where we are going to grow. That is where we’re going to grow. Tell us another story of somebody you worked with that really touched you, and they took your wisdom and did something significant. Give us another story. Dave: There was a kid I knew. Let’s call him Chuck. Chuck was a personal trainer. Chuck had amazing skills. He was handsome. He was smart. He was very talented in helping people achieve results with their bodies and nutrition, the whole nine. He was working for a company, and that company had him as a trainer, but he could only work so many hours. He couldn’t get into the gym after hours. He couldn’t work with clients. I built out a structure for him, and within 90 days, he quit his job and is making six figures, going on seven, helping high-end clients with their businesses. The reason we’re not working together right now is that there were certain things that took time. Because there were certain things that happened very quickly, he thought everything should happen very quickly. I said, “If you just hang in there, you will see something great.” He wouldn’t hang in there; he thought he could go off on his own. He is doing very well, don’t get me wrong. Once you feel like you’ve got what you need, cool. But be prepared to deal with that. He got what he needed, he left, and the next day, I was on national television. He hit me up and said, “I didn’t know.” I said, “You should have listened.” I believe in helping people do what they do. I’m not out to create an army of Dave Andersons. I wouldn’t want that. My wife would beg you to kill me if I did that. I’m a big believer in, like Les Brown said, if you have somebody that is fighting for their limitations, you let them keep them. Yes, he is making money. Yes, he is doing well. Could he be bigger? Yes. Could he have several bestselling books? Yes. Could he have had a growth in his online fitness program? Yes. But he chose not to. Even in success, sometimes a taste of success overpowers the hunger for a global domination perspective. I think that that’s important. I could sit up here and tell you success stories all day in that it is a success story. But I am also going to have to temper the success stories with the reality of what happens when people get a little too gung-ho. Hugh: Amen. Les Brown is a dear friend of mine as well. There is an interview I did with him on thenonprofitexchange.org. You might be interested in checking out thenonprofitexchange.org. I had to follow Les on stage twice in my career. We talked about that. He chuckles about it, Okay, yeah, Hugh Ballou, you’re on stage, and Les Brown was your opening act. He’s a brilliant man. We’re doing the Les Brown Foundation. He is going to have programs to prevent people from going back to prison over and over again. This is intense stuff, and I have learned that people listen to shorter podcasts more, so we’re going to taper it off here. You and I have a lot more conversations to have. Dave: Absolutely. Hugh: We will schedule things we can do together in tandem. It’s just inspiring to be in your presence. I’d like you to think about a closing tip or thought or challenge for people. So Dave, what do you want to leave with people? Dave: I would say this. Most people are not honest, especially with themselves. So I challenge you to be honest as to why it is that you’re not showing up in all the places you want to. Mostly, it’s not because you’re scared of the camera. It’s not because you’re worried about the way that you look. What you’re really worried about is there are a bunch of people who are going to show you, hear you, get that message, and you won’t be able to control the narrative on how they talk about you. We have to get over that. On the other side of people’s opinions is your destiny, is your passion, is your freedom, is your money. So I challenge you if you’re ready to make something happen. You can feel free to reach out at bit.ly/bullycall. I am very easy to find. Bit.ly/bullycall. Or you can text “business bully” to 31996. That is “Business bully” to 31996. Hugh: 31996. The word is business bully. Dave Anderson, you are brilliant. I am pleased to know you. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with my audience today. Dave: Thank you for allowing me to share. This has been very therapeutic. Now I am going to go murder a sandwich.

Debbi Mack interviews crime fiction author Dave White on the Crime Cafe podcast. The transcript is below, if you'd like to read it. Debbi: Hi! This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I am your host, Debbi Mack. Before I bring on my guest, I'll just remind you that The Crime Cafe 9 Book Set and The Crime Cafe Anthology are on sale at all major online retailers for $1.99 and $.99 respectively. So, just go to my website debbimack.com. That's debbimack.com and click on Crime Cafe and you'll find the links for the books, as well as how to subscribe to this podcast. And with that, I'd like to introduce now, it is with great pleasure that I introduce now my guest, Dave White; the highly acclaimed Dave White. Dave: Hello. Debbi: Thanks for being here Dave. It's great to have you on. Dave: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this for a while. We've been talking about this for a while, so this is nice. Debbi: This is awesome! I'm so glad you could be here because I've seen you so often at conferences and I'm such a shy person, I don't know why I didn't just walk up to you and say, “Hi Dave, I'm Debbi”. Dave: I'm shy too. It takes a lot for me to introduce myself to people, so I get it. I understand. Hi Debbi! Debbi: Hi Dave! And you're from New Jersey. I am originally from New York, so that's all the more reason why would should know each other. Dave: Exactly, exactly. Debbi: So, you're the author of the sixth book so far series, correct? The Jackson Donne books. Dave: Right, there are five Jackson Donne books and one standalone called Witness to Death. Debbi: Oh, Okay! That's a Jackson Donne also then? Dave: No, Witness to Death is a stand….wait, now I gotta count my books. There are six books total and five Donne. Debbi: Ok, five Donne done. Dave: Yes, exactly! Debbi: So, tell me a little bit more about the character Jackson Donne. Dave: Jackson Donne is a, we can go through a long history here. He's a former private investigator. In the first novel, When One Man Dies, he was a private investigator, mourning the death of his fiancé and asked to solve a hit-and-run where one of his close drinking buddies was killed. And from there, the series kind of grew because Donne clashed with his former cop partner, Bill Martin, several times throughout the series and Martin kind of became an arch enemy for a couple of the books. Since then, Martin took Donne's private eye license, got it taken away, Donne kind of became a freelancer and tried to go back to college and he was very much like, you know they pull me back in. Every time he thinks he's out of the private eye or the crime business he gets pulled back in. He's been on the run to Vermont at one point. He was in prison. He's had quite the five-book life. Debbi: Oh my goodness! I was going to ask you about his journey as a character. It sounds like he's had a rather rough one. Dave: Yeah! Debbi: I think of this right away. His fractious relationship with the police. What was it that caused that rift between himself and the police? Dave: In the books, Donne was a narcotics agent with…there was a New Brunswick police narcotics committee I guess you would call it as part of the police force and they were corrupt. They were stealing drugs, they were doing drugs, they were skimming money off the top anytime they busted someone up and what Donne finally realized was he was going down this dark hole, he became a drug addict (that sort of thing), so he turned in the narcotics force; everybody except his partner, Bill Martin, who he kind of let off easy. He kind of destroyed the narcotics force, but Martin was able to keep his job. The rest of them went to prison and Donne left and become a private investigator. So that's kind of what started it because now all the cops kind of hate him for turning in these guys and Martin really holds a grudge because...

Michael: Hello everyone. This is Michael Gross and James Cordier of OptionSellers.com. We are here with your July OptionSeller TV Show. James, welcome to the show this month. James: Thank you, Michael. Always glad to be here. Michael: We have a pretty full slate this month, so we’re going to jump right into things. First thing to talk about this month, obviously, is the FED rate hike coming down. It hiked another quarter point in June. So, that’s going to have a different type of effect on commodities. James, I know you talked about it in your weekly video, but maybe just cover that a little bit right now for our viewers and what that might mean for commodities markets. James: Okay. Most recently, interest rates have been, here in the United States, pegged at zero. With this latest quarterly rise we are slightly off of zero- somewhere between half and one percent. The quarter point rise really wasn’t a big surprise, certainly, but what Janet Yellen specified was the rollback of the incredible amount of cash and bonds that the government is holding. This rollback of the size of what the government is holding is just incredible – it’s some 3.5 trillion dollars and we’re going to see them start to sell that back into the market. Michael: So, how would that affect say… the first thing you think about when you think of interest rates is probably the U.S. dollar. How is that going to play out, do you see, as far as its affect on commodities? James: Well, as we effectively went into quantitative easing, as you know, some 8 or 9 years ago, the talk of the town was “We’re going to have an incredible amount of inflation, we’re going to have inflation, and we’re going to have infrastructure spending creating inflation”. A lot of people weren’t familiar with quantitative easing or what that meant to interest rates. Basically, a lot of people would put commodities into their portfolio. Someone who has never traded commodities before, thought that having gold or oil or something like this as an investment because of quantitative easing thought that would be the way to go because, certainly, interest rates at zero was going to spur a great growth worldwide and inflation. It simply didn’t pan out that way. Now, rolling back the balance sheet of the federal government from 3.5 trillion dollars to 3, then 2.5, then 2, then 1.5 is going to reverse this thinking for the majority of the people who are looking for inflation hedges. The inflation hedge is probably going to be not so popular going forward. As a matter of fact, not only not having an inflation hedge in your account or in your portfolio, but the fundamental factors that create inflation aren’t with us anymore. So, we don’t have 0% interest rates, we don’t have quantitative easing, we have that rolling back, and a time where inflation never really actually took place, clearly everyone is very familiar with what happened to China the last 7 or 8 years with the infrastructure spending. That’s done. That’s complete. Without quantitative easing and without 0% interest rates, the need for investors to put gold or oil in their account just haphazardly just to own it as an inflation hedge, we think that that time has come. So, gold and silver and crude oil will rally on its own accord, but as far as simply people buying it, hedge funds, private investors, we think that’s in the 9th inning and that’s likely wrapping up. Michael: Of course, we have better ways to take advantage of commodities prices other than buying them outright, as most of our viewers know. What we’re going to point out to those of you watching and listening, we talk often about how commodities are diversified and they are uncorrelated to equities and interest rates and that type of thing, especially the way we approach them or you would approach them as an options sellers, because, yes, when James is talking now about interest rates and it’s affect on inflation, that’s a bigger macro-type issue. That doesn’t mean that the individual fundamentals of these commodities aren’t still important and aren’t still a driving force in what’s moving them. If you’re trading commodities you want to be familiar with these macro factors, as well, because they can put a head wind or a tail wind depending on what side of the market you’re on. That’s why we talk quite a bit about them. We’re going to switch things up a little bit this month. We’re going to do our lesson portion first because we have a couple markets here that the lesson applies to. We want to review the strategy first so you understand it and then we’re going to talk a little bit about a couple of markets that we think are excellent opportunities for applying it. That strategy, of course, is the strangle, the option strangle, which is selling a call on one side of the market and a put on the other side of the market - one of our favorite strategies here. James, maybe you just want to briefly cover that for our viewers for how a strangle actually works. James: Certainly. I think most of us who are following along and have been trading or investing in commodities or stocks for a period of time, we’re dating ourselves here slightly, but of course the great thing I like talking about, I know I’ve heard you say it as well, Michael, but it’s The Price is Right. The person guessing the window that the car or the showcase or something is going to be inside, basically, we are playing The Price is Right. When suggesting a strangle, we are identifying fair valued markets. From time to time, the idea that crude oil is about to make a large rally or a great fall, usually oil and gold are generally trading exactly at their fair value. Basically, what we’re doing is we are identifying where the market might be over the next 6-12 months. If we see the gold market, per say, trading around $1,250 right now, and we think it’s fairly valued, what we are going to do is put a strangle around that market. How you do that is by selling a call option way above the market, selling a put option at extremely low levels below the market, and expecting it to stay inside that parameter. For example, the gold market, there’s still gold bulls out there. Whether quantitative easing is over or not, there’s still gold bulls out there. You might sell an $1,800 or $1,900 call above the market, at the same time you would be selling a put. That would be the lower end of the bracket that you’re putting around the option strangle and possibly selling a $900 or $950 put under gold. Basically what you’re doing is you’re saying gold is going to stay inside of a $900 price range for the next 6-12 months. Now, that sounds like an extremely wide window, and that’s because it is. We’re talking about selling puts and calls some 40-50% above and below the market, and all we have to do is see gold stay inside that band and 6-9 months later these options are worthless and we’ve collected money on both sides. Michael: James, something too I think our viewers would be interested to know about is we have a lot of stock options sellers, maybe you’re selling index options, and you’re thinking, “Well, I do that but it has to stay in a fairly narrow range for me to make money”, whereas if you’ve never traded futures before, you talk about sideways market but you use that term loosely because the range we can sell these options the market can do a whole lot of things. It can go up for a long time or it can go down for a long time and trade at a fairly wide range, and you and I call it sideways because we’re so used to those big ranges, but to somebody unfamiliar with futures they may say, “Oh the thing is screaming up”… Yes, but it’s still far away from our strike, so that’s probably a bigger difference they would have to get used to. Do you agree with that? James: These $25 and $50 moves in gold, or these $2-$3 moves in crude oil, they make great TV., especially when they’re talking to someone on the floor and they’re hearing pandemonium going on. “What’s going on down there, John?” “Well, gold’s up $25 because of this or that”, and people are thinking “Oh my goodness, I need to get into this” or “Thank goodness that I did puts instead of calls, or what have you”. $800 or $900 trading range in gold, these parameters are likely not going to be seen tested, much less touched. Quantitative easing rallied gold up to $1,900 an ounce. That was an all-time high. These levels, in my opinion, won’t be seen for years. On the downside, being long gold from $900 or $950 is a very great value and we don’t see the market falling down to levels like that with the stock market trading at all-time highs and people talking about diversification. Part of that will be buying gold, because when the stock market does finally take a dip, and certainly it’s not a matter of when, but when it does take a dip gold is probably going to come back into flavor, but without inflation it’s not coming up too high. Michael: Obviously a good article on the blog James wrote this month about that exact strategy, some of the bullish and bearish factors affecting gold and why we feel it should remain in those ranges. Obviously, if you haven’t guessed, our first market this month is gold, so James is already kind of explained the strategy at what we’re looking at there. With the current hike in rates, the current strength in gold, James thinks, is going to mitigate/stay in those ranges. Another thing we should probably talk about, James, is a lot of people when they hear us talking about strangles, and you write about them a lot or talk about them a lot because it is one of our core strategies here, is do you put the thing all on at once or do you wait until it rallies and sell the call or wait until it falls and sell the put? How do you know when to do that? That’s a strategy called legging-in. It’s a little more advanced for more advanced traders, but I know it’s something you like to do at times. Can you maybe just talk briefly about that or how you approach that? James: That’s interesting, Michael. Approximately 2-3 weeks ago, just as the month of June was beginning, gold did have a rally. It tested up towards $1,300. We really saw a lot of resistance at $1,300 and we did start legging on gold strangles at that time. We were able to sell gold calls even higher than you can now because gold was on a bit of a rally. As long as you’re legging on a position, if you feel that if you don’t get the other side of a strangle on and you’re still good with the investment, legging on is a great idea. When gold rallied up to $1,300 recently, we were selling gold calls with both hands. Not that I knew the market was going to fall $50, which it seems like it has over the last week or two, but we’re quite confident it wasn’t going to the levels that we saw. Now with gold back and down about $40-$50 recently, we are applying our puts to our strangles, so we did successfully leg in to this gold strangle that we’re most recently involved with. As long as you are able to live with one side or the other, if you don’t get the other side on and you’re comfortable with that, legging on is a great idea. When we were putting on our calls here recently, the lowest a put we could sell was $1,000 and now we can sell the $900-$950’s, so we were rewarded in legging on this position. Generally, commodities will trade. Technically, gold is doing extremely well right now, and that gave us a window to make our strangle some $50 wider than it would have been had we just put the position on. Michael: A lot of people watching are used to hearing us talk about bushels of soybeans or bags of coffee. It switched to macro here this month and it may seem a little bit different, but when you’re trading gold that is really what it is. It’s kind of a different animal than a lot of these other commodities. You have a lot of public interest in gold, everybody has an opinion on gold, but as an option seller that helps because the public interest comes in and they usually like to buy options. Would you agree? James: Michael, so many investors right now are looking at diversifying away from the stock market, and that is not a call on what the stock market might do, it’s just that a lot of investors, I know you talk to perspective clients all the time and I speak to clients myself, and that is the keyword everyone is talking about right now: diversification. People delving into commodities often want to buy options. That’s their best way to get involved with it. A lot of them are newbies, of course, we have a special relationship with our clearing firm and we actually sell a lot of our options to banks, who have extremely deep pockets. Often when we are making a sale of a particular commodity available, a bank might hear about it and they might want to purchase a lot of these options from us, so we both get the excitement of the public to buy our options, as well as large banks. We mainly deal with banks in New York and London. They’re taking the other sides of our market lately, and it really gives us a great deal of liquidity as long as the conversation about things going on in the administration and things going on globally, the debt in China, constant demand for commodities, and lot of these are option buyers. Certainly, we are very happy to have them. Michael: That’s a question we get often is “who is on the other side buying these options?” That’s a long list of people, but a lot of times it is banks and I doubt they’re buying them as an outright long strategy. Often times, these are part of complex spreads or hedges they might be putting on, but they’ve certainly got a lot of liquidity. We have a special guest that’s going to be on the show here later that’s going to talk a little bit about that with us; however, in the meantime, let’s finish our discussion here about strangles. If you would like to learn more about strangling the market, you can go to the blog. We do have our seminar videos there. Also, don’t miss James’ article last month on the gold market, The Golden Brackets. It’s exactly what we were talking about here. That’s also available on the blog. If you’d like to learn more about the strangles strategy, I do recommend our book, The Complete Guide to Option Selling: Third Edition. You can get that at OptionSellers.com/book. James, let’s move in to our second market this month. This is a market we’ve been talking about now for a couple months. Last month, crude oil was trading in the low 50’s. The media was ablaze with the story of how OPEC’s cuts and how high oil would go, and you were saying “It’s going down. It’s going into the low 40’s”, and here we are today at $43 a barrel. The market has come down and now we’re thinking of a different type of option strategy again. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about that. James: Michael, very interesting point that you make. We were bearish crude oil when it was trading around 50-52 recently. It is headed to the low 40’s right now, or certainly it seems that way. You mentioned something very interesting a moment ago. What we do is we count barrels of oil and we count pounds of coffee and we count pounds of cocoa. Just laying out a fundamental analysis and a fundamental reason for getting into the market. When OPEC announced cuts, what people didn’t talk about then was the fact that they amped up production the weeks prior to this taking place. What that inevitably did was it locked in production at all-time record highs at a time when demand for oil right now is slipping slightly, basically because cars around the world no longer get 15 miles to the gallon, they get 30 miles to the gallon. The demand from China seems to be slowing just slightly. The main player in oil right now is the Permian Basin in the United States. Rate counts have doubled in the past year, and we’re going to be awash in oil, we think, in the 3rd and 4th quarter of this year. We are looking at crude oil starting to trade seasonally again. We mentioned this a couple of TV shows ago that the crude oil market, the seasonal trade this year, got hijacked by the production cut announcement in OPEC. We see crude oil returning to the seasonalities that we’re so accustomed to, and that is selling oil in June and July and selling it in December and January. We will likely be doing that again this year. The crude oil market is probably going to base out near 40, it’s going to rally near 50, and this window and this bracket around oil is likely going to be staying with us for quite some time. We know that, at least we feel we do, by counting barrels of oil and understanding the market. So many investors were piling into crude oil recently and the production cuts. Simply knowing what the fundamentals are and not watching headlines allows us to be a little bit ahead of the market. If you have option selling to produce a position for you, some 50% out-of-the-market sets up a nice scenario for us. Michael: That’s pulling out, too. We talked last month about oil returning to its seasonality. Here we are at the beginning of July and all through June and crude oil did nothing but come down. I mean, it’s almost aligning with the seasonal chart again. Just like we discussed last week, the energy markets are some of the most seasonal markets on the board. Nothing guaranteed, of course, but just because of the cyclical nature of demand, it seems to match up- it’s definitely a factor you want to look at if you’re trading energy markets. James, we talked about the media’s effect on crude oil. Last month, they were all about OPEC and talking about potential rallies in the market and they are ignoring things like seasonals. I don’t know if they actually don’t know about them or they are looking for a story, but here we are and now the crude is falling. I’m watching CNBC this morning and Cramer’s on there talking about oil in the 30’s. Now they are bearish and they can’t get bearish enough. You’re talking about, really, looking at a strategy similar to what we talked about in gold, where we may be looking to trade both sides of a possibly range-bound market. Is that correct? James: It is correct. Herd mentality in stocks, even more so in commodities, just takes place like you wouldn’t believe. The same absolute experts, the talking heads on TV, so bullish in oil when it was at 55 and 60, and it’s certainly going to go to 65 and 70. These exact same experts are now talking about oil going into the low 30’s. I think, sometimes, you could just watch CNBC, especially CNBC, and just do the opposite of what everyone’s doing, because when everybody is bullish, you can get one analyst and one expert all saying the same thing, “My gosh- oil is certainly going up. How high is it going to go? I’m not sure.” You can close your eyes and sell calls when that happens. Now, when the market is falling possibly into the 30’s this fall, that will be the time to get bullish for next summer. I think last TV show we did, I talked about passing not to where the market is but where it’s expected to be. This winter, when we have extremely low prices, we’re going to want to sell puts to the June and July time frame. Michael: Do you like the strategy of strangling the market right now? James: We strangled the market some 6 months ago when OPEC had made its announcement. We went long from 33 and short from 76. We love that position. Those positions are basically retired now. We’ve collected some 75%-80% on both of those positions. What we’re going to look at doing is that the fall has already begun. We just dropped practically $10 here in the last 2 months for oil. Our next position will be strangling the oil. We will be looking at legging on this position, and we will probably be putting our puts on as the first leg and then waiting for the market to rally some later on and putting on a call position. We will be strangling oil. We’ll be strangling oil probably for the next 2-3 years. We think we can see that far out. We think we know what the band is going to be. Right now, we’ve had a $9 decline on oil real rapidly. We could probably see it fall another $3-$4 and we’re going to start getting our calculators and pens out and starting writing some puts. Michael: So, you think to a point there, and it’s a good point that we should probably make, because the point you’re talking about is a longer-term investment based approach. Some of the viewers watching today are probably traders, and there is a difference there between trader and investor. You’re talking about, “Well, we will leg this position on in the fall and then we’ll add another leg to it in the spring.” Those are long-term type projections, where some people used to trading options are thinking, “Well, what can I do today? What can I do today to make a profit by the end of the month?” That’s not really how we approach it. You can gear option selling to be that way if you want, but it’s really not an investment based approach that you have really shifted to and had a lot of success with. James: You know, we don’t consider ourselves traders. We take a fundamental view on about 8 different commodities and we make positions as investments. The market does have gyrations, the stock market does, the commodities market will certainly gyrate from time to time, and we need those to pump up premiums on both puts and calls. The key to the fact is, if you’re a fundamental trader, you are able to stay with your position when the market has a small move against your position. We sell options, both in time and in price, much further out than probably most anyone does. We want to be invested in our positions and not simply be trading them. When you are selling options in commodities some 40%-50% out-of-the-money, granted it might be 6-12 months out, much further than most people would every consider selling options, especially in commodities, people say to us, “James, that leaves a long time in the market for you to be wrong.” We look at it as that gives us a lot of time to be right. So often, when you sell a short-dated option, the market will make a short move against you and knock you out of your position. Lo and behold, 30 days later, the market was doing exactly what you thought it would do, except you’re not holding your short option anymore. We get paid to wait. If you know what the fundamentals are and if you’re applying them in long-dated options, being paid to wait is much easier and it gives you the ability to be patient. Michael: Great point to make. You talk about that a little bit in this month’s newsletter. We got questions about timeframe and what’s a good timeframe to sell options. That’s addressed in this month’s newsletter. The July Option Sellers will be out on July 1st. You can look for that in your e-mail box as well as your hard copy mailbox if you’re a subscriber. We’re going to take a little bit of a detour off of our usual schedule for our show this month. We brought in a very special guest for you. He’s going to bring you some different trading insights, and we will be back in just a moment with him. All right, everyone, we are back. We have a very special guest with us today. With us is Mr. Dave Show. Dave is one of the floor traders that actually has been a tremendous help to OptionSellers.com. He gets our orders filled up to Chicago board to trade with a lot of our orders up there in the agricultural markets. Dave, welcome to the show. Dave: Thank you very much. It’s nice to be here. Michael: One of the things we’re going to talk about is, as a floor trader, Dave has some unique insight in option trading, getting fills, and how orders are actually getting through the system. One of the things we’ve talked about, a big topic, is electronic trading. Is it going to make floor traders go the way of box TV sets? We don’t necessarily feel that’s the case. There are still some benefits, substantial in our case, we feel, of still trading through the floor. Dave, maybe you can talk a little bit about that and what do you see happening with that? Dave: I’d be happy to, Michael. The floor trading still exists because there is a marketplace and a need for it. Electronic trading certainly has its place. It’s used substantially in our markets, but especially in the options markets, which there are so many permutations and different strategies to ploy. It sounds very difficult to get that expressed on a screen and to get a response, a bid or offer, on that. Whereas in the pit, we have several hundred people on the floor that are participating and have instant access to whatever quote you’d like to get. It’s usually a best bid invest offer. It’s not a feeler kind of bid or offer. We have huge backing down there with these traders, different banks and different huge trading companies, and they keep their traders there to make the best market. As a trader and investor, you may wish to ask for a market at a strangle, spread, call, or whatever. You put down the screen and you wait for your RFQ to come back. You call the floor, you call your broker, and he can get you, in 3 or 4 seconds, a market that is tight and is deep and is transparent. So, if you have size to do, to move many hundreds or thousands sometimes of transactions, it’s much more efficient to do it that way in the pit where you get it all done at a specified price and at one time and the trade is completed. James: That’s an interesting point. Quite often, we will be selling some strangles and some outright positions on the screen and it doesn’t seem like there’s that much volume on the floor until the screen trade actually takes place. I know, from time to time, we will bait the market, it seems. We will have a certain market to trade on the screen, maybe 100 lots, and then I will be speaking to you and I’ll ask you, “Does the floor see this trade? What do they think about it and can they help us move some size?” Can you speak to that? Dave: James, that is very much often the case. We’ll have customers that when they need to move a large amount, they will tickle the screen with a bid or offer. They will also simultaneously put it in the pit. The screen has a much larger audience, granted, and there will be someone out there starting to lift the bid or take the offer and get your order filled. Once our pit community sees that, they will generally, as a mass feeding, come out and take on whatever we have to match the screen so that it stays with us instead of going on the screen. Michael: Dave, one of the things we talk about and investors ask us there at home is, they’re trading 2 or 3 lot options on the screen and we talk about an economy of scale where instead of doing that they say, “well, I can’t get a fill.” Yet, if you want to sell a thousand it is easier to get a fill. Can you kind of speak to that or how that affects it with you? Dave: Absolutely. There is a bid and offer for every market out there. Generally, it’s a certain range depending on how liquid the market is. We all see the parameters that the world is putting out on a screen. We, as traders in our pit, will generally, as a rule, be able to get inside that current bid or offer you see on the screen to make a tighter more liquid market, because if people in our pit are not trading 2’s or 3’s, they are equipped to trade 2 or 3 thousand. They are very well capitalized and they have management teams upstairs in the offices handling what they are doing in the pit. Any trade that is done in the pit, we’ll generally admittedly go up to the office and they’ll take it from there, and they’ll spread and hedge that off somewhere in the outside markets. Michael: Dave, just in closing, in your professional opinion, you’ve been on the floor since 1980? So, you’ve been on the floor a long time. Do you think there will remain a place for floor traders in the next 10-20 years or do you see it going electronic? Dave: That’s a long time, Michael. Let’s talk near-term. I think near-term there is certainly a place for us. The exchange has never stated they intend on doing anything but stay open. We provide a service, especially for the larger markets, and we expect to be there for many years to come. Michael: That’s good. James, I know you and I, we still rely on those floor traders and really think they can still give us an advantage. Wouldn’t you agree with that? James: It’s interesting, Michael, there are people probably trying to trade 2 and 3 lots. Like Dave mentioned a moment ago, we’re trying to trade 2 and 3 thousand lots. Wherever we can increase the volume and increase the liquidity, that’s something we’re always going to try and take advantage of. I know that when we’re selling options in the grains, Dave has probably brought more liquidity to the ability for us to do that than any other way to do it. We hope the floor stays around for a little bit longer, hopefully a lot longer, and we’ll transition if we have to, but right now we are glad to have you on the floor. Dave: Thank you. I’m glad to be there. Michael: Let’s hope he stays there. Well, everybody, thank you for tuning in to this month’s show. Just a reminder, if you’re interested in opening an account with us, we are fully booked for July and we are into our waiting list for August. If you are interested, feel free to call Rosemary. It’s 800-346-1949. She can get you schedule for our remaining consultations, which are still taking place in July. If you’re interested in learning more about our accounts first, you can request a discovery pack online at www.OptionSellers.com/Discovery. Have a great month of option selling. We will talk to you in 30 days. Thank you.

Commercial Lender Training provided by the Small Business Finance Institute with Founder Charles Green Interview. Hi everybody Dave Sullivan here for the Credit Guy TV with special guest... Charles Green of the Small Business Finances Institute Dave: Charles thanks for reaching out to me on LinkedIn, I have really enjoyed our relationship. You have found a niche, something that the commercial banking industry needs. Tell me a little bit more about that. Charles: Dave, I have been a career banker since the late seventies, when I joined the industry, I was given about eight weeks of training in my first two years of employment. I was really not worth much to the company that hired me, but after the S&L crisis internal training programs for most banks sort of went away and it's never really come back, although there have been some really good times since. I started a training operation to create content to train commercial lenders the fundamental skills needed to evaluate, fund and close commercial loans across all different product types.  We plan to deliver this through streaming video across the nation. Dave: Training is so important and has been overlooked in the commercial space. The mortgage lender has really been trained to death today and commercial lending is ignored completely.  There is a real need for this don't you agree? Charles: I do, mortgage brokers are licensed and that gives them particularly standards that they have to adhere to.  They can be evaluated in a simpler way against those standards.  In commercial lending, you have a diversity of product lines you've got regulated banks and non-regulated finance companies that provide different financing products.  It can be a big sea of people floating around with different kinds of experience with products to offer, that just sort of gets lost to them in the fray and customers suffer consequences, because commercial customers don't always know who can help them and the person that they find might not know where to send them if they can't deal with the situation. Dave: Many times commercial loan officers are really thrust into that position with little or no training. I think this product is very important and I flew down to Atlanta to meet with you to record a session on business credit.  I was very impresses with the professionalism of the organization you have down there, talk a little bit about the teachers that you found for the program as well as your background.               Charles: I have been away from active banking for almost five years, so I had adopted the job title of "Recovering Banker". I still retained quite a bit of this knowledge from my thirty five year career. I have also have recruited a lot of other leaders who have different perspective and experience in particular credit lines like: Asset based lending Commercial real estate Government guaranteed products In addition, we're putting together a group of professionals who haven't been lending the money but they've been supporting the lending industry through providing their professional services for the due diligence. You're joining us was one such instance where you're an expert on credit data, credit histories and how the FICO(r) score stacks up.  How credit scores can be accurate or sometimes not so accurate for business owners. Explaining these kinds of lessons, giving commercial lenders more context around the job that they have to do.  Similarly we have been working with a real estate appraiser and an environmental engineer that is going to help teach bankers how to evaluate property in terms of the environmental risk.  We have an attorney creating content about the different closing functions, the different contracts banks use, the different issues that can arise with the property title and so forth. Dave: I think that is all key information and to have it all in a concise video format. I don't think it has been done before for the commercial lender and I'm very excited to be a part of it. Charles how can people find the products or take a look at what you have to offer? Charles: Our website SBFI.ORG that stands for Small Business Finance Institute SBFI.ORG and there's a tab there that says “lender training” just follow the navigation from there to see everything we offer. Dave: Thank you so much for being on the blog today, do you want to give out your email address so people can contact you directly? Charles: Certainly director@SBFI.ORG thank you so much Dave. Commercial Lender Training provided by the Small Business Finance Institute Never Pay A Collection If you want to see more videos about credit and credit scoring check these out at www.thecreditguy.tv. If  you are a mortgage lender please share this on your Facebook or LinkedIn page.   If you have any questions, leave them down below I'd be happy to answer them. 7 secrets of a perfect credit score Go to www.getloanready.com to find other ways to improve your credit score. I'm Dave Sullivan here for the credit guy TV so you with a little bit me we're going to change the credit industry thank you Why is my credit score different when a lender pulls it? 90% of Top Lenders Use FICO® Scores

Mitch Kider was our special guest at the MMLA conference this year. I just want to say thank you to Mitch for spending sometime with me. (I apologize for the lighting.) Mitch Kider Interview, Edited for read ability  Dave: Hello everyone Dave Sullivan here for the MMLA membership committee with… Mitch: Mitch Kider with The WBK law firm located in Washington D.C. Dave: Thank you for coming out to northern Michigan. This is a beautiful part of the state. We certainly like to have you out here. The October third TRID implementation date is coming up, what kind of things can we anticipate whenTRID comes to fruition? Mitch: TRID comes to fruition October third, lenders need to be ready for it. I think that it will take some time to get used to it, quite frankly but I think the regulators atThe CFPB as long as the lender is acting in good faith, and making good faith effort, I think they will be fine. I think it will be quite some time before the CFPB begins to really scrutinize it and audit for it. Dave: What advice would you give mortgage lenders to survive this craziness that is going on with the CFPB? Mitch: There is a lot of craziness going on with the CFPB. They certainly have a bent that leans away from lenders they think that mortgage servicers for example are not fully doing their job and originators have some origination problems as well. To survive in today’s environment you have to have an excellent compliance management system and you need to make compliance your number one priority. Dave: It really comes back to how much of an effort, how much time and resources lenders are dedicating to their compliance effort. Mitch: That’s absolutely right, it is the effort, the resources. It is making sure that everyone in the company is a part of that as well. Dave: I think many times as lenders go through their day they forget that everyone in the organization needs to know what the compliance policies are. Mitch: That’s absolutely right, but believe me when the CFPB does a supervisory examination, they talk to everyone from the top to the bottom. They need to be sure everyone understand their role in compliance. Dave:  One of the things we talked about today was the RESPA interpretation by the CFPB and their interpretation the 40 year old RESPA laws. What should lenders be concerned about? Mitch: It comes down to this, for a period of 40 years RESPA section 8 has been interpreted the same way. That is 8c especially 8c2 is an exemption to 8a, as long as you are paying someone that is referring business to you. If you are paying them for the value of other goods or facilities or if you are paying them for bonafide compensation for services they provide, then you are ok. The CFPB says no. If in fact you are getting referrals the CFPB says that you cannot be in a business relationship with that party. One has to tread very lightly over here, and recognize that the CFPB believes that any payments you make, even if they are legitimate payments, for other services rendered that they are being made to parties that are referring business to you, it violates section 8 of RESPA. Dave: Thank you for coming out Mitch, how can people reach out to you or follow you? Mitch: I would love for people to follow me, you can go to my websitewww.thewbkfirm.com or email at kider@thewbkfirm.com Dave: Are you on Twitter? Mitch: I am on twitter, my handle is @mitchkider Dave: Thank you.