Podcasts about david thanks

Gratitude is placing ourselves into the hands of God, trusting in His providence and allowing Him to guide us where He wills (without asking us for permission or our understanding His purpose). It is like having a bucket of cold water dumped over our heads. We are suddenly awakened and our whole being is set on edge.  We realize in the words of Saint Isaac the Syrian that gratitude and faith are often not what we imagine or want them to be. To show gratitude to He who is crucified Love means that we embrace that Love in our lives, are driven by the same desires as Christ, and willing to bear affliction patiently and with joy.  In the Scriptures, we hear the surprising words: “He was made perfect by what he suffered“. We see the perfection of love and the mercy of the kingdom most fully when Christ allows himself to be broken and poured out on the cross. Life allows himself to be swallowed up by death.  From the perspective of human understanding, it seems to be absurdity and failure. Despite our acknowledgment and the celebration of the resurrection of Christ - trampling death by death, so that those in the tombs might be granted life, we do not want this reality to shape our experience of life in the world. Saint Isaac is not presenting us with anything different from the gospel and yet our almost infinite capacity for rationalization makes us avoid affliction at every cost and become resentful when we find it ever present in our lives.  The kingdom of heaven is within. Salvation is now. The life that we are called to live and the love that we are to embody has been freely given to us. Not to embrace this life and love, not to allow it to shape the very essence of our lives is the height of ingratitude. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:01:11 Fr. Charbel Abernethy: Page 120 01:10:34 Catherine Opie: I think that we have been indoctrinated into only being grateful when things go the way we want, I read a story about St Dominic that he took great pains to build a church on a hill. When it was finally complete the local king demanded it be torn down stone by stone until nothing was left. St Dominic upon finding this out declared joyously "Praise the Lord!". This really struck me deeply because it is so the antithesis of the attitude I was brought up in where we bemoan and curse God for misfortune and only are grateful when we get what we want. Or we see relationship with God only as a place to demand what we want. 01:10:56 Kathleen: Tall order. Very difficult. 01:11:35 Maureen Cunningham: Wow it hard but many rewards . That we can not see 01:11:36 Kathleen: It's a decision one makes with complete awareness of the situation at hand 01:11:47 Rebecca Thérèse: Sometimes there's no option but to suffer. Uniting one's suffering to the redemptive suffering of Christ gives it purpose. 01:12:36 Art iPhone: Reacted to "I think that we have…" with

Anytime there is any sort of issue in your business that's not quite going the way it should, don't sabotage your sales success. Instead, just ask yourself, is this because the process that I have in place is not working? Or is it because the person who is supposed to be following the process just didn't do it? David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co-host Kevin Rosenquist and will be discussing How Businesses Sabotage their Sales. Welcome back, Kevin. Kevin: Good to see you, David. How you been? David: Been doing great. It's good to see you too. Kevin: Yeah, for sure. I'm excited to talk about this. So, sabotaging sales, what do you mean by that, when you say businesses are sabotaging their sales? David: You know, I had some experiences recently and I'm like, did they intend to do this? Is this what they were trying to do? Did they set out to do this when they were doing it. One of the experiences I had recently was I was going to buy a pair of earbuds, right? And there's a particular brand of earbuds that I like. It's not the ones that would normally leap to mind. It's another one. But a good brand, they work really well. And I got a text from them saying that they were having a sale. And I was like, okay, cool. Maybe I'll buy an extra pair of earbuds even though I don't need them. And so in the link that they sent me, they said, click through and you get 35% off. I'm like, cool. So I click through the link and it takes me to a picture of what I think are the earbuds that they're selling, and it says 20% off, with a certain promo code. And I'm like, okay, well I'm looking for the 35% off, but there was a different promo code in the text, so I'm like, okay, I'll just plug the correct promo code and it'll work. Right? So finally figured out how to do that. No, it said this is not applicable to this particular product. So I'm like, okay. But they had some sort of chat person or chat being or chat AI, I don't know what it was. Kevin: Chat AI agent. Yeah. David: Yeah. Something not quite what I thought it might be, but. I thought, okay, well I'll ask the question. And none of the answers that I got were relevant to what I was asking. And I was like, I'm here. I've got my wallet open. Kevin: I'm ready to buy! David: I want to buy exactly the thing that you sent me a text to, and you're making it hard. Why are you making it so hard? Kevin: Yeah. David: And it replied quickly to a lot of questions and then, it was just like ghosting. It's like, okay, I didn't hear anything back. So I'm like, I'm like, are you AI? And I didn't get an answer. I thought if it was AI, it would at least tell me it was AI. So, I didn't get to order that day. The next day I tried again. I actually reached out to their customer support, had another non-experience there. But eventually I was able to figure out that apparently there were two sets of this earbud in a similar color, and the link took you to the wrong one and applied the wrong link. And so that's why it was saying it was wrong. And I didn't care about the color. I was like, I wouldn't have normally bought this color, but it was 35% off, so I was like... Kevin: Yeah, yeah, whatever. David: Right. Kevin: Earbuds. David: Anyway, long story short is what should have taken three to five minutes and been an exceptional experience took a whole lot longer and diminished my passion for this particular product. So I thought, you know, there are a lot of businesses that do this sort of thing, and the words that leap to my mind is that they're sabotaging their own sales, which is kind of the purpose of this conversation. Not for me to vent, but for us to talk about what businesses can do about it. Kevin: Well, I'm glad you got that off your chest, David. David: Thanks. Kevin: It's probably something you needed to do. David: I feel a lot better. Kevin: Good, good, good. Well,

Reed Smith and its lawyers have used machine-assisted case preparation tools for many years (and it launched the Gravity Stack subsidiary) to apply legal technology that cuts costs, saves labor and extracts serious questions faster for senior lawyers to review. Partners David Cohen, Anthony Diana and Therese Craparo discuss how generative AI is creating powerful new options for legal teams using machine-assisted legal processes in case preparation and e-discovery. They discuss how the field of e-discovery, with the help of emerging AI systems, is becoming more widely accepted as a cost and quality improvement. ----more---- Transcript: Intro: Hello, and welcome to Tech Law Talks, a podcast brought to you by Reed Smith's Emerging Technologies Group. In each episode of this podcast, we will discuss cutting-edge issues on technology, data, and the law. We will provide practical observations on a wide variety of technology and data topics to give you quick and actionable tips to address the issues you are dealing with every day.  David: Hello, everyone, and welcome to Tech Law Talks and our new series on AI. Over the the coming months, we'll explore the key challenges and opportunities within the rapidly evolving AI landscape. Today, we're going to focus on AI in eDiscovery. My name is David Cohen, and I'm pleased to be joined today by my colleagues, Anthony, Diana, and Therese Craparo. I head up Reed Smith's Records & eDiscovery practice group, big practice group, 70 plus lawyers strong, and we're very excited to be moving into AI territory. And we've been using some AI tools and we're testing new ones. Therese, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself.  Therese: Sure. Thanks, Dave. Hi, my name is Therese Craparo. I am a partner in our Emerging Technologies Group here at Reed Smith. My practice focuses on eDiscovery, digital innovation, and data risk management. And And like all of us, seeing a significant uptick in the interest in using AI across industries and particularly in the legal industry. Anthony?  Anthony: Hello, this is Anthony Diana. I am a partner in the New York office, also part of the Emerging Technologies Group. And similarly, my practice focuses on digital transformation projects for large clients, particularly financial institutions. and also been dealing with e-discovery issues for more than 20 years, basically, as long as e-discovery has existed. I think all of us have on this call. So looking forward to talking about AI.  David: Thanks, Anthony. And my first question is, the field of e-discovery was one of the first to make practical use of AI in the form of predictive coding and document analytics. Predictive coding has now been around for more than two decades. So, Teresa and Anthony, how's that been working out?  Therese: You know, I think it's a dual answer, right? It's been working out incredibly well, and yet it's not used as much as it should be. I think that at this stage, the use of predictive coding and analytics in e-discovery is pretty standard, right? Right. As Dave, as you said, two decades ago, it was very controversial and there was a lot of debate and dispute about the appropriate use and the right controls and the like going on in the industry and a lot of discovery fights around that. But I think at this stage, we've really gotten to a point where this technology is, you know, well understood, used incredibly effectively to appropriately manage and streamline e-discovery and to improve on discovery processes and the like. I think it's far less controversial in terms of its use. And frankly, the e-discovery industry has done a really great job at promoting it and finding ways to use this advanced technology in litigation. I think that one of the challenges is that still is that while the lawyers who are using it are using it incredibly effectively, it's still not enough people that have adopted it. And I think there are still lawyers out there that haven't been using predictive coding or document analytics in ways that they could be using it to improve their own processes. I don't know, Anthony, what are your thoughts on that?  Anthony: Yeah, I mean, I think to reiterate this, I mean, the predictive coding that everyone's used to is it's machine learning, right? So it's AI, but it's machine learning. And I think it was particularly helpful just in terms of workflow and what we're trying to accomplish in eDiscovery when we're trying to produce relevant information. Information, machine learning made a lot of sense. And I think I was a big proponent of it. I think a lot of people are because it gave a lot of control. The big issue was it allowed, I would call, senior attorneys to have more control over what is relevant. So the whole idea is you would train the model with looking at relevant documents, and then you would have senior attorneys basically get involved and say, okay, what are the edge cases? It was the basic stuff was easy. You had the edge cases, you could have senior attorneys look at it, make that call, and then basically you would use the technology to use what I would say, whatever you're thinking in your brain, the senior attorney, that is now going to be used to help determine relevance. And you're not relying as much on the contract attorneys and the workflow. So it made a whole host of sense, frankly, from a risk perspective. I think one of the issues that we saw early on is everyone was saying it was going to save lots of money. Didn't really save a lot of money, right? Partly because the volumes went up too much, partly because, you know, the process, but from a risk perspective, I thought it was really good because I think you were getting better quality, which I think was one of the things that's most important, right? And I think this is going to be important as we start talking about AI generally is, and in terms of processes, it was a quality play, right? It was, this is better. It's a better process. It's better managing the risks than just having manual review. So that was the key to it, I think. As we talked about, there was lots of controversy about it. The controversy often stemmed from, I'll call it the validation. We had lots of attorneys saying, I want to see the validation set. They wanted to see how the model was trained. You have to give us all the documents and train. And I think generally that fell by the wayside. That really didn't really happen. One of the keys though, and I think this is also true for all AI, is the validation testing, which Teresa touched upon, that became critical. I think people realized that one of the things you had to do as you're training the model and you started seeing things, you would always do some sampling and do validation testing to see if the model was working correctly. And that validation testing was the defensibility that courts, I think, latched on on. And I think when we start talking about Gen AI, that's going to be one of the issues. People are comfortable with machine learning, understand the risks, understand, you know, one of the other big risks that we all saw as part of it was the data set would change, right? You have 10 custodians, you train the model, then you got another 10 custodians. Sometimes it didn't matter. Sometimes it really made a big difference and you had to retrain the model. So I think we're all comfortable with that. I think as Therese said, it's still not as prevalent as you would have imagined, given how effective it is, but it's partly because it's a lot of work, right? And often it's a lot of work by, I'll say, senior attorneys instead of developing it, when it's still a lot easier to say, let's just use search terms, negotiate it, and then throw a bunch of contract attorneys on it, and then do what you see. It works, but I think that's still one of the impediments of it actually being used as much as we thought.  Therese: And I think to pick up on what Anthony is saying, what I think is really important is we do have 20 years of experience using AI technology in the e-discovery industry. So much has been learned about how you use those models, the appropriate controls, how you get quality validation and the like. And I think that there's so much to use from that in the increasing use of AI in e-discovery, in the legal field in general, even across organizations. There's a lot of value to be had there of leveraging the lessons learned and applying them to the use of the emerging types of AI that we're seeing that I think we need to keep in mind and the legal field needs to keep in mind that we know how to use this and we know how to understand it. We know how to make it defensible. And I think as we move forward, those lessons are going to serve us really well in facilitating, you know, more advanced use of AI. So in thinking about how the changes may happen going forward, right, as we're looking forward, how do we think that generative AI based on large language models are going to change e-discovery in the future?  Anthony: I think there, in terms of how generative AI is going to work, I have my doubts, frankly, about how effective it's going to be. We all know that these large language models are basically based on billions, if not trillions of data points or whatever, but it's generic. It's all public information. That's how the model is based. One of the things that I want to see as people start using generative AI and seeing how it would work, is how is that going to play when we're talking about very, it's confidential information, like almost all of our clients that are dealing with e-discovery, all this stuff's confidential. It's not stuff that's public. So I understand the concept if you have a large language model that is billions and billions of data points or whatever is going to be exact, but it's a probability calculation, right? It's basically guessing what the next answer is going going to be, the next word is going to be based on this general population, not necessarily on some very esoteric area that you may be focused on for a particular case, right? So I think it remains to be seen of whether it's going to work. I think the other area where I have concerns, which I want to see, is the validation point. Like, how do we show it's defensible? If you're going in and telling a court, oh, I use Gen AI and ran the tool, here's the relevant stuff based on prompts, what does that mean? How are we going to validate that? I think that's going to be one of the keys is how do we come up with a validation methodology that will be defensible that people will be comfortable with? Again, I think intuitively machine learning was I'm training the model on what a person, a human being deemed is responsive. So that. Frankly, it's easier to argue to a court. It's easier to explain to a regulator. When you say, I came up with prompts based on the allegations of the complaint or whatever, it's a little bit more esoteric, and I think it's a little bit harder for someone to get their heads around. How do you know you're getting relevant information? So, I think there's some challenges there. I don't know how that's going to play out. I don't know, Dave, because I know you're testing a lot of these tools, what you're seeing in terms of how we think this is actually going to work in terms of using generative AI in these large language models and moving away from the machine learning.  David: Yeah, I agree with you on the to be determined part, but I think I come in a little bit more optimistic and part of it might be, you know, actually starting to use some of these tools. I think that predictive coding has really paved the way for these AI tools because what held up predictive coding to some extent was people weren't sure that courts were going to accept it. Until the first opinions came out, Judge Peck's decision and the Silvermore and subsequent case decisions, there was concern about that. But once that precedent came out, and it's important to emphasize that the precedent wasn't just approving predictive coding, it was approving technology-assisted review. And this generative AI is really just another form of technology-assisted review. And what it basically said is you have to show that it's valid. You have to do this validation testing. But the same validation testing that we've been doing to support predictive coding will work on the large language model generative AI-assisted coding. It's essentially you do the review and then you take a sample and you say, well, was this review done well? Did we hit a high accuracy level? The early testing we're doing is showing that we are hitting even better accuracy levels than with predictive coding alone. And I should say that it's even improved in the six months or so that we've been testing. The companies that are building the software are continuing to improve it. So I am optimistic in that sense. But many of these products are still in development. The pricing is still either high or to be announced in some cases. And it's not clear yet that it will be cost effective beyond current models of using human review and predictive coding and search terms. And they're not all mutually exclusive. I mean, I can see ultimately getting to a hybrid model where we still may start with search terms to cut down on volume and then may use some predictive coding and some human review and some generative AI. Ultimately, I think we'll get to the point where the price point comes down and it will make review better and cheaper. Right. But I also didn't want to mention, I see a couple other areas of application in eDiscovery as well. The generative AI is really good at summarizing single large documents or even groups of documents. It's also extremely helpful in more quickly identifying key documents. You can ask questions about a whole big document population and get answers. So I'm really excited to see this evolution. And I don't know when we're going to get there and what the price effectiveness point is going to be. But I would say that in the next year or two, we're going to start seeing it creep in and use more and more effectively, more and more cost effectively as we go forward.  Anthony: Yeah, that's fascinating. Yeah, I can see that even in terms of document review. If a human was looking at it, if AI is summarizing the document, you can make your relevance determination based on the summary. Again, we can all talk about whether it's appropriate or not, but that would probably help quite a bit. And I do think that's fascinating. I know another thing I hear is the privilege log stuff. And again, I think using AI, generative AI to draft privilege logs in concept sounds great because obviously it's a big costs factor and the like. But I think we've talked about this, Dave and Therese, like we already have, like there's already tools available, meaning you can negotiate metadata logs and some of these other things that cut the cost down. So I think it remains to be seen. Again, I think this is going to be like another arrow in your quiver, a tool to use, and you just have to figure out when you want to use it.  Therese: Yeah. And I think one of the things I think in not limiting ourselves to only thinking about, right, document review, where there's a lot of possibility with generative AI, right, witness kits, putting together witness outlines for depositions and the like, right? Not that we would ever just rely on that, but there's a huge opportunity there, I think, as a starting point, right? Just like if you're using it appropriately. And of course, today's point, the price point is reasonable, you can do initial research. There's a lot of things that I think that it can do in the discovery realm, even outside of just document review, that I think we should keep our minds open to because it's a way of giving us a quicker, getting to the base more quickly and more efficiently and frankly, more cost-effectively. And then you can take a look at that and the person and can augment that or build upon it to make sure it's accurate and it's appropriate for that particular litigation or that particular witness and the like. But I do think that Dave really hit the nail on the head. I don't think this is going to be, we're only going to be moving to generative AI and we're going to abandon other types of AI. There's reasons why there's different types of AI is because they do different things. And I think what we are most likely to see is a hybrid. Right. Right. Some tools being used for something, some tools being used for others. And I think eventually, as Dave already highlighted, the combination of the use of different types of AI in the e-discovery process and within the same tool to get to a better place. I think that's where we're most likely heading. And as Dave said, that's where a lot of the vendors are actually focusing is on adding into their workflow this additional AI to improve the process.  David: Yeah. And it's interesting that some of the early versions are not really replacing the human review. They are predicting where the human review is going to come out. So when the reviewer looks at the document, it already tells you what the software says. Is it relevant or not relevant? And it does go one step beyond. It's hard because it not only tells you the prediction of whether it's relevant or not, but it also gives you a reason. So it can accelerate the review and that can create great cost savings. But it's not just document review. Already, there's e-discovery tools out there that allow you to ask questions, query databases, but also build chronologies. And again, with that benefit, then referencing you to certain documents and in some cases having hyperlinks. So it'll tell you facts or it'll tell you answers to a question and it'll link back to the documents that support those answers. So I think there's great potential as this continues to grow and improve.  Anthony: Yeah. And I would say also, again, let's think about the whole EDRM model, right? Preservation. I mean, we'll see what enterprises do, but on the enterprise side, using AI bots and stuff like that for whether it's preservation, collection and stuff, it'll be very interesting to see if these tools can be used there to sort of automate some of the standard workflows before we get to the review and the like, but even on the enterprise side. The other thing that I think it will be interesting, and I think this is one of the areas where we still have not seen broad adoption, is on the privilege side. We know and we've done some analysis for clients where privilege or looking for highly sensitive documents and the like is still something that most lawyers aren't comfortable using. Using AI, don't know why I've done it and it worked effectively, but that is still an area where lawyers have been hesitant. And it'll be interesting to see if gender of AI and the tools there can help with privilege, right? Whether it's the privilege logs, whether it's identifying privilege documents. I think to your point, Dave, having the ability to say it's privileged and here's the reasons would be really helpful in doing privilege review. So it'll be interesting to see how AI works in that sphere as well, because it is an area where we haven't seen wide adoption of using predictive coding or TAR in terms of identifying privilege. And that's still a major cost for a lot of clients. All right, so then I guess where this all leads to is, and this is more future-oriented. Do we think we're at this stage now that we have generative AI that there's a paradigm shift, right? Do we think there's going to be a point where even, you know, we didn't see that paradigm shift bluntly with predictive coding, right? Predictive coding came out, everyone said, oh my God, discovery is going to change forever. We don't need contract attorneys anymore. You know, associates aren't going to have anything to do because you're just going to train the model, it goes out. And that's clearly hasn't happened. Now people are making similar predictions with the use of generative AI. We're now not going to need to do docker view, whatever. And I think there is concern, and this is concern just generally in the industry, is this an area, since we're already using AI, where AI can take over basically the discovery function, where we're not necessarily using lots of lawyers and we're relying almost exclusively on AI, whether it's a combination of machine learning or if it's just generative AI. And they're doing lots of work without any input or very little input from lawyers. So I'll start with Dave there. What are your thoughts in terms of where do we see in the next three to five years? Are we going to see some tipping point?  David: Yeah, it's interesting. Historically, there's no question that predictive coding did allow lawyers to get through big document populations faster and for predictions that it was going to replace all human review. And it really hasn't. But part of that has been the proliferation of electronic data. There's just more data than ever before, more sources of data. It's not just email now. It's Teams and texts and Slack and all these different collaboration tools. So that increase in volume is partially made up for the increase in efficiency, and we haven't seen any loss of attorneys. I do think that over the longer run that there is more potential for the Gen AI to replace replace attorneys who do e-discovery work and, frankly, to replace lawyers and other professionals and all other kinds of workers eventually. I mean, it's just going to get better and better. A lot of money is being invested in. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think that we may be looking at a whole paradigm shift in how disputes are resolved in the future. Right now, there's so much duplication of effort. If you're in litigation against an opposing party, You have your documents set that your people are analyzing at some expense. The other side has their documents set that their people are analyzing at some expense. You're all looking for those key documents, the needles in the haystack. There's a lot of duplicative efforts going on. Picture a world where you could just take all of the potentially relevant documents. Throw them into the pot of generative AI, and then have the generative AI predetermine what's possibly privileged and lawyers can confirm those decisions. But then let everyone, both sides of court, query that pot of documents to ask, what are the key questions? What are the key factual issues in the case? Please tell us the answers and the documents that go to those answers and cut through a lot of the document review and document production that's going on now that frankly uses up most of the cost of litigation. I think we're going to be able to resolve disputes more efficiently, less expensively, and a lot faster. And I don't know whether that's five years into the future or 10 years into the future, but I'll be very surprised if our dispute resolution procedure isn't greatly affected by these new capabilities. Pretty soon, I think, when I say pretty soon, I don't know if it's five years or 10 years, but I think judges are going to have their AI assistance helping them resolve cases and maybe even drafting first drafts of court opinions as well. And I don't think it's all that far off into the future that we're going to start to see them.  Therese: I think I'm a little bit more skeptical than Dave on some of this, which is probably not surprising to either Dave or to to Anthony on this one. Look, I think, I don't see AI as a general rule replacing lawyers. I think it will change what lawyers do. And it may replace some lawyers who don't keep pace with technology. Look, it's very simple. It's going to make us better, faster, more efficient, right? So that's a good thing. It's a good thing for our clients. It's a good thing for us. But the idea, I think, to me, that AI will replace the judgment and the decision-making or the results of AI is going to replace lawyers and I think is maybe way out there in the future when the robots take over the world. But I do think it may mean less lawyers or lawyers do different things. Lawyers that are well-versed in technology and can use that are going to be more effective and are going to be faster. I think that. You're going to see situations where it's expected to be used, right? If AI can draft an opinion or a brief in the first instance and save hours and hours of time, that's a great thing. And that's going to be expected. I don't see that being ever being the thing that gets sent out the door because you're going to still need lawyers who are looking at it and making sure that it is right and updating it and making sure that it's unique to the case and all the judgments that go into those things are appropriate. I do find it difficult to imagine a world having, you know, been a litigator for so many years where everyone's like, sure, throw all the documents in the same pod and we'll all query it together. Maybe we'll get to that point someday. I find it really difficult to imagine that'll happen. There's too much concern about the data and control over the data and sensitivity and privilege and all of those things. You know, we've seen pockets of making data available through secure channels so that you're not transferring them and the like, where it's the same pool of data that would otherwise be produced, so that maybe you're saving costs there. But I don't, again, I think it'll be a paradigm shift eventually in that, paradigm shift that's been a long time coming, though, I think, right? We started using technology to improve this process years ago. It's getting better. I think we will get to a point where everyone routinely more heavily relies on AI for discovery and that that is not the predictive coding or the tar for the people who know how to use it, but it is the standard that everybody uses. I do think, like I said, it will make us better and more efficient. I don't see it really replacing, like I said, entirely lawyers or that will be in a world where all the data just goes in and gets spit out and you need one lawyer to look at it and it's fine. But again, I do think it will change the way we practice law. And in that sense, I do think it'll be a paradigm shift.  Anthony: The final thought is, I think I tend to be, I'm sort of in the middle, but I would say generally we know lawyers have big egos, and they will never allow, they will never think that a computer, AI tool or whatever, is smarter than they are in terms of determining privilege or relevance, right? I mean, I think that's part of it is, there's, you know, you have two lawyers in a room, they're going to argue about whether something is relevant. You have two lawyers in a room, they're going to argue about something privileged. So it's not objective, right? There's subjectivity. And I think that's going to be one of the chances. And I think also, we've seen it already. Everyone thought. Every lawyer who's a litigator would have to be really well-versed in e-discovery and all the issues that we deal with. That has not happened. And I don't see that changing. So unless I'm less concerned about being a paradigm shift than all of us going out for those reasons.  David: Well, I think everyone needs to tune back in on July 11th, 2029 when we come back to get stuff to begin and see who we're going.  Anthony: Yes, absolutely. All right. Thanks, everybody.  David: Thank you.  Outro: Tech Law Talks is a Reed Smith production. Our producers are Ali McCardell and Shannon Ryan. For more information about Reed Smith's emerging technologies practice, please email techlawtalks@reedsmith.com. You can find our podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, reedsmith.com and our social media accounts.  Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers.  All rights reserved. Transcript is auto-generated.

In this episode, Brian is joined by David Duncan President and CEO of First Hospitality. Based in Chicago, First Hospitality delivers award-winning development and management solutions for some of the most recognizable hotel brands in the world. Alongside over 70 celebrated hotels, First Hospitality also conceptualizes and manages over 35 premier-quality restaurants and bars. Tune in to hear who David Thanks for helping him along the way.

In this episode, Brian is joined by David Connor, Regional Vice President for Eastern Canada with the Accor Hotel Group. What started in 1967 with the first Novotel Hotel in France, the Accor Hotel Group has grown to over 40 brands in 110 countries with over 5,400 hotels. Tune in to hear who David Thanks for helping him along the way.

We honor Martin Luther King Jr. Day with a special encore discussion on leadership, civil rights, and moving forward together. Acclaimed neurosurgeon and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Dr. Ben Carson joins David to share his unique perspectives on race, community, faith, and equality in America. Dr. Carson reflects on our nation's progress since the civil rights movement while weighing in on today's challenges. He calls for common-ground solutions to issues like border policy, healthcare, and more. From uplifting personal stories to insightful commentary on respecting our differences, this powerful conversation provides inspiration to carry on Dr. King's legacy.TRANSCRIPTION (AI transcription software was sued to convert spoken language into written text)David: I'm honored to be joined this week by Dr. Ben Carson. Ben is a groundbreaking neurosurgeon who served as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021. You might recall he was also a candidate for president in the 2016 Republican primaries. Currently, he's the chairman of the American Cornerstone Institute and an author of several books, including his new and most timely book, Created Equal.Mr. Secretary, Dr. Carson. Welcome to the podcast.Ben: Thank you. I'm delighted to be with you in yourDavid: books gifted hands and created equal. You shared some of your humble beginnings and background arising from poverty in Detroit and Boston, including incidents of clear racism with threats to schooling, playing football and honors received.You also mentioned how you were able to get some surprising, mystical and extraordinary gifts. A note after falling asleep, traveling with your wife, Candy going 90 miles an hour in a car earlier in your life. Our dream helped you through a key test while at Yale. In addition, as well as the difficult surgeries and political tax on faith.Dr. Martin Luther King said, trouble will come upon you. Disappointment will rain on your door. Like a tidal wave. If you don't have a deep and patient faith. It ain't gonna make it. How important has faith been in your life? And how has it navigated you through such as these difficult situations into becoming the expert worldwide neurosurgeon that handled conjoined twins and other extraordinarily difficult situations?Ben: I would dare say that I couldn't do any of that without the incredible faith that has brought me through so many trials. I hearken back to The fact that I had a horrible temper and I would just go fly off the handle and want to seek revenge, harm people, regardless of the consequences. It was after such an incident where I tried to stab another teenager with a camping knife that I was locked in the bathroom and I was thinking about my life.I turned things around academically very significantly, but I knew I would never achieve my dream of becoming a doctor with a temper like that. I would end up in jail, reform school, or the grave, and I just said, Lord, I can't control my temper. And there was a Bible there, and I picked it up, and there were all these verses in the book of Proverbs about anger, and also about fools, and it all seemed like they were written about me.For three hours, I prayed and contemplated and read, and it dawned on me during that time, it was always about me, my, and I. Somebody did this to me, they took my thing, I want this. I said, if you learn how to step out of the center of the equation, let it be about somebody else. You won't be angry. That was the last day I had an angry outburst.And I recognized at that point, God was real. He was more than somebody you learned about in church. And it really changed my life. And I began to really depend on him at that point in time. And it's been something that has gotten me through so many trials. When I was a first year medical student.I did poorly on the first set of comprehensive exams, and I was sent to see my counselor who said, You seem like a very intelligent young man. I bet there's a lot you could do outside of medicine. He tried to convince me to drop out of medical school. He said I wasn't cut out for medicine, and I would just torment myself and everybody else, and they could help me get into another discipline.The only thing I'd wanted to do was be a doctor since I was eight years old. I started thinking, what kind of courses have you always done well in, and what kind of courses have you struggled in? And I realized I did very well in courses where I did a lot of reading, and I struggled in courses where I listened to a lot of boring lectures, because I don't get anything out of boring lectures.Nothing at all. And yet, there I was, six to eight hours a day, sitting in boring lectures. So I made an executive decision to skip the boring lectures and to spend that time reading. And the rest of medical school was a snap after that. And some years later when I was back at my medical school as the commencement speaker, I was looking for that counselor because I was going to tell him he wasn't cut out to be a counselor.Because so many people are just negative. They never seem to be able to figure out a positive thing to say.David: Thanks for sharing that positive, transformative experience due to your great faith. As you mentioned on life, Martin Luther King discussed the three dimensions of a complete life and the onward push for fulfillment, helping others and the upward reach for God.Dr. King preached loving your enemies with agape and finding what's good in your enemies and finding what's wrong with yourself on the road being judged by your content, your character, and not your skin color. He spoke about even in prison, finding out how much white jail guards made, and they should perhaps join his movement.You said that in America, we valued each individual as unique being in someone who can be a special perspective to the table so we can work together to come up with common sense solutions to problems and believe that we've progressed to a point where many African American businesses, political doctors, and other professionals trades.Where people are more open minded about each other and believe that people are indeed created equal Can you kindly comment on certain common sense solutions? That you have been involved with to address underserved communities that improve lives, as well as other key lessons learned from your career.Ben: Yeah, one of the things that has been very important to me is the whole concept of self sufficiency. And that was really the reason that I, Wanted to take the job as the secretary of housing and urban development. There were so many things that were built into the system that kept people dependent. I worked very hard to enhance and improve and expand programs that would lead to self sufficiency so that when people, for instance, made more money on the job.Instead of having to report that, so that your rent could go up, you would record it, but instead of the rent going up, the extra money could go into an escrow. And over the course of a few years, you might be able to accumulate enough for a down payment on your own house. And home ownership is the principal mechanism of wealth accumulation in this country.The average net worth of a renter is 5, 000. The average net worth of a homeowner is 200, 000. That's a 40 fold difference. And in many cases, we're talking about the same money that is used to either be squandered or to go into creating that nest egg. Those are the kinds of things that really make a difference in people's lives.And then we've worked very hard to create The Carson Scholars Fund, in which we recognize students from all backgrounds who achieve at the highest academic levels and also who care about other people. You have to do both. We give them rewards, including scholarships as early as the fourth grade.So that the other kids look at them, and instead of that old nerd, Wow, that kid has a scholarship. He's only in the fourth or the fifth grade. What the heck did he do? And a lot of teachers tell us that other kids start trying harder at that point. And then we also put in reading rooms, and that's absolutely critical.There's over 260 of them now. around the country, primarily in Title I schools, where a lot of kids come from homes with few or no books. They go to schools that don't have a budget of significance for libraries. Most kids are not likely to become readers, but you put these incredible rooms in the school with all kinds of fascinating books.The rooms are decorated frequently in a way that's consistent with the area where they're found. For instance, one that's near a NASA site is Decorate it like a space capsule. You look through one window, you see the Earth. Another one, you see the Moon. Another one, E. T. And the kids just love these places, and they get points for the number of books they read.And they can trade them in for prizes. But, in the beginning, they're interested in the prizes, but it doesn't take long before that begins to affect their academic achievement. And many studies have shown us that if a child is reading at grade level by grade three, it changes the trajectory of their lives.That's what it's really all about. We're made in the image of God. Tremendous potential, but it has to be directed correctly. IDavid: appreciate the thoughtful introspection. Turning to systematic racism, you stated by taking every incident of perceived racial discrimination and magnifying it, repeating it incessantly, the case for systematic racism is made.The guilt and shame is done to manipulate the public. Could you then please explain for our listeners as to why there are calls there for systematic racism? Black and minority victimization and critical race theory and related calls to defund rather than support the police?Ben: It really doesn't make a lot of sense to defund the police under any circumstances.But you take something like the George Floyd incident. It was repeated ince

We find out about Copper Mountain in Colorado and look at look at this season's equipment trends, including BOA ski boots, the Rossignol ‘Essential' ski, the new Lange ‘Shadow' innovation and look at clothing rental. Iain was joined by Maria Fox, Director of Marketing at Copper Mountain, and podcast regular, Al Morgan, from SkiKitInfo.com Intersport Ski Hire Discount Code Save money on your ski hire by using the code ‘SKIPODCAST' at intersportrent.com, or simply take this link for your discount to be automatically applied at the checkout. SHOW NOTES Copper Mountain stayed open to 28 May last winter (2:00) Intersport Rent is the new main partner of The Ski Podcast (3:45) Use the code ‘SKIPODCAST' when you book your ski hire at intersportrent.com (4:00) National Snow Week takes place between 14 and 22 October (5:00) The shows are at the Birmingham NEC (14-15 Oct) and the London Excel (21-22 Oct) Listeners can get a free ticket by using the code ‘SKIPODCAST' (5:30) LISTEX takes place at London Excel from 17-19 October (6:00) The Ski Podcast is a finalist as ‘Best Broadcast Programme' in the Travel Media Awards (6:15) SNCF trains are now on sale for journeys up to 09 January (6:30) Listen to Episode 185 for more info on Inghams train options (6:45) Go to Ski Flight Free for all the info you need about train travel this winter The Telegraph's Bucket List poll showed 26% of people have a US Road Trip on their list (7:00) Snowmaking started in Copper Mountain on 02 October (7:30) Check all the facts about Copper here (9:00) Downhill race training is on offer in Copper from 20 October (10:00) Copper Mountain bills itself as the 'Athlete's Mountain' (12:30) Copper is the Official Training Centre for the US Ski and Snowboard team The Woodward Terrain Parks in Copper are a key feature (14:45) Copper hosts the Colorado Special Olympics Winter Games (17:00) Employees at Copper Mountain are also eligible for Athlete Sponsorship (18:00) Find out more about the BOA binding system for ski boots (24:00) https://youtu.be/fMCQuZvNm8U Find out more about the Lange ‘Shadow' system (29:00) The Rossignol ‘Essential' ski is the ‘most sustainable ski' Al has ever seen (33:00) Planks is very upfront that "We are not eco-friendly" (35:15) Clothing rental trend is evident with Hurr, John Lewis, ecoski, Selfridges all offering ski clothing rental (36:00) Feedback (39:00) I enjoy all feedback about the show, I like to know what you think, so please contact me via social @theskipodcast or by email theskipodcast@gmail.com  Ian: “Just catching up on a few eps of the podcast. That 3 Valleys hike in Episode 184 sounds awesome!” David: “Thanks so much for the podcast: my wife and I are keen listeners”  James Hawkins: “I love listening to every episode so keep up the good work. I enjoyed the conversation about golf in Episode 186 and wanted to mention the Kitzbuhel Golf Festival…they transform “The Streif” into a golf course for the day. The first tee shot is taken from the actual Hahnenkamm starting gate and you play the exact race track.” Tom Kelly: “I've enjoyed listening to your podcasts. I also do a skiing pod, the Last Chair, for Ski Utah. The episode on rail travel to the Alps made me jealous that we really don't have that here in the USA.” If you like the podcast, there are three things you can do to help: 1) Review us on Apple Podcasts (104 ratings) or Spotify (31 ratings)  2) Buy me a coffee at BMAC/theskipodcast (thanks David) 3) Book your ski hire with Intersport Rent using the code ‘SKIPODCAST'   You can follow Iain @skipedia and the podcast @theskipodcast

In the studio today is David Leon, Director of Workforce Programs at the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services (DARS), and Kate Kaegi, Project Manager for the DIF. In recognition of Disability Awareness Month, the second podcast of our DIF series includes David and Kate explaining how Virginia's DIF grant was initiated, implemented, and adjusted to best reach their initiatives of placing 750 individuals with disabilities in STEM and healthcare careers, registered apprenticeships, and State, County, and City jobs. Learn about the challenges they navigated and what they recommend when applying for a DIF grant.   Listen Here   Full Transcript:   {Music} David: Don't be afraid to apply for a diff grant. It is an amazing opportunity to infuse energy and enthusiasm into your workforce. It is a chance to stretch, learn new skills, try new programs. You get to see staff flourish and more importantly, get some really cool outcomes for the clients we serve.   Kate: I was a little intimidated with the idea of RSA, but what I have found is this RSA is there to help us. They want us to succeed.   David: You can accomplish some great things.   Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management, Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: Well, welcome to the Manager Minute. Joining me in the studio today is David Leon, director for workforce programs at the Virginia Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services, or DARS, and Kate Kaegi, project manager for the DEP. So David, how are things going at DARS?   David: They are great. We are plugging along, working on our grant. A colleague has a SWITZI grant, so it's been neat to really try a bunch of new things here in Virginia.   Carol: Very cool. So how are you Kate?   Kate: I am doing spectacular. Thank you for having me here today.   Carol: You bet. So, David, you and I had a chance to visit in a podcast on work incentives counseling in April of 22. And just so you know, you were one of my top five downloads. And when I think of Virginia, I always think of you and all the amazing things that have been cooking all the time. You guys always have something in the hopper and this is no different. So I started a series of podcasts focused on the diff grants and career advancement, and you are the second in my series and happened to fall in October with a nod to Disability Employment Awareness Month. So I want to just give our listeners a little snippet again about the diff grant. And so this particular round, the grant activities are geared to support innovative activities aimed at improving the outcomes of individuals with disabilities. And the Career Advancement Initiative model. Demonstrations were funded in federal fiscal year 2021. They were intended to identify and demonstrate practices supported by evidence to assist eligible individuals with disabilities, including previous served participants in employment who reenter the program to do the following. They were looking at advancing in high demand, high quality careers like science, technology, engineering and math, or those Stem careers to enter career pathways in industry driven sectors through pre apprenticeships, registered apprenticeships and industry recognized apprenticeship programs to improve and maximize competitive integrated employment outcomes, economic self-sufficiency, independence and inclusion in society, and to reduce reliance on public benefits like SSI, SSDI, or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and State or local benefits. Now, I remember reading in the announcement some of that sort of I thought it was disturbing data that provided the base for why RSA picked this particular area and chose to fund it. And they based it on the program year 2019, RSA 911 data. And some of the things that they said were participants that were exiting the program in competitive integrated employment reported a median wage of 12 bucks an hour and working like 30 hours a week. And the top ten most common occupations were reported. They were like stock clerks and they were order fillers, customer service reps, janitors, cleaners. I call it the whole Food, Filth and Flowers. So I know through this initiative they were trying to do more. So let's dig into what you guys have cooking in Virginia. David, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. How did you get to VR?   David: Thanks, Carol. Started as a job coach years ago. We won't say when. It'll make me feel old, and I worked for a private nonprofit. I then assisted in Virginia, working with individuals, exiting a training center and moving towards community living. From there, I came back to the Richmond area to work for a community service board and again was a job coach and then worked within a sheltered work and day services program before coming to DARS, where I started with the Ticket to Work program and now have that the work incentives and a few grants and the workforce programs.   Carol: You and I have very similar backgrounds. I too was a job coach. I did work in a sheltered workshop for a while as well and all of that. It's always interesting how people find their way to VR. Kate, how about you? Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and how you got to VR?   Kate: I kind of fell into this. A lot of times, similar to other people. Unexpectedly, I found out about East Carolina's rehab program and that they had a scholarship for people who wanted to get their master's. And I'm like, Oh, free money. So I jumped into that. Absolutely loved it. I did my internship at the Wilson Workforce and Rehabilitative Center. It was called something or a different title when I started back in the day. As I tell my kids, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I was there, started off there as an evaluator and then kind of moved across the state, became a rehab counselor in the field, have done transition counseling, substance abuse counseling, went back to Boca Vale for a little bit, even dipped my toes into the world of job coaching and worked with David for a period of time at the CSV, came back to DARS, worked with the Department for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and also, as an aside, also had joined the military during that timeframe on the reserve side. So I'm out of that at this point. So I have quite an eclectic background. As a supervisor once said that I couldn't make up my mind what I wanted to do, but it was all overall 24 years of work working with individuals with disabilities in a variety of areas. So it really kind of dovetailed well for me to work in the first dif grant that we received prior to this grant where I was a VMA or Virginia Manufacturing Association liaison for our grant. And when we were working on this Phase two grant, it was just pulling from what we've learned previously and growing from there. And so here I am.   Carol: I love it, it positions you really well for the work under this new grant. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that. So, David, why don't you paint us a picture of Virginia DARS How many staff do you have? About how many people are you all serving?   David: Okay, DARS comprises the Division of Rehabilitative Services, the Disability Determination Services, Aging Services. We have roughly 28 to 30 offices around the state and are currently serving just around 18,000 clients. If you include Pre-ETS in those totals.   Carol: that's a bunch., holy cow. I didn't realize you guys were that big.   David: Yeah, and that doesn't include however many cases DDS is handling or our aging or the other units. But that's a little bit about DARS, and I like to say we stretch from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to almost as far west as Detroit. If you go down to Bristol, Virginia, which is technically a little further than Detroit. So lots of types of environments and communities and very unique challenges in different areas.   Carol: Yeah, so you're definitely facing different geographical issues and I'm sure probably even economic differences. You know, if you're talking the coast versus maybe more of a rural area. So I'm sure there's probably some challenges there with even getting providers or how you're providing services.   David: It's interesting. One of the things we've been able to see in, for instance, Southwest Virginia, there is an economic center that's only 16 miles away from an office. But to get there, you go over three mountains and it could take two hours. So are those jobs really accessible to someone without a vehicle? On paper from Richmond, it might look like, why aren't we placing folks in this community out of that office? Well, it's a two hour drive each way, and that's the only way to do it. You mentioned at the beginning those top ten job areas. And one of the things we're really trying to challenge ourselves with now is giving people the information to make an informed decision about a career choice. But if they choose a career that might not look as great, what is the best potential version of that job? What is the job within that sector that actually could become a career? So at the beginning when we were starting to work on this, our agency had been in order of selection for years with categories closed and with the pandemic. That all changed. But the clients we were seeing didn't change and their goals didn't change. I think that's going to be a longer term conversation. But if we can do things to promote the best version of a position. And so I'll just give you one example. And our commissioner, other folks would probably say, why do we have so many folks who want jobs in food service or in this? Because typically they're low paying. Typically there's a lot of turnover. It's hard to become stable. One of the first projects we worked on in this grant was a partnership with a school nutrition program, and we've been able to help a few individuals enter into work in a kitchen at a school where they have the same hours. Monday through Friday. They have the opportunity for benefits. In one case, we couldn't find transportation. That school system was allowing the individual to take the school bus for that person. That's a really stable job and it's somewhere they can grow and thrive for years. So I do want to just say we have to think a little bit differently about what Kate or I or others might think of as a career. How do we find that best option for someone where there is room for growth, but equally important room for that time for stability to get to mastery, to then look at other skills and hopefully down the road they'd come back, not because they lost that job and need it again, but because they've learned so much that they want to go on to the next thing of their own accord.   Carol: Yeah, I like that you said that because I remember that when we visited before talking about that best version of that job. So not to mean that no one can work in kind of food, filth and flowers. I know I say that and it sounds sort of condescending and it's not meant to be. But we typically relied on kind of those occupations, really entry level. But I like that you're taking a spin on that and really looking deeper because we need folks to work in those occupations too. And there's people that love doing that work. But how like you say, can you do the best version of that? So you have benefits and you're looking at those long term like working in a school district, you can get retirement and all these different really awesome things that go with that. So, Kate, I'm going to switch to you. So big picture, break it down for us on your grant proposal and what you're hoping to accomplish with I know you had said you have three core components. Talk a little bit about that.   Kate: Sure. I do want to make a caveat that I love about this grant is it is a demonstration grant, meaning we have the opportunity to try out innovative products and projects across the state. I just want to put a caveat on that to keep that in your mind as I'm going forward here. So our main goal is to place 750 individuals with disabilities in federal, state, county, city jobs and or registered apprenticeships or also Stem and health careers. So we have those three main components on that. And when we looked at this grant and David worked on the development and the proposal for this, we really wanted to touch individuals that had been kind of missed in the first grant. And this I think, is something as we're doing a grant, you're learning all the time. And we wanted to make sure that we were hitting those unserved and underserved across the state. So individuals that aren't as plentiful in different areas. So say like Winchester has a large Hispanic population, does that reflect the number served in the actual DARS office? How do we get Spanish speaking individuals more involved in DARS? How do we get women who may only recognize those areas that you talked about that flower filth? And because that's what they're aware of, that's the work they've done in the past. So I just need another job in that area. How can we open up some possibilities? Have you thought about the IT field? Have you thought about advanced manufacturing and can you see yourself doing that? So providing those opportunities, it's a way for us to look at those unserved and underserved across the state. And we're defining that as we're going and we're looking at the census data, we're looking at who we're serving within each state. And then we're also looking at our plans, the plans that the rehab counselors are creating. What are those plans? What is the main goal? Overall we see a lot of customer service because it's kind of a catch all. What does that mean? Is that customer service as a helpdesk technician as opposed to just somebody as a receptionist? So we're really helping both the VRC, the counselor, and the candidate explore possibilities like that.   Carol: I like that. I just love what you guys are doing and really fundamentally getting down, digging in and really focusing on those folks that have been underserved or unserved and just taking that twist on the occupation because there's a wide range like within customer service, you have the job from here to here.   Kate: Exactly.   Carol: Yeah, that is very cool. Now, I know you all had some really weird hiccups in the beginning when you were starting out with this particular grant. So what were some of those kind of hiccups and how did you overcome that? And Kate, I'll probably shoot to you first on this.   Kate: So part of the thing that I didn't mention was is that the roles that our team players have. So we have a liaison with Department of Labor and Industry, specifically the registered apprenticeship side. So they have their foot in the DOLI world and the foot in the DARS world. We also have a team member who has their foot in the Department of Human Resource Management Liaison, and then also her toes are also dipping in the DARS. So we've had some different team members on that. We also have a quick response, counselor, somebody who can go in and respond to immediate needs of employers, of an individual that might be working with them, that has a disability, that might need some help, whether that's in a registered apprenticeship or on that particular job. During the first year we hired and we had everybody up and running and we had two team members, one had a medical emergency and had to move away from the position because there was some driving involved. And then unfortunately, we had Lisa Hanky, who passed away unexpectedly on us. So, you know, you get all getting that hiring going and then all of a sudden we lost two individuals, so we had to restart that process.   David: But Kate, if I can add to that, and I believe this is true for everyone in our round of this DIF funding, I believe we were told two days before the beginning of the project, it was about a day after that that, you know, many agencies coming out of the pandemic have had challenges with staffing and we had those challenges in our procurement division. So getting contracts signed, getting those staff replaced. But the other thing that has been a challenge and we're finally coming out of. We created three positions that this agency has never had, and it had meant that we had to learn how to provide quality support to two other state agencies in the context of working with DARS and similarly with our quick response counselors. So we created these positions that we had an idea of how they could work. But once someone got into those roles and was learning the other agency, we've had to be flexible in understanding how they can actually benefit our clients and our agency. And that has been a learning process.   Carol: You guys bring up a really good point because I think sometimes when folks are applying for the DIF grant, you're not recognizing off the get-go That first year can be a struggle because like you said, you found out two days before and then you get the money. And then as we know with any state government, it takes time to hire and like to get through all those processes. And so RSA may be on one hand going like spend the money and you're like, we're trying, but we've got to get through all our HR processes and all this crazy stuff. So it takes a little bit to get rolling in that first year. And I know we often on the TA world are talking with people as they're applying for grants going just know as you're going into it that first year, you're probably not going to spend the amount of funds you projected originally because there's just is a time factor and getting through all of that.   Kate: Absolutely. That was the one thought that David and I, if you know, we apply for another one down the road, maybe making that first year a little bit less intensive and spreading it out from year 2 to 5 because that's where the major work will be done.   Carol: Yeah, that's smart. Very smart. So I know you guys were talking about some challenges. What are some other particular challenges that you're experiencing right now?   Kate: Well, I'll get started on that piece. One of the things we have found similar to the staffing, the challenge that we had when we first started of hiring individuals, we're finding a turnover in staff in DARS. And so we are having a lot of younger counselors that have, in some cases don't have a rehab background. They might have a social work background. So we have a lot of training that we're doing and then redoing on that. We're having a training coming up in October for the VOC rehab counselors and we're getting kind of back to basics. What makes a good referral for our Pathways Grant, looking at those possibilities of not just that receptionist job, let's look at helpdesk. What are the opportunities that are out there? And so that has been kind of a challenge, is just retraining. And I think this is kind of normal across the board. But these rehab counselors are busy. They have a lot more documentation they have to put in Aware. There's a lot more individuals coming through their door because we have the rapid engagements, so they are overwhelmed. And how can we dovetail our services to best support them, how to make the referral process as easy as possible for them, what supports make the most sense for them? So that's been one of the interesting challenges.   Carol: So, Kate, have you guys done anything around just the way in which your staff or the support of those counselors, do you have like other staff that are kind of wrapped around them, whether you call them maybe a rehab tech or some sort of a case aide or whatever it might be that can help the counselors with sort of all the documentation requirements and that kind of thing. Have you done some work in that?   Kate: Actually, here in Virginia, we do have support. We have vocational evaluators, placement counselors and what they call employment service specialists that run the job club and things like that. And they can help support with some of the paperwork. But similar to other states that actually have like a rehab tech that would do some of the counseling or the that kind of thing, not as much. And each office is run a little bit different. That's part of the appeal. And what I mean by that is, is some of the offices might not have a vocational evaluator, some might have a placement counselor that might be covering more than one office so that there is enough differences on that piece. But yeah, that has been a struggle for keeping all of that work and getting it done for them.   Carol: Yeah, You're definitely joined by your colleagues across the country on that. I keep hearing that over and over. David did you have anything else you wanted to add to that about any of the particular challenges?   David: Yeah, I think we wrote this knowing we needed to do some things better and serve certain populations differently to get to where people had the same outcome regardless of gender, race, ethnicity. And that is still a challenge. We are learning that we have a long way to go to effectively serve those folks who have English as a second language. And when we started the project, we started with like a counselor advisory board to help not only create buy in, but inform us what the counselors needed. We have now shifted to an advisory board geared towards helping us do better with the Hispanic Latino population, and that English is a second language. So we're hoping over this next year, working with members of our state who are representative of those groups will actually help us figure out what services are going to be most likely to bring people in for help. What supports we will need to think about providing for those individuals to be successful. And again, it goes back to how do we help people see for themselves greater opportunities and careers than they might have.   Carol: So are you linked in then with your like your WIOA partners on your adult basic ed side? Like under that, you know, the English as a second language, Like they're more expert than us in working with that group?   Kate: Absolutely. One of our key partners is the Virginia Adult Learning Resource Center, who teach the adult ed, they help support them across the state when we get further along I'll talk about some of the projects that we're working with with them.   Carol: Yeah, that's excellent. I love that. So I know you guys are seeing some exciting results. What kind of exciting results are percolating up?   Kate: So one of the things that we found as we're moving forward is we actually had working with adult Ed, we had a program that we were doing Intro to IT, where we're starting a basic starting platform for accounting fundamentals, and we were ready to go. We had seven individuals in this first cohort, and one of the things we found was the individuals that we met, even though we just came through Covid with all of the tech training, we had individuals they knew enough to get on to Zoom and to do some items, but we really needed to step back and do some basic tech training. So, they had enough gaps in their knowledge that they couldn't move forward without some major help. So what happened on this is, is we stepped back and started to do some digital literacy training and they moved forward with that. And each of those individuals are now moving forward with the accounting fundamentals this summer. So stepping back, we're actually looking at what we're calling digital work skills training, which is really exciting opportunity for individuals to get started with North Star digital literacy. We're working on goal setting some soft skill development just to get them started on that end. So we have individuals that would typically not be able to go to a virtual training actually get started there. And what we're finding with that end is, is that we have some individuals, you know, those customer service people who just want to do clerical, they're getting introduced to IT. And so we've had a few individuals that have moved on to our next training, which we call the Max Career Lab. And Max Potential is an employer here in Virginia. And I think they go into other states as well, several other states. And what they are, they're a temp agency for IT employment. So they hire individuals to work with Dominion, to work with, you know, with all these employers doing various IT. But they have a unique hiring model. They actually have an opportunity where individuals come in and they go through a career lab five day, three hours a day, 15 hours of a career lab. Then they do an interview. During those five days, they do an overview of data analytics, networking, all these different career areas. So they'll do an hour and a half of overview of the career, and then they do an actual interactive activity that they break out in groups for. So it's a great way to explore the IT field. So we've hired them to actually run career labs for us. They do the 15 hours, then they get homework and then they have an interview assessment. So the interview is just like a typical interview that they run, but they follow up with what activities that they're interested in. So this has been a wonderful way for us to explore different IT areas and to help individuals determine what area of IT they want to do. Here in Virginia, we're blessed. We've got Nova, we've got a lot of IT careers, but counselors and vocal evaluators don't always know how to direct somebody into the right avenue because technology is always changing. You know, cybersecurity, cybersecurity, that's always a great one, right? Because we're right here in Nova. However, not everybody wants to do cyber. Have you thought of data analytics? Have you thought of the different networking positions? Have you thought of machine learning? You know what, all is out there? And so it's an opportunity for us to do a hands on career exploration and next steps with an actual employer running the sessions for us.   Carol: That's cool. Yeah, I hadn't heard about a career lab before like that. That is very intriguing because so many people learn much better, you know, by actually experiencing seeing what that's about because it can sound cool. You read about something like the cybersecurity was the big deal, but then you get into it and you're like, Oh, I don't really want to do that, you know? So giving them that opportunity, I think that's fabulous.   Kate: Yes, and we have had our first cohort. We had 25 people sign up. We had 22 complete the whole piece. That includes the interview.  Of that group we had six individuals. So they compare the group together, but they also compare them to the other public groups that they have across the board. So of those individuals, six are encouraged to look at direct work experience. The rest have been encouraged to do a few other activities, like maybe develop more professional skills or develop more tech training, possibly, you know, accounting fundamentals. We had one that decided they did not want to do IT training. And I'm thinking, what a great opportunity you now know what you don't want to do. And for us, that can be great, right? So we're looking at some other options for that young man. It has been a wonderful opportunity. We're now in our second cohort and our hope is, is to keep continuing this as we're going through this grant and to see how we can set this up once the grant is over.   Carol: Very cool. Have you had any surprises kind of as you've started this. I know you're in year two. Are there any surprises?   David: I think there are always surprises. This is right. Staff and surprises some of the opportunities that have come up. I don't think we anticipated. So we've shifted to take advantage. One of the big pieces of this grant is our focus on state hiring and the individual we hired for that aspect worked diligently during the first six months with them on an alternative hiring process through the legislation, had a go live date, whether we were ready or not. And what we didn't understand is during the first year, this process, it wasn't available to current state employees who may be disabled. That created a lot of issues for folks who were upset that they couldn't access this to move up within state government. We weren't able to change that ourselves, but it was changed in legislation. And starting in July of this year, we were allowed to offer a certificate of disability to someone who was currently employed and that has seen an increase. We've had roughly 1500 people request certificates of disabilities. I think part of what was surprising is what a great opportunity that has become as a referral source for DAR's. Roughly 300 individuals have chosen to get more information and receive VR services, and we are seeing that as a really nice piece of the process. Additionally, I think we finally had our first individual who went from what we call part time wage employment to full time classified, which was one of the intents of the process we developed. So it's nice to begin to see that work. But for Kate and I, we have to remind ourselves some of this might take two, three, four years before we really actually see these things that could be possible in action. And I think the other big surprise there is just how great of a partner our Department of Human Resource Management has been. They recently allowed us to present to 120 hiring managers and we will be a regular part of their monthly recruitment network action meetings. They've bought into our use of windmills training. They advertise it every month and we are co-sponsoring a job accommodation network training in October for them that they will heavily market to state hiring managers. So I think that's been really great. And then the other surprise, it turns out that our division of registered apprenticeship within the Department of Labor and Industry is moving to a new state agency. So we will see what that does. You know, you think things are pretty stable and static in certain ways, but they can change. That's been a surprise. But it's not a good or bad. It just, you know, might be a chance to actually work with more of our partners more directly.   Kate: And David, another surprise that we had was the use of data. We have been doing some trainings with the field and they you know, when you bring numbers involved, people get a little, oh, I don't know if I want to touch this, but what we found was the counselors, the evaluators, the placement, they enjoyed looking at this data. They ate it up. So the use of data as a tool to look at who we're serving, how are we serving them, has been an eye opener. At least it was a surprise for me. Now I'm a vocational evaluator, so I love data and I thought I was, you know, unique. But I'm not you know, everybody is, you know, surprisingly likes that data.   Carol: Yeah.. Well, and definitely how you present it to the field, you know, if you're just like blah, blah, blah, whatever, they really are interested because it's the culmination of their work, you know, so they see what's happening. It really helps to paint that picture and then they can react and respond and do things in a different way in response to that data. So I think that's smart that you guys are doing that. Now. I know you both had talked about shifting the conversation around employment and shifting that whole narrative on barriers to advancement and employment. Talk a little bit about that.   Kate: So one of the things that the counselors are really good at is, is when somebody comes in the door and they say, hey, you know, I need help finding work. But when we look at the definition of what we do, it's getting and but it's also keeping or advancing in your career. So what is that advancement look like? So if you have somebody coming in who I need a job right away, maybe this is where somebody is going to go for a stock clerk. But what about the idea of doing a quick training so that they can get a credential in the Certified logistics associate and then moving from there, maybe when they do that interview, now that they have that credential, maybe they can ask for a little bit of a raise. And what is the next step on that piece? So we've definitely looked at that. How do we make, as David said, the most of the career that you're looking at or the other areas that we've already talked about? Let's look at other areas.   David: One of the things that actually came from one of our offices that they wanted was we've heard more and more about attrition and attrition from application to plan, but also attrition from plan before employment or before successful closure. And we have created a group called Work Wise, which is designed for individuals who have just become employed to meet once a week in the evening, talk about their jobs, have an opportunity with a staff person to talk through issues, challenges. It's been really a powerful group, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how the individuals who choose to participate in a couple of cases did not want to stop going when their case was closed because of how valuable it was to in close to real time talk through things that were happening at work with someone with a VR counseling background. And that has been a really powerful group because it's also given folks to learn from each other and get to that stability and confidence to maybe also look for future opportunities. I know we're getting ready to also hold a salary negotiation training for folks. So again, let's help people think through and have those skills now that they may use now or they may use later when an opportunity to move up comes around. And similarly, we've started a group that we're calling money wise where we've partnered with a local credit union with that hope of how can we help make sure folks maximize their the benefits they choose to take advantage of from an employer. How do we help someone make sure that if there's a 401 match and it's X amount, that they do that much at the very least, Right. Those things that everyone is told, Well, if there's free money from an employer, you take it or if there's tuition assistance or some other thing, maybe there are things to plant some seeds. So someone would continue to move forward.   Carol: I can see how so much of this work that you are doing is so foundational and will be of benefit to, you know, your other colleagues across the country with the things you've uncovered and the things that you are working on, these different classes and groups and all of that. I'm sure other people are going, Gosh, I want to do that too. I think this will be amazing to help plant the seeds across the country. Now, David, I know you were concerned about implementing something that could withstand the test of time. And I know DIF grants are meant it's a demonstration grant. You're trying something out, but you want to also be able to carry forward these ideas into the future. So how are you guys structuring this to make that happen?   David: We really are thinking about sustainability and to Commissioner Hayfield's credit, that's been one of the things that she and Dale Batten have really stressed to us. It's great to do great work in a period of time, but how can we make sure that the things that have the potential to be value add or transformative continue and don't just end the day the funding stops? And we've really thought through many of the activities that we are creating, we are working on from at the beginning. What would this look like when there's no funding? How will we continue these? It's part of our partnership with Valray. We're working to get some of these pieces put into Canvas and set up through that learning management system. But within some of the positions, you know, one of our hopes is that the DHRM VR liaison could become its own full time non restricted position at the end. Similarly, we would hope that for the others, or at least those activities become a part of multiple staff strategically throughout the state. And that's one way we're looking at it.   Kate: And yeah, we're looking at the train, the trainers, also the tools that we're using. One of the pieces for vocational evaluators would be English language acquisition and knowledge. So there are assessments that are out there that can test somebody's English language, which is important for us to know if we're working with individuals and we're trying to place them on the job. So how do we get the tools necessary into the hands of the individuals and trained up for that so that that can be moving forward? So we're being proactive for these individuals that we hope to come into our doors a little bit more often.   Carol: That's excellent. So what do you guys see as your next steps? Where are you going from here? The point you're at right now, what are the next steps?   Kate: So a lot of our programming that we're doing right now is in partnership with adult ed. We see a great marriage between DARS and Adult Ed because Adult Ed works with a lot of individuals with disabilities already. They're adult educators. They can provide a little bit more support for our learners for credential training. They've got different things that are across the state. I'm working with our rehab center, Wilson Workforce and Rehabilitation to really figure out how can we marry these? Right now I'm coordinating all these trainings. Is there a way that the center can provide this? And this gives the center an opportunity to look at a virtual environment? What does this look like? We're not sure what it looks like, but we're giving a try to see for that next piece so that max potential with the employer, can that be run through Wilson so that it is open and able to run after the grant is over.   Carol: So for our listeners that would want to apply for a grant, but they've been afraid to do so. What advice would you give to other people?   David: Don't be afraid to apply for a grant. It is an amazing opportunity to infuse energy and enthusiasm into your workforce. It is a chance to stretch, learn new skills, try new programs and get some great outcomes. If there are things you've wanted to try and you don't necessarily have the budget to do or don't seem to fit a demonstration grant is a phenomenal opportunity, and when I came into this agency under grants and special programs, usually we had to worry about things like a match component. And if you have the chance to apply for a grant where there isn't a match and you are willing to be patient with that work, you can accomplish some great things. You get to know your partners better. You get to see staff flourish and stretch and more importantly, get some really cool outcomes for the clients we serve.   Carol: Love that infuse that energy and enthusiasm. I wrote that down. That was a great. You're like giving a commercial for the RSA DIF Grants, that's awesome.   Kate: One thing I would add on this too is when I first came in eight years ago on the other grant, I was pretty much kind of a newbie in the grant world, and I was a little intimidated with the idea of RSA. But what I have found is, is RSA is there to help us. They want us to succeed. And if you have a solid grant application and know what you want to do, they will help you give you some ideas. They invited other states to meet with you to kind of talk about different things. So they have been very good about sharing knowledge and they want to see us succeed.   Carol: That sounds so great. Well, I am going to definitely tell our listeners like they should reach out to you too, if they've got some questions to reach out to David and Kate, because you all have a lot of very cool stuff cooking, and I'm sure you're willing to talk to others about what you've been doing as they're thinking about maybe applying some of this, even though they may not have a DIF grant, but applying some of the things that you're learning into their own work in their states?   Kate: Absolutely. We're here.   Carol: Excellent. Well, I appreciate you both. Thanks for spending time with us. And I look forward to circling back with you a little bit in a couple more years as time flies on this grant and see where you're coming in at and those good results. So have a great day.   David: Thank you very much.   Kate: Thank you.   {Music} Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR, one manager at a time, one minute at a time, brought to you by the VR TAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!  

David Colebatch, CEO of Tidal, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss Tidal's recent shift to a product-led approach and why empathizing with customers is always their most important job. David describes what it was like to grow the company from scratch on a boot-strapped basis, and how customer feedback and challenges inform the company strategy. Corey and David discuss the cost-savings measures cloud customers are now embarking on, and David discusses how constant migrations are the new normal. Corey and David also discuss the impact that generative AI is having not just on tech, but also on creative content and interactions in our everyday lives. About David David is the CEO & Founder of Tidal.  Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.Links Referenced: Company website: https://tidal.cloud LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-colebatch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Returning guest today, David Colebatch is still the CEO at Tidal. David, how have you been? It's been a hot second.David: Thanks, Corey. Yeah, it's been a fantastic summer for me up here in Toronto.Corey: Yeah, last time I saw you, was it New York or was it DC? They all start to run together to me.David: I think it was DC. Yeah.Corey: That's right. Public Sector Summit where everything was just a little bit stranger than most of my conversations. It's, “Wait, you're telling me there's a whole bunch of people who use the cloud but don't really care about money? What—how does that work?” And I say that not from the position of harsh capitalism, but from the position of we're a government; saving costs is nowhere in our mandate. Or it is, but it's way above my pay grade and I run the cloud and call it good. It seems like that attitude is evolving, but slowly, which is kind of what you want to see. Titanic shifts in governing are usually not something you want to see done on a whim, overnight.David: No, absolutely. A lot of the excitement at the DC summit was around new capabilities. And I was actually really intrigued. It was my first time in the DC summit, and it was packed, from the very early stages of the morning, great attendance throughout the day. And I was just really impressed by some of the new capabilities that customers are leveraging now and the new use cases that they're bringing to market. So, that was a good time for me.Corey: Yeah. So originally, you folks were focused primarily on migrations and it seems like that's evolving a little bit. You have a product now for starters, and the company's name is simply Tidal, without a second word. So, brevity is very much the soul of wit, it would seem. What are you doing these days?David: Absolutely. Yeah, you can find us at tidal.cloud. Yeah, we're focused on migrations as a primary means to help a customer achieve new capabilities. We're about accelerating their journey to cloud and optimizing once they're in cloud as well. Yeah, we're focused on identifying the different personas in an enterprise that are trying to take that cloud journey on with people like project, program managers, developers, as well as network people, now.Corey: It seems, on some level, like you are falling victim to the classic trap that basically all of us do, where you have a services company—which is how I thought of you folks originally—now, on some level, trying to become a product or a platform company. And then you have on the other side of it—places that we're—“Oh, we're a SaaS company. This is hard. We're going to do services instead.” And it seems like no one's happy. We're all cats, perpetually on the wrong side of a given door. Is that an accurate assessment for where you are? Or am I misreading the tea leaves on this one?David: A little misread, but close—Corey: Excellent.David: You're right. We bootstrapped our product company with services. And from day one, we supported our customers, as well as channel partners, many of the [larger size 00:03:20] that you know, we supported them in helping their customers be successful. And that was necessary for us as we bootstrapped the company from zero. But lately, and certainly in the last 12 months, it's very much a product-led company. So, leading with what customers are using our software for first, and then supporting that with our customer success team.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year. We've seen simultaneously a market correction, which I think has been sorely needed for a while, but that's almost been overshadowed in a lot of conversations I've had by the meteoric rise and hype around generative AI. Have you folks started rebranding everything with a fresh coat of paint labeled generative AI yet as it seems like so many folks have? What's your take on it?David: We haven't. You won't see a tidal.ai from us. Look, our thoughts are leveraging the technology as we always had to provide better recommendations and suggestions to our users, so we'll continue to embrace generative AI as it applies to specific use cases within our product. We're not going to launch a brand new product just around the AI theme.Corey: Yeah, but even that seems preferable to what a lot of folks are doing, which is suddenly pivoting their entire market positioning and then act, “Oh, we've been working in generative AI for 5, 10, 15 years,” in some cases. Google and Amazon most notably have talked about how they've been doing this for decades. It's, “Cool. Then why did OpenAI beat you all to the punch on this?” And in many cases, also, “You've been working on this for decades? Huh. Then why is Alexa so terrible?” And they don't really have a good talking point for that yet, but it's the truth.David: Absolutely. Yeah. I will say that the world changed with the OpenAI launch, of course, and we had a new way to interact with this technology now that just sparked so much interest from everyday people, not just developers. And so, that got our juices flowing and creativity mode as well. And so, we started thinking about, well, how can we recommend more to other users of our system as opposed to just cloud architects?You know, how can we support project managers that are, you know, trying to summarize where they're at, by leveraging some of this technology? And I'm not going to say we have all the answers for this baked yet, but it's certainly very exciting to start thinking outside the box with a whole new bunch of capabilities that are available to us.Corey: I tried doing some architecture work with Chat-Gippity—yes, that is how I pronounce it—and it has led me down the primrose path a little bit because what it says is often right. Mostly. But there are some edge-case exceptions of, “Ohh, it doesn't quite work that way.” It reminds me at some level of a junior engineer who doesn't know the answer, so they bluff. And that's great, but it's also a disaster.Because if I can't trust the things you tell me and you to call it out when you aren't sure on something, then I've got to second guess everything you tell me. And it feels like when it comes to architecture and migrations in particular, the devil really is in the details. It doesn't take much to design a greenfield architecture on a whiteboard, whereas being able to migrate something from one place to another and not have to go down in the process? That's a lot of work.David: Absolutely. I have used AI successfully to do a lot of research very quickly across broad market terms and things like that, but I do also agree with you that we have to be careful using it as the carte blanche force multiplier for teams, especially in migration scenarios. Like, if you were to throw Chat-Gippity—as you say—a bunch of COBOL code and say, “Hey, translate this,” it can do a pretty good job, but the devil is in that detail and you need to have an experienced person actually vet that code to make sure it's suitable. Otherwise, you'll find yourself creating buggy things downstream. I've run into this myself, you know, “Produce some Terraform for me.” And when I generated some Terraform for an architecture I was working on, I thought, “This is pretty good.” But then I realized, it's actually two years old and that's about how old my skills were as well. So, I needed to engage someone else on my team to help me get that job done.Corey: So, migrations have been one of those things that people have been talking about for well, as long as we've had more than one data center on the planet. “How do we get our stuff from over here to over there?” And so, on and so forth. But the context and tenor of those conversations has changed dramatically. What have you seen this past year or so as far as emerging trends? What is the industry doing that might not be obvious from the outside?David: Well, cost optimization has been number one on people's minds, and migrating with financial responsibility in mind has been refreshing. So, working backwards from what their customer outcomes are is still number one in our book, and when we see increasingly customers say, “Hey, I want to migrate to cloud to close a data center or avoid some capital outlay,” that's the first thing we hear, but then we work backwards from what was their three-year plan. And then what we've seen so far is that customers have changed from a very IT-centric view of cloud and what they're trying to deliver to much more business-centric. Now, they'll say things like, “I want to be able to bring new capabilities to market more quickly. I want to be able to operate and leverage some of these new generative AI technologies.” So, they actually have that as a driving force for migrations, as opposed to an afterthought.Corey: What I have found is that, for whatever reason, not giving a shit about the AWS bill in my business was a zero-interest-rate phenomenon. Suddenly people care an awful lot. But they're caring is bounded. If there's a bunch of easy stuff to do that saves a giant pile of money, great, yeah, most folks are going to do that. But then it gets into the idea of opportunity cost and trade-offs. And there's been a shift there that I've seen where people are willing to invest more in that cost-cutting work than they were in previous years.It makes sense, but it's also nice to finally have a moment to validate what I've assumed for seven years now that, yeah, in a recession or a retraction of the broader industry, suddenly, this is going to be top-of-mind for a lot of folks. And it's nice to see that that approach was vindicated because the earlier approach that I saw when we saw something like this was at the start of Covid. And at that point, no one knew what was happening week-to-week and consulting leads basically stopped for six months. And that was oh, maybe we don't have a counter-cyclical business. But no, it turns out that when money means something again as interest rates rise, people care about it more.David: Yeah. It is nice to see that. And people are trying to do more with less and become more efficient in an advanced pace these days. I don't know about you, but I've seen the trends towards the low-hanging fruit being done at this point so people have already started using savings plans and capabilities like that, and now they're embarking in more re-architecture of applications. But I think one stumbling block that we've noticed is that customers are still struggling to know where to apply those transformations across their portfolio. They'll have one or two target apps that everybody knows because they're the big ones on the bill, but beneath that, the other 900 applications in their portfolio, which ones do I do next? And that's still a question that we're seeing come up, time and again.Corey: One thing that I'm starting to see people talking about from my perspective, has been suddenly they really care about networking in a way that they did not previously. And I mean, this in the TCP/IP sense, not the talking to interesting people and doing interesting things. That's been basically steady-state for a while. But from my perspective, the conversations I'm having are being driven by, “Wait a minute. AWS is going to start charging $3.50 a month per assigned IPV4 address. Oh, dear. We have been careless in our approach to this.” Is that something that you're seeing shaping the conversations you're having with folks?David: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean right off the bat, our team went through very quickly and inventoried our IPV4, and certainly, customers are doing that as well. I found that, you know, in the last seven years, the migration conversations were having become broader across an enterprise customer. So, we've mapped out different personas now, and the networking teams playing a bigger role for migrations, but also optimizations in the cloud. And I'll give you an example.So, one large enterprise, their networking team approached us at the same time as their cloud architects who were trying to work on a migration approached us. And the networking team had a different use case. They wanted to inventory all the IP addresses on-premises, and some that they already had in the cloud. So, they actually leveraged—shameless plug here—but they leveraged out a LightMesh IPAM solution to do that. And what that brought to light for us was that the integration of these different teams working together now, as opposed to working around each other. And I do think that's a bit of a trend change for us.Corey: IPAM has always been one of those interesting things to me because originally, the gold standard in this space was—let's not kid ourselves—a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. And then there are a bunch of other offerings that entered into the space. And for a while I thought most of these were ridiculous because the upgrade was, you know, Google Sheets so you can collaborate. But having this done in a way with particular permissions and mapping in a way that's intuitive and doesn't require everyone to not mess up when they're looking at it, especially as you get into areas of shared responsibility between different divisions or different team members who are in different time zones and whatnot, this becomes a more and more intractable problem. It's one of those areas where small, scrappy startups don't understand what the fuss is about, and big enterprises absolutely despair of finding something that works for them.AWS launched their VPC IPAM offering a while back and if you look at it from the perspective of competing with Google Sheets, its pricing is Looney Tunes. But I've met an awful lot of people who have sworn by it in the process, as they look at these things. Now, of course, the caveat is that like most AWS offerings, it's great in a pure AWS native environment, but as soon as you start getting into other providers and whatnot, it gets very tricky very quickly.David: No, absolutely. And usability of an IP address management solution is something to consider. So, you know, if you're trying to get on board with IPAM, do you want to do three easy steps or do you want to follow 150? And I think that's a really big barrier to entry for a lot of networking teams, especially those that are not too familiar with cloud already. But yeah, where we've seen the networking folks get more involved is around, like, identifying endpoints and devices that must be migrated to cloud, but also managing those subnets and planning their VPC designs upfront.You've probably seen this before yourself where customers have allocated a whole bunch of address space over time—an overlapping address space, I should say—only to then later want to [peer 00:13:47] those networks. And that's something that if you think you're going to be doing downstream, you should really plan for that ahead of time and make sure your address space is allocated correctly. Problems vary. Like, everyone's architecture is different, of course, but we've certainly noticed that being one of the top-button items. And then that leads into a migration itself. You're not migrating to cloud now; you're migrating within the cloud and trying to reorganize address spaces, which is a whole other planning activity to consider.Corey: When you take a look at, I guess the next step in these things, what's coming next in the world of migrations? I recently got to talk to someone who was helping their state migrate from, effectively, mainframes in many cases into a cloud environment. And it seems, on some level, like everyone on a mainframe, one, is very dependent on that workload; those things are important, so that's why they're worth the extortionate piles of money, but it also feels like they've been trying to leave the mainframe for decades in many cases. Now, there's a sense that for a lot of these folks, the end is nigh for their mainframe's lifespan, so they're definitely finally taking the steps to migrate. What's the next big frontier once the, I guess, either the last holdouts from that side of the world wind up getting into a cloud or decide they never will? It always felt to me like migrations are one of those things that's going to taper off and it's not going to be something that is going to be a growth industry because the number of legacy workloads is, at least theoretically, declining. Not so sure that's accurate, though.David: I don't think it is either. If we look back at past migrations, you know, 90, 95% of them are often lift-and-shift to EC2 or x86 on VMware in the cloud. And a lot of the work that we're seeing now is being described as optimization. Like, “Look at my EC2 workloads and come up with cloud-native or transformative processes for me.” But those are migrations as well because we run the same set of software, the same processes over those workloads to determine how we can re-platform and refactor them into more native services.So, I think, you know, the big shift for us is just recognizing that the term ‘migrations' needs to be well-defined and communicated with folks. Migrations are actually constant now and I would argue we're doing more migrations within customers now than we have in the past because the rate of change is just so much faster. And I should add, on the topic of mainframe and legacy systems, we have seen this pivot away from teams looking for emulation layers for those technologies, you know, where they want to forklift the functionality, but they don't want to really roll up their sleeves and do any coding work. So, they're previously looking to automatically translate code or emulate that compute layer in the cloud, and the big pivot we've seen in the last 12 months, I'd say, is that customers are more willing to actually understand how to rebuild their applications in the cloud. And that's a fantastic story because it means they're not kicking that technology debt can down the road any further. They're really trying to embrace cloud and leverage some of these new capabilities that have come to market.Corey: What do you see as, I guess, the reason that a number of holdouts have not yet done a migration? Like, historically, I've seen some that are pretty obvious: the technology wasn't there. Well, cloud has gotten to a point now where it is hard to identify a capability that isn't there in some form. And there's always been the sunk cost fallacy where, “Well, we've already bought all this stuff, and it's running here, so if we're not replacing it anytime soon, there's no cost benefit for us to replace it.” And that's actually correct. That's not a fallacy there. But there's also the, “Well, it would be too much work to move.” Sometimes true, sometimes not. Are you seeing a shift in the reasons that people are giving to not migrate?David: No, I haven't. It's been those points mostly. And I'd say one of the biggest inhibitors to people actually getting it done is this misconception that it costs a lot of money to transform and to adopt cloud tools. You've seen this through the technology keeps getting easier and easier to adopt and cheaper to use. When you can provision services for $0 a month and then scale with usage patterns, there's really no reason not to try today because the opportunity cost is so low.So, I think that one of the big inhibitors that comes up, though, is this cultural barrier within organizations where teams haven't been empowered to try new things. And that's the one thing that I think is improving nowadays, as more of this how-to-build-in-the-cloud capability becomes permeated throughout the organization. People are saying, “Well, why can't we do that?” As opposed to, “We can't do that.” You know what I mean? It's a subtle difference, but once leadership starts to say, “Why can't we do this modern thing in the cloud? Why can't we leverage AI?” Teams are given more rope to try and experiment, and fail, of course. And I think ultimately, that culture shift is starting to take root across enterprise and across public sector as well.Corey: One of the things that I find surprising is the enthusiasm with which different market segments jump onto different aspects of cloud. Lambda is a classic example, in that it might be one of the services that is more quickly adopted by enterprises than by startups and a lot of cases. But there's also the idea of, “Oh, we built this thing last night, and it's awesome.” And enterprises, like you know, including banks and insurance companies don't want to play those games, for obvious reasons.Generative AI seems to be a mixed bag around a lot of these things. Have you had conversations with a number of your clients around the generative AI stuff? Because I've seen Amazon, for example, talking about it, “Oh, all our customers are asking us about it.” And, mmm, I don't know. Because I definitely have questions about and I'm exploring it, but I don't know that I'm turning to Amazon, of all companies, to answer those questions, either.David: Yeah. We've certainly had customer conversations about it. And it depends, again, on those personas. On the IT side, the conversations are mostly around how can they do their jobs better. They're not thinking forwards about the business capabilities. So, IT comes to us and they want to know how can we use generative AI to create Lambda functions and create stateless applications more quickly as a part of a migration effort. And that's great. That's a really cool use case. We've used that generative AI approach to create code ourselves.But on the business side, they're looking forwards, they want to use generative AI in the, again, the sample size of my customer conversations, but they see that the barrier to entry is getting their data in a place that they can leverage it. And to them, to the business, that's what's driving the migration conversations they're having with us, is, “How do I exfil my data and get it into the cloud where I can start to leverage these great AI tools?”Corey: Yeah, I'm still looking at use cases that I think are a little less terrifying. Like, I want to wind up working on a story or something. Or I'll use it to write blog posts; I have a great approach. It's, “Write a blog post about this topic and here are some salient points and do it in the style of Corey Quinn.” I'll ask Chat-Gippity to do that and it spits out something that is, frankly, garbage.And I get angry at it and I basically copy it into a text editor and spent 20 minutes mansplain-correcting the robot. And by the time it's done, I have, like, a structure of an article that talks about the things I want to talk about correctly. And there may be three words in a sequence that were originally there. And frankly, I'm okay with plagiarizing from the thing that is plagiarizing from me. It's a beautiful circle of ripping things off that that's glorious for me.But that's also not something that I could see being useful at any kind of scale, where I see companies getting excited about a lot of this stuff, it all seems to be a thin veneer over, “And then we can fire our customer service people,” which from a labor perspective is not great, but ignoring that entirely, as a customer, I don't want that. Because by the time I have to reach out to a company's customer service apparatus, something has gone wrong and it isn't going to be solved by the standard list of frequently asked questions that I clicked on. It's something that is off the beaten path and anomalous and requires human judgment. Making it harder for me to get to people who can fix those things does not thrill and delight me.David: I agree. I'm with you there. Where I get excited about it, though, is how much of a force multiplier it can be on that human interaction. So, for example, in that customer's service case you mentioned, you know, if that customer service rep is empowered by an AI dashboard that's listening to my conversation and taking notes and automatically looking up in my knowledge base how to support that customer, then that customer success person can be more successful more quickly, I think they can be more responsive to customer needs and maybe improve the quality, not just the volume of work they do but improve the quality, too.Corey: That's part of the challenge, too. There have been a number of companies that have gotten basically rapped across the snout for just putting out articles as content, written by AI without any human oversight. And these don't just include, you know, small, scrappy content mills; they include Microsoft, and I believe CNN, if I'm not mistaken, had something similar with that going on. I'm not certain on that last one. I don't want to defame them, but I know for a fact Microsoft did.David: Yeah, and I think some of the email generators are plugging into AI now, too, because my spam count has gone through the roof lately.Corey: Oh, my God. I got one recently saying, “Hey, I noticed at The Duckbill Group that you fix AWS bills. Great. That's awesome and super valuable for your clients.” And then try to sell me bill optimization and process improvement stuff. And it was signed by the CEO of the company that was reaching out.And then there was like—I expand the signature view, and it's all just very light gray text make it harder to read, saying, “This is AI generated, yadda, yadda, yadda.” Called the company out on Twitter, and they're like, “Oh, we only have a 0.15% error rate.” That sounds suspiciously close to email marketing response rates. “Welp, that means 99% of it was perfect.” No, it means that you didn't get in front of most of those people. They just ignored it without reading it the way we do most email outreach. So, that bugs me a fair bit. Because my perspective on it is if you don't care enough to actually craft a message to send me, why should I care enough to read it?David: Completely agree. I think a lot of people are out there looking for that asymmetric, you know, leverage that you can get over the market, and generating content, to them, has been a blocker for so long and now they're just opening up the fire hose and drowning us all with it. So I'm, like, with you. I think that I personally don't expect to get value back from someone unless I put value into that relationship. That's my starting point coming into it, so I would maybe use AI to help assist forming a message to someone, but I'm not going to blast the internet with content. I just think that's a cheeky low-value way to go about it.Corey: I don't track the numbers anymore, but I know that at this point, through the size of my audience and the content that I put out, I have taken, collectively, millennia of human time focusing on—that has been spent consuming the content that I put out. And as a result of that, I have a guiding principle here, which is first and foremost, you've got to respect your audience. And I'm just going to have a robot phone it in is not respecting your audience. I have no problem with AI assistants, but it requires human oversight before it goes out. I would never in a million years send anything out to the audience that I hadn't at least read or validated first.But yeah, some of the signups that go out, the automatic things that you click a button and sign up for my newsletter at lastweekinaws.com, you get an auto message that comes out. Yeah, it comes out under my name and I either wrote it or reviewed it, depending on what generation of system we're on these days, because it has my name attached to it. That's the way that this works. Your credibility is important and having a robot spout off complete nonsense and you get the credit or blame for it? No thanks. I want to be doomed from my own sins, not the ones that a computer makes on my behalf.David: [laugh]. Yeah, I'm with you. It's unfortunate that so many people expect the emails from you are generated now. We have the same thing when people sign up for Tidal Accelerator or Tidal LightMesh, they get a personal email from me. They'll get the automated one as well, but I generally get in there through our CRM, and I send them a message, too. And sometimes they'll respond and say, “This isn't really David, is it?” No, no, it's me. You don't have to respond. I wanted to let you know that I'm thankful for you trialing our software.Corey: Oh, yeah. You can hit reply to any email I send out. It comes from corey@lastweekinaws.com and it goes to my inbox. The reason that works, frankly, at this scale is because no one does it. People don't believe that that'll actually work. So, on a busy week, I'll get maybe a dozen email replies to it or one or two misconfigured bounces from systems that aren't set up properly to do those things. And I weed those out because they drive me nuts.But it's a yeah, the only emails that I get to that address, honestly, are the test copies of those messages that go out, too, because I'm on my own newsletter list. Who knew? I have two at the moment. I have—yes, I have two specific addresses on that, so I guess technically, I'm inflating the count of subscribers by two, if advertisers ask. But you know, at 32,000 and change, I will take the statistical fudging.David: Absolutely. We all expect that.Corey: No, the depressing part, when I think about that is, there's a number of readers I have on the list that I know for a fact that I've been acquainted with who have passed away. They're never going to unsubscribe from these things until the email starts bouncing at some and undefinable point in the future. But it's also—it feels morbid, but on some level, if I continue doing this for the rest of my life, I'm going to have a decent proportion of the subscriber base who's died. At least when people leave their jobs, like, their email address gets turned off, things start bouncing and cool that gets turned off automatically because even when people leave voluntarily, no one bothers to go through an unsubscribe from all this stuff. So, automated systems have to do it. That's great. I'm not saying computers shouldn't make life better. I am saying that they can't replace a fundamental aspect of human caring.David: So, Corey Quinn, who has influence over the living and the dead. It's impressive.Corey: Oh, absolutely. Honestly, if I were to talk to whoever came up with IBM's marketing strategy, I feel like I'd need to conduct a seance because they're probably 300 years old if they're still alive.David: [laugh]. Absolutely.Corey: No, I get passionate about this stuff because so much of a lot of the hype now has been shifting away from letting people expand their reach further and doing things in intentional ways and instead toward absolute garbage, such as, “Cool, we want to get a whole bunch of clicks so we can show ads to them, so we're going to just generate all bunch of crap to your content and throw it out there.” Everything I write, even stuff that admittedly, from time to time, is aimed for SEO purposes for specific things that we're doing, but that's always done from a perspective of okay, my primary SEO strategy is write compelling, original content and then people presumably link to it. And it works. It's about respecting the audience and so many things get that wrong.David: Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of scary now because I always thought that podcasts and video were the last refuge of authentic content. And now people are generating that as well. You know, you're watching a video and you realize hey, that voice sounds exactly consistent, you know, all the way through. And then it turns out, it's generated. And there's a YouTube channel I follow because I'm an avid sailor, called World On Water. And recently, I've noticed that voice changed, and I'm pretty sure they're using AI to generate it now.Corey: Here's a story I don't think you probably know about yourself. So, for those who are unaware, David, I hang out from time to time in various places. There's a international boundary between us, but occasionally one of us will broach it, and good for us. And we have social conversations where somehow one of us doesn't have a microphone in front of our face. Imagine that. I don't know what that's like most weeks.And like, at some level, the public face comes off and people start acting like human beings. And something I've always noticed about you, David, is that you don't commit the cardinal sin, for an awful lot of people I meet, which is displaying contempt for your customers. When I have found people who do that, I think less of them in almost every case and I lose so much interest in whatever it is that they're doing. If you don't like the problem space that you're in and don't have respect for the people paying you to make these problems go away, you shouldn't be doing it. Like, I'll laugh at silly AWS misconfigurations, but my customers are there because they have a problem and they're bringing me in to fix it. And would I be making fun of? “Ha ha ha, you didn't spend eight months of your life learning the ins and outs of how exactly reserved instances apply in this particular context? What a fool is you.” That's not how it ever works. I wish I could say it wasn't quite as rare as it is but I'm tired of talking to people who have just nothing but contempt for their market. Good work on that.David: Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. You know, I had a penny-drop moment when I was doing a lot of consulting work as an independent contractor, working with different customers at different stages of their own journey and different levels of technology capabilities. You know, you work with management, with project people, with software engineers, and you start to realize everybody's coming from a different place. So, you have to empathize with where they're at.They're coming to you usually because you have a level of expertise, that you've got some specialization and they want to tap into that capability that you've created. And that's great. I love having people come to me and ask me questions. Sometimes they don't come to me nicely asking questions, they make some assumptions about me and might challenge me right off the bat, but you have to realize that that's just where they're coming from at that point in time. And once you connect with them, they'll open up a little bit more, too; they'll empathize with yourself. So yeah, I've always found that it's really important for myself personally, but also for our team to empathize with customers, meet them where they're at, understand that they're coming from a different level of experience, and then help them solve their problems. That's job number one.Corey: And I'm a firm believer that if you don't respect your customer's business, they shouldn't be your customer. It's happened remarkably few times in the however many years I've been doing this, but there have been a couple of folks that have reached out I always very politely decline to work with them when this happens. Because you don't want to make people feel obnoxious for reaching out and, like, “Can you help me with my problem?” “How dare you? Who do you think you are?”No, no, no, no, no, none of that. But if there's a value misalignment or I don't think that your product is going to benefit people who use it as directed, I will not let you sponsor what I do as an easy example. Because I can always find another sponsor and make more money, but once I start losing the audience's trust, I'll never get that back, and I know that. It's the entire reason I do things the way that I do them. And maybe, on some level, from purely capitalist perspective, I'm being an absolute fool, but you know, if you have to pick a way to fail and assume you're going to get it wrong, how do you want to be wrong? I'll take this way.David: Yeah, I agree. Keep your ethics high, keep your morals high, and the rest will fall into place.Corey: I love how we started having ethical and morality discussions that started as, “So, cloud migrations. How are they going for you?”David: Yeah [laugh]. Certainly wandered into some uncharted territories on that one.Corey: Exactly. We started off in one place; wound up someplace completely removed from anything we could have reasonably expected at the start. Why? Because this entire episode has been a beautiful metaphor for cloud migrations. I really want to thank you for taking the time to chat with me on this stuff. If people want to learn more, where should they go to find you?David: tidal.cloud or LinkedIn, I'm very active on LinkedIn these days.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to both of those in the show notes. Thank you so much for going down this path with me. I didn't expect it to lead where it did, but I'm glad we went there.David: Like the tides ebbing and flowing. I'll be back soon, Corey.Corey: [laugh]. I will take you up on that and hold you to it.David: [laugh]. Sounds great.Corey: David Colebatch, CEO at Tidal. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, upset comment that doesn't actually make cohesive sense because you outsourced it to a robot.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Ask David: Burn Out; When Challenging Thoughts Doesn't Work; and more! Featuring Dr. Matthew May In today's podcast, Matt, Rhonda and David discuss four challenging questions from podcast fans like you: 1. Joseph asks if it's okay to take a break when you get “burned out.” Below, David expands on this and describes the difference between “healthy” and “unhealthy burnout.” 2. Joseph also asks why your feelings might not change when you challenge your negative thought with a positive thought that's 100% true. 3. Dan asks about Step 4 of the Relationship Journal, which is the most difficult and important step in the TEAM interpersonal model—see exactly how you're forcefully causing and reinforcing the very relationship problem you're complaining about. For example, if the person doesn't “listen,” you'll see that you're forcing them not to listen. If she or he doesn't open up and express feelings, you'll see that you prevent them from opening up. And if you think your partner doesn't treat you in a loving and respectful way, you'll suddenly see exactly why this is happening—if you have the courage to take look and see: But if fact, this is one of the “Great Deaths” of the “self” in TEAM-CBT, and very few folks are willing to “die” in this way. 4. Finally, Clay asks about EMDR. He's been treated with it without success. David and Matt weigh in with their thoughts about EMDR. This question was not addressed on the podcast, since some practitioners of EMDR might be offended by David and Matt's thinking, but they did describe their thoughts in the show notes below. If you are an EMDR enthusiast, you might prefer NOT to read our comments. Joseph writes: Thanks, David, for sharing so much on the podcasts! I have a couple questions. Personally, I find that when I'm burnt out, I get a lot more anxious automatic thoughts. While it's definitely good to combat these distorted thoughts by replacing them with realistic ones, my takeaway is that it's also sometimes wise to change our lives / circumstances (e.g. to take a break). By the way, I also wanted to ask if you've ever faced a situation where you are convinced that a thought is distorted and irrational (and you know what the realistic thought is), but you still can't shake it off? I sometimes get stuck when I already know the "right answer" (ie. what the realistic thoughts are based on the methods you've taught), but I just can't seem to get my brain to fully believe it. For example, I was recently on vacation and a small blip made me think "my vacation is ruined!". I immediately identified it as all-or-nothing thinking, and replaced it with "my vacation is still going very well even if it's not perfect" (and I'm convinced this thought is true), but somehow my mind kept going back to the automatic thought again and again. Curious if you've ever experienced this. Thanks again so much for your time and your teaching; just wanted to say I really appreciate it! :) Regards Joseph David's Reply to Joseph. Thanks for the great questions. We address both of them on an upcoming podcast. Here's the quick response. Yes, it is okay to take a break when you feel “burned out.” However, you can get “burned out” in a healthy or unhealthy way. For example, after I edit for two or three hours, which I love, my brain gets “burned out.” So I take a break and come back later, maybe even a day later, and I feel refreshed and filled with enthusiasm about writing and editing some more, because I love these activities. When I was in private practice in Philadelphia, I saw 17 patients back to back on Wednesdays. That way, I could have a three day weekend. Actually, I loved it and as the day went on, I got higher and higher. At the end I was exhausted, but exhilarated. I was never “burned out” because I loved what I was doing, and the clinical work was SO rewarding! However, sometimes I made a mistake and a patient would get very upset, sometimes angry with me, or felt hurt. THAT was when I got suddenly burned out and exhausted. But it wasn't because of my work, or the conflict, but rather my thoughts about it, which generally involved a combination of self criticism and frustration with the patient, both the result of distorted thoughts, generally Self-Directed and Other-Directed Should Statements. And THAT kind of “burned out” won't improve with a break. The answer is challenging and changing your own inner dialogue, as well as your dialogue with the other person, using the “failure” in the relationship as an opportunity to listen and support and create a deeper and more meaningful relationship. With regard to your second excellent question, we explored that in depth in the podcast, and also made it a problem for our listeners to think about. So tune in for the answers! This is a popular question I've been answering for more than 40 years, and the answers tell us a great deal about how cognitive therapy actually works. Thanks so much, Joseph!  Subject: Relationship Journal Gem I Found Dan (a former participant in David and Jill's Tuesday training group at Stanford) writes: Hello to the Dynamic Duo (David and Jill), I came across this doc for Step 4 of the Relationship Journal, but I don't really understand it and I don't remember the context. I know it was from the Tuesday Group years ago. It says it's about conceptualizing the problem, just not sure how to utilize this in step 4. Thanks. (You will find this document in the show notes below.) ~Dan (Daniel C. Linehan, MSW, LCSW) David's Reply Hi Dan, Great question. In this document, I am trying to make it a bit easier for folks to see how they are triggering the very problem they are complaining about. So, I have listed three categories of common complaints. For example, an Empathy complaint would be that “My partner doesn't listen,” or “always has to be right.” Then you ask, “If I wanted to force my partner to behave like this, how could I so?” Well, one good way would be to interrupt when your partner is trying to talk, or argue and insist your partner is wrong when they're trying to make a point, and so forth. This would force your partner to argue and insist that they are right! It is pretty basic and obvious. But most human beings don't “get it,” and in part that's because a great many don't want to. Blaming the other person seems way more popular than looking at your own role in the problem these days. Good to hear from you on this important topic! People can usually “see” how step 3 of the Relationship Journal works—you simply examine what you wrote down in Step 2, and you can almost always see no E (Empathy), no A (assertively sharing your feelings with “I Feel” Statements, and no R (conveying respect or liking to the other person, even when you're angry.) But most people don't seem to have the natural mental aptitude or the stomach for Step 4, where you go beyond Step 3 and explain EXACTLY how you FORCE the other person to behave in the exact way you're complaining about. The document in the link is an attempt to help people with Step 4—IF you are willing to examine your own role in the problem. In Step 4, you ask yourself what category you see the other person in, and there are three choices to make it fairly simple. You might feel that they don't listen or try to see your point of view. This would be an E = no Empathy complaint. Or you might feel like they can't, or won't, share their feelings. Instead, they might just keep arguing, or they might refuse to open up. This would be an A = no Assertiveness complaint. Or, you might complaint that they don't treat you with warmth, love, or respect. That would be an R = no Respect complaint. This makes it much easier to “see” how your response to the other person in Step 2 actually causes and reinforces the exact behavior you're complaining about. Lots of people get defensive or annoyed at this step of the RJ, and refuse to continue! That's because Step 4 is all about the third “Great Death” of the “self,” or “ego,” in TEAM-CBT. Most of us don't want to “die” in this way. It can feel humiliating, or shameful, to pinpoint your own role in the problem. But, there's usually a big reward—you're suddenly “reborn” into a far more loving and satisfying relationship. In the podcast, brave and wonderful Rhonda provided David and Matt with an example when she was visiting her son and daughter in law in Germany last month to help out with their twin baby girls. This example really brings this “Great Death” to life, and we are grateful to Rhonda for helping us in this very vulnerable and real way! Feel free to ask again if I have not made it clear. To me, this phenomenon of causing the very problems we are complaining about in our relationships with others is incredibly fascinating. However, change involves the “death of the self,” which is painful, because you have to see, usually for the first time, your own role in the problem you're complaining about. It is based on the Buddhist idea that we create our own interpersonal reality at every moment of every day. In other words, we CREATE our enemies, and then whine and complaint about it! Most people don't want to see this! They want the therapist (or friend they're confiding to) to agree that the other person REALLY IS a jerk, or to blame, or whatever. They just want to complain and blame and feel superior! In my book, Feeling Good Together, I think I said something to the effect that we “want to do our dirty work in the dark.” In other words, we don't want to turn the lights on so we can “see” how we're actually causing the conflict. The person asking for help can nearly always be shown to be the 100% cause of the conflict. This technique is one I recommend when working with an individual, and not a couple. Other less confrontational techniques are probably more effective when you are working with both partners at the same time. Warmly, david (David D. Burns, MD) Here's the document: Conceptualizing the Patient's Complaint in Step 4 of the Relationship Journal (RJ) By David D. Burns, MD* Problem Area Specific Complaint—S/he Complaints about the other person's lack of E = Empathy Won't listen Does not understand me Always has to be right  Always criticizes me Constantly complains and ignores my advice Constantly brags and talks about himself / herself Doesn't value my thinking or ideas. Is defensive and argumentative Doesn't care about my feelings. Complaints about the other person's lack of A = Assertiveness Cannot (or will not) express his or her feelings Cannot deal with negative feelings Expects me to read his or her mind Clams up and refuses to talk to me Won't be honest with me pouts and slams doors, insisting s/he isn't mad! won't tell me how she / he is feeling. isn't honest with me. suddenly explodes for no reason, out of the blue. Complaints about the other person's lack of R = Respect Always has to get his or her way Is stubborn Is controlling Does all the taking, while I do all the giving Uses me Puts me down Is judgmental Does not care about me or respect me Only cares about is himself / herself Constantly complains and ignores my advice. Explanation. When you are using the Relationship Journal, you will usually have a complaint about the other person. For example, you may complain that she or he “never listens,” or “is always si critical,” or “constantly complains but never listen to my advice.” If you write down one thing the other person said in Step 1 of the RJ, and exactly what you said in Step 2, you can usually easily analyze your response with the EAR Checklist. That shows what you did wrong, and why your response was ineffective. You can also use the Bad Communication Checklist to pinpoint your communication errors, and some people prefer this format. In Step 4, you go spell out precisely why your response will FORCE the other person to keep doing the exact thing you're complaining about. One easy way to conceptualize the nature of your complaint about the other person is with our convenient EAR algorithm. This document can help you “see” the problem you're complaining about when you do Step 4 of the RJ. That makes it much easier to discover exactly how you are triggering and reinforces the exact problem you're complaining about. LMK what you think! Clay writes: Hello David, I know you no longer practice, but could I please get an opinion from you on EMDR? So far I have done about six sessions of EMDR and I feel worse than when I began. Does one typically feel worse before one feels better with EMDR? I know you are for Team CBT, and I think it has a lot of merit and science behind it! It just seems a little magical to me that by alternately tapping that I am going to resolve traumas or anxiety issues that happened a long time ago and maybe even recently, but I am going into it with an open mind and the possibilities. Best to you and your family, David, and thank you for the revolution in cognitive therapy you started with Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis! Kind regards, Clay Wilson Hi Clay, I've never been an EMDR enthusiast. To me, it's just cognitive exposure, which definitely can have value in anxiety, coupled with “eye jiggling.” Many of it's proponents seem to think that they have found the holy grail, and I have no doubt that a few will slam me for me non-supportive response! And please remember that I'm a cynic, so take it with a grain of salt. In TEAM, we use more than a hundred M = Methods, and only after doing the T, E, A steps, which are absolutely crucial to success in most cases. Best, david PS I'm copying Rhonda and Matt. If we used your question on an Ask David, would you be open to that, with or without your correct first name? Happy to disguise your name. David D. Burns, MD Dear David, I greatly value your ideas and that you are a cynic. In 6 sessions of the EMDR, I have not felt any better. You are absolutely free to use my name and you don't need to disguise it at all. I live in Columbus, Montana and as far as I know, there is only one person in Bozeman who does Team CBT. I sent her an email but didn't hear back but it's 100 miles from us anyway. Thank you very, very much for your view on EMDR! I was thinking something similar myself. All the very best to you and your family! Most Sincerely, Clay David's Response HI Clay, You're welcome. My website is full of free resources, anxiety class, depression class, more than 300 TEAM podcasts, and more. My book, When Panic Attacks, is pretty cheap in paperback. Also, beta testing of thee Feeling Good App is still free. T = Testing, E = Empathy, A = Addressing Resistance, and M = Methods (more than 100.) A is likely the most important step! Thanks, best, david Matt's Response Hi Dan and David, My guess is that EMDR showed some early results due to the tendency of most therapists to avoid exposure techniques and try to 'smooth over' anxious thinking and trauma, rather than just dive in and explore it, fearlessly. I suspect this created a large cohort of anxious and traumatized patients, waiting in the wings, for such treatment, so it showed immediate favorable data. However, this method is only one of dozens, and the setup is key. Why would you want to overcome something traumatic? Wouldn't it be more useful to remember it and avoid anything that resembles it? Meaning, there may be powerful methods, including exposure and (usually) less-effective methods, like 'eye-jiggling' and other distraction techniques out there for anyone, but why bother with these if the symptoms are helpful and appropriate? This is the main idea in TEAM . People recover when they want to recover, not when someone applies the correct methodology. -Matt Hi Dan, David, and Matt:  In addition to being a TEAM therapist, I also practice EMDR.  I find it to be very effective, especially when used within the TEAM structure.  It may not be for everyone, but it's great to have many options for our clients. -Rhonda  David's comment. Yes, and here Matt's is pointing out some of the paradoxical “Outcome Resistance” strategies we use with anxious patients when doing TEAM therapy. We become the voice of the patient's resistance to change, and verbalize all the really positive things about the anxiety symptoms: how they protect us from danger and express our core values as human beings. Paradoxically, this often reduces resistance and opens the door to change. In TEAM, we treat the human being with systematic TEAM therapy. We do not treat symptoms with techniques. The meaning of this may be hard to “see” if you haven't seen or experienced it. But there are a large number of actual therapy sessions your can listen to in the podcasts. Best, David Thanks for asking such terrific questions and for listening! We all greatly appreciate your support. Keep your questions and comments (negative as well as positive) coming! Rhonda, Matt, and David

Sentry is an application monitoring tool that surfaces errors and performance problems. It minimizes the need to manually look at logs or dashboards by identifying common problems across applications and frameworks. David Cramer is the co-founder and CTO of Sentry. This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio. Topics covered: What's Sentry? Treating performance problems as errors Why you might no need logs Identifying common problems in applications and frameworks Issues with Open Telemetry data Why front-end applications are difficult to instrument The evolution of Sentry's architecture Switching from a permissive license to the Business Source License Related Links Sentry David's Blog Sentry 9.1 and Upcoming Changes Re-Licensing Sentry Transcript You can help edit this transcript on GitHub. [00:00:00] Jeremy: Today I'm talking to David Kramer. He's the founder and CTO of Sentry. David, welcome to Software Engineering Radio. [00:00:08] David: Thanks for having me. Excited for today's conversation. What's Sentry? [00:00:11] Jeremy: I think the first thing we could start with is defining what Sentry is. I know some people refer to it as an error tracker. Some people have referred to it as, an application performance monitoring tool. I wonder if you could kind of describe in, in your words what it is. [00:00:30] David: You know, as somebody who doesn't work in marketing, I just tell it how it is. So Sentry started out doing error monitoring, which. You know, dependent on who you talk to, you might just think of as logging, right? Like that's the honest truth. It is just logging just a different shape or form. these days it's hard to not classify us as just an APM tool that's like the industry that exists. It's like the tools people understand. So I would just say it's an APM tool, right? We do a bunch of things within that space, and maybe it's not, you know, item for item the same as say a product like New Relic. but a lot of the overlap's there, so it's like errors performance, which is like latency and sort of throughput. And then we have some stuff that just goes a little bit deeper within that. The, the one thing i would say that is different for us versus a lot of these tools is we actually only do application monitoring. So we don't do any since like systems or infrastructure monitoring. Meaning Sentry is not gonna tell you when you need to replace a hard drive or even that you need new hard, like more disk space or something like that because it's just, it's a domain that we don't think is relevant for sort of our customers and product. Application Performance Monitoring is about finding crashes and performance problems that users would associate with bugs [00:01:31] Jeremy: For people who aren't familiar with the term application performance monitoring, what is that compared to just error tracking? [00:01:41] David: The way I always reason about it, this is what I tell new hires and what I would tell, like my mother, if I had to explain what I do, is like, you load Uber and it crashes. We all know that's bad, right? That's error monitoring. We capture the crash report, we send it to developers. You load Uber and it's a 30 second spinner, like a loading indicator as a customer. Same outcome for me. I assume the app is broken, right? So we also know that's bad. Um, but that's different than a crash. Okay. Sentry captures that same thing and send it to developers. lastly the third example we use, which is a little bit more. I think, untraditional, but a non-traditional rather, uh, you load the Uber app and it's like a blank screen or there's no button to submit, like log in or something like this. So it's kind of like a, it's broken, but it maybe isn't erroring and it's not like a slow thing. Right. Same outcome. It's probably a bug of some sorts. Like it's what an end user would describe it as a bug. So for me, APM just translates to there are bugs, user perceived bugs in your application and we're able to monitor and, and help the software teams sort of prioritize and resolve those, those concerns. [00:02:42] Jeremy: Earlier you were talking about actual crashes, and then your second case is, may be more of if the app is running slowly, then that's not necessarily a crash, but it's still something that an APM would monitor. [00:02:57] David: Yeah. Yeah. And I, I think to be fair, APM, historically, it's not a very meaningful term. Like I as a, when I was more of just an individual contributor, I would associate APM to, like, there's a dashboard that will tell me what's slow in my application, which it does. And that is kind of core to APM, but it would also, none of the traditional tools, pre sentry would actually tell you why it's broken, like when there's an error, a crash. It was like most of those tools were kind of useless. And I don't know, I do actually know, but I'm gonna pretend I don't know about most people and just say for myself. But most of the time my problems are errors. They are not like it's fast or slow, you know? and so we just think of it as like it's a holistic thing to say, when I've changed the application and something's broken, or it's a bug, you know, what is that bug? How do we help people fix it? And that comes from a lot of different, like data signals and things like that. the end result is still the same. You either are gonna fix it or it's not important and you ignore it. I don't know. So it's a pretty straightforward, premise for us. But again, most companies in the space, like the traditional company is when you grow a big company, what happens is like you build one thing and then you build lots of check boxes to sell more things. And so I think a lot of the APM vendors, like they've created a lot of different products. Like RUM is a good example of another acronym that lives with an APM. And I would tell you RUM is completely meaningless. It, it stands for real user monitoring. And so I'm like, well, what's not real about monitoring the application? Well, nothing's not real, but like they created a new category because that's how marketing engines work. And that new category is more like analytics than it is like application telemetry. And it's only because they couldn't collect the app, the application telemetry at the time. And so there's just a lot of fluff, i would say. But at the end of the day too, like developers or engineering teams, it's like new version of the application. You broke something, let's tell you about it so you can fix it. You might not need logging or performance monitoring [00:04:40] Jeremy: And, and so earlier you were saying how this is a kind of logging, but there's also other companies, other products that are considered like logging infrastructure. Like I, I would think of companies like Paper Trail or Log Tail. So what space does Sentry fill that's that's different than that kind of logging? [00:05:03] David: Um, so the way I always think about it, and this is both personally true, and what I advise other folks is when you're building something new, when you start from zero, right, you can often take Sentry put it in, and that's good enough. You don't even need performance monitoring. You just need like errors, right? Like you're just causing bugs all the time. And you could do that with logging, but like the delta between air monitoring and logging is night and day. From a user experience, like error monitoring for us, or what we built at the very least, aggregates the errors. It, it helps you understand the frequency. It helps you when they're new versus old. it really gives you a lot of detail where logs don't, and so you don't need logging often. And I will tell you today at Sentry. Engineers do not use logs for the most part. Uh, I had a debate with one of our, our team members about it, like, why does he use logs recently? But you should not need them because logs serve a different purpose. Like if you have traces which tell you like, like fast and slow in a bunch of other network data and you have this sort of crash report collection or error monitoring thing, logs become like a compliance or an audit trail or like a security forensics, tool, and there's just not a lot of value that you would get out of them otherwise, like once in a while, maybe there's like some weird obscure use case, but generally speaking, you can just pretend that you don't need logs most days. Um, and to me that's like an evolution of the industry. And so when, when Sentry is getting started, most people were still logs. And if you go talk to SRE teams, they're like, oh, login is what we know. Some of that's changed a little bit, but. But at the end of the day, they should only be needed for more complicated audit trails because they're just not a good solution to the problem. It's just free form data. Structured or not, doesn't really matter. It's not aggregated. It's not something that you can really use. And it's why whenever you see logging tools, um, not even the papertrails of the world, but the bigger ones like Splunk or Cabana, it's like this weird, what we describe as choose your own adventure. Like go have fun, build your dashboards and try to make the logs useful kind of story. Whereas like something like Sentry, it's just like, why would you waste any time trying to build dashboards when we can just tell you when something new is broken? Like that's the ideal situation. [00:06:59] Jeremy: So it sounds like maybe the distinction is with a more general logging tool, like you mentioned Splunk and Kibana it's a collection of all this information. of things happening, even though nothing's necessarily wrong, whereas Sentry is more Sentry is it's going to log things, but it's only going to log things if Sentry believes something is wrong, either because of a crash or because of some kind of performance issue. People don't want to dig through logs or dashboards, they want to be told when something is wrong and whyMost software is built the same way, so we know common problems [00:07:28] David: Yeah. I, i would say it's about like actionability, right? Like, like nobody wants to spend their time digging through logs, digging through dashboards. Metrics are another good example of this. Like just charts with metrics on them. Yeah. They tell me something's happening. If there's lots of log statements, they tell me something's going on, but they're not, they're not optimized to like, help me solve a problem, right? And so our philosophy was always like, we haven't necessarily nailed this in all cases for what it's worth, but. It was like, the goal is we identify an actual problem, like close to like a root cause kind of problem, and we escalate that up and that's it. Uh, versus asking somebody to like go have to like build these dashboards, build these things, figure out what data matters and all this because most software looks exactly the same. Like if you have a web service, it doesn't matter what language it's written in, it doesn't matter how different you think your architecture is from somebody else's, they're all the same. It's like you've got a request, you've got a database, you've got some cache, you've got all these like known, known quantity things, and the slowness comes from the same places. Errors are structured while logs are not [00:08:25] David: The errors come from the same places. They're all exhibiting the same kinds of behavior. So logging is very unstructured. And what I mean by that is like there's no schema. Like you can hypothetically like make it JSON and everybody does that, but it's still unstructured. Whereas like errors, it's, it's a tight schema. It's like there's a type of error, there's a message for the error, there's a stack trace, there's all these things that you know. Right. And as soon as you know and you define those things, you can just build better products. And so distributed tracing is similar. Hypothetically, it's a little bit abstract to be fair, but hypothetically, distributed tracing is creating a schema out of basically network annotations. And somebody will yell at me for just simplifying it to that. I would tell 'em that's what it is. But, same goal in mind. If you know what the data is, you can take action on it. It's not quite entirely true. Um, because tracing is much more freeform. For example, it doesn't say if you have a SQL statement, it should be like this, it should be formatted this way, things like that. whereas like stack traces, there's a file name, there's there's a line number, there's like all these things, right? And so that's how I think about the delta between what is useful information and what isn't, I guess. And what allows you to actually build things like Sentry versus just build abstract exploration. Inferring problems rather than having user identify them [00:09:36] Jeremy: Kind of paint the picture of how someone would get started with a tool like Sentry. Do they need to tell Sentry anything about their application? Do they need to modify their source code at all? give us a picture of how that works. [00:09:50] David: Yeah, like one of our fundamentals, which I think applies for any real business these days is you've gotta like reduce user friction, right? Like you've gotta make it dead simple to use. Uh, and for us there were, there was like kind of a fundamental driving constraint behind that. So in many situations, um, APM vendors especially will require you to run an agent a basically like some kind of process that runs on your servers somewhere. Well, if you look at modern tech stacks, that doesn't really work because I don't run the servers half my stuff's in the browser, or it's a mobile app or a desktop app, and. Even if I do have those servers, it's like an entirely different team that controls them. So deploying like a sidecar, an agent is actually like much more complicated. And so we, we looked at that and also because like, it's much easier to have control if you just ship within the application. We're like, okay, let's build like an SDK and dependency that just injects into the, the application that runs, set an API key and then you're done. And so what that translates for Sentry is we spend a lot of time knowing what Django is or what Rails is or what expresses like all these frameworks. And just knowing how to plug into the right signals in those frameworks. And then at that point, like the user doesn't have to do anything. And so like the ideal outcome for Sentry is like you install the dependency in whatever language makes sense, right? You somehow configure the API key and maybe there's a couple other minor settings you add and that gives you the bare bones and that's it. Like it should just work from there. Now there's a lot you can do on top of that to enrich data and whatnot, but for the most part, especially for errors, like that's good enough. And that, that's always been a fundamental goal of ours. And I, I think we actually do it phenomenally well. [00:11:23] Jeremy: So it sounds like it infers things about the application without manual configuration. Can you give some examples of the kind of things that Sentry knows without the user having to tell it? [00:11:38] David: Yeah. So a good example. So on the errors side, we know literally everything because an error object in each language has all these attributes with it. It, it gives you the stack trace, it gives you a lot of these things. So that one's straightforward. On the performance side, we use a combination of leveraging some like open source, I guess implementations, like open telemetry where it's got all this instrumentation already and we can just soak that in, um, as well as we automatically instrument a bunch of stuff. So for example, say you've got like a Python application and you're using, let's say like SQL Alchemy or something. I don't actually know if this is how our SDK works right now, but, we will build something that's aware of that library and make sure it can automatically instrument the things it needs to get the right information out of it. And be fair. That's always been true for like APM vendors and stuff like that. The delta is, we've often gone a lot deeper. And so for Python for example, you plug it into an application, we'll capture things like the error, error object, which is like exception class name exception value, right? Stack trace, file, name, line number, all those normal things, function name. We'll also collect source code. So we'll, we'll give you sort of surrounding source code blocks for each line in the stack trace, which makes it infinitely easier to consume. And then in Python and, and php, and I forget if we do this anywhere else right now, we'll actually even allow you to collect what are called stack locals. So it'll, it'll give you basically the variables that are defined almost like a debugger. And that is actually, actually like game changing from a development point of view. Because if I can go look in production when there's an incident or a bug and I can actually see the state of the application. , I, I never need to know like, oh, what was going on here? Oh, what if like, do I need to go reproduce this somehow? I always have the right information. And so all of that for us is automatic and we only succeed like, it, it's, it's like by definition inside of Sentry, it has to be automatic. Like if we ask the user to do anything whatsoever, we're failing. And so whenever we design any product or anything, and to be fair, this is how every product company should operate. it's gotta be with as little user input as humanly possible. And so you can't always pull that off. Sometimes you have to have users configure stuff, but the goal should always be no input. Detecting errors through unhandled exceptions [00:13:42] Jeremy: So you, you're talking about getting a stack trace, getting, the state of variables, source code. That sounds like that's primarily gonna be through unhandled exceptions. Would you say that's, that's the primary way that you get error? [00:13:58] David: Yeah, you can integrate in other ways. So you can like trigger our API to capture an, uh, an exception. You can also, for better or worse, it's not always good. You can integrate through logging adapters. So if you're already using a logging framework and you log their errors there, we can often capture those. However, I will say in most cases, people use the logging APIs wrong and the data becomes junk. A good, a good example of this is like, uh, it varies per language. So I'm just gonna go to Python because Python is like sort of core to Sentry. Um, in Python you have the ability to log messages, you can log them as errors, you can log like actual error objects as errors. But what usually happens is somebody does a try-catch. They, they capture the error they rescue from it. They create a logging call, like log dot error or something, put the, the error message or value in there. And then they send that upstream. And what happens is the stack trace is gone because we don't know that it's an error object. And so for example, in Python, there's actually an an A flag. You pass the logging call to make sure that stack trace stays present. But if you don't know that the data becomes junk all of a sudden, and if we don't have a stack trace, we can't actually aggregate data because like there's just not enough information to like, to run hashing on it. And so, so there are a lot of ways, I guess, to capture the information, but there are like good ways and there are bad ways and I think it, it's in everybody's benefit when they design their, their apt to like build some of these abstractions. And so like as an example, when, whenever I would start a new project these days, I will add some kind of helper function for me to like log an exception when I like, try catch and then I can just plug in whatever I need later if I want to enrich the data or if I wanna send that to Sentry manually or send it to logs manually. And it just makes life a lot easier versus having to go back and like augment every single call in the code base. [00:15:37] Jeremy: So it, it sounds like. When you're using a tool like Sentry, there's gonna be the, the unhandled exceptions, which are ones that you weren't expecting. So those should I guess happen without you catching them. And then the ones that you perhaps do anticipate, but you still consider to be a problem, you would catch that and then you would add some kind of logging statement to your code that talks to Sentry directly. Finding issues like performance problems (N+1 queries) that are not explicit errorsz [00:16:05] David: Potentially. Yeah. It becomes a, a personal choice to be fair at that, at that point. but yeah, the, the way, one of the ways we've been thinking about this lately, because we've been changing our error monitoring product to not just be about errors, so we call it issues, and that's in the guise of like, it's like an issue tracker, a bug tracker. And so we started, we started putting what are effectively like, almost like static analysis concerns inside of this issue tracker. So for example, In our performance monitor, we'll do something called like detect n plus one queries, which is where you execute a, a duplicate query in a loop. It's not necessarily an error. It might not be causing a problem, but it could be causing a problem in the future. But it's like, you know, the, the, the qualities of it are not the same as an error. Like it's not necessarily causing the user to experience a bug. And so we've started thinking more about this, and, and this is the same as like logging errors that you handle. It's like, well, they're not really, they're not really bugs. It's like expected behavior, but maybe you still want to keep it like tracking somewhere. And I think about like, you know, Lins and things like that, where it's like, well, I've got some things that I definitely should be fixing. Then I've got a bunch of other stuff that's like informing me that maybe I should take action on or not. But only I, the human can really know at the end of the day, right, if I, if I should prioritize that or not. And so that's how I kind of think about like, if I'm gonna try catch and then log. Yeah, you should probably collect that data. It's probably less important than like the, these other concerns, like, like an actual unhandled exception. But you do, you do want to know that they're happening and whatnot. And so, I dunno, Sentry has not had a strong opinion on this historically. We're just like, send us whatever you want to capture in this regard, and you can pay for it, that's fine. It's like usage based, you know? we're starting to think a lot more about what should that look like if we, if we go back to like, what's the, what's the opinion we have for how you should use the product or how you should solve these kinds of software problems. [00:17:46] Jeremy: So you gave the example of detecting n plus one queries is, is that like being aware of the framework or the ORM the person is using and that's how you're determining this? Or is it at more of a lower level than that? [00:18:03] David: it is, yeah. It's at the framework level. So this is actually where Open Telemetry causes a lot of harm, uh, for us because we need to know what a database query is. Uh, we need to know like the structure of the query because we actually wanna parse it out in a lot of cases. Cause we actually need to identify if it's duplicate, right? And we need to know that it's a database query, not a random annotation that you've added. Um, and so what we do is within these traces, which is like if you, if you don't know what a trace is, it's basically just like, it's a tree, like a tree structure. So it's like A calls B, calls C, B also calls D and E and et cetera, right? And so you just, you know, it's a trace. Um, and so we actually just look at that trace data. We try to find these patterns, which is like, okay, B was a, a SQL query or something. And every single sibling of B is that same SQL query, but sort of removing certain parameters and stuff for the value. So we'll look at that data and we'll try to pull out anomalies. So m plus one is an example of like a fairly obvious anti pattern that everybody knows is bad and can be optimized. Uh, but there's a lot of other that are a little bit more subjective. I'll give you an example. If you execute three SQL statements back to back, one could argue that you could just batch those SQL statements together. I would argue most of the time it doesn't matter and I don't need to do that. And also it's not guaranteed that that is better. So it becomes much more like, well, in my particular situation this is valuable, but in this other situation it might not be. And that's where I go back to like, it's almost like a linter, you know? But we're trying to infer all of that from the data stream. So, so Sentry's kind of, we're kind of a backwards product company. So we build our product from a technology vision, not from customers want this, or we have this great product vision or anything like that. And so in our case, the technology vision is like, there's a lot of application data that comes in, a lot of telemetry, right? Errors, traces. We have a bunch of other streams now. within that telemetry there is like signal. And so one, it's all structured data so we know what it is so we can actually interpret it. And then we can identify that signal that might be a problem. And that signal in our case is often going to translate to like this issue concept. And then the goal is like, well, can we identify these problems for people and surface them versus the choose your own adventure model, which is like, we'll just capture everything and feed it to the user and they can figure out what matters. Because again, a web service is a web service. A database is a database. They're all the same problems for everybody. All you know, it's just, and so that's kind of the model we've built and are continuing to evolve on and, and so far works pretty well to, to curate a lot of these workflows. Want to infer everything, but there are challenges [00:20:26] Jeremy: You talked a little bit about how people will sometimes use tracing. And in cases like that, they may need some kind of session ID to track. Somebody making a call to a service and that talks to a database and that talks to other services. And you, inside of your application, you have to instrument some way of tracking. This all came from this one request. Is that something that Sentry can infer or is there something that the developer has to put into play so that you can track that sort of thing? [00:21:01] David: Yeah, so it's, it's like a bit of both. And i would say our goal is that we can infer everything. The reality is there is so much complexity and there's too much of a, like, too many technologies in the world. Like I was complaining about this the other day, like, the classic example on web service is if we have a middleware hook, We kind of know request response, usually that's how middleware would work, right? And so we can infer a lot from there. Like basically we can infer the boundaries, which is a really big deal. Okay. That's one thing is boundaries is a problem. What we, we describe that as a transaction. So like when the request starts. When the request ends, right? That's a very important boundary for everybody to understand because when I'm working on the api, I care about the API boundary. I actually don't care about what the database is doing at its low level or what the JavaScript application might be doing above it. I want my boundary. So that's one that we kind of can do. But it's hard in a lot of situations because of the way frameworks and technology has been designed, but at least traditional stuff like a, a traditional web stack, it works like a Rails app or a DDjango app or PHP app kind of thing, right? And then within that it becomes, well, how do you actually build a trace versus just have a bunch of arbitrary labels? And so we have a bunch of complicated tech within each language that tries to establish that tree. and then we annotate a lot of things along the way. And so we will either leverage Open Telemetry, which is an open format spec that ideally has very high quality data. Ideally, not realistically, but ideally it has high quality data. Every library author implements it great, everybody's happy. We don't have to do anything ever again. The reality is that data is like all over the map because there's not like strict requirements for what, how the data should be labeled and stuff. And not everything even has that data. Like not everything's instrumented with open telemetry. So we also have a bunch of stuff that, unrelated to using that we'll say, okay, we know what this library is, we're gonna try to infer some characteristics from this library, or we know what maybe like the DDjango template engine is. So we're gonna try to infer like when the template renders so you can capture that block of information. it is a very imperfect science and I would tell you like it's not, even though like Open Telemetry is a very fun topic for people. It is not necessarily good, like it's not in a good state. Could will it ever be good? I don't know in all honesty, but like the data quality is like all over the map and so that's honestly one of our biggest challenges to making this experience that, you know, tells you what's going on in your database so it tells you what's going on with the cash or things like this is like, I dunno, the cash might be called something completely random in one implementation and something totally different in another. And so it's a lot of like, like data normalization that you have to deal with. But for the most part, those libraries of things you don't control can and will be instrumented. Now the other interesting thing, which we'll see how this works out, so, so one thing Sentry tries to do there, we have all these layers of telemetry, so we have errors and traces, right? Those are pretty high level concepts. We also have profiling data, which is very, very, very, very low level. So it's usually only if you have like disc. I like. It's where is all the CPU time being spent in my application? Mostly not waiting. Like waiting's usually like a network call, right? But it's like, okay, I have a loop that's doing a lot of math, or I'm writing a bunch of stuff to disc and that's really slow. Like often those are not instrumented or it's like these black box areas of a performance. And so what we're trying to do with profiling data, instead of just showing you flame charts and stuff, is actually say, could we fill in these gaps in these traces? Like basically like, Hey, I've got a long period of time where the app's doing something. You know, here's an API call, here's the database stuff. But then there's this block, okay, what's that function or something? Can we pull that out of the profiling data? And so in that case, again, that's just automatic because the profile actually knows everything about the application and know it. It has full access to the function and the stack and everything, right? And so the dream is that you would just always have everything filled in the, the customer never has to do anything with one minor asterisk. And the asterisk is what I would call like business context. So a good example would be, You might wanna associate requests with a specific customer or something like that. Like you might wanna say, well it's uh, I don't know, Goldman Sachs or one of these big companies or something. So you can know like, well when Goldman Sachs is having performance issues or whatever it is, oh maybe I should focus on them cuz maybe they pay you a lot of money or something. Right. Sentry would never know that at the end of the day. So we also have these like kind of tagging contextual APIs that will say like, tell us some informations, maybe it's like customer, maybe it's something else that's relevant to your application. And we'll keep that data associated with the telemetry that's like present, you know, um, but the, at least the telemetry, like again, application's just worth the same, should be, there should be a day in the next few years that it's just all automatic. and again, the only challenge today is like, can it be high quality and automatic? And so that, that's like to be determined. [00:25:50] Jeremy: What you're kind of saying is the ideal is being able to look at this profiling information and be able to build a full picture of. a, a call from beginning to end, all the different things to talk to, but I guess what's the, what's the reality today? Like, what, what is Sentry able to determine, in the world we live in right now? [00:26:11] David: So we've done a lot of this like performance detection stuff already. So we actually can do a lot now. We put a lot of time into it and I, I will tell you, if you look at other tools trying to do tracing, their approach is much more abstract. It's like your traditional monitoring tool that's like, we're just gonna collect a lot of signals and maybe we'll find magic anomaly detection or something going on in it, which, you know, props, but that can figure that out. But, a lot of what we've done is like, okay, we kind of know what this data looks like. Let's go after this very like known quantity problem. Let's normalize the data. And let's make it happen like that's today. Um, the enrichment of profiles is new for us, but it, we actually can already do it. It's not perfect. Detection of blocking the UI thread in mobile apps [00:26:49] David: Um, and I think we're launching something in April or May, something around the, that timeframe where hopefully for the, the technologies we can instrument, we're actually able to surface that in a useful way. but as an example that, that concept that I was talking about, like with n plus one queries, the team built something using profiling data. and I think this, this might be for like a mobile app more so than anything where mobile apps have this problem of, it's, you've got a main thread and if you block that main thread, the app is basically frozen. You see this on desktop apps all the time. You, you very rarely see it on web apps anymore. But, but it's a really big problem when you have a web, uh, a mobile or desktop app because you don't want that like thing to be non-responsive. Right? And so one of the things they did was detect when you're doing like file io on the main thread, you know, right. When you're writing a disc, which is probably a slow thing or something like that, that's gonna block the whole thing. Because you should just do it on a separate thread. It's like an easy fix, potentially may not be a problem, but it could become a problem. Same thing as n plus one. But what's really interesting about it is what the team did is like they used the profiling data to detect it because we already know threads and everything in there, and then they actually recreated a stack trace out of that profiling data when it's surfaced. So it's actually like useful data with that. You could like that I or you as a developer might know how to take and actually be like, oh, this is where it happens at the source code. I can actually figure it out and go fix it myself. And to me, like as like I, I'm still very much in the weeds with software that is like one of the biggest gaps to most things. Is it just, it doesn't make it easy to consume or like take action on, right? Like if I've got a, a chart that says my error rate is high, what am I gonna do with that? I'm like, okay, what's breaking? That's immediately my next question. Right? Okay. This is the error. Where is that error happening at? Again, my next question, it, it's literally just root cause analysis, right? Um, and so that, that to me is very exciting. and I, I don't know that we're the first people to do that, I'm not sure. But like, if we can make that kind of data, that level of actionable and consumable, that's like a big deal for me because I will tell you is like I have 20 years of software experience. I still hate flame charts and like I struggle to use them. Like they're not a friendly visualization. They're almost like a, a hypothetically necessary evil. But I also think one where nobody said like, do we even need to use that? Do we need that to be like the way we operate? and so anyways, like I guess that's my long-winded way of saying like, I'm very excited for how we can leverage that data and change how it's used. [00:29:10] Jeremy: Yeah. So it sounds like in this example, both in the mobile app blocking the UI or the n plus one query is the Sentry, suppose, SDK or instrumentation that's hooked inside of your application. There are certain behaviors that it knows are, are not like ideal I guess, just based on. people's prior experience, like your own developers know that, hey, if you block the UI thread in this mobile application, then you're gonna have performance problems. And so that way, rather than just telling you, Hey, your app is slow, it can tell you your app is slow and it's because you're blocking the UI thread. Don't just aggregate metrics, the error tracker should have an opinion on what actual problems are [00:29:55] David: Exactly, and I, and I actually think, I don't know why so many people don't recognize this gap, because at the end of the day, like, I don't know, I don't need more people to tell me response times are bad or anything. I need you to have an opinion about what's good because. The only way it's like math education, right? Like, yeah, you learn the basics, but you're not expected to say, go to calc, but, and then like, do all the fundamentals. You're like, don't get a calculator and start simplifying the problem. Like, yeah, we're gonna teach you a few of these things so you understand it. We're gonna teach you how to use a calculator and then just use the calculator and then make it easier for everybody else. But we're also not teaching you how to build a calculator because who cares? Like, that's not the purpose of it. And so for me, this is like, we should be helping people sort of get to the finish line instead of making them run the entirety of the race over and over if they don't need to. I don't, I don't know if that's a good analogy, but that has been the biggest gap, I think, in so much of this software throughout the industry. And it's, it's, it's common everywhere. And there's no reason for that gap to exist these days. Like the technology's fine. And the technology's been fine for like 10 years. Like Sentry started in oh eight at this point. And I think there was only one other company I recall at the time that was doing anything that was even similar to like air monitoring and Sentry when we built it, we're just like, what if we just go deeper? What if we collect all this information that will help you debug the problem instead of just stopping it like a log aggregator or something kind of thing, so we can actually have an opinion about it. And I, I genuinely, it baffles me that more people do not think this way because it was not a hard problem at the time. It's certainly not hard these days, but there's still very, I mean, a lot more people do it now. They've seen Sentry successful and there's a lot of similar implementations, but it's, it's just amazes me. It's like, why don't you, why don't people try to make the data more actionable and more useful, the teams versus just collect more of it, you know? 40 people working on learning the common issues with languages and frameworks [00:31:41] Jeremy: it, it sounds like maybe the, the popularity of the stack the person is using or of the framework means that you're gonna have better insights, right? Like if somebody makes a, a Django application or a Rails application, there's all these lessons that your team has picked up in terms of, Hey, if you use the ORM this way, your application is gonna be slow. Whereas if somebody builds something totally homegrown, you won't know these patterns and you won't be able to like help as much basically. [00:32:18] David: Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly, and, and you might think that that is a challenge, but then you look at how many employees exist at like large tech companies and it's, it's not that big of a deal, like, , you might even think collecting all the information for each, like programming, runtime or framework is a challenge. We have like 40 people that work on that and it's totally fine. Like, and, and so I think actually all these scale just fine. Um, but you do have to understand like the domain, right? And so the counter version of this is if you look at say like browser applications, like very rich, uh, single page application type experiences. It's not really obvious like what the opinions are. Like, like if, if you, and this is like real, like if you go to Sentry, it's, it's kind of slow, like the app is kind of slow. Uh, we even make fun of ourselves for how slow it is cuz it's a lot of JavaScript and stuff. If you ask somebody internally, Hey, how would we make pick a page fast? They're gonna have no clue. Like, even if they have like infinite domain experience, they're gonna be like, I'm not entirely sure. Because there's a lot of like moving parts and it's not even clear what like, like good is right? Like we know n plus one is bad. So we can say not doing that is the better solution. And so if you have a JavaScript app, which is like where a lot of the slowness will come from is like the render times itself. Like how do you fix it? You, you can't actually build a product that tells you what to fix without knowing how to fix it, right? And so some of these newer and very fast moving targets are, are frankly very difficult for us. Um, and so that's one thing that I think is a challenge for the entire industry. And so, like, as an example, a lot of the browser folks have latched onto web vitals, which are just metrics that hopefully tell you something about the application, but they're not always actionable either. It'll be like, the idea with like web vitals is like, okay, time to interactive is an an important metric. It's like how long until the page loads that a user can do what they're probably there to do. Okay. Like abstractly, it makes sense to us, but like put into action. How do I optimize time to interactive? Don't block the page. That's one thing. I don't know. Defer assets, that's another thing. Okay. So you've gotta like, you've gotta build a technology that knows these assets could be deferred and aren't. Okay, which ones can be deferred? I don't know. Like, it, it, it's like such a deep rabbit hole. And then the problem is, six months from now, the tech will have completely changed, right? And it won't have like, necessarily solved some of these problems. It will just have changed and they're now a completely different shape of problem. But still the same fundamental like user experience is the same, you know? Um, and to me that's like the biggest challenge in the industry right now is that like dilemma of the browser at the end of the day. And so even from our end, we're like, okay, maybe we should step back, focus on servers again, focus on web services. Those are known quantities. We can do that really well. We can sort of change that to be better than it's been in the past and easier to consume with things like our n plus one detections. Um, and then take like a holistic, fresh look at browser and say, okay, now how would we solve this to make sure we can actually really latch onto the problems that like people have and, and we understand, right? And, you know, we'll see when we get there. I don't think any product does a great job these days for helping, uh, solve those problems. . But I think even without the, the products, like I said, like even our team would be like, fixing this is gonna take months because it's gonna take months just to figure out exactly where the, the common bottlenecks are and all these other things within an application. And so I, I guess what I mean to say with that is there's a lot of opportunity, I think with the moving landscape of technology, we can find a way to, whether it's standardized or Sentry, can find a way to make that data actionable want it something in between there. There are many ways to build things on the frontend with JavaScript which makes it harder to detect common problems compared to backend [00:35:52] Jeremy: So it sounds like what you're saying, With the, the back end, there's almost like a standard way of doing things or a way that a lot of people do it the same way. Whereas on the front end, even if you're looking at a React application, you could look at tenant react applications and they could all be doing state management a totally different way. They could be like the, the way that the application is structured could be totally different, and that makes it difficult for you to infer sort of these standard patterns on the front end side. [00:36:32] David: Yeah, that's definitely true. And it, it goes, it's even worse than that because well, one, there's just like the nature of JavaScript, which is asynchronous in the sense of like, it's a lot of callbacks and things like that. And so that already makes it hard to understand what's going on, uh, where things are happening. And then you have these abstractions like React, which are very good, but like they pull a lot of that away. And so, as an example of a common problem, you load the application, it has to do a lot of stuff to make the page render. You might call that hydration or whatever. Okay. And then there's a completely different state, which is going from, it's already hydrated. Page one, I, I've done an interaction or something. Or maybe I've navigated a page too, that's an entirely different, like, sort of performance problem. But that hydration time, that's like a known thing. That's kind of like time to interactive, right? But if the problem is in your framework, which a lot of it is like a lot of the problems today exist because of frameworks, not because of the technology's bad or the framework's bad, but just because it's abstracted and it's really hard to make it work in all these situations, it's complicated. And again, they have the same problem where it's like changing non sem. And so if the problem is the framework is somehow incorrectly re rendering the page as an example, and this came up recently, for some big technology stack, it's re rendering the page. That's a really bad problem for the, the customer because it's making the, it's probably actually causing a lot of CPU seconds. This is why like your Chrome browser tabs are using so much memory in cpu, right? How do you fix that? Can you even fix that? Do you just say, I don't know, blame the technology? Is that the solution? Maybe that is right, but how would we even blame the technology like that alone, just to identify why it's happening. and you need to know the why. Right? Like, that is such a hard problem these days. And, and personally, I think the only solution is if the industry sort of almost like standardizes on a way to like, on a belief of how this should be optimized and how it should be measured and monitored kind of thing. Because like how errors work is like a standardization effectively. It may not be like a formal like declaration of like, this is what an error is, but more or less they always have the same attributes because we've all kind of understood that. Like those are the valuable things, right? Okay. I've got a server rendered application that has client interaction, which is sort of the current generation of the technology. We need to standardize on what, like that web request, like response life cycle is, right? and what are the moving targets within there. And it just, to me, I, I honestly feel like a lot of what we use every day in technology is like beta. Right. And it's, I think it's one of the reasons why we're constantly always having to up, like upgrade and, and refactor and, and, and shift dependencies and things like that because it is not, it's very much a prototype, right? It's a moving target, which I personally do not think is great for the industry because like customers do not care. They do not care that you're using some technology that like needs a change every few months and things like that. now it has improved things to be fair. Like web applications are much more like interactive and responsive sometimes. Um, but it is a very hard problem I think for a lot of people in the world. [00:39:26] Jeremy: And, and when you refer to, to things feeling like beta, I suppose, are, are you referring to the frameworks people are using or the libraries they're using to support their front end development? I, I'm curious what you're, you're thinking there. [00:39:41] David: Um, I think it's everything. Even like the browser APIs are constantly shifting. It's, that's gotten a little bit better. But even the idea like type script and stuff, it's just like we're running like basically compilers to make all this code work. And, and so the, even that they're constantly adding features just because they can, which means behaviors are constantly changing. But like, if you look at a real world example, like React is like the, the most dominant technology. It's very well designed for managing the dom. It's basically just a rendering engine at the end of the day. It's like it's managed to process updates to the dom. Okay. Makes sense. But we've all learned that these massive single page applications where you build all your application logic and loaded into a bundle is a problem. Like, like, I don't know how big Sentry's bundle is, but it's multiple megs in size and it takes a little while for like a, even on fast fiber here in the Bay Area, it takes a, you know, several seconds for the UI to load. And that's not ideal. Like, it's like at some point half of us became okay with this. So we're like, okay, what we need to do is go back, literally just go back 10 years and we need to render it on the server. And then we need some stuff that makes interactions, you know, highly responsive in the UI or dynamic content in the ui, you know, bring, it's like bringing back jQuery or something. And so we're kind of going full circle, but that is actually like very complicated because the way people are trying to do is like, okay, we wanna, we wanna have the rendering engine operate the same on the server and is on as on the client, right? So it's like we just write one, path of code that basically it's like a template engine to some degree, right? And okay, that makes sense. Like we can all get behind that kind of model. But that is actually really hard to make work with a lot of people's software and, and I think the challenge and framers have adopted it, right? So they've taken this, so for example, it's like, uh, react server components, which is basically just like, can we render it on the server and then also keep that same interaction in the ui. But the problem is like frameworks take that, they abstract it and so it's another layer of complexity on something that is already enormously complex. And then they add their own flavor onto it, like their own opinions for maybe what the world way the world is going. And I will say like personally, I find those. Those flavors to be very hard to adapt to like things that are tried and true or importantly in this context, things that we know how to monitor and fix, right? And so I, I don't know what, what the be all end all is, but my thesis on this is you need to treat the UI like a template engine, and that's it. Remove all like complexity behind it. And so if you think about that, the term I've labeled it as, which I did not come up with, I saw this from somebody at some point, is like, it's like your front end as a service. Like you need to take that application that renders on the server and the front end, and it's just an entirely different application, which is annoying. and it just calls your APIs and that's how it gets the data it needs. So you're literally just treating it as if it's like a single page application that can't connect to your database. But the frameworks have not quite done that. And they're like, no, no, no. We'll connect to the database and we'll do all this stuff, but then it doesn't work because you've got, like, it works this way on the back end and this way on the front end anyways. Again, long winded way of saying like, it's very complicated. I don't think the technology can solve it today. I think the technology has to change before these problems can actually genuinely become solvable. And that's why I think the whole thing is like a beta, it's like, it's very much like a moving target that we're eventually we'll get there and it's definitely had value, but I don't know that, um, responsiveness for low latency connections is where the value has been created. You know, for like folks with bad internet and say remote Africa or something, like I'm sure the internet is not a very fun place for them to use these days. Some frontend code runs on the server and some in the browser which creates challenges [00:43:05] Jeremy: I guess one of the things you mentioned is there's this, almost like this split where you have the application running on the server. It has its own set of rules because it, like you said, has access to the database and it can do things that you can't do in the browser, and then you have to sort of run the same application in the browser, but it's not quite the same application because it doesn't have access to the same things in the browser. So you have this weird disconnect, I suppose. [00:43:35] David: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and then the challenges is like a developer that's actually complicated for you from the experience point of view, cuz you have to know somehow, okay, these things are ta, these are actually running on the server and only on the server. And like, so I think the two biggest technologies that try to do this, um, or at least do it well enough, or the two that I've used, there might be some others, um, are NextJS and remix and they have very different takes on how to do this. But, remix is the one I use most recently. So I, I'll comment on that. But like, there's a, a way that you kind of say, well, this only runs on, I think the client as an example. And that helps you a little bit. You're like, okay, this is only gonna render on the client. I can, I actually can think about that and reason about that. But then there's this thing like, okay, sometimes this runs on the server, only this part runs on the server. And it's, it just becomes like the mental capacity to figure out what's going on and debug it is like so difficult. And that database problem is like the, the normal problem, right? Like of like, I can only query the database on the server because I need secure credentials or something. Okay. I understand that as a developer, but I don't understand how to make sure the application is doing what I expect it to do and how to fix it if something goes wrong. And that, that's why I think. , I'm a, I'm a believer in constraints. The only way you make progress is you simplify problems. Like you just give up on solving the complicated thing and you make the problem simpler. Right? And so for me, that's why I'm like, just take the database outta the equation. We can create APIs from the client, from the server, same security levels. Okay? Make it so it can only do that and it has to be run as almost like a UI only thing. Now that creates complexity cuz you have to run this other service, right? And, and like I personally do not wanna have to spin up a bunch of containers just to write like a simple like web application. but again, I, I think the problem has not been simplified yet for a lot of folks. Like React did this to be fair, um, it made it a lot easier to, to build UI that was responsive and, and just updated values when they changed, you know, which was a big deal for a long period of time. But I feel like everything after has not quite reached that that area, whereas it's simple and even react is hard to debug when it doesn't do what you want it to do. So I don't know, there, there's so gaps I guess is what i would say. And. Hopefully, hopefully, you know, in the next five years we'll kind of see this come to completion because it does feel like it's, it's getting closer to that compromise. You know, where like we used to have pure server rendered apps with some weird janky JavaScript on top. Now we've got this bridge of really complicated, you know, JavaScript on top, and the server apps are also complicated and it's just, it's a nightmare. And then this newer generation of these frameworks that work for some types of technology, but not all. And, and we're kind of almost coming full circle to like server rendered, you know, everything. But with like allowing the same level of interactions that we've been desiring, I guess, on the web. So, and I, fingers crossed this gets better, but right now I do not see like a clear like, oh, it's definitely there. I can see it coming. I'm like, well, we're kind of making progress. I don't love being the beta tester of the whole thing, but we're kind of getting there. And so, you know, we'll see. There are multiple ways to write mobile apps as well (flutter, react native, web views) [00:46:36] Jeremy: I guess you, you've been saying this whole shifting landscape of how Front End works has made it difficult for Sentry to provide like automatic instrumentation and things like that for, for mobile apps. Is that a different story? Like is it pretty standardized in terms of how do you instrument an Android app or an iOS app. [00:46:58] David: Sort of, but also, no, like, a good example here is like early days mobile, it's a native application. You ship a binary known quantity, right? Or maybe you embedded a web browser, but like, that was like a very different thing. Okay. And then they did things where like, okay, more of it's like embedded web browser type stuff, or dynamically render content. So that's now a moving target. the current version of that, which I'm not a mobile dev so like people have strong opinions on both sides of this fence, but it's like, okay, do you use like a, a hybrid framework which allows you to build. Say, uh, react native, which is like arou you to sort of write a JavaScript ish thing and it runs on both Android and mobile, but not really well on either. Um, or do you write a native, native app, which is like a known quantity, but then you may maintain like two code bases, have two degrees of expertise and stuff. Flutters the same thing. so there's still that version of complexity that goes on within it. And I, I think people care less about mobile cuz it impacts people less. Like, you know, there's that whole generation of like, oh, mobile's the future, everything's gonna be mobile, let's not become true. Uh, mobile's very important, but like we have desktops still. We use web software all the time, half the time on mobile. We're just using the web software at the end of the day, so at least we know that's a thing. And I think, so I think that investment in mobile has died down some. Um, but some companies like mobile is like their main experience or one of their driving experience is like a, like a company like DoorDash, mobile is as important as web, if not more, right? Because of like the types of customers. Spotify probably same thing, but I don't know, Sentry. We don't need a mobile app, who cares? It's irrelevant to the problem space, right? And so I, I think it's just not quite taken on. And so mobile is still like this secondary citizen at a lot of companies, and I think the evolution of it has been like complicated. And so I, I think a lot of the problems are known, but maybe people care less or there's just less customers. And so the weight doesn't, like, the weight is wildly different. Like JavaScript's probably like a hundred times the size from an investment point of view for everyone in the world than say mobile applications are, is how I would think about it. And so whether mobile is or isn't solved is almost irrelevant to the, the, the like general problem at hand. and I think at the very least, like mobile applications, there's like, there's like a tool chain where you can debug a lot of stuff that works fairly well and hasn't changed over the years, whereas like the web you have like browser tools, but that's about it. So. Mobile apps can have large binaries or pull in lots of dependencies at runtime [00:49:16] Jeremy: So I guess with mobile. Um, I was initially thinking of native apps, but you're, you're bringing up that there's actually people who would make a native app that's just a web view for a webpage, or there's React native or there's flutters, so there's actually, it really isn't standard how to make a mobile app. [00:49:36] David: Yeah. And even within those, it comes back to like, okay, is it now the same problem where we're loading in a bunch of JavaScript or downloading a bunch of JavaScript and content remotely and stuff? And like, you'll see this when you install a mobile app, and sometimes the binaries are huge, right? Sometimes they're really small, and then you load it up and it's downloading like several gigs of data and stuff, right? And those are completely different patterns. And even within those like subsets, I'm sure the implementations are wildly different, right? And so, you know, I, that may not be the same as like the runtime kind of changing, but I remember there was this, uh, this must be a decade ago. I, I used, I still am a gamer, but. Um, early in my career I worked a lot with like games like World of Warcraft and stuff, and I remember when games started launching progressive loading where it's like you could download a small chunk of the game and actually start playing and maybe the textures were lower, uh, like resolution and everything was lower fidelity and, and you could only go so far until the game fully installed. But like, imagine like if you're like focused on performance or something like that, measuring it there is completely different than measuring it once, say everything's installed, you know? And so I think those often become very complex use cases. And I think that used to be like an extreme edge case that was like such a, a hyper-specific optimization for like what The Warcraft, which is like one of the biggest games of all time that it made sense, you know, okay, whatever. They can build their own custom tooling and figure it out from there. And now we've taken that degree of complexity and tried to apply it to everything in the world. And it's like uhoh, like nobody has the teams or the, the, the talent or the, the experience to necessarily debug a lot of these complicated problems just like Sentry like. You know, we're not dealing with React internals. If something's wrong in the React internals, it's like somebody might be able to figure it out, but it's gonna take us so much time to figure out what's going on, versus, oh, we're rendering some html. Cool. We understand how it works. It's, it's a known, known problem. We can debug it. Like there's nothing to even debug most of the time. Right. And so, I, I don't know, I think the industry has to get to a place where you can reason about the software, where you have the calculator, right. And you don't have to figure out how the calculator works. You just can trust that it's gonna work for you. How Sentry's stack has become more complex over time [00:51:35] Jeremy: so kind of. Shifting over a little bit to Sentry's internals. You, you said that Sentry started in, was it 2008 you said? [00:51:47] David: Uh, the open source project was in 2008. Yeah. [00:51:50] Jeremy: The stack that's used in Sentry has evolved. Like I remembered that there was a period where I think you could run it with a pretty minimal stack, like I think it may have even supported SQLite. [00:52:02] David: Yeah. [00:52:03] Jeremy: And so it was something that people could run pretty easily on their own. But things have, have obviously changed a lot. And so I, I wonder if you could speak to sort of the evolution of that process. Like when do you decide like, Hey, this thing that I built in 2008, Is, you know, not gonna cut it. And I really need to re-architect what this system is. [00:52:25] David: Yeah, so I don't know if that's actually the reality of why things have changed, that it's like, oh, this doesn't work anymore. We've definitely introduced complexity in the sense of like, probably the biggest shift for Sentry was like, it used to be everything, and it was a SQL database, and everything was kind of optional. I think half that was maintainable because it was mostly built by. And so I could maintain like an architectural vision that kept it minimal. I had the experience to figure it out and duct tape the right things. Um, so that was one thing. And I think eventually, you know, that doesn't scale as you're trying to do more and build more into the product. So there's some complexity there. but for the most part you can, it can still

David Colebatch, CEO at Tidal.cloud, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how Tidal is demystifying cloud migration strategy. David and Corey discuss the pros and cons of a hybrid cloud migration strategy, and David reveals the approach that Tidal takes to ensure they're setting their customers up for success. David also discusses the human element to cloud migration initiatives, and how to overcome roadblocks when handling the people side of migrations. Corey and David also expand on all the capabilities cloud migration unlocks, and David explains how that translates to a distributed product team approach.About DavidDavid is the CEO & Founder of Tidal.  Tidal is empowering businesses to transform from traditional on-premises IT-run organizations to lean-agile-cloud powered machines.Links Referenced: Tidal.cloud: https://tidal.cloud Twitter: https://twitter.com/dcolebatch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidcolebatch/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey:  LANs of the late 90's and early 2000's were a magical place to learn about computers, hang out with your friends, and do cool stuff like share files, run websites & game servers, and occasionally bring the whole thing down with some ill-conceived software or network configuration. That's not how things are done anymore, but what if we could have a 90's style LAN experience along with the best parts of the 21st century internet? (Most of which are very hard to find these days.) Tailscale thinks we can, and I'm inclined to agree. With Tailscale I can use trusted identity providers like Google, or Okta, or GitHub to authenticate users, and automatically generate & rotate keys to authenticate devices I've added to my network. I can also share access to those devices with friends and teammates, or tag devices to give my team broader access. And that's the magic of it, your data is protected by the simple yet powerful social dynamics of small groups that you trust.Try now - it's free forever for personal use. I've been using it for almost two years personally, and am moderately annoyed that they haven't attempted to charge me for what's become an essential-to-my-workflow service.Corey: Have you listened to the new season of Traceroute yet? Traceroute is a tech podcast that peels back the layers of the stack to tell the real, human stories about how the inner workings of our digital world affect our lives in ways you may have never thought of before. Listen and follow Traceroute on your favorite platform, or learn more about Traceroute at origins.dev. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Every once in a while at The Duckbill Group, I like to branch out and try something a little bit different before getting smashed vocally, right back into the box I find myself in for a variety of excellent reasons. One of these areas has been for a while, the idea of working with migrations on getting folks into cloud. There's a lot of cost impact to it, but there's also a lot of things that I generally consider to be unpleasant nonsense with which to deal. My guest today sort of takes a different philosophy to this. David Colebatch is the CEO and founder of Tidal.cloud. David, thank you for joining me.David: Oh, thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: Now, cloud migrations tend to be something that is, I want to say contentious, and for good reason. You have all the cloud providers who are ranting that cloud is the way and the light, as if they've just found religion, and yeah, the fact that it basically turns into a money-printing machine for them has nothing to do with their newfound advocacy for this approach. Now, I do understand that we all have positions that we come from that shape our perspective. You do run and did found a cloud migration company. What's your take on it? Is this as big as the cloud providers say it is, is it overhyped, or is it underhyped?David: I think it's probably in the middle of this stage of the hype cycle. But the reason that that Tidal exists and why I founded it was that many customers were approaching cloud just for cloud's sake, you know, and they were looking at cloud as a place to park VMs. And our philosophy as software engineers at Tidal is that customers were missing out on all the new capabilities that cloud provided, you know, cloud is a new paradigm in compute. And so, our take on it is the customer should not look at cloud as a place to migrate to, but rather as a place to transform to and embrace all the new capabilities that are on offer.Corey: I've been saying for a while that if you sit there and run a total cost analysis for going down the path of a cloud migration, you will not save money in the short term, call it five years or whatnot. So, if you're migrating to the cloud specifically to save money, in the common case, it should be for a capability story, not because it's going to save you money off of what you're currently doing in the data center. Agree, disagree, or it's complicated?David: It's complicated, but you're right in one case: you need to work backwards from the outcomes, I think that much is pretty simple and clear, but many teams overlook that. And again, when you look at cloud for the sake of cloud, you generally do overlook that. But when we work with customers and they log into to our platform, what we find is that they're often articulating their intent as I want to improve business agility, I want to improve staff productivity, and it's less about just moving workloads to the cloud. Anyone can run a VM somewhere. And so, I think, when we work backwards from what the customer is trying to achieve and we look at TCO holistically, not just about how much a computer costs to run and operate in a colo facility, look at it holistically from a staff productivity perspective as well, then the business case for cloud becomes very profound.Corey: I've been saying for a while that I can make a good-faith Total Cost of Ownership analysis—or TCO analysis—in either direction, so tell me what outcome you want and I can come up with a very good-faith effort answer that gives you what you want. I don't think I've seen too many TCO analyses, especially around cloud migrations, that were not justification exercises. They were very rarely open questions. It was, we've decided what we want to do. Now, let's build a business case to do that thing. Agree, disagree?David: [laugh]. Agree. I've seen that. Yeah, we again, like to understand the true picture of total cost of ownership on-premises first, and many customers, depending on who you're engaging with, but on the IT side, might actually shield a few of those costs or they might just not know them. And I'm talking about things like in the facilities, insurance costs, utility bills, and things like that, that might not bubble up.We need to get all those cards on the table in order to conduct a full TCO analysis. And then in the cloud side, we need to look at multiple scenarios per workload. So, we want to understand that lift-and-shift base case that many people come from, but also that transformative migration case which says, I might be running in a server-ful architecture today on-premises, but based on the source code and database analysis that we've done, we can see an easy lift to think like Lambda and serverless frameworks on the cloud. And so, when you take that transformative approach, you may spend some time upfront doing that transformation, or if it's tight fit, it might be really easy; it might actually be faster than reverse-engineering firewall rules and doing a lift-and-shift. And in that case, you can save up to 97% in annual OPEX, which is a huge savings, of course.Corey: You said the magic words, lift-and-shift, which means all right, the gloves come off. Let's have this conversation.David: Oh yeah.Corey: I work on AWS bills for a living. Cloud cost and architecture are fundamentally the same thing, and when I start looking at a company's monthly bill, I can start to see the architectural patterns emerge with no further information than what's shown in the exploded bill view, at least at a high level. It starts to be indicative of different things. And you can generally tell, on some level, when companies have come from a data center environment or at least a data center mentality, in what they've built. And I've talked to a number of companies where they have effectively completely lifted their data center into the cloud and the only real change that they have gotten in terms of value for it has been that machines are going down a lot less because the hard drive failed and they were really bad at replacing hard drives.Now, for companies in that position who have that challenge, yeah, the value is there and it's apparent because I promise, whoever you are, the cloud providers are better at replacing failed hard drives than you are, full stop. And if that's the value proposition you want, great, but it also feels like that is just scratching the surface of what the benefit of cloud providers can be.David: Absolutely. I mean, we look at cloud as a way to unlock new ways of working and it's totally aligned with the new distributed product team approach that many enterprises are pursuing. You know, the rise of Agile and DevOps has sort of facilitated this movement away from single choke points of IT service delivery, like we used to with ITIL, into much more modern ways of working. And so, I imagine when you're looking at those cloud bills, you might see a whole host of workloads centered into one or two accounts, like they've just replicated a data center into one or two accounts and lifted-and-shifted a bunch of EC2 to it. And yeah, that is not the most ideal architectural pattern to follow in the cloud. If you're working backwards from, “I want to improve staff productivity; I want to improve business agility,” you need to do things like limit your blast radius and have a multi-account strategy that supports that.Corey: We've seen this as well and born-in-the-cloud companies, too, because for a long time, that was AWS's guidance of put everything in a single AWS account. The end. And then just, you know, get good with IAM issues. Like, “Well okay, I found that developer environments impacted production.” Then, “Sounds like a skill issue.”Great, but then you also have things that cannot be allocated, like service quotas. When you have something in development run amok and exhaust service quotas for number of EC2 get instance info requests, suddenly, load balancers don't anymore and auto-scaling is kind of aspirational when everything explodes on you. It's the right path, but very often, people got there through following the best advice that AWS offers. I am in the middle of a migration myself from the quote-unquote, “Legacy” AWS account, I built a bunch of stuff in 2016 into its own dedicated account and honestly, it's about as challenging as some data center moves that I've done historically.David: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the cobwebs build up over time and you have a lot of dependencies on services, you completely forget about.Corey: “How do I move this S3 bucket to another account?” “That's the neat part. You don't.”David: [laugh]. We shouldn't just limit that to AWS. I mean, the other cloud providers have similar issues to deal with through their older cloud adoption frameworks which are now playing out. And some of those guidance points were due to technology limitations in the underlying platform, too, and so you know, at the time, that was the best way to go to cloud. But as I think customers have demanded more agility and more control over their blast radiuses and enabling self-service teams, this has forced everyone to sort of come along and embrace this multi-account strategy. Where the challenge is, with a lot of our enterprise clients, and especially in the public—Corey: Embrace it or you'll be made to embrace it.David: Yeah [laugh]. We see with both our enterprise accounts that were early adopters, they certainly have that issue with too much concentration on one or two accounts, but public sector accounts as well, which we're seeing a lot of momentum in, they come from a place where they're heavily regulated and follow heavy architectural standards which dictate some of these things. And so, in order for those clients to be successful in the cloud, they have to have real leadership and real champions that are able to, sort of, forge through some of those issues and break outside of the mold in order to demonstrate success.Corey: On some level, when I see a lift that failed to shift, it's an intentional choice in some cases where the company has decided to improve their data center environment at the cost of their cloud environment. And it feels, on some level, like it's a transitional step, but then it's almost a question that I always have is, was this the grand plan? So, I guess my question for you is, when you see a company that has some workloads in a data center and some living in the cloud provider in what most people call hybrid, is that outcome intentional or is it accidental, where midway through, they realize that some workloads are super hard to migrate? They have a mainframe and there is no AWS/400 available for their use, so they're going to give up halfway, declare victory, and yep we're hybrid now. How did they get there?David: I think it's intentional, quite often that they see hybrid cloud as a stepping stone to going full cloud. And this just comes down to project scoping and governance, too. So, many leaders will draw a ring around the workloads that are easy to migrate and they'll claim success at the end of that and move on to another job quite often. But the visionary leaders will actually chart a path to course that has a hundred percent adoption, full data center closure, off the mainframe, off AS/400, you know, refactored usually, but they'll chart that course at a rate of change that the organization can accept. Because, you know, cloud being a new paradigm, cloud requiring new ways of working, they can't just ram that kind of change through in their enterprise in one or two years; they really need to make sure that it's being absorbed and adopted and embraced by the teams and not alienating the whole company as they go through. And so, I do see it as intentional, but that stepping stone that many companies take is also an okay thing in my mind.Corey: And to be clear, I should bound what I'm saying from the perspective that I'm talking about this from a platonic ideal perspective. I am not suggesting that, “Oh, this thing that you built at your company is crappy,” I mean, any more so than anything else is. I've never yet seen any infrastructure that the people running it would step back and say, “This is amazing and perfect.” Everyone thinks it's a burning dumpster fire of sadness and regret and I'm not entirely sure that they're wrong.I mean, designing an architecture—cloud or otherwise—on a whiteboard is relatively straightforward, for a junior employee, even. The problem is most people don't get to start from scratch and build that thing. There's existing stuff that needs to be migrated in and most of us don't get the luxury of taking two years of downtime for that service while we wind up rebuilding it from scratch. So, it's one of those how do you rebuild a car without taking it off the highway to do it type of questions.David: Well, you want to have a phased migration approach, quite often. Your business can't stop and start because you're doing a migration, so you want to build momentum with the early adopters that are easy to migrate and don't require big interruptions to business. And then for those mission-critical workloads that do need to migrate—and you mentioned mainframe and AS/400 before—they might be areas where you introduce, like, a strangler fig pattern, you know, draw a ring around it, start replicating some services into cloud, and then phase that migration over a year or two, depending on your timeline and scale. And so, we're very much pragmatic in this business that we want to make sure we're doing everything for the right reasons, for the business-led reasons, and fitting in migrations around business objectives and strategies is super critical to success.Corey: What I'm curious about is when we talk about migrations, in fact, when I invited you on the show, and it was like, well, Tidal migrations—one thing I love about calling it that for the domain, in some cases, as well as other things is, “Huh, says right in the tin what it is. Awesome.” But it's migrations, which I assumed to be, you know, from data centers into cloud. That's great. But then you've got the question of, is that what your work looks like? Is it migrations in the other direction? Is cloud repatriation a thing that people are doing, and no one bothered to actually ever bother to demonstrate that to me? Is cloud to cloud? What are you migrating from and to?David: Well, that's great. And we actually dropped migrations from the name.Corey: Oh, my apologies. Events, once again, outpace me.David: Tidal.cloud is our URL and essentially, Corey, the business of migration is something that's only becoming increasingly frequent. Customers are not just migrating from on-premises data centers to cloud, they're also migrating in between their cloud accounts like you are, but also from one cloud provider to another. And our business hypothesis here Tidal is that that innovation cycle is continuing to shrink, and so whereas when I was in the data center automation business, we used to have a 10 and 15-year investment cycle, now customers have embraced continuous delivery of their applications and so there's this huge shift of investment horizons, bringing it down to an almost an annual event for many of the applications that we touch.Corey: You are in fact correct. Tidal.cloud does have a banner at the top that says, “Tidal Migrations is now Tidal.” Yep, you're correct, not that I'm here to like incorrect you on the name of your own company, for God's sake. That's a new level of mansplaining I dare not delve into.But it does say, “Migration made modern,” right at the top, which is great because there's a sense that I've always had that lift-and-shift is poo-pooed as a bad approach to migrating, but I've done it other ways and it becomes disastrous. I've always liked the approach of take something in a data center, migrated into cloud, in the process, changing as few things as possible, and then just get it stable and working there, and step two becomes the transformation because if you try and transform while it moves, yeah, that gets you a little closer to outcome in theory, but when things don't work right—and their computers; let's not kid ourselves, nothing works right—it's a question now of was it my changes? Is it the cloud environment? Is there an unknown dependency that assumes things in the data center that are not true in cloud? It becomes very hard to track down the why of these things.David: There's no one-size-fits-all for migration. It's why we have the seven-hour assessment capabilities. You know, if one application, like you've just talked about, that one application might be better to lift and shift than modernize, there might be real business reasons for doing that. But what we've seen over the years is the customers generally have one migration budget. Now, IT gets one migration budget and they get to end a job in a lift-and-shift scenario and the business says, “Well, what changed? Nothing, my apps still run the same, I don't notice any new capabilities.” And IT then says, “Yeah, yeah. Now, we need the modernization budget to finish.” And they said, “No, no, no. We've just given you a bunch of money. You're not getting any more.”And so, that's what quite often the migrate as a lift-and-shift kind of stalls and you see an exodus of talent out of those organizations, people leave to go on to the next migration project elsewhere and that organization really didn't embrace any of the cloud-native changes that were required. We'd like to really say that—and you saw this on our header—that migrations made modern, we'd like to dispel the myth that you can either migrate or modernize. It's really not an either/or. There's a full spectrum of our methods, like replatform, and refactor, rehosting, in the middle there. And when we work backwards from customers, we want to understand their core objectives for going to cloud, their intent, their, “Why cloud?”We want to understand how it aligns on the cloud value framework, so business agility gains, staff productivity gains, total cost of ownership is important, of course. And then for each of their application workloads, choose the right 6R based on those business outcomes. And it can seem like a complicated or comprehensive problem, but if you automate it like we do, you can get very consistent results very quickly. And that's really the accelerant that we give customers to accelerate their migration to cloud.Corey: One thing that I've noticed—and maybe this makes me cynical—but when I see companies doing lift-and-shift, often they will neglect to do the shift portion of it. Because there's a compelling reason to do a migration to get out of a data center and into a cloud, and often that is a data center contract expiry coming up. But companies are very rarely going to invest the time, energy, and money—which all become the same thing, effectively, at company scale—in refactoring existing applications if they're not already broken.I see that all the time in my work, I don't make recommendations to folks very often have the form, “Oh, just migrate this entire application to serverless and you'll save 80% or more on it.” And it's, “That's great, but that's 18 months' worth of work and it doesn't actually get us closer to our business milestones, so yeah, we're not going to do that.” Cost directly is very rarely a compelling reason to make a migration, but when you're rebuilding something for business purposes, factoring cost concerns into it seems to be a much better way to gain adoption and traction of those ideals.David: Yeah, yeah. Counterpoint on that, when we look at a portfolio of applications, like, hundreds or thousands of applications in an enterprise and we do this type of analysis on them with the customers, what we've learned is that they may refactor and replatform ten, 20% of their workloads, they may rehost 40%, and they'll often turn off the rest, retire them, not migrate them. And many of our enterprise customers that we've spoken to have gone through rationalizations as they've gone to cloud and saved, you know, 59%, just turned off that 59% of an infrastructure, and the apps that they do end up refactoring and modernizing are the ones where either there's a very easy path for them, like, the code is super compatible and written in a way that's fitting with Lambda and so they've done that, or they've got, like you said, business needs coming up. So, the business is already investigating making some changes to the application, they already want to embrace CI/CD pipelines where they haven't today. And for those applications, what we see teams doing is actually building new in the cloud and then managing that as an application migration, like, cutting over that.But in the scheme of an entire portfolio of hundreds or thousands of applications that might be 5, 10, 20% of the portfolio. It won't be all of them. And that's what we say, there's a full spectrum of migration methods and we want to make sure we apply the right ones to each workload.Corey: Yeah, I want to be clear that there are different personas. I find that most of my customers tend to fall into two buckets. The first is that you have the born-in-the-cloud SaaS companies, and that's the world I come from, where you have basically one workload that's 80% of your application spend, your revenue, et cetera. Like, they are not a customer, but take Datadog as an example. Like, the Datadog monitoring application suite would be a good example of this, and then you have a bunch of longtail stuff.Conversely, you've got a large enterprise that might be spending $100 million or so every year, but their largest single application is a couple million bucks because it just has thousands upon thousands of them. And at that point, it becomes much more of a central IT planning problem. In one of those use cases, spending significant effort refactoring and rebuilding things, from an optimization perspective, can pay dividends. In other cases, it tends not to work in quite the same way, just because the economies of scale aren't there. Do you find that most of your customers fall into one of those two buckets? Do you take a different view of the world? How do you see the market?David: Same view, we do. Enterprise customers are generally the areas that we find the most fit with, the ISVs, you know, that have one or two primary applications. Born in the cloud, they don't need to do portfolio assessments. And with the enterprise customers, the central IT bit used to be a blocker and impediment for cloud. We're increasingly seeing more interest from central IT who is trying to lead their organization to cloud, which is great, that's a great sign.But in the past, it had been more of a business-led conversation where one business unit within an enterprise wants to branch away from central IT, and so they take it upon themselves to do an application assessment, they take it upon themselves to get their own cloud accounts, you know, a shadow IT move, in a way. And that had a lot of success because the business would always tie it back to business outcomes that they were trying to achieve. Now, into IT, doing mass migration, mass portfolio assessment, this does require them to engage deeply with the business areas and sometimes we're seeing that happening for the very first time. There's no longer IT at the end of a chain, but rather it's a joint partnership as they go to cloud, which is really cool to see.Corey: When I go to Tidal.cloud, you have a gif—yes, that's how it's pronounced, I'm not going to take debates on that matter—but you have a gif at the top of your site a showing a command line tool that runs an analyze command on an application. What are you looking at to establish an application or workload's suitability for migration? Because I have opinions on this, but you have, you know, a business around this and I'm not going to assume that my strongly-held opinions informed by several weeks of work are going to trump, you know, the thing that your entire company is built around.David: Thanks, Corey. Yeah, you're looking at our command-line utilities there. It's an accompanying part of our product suite. We have a web application and the command-line utilities are what customers use behind their firewall to analyze their applications. The data points that we look at are infrastructure, as you can imagine, you might plug into VMware and discover VMs that are running, we'll look for non-x86 workloads on the network.So, infrastructure is sort of bread and butter; everyone does that. Where Tidal differentiates is going up the stack, analyzing source code, analyzing database technologies, and looking at the schema usage within your on-premises database, for example, which features and functionality are using, and then how that fits to more cloud-native database offerings. And then we'll look at the technology age as well. And when you combine all of those technology factors together, we sort of form a view of what the migration difficulty to cloud will be on various migration outcomes, be it rehost, replatform, or refactor.The other thing that we add there is on the business side and the business intent. So, we want to understand from leadership what their intent is with cloud, and there's some levers they pull in the Tidal platform there. But then we also want to understand from each application owner how they think about their applications, what the value of those applications are to them and what their forward-looking plans are. We capture all these things in our tool, we then run it through our recommendation engine, and that's how we come up with a bespoke migration plan per client.Corey: One of the challenges I have in the cost arena around a lot of these tools that oh, we're going to look at your various infrastructure-as-code situation and see what that's going to cost you for a given change. It's like, sure, that that's not hard from a baseline of I want to spin up ten more EC2 instances. Yes, that is the tricky part of cloud economics known as basic arithmetic. The problem where I see is that okay, and then they're going to run Kubernetes, which has no sense of zone affinity, so it's going to wind up putting nondeterministic amounts of traffic across a AZ boundary and that's going to spike data transfer in some use cases, but none of these tools have any conception as to what those workloads look like. Now, that's a purely cost perspective, but that does have architectural approaches. Do you factor things like that in when you move up the stack?David: Absolutely. And really understanding on a Tidal inventory basis, understanding what the intent is of each of those workloads really does help you, from a cloud economics basics, to work out how much is reasonable in terms of cloud costs. So, for example, in Tidal, if you're doing app assessment, you're capturing any revenue to business that it generates, any staff productivity that it creates. And so, you've got the income side of that application workload. When you map that to on-premises costs and then later to cloud costs, your FinOps job becomes a lot easier because now you have the business context of those workloads too.Corey: So, one of the things that I have found is that you can judge the actual success of a project by how many people who work at the company claimed credit for it on LinkedIn, whereas conversely, when things don't work out super well, it's sort of a crickets moment. I'm curious as to your perspective on whether there is such a thing as a migration failure, or is it simply a, “Oh, we're going to iterate on this in a new direction. We've replaced a failing part, which turned out, from our perspective, to be our CIO, but we have a new one who's going to move us into cloud in the proper time and space.” We go through more of those things than some people do underwear. My God. But is there such a thing as a failed cloud migration?David: There absolutely is. And I get your point that success has many fathers. You know, when clients have brought us in for that success party at the end, you don't recognize everybody there. But you know, failure can be, you know, you've missed on time, scope, or budget, and by those measures, I think 76% of IT projects were failing in 2018, when we ran those numbers.So absolutely, by those metrics, there are failed cloud migrations. What tends to happen is people claim success on the workloads that did migrate. They may then kick it out into a new project scope, the organizational change bit. So, we've had many customers who viewed the cloud migration as a lift-and-shift exercise and failed to execute on the organizational change and then months later realized, oh, that is important in order for my day two operations to really hum, and so then have embarked on that under a separate initiative. So, there's certainly a lot of rescoping that goes on with these things.And what we like to make sure we're teaching people—and we do this for free—is those lessons learned and pitfalls with cloud early on because we don't want to see all those headlines of failed projects under that; we want to make sure that customers are armed with here are the things you should consider to execute on as you go to cloud.Corey: Do you ever run an analysis on a workload when a customer is asking, “So, how should we go about migrating this?” And your answer is, “You should absolutely not?”David: Well, all applications can go to cloud, it's just a matter of how much elbow grease you want to put into it. And so, the absolutely not call comes from when that app doesn't provide any utility to the business or maybe it has a useful life of six more months and the data center is going to be alive for seven. So, that's when those types of judgment calls come in. Other times we've seen, you know, there's already a replacement initiative underway by the business. IT wasn't aware of it, but through our process and methodology, they engaged with the business for the first time and learned about it. And so, that helps them to avoid needing to migrate workloads because the business is already moving to Salesforce, for example.Corey: I imagine you're also relatively used to the sinking realization that customers often have when they're used to data center thinking and you ask them a question, like, “How many gigabytes a month does your application server send back and forth to your database server?” And their response, very reasonably, is, “Why on earth would I know the answer to that quest—oh, God. You mean, that's how it bills?” It's the sense of everything is different in cloud, sometimes, subtly, sometimes massively. But it's a different way of thinking.So, I guess my last real big question for you on this is, moving technology is relatively straightforward but migrating people is very challenging. How do you find that the people and the processes that have grown up in data center environments with people whose identities are inextricably linked the technology they work on, being faced with the idea of it is now time to pick up and move these things into an environment where things that were incredibly valuable guardrails in a data center environment no longer serve you well?David: Yeah. The people side of cloud migration is the more challenging part. It's actually one of the reasons we introduced a service offering around people change management. The general strategy is sort of the Kotter change process of creating that guiding coalition, the people who want to do something different, get them outside of IT, reporting out to the executives directly, so they're unencumbered by the traditional processes. And once they start to demonstrate some success of a new way of working, a new paradigm, you kind of sell that back into the organization in order to drive that change.It's getting a lot easier to position that organizational change aspects with customers. There's enough horror stories out there of people that did not take that approach. And quite rightly. I mean, it's tough to imagine, as a customer, like, if I'm applying my legacy processes to cloud migration, why would I expect to get anything but a legacy result? You know, and most of the customers that we talk to that are going to cloud want a transformational outcome, they want more business agility and greater staff productivity, and so they need to recognize that that doesn't come without change to people and change the organization. It doesn't mean you have to change the people out individually, but skilling the way we work, those types of things, are really important to invest in and I'd say even more so than the technology aspects of any cloud migration.Corey: David, I really want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about something that is, I'd say near and dear to my heart, except I'm trying desperately not to deal with it more than I absolutely have to. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?David: Sure. I mean, tidalcloud.com is our website. I'm also on Twitter @dcolebatch. I like to tweet there a little bit, increasingly these days. I'm not on Bluesky yet, though, so I won't see you there. And also on LinkedIn, of course.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:29:57]. Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.David: Thanks, Corey. Great to be here.Corey: David Colebatch, CEO and founder of Tidal.cloud. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that you will then struggle to migrate to a different podcast platform of your choice.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

We continued to our reflection on step number 14 - gluttony, or that “clamorous mistress, the stomach.”  We are being exposed to the wisdom of the fathers, so deeply rooted in their experience of human nature and how it has been effected by sin. St. John, in his typical fashion, reveals to us the subtleties (psychological, emotional and spiritual) of how we are deceived by the evil one and how our bodily appetites can be used against us. It is precisely because our appetite for food is natural and needed for sustenance that it is something that can be used against us and so powerfully.  This step shows how St. John and the other fathers were not only spiritual warriors, but the first depth psychologists. They knew how the mind and the heart work. We are easily deceived and easily moved to rationalize our use of food. Perhaps what is most significant is that St. John shows us how essential this practice of fasting and abstinence is in our spiritual life. We can't be dabblers or minimalists. Because it is such a part of who we are, our appetite for food must be formed and shaped both by discipline and by the grace of God. What and how we eat is often a reflection of our emotional state a response to a need and desire for consolation. Rather than nourishing ourselves upon the love of God, we will choose some thing that offers immediate satisfaction - even though we know it is ever so temporary. --- Text of chat during the group: 00:22:56 Anthony: Months ago we talked about the monk who cut off his genitals, to great spiritual and physical harm.  Fasting is a healthy way of cutting off an appetite; it cannot be complete, since that is absolutely repulsive to natural law.  It encourages both cutting something off and moderation in approach.  Maybe that is a reason why fasting is a help for both gluttony and lust.   00:24:00 Anthony: In addition, fasting is accessible to both men and women - a remedy for all.   00:25:03 angelo: Reacted to "Months ago we talked..." with

Full Transcript In episode 6 of Manager Minute, employment and VR take center stage during October's National Disability Awareness Month. David D'Arcangelo, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind (MCB), and Natasha Jerde, Director of State Services for the Blind of Minnesota (SSB), join Carol Pankow to talk about the state of employment, today's challenges, and the initiatives and practices they implemented to improve employment for individuals with disabilities.   Learn how David and his team at MCB increased their customer base by 25% over the last year and how partnerships and creativity in Minnesota are helping to increase the number of people with disabilities being employed.   Find out more about VRTAC-QM at https://www.vrtac-qm.org/.                                                                       Stay up to date by following VRTAC-QM on Facebook and follow us on Twitter @VRTAC_QM.   About VRTAC-QM Partnering with State Vocational Rehabilitation Agencies (SVRAs) to enhance service delivery and maximize outcomes through quality program and resource management.  The purpose of the VRTAC-QM is to provide training and technical assistance that will enable State VR agency personnel to manage available resources, improve effective service delivery, and increase the number and quality of employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities. The VRTAC-QM provides TA and training in VR program and performance quality management, fiscal and resource quality management of the VR program, and general quality management of organizations. You can request technical assistance from the VRTAC-QM by contacting your TA Liaison directly, contacting any member of the Center you wish, or by filling out the information on our main website and clicking on submit. While on the main website, join our mailing list to receive updates on training and new activities occurring within the center.    Full Transcript:   Speaker1: Manager Minute brought to you by the VRTAC for Quality Management conversations powered by VR, 1manager at a time, 1 minute at a time. Here is your host Carol Pankow.   Carol: So welcome to the manager minute, I am so excited to have David D'Arcangelo, Commissioner of the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind, and Natasha Jerde, Director of State Services for the Blind in Minnesota. Thank you both for joining me today. Natasha, you've been in your position for two years now. So how's it going in Minnesota?   Natasha: Well, first, thanks for having me, Carol. And for others, I'm actually filling in for detail magazine with Minnesota General, so I am representing both. So I will speak globally and with Minnesota. We are definitely going through a state of evolution because not only are we going through COVID, we are also one of the states that really are going through the racial reckoning that's been happening when George Floyd was murdered. So we are having a lot of diversity and inclusion efforts in addition to trying to figure out what VR is going to look like in this new era. So it's been a challenge, but it's also been an opportunity as well.   Carol: Yeah, it definitely has been a heavy load and thank you for pinch hitting for Dee, too. I knew you could represent both, so that's great. And David, I saw you just had your three year anniversary in August. So how are things in Massachusetts?   David: Thanks for having me on. Things in Massachusetts are going well. I'm excited to talk about all of the various programs that we have. We haven't let COVID stop us at all. We continue to move forward. We're doing realignment projects. We've done a bunch of those that we'll talk about. Hiring is up good things happening in Massachusetts. I know we're going to go into more detail.   Carol: Good to hear it. Well, October is designated as a National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and when I was thinking about an October topic, well, it just made perfect sense to talk about employment and VR. David, I remember last year when we were on a call with RSA and they were highlighting VR's 100th anniversary. You presented what was happening at the Mass Commission and you really had some exciting things happening for customers during the pandemic. And I love following all the work that you do on your social media and I saw y'all have a podcast as well. And Natasha, I know your team well, and they're always creating some wonderful ways to build partnerships with employers and create interesting and lasting relationships that have helped to improve employment opportunities. And you're also a really good partner with Minnesota General. I know two years ago we held the roundtable and recognition of employers in Minnesota during this very month to celebrate National Disability Employment Awareness Month. I just wanted to talk for a second about some Bureau of Labor Statistics and as I was looking things up as of August 2021, the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that unemployment rates for persons with disabilities are 11.5 percent, compared to five point one percent for persons without disabilities. And the labor force participation rate for people with disabilities is 35.6 percent, compared to 75.8 percent for working age people without disabilities. Now, the labor force participation of people with disabilities is higher than it was prior to the pandemic, and John O'Neill, he's the director of the Center for Employment and Disability Research at the Kessler Foundation. He said that this actually has been a bright spot during the pandemic as people with disabilities, and he thought maybe out of economic necessity remained engaged in the labor market. He says the last time that we saw labor force participation at this level was July of 2009. But even given all of that, you know, that bright spot, much work needs to be done to increase the number of people with disabilities in the labor force, which really ties directly to the mission of VR. So I know these past 18 months have definitely been a challenge for you both pivoting to remote work for your staff, figuring out new ways to provide services to your customers and figuring out the reality of this new world of work. And in some ways, I'm really hopeful that the pandemic has proven there are new ways in which work can be done that's going to benefit our consumers in the end. So let's dig in. So, Natasha, can you paint us a picture of your agency? Like, how many people are you serving right now? Do you currently have a waiting list and how are your employment numbers looking?   Natasha: I have both Minnesota blind and general here at Minnesota Blind. We're at about 650 individuals we're currently surveying. And if you look at 2, 3, 4 years ago, we were usually in the 700's. So our applications are still down, but they are trending upwards. We haven't had a waiting list for a few years. All categories are open. Our employment numbers are slowly trending upwards. 2021 brought much higher well, not much higher, 3 higher than 2020. But we are looking to get back our 2019 numbers slowly but surely. And as for Minnesota General, they've had a downward trend. There are about 2000 fewer applications and serving 11 percent fewer applicants than they did in the previous year. Our numbers are pretty on par with the national trends. Minnesota General has been offering services to all people on the waiting list. They reopened their final 2 priority for service categories, which had been closed since the fall of 2014. They have effectively eliminated the waiting list. They are seeing rates of employment at the time of exit decrease overall about 13 percent decrease, which is very identical to the national trends.   Carol: That's big news, though on the waiting list, that's good stuff. That is really good stuff for both of you. So, David, paint us a little picture of your agency.   David: Basically, everything I'm going to talk about is on our website. So let me just start with that. If people hear something that resonates with them, please use us as a resource. We want to collaborate with you. Go to Mass.Gov/MCB Mass.Gov/MCB and find out all that's going on with the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. We've seen a 25 percent increase over our previous year in terms of VR despite the pandemic, so that's really a testament to our team, our counselors, and most especially though, the consumers we work with who have persevered and there's just a lot of opportunity in Massachusetts. Some of that might be related to the pandemic, actually. You know, COVID has put real strain on the health care system. We've seen hiring there. But even other service industry things, we've seen hiring there to go back to John O'Neill's data point, which I believe in John very much and Andrew out Anvil that does the entire program first Friday of the month at noon, I faithfully listen to the number come out and they do a great job since the data has been collected in 2008. Yeah, I mean, we made a great amount of progress that COVID happened. We slid all the way back and now we've slowly regained. So at least we're back to where we were, which I think is a good thing for people with disabilities. Specifically to Massachusetts, though, we've seen that, we've seen our VR program increase and consumers typically we have, you know, somewhere between 850 and 950. Now we're at about 1050, 1038 consumers. Exactly, actually that we served as of June 30 at the end of the fiscal year. And of that, we had 155successful closures, and many of those were six figure closures. We had a significant amount of people that got a high level job, so that's very encouraging to us and we've had some good results. I know we're going to talk about some of the specific programs we're looking at pre X, we're looking at the mid-career professional and even older adults who want to reenter the workforce or continue to work beyond retirement age.   Carol: That is super exciting news. It really is. I love it. That's what I remember you talking about with RSA when we were doing that. Other call it like a year ago, like these six figure positions, that's that's incredible. So now that we've gotten this kind of picture of what's going on in general with your agencies, let's just look a little bit at the overall employment picture in each of your states. So what's your employment rate kind of look like and what are your hot employment markets and sectors? And David, I'll go to you first. I know you started a little bit on this. I'll let you expand.   David: Yeah, as I indicated, health care remains strong. In Massachusetts, we're hovering right around five percent for the general unemployment number. Our labor participation rate among the general population remains strong. Unfortunately, among people with disabilities, we're still looking at around two thirds of all working age people with disabilities who are not in the labor force. To me, that's job one, right? That's job one for our agency, for our counselors, is engaging our consumers and trying to get them resolved to want to work. That, I think, is because before you can get the job, we know how to get them the job once they're resolved, but they've got to be resolved to want to work. So that's job one. Then the second part is getting them a job, which is it's not easy, but it's easier, right? I think we're doing well. We've put together public awareness campaigns to really try to get out there. We use actually real allotment dollars from RSA to launch our What's Your Vision campaign, which we're out on TV with 30 second ads. We've been in print or on social media again, go to mass dot gov food slash MQB to check out the full campaign. I know there was a plethora of real dollars coming from RSA, so if you're looking for something to do with those dollars, we've proved the proof of concept that you can do it and it can be effective because we're having more people come to MQB.   Carol: Very cool. Yeah, I'm looking forward to looking at that link. So Natasha, how about you? What's going on with the employment overall? The picture in Minnesota?   Natasha: Minnesota is looking great. Our unemployment rate is at 3.8percent, which is well below the national average. Our labor force participation rate is 67.8 percent for all individuals and about 48 percent of Minnesotans with a disability are employed, and that's compared to about 38.8 percent nationally. So the numbers are looking great. And when you're asking about hot jobs across the board, everything is hot right now. Job vacancies are at a record number. Employers across the state are reporting difficulty finding workers. The demand is especially high in health care and social assistance. But those other areas that really were hit hard during the recession, including food service, hospitality, those are soaring right back.   Carol: Wow, thank you for that. So it's no secret that the pandemic had a huge impact on employment and the economy as a whole. But can you tell us how the pandemic has affected employment for the customers you serve in particular? And are there any lessons you learned during these past 18 months you're putting into place for the long term and attached? I'm going to punt that one to you first.   Natasha: We actually had a lot more opportunity than challenge when COVID hit, so we did have a number of individuals with disabilities who were laid off primarily because they were in the service and hospitality industry, and that was hit especially hard. But with COVID, it really showed that teleworking is completely and utterly doable, and all of these job postings we're seeing now are for remote workers. And when you're working with people who have transportation barriers who also live in very rural settings, this has been incredible and they're getting jobs and we're able to accommodate those jobs. The biggest struggle, though, is because we are so remote and virtual is accessibility issues, and we've been doing a lot of education of employers, of our own employer, the state of Minnesota, how to make sure everything is accessible so that if someone is working virtually, they can still do their job. And how we implement accommodations in a virtual world look very different. I think our biggest lesson learned is you just need to roll with it. You have to be flexible and you can't get locked into the way you used to do things. So we did things we didn't think was actually possible. We've done virtual adjustment to blindness training. We've even done virtual job site accommodations where they would walk us around on their phone or their laptop showing us the worksite, and we had been able to give suggestions and ideas how to accommodate without ever leaving our house. You just have to throw the book out the window is what we learned.   Carol: I bet your team has been super busy. I bet those guys are just like, Wow, but it's got to make the work super interesting.   Natasha: It's so much fun. I have never seen such creativity as I have these past 18 months. We have tried anything and everything, and it's been incredible. We're going to use a lot of those things from here on out.   Carol: Oh, very cool. So, David, I know you guys are always super innovative at the mask commission. So what about you? Tell us about how these last 18 months have impacted you and employment for your customers and kind of any lessons you've learned?   David: Yeah, really. Just a big credit goes out to our team and our consumers, one for being resilient. And we closed Friday, March 13 at five o'clock and we were open for business Monday morning, 9:00 a.m. Our counselors were already equipped with mobile laptops. Aware, which is our case management system, is all in the cloud, so we were positioned well to be able to work in this remote environment. So that's helped our counselors and our team. But additionally, I got to agree in Natasha's right, and I think you all listening to this podcast will agree the amelioration of transportation as a barrier or at least the significant amount of that as a barrier has been a game changer. It's really a paradigm shift and is unlocked. So many potentials for not only blind people, but all people with disabilities. I think that the permanence of that opportunity is a huge takeaway, a silver lining. Covid is a very serious situation. A lot of people have suffered, so I don't want to say it's a great thing because we wouldn't want to trade that right. But this is really help people with disabilities. And I think in the long term, it's going to continue to help them. I think that's the top of the full thing. And how can we leverage that even further? Is there are things we can collectively go to RSA for or I think, you know, Carol, I also sit on the National Council on Disability. Although I'm here as commissioner today, I'm trying to influence people on the federal level to think outside the box. And let's consider if there are other ways that we can leverage, whether it's being online or any technology that we can use to bring to bear for the benefit of people with disabilities to work.   David: I think more and more of that is coming, and that's a good thing. We're getting some of the other things we've been doing, though we just want an award. I'm pleased to say for our graphic novel that we put together our Patriots Best Practices guide. That's a good thing. We're trying to engage those students and their families who traditionally you know how some of these RSA guidelines go. They're very dry. They're on an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper typed print. This is engaging. We find once you put it in the kids hands, they can't put it down and they're learning about all the steps of VR and the families are learning about that. That's a good thing because we really believe it takes a village and back to the other thing we were talking about where you've got to get the person with the disability resolved to want to work. And yes, they come about that ultimately on their own. But if their families are in on it, their friends are in on it, the community is on it and telling them, Hey, this is a good thing. Work brings independence, self-determination and it really, you're going to be contributing to something. I mean, I would assert somebody's self-identity really work is intertwined with that. So we think that things, whether it's the what? Your Vision ad campaign, this Preets practices guide, all of the other work that we're doing, trying to get out into the broader community. We think that rising tide will lift all ships.   Carol: So is that price guide also on your website, David?   David: It sure is Mass.Gov/MCB. Additionally, we have a companion website that goes with it that shows you the graphic novel and is audio described at the same time. And I think that's quest for independence. It's the UWW, AMC B Dash quest for independence. Again, go toMass.Gov/MCB. You'll get the link to it.   Carol: Awesome. No, I'm sure there's some people going to be interested in that as well. That's a bonus tip all listeners for the price guide. That's great. So it might be a little early on seeing this yet, but have you either have you seen any kind of the signs of the long COVID starting to impact customers? David, I'll ask you that first, have you started to see that?   David: Yeah. So in Massachusetts, we haven't seen too much of that, but we have seen hesitancy getting back out into the community a little bit. And on the consumer side, you know, so we're only going to do that when people are comfortable because it's really it's safety first, it's safety first for our team, for our counselors and then additionally for the consumers. We haven't seen too many breakthroughs, fortunately or too much spread in our community in Massachusetts, which we're grateful for. We have a high vaccination rate. I think Massachusetts leads the nation in the percentage of our people who are vaccinated. I think that's contributed and helped really open things up in Massachusetts here. I wouldn't say it's back to what it was pre-COVID, but I think we're trending in the right direction and hopefully sometimes we'll be able to put this behind us.   Carol: Good. Good, Natasha, what about in Minnesota? Are you seeing any signs of like the long COVID in customers?   Natasha: We have not. Between both general and blind. We haven't seen a single applicant or customer who is dealing with long COVID. Part of me is, yes, it might be too soon, and the other part of me is thinking, I don't know if individuals really are realizing that those long term effects are going to have a disabling impact on them, and they may not even realize what VR is or what disability is. They were living and working just as anyone does. And then this happened. So I think there might need to be some awareness out there in the future.   Carol: I can see a campaign coming. I can see David like launching a campaign around this, how we going to serve the long COVID folks. So back in the day, I used to have this personal philosophy. I like to tag to start with, you know, about employment, and I always felt that I wanted our customers to achieve and obtain or maintain family sustaining wages. And I don't focus used to be like, what? Like, what is that? But I didn't want people to just get a job. I wanted them to give more than a job. I was hoping it could lend itself to a career and moving up and having a ladder and buying a house and doing all of that. So what is your personal philosophy around employment and people with disabilities and Natasha, I'll ask you first.   Natasha: My first philosophy is I agree with you, Carol. Any old job does not mean a good job, and family sustaining wage is essential. My other philosophy is I don't believe there should have to be a philosophy around employment of people with disabilities. I mean, frankly, VR is a long term goal needs to be that we aren't needed, that the only factor in any employment situation should be that the individual can do the job and it should not matter if they have a disability or not. And employers need to recognize that every single person brings value and strength to the organization. And we are doing a family sustaining wage study in Minnesota, and 93 percent of individuals with disabilities who are part of the data did not receive a family sustaining wage. 93 percent, there should not be a gap and they should not be relegated to entry level employment, minimum wage employment if they want and need to do more. My philosophy is there shouldn't have to be one.   Carol: I love that here here, Mic-drop on that boom. So David, how about you? Even though we shouldn't have to have one? Do you have a personal philosophy?   David: I certainly do as a consumer myself, having been completely blind multiple times in my life and now being legally blind right on 20-200, there is a significant amount of suffering that occurs with people with blindness, people with disabilities in general. Coming to that acceptance, that disability is going to be part of the natural human condition, I think is the first thing. So once you can come to terms with that, then it becomes the greatest secret right, which is we become what we think about. So if you focus and your resolve that you want to work, you will achieve that and then move up. And so it starts with goal setting and a plan and all the things we talk about in VR, the tried and true methods of sitting down with your family, with your extended circle and drawing up that plan and sticking to it, the path to prosperity is paved by perseverance. You got to hang in there for everyone hundred you ask you. I get 99 no's, and you can't give up until you get that one, yes, even if it's at the hundredth time, so you've got to hang in there, that is. The number one thing is that perseverance, because people with disabilities are naturally inclined to solve problems to hang in there. Whether it's the Accenture study that we know that people with disabilities outperformed in terms of being on time in terms of having less absenteeism, in terms of being productive in many ways. Those are all good traits, but it starts with overcoming the inherent challenges that come with disability. And then once you do that, then come into VR. We've got programs and services, and we've got great professionals who know how to provide opportunities for you.   Carol: I love that. Oh my gosh, I'm glad you said it. That Accenture study as well. It's back to the basics. I always think we used to talk about that. Going back to the basics. I know sometimes it's like, Oh, here's a flashy new program that's going on, but really, it is back to the basics. I am going to ask you, though, have you had any other types of initiatives or practices that you put into place around employment that you're hoping are going to help to move the needle forward? And David, I'm going to kick that to you.   David: So let's talk about some of the realignment projects that we do. I think year one realignment projects that we did. Twenty four separate realignment projects, we follow that up with another six this year. I think we're doing another 6. So we're talking everything from the graphic novel that we talked about to we launched an employer challenge during the pandemic. We get great response on that from the business community, where we challenge the business community to, hey, do one more thing. That's the name of the campaign. Do one more thing. Everybody can be a mentor. You can offer one more internship. How about interviewing and then hiring and then promoting and retaining all of those things? So that's what that campaign is centered around. We launched our Career View podcast. We've got twenty one episodes there on all types of VR topics. We have special guests and staff and counselors sharing their insight, by the way that's available on our website Mass.Gov/MCB. You can also find it on SoundCloud, Apple and Google. So we have our nationally recognized summer internship program. This year, we had nearly 70 individuals participate that joins more than a group of 700 that we've had over the years. In October, we had our job fair. We do that annually at Radcliffe and with partners like Perkins School for the Blind, Carroll Center for the Blind and other community stakeholders. This year we had 40 career ready candidates who pitch themselves. We did reverse pitches, which seem to be a very effective model in the 20 personnel executives that we have loved it and we're getting placements out of that job fair. We did the 60 second elevator pitch, so if you want more information, contact me, be pleased to share it. We did a reach for the stars, which was in that event where we gave out gifts to the people that had the best pitches. And then for Nadeem, we created blogs and worked with our sister agencies, MRC and Match Commission for the death of Hard of Hearing to get it out through their communities to make sure that people know that, yeah, it's about blindness, but it's also about people with deaf blindness and people with blindness and other disabilities as well. So whether it's the virtual town halls that we're doing, I came day celebrations. I mean, we've got a lot of events going on. My team has worked so hard and I think we have the advantage, though, of such institutional knowledge and just great human resources here in Massachusetts with our team at MCB and the consumers. I mean, you just got to have a willing consumer group that wants to take part.   Carol: Well, I think you need to have a session at NCSAB or CSr CSAvR and all the things that you're doing because I could just see, like my old director, wheels are turning. I am sure colleagues from across the country would be like, What are you doing? I want to know more about that.   David: Sign us up. I mean, there is a number of other studies that we did realignment projects. I think in total, Carla and I, who's our communications director, Carla Cathy, does a terrific job. I think we stopped at 52 different projects that we've done over the past 24 months or something like that. So we've got a lot going on. Check us out. Mass.Gov/MCB to find out more.   Carol: Holy smokes. Thanks for sharing that. So Natasha, I know you're representing you and Dee, so are there any other initiatives or practices that you all are doing around employment to move the needle forward?   Natasha: I got sent a whole list that Minnesota General has been doing, but I think the biggest thing I wanted to share first is that we are doing most of these things together. I think Minnesota General and Minnesota Blind had had a long history of being very isolated from one another and siloed. That is no more. We do almost everything together and as one voice, and so a lot of the things I'll be talking about, we are doing this as a team, but with employment, I think pre-employment is the first place we start is when you build that. Relationship between a student and work, so a couple of things that we're doing at SSB is bring your a game where students are meeting monthly and they get information about an Alexa game and then they play that game with their family and friends, and then they come back together with their peers to talk about the game and how it relates to jobs and job skills. And then we also did an open mic night so that we can encourage the artistic side of our students. And they came, Well, they're going to be coming on the 28th. They're singers and bands and poets and comedians and storytellers, so they'll be able to share their talent. We're also expanding our pre-employment transition services programs. We're adding another work opportunity navigator who's going to be focused on providing work experiences in the northern region since we have a ton of students up there and a lot of need. We're also entering into a contract with the third party to host liability insurance so that we can get more students out there for work experiences. That's been our biggest barrier, so we figured let's get over that so we can get students paid work experiences. We have a program in Minnesota called the Connect seven hundred program, which is great but could be better. But Connect seven hundred is like Schedule A, where a person with a disability can come in and have a noncompetitive interview. And the Connect 700 program has just soared this last year. And the stats are that someone who applies for Connect 700 with the state are nearly twice as likely to get hired than someone from the general public firsthand. SSB has had a number of vacancies in every single vacancy, has had to connect 700 applicant and almost every single vacancy has been hired from a Connect 700. So that's been a really great experience. Another huge project, and I'm going to say it's 2 projects. The first is the elimination of subminimum wage. Legislature created a task force to eliminate it by 2025 and going hand in hand with that is our collaboration with the Department of Human Services to help people who are on waivers and receiving vocational rehabilitation to get jobs. We're doing something called service provider alignment, so if someone's on a waiver and getting vocational rehabilitation services, they can have the same provider from start to finish. We have a new framework called Engage Plan, Find and Keep so that it helps people move through that process without any delays so that they can get into employment. And there's no back and forth of who's paying for what. So it's a seamless experience. And then I could go on and on with 50 more things, but for sake of time, I won't. But the final thing is we have increased our collaboration with our WIO partners tenfold because they have connections. We don't we know disability, but they have connections with the business community we often can't replicate. So we've been doing a lot with our title 1 and title 3 partners. And so with that, I'll turn it back to you, Carol.   Carol: Well, I know that's been on your heart for a long time. You've always talked about that partnership with the WIO partners, and that is so critical. You both have so much happening. And so I want to lead us into our National Disability Employment Awareness Month, little part of our discussion and how each of your agencies is drawing attention to this month. So, Natasha, I know that I was following on social media as well and saw that there was an employer event earlier in the month. So can you tell us a little bit about how that went?   Natasha: Yeah, we had over 400 attendees. We invited the creators of the windmill training. If you're familiar with windmills, Milt Wright is the company, and the two owners of that corporation actually came and presented. And the topic was music within disability inclusion in a business world, and that recording is available on YouTube. And if you go to our Career Force website, it's available on there. We also unveiled something called disability inclusion bite-size learning modules for employers, and they are 20 minute modules and there are five of them that employers can go in and learn about disability inclusion, and there's tip sheets and tip cards and how they can incorporate it into their business. We've also done a number of blog posts and of course, we celebrated White Cane Day and we posted three videos regarding White Cane Day and what it means for people with vision loss. And fortunately, our governor is very much in support and issue two proclamations one for NDI and one for White Cane Day.   Carol: Yeah, that was awesome and I loved it. I saw your video too, promoting White Cane Day. I thought that was really well done. Both of you are good at the old social media and David, I follow the mask commission all the time on social media and I saw you were part of a panel a couple of weeks ago for National Disability Employment Awareness Month.   David: Yeah.   Carol: and also I saw there was a podcast dropped and you had a couple of other tweets out and some really cool things with customers. I just wondered if there's any things you want to highlight about the special month.   David: Again, just a shout out to our team for doing such a great job with all of the social. Media, Caller Kath is doing a great job, but did a VR panel with the state exchange for employment for people with disabilities, a seed project which counts on state governments, has an affiliate. It's the National Association of State Personnel executives. So NASPE they had their conference in Boston, so they wanted to hear from me. So we were able to present there about hiring people with disabilities. So we're a model employer state. We talked a little bit about that and how they could do things in their state. So that was good. But we kicked off the month with our vlog and our ad campaign that I mentioned previously. What's your vision, which is on TV and it's in print and it's really getting a lot of traction. We had our job fair. We had our employer of the year and then our Reach for the Stars contest, which we talked about. We had our virtual town hall with our transportation authority, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, about barriers and making sure that people with disabilities have their free or reduced Charlie card in Massachusetts. If you're blind, you have a free travel pass to be able to travel throughout the public transit system. So we talked about that we had a white pain awareness day and celebration where we had some mobility awards within that program. That was fun, but we had a provider's council presentation with the disability commissioners all throughout Massachusetts about human services and things like that. We presented to higher education professionals at Lesley University. We did an event for parents of children with blindness and visual impairments for the Boston Public Schools and New England College of Optometry. Again, just more of the reallotment project. So it's very busy at MCB, but it's a good thing. And I think that's one of the reasons why you're seeing the amount of consumers coming in for VR is up. The amount of closures is up. So it's a good thing. I think it's working.   Carol: I'd say so, David, I think you need to train your peers. I have never seen anyone quite like you and how you've promoted and really gotten traction in Massachusetts and have made some really cool things happen. I think it's amazing. And Natasha, I just wanted to say so that if people wanted to follow what you were talking about with the mini modules for the employers, I looked it up and it's CareerForceMN.com. So if anybody wants to listen to that, definitely. David's promoted his website to a number of times, but folks should definitely go to both because I think that you will get a lot of rich information that is applicable in any state. It doesn't have to be that it was developed for Massachusetts or Minnesota. What's being said are things that are pertinent anywhere. So I know we need to close up here shortly and I just want to ask you each. So if you had a shiny VR crystal ball and you could forecast what is happening with VR 5 years from now and how would employment for VR look? And what do you think needs to be done to just overall improve employment for individuals with disabilities? Natasha, I'm going to go to you first and then I'll go to David   Natasha: O if only I had that crystal ball. You know, I think we can't have VR look the same in 5 years from now as it does 5 years ago. I think we have hung our hats on the old way of doing VR for so long, and we really, really need to reimagine across the board how we work with our customers and everything that David says. This is what I hope that all VR agencies embrace. We need to connect people to not just any old job. We need to be focusing on advancement. We want people to never have to come back to VR. But yeah, that's the majority of our cases. Are people returning. That's why we need to invest people for the long haul and we need to make sure that they have everything that they need so that they do not come back. And the way that we approach businesses, I think, has been kind of archaic and has been from this. Well, we're going to convince you to hire people with disabilities, but we need to be driving home that the expectation is if employers want talented, loyal staff, a strong business model that embraces diversity and inclusion and a workforce that actually reflects their stakeholders and customers, then they cannot disregard the disability community. And VR needs to be the leader in that message. And it cannot be. Just please hire someone with a disability that's not going to work, and that's not our approach anymore.   Carol: Well said. Well said. So, David, how about you? Do you have a crystal ball?   David: Wish I did. But the great poet Santayana said those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, so I think we need to look back. Let's look back at starting with like Smith's best act and all of that and see how much progress we have made. And even it just contemporarily when we're talking about we did away with homemakers, that was a big VR thing. Right now, it's imminent that we're going to get rid of. 14C, that's another step. You know, I look at programs like the SBA8A program. Let's get included in that. I look at Randolph Sheppard as we've seen the pandemic just crushed so many of those vendors there. What can we do now to expand that program or to get that program into other sectors or industries to keep that alive and keep people entrepreneurial? So I. I think the future's bright for VR, I believe in incremental change. These are long standing challenges that are profound. And so to me, it's like, what can we do to look at the existing program, incorporate all of the good things that we've talked about, all of the things that we've been hyper accelerated to learn as a result of COVID. It's the transportation piece that we talked about, the technology piece that we talked about. Let's keep that going so we can provide our people with access to the opportunities. And I'm just very confident that we're trending in the right direction. I want to keep it going.   Carol: Well, thank you, David, for those positive words at the end. I really appreciate that. I think you two are both such a visionary and just talented leaders, and I'm really looking forward to the work you all do over these next five years. Very excited. Thank you for being on the show. I appreciate your time. I know you're both busy.   David: Thank you, Carol.   Natasha: Thanks to you all.   Speaker1: Conversations powered by VR. 1 manager at a time, 1 minute at a time brought to you by the VRtAC for Quality Management. Catch all of our podcast episodes by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening!

Journalist David Seaman replying to an interesting story on the homepage of Reddit yesterday, where redditors added it up and found Joe Rogan deleted 40 episodes from his show archive upon the move to Spotify, 7 of those episodes were conversations with our founder. The conversations were also scrubbed from YouTube and Soundcloud, it appears, making them essentially unfindable in raw form at this point.David’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Winner-Take-All-Bitcoin-Ether/dp/B08Z4CNTVN/ Full statement from David: “Thanks to Reddit for focusing on Rogan’s dishonesty here. He deleted his past guests, knowingly and to secure a huge deal from Spotify. Nothing wrong with that, but be honest with your listeners. If I were getting $100 to $350 million to delete some people from my podcast feed, who knows, I’d probably take it — but I wouldn’t beat around the bush after the fact. I’m grateful to the listeners of his show who have found my work and respect them deeply, but I have no respect for Rogan’s recent commoditization of his own audience, and show history, in order to please Spotify. He’s a sell out, pure and simple. Thank you.”

The world is moving toward being decentralized in every area from the internet to big business. What that means is that the way we do things will change, and in some cases, those things are already vastly different than the norm we all have grown accustomed to.Funding and investments are one aspect of the business world that for a long time have operated in silos. But the tide is shifting, and David Koifman is helping to democratize the world of investment through his work at Kickfurther.Kickfurther is an investment platform that uses the power of crowdfunding to help CPG companies fund their inventory and production runs. Most of the deals on Kickfurther are fully funded and closed within minutes, which proves there is an appetite for this kind of investment in the general market. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, David explains the model and its benefits to both businesses and investors, and he explains how crowdfunding will continue to make an impact on ecommerce companies in the decentralized future. Main Takeaways:Democratizing Investment: For too long, companies have been at the mercy of financial institutions to help fund early production runs or other operational costs. And while that solution works for some, we think that new solutions are still needed. Opening up investment opportunities to the general public is a peek into where the world of funding is headingKeep Proving Yourself: When a company gets a bank loan and pays it off, the business is seen as more successful and its credit rises. A similar thing happens when a company uses crowdfunding for inventory: by delivering the inventory the crowd has purchased and then opening up a new round of funding, a business is building credibility with a consumer and broad investor audience that it otherwise would not have been able to reach.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles. And today we're talking to David Koifman, the head of growth at Kickfurther. David, welcome to the show.David:Hey Stephanie. Great to be on the show.Stephanie:I'm glad to have you. So I was looking through your background and I was hoping we could start there because I saw that you've been in sales and partnerships and business development, and it seems like you've had a wide ranging career. So I wanted to hear a little bit about what you did before Kickfurther, and what brought you here.David:Before Kickfurther? I was in marketing right out of college. And then I went into the world of startups in financial technology. I began as a sales rep and grew within a small organization to a much larger organization, led the team, and basically built out sales account management partnerships. And then we were getting to a stage of growth where I wasn't feeling the excitement that I initially felt and joined the team at Kickfurther to do it all over again. So I've been here three and a half years. It's been awesome. We've grown tremendously, and I'm very excited about the next few years to see where it will go.Stephanie:Awesome. So you've always, always had the startup bug, where you're looking for that crazy hectic environment, fast growth.David:Yeah. It's like I see myself as a sales guy who doesn't like just selling. What I like is building the sales process, building the team, understanding the customer. So a little bit more beyond just knowing individual customers and building a book of business.Stephanie:Yep. Got it. So tell me a bit about what Kickfurther does.David:So Kickfurther solves a unique problem that every consumer goods business faces in their early stages of growth. You'll see a lot of companies are funding on platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo. These are crowdfunding platforms where businesses raise money to fund their first production run. Production run is when a business is producing inventory. Inventory is the product that they sell. So as that business completes their crowdfunding campaign or determines that they have product market fit, they will need to come back and order more product. Sometimes, they're buying that product from a supplier, maybe a manufacturer in China or here in the U.S., somebody that produces a finished product, and then they receive it in their warehouse and they sell through it. Sometimes they're buying a bunch of raw materials and making a product themselves. Usually that's the case in food or some health and beauty applications.David:But the bottom line is that costs a lot of money, and the faster the business grows, the more they have to invest into inventory upfront. You have to pay for that inventory, it takes months to produce, and then you get it into a warehouse and then you start selling it to customers. And then your customers start paying you. So there could be a long amount of time from when you need to outlay that cash to produce the inventory until you're able to recoup that revenue and put it into the next production run. So as businesses grow, they encounter this cash flow pinch, and Kickfurther solves that pinch. We have developed a marketplace on kickfurther.com, where we will vet companies and structure deals. And then a community of users will come to those deals and participate in purchasing the inventory for that business. The business will then produce the inventory, sell it, and pay back Kickfurther and the users who participated in the deal; we'll make some money and get to do it all over again.Stephanie:Yeah. Very cool. It reminded me of, I saw quite a few real estate investment platforms like this too, where you get the fund, the next three or whatever it may be. So it seems like they're popping up in different ways to have a Kickstarter approach, but also getting people in the market who have the funds to be able to fund this inventory or investments or whatever it may be. So is that the main way that Kickfurther is different, where it's sourcing investment from the community instead of traditional lenders or actual investors?David:Yeah. So I mean, what we're doing is using the power of crowds rather than financial institutions. There's a lot of solutions out there that take money. They borrow money from banks and other financial institutions, and then present it to businesses and take a cut. And what we're doing is creating that opportunity for any individual on the internet, somebody who has money sitting in their bank account, and they want to use that money to make money by participating in a purchase of inventory for a consumer goods business. And so what we do is, it's not a loan. It's not an investment, it's actually a consignment agreement. So what we're doing is purchasing inventory for a business and consigning it to them to sell on our behalf. And as the business sells that inventory, then that triggers the consignment, and then we invoice them for it and they buy it back plus their cost of funding.Stephanie:Got it. Okay. So how do you make sure that you're bringing on companies onto your platform that won't make you nervous, where it's like, are you actually going to sell all this inventory? Because I'm not trying to cover that cost.David:Yeah. Well, there's a pretty thorough diligence process that we go through for every business that goes on the platform. We evaluate everything from their revenues to their supply chain, to how they distribute that product. And it's all verified through documentation. So it's not like anybody can come to us and say, Hey, we need money," and then just go up on the platform. There's a diligence process, just like there would be going to a bank or any other financial institution. I would say our uniqueness is we look at supply chain and distribution, and we assess risk in a very specific way. It's different from a bank. So some of our customers, everybody wants to go to a bank. Bank money is the cheapest. You want to go to a bank and get a line of credit and fund your business that way.David:However, if you're a small business, whether you're a restaurant or a clothing store, the bank looks at you the same. They say, how long have you been in business? Are you profitable? How much have you sold? Whereas we're looking at a very specific sector of small businesses that are consumer goods, businesses with supply chains. And we understand the intricacies of that supply chain and then how they get that product to their warehouse, get that product from the warehouse to the customers, and collect that money through their distribution channels. And so we use that information to determine who has access to capital on Kickfurther.Stephanie:Got it. Yeah, what's cool is that you guys are acting as like the trusted source, so that the community doesn't have to do as much due diligence, or I don't know if they do any at all, but you're acting as like the mediator, to be like, "We've done all the research. We know this company, and it's for the most part trustworthy," and then people can come in and fund that based off of your research and due diligence.David:We do verify all the information that's presented about the company. The individuals still do decide which deals they participate in. And that's based on what they read in the public profile. Some of them will go investigate more. Some of them will actually ask questions on the platform. So you have the ability as a participant to ask the owner or CEO questions before you participate, or during the deal, about distribution or how they're making products, or what if they're worried about competition? Any topic is welcome. There's a lot of additional diligence that an individual can conduct before they make the decision to participate.Stephanie:Cool. And is there a risk rating of, okay, this company is more of a startup one, this is going to be their first time raising money here; we're going to give them a risk rating of this? so maybe you have a higher payoff because of that if they end up selling all the inventory, or how do you guys think about the risk-based approach when it comes to getting investment?David:It's not as simple as just boiling it down to a one to 10 scale or something like that. But there's a lot of categories which each one of the customers that we fund will be shown in. And so you can look at how many years in business, what their revenue range is, how many different wholesale buyers they have, how many times they've gone through the supply chain and produced with their supplier. So there's a number of different elements that, that are categorized in terms of risk.Stephanie:Got it, cool. And what is the average return for someone? If I were to go in there and invest right now in a deal, is there an average range of what you make over one year or that a longer time horizon?David:So the deals range in duration from two to 10 months. So the way we compare deals is on a profit per month basis, and businesses will offer anywhere from one to two percent per month. And so you can annualize that in a way where, if you participate in a deal and then that money comes back to you, then you can redeploy it into another deal. And if you continue doing that, let's say 1.5% a month will translate to about 18% per year.Stephanie:Got it, cool. So what kind of struggles do you see ecommerce brands having right now when it comes to ... Obviously not having money to fund inventory is the high level problem, but maybe what kind of sticky situations do you see brands getting in by either waiting too long to get funding or not even thinking about it. What are some stories that you have around the whole inventory funding?David:Yeah, I think the biggest thing to do is to be proactive and understand what solutions are out there and how to use them before that need comes around. Because being desperate is the worst time to be looking. And if you've run out of inventory as a business owner, you're missing out on opportunities to sell. So like you could have a really successful Q4, and then you get to Q1 and people still want to buy your stuff, but you're all out. And then you placed an order with your supplier, and the supplier takes two months to produce. And then maybe you're in a position where you have to air freight instead of going on the water and you have to pay a lot more money to get it there faster. So there's all sorts of obstacles that come into play. And that's ecommerce.David:A lot of the businesses that we work with are multi-channel sales. So they're selling ecommerce and then they're selling to target or Best Buy or REI. And those companies will place orders, if you don't deliver those orders when you say you will, then you're probably going to lose that opportunity or at least jeopardize it in the future. So it's important to make sure that you have the inventory ready when you're going to need it. And you also don't want to have way too much. So if you buy a lot, and then you don't sell at the rate that you expected, you have a lot of cash sitting in the form of inventory in your warehouse. Sometimes it's going to go bad, if it's a crude product or it's just cash that you want to spend on advertising to sell the product, but you can't because you don't have it.Stephanie:Cool. So if I'm a new brand and I'm looking to crowdfund my inventory, what are some best practices that attract the investors in the crowd? What kind of things do you see connecting with people? How would I write up a good post right now to attract funding for someone to help with my inventory?David:The most important things are that you've done it before. So we don't work with businesses that are doing their first production run. We did in our very early days, and, as you can imagine, it's much higher risk. So we only work with businesses that have at least $150,000 in sales. And once they've demonstrated that, it's good to talk about how you work with your suppliers, what sort of things you do to ensure that you're going to receive the product that you want to receive within the timeframe that you plan on receiving it. So being conservative with time estimates, making sure that you have testing in place so that once your supplier says the product is ready, that somebody goes in and looks at it and you don't get a bunch of broken stuff.David:And then once it arrives, it's important that you have reliable distribution. People want to see good reviews. People want to see lots of reviews. And I would say, if there's somebody who's selling to a wholesale customer and they just have one customer who is placing large orders, that's pretty high risk. Because if that customer decides they don't want to buy anymore, who are they going to sell that product to? So those are the kinds of things that users on Kickfurther are taking a look at, reading through the profile, to decide if they're going to participate. One thing I will say that we haven't touched on is how fast these deals fund. So it's good for us at this point. It means that there's an imbalance in the marketplace in our favor. So the deal flow that we put up gets funded oftentimes in minutes.Stephanie:Yeah, I know. I noticed that, because I'm like, "Hmm, maybe let's see if I should investigate these deals." And I think it looked like everything was sold out, or it was all met to the limit. At least the two I was looking at. And it seemed like it happened really quick, where I'm like, "Hmm, this is competitive."David:Yeah. It's super competitive. So we have the ability to scale our deal flow pretty substantially without having a concern for deals funding fast enough. And as a user, if you're thinking about participating, you're going to get emails, you got to act on it fast. And so we put deals up. They have about 24 hours before they launch. And they always launch at 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. And if that, there's hundreds of people that are clicking, trying to get into deals like within a minute or two of 5:00 PM, when they usually fill up.Stephanie:Wild. I think you need more deals then for people to get in on.David:Yep. That's my job. I've been working hard on it. So we we've grown quite a bit. We have aggressive growth goals for 2021, and so far we're on track. It's early, but it's an exciting time to be at Kickfurther.Stephanie:That's great. So what brands are you trying to get on the platform right now? Who are you trying to convince to get on there?David:There's a lot of repeat customers, and we have really good retention. We average over four deals per customer, but they're all across the board. We're pretty product agnostic. We serve anybody who either buys or makes physical goods and then sells them with the exception of regulated things like alcohol, tobacco, firearms, THC, anything that's temperature controlled or perishable. Because of the consignment agreement nature of the contract, the inventory is our collateral in these deals. So we don't want it to go bad. And we want to make sure that it is available to anybody who participated in the consignment, they have to be able to purchase it.Stephanie:Yep. Oh, got it. So if the inventory doesn't sell out, you guys essentially have it in a warehouse, and me as an investor could be like, "I want one of those t-shirts then." Is that how to think about it?David:Yes, that is a way to think about it. So if the business is unable to sell the inventory, and they're unable to pay back Kickfurther and their users for the cost of it, then Kickfurther, based on our contract, will require a delivery of that inventory to us, at which point we'll attempt to sell it, and all the proceeds of that resale goes to the participants in that agreement.Stephanie:Have you had to do that yet?David:We have had to do that. We've been around for seven years. So it's happened, but these days it's very infrequent, and that's why these deals fund so fast as people who are participating on Kickfurther have great returns and they tell their friends about it and they the deals. So the performance, overall, is strong.Stephanie:Yeah, got it. So when I'm thinking about, as a business myself, getting credit and working with banks, you're building up your business credit worthiness. When you get traditional loans, I know we had to take on a couple of last year and it does help being like, "Oh yeah, we took on this size loan, we paid it off." How do you view crowdfunding in that kind of sense? Is it building up a business's credit worthiness or is it so siloed still at this point that it doesn't actually build up the financial view of the businessDavid:In some ways, it does, and in some ways it doesn't. It isn't considered debt to them. So it doesn't operate the same as taking out a loan and paying it back. But there's a lot of transactions that still occur that show the business is selling and making money. So their business credit will improve as a result of that. But yeah, it's kind of a mixed situation.Stephanie:Yeah, yeah. That seems tricky. Because it seems like a really good avenue to not only help the businesses, but then also bring in a lot more players. It seems like it's much more decentralized, which is great. The whole world's moving in that way, but if you can't really use it, be like, "Oh, look at these three different loans I have right now, the market funded them." I feel like the world needs to move to that place, the more of that crowdfunding and the decentralized approach is coming to the forefront.David:Well, the world is moving in that direction, but what's really cool is Kickfurther moves in that direction with the clients themselves. So as we establish a relationship with a business and they come back for repeat deals, we increase their limits substantially. And they have access to lower rates. Basically, they're earning credibility with this community. So let's say they offer one and a half percent per month on their first deal and they complete on time, and then they come back, they can offer less. It's really in the hands of the business owner what they want to offer, and the community, the marketplace, will decided if that business has earned that rate and are able to fund it at a lower cost. So as a customer at Kickfurther, as your revenues grow, you'll be able to take on more funding with Kickfurther, buy more inventory, and do it at a lower cost.Stephanie:Got it, okay. So you're building up that credit worthiness, just in a different hub, but you're doing that by just performing well and, yeah, that makes more sense.David:We will work with businesses who are starting at 150,000 in annual sales, and all the way up to 30 million. So there's quite a range of growth in service by Kickfurther. There's businesses that, once they reach a certain stage, either they're not accelerating as much as they used to and they have the cash flows to fund their own inventory and continue producing, or there's other businesses that have been long and around long enough where they are now exciting to banks and other financial institutions that have very low cost lending.Stephanie:Yep. Is there any guidance or any point where you're like, "Oh, you should probably just reinvest revenue or profits instead of getting a loan." Do you ever give guidance on that? Because I could see a lot of businesses always being like, "Oh, at such a low rate, why don't I get loans?" But then quite a few businesses have a lot of cash on their balance sheet too, and they don't know how to fully deploy it, but they're just so used to getting low interest loans. Is there any point where you've actually advised a company like, "You guys are good. Maybe you should reinvest profits." Or do you even see it from that angle?David:I don't think anybody's coming to us if they don't want additional capital. And I am always very transparent with everybody, and [inaudible] make sure you know, what your options are. We don't make money off convincing you to do one deal. We want that long-term engagement [inaudible] coming back. But I think the reason people come to Kickfurther is they have an opportunity with a buyer, or sales are growing so fast and in a channel where they want to launch a new product, they just don't have the cash to be able to do that. And that's why they're looking for funding solutions. And maybe they go to their equity investor and they say, "Hey, I need some additional capital to be able to take advantage of this opportunity." And the VC says, "You know what, why don't you seek some non-dilutive capital for that? That's a much better use of, why give up five or 10% of your ownership just so you can produce the next run when you're going to have to do another one and another one and another one after that?"Stephanie:Yep, yeah. That makes sense. So, since you're deep in the crowdfunding space, I'm sure you just see opportunities all around. So much stuff could be crowd crowdfunded. Where do you see that world headed? What kind of new opportunities do you see popping up in that space? Or what do you think is missing right now, where crowd funding could be meeting a need?David:I think there's a lot of money and power in crowds. And there's the ability to cut out middlemen and big entities that have been around for a long time and empower individuals to help these business owners grow. It's also not just the money that's coming from them. Why are people deciding to participate in these deals? A lot of them believe that they have an advantage and they have the knowledge in the space. So maybe they want to help the business owner. I've had plenty of users come to me and say, "Hey, I actually work in this space. And I have a couple of distribution opportunities that I'd like to connect with your client about." And I'll make a direct introduction, and all of a sudden they acquire a new sales channel. Or somebody who's got a lot of money and they want to do a side deal. Yeah, I am looking for equity investors, let me connect these two people.David:So those kinds of things happen rather frequently. And that's not going to happen when you're working with a sales rep at a bank. Because everything's coming from the bank's bank account. And actually the money that the bank is using is just coming from account holders and their deposits. So if you're storing money in a bank, the bank is using that money to lend to businesses and whoever else. So we're cutting that out of the mix. And I think it's good for everybody involved.Stephanie:Yeah, I think it's a good reminder too, about diversifying investments and why finding opportunities. Yeah, you don't want to just keep your money in a bank and let inflation just wither it away to nothing. So, yeah. It's cool to hear about opportunities like this that are very different, but will definitely help diversify your portfolio.David:Yeah. And it's really fun, from our standpoint, to work with all these young business owners. I mean like the business is young, not the individuals per se, but some of them just started a few months ago and they've had some real success. Some of them, it's a family business that's been around for a couple of generations, and all of a sudden they're discovering that ecommerce is a way to skyrocket the business. They have a really good product; they just haven't put it in front of the right audience. And they're figuring out how to make this happen financially, and we're there to help them. And it's just really great to be side by side with them as a partner and see that growth.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. It seems like there's also could be a lot of international opportunities. I know that's a lot more risky once you start going that route and finding people who are doing much smaller scale ventures and being able to help back that, then turn into a bigger thing. But I have read a few stories of finding people doing amazing things in other countries, but they just don't have any kind of funding. Or they can't buy inventory for even 10 things to sell. And yeah, it seems like there's a lot of opportunity around the world, but of course it'd be much more risky trying to vet those projects and companies.David:It is definitely a challenge. It's something that we're considering doing down the road. You probably start with Canada and some EU companies, but there's different regulations in different countries. And also, if we get into a bad situation with a client, we have to pursue them legally. So working in a foreign legal system is very costly, and we try to help businesses out, and so our margins are pretty slim. So being able to afford that kind of activity is probably a ways down the road for us.Stephanie:Yeah. So what are you guys looking forward to for the next, maybe, two to three years? What are you planning for? You said you were going to be growing really quickly this year. What kind of things are you putting in place right now and where do you want to be in the next couple of years with Kickfurther?David:I'd say we want to be a household name for inventory funding. A lot of people are starting their own businesses. And we want to create an opportunity for them to grow at the rate that they're able to grow and have access to capital. And so our goal is to put our name out there in a way where it becomes recognizable to all business owners who are in the right space for us.Stephanie:Yep. Very cool. Yeah, Amazon be a good space, but then sometimes those one-off products that are being sourced and sold on there. So maybe that's not the best space. I'm not sureDavid:Those people are business owners and growing too. So if you have one product that's selling really well, and that's what you want to focus on, sure, that's great.Stephanie:Cool. All right. Well, let's shift over to the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, David?David:I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?David:Probably the state of the world. So the ability that people have to shop and travel and continue to live their lives the way they did before lockdowns and quarantine.Stephanie:Yep. All right, cool. If you had a podcast, what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?David:I don't think I would have a podcast.Stephanie:What would you have then, a clubhouse? What would you have then?David:A clubhouse. I think that, honestly, I was a little bit foreign to this whole world of supply chain and inventory finance when it came to Kickfurther, and I've discovered a passion for helping these business owners. So I think the clubhouse that I would have would be one where business owners get together and talk about different solutions that help their business grow, and what vendors they use and what are best practices, just an exchange of information across business owners and vendors.Stephanie:I like that, because yeah, I think even thinking about, "What manufacturer should I use? And how do I even source those people?" Still always feels like a black box and it's referrals. Or you have to know someone and that'd be a good one.David:We make quite an effort to make those resources available to our customers. So, as we go through our diligence process, we cover a lot of topics, and oftentimes customers will identify pain points, and we will say, "If you're interested in these, this is a partner of ours, or we've got a few different options or people you can talk to, to learn more about the solutions in this space."Stephanie:Yep. Cool. What's up next on your reading list?David:Can't Hurt Me by David Goggins.Stephanie:Okay. Nice. Where are you traveling to next when it's easier to travel again?David:In two weeks, I'm traveling to Salt Lake City to go skiing, but that's a drive for me.Stephanie:Yeah.David:Big skier. And whenever the snow comes, I'm out there.Stephanie:I love that. All right. And then the last one, what is your favorite piece of tech that you're using right now? It can be personally or with the business.David:Don't hate me, but it's my iPhone 12 Pro.Stephanie:What's to hate? I have the same thing. It's my favorite. It has the best cameraDavid:I bought it for the camera, but it's really fast. It's a computer in my pocket that does pretty much everything my actual computer does.Stephanie:Yeah.David:Super valuable piece of tech.Stephanie:Yep. I agree. All right, David, thanks so much for joining the show. Where can people find out more about you and Kickfurther?David:Kickfurther.com is the best place. You can find me on LinkedIn, David Koifman, and I look forward to connecting with anybody who's interested. Also, if you're a business owner listening and you're interested in funding with us, you can go to our website, fill out an application, or you can just email me david@kickfurther.com.Stephanie:Yeah.David:Thanks so much, Stephanie.Stephanie:Cool.David:It's good to be on here.Stephanie:Yeah, thanks, David. All right. See you.David:Take care.

The mission of this podcast is to highlight the beauty and diversity of God's Church – both in Chattanooga and the Church at large.In the final episode of this season, the conversation takes a downward turn – into hell, that is. Adam, Joey, David, and Keith finish discussing the purpose of Jesus's death before turning to the subject of God's character and what hell is like.Athanasius may emphasize God's goodness, but is that how modern Christians describe God? This issue bookends a discussion of various ideas about hell in light of God's character. The group characterizes hell as an experience caused by a negative response to God's love instead of being a punishment for sins committed; however, the fact of God's wrathfulness cannot be ignored, and Joey and Keith wrestle with how justice fits into the picture. This concluding episode is not only full of eruditeness but funny anecdotes about Martians, asbestos, and Sunday school. Listen in to hear the end of the discussion of Athanasius' On the Incarnation!About Adam WhitescarverAdam is passionate about seeing God's people possess vibrant prayer lives to help them make a difference in the sphere of influence God has given them. In ministry since 2001, Adam enjoys his family, teaching, singing, and reading a myriad of subjects. He and his wife, Stephanie, live in North GA with their four children.Jump Through the Conversation:[1:07] Adam's intro[2:33] How Athanasius emphasizes God's goodnessConnection to several heresiesGod isn't just wrathful[4:55] Athanasius' optimistic/comprehensive view of Jesus's deathYou have to “opt out” of God's redemptionDoes God make the choice for us to go to hell or do we?[6:15] David: God is somewhere in the middle of our benevolent and wrathful pictures of HimGod's love is still shown by people existing in hell as non-existence is worseWhy God wouldn't force people into heaven[8:31] David: heaven and hell are “the same reality perceived differently”Analogy of loving/hating an embrace[10:09] Keith: Orthodox view of hell is hating God's love for you[10:50] David: hell is emotional separation from God[11:42] Rabbit trail on Lewis and accents[13:37] Joey: Protestants agree that righteousness is love of “the things of God” and wickedness is opposing those things[14:24] Debate about whether God is punishing and wrathful or loving and if those attributes can coexist or are contradictory[15:46] Joey: God's justice is an important part of His characterKeith: punishment is not the same as justiceConsequences vs punishment[18:52] God's character and the Reformation[19:52] The “how” of God's redemption is simply Him taking a body[20:40] Doctrine of justification developed laterKeith: it's overexplainingJoint Declaration of the Doctrine of Justification in the 1990s[21:41] More on God's motivation for redemptionBook recommendation from DavidStories from Sunday school Links and Resources:A Beautiful Church websiteChattanooga House of Prayer websiteGive todayOn the Incarnation (Adam's recommended edition)Joey Sherrard's ministryKeith Kettenring's ministryDavid Carter's ministryJesus Shock by Peter Kreeft (book recommendation from David) Thanks for listening! Don't forget to subscribe! If you like what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and share what you liked about the show.

https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/hcce6e/IAJ_DavidRoth_111020.mp3 Stewart: Welcome to another edition of the Insurance AUM Journal podcast. My name is Stewart Foley, and I’ll be your host standing with you at the corner of insurance and asset management with David Roth. Welcome, David. David: Thanks, Stewart. Nice to see you. Stewart: David is a partner and the head of US […]

In this episode we have David Young from RCN Capital tell us all about the world of private lending: what it is, how it works, who might want to use it, where the money comes from and how it differs from traditional lending.  --- Transcript: Tom: Greetings and welcome to the remote real estate investor. In this episode, we're going to be talking about what investors should and need to know about private capital. We're connecting today with David Young of RCN capital to answer all of our questions. Alright, let's do it.   -Theme song-   Tom: Awesome David. Well, first off, thank you so much for joining us. And, why don't we start by telling us a little bit about yourself.   David: Thanks to Tom and Michael for having me, really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. My name is David Young. I'm the director of business development with RCN capital. We are a direct private lender headquartered in South Windsor, Connecticut, just outside of Hartford. And we do lend nationwide. I'm actually located personally in Boston, remote to the office as are some of our employees. And my background is pretty diverse, prior to arriving at RCN where I got to RCN in 2014, the company started in 2010 in response to the previous financial crisis. If you will, now, we're certainly going through another challenging period, but if you go back to the 2007/2008/2009 nine meltdown RCN was started in response to that, and I'll get to that a little bit more. So my background is spreads across a variety of things. I graduated from the United States military Academy. At West point, I was in the army active for about seven and a half years upon leaving the service. I took on a variety of roles, many of which were oriented around sales business development. I had executive level positions as a division vice president as well. I also ran a small business in central Massachusetts as a VP running a outbound and inbound call center and a variety of other roles spread across a lot of different types of skills and levels of experience that cover a lot of different ranges of medical, home improvement financing, and several others as well.   Tom: All right, that's great David, let's jump right into the meat of questions around private lending. So a lot of remote investors, they like to invest with debt, lot of great benefits to investing with debt. And there's this decision right of private capital versus more traditional loans that you would get in your personal home mortgage. Why don't you break down some of the differences between private capital and a more traditional mortgage?   David: Sure. So, you know, the more traditional route of a mortgage say going to a bank of America or Wells Fargo and applying for your typical 30 year mortgage is certainly an option and might be the best option for somebody depending on their particular situation. In fact, private lending essentially exists and evolves in response to those that can't be served by the traditional sector. So it's filling a gap that isn't being met in the traditional sense. So, you know, a traditional mortgage may be suitable if there are no issues to consider in terms of, you know, damaged credit, if there's not an extreme or even a high sense of urgency in terms of time and being able to complete a transaction in a very rapid amount of time, perhaps if there is no issues with, you know, citizenship, you know, private lending, a lot of the firms such as ours will work with foreign nationals, you know, with traditional mortgages or other, you know, hoops, if you will, that you have to jump through. There's a lot more that goes into the underwriting with a traditional mortgage in terms of looking at income verification, tax returns and so forth. So, but again, it may be the right route. Generally, the rates are going to be lower and a traditional mortgage, as you see right now, 30 year mortgages are somewhere in the low to mid threes and on private lending, you're not going to be able to get that low, but that's because you're being represented in a different asset class and there's different variables that come into play. So why would somebody pursue a private loan in terms of making a real estate transaction? That could be a variety of reasons. Let's just look at a typical fix and flip, if you will. Timing might be very critical. Somebody might be analyzing an asset that they want to move on and they need to line up financing on that. There may be competition for that particular asset, perhaps there is perhaps there isn't, but either way investors tend to feel a sense of urgency when they identify something that they want to acquire and then renovate and eventually flip. So private lending, generally speaking is going to give you a much faster response time. In other words, you can link up private lenders, such as RCN capital and fairly quickly get through the process and get approved and actually get funded on that loan. Why? Well, there's generally a lot less that goes into the underwriting and there's general early, a lot less in terms of a regulatory issues and traditional banks, you know, going back to the bank of America in order to administer and process your typical mortgage, there's a lot of regulation involved. There's a lot of issues that they have to consider. They're not necessarily the ones that are thrusting that upon you. Those are things that they must comply with, private lending, not as much, for example, we're not at least in RCN and many others as well. There's no check on tax returns. There's no check on income verification in terms of you don't necessarily have to have a W2 type wage job in order to be approved. And it certainly wouldn't hurt, but you don't necessarily have to have that private lending, particularly if we look at hard money fix and flip, you know, residential real estate where RCN focuses on non owner occupied residential it's asset based. So the focus is on the asset itself. And then other key factors tend to be the experience of the borrower. So how many transactions have the borrower has the borrower completed? We tend to look at the last, most recent 36 months by verifying if their name is on entity that completed a transaction. And then there's going to be a look at other things like credit score. But for example, in private lending, there are requirements or expectations on a credit score typically lower. In fact, maybe even much lower than in traditional mortgages case in point right now, just in response to the COVID crisis. In some tightening of lending standards across the board, both traditional and private lending, a lot of your traditional banks have really ratcheted up their standards and expectations. Credit score minimums have gone way up liquidity requirements, et cetera, that in and of itself is going to bump a lot of people over to the private lending space and private lending. Currently at RCN Capital, the minimum FICO is 650. If you look across all of our product categories, you're not going to find that at a Wells Fargo. So speed, credit requirements, the ability to be perhaps a little bit more creative with an approach and how to go about getting something done and being rewarded much, much more so for the asset itself. So is this a good deal that you're going for? You know, that's going to be a very high concern to a private lender. Yeah, nd the experience that you bring to the table. So do you know what you're doing? Do you have the experience, do you have the liquidity to accomplish it? That is what really matters as opposed to what, you know, a Wells Fargo or bank of America is forced to look at.   Michael: That's a really great point. Yeah, I was just going to ask you, you mentioned it in passing hard money is private capital and hard money. Are those two synonymous or do they really differ?   David: Yeah, that's a great question. Now again, I've been with RCN since 2014. Initially I wasn't directly on the real estate side, but a lot has changed as RCN originated in 2010. What private money consisted of in hard money was what a lot of people I hear now refer to as you know, kind of the old school where, you know, you know, a guy who might know a guy who could get you alone. And then when we say asset based, I mean, it's, there may, there may not even have been, and this still exists today, by the way, we compete with this and RCN where leverage, LTVs loan to values. If you will, to keep it simple, tend to be lower and you're more old school had money, maybe even no doc may not have require barely any documentation. And certainly not necessarily an appraisal or even running a credit score and for the purposes of just adding it to a file. So now when you kind of, it's almost, you know, a point of contention or even something that people joke with each other about in the industry where, you know, hard money has really evolved into a much bigger and more sophisticated ecosystem where more money comes in, where there's more requirements like just looking at the FICO, FICO requirements, FICO minimums. A lot of that is tied to where the capital is originating from to fund these loans. So there's institutional capital that helps. And not in all cases, there are funds. Well, there are private investors that buy loans directly, but institutional capital tends to come with certain expectations. The FICO is one of those where you have to check the box. If you will, the old school, if you will hide money, probably shrug their shoulders at that. Um, they're not concerned with that. They're not necessarily concerned with an appraisal. They want to see the asset and they're going to protect themselves by, in all likelihood having a lower level of leverage, lower LTV we had prior to COVID essentially the whole private lending, hard money space fix and flip space was getting, you know, leverages, you know, up to 90% or even higher with some particular vendors out there where you were getting 90% of LTV, plus a hundred percent of the rehab funding to close a loan on a flip, as an example, someone doing your so-called old school, hard money. I mean, I haven't heard of anybody doing that high of leverage in that space, but it's still out there. There's those people that, whether it's a lot of times it's speed, somebody will close alone very, very quickly with minimal underwriting work done aside from looking at the asset itself. So there's still a market for that, but there's a lot to your question, a lot of crossover or kind of a lot of blending they're one and the same in some ways. And then they separate from each other as well in different segments of the marketplace, depending on who you ask, different people have different interpretations as well.   Tom: One piece you touched on is room for, I don't know is creativity is the right word, but there's a little bit more variability in the different products in that it's just, there's way less regulation I'd say on it. Would you mind touching on that on some of the different products that, and maybe one of the more popular products specifically as a remote investor that you guys originate?   David: Yeah. One of the ones that really took off, uh, heading into COVID and we've now just activated it again is our 30 year long term rental. Okay. So this is a 30 year fixed, fully amortized loan, much like what many people are familiar with with your traditional 30 year mortgage that we talked about a couple of minutes ago. So 30 year fixed non owner occupied residential. We have that available on one to four units. This really came into play. It. This really took off like a rocket, uh, in March of roughly in the spring of 2019. I don't remember the exact date when we launched it, to be honest with you up to COVID. This thing was already approaching 40% of our originations at that point. And it gives people a lot of flexibility. We could look at portfolios of assets, so you'd have investors out there with say they had 10 single family residences and they had 10 different financing situations on each one. Maybe two of them were with a particular guy. I know a guy who knows a guy who gave them a bridge loan a couple of years ago. Maybe one of them was with someone else. And there was just all spread out everywhere. The 30 year longterm rental, you could take a whole portfolio and roll it into one transaction and get that entire portfolio into a 30 year fixed fully amortized mortgage. At that time, back in February, you know, rates were getting as low as four 449 on that, which is very low for non owner occupied resi. So you had that, you had the ability to look at those assets. So you may have one particular, if we stick with that example, one house perhaps was not cash flowing as strongly as the others. You weren't necessarily penalized for that. You weren't necessarily told that that one couldn't join the party, so to speak. That one was weighed against the portfolio as a whole. So we could look at the whole portfolio, also look at the investors level of experience, their level of liquidity and take all of that into account to make a decision. We have an executive committee at RCN Capital that looks in each and every transaction and they can exhibit, you know, a certain amount of creativity, if you will, at any point in time to see if the transaction truly makes sense, as opposed to trying to run that through a large bank, traditional bank could potentially be an entirely different experience.   Michael: That's so cool. David, it's something I talk a lot about with students in the Academy about portfolio loans. It's something that I've used on the commercial side of things, and I think it's the best thing since sliced bread. So I've always thought that they existed for single families, but that's great to hear that they do indeed. So anybody listening that have spoken to me within the Academy about getting, go for portfolio loan, go call David Young at RCN Capital.   Tom: in coming up with what the rates are. Is there a little bit of a discount for larger pools, larger portfolios, or how does that typically work?   David: Yeah, that's a great question. So we have generally, you'll see, uh, and right now, as listeners are hearing this, uh, allow me to emphasize if I can, that things are changing very quickly. So in terms of pricing as a whole rates points and whatnot, we saw a very high level of liquidity is kind of sloshing around the system, heading into a COVID and then things really tightening up seizing up even, and then starting to now loosen up. We've seen changes on almost a daily basis over the last couple of weeks here at RCN capital. So the way those rates are determined, you know, in terms of the price at anything is which is, you know, in large part driven by supply and demand as things seized up and there was less or no liquidity for this paper and the secondary market, it became very difficult to price it, you know, because we didn't know what it was trading at when there was a lot more trading volume and activity on this paper and the secondary. Then you could determine pricing a lot more clearly. Furthermore, you had a lot more of the competitors actually active and lending in the last couple of months, people have pulled back. So we don't necessarily know what this company over here is doing because they've completely ceased lending at this current time. So a lot of that is supply and demand driven, how much volume and activity is there for this paper behind the scenes. And then that results in, you know, subsequent pricing that the retail sees factors that we look at from an underwriting standpoint, and to determine kind of how to bracket that again, back to experience and also the size of the loan. So generally speaking again, pre and post and kind of while we're still with COVID here for the time being, it's a little different, but generally speaking, more experience and a higher loan value dollar absolute dollar value would generally lead to better pricing to the retail client. And through our wholesale channels. My role primarily is with our correspondents that work on our private lending platform, other hard money lenders, private lenders out there in the community that are looking to leverage our infrastructure to grow. We also work in that capacity as well, but the pricing, the borrower's experience and the size of the loan, we have systems in place. Whereas the loan exceeds a certain amount in dollar terms, you may get some relief in terms of the yield. There may be some relief in terms of the origination, but those would be the two main things experienced in the loan size.   Tom: Got it. And for the kind of ongoing ownership, you know, so there's a secondary market where you guys are selling the mortgages that you guys originate from the experience of the person who was getting their loan originated, or do you guys ongoing service them after you, it, of the loan,   David: Yeah, depending on the product, but actually RCN Capital. What we have here is, is pretty unique in the industry. And I leveraged this a lot with our wholesale partners when they're looking to find somebody to work with in terms of a capital partners that we have essentially everything in house now, right now, a lot of folks are remote. In fact, almost everybody is given the scenario, but if you'd look past that for the current situation, when we talk about servicing the loans, yes, we have our own servicing team at RCN capital. A lot of lenders in this space are set up with a situation where they're outsourcing that, which is fine. That's a decision. A lot of people make. We actually did that ourselves for a certain amount of time and decided to internalize that and make that organic to RCN, to place that amount of value on the customer experience. So yes, we're doing that, not all do that, that also holds true for another good example is our legal team. A lot of these transactions involve, you know, somebody originating and kind of setting the table if you will. And then the actual closing of the loan document prep and so forth, working with attorneys, which that can be intimidating and frustrating as a whole to a lot of people that is sent out to some other entity to conduct that business where we have that internally. So we have that an entire legal staff. That's all they do all day long is work on legal issues, closing stock preps, et cetera. We have our accounting team, our marketing team and everything actually in house in RCN. And that really helps as well. Not only does that help the retail client by providing them, they get a loan from us that they're to get an exceptional level of service, everything under our control. If there's a problem, we identify it, we fix it. But also with our, you know, our B to B or our wholesale partners, if you will, other lenders brokers, when they choose to work with us, they have that entire team, all organic to RCN capital to support them and help them grow their business by using our infrastructure and platform.   Michael: Great. David kind of a specific question for you around some of our CMS product, but anytime someone's using hard money, they want to get out of it as soon as possible because it's typically more expensive than traditional lending. So do you guys have any type of prepayment penalties that would prevent someone from getting out or is that really too specific of a question it's kind of on an ad hoc basis based on the product?   David: No, that's a great question. It depends on the product. I'll walk you through each of them here briefly. So on our long-term rental. Yes, we do encourage investors to be, you know, fully aware and committed to the asset for that exact purpose. You know, long-term rental and holding of that asset. There is a five, four, three, two, one step down. In other words, you can choose, you know, at what level you are, what time period and what penalty would be associated with that if you were to try and refinance out of that loan. So, you know, obviously that's a big decision to make that you have to be aware of that on our midterm product, which actually now is presenting all kinds of interesting opportunities for investors. It's a two years of interest only we call it a two plus one and already has built in an option to extend for a year. We have this available on one to four units, multifamily five-plus and mixed use, as long as it's at least 51% residential by square footage. On that product, there's a six month prepay penalty. So if you think it through, if you were to enter into that product to interest only for two years, perhaps you have an asset that you do want to rent, but you're not entirely sure you could change your mind. You may try to sell it. You make, you know, you may rent it for a year. And then at that point, you may want the flexibility to see if you want to do something different with it. The two plus one with only a six month prepay gives you that exact flexibility because after six months you could theoretically enter into a new transaction to get out of that one without a penalty applying. So there's that on the short term, I won't get into specifics on that. It can be on a case by case basis, but there's nothing to dissuade you from completing your project as quickly as possible. You know, as a lender in particularly with the yield component, you know, there's origination, which are the economics kind of front loaded to the front of the transaction. And then there's the yield component in terms of collecting the actual payments as each month goes by. So there can be challenges that a lender or a transaction ends up being very short. There wasn't much time to collect yield, but again, we don't want transactions that drag out for long periods of time and have to ultimately potentially approach modification as well. So on a 12 month, you know, a flip, if you will, our transactions show that, you know, investors are not penalized for, you know, being expeditious and efficient with their work. And we also have incentives to, you know, not, uh, enable them or make them feel like they should consider trying to extend it or go past a certain point. We try and we want to position them so that the project is done efficiently. According to the data that we have that shows, you know, what success looks like.   Michael: Awesome. Kind of taking a step back and looking more high level at private lenders. I mean, you touched on it briefly, but who where's this money coming from to fund some of these loans?   David: That's a great question. When you let's compare it to conventional, you know, just here in COVID, this, this could go in a lot of different directions, but in COVID what we saw was the federal reserve came in and really just threw the kitchen sink at everything essentially. I mean, they've, they've done things that are truly unprecedented that that's cannot be overstated, but one of the things they did is something they've done before. They certainly did it as part of so-called QE, quantitative easing since the 2009 crisis, which was to come in and provide a backstop to mortgage backed securities MBS. Now, even just saying that they're going to do that can have a huge effect regardless of how many they ultimately buy, but those are the traditional mortgages that are originated from, you know, you know, Fannie Freddie type stuff from a bank of America type of transaction that are sliced and diced into exotic securities, and then sold the fed comes in and says, look, we'll back up those, you know, we're gonna, we got your back on that, that helped that particular sector kind of spring back from the depths of the COVID crisis, if you will. And private lending, you know, we don't have such a backstop from the government. So this money is coming from, you know, private capital sources. However, there's been a big evolution, you know, for a period of time, a lot of this was from a private, you know, private investors, private investors would form funds. So you might form a fund with a group of investors that has, you know, I don't know, $20 million together. And then that funds purposes to invest in these various private lending transactions in whatever area that they choose to focus on. So they're out there lending and recycling that cash and doing their thing. And that's with, you know, that amount of money that they've been able to put together. There's also one off transactions that occur when an originator may take a loan and say, look, here's a loan. We have, do you want to fund this? So they take this loan, it's a 500 K transaction. They present it to that particular investor and they get a yes or no answer. And it's funded that way. RCN can help in those scenarios where you run out of capital and then you can come and jump on our platform. If you happen to be in one of those positions, any of the listeners out there. And then as the industry grew, you know, you have yields here that are pretty juicy compared to traditional. You look right now. Uh, if I pulled it up, I know from looking recently, uh, the 10 year note is what around 0.7%. So you're lining the government money for 10 years, for .7% annualized. A lot of institutions are, you know, they have to do that, but if you can lend as an institution into the private lending sector for loans that are collateralized by real estate and get five, I don't know, I'm just throwing these numbers out there. A lot of pricing is bounced around, I don't know, five, 6% versus less than one on government notes, government bonds. Then that's certainly a decision that you might want to take a look at. So a lot of that, I think yield differential investor demands for yield, the thirst for yield. You've had interest rates just being destroyed down to nothing. You have negative interest rates in some parts of the world. A lot of folks speculate, you know, rates could even be driven negative here in the United States. So pension funds, you know, other people that manage money institutions, there's no yield. It's very difficult to get yield secured and then incomes private lending, where you have these loans that are backed by hard assets. And as the ecosystem grows, becomes more mature. You have more underwriting standards, you have more eyes looking at it. You have more ability theoretically to, uh, make better loans, uh, minimize the faults and kind of feed the whole beast, if you will. Institutions look and they say, Hey, that's pretty juicy yield. I wouldn't mind getting some of that. And then you have that type of money coming in institutional level. So say, you know, you have funds, people put funds together, you have private investors to do one off transactions and then institutional capital.   Michael: Super great description.   Tom: That's a great overview. I'd love to learn a little bit more about the different types of customers and the different flavors of customers that use private capital. So there's individual investors, perhaps there's syndications, I'd love just to learn a little bit more of the different kinds of avatars or profiles of people that use private capital.   David: Right, yeah. So back to our discussion on experience. So when RCN creates products and underwriting standards, generally speaking, that experience factor is huge. So we do lend to people that have no experience. In many cases, those are, you know, kind of a mom and pop, maybe, you know, an individual that's looking to get involved with their first flip transaction. And that person might be someone that could come from a variety of backgrounds. It may be somebody that was working with someone else on these transactions actually executing the labor, the work, you know, watching a project, go from A to Z with their own eyes, and then deciding that they want to dive in on their own. Maybe it's a husband and wife, couple that are, you know, have a little side hustle going on. So you've got that. You certainly have the mom and pops. Then you have the call it a small business. If you will, maybe that tends to have multiple projects going on at one time, they may have their own crew in terms of contractors and a more sophisticated setup in terms of having a, you know, a playbook on exactly how to execute a transaction and already having the resources lined up or even on their own staff, you have that. And then you have even bigger organizations that are doing this in big numbers. You know, maybe they may have 20, 30, 40 transactions going on at any given time. They may, you know, they talk in terms of flips. In many cases, they may flip a couple of hundred houses in a given year. You have that as well. We're also seeing, you know, more activity and more interest in the multifamily space. So multifamily five-plus units, you know, these are small balance apartments. Generally. I know in Boston and other areas on the East, you see these spread throughout the communities, a building that may have eight, 10, 12, 16 units. You know, there's estimates, there's about 10 million of these out there in the country. And those are starting to get more activity as well. And for those, you know, that's probably a project that's going to require more than just a couple of guys working together on a side gig and some more sophistication. So you see a variety of different flavors out there. You see people that have made this, their, their living. This is how they make a living. This is their job. This is their career. This is everything. So we've seen different variations.   Tom: Awesome David, I think people hear private capital or private money tossed around a lot, like we were saying before, and you've given us such a great overview and background of kind of the institutional side of things, if you will, but from a private lending perspective, if I'm looking for money and I happen to know someone that has some extra, could I just go ask them to lend it to me and I think work out some kind of agreement with them, or do I have to go through maybe the more traditional channels of private money?   David: Yeah. I mean, we have actually specific to my role. We have investors lenders, if you will, that were doing exactly that. Or maybe they may even still do that, where they are providing kind of one off direct transactions between themselves and an individual investor out there looking to flip a house or what have you. So to your question, can you do that? I mean, there's nothing that I could say that's could literally stop somebody from doing that. There may be other things to take into consideration in terms of making sure everything is within compliance. I mean, the compliance is certainly looser on the private lending side than it is on traditional, but you want to make sure that you're working with, you know, it may be worth considering to take a look at working with an established organization or entity. That's been doing this to ensure that all documentation is done correctly, to ensure that all procedures are done. They'd probably be, it's in their vested interest to help you, help you to look at the project and make sure it makes sense. And there's ROI available there for you to capture, obviously to be able to pay back, pay them back and make the monthly payments. So I, yes, you can still, you know, there's nothing stopping someone from, I suppose, from approaching an individual saying, Hey, do you think you could give me X amount of flip this house? And that's kind of how it all got going, you know, looking at, you know, maintain a certain leverage level minimum or no doc, you know, obviously securing with a lien, putting that money out, collecting interest, only getting it paid off and then getting the balance back, you know, your principal balance back. So there's nothing per se stopping you. I think there's other things to consider in terms of, you know, working with an established entity that, you know, has a strong reputation has done this before, and they may have a lot more options. You know, you're kind of guy on the corner of the street, if you will, may have certain options that might fit certain people, but you go to a lender such as RCN Capital, and there may be more choices there for you that might be a better fit to your situation after you take a complete and thorough look.   Michael: Okay, great.   Tom: That's awesome. I think we're, we're getting close to covering all the questions we have. I guess another question, practical question is geographic footprint. So do you guys have any limitations on where you originate loans?   David: Yeah, that's an excellent question. Anyone that's curious, it's a better description than here in me, you know, yap about it would be to go to rcncapital.com and see if I can get some traffic to our website. Here are capital.com and scroll down to the bottom. You'll see the map and that will show, but yeah, we can originate and close loans in the entire country everywhere except for a few States, Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Vermont. So the bulk of where the business is and where the volume is not nothing against those other locations where we're not currently able to do that. We have that covered. So any investor that is looking to do whether it's activity locally, or perhaps even dabble in other areas, you know, another benefit of an established entity such as RCN capital is the fact that we have that footprint nationally already. So we're already established in those areas. If you have something in Tennessee, great, but you may also have something in Oklahoma, we can do both of them. So we've got a pretty well covered.   Tom: My last question has to do with a product that I'm not that familiar with, but very interested. I'm just not sure I'm interested. If you guys carry it like a revolving credit where you can add properties in and out of a facility, do you guys offer any type of products like that? And this is a self serving question. Just something that I've heard about and just interested in learning more about,   David: Yeah. I mean, what I can say on that and thank you for that. It is a great question for investors with a certain level of experience, you know, a strong level of experience. If they get connected to RCN Capital and a loan officer, they can certainly take a look at pursuing what we would call a line of line of credit in the precise definition of that is probably not the best description, but we, it comes up a lot in the, in that, in those terms. And people use that to describe it. It's not exactly what it is, but we could potentially consider and look at that for someone with a certain amount of experience in the sector and has that documented and demonstrated. And what that could look at like is just use a million bucks to keep it simple. Perhaps someone being granted exposure of a million dollars every 12 month period, every annual designated period at certain terms. And in that case, they're, you know, why would it benefit them? Why would they care about that? It could be improvements in terms of speed and efficiency. If the borrower's already underwritten, ie. the entity, you know, on these short term loans in particular can only lend to a legal entity. So if that entity and the owners of it are already underwritten, then that's all locked and loaded. And now you're presenting each asset as you identify it and decide to move on it into the mix from an underwriting standpoint. So you still have to follow procedure, you know, appraisals and whatnot, but you've got some of the things out of the way to expedite the process and make it more efficient and make it a cleaner experience for your high volume, high experience clients. And that also would take into account. You may be able to add more fuel to the more logs on the fire in terms of supporting your own case, by adding in, like, if you have other things that contribute to your liquid net worth, you could provide that to perhaps support your case. If you're trying to obtain a certain amount of exposure that you're granted annually, you could look at doing things like that on.   Michael: Tom you gotta get on that.   Tom: I know. Yeah, definitely.   David: It sounds like, Tom was thinking about that one,   Tom: For sure. Yeah. Okay Michael, do you have any other questions?   Michael: I think that's it for me that this has been awesome.   Tom: David, this is great. Yeah. So we're going to end this David with a couple of what we call quick fire questions, and these are just general investing philosophy. It's great having smart guests, such as yourself, come on the show and just love your thoughts on this either or type of question. So are you ready to do it?   David: I'm ready unless you got a bunch of trick ones in there. Tom: All straight forward ones. All right. So consolidation or diversification. David: You want me to give a quick answer? Speaker 4: All quick answers, all quick answers. Yes. You can say both. I'll always... Speaker 1: I'll say both, I always tend to, when I, if I may, when I identify a trend, I tend to favor something. If it depended on my belief in it, I tend to consolidate, I'll give you an example, crypto. I can consolidate Bitcoin. I don't need to mess around with the others, but in other scenarios, I might favor diversification. Tom I think a good way to say that is either shallow and wide or deep and narrow. David: Yeah.   Tom: Deep and narrow, I like it. High property taxes or high income taxes?   David: Neither   Michael: That's the best answer we've had yet. Tom: High rent growth or low vacancy?   David: Probably say low vacancy. On that type of thing, I like to play it more safe.   Tom: Yup. Yup. Cashflow or appreciation?   David: I'm going to say cashflow. Cause I look at real estate as the primary benefit to me is a hedge against the inevitable destruction of your purchasing power over time. So I feel like that will happen when a hired asset, if it's chosen properly. So I'll go for the cashflow. If you pinned the two against each other.   Tom: Debt or equity?   David:   From the standpoint of real estate, debt.   Tom: Love it. Single family or multifamily? David: Tough to go against SFR right now.   Tom: I like it. Alright. Last couple of questions. Turn key or massive project?   David: How cheap did you get it? Being realistic, turnkey. You know, assessing my own situation.   Tom: Yeah. Midnight oil or early bird worm?   David: Early bird worm   Tom: Text message or email?   David: Neither. No, I'm kidding. I'm either, probably either.   Tom: Alright. And the last one kind of an off the wall, olive oil or butter?   David: Well, I do like that butter that is allegedly made with olive oil. Tried that on a steak and that worked out pretty well, but..   Tom: I know what you're talking about.   David: Yeah. It's olive oil or butter with olive oil. I'm not sure what brand it was, but I tend to use olive oil fairly consistently. So I have to be true to myself and to you and this excellent show we're on.   Tom: Awesome. Well, well, that's it. You made it through the quickfire questions. Want to give you a chance to yeah. Where can people find you get a hold of you and get ahold of RCN?   David: Folks can find the company at rcncapital.com, blue and white colors there. If you're Googling around looking for it, usually you'll find it. You can link up to myself. You could certainly shoot me an email if you'd like a first initial, last name dyoung@rcncapital.com. You can hunt me down on LinkedIn as well. Love to make connections with folks and expand the network and learn from people. So those are probably the best ways to get ahold of me and the company.   Tom: Awesome. David. Well, thank you so much for coming on.   Michael: David. Thanks so much. This was great.   David: Thanks guys. Really appreciate you having me and I'd love to do it again. Appreciate it. Thanks.   Speaker 1: Thanks again to David Young for answering our questions. Today's episode was brought to you by Roofstock Academy and we're running a special promotion right now. For a limited time you can receive a $100 discount with the promo code JULY4. With Roofstock Academy we have all these benefits: coaching, on demand lectures, the tools, the SFR paybook, on and on, but the Roofstock Marketplace credits just got that much sweeter. So initially it was a $750 credit when you buy, now it is a $2500 credit. So you buy Roofstock Academy and for your next 5 transactions you will $500 back at the close of your transaction. Happy Investing!       

Kate and Liz recap season 4 episode 16 and 17 (the tell all episodes) of Before the 90 Days. Follow them on Instagram @90dayourway and reach out at 90dayourway@gmail.com!

Lesson 24.6 认识全世界的朋友David：Hi, Could you tell me how to get to the Summer Palace?Sherry：Sorry, I'm not from here.David：Thanks anyway.Sherry：Not at all. I'm heading to the Summer Palace too. Do you want to go together?David：Sure, I like making friends. My name is David. Nice to meet you.Sherry：I'm Jerry. Nice to meet you, too.David：All right, Sherry. Let's go.David：你好，请问颐和园怎么走？Sherry：不好意思，我也是刚到这儿的。David：谢谢。Sherry：不客气，我也要去颐和园。一起走吧？David：好，我喜欢交朋友。我叫大卫，很高兴认识你。Sherry：我叫杰瑞，我也很高兴认识你。David：嘿，Sherry，走吧。跟Lily一起说英语去旅行的训练营即将开营啰！有144节线上课程，针对24个不同的旅游场景循环加深强度，课后你还可以缴交自己的录音还有老师亲自帮助你纠正不好的发音，让你立即开口说英语，在家学习也好像在世界各地游走！现在报名到公众微信帐号guilvte或是Line ID：flywithlily，回覆训练营，跟我们一起学英语环游世界去！

Lesson 24.6 认识全世界的朋友David：Hi, Could you tell me how to get to the Summer Palace?Sherry：Sorry, I'm not from here.David：Thanks anyway.Sherry：Not at all. I'm heading to the Summer Palace too. Do you want to go together?David：Sure, I like making friends. My name is David. Nice to meet you.Sherry：I'm Jerry. Nice to meet you, too.David：All right, Sherry. Let's go.David：你好，请问颐和园怎么走？Sherry：不好意思，我也是刚到这儿的。David：谢谢。Sherry：不客气，我也要去颐和园。一起走吧？David：好，我喜欢交朋友。我叫大卫，很高兴认识你。Sherry：我叫杰瑞，我也很高兴认识你。David：嘿，Sherry，走吧。跟Lily一起说英语去旅行的训练营即将开营啰！有144节线上课程，针对24个不同的旅游场景循环加深强度，课后你还可以缴交自己的录音还有老师亲自帮助你纠正不好的发音，让你立即开口说英语，在家学习也好像在世界各地游走！现在报名到公众微信帐号guilvte或是Line ID：flywithlily，回覆训练营，跟我们一起学英语环游世界去！

Lesson 24.6 认识全世界的朋友David：Hi, Could you tell me how to get to the Summer Palace?Sherry：Sorry, I'm not from here.David：Thanks anyway.Sherry：Not at all. I'm heading to the Summer Palace too. Do you want to go together?David：Sure, I like making friends. My name is David. Nice to meet you.Sherry：I'm Jerry. Nice to meet you, too.David：All right, Sherry. Let's go.David：你好，请问颐和园怎么走？Sherry：不好意思，我也是刚到这儿的。David：谢谢。Sherry：不客气，我也要去颐和园。一起走吧？David：好，我喜欢交朋友。我叫大卫，很高兴认识你。Sherry：我叫杰瑞，我也很高兴认识你。David：嘿，Sherry，走吧。跟Lily一起说英语去旅行的训练营即将开营啰！有144节线上课程，针对24个不同的旅游场景循环加深强度，课后你还可以缴交自己的录音还有老师亲自帮助你纠正不好的发音，让你立即开口说英语，在家学习也好像在世界各地游走！现在报名到公众微信帐号guilvte或是Line ID：flywithlily，回覆训练营，跟我们一起学英语环游世界去！

One of the privileges we have as the owners of QLB is that we have a panel of experienced entrepreneurs that act as advisers and also happen to be our brokers. On today's episode, we are hosting our first Podcast Panel, these in-house experts are here to answer key questions regarding buying and selling. Jason, Bryan, Amanda, and David have a combined 40 years of experience in brokering e-commerce businesses and are here to share some great insights into their first-hand transaction experience. The discussion today focuses on the sell side and how human behavior can influence a transaction, balancing being a good seller without being a pushover, and finally on valuation and managing expectations from the seller side. Episode Highlights: Can a seller increase their sales amount just by being a good seller? How to handle challenging sellers and tips for approaching the negotiations with them. Thoughts on where seller behavior fits into the entire valuation process. Some of the principals of a good seller and behaviors they should avoid. Where the line is between two being too private and being proactive as a seller. Ways certain SaaS elements can be revealed in due diligence without giving away too much before the handover. Specific contingencies that sellers can hold onto until the signing. The importance of the buyer/seller face to face meeting. Things sellers tend to put too much emphasis on during a transaction. Staying on for extra consult periods as a way to earn buyer trust and confidence. How to temper unreasonable valuations or unreasonable expectations for what market can bear on the part of the seller.   Transcription: Joe: So Mark one of the privileges that you and I have as owners of Quiet Light Brokerage is that we have an unofficial board of directors and highly successful entrepreneurs that are our advisors slash brokers. And we joke often that most of them are more experienced and smarter and more successful than we are. And I think with the panel that you put together in this upcoming episode it's absolutely true. We've got Jason, Brad, Amanda, and David all sharing their experience as advisors, brokers about how to be a good seller and beyond that with the entire transaction. How did the overall panel go? Did everybody behave and give nuggets of wisdom throughout the whole podcast? Mark: Well, naturally I started this all first well it was a pretty interesting idea. I was talking to Amanda about going to a conference down in Austin where she lives and she was invited onto a panel and she said that she'd be really interested in doing stuff like that. So I thought well why don't we do a panel here at Quiet Light and bring forward some of the advisors that have been working on deals. I mean I think the combined number of years on that panel alone was something like 40 some odd years of experience combined. Joe: As buyers or entrepreneurs? Mark: I didn't even get into the; I have no idea how to calculate that. That'd be a much bigger number. My math abilities stop after about 40, 45. Joe: So everything is 40 years of experience for you. Mark: Well I become 42 so yeah everything is; that's going to be the limit. Every year I add one number to my math abilities. The panel was pretty fun. I didn't know how it was going to go. I didn't know if it was going to be too many people on the panel. I was hoping for some discussion between them and we did get into that. We got some great discussion between people who have been doing this for a really, really long time. I wanted to keep the topic pretty simple and just kind of dig into their actual experience in doing deals. I wanted to find out what are they seeing on the sell-side specifically and working with people; humans that can really influence a transaction by their behavior. How much are they seeing that actually come into influencing the price? Jason right out the gate is like look we can sometimes influence the price but the bigger worry here is having a primary effect. If you're a crappy seller you might make this an unsellable business. And that kind of launched off this conversation of what is it; how can you be a good seller? How do you balance this idea of being a good seller who is open and proactive? David talked about being proactive as a seller. How do you balance this proactivity and openness versus being a pushover? What elements should sellers also not necessarily open up on their business right away? And where should they stick their foot down and say we shouldn't be sharing this? A pretty interesting conversation on that front to see what other people's experience was in these different questions that came up. I didn't lay it out right away. Joe just to let you know I asked them to pick out a URI moving forward for the company and I won't tell you what the result was of that. Joe: So I have to listen to this to get the answer. What was the question again specifically and what wiseass comment did Jason make because I'm sure that's exactly where it came from? Mark: You're going to have to listen. Joe: Alright. What was the question though? Mark: The question was choose Joe or Mark. Joe: To do what? And you're like hosting the podcast so you could totally edit it out and tell them no, no, no, no, choose me so it's…for the audience, I want to know Mark has full editing control of the podcast so whatever negative things said about him were completely edited out. Mark: Well, that's actually not true. I don't touch it, in fact, there's a point in there and I'm hoping the editors… Joe: See he's fabricating he's making this up. It's totally true. Chris and Podcast Motor; they do what he tells them to do. Mark: They're the only people in my life that do what I tell them to do. Joe: You man have seven children, that's the way it is. Mark: Yeah, I guarantee nobody in my household does what I tell them to do. Joe: There is teenagers. Mark: There is a point in there; I hope the editors catch this where Amanda cuts out and I awkwardly interject so we'll see if the editors catch that part. If they don't just bear with it because she's actually giving some really good advice during that point in the podcast. Joe: So you and I always joke about or I always joke about the fifth pillar. You always correct me and tell me it doesn't exist. And for those that don't know the pillars, it's growth, risk, gross transferability, and documentation and I always say there's a fifth. It's an invisible fifth and it's the person behind the business. Who you are and how you behave and what you post on Facebook and what's your LinkedIn profile says and it's silly pictures and things of that nature. It has an impact on the overall value of your business. People are going to stroke a check for enough money that is going to make a difference in their life savings and the risk they're going to invest in their future. They need to like you number one, they need to trust you number one; both a number one. That is so so valuable so I love this topic. I absolutely have to listen to see how quickly they all said your name instead of mine. And then I'm going to have to have another panel on with the other four advisors and see what they say. Mark: Sounds great. Mark: Okay, welcome everybody. We're having our very first podcast panel or panel podcast. I don't know what we want to call this but basically, we have a bunch of people on this podcast here. We have Amanda, Jason, David, and Bryan all joined me for a conversation. We've never done this before so we're going to see how this actually works out. The format is going to be pretty simple, I'm just going to ask questions and pick out different people and see what sort of conversation comes from those questions. So, guys, I'm just going to start off with a very simple question. You've got to pick one personally Joe or me; me or Joe? No, don't answer that. I'm just joking. Don't answer that because I already know what the answer would be. You guys would want Joe. Alright so let's; I want to focus this panel on more seller questions because we obviously work with buyers. I know a lot of buyers listen to the podcast but we work with a lot of sellers as well. And so I want to focus a lot on that. What is it like to sell a business? What are some of your experiences? You guys have a ton of experience working with sellers, preparing their businesses for sale, helping them go through that really difficult emotional complex process of exiting their companies so I wanted to try and tap into your collective wisdom here, get some good information and insights into sellers and that process of actually selling a business. And I want to start out by looking at how much influence a seller can have on the value of their business just by how they act with their business. Let's start with you Jason because you are the longest-tenured member of QLB here so I'm going to start with you. I'm going to ask you just a pretty basic question here and that is do you think that you can increase the amount of money; can the seller increase the amount of money they get out of the exit of their business by being a quote-unquote good seller? Jason: Absolutely 100% but it may not be in the way that you're thinking about it. I don't know that your value goes from a million dollars to a million one because you're a good seller. I think it's more binary. I think it's either a million dollars or zero. Meaning if you're not a good seller I think it's likely to spook a buyer to the point where they simply don't want to complete a deal. So I think it's incumbent to be a good seller, to be ethical, to be honest, and very very important to be transparent. So like any little thing about the business that in the back of your mind you think gee I really don't want to talk about that, that's exactly the thing that the seller should talk about with the buyer. Get it out there. Mark: Yeah. Amanda, I know over the years you've also been with QLB for a really long time, we've worked with all sorts of different people. Some people are really easy and a joy to work with and while not dumping on any previous clients, some people are a little bit more challenging. And I want to take a step back and just say something real quick. When we talk about challenging clients, difficult people to work with, the one thing that's always important for us to keep in mind is I get why some people are somewhat challenging. They've built a business, they have a valuable asset, they want to make sure the deal goes through well. So they have a right to a certain extent to be a little bit more challenging. But what has been your experience, Amanda, when you've dealt with a client that might be a little bit more difficult to work with and maybe a little more abrasive in the negotiations? Have you seen that impact the deal that they're able to get? Amanda: Absolutely. I think it's important to actually take those clients and take them aside and say it's really important to look at the feedback that we're getting from buyers and to be reasonable with their expectations. Otherwise, we're not going to deliver for with the deal successfully because the buyer's feedback is super valuable. If you get a lot of feedback that's consistent and a seller is not willing to hear it, it makes it very difficult to take those items there that could be actionable, make them happen, and then get a deal done. I think that also working with abrasive sellers can rub buyers the wrong way because obviously after a deal is done they have to work with the buyers. The buyers work with the seller for extended period time for training and support and it certainly is concerning if a seller is not easy to work with and has a difficult time getting along with the buyer for that matter. So yes it definitely can impact the deal. Mark: Yeah. And I think Jason your point about it being somewhat binary I think is interesting. At the end of the day obviously, we're valuing the business not necessarily the business owner and so Bryan what are your thoughts on what Jason is saying as far as it being somewhat binary? Do you agree with that or do you think that the seller is just one other element of the entire business mix? Obviously, we're valuing the business on its own to a certain extent where does the buyer fit in; I'm sorry, where does the seller fit into that entire valuation process? Bryan: Yes. So I think Jason makes a really, really good point and I'd like to touch on his point about honesty first [inaudible 00:11:30.1]. I think that's probably the most important quality that a good seller can have. But in terms of sort of being a good seller, being more binary than affecting the valuation I think it can be like this and if the seller is really difficult to deal with then disconcerting there is something that's not happening. But I think that being a really good seller can actually also increase the ultimate value that the seller gets out of the transaction simply because being likable and getting along well with buyers is in my opinion likely to induce better offers, induce better conversations that lead to better offers, and thereby can lead to a better and more profitable deals for the seller itself. Mark: Yeah, I think the only issue that I would just if I'm going to comment on this here would be that the buyer is going to look at a business and look at the element of risk. There's always a perceived unknown of what am I actually getting into here. And if you have a seller who is shifty, if you have a seller who is maybe withholding information or is being just kind of; I think Jason to what you're saying, if they're being really abrasive or just mean or whatever yeah that becomes a very binary sort of situation where if I'm a buyer I don't want to get into that because who knows what's going to happen after the sale. Jason: I find in the real world though it's not necessarily that that a seller is abrasive it's more the word you used is good shifty. A buyer just gets the sense there's something that the seller is not telling me. Are they planning to start a competing business the day after they sell? Do they know that this industry is about to hit a brick wall? Are there issues with the supplier? It's that shifty element more than the abrasive element is what I find in the real world. Mark: I would agree with that. I mean the thing that I think people on the sell-side need to understand is that from a buyer's standpoint risk plays into a valuation perceived or real. It doesn't matter if the risk is real or if it's perceived it's still there. And so if you are giving off a sense of risk to a buyer that's going to play in the valuation that you get. So I guess we can put this out there as a plea to be a good seller; to behave correctly. But what does that actually mean to be a good seller? David I'm going to throw it over to you because I haven't got you in on this yet. And sorry, I didn't get to turn in you in the first question here but I want to ask you what are some ways that you've seen from sellers that make them good to work with and things that maybe sellers can do to maybe reduce that element of risk; that perceived risk that they might give out otherwise? David: Yeah, it's a great question. For me, it comes down to three core principles and the guys have touched upon perhaps the most important one right away which is honesty. And then after that, I think it's diligence and knowledge of your own business to the extent that they understand their own numbers in great depth. They understand the reasons, the trends, the way things happen, the problems that they've had; like fully understanding then business. When you have that and have someone with that level of knowledge come on the call with the buyers it's incredibly reassuring that they have this gross knowledge about their own business. And then to a company both that depth of honesty with expertise in their own business. And you know that's not taken for granted because sometimes many entrepreneurs are running multiple businesses and they haven't had the time to focus a lot on one specific thing. So when you have that knowledge it's really helpful. And then the third piece, of course, is productivity. I think that it's easy to come into a selling process perhaps when you are quite emotionally spent even being in the business for a while and to underestimate that a lot of clients will ask some questions and they will want to go back into past historic information and having like a positive mindset about putting that information and realizing that it's also the benefit of the ultimate end goal of the transaction which is to get the best deal terms. Going at that formula very proactive and positive perspective really just creates that like perfect cluster I think of the best seller like proactivity, positivity, honesty, and diligence. Mark: Yeah, that can be a really difficult line to draw because from a seller's standpoint you hear some of these questions and you think I don't want to share this. But at the same time, you don't want to appear shifty. I mean where do you guys think that line is for a seller when they're going through; especially like initially, right? We put up the listing out to the market. I think Brad who is not on this call recently put a listing on the market and had like 300 inquiries on it. We had to shut things down and that client is going through multiple calls one after another after another. And some of these buyers get on and they start asking some pretty pointed questions pretty quickly. What do you think the line is? Amanda I'm going to throw it to you, what do you think that line is where between being a shifty yet still open and honest and proactive as David says? Because I agree with you 100% David that being proactive makes a big difference. So where would you put that line, Amanda? Amanda: I think it has to do with creating expectations for when you're going to open up certain information and letting them know upfront what you're comfortable with. So there are certain things obviously that you want to keep pretty close to you like your suppliers or certain proprietary information that you just don't want to open up to everybody. And so possibly you say okay I'm going to give you all this information; my financials, this is how I do this, this, and this but creating a timeline of when they'll have access to that information based on certain steps being in place and finalizing the deal. And keeping some of that information towards the end I believe has worked really well for most sellers and buyers because if you have that trust level that you built between the two along the way and then you're just basically following the course of actions that have been set out ahead of time then I think that creates a nice flow. And obviously, that's what we want. We want sellers and buyers to both be comfortable through the entire process so that we can get to that finish line. And so I think it is obviously definitely a fine line. But also when a seller and a buyer are working together and they're meeting in person I think that makes a huge impact in what information is shared because you can just feel whether a person is trustworthy or not and what they're going to do with that information. It often comes across just in energy and so oftentimes the seller will let their guard down just when they get to know the buyer a little bit more. But upfront I think obviously you don't want to give 300 people everything you have for obvious reasons. Mark: Yeah and I think for… Amanda: It's about creating expectations. Mark: I would agree 100%. For the buyers that are listening to this, I think the insights that you can take away from this as well is understanding that. Amanda your suggestion is something that we use quite a bit here at Quiet Light during the due diligence process of ordering your requests and understanding some items are going to be more sensitive than others is a really good tip there. It does a great job of helping that seller get put at ease and from the sell-side is a great way for you to protect your more sensitive data by promising this saying I'm more than happy to share this with you but let's first go through these other items first just in case that torpedoes the deal. Bryan, I'm interested to know what your thoughts are where you think the most sensitive sort of data is that sellers might want to consider maybe safeguarding a little bit more than others. Obviously, different sellers are at different levels of comfort. Some don't want to share a single thing about their business and other people are like I don't care. You can't replicate what I did because I got the magic sauce. What sort of information do you think sellers is kind of the main stuff you would probably want to hang onto until the end? Bryan: Yeah, that's a great question. I think it depends a lot on like I said an individual seller. It also depends a lot on the type of the business and the business model, to begin with. So I think with that with an e-commerce business the most closely guarded secrets so to speak might be like Amanda mentioned the vendors with any any business that depends entirely or for the most part on a single or a couple of traffic sources the seller might hold the details of those traffic sources confidential such as for instance in indication of PPC traffic they might not feel comfortable disclosing their full keyword lists and that copies and so forth in the early stages. So it really depends on the business model. It also depends on the business itself and how defensible the business is. Like you said there are some business sellers who are happy to open up absolutely everything because they are fully sourcing that nobody can replicate the business no matter what they sold on but businesses are different and so does comfort level is different. Mark: David and Jason I'd be interested to know from you are there any elements that you have ever run across that have been off-limits in a due diligence process and if so how have you handled getting around that? For example vendor names, customer names, talking to employees; if you're able to share any details on that please do. And I didn't prep before this so if you're not we'll just move on to the next question. Jason: No, that's fine. Well, one thing if I may I just want to add onto what Bryan said. He mentioned about whether a business is replicable. One thing sellers hopefully are aware of, any buyer that's going to see the information has signed I think it's about a five-page non-disclosure agreement which specifically says they're not allowed to scan for ideas to steal. So if a buyer did that they would be blatantly violating their NDA. And a seller would potentially have legal recourse. So hopefully that will give sellers a little more comfort. In regards to what information is truly off-limits, the thing I found is by the time of closing it all has to come out. But some of it does come out essentially at the closing table. So one of the big areas of sensitivity I found is if a business has employees a lot of times the seller doesn't want to mention the sale to the employees literally till the last minute. The reasoning is it could really make them panic and look for other jobs if the deal doesn't go through. The buyer who might be inheriting these employees will have some obvious consternation. They're going to want to know who's about to work for them; are those people planning on sticking around? That can be a really sensitive area. And I've had situations where it feels like we're a lock on that or some other small issue and it always seems to get resolved at the closing table at the 11th hour when finally everyone feels confident that the deal is actually going to happen. David: Yeah and I think to add to Jason's point it's something that comes to mind a lot. Me over the years that's owing a lot of SaaS deals you can imagine the code base is just a really cool secret sauce component of SaaS business and the buyer very naturally wants to see that annotate to see what kind of code quality is annotations and see what kind of architecture is and that creates a lot of shrikes naturally in the owner right away. And it was an interesting bridge trying to think about how we could do that in a very safe way to get to that point that Jason is talking about which is the eventual reveal at closing. And what we did that's worked very effectively over the years and what we do at Quiet Light is show a snapshot of that code base and just provide enough insight and then a high-level like architectural look so that they can see how this sort of modules are put together. And then just a small snapshot so they can analyze the code based on a very discrete basis. Or also consider using a third party due diligence advisor to come in and review the code base and that way the owner is never really hands-on with it. It's being reviewed by a third-party specialist and there's a non-disclosure agreement in place and so you really can actually go into something that looks like quite a difficult issue and something to verify with a lot of credibility and integrity. So that's one of the ways that we've done most to do that with SaaS. Mark: Yeah I think one of the things I've learned over now 13 years of helping people through this is that during the due diligence process oftentimes a buyer comes in and says I need to understand X. And rather than saying in the due diligence process that I need to understand X they say okay I need to understand X and the way to do that is Y. And so what they say is let's do Y. And the seller says I can't do Y. And then the buyer says well what are you trying to hide, right? And so one of the tricks for you guys that I know you guys have done so well over the years is figuring out what is that X; what is the person actually trying to achieve through this request? What are they trying to learn through this request? And David to your point I'm glad you brought up [inaudible 00:25:11.7] because I was going to bring that up. That's one thing that I would consider to be kind of a non-negotiable. If I had a SaaS business and a buyer came in and said I need to get the codebase I would say no. I don't think that that's reasonable mainly because we can satisfy the same information that you're seeking in a way that does not involve handing over the entire code base through a third party due diligence requests or otherwise. I think there are other elements that could be non-negotiable such as if you have a business that has only five clients. And if the buyer wants to speak to those clients there might be a reasonable request there. But it can also be pretty dicing so how do you overcome that sort of friction in a due diligence process. Jason, it looks like you have something that you want to add onto that. Jason: Yeah I mean just touching on that. One thing we were talking about earlier was being a good seller and the corollary is being a good buyer. But one thing I've encountered on occasion is somebody will have experience with having done other deals in the past; either business acquisitions or dispositions or real estate or something. And a person might have an attitude of I've done a lot of deals; this is the way it's always done. And one message I would try to get out to people is just because you've done a deal in a certain way that's not the way it's always done. This panel has done literally hundreds of deals and probably in dozens and dozens of different ways. So I think Mark what you're saying is try to figure out the core of wants and then get creative about how to supply it is probably the most appropriate answer rather than being rigid and saying this is how it has to be. Amanda: I also think to David's point about bringing a third party to do due diligence and possibly a financial audit or an audit of some technology or code it brings a lot of value because it gives the buyer some time to focus on actually what they wanted to do at a business point or it takes the nuances of the financial load because it's so tedious when you're going through financial due diligence or looking at code. And to have somebody else do that who's professional and experienced with that while the buyer can focus on future opportunities and getting prepped and ready for your transitioning into the business then I think there's a ton of value in doing that. And oftentimes it helps the seller feel more comfortable sharing that information with a third party as well. Mark: I'd be curious to see what experience each of you has had with conditional purchase agreements. I've used them sparingly and just I'm going to take a step back, whenever we do the podcast I introduce something that is a little bit outside the normal. Oftentimes I hear from you guys they're saying why are you saying that now everyone is going to want a conditional purchase agreement. So I'm not necessarily encouraging this but I've used it on occasion when somebody really doesn't want to disclose vendor names or really doesn't want to disclose something else. So we say alright let's put together a conditional purchase agreement where basically this thing is binding conditioned on a very specific term. Have any of you others worked with those? Jason: I mean I think like I said I've had some deals where it really seems like it's either going to close or fall apart at the closing table and they've always closed. It's always whatever is that one condition has been revealed right at the very end. Mark: Yeah, and I think I'm going to wrap this up. Amanda, I think one point that you made that I kind of went right on over is meet in person. If I could give one bit of advice to anyone doing an acquisition on the buy-side or sell-side, get together and meet in person. It solves so many problems. If you can spend a couple of days with that person in the same room going over some of the due diligence materials I think it solves a ton of problems or it creates a massive problem that deals shouldn't happen anyways. And that's an outcome that might be okay if the deal is going to be bad anyway. And so a meeting in person is a great suggestion. It's something that I would definitely recommend. Alright, I'm going to ask and move on to another topic here. Bryan I'm going to move this over to you here and that is talking about what's important in the negotiation. When somebody is looking to sell their business oftentimes what we do is we think well I want to get money out of this. I want to get X out of it. I want to get as much as I can possibly get out of it and forget that there's a lot of elements that you have to negotiate. You have a non compete agreement, you have an employment or consulting agreement on top of that. And there's literally probably about a half dozen different things that get negotiated through the process of selling an online business. What are some areas that you've seen maybe a wrong emphasis from sellers in the past where they might put too much weight on one element of a transaction? Bryan: Yeah there is definitely a lot going on in terms of what makes an offer than just total price of the offer. There are things you mentioned and there are seller notes, equity rules, you mentioned an offer can be structured in so many ways. In terms of wrong emphasis, I think sellers are often a little bit perhaps too much against carrying a seller note especially if it's a small seller note. I've seen this sentiment changing over the recent years though and it used to be the case years ago that most sellers would basically only want to want to deal with good cash offers. It's now getting more and more common for sellers to be okay with a 5, 10, or 20% seller note. And the reason why I believe a seller should be more okay with carrying small notes is because that's what I often explain to sellers themselves is that oftentimes those offers that they get that are structured this way are actually going to have bought them more money at the end than a full cash offer route to the extent that they can even easy to consider the seller note to be sort of a bonus on top of what they get anyway. So they can keep pushing for an all-cash offer but it's likely that this all-cash offer would actually go to turn out to be lower than the cash part of the offer that might go to small notes. Mark: Yeah to that we have a podcast I think it probably would have aired a couple of weeks before this episode here with Shannon Stewart who's a tax advisor on the sell-side. And she has an example of a business that sold for 11 million dollars and that she was able to; the net proceeds increased by 43% largely through deferring some of the payments that came in. And when you're talking about an 11 million dollar deal a 43% increase in net proceeds is not a small amount of money. So I would agree, seller notes and knowing how to structure those the right way is is something. Jason what would you say; is there any element that you think sellers tend to overemphasize when they're negotiating? Jason: Yeah I mean I think like Bryan said headline price gets a lot of focus when in reality it's more about how much are you going to get overtime after-tax that you get to keep. And then I think another thing that gets way too much emphasis is multiple. I think a lot of people get hung up on multiple both buyers and sellers and it kind of boils down more to bragging rights than to a discernible business reasoning meaning ohI sold my business for 4X or whatever so I can tell my friends. The reality is okay let's say you pushed the multiple for your particular industry; let's say you're selling an e-commerce business and they normally sell around three times earnings and you managed to push it to four times like you're taking a lot more risk to get to four times you had to accept an earn-out and it's depending on performance and this and that and the other. Even if you collect it all you're earning what you would make in four years anyway. You wouldn't be selling the business if the sole reason was the money that you're getting paid. There are clearly other reasons otherwise you're better to keep the business. So the big advice I give to sellers is the market will determine the value of your business better than anyone on this panel, better than you the seller, better than any individual buyer. We have thousands and thousands of buyers and for most businesses, we get multiple offers. That's the market. If you're not willing to accept what the market will bear you're better to keep the business than to sell it or to try to push the market beyond what it will bear because it very likely could backfire. Mark: Well Jason you're begging me to go into a question that is also on the list. I'm not going to go there yet because I want to stay on this one here and then we're going to get over to that question to wrap things up here. David, I'll be interested in your thoughts on this as well here. Are there elements; I mean you've got a ton of experience in working with sellers just like everybody here, what are some things that you see people often negotiate maybe more heavily than they should and what advice would you give to them on that? David: Well I think certainly on the emphasis question I would say to sellers when they're reviewing any offer that 50% of the decision; only 50% of the decision should come down to purchase price and terms and the other 50% should be based on the execution certainty of the buyer that's actually presenting the offset. Because there's an ocean of difference between coming out with an LOI for your business and actually closing it. And I think it's part of the; well a huge component of hiring a broker and an advisor to help you take that bridge from there to there and I think it's for me sellers that have been really receptive to guidance and advice at that point whether they should take the focus off the headline price off the headline multiple that Jason is talking about and consider the wider context that is this still going to close because the buyer has experience, for example, they have a readily available source of funding their due diligence requests are miles and miles long they're not reliant on any kind of outside financing [inaudible 00:35:22.8] all of these things introduce risk into the deal and ultimately that's risk needs to be looked at properly in the context of the whole deal so I think that's really important. Negotiating terms, one thing that I always recommend for sellers to be open to is the prospect of keeping the window open for like the minority kind of consulting arrangements after the sale. Honestly, we had enough every business through a standard transition period and depending on the size and complexity that can vary. But I think one thing that's actually really good for sellers to think about is maybe staying on to do like an hour or two a month to just say six months longer with the sale and that goes a huge way with buyers knowing that they just have a slightly longer line which the owner has to ask a half an hour-long question in four months time. And to that point about getting the trust and getting the deal over the way, that's a huge point that I think sellers are sometimes like they're spent and they never really want to spend more time on the business. But just that tiny little time investment for just a few moments goes a huge way towards getting a deal on the way and a great value. Mark: Yeah I would agree to that 100%. I remember when I sold my business now a long time ago they asked me to stay on for six months afterwards and they paid me for it; so a regular monthly consulting fee and at first I was like man this is going to be a pain but what I found pretty quickly is it wasn't. It was really easy. It was very easy money that I was bringing in as a result of that. And it really helped with their transition as well. Alright, we're at 35 or about 30 minutes here on this so we're going to round it out with one last question and this is one that is pretty important to me because I think it's what we all do here. We all earn a living in some capacity through helping people exit their businesses and from our standpoint it can be really easy to treat people's businesses as inventory that we're simply moving. And obviously, we don't ever want to go there because we're all business owners ourselves. We've all been through that. We know what work it takes to build these and then how difficult it can be and how stressful it can be to sell them. So one of my pet peeves that have grown over the years is just hearing people say oh man is this seller I was approaching them I wanted to buy their business they weren't selling it but I was doing outreach and I asked them how much they'd sell it for and man his expectations were crazy. It's a pet peeve of mine so I'm kind of implanting here the answer that I want to hear. Amanda; we're going to go left and right on my screen, Amanda, you're first here. Do you think that there is such thing as an unreasonable valuation or is it only really unreasonable expectations of what the market can bear? Amanda: Well I think both actually I think unreasonable expectations for where the market can bear; I mean when we're seeing that right now. Certainly, we're seeing a lot of growth in multiples over the last two years and there's been a push to constantly drive that multiple. And I think we've done a really good job of doing that. But sellers, of course, have their own expectations on what they think that multiple should be because they hear things from other sellers or they possibly got an offer four years ago from a strategic and they decide to pass that. And that has dried up and gone away and is no longer a viable option. And so I think the market evolves really quickly. And I'm actually one of those people who may have unreasonable expectation professional with expertise and proper data to bring somewhere like that back to reality. And I think that that's; actually, the core of it is having realistic expectations with what the market is; the ability of the market at this time because obviously, that may change in six months for better or for worse. I think that whether the expectations are reasonable is less important than the seller being able to be open to the feedback and coming back down to reality. And I think that makes a lot of difference because we see that quite often where sellers will come in and they think their business is for X multiple but then they're open to hearing what we're experiencing, what we're seeing because we do a lot of volumes and then having those realistic expectations is super important. Mark: Yeah and I think one thing I've been trying to remind people as well especially in the sell-side when we get up into the high seven and eight-figure territory; you brought up Amanda that the seller might have gotten an offer from a strategic years ago but obviously never went through or they heard about so-and-so who got a 6X on their business what they never really hear when they hear these big prices is what was the composition of that offer. How much was there actually cash? How much was equity that can be the phantom value? Jason, I know you have a lot of stories about phantom values in equity, right? And so that's something that we don't hear about. It's like the sports contract of oh my gosh they got o120 dollars but it's only 10 million dollars guaranteed and like it's so much in incentives. Jason, what are your thoughts on this aspect of unreasonable expectations on the part of sellers? Jason: I think part of it depends on how you define unreasonable because I look at myself as an example. Most people say I've got very unreasonable expectations of the value of an hour of my time and I will concede absolutely positively. What I expect to earn is way more than what my job will provide and all that means is I need to adjust how I use my time in order to achieve it. So if you're a person who believes your business is worth a lot more than the market will bear, that's perfectly fine. I just think don't be a seller because the market won't provide it. It's important to understand the people on the other end of the transaction are buyers. They're seeking a certain rate of return. You're comparing your business not only to save alternatives like or I mean to a spectrum of alternatives and various safety like bonds, stocks, municipals, real estate. They're also comparing it to other businesses for sale that earn roughly the same amount. You might have roughly the same growth plans. And it can be really frustrating if anyone is banging their head saying no, no, no, no, my business is special and deserves more when the market simply won't bear it out. I think most of us on the panel have kind of learned that there's a range. There's a spectrum where a valuation could be within a certain range depending on certain factors. Sometimes it's worth it to test the market to put out something at a bit higher valuation just that so you see the seller understands that the odds are going to go down the harder you push. And then one other kind of important point I want to bring up, we talked about this on an internal email the other day. A lot of times a seller will call multiple brokerages; they'll call Quiet Light and then two or three of our competitors and that's perfectly fine. We want you to talk to whoever you want to talk to. But one common thing I'll hear is a seller will say to me how much is the business worth and I'll quote a price. I'll say I think it's worth about a million dollars for the sake of argument and they'll say well wait I just talked to Brokerage X and they quoted me a million two, can you get me a million two? My answer is I don't know and neither do they. It's not the broker that's buying your business. It's a buyer that we've not yet identified and all that all of us are doing is giving an opinion. And in some cases, it can be really detrimental to the seller to try to play brokers off each other because the broker's tendency might be well gee if these three other people told you it's worth more maybe I'm wrong and the price gets bid up in the sellers head. And then when you get to market the buyers; the people that are actually writing the check for the business are like what are you talking about you're way out of bounds? So it's really important to remember who's the decision-maker. In my mind the decision-maker is always the person that's writing the check for your business; sometimes that's the buyer, sometimes that's the banker who's funding the buyer, but you always have to cater to that ultimate decision-maker to figure out what's the true value. Mark: Absolutely. So in regards to the value of your time Jason I appreciate you putting it on a payment plan for this little podcast panel because it is pretty crazy. Alright, David, over to you I want to get your opinions on this. David: I think Jason said absolutely the best. I think the market ultimately informs everyone to pick up on what Amanda said it's all about receptivity to that. I mean you can continue on as a business owner with a maybe like a grand ass perspective of the value of your business for a long enough period of time and as Jason said potentially go with the broker that's gone for a particularly inflated valuation. The problem is as Jason and we all know here is that if you come out way too high you will flop in the market and it will be a long long period of time before you then eventually have to come off the exclusivity pulling down the listing and then return back to market at a later point in time often with another advisor and how many times do we see that at Quiet Light with people coming to us from a very correct or whatever having spent an awful lot of wasted time and to cut in to Jason's point all of our time is valuable and we love the perception of it. If you're a business owner with a great business that you want to exit your time is especially valuable. So that decision right out the gate in terms of your receptivity and so what the market will bear is arguably the most important decision when it comes to respecting your own time and getting a process done and completed and money in the bag. Mark: Yeah, I remember probably about a year ago I was recording a potential client and then he came back and said another broker quoted me and said that they could get me this much and it was substantially higher than what I was going to; what I was quoting him at. He said and he's going to reduce his commission to this. I looked at it and I called him and said yeah you should sign with them. How do you counteract that, right? You couldn't really counteract that too much other than say if you really think they can get that and are being less commissioned then you should sign with them. He ended up signing with me later and we ended up getting a really good deal for him. But I think you guys point about valuations being a predictive exercise is on point. Alright, Bryan, I saved the best for last. What are your thoughts as far as these unreasonable expectations or is it just unreasonable expectations for the market? Bryan: I think Chris and David both absolutely nailed it. And I'm glad that they took the conversation the way they did. I think the market is always going to be brutally honest and any valuation mistakes that are being made, any unreasonable expectations are going to be corrected by the market. But I think the one most important thing on this is it is going to be the market who will buy the business it's not going to be the broker. There's no point negotiating the valuation of your business with the broker because it's not in the broker's power to value your business it's the market that values your business ultimately. Mark: Absolutely I'm going around this out and close it up by saying one thing and that is Jason, you said this in what you brought up, if the value of your business in your head is 10 million dollars but the valuation of the market is 1 million dollars just don't become a seller. That's kind of the result. As far as Quiet Light Brokerage, look I know where the value of Quiet Light is. If somebody came up the street and offered me the value; the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they are offering me two times the market value of Quiet Light I would say no. If they offered me three times I would still say no because the value of my head for what this business is worth to me right now is way more than what the market value is. I'm not a seller; not going to be a seller for a long long time. And that's totally fine because I love this business. I love working with you guys. Thank you so much for coming on this podcast panel. Guys give us feedback on this. Let us know what you think. If there's something that you want us to do a panel on as far as topics let me know. If you want it to be specific in industries such as e-commerce or SaaS or content sites we can do that as well. We've got a wealth of experience here with the advisors and we're about to be able to tap into them more with these podcasts. So again, thanks everyone for joining this. Let's do it again hopefully sometime soon. Bryan: Thanks, everyone. Amanda: Thank you. David: Thanks, Mark.

Greetings and welcome to “Moya Financial Matters” brought to you by Moya Financial Credit Union in Toronto, Canada.   This podcast is not intended to provide financial or financial planning advice, please visit us in person at our branch and we’d be more than happy to meet and chat in person!In this episode we connect with David Wreglesworth, Moya Financial’s branch manager at main branch located at Browns Line.  But more than a branch manager, at Moya David is the focal point and key contact between our members, our investment team and part of the leadership group.  For members, this means a direct connection between the front lines at the branch and head office, ensuring that the membership experience, needs and objectives are in sync.David reflects on his rich, decades-long career in the financial sector helping Canadian achieve their financial goals and objectives, and really helps bring home the differences between being a credit union member and a customer of the big financial institutions.  As well, David shares his top tips for existing and prospective members on how to work with him and his team to really experience all the things that Moya Financial has to offer.Let’s listen now to my interview with David****Thanks to David for being our guest for this episode of Moya Financial Matters!Be sure and tune in on a regular basis on Apple iTunes or your favourite podcast platform for more episodes of Moya Financial Matters -  please rate and review, and be sure and recommend to a friend or colleague in the Slovenian community and beyond - anyone who is looking for a no-fee alternative to the big banks and wants to feel like more than a number when they deal with their financial institution.   To learn more visit us at www.moyafinancial.ca.I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and until next time, have a great week!

Welcome to Finance and Fury, The Say What Wednesday edition.  Today's question comes from David Hi Louis, I must commend you on your contribution to the finance community. If you have thought me one thing, it’s that the more you learn the more you realise how little you know. So, one thing that does perplex me is the Australian made product of the offset account. Whilst I understand how they work and the power they have when used correctly, I can’t figure out why the banks have them. I mean it’s the modus operandi of the banks to extract money from lenders via the mechanism of interest. Call me a cynic but I feel the banks must have an ulterior motive to this play. I would love to know your thoughts. - David    That is a great question – made me think as well and do some further digging – today - Offset accounts and Why banks allow them? First – the basic = Offset accounts are a type of deposit account that is directly linked to a loan – like a mortgage Money deposited into offset accounts effectively reduce the loans net position and the interest payable Means where a borrower has a deposit account and a loan (usually a housing loan) with the same institution. Instead of receiving interest on the deposit account, the interest payment due on the loan is calculated on the net balance of the loan As they act as deposit accounts – only ADI can offer true offset accounts – non-banks will offer redraw facility instead – which means the money is on the loan – different In Aus - Offset account balances currently total around $90 billion – almost over 6% of housing loans outstanding Annual growth in total housing debt of around 7-8% - Offset account balances grown by 30% - annual growth in net housing debt is still growing by 6-7% due to new loans - Why banks allow them? – number of reasons Simple one - Better with them than another bank - Incentive to have your money with them and not the competition Also – repayments come from the offset accounts – easy for banks to have their funds – but minor But one of the major reasons – they Allow for the further growth of credit – remember – they are deposit accounts Because Offset accounts are deposit accounts – banks can use them as part of reserves in fractional lending for the creation of money RBA - Offset account balances have also been making a significant contribution to household deposit growth If offset balances weren’t in deposits but had paid the loan back – would reduce growth in household deposits by around 1% (from around 7-8%) -12-14% or so reduction Mortgage payments reduce the ‘stock of outstanding credit’ – i.e. total amount of loans and are a negative growth factor on total credit - if everyone makes additional repayments the credit growth shrinks – the credit growth can be negative = no new lending and only repayments is negative credit growth Offset accounts are an alternative form of mortgage prepayment that like an at-call deposit account – Because it acts like an at-call deposit account, any accumulated funds are easily available for withdrawal or for purchasing goods and services - They are treated as such – can be used as any other deposit for lending by the bank Also - while funds in the account are reducing your outstanding debt for the interest on the loan – you still have the same loan For the individual with a mortgage and uses an offset account or redraw - similar household economic effects - net housing debt and interest payable are reduced But for a bank - loans and deposits are higher than they otherwise would be – offset provides deposit funds and doesn’t give a negative credit growth effect – like redraw facilities do If that $90bn was sitting in the loan (i.e. paid off) – less lending due to fewer depositor funds Therefore – offset accounts Can increase banks lending income – not decrease it- Say loans are 4% - you can save 4% or banks can charge it – $100k in an offset – you save $4,000 Banks use it to lend $800k (12.5% deposit ratio) – they make $32,000 – net $28k better off Also – Other factors like bail-ins and deposit schemes Bail in-laws – We’ll leave a link on the website to the episodes covering the bail-in regulations and pitfall of this In short – as it is a deposit account – can be used as bail-in provision – Most people with loans would have much more in offsets than savings – or should at least – But the catch is that all your deposits will likely to be with one ADI – and potentially above the $250k Government Guarantees – May not actually help - You have a few problems there: A guarantee only applies to a bank going insolvent and collapsing— with not enough money left over for depositors. Bail-ins (if they are in fact legal) will just take your money to prevent that from happening. That is, the government guarantee won't cover a bail-in. Guarantees are capped at $20B per ADI – stated in Financial System Legislation Amendment (Financial Claims Scheme and Other Measures) Bill 2008 Activation of the EAFD 1.20 - A declaration outlines the total amount available to make payments to depositors of a declared ADI. For the first three years of the scheme (from 2008), the amount that can be appropriated for the purposes of meeting depositors’ entitlements is unlimited. After three years, the maximum that can be appropriated is $20 billion. The declaration must also outline the amount available for the administration costs for implementing the scheme up to a maximum of $100 million RBA aware of this - in their “Depositor Protection in Australia” - “Payouts of deposits covered under the FCS [The Australian Government’s Financial Claims Scheme] are initially financed by the government through a standing appropriation of $20 billion per failed ADI [Authorized deposit-taking institutions] The total size of deposit accounts totalled $2 trillion (Commonwealth Bank— $581 billion, ANZ — $467 billion, NAB— $407 billion and WESTPAC — $533billion). This includes savings, term deposits, chequing, debit card, transaction accounts, mortgage offset accounts, pensioner deeming accounts, retirement savings accounts etc… So only $80 billion (or 4%) out of this $2 trillion dollars is actually covered by the guarantee. The question remains – once they activate it – where will the money come from? In summary Does benefit you – But so does repaying your home loan in most other means – except the accessibility – offsets are best for this But benefit the bank as well – you repaying the loan doesn’t benefit them as much as you keeping the loan and then being able to keep expanding credit using the deposits – take your $100k and lend $900k – which they make 3% - Also – more money with the bank to be used in ‘resolution proceedings’ with Bail in regulations Thanks for the Great question David Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you want to get in contact you can do so here: http://financeandfury.com.au/contact

David A. Duryea is business improvement veteran with more than thirty-two years of experience in practical business improvement and technology innovation. He has led more than sixty business improvement and innovation projects in sixteen different industries. As a legal expert witness for failed technology and business innovation projects, David has performed project forensics on failed implementations for over a dozen large-scale projects. A popular speaker on business improvement, he has been featured at Computerworld, InfoWorld, and industry conferences. His articles in the area of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and advanced technology implementation practices have been featured. David holds a patent from the United States Patent Office, degrees in business administration and computer science, and an MBA with a focus in project management. David is happily married with seven children, four of whom were adopted from China. He and his family live near Cleveland, Ohio. When not studying the intricacies of business improvement, he enjoys hiking, bicycling, baseball, coaching, and investing time in activities with his children. His Business-Improvement Model Part 1: Business Strategy Structure Step 1 Understand the Law of Business Reality Organizations serve customers in a profitable way (balancequality and efficiency) or cease to exist. Step 2 Understand the Target—The Core Business Model Why organizations generate profit different from their competitors. Step 3 Influencers of the Core Business Model Pressure and Enhancers on Performance Step 4 Embrace Business Strategy and Structure Basis for Improvement—Whether Leaders Know It or Not Part 2: Business Process Structure Step 5 Common Processes and Functions of a Business Model The Law—Inherent to Process, Functions, and Operation Step 6 Industry Processes of a Business Model Developing Industry Common Process Structure Step 7 Core Business Model Processes Embrace for Uniqueness and Profitability Step 8 Business Processes Influencers Influencing Process Structure, Performance , and Profitability Step 9 The Business-Improvement Objective Change Operations to Further an Organization’s Core Business Model Step 10 Business and Operational Performance The Performance Goal—Core Business Model Productivity Step 11 True Operational Performance Measurement Measure the Goal: Core Business Model Productivity Part 3: Business Enablement Structure Step 12 Business Process Enablement: Resources to Realize the Core Business Model The Interview Transcript Interview with David Duryea Hugh Ballou: It’s Hugh Ballou again. My guest tonight is a man I met through another person, his publicist. We talked a little bit, and I discovered we had a lot of values in common and we do similar work. We are going to talk about David Duryea’s new book that is out. I have a copy of this book, and it’s really good. It’s 200 pages of really, really well-researched, well-written content. The book is called- I’m getting to the cover. I’ve started reading and I am deep down into it. The cover is a light bulb, and it says Do the Right Thing. My guest on this podcast is David Duryea. David, tell people a little bit about yourself and what inspired you to want to write this really great book Do the Right Thing. David Duryea: Well, first of all, Hugh, thanks for having me on again. It’s been a great conversation and connection with you as well. Basically, Do the Right Thing is doing the right thing in business improvement, including process and technology. I would have to say that I came up with the idea, or at least the inklings of the idea, somewhere around the late ‘90s, believe it or not, when we were in the heydays of putting in a lot of different technologies. Dot coms were coming up as well, and we were doing a lot of implementations. I also saw at the same time a very high failure rate. Some of my background is integrated in that. Not only have I been working in this industry for almost 32 years—I have done a lot of researches, I have been on over 60 different implementations and projects myself—I was also called on the courts to be an expert witness for failed projects. What that means is I was in project forensics. I would go in, figure out why the project died, what caused it, and where the bones were buried. I wrote the reports and submitted it to the courts. During that process, there was a lot of things that came to light. I saw a lot of different failures, and I also saw a lot of different reasons. What happened was all of those projects converged into a similar idea and concept. Those are the concepts I have highlighted in the book. I put a lot of these concepts into different phrases so people could really understand them and use them in their insightful way. The first thing was the law of business reality. The law of business reality is how an organization is created basically to serve their customers in a profitable way. The law says that if you don’t serve your customers in a profitable way, you will cease to exist. All organizations are under that principle, that law if you will. A core business model, which is a big part of the book, is a subset or derivative of the law of business reality. That is an organization serves its customer uniquely in its industry in a profitable way. Every organization needs to understand exactly why they are there, how they serve their customers, and how they do that in a profitable way. If you cannot serve your customers, and you cannot be profitable in some way, then you will cease to exist. Hugh: You say in the latter part of the book that “You understand how crucial it is to have a good understanding from the law of business reality to your organization’s own core business model to a sound, functional, and cost-effective enterprise establishment strategy. It is a cascading relationship that starts with the essence of the organization.” “It is a cascading relationship that starts with the essence of the organization.” That is a profound paragraph. David: Hugh, the core business model is what an organization is all about. It transcends all the mechanics and knowledge and things people want to do with their business. It is the heart of why you’re there. Very successful organizations have those. If you look around at the most successful what I would call start-ups or large organizations, like Apple, Netflix, FedEx, even Amazon right now. Amazon is really in the news right now with what it did with its acquisition that it’s impending on. They know exactly who they are, how they serve their customers, and the customers themselves know who they are and how they will serve them. When you have that essence, when you really understand yourself—you are not just going through the motions of “Hey, this is serving up a service or a product, and here you go,” but you really have that passion for it—then your organization emulates that as well. The connection point between the core business model of the organization, all of the operations that need to activate if you will your core business model, all of that is- In the book, it is described as three major pieces: your marketing and sales, your product or service development and delivery, and your administration to support those. All of those have different activities and processes that they need to go on. The essence is something that permeates all of those things. The core business model turns into core business processes, and then they also turn into core business enablement. And we discuss that all the way through the book so you understand when you buy a certain type of technology, if it doesn’t further your core business model, then you will have a real problem serving your customers in the way they want to be served. Just to give you a quick idea, Hugh: When we were doing implementations, one of the root causes of the failures was because they actually purchased software, which is called ERP software, that was really designed for a different industry than the industry they were in. For instance, this was a distribution company, and they bought software that was about manufacturing. Those were a mismatch; therefore, the software didn’t fit them real well. The project failed. In this case, the project failed, and it brought down the organization. It literally sent the company into chapter eleven. Hugh: Oh my goodness. You talk about that as well: “You can see the direct relationship of how it affects not only your business, but also every business. It’s the reality-based improvement that so many organizations seem to try to ignore or circumvent. Now that you have the insight to the misguided leadership styles, failed establishment initiatives, and disintegrated operational models that have led to failed projects and bankrupt companies, you in turn have the methods to directly drive your company to be one of the industry leaders.” How did you come to the essence of all of these moving parts? There are a lot of them, and you address all of them in the 200 pages of this book. I find it easy to grasp because it is laid out so cleanly. I hate books that are all just copy, but you have it laid out so it’s really easy to grasp the concepts visually, which means in my simple mind, I can internalize it. Tell me about your background of how you assimilated all of these components and put them together in this really good book. David: Because I was not only doing the implementations for business, but I was also doing forensics, I could see it from both ends. I was speaking not only to people that were in the operations side, but I was also speaking to the business side and boards of directors and investors. It gave me such a broad-based perspective of exactly every level of the organization and which level has an impact or influence on it. I also spoke to some customers. I also got the unique perspective of understanding how the customers looked from the outside in, and also from the management and leadership from the inside out. Because of that broad base or that holistic viewpoint I was able to glean out of so many different engagements, I was able to clearly put all of these concepts together, and also I saw how they all connected and they were all holistically and synergistically connected. Hugh: I like that word “synergy.” My company, as you may know, is called SynerVision. I took Synergy and Vision and put them together. As you may also know, I spent 40 years as a musical conductor. We create the culture of high performance, which we call ensemble. SynerVision is what resembles ensemble in a culture that is not a music culture. What you talked about, about your core model, I relate everything to the orchestra, the choir. There is a core model for how we function. It is a very high-performance model. You either cut it, or you don’t play. It’s a very high standard indeed. I’ve yet to find that kind of standard in any other organization that I work with, whether it’s a mid-cap organization or a smaller nonprofit. I don’t find that system anywhere. This core business model driving to higher performance, expand on that a little more, if you think there is some synergy with what I just talked about. David: Absolutely. I have been nowhere near the level of music talent that you’ve been, but I certainly have played an instrument. I was all the way through college in the marching bands. If you can’t play in tune, you’re out. You know it instantly when someone is out of tune. You’re always nudging the guy next to you and saying, “Hey, what is wrong with you?” In the same side of it, in the marching band, if someone isn’t in line, you know that, too. In fact, the whole audience sees that. The idea of the core business model is exactly what you said, Hugh. It actually is not only the essence, but it is also the goal. It gives you the idea of exactly what you need to do. As you say, you’re a conductor. Everybody in the orchestra needs to look at you. Everybody needs to know where they are in the music. Everybody needs to know what’s coming next. It’s the same thing as the core business model. Everybody understands what it is they are driving for. This is the model; this is the goal; this is what we need to do. They all know their places in the organization, whether it’s in the process of marketing/sales/service; administration; or service/product deliverability. They all know their individual roles, and they all know how they fit together so the whole operation runs at the same time. Believe me, Hugh, they know when the sales and marketing isn’t in sync with the product deliverability because someone is overselling the features or just the product itself, the features aren’t doing what they said they did, and it’s not in alignment with the core business model. All the way down to your attorneys. If your attorneys are not expressing the contracts they need to, it emulates who you are at a core business model. All of it together is either in sync or out of sync. And guess what? Your customer is going to know immediately. Hugh: That is so critical. Under your business improvement model on page 162 in your book, step one under part one of the Business Strategy Structure, Understanding the Law of Business, the footnote, the description underneath it is, “The organization serves customers in a profitable way (balance, quality, and efficiency) or cease to exist.” In the next one, Understand the Target of the Core Business Model: Why Organizations Generate Profit Differently from Their Competitors. We want to serve customers in a profitable way. It’s really the balance that is important. Talk a little bit more about those. We get off track. Some companies are so focused on profitability at the expense of the customer experience that it really hurts their company. Talk about this balance a little bit under the law of business. David: That’s a great point, Hugh. The whole idea of the core business model is about balance. You have to serve your customers, and you have to earn profits; otherwise, you are not sustainable as an organization. You cannot continue to serve your customers in the way they would like if you cannot make the profits that you need. At the same time, we know you have to earn some sort of profits not only to maintain but also to pay all of your expenses and to earn a little bit of investment. You have to have some investment; otherwise, you can’t be sustainable. At the same time, if you take advantage of your customer, or even basically take them for granted, I see that so often in businesses. Taking a customer for granted, that they are always going to be there. Well, because of the invent of all the things of social media, online purchasing, it will take you all but 30 seconds to lose a customer. In the book, I actually highlight the cost of losing customers and how that has an impact and how much of an impact on market share and things like that. You definitely do not want to take advantage of your customer, and you certainly don’t want to take them for granted. That takes a lot of effort and investment on the other side. You have to be efficient at serving that customer. If you are not efficient, you won’t be profitable enough to serve your customers in the way they expect. The balance is constant, where you are constantly trying to serve, constantly trying to be efficient, and constantly trying to do both at the same time. If you don’t keep that focus of constantly balancing, one of them is going to get out of balance, and then you are going to start to slide into unprofitable situations or you will lose market share and customers will run to a competitor who is serving them in the way they want. Either way, it’s going to slide the company into probably dissolution. Hugh: Absolutely. You should send a copy of this book to the major airlines. Let’s let that one slide. How does focusing on an organization’s core business model help drive higher performance? Going back to the musical analogy, to me, the core of who we are is our performance. It’s not the theory of what we do; it’s how we actually perform the day-to-day operations. We do make a profit because we provide value to our customers. How does focusing on this core business model drive higher performance? David: The first thing you want to do is understand why you are serving your customers, why they are coming to you. It’s not, “Hey, this is what we’re offering you. You need to come to us.” That’s not the way it works. The way it works is the customer says, “Hey, you’re serving me in the way I want. I like that, and you’re giving it to me for a fairly good price that I can work with.” The idea is the performance side of it is first you have to lay out how you are going to serve your customer. From that, there are processes and functions. You also need to enable those processes and functions. The number one enablement right now is technology, as everybody knows. Technology is a big deal. But the issue is now technology is extremely expensive. Furthermore, it can be complex to work with. The company needs to keep a very good focus as to what kind of technology they need and their own customer value. When you are driving in performance toward the back end of the book, I have actually laid out how you can measure the performance of the processes in something I call core business productivity. There is a way you can measure that and then compare that with a new operation you want to put in. That is a good way for most organizations to understand whether a new piece of technology, a new vendor, or even a third-party outsourcer—I am constantly being asked if we should keep something in-house, or should we give it to a third party? Remember this. Any time you take a particular function and move it outside of your organization, it is going to dilute your core business model because somebody else is doing it. If there is a way you can maintain that, then it’s fine. But most of the time, if you keep it in-house, you have total control, but it could be more expensive. So you are constantly balancing those pieces of how you are going to enable your process and your operations to perform it in a higher way. Performances can be measured in the core business model productivity. This helps you understand what keeps you in balance all the way through from the top part of the organization down to the lower ends, where you are actually in contact with your customers. Hugh: Productivity = F:E. Is that the shortened version of it? Core business productivity = Core business model functionality and efficiency performed. David: Yes. It’s basically functionality times efficiency. The reason why it’s laid out that way is that the functionality piece is the functions you want to perform for your customers. It’s literally what it is that needs to get done. The efficiency side is how efficient are you at performing those functions. That’s the balance. You have these functions that need to be done, and the efficiency, how well you are performing those functions. If you multiply those two together, then you get what is called productivity. If one goes out of balance, meaning you are not doing the functions you need to, then your productivity goes down. If you are not doing the functions efficiently, then your productivity goes down. See how those balances balance out? Hugh: Yes. What I was thinking is this ought to be mandatory reading for anybody starting a business. We get off track because we look at the existing models of ineffective, inefficient productivity and not really valuing the customer experience. I guess you are familiar with the Gallup poll that says 70% of employees are either disengaged or actively disengaged. David: Correct. Hugh: Which adds to negatively impacting their performance. David: Exactly. They are not- I’d love to be able to do some research on that to peel back the layers on the onion here and try to understand why that 70% exists. Why is it so persistent out there? I bet you those people are not connected to the organization’s core business model. They are not invested in what’s going on. They don’t seem to understand how they fit into the tonal model. Hugh: My experience is you’re spot-on. I do the people part of that. How do we integrate it into performance? It’s the culture piece that I work with. We call it leadership, but very few people understand leadership. What you are giving us is a solid framework to educate us on what it should look like and how we measure it. I am going back to if we are starting a business. A lot of people start a business, and many of them fail. Dunne and Bradstreet said 90% of entrepreneurs fail because they don’t have the skillset to run a business. They call it manage-to-manage. It’s leadership, and as John Maxwell says in The Law of the Lid, the organization can’t go any further than the leader’s ability to lead it. What you are giving in this book from what I have seen—and I have not digested it, it’s a lot of really useful content that I was not willing to rush through, but the parts that I have seen I resonate with a lot. Your listing of citations in the back, your attributions, you did a lot of research in addition to your own personal experience. So it’s not just you shootin’ from the hip. It’s well-thought out, well-researched. It took you five years to put this together, I believe you said. David: It took me five years to write it. Again, it was a part-time thing. But it probably took more like 15 years to actually be able to solidify and legitimize all of the concepts in the book itself. But yeah, it was pretty rigorous, but I wanted to be comprehensive. I wanted it to be something a business leader or someone in the trenches could pick up and say, “Okay, I understand this piece. I know how this works for me.” Like you said, it is step by step. It is like a handbook, but also something people can pick up and understand the concepts and how those concepts fit in their own organization. Hugh: I found that to be very true. What do you see as the major issues as to why organizations do not perform or projects that do not attain the target of performance? David: Well, I would say the biggest reason is the leadership really doesn’t understand their own core business model. This one, Hugh, was a big revelation for me. I even have a story in the book of how I sat down with a business leader and asked him the question, “So why do the customers buy from you?” And he said that I was the very first consultant that ever asked that question of him. He said many consultants come in and talk to him about all kinds of performance models and analytics and things like that, but I was the first one to ask him why the customer buys from them. Instinctively, he knew his core business model. It was a private organization, and a lot of private organizations know that instinctively. A lot of leaders and organizations do not understand their core business model, and they get into some ideas how they want to expand the company. They don’t even realize some of those initiatives go against their core business model. That is very problematic, and we have seen that a lot. The first thing is why do businesses or some project initiatives fail? That is because they don’t understand how those initiatives are going to affect their core business model. I would say the next thing is the companies don’t understand how their own products and services fit into their core business model. One of the great cases I would think of is the Apple computer. If you think of the history of the Apple computer and what they have been able to do, and they have changed a lot over the years, but what hasn’t changed is their core business model. People don’t even realize this, but they take technology and make it simple. That’s what they do. On top of that, they make it, if I will, cool. And that is how they have been able to add on all products, not just computers, but also their phones, their pads, their iPods. Everything they do is all about taking some technology and making it easy to use and then making it real fun. They really understand their products and services and how all of their products would fit inside their core business model. I would say another big one is the misnomer that technology will automatically further an organization’s core business model. Not necessarily. You have to get the right kind of technology. The next one is the big one I work with almost every day. That is innovation will automatically further an organization. Those two sound a little bit the same, but they’re not. There are all kinds of innovation that comes out, but sometimes organizations don’t necessarily mesh with the innovation itself. Here is the biggest one of all: Organizations that don’t even realize that their industry has been changed by innovation. They don’t grasp that. Hugh, that dovetails very much into what you do with leadership and the skills and things you are talking about. They didn’t have the skillset to realize what the impact of certain innovation is going to be on their organization and in their core business model. I see that a lot these days because these things are changing very well. Hugh: I agree with you. It’s partly that leaders don’t understand their role and the consequences of their actions. They think they have to be the boss. They have to make all the decisions rather than using the expertise around them. I bought a little camera store in Florida and grew it from $12,000 a year to $1.4 million and owned commercial photo in that part of central Florida over the years. I had five distinctly different Kodak dealerships. At that point, Kodak owned the imaging business. They were the big guy on the block. They totally ignored Fuji and the innovation of dealership. As you know, they ultimately went into bankruptcy. Now they are just a very different minimal player instead of a major player. The leadership was really blind to the status quo. This innovation thing can really distract you or not. It can kill you. That’s a huge point you just made. David: Exactly. Hugh: I’m curious: What instrument did you play? David: Trumpet. Hugh: Ah! I won’t tell you my trumpet player jokes because you will probably come back with conductor jokes. There is some synergy in the core business model and the orchestra; I want to use an orchestra because there are so many different kinds of distinct personalities. Brass players are very different from the woodwinds, for example, would you say? David: Absolutely. Hugh: So the leader nuances all of those, but your core business model is your culture, and your core business model is the structure, which is a very analytical, highly mathematical structure, which then provides the basis for structure to be created. In that core model of the orchestra, we have the strategy of the music itself, the piece of paper, but it’s the connection and integration of that and performance that really makes something happen. The core business model and the understanding of it is what’s missing and the different players understanding their role. We serve the music, we serve the client, which is the audience. We focus on what makes a good user experience. Is there an analogy there that fits what you’re talking about? David: Absolutely. What you are talking about, analogies with music, and we were talking the other day about that- it really does fit similar to that as well is that the model itself gives the goal of where the organization wants to go. The other people, as in musicians, know how to play that instrument. They need that sheet of music to know how they fit altogether. If they fit altogether, and they are doing the right thing, they sound fantastic. If they don’t, then we are out of tune, out of key, and some are coming in when they are not supposed to come in on the music. I only make that analogy because I had a professor constantly tell me- He was a stickler for making sure you were coming right exactly on the downbeat where you should be. And he knew, within milliseconds, or that’s what it seemed like, whether that was accurate or not, but all of those things together, if you don’t come together, then you sound awful. Just like the core business model, if you don’t have everyone together, which sounds like an amalgamation of the culture and the structure and operation all working in concert together. When they do, then it’s working very well. You will be able to instinctively know how to serve customers and balance that quality and efficiency that you need to maintain profitability and sustainability. Hugh: This fits my podcast “Orchestrating Success: Converting Passion to Profit.” The profitability, as you said earlier, drives what we do. I am amazed at how many people don’t realize that even in charities we have to make profit. We are focused too much on profit, or we don’t do that critical balance that you talked about. This is helpful. What steps can an organization take to help improve their performance? David: Well, the first thing they need to do is they need to implicitly understand their own core business model. If they don’t know, they need to figure that out so they can figure out the effects on the operation itself. Once they understand that, they need to understand exactly how their profit generation is tied to their core business model. They need to understand that customer and why they are buying from them. They will be able to understand how that is affecting the model and the generation itself. I really think that businesses need to constantly review industry trends and changes that might impact their core business model. They need to sift them, if this is really moving this or if it’s not. Further technology and innovation, or even a lot of it, is- what about a disruptor? A particular company that is coming in and they look like the start-up, father/son, if you will, and they come up and all of a sudden they dissipate out. An organization that understands why their core business model is there and why that customer is purchasing from them will understand whether a particular disruptor is going to impact them or not. So organizations need to really understand the disruptors and any new innovation and technology that is coming in and sift that with their own core business model. They might need to make the moves, to make the changes. Right now, there is a huge change in what we call the financial advisory industry. Those organizations are starting to really feel the impact, and actually a number of them are starting to file bankruptcy because they did not change, from the impact of how innovation is making it move from an active management model to a more analytical and technology-driven model to reduce costs and make them more efficient. Huge changes that are going on in there. That is just to name one of those impacts. Those pieces themselves constantly looking at what their core business model is, why customers purchase from them, how they can constantly improve that model, and further their customers is the best way to understand how to improve the business. Hugh: This brilliant book that you’ve created, Do the Right Thing of Business Improvement and process and technology. How does the book help organizations to improve? Where can they get the book? David: Okay. The way that it helps them be able to improve themselves is the book is laid out, as you mentioned, Hugh, in a step by step process. It is organized in three areas from top to bottom. It goes from the strategy side to the process of execution side, and then it even has a section on enablement, which is how to evaluate resources for your organization. Basically it goes from A to Z. You can pick it up and read it, and with the stories and research in there, I try to make it more interesting than just a book of definitions, then hopefully you can pick it up and understand the concepts a little bit better. Where they can get the book. It’s on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and my publishers’ website at Westbone.com. It is under the name Do the Right Thing of Business Improvement with my name of David A. Duryea. The other thing they can do is if they like the book and some other resources out there, then they can go to my website, davidaduryea.com, and out there, we highlight those core business model ideas. We have other resources that folks will be able to download, a bunch of white papers, if they are interested in strategy, innovation, and even disruption. Hugh: Love it. David Duryea, you have created a book that should be a standard in anybody’s business library. It’s not only a learning experience, but it’s also a good reference tool to go back to to keep current. I suggest to clients they get good books like this and they read it through with a highlighter and then six months or eight months later, go back and read it again with a different colored highlighter. We find that we have learned enough that we are ready to learn the next thing. This book has enough depth to it that there is more to learn when you go back and review the content. It’s many years of sweat, and it’s really practical advice. Practical content. And very usable content, I find. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with the listeners of Orchestrating Success. We are people who are making a difference in the world, and it’s content like this that empowers us to make a difference. As we close out this interview, is there something we didn’t cover that you’d like to mention briefly? Finally, what is a tip or thought you’d like to give people as we do a summary at the end here? David: The one thing I wanted to do is to make sure that your audience understands that the core business model- There are a lot of ideas, but the one takeaway they have is understanding a core business model in their organization is to serve the customers in a profitable way. They keep that in the forefront of themselves. This is the tip: always keep that in the forefront. Every time you think about an improvement or something you want to do to add a product or a service, keep that in the forefront. Your organization will not get off the rails. It will keep to the core business model. I believe they will be able to sustain a high level of success in all they do. Hugh: David Duryea, thank you for sharing your wisdom with our listeners today. David: Thanks for having me, Hugh. It’s been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

David Corbin: Keynote Speaker, Business Adviser, President of Private and Public Corporations, Inventor, Mentor and pretty good guy…..David M. Corbin has been referred to as “Robin Williams with an MBA” because of his very practical, high relevant content speeches coupled with entertaining and sometimes side splitting stories. A former psychotherapist with a background in healthcare, he has served as management and leadership consultant to businesses and organizations of all sizes – from Fortune 20 companies to businesses with less than 1 million – and enjoys the challenges of all. He has worked directly with the Presidents of companies such as AT&T, Hallmark, Sprint as well as the Hon.Secretary of Veterans Administration and others. http://davidcorbin.com Notes from the interview: Why is it important for nonprofits to be clear about their brand? You have a brand. If you don't work at defining it, your audience will. You create an impression by your actions, intent does not stop that. Everything you do adds to the impression you create. Make believe you are always being observed and act accordingly. Audit your service by experiencing your deliverable. Would you do business with your organization? When working with people to build organization framework, when to we focus on brand promise? From the beginning. Why do we exist? Who do we serve? How do we want to be known? What do we really want? Who are we really? Everything we take on needs to fit who we are at the core! Do the Brand Audit right at the beginning(Before you deliver any services or approach anyone)! Team must be fully engaged all the way through. Quality and Clarity Determine Financial Results. Growth must start at an individual level for the organization to grow. People – The only completely renewable resource of any organization! (And the most valuable) Culture is a reflection of leadership! How Do Leaders Keep Our Internal and External Brands Fresh? Integrity – Living the values of the organization. Boss Watching – Biggest Sport! Model the behaviors the brand represents. Transformation consists of a series of small steps, often many of them! It starts with one in a row! Everything counts when it comes to integrity. Leader must lead by example. The Transcript NPC Interview with David Corbin Hugh Ballou: Greetings, this is Hugh Ballou. We are live with the Nonprofit Chat. Today, we have a guest who will bring energy to a lot of different topics tonight. David Corbin is a friend of ours. We have known each other for a number of years. This is the first time we have had a live interview, so welcome and thank you for being here. David Corbin: My pleasure. I'm happy to be a live interview. I hope the other ones weren't dead. What are you trying to say, Hugh? Hugh: You're a live one, man. I like guests to start out by telling people something interesting about yourself. Why do you do what you're doing, and what is your background that gave you… The few times you and I have had some deep conversations, I have really been impressed by the depth and breadth of wisdom that you have on these topics that you talk about. Give us a little paragraph or two about David Corbin. Who are you, and what brought you to where you are today? David: Well, I'm a human being. I'm not a speaker. I'm not an author. I'm not a doctor. I'm a human being, and I play the role of a keynote speaker, inventor, and mentor. I am a guy who loves life. What can I say? If there is a way- As I did yesterday, I had a client fly out from Mexico. The objective overall was for him to be happy, healthy, prosperous, and the like. I am the guy who likes to do that and likes to be that as the extent I can continue to learn and grow. I do all of those things. As you know, you have been in my audience, and I have been in yours. I love to share ideas from a platform. I like to consult with corporations at the highest levels and then solopreneurs. I love to run my 5K every Saturday, and I love to play tennis. I love to hang out in my backyard. I look out there, and I have chickens running around and a turtle in the pool. Life is great. Hugh: You're in San Diego, California. David: I am. Home of Tony Gwynn, the famous Padre. Today I was honored to be invited to the unveiling of his statue in our little town here. I was also with his family at Cooperstown at Baseball Hall of Fame as he was inducted with Cal Ripken. I am in southern California, San Diego. The town is called Poway. Hugh: Love it. The first time we met, we were in Lake Las Vegas, and you had just published Illuminate. You're not an author, but you write some really profound stuff. You actually were in a suit and tie that day. What inspired you to write that book, and what is it about? David: I'll tell you what it's about. It's about facing the reality of situations in our life and our business. You see, I have read the positive mental attitude literature, and I have had the honor of meeting Dr. Norman Vincent Peele and some of the luminaries in positive mental attitude. I am honored to be in the latest Think and Grow Rich book, Three Feet from Gold. Nowhere in that literature does it say ignore negative issues, that we should push them under the carpet as it were. I came to realize that my most successful clients were individuals who had the courage to face those issues, not just accentuate the positive as the song goes. But rather than eliminate the negative, I learned the key is to illuminate the negative in a model that I call “face it, follow it, and fix it.” That is what Illuminate is about. It came from the realization from practical experience, that whether it is a nonprofit, a for-profit, or a for-profit that doesn't intend to be a nonprofit but ends up that way, no matter who it is, the individuals who have the courage and the character to face the problems head-on, that is what I found to be the greatest model, and hence the title of Illuminate: Harnessing the Positive Power of Negative Thinking. Hugh: What I can count on if we are having conversations is the words coming out of your mouth are not what I can expect from anyone else, because David Corbin is one of the most creative people I have ever met. I remember when we were introducing ourselves at CEO Space one time, one person said they were a consultant, and then you came along and said, “I am an insultant,” and I said, “I'm a resultant,” and your head went, Whoosh. At least one time I one-upped you. David: It's on my website now. There is an asterisk at the bottom and says, “Maestro Hugh Ballou, genius extraordinaire.” Hugh: I am honored, David Corbin. I have not seen that. A resultant in a pipe organ is a pipe that is not as long. A sixteen-foot pipe has a certain pitch. They don't have space, so they miter it, and the result is a lower tone from a shorter pipe. We actually create a bigger result without having to be bigger ourselves. We can amplify the sound by what we do. You and I, I love this Illuminate. Two weeks ago, I talked to David Dunworth, who is also an author. He has quoted you. We talked about that. You illuminate a lot of people you maybe don't even know. It's really how we amplify what other people do. I'm just energized by the fact that you're here. You have another book that is new. You've written about brand slaughter. Is that the title? David: It is. I was just on the TV news this week talking about that. It was fun. The guy couldn't get over the title. The concept is- People create their brand based upon their values and the brand promise out to the world. They put a check off and think they're done. Don't stop there. You're either building your brand—you, your employees and everyone else in your organization—or killing it. Nothing is neutral. You are either engaged in brand integrity or engaged in what I call brand slaughter, just like manslaughter in the first, second, or third degree. We can read in the news that people are convicted of manslaughter, but you don't often see people convicted of brand slaughter, except maybe in the case of United Airlines or Pricewaterhousecooper in front of 30 million people after 87 years of great service to the Oscars. I don't know if it's brand slaughter. I think they can recoup from that. However, United Airlines is going to have a hard time coming back from that brand slaughter, wouldn't you agree? Hugh: I would. It's one that got highlighted in a series of really dumb things the airline has done. We're talking to passionate people who are providing amazing value but are limited by how people perceive us. I was talking to someone on a radio interview, and he said, “There is a charity in my area, but I quit giving because I really wasn't sure what was happening.” That is part of our brand promise, who we are and what we stand for. David: That's right. When we look at the organizations that part of our charter is to serve others in an amazing way, and there is no shortage of people in the giving field, those organizations are carrying a lot of weight for the society. They are making a promise out there. By and large, they are delivering. However, there are some actions and behaviors they either are taking or their management/leadership is taking or their front line people are taking—they are taking certain behaviors that are undermining the brand and the promise of the entire organization. It doesn't have to be that way. Look, I have had great experiences on United Airlines. I truly have. I love Gershwin, so when I hear that music, it pus me in a wonderful state. I have met some wonderful people. They are not just a group of dirtbags. However, the one person who carries the credibility and reputation of the organization pulled down the asset value of the corporation, the reputation of the corporation, and created for great humor, “United Airlines put the hospital back in hospitality,” such that Southwest Airlines came out and said, “We beat our competition, not our customers.” That kind of stuff is just going to keep going because of one guy making one bad move. I want to tell the leaders, managers, supervisors, and individuals who are carrying the torch of these organizations to do what I teach in this book called an ABI, an Audit of Brand Integrity. Have every one of your employees take a sheet of paper and write down the values, write down the brand, and then write down the touchpoints they have on a daily basis with the individuals they are touching: a customer, a fellow employee, a vendor. Everyone who is carrying that brand, and that individual looks at their touchpoints and asks themselves, “How does the brand live that touchpoint?” What could I do, what might I do, what should I do, what ought I do to really boost that brand? If the organization, let's say United Airlines because we are picking on them, but I can tell you two of them I experienced today alone. But I focus in on that one. If the CEO said, “Folks, this is our brand. We are doing a brand audit. After you do that audit, come back and tell us examples of how that brand is to live in your head. Maybe even tell us some examples of what you have observed in our organization when we have committed brand slaughter.” There is a statute of limitations. Nobody is going to get busted. But it helps us to see how the brand is alive and well and being fed and nurtured and supported, and on the other side, by the law of contrast, we can see where we have fallen down so we don't fall down that hole again. That would be an amazing solution. I implore everyone who is listening, whether you are running a nonprofit or not—maybe you are going to at some point but now you are a parent or a neighbor or a member of a church or synagogue—and ask yourself: What is your brand? How are you living that brand? I think when we get serious about this, we can't solve everything we face, but we can solve anything unless we face it. This is a way of facing the opportunity of building your brand asset value. I sound like a politician. I am David Corbin, and I endorse that message. Hugh: That's right. Your passion is contagious. Our friend from Hawaii, Eve Hogan, is watching on Facebook. We have a lot of people that we know. David, there are four million 501(c) somethings. There are 10's, 6's, 3's, and government organizations. There are all kinds of tax-exempt organizations. They are charities; they are social benefit organizations. Russell and I are on the campaign to eliminate the word nonprofit. Rather than defining ourselves by what we're not, which is not correct either—we do need to make a profit to make things happen—we are social benefit organizations. We leverage intellectual property. We leverage passion. We leverage the good works and products we have for the benefit of humankind. These nongovernmental organizations that we represent have a bigger job and more important job today than ever before. There is real confusion on the whole branding thing. I want to back up a minute to a question posted a few minutes ago. How can nonprofits eliminate their brand? But I think it's important for them to know why they even need a brand and why it is important to be clear about the brand. It's true for any organization, but we are talking to nonprofits. The reason we have top-level business leaders like you on this series is we need to understand good, sound business principles to install into these organizations that we lead. Why is branding important? How do we illuminate that into the communities that want to support us but need that information? David: Let's just say this. Whether you like it or not, you have a brand. Whether you know it or not, you have a brand. These scanners- I have a scanner over there. It's a Hewlett Packard. It doesn't compare to these scanners. *points to eyes* I have a computer that we're working through. It doesn't compare to this computer .*points to brain* Everyone is walking around with these scanners and this computer, and everything counts. Whether you acknowledge it or not, you are creating an impression from the eye to the brain to the heart to the soul of who you are and what you're doing, whether you believe in it or not. I don't know if you believe in gravity or not, but if you walk off of any building in any town of any city, you are going down. It's an immutable fact. Now, thank you for the concept of the not-for-profit. Why talk about what we're not? That was brilliant. You open up my thinking. I thank you for that. I want to let all of my service providers know that everything that you do is creating an impression, whether you believe in it or not. Could you imagine if I came out and said, “I want to talk about hygiene and important it is?” *while sniffling and rubbing his nose and eyes* That would be absurd. I happen to have a 501(c)3 for anti-bullying called Anti Bullying Leadership Experience. Everything that we do is going to be carrying our mojo of the anti-bullying. Could you imagine if I started yelling at one of my vendors and pouncing on them and playing a power trip with them? That would be the antithesis of everything. The point I want to make is make believe that you are on the stage of a microscope and you are being observed in everything that you are doing because you are. And as soon as the leaders know that, they will start looking at things differently. You drive up to the parking lot, see what the front door looks like, see how you are greeted, and you are watching everything that is going on. God is my judge, I must tell you. Hugh, you know I am putting together a little wedding party for my daughter. I was at two places today, one of which the woman didn't show up to the appointment, and she needed to call me back, and she didn't later. One was a very famous place called L'Auberge Del Mar. It's five-star. When I called to make a room reservation there, I was there for seven and a half minutes before I even found someone. I eventually called the manager who called me back. I said, “I'm going to give you a gift. I would like you to call and try to make a room reservation and get the experience of what that's like.” She did. She called me back and goes, “My goodness, Mr. Corbin. I had no idea.” We need to audit all of these activities. Our service organizations, which do not have an unlimited budget that a lot of corporations might have today, must be efficient, must be effective. The best consultation you can get is from yourself experiencing your deliverables and that which it is you are bringing to the market. I just think that we don't have a lot of wiggle room for error. There is a wonderful book by Andy Grove who started a little company called Intel. You probably haven't heard of it. Andy wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. I don't think he is suggesting that we walk around paranoid. I think he is suggesting a strong and deep introspection into what we are doing and how we are doing it. I want to punch that home. Please, please for the benefit of all whom you are serving and whom you could serve in the future, take this message seriously. Know that you have a brand. Live that brand. Make sure that everyone in your auspices know how they live that brand. Hugh: Those are wise words. Mr. Russell Dennis is capturing sound bites. He is very good at picking out things, and you have given him a lot of fresh meat today. David, you work with a variety of different kinds of clients, some of whom you and I both know. When you are working with them on building out the whole framework of the organization they are launching and growing, at what point do you hone in on this brand image, brand promise, brand identity? At what point in this process do you focus on that aspect? David: I believe strongly with begin in the end in mind. It's more than rhetoric. If you are a service organization, really ask the penetrating questions. 1) Why do we exist, and do we need to exist? 2) Who do we serve, and how do we serve them? 3) How do we want to be known? 4) What do we want somebody to yell over to the fence to their neighbor about our organization? When you have that, you work backwards from that. Business planning takes the existing business and carries it out into the future, but strategic planning envisions the future and works backwards from there. I take a deep dive of visualization. Actually, as you know, I am a graduate of Woodstock. I was there in 1969. So I can say not just visualization, but hallucination. I can really hallucinate on those questions. I just was in front of an audience in Atlanta and said, “What do you want? What do you really want?” I say that to businesses as I do strategic planning. Who are you? Who are you really? Then you know all of that. That is when you contemplate for your brand promise and the reputation that you want to earn because you can't demand it. Then when you do that, you get the confidence to move forward. You now have the gristmill, and everything must go through that. How does it go against our brand? Should we do that? Great, tell us how it fits into our brand. When someone does something that is off-target, how did that dent our brand, and what can we do to prevent that from happening again? In direct answer to your question, do this brand audit right form the get-go. I promise you not only does it give individuals a sense of ownership, but it gives them a sense of confidence because nobody wants to mess it up. In Europe, they take it down to the bottom line. When you ding the brand, you are actually pilfering money from the organization. Isn't that something? Imagine if we really own the brand. No one changes the oil when we rent a car because they don't have ownership. When people know what the brand is in their hands, they take ownership. What happens is when you collaborate with your people, you breed creativity and commitment. Now they are engaged, they are enrolled. Nothing can stop a service organization with passionate, engaged people. That is why I plug what you're doing, Hugh. Hugh: Thank you for that, David. That is such a vivid description of how we can upgrade our performance and upgrade the performance of the organization that we have a huge responsibility for as the leader. Perceiving ourselves as the leader doesn't mean we have to do everything. It does mean we need to be involved in the grassroots of what is going on so we can know what is actually happening. And what you talked about brings to mind that we build relationship with others in the organization. To me, that is the foundation of leadership, and it is also the foundation of communications. You gave the gift to the hotel manager that she didn't have because she was too busy doing the top-level things to get into the minutiae and figure out, Whoa, how do we look to the public? You could go to any big company in America and help them do an audit, and it would bring them immense value, probably within the first 30 seconds of your conversation. Part of what you described is part of this word that you have used, which is such a brilliant framing of how we- Everybody in Synervision is a leader. We lead from different perspectives, and we impact everybody else in the organization. We also represent the brand. We don't know who is going to go wild, like United Airlines. That was such a terrible thing for everybody, but it highlighted an underlying problem. Brand slaughter was what brought it to the fore. I bet that cost United a whole lot of money so far, not to mention future business. Let's take it back to the charities. We are doing work that impacts people's lives, sometimes saving people from drug addition or suicide or insanity. There are a lot of worthy things we are doing. We have elements going on that kill the brand. I love it when you talk about this brand slaughter thing. I'd like to put it back into context in what we're doing with this world of charities and how we need to contain this brand and empower our tribes to represent the brand and not be guilty of brand slaughter. Give us a little more food for thought, especially for charities. I work with churches, synagogues, community foundations, semi-government agencies. I find there is a similarity with everybody, that we are not aware of how the culture is represented by the people, and that brand slaughter is committed in minor ways, but also in bigger ways. I am going to shut up now and let you talk about brand slaughter and why that is so crucial for our charities. David: I look at it this way. I believe that the financial results of any organization is largely dependent on the quality of its people and the clarity of its people. Be it a service organization or otherwise, I believe everyone in the organization should create a circle. I don't mean hands holding. I mean draw a circle, a wheel with a hub and spokes. Every one of those spokes is an essential core job function for that person. If it's a leader, we know some of the spokes are delegation, communication, strategic thinking, and financial management. Those are all spokes. Whatever the position is, if you're an operating room nurse or a development manager for a service organization, you create that wheel and look at the spokes. When you do, you start rating yourself on those spokes. The hub means you're terrible. Outside at the end is a number ten. That is mastery. You get real serious with whoever you are, whatever your job is, and rate yourself on a scale of zero to ten. Where you are an eight or nine, great, pat yourself on the back. That is really cool. But don't stop there. Unfortunately, Americans tend to stop at the immediate gratification. Look at what I'm doing great. We say no. Focus in on the threes, fours, and fives. Set a goal to a six, eight, and nine, and close those gaps. I say that to my brothers and sisters who work in the serious world of service delivery. I mean what we would call service providers and not-for-profits or whatever you want to call them. When you get serious, and you rate yourself on a scale of one to ten in those areas, and you start closing those gaps, magic happens. You know what the magic is? You start building a momentum of growing yourself. You can't grow an organization unless the individuals are growing themselves. You show me an organization that does what I'm talking about: closing the gaps, setting personal goals, and getting more efficient and effective in what they do. I don't care if their building burns down; they could accomplish their mission in a tent. They could do it with dirt floors. They could do it anywhere. The saying is, “Wherever two or more people are gathered in His name, there is love.” Let me tell you. Whenever you have a leadership team and a management team that talks about building their people, the only renewable asset in an organization, no matter what happens, they will win. Every one of the employees increases their asset value. You invoke the law of control. People feel good about themselves in the extent they are moving in the direction of destiny. Their confidence goes up. Their competence goes up. People talk about going down the rabbit hole. Now you are going up this amazing spire into success, achievement, productivity, confidence, peace of mind, and self-esteem. I am passionate about that because I have seen it work. I help it work. I live it myself. I couldn't talk about it if I didn't live it, or else that would be a form of brand slaughter. Hugh: I can validate that. You live out the David Corbin brand. You illuminate the brand. Or you don't do it. You are very serious about being spot-on. You show up fully present. I have been doing the German ice cream thing. I am being Häagen-Dazs Mike. Russell, do you have a comment or a question for our guest tonight? Russell Dennis: It's a lot easier to tear a brand apart than it is to put it together. Look at United. Those guys have been around forever and a day. And in the space of a day, they have torn the whole thing down and trashed a lot of good wealth. It's very easy. Brand is about- it goes beyond a logo. People think of a logo when they think of a brand. It's not the logo; it's what is behind the logo that symbolizes something. I am going to pull a definition out of a book that a very wise man wrote, “The brand as is a tangible expression of top-performing culture comes to life when the elements including the mission are taken off the wall and put into daily action at all levels and through all individuals in the organization.” That is a big mouthful. Hugh: Who is the wise person that wrote that? Russ: Just some guy who is sitting around while we chat. Hugh: David Corbin wrote that. Russ: Brand slaughter, to me, is the ultimate thing. To say this is what we stand for and do something completely different. I think there are some people out there who are scrutinizing and are waiting for somebody to make a mistake. I have seen people do that. You run into those folks in a supermarket. People don't intentionally set out to fail, but it happens. These are things that are talked about in the Core Steps to Building a Nonprofit course. When it's building that foundation, they could lay all those things out. The time to figure out your brand is right at the outset. Who do we serve? What is in our wheelhouse? What do we have? What are we weak at? Where are our gaps? I think you have to hammer those strengths and work with them, but when you have a gap, that is where your recruiting starts. You recruit your advisors, you recruit your board. Or you look for collaborative partners. But you find a way to do it that will stay because everything rides on it. You have to have it all in place. You have to have a solid foundation to start making those plans and do the things that you want to do first. What are we going to do first? There is a big vision. I have been working with Sue Lee. We had a great conversation yesterday. I have also been working with Dennis Cole on his foundation. We are looking at some potential sponsors. We have got some things that we are going to be doing really soon that are interesting, but we are ready to break out and go out there and be a service to people by telling them they don't have to succumb to any bad circumstances they have because of an injury or major illness. You can work around that. The whole brand is about living that and walking that walk. These are pretty courageous young men I am proud to be helping. Hugh: Part of that course where you talked about- David, Russell is helping people bring in revenue to their so-called nonprofits/charities. There is a relevance. Russ, I'd like to get David weigh in on the relevance of this branding and attracting revenue, the income that we really need that is the profit that runs our charity. Russell, I'll bring it back to you in a minute, but you had illuminated some things that I wanted to get David to weigh in on. There is a monetary equivalent to the integrity in our brand that you talked about earlier. David: Yeah. Just as in the strategic planning you are asking yourself who are we serving and why are we serving and how are we serving, when you look at the individuals you are appealing to in business development, you say, “Hey, contribute to us. Support us.” When we are looking at that, we then need to reverse-engineer that. That is what I do in my visualization/hallucination. Why are they contributing? What have they contributed to before? What are they contributing to? What is going to make them feel good? How do they know they are contributing to the right organization after they contribute so they might want to contribute again? When you contemplate the psychology of that, much like you look into why people invest into businesses, you think about those donors. Then you know that the emotional connection- You guys have heard me talk about the mojo factor or the God only knows factor. Why are you contributing to them year after year? God only knows. Would you consider not contributing to them or contributing to someone else? Absolutely not. Why? God only knows. They are not sure what that emotional connection is, but you know the emotional connection. In my case, with the anti-bullying, we are looking at the ramifications of some of these young souls who have been bullied and how it impacts their lives. Individuals who are donating to that might have experienced some bullying before and know the pain they went through, as well as the imaginations throughout their life. We know that now, so we know what the mojo factor is to get that individual to know who we are, what we do, and how and why they might want to invest. When that becomes our brand, when they can see it and feel it and taste it and touch it, which it to say there is energy between what we are doing and what we are saying, from the logo and the color and the actions and our behaviors and our sounds, then when we have that going on, we have this awesome connection. Years ago, some of us are old enough to know about Ma Bell. Remember Ma Bell? And then a company came in called Sprint and they wanted to break that God only knows connection, that amazing connection between Ma Bell. Sprint came in and said. It was MCI. They said, “We are going to beat the price,” and Ma Bell came out and said, “Oh yeah? Make them put it in writing.” Ma Bell, you don't talk like that. Ma? They broke that bond, you see. That is just an example of breaking a bond. When it comes to our organizations who are listening today, the bond is that promise. The two great things that my friend Russell just discussed are 1) it's a lot easier to kill a brand than to build a brand. That is so true. And secondly, among other things Russell shared, there are some people out there who are looking for you to mess up. There is an individual looking for the rabbi to have a ham sandwich. There is an individual who is looking for the such-and-such the wrong way. They are looking for that. Why? Because it is easier to find the fault in others than to take the personal responsibility to build themselves. So when you know that, don't be paranoid. But be a little paranoid and know they are watching you. Not only are people scanning you from a neutral point of view, and those scanning you from a positive point of view, but there are also those naysayers who are looking for you to be hypocritical. They are looking for you to mess up. That is when I say have everybody lockstep in knowing what is our promise and behaving that way. You can't go after fund development and not be the brand, or you are wasting your time. Hugh: Whoa. So Russell, I have interrupted you. Were you formulating a question? We are two thirds of the way through our interview, and we are getting into the nitty-gritty. Did you have a really hard question to stump our guest with tonight? Russ: There is no stumping David. It just follows in with what I was saying. The fourth step of building a high-performance nonprofit is to be able to communicate that value that you bring to everybody you come into contact with. You have people that work in the organization. You have donors. You have people who get your services. You need to know how to do it with everyone. With people who are working with you internally, you have to set an expectation so people know exactly what they are signing up for. Understand that you are not everybody's flavor, but you are some people's flavor. When you talk to organizations or donors or people who are going to support you, here is the reality of anything you undertake: There is going to be some risk associated. If you walk in and tell them, “Everything is going to be peachy,” when you are in the service mind-frame or an entrepreneur, we can be hopeless optimists a lot of times. It has been my experience that a lot of things take twice the money, time, and effort they are going to take because we go in with those good intentions. We have to be fully transparent, especially if we discover we have some problems or snags implementing the project. The time to talk about that is as soon as you discover it and look at it and say, “Well, we may not be where we quite want to be.” Up front, transparent. Illuminate as David has talked about. That is a book that is on my shelf. I love that book. I read the thing in one sitting. A lot of people want to cover up. Or human egos want to make us look good. When we are in the business of trying to help people with some serious societal problems, you have to get the ego out of the way. That is hard to do. It makes it difficult to get organizations to collaborate or talk to one another. I have seen a lot of that, too. My philosophy is that you can get a hell of a lot done if you are not hung up on who gets the credit. It is an uphill climb often, but I think the landscape is changing a little bit. People are going into business with a socially benefited mind. They create business structures like the LLC and the B-corp and the benefit corporations. We are seeing a lot of these social enterprises crop up. People can not only make a profit but can also do some good. It's all about doing some good, but there are certain things we have to look at. It has to be run efficiently and effectively, but it doesn't matter what your tax stamp says. Hugh: There is a comment on Twitter: “Doing what you love, loving whom you serve, believing that your nonprofit is vital. I knew too many whose hearts aren't in…” That's interesting. David, do you want to respond to Russ before we go to the final set of questions here? David: Well, a couple things that come to mind. Something that you had said earlier, Hugh, and something that Russell just said. I'll start with Russell. Yes, you need to face the issue. Face a lot of issues. Look at what happened. Happily, there will be lemonade coming out of this lemon on the United Airlines. Not for that doctor, but he will get a huge settlement. That is not what he wanted. I think the industry is shifting now. I read somewhere that Southwest Airlines has changed their model around overselling seats. Sometimes it takes this type of situation for people to learn, and then they shift. A lot of people don't really appreciate their life or family until God forbid maybe a near-death experience, and that is what wakes them up. I say practice safety in driving before then, don't wait for a near-death experience. Start contemplating for the potential issues or challenges that might happen in your organization before it happens. That is the part of roleplaying what could/might happen. What could possibly happen in this situation? Those are the types of things. Don't be a negative nelly. Don't get me wrong. The government has something called Sarbanes-Oxley that says the corporation has the fiduciary responsibility to anticipate, predict, and prepare for a natural disaster. It makes good sense. You don't have to mandate that to me as a business owner. Of course, if I am manufacturing a car, I want to make sure that if the person who creates my rearview mirrors goes down, I am still going to be able to meet the needs of my organization, my shareholders, my staff, my employees. Of course I am going to do that. I don't need regulation. For crying out loud, I don't even need the Americans with Disabilities Act, which is to provide reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. For crying out loud, that is just good sense. It is just good sense. Plus it is the right thing to do. But be that as it may, we need to face the issue before it happens. Oh by the way, be prepared for facing the issue after it happens. So Mr. President of United Airlines, anticipate if a problem goes down how you are going to handle it. Don't say he was only following procedure. There was a guy in Nazi Germany who used to say that, too. I was just following procedure. I hate to make an extreme example, but I make a point following procedure. Following procedure, pulling a guy off, breaking his teeth. Come on. To say that is just ridiculous. What Pricewaterhouse did after they had a big brouhaha in front of 33 million people, they had 87 years of doing the job really well. What happened after that is they came back and apologized. They said Mea culpa. Just like the Japanese corporate executives did if a plane goes down, they resign. They take personal responsibility. But what Pricewaterhouse did is they said: It was our responsibility, and we apologize. We are looking into it. We want to congratulate those people on camera, including Jimmy Kimmel, for handling it elegantly. Even bringing a little humor into it. We apologize from the bottom of our hearts—I am paraphrasing here—and we will get to the bottom of this. We will let you know what happens so it never happens again. You see, that ding wasn't brand slaughter. It was kind of like getting a ticket for tinted windows or a light being out. I believe we are going to forgive them after a while, but it will be hard to forgive United Airlines after they issued responsibility and took that cheap ticket out. I'm piggybacking off some of the comments you made earlier. I think it's an important point. Anticipate what can go wrong. It doesn't require legislation for that; it requires common sense. Then practice. Practice so it comes out naturally. Sir Lawrence Olivier said the key to acting is spontaneity, which is the result of long, hard, tedious practice. I say practice. Hugh: I could hear you talk all night, David. I think people would be with us this long. There are people listening to you with lots of focus. We could all reframe our own leadership. The question we threw out for people to think about is from the leadership position. My forty years of conducting, I know that what the orchestra and the choir sees is what I get. The culture is a reflection of our leadership. Representing the brand internally helps them represent the brand externally. My question to you is, in this whole spirit of illuminating- I don't know about you, but I find some leaders who have more blind spots than awareness on the impact they are having on the brand externally and internally. You can do your own inventory, but I don't think we can. We need to illuminate with some outside, impartial person asking us the right questions. David, how can a leader, especially one that has been in a position for a while, keep it fresh and illuminate our own representation of our brand internally and externally? David: I think it's about integrity. Integrity is a powerful word. It's thrown around. But integrity, the leader living the values of the business. I can't ask you to do what I'm not willing to do. They say one of the biggest sports in life is soccer, but I don't think that's true. I think the biggest sport in life is boss-watching. Seriously. I really think that. They set the culture. They set the pace. To the extent they are leading with honor and integrity, with the values and behaviors and all. I talk about illuminate, face it, follow, and fix it. One time, instead of getting out of the shower and running past the mirror, I stopped. I didn't quite like what I saw, and I saw a guy who was 40-50 pounds overweight. I thought, My goodness. How dare I talk about illuminate if I don't face it. I faced it. I am asking everyone, every leader, to face: Are you living in integrity? I followed it. I found out why I was gaining weight. I was having a glass of wine or two every night, and it brought my blood sugar down. I would eat anything that was there. There are sardines and chocolate syrup. Looks great! And then I'd go to sleep. I didn't realize I was training to be an athlete. There is an athlete who drinks alcohol and eats a lot of food at night, and that athlete is called a sumo wrestler. I was training to be a sumo wrestler. I couldn't be a leader of Illuminate and be that hypocritical. The fix it was to take small steps and make some transformation. I ask my leaders, my brothers and sisters who are leaders, to get serious. I walked into an association that has to do with diabetes, and I saw a big Coke machine there. I look at some of our organizations who are in the health industry, and they are not healthy. I did a lot of work with a company. I won't tell you the name of it, but it rhymes with Schmaiser Permanente. They are talking about their model called Thrive. And I look at some of their employees, and they are out of integrity. I say, “Don't talk about thrive. You are better off saying nothing. When I see the word ‘thrive' and see people who are grossly unhealthy, I know you are hypocritical. I wonder where else you are cutting corners. I don't like that.” Everything counts. Everything counts. I scan, I think, I feel. Maybe below the line of consciousness. But if it is not in integrity, I am not donating my time and my money to you. I am going to move on to someone who is. Any business, any organization, the leader must lead by example. When she falls down, she says, “Mea culpa. You know what. I fell down. I apologize for that. Here is my plan.” The feminization of business today is so important. Authenticity comes with that, and a lot of drive. When we have the character to say, “Whoops, I messed up, wow, that is a big difference,” that is leadership. Leadership is real. Vulnerability, authenticity, those are just words. They are being overused, but they are real. Get serious about that. Hugh: You are preaching our song. We preach that leadership is influence. We get to choose if we influence positively or negatively. Those are good parting words, but I am going to give you the chance to do a wish or thought or tip for people as we leave. I want to recognize that they can go to davidcorbin.com. David Corbin leaps over tall buildings. Do you really run a 5K every Sunday? David: Every Saturday when I am in town. Hugh: Wow. And you went to Woodstock? You know who else was there? David: My brother David Gruder. Hugh: Yes, he was at Woodstock. You and I are contemporaries. I am a little older than you are. I have never had anybody on this interview series take a sound bite from Rhapsody in Blue. He is a modern-day Renaissance man with many skills. David Corbin, you are indeed a blessing to a lot of people, but tonight, to Russ and me for sharing this great stuff with so many charities. As we are winding up this really powerful interview, David, what is a parting thought or tip you'd like to leave with these amazing leaders that are making such a difference in people's lives? David: I would express my gratitude for their passion, for their hard work. It is difficult today. Service organizations, it seems as though they are being told to jump through hoops and then they make the hoops smaller and then they set the hoops on fire. It's not easy. We need to attract people to volunteer and donate and work for our noble mission. Every morning, I wake up. My hands and knees are on the ground like our Muslim brothers, and I give thanks and gratitude every single morning. I want to give gratitude to those of you who are taking the rein and doing this amazing work, this social work. I thank you for that. I deeply hope that some of these ideas might help you be more effective, more efficient, and more joyous and confident in what you do. Thank you for what you do. Hugh: David Corbin, special words indeed. Thank you for sharing your wisdom with so many people. Your words will live on. Thanks so much for being with us. David: Thanks, brother. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode 17 Interview With David Barnett Hello Heartreperenuers. It’s Terry Levine and thanks for tuning in to Heartrepreneur® radio. I know many of you are very curious about selling your businesses. I’ve never been able to get a great expert to share their knowledge. That changes today. Today I have David Barnett. He has been evaluating businesses since 2008. He is a certified machinery equipment appraiser since 2009. He was the first person in his market to earn the certified business intermediary designation from the international business brokers association in 2009. He has worked with clients on transactions and that led him to the field for preparing businesses for sale and helping owners maximize value. I am excited about that. In 2014 he formalized a process to help businesses systematize their operations and formalize their organizations in bite sized steps that required minimal disruption of operation. This is getting to be really exciting. I want to tell you about his first book. It came out in 2014 and was an Amazon best seller. Today I invited him to talk about 2016, how to sell my own business. All of his books have achieved top selling spots in Amazon. I know David is busy. He does all kinds of things. Workshops, business acquisition, a YouTube channel, and a blog. David, thanks for taking time out of your day to join us here today on Heartrepreneur® radio. David: Thanks for inviting me. Terri: How did you and why did you resonate with the concept of selling businesses. How did that show up for you? David: It started because I was brokering debt solutions for small business owners. People were coming to me looking for ways to get money to start or expand their business. Increasingly, they were looking for money to buy businesses. What I noticed was there was a real lack of expertise in my market to help people do this properly. I saw a lot of poorly structured deals. I saw that many had no idea of what they doing. So I jumped into that field. I was in the industry from 2008-2011. I ended up leaving that business model behind me and now today what I do is work with people around the world to help them sell their own business. Instead of being a broker. Terri: The reason I am stoked about this is very often I talk to business owners of all kinds of businesses and they don’t have an end game. A lot of them are getting older, don’t have an end game. So let’s talk about both. What would you advise to someone who is starting out and what would you advise to someone who is getting towards the place where they should think about selling their business. David: I tell people in my workshops and seminars, that you should have a plan for getting out of your business as well getting into it. Terri: I am glad you said that. David: A business is an asset. It is something that you own that is supposed to generate cash flow. When I owned my business brokerage and people were coming in to sell their business, they had one of the five top reasons to sell. Those were burnout, divorce, poor health, relocation and retirement. Four out of the five have nothing to do with how old you are. Four out of the five are not things that we plan for. I always advise people that if they are consistently considering the sale of the business and keeping their business in a saleable condition, not only will it be easier to sell when the time comes, but here is the great part, if your business is ready to sell and you have systems in place and everything is ready and you can hand over the reins to someone else, you will end up with an easier, manageable business in the present paying you more to own it today, regardless if it sells or not. Terri: That is fantastic. That is important for people. I go with Steven Covey. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Heartrepreneur® Radio community today: heartrepreneur.com Heartrepreneur® Radio Facebook Terri Levine Twitter Terri Levine Instagram Heartrepreneur® Radio Pinterest Terri Levine YouTube Terri Levin LinkedIn

"There is no better time to start a media venture because you no longer need the approval of some executive somewhere or pass a Myers Briggs personality test in order to get a show. You can just start it." - David Pakman (Host of The David Pakman Show) Today we interview David Pakman, Host of The David Pakman Show; a multi-platform politics and news talk show currently airing on TV, radio and online. You'll want to listen to this interview to learn more about the rise of independent marketing, how technology is giving more of a competitive advantage to those looking to tell a story and David's words of wisdom on how to leave an impact through marketing and digital media when entering into the media industry. More information about David: https://www.davidpakman.com Twitter: twitter.com/davidpakmanshow Facebook: www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow YouTube: www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/david.pakman/ More information about us: www.WaverleyKnobs.com Facebook: www.facebook.com/waverleyknobs Twitter: www.twitter.com/waverleyknobs Instagram: www.instagram.com/waverleyknobs Resources: Free Speech TV: https://www.freespeech.org/collection/david-pakman-show The David Pakman Show subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow/ The David Pakman Show - Podcast on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-david-pakman-show/id402050558?mt=2 Valley Free Radio: http://valleyfreeradio.org/ MassLive Article on David Pakman: http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/northampton_david_pakman_midweek_politics.html David Pakman on Nancy Grace's HLN Show: KS Shooting Suspect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mjBS8_oPnI Neil Degrasse Tyson Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nlWLdlB7J8 Pacifica Radio: http://pacificanetwork.org/ Ben Carson and Donald Trump: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/is-ben-carson-the-worst-or-the-best-surrogate-of-all-time-yes/2016/05/13/0afc3c52-17ac-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html Paid political online trolls: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2016/4/21/1518537/-Clinton-SuperPac-Admits-to-Paying-Internet-Trolls Myers Briggs Test: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/ Sample Episode Transcription: Evin: Thank you for listening to episode 30 of Branch-Out: The Digital Media & Marketing Podcast with Evin Charles Anderson and Tatiana Ivan. Today we have a very special guest that we're very excited about. It is David Pakman from The David Pakman Show. Now if you haven't heard of David Pakman, let me tell you, you're missing out. He has an absolutely amazing political commentary show, which is multi-platformed and is on radio, television, and internet. It's airing on Pacifica radio stations, Free Speech TV via DIRECT TV and Dish Network, and on public access TV nationwide and via internet podcast or even YouTube. David holds an MBA from Bentley University and an Undergraduate Degree in Economics and Communications from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. David is also joined by producer and childhood friend, Louis Motamedi. Thank you very much for joining us today David. We really appreciate you being here. David: Thanks for having me. Evin: Absolutely. We're very excited. We are big fans of your podcast and as well as of your show. We were [inaudible 00:01:25] about that, especially on YouTube, which you can capture certain clips and everything from. You have a great membership structure to it too. Can you go a little bit into that? [Learn more today by listening to the entire episode!]

David: What does it take to start and build your own successful e-commerce store? What are the common mistakes that e-commerce stores make and how do you increase your e-commerce conversion rates? Those are just 3 of the questions that I intend to ask today's special guest, Brandon Nolte. Brandon, welcome to DMR. Brandon: Thank you so much for having me, David. David: Thanks for joining us. Brandon is an e-commerce entrepreneur. He's founded a store, bringing in over $20,000 a month in revenue. His favorite things include hiring, working with his awesome team, and saying no! So Brandon, what prompted you to start an e-commerce store? Brandon: I guess I was looking for a way out of my previous business, which was a Kindle publishing business. It was actually doing really well for me, but I wanted to grow myself and my skill set. I thought e-commerce sounded like fun. It's probably not the most scientific way to go about it. Yeah, I was really just looking to grow myself as an entrepreneur. I feel like the e-commerce business model really allows you to expand your skill set. There's so many things you can learn from e-mail marketing to customer service to building teams and stuff like that. David: How long ago was it that you actually started? Brandon: The store went live basically January 1st. It's been running pretty much this whole year. David: Okay. Wow! We're talking just the beginning of October 2014. You're talking about 9 months or so it's been going. Fairly fresh, but you're obviously doing very well already. What would you say are the things you've done so far that has driven along the furthest that made it to the success that it is today? Brandon: I think the first one is certainly finding a good market. I ended up getting into a market where I saw that there was demands. I think, a lot of times, people go into businesses because they have a great idea or they think they have a great idea, and they have to try to validate it with the market. What really convinced me to get into my particular market was just talking to somebody who was already in it. After hearing his success, I wanted to get in. That was validation enough for me to try it. I guess the point I'm trying to make is you want to make sure that there is enough demand for your store to grow. That's certainly one of the things that's important.