Podcasts about doug so

About Doug C. Brown: Doug C. Brown is the CEO of CEO Sales Strategies and a Sales Revenue and Profit Growth Expert. He has led client award-winning and high-performance teams as well as pioneered profitable development programs for companies. He has advised companies such as Intuit, CBS Television, Procter & Gamble, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Nationwide, Embassy Suites, Inc. 500 to 5000 companies, and thousands of other businesses and entrepreneurs. As an independent division head, Doug created, trained, and presented high-impact, results-oriented web seminars for prospects of Tony Robbins and Chet Holmes. Doug increased their division sales by 864% and close rate by 62% in just six months. Today, he helps companies and individuals increase their sales by incorporating sales revenue and profit growth strategies used by top 1% performers through the Top 1% Academy, Sales Revenue, and Profit Growth Masterminds. He also specializes in creating commission-only sales teams and advises companies on how to properly prepare for a high-performing sales team so they can attract and retain elite sales producers. Check out the latest episode of our Conversational Selling podcast to learn more about Doug.In this episode, Nancy and Doug discuss the following:Understanding commission-only salesOptimizing sales strategiesDoug's experience in revolutionizing seminars for Tony Robbins and Chet HolmesHow does someone become a 1 % earnerThe definition and importance of sales optimizationWorking techniques to close the sale Why “Maybies” are the great start of salesKey Takeaways: Optimization is taking a look at everything that you're doing and then asking two questions: How do I make it more effective? How do I make it more efficient?There are no bad clients, there are bad sales and buying decisions that turn into bad clients.If you make mistakes, don't beat yourself up for it because multi-billionaires who are selling make mistakes too."I became a 1% earner firstly, through declaring and deciding that that's what's going to be. It's a mental game in that regard. A lot of people talk about wanting to become a 1% earner, they want to double their sales, but it's just an idea. It's not a committed idea. Firstly, it requires that commitment and, quite frankly, one's now asking to be in the top 1% of earners in the world. You know, that's a commitment, and it takes time, energy, a lot of studying, and a lot of practice—and frankly, money, right? Because we've got to, we must be investing in things and getting around people who are in the 1% and learning what they're doing and how they're doing it. You know, fortunately for us, we train on that. So, you know, somebody comes here, obviously, they'll learn that. But it's still about getting around, you know, and I still do the same thing today, Nancy. I mean, I search out people that I feel a little uncomfortable being around because of their place in life, right?” – DOUG"So, the conversation of selling is really about having a conversion conversation, and I'll explain what that is versus having a sales conversation, right? Conversion conversations are really doing three things. First, they're boosting rapport continuously. So, you know, we're working on trust, like, and respect. A little luck sometimes doesn't hurt, but it's really about promoting those three. Second, it's constantly moving the conversation in the direction of the business return on investment or personal return on investment that the potential buyer is always looking for. I can expand upon that. And third, we're always creating what we call "yes states." When we move from step to step in the buyer's mind, they're thinking, "Yes, this makes sense," "Yes, wow," or "I didn't know that that's good." You want to constantly create a state of yes throughout the process. Now, on business and personal returns, people buy for different reasons, but they all fall into two categories: What is my business return on investment? What is my personal return on investment? When we really understand that ideal client profile and the ideal buyer persona—their motivations, what they want, need, feel, fear, and value—we can construct our conversation to be more like what we're doing right now: just having a conversation. It's not about taking them step by step, like, "Well, hey, we built rapport here. Next step, let's do a discovery session. Next step, let's..." and so on. That's a sales conversation. If you do conversational conversion the right way, in most cases, you never even do a presentation. They never ask for it." – DOUG"So, the other thing I wanted to say about that, Nancy, is if they're getting a "maybe," I would suggest that through their conversational conversion, they haven't been qualifying or disqualifying. When we're thinking about creating these yes states, if we're creating these yes states, but they're turning out to be "nos," it's like your radar goes up as the selling entity. It might be time for you to disengage or at least qualify why. A lot of times, the "maybes" will come at the end because they're thinking the same thing you are: "I'm really not sure if this will work, but we're trying to get it to a sale." And that's where the apprehension comes up, right? As the seller, we would be much better off going—and we do teach this—if you are not the right fit for this, you gracefully disengage and find out who the right fit is. It goes a long way versus just trying to push the sale. Because there are no bad clients, but there are bad sales and buying decisions that turn into bad clients." – DOUGConnect with Doug C. Brown:LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougbrown123/CEO Sales Strategies: https://ceosalesstrategies.com/Download the E-Book: https://www.ceosalesstrategies.com/1PETry Our Proven, 3-Step System, Guaranteeing Accountability and Transparency that Drives RESULTS by clicking on this link: https://oneofakindsales.com/call-center-in-a-box/  Connect with Nancy Calabrese: Twitter:https://twitter.com/oneofakindsalesFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/One-Of-A-Kind-Sales-304978633264832/Website:https://oneofakindsales.comPhone: 908-879-2911 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ncalabrese/Email: leads@oneofakindsales.com 

HIGHLIGHTSGrowing up developing sales skills and understanding its valueHow selling door to door taught Doug about business conversationsPutting importance on the buyer's point of viewWorking in Oracle and adopting an environment of disciplineThe preference for sales productivity instead of sales trainingQUOTESDoug: "That is what I recommend to every seller going into a conversation with a prospect or even an existing customer. Have a point of view of what's going on in their world, their industry, their company, and in their role or function."Doug: "The more I knew and understood about my domain—power tools, construction, accessories, the works—it made it easier for me to go into a company or business and assess what's going on and develop a point of view."Doug: "We learned discipline. It was like military. You're here on time, you hit your numbers, you do what we say you're going to do. If you follow the playbook, you're going to be successful. There's not that same level of discipline in the world we live in today and, man, it's frustrating."Doug: "So, in order to go sell more products, you've got to help them figure out how to sell what they already have. You can't go expand or upsell your customers until you help them get the most value out of what they already have."Find out more about Doug in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglandis/Twitter: https://twitter.com/douglandisYou can find and connect with Kevin in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khopp/Website: https://www.hoppconsultinggroup.com/

Episode 149 – Truth and Proof – Part 9 – The New Testament is Reliable Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: …why are some of you saying there will be no resurrection of the dead? For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless. 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 12 through 14, New Living Translation ******** Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. As listeners who have been with us for the last several episodes know we have been working on a series that addresses Christian apologetics. We’ve called this series “Truth and Proof.” This series was inspired by Dr. Gregg Alexander who has been teaching Sunday school for more than 25 years. Several years ago Dr. Alexander developed a very similar series for his class. When we learned about it, we were so impressed we wanted everyone to have access to the wonderful work Dr. Alexander had done. And Dr. Alexander has been kind enough to join us on a few of our episodes during the series. But today we are joined by another special guest. Today on the show we have Doug Apple who is the manager of the WAVE-94 radio station in Tallahassee, Florida. Doug is an extremely faithful student of the Bible and he has thought deeply about his faith. Doug would you like to take a couple of minutes and tell us a little about yourself? DOUG: - Introductory comments - VK: Wow. 14 grandchildren! That’s such a blessing and I’m sure one of the reasons Doug has been so blessed is because of his love for – and dedication to – God’s Word. Doug is so serious about his love of scripture that he has taken upon himself to memorize entire books of the Bible including several from the New Testament. So, it’s particularly appropriate for us to have Doug here today because today on Anchored by Truth we are going to tackle one of the most important topics about the truth of Christianity – the reliability of the New Testament documents. The New Testament is the part of the Bible that tells us about Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. DOUG: And, of course, we get the very title of our faith from Jesus. Jesus was the Christ. The term “Christ” comes from the Greek word Christos which means the “anointed one” or the “chosen one.” This is the same term as “Messiah” which came from the ancient Hebrew word “Mashiach.” So, Christianity is essentially a belief in the work and person of Christ. And while that sounds very simple to say it’s actually a truth so profound we’ll spend all eternity understanding it more thoroughly. But we certainly begin our understanding of that truth by reading the New Testament documents. As such, knowing that the New Testament is reliable and true is a fundamental part of demonstrating that the God that logic tells us must exist is, in fact, the God of the Bible. VK: Christianity depends entirely on the historical person of Jesus Christ. Otherwise Paul could not have said the verse that we heard in our opening scripture from 1 Corinthians. Notice that Paul said, “For if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless.” The Apostle Paul stated very plainly that the Christian faith is all about Jesus. And, while there is information about the Messiah in the Old Testament, that information is prophetic. The Old Testament anticipates the arrival of Jesus. But it is in the New Testament that hear we hear about that arrival. Therefore, since the New Testament is the primary source of information about the words and works of Christ, if it is not accurate then we do not possess a first-hand account of Jesus’ claims, character, and credentials. The historical integrity of the New Testament is crucial to Christian apologetics. DOUG: Before we get too much into our discussion about why we can have confidence in the reliability of the New Testament, we should probably note that there are some people who believe that no history can be objectively known. Unfortunately, we live in a time when the past is often manipulated by the subjective desires of historians, writers, politicians, social change advocates, con artists, or others who have an agenda that is served by a revision of history. Political correctness doesn’t just affect how contemporary issues are being framed. It is also being woven into all kinds of discussions of history. Pretty much everyone who is paying attention knows that. But political correctness is not what I’m talking about here. There is a strain of thought among some elites, especially academic elites, who believe that it is impossible for us to know anything true from or about history. VK: But the kind of radical skepticism that would say that history is objectively unknowable eliminates the possibility of knowing anything at all about the past. As soon as we get anywhere close to such a radical belief all university history and classical departments evaporate – there is no source about past events that can be trusted. Such skepticism would eliminate all historical science, such as anthropology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, and forensic science because each of these depends on examining and interpreting remains or evidence from the past. Since everything not occurring now is history, such a belief system would eliminate all eyewitness testimony. Even living witnesses could only testify to what they saw at some other point in time. But if this skepticism were true their testimony would not be considered relevant, real, or accurate. On the other hand, if their testimony could be accepted while they are living, wouldn’t it also be true to say that the records they leave behind are just as credible as their testimony in the present time? DOUG: And, another question: isn’t a statement that says we can’t objectively know history an attempt at establishing an absolute and objective truth about history? The statement that “The past is not objectively knowable” is itself an objective statement about the past. Therefore, the position against the knowability of history is self-defeating. It fails the test of its own central premise. In effect, metaphorically speaking, the idea that we can’t know anything true from or about history shoots itself in the head. VK: So, let’s move on to talking about the reliability of the New Testament documents. As we have indicated without a reliable New Testament, we have no objective, historical way to know what Jesus said or did. We cannot establish whether Jesus was God, what Jesus taught, or what His followers did and taught. We must know if the sources or witnesses used by the authors were reliable, and we must show that the manuscripts were written early enough and with enough attention to detail to be accurate records of actual events. As we look at these questions, we will see that we have every reason to be confident in the accuracy of the New Testament. DOUG: So, what you’ve proposed is that the first step in establishing the historical accuracy of the New Testament is to show that the documents were written by reliable eyewitnesses of the events or their contemporaries. And the second step you mentioned is to show that the New Testament documents have been accurately transmitted from the time of their original autographs, i.e. the original documents, down from the time of their creation to our time. And contrary to what many critics believe and say, there is more evidence for the historical accuracy of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ than for any other event from the ancient world. These issues are a crucial part of the overall rational defense of Christianity. VK: So, let’s start by looking first at one of the things we just mentioned: the dating of the New Testament manuscripts. One of the things we want to determine is whether they were “early enough?” In other words, were they prepared close enough in time to the events they tell us about to be reliable? Critics of the Bible and of Christianity would have better arguments if they are able to separate the actual events from the records of those events by as much time as possible. If they can stretch out the time from the date of the event to when the event was first recorded they can argue that the New Testament writers created the events rather than reported them. This then permits them to argue that the New Testament, especially the Gospels, more than likely contains myths. This is a common assertion among scholars. The longer the time between an event and the first record made about it the more likely that embellishments will creep in. And another thing we want to determine is the question of authorship. Said differently, we want to be sure that the record writer was not too greatly removed from the event. Distance is not a problem if the writer was also an eye witness of the event, but historical records are often prepared by people who were not eye witnesses themselves. But we would still consider a record to be reliable if the writer spoke directly to an eye witness or had direct access to supporting information such as records or artifacts that corroborated key details. DOUG: So, let’s take a look at some specifics at one of the most important books of the New Testament, the book of Acts. The Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were both written by Luke. The person to whom they were written “Theophilus”, the style, and the vocabulary indicate that they were, indeed, written by the same person. The date and authenticity of the Acts of the Apostles is crucial to the historical account of early Christianity, because if Acts was written before AD 70 then it has great historical value in informing us of the earliest Christian beliefs. AD 70 is a crucial date because that was when the famous Roman general and later emperor, Titus, destroyed Jerusalem. When Titus destroyed Jerusalem a great many Jews died and the rest were scattered. The nation of Israel disappeared in 70 AD and would not be restored for almost 2 millennia. It was ultimately reconstituted in 1948 by the allies after World War II. VK: So, if the book of Acts was written before 70 AD there’s a much better chance Luke would have been able to speak to eyewitnesses while they were still alive. And the fact that Acts was written by Luke is also crucial. We know from Paul’s letters that Luke was a companion of the Apostle Paul during many of his ministry travels. Therefore, if Acts was written by Luke, it brings us right to the apostolic circle. In other words this means Acts was written by someone who would been a close companion to those who participated in the events reported. And Luke himself was likely an eyewitness to some of the events. In other words, we have the very closest relationship of the author to the historical report. DOUG: Right. So, that is one big point about the historicity of the book of Acts. The author would have had personal knowledge of the events he recorded or he spoke to people who had personal knowledge. As to the question of the when Acts as written, the traditional date assigned to the creation of Acts is 62 AD. This means it was written before the loss of many of the eyewitnesses from the destruction of Jerusalem. It also means it was written by a contemporary of Jesus himself because Jesus died in approximately 33 AD. One person who has assigned a date for the composition of Acts to no later than 62 AD is Roman historian Colin Hemer. Hemer cites a wide range of evidence for his view. For instance, there is no mention in the book of Acts of the fall of Jerusalem. This would be an extremely unlikely omission if the fall of Jerusalem had already occurred. Acts contains no hint of the outbreak of the Jewish War which occurred in AD 66. Acts also does not mention the dramatic deterioration of relations between Romans and Jews which preceded the war. This implies it was written before that time. Moreover, there is no hint of the deterioration of Christian relations with Rome which was caused by Nero’s persecution of the Christians in the late 60s. Hemer believes that Acts was most likely composed between 60 AD and 62 AD because of these and other factors. VK: The other factors include the fact that there is no hint of the death of Jesus’ half-brother, James, at the hands of the Sanhedrin. According to the famous Jewish historian, Josephus, in his book, Antiquities, James was martyred in 62 AD. Had the martyrdom of James already occurred it is extremely unlikely that Luke would have ignored an event that important to the early church. Also, the prominence and authority of the Jewish sect called the Sadducees noted in Acts belongs to the pre-70 AD era. This indicates that Acts was written before the collapse of the Sadducees’ political cooperation with Rome. DOUG: Yes. Also, Luke doesn’t give any indication in the book of Acts that he is aware of Paul’s letters, his epistles, to the various churches in Greece and Asia. In both his gospel and in Acts Luke is very careful about getting particular details right. If Acts was written later in the first century, why wouldn’t Luke have attempted to support his historical account by citing relevant sections of the Epistles? The Epistles evidently circulated through the churches and must have become available sources because they were passed along in every generation. This silence suggests that Acts was written early during the apostolic era. Finally, the ending of the book of Acts does not continue Paul’s story. It simply stops at the end of the two year described in Acts 28, verses 30-31. VK: Those verses say “For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.” DOUG: So, the fact that Acts just ends with a simple declaration of what Paul had been doing for the previous two years makes it look very much like Luke was just bringing his narrative up to date at that point. Remember, that Luke tells us that he was writing both of the books attributed to him to a man named Theophilus in order for Theophilus to “know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” In his book, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, Hemer says, “It may be argued simply that Luke had brought the narrative up to date at the time of writing, the final note being added at the conclusion of the two years.” So, all of these factors tell us that the date for the composition of the book of Acts was quite likely not later than 62 AD and may have been even earlier. VK: So why have we spent so much time now focusing on demonstrating that the book of Acts is a reliable record of history. How does this fit in to our larger goal of establishing that the God that exists is the God of the Bible? DOUG: Because, if Acts is shown to be accurate history, then it brings credibility to its reports about the most basic Christian beliefs. For instance, the book of Acts contains accounts of the life, death (Acts 2:23), resurrection (Acts 2:23, 29–32), and ascension of Christ (Acts 1:9–10). It also contains the records of a number of miracles (Acts 2:22) and it gives us important contextual information that enable us to make better use of that Paul’s letters to the churches that are also important parts of the New Testament. VK: Acts also contains significant details about Jerusalem, Rome, and many other geographical areas that have been extensively substantiated by historical and archaeological research. In other words, Acts is confirmed by overwhelming evidence. Nothing like this amount of detailed confirmation exists for any other book from antiquity. This is not only a direct confirmation of the earliest Christian belief in the death and resurrection of Christ, but also, indirectly, of the Gospel record, since Luke also wrote a detailed Gospel. The evidence that we have that validates Acts confirms not only the historical accuracy of the book of Acts but also the reliability and validity of several other books of the New Testament. DOUG: Exactly. Luke’s Gospel directly parallels the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. As we’ve been talking about, the best evidence is that Acts was composed around AD 60 which places its composition only about twenty-seven years after the traditional dating of the death of Jesus. This places the writing during the lifetime of eyewitnesses to the events recorded – and as we have mentioned this enhances our confidence in the trustworthiness of what it reports. This dating of Acts does not allow time for any mythological development by persons living generations after the events. Furthermore, if Luke wrote Acts, then his “former treatise” (Acts 1:1), the Gospel of Luke, should be seen as written at an even earlier date, and, therefore, easily within the life-time of apostles and eye-witnesses who could have refuted all or part of Luke’s Gospel if he had gotten anything wrong. VK: And as we have mentioned in other episodes of Anchored by Truth we have to remember that all of the New Testament documents were being written in a world that was largely hostile to Christianity. If Luke had been creating fabrications it would have been easy for the people of the time to rebut his books and many of the people of the time had a strong motivation for doing so. The fact that Luke’s records have survived with the content they did tells us that he was reporting the truth. DOUG: So, let’s take a quick look at some of the other writings of Paul. It is widely accepted by critical and conservative scholars that 1st Corinthians was written by AD 55 or 56. This is only about a quarter century after the crucifixion. Further, in 1 Corinthians Paul speaks of “most” of the 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrection who were still alive when he wrote (15:6). This shows that was a substantial body of people at the time that Paul wrote who could confirm the central fact of the Christian faith, Christ’s resurrection from the dead. VK: And along with 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians and Galatians are known to be early. All three reveal a historical interest in the events of Jesus’ life and give facts that agree with the Gospels. Paul speaks of Jesus’ virgin birth (Galatians 4:4), sinless life (2 Corinthians 5:21), death on the cross (1 Corinthians 15:3); resurrection on the third day (1 Corinthians 15:4), and post-resurrection appearances (1 Corinthians 15:5-8). Paul also gives historical details about Jesus’ contemporaries, the apostles (1 Corinthians 15:5-8), including his private encounters with Peter and the apostles (Galatians 1:18-2:14). DOUG: Critics of the New Testament sometimes claim that the New Testament was not written until almost 400 years after Jesus lived – but these critics are confusing the date that the New Testament documents were written with the time at which they were compiled into the form that we most commonly see them today. We have abundant evidence that the New Testament documents were all prepared well before the end of the 1st century AD. For example, we know that the many of the books of the New Testament were widely quoted by the early church fathers starting in the late 1st century AD. Well for the early church fathers to quote the documents they had to have already been in wide circulation. VK: For instance, of the four Gospels alone there are 19,368 citations by the church fathers from the late first century on. This includes 268 by Justin Martyr who lived from 100 AD until 165 AD. There were 1017 by Clement of Alexandria who lived from approximately 155 AD to 220 AD and there were 3822 by Tertullian who lived around the same time. DOUG: And even earlier, Clement of Rome cited Matthew, John, and 1 Corinthians in AD 95-97. Ignatius referred to six Pauline Epistles in about 110 AD, and between 110 and 150 Polycarp quoted from all four Gospels, Acts, and most of Paul’s Epistles. Papias who was a companion of Polycarp quoted from the Gospel of John. This is particularly significant because Polycarp knew John personally and was a disciple of the apostle John. This argues powerfully that the Gospels were in existence before the end of the first century, while eyewitnesses (including the Apostle John) were still alive. Jose O’Callahan, a Spanish Jesuit paleographer, made headlines around the world on March 18, 1972, when he identified a manuscript fragment from the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran Cave 7 as a piece of the Gospel of Mark. Fragments from this cave had previously been dated between 50 BC and AD 50 which in 1972 was not typically thought of as being within the time frame for New Testament writings. Using the accepted methods of papyrology and paleography, O’Callahan compared sequences of letters with existing documents and eventually identified nine fragments as belonging to one Gospel, Acts, and a few Epistles. Some of these were dated slightly later than 50, but still extremely early. VK: Both friends and critics agreed that, if valid, O’Callahan’s conclusions revolutionize New Testament theories. If O’Callahan is correct, the implications for Christian apologetics are enormous. The Gospel of Mark must have been written within the lifetimes of the apostles and contemporaries of the events. This completely eliminates any time for mythological embellishment of the record. It must be accepted as historical. And since the manuscripts found in the Dead Sea scrolls are not originals but copies, the originals would have necessarily been written earlier. This means these parts of the New Testament would have certainly been copied and disseminated during the lives of the writers. These early dates do not allow time for myths or legends to creep into the stories about Jesus. Historians generally agree legend development takes at least two full generations. Even putting aside O’Callahan’s claims, the cumulative evidence places the New Testament documents within the first century and the lives of eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life and resurrection. DOUG: There is a growing acceptance of early New Testament dates, even among some critical scholars. Let’s take a quick look at two of them illustrate this point: former liberal archeologist William F. Albright and radical critic John A. T. Robinson. Albright wrote, “We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about AD 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today” (Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands, 136). Elsewhere Albright said, “In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century (very probably sometime between about AD 50 and 75)” (“Toward a More Conservative View,” 3). Known for his role in launching the “Death of God” movement, Robinson wrote a revolutionary book entitled Redating the New Testament. In it he determined that the New Testament books should be dated even earlier than even the most conservative scholars ever believed. Robinson places Matthew at AD 40-60, Mark at about 45-60, Luke at or before 57-60, and John at 40-65. This would mean that one or two Gospels could have been written as early as 7-10 years after the crucifixion. At the latest they were all composed within the lifetimes of eyewitnesses and contemporaries of the events who could have refuted any parts of the accounts had they been in error. VK: In short we have very strong evidence that the New Testament documents were written very close to the time of the events they record. We know that they were composed by either eyewitnesses to the events or the authors had direct access to eyewitnesses. And we have so many quotations from the original documents in the writings of the early church fathers we can be very sure that the transmission of the original texts was reliable. This sounds like a time to go to God I prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for our country – that God’s hand of mercy and provision would be with us now and always. ---- PRAYER FOR THE NATION (MARCUS) VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!” (Bible Quote from the New Living Translation) 1 Corinthians, Chapter 15, verses 12 through 14, New Living Translation SELECTED FACTS THAT DEMONSTRATE THE HISTORICITY OF ACTS Archaeologists at first believed Luke's implication wrong that Lystra and Derbe were in Lycaonia and Iconium was not (Acts 14:6). They based their belief on the writings of Romans such as Cicero who indicated that Iconium was in Lycaonia. Thus, archaeologists said the Book of Acts was unreliable. However, in 1910, Sir William Ramsay found a monument that showed that Iconium was a Phrygian city. Later discoveries confirm this. Evidence That Demands a Verdict - Ch. 4 p. 8 (angelfire.com) Similarly, Luke’s identifying Gallio as proconsul of Achaia in A.D. 51 has been confirmed by a discovered inscription at Delphi (18:12). His report of Claudius’ expulsion of the Jews from Rome around A.D. 49 is referred to by Suetonius (Life of Claudius, 25:4). His incidental reference to Felix as Roman procurator along with his Jewish wife Drusilla is corroborated both by both Josephus and Tacitus (24:24, cf. Ant. 20:131–43, History, 5:9, Annals, 12:54). His identification of Festus as Felix’s successor is likewise confirmed by Jospehus and Suetonius (Ant. 20:182; Claudius, 28). And his mentioning of Agrippa II and Bernice, elder sister of Drusilla and widow of Herod, is again corroborated by Jospehus (25:13, cf. Ant. 20:145). Is the Book of Acts Reliable? - Greg Boyd - ReKnew The topographical position of Iconium is clearly indicated in Acts, and the evidence of Ac has been confirmed by recent research. Was Iconium in Phrygia or in Lycaonia, and in what sense can it be said to have belonged to one ethnical division or the other? The majority of our ancient authorities (e.g. Cicero, Strabo, Pliny), writing from the point of view of Roman provincial administration, give Iconium to Lycaonia, of which geography makes it the natural capital. But Xenophon, who marched with Cyrus' expedition through Phrygia into Lycaonia, calls Iconium the last city of Phrygia. The writer of Acts 14:6 makes the same statement when he represents Paul and Barnabas as fleeing from Iconium to the cities of Lycaonia--implying that the border of Phrygia and Lycaonia passed between Iconium and Lystra, 18 miles to the South. Other ancient authorities who knew the local conditions well speak of Iconium as Phrygian until far into the Roman imperial period. At the neighboring city of Lystra (Acts 14:11), the natives used the "speech of Lycaonia." Two inscriptions in the Phrygian language found at Iconium in 1910 prove that the Phrygian language was in use there for 2 centuries after Paul's visits, and afford confirmation of the interesting topographical detail in Ac (see Jour. Hell. Stud., 1911, 189). In the apostolic period, Iconium was one of the chief cities in the southern part of the Roman province Galatia, and it probably belonged to the "Phrygian region" mentioned in Acts 16:6. The emperor Claudius conferred on it the title Claudiconium, which appears on coins of the city and on inscriptions, and was formerly taken as a proof that Claudius raised the city to the rank of a Roman colonia. It was Hadrian who raised the city to colonial rank; this is proved by its new title, Colonia Aelia Hadriana Iconiensium, and by a recently discovered inscription, which belongs to the reign of Hadrian, and which mentions the first duumvir who was appointed in the new colonia. Iconium was still a Hellenic city, but with a strong pro-Roman bias (as proved by its title "Claudian") when Paul visited it. Iconium - International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (biblestudytools.com)

Colorado's Doug Wilson has worked in the public defense system for over 40 years, so to say he holds a boatload of knowledge is an understatement!   Colorado has one of the best models of public defense and Doug is one of the people responsible for that success.    In this episode, Doug explains how he worked with the Colorado legislature to create a system built on independence and increase their budget by over 40 million dollars.    You'll also hear about Colorado's weaknesses—poor determination standards, court fees, and a lack of community outreach.    However, Wilson continues to advocate for an improved public defense system in Colorado.    In a world where not everybody gets access to representation and public defenders are overworked and underpaid, Doug Wilson is tenaciously working to change that.    Key Topics and Takeaways:   Why Colorado's public defense system so well and how Doug laid that foundation [4:05] Public defense is a part of public safety [12:35] Defining recidivism [13:58] Doug and I dive deep into The Colorado Project, a recent workload analysis [28:16] Doug breaks down Colorado's determination standards [32:09] Colorado's struggle to provide adequate mental health services [50:30] The negative impacts of horizontal representation [1:04:06]   Guests:   Doug Wilson, Chief Public Defender of Aurora Municipal Defender Office and former Chief Public Defender of The Colorado Office of the State Public Defender    Resources:   NLADA Aurora Public Defender Assessment ACLU Report on Colorado Municipal Courts Office of the State Public Defender of Colorado Aurora Office of the Public Defender Do You Qualify for a Public Defender in Colorado? Colorado Workload Study   Memorable Quotes:   “Indigent clients must be given the same constitutionally effect and officiant counsel as folks who can afford to pay for their attorney. That's huge. You don't see that level of independence or those mandates in very many systems around the country.” (6:38, Doug)   “We're part of the public safety discussion as well, because for every person that we can keep out of the system or keep from coming back into the system, by our intervention or our representation, or our alternative sentencing plan… that protects the public.” (12:45. Doug)   “50% of the bill of rights is there to protect the individual against the government.” (22:00, Doug)   “So for my listeners, indigent does not mean just the homeless person on the side of the road with two pennies to rub together. It is the family next door struggling with medical debt, it is the family across the street who just got into a fender bender, it is the guy at work who just got laid off to no fault of his own. It is every ordinary people who will face the brunt of the legal system without an attorney.” (38:07, Hunter)   “There are only five dedicated, municipal structured public defender offices in the country. Think about that.” (49:59, Doug)   “When a person's livelihood is dependent upon them not realizing they're doing something bad, they will very rarely realize they're doing something bad.” (46:34, Hunter)

Episode 145 – Truth and Proof – Part 5 – Proof a God Exists Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God. Romans, Chapter 1, verse 20, New Living Translation ******** Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you as we continue our series we’ve called “Truth and Proof.” This series is all about the truth that there is a God and that God is the God of the Bible. Then we’re going on to offer proof that supports that truth. Today we have a special guest with us on the show, Doug Apple who is the manager of the WAVE-94 radio station in Tallahassee, Florida. Like a lot of people in Christian radio Doug is a diligent student of the Bible and he has thought deeply about his faith. This includes wanting to help others see that the Christian faith is a faith that will not only satisfy our souls but also our minds. Today Doug is going to help us take a detailed look at some of the essential observations that form the foundation for the inescapable truth of God’s existence. But before we get into the discussion, Doug would you like to take a couple of minutes and tell us a little about yourself? DOUG: - Introductory comments - VK: So, I’d like to remind everyone of the purpose of this series. We are learning how to defend the Christian faith. This defense is often termed “apologetics.” Now sometimes people will get the mistaken impression that apologetics can only be done, or should only be done, by professional apologists. The truth is, however, that any sincere, mature Christian can become an effective apologist – at least effective enough to demonstrate the two main points that are the concern of classical apologetics. The first point is the existence of God and the second point is that God is the God of the Bible. We do this by demonstrating the truth of the New Testament, and, therefore, the truth of Christianity. What do you think, Doug? DOUG: I agree. It may take a little time and effort to “prove” God’s existence, but every mature, thinking, normal person can – by the power of his mind and the operation of his senses – come to the valid conclusion that somehow some thing is “bigger than” he or she is. And, this is precisely what every culture has done over the last 6,000 plus years of recorded history. Just about every culture throughout history has come to the realization that “someone,” or a bunch of “someones” is pulling the strings at a higher level than the level where we are. And, with some deeper thought people can not only know that there is a “god,” but also they can know a lot about the nature of that “god.” And when they have reached those two conclusions, hopefully, they will look in the direction of the real God. VK: So, at this point let’s again stop and briefly review what we’ve covered so far in the first four episodes of this series. First, truth is what corresponds to reality. In other words truth corresponds to the way things really are. The way things really are is the same for all people in all places, and for all belief systems. Whether or not someone knows the truth, or believes the truth, is not the point. We’ve also learned that truth is knowable and absolute. DOUG: You have also covered the fact that the absoluteness of truth counters the claims of skepticism, agnosticism, relativism, and post-modernism. Those are four philosophies that deny the existence of absolute truth, but each of them is self-defeating. Each fails its own central premise. For instance the skeptic says we must doubt the existence of absolute truth – but does not doubt the absoluteness of their own position. Said differently, the skeptic is certain about doubt. And in your last episode of this series you covered the fact that the existence of truth is supported by the most fundamental laws of logic which include: • The law of identity (A is A). • The law of non-contradiction (A is not non-A at the same time in the same relationship). • The law of the excluded middle (either A or non-A). VK: These laws of logic mean that opposites cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. This counters the idea of religious pluralism – the idea that all religious faiths are equally valid. The opposite of true is false. This unbreakable law applies to all aspects of the universe – including religion. So, the belief that God exists and the belief that God does not exist are fundamentally at odds with one another and there is no third option. So, one of those beliefs must be true and the other must be false. The same would be true of the distinction between monotheism and polytheism. Monotheists believe there is one and only one God. Polytheists believe there are many gods. Both views cannot be true. DOUG: What we’re building up to is a proof for the existence of God – and not just any “god,” but the real Jehovah God of the Bible – the God of Reality. This real God started His revelation of Himself with the words, “In the beginning God . . .” (Genesis 1:1). In this verse, God, in His wisdom – and possibly with a little grin of anticipation – gives us a hint as to how we actually can prove to ourselves and to others the reality of His existence. Even if we could not be sure of God’s existence in any other way – and there are other ways – we can be sure of God’s existence by observing His creation. But as I said we must build up to that final conclusion. Before we can demonstrate that the God of the Bible is an objective reality we must first demonstrate that reason, logic, and evidence support the need for some kind of a divine being. VK: And as we’ve mentioned before that need has been recognized by pagan philosophers as well as Christian theologians. In a previous episode we mentioned that Aristotle was one of those philosophers who arrived at this conclusion simply by making keen observations of the world around him. DOUG: In the order of famous Greek philosophers there are three who are still household names even today. First came Socrates. Socrates’ most famous student was Plato. After Plato there came Aristotle. As you mentioned Aristotle was a diligent observer of the world around him. He wrote extensively about the physical universe, and he, like some of the philosophers before him, saw that there was one thing that all beings have in common, and that is being itself. But when Plato and Aristotle and others speak of “being,” they are not speaking of existence, they are speaking of essence. Existence was implied. So, mere existence was not their primary concern. Their primary concern was understanding what constituted the essence of things. VK: And Aristotle’s philosophy about the essence of things started with his work in “physics.” Said slightly differently Aristotle began his thoughts about “being” and “essence” with his observations of the physical universe. He then shifted to an understanding of what is prior to the physical universe that gives “being” to everything else. “Prior to” was not a chronological designation. It didn’t mean the passage of time, but rather the order in which things came to “be.” Aristotle’s work along these lines went “beyond” or “after” his work in physics, and became known as “metaphysics.” The focus of metaphysics is the nature of being and reality. Later, a new and separate philosophical discipline about the origin of reality followed along. That study of origin of reality came to be known as “cosmology” – the study of the origin of the universe and its laws. DOUG: So, one of the observations made by Aristotle was that the one constant he observed all about him was change. Aristotle noted two basic kinds of change: substantial change – the change in the substance of something, e.g., something comes to be (like a plant coming up out of the ground from a seed), or something ceases to be, e.g., like dying. We could come up with a lot of other examples but the point is that substantial change is reflected in birth and growth or decay and death. In addition to “substantial change,” the other form of change Aristotle noticed he called accidental change – the change that occurs when something adheres to the substance of another something, but is not inherent in that substance or essence. For example when I learn something new I have changed but I am still of and possess the same “essence” which you might call “human-ness.” And I am still the same substance which you might call “Doug-ness.” But despite me possessing the same essence and substance I am still different for having learned something. In other words my essence and substance didn’t change but one or more of my attributes as the world perceives me did. So, Aristotle noted that, even as change marked everything in the world around him, with that change some aspects of things stayed the same and some other aspects did not. VK: A particularly dramatic example of change was death. In death living beings undergo a fatal change resulting from the withdrawal of its life. But even through this change one creature did not become another. A dead dog did not turn into dead squirrel or a tree, or anything else. But Aristotle recognized that the dead body did not remain that way for long. The thing that made it what it was, i.e., the power within it that accumulated and arranged the atoms and the molecules of the universe into that particular body and held them together is now gone. Consequently, the elements of that body quickly become disorganized. The form of that body – the dog-ness didn’t change; but the substance, what we would call “matter” – the part left behind – did change. Aristotle’s understanding of reality, then, involved two components: actuality – what doesn’t change and potentiality – what does change. DOUG: So, Aristotle’s view of reality was that everything in creation is composed of both form (actuality) and matter (potentiality). The implication of this view is that the reality we perceive through our senses is constantly changing but that the forms or essences of things did not. Aristotle didn’t have modern science, but he had an exceptional mind and genius intellect. He likely saw that everything necessary to make an oak tree is contained in the acorn. If he had had a microscope, he might have been the first to accurately note that everything necessary for me to be me was contained in a single cell inside my mother. And when that cell divided into more cells they grew, and they differentiated, and they matured, and they became a unique human being unlike anyone else – just the same process that got us all here. And that being will continue to change. The notion has been bounced around in medical circles for the last 80 years that every atom of the human body is changed out every seven years. This cannot readily be proven, but we know with certainty that there is a constant balance being achieved between the dying cells and the new ones. The turnover rate for various body tissues has been calculated in the range of 3 years to 16 years, the brain being on the low end. I’m not sure if that’s the good news or the bad news. And we know with certainty that the last changes in the human body happen very quickly – those changes we call “decomposition.” VK: It didn’t take long for observers of nature to realize that when a tomato seed is planted a tomato plant comes up. Ditto for every other kind of plant – what you sow is what you reap. If a pregnant dog and a pregnant cat are fed the same kind of food, the dog will have a puppy and the cat will have a kitten. It has nothing to do with the food they eat except that the food provides each one with the building blocks necessary to make a kind of replication of the mother and father. DOUG: So, it would seem from Aristotle’s model that the actual thing – the “form” – is in the seed, or the acorn, or the fertilized egg for the particular species. And the potential thing – the “matter” – is the elements of the earth and of the universe which are capable of becoming the substance of any type of plant or animal. So, the question becomes what is it in that seed or egg that “drives” the earthly elements to be arranged in such a way as to become a unique product? Well, we now know something that Aristotle didn’t. We know about the genetic code – the code of life, if you will. We know that every living creature has a pre-programmed set of instructions present in its DNA. So, in that tomato seed, or in that acorn, or in that pre-born human baby, beginning with the most fundamental components of mass and energy and working outward to and through the DNA, there is the form of that thing – immaterial, unmeasurable, unseen, and, in a certain sense, eternal. And, that form has being – not only is it specific, and, therefore, has a unique essence, but also it operates in the material universe, and, therefore, it exists. VK: And we know some other things that Aristotle didn’t. We know about the underlying properties of atoms and sub-atomic particles through the Standard Model of particle physics, general relativity, and a system called quantum mechanics. For instance, we know that quarks interact by gluon exchange; that neutrons decay to protons through the weak interaction mediated by boson force carriers. We know that quarks and other sub-atomic particles spin. We’ve come to know a lot about the building blocks of physical reality. What we see through our modern observations is the proof of what Aristotle observed: there is constant change. When we reduce all physical matter to its smallest components we see that even the quark changes in its characteristics and interactions, but it’s still a quark! And nature testifies to what Aristotle believed. All around us is change, but something always remains the same and something else doesn’t. So, what is it that always remains the same? DOUG: It is the thing that is the actual – the form – not the thing that is the potential, the matter. This means there has to be something that accounts for the order and the arrangement of every physically existent thing, beginning with its most fundamental components. Plato and Aristotle called it “form” – and they knew it had to be something that is immaterial. They reasoned that can’t be seen, felt, or measured. And they knew this something cannot itself change, and is, therefore, eternal. They knew this because if it came into being it would have undergone change from non-being to being. Now the listeners don’t have to remember any of the particulars of any of this. But they do need to remember that the matter of the universe is the part that can change whereas the forms of those individual things of the universe don’t change. The matter, which is mass and energy, not only can change, but is constantly changing, even if the change is only motion. And here is the take-home message: all change requires a cause. VK: That is such an important point so I want to restate it. All change requires a cause. And we see change all about us. Yet, we also see that despite this change there is still something that accounts for the order and the arrangement of every physically existent thing, beginning with its most fundamental components. Plato and Aristotle called it “form” – and they knew it had to be something that is immaterial; that it couldn’t be seen, felt, or measured. They also knew that that something that ordered everything else could not itself change, and would therefore be eternal. This concept of an Eternal Cause that causes order throughout the material creation while being immaterial itself brought them – and brings us – to God. We’re not yet at that God being the God of the Bible but we are firmly standing on the top step of the staircase we’ve been climbing. DOUG: So, let’s catch up to the stairs we’ve been ascending. We started out simply by acknowledging the existence of truth. Then we demonstrated that the fundamental laws of logic not only indisputably prove that truth exists but those laws also prove that we exist. We then extended that awareness of our existence to the existence of a material universe and we’ve taken this realization further to the fact that there must be an Eternal Cause that brings order to the material universe. VK: Right. Aristotle is given credit for coining the term “Unmoved Mover” as one term for this eternal cause. The term “Prime Mover” was also used. Aristotle and Plato knew that the Unmoved Mover must be eternal because if it had come into “being” it would have undergone change from non-being to being. The fact that Aristotle, with a little help from some of his Greek predecessors could deduce all this truly is remarkable. DOUG: Especially since Aristotle did not have the benefit of the technological and scientific information that we do today. Today we know far, far more about the fundamental components of the physical universe. As you alluded to briefly, we know there are two particles that cannot be reduced to anything smaller or more simple. We know there are four fundamental forces that simply “are” and cannot be reduced to anything more basic. And we know there are four “force carriers” which behave as both particles and energy waves, and have no mass. And with these basic components of all mass and energy there is always directional motion, spin motion, interaction, and the potential for different relationships among them. There is always change, because what we – and everything – are made of is in motion. We also know that each thing of substance is uniquely different from every other thing of substance, that it has its own unique form. Otherwise everything would be the same thing. So, we can start building from there to everything else. Each thing is “formed” by component parts put together by “form” – the determiner of each substance. We can now say that form is cause, matter is the changeable intermediary, and substance is effect. We use the words “cause” and “effect” in much the same way as we would say “the producer” and “the product” – cause produces an effect. Every effect has a cause. VK: Right. And when we look at the universe we see a countless variety of forms, for there is a countless number of different things. And we know a few other things. The universe is in motion. The earth, the sun, the moon, planets, and galaxies are moving in relation to one another. We know that things come into being, undergo change, and appear to go out of being such as when a plant comes out of a seed, grows, dies, and decays. DOUG: Ancient thinkers, like Aristotle, saw the same things. So, Aristotle saw the cause as the “actualizer.” Or said differently Aristotle saw that everything that comes to be is caused by something that already is. VK: Or in other words, the actualizer transforms potentiality into actuality. The actualizer produces change. One very important change that the actualizer produces is changing non-being into being. DOUG: And Aristotle saw that everything that comes into being is limited, only a finite part of all there is. He also saw the things that come into being as being contingent. The things that came into existence were dependent on something else for their existence. Therefore, they could exist or not exist. Aristotle saw all things that come into being as ultimately requiring a cause that is not dependent on any other cause – a cause that is not contingent, for if it was contingent it would be dependent on something else for its existence. This brought Aristotle to another of his great contributions – the realization that that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. There must be a starting point – there had to be a “first actualizer” to get the whole series started. Something that “has to be” is something that is necessary. Later philosophers and theologians would come to refer to this idea of the first actualizer as the “Necessary Being.” VK: Christians of course agree with this line of reasoning but we have an awareness that Aristotle did not. We know that the God of the Bible is that Necessary Being. We are blessed because we have not only the line of reasoning that was available to Aristotle, God’s general revelation, but also we have God’s special revelation in the Bible. Now, as we’ve said before we know that all of this can produce some head scratching and even some headaches. But once Christians master these principles it produces a Christian who can encounter the barrage of criticism aimed today at the Christian faith and emerge unscathed. DOUG: Absolutely. There are real challenges and real reasons for studying apologetics. But, as you have emphasized throughout this “Truth and Proof” series, being able to understand and defend Christianity is not the sole province of the clergy, the evangelists, the authors, the pastors, the scholars, or any other group of “professional Christians.” It is the province of every Christian. It is possible for all people who have the desire to understand these concepts and ideas. Paul told us this in the opening scripture we listened to from Romans 1:20. Paul said that the people who deny God’s existence don’t have any excuse for denying it because God has made his clear through His creation. Frankly, Aristotle proves Paul’s point. Aristotle was able to come to the awareness that the nature of reality pointed to an Unmoved Mover, a first actualizer, a Necessary Being. So when we hear people deny the existence of God we should also keep in mind what Jesus said to his listeners in John 8: 43-47: “Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” VK: Jesus’ warning shows that as important as that is for adults to make an effort to understand something about apologetics, it’s even more important for our kids and grandkids. Apologetics, as an area of study, isn’t first and foremost a way to win arguments. It’s a way to protect ourselves, our friends, and especially immature believers from a hostile world. Naturally, we also hope that an increased understanding of the foundations of our faith will also make us better witnesses to that world. Well, this sounds like a time we really need to go to God I prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer of corporate confession because there are certainly times in all our lives when we have fallen short. The good news is that even when that happens God has promised that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us. ---- PRAYER OF CORPORATE CONFESSION VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!” (Bible Quote from the New Living Translation) Romans, Chapter 1, verse 20, New Living Translation

Allen: All right, Passive Traders. Welcome to another edition of the Option Genius Podcast, we got a real treat for you today. I have one of my long, long time friends with me today and we're actually doing something special, we're going to do a video as well as audio on the Podcast, we will be having some slides, but when we show the slides will describe to you what's going on in the slide so those of you who are listening will not be missing out. And the video will also be on our media channels and YouTube channel. So you can catch it there if you need. I want to introduce my guest today He is Mr. Doug Smith of Hawthorne Funds. Doug and I go back, man, we go back, like over what over a decade or so. But yeah. Doug: 15 years. Allen: So Doug is Mr. Moneybags himself, Mr. Real Estate, you know, he's been doing real estate for years and years, he launched a very successful company called MyHouseDeals.com where if you are a real estate investor, you can go and find all the deals that are not on the MLS. So it's pretty cool. And that site has made a lot of people a lot of money. But today, we're gonna be talking about Doug's newest venture, this is something that he's been doing for a few years now. And you know, whenever you get together with friends, you talk and "Hey, what's up?" "What are you doing?" And we would share stories of what we were doing and, and Doug A few years ago, came up to me, and he's like, yeah, you know, I'm doing all this stuff with land and doing this and doing that. And I was like, Wow, man, you're making a killing. And he made such a big killing that he just like, he just has to get out. And he's like, Alright, we need to do this on a bigger scale. And so Doug went and figured out how to do a investment fund. And so that's what we're going to be talking about today. I know back in Episode 94, it's called "How I Invest". I shared that one of my investments is in a real estate fund. And that is Doug's fund. And so I asked Doug, to come on and answer some questions and give us some highlights about what investment funds are, how they work, what to look for, when you're choosing one, making sure that your investment is safe, and all that stuff. So Doug, hopefully, I covered everything. If you anything you want to add, please go ahead. Doug: More or less, you covered all the stuff that makes me look good. So we'll just skip all the other stuff. Allen: Yeah, I didn't want to tell all your dirty secrets. Doug: It's good to see you again, Allen. And thank you so much for having me here on the call. I'm really looking forward to sharing everything I can to educate people help you out. Allen: Yeah, I appreciate it. Appreciate it. Thank you for having us. So tell us what are you doing at Hawthorne? Doug: Oh, my gosh, well, I work all the time, which was so funny, because when you and I met, I was like a lifestyle guy. But yeah, for those considering starting up a private equity firm, just know that it will consume you. We buy and sell land outside of Houston, Texas. And so we're buying about a million dollars a month worth of land, sometimes more. And we're selling maybe $2 million a month worth of land, it really just depends on the month. But that requires a lot of people and a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls, a lot of Excel spreadsheets, there's just a lot going on, there's 20 or 30 of us that make all of this happen. So there's always something kind of vying for my attention as it pertains to mining selling land and raising people's money and investing that money properly. Allen: Yep. And so one of the things I do want to point out that Doug, you are doing this for yourself before you started the fund? Doug: Yes, that's right. So not only that, I have my house deals calm going on, I was buying and selling houses, I was selling those on owner financing. And then my business partner and I switched over to land in 2016 started buying that and selling on owner financing. And it was just, it was very profitable, requiring a lot of my capital. And sometimes that capital would take a year and a half or two years to come back. And I was wanting to do more deals as opposed to just sit on sidelines, right and wait for money to come back. So that's when I started the fund around 2018 or so started taking other people's money on as well. Allen: Okay, so you had one iteration, and then now you're in the second iteration, right? Or the second fund?  Doug: Yes, there's the first time that was an equity fund. And then we formed a debt fund, I guess a few weeks ago at this point, maybe a month or two ago and took on 5 or $6 million into that second fund. We've taken out about the same amount into the first one, but there's, they're structured differently, but they The end result is pretty similar for the investors and for us. Allen: So can you give us a difference between debt versus private equity?  Doug: Yeah, sure so that's one thing you said we're gonna talk about on the call is like, what would you want to look for if you're looking at investing in a private equity fund, and the majority of those funds out there are equity funds, and so that means that they're probably buying one or more assets like multi multifamily apartment complex. For example, and they are going to leverage up with maybe 75 or 80% bank money. So that's debt. And then you as an investor, you're a limited partner in these deals. So you're now you're the equity portion, the 25% equity, and whatever it appreciates, you know, force appreciation or just natural appreciation over time, you benefit from that. But that can be a little bit risky. If there's a downturn in the market, or the property's not managed properly, because equity holders can get wiped out, or at least have a lot of their money, kind of like, you know, wiped away. So a debt fund is when you invest in a fund, and that fund becomes the lender against something. So they are now in the bank's position in that first example. So let's say you, Allen, or your friend is wanting to buy a house for $100,000. And you lend him $50,000. Well, he totally mismanaged the project, and you have to foreclose on him, he's not paying you, well, you're gonna become the owner, you're foreclosing become the owner of that house and be able to resell it on the open market, and, and almost certainly recuperate your $50,000, because the house would sell is worth more than that. So that's kind of like a simple way to explain the difference between an equity and a debt fund. Allen: Okay, so now on the first one, the equity fund, you said that they go out and they borrow 75% of it. And they in the investment funds are 25%? Doug: I think there's a fairly typical kind of split, right, equity funds. There are some equity funds that don't take on debt, but the majority do, and that's why they're able to pay out at, well, sometimes the ends up being maybe 15%, internal rate of return over time. But there's, you know, there's some risks, there's some negatives, those are projections, you never quite know how it's going to shake out. Yeah. And your money would be locked up for usually about three, five or seven years, depending on the fund. Okay. And what if you wanted to get out sooner than that? What would you Is there any recourse?   For most funds, you can't. Allen: No, just you can't give it to somebody else, or they won't help you facilitate it change or.. Doug: It might help you, but they're not obligated to do so. The latest fund that we set up, there was finalized one or two months ago, you can get it out. It's an evergreen fund, it is a lot more liquid. So that's one of the advantages of it. Allen: Okay, so now you said yours is a debt fund, right, then and so you are using the funds money to go out and buy the land? Doug: Yeah, so let's say like, let's say we're about to buy some land, and it's gonna cost a million dollars, we're able to borrow from the fund and the fund be a lender on that deal. So my entity that I own - Hawthorne land LLC will borrow. And it's all at the courthouse. It's documented from Hawthorne Income Fund, LLC, which is where all the investors are as members. Allen: Okay, so, okay, so basically, you created your own bank? Doug: Yeah. Here's the deal. Most banks, they do not like to lend on anything that is slightly outside of this cookie cutter box. And what we're doing buying raw land outside of the city, subdividing it and proving it and selling on honor on owner financing there, they've never heard of that most of them. And they're like, we don't know which box to check here on this form. So maybe you can go talk to this or that banker, but we did find bankers, and we saw bankers that will mind on it, but they're a huge pain to deal with. They take weeks to process alone. And there's all these requirements. It's just very, very bureaucratic, so much red tape. So yes, we created our own bank.  Allen: Okay so basically, you borrow the money from the fund, and then the fund gets a set percentage. Doug: Yes, it doesn't get any of the profits or anything. No, it's just the lender. It's very clean. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like a lot of people all they know is about investing in some sort of index fund. And then maybe they'll put some of their money in bonds. And so this is like a lot of people that invest with us there. They're familiar with other strategies, like they might invest in other private equity funds that are a little riskier and maybe they're an equity fund, and they will treat us as if we're like, the bonds. So we're the lower stable like steady investment that they feel like if all the crap hits the fan that we're standing Allen: And so say you're paying 10% and that's paid out every month Doug: It's every month or people can check a box and have it automatically reinvested in compound. Allen: Awesome, sweet. Okay, yeah, cuz I know the first time we had it, we had a, that wasn't a possibility. So actually into our investors who wanted that. Yeah. So you're actually growing and learning at the same time. So that's awesome. Doug: Yes. Allen: Awesome. So who is able to invest in your fund anybody or accredited or how's that work? Doug: Accredited investors, and the minimum is 100,000. So who knows? Maybe 95% or more of American population can invest unfortunately. But those who can enjoy it. Allen: So now accredited, that means what 200, I think it's 200. Doug: If you're an individual, you need to be making 200,000 a year or more if it's a married couple 300 or you need to have a net worth of a million dollars, not counting the equity in your house that you're living in, Allen: Okay. And the minimum to put in is 100. And there's like you said, there's no tie up phase. So somebody come in, and then if they need it six months down the road, they'd be like, hey, I need to get out.  Doug: That's correct. So we have provisions that if anybody's trying to get their money back at the same time, there's a slow process of giving it to everybody. But in general, people get their money back fairly quickly, if they need it. We've not even had our first requests yet, everybody, they're putting their money with us, because they want it to be with us not because they want to pull it, pull it out. But it would take a few days to, who knows a week or two to get someone's money back to them on a typical scenario. Allen: Right. And I mean, this is real estate. So people understand that this is not liquid, you know, most times you go buy a house, it's going to take you two months to sell it anyway. This is putting it in a fund that's invested in real estate. So that when if they need to, it takes time. So.. Doug: Yes, but with a structure, it is pretty liquid. Allen: Okay. Okay. Doug: Like it could be the next day, we get their money back to them, but I cannot go. Allen: So, I mean, I wanted to go over some of the reasons for our listeners, why, you know, why I invested in Doug in the first place. And, you know, this was one of the first investments that I actually made in a fund. And, you know, he came to me and said, hey, look, I've been doing this, and I'm starting a fund. And if you'd like to invest, you know, go ahead, these are the parameters, and this is how much we're gonna pay out. And there's risk involved. Of course, there's risk involved all assets, and all investing and trading and whatnot. Doug: My attorney made me say that. Allen: Oh, yeah, there is. So you know, you don't want to have somebody come in and be like, Oh, man, I'm gonna get rich. And then, you know, it doesn't happen. Doug: We do sell for about double what we buy for. So it's just like, with the margins like that, it's kind of hard to mess up. Allen: So I came up with some criteria, I was like, Alright, so number one, you know, who is actually doing or leading this fund, righ? And in this case, it was Doug. And I've known Doug for 10 years, and those of you guys know him, you don't know this, and you can't tell because he, you know, he looks like a really nice guy and everything on the in the video. That guy is I mean, he's a stickler, he, I mean, I only know this because I've known him for so long. But he tracks his net worth on a regular basis, he accounts for every single penny, in his business man, every single point 001% he knows what's happening and where it's going. And this guy is meticulous on his numbers. And he was not somebody that plays loose and fast, you know, he's got every dotted eye, every T is crossed. And so that was really something that gave me a lot of confidence. Like, you know, this guy, he knows what he's talking about. And he's been doing it on his own for a while. And the numbers just make sense. And so, you know, a lot of times people get attracted to these investments, the only thing they know about is Oh, I can make 10%, I can make 50%, I can make 25% in maybe some cases where, you know, it's, it's, it's more of a scam than anything else. There was like a lot of people investing in this crypto stuff. You know, there are crypto funds that I've seen that are like, oh, we'll pay you 30% a month, a month. Wow. And so you get money for a month or two, and then it folds and it goes out of business because it was a big Ponzi scheme. But in this case, you know, I knew Doug, and I trusted him. And that's what one of the things that led me to it. The other thing was, you know, his experience was there. And then the second part was, does the investment makes sense, is like, What is he doing? Or what is the investment. And in this case, it was something I had never heard about, it was pretty unique, where he's buying hundreds of acres of land, and then he's subdividing them into smaller pieces. And then when you subdivide it, and you smell a smaller piece, you get to sell it for a lot more money. So I think some of the numbers were you were buying it for four or $5 a square foot, selling it for $10-$12 a square foot originally. And like you said, it's pretty hard to go wrong with those kind of numbers. This was not like a apartment complex in some other country that we're going to Airbnb it and hopefully people want to go there and stay there. And maybe maybe it's run properly. This is something that he was already doing. The third thing was, what is my risk? You know, I'm going to put my money into this thing. I want to own that land. As an investor, what's my risk? And I was looking at, I think, well, this is raw land. It's been there for hundreds of years, it's not going to go anywhere. If it's not going to burn down, it's not going to go out of business. You know, he can't take it and run away with it. The only thing that might happen is it doesn't sell, you know, he'll buy it, it doesn't sell it'll sit there and maybe 5-10 years from now we'll sell it. To me that was like the only risk is like if the lead doesn't fill. It's just gonna sit there. No, I don't get my return but leaves my money is still safe. And so all those aspects, I was like alright, let's go. Let's do it, you know, and so that's why I feel comfortable. And those are the three aspects, I would look for investing in any other fund. Is there anything, Doug that you want to add? Like, you know, what are the things people should look for when there's questions I should ask? Doug: I can go into that a little bit. So one of the main problems with a lot of private equity funds that they have this projected internal rate of return. And the majority of funds do not meet their projection, really don't say like 15 to 20%, or whatever, but you can, but here's, here's what you do. So that'll be based on a certain amount of appreciation of whatever asset they're holding, you like reduce that appreciation by just .5% per year or something, and that projection all goes to crap. And the reason that it's so effective is that there is some debt ahead of you. And so you're just dealing with that little thin equity margin. So you play with that a little bit and that's a high percentage of your potential return that can be taken away from you. So that's kind of like the main problem. But yes, I do invest in other funds. And you know, private equity funds can be a good way to invest your money, right? Probably just a mix of right, different things like that. You could be doing Options Trading, like maybe you've got some like long term, like buying hopes, maybe you've got one or 2% of your money in crypto, whatever. But it can certainly be part of your strategy. So that's like the main problem I see with certain private equity funds, the less common one is that they're a scam. You'll see that maybe more like if there's like a crypto fund, okay, maybe like that could kind of like maybe be a scam. Oil and gas is kind of notorious for some guys that come and go with a little scam. They're gonna go drill some wells here and there on the wells and of dry or maybe they run off with your money, but pretty notorious. But for the most part, people running private equity funds do not want to go to prison. Like they're not super incentivized to run a scam. But I'm more than happy to tell you about a story where I was scammed recently in a private equity fund. Allen: No way. Doug: Yeah, I mean, if you want me to go into it. Allen: Yeah, yeah let's go. I'm sure people will be excited to hear about that. How the Mr. Smart Guy got scammed.  Doug: Yeah, that's crazy. Well, looking back, I can see like, now I can see how the scam and where I went wrong. So like I said, I like to kind of diversify a little bit of my money away from these land deals, not because I'm worried about the land deals, but it is nice to dabble in other stuff. I think we're a bunch of like business people, entrepreneurs on this call, right? So like, when somebody comes to us with something, it seems like "Oh, just plop 100 grand, or whatever it is, and your fund, and you're gonna pay me. Sounds great". So there was this guy, I was at this competition where veterans were pitching their business ideas, and we're all investing in some of their businesses. And there was a guy in the audience, and he actually ran a private equity firm himself, which he was on his maybe 6th fund, and each fund was like only a year. So that's kind of a shorter duration than his normal. So that was a little bit atypical from the beginning. And then his first fund got a return of 63% in a year. And so it's like, of course, like, my eyes lit up. “Oh, my God. Wow, that's awesome”. Like, well, what about your second one? Oh, that was 45%. What about these other ones? And and it was I talked to one of the person who had invested with him, and they were, like, fairly happy at the time. And so I went out and I.. Allen: What was he doing? Doug: Yeah, that's a good question. Well, I'll tell you what he said he was doing. He said that he and his team are going out there and buying mineral rights from individuals and then aggregating those, and selling them to companies that were looking to buy larger chunks of minerals into like, they like direct mail and stuff. So that like, you know, old Sue, she's like eight years old, and heritage minerals, she didn't even know about it. And she gets a little direct mail piece from his company saying that they'll buy her minerals, I'm sure at a discount. doing that for a lot of people aggregating them and then selling them in a package. So it kind of made sense, you know, aggregate and sell for a higher price. And so but here's the deal, I'm not an oil and gas guy. And so I was not able to properly vet the investment. I was just sort of going off these other investors seeing kind of happy to seems legit. I went out to his office, and I met with him and his staff out there. He's got like, all these people with firm handshakes and strong like backslaps, you know, like, and I'm just like, maybe a team of 15 or 20 people there are a lot of them were rice, MBA, Rice University MBA graduates, and it just seemed, it seemed kind of legit, you know, the, and here's the deal. They're all almost all veterans. It was a veteran owned and operated business. So like, wow, you go in there. And there's like all these like, swords on the walls and stuff like, you know, and flags. And just like, this guy seemed like Miss Captain America. Like, I was like, you know, 15 years ago, I was running an internet business and this guy was out there like killing terrorists or something. It's like, okay, I was like really looking up to this guy and a lot of other people were too and so over time, he took on maybe 60 million from people over the course of five years or something like that. And ultimately, we found out through an email from him like two months ago that he had squandered almost all of our money and that he was basically using fun money to pay a staff which you cannot you cannot do that the fund money has this very designated purpose, which is to invest in whatever asset you're investing in and had just basically raped and pillaged the the bank account for the fund. And it's very hard for like 30 or $60 million, because I think ultimately the losses were 30 million. But for me, it was like, almost all of my money. The early like first two funds, they mostly got their money back. But beyond that it was it was scam time. Allen: Oh, wow Doug: And so yeah, so like he was holding this managing the funds. And we still don't know if he ran off with some of them on his own. Or if he was just trying to pay his employees and save his company and make desperate business moves to sort of save things or salvage things. And the oil and gas has been going downhill. It's been in a, I guess, a trough over the last year or two. Maybe it's doing better lately? I think it is. But that really hit him. Just, I guess maybe when the pandemic was starting and maybe..  Allen: Yeah it was, you know, oil went in the toilet pretty much. Doug: Yeah. So I kind of like, we're like, he'll go to prison, which I don't know why in the heck, you'd want to do something that would lead him to prison. That's crazy. Like any sane private equity fund manager, their main goal is not to go to prison. So then what do you? How do you not go to prison? You don't do anything illegal? Yeah. Tell that to made off? Yeah, it's crazy. So anyway, so but looking back, I've got some insights as to why I kind of got scammed there. I understand it more now. Allen: Okay, tell us tell us. Doug: Basically, if anybody's really like his disguise themselves, it's like a Veteran Business or Christian business or something like that. That's usually a little bit of a red flag, because they're trying to make themselves seem like a very reputable, or moral and principled, and all that, it's like an overreach. Allen: And they're taking credibility from another organization kind of thing. You know, they're tying themselves to something else. Doug: Yeah. So that's one. I mean, there's many things that came together, when you go on his website, which are websites probably even not even there anymore. A lot of his team members, they had various positions, but their background on LinkedIn, and all ends up being sales. Like they were all in sales before, like the Geologists was in sales. So that was kind of a red flag. He had a huge overhead, like, he's, obviously all these MBAs, I was like, maybe this is a red flag, but I wasn't so sure. And here's what I messed up doing too, is like, I know, his professor at Rice, or that was his professor. He is one of our fellow members. And I could have asked that guy because I asked him later and he said, “You didn't know that was a scam? It was pretty obvious”. He came in here. And every time they were raising money for something, he was dropping $20-$30,000 at a time, everybody else was dropping, maybe 1000s. So I thought, well, he's probably just dropping all the investors money. You see what I'm saying? I was like "Oh I got it". And he was, uh, yeah, he seems like he's maybe trying to compensate for something, make himself look a little bit better than he is. And then I got to know another investor in the oil and gas business later. He's like, "Oh, we've known that was a scam for the last 12 months", just the types of returns he's been paying out are not feasible in this industry. It doesn't make any sense. Allen: Oh wow. Doug: And so basically, I mess up by not asking those two guys before I invested, I just asked that the the satisfied investor that I knew. And actually when I asked him right before I invested, he said he was less satisfied with the fund, and that he would not recommend it. But I went against his advice, because he could not give me a firm reason as to why I should not invest. It was more like a gut feel that he had. My own brother who ended up investing had a negative gut feel about it, too. So basically, in the future, if I get some of these red or yellow flags, I'm just gonna sit on the sidelines, and I'm gonna sit out of that deal. Another problem is like he was, I'm 40 now and he was my same age. And so like, I'm thinking, Okay, this is a guy, like, I've had, like, 20 years of business experience at and so but I'm not sitting across from another guy with that amount of experience, even though it's just it kind of felt like it because he was in the military 13 or 15 years. And so that's life experience, for sure. But like, as far as like business, this guy was green. I'm throwing a bunch of money at this guy that's green and so as everybody else so that's a red flag especially in oil and gas. I think they need to be in the industry for like decades because that's that can it's very tricky, complicated industry and, and very volatile. And a lot of fortunes have been made and loss. I don't want the guy that's like new to the industry. Right? Yeah. So yeah. And also I messed up. I should not necessarily be investing in stuff that I don't understand very well like oil and gas. Unless I'm willing to put the time into that. So the outrageous returns were red flag. Anybody saying we're gonna get you 60 something or he didn't guarantee that but right. I don't know. It's just like, that's not super realistic. I mean, it can be done, I guess. But red flag.  Allen: Yeah, I mean, our traders they can get it but We don't run a fun doing that, you know, they can do it on their own. They hear the trades, he learned how to do it and go for it and do it. And some markets, you do it in some markets, you don't in some markets you lose. But when you have a fund, you obviously have all these expenses, like you said, you know, the staff and the work involved and all that information, all the lawyers that you paid, I remember you telling me, you know how much you paid to the lawyers to make all the documents and the accounting and the photos and all the auditing. And that's done on a regular basis and all that stuff. Yeah. So it takes a lot of money to put this stuff together and actually run it. Doug: Yeah, totally. Oh, here's the company. Here's a couple more things about him. Like, he didn't let his investors mix and mingle. So I never really met any other investors besides that one guy like, there's other guys that run funds, they'll like even sometimes do lunches and dinners or like a group events for the investors because they have nothing to hide, let the investors check. Allen: This, I mean, if you're legit, if you're legit, you want that, you know, you want the happy people to mix with the new people. So the new people are like, Oh, yeah, are you doing it? They're like, Yeah, I do. It is great. You want that to happen if you're legit. Doug: Yes, totally. And we never got any documentation like showing which minerals we owned and what was sold. Like, I want to see like legitimate notarized documents, stuff that was filed somewhere like, so that's the problem with some funds, too, is like they're not obligated to show you all that stuff. Like, who regulates all this stuff? sec. sec. That's not I was thinking that may see that maybe needs to be something that maybe at some point becomes regulated. I hate to like, I don't I'm not like a fan of more regulation. That might be actually kind of handy. You know, like, it's crazy like the if you want to be a scammer with a private equity fund, you can. It does not end well, though. So you're not incentivized in that. That's when I shocking to some people would want to do it. You go to freakin jail. Allen: Yeah, Oh, I mean, you take the money and run to another country and live in it. Doug: There's like international police now. They'll get you anywhere. Allen: You can't go to like some island that doesn't have extradition or something? Doug: You'll be like the only white guy or whatever. Yeah.  Allen: Head on down to Cuba and you'll be the king. Doug: It baffles me that anybody would want to do what he did. But I again, I don't think that's the norm. I asked a couple of attorneys. I said, How often do you see this? And they said not very often? Allen: No, because I mean, I know with your stuff ever since we'd invested with you. It's like, we get regular emails, we get regular update, since like hey this, look, we bought this land and hey, we bought this property. And here's the address. And here's the photo. And and before we before we even invested, I mean, you took us on a tour, like, you know,  Doug: Yeah, we were actually on the land. Allen: Yeah, we saw the land we saw where it was subdivided. We saw, you know, people that were there, you know, that purchased other plots already. And they were building stuff. So I mean, it was everything was on the up and up, and it's still on the open up still, you know, if you want access, you call Doug up, and he'll explain everything. And if you want to go see it, he'll give you all the details and you go take a look and check the deeds are whatever you want to do. Doug: Yeah we'll send our statements or deeds, whatever. Also, some people if they are hesitant about investing in a fund, like for us, we're willing to sell people the notes that we generate. So like, they can get about a 10% return if they just own the notes, but it's a little bit more volatile. Because every now and then you might have a borrower that defaults, and you have to foreclose and then resell, so like investing the fun is just simpler. But if you're one of those people that just like I don't trust like somebody else having control over my money, there's other ways to get the same return with what we've got going on. That's why we changed our name from Hawthorne funds, the Hawthorne capital, because we sell notes, and you can lend against notes or you can invest in the fund, the fund is just the easiest. Awesome, cool, cool. How do people find out about you or talk to you about this? shoot me an email at Doug@HawthorneCapital.com That's D-O-U-G Doug@HawthorneCapital.com Allen: Alright, I'll put that in the show notes as well. And you know, one of the questions that I got after I did that episode 94 was like, you know, if you're making so much money in the stock market in an options, why are you investing in real estate or something else. And right now, at least in this market in this economy that we've had, you know, the stock market is doing amazing, it's doing great. I mean, this year, not so much. It's kind of, you know, going up a little bit last year was really good. But still as Options Traders, were making a killing. And I see my investments in my accounts in there, you know, just increasing and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. We're at the point now where I mean, it's got to end sometime, you know, and it's time for if you have a bunch of gains in your accounts, it's time to be diversified, especially with you know what they're saying with inflation coming down the road that's gonna be coming pretty hard. Land is a good thing to invest in when you have inflation because you can automatically just raise the price. Things lost more when you have inflation so. Doug: Well for us you know what the way that's affected is land has gone up in value. Big time over the last year, which a lot of us didn't see coming. We thought just you know, in a recession with our heading into a big recession, that would just decrease the value of a lot of stuff. We used to, we used to buy land for about four, or $5,000 per acre. And now we're buying it for eight to $10,000 per acre. Wow, no, we sell it for a lot more to so we're kind of in the flipping game we buy. And then a few months later, or sometimes it's maybe a year, we sell the little pieces because we buy a bunch and we chop it up a little pieces. So we'll sell those, but then we sell them on owner financing. So we collect on my income income stream over about 15 years. But we've seen that the market moving inland for sure. Allen: So who's buying these little pieces from you? Doug: Blue collar individuals who live in the city and want to be able to go out to the country on the weekends and enjoy time with their family and their dogs. And maybe they want some get some animals out there and maybe have a little swimming pool or something like that. They want to be on the country and there was already such a demand for that pre-pandemic, but it just exploded here with the pandemic. But our model works like pre pandemic during pandemic post. It doesn't really matter for us. It just, it changes some of the numbers a little bit like if we have to buy for more than we sell for more. Right, the demand is there. And we just we do a lot of advertising on Facebook to sell our ranchettes. And we also are on MLS and all these other places. But with Facebook ads, we're able to we spend about $2 per lead, and we're able to ramp that budget up or down and get as many ranchette buyers as we want. So it's just a matter of the sales team handling all those leads. Allen: Really? Doug: That was that was true before the pandemic, we didn't need the pandemic to make our business work. Allen: And what about the land, finding the land? Doug: We look on the MLS, there's a website called lands of Texas, there's one of those for just about every state. So we look at a bunch of land, and we try to get a deal on when we can but usually maybe the best we can do is about a 10% discount. No, we're looking for land that has access to roads on a couple of sides that we can chop it up into where each little ranchette it will have access to a road. So normally we'll buy one or 200 acres at a time, for example. And these are all over different parts. It's not like one all together, it's the subdivision. And yeah, so then we'll chop it up. And we need to give each of those little pieces access to road because it costs a lot of money to build roads. And that would make our deals a lot less profitable. If we had to do that. Allen: Ah, I see. So you buy the properties that already have roads, and you add the utilities or? Doug: Yes, we bring in we'll put in a water well, that costs about $6,000, maybe seven, and they will put in fencing usually cost about 5000 put in a gate for maybe another 1000 culvert driveway. Every now and then a pond that we bring we bring in power can cost one or 2000 per ranchette. So like the typical like 10 acre ranchette, we will have bought for about $80,000. And we will put about 20,000 and improvements into it. So now we're in it for 100. And they will sell it for maybe 180. Allen: Hmm, okay. Doug: And the fund lens as we do these things, it lands on the land, and then it lands on the note that we generate. So that's kind of the margins we're dealing with lately actually are probably selling for more than 180. Actually on that scenario. Allen: And how long do you think this will last? This will run? Doug: I don't see how it would end. Allen:There's plenty of land out there? Doug: Yeah, there's plenty land, plenty of buyers. I've got a lot of investors investing with us. And once a.. Allen: So you're not closed or you're not you're not full, you're still taking investors.. Doug: Okay yeah, that's good question. Fund to opens and closes as needed as so we took on about five or 6 million last month. And we close it because we have to deploy capital for new purchases, because as soon as we take it on, we have to start paying our investors. So we're not going to take on like 10 million when we can only deploy five. So as we're about to buy more land, so we'll open it up, temporarily take all that money and then close it. And we'll just accept a certain amount of money, whatever we need at that time, whether that's 2 million, 5 million, whatever it is, then we'll close it. Allen: So you have basically like a waiting list. Doug: Yes. Allen: Awesome. Cool. Cool. Cool. All right. Okay, I think we've covered everything I had all my questions. Is there anything else that you wanted to share anything else our listeners and our watchers need to know before they go out and invest funds? Because there's a lot of funds on now that you know, with the crowdfunding and all that stuff? What do you think about that? Doug: I think some of the inferior funds are going that route because if you've got a solid fund, you really pull a lot from your own network. And so you don't have to go like I don't have to go like list my fund on some sort of like fundrise or realty mogul or whatever. Because I get all my money just from my like word of mouth. Everyone just talks right. And that's how most like well operated funds are because they will take a cut of whatever you raise and so you get sometimes like slightly newer operators or they don't have. They don't have a network, or maybe there's not as good of word of mouth or something. So I'm not like a fan necessarily of investing in that kind of stuff. There is a cool website that came out called Vera Vest. It's fairly new, and they research, they do this sort of a background check on certain private equity funds. And so you can kind of go and make sure that they're, you can ever be fully sure, right, but make sure they're probably not a scam. But those operators are paying very best a fee. I don't know if it's like a monthly fee or what, for them to be like gold verified, or whatever it is on that website. And then so if they are, they're showing up high on that website, and they get a lot of new business from investors, or even a new investor capital. I say it's kind of like the BBB, you know, the Better Business Bureau where you have to pay them for drinking. To get the young people, people still believe in it. They're like, Oh, well, I mean, not too much anymore. I don't hear about it anymore. But people before were like, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm gonna go check the BBB. I'm like, okay, but, you know, if we pay them, they'll say good stuff about us. That's kind of on my other business My House Deals with, we had had 42,000 something paying subscribers at the time, and we had five complaints in the BBB, that's five out of like, 42,000 something. And these are people that had never even raised the issue with us. First, they just went straight to BBB, because they wanted to refund or whatever. And the BBB gave us a D or F rating. And yeah, we went in there. And they basically said that we were like, poorly operating our company, I said, five, I'd like for you to say here's our list, I printed out like this huge stack, here's all of our customers, by people complained. And they said that basically, we need to pay them some more money. And then we would be like A-Rated. That's like, this is a racket. It is a racket! Allen: It is, it is. Doug: So luckily, nowadays, people can just look at Google Reviews. And those can be manipulated a little bit too. Like if the company is like sending all their customers to leave reviews or.. Allen: For something free. Like they're giving away a free service or something. Doug: Yes, they do that on Amazon too. Like.. Allen: Oh, Amazon full of fake reviews. I mean, they buy the reviews, they don't even give you know, it's like they'll there are companies out there you can hire and they'll just go out and give you like, Yo you want 20 fake reviews, okay, pay us. And we'll go and our people will go and, you know, they have all these fake accounts and everything. And they just yeah, Amazon. I don't I don't trust anything on Amazon like I have. It's super hard to know if the reviews are good. Doug: Yeah, they need to do some coding to kind of look for that. But there are certain plugins you can install. Like if you use Chrome as your browser, like a fake spotter review, and they'll analyze, see whether that they think that Amazon review is legit or fake, and I'll give it they'll give it a rating. That's pretty cool. Allen: Interesting. Doug: Yeah, at least we have that we don't have to depend on the BBB anymore. Allen: Yeah.Yep. Cool. All right, Doug, I appreciate everything you've shared with us. Again, Doug's email is Doug@HawthorneCapital.com Doug: ..or email my assistant Ellen@HawthorneCapital.com. Allen: Okay. Doug: We'll put you on the email list. So like maybe every, every four, six weeks or so you'll get an update that shows what we're doing. So if you even if you're not looking to invest now, it's fine. Like maybe three years from now, you've been getting our updates, and you've been getting educated and seeing what we do. Then if you felt like investing you could. Allen: Yup and full disclosure, I am an investor. I was in the first fund and we were over the money into the second fund. But yeah, so you know if you're, if you're interested in getting into a fund, do your due diligence, please, you know, this is you turning over your money to someone else, hopefully, they have experienced hopefully, they have a track record and they know what they're doing. And they'd like, you know, most of them most of these funds are not scams, because they do take a bunch of money to put together and investment to start up and they have something to show for it. I think the bigger fear is, you know, if the investment goes south, you know, how much of your investment Can you lose? Can you lose all of it, etc? Doug: Yeah, that's gonna be case by case each fund is going to have a different risk reward profile. So you really got to look at that. Allen: Yeah, yeah. How would you know? Doug: Well, ideally, either you're in that industry kind of like sort of like or you have a friend who is okay, you people that you want to run it by people and really get to know the operator, maybe talk to a couple different people who run you know, similar types of funds if it's more it's pretty common as multifamily apartments. Of course there's some commercials there's some office buildings and stuff that has been beat the heck yeah, I was talking to somebody at the gym that he put a put a bunch of money in a fund that invested in hotels. He put in his money and right before the recession. He got hammered. Allen: Oh, boy. Yeah. So do they like do those funds, then they go out of business and then they everything gets foreclosed? Hmm. Doug: The lender forecloses on the fund because the fund has borrowed money. Allen: Okay, so what can the individual investors do and when that happens? Doug: They get whatever's left over after the bank gets paid. Allen: So they can't sue,they can't do anything? Doug: Well, if there was like fraud committed, yes, but a lot. Some of that there was no fraud. It was just gonna be a poor investment. Allen: Oh okay, yeah if you guys do your due diligence. Make sure you know. Alright, Doug I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. We're gonna put this up to everybody and you know, at least my recommendation is that Doug is a stand-up on his guy, most of the time and again, I've known him for years so yeah. Thanks Doug again and talk to you soon! Doug: Thanks Allen! Allen: Alrighty, bye bye Doug: Alright, bye

Episode 94 – The Lord of Logic – Part 6 – Too Many Versions of God Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: Don't be like the people of this world, but let God change the way you think. Then you will know how to do everything that is good and pleasing to him. Romans, Chapter 12, verse 1, Contemporary English Version Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly, and proper. Don't ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise. Philippians, Chapter 4, verse 8, Contemporary English Version ******** VK: Hello! I'm Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. If you've been with us on our last few episodes of Anchored by Truth you'll know that we're in the midst of a series about objections that are often raised against the existence of God. In this series we're examining 5 specific objections that you often hear. Our specific aim is to see whether those objections are reasonable when you subject them to a logical analysis. Again with us today is Doug Apple who is the manager of the WAVE-94 radio station in Tallahassee, Florida. Doug has been active in Christian broadcasting for more than 25 years, is a faithful student of the Bible, and meditates frequently about his faith. He has a passion to help Christians understand our faith is a blessing for our minds as well as our souls. Before we get into the discussion, Doug would you like to take a couple of minutes and tell us a little about why you wanted to help Anchored by Truth pursue this series? Doug: - Opening Comments VK: Thank you, Doug. And just for the listeners' benefit we do expect Doug to be with us for the next few shows as we continue to address specific objections that are sometimes raised about God's existence. Today the objection we're going to look at is that there are so many different ideas or versions of God that exist around the world that it is impossible for us to know which, if any of them, is true. This is sometimes expressed in the bumper sticker “God is too big to fit into one religion.” But before we begin examining this specific objection let's take a brief look back and see what we learned about the first two objections we tackled. The first objection was that because we can't perceive God with any of our physical senses we have no evidence for God's existence. When we examined this objection we noted several important points. First, God is the ultimate cause of everything in the universe. This includes not only the features of the physical universe – matter, energy, time, and space - but also the personal attributes that we see present in human beings. These attributes include the ability to use logic, apply reason to reach valid conclusions, and express ourselves through language, Doug: Right. God, like all causes, can be known by His effects. Obviously, one of God's spectacular effects is His creation of the visible universe. And not only did God create the universe but He so ordered it that universe so it supports living and intelligent creatures. If you do away with God as the creator of the universe, then you are forced to conclude that the universe is somehow self-existent. That changes the universe from being an effect of an omnipotent Creator to being a self-existent cause. But if the universe is the cause of everything then what is the universe's effect? There is no satisfactory answer to that question. VK: Exactly. As we've noted many times on Anchored by Truth empirical observations of the universe tell us that the universe is not eternal. Even if we accept the conventional big bang theory, as opposed to Biblical creationism, it would require the universe to have a beginning. And the second law of thermodynamics tells us that one day the universe will run out of energy and come to an end. Anything that is self-existent would also be eternal. Empirical observations of the universe reveal that it is not eternal. So, even conventional science tells us the universe is not self-existent and needs a cause outside of itself. Doug: Yes. And the second objection we addressed was that even if God exists that God is so different from mankind that it would be impossible for us to know anything about God. In other words, if God existed He would be unknowable. This objection does not deny God's existence but declares any efforts to study God or have a relationship with Him would be futile. VK: Right. But we noted that this objection faces an immediate problem. The objection states that God cannot be known. But the objection proceeds from the assumption that we do know at least one thing about God – that God is completely different from man. This then leads to a number of obvious questions. If we don't, and can't know, anything about God, how do we know God is so different from man that God is unknowable? To state that two things are different you must know something about both things. So, this objection is self-defeating. It simultaneously claims we know nothing about God while claiming to know something about Him – namely that God is different from man. Now, of course Christians acknowledge that God is very different from man but we can claim that knowledge because we accept the revelation that God has made of Himself in the Bible. At any rate, listeners who want to hear the complete discussions of how we handled both those objections can go the podcast versions of those shows which are available from soundcloud.com or most major podcasting applications. So, Doug where do you want to start looking at the objection that there are so many versions of God that circulate in the world that it is impossible to know which of those versions is true? Doug: Well, as we've done before, let's start by looking at the propositions that are involved in, or stand behind, the objection. VK: Such as? Doug: Well, first notice that this objection rests on the awareness that there is a large variety of versions of God that exist around the world. In fact, it's probably safe to say that just about every culture that has ever existed, regardless of geography or time in history, has some concept of God. Or let's say some concept of the supernatural because many of the concepts involve belief in more than one supernatural figure. So, one question that comes to mind right away is why is there is such a widespread belief in the supernatural that transcends geography, culture, place in history, or other factors that distinguish one group of people from another? In other words, why does a belief in the supernatural exist and persist among just about every society that has ever existed? VK: Well, the critics would say because many of these cultures have been technologically primitive and therefore invented an explanation of things in the natural world they couldn't understand. As when some ancient cultures thought thunder was the voice of a god or maybe the noise the gods made when they were fighting. Doug: So, the contention would be that a lack of technological sophistication would induce men to invent something beyond themselves or things they could perceive with their senses to serve as an explanation for one phenomena or another. And I agree that that is one contention that is common. But that contention misses a very big point. VK: Which is? Doug: Why did those technologically unsophisticated people need or want an explanation in the first place? Thunder is loud and lighting is scary. But so what? Our pets are often scared of lightning and thunder but your dog has never asked you for an explanation of what's going on. Your pet is just scared and that's the end of it. But human beings wanted an explanation. They wanted to know what was causing the phenomena that scared them. Human beings have an innate desire not to just experience the world around them, but to understand it. Why? VK: I see what you're saying. One of the reasons there are so many variations of the God or gods hypothesis is because human beings have an intrinsic desire to have a comprehensive understanding of the world in which they live. That not only differentiates them from every other animal but it points out that human beings believe they have the capacity to grasp concepts that go beyond their sense perceptions. Yikes. That's the kind of the thought that can set off a bit of a brain freeze. Doug: Bingo. Human beings can conceive of a reality beyond themselves. And not just some limited group of human beings possesses this ability. As we've said, cultures that have limited technological sophistication possess this ability as well as those of us who have live in what we call the modern world. Human beings everywhere and at all times can perceive that realities can, or do, exist beyond that which they can see, hear, or feel. And this ability is universal. So, why is it universal? VK: Well, of course, this is a major problem for anyone who believes that life arose from the random collision of atoms and molecules. If human beings were just the ultimate product of a random, chaotic, and undirected process, that would make our brains just another product of that process. So, any belief humans have about a supernatural reality would just be another product of chaos. Doug: Right. So, the evolutionary hypothesis provides a very weak explanation for our ability to conceive of a supernatural reality regardless of the particular elements of that reality. But what would provide a much more reasonable explanation for the human ability to perceive a supernatural reality is if we were designed and created with that ability. And not just created with the ability but actually imprinted with an awareness of the divine. So, far from many different versions of God being an argument against God's existence, it actually provides strong evidence that God does exist. And God implanted in human beings an awareness of His existence that is so strong that it has been present universally throughout human history and all over the world. And that leads us to a second point to notice about this objection – that there are so many versions of God that we can't know which, if any, are true. The objection affirms that there is a difference between truth and error. After all, why say that you can't know that something is true or false if there's not a real difference between the two? VK: And that's a really important point. In a random and chaotic universe that has no superintending intelligence any distinctions made about truth or error would be illusory. Such distinctions would be meaningless so there would be no point in making them. But the critic who objects that we can't know which version of God is true is acknowledging that separating truth from error is meaningful. But making such a separation would only be possible if there is a Being who established order in the universe – the kind of order that makes some things true and some things false. And the kind of Being who is able to create human beings in such a way that they are aware of the distinction between truth and error and they are aware that making a correct distinction is important. Doug: Again, bingo. Human beings have a universally shared concept that some things are true and some things are false and that it is important to be able to make the distinction. Human beings also believe that they possess the ability to understand the difference, and in every human culture this awareness extends to believing that we have an obligation to act in accordance with our ability to distinguish truth from error and right from wrong. And we are all aware not only of our abilities but our obligations. VK: So, again this raises the question of how these obligations would arise. Even if random and chaotic collisions of molecules could create life or even a brain, random collisions can't create obligations such as laws. Or said differently, laws require a lawgiver. But I suppose a critic might say that what most people call laws or obligations are really just expressions of preference or convenience. That there really aren't any laws. Just the perception that there are. Doug: And, in fact, that is one contention that is sometimes raised. But it's amazing how fast those critics believe those laws are real when someone steals their property. All denials that human beings are not subject to some shared obligations are forced and artificial and they fall away when a real violation of law occurs that affects them. So, that leads us to a third point. The notion that we can't determine which concept of God is true rests on two premises that are both self-defeating. Let's take the first of those possible premises – that it is not possible to know enough true facts about God for us to accurately separate truth from error. So, this premise states a definitive conclusion about the nature of how human beings think about God. Yet it does so while telling us it is not possible to make any definite statements about that God Himself. In other words, the statement purports to tell us something about how we can think about God while maintaining that it is impossible for us to know enough about God to say anything true about Him. VK: So, the notion that there are so many different concepts about God that we cannot know if any are true is a statement of certainty. But it is a statement of certainty that rejects the possibility of others being able to have that same degree of certainty. In other words the statement says that “I am certain that others must always remain in uncertainty.” When you phrase the objection this way some problems immediately become apparent. First, for anyone to be certain about what it is possible for others to know, or not know, is presumptuous. Second, for anyone to know what others can, or cannot know, would mean that the objector possesses an exhaustive knowledge of how other people think or can obtain knowledge. For the statement to be true the objector would have to be omniscient. So, we know right away the statement is an overly broad claim. Third, there is absolutely no way to prove that the statement is true. In fact, it's hard to even see what meaningful evidence could be offered to support the claim. As such, this objection is really just an unsupported assertion. Like so many objections that are made about God, it sounds profound but when you examine it carefully it falls apart. Doug: Exactly. The objection fails the standard that it establishes. As you said, it proclaims with certainty that no one can ever possess enough certain knowledge of God for them to correctly sort among the various concepts of God that circulate. So, a fair question to ask the objector is how they can be so certain that uncertainty is the necessary plight of everyone else. The same observation can be made of an objection that is a first-cousin to this objection. This objection states, “That there are so many different concepts of God that exist that it is not worthwhile to study them to determine if any of them is true.” The first form of the objection says that it is not possible to determine whether any concept of God is true. This form of the objection acknowledges that it may be possible to know which concept of God is true, but that it is so difficult that it is simply not worth the effort. The first form of the objection is an absolute statement. The second is simply a statement of comparative value and worth. VK: But like the first form of the objection, the second form presumes that the objector possesses an exhaustive knowledge of what would make the lives of other people meaningful. So, again this is a very presumptuous statement because it presumes to judge what others may choose to do with their lives. What would give anyone the right to make that judgment on behalf of everyone else? So again, this form of the objection would require the objector to be omniscient. Furthermore, both forms of the objection are impossible to prove. In the first place it is almost impossible to prove a negative. Both of these objections are framed around negatives. You cannot know something. It is not worthwhile to try. In addition to the fact that it is very hard to prove a negative, it's hard to even begin to see what evidence can be offered to support either of these propositions. Doug: Yes. But these objections do raise one very valid question that we should tackle before we end this discussion. And that question is – given the fact that are a very large number of differing concepts of God that exist – how can we go about determining which of them, if any, is true? As you often discuss on Anchored by Truth, sorting among competing truth claims is a worthwhile endeavor. But before we go to that question let's make one more observation about the objections themselves. The objections could be restated to say, “There are so many different concepts of God it is very difficult to know which is the true one.” Or, “There are so many different concepts of God it is not worth it to me to figure out which one is true.” When these objections are stated this way they are no longer self-defeating. But stating them this way reveals something very important. Whether someone chooses to invest the time to come to know God is a personal decision. And we would readily acknowledge two things right away. First, the large variations in belief systems that exist around the world can make finding the truth challenging. And second, it is the right of every person to decide whether they want to engage in that effort. VK: Yes. We agree with both of those observations. It can be hard to know which concept of God is the correct one. And it is up to every person to decide whether or not they will make that effort. But, as we point out so often, knowing about God and knowing God personally, is a choice that has eternal consequences. Every other decision that we make as human beings – whether it's what job to do or car to buy or even who to marry – these are decisions that will largely affect us while we are alive on this earth. But decisions we make about God have eternal consequences. The consequences to accept or reject Jesus as your savior go on for eternity. And it is so important for people to understand that we only have the opportunity to make those decisions as we go through this life. Hebrews 9:27 tells us that “people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.” Doug: That is what makes this series on the Lord of Logic so important. Some surveys indicate that even if a child is raised in a Christian home, as many as 75% of those kids will abandon their faith after they leave home. This is a tragedy. But it is an avoidable tragedy. We need to prepare our kids with the evidence and the reasoning capacity to be able to deal with the opposition they're going to get to their faith once they are out on their own. And that brings us to the question of how we can successfully sort among the many competing truth claims that exist about the nature and attributes of God. To do that successfully is a two pronged effort. There is both an internal and an external component to knowing that the Christian faith is true about what it claims and teaches. Naturally, the external component begins with the Bible. VK: And that, of course, is the central focus of Anchored by Truth. Our whole goal is to demonstrate that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God. The Bible is more than just a book or even a collection of books. The Bible is God's special revelation to mankind to enable people to discern the truth about God. God knew we would confront many counterfeit versions of the true God as we go through life but He didn't leave us helpless. He gave us the Bible so we would be able to know the truth and, by knowing the truth, defeat the falsehoods. Doug: Yes. So, the external component of knowing the truth about God begins by gathering knowledge, evidence if you will. And one really important body of evidence people need to investigate for themselves is the evidence that supports the inspiration of scripture. You and RD talk frequently about the remarkable unity of the Bible for a book that was assembled over a period of 1,500 years by dozens of human authors. And you have done series on the fulfilled prophecies that are contained in the Bible, prophecies so specific they could only have been given by a being that knows all of history in advance. VK: The Bible's remarkable unity and fulfilled prophecy are two of the four lines of evidence we frequently discuss on Anchored by Truth. Another one is the reliable history the Bible contains. This demonstrates that we can be confident in the accuracy of the Bible because thousands of facts contained in the Bible have been confirmed by archeology or other extra-Biblical sources. The final line is changed destinies. Hundreds of thousands of people, or more, have testified that the Bible changed their lives for the better. They stopped drinking, got off drugs, reconnected with their families, and more. The changes in their lives prove that the Bible isn't just a book of moldy history or fantastic tales. It is a book whose power continues to operate even in a world that has changed drastically in so many other ways. Doug: Yes. So, reading the Bible, getting to know the Bible, and meditating on the Bible helps us build that external component that tells us the Christian faith is true. But the external component doesn't end there. The external component also includes spending time with other believers in corporate worship and group prayer. It includes listening to testimonies and teaching, including teaching on Christian radio like we're doing today. It includes consulting with believers who have been on the road longer than we have to get the benefits of their insight and knowledge. So, the external component to knowing that Christianity is true itself has a lot of different facets. But, there is also an internal component to knowing that the Christian faith is true. And that comes from the internal witness of the Holy Spirit. In John 16:13 Jesus said, “I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth.” VK: And that is so critical because it forms the basis for what we are doing in this Lord of Logic series. We want believers to begin to realize that they do not have to accept the world's characterization of the Christian faith as being a faith that sets aside logic, reason, and evidence. To the contrary, the truth of the Christian faith is demonstrated by the correct use of logic, reason, and evidence. But as much as we can help people with that, ultimately they must apply some effort to build a rock-solid foundation for their own faith. Doug: Yes. The first time someone hears the objection that there are so many different varieties of God that exist around the world that it is impossible to know which one is true, the objection sort of sounds profound. Certainly, we know there are a lot of different concepts of God out there. That much is self-evident. But, by applying just a bit of logic, you can quickly realize that this is an objection that is without merit. If someone told you that there are three pieces of paper on a table in front of you, one of which was a $100 bill – and that you could keep the $100 if you identified it – you would immediately make the effort to figure out which piece of paper was the real bill. Now maybe one of the pieces has a picture of a bunny rabbit on it and the hundred-dollar label is in orange crayon. Pretty easy to toss that one. But maybe the third piece of paper is a counterfeit $100 bill. So, now you have to work a little harder. You'd hold it up to the light and look at the lines. Real bills are sharp and clear. If it looks like a recent $100 bill you'd look for that blue-gray stripe they put in them. The point is you would take time to sort between the true and the false because it would be meaningful to you. It would improve your life by identifying the real bill. Well, if it's important to sort out the real $100 bill, it is immeasurably more important to sort out which concept of God will guarantee you eternal life in heaven – or which ones will leave you wondering for all eternity why you didn't make the effort. VK: Well, all this sounds like a great time to go to the Lord in prayer. Since this series has required no small amount of thinking perhaps it will help us sympathize with our kids who are still in school or college. Today let's listen to a prayer for anyone who is preparing to take a test and let's use it to recommit ourselves to our own study of God's word. ---- PRAYER FOR TAKING A TEST (RANNI) VK: We'd like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” If you'd like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We're not famous but our Boss is!” (Bible Quotes from the Contemporary English Version) John, Chapter 12, verses 37 through 41, Contemporary English Version 21 Great Scientists Who Believed the Bible - creation.com Essential Truths This objection that there are too many versions of God to know which one is true rests on one of two premises both of which are self-defeating. 1. There is no way to determine the truth about God 2. It is not worthwhile to determine the truth about God But both of these statements are themselves determinations about God. Both arrive at a definitive conclusion about the value and nature of God. So, both attempt to make a definitive statement (there is no way to … or it is not worthwhile to …) about an entity about which they say it is not possible to or worthwhile to make any true statements about. In other words these statements purport to tell us something about God while maintaining that it is impossible to say anything true about God or not worthwhile to determine something about God. 1. It is acceptable to say that it is hard/difficult to find out the truth about God. 2. It is acceptable to say that, as a person, you do not believe it is worth your personal time to try to determine the truth about God. The first statement is simply a statement about the comparative effort of gaining knowledge in a particular subject. Some people don't want to study botany. Others don't. The second statement is a statement about personal preference. I don't want to spend time doing a particular thing. Neither of these statements is self-defeating. They may be foolish but they are not self-defeating. But the minute you try to turn a statement of comparison or preference into an absolute you now make a statement that cannot pass the standard the statement sets.

Independent Journalism is a critically important part of maintaining a democratic society. Unfortunately, it seems that media has become increasingly dominated by a handful of major corporations and technology companies. In many cases, local journalism is the only remaining bridge to create an independent voice. Doug and Mark talk about the dynamics of local journalism and its importance to the community's overall health. Doug's business specializes in partnering with companies and non-profits to capture overhead cost savings without layoffs to fund growth and strengthen financial results. Schedule time with Doug to talk about your business at www.MeetDoug.Biz [Music] [Introduction] Welcome to the terminal value Podcast where each episode provides in depth insight about the long term value of companies and ideas in our current world. Your host for this podcast is Doug Utberg, the founder and principal consultant for Business of Life, LLC. Doug: Welcome to the terminal value podcast. I have Mark Garber with us. Mark is the chief publisher for Pamplin Media Group, which is a local media chain, I think you'd say for the Portland metropolitan area. And Mark and I are here today to talk about the importance of local journalism, not just to the Portland area, but really to pretty much any area. Mark, welcome to the show. And thank you for coming on. Mark: Thanks, Doug. Glad to be here. Doug: So tell me a little bit how has the pimply Media Group been, you know, how is the vault? Everybody wants to talk about COVID. But just in general, the, you know, the technical turmoil, the technology turmoil that's been happening for the last 15 years. How is this impacted? pamphlet? Because, of course, it's a diversified set of newspaper news publications, but there has to have been an impact. Mark: Oh, yeah, the technology, as you know, dramatically changed what we do. And local journalism. And you know, it really goes back, Doug for 25, 30 years. If you think back to the very beginnings of, of online content, and newspapers, actually, were some of the first entities to jump into online news. You know, I started publishing news online.  Doug: Yeah. Mark: And so we were really competing with ourselves for a number of years in terms of giving our product away. Doug: Yeah. Mark: Online while we were still charging people to read it in print. So but you're right, that is really accelerated. I'd say, you know, since you know, the mid 2000s.  Doug: Yeah.  Mark: It's really changed the newspaper world. And we actually, with our 25, local newspapers, we have more people now, who read us digitally than who read us in print, we still have, you know, hundreds of 1000s of people read us and brand. Doug: Yeah.  Mark: But we have more than that, who read us online? Doug: Yeah. yeah, that's, and yeah, I mean, what are some of the adaptations even making I mean, because, you know, I think, you know, of course, we'll get to the importance of the local journalism, because I obviously think it's important because I subscribe to the local journalists, and, you know, and to the, I actually do the all digital all access package, to subscribe, not just to the Portland Tribune and the Newburgh graphic, which is where I live, but also the broader Metropolitan papers, just because I think it's really important to understand what's happening in the different local communities. Just, you know, that tell me a little bit about, you know, just kind of a about the adaptations that Pamplin has made to, you know, to stay in the game. Mark: Yeah, and I'll try to not get too too technical in what we do. But obviously, it's changed our entire workflow as far as how we, how we distribute the news. Doug: Yeah.  Mark: And so, you know, in the old days, where there was a daily newspaper, or weekly newspaper, or twice weekly, whatever the frequency was, I mean, everything was geared toward meeting a...

To many people, faith and religion are the same thing. This is certainly true some of the time, but not in every situation. Doug and Craig spoke the perspective of faith as deep belief and the way that belief can truly bring people together even if the nature of their beliefs are different. When we take this broader view of faith-based organizations, it becomes apparent that nearly everybody is engaged in some form of faith-based endeavor. Doug's business specializes in partnering with companies and non-profits to create value and capture cost savings without layoffs to fund growth and strengthen financial results.  You can find out more athttp://www.terminalvalue.biz ( www.TerminalValue.biz) You can find the audio podcast feed athttp://www.terminalvaluepodcast.com ( www.TerminalValuePodcast.com) You can find the video podcast feed athttp://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5a4QbT-dXhpgb-8HJHdGg ( www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5a4QbT-dXhpgb-8HJHdGg) Schedule time with Doug to talk about your business athttp://www.meetdoug.biz ( www.MeetDoug.Biz) [Music] [Introduction] Welcome to the terminal value Podcast where each episode provides in depth insight about the long term value of companies and ideas in our current world. Your host for this podcast is Doug Utberg, the founder and principal consultant for Business of Life, LLC. Doug: Welcome to the terminal value podcast, I have Craig Carter on the line. And Craig has the auspicious notoriety of being my former boss when I worked at Intel. But that's actually not what we're here, what we're here to talk about today, what we're here to talk about is Craig's life passion, which is running a face faith based organization within the Intel network. And in particular, what I'd like to talk about today is that, of course, the political environment is crazy right now. And you're trying to really stick to your mission of a faith based organization while navigating that political environment. Craig, welcome. And thank you for your time.  Craig: Well, thanks Doug. It's good to be here. Doug: So just tell us some of the experiences you've been having, you know, because of course, right, you know, the, there's, you know, it's interesting how what happens in the media is you always only see the crazy people on the media, you don't ever see, hey, these are normal people wanting to help people get through the the travails of their life that they feel like they can't talk about talk to anybody about that's not interesting. So nobody posts articles about that.  Craig: True. Doug: That's probably 99% of what you do. But of course, the the things you're going to hear are somebody who makes some sort of, you know, horrendously offensive racial remark, and people say, that's so terrible. And it's like, Well, okay, okay. Yes, it is terrible, but it's not representative of everybody who have a particular face.  Craig: True. Doug: I'm you You must have been dealing with this, Craig. Actually, I know you've been dealing with it, because we've been talking. Craig: Yes absolutely. Doug: To you a softball question. Craig: We've you. We've been talking a lot over the years. So let me maybe give a quick recap. And that can kind of walk into this. And then we can take it from there, Doug. So I've been involved with the different Christian groups. Doug: Yeah. Craig: Here at Intel for probably two decades or so. And then just even I was about.  Doug: You don't look anywhere ear that old Craig. Nice. I'm just so I'm, you look, you look every year that old? Craig: Thanks, is I look at you through my aggressive lens this year.  Doug: Exactly.  Craig: Yes. And yeah. So I paint the ground there just to look a little old.  Doug: Yeah. I do the same Craig: So been doing this for like 20 years, and it's been really neat. And then this last fall, felt led to reach out to people of other faiths and to get to know these other leaders of...

The best corporate team building activities with Terry Barkman A sailboat is a great place to work on corporate team building activities and to see how your team is functioning together and where the fall-downs are in your communication. The boat inherently sets up short feedback loops and we can tell if the things that we've asked for and communicating for are happening, we can tell how quickly they're happening, we can tell who's jumping in and being a team player and who's hanging back and waiting for somebody else to take the lead. A big part of what a sailboat coaching trip is is it's a retreat. It is getting away from the office, getting away from even home, and being in a new setting that's beautiful and having the trees and the water all around you. I feel like if you want to be the best version of yourself that you can be if you want to excel if you want to win at life, you should have a coach. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: THE BEST CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES [just click to tweet] THE BEST CORPORATE TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITIES A sailboat is a great place to work on corporate team building activities and to see how your team is functioning together _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to take you in a different direction actually in a different vehicle. My guest joining me in the studio today is Terry Barkman. Now, Terry is known as the Sailboat Coach. Now before you think, "Hey, I didn't log in to this podcast to listen about sailing," just hang in with me for a few minutes. Terry's a visionary, entrepreneur, he's a coach and he's a sailing captain, and his mission is to create momentum and connection through shared outdoors so people feel empowered to impact the world in creative and meaningful ways.  He was frustrated with the traditional limits of industrial coaching so he founded a sailboat coaching international company This positioned him as a thought leader in the emerging free-range coaching community. Sailboat coaching uses one week on the water to create space for learning and transformation and quality time with other visionaries. They also do team-building exercises that are over a couple of days. And when I first talked to Terry, he said something magical happens when a small group of adventures get together, set out on a boat to explore the winds and the world together. So SCI trips encourage clients to relax, rejuvenate by talking them through their ways of their busy lives. And this is kind of a sacred space that encourages deep, meaningful work for yourself and the next steps you might take in your life. So I'd like to welcome Terry to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Well hey, Terry, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Terry Barkman: It's great to be here, Doug. I'm excited to get into it. Let's talk real fast. Doug: Well, I think the downside of a podcast is after spending some time on your website and looking at all those beautiful images and then enjoying some of the videos and the testimonials from your happy clients, whether it was pulling up a bucket or a net full of crabs or sitting on the beach having a picnic, I don't think a podcast is going to do what you do justice. Terry Barkman: Well, thank you. Like you, I spend time looking at those pictures and dreaming of the trips that I'm about to go on, remembering the trips that we have gone on, but the great news today is that you and I get to talk about trips and team building and all the fun stuff, and that's fun, too. Doug: So why don't you just share with the audience a bit more detail in terms of what it is that you do and who you help and serve?  Terry Barkman: We are coaching on sailboats, and our clients, in the beginning, were mostly personal growth,

Grow your top line revenue fast with Lisa Florenzen I try to help any business gain at least $20,000 of revenue in less than an hour. And how I do that is really taking a look at their message, their content, what their goal is with their business. I look at, are they bundling? Do they have joint venture partnerships? What are they doing with those partnerships? Have you raised your prices? I really try to get in there and just look at the numbers first, see where we are, see where we want to go, how we can do it intelligently, and then start implementing steps to get there. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: GROW YOUR TOP LINE REVENUE FAST [just click to tweet] GROW YOUR TOP LINE REVENUE FAST I have been there and done that and I'm still doing it. I am worth it and if you want to save your business, if you want to [grow your top line revenue], you need, people like me. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. In-studio today, I've got joining me a fellow marketer. Lisa Florenzen calls herself the Small Business Swiss Army Knife. By spending the last 25 years working with Pre-IPO startups and medium-sized entities in California and Idaho and nationally doing everything from getting coffee, writing copy, and staffing bodies. Her non-sugar coated sense of business style and her former stint as a standup comic have given her a unique perspective on handling the marketing drama with humor, tact, and in almost any financial environment. She currently runs a consulting firm called Kabomb Coach Academy and is honored to be a consulting partner with the first social selling app, RelyCircle. So I'd like to welcome Lisa to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well hey, I'm super excited to have my next guest on the show. I just want to welcome Lisa Florenzen to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Lisa Florenzen: Thank you, Doug. I'm super elated to be here. Doug: So we connected on social media and I think the reason that happened is that we use social media what it's designed to do, and that is to be social and not just broadcast. Lisa Florenzen: Absolutely. I was, yeah... I mean I was tickled when I got your invite, so thank you again. Doug: Well I connect with a lot of people that way and it surprises me that in the days of people wanting to be more social and connect that they still use it as a broadcast channel where they just think they can pump out their messages and not have conversations. And then they wonder, "Hey, social media doesn't work for me." Lisa Florenzen: Yes. I've experienced that. Especially, I don't want to slam any social media outlet, but LinkedIn I've had conversations with people or brief little things where people try to hit me up or they invite me somewhere, and then I call it the abduction by aliens, where they are gone. You don't ever hear anything from them again. So- Doug: That's funny, abduction. Lisa Florenzen: ... I appreciate the fact that you come through with your contact. It's refreshing. Doug: Well, some of it I automate and some of it I use the team for, but I think that the goal here really is to build our network, look for smart people that you want to connect with. And that gives us an opportunity for referrals, it gives us an opportunity to work with new potential vendors and just a support network of other people who are trying to do the same thing that we're trying to do. Which is to build our businesses and help our clients. Lisa Florenzen: Absolutely. And I don't know if you got the smart thing over here, but I know I got the smart thing over there where you are, so that'll be good. At least one of us will get something out of it. Doug: So do you want to just fill in the blanks and give us a little bit of background on kind of what your specialty and superpower is and how you work with businesses to hel...

How to generate more leads on LinkedIn with Dana Lindahl What we've been realizing recently is that LinkedIn is actually a great place to post content. The one thing I tell most people is that there is such a thing as too much content on LinkedIn. Any person that's trying to actually generate more leads on LinkedIn, they need to focus first on having a completely optimized LinkedIn profile. This is what I view as the modern business card today to B2B sales. If someone were to gain access to your message box and post that publicly, would you be embarrassed by what was there? So the biggest mistake I see all the time with people using LinkedIn is just bad targeting.  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO GENERATE MORE LEADS ON LINKEDIN [just click to tweet] HOW TO GENERATE MORE LEADS ON LINKEDIN Any person that's trying to generate leads on LinkedIn needs to focus on having an optimized LinkedIn profile. I view this as the modern-day business card. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to talk about lead generation. All things around lead generation, how to position yourself as an expert, how the world has changed in the last six to eight years in terms of lead generation, but more importantly, how it has changed in the last six to eight months. And my guest in studio today is Dana Lindahl. Dana is the founder of a company called Legendary Leadgen and it's one of the first outbound focused marketing agencies. He and his team have been helping business to business, B2B service companies, and marketing agencies grow since 2014. So he's not the newest guy on the block, he's been around. He probably got some war wounds to show for that. Now he and his team specialize in helping companies set up sales appointments with their ideal prospects as well as establishing them as an authority within their industry. So if you're interested in generating highly qualified leads, using highly professional, respectful, and engaging techniques, I would suggest that you stay tuned. I really enjoyed my conversation with him and listen in. Doug: So I'd like to welcome Dana to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Hey Dana, super excited to have you on the show today. So, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast. Dana Lindahl: Hey Doug, glad to be here. Doug: So, I can't think of a better topic to talk about than lead generation. I mean, there are so many elements in running our business and we can argue which one is more important, but I would say that if you don't have a well-qualified lead, you're not making sales, then you really don't have a business. So, maybe you want to take a minute and just fill in the kind of background for our listeners. Kind of what your superpower is and what you guys do. Dana Lindahl: Yeah, sure. So our superpower, in general, is outbound marketing, although we've seen that take a wild drive since we started here in 2014. We started out primarily doing outbound emails and now we find ourselves on LinkedIn and to be honest, our method now is not really based around marketing, so much as it is around content and authority building. Doug: Okay. So when you say content authority, what does that mean? Dana Lindahl: So we help our clients to establish themselves as authorities on LinkedIn by producing content that puts themselves out there as thought leaders within their industry. So this all kind of starts off by growing their networks so that people can actually see their content, see who they are, and see what they have to say. All of this would be for nothing if it didn't actually get out there into the world so people could see it. So, instead of doing the normal thing that you're probably seeing, all of your listeners are probably getting bombarded on LinkedIn by outbound messages with Calendly links and let's get o...

How to sell on Amazon with Carolyn Lowe The first thing we do is does discover if it makes sense for you to sell on Amazon? Things that are heavy, that cost a lot, that are cheap, lower priced. Those don't usually don't make sense, you can't make money. So what we do typically if we're going to work with a new brand, we'll do an audit, we'll see if there are search terms and how many search terms they have for their brand or their product on Amazon before we take them on. I have an interesting stat from Amazon that 70% of their people don't make it past page one. So if you're an Amazon shopper, Amazon has told me that 70% of people don't make it past page one. So if you're not on page one, you're never going to get purchased. I can work with my brands and say, "Hey, there's a lot of customer demand for this on Amazon, but they don't have a great selection. This could be a winning product for you." _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO SELL ON AMAZON [just click to tweet] HOW TO SELL ON AMAZON We have a $15 rule to determine if you should sell on Amazon. If your product isn't $15 or more and it's not light enough to make money, that's where we start. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're talking about all things Amazon. So if you're interested in getting your brand or product listed in Amazon and seeing double-digit growth month after month, I think you're really going to enjoy the conversation with my guest today. Today's guest is Carolyn Lowe. She is the CEO and founder of a company called ROI Swift and an Amazon and digital marketing agency that excels in growing small and medium-sized businesses. Carolyn is passionate about helping her consumer brands grow through Facebook and Instagram ads paid Google searches and Amazon marketing. In addition to helping her clients see larger profits, Carolyn is a mum of two and a licensed pilot. So I'd like to welcome Carolyn to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Well, hey Carolyn, super excited to have you on the show today. So welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast. Carolyn Lowe: Thanks for having me, Doug. Doug: So do you want to share with our listeners just a little bit of your background and what your superpower is and how you help people move the sales dial and scale their business? Carolyn Lowe: Sure, I'd be happy to. We focus on four core areas for mostly B-to-C brands, but we also do some B-to-B business as well. But really our core competencies are around paid social, your Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat marketing and your paid search and social ... sorry, paid search as well. And then, of course, your Amazon and email marketing. And I know you've had some great email marketing guests on and you've had some great paid search on. One of the things that we're a little bit different is we manage Amazon's presence for a lot of consumer brands. Doug: So for their audiences not aware of that, what does that mean? Carolyn Lowe: Yes. So there's three different ways to sell on Amazon. And as a brand owner, if Amazon invites you, you can wholesale to them, which is shipped from and sold by Amazon. And then there's two other ways to sell, which are what they call seller central. So you go on, it's sort of a self-service portal and you can either ship into Amazon and have them fulfill it or you can take the order from Amazon and fulfill it yourself. So either way, you still have to pay Amazon a referral fee, and then if you have Amazon fulfill your product which makes you Prime eligible, you must also pay the outbound shipping fee, but that does make you eligible for Prime. Doug: Okay. So for our listeners that have a brand, have a business and have a product that would be, or maybe a good fit for Amazon, where's the starting point? How do you determine whether or not Amazon could be an ...

Tips on how to scale your business past six figures with Taylor Welch To scale your business you have to be okay with earning money off of the effort of the people on your team and trusting the people on your team. To get to six figures is pretty much your effort. But then you pass a critical mass where getting past seven figures and eight figures, you have to disconnect that. For us, it was, the first hire was a client success director. People are doing a million things, none of it works. And really targeting them towards the one, two, maybe three things that they need to be doing in their business to scale. If you really go beneath the surface, it's an identity modification company. We are rewiring the way people think about themselves, their markets, their teams, money. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS PAST SIX FIGURES [just click to tweet] HOW TO SCALE YOUR BUSINESS PAST SIX FIGURES To scale your business you have to be okay with earning money off of the effort of the people on your team and trusting people on your team. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to take a slightly different direction on the podcast and podcast topic. You've often heard me say that never ask anyone for advice who hasn't done what you want to do or is willing to pay the price that you're willing to pay. And I think our guest today just exemplifies an individual who has built a very successful business, scaled business from a startup to six figures, to seven figures, to eight figures, and now looks like he's going to cross the nine-figure barrier. Doug: My guest is Taylor Welch. He is a co-founder of a company called Traffic and Funnels, which many of you have probably heard of. An investment company called Wealth Cap Holdings, and he's also the CEO of a website called Sales Mentor. He helps his clients build online digital marketing systems and drive paid traffic to them. They will teach you how to generate these leads. But more importantly, I think what you'll find in listening to our conversation today is that, in terms of scaling, a lot of scaling has to do with your mind, your mindset, the things that you're doing, the things that you shouldn't be doing. So I think you'll enjoy this conversation. So sit back, get your notepad out. And just enjoy the conversation today with a Taylor Welch. Hey, Taylor, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. So welcome to the show. Taylor Welch: Thank you for having me. Glad to be here. Doug: So you've got, man, a ton of business history in a real short period of time and have built a very successful business, obviously doing more things right than wrong. So do you want to give us just a thumbnail for our listeners who don't know who you are and what you've done, kind of where you're at in your life today? Taylor Welch: Yep. So we started an advertising agency, then got into advertising and marketing consulting. This was about 2016 and '17. It grew really, really fast. My business partner and I, we were able to learn the underlying principles behind scaling, which I think we're going to talk about today. Got into real estate. And we've kind of gotten into a lot of different things. But today, we run about 20,000 clients a year. We have a couple of million dollars in real estate portfolios. We're doing wealth management training. We're kind of all over the place, but we have an amazing team that allows us to do that. Doug: So what was it like when you started scaling your business? And when we talked briefly before we started recording today of the difference between the mindset of I'm someone trying to get to six figures and then someone moving from six figures to seven figures. Taylor Welch: Yeah. The hardest part that I've seen and this is,

Marketing funnel tips from the 28-year-old millionaire Tanner Chidester  I have a systematic process of moving people through my marketing funnel quickly and efficiently by asking important questions. Then we sign them up for a call. And I think it's what has allowed me to grow so fast because I'm doing things most people aren't doing and so when you do that usually it gives you an advantage over others. I'm pretty vocal about I don't like the low ticket model for beginners. I think that that's what actually kept me stuck for the first two years. I was like I'm going to be successful or I'm going to be homeless and when you have a mindset like that it's hard to fail. At the end of the day it doesn't freaking matter how it works, you've just got to get it to work. As long as the lead turns into a sale you're good to go. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS EPISODE: MARKETING FUNNEL TIPS FROM THE 28-YEAR-OLD MILLIONAIRE [just click to tweet] MARKETING FUNNEL TIPS FROM THE 28-YEAR-OLD MILLIONAIRE I have a systematic process of moving people through my marketing funnel quickly and efficiently by asking important questions. Then we sign them up for a call. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. In the studio today I've got Jamie Tanner-Chidester he is a 28-year old millionaire. He is the CEO of two companies, Elite CEOs and Fit Warrior and what I want you to listen to in this episode is I want you to listen and understand how he uses pay traffic, how he started, it didn't work and how he managed to continually test and try until he got it to convert. And now he spends between $200 and $250,000 a month driving traffic to his sales funnel and operating an eight-figure business. Doug: So Tanner has been an industry leader not only in the fitness industry but also in digital marketing and sales as well. He is a four-time winner of the 2 Comma Club in ClickFunnels and as you'll hear in this episode he is now going to the 8 Figure Funnel award. He works with Fitness Warrior which is a fitness coaching program, he helps to shred fat and eat how they want and with his business Elite CEOs, he helps fitness trainers and online businesses generate more revenue. Doug: So if you're interested in generating more revenue, growing your business from six figures to seven or seven to eight sit back, tune-in and listen to Tanner [inaudible 00:01:20] I hope you enjoy this episode. So hey Tanner, super, super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. So welcome to the show. Tanner Chidester: Yeah, thank you so much for having me I'm excited to talk about marketing and see what value I can provide, so thank you. Doug: Well I mean there are two things that I found really interesting around your background and one is that you've developed a very successful business coaching people and helping them make money online and you also pay attention to your health. And you've helped people walk through the health journey and often lots of times as people build big businesses they spend all their time on the business end, they don't spend any time on their health. So if you want to just share a little bit on how you combine your passion for eating and living well, as well as building a business? Tanner Chidester: Yeah, absolutely. So I mean ironically when I first started I didn't know what to do and I had a mentor and he was like, "Well what are you good at?" And I was like, "Well not really anything. I work hard and I work out." And he was like, "Well why don't you do fitness?" I was like, "Okay." So yeah I started off just helping people get in shape and I built that pretty big and before you knew it I had trainers and so forth they were asking, "Hey man how are you doing this?" Tanner Chidester: Because most trainers don't make a lot of money and ironically to your point it's k...

Tips on how to gain attention and increase sales with Tyler Basu We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and some appointments. I'll start at the bottom of the funnel process. I like to focus on things that are the closest to the money. It's not about the time, it's about the resources that are poured into it. You can really speed up building your audience if you're a bit more generous with the money you spend on doing that. If you're not spending money on ads, there is a cost to creating content too and that cost is your time. And every entrepreneur should know what the value of their time is. Just focus on the fundamentals. Do the things that make you the most money and then later when you have a bigger team, more resources, then you can add all more layers of complexity. I learned about pre-selling. Building up a list or doing some outreach and talking to people and seeing if you can sell them your thing before you actually create it. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS POST: HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES [just click to tweet] HOW TO GAIN ATTENTION AND INCREASE SALES We help people create content to gain attention and then we make sure that we bridge the gap to actually getting some leads and appointments. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: So kind of where do you start? Tyler: I start closest to the money. So if somebody has got an offer I say, "Okay, great. What's the step that comes right before somebody buys from you?" Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. I think you're going to really enjoy our episode today. We're going to talk about creating content, but more importantly, we're going to talk about how to take the content that you're already creating if you are creating content and how to make it convert. So how to use your content strategy to generate leads and sales. And then if you're not generating the content, our guest is going to help cover off some tips and techniques on how to create content. So our guest today is Tyler Basu. I met Tyler in San Diego. We're both icons of influence at the New Media Summit a few years ago and we just really connected and really hit it off and I've got a lot of respect for Tyler and what he does. Tyler is a Content Marketing Strategist and what he does is he specializes in helping startups and entrepreneurs create content that drives qualified traffic and leads to their business. He's the co-founder of a company called Influencer Studio. It's a content marketing agency that offers content creation, publishing and promotional service to entrepreneurs. He's also a publisher of a lifestyle business magazine and podcast and an online publication dedicated to helping entrepreneurs help to build a life and business on their own terms. So I'd like to welcome Tyler Basu to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast. Well, Hey Tyler, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Tyler: Doug, it's a pleasure to be here man. I'm really grateful to be on your show. Doug: Yeah, it was great. I mean we connected a couple of years ago at the New Media Summit because you are an Icon of Influence and we kind of stayed in touch so we both drove or flew down from the same neighborhood to down in San Diego and enjoy some sunshine and some great conversations. Tyler: I remember that. I remember being at the restaurant table with you and we were laughing about all my rejection I faced doing door to door sales. They were good times. Yeah. Doug: Well I mean you come from a sales background and it's interesting because now you're helping businesses with their marketing, marketing funnels, and content. So it's always great to have someone who's worked on both sides of the ledger, where often sales and marketing are arm wrestling each other. Tyler: Yeah.

Tips on how to improve customer loyalty with Rob Gallo  If you have a customer loyalty program already, the people who are in your program using it are already loyal. Can they be more loyal? You have an emotional connection to a brand that leads you to engage with that brand. You might drive out of your way to get to a Starbucks if you have that emotional connection. That's the first step in customer loyalty. The best thing to do for your customers is ease of use. Reduce friction on the user experience side. It needs to be seamless. Rather than points, rather than discounts, people want unique experiences that are personalized to them. Ask them what you can offer that would be appealing to them? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER LOYALTY [just click to tweet] SHARE THIS EPISODE: HOW TO IMPROVE CUSTOMER LOYALTY If you have a customer loyalty program already, the people who are in your program using it are already loyal. Can they be more loyal? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I have joining me Rob Gallo, and he runs a company called Comp Links. So if your business deals with customers, and you want to understand what makes them tick, then you and I owe it to ourselves to glean some knowledge from someone who's literally been there and done that. Doug: So Rob is considered an expert in customer engagement and building consumer brand loyalty. He's going to share some real life stories of his 20 years of successes and failures in that business, in the ultra competitive casino business that translates really into any business that deals with customers as their lifeblood. We had a great conversation. It kind of brought me back to years ago working in the customer loyalty business or space with retailers, and really just shone a light on how far technology's advanced and how we can leverage this type of program to have our customers repeatedly come back, earn rewards elsewhere but spend that money with us. Doug: So if that sounds interesting to you, I'd just suggest that you sit back, tune in, listen up. And then when you've got some questions at the end of the episode, make sure you reach out to Rob. So, hey Rob, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Rob: Thanks, Doug. Thanks for having me. Doug: So, super excited to talk to a fellow entrepreneur and really interested in kind of your deep expertise with engagement and customer loyalty. So do you want to give just a little bit of background for our listeners who don't know you yet, on kind of what you're doing and how you're helping people? Rob: Sure. So, starting back in the beginning and how it relates to marketing, I started in the online industry, advertising, and marketing back in '95. So we used to advertise in the newspapers and get leads, and it was a laborious process. You'd put the ad out there, you'd wait two or three days for it to get approved, and then get in the paper the following week. And then by the end of the month maybe you'd have 10, 15, 20 leads. Rob: And then CompuServe came about. And I know I'm dating myself, but you know the pre-AOL days and dial-up on a probably 300 baud rate modem. Again, dating myself, people don't even know what that is. But nonetheless, I put an ad out on a forum and I had 16 leads by the end of the day and I was blown away. And I became an internet junkie since. Rob: Then in 1997 I launched an online casino. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time, and it was phenomenal. So the marketing in that aspect was a completely separate animal. So when I started in '97 there were probably five other properties in the industry and making money was easy. Cost per acquisition for a customer was $20, lifetime value was 900 so you could do the math. That's how I got scarred.

Tips on how to get articles published by major publishers Whenever I put out a piece of content that I've created where I'm controlling the narrative and the messaging, I consider a big fat ad for me. Because essentially I'm talking about something that I know about and asserting myself as a subject matter expert, a thought leader. The media outlets like Time Inc., or Conde Nast for example, they've been around for over a hundred years and they've spent millions building their brands, their cred, their authority. In an instant when your article is featured that is fully lent to you. What I know after working with editors and producers for years now is that they love hearing from the talent directly, which is you.  You know who you are and you could easily do some homework on the right type of media outlets for you. People say "I can't believe that they want to hear from little old me." It's not a little old you.  It's "expert" you. And the media needs experts.  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO GET ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY MAJOR PUBLISHERS [just click to tweet] HOW TO GET ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY MAJOR PUBLISHERS Major media outlets have spent millions building their authority. In an instant when your article is featured that is fully lent to you. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to talk to somebody who's gotten some of the best jobs in technology with up to a half a million dollars in income without a college degree so she knows that you don't need one to succeed. She also writes for some of the best in media outlets which you'll recognize as I formally introduce her in the world and she has no journalism or writing training. In fact, she has zero credentials besides her high school education. I find that the best stuff comes from... I mean this might sound a little sentimental, but just like being a good person, right? Like showing up, being consistent and reliable. I'd like to introduce you to Susie Moore. She's a former Silicon Valley sales director, term life coach and advice columnist. Her work has been featured on the Today Show, Oprah Business Insider, the Huffington Post, Forbes, Time Inc, Marie-Claire and she's treated as a resident life columnist for some of the greatest. Susie's work and insights have been shared by celebrities and thought leaders, including Adriana Huffington, Kris Jenner, and Sarah Blakely. Her first book, What If It Doesn't Work Out was named by Entrepreneur as one of the eight business books every entrepreneur must read to dominate their industry. She lives in Miami with her husband Heath and their Yorkshire terrier Coconut. So I'd like to welcome Susie Moore to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well good morning Susie, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast. Hey, I'm super excited for you to share with our audience today. Susie: Oh, thank you. I'm very, very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Doug: So do you want to just share quickly what you would say your superpower is and how you help your clients and help entrepreneurs and business people to be more successful in what they do? Susie: Yes, I would love to. I think that one thing that I am very passionate about doing is helping people kind of come out from the behind the scenes of their business, right? Sometimes it's very easy to even just think your Instagram's enough, maybe you know, YouTube is enough. And too busy ourselves with all the backend stuff. But one thing that I really know that helps move any business forward is a real personal connection with the owner, with the CEO of that business. And one thing that I love to do is to help people become confident in really owning who they are and then confident in then showing that and becoming far more visible as a leader. Doug: So what steps would someone take?

My guest this week is Sina Barham, founder of Prima Access Computing.Show NotesGuestSina Bahram, Founder and President of Prime Access ComputingHostHost: Doug SchumacherWebsite: Arrovox.com/VoiceMarketingTwitter: @MemeRunnerPrime Access Computing Websitehttps://pac.bzTranscriptIntroDoug:Welcome to VoiceMarketing. I’m Doug Schumacher, and on today’s episode, we have a very special guest. Sina Barham.Sina does what you might call speed listening using a TTS engine. And he’s getting up to some pretty remarkable speeds, which we’re going to go through in the podcast.It’s a fascinating discussion about speed listening with TTS engines, voice assistant UX, and the future of audio as the primary format for content consumption.Sina’s going to give a brief overview of his background, but a couple of things that he didn’t mention that I want to, are,In 2012, Sina was recognized as a White House Champion of Change by President Barack Obama, for his work enabling users with disabilities to succeed in the STEM fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.In 2015, Sina was recognized as an Emerging Leader in Digital Accessibility at the annual Knowbility Heroes of Accessibility Awards.In 2017, Sina served as co-chair of the Museums and the Web conference. And in 2019, Sina started serving as an invited expert on the W3C ARIA working group.So let’s get right into it. Here’s my conversation with Sina Barham.InterviewVoiceMarketing.m4aDoug: Sina,Sina: Hi how’s it going.Doug Hey good to talk to you too. So let’s go ahead of giving people a quick overview of you.But why don’t you introduce yourself and give us a quick quick background of your history your education work all that stuff.Sina; Sure. I run a company called prime access consulting or PAC Casey for short. We’re based out of Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.And Kerry and a lot of what we do is focus on inclusive design and accessibility is one of those outcomes of inclusive design so we look at processes whether it’s software whether it’s inside of a museum or university or startup. What have you. On how we can make things available to the widest possible audience. That means things like tech signs that means things like making sure programs like a screen reader can access content but it also means you know physical considerations for getting around an exhibit or getting around a service offering from from a company and just really trying to work with designers developer boards of trustees. What have you on making sure that these various afford says we’re designing and we’re putting on into the world are as accessible as possible. I got into this work because of my background in computer science so my undergraduate and graduate degrees are in computer science. I’m a BD and a Ph.D. in computer science and in a field called Human Computer Interaction and. I happen to be blind. So a lot of my time in grad school was spent at the beginning not wanting to go into accessibility not wanting to go into inclusive design because I kind of felt it was pretty stereotypical as the blind guy to go into accessibility I wanted to do a lot of other things but I got really frustrated with a lot of the tools I had to use and a lot of the various things that people were claiming were accessible and in fact really were not where I knew the technology to be able to be or where I knew the software capabilities were what we’re able to achieve. And so I started getting into designing solutions in the space and then brought in that not only for persons with disabilities or people who use assistive technologies but really for everyone so that we can make experiences that are delightful and enjoyable by as many people as possible because that’s really fantastic.Doug: You mentioned a little bit about the the tools and the interface and so on and I want to come back and talk about that a little bit but the thing that I want to start with is the video that I saw of you on YouTube.I believe it’s from 2011. But what what really captured my heart my attention on that was you were you were consuming text at edit incredible rate. I mean what I was hearing was just a literally an audio blur going past and you were apparently passing that and comprehending what was being said. And so you want to give a little setup to that what that was about and then we’ll go into that from there.Sina: Sure. First of all 2011 seems like a century ago. So it’s just amazing to think about that.And I was using a program called a screenwriter at that time so I mentioned that I happen to be blind which which means that I’m not able to see what’s on the screen but I’m still able to program and access email and do all of these various things access to command line and so the the way that I do that is with a program called the screen reader. It uses a variety of programmatic interfaces it’s not just you know doing OCR it’s not doing optical character recognition on the screen. It’s actually programmatically getting the content of these various applications whether it’s something like Outlook PowerPoint or Microsoft Word or something like Firefox or Chrome on the web cetera. And it is able to then turn that information into speech. Now this is pretty straightforward. But the thing that caught your caught your ear was the fact that I had the speech cranked up quite a bit. I believe in the video that you’re referencing. You know I was listening to it about eight hundred nine hundred words per minute. Something around there maybe 950. Yeah. Yeah. That’s you know you can think of that like roughly six or seven acts human regular conversation like like we’re talking right now at about 150 hundred sixty I tend to talk a little fast. Average speaking rates right around there. And that’s that program that screen reader is driving something called a text to speech engine or a T. Or just think of it as a voice and there’s tons of different voices out there. I tend to use a pretty robotic sounding voice. I mean it really sounds like it’s out of the 1980s and a lot of ways it is but because it’s mathematically generated it’s not a recording of someone in a studio where those phones have been stitched together it’s actually mathematically generated as a result you can crank it as fast as you can understand. And I’m fortunate enough through my life to have trained myself to listen to it very quickly as have many other screen reader users and that’s what we’re hearing.Doug: So. So do you have a clip of that you can play for us because I think that’ll be really fascinating.Sina: Yeah I can I can. What I’ll do here is I’ll just have my computer see some stuff out loud and we’ll take a listen to that. Great.All right. So there’s that.For example if we wanted to do like here’s the here’s the time that the current time right now.Right. So three twenty two we can. We know we can slow this down.Right. So slow down a little bit more slower frequently. Right. That’s starting to become understandable right. Slower frequently. Right. And then all I’m doing is like that.And so what is that speed right there.That’s what I would say that’s about a six to seven x so that’s it that’s about a thousand words from it but between nine hundred and a thousand depending you can process it.Doug: No problem. Yeah for sure.Sina: Now I might slow it down you know if I’m reading you know a contract or something like that and like for example you’re like I’ll use the interface right now to route the audio back to my to my headphones I’ll use it at the speed that I’ve got it out because more of a navigational test I’ll do something like this. Great sound card window’s default. Right. And now it’s back in my headphones so that I’m able to understand fine but if I’m reading a book for pleasure or if I’m reading a contract with legal language in it especially if it’s in a spreadsheet with numbers I will slow down but I won’t slow down anywhere to that you know the speed that you’ve you were listening to when I when I had it all the way low I might just slow down a few a few ticks if you will. So like call it 700 words or 600. You know it’s like really really relaxed. Right.Doug: And that’s how anybody would read printed text as well. The more contracts and technical things you tend to read a lot slower and for more of the leisure and long format stuff. Right.To accelerate your reading speed. So yeah that’s that’s really fascinating. Now are you. Are you using so with the with the text to speech generator you’ve got on your computer are you reading primarily from when you’re surfing the web or you’re reading primarily from ACA compliant Web sites or are you processing pretty much everything.Well that’s a that’s a it’s an intricate question right. So when you say an ADA compliannt Web site you know you’re referring to something called Web site accessibility or the fact that a web page is able to be accessed in a better way with assistive technologies and there’s no way that you do that.Is that the developers and the designers have have followed something called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or weak WC first report and that’s really important because what it is is a set of principles a set of rules that really are the things that everybody should be doing on a Web site making sure he has available apps not hiding it in an image that sort of thing. And so it doesn’t mean that Web sites that are not like that cannot be gotten through. It just means that if these accessibility considerations are not taken then it’s a lot more arduous a lot more difficult. So imagine like an academic portal or a news Web site with a ton of links on it and no headings on the page then you can’t use those headings to navigate around. So you have to hear all those links or figure out a way of skipping past them. So it’s those kinds of things that you end up doing. You can still sort of get to th

Tips on how to target, connect and convert sales leads with Craig Klein Everybody's trying to move the sales numbers. That's not unique or different. It's all about how do we do it, right? So we just try to make it easy for the salesperson to see the lead when it's available, also to give teams a way to sort of autoroute leads to the right people at the right time. What that means is that leaves zero time for salespeople to focus on the leads that said no last month or a quarter ago or six months ago. When you run the numbers, that is such a lost opportunity. It's just huge for any business. If you and I talked six months ago and I presented you my product and you said no and now you're on my lead nurturing campaign. Stepping into the customer's world and understanding their needs is the number one way to create good marketing content. Now what I see in articles and webinars and things is it takes seven or eight touches to close a sale. You've got to automate some of it. We like to on not just how many new leads did I talk to but how many new leads did I identify, whatever that looks like in your world. What I see businesses do is they try to motivate salespeople to be part of the system by handing them nice little bells and whistles, and that just doesn't work. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO TARGET, CONNECT AND CONVERT SALES LEADS [just click to tweet] HOW TO TARGET, CONNECT AND CONVERT SALES LEADS Everybody's trying to move the sales numbers and convert sales leads. That's not unique or different. It's all about how do we do it, right? _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Hello and welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I have to join me, Craig Klein. Small and medium-sized businesses suffer from two main challenges that slow growth. Number one, potential customers just don't know that they even exist, and number two, salespeople are investing too much time seeking out customers who don't need what they're selling instead of helping those that do. Craig Klein is the founder and CEO of SalesNexus and has developed a system to address these challenges simply and affordably, ultimately helping grow thousands of businesses. SalesNexus is a leading CRM platform, automation, lead generation solution for companies with sales teams of 10 to 100. Together with his team at SalesNexus, Craig works with startups at Fortune 500s to create systems that give salespeople more time to sell to qualified leads to sell to while giving management the accountability that is so elusive in sales. Craig is a member of the Forbes Agency Council, where he's also a contributing writer. Craig is the father of three beautiful children. He is an avid sailor. He's an avid hunter and skier and when he's not growing the SalesNexus team and/or writing, he's probably planning his next adventure to somewhere you've never heard of. With that said, I'd like to welcome Craig Klein to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well, Craig, I'm super excited to have you on the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today, so thanks for taking time out of your day to join us. Craig Klein: Thank you, Doug. I'm really happy to be here. Can't wait to have our conversation. Doug: Well, and you've got a super exciting topic. Who doesn't want to know about sales and marketing, moving the sales dial and crushing the competition, as your bio said, and being the dominant player in your marketplace? Craig Klein: Yeah, everybody's trying to move the sales numbers. That's not unique or different. It's all about how do we do it, right? I find a lot of people are just groping and just sort of trying to do everything and overwhelming their entire team with too much stuff. Doug: So do you want to take us and just give us a 30-second highlight view of where we're at and where your company's at? Craig Klein: Yeah, sure.

Tips on how to create authentic engagement with branded video content with Gideon Shalwick The key when it comes to video content is that a lot of people miss is the match that you have between who you're talking to and the message that you have, so your message and your market match. How do I come up with the topics? One easy shortcut is to ask yourself, what are all the problems that your target audience are experiencing? Problems, frustrations, needs, desires, all those sorts of things. I remember how excited I felt because I felt for the first time you didn't have to be like a movie star or a celebrity or get into a television show to be able to have widespread sort of recognition and sort of influence for your brand. But really the best camera you have always is the one that you have with you, right? What's the biggest pain point? Video editing. That's an easy fix. Use QuickTime it's a free piece of software and it allows you just trim the front and back out and it takes a few seconds. It's instant. It's really easy and quick to do you don't even need fancy software. But it doesn't matter what you look like. Really what it matters is what you can do for other people and how you can serve them through your message and what you can teach them and help them with. Feel the fear and do it anyway. They just have a really good SEO strategy where they optimize for the right keywords and then they get all the longterm traffic. And they're just crushing it at the moment. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT [just click to tweet] HOW TO CREATE AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT WITH BRANDED VIDEO CONTENT The key is the match between who you're talking to and your message, so your message and your market match. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing, Real Fast. Today's guest is Gideon Shalwick. He's a serial entrepreneur who's been creating online videos and video content for over a decade. I first met Gideon several years ago at a conference called the Tropical Think Tank held in the Philippines and run by Chris and Irv Ducker. Doug: After a couple of entrepreneurial hiccups, Gideon found his niche in video marketing with his finger on the pulse of social media content marketing trends, Gideon knows the impact of authentic engagement with branded video content. While you've learned that 85% of video content is viewed on mobile, he realizes that the importance of high-quality captions for that content. Doug: So he launched a new company called Splasheo, it's a video captioning service that's powered by real people that manually transcribe your video and add personalized captions. Because of the human touch, Splasheo also creates meme-worthy videos using flawless captions to grab users attention and keep them engaged. Doug: So I'm super excited to reconnect with Gideon today and welcome to the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast today. Doug: Hey Gideon, super excited to reconnect with you today and to invite on the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast. So welcome to the show today. Gideon Shalwick: Awesome to be here, Doug. Looking forward to it. Doug: So we met a whole long time ago over in the Philippines at the Chris Ducker event and I'm just super excited to catch up with you and for you to fill us in a little bit on what you've been working on in the video content and online marketing space. Gideon Shalwick: Oh man, it's been a journey since we've talked last. I think we just mentioned before we started this call that when we met back at Tropical Think Tank, with Chris Ducker's event. I was just about to start a new business Veeroll a company that I started with some co-founders of mine. J.C. and... J.C. and Sophie. Gideon Shalwick: And that company I've exited from now, but it was a wonderful journey. Lots of learning experiences.

Tips on how to delegate to improve your bottom line with Tim Francis I didn't know how to delegate and I didn't know how to lead and manage. What I discovered after my first failure with an assistant was that at least 50% of the problem was not with the assistant, but was with me. At the very top, which is what the surgeon focuses on and what I encourage entrepreneurs to focus on, is strategy, high-level skill, and high-level access. Everything below that we draw a delegation line and everything below that should be done by everyone else. Sooner or later there is going to be those rinse, wash, and repeat tasks that come up. They seem innocuous, but they really add up. The number one of the big six concerns when it comes to hiring an assistant was actually, I don't know how to trust and let go of control. I mean I am super passionate about a few things. One of which is actually our dinner parties. A horrible idea is going on Facebook and posting up, "Hey, who knows someone?" That's bad advice number one. Bad advice number two is hiring the first person that you meet, irrespective of how you find them. I actually think it's a great idea to go overseas if you are going to be delegating work that happens every week or every month and is a simple task that doesn't require a lot of decision making. But, to have someone with those three attributes, the culture, time zone, and language, you immediately solve at least 40% of the misunderstandings, maybe 50% of the misunderstandings that are happening. I think the other thing that people don't realize is how affordable it can be. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO DELEGATE TO IMPROVE YOUR BOTTOM LINE [just click to tweet] HOW TO DELEGATE TO IMPROVE YOUR BOTTOM LINE I didn't know how to delegate. What I discovered was that at least 50% of the problem was not with the assistant, but was with me. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Hey welcome back another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I've got joining me, Tim Francis. Now Tim is a fellow Canadian, but he's also an NYU guest lecturer, certified Scrum Product Owner and lecturer at the University of Alberta. He's an award-winning entrepreneur and the founder of Profit Factory.com and the greatassistant.com. He's a graduate of the University of Alberta and in 2010, 2011 Tim was blindsided and he had a rare illness that left him unable to walk for three months. He nearly went bankrupt as a result of this, and he was re-forced to restart his business, and at that point, he promised himself that he'd never be a burnt out entrepreneur again. So I had a great conversation with Tim and we talked about why more entrepreneurs don't have assistants. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. You're going to want to make sure that you stick around to the very end as Tim rolls out and shares with you how he got his humble start and the challenges that he had to overcome to build his business to be successful and what it is today. Doug: So I'd like to welcome Tim Francis to the Real Marketing Real Podcast today. Hey Tim, super-excited to have you to join me as part of the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today, so welcome to the show. Tim: Thanks for having me, Doug. Doug: So we start talking a little bit before we started recording and I asked you what your superpower was and I'd just like you to recap that because I think it's so valuable. I mean, we have entrepreneurs and C-level business and executive guys on here and often they feel overwhelmed, there's lots of details and stuff to do. So do you want to take a minute and just give us a little bit of background on what you're doing and how you help your clients be more successful? Tim: So I own a company called Great Assistant, and we help entrepreneurs to get a great executive virtual assistant that's coming out of corporate America.

Tips on how to advertise to generate high-quality leads with AJ Wilcox I had a sales guy come up to me and introduce himself and he said, "AJ we don't know what you're doing over here, but we're fighting over your leads. Keep it up." I think people being in the right mindset is really key with LinkedIn. When you move over to LinkedIn ads, your sales team is going to tell you "This is the perfect person. Thank you. We are talking to an ideal quality type of prospect." But we're still little ways out. They haven't started the project yet. We have to nurture this relationship. I really like combining search and social channels, because you really do give your sales team a little bit of a variety. You get those leads that want to close immediately, and then you also get the leads that will turn into the bigger deal sizes over the long term. [With Ads on Social] you have to catch their attention, and that's usually by giving free knowledge, free access to content. So, you have to options every time you're advertising on LinkedIn for traffic. You can either send them to your own landing page, which I prefer. You as a marketer, you can only change so many things with ads and try to draw people in. But you can increase performance by three, four, five, 10X if all you do is just understand your customer. Not everyone wants to post content on LinkedIn because maybe they're afraid of what their business colleagues think of them or whatever. But when you post it, it's by far the easiest network in the world to go viral on and people are having crazy success on the organic side. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO ADVERTISE TO GENERATE HIGH-QUALITY LEADS [just click to tweet] HOW TO ADVERTISE TO GENERATE HIGH-QUALITY LEADS I had a sales guy come up to me and introduce himself and he said, "AJ we don't know what you're doing over here, but we're fighting over your leads. Keep it up." _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing, Real Fast. Today's going to be a real fast episode and it's going to be all around advertising and generating high-quality leads. So, make sure that your seatbelt is fastened and your hands are firmly on the wheel. Today guest in the studio is AJ Wilcox. He is a lifetime digital marketer who fell in love with LinkedIn and generating leads as a platform in 2011, and then he went off and founded his own company B2Linked.com in 2014 which specializes in LinkedIn ads, account management, training and consulting. Doug: Since then he has managed hundreds of accounts and a combined budget of 110 million Dollars in ad spend on the LinkedIn network exclusively. So, he's worked directly with several LinkedIn's top 10 accounts. AJ's entrepreneurial journey is deeply rooted in his faith. After he was fired from his last job, he was offered multiple job opportunities after he prayed to God to figure out what he should do, the answer came, and it all came down to starting his own business and he's never looked back. Doug: Not AJ is somebody I have seen online. I've followed him for a little while. And he's someone that I've wanted to have on the podcast for at least six months. So, I'm super excited to have him on the podcast. You're going to hear some just amazing information on how to leverage this platform to generate super high-quality leads, and you're going to want to listen to the section around being able to target companies where you can actually load a list of all the companies that you want your advertising to be shown to exclusively. Doug: So, with that being said, I want to welcome AJ to the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast today. Well hey AJ, I'm super excited to have you on the Real Marketing, Real Fast podcast today. So, welcome to the show. AJ: Thanks so much, Doug. I'm excited about that awesome intro. Doug: Well, it's interesting because I saw your profile months an...

Tips on using your web presence to make the world a better place with Chris Yoko You could use your web presence to do something, whether it's to be a little bit more charitable, a little bit more sustainable, a little bit more in favor of generating more opportunity for people throughout the entirety of their journey. We work exclusively with organizations that have a passion or a purpose beyond mere profit. Here's the real tangible impact of the work we did, that we would've never known if we hadn't thought about the kind of stress that this puts on people and how we remove that. That tends to be more meaningful for a lot of people. Here's how we make an impact, and here's how we help people. Saying that tends to transform a lot of your messaging. But if you're punching through [your target] and really aiming for the purpose that falls behind it, you're going to find your follow through is much stronger. You're going to find your outcomes are much better. You can use that kind of language on your web site, and it might be really attractive and it might seem like a differentiator. But if it's not authentic and it's not true to who you are, none of that converts into an actual business opportunity. So if you can make sure that from a standpoint of their role, they check the boxes they need to in terms of business results, and then you give them an emotional reason to also connect with that mission. You're only going to find more success. I'm really excited about is the fact that we get to bring that level of personal alignment for our team into a greater arena of opportunities in terms of the clients that we work with. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ USING YOUR WEB PRESENCE TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE [just click to tweet] USING YOUR WEB PRESENCE TO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE You could use your web presence to do something and make the world a better place _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today I've got joining me Chris Yoko, who is the CEO of Yoko Co. Now I was introduced to Chris, and I took a look at his background and am quite excited. He's an expert in digital marketing and web design, but his company has a slightly different focus and ed that they spend time focusing on social responsibility and company culture. I think you're going to enjoy this podcast episode as you listen to Chris and how they made some changes in their business that had a significant impact to both the bottom line, so increased profits, less stress with clients, a better relationship with clients, and a more engaged and more enthusiastic team and staff. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Chris Yoko to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Doug: Well, hey, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Chris, super happy to have you on the show. Chris Yoko: Thanks for having me Doug, happy to be here. Doug: So one of the things that I noticed right off the bat when I started looking at you and your company and what you're doing, were two things that really stuck out, and they were that you focus on company culture and social responsibility. And then it kind of went into the business topics below that, and one that's dear to my heart, digital marketing. So do you want to just share a little bit of your background and kind of your angle and perspective on what makes your company unique, and why you put those things kind of at the top of the list? Chris Yoko: Yeah, for sure. So the way that we phrase the work that we do and the people that we work with is that we work exclusively with organizations that have a passion or a purpose beyond mere profit. And what we've found that I'm happy to tell more of the backstory, kind of how we got there, is if you're working toward a cause, you're much more likely to put more heart and soul and feel more attached to the work ...

Tips on how to increase sales with influencer marketing with Shane Barker There are still millions of influencers and there are still great products that match up perfectly with those influencers if you put in the time and effort into influencer marketing. This is not only influencer marketing. This is SEO. This is anything you do. If you're going to spend a lot of money on influencer marketing hands down, try to find an agency or find somebody to work with. Don't go and put all your budget into one person, right? One of the biggest things is before you go and pitch influencers and get all this, you have to know who your avatar is, who's in theory what you think your perfect client is. It comes down to the terms and putting a brief together and better understanding what the goal of your campaign is and what are you trying to get out of this. The key is people look at followership and they think that person must be good because they have a lot of followers instead of really looking at the individual numbers and the actual profile. How do I pay an influencer? What should I pay for them? Well, everybody's different. You need to protect your brand. You need to make sure it's a good fit. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO INCREASE SALES WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING [just click to tweet] HOW TO INCREASE SALES WITH INFLUENCER MARKETING There are millions of influencers and there are products that match up perfectly with those influencers for influencer marketing. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio I've got joining me, Shane Barker who is an influencer marketing consultant and he consults to Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, and A-listers, but I don't want you to tune out at this point. I had an absolutely awesome time and a great conversation with Shane. He is down-to-earth and he's going to share some really intimate details, how regardless of the size of your company, whether you're a Fortune 500 company or you're a brand new startup, how you can take a look at influencer marketing and see if it's a way to leverage your brands, grow your business and increase your sales. Doug: Shane has helped thousands of expert entrepreneurs expand their outreach and bolster their reputation using influencer marketing. So whether it's launching products or creating and converting this website traffic or building targeted sales funnels. So he works daily to make sure that brands like Puma and IMAX stay relevant and influential. His wheelhouse also includes business development, marketing, blueprints, SEO and social media marketing and as you'll hear him talk a little bit later in this episode as well, his expertise in content marketing. Doug: So in that realm, he practices what he preaches on content marketing, he's a top contributor at Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post and has been named one of the top Salesforce influencers for his viral article, 15 Ways To Writing Better Content For Social Media Campaigns. So I think you're gonna enjoy this episode. Make sure you've got a pen and paper handy. There's lots of information that's going to come at you and I would challenge you to listen deeply to what he's got to say. We're going to cover a couple of topics. We're going to spend most of our time talking about influencer marketing and kind of what it is, what it isn't and how to navigate that water. Doug: And at the very end we're going to wrap up with the discussion on what would it be like to be an influencer. So if you're someone who's thinking hey, not only could I use this for my business, but I have influence in my social media following, what you need to do to get there. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Shane Barker to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Well, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today Shane.

Tips on creating a successful and compliant email strategy by Jenna Tiffany I fully believe that GDPR is a massive opportunity for marketers, and it shouldn't be seen as a negative impact. I've seen some organizations, they've lost more than 50% of their email marketing database because they couldn't prove consent. Email is a top-performing digital channel, it generally doesn't get the right attribution, so it probably outperforms way more than we actually realize. Think about putting yourself in the shoes of the customers. What are the key questions and information that you would want to know before you hand your information over? Tell your customers how you use data. Why you want to use it. And be really open and transparent about that. Every channel needs a strategy, and email marketing is no different to that. There should be a value exchange. The customer's going to buy your product because you solve a need or a want that customer has. And the same with the email. To develop an email strategy assess both the internal environments and external environments. And then from all of that, you can start to see where opportunities are. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ CREATE A SUCCESSFUL AND COMPLIANT EMAIL STRATEGY [just click to tweet] CREATE A SUCCESSFUL AND COMPLIANT EMAIL STRATEGY Tell your customers how you use data. Why you want to use it. And be really open and transparent about that. #email #strategy _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today I've got in studio, I've got a friend of mine joining me from the U.K. I've got Jenna Tiffany. And she is an expert in all things strategy and marketing, and especially in email. I think you'll enjoy today's episode as we talk about the new legislation that's come in recently with GDPR. What's happening with the new legislation in California. And she's going to share with you some tips of how you can take advantage of these changing landscapes and rules around marketing and connecting with your customers. And she'll share with you, some of her clients that have implemented these strategies, they've had massive wins. We're also going to cover off some new topics of how you can increase your revenue by five times. So, if that's something that you're interested in, then I would say sit back, take some notes, and enjoy the episode. Doug: So, just a bit better introduction for Jenna. Jenna is the founder and the strategy director at a company called Let's Talk Strategy. She provides strategic consulting services across the digital marketing mix, and she's also a chartered member of the IDM, with over 10 years experience in both the business to business and business to consumer marketing. She's consulted with some really large brands such as Shell, Hilton, Whirl, Duty-Free, just to name a few. Doug: I follow her on social media and I see her out speaking constantly around the world. So, doing that she's been recognized as an expert in her field. She is elected and served on the DMA UK Email Marketing Council, as well as she's the chair of the email best practice hub that's helping to shape the industry's best practices. And she's involved in the latest research. She's also a marketing tutor. She's teaching CIM courses, as well as a competent public speaker. And most recently she was just nominated in added to the list of the top 100 female marketers around the world to follow. Doug: So, with that said, I'd like to turn it over to Jena and welcome you to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today.  Doug: Well hey Jenna, I'm super excited to have on the Real Marketing Podcast today. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to share with our audience. Jenna: Thank you so much for inviting me back. It's great to be back a second time on your show. Doug: Well I mean, yeah you just shared with me just a minute ago on Wom...

Tips on how to get more ROI from your PR with Christina Nicholson To get more ROI from your PR stop thinking about promoting yourself and start thinking about just giving the media what they want and what they need. So the bad pitches are the overly promotional ones, which unfortunately for some reason is what most people do. So you need to set yourself up not just on your own social media and on your own websites as an expert in your industry, but you need to be getting on podcasts. And then when you're getting those media hits, no matter how big or small, you need to be turning around on your social media and constantly sharing them. I think the first thing you want to do is you want to be clear on your goals, like don't get media for the sake of getting media. I always say start with local because you're more newsworthy where you are local. I think the biggest myth is that people think that they need a big brand with a lot of money to earn TV exposure or exposure in any media outlet, really. You have to make yourself accessible ASAP. And then you just want to give them everything they want and everything they need on a silver platter. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO GET MORE ROI FROM YOUR PR [just click to tweet] HOW TO GET MORE ROI FROM YOUR PR To get more ROI from your PR stop thinking about promoting yourself and start thinking about just giving the media what they want and what they need. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. If you'd like to have your business exposed and put in front of millions of ideal customers in minutes instead of months, you want to tune into today's episode. My guest today is Christina Nicholson and she is a marketing expert in dealing with the media and her company is called Media Maven. If you want to tune into her podcasts, you can listen to her podcast at Become a Media Maven. So that's exactly what Christina does, she is a television host and she helps bloggers and business owners grow their audience by reaching thousands and millions of listeners and viewers and getting them in front of their ideal customers and clients. Doug: And she does this in minutes instead of months through the power of traditional media without spending big advertising dollars. Be sure to listen to her biggest myth around this, and the myth is that I'm not ready. So she's going to share with you and me today that we're all ready, and that we could be doing this today in our business without writing a check, this is earned media. Doug: So you can see Christina in front of the camera as a host on Lifetime TV, in national commercials as well as her work online in the HuffPost Thrive Global Inc Magazine and Fast Company. Christina also has a local lifestyle and family blog called Christina All Day. She lives in South Florida with her husband and two children, and she was an absolute delight and a pleasure to have on the podcast today. So welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Doug: Well, welcome to the podcast today, Christina. I'm super excited to have you share your superpower on how you help companies and entrepreneurs grow their business. Christina N.: I'm so happy to be here, Doug. Thanks for having me. Doug: So do you want to fill us in just a little bit of your background on how you started and how you move to where you are today? Christina N.: Yeah, sure. So I started in TV, I was a TV reporter and anchor for about 10 years. And while I was in that role, I was getting pitched by a lot of publicists and a lot of business owners. And most of what they pitched me was ignored because it was bad, honestly, it was very clear that a lot of these people did not understand how the media industry worked. They've never been in a newsroom or worked in a newsroom to know how we put our stories together, what we needed and what we wanted.

Tips on how to improve email deliverability and email sender reputation by Rob McEwan Invaluement started off from the ground up as particularly good at blocking that very elusive kind of spam that was slipping past other spam filters. More recently, though, a lot of old email addresses that just haven't been used for many years have been recycled into spam traps, so it's slightly more questionable as to whether it was spam or not. But it's our position, basically, that when the recipient doesn't have a reasonable way to connect the dots from whatever they're receiving to whatever they signed up for originally, then at that point all permissions are null and void. It was so fascinating because when I was listening to your podcast and reading through your book, I got about 25% into your book before I saw the clarifications that made me feel comfortable with it. Yeah, your domain reputation's going to follow you around everywhere. Make sure your practices are really good, and if you inadvertently get blacklisted, fight for it and explain to any blacklist that might blacklist you what it is that you're doing good that's causing recipients to get angry if they don't receive those messages. But, you know, having really helpful high-quality information is so important now for that engagement to keep Google Office 365 happy, because they focus so much on engagement, is very, very helpful. When marketers get blacklisted, there's almost always something going on, like an insecure form that wasn't CAPTCHA protected that your worst enemy signed a spam trap upon, or some bot did. Well, one of the things that's happened with the industry, in terms of email, is so much has gone to Office 365 and Google, and a few other large providers, but mostly those two. It's helped the industry a lot because of the way they're focusing on engagement is forcing the industry to do better, and that's great and it's improving the industry. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ IMPROVE EMAIL DELIVERABILITY AND EMAIL SENDER REPUTATION [just click to tweet] IMPROVE EMAIL DELIVERABILITY AND EMAIL SENDER REPUTATION To improve email deliverability make sure your email practices are really good. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back, listeners, to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to talk about email and email marketing, but we're going to come at it from a different point of view. We've all heard that the money's in the list, but, obviously, your list is no good if you can't get your email delivered, or if you end up in the spam drop. My guest today in studio is Rob McEwen, and Rob has a long history of managing email web servers since 1996. At that time he was a computer programmer and then later a web developer. Then, in early 2000s, Rob pivoted towards a high-quality email spam filtering and hosting services. Then, 2005, he was already heavily involved with a blacklisting company that some of you may be familiar with called SURBL. It's S-U-R-B-L.org. He was there as a volunteer near their very beginning when that new type of anti-spam blacklist services started to come up. Doug: Rob has a wealth of experience, so we're going to talk today in today's episode about how to stay off of a blacklist and how to have a higher reputation for your domain and for your emails, and how to get your email delivered. With that being said, I want to invite Rob onto the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast. Doug: Hey. Well, welcome to the studio, Rob. I'm super excited to talk to you today. You've got a great topic. Rob McEwen: Yeah. Me, too. I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Doug: So, listeners, today we're going to cover off a whole bunch of topics. Rob's a super smart guy, so he's going to try to keep it simple enough for those of us that aren't technicians to understand. We're going to talk about how to stay off a blacklist,

Tips on how to build a profitable Wordpress business by Lee Blue Here's the thing. The thing is clients don't actually want a website, right? They don't want digital marketing. They don't want the SEO stuff that you're doing. They don't want social media stuff except for one thing. They want the result of having done those things successfully. The reason that it's surprising is one of the big things that I think dramatically changes the picture for everybody is actually raising your prices. Another thing that I say all the time is, let me show you how you can charge like five to 10 times more than you're currently charging without pricing yourself out of the market. I'll ask a lot of questions up front to see if it's a good fit for both of us. If it's not, then that's totally cool. If I had to distill it down to one sentence, it would be, let me show you how to intentionally pursue the clients you can serve the best. I don't even say I sell things to people. I serve them. But everybody is still selling websites like it's five years ago. That's why the price race is going right down to the bottom. So don't feel like you're stuck because you don't have a portfolio. Don't feel like you have to take on free or cheap clients to build your portfolio. Show up with leadership, and then leadership breeds confidence, and confidence brings that high ticket investment, that chain of events there is really critical. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ HOW TO BUILD A PROFITABLE WORDPRESS BUSINESS [just click to tweet] HOW TO BUILD A PROFITABLE WORDPRESS BUSINESS If I had to distill it down to one sentence, it would be, let me show you how to intentionally pursue the clients you can serve the best. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back listeners to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today in the studio, I've got joining me a gentleman by the name of Lee Blue. He is the founder of a company called DoubleStack. Before I get into the more formal part of his introduction and his background, I just want to say that this was a very exciting interview. Doug: Lee brings a lot of energy and enthusiasm for what he does. I think that if you listen closely, there's a lot of value and a lot of tips, whether you're an entrepreneur, or whether you're running a larger company, or whether you work for somebody else. The tactics that he uses and teaches his clients to increase their sales by moving their price up sometimes by five times, sometimes by as much as 10 times. Doug: So this might sound like a big grasp and maybe something that's not obtainable, but I just really encourage you to hang in there and have a good listen and then follow up on the show notes when this episode goes live. Doug: So Lee has spent the last 15 years of his business running a ... of his life running a web design agency. The last 10 years he's been deeply involved in the WordPress community. So he speaks at WordCamps and he presents at the Wu Conference. He's worked with hundreds of WordPress developers and freelancers through Cart66, the WordPress eCommerce platform that he founded in 2008. Doug: I think you'll find his background in technology working for the government in bioterrorism may come to like a bit of a surprise being that he's an entrepreneur helping people like you and me to grow our businesses. So having studied the WordPress community and the economy deeply over the last 10 years, Lee developed the DoubleStack program to equip, say, WordPress operators with tools and the skills and the mindset they need to rise above a saturated marketplace and to really succeed in today's new economy. Doug: So his students are trained in delivering profitable business development solutions for the advanced technical skills that they have. So he can help them, who implement those concepts for both themselves and their clients. I think that's what's really key.

Tips on creating more traffic and revenue with effective SEO by Jeremiah Smith Google is now looking at something called user engagement metrics as the number one ranking factor, meaning it's the strongest thing that influences the way your site's going to rank in Google. Within the past couple of years, Google has just kind of silently swapped out their algorithm-based engine with an artificially intelligent engine. Links are really a big part of SEO and have been for a long time. So it's a little creepy, a little scary to some people, but really we don't need to think of it as something that is outside of us thinking about us, as much as it is something that is being fed by us. And one of the words in Google's mission statement and brand promise is "information." They want to organize the world's information. So what I like to do, is just to a large degree, let go and kind of trust Google. He's the Wizard of Moz is what they call him. He taught me so much about SEO just through his blog. He actually recently said that best practices used to be a thing, but now the new best practice is testing, A/B testing. So, what I've found is that if we go back to the good old fashioned thing that still works with human beings, then it actually works really well for link building as well, and that is PR. But those private blog networks are a mess, and they're a scam. I see a lot of that kind of stuff going on. We have to be really careful and shield our clients from that _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ MORE TRAFFIC AND REVENUE WITH SIMPLY EFFECTIVE SEO [just click to tweet] MORE TRAFFIC AND REVENUE WITH SIMPLY EFFECTIVE SEO As far as effective SEO is concerned, Google is now looking at user engagement metrics as the number one #ranking factor. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Doug: Well, welcome back. Let's listen to another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today we're going to talk about SEO, but we're going to cover a couple different angles of SEO that we haven't talked about before. One is the new user metric that Google's using, the number one metric, which is user engagement. We're going to talk a little bit about testing keywords, and then artificial intelligence and how Google is now using this as a key part of their algorithm, well not their algorithm but the determining factor of how your website and my website gets ranked. Doug: So my guest today is Jeremiah Smith. He is the founder of a company called SimpleTiger. It's a boutique digital marketing agency that specializes in SEO for startups. For the last 12 years, Jeremiah has helped companies like Segment.com, Shopify, NBC, MTV, E*Trade, LG, and Sports Illustrated to see significant gains in their search results, organic traffic, and revenue. During his time growing SimpleTiger, Jeremiah has seen firsthand how clients have been unsuccessfully burned by other agencies, or in the past confused by misleading SEO strategies. The SEO industry is plagued with lots of smoke and mirrors, black-hat techniques, and a lack of transparency. Jeremiah's mission is to open up about what many other SEO marketers and agencies won't share, the best practices and frameworks that actually work. So people ask him, "Well, why share this?" And he believes that transparency is much needed in this industry where confusion runs rampant. With a fully distributed team, SimpleTiger has helped venture-backed startups with everything to lose, all the way up to the largest companies in the world, get on the first page of Google. There is no one size fits all approach to SEO, like some would have you believe, but there's a simple and effective right way to do it. So with that being said, I'd like to welcome Jeremiah to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast today. Doug: Well, welcome to the Real Marketing podcast. I am super excited to talk to you today. SEO is I think a hot topic, or has been a hot topic,

Tips for writing copy that converts by Joel Klettke Customer driven copy, what does that mean, exactly? It's amazing how saying the same thing but slightly different clicks a whole different set of switches in somebody's brain. You can never trust one data source on its own. You have to look at multiple sources to get the real story. Both of those clients just saw great results because they were open-minded and open to being wrong. Too many businesses are defensive, they're scared. I used to get a ton of pushback about doing the research, doing the homework. People said, "Just write the thing." One of the things that you cannot be a great conversion copywriter and have a huge ego But copy remains I think for way too many businesses an afterthought Case studies are one of those things that everybody needs, most people know they need. But I truly believe if we're going to exist as a company five years from now, we have to be a video first company. _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ TIPS FOR WRITING COPY THAT CONVERTS [just click to tweet] TIPS FOR WRITING COPY THAT CONVERTS Joel Klettke on writing copy that converts into sales _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _   Doug: Well, welcome back listeners, another episode of Real Marketing Real Fast. Today, I am pleased to have joining me in the studio, another fellow Canadian Joel Klettke. Now, Joel is an interesting guy. He is a copywriter, but if you read his bio on his Twitter account, it says "pray for your competitors, after you hire me they'll need it." So, he is a conversion specialist, and a copywriter, and a consultant to B2B businesses. He is the founder of Casual Copywriting. One of the articles I read on Joel prior to inviting him and having him on my show was a case study that he did for a company named HubSpot, so I'm sure you've all heard of HubSpot. The case study was how a customer driven copy helped HubSpot increase their conversion by nearly 100%. So if you want to know how Joel helped HubSpot increase their conversion and how they can help you and increase the conversion of your landing pages and sales pages and all the online marketing tactics that you use, I would suggest that you tune in. If you stay at the very end, we're going to have a discussion about something new that Joel's doing that I think is really cool, that you may find interesting as well. He started a new venture called Case Study Buddy and what he does is he works with businesses and he manages the entire process of building out case studies for you to use both internally and externally for your marketing. So, with that said, I'd like you to join me in welcoming Joel to the Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast today. Hey, Joel, I'm super excited to talk to you today, for a couple reasons. First of all, I love copy and copywriting. But more importantly, I like copy that converts. I couldn't help but notice your introduction that you have in your Twitter account. It says, "Pray for your competitors after you hire me." So, it should be a great conversation and as well as what you're doing with case studies. I had a guest on a while ago saying, "Hey, If can give you a tip to get your business fired up, you should make sure to do case studies early." So, here we are talking to you. So, welcome to the Real Marketing Podcast. Joel Klettke: Yeah, thank you so much for having me here. Doug: So, why don't you give us a little bit of background? You've got a number of skills, but obviously, one of the biggest skills is moving the sales dollar for people. So, why don't you tell us how that works? Joel Klettke: Yeah, certainly. I'm a conversion copywriter in my own consulting firm. As you mentioned, I spun off case study a few years ago. Where I come at it from and what I'm really passionate about bringing to businesses and evangelizing and getting people to see the value in, is customer driven copy and how you can essential...

  ALPS Executive Vice President, Chris Newbold, recently sat down with Doug Ende, the Chief Disciplinary Counsel at the Washington State Bar Association in the Bar's Seattle offices. Doug was able to shed some light on mandatory malpractice insurance from a disciplinary perspective and how coverage not only protects attorneys but ultimately is a protection for the public as they engage legal services. ALPS In Brief, The ALPS Risk Management Podcast, is usually hosted by ALPS Risk Manager, Mark Bassingthwaighte. This episode is hosted by Chris Newbold, ALPS Executive Vice President. Transcript: CHRIS: Hello, and welcome to ALPS in Brief. This is Chris Newbold, executive vice president of ALPS, and today I sit in downtown Seattle in the offices of the Washington State Bar Association with Doug Ende, who's the chief disciplinary counsel of the Washington State Bar Association. And we're going to talk about an issue that is kind of growing I popularity, dare I say a trend, perhaps, in the legal world, which is bar associations and regulators thinking about their role with respect to protecting the public and whether they should require mandatory malpractice as a condition of licensure to be an attorney. So Doug has been working on this issue, and so Doug, maybe you could start off by just introducing yourself and your role, how long you've been with the Washington State Bar and what you generally do both with respect to this issue and other responsibilities. DOUG: Sure. Thanks, Chris. I am, as Chris mentioned, the chief disciplinary counsel at the Washington State Bar Association, so my typical portfolio of work is as director of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel, and that is the component of the bar that receives grievances or complaints against lawyers alleging ethical misconduct, investigates those complaints and prosecutes allegations of violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct. So that's my typical day-to-day work. I should say that in my capacity as staff support or staff counsel to the Mandatory Malpractice Insurance Task Force, that's not because there's a disciplinary dimension to mandatory malpractice insurance, and it's not the intent and it won't be the outcome that it's a disciplinary initiative. It's a general regulatory initiative. CHRIS: Sure. And what do you think was the catalyst to get the discussion going in Washington? I mean, obviously there's lots of different kind of things going on in terms of some other states looking at this particular subject, but as it relates to Washington, why do you think now the discussion's happening here? DOUG: I would say that there are a number of reasons or catalysts that generated a discussion starting in 2016. One of those catalysts was the existence in Washington State of two other license types: limited practice officers and limited license legal technicians, or LLTs, both of which by rule are required as a matter of licensure to carry malpractice insurance, or otherwise in some cases, to establish proof of financial responsibility. And the gap or the dissonance between one license type being require to have insurance, professional liability insurance, and another license type, the lawyer license type, not having that requirement, began to be questioned. Simultaneously, there were some members of the Washington State Bar Association that began to inquire of the Board of Governors, "Is this an issue that needs to be revisited in the state of Washington?" And as that exploration happened, the Board of Governors did authorize a work route to start to look into the issue. In 2016, Idaho, seemingly out of nowhere, came on board as requiring mandatory malpractice insurance, becoming, as you know, the second state in the United States to do so. So I would say those three factors coalesced and became the impetus for further investigation. CHRIS: Yeah. And Washington's obviously what I would consider a large state from a lawyer population size. Talk to us about just kind of the numbers of lawyers that you have in Washington. To the extent that you know, how many are in private practice, to the extent that you know, to what extent there might be a problem in terms of lawyers being uninsured in the Washington legal market in terms of those providing service to clients? What do the numbers tell you? DOUG: So the membership of the bar in Washington is relatively large for a west coast state. Setting aside California, which is in another league, Washington I think has the largest population of lawyers in the western states. We have approximately 40,000 members, approximately 32,000 actively licensed lawyers. Unfortunately, I don't have at my fingertips the breakdown between private practitioners and other practitioners, but there are a great many private practitioners, lawyers, in Washington State. And we do have the advantage in Washington State of having some information about private practitioners who are insured or not insured, because we do have an insurance disclosure rule. The insurance disclosure rule, which is in our Admission and Practice Rules, is based on the model ABA as a model insurance disclosure rule. And essentially what it requires is as part of annual licensing, lawyers inform the Bar Association whether they're in private practice, and if so, whether they are carrying professional liability insurance, malpractice insurance. We've had that rule and we've been collecting that data for about 10 years now, so we have a reliable and fairly deep data source for that information. And at least in recent years, past three-plus years, what that data shows is that of lawyers in private practice, about 85% are reporting that they carry insurance and 15% are reporting that they do not. CHRIS: Okay. And what does your gut tell you about that fact? I mean, you obviously work for an organization that has a mission, a component of your mission that's protecting the public, right? And with 15% of your lawyers in private practice going uninsured, what do you think about that? DOUG: Yeah, absolutely. Part of the Bar Association's mission is both to serve its members and to serve the public, and certainly a key component of the regulatory mission is to protect the public and make sure legal services are being delivered in the public interest. From a disciplinary perspective, we do from time to time see the tragic stories where lawyers have made a mistake, there's been an act of negligence, if you will, the client has been harmed, maybe lost their ability to protect a legal right or lost a remedy of some sort, and in the absence of malpractice insurance or other means of, say, satisfying a judgment or making the client whole, most of those individuals have no legal remedy. And from a regulatory and public protection standpoint, that seems like a failure of the mission. CHRIS: Yeah. One of the things I think is very interesting about the issue is there are very clear and stark excellent arguments on both sides of the ledger on this particular issue. If you look at Idaho, for instance, when they put this to a vote of their membership, 51/49, right? It was kind of right on the cusp. And obviously, it went in the favor of yes and went to the Supreme Court and got passed. I wonder if you could just kind of briefly lay out for us kind of what you see as what's the argument for, what's the argument against? Because I do think that the arguments are kind of rock solid on both sides, and most people come at it with kind of a definitive sense of, "This is what I think." DOUG: Right. There are interesting and important arguments on both sides of the issue. And I should say preliminarily that when the Board of Governors, the Washington State Bar Association Board of Governors, authorized this and convened this task force, the issues on both sides were paramount in the minds of the board members. And they made it very clear in the charter of the task force, that job one, literally purpose number one, is to solicit and collect input from Washington State Bar Association members about the issue of mandatory malpractice insurance, so that is an element of what the task force is doing. The arguments, on the one side, it is fundamentally a public protection argument, that in the absence of insurance, lawyers who are practicing and delivering legal services are putting clients, putting consumers, putting the public, at risk should a circumstance arise where someone is harmed and there isn't a realistic remedy to address that harm. There's also perhaps, I'm sure you're familiar with, a risk management component, that it's in the best interest of the members to have that protection. And we see that in other context. Not everyone necessarily likes or wants automobile insurance, and yet as a policy, our government has decided that that needs to happen for the protection of others and for the protection of ourselves. And I think some of the arguments here are similar. CHRIS: Yeah, particularly as a self-regulating profession, right? I mean, if we're not regulating ourselves, then we, I think, open ourselves up to other branches of government thinking that they need to regulate us. And so there is kind of some notion of if we're not leading ourselves in this protection movement, then we're probably leaving ourselves vulnerable to others kind of infringing in that space. DOUG: Absolutely, to the extent we are self-regulating. And of course, we're ultimately judicially regulated, as the Supreme Court has plenary authority to regulate the practice of law and delegate some of it to the Bar Association. I think it's obligatory on a somewhat self-regulated profession to not act only in its own interest, but also to act in the public interest. On the other side of the equation, there are important arguments, multiple arguments, and we've seen some of them already come through to the task force, that there's a cost issue. It's going to add yet another cost of doing business to this regulated industry, and I think it's fair to say that no one likes the idea intrinsically of adding more cost to the cost of doing business. Related to that argument, there are those who argue because of the nature of their practice, the cost is prohibitive, because as you well know, not every practice area presents the same risk, and therefore, insures at the same cost. Some arguments relate to where particular lawyers are in the continuum of practice. So for example, lawyers at the tail end of practice thinking about winding things down or in the midst of winding things down I think are concerned that given the level or magnitude of the practice, which is perhaps diminished, the cost of obtaining malpractice insurance would outweigh the value of continuing to maintain an active license. So they suggest that for retired or nearing retirement practitioners, this may drive them out of practice for new lawyers just coming in to the profession, perhaps carrying a substantial debt load from law school and perhaps even larger than just law school. Again, there's a cost concern. And then finally, and I'm not necessarily naming every conceivable objection to mandatory malpractice insurance, but some point to an issue of uninsurability. I don't know of the extent to that's true. You probably know more about insurability versus uninsurability than I, but I think some members are concerned that if there are truly uninsurable risks that those individuals are going to be forced out of practice because they just can't obtain obligatory insurance. CHRIS: Sure, sure. So where are you at now in your process? Obviously the task force is being convened. As you think about the next 12 to 18 months, where do you see that process going, and then ultimately, what steps does the task force envision kind of taking in terms of recommendations and so forth? DOUG: We are still in the fairly early stages of our process. The board launched the task force by adopting its charter in September of 2017. The task force was convened and had its first meeting last month. We are in February of 2018. The task force is about to begin its second meeting. So we are really still at the headwaters, the information-gathering stage. So the Board of Governors through its charter asked for a report and recommendation from the task force in January of 2019. So they gave the task force about a year to do the work, determine what its recommendation would be, and prepare its report back to the Board of Governors. So what we expect is at some point the task force will make a recommendation. I wouldn't be surprised if it evaluated more than one possible solution to the issue, malpractice versus other initiatives that might service the same or a similar public protection purpose. And we'll solicit and gather input from the WSBA membership when those recommendations start to solidify, and then based on all of that information, we'll report back to the board, we fully expect, in January 2019. CHRIS: Okay. Well, good. Doug, any other kind of closing comments or remarks or kind of perspectives that you'd like to share with our audience? DOUG: Should any WSBA members find themselves interested in the issue, or even others find themselves interested in the issue, and care to share their perspective with the task force, with the Board of Governors, now would be a good time. There is a web page on the WSBA website devoted to the activities of the task force, so it's easily accessible and it's easy to provide feedback through electronic means, and we are be eager to hear from the membership, to hear from the public, to hear from others, about these ideas. CHRIS: Great. Well, thank you, Doug. I mean, this is an interesting subject, obviously one that we're kind of keeping a close eye on as the endorsed malpractice carrier for the Washington State Bar Association. And I think the carriers are obviously thinking about the affordability issue and whether even some insurance at a good or a basic level is better than no insurance, and particularly your solo practitioner community is a community that we're particularly sensitive to as we think ahead to the future of the market. DOUG: Sure. CHRIS: Well, good. I appreciate the time, Doug. And if you have any other thoughts or questions about this subject, feel free to contact me, Chris Newbold at ALPS, cnewbold@alpsnet.com, and we thank you for listening. DOUG: Thanks, Chris.