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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

Presented by Ferret: Ferret is the first relationship intelligence tool for all business savvy investors to know, for the first time, who they can trust Click Here to jump to the top of the waitlist. Presented by Gorgias: Gorgias is the #1 helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce stores, and can turn your customer support into a profit center.If you're looking to increase your retention for your business, mention Consumer VC and get 2 months of Gorgias for free. Click Here to get started.  My guest today is Doug Hudson, founder and CEO of Tend. Tend has reimagined the entire dental experience with transparent pricing, modern studios & no judgment ever. Previously he founded several consumer health companies. In this chat we discuss building companies in regulated sectors, why he decided to focus on disrupting the dental industry, and how he approaches expansion. Some of the questions I ask Doug: You've built multiple businesses in heavily regulated industries, what was your attraction to heavily regulated industries? When you founded Tend, what was the fresh perspective and opportunity that you saw?What was the opportunity in dental?When you say direct to consumer when it comes to dentistry, what do you mean by that?How does the online experience relate to the in-store experience?How you go about building a brand around a patient journey The NPS score for dentists are generally, very low. How did you think about improving that score in the category with Tend? So once you decided this was the next opportunity, what were some of the first steps to building Tend?How did you pick the first location?How do you think about retail design and ambiance for each location?How did you approach building a brand? What was your approach to attracting customers? How do you think about the different components of Tend?What's the decision making process like when launching new products? What's your approach to city expansion? Why did you decide to fundraise from venture capitalists? What was your approach to fundraising?What was your process?What was the biggest reason why investors past? What's one thing you would change about the fundraising process? What's one book that inspired you professionally and one book that inspired you personally? What's the best piece of advice that you've received? What's one piece of advice for founders?

If it's free, it's for me — that's one of my mottos. And that's why I love free samples. But free samples are universally adored, and in recent years the customers getting the goods aren't the only ones who are benefiting. Ecommerce companies and retailers alike are using samples as a way to raise awareness, convert more sales, and drive traffic to a product or webpage, and it's working. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, guest host Albert Chow talked to Doug Guyer, the Co-founder and Director of Strategic Development at Brandshare, the company that brings many of those free samples to your door. Doug explains that sampling is a tool that any brand can take advantage of, and if they do, they could see 97% of people who get the sample try it out, and 32% of those folks actually convert into buyers. It's a massive opportunity, but Doug also says that most brands out there don't know that this is possible. How has Doug and the team gotten the word out — including the story of how they landed their very first campaign with Tylenol — and what should brands be thinking about when they engage in the sampling strategy? Find out on this episode!Main Takeaways:It's Worth A Try: Very few marketing tactics are as effective as free samples. Reports from Brandshare indicate that well-run sampling campaigns see 97% try rates and as high as 32% conversion rates. Consumers are more willing to try something that is of no cost to them, and brands will be rewarded with both awareness and increased sales by making a relatively small investment in samples.Building Trust: When a brand gives a free sample, or includes a related free sample from another brand in a customer's order, the original brand is seen as going above and beyond. Customers view the sample as a sort of curated experience that was sent just for them, and it creates more brand loyalty.Not a Cureall: While sampling is effective, it can't solve all of a brand's problems. A struggling company or a business that simply doesn't have a good product will be negatively impacted by free sampling.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Albert:I'm sorry. You're going to cover Brandshare after my intro. Welcome everyone to another episode of Up Next In Commerce. And today, I have a special guest, Co-founder and Director of Strategic Development at Brandshare, Doug Guyer. Doug, welcome to the show.Doug:Thanks Albert. Honored to be here.Albert:Right out the gate Doug. What is Brandshare and what does it do?Doug:What is Brandshare is a great question. We have an E-commerce Media Network and we've built that over 37 years. And then people say, what is an E-commerce Media Network?Albert:That was my next question.Doug:And of course it's a consortium of 800 different Ecomm retailers that collectively ship out 75 to 80 million e-commerce order packages every month. What we do is we took those 800 Ecomm retailers, categorize them into 42 different lifestyles and then embed a product sample or brand experience insert into each outgoing FedEx package so that consumer, that online buyer gets a surprise and delight in their package when they receive it the next day, after order. I would say it's a delivery vehicle for the brands, for the CPT brands, OTC brands and a variety of brands to infiltrate the consumer's home with their product.Albert:Okay. Now is it done? I mean, back up a little bit because I to make sure everyone understands what we're doing here. You're not a shipping fulfillment network. You don't ship and fulfill orders for the brands. Is that accurate?Doug:That's correct.Albert:Okay. So it's not on the order level, it is like when I literally get samples in my mail from a brand, Brandshare might be part of that, is that accurate?Doug:That's not accurate. Only because our samples are our brand experience inserts right along with that FedEx order package. Give you an example, you order your bed linens and bath towels from www.bedbathandbeyond.com.Albert:Okay.Doug:You order today, tomorrow, there's a package on your front door. You come home from work, you open up that package. You know what you ordered, you just spend a 100 dollars and ready to go. You need these bath towels. And there in the package, there's a Tide PODS Downy fabric softener product sample in there. You didn't buy it. You didn't expect it. It's a surprise and delight to you the buyer because it makes synergistic sense to ride along with washables from Bed, Bath & Beyond. That's the customer experience we bring to the brands and to our Ecomm retailers and ultimately to the consumer in home.Albert:Talk a little bit about the value. I understand that... Later on in the conversation, I certainly want to dive in and understand like how these relationships are felt because I find that fascinating because it sounds like a retailer would then offer, it's like an end gap. They let little other brands bid based on their end gap. But talk a little bit about the power of sampling because this is something that I definitely can see working. Less people go into retail stores, especially the last year. Most people tend to buy things that they can touch, feel, look at. And so on. To be introduced to a new product digitally, kind of hard. And you're not as quick to consume a product digitally. I would assume.Albert:And then I was thinking, the other thing that's another value plus is I don't recall ever getting a sample and not trying it, literally every sample that's ever been sent to me, I tried it. Whether it was gum, whether it was whatever. I've tried literally every single sample, including, as you said, if it's a laundry detergent that I don't currently use, I'll do one load with it just to... Why not? It's a two-part question. I'd love to hear, understand a little bit about, why this has become so important in your perspective and then also give us an idea of what value does it really bring to the retailer from any case studies or results that you have?Doug:Yeah. Sampling is not a digital tactic. We made it an e-commerce digital tactic by partnering with Ecomm retailers back in the 70s, oh God. I'm sorry. The 90s, because we started in 84, we worked with catalogers, catalogers morphed into Ecomm retailers instead of Cabela's sending out 140 million catalogs a year, they're now send out 5 million. Why? Because they were very well-perceived or situated to have a fulfillment center and didn't have to build the postponement centers like the www.petsoftheworld.com did. And they were making money as catalogers and morphed beautifully into Ecomm retailer.Doug:And then so many of catalogers that we dealt with in the 80s and 90s are doing so well today because of the backend. What we did is pivoted from catalog to Ecomm retail and built that media network, Ecomm media network for the benefit of the brands. To instead of solo direct mailing a sample or instead of being in gyms where their sampling, instead of being in store with their sampling. In store sampling will always have a place with many brands but this is to supplement that not to replace that there's a place for in store and there's a place for in home.Doug:Where in home, via that FedEx Ecomm meets media package so that's a beautiful thing for a brand, because why? Because there's comfort, there's safety, there's privacy in your home. When you can try that sample, whether it's shampoo or detergent or makeup or something for your kids, whatever it may be. You don't have to stand in front of anybody else and do this. Awesome. But it's also good for the Ecomm retailer. Ecomm retailer gets a sample that aligns with them and obviously they have every right to say yes or no to that sample. And it's our job to vet out the properly aligned products and or brand experience inserts from Disney or HelloFresh or whatever it may be, that can sample but they can really put a beautiful educational booklet of their product or service into the packages as well.Doug:When that happens and it's properly aligned and executed flawlessly, the consumer is the one that wins. Because he or she is going to try that product. Like you said, every sample you've gotten, you've tried. Because why? Because it's no cost. It's a no cost experience for that consumer to try it, especially if it comes from the privacy and safety of their home. And then if the product does their job and it's a good product, hey, you're going to convert a certain amount of those. You're going to convert the 8%, 14%, 32%. We're in that top tier of conversion from a trial and conversion standpoint because of our targetability our scalability and our delivery vehicle.Albert:Wait. You're saying for some of these samples, they'll convert 32% of the packages. If I send a million, 320,000 people are going to live by this product that I just gave them a sample, is that accurate?Doug:Yeah. That's... The one step before that is how many tried. Is it 80% that tried and then you take 32%? or is it 97% that tried? And a good program will have 80% or so try it.Albert:Well, how do you know that if someone tries it? I mean, that's...Doug:I'll walk you through that.Albert:Yeah.Doug:It's 80% trial, 10% conversion, that's a nice sampling program. A very well done, flawless executed sample program should have 95, 97% trial. And it really should, based on the target ability of that same big program, whether it's grand shares or anyone else's, is the derivative of that 14 to 32% or 8% or 2%. We're driving as high as 32 but some at 14%, some at 18%, some at 21% got 95, 96. To answer your question, a million... Hey. 97% of that is 970,000. If it's a max conversion of 32%, yeah. It's close there 320, it's 316 or so. Between a 60,000 conversion, that's a beautiful thing.Albert:That's substantial. Those numbers are staggering. It's pretty darn impressive. I can totally see a 97% try rate because that's like I said, I've literally tried every single... Or my house has tried every single sample I've ever gotten. You know what I mean? You sent me a snack, I'm going to eat it. I mean, I guess the only time I don't try it, if it's damaged. I wouldn't try if it was damaged. Talk a little bit about how do brands get in to these sample packs, because there are a lot of brands and what's really fun about Up Next In Commerce is we get to interview companies that are small, we get to interview with companies that are just starting, we get to interview companies that have reached massive size and scale. Whether I'm consumable, I guess most people sell... I guess that's a great question to start. Are most of these product samples done by people who have consumables. Like coffees, soap, shampoos. I don't think YETIs sending tumblers. I mean...Doug:But there's an opportunity for that and that's a different world but the majority of our business is from, I'll use the term CPG, Consumer Packaged Goods and OTC Over The Counter goods. To a lay person, any brand, when you walk into a grocery store or you walk into a drug store, any brand that's on the shelf is basically a brand prospect of ours that we call on, we talk to, whether it's the Unilever or the Proctor & Gambles or the Campbell Soups or whoever they may be areour clients. And we educate them on the opportunity. Many brands have never heard of what we do and how we do it.Albert:Really?Doug:And when we describe that and they're like, 'I had no idea you could do that. Wow. That's really awesome." And it's not super expensive. We're not the low cost provider for sampling, we're not the high cost. We're super effective, we have clients that are been with us since the 90s because of that and it's not like a brand sample's every month, they advertise every month or market the same brand every month.Doug:But typically they'll sample when they have two things. They want to defend their legacy brand against come challenge innovative brands, look at the Tylenols of the world. You have those legacy brands that have a new formula, new shampoo and conditioner that's a little different than it was before or new flavor, a new texture for skin cream. Something that when the consumer tries it, it's going to make a difference. When they try it once, they give them enough cream skin cream, let's say to try for the week and it makes a difference and they see the difference. And then they have that trial conversion and the lifetime value of a new buyer who's going to buy from them once a month, once a quarter, twice a year, whatever it is for how many years.Albert:Let's say for example, let's walk our audience through an example, let's say I'm an energy... There's a lot of energy drinks out there. Let's say I'm an energy drink company. Been around for a little bit, hovering right around a couple million dollars in sales but I haven't broken through. I think I need to reach new markets, new people and I discover that gamers are an untapped market. They tend to drink energy drinks, they stay up late at night, but there's a downside in energy drinks.Albert:And they don't want to be twitchy. Let's say for example, because red bull makes me twitchy, they want to be... We have a smooth energy drink so we keep you smooth but focused because so you can game all night long. And they come to you and they knock on your door and they say Doug. I want to get this in the hands of gamers. Is that how it works? Do they already have a target audience in mind where they come to you and say, who could we possibly bundle with? Or are they even more specific and say, I want to get into retail box of X. How does this work?Doug:It's the former. And it's Hey. I hear you. If they're knocking on our door, they've heard from a podcast like this or some of them are marketing communications that we have an Ecomm media network that has 42 different lifestyles. They're like, "is one of those 42 lit lifestyles appropriate for my brand because my brand is gamers, my brand targets gardeners, my brand targets diabetics or pants conscious woman. We have a network, we'll pull the network down and say okay. For the want to be red bull that you described, who is... could be a DTC challenger. And they're not in Walmart or they're not in Kroger, they're not a shelf but they're just shipping direct to consumer. You can buy a four-pack APAC case, whatever it may be. We can arrange to put their sample in the outgoing FedEx packages of who? Newegg.com [inaudible].Albert:Name your computer [inaudible]. Yeah.Doug:Products, cables, you name it. In there with a cart open. That red bull, or I'm sorry. That energy drink will have a neck hanger on it and or sometimes cut a little piece with it that tells that consumer why this is good for you. It's not just chemicals. It's 12 different sets of vitamins or whatever the case may be and then what? And then what do you want them to do with direct result of training? You end up buying it and we'll make it easy and convenient. We'll put a QR code on there that directs them right to the site or right to, if there are in retail to Amazon, to Walmart.com to buy. And with one click, with click to cart technology so it's easy and convenient for that person to sit there, try it or like it, buy it right on the phone.Albert:That is sweet. Tell me a little bit about what are some of the success stories that you may have from this? Because I have a feeling some of the brands that you've worked with in the past they plateau or whatever and they just need more people to try it. And they hit the right demographic and it pops, I'd love to hear stories that you have of brands that once they got into the right partners, the right demographic, things just fundamentally transformed for them.Doug:Yeah. It becomes a not a promotion, it becomes part of their advertising. It does become a staple in our advertising because they could test. Much like could tests anything to see how it works, whether you're testing digital, you're testing DM, direct mail, you're testing outboard, there's some type of call to action that makes it accountable and responsible to the dollars and the resources you're investing in that marketing tactic. In this case, yeah. That want to be a red bull, that's two million but wants to be two billion plus with a 100,000 and have that clear call to action of how many cases did I sell with this QR code versus the QR or another type of call of action to use them with another vehicle and they can track accordingly. We've had a hundred thousand campaigns turning to 600,000 of carted value.Doug:We've had $250,000 campaigns turned into $1.9 million of carted through the cart technology. And why? Because we're delivering that single solo sample, not with a collection of samples. That single solo sample, to FedEx and UPS right into the person's home, where again, the trial rates are going to be at their highest because they're in the privacy and comfort and safety of their home. No one's around him. And that really came into play with COVID. I get it but those nuances of privacy safety and [inaudible].Albert:Okay.Doug:Fine. Are going to keep going throughout COVID. They were always part of our program before COVID and COVID just kind of made it more prevalent to the branch to say, I really want to be in there now.Albert:Do you have any brand stories that you're able to share?Doug:Well, the Tylenol story is a great one. We were one of the original testers or if not the original tester of Ecomm and back then, it was not even Ecomm. It was just little packages with the L.L.Bean, Eddie Bauer, Cabela's and Sportsman's Guide. We did 200,000 pieces, 50,000 each, coded each UPC code accordingly because back then was just coupons. And the redemption rate was so high that they thought there was an issue. There wasn't an issue and they rolled out to 4 million pieces immediately after that. They went from 200,000 to 4 million pieces why? Because your case, they saw it work and they wanted to be there before competitors, the Advil and Aleves of the world got into it. That was a springboard for them and they've been a client ever since J&J and McNeil pharmaceutical.Doug:There's many. We don't lose clients, which is a nice thing about what we do. It works. It works for two sets of clients right? We've got the brand client and the Ecomm retail client but it's got to work for both parties. Because this has got to be a surprise and delight for the Ecomm retailers customers that we're riding along with and it's got to work big time for the sampling customers. Because they don't just have what? They don't just have the cost of distribution, they have the cost of the goods too.Albert:Cost of goods sold. Yeah.Doug:Cost of goods sold. They're giving that away. 100,000, 500,000, 14 million pieces. And that's some costs of goods that has to be regained by additional sales.Albert:Yeah. And when it comes... I mean, for a CPG product, it makes total sense because we as people, we're creatures of habit. Once we buy a specific brand, when I buy a certain soap, I buy that soap every time. If I buy a shampoo, I buy that shampoo every time. I buy anything, even tape. [inaudible] scotch tape. We're like we're going to buy gorilla tape or whatever. Everything we buy, humans are creatures of habit. If you can get that habit to develop, the lifetime value's substantial.Doug:That's exactly it. The lifetime value is not about the one-off, one-time buy, it's hey. You took little buying cadence of toilet paper, of skin cream, of shampoo, of toothpaste, of whatever it may be is based on the product category it's going to be what it is. It's once a month or once every six months, a bottle of Tylenol, maybe once a year. If that, you don't get that many headaches. With 60 tablets in there, that might be once a year. That better be good. Because next year you with it and that medicine accounted for the next 12 years instead of one year.Albert:Yeah. And so talk to me a little bit about for the retailer. The retailer of course, they're going to want to know that QR code, that discount, whatever the buy add to cart, as you suggested is done through their cart, for sure. They're not going to want no... Let's just get serious. Nobody wants their customer to go shop at Amazon. That's a fact of life. Of course you, I would love if you had... Do you have any numbers as to like how many people will just continue buying from the retailer? Because it does make sense that they would, since they bought it from them to begin with. For example, like in your Bed, Bath & Beyond, if I ordered linens, clearly I'll shop there but then I get the soaps and shampoos or whatever I need maybe I add them to my basket the very next time I go back there, what percentage of people redeem directly at the store and then yeah. I'm curious for the retailer perspective, how does that look?Doug:The majority of the brands samples for products that we embed into the Ecomm packages are not driven back to that Ecomm retailer, because that Ecomm retailer like Zulily yet they sell merchandise, they sell apparel, shoes, accessories for moms and kids. They're not selling Tide PODS, they're not selling [inaudible].Albert:Okay.Doug:we're okay to them to a Walmart.com or Amazon.com to buy that product. It's a good CX for that customer because they're trying to buy the product being sampled. When you're dealing with a larger Ecomm retailer, like a walmart.com, they will allow a sample in their outgoing packages but that has to be bought at walmart on www.walmart.com. That's really the only one Ecomm retailer that it has that scenario that you just described where it's driven back only to that one Ecomm retailer.Albert:No. That makes total sense. And then from your perspective, I guess, I'd love to hear, what does the retailer gain? Is like the Zulily example?Doug:Yeah.Albert:I sell moms and kids products, I'm allowing sampled products to ride my, I call it riding rails but travel along my package. And like you said, there might not be a direct benefit immediately because I don't sell whatever product that is part of the package. How do you convince them to say yeah. You can do that to my customer base. Is it just solely on a guaranteed customer experience or yeah. How does that work?Doug:Yeah. There's two answers to that. One is there's a revenue standpoint from that. The brand pays us and we pay the majority of that fee to the Ecomm retailer.Albert:Got you.Doug:The Delta is our management fee for doing that. Yeah. Sometimes it's life-changing money, other times it's not based on the quantity of samples or our products that were running through an Ecomm retailer, but it's incremental revenue from an untapped resource for sure. The bigger part of that is the pleasurable customer experience that Zulily or Reulalaa is giving to their customers. It's other Ecomm retailers are not. They're able to give a Revlon eyeliner to a person at Ruelalaa to someone who's buying a dress for Saturday night or some L'Oreal shampoo and conditioner that they want to try and makes their hair look great for Saturday night. The customer doesn't typically think L'Oreal, they thank Ruelalaa. Ruelalaa gets organic post of thank yous of. Hey. You did a solid from me. Thanks for going above and beyond. The Art of Shaving starter kit, went into www.brooksbrothers.com packages and I got my $89 shirt but I also got this awesome starter kit from the Art of Shaving. Isn't that awesome? Thank you very much Brooks Brothers. They'll thank Brooks Brothers but they'll buy from the art of shaving.Albert:Interesting. It doesn't have any brand conflict because it actually creates even more brand loyalty. They almost view the retailer as like a personal buyer or something like that.Doug:That's it. And they do know, they being the customer of the Ecomm retailer that hey. That Ecomm retailer, one of my favorite retailers is vetting out products to give to me. Because they're not going to allow anything in there. It's got to have a perfect fit. And it's our job to make sure that when it's a perfect [inaudible], we send it over to our Ecomm retailer partners for review by marketing legal and fulfillment to make sure all three approve and are okay. Not just okay but want that in there.Albert:Yeah. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you guys built this business over the years because one of the things that's clearly evident talking to you is this is a business that requires scale. I mean, You need to be able to be in a lot of... Or a lot of homes as you said. If these packages aren't going a lot of homes that it defeats the purpose, talk about how these partnerships and stuff were built over time. I mean like you mentioned you'd been there since the beginning co-founder right? Was this the always the intent like hey. We're going to build this giant consortium of retailers and e-commerce brands or how did this business start? I'd love to hear how it evolved because I imagine it'd be extremely, almost impossible to knock on everyone's door and be like hey. I want to interconnect everybody in this network and then I want to let products and brands ride our packages into consumers homes. It'd be like, what are you talking about Doug? Who are you?Doug:And I'll tell you Albert, so many companies have tried over the years when they saw what we were doing and tried to build the same type of Ecomm media network and for a lot of reasons, it's so tough to do. You can have a couple of relationships with Ecomm retailers but to have 800 plus is really tough to do, manage and fulfill and make them all happy. We have a team, we've with two folks here. How we started is, me being the co-founder and another co-founder is my dad. And he's still with us, not in the business but my role was to talk to catalogers and say, hey. Would you accept in your upcoming packages an insert or sample that would make you extra money? It wasn't about the CX for them. That's when we recruited about 50 to do this and our very first campaign was with Tylenol like I told you with 200,000 pieces for a sample. Very first sampling campaign. Because before that it was American express application. Matching that up with high worth sharper images of the world. You were too young to remember Sharper .Albert:No. I remember Sharper Image, there's the catalog of gadgets and stuff. And we were going to storage, like all these gadgets and gizmos, like hey. This is a neon toaster. I'm like, I don't know why I need one but it looks cool.Doug:Exactly. With the success of Tylenol, it really opened us up to the CPG world of hey. Let's knock on Purina's door. Hey. Let's knock on Procter & Gamble's door. And started doing work with Cheer and Gain, and P&G and Olay and a Secret. And it just kept working for every brand. It really became a really nice situation for the brands, a really nice situation for the Ecomm retailers and me as one of the founders, it made me jump out of bed in the morning why? Because you're dealing with happy customers or happy clients who are on the Ecomm retailer side and on the brand side. We built the company around that and now put some digital... Not some but a digital stack with every campaign so that consumer knows that they can with a QR code, click the cart to order that product if they so desire. And a fair number of more are doing just that and that's what makes that ease and convenience for the consumer to go, wow. This is really nice. I'm doing it in my home and it takes just 30 seconds to do.Albert:No. That is pretty cool. I mean, but there's a little bit in that story that I can't quite comprehend, which is how did you guys convince Tylenol to take such a gamble on you guys? I mean, it seems like a gamble to me, right? What was that first conversation like?Doug:This is the story on that. Is, I'm at a conference and it's the largest marketing conference in the world. And back in the day, this is in the 90s. And it's a three-day conference. We're a young company. We can only afford to send one person out 10 by 10 booth. You've been there.Albert:Yeah.Doug:There's 1500 booths and there's 30,000 people walking in the house. Last day, last hour. All the other booths are, pull their booth down. And I'm like, I'm standing. This is in San Francisco. We're in Philadelphia. This is in San Fran. I'm standing here. I'm going to get the whole hour. The last 10 minutes, 10 to seven on a Thursday night, this gentleman walks up and he's suited up and I'm suited up and everyone else is pulling down and he goes, "what do you guys do?" And I tell him what we do. He goes, "have you ever done a sample?" I was like no. But I think we can do that.Doug:A sample in the package. Before that, it was brand inserts, the American Express inserts. We did that test and that's where it happened. That's where it started. With that gentlemen from J&J and McNeil said direct mail is not working for him anymore, this is not working for him anymore. Response is going down. Can I try something new? And we tried the catalog FedEx packages, which again, morphed into Ecomm packages and they went from 200,000 to 4 million. When Pepsi did their [inaudible] from RX to OTC, they went from zero to 14 million pieces because they knew that the tactic worked. The in-home tactic where again, privacy, safety and comfort is perfect in-home versus out-of-home and taking it when it's appropriate for them. It's a really cool success story that I can talk about for hours because again, because why? Because it works. It's not like it works a little bit and only works with these types of brands when it's properly aligned and logistically executed flawlessly, it works wonderfully.Albert:I mean, because now this business has been around since then you mentioned 30 plus years. I mean on the surface, just talk to you, makes total sense. You have a product, you haven't been able to get penetrate or convince enough people to sign up and buy it digitally, especially now, today digitally right? Because reality is how I got to I imagine it's really hard to convince somebody to try something they've never tried before, especially if they already have an incumbent CPG they use. I use Dr. Squatch for example, Dr. Squatch of course has made a huge splash with marketing and it's soaps. It's really expensive soaps but even as great as Dr. Squatch does, you and I know this, made and a drop in the market compared to like Dove, you know what I mean?Albert:There's so many people that use Dove and Dial and all that Lever 2000, all those soaps right? And so a company like Dr. Squatch, it makes total sense that they need more people to try it so that they know what it smells like, how it washes you, whatever the product we need, is just products that just have to get in the hands of people. I'm curious. What would you say the repeat rate is now, with the last five years of brands when they come to you or you go to brands whatever, when they do the sampling, how many of them repeat? Because I don't give a great indicator for our audience. Like how successful this is?Doug:I'll tell you exactly that. It's 93%.Albert:93%.Doug:93%. and there's 7% that don't come back. Hey, it worked well but our brand overall is failing. Just sampling alone is not going to save this particular brand. Dr. Squatch, which is already a successful brand by itself, DTC, innovator, challenger brands, to all the men's grooming brands. I love the brand and I've received the sample of it in a subscription box. That's how I found out about it and I went online and saw one of the videos and it's really well done. But if they did a subscription box that had 25,000, that I just happened to be one of the 25,000, that's nice. But how can they get to 250,000 or 2.5 million? That's where, in addition to what they're doing, they could do some things with a company like us or others. It could be around what we do but we have the scale and the target ability to do 2 million in a monthly basis or based on a certain target.Doug:Men's grooming or men's apparel or the www.fanatics.com. Let's say, they can do for a number and they don't have to do a huge number to test. Let's make sure it works for you. We're in no rush, we want to make sure it works for the brand. Let's do a small number, a hundred thousand. Hey, that's going to cost you roughly $50,000 and based on the size and the weight of the sample and make sure that their return on ad spend is there.Albert:That makes total sense. 7%. when you said that the brand was already struggling, I'm not going to say these were the brands that did it but that would be like, let's bring some scope for people. It'd be like back in the day when Kodak started to fail, had they sent film to people, probably still wouldn't have worked. That's one of the samples people wouldn't have tried. They're like, I don't know what to do with this.Doug:That's exactly it. They tried and that's where if you're going to sample, you better have a good product. Because that's going to expose your brand in awesome ways or if it's not a good product it's going to, oh my gosh, that tastes horrible or that gave me a rash. That skin cream gave me a rash. The trial and conversion rates will be high even if it's a great product. And if it's a not a good product, don't bother obviously.Albert:Yeah. Don't bother. Great point. Doug. It was awesome having you on the show today but before you go, we have to ask you a couple of questions from the lightning round. The lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. And what we do here is we ask you quick, rapid fire questions and you give us quick, rapid fire answers. Try not to spend more than a minute on each one. You ready? This is so our audience to get to know you a little better and know how you think.Doug:Cool.Albert:All right, what's the one thing that's going to have the biggest impact on e-commerce over the next year?Doug:New tech platforms that make it even easier and more convenient for the consumer to buy.Albert:Yeah. Anything that makes it easier to buy?Doug:Last three years. This is last three years, including COVID. The number one driving factor of consumers going into e-commerce and buying more and more e-commerce is I saved time, not I saved money, I saved time. If you're not making it easy and convenient for your customer, Mr. ER, Mr. Ecomm retailer, you better get Shopify or you get to get Shop Pay or you better get something from a tech platform that is one click and you're done.Albert:Makes total sense? What's the weirdest free sample you've ever sent out?Doug:Well, we've been asked to send out some weird, not so much weird ones but condoms of the world and which stands for Victoria Secret and [inaudible] Hollywood, et cetera but even they said no. Thank you. [inaudible] do that.Albert:Yeah. It's like, this is necessary in society. Like yeah. We just don't want to baggage it with our...Doug:No. They get one consumer complaint, that's too many.Albert:Yeah. That makes total sense. What's the one thing from 2020 you hope that sticks around in 2021?Doug:2020. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the consumer buying behaviors will stick around in 21 and beyond. And that's from online grocery buying. Buying your groceries online, some people never heard of that. All of a sudden 2020, it went from what 16% to 42% of certain amount of your groceries were being bought online. Not all of them. How much of that will continue on. It is a celebrated online grocery by six or seven years. That's going to stick around. And I look at it much like the adoption, the slow adoption of E-ZPass back in the day. E-ZPass pass [inaudible].Albert:Yeah. Wait a second. That was picked up slowly?Doug:Slow adoption. Horrendously slowly. I mean, why? Because a lot of reasons from taking jobs away from the toll booth workers, but once someone got an easy pass and they looked at the lane on the right-hand side where people were still waiting in line to give the guy a dollar, they'll never do that again. When they saw... When consumers in 20 recognized how easy and convenient Ecomm and online grocery is to... Whether it's my beer, wine or spirits, I can get delivered by Drizly. Okay. Or I can get my dinner delivered by DoorDash. Okay. Then continue those buying behaviors in addition to not just in total replacement of going in store but in addition to, you'll see that you already saw the celebration of Ecomm by six or seven years.Albert:It's funny how you mentioned them at grocery because I think back to pre COVID, you go into a Whole Foods, it's of course slammed with the buyers. People shopping for their homes. Now you go to whole foods, it's still slammed but it's like with Packers. People that aren't... There packing orders for other people to be picked up by prime delivery or Instacart or even Curbside, it doesn't matter how someone's picking up. The point is there's people are literally people pushing those carts with tons of grocery bags. It's like the store is still packed, it's still full but they're all pickers and Packers, they're not actual people buying for themselves.Doug:Yeah. Would you rather spend an hour in a grocery store with your kids running around or an hour playing with him at the park? Kind of a no brainer.Albert:I'm curious for yourself, one of the things that's really cool about your story about getting started was meeting a person by chance. Great relationship was a spark, an igniter for your business. I'm curious if you could meet with anyone today and have a sit down conversation. Who would you want to meet?Doug:Nope. Mark Lore from Walmart.com previous with Diapers.com.Albert:jet.com.Doug:Jet of course. He is a guy that I have met a couple of times but real in passing and we had nice quick conversations. We did a lot of business with a lot of his direct reports. There's a guy want to have beer with or have a glass of wine with one day and really pick his brain about what he sees going in five years, because he is truly a visionary and just freaking smart.Albert:There you go. Doug, I appreciate you joining us today on Up Next In Commerce. We'll see what we can do about connecting you with Mark Lore. He has not joined us on the show so Hilary let's go invite him. Doug. Thanks for joining us on Up Next In Commerce.Doug:Awesome. Had a great time Albert. You were awesome. Thanks very much.

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

Max: Hello everybody and welcome back to the 'Recruitment Hackers Podcast'.  I am your host Max Armbruster, and today I'd like to welcome to the show Mr.Doug Updike, who is VP of National Sales Recruiting at Nations lending. Welcome to the show Doug.Doug: Thank you. Appreciate you and what you are doing and thanks back.Max: Thank you. Doug connected with us listening to some of our content and feeling we were just talking about the fact that we are feeling a little cooped up in 2020 and that we miss the opportunity to connect with others and so this is the chance to connect and to connect with the audience as well. So for the audience, tell us what you do and the company that you work for?Doug: Sure. YeahMax: that's about Nations lending.  Doug: Yep. Nations lending, I'll start with the company. Company is at top 80 lender in the US, traditional retail mortgage lender so our customers are first time home buyers but people who are buying you know moving up in the market place or in the last year we finance here in the US within a huge marketplace for so a top 80 mostly in the central US and I was brought on a year ago for national expansion and then brought my team from top five competitor with me over to the nations almost exactly to the day a year ago.Max: Happy anniversary.Doug: YeahMax: So refinancing is a hot topic in 2020 you are saying?Doug: Absolutely! In my lifetime I have not seen rates like this in you know in giving people opportunity to get into their dream home or first time buyers to get in the market when they didn't think they could not afford a home, so.   Max: Right. Alright, I am curious to hear more about this firms but perhaps before, for the first to understand where you're coming from, can you tell us how you ended up in recruitments?  I am looking up at your Linkden profile now and I can see it was sometime in 2004.Doug: Naah before that Max: No it was before this century. It was back in         Doug: You guys were calling me in grade school or before that. Let's not make fun of me too much. Like most folks I did not think I was going to end up a recruiter. 100% by accident, fun story. I had sold a company was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next and a recruiter, nice fellow, he had been calling me I had a non-compete and all through the year he would call and ask me-do I know a person this wasn't a bank card/credit arena but you know do I know a person in Salt lake city that I might give a name he could connect with and this went on throughout the year like I say, so he invited me and wife I was living in San Diego and he invited me to a dinner and I made the mistake of asking him 'you know the folks number I gave you, did you make any money at all?' you know how does that work, and I didn't know the industry one bit. Max: YeahDoug: He happened to tell me that he made quarter money dollars on the leads that I'd give him and all of a sudden the steak and wine didn't taste as good as I thought it was going to because I was trying to figure out what to do.  So I actually worked with him for a few years and learned it, he knew that I was going to start my own company, went on to start my own staffing company which I integrated into a mortgage company right before the credit crisis. So that's how I got in, again 100% by accident, just happened to ask the right question at the wrong time and decided to jump in.Max: So you have been in this industry specifically not just recruitment but mortgage recruitments for a long time and I suppose some of that is because you know the people, you know the industry, so you go from one opportunity to another organically but are there some specific profiles and skill sets that this industry has homed in the recruiter in you?Doug: In the arena, yeah absolutely, but I think like most one of the reasons I picked mortgage right is the freedom. I'd like to have some freedom in what I was doing, the other piece it was an industry that had when I had back when I got in it, there was a wide gap between the folks that were doing it for a long time and I didn't find any rookies any folks that were newer in the industry that changed probably in the last three years, but I saw this huge gap and so being a connector of people, I kinda just went where people weren't. Mortgage is really sleepy. They kind of it was old school recruiting it was a yellow pad, believe it or not and who did you meet at a conference and so some years ago and then you know stuck in it dabble the outside of edges and you go back to what is comfortable. The biggest part of the mortgage arena that I love is you know personal friends that it was one arena where you stay in touch really the rest of your life. So I have this round table of folks that either you follow me or that I follow them that you know they became colleagues and friends at the same time.  Max: There is always that advantage of you can probably dig and do a background screening on a lot of people indirectly you know where only one or two connections removed away from somebody in mortgage by now.Doug: Yep. I would take that.  The other piece in staying in one arena that's very much helped me and my team with that is you know when you get to know people and you like people, people refer you a lot of business so staying in that probably still today 65% of what I do is somewhat referral based. Now I might just be that I heard that you know you guys did a great job for my aunt and my uncle who lives in Florida, can you help him? but there is an awful lot of texts, quick conversations and to that I think a big part of a way that I recruit, I wanna help folks even if it doesn't help myself so if I can open the door and it's in a different arena or different part of mortgage I am gonna do that everytime, just especially in these times I wanna help folks you know a lot of people got kicked in the butt that didn't have any idea in February and March that life was gonna change. So taking that platform and making it bigger than just mortgage and being able to help folks if they need it with an introduction could be any industry but staying put has allowed me to do that.Max: Yeah. I heard that it's less and in 2020 would be explosion of volume and digital hiring and digital channels that it's a bit less about who you know and little bit more about what you know that now for a recruiter that there is more talent available than ever before if you know how to use the tools and so you're gonna be less likely to use the buddy network. On the flip side what you are saying is you are all scoring points with your network inorder to build good karma and referral for the future. So the network remains critically important, though perhaps on the sourcing side less on than before, right. I mean if you source your talent digitally I assume.Doug: Yep, a good portion. I think you nailed it too. If you were to look a year and half ago I came from a place that didn't have much technology to Nations and Nations afforded me this look into technology that I'd never experienced. A lot of your audience would laugh but I mean I didn't know what to do with the salesforce license. We had a team building out some work force but SMS I hadn't used. So when I got those tools..access to those tools and had a team that we were just traditional cold call recruiters and we integrated the technology with our network and those were bounce store steps they were something different. I think it was different I think out tech guys would tell you, you know I get there but I would call it 'too much ice cream' you know technology for me for that first little bit when I have access to some three hundred and thousand something loan officers, that is lot bigger than any network what I would have ever thought that I could built. So I am probably one of the few people that said 'wow'. I didn't fully believe it until I started using it, meaning some of the technology that's just coming out.Max: YeahDoug: Specifically in my world, I used to scoff and laugh at text because I didn't like getting them. Text SMS technology Max: YeahDoug: And we probably half of our business came from SMS, starting campaign that's not how we ended it but we started a relationship that we didn't have. So I am you know honoured to say 'Hey!' we are now we are adapters and we are catching up with probably the rest of your audiences withMax: Cool!Doug: some of the mortgage'.Max: I don't know. Sounds like you are quite advanced. Text recruiting is still a relatively fresh area. I mean I guess the early adapters were 5-10 years ago Doug: Some of them were laughing at us. Yeah but anyway.Max: Well that's interesting. So are there some specific pieces to your text act that you would recommend for the text hiring or for people who are listening or who are looking for solutions?Doug: Yep. So, it could be so redundant and stuff that you guys it is intuitive to your audience. A couple of things that we did that were just simple is, literally taking and looking up birthdays with a quick text first thing in the morning. I know it's your birthday today, I wish I would've known that and I would have texted you, and Happy Birthday by the way, which is awesome. Max: Thanks!Dough: A lot of personal touches along with our brand 'Nations'. Here is a product that we would like you to learn about. Getting down to just even a 'Happy Birthday' right and making it first thing in the day. So we make sure they go out before 8AM, there is a birthday text and it's not just branded with and by the way now we are going to try to recruit you in the second paragraph. So some of what we have done is just take or what our call would be, but a lot of it's been congratulations when we see it, in our industry there is a magazine that comes out with top 200 you know loan officers and the top branches. Using that as an SMS but just to acknowledge our competitors without you know beating them over the head. Max: YeahDoug: We call it beating them over the head recruiting has been you know helpful. And the other thing as you guys probably all do. Once we became a consistent show. Tuesday mornings you know we know within a half hour that there is gonna be a campaign going out, we know to our competitors. Once we got serious with it in building it into our everyday activities we started having some real success, with the text.Max: Right. I don't think you are behind the curve at all. I am actually thinking of taking some of your ideas right to my product team and you know we send millions of SMS every month so I should've thought about it at all but I don't think we have automated birthday messages going on, which I think is a pretty cool feature for us to add so I am writing this one down.Doug: I'll take it like I say we try to make things super simple.Max: Yeah.Doug: Right. In the recruiting world and so we look at it and go like how simple can we make it, it's like you know how complicated, and then how many touch points. And that's the other thing that is broadcast. We are doing a little, I don't want to plug that slide dial is the one that we happen to users lots of them, but on the broadcaster's piece same thing is that we use a lots of humor with here to get some of our what we'll use a broadcast. Hopefully this will go out this goes out after January 1st right? Max: YesDoug: Good good. Then I'm gonna say this or you'll leak it that part out, whatever. We're having some fun, making fun of ourselves is a recruiters. January 1st we have a campaign going out at 12:01 on social media making fun that we wanted to be the first recruiter to try to recruit you in 2021.Max: NiceDoug: and then at 08:01 we have a bet going that we wanted to be the first recruiter in our space that reached out to you because there is so many recruiters in our space and it's just so competitive that we've actually decided to have a little bit of fun, it will be..we are gonna report back to you if this works but we are literally gonna take and have a little humor because there are so many people that we get you know you are the eighth or tenth recruiter this week that have called me, what do you have that's different? So you know, using that technology but then getting personal with it is what the team goal is. Max: Brilliant! Brilliant! And you can make use of tools that will personalized as well as the outreach, so obviously using things like the first name of the recipients 'Dear Doug' etc etc but you can now also automate things like voice notes and even sending out videos and GIFs in order to give it a little bit of you know spunk and branding. Yeah. Doug: Good points on your part. The other one that, and this is gonna be just kinda down what we call it 'down and dirty recruiting' we did it by accident and it's become part of our whenever we can now. We did a little, we are quick on the iPhone, a little twenty seconds in front of the competitors office coffee shop we all like to go. 'Hey Max I was thinking of you, I am right in front of your office, I am not bold enough to walk-in and try to recruit you in person but I'd love to have a coffee with you next time I am you know off to twenty fourth street'.Max: Yeah. Love it!Doug: It was returned within thirty seconds because it was clever. The guy just said 'super clever. Next time you are buying me coffee, I can't wait to meet with you. Different than anything that I'd got this week'. Now I'll take a week. I'd like to say ever you can pattern me out, but you know we'll take it. So we are trying to use technology but put a fun spin with traditional cold call recruiting, which our industry is not an early adapter to just about anything. We wait for everybody else to make all the mistakes and then as an industry we have to go out reluctantly we come crawling in at the end. So trying to get the team up to you know what's new? What's exciting out there? How come we have a fresh take to what we are doing?Max: I like it very much. I think just try to..I am thinking of all ways we can help people re engage with their townpool and do that kind of messaging because yeah you generally, if you have a good database you know who your competitors are employing, so you can have a targeted campaign just for them and because you've been in the industry for so long you know every lender out there so it would make sense if you'll be able to use that, yeah. And yeah going back just on the way the industry or the market is changing, you're saying is your industry generally doing well? I know in the insurance phase, the insurance world and life insurance they are having a good due in 2020 and refinancing is the hot area overall. Would you say that the lending space has grown in 2020 or for your market?Doug: Yep. Absolutely. Probably one of the top three years that I've ever had in the last twenty five. Some of the challenges have been, it's been so good but we are watching other people in other industries. You know and I'll use where I am here in Arizona, you know we've had a tough tough time with converting a lot of what is around us, is some warehousing, you know electronics, manufacturing and it's, that we've been growing as an industry you know watching others have to pivot or navigate that, has been tough but I were doing so well right and in the end I don't want to, knock on the wood, I hope this continues in our space but it's been an odd year to watch others really struggle and try to find their ways especially recruiting friends.Max: I mean it's a bit countercyclical right, when business is gonna be doing great and everybody is gonna have money in the bank then you'll have a slow year.Doug: Yeah. That's well said, well said but. You know seeing recruiters too that you know we are getting a lot of calls from other industries where they just can't recruit right or they can't recruit the way they had, so that's been a challenge but overall for our industry a top three in the last twenty five and really a time for people to pause and look at a new way to do business too. The tough times of covid have forced us to we don't get to jump on a plane and have a steak dinner. That would have been a majority of a lot of what I do was, coming in the town, face to face, breaking bread and it took a minute to get hold, 'hey! we can't just crawl and haul, we have to keep recruiting if we have to keep growing' and so you know all of this is forcing us to do that. And five different avenues and tactics to say much.Max: Sounds like you are not running out of ideas there and found other ways to build rapport and that's gonna be..yeah..continue to be the same for many years to come. Looking back at 2020, are there lessons that you've taken away from this year or ways in which your industry has adapted?                                                                       Doug: Oh you are not going to cut me off guard a little bit, yes. But I think what we have to do to adapt is really slow down and it can't just all be about comp, because so many people did well, so we had to slow down and go wait a minute you can't just have a compensation conversation, right, you can't lead with compensation, everyone is doing well. So it's a time that you know I used a..mentor used to tell me you know I would feel horrible you hold up mortgage company and he said you know if people having to hit their brakes at yellow lights because they don't want to work here like I wanna slow down and look at that and go 'can we do very well?can we do incredible?' and still change the way we're doing, give people more time with their families those sort of things. So my recruiting team, we are really focused on you know 'Hey, get a little get better at your pitch, get better at your craft. Ask. Listen just listen better' and I think what we learned in you know in 2020 is, we didn't listen very well. We just kept yelling on message instead of listening to what people want. Right.Max: The more competitive and the harder the industry is, the more you've to adapt your employer or value propositions to your audience and think like a salesperson.Doug: Yeah, and again a lot more listening. Right like there is a lot more empathy, there is a lot more caring, but you are hearing. You know I tend to be storytelling I tend to recruit by story telling and but just hearing what people are going through and slowing down and going you know, it might not just be comp, it might be hey you know we just had this on a call I was today so it's just six weeks of working seven days a week fifteen hours like I don't really care about the money. I am already gonna split it in half and get divorced. Doug is joking, everybody is like I am gonna split my money in half like can you tell me you know hey I just wanna be able to do this and have baseball literally with my kids you know. So those are the things I am gratifying.Max: Baseball is not legal anymore, Doug.Doug: Oh you guys can't and you are closed down. Here in Arizona we are not closed down on anything so come on over. Everybody come visit.Max: Anyway. The one question I would like to ask is to move back down the memory lane into the dark memories and to thinking about a terrible mis-hire that you've made. We make mistakes and of course retract you thought about your mistake and realize that could have been prevented or you decide you weren't going to make the mistake again. Can you walk us through that experience and you know for our audience to learn from your mistake?Doug: Yeah, so like it was yesterday. Unfortunately I probably think about it far more than I should. I think our losses right we think about probably more than our wins at times. Quite frankly it was this, I knew of the gentlemen and his whole team. I knew of him because he did great advertising right. He was on every billboards on this town, he was on shopping cart, he was everywhere, and in our world that must mean you have a lot of production. Max: yeahDoug: So it didn't quite match up. There was ways and excuse to why he couldn't provide right any substantiation of income or this and I kept valging and valging and valging and there is no way you could be doing these things, you have to be incredibly successful. It was probably the largest sign-on bonus that I'd ever been involved with that I was just fell flat and it was one of those things where you walk to the room and everyone is looking at you like "that's on you. Like you're the one that pushed it pushed it everytime' and you know there were yellow lights there were things I could look at but I had just decided it was gonna be the deal of a life time, right, like and probably the only time or first time. I can't say the only time I had thought of my commissions ahead of slowing down and doing the right thing. I started getting literally added like you know month three it's gonna be this month four it's gonna be that, like I had my scrunchie and I got blinded by the you know just all that you know he wouldn't be there and doing what he's doing if he wasn't successful.Max: Yeah    Doug: So I started finishing my own sentences without proof right like, well he has a good reason as a tax attorney couldn't get us what he needed, but I know people that know him. So horrible mistake to just again I started finishing my own sentences and writing my own email with what I wanted to be true instead of slowing down and getting a lot more..  Max: Sounds like you got greedy, Doug.Doug: I did. There is no other word to say that yeah. I got excited and I started wanting to cash the cheques before they showed up.Max: Alright, that I think we've all made that mistake and doesn't matter whether you are selling a career or selling something else or you are selling a talent. We all get greedy sometimes, but it does hurt you in the end right? I mean you got your commissions stillDoug: What does it look it. I earned on what they do. I got I got..Max: You got nothing thenDoug: But you know relation-ly I did too, it hurt, because there were plenty of people that said you know slow down,'Are you sure Doug? Are you sure?'and I just decided I was gonna be the smartest guy in the room like I couldn't be wrong and I just stopped listening and I stopped waiting, I was gonna answer-yes this is gonna be the deal of a lifetime.Max: And in your world to somebody who is good at self promoting by bill boards and ad space and as you said it seem everywhere in the city, but for most industries we are seeing this kind of self promotion happening on social media now like people touting their success on Instagram or on Linkedin or other places and endlessly promoting their own success. I guess there is a measure to which this is necessary for them to be successful but sometimes it's just a compulsive attitude that doesn't necessarily add anything to top line.Doug: I 100% agree. The other thing and I think our team learned this at Nations. One of the things that we slow down and see is, if you are infront of..I am gonna make fun of it so it's not just a car or boat, a plane, a car or boat. It's very easy to connect on two or three or four parts of social media and it's just is the human being you are talking about the same human being five pages into a Facebook feed or Linkedin or do they have a different lifestyle on every one, right. Some of the things that we are seeing are really conservative with a nice suit on Linkedin, we won't even talk about Tik Tok or whatnot, but is it congruent and does it tell a story? and it's slowing down and watching and looking because you are right we get a lot of people that are you know in front of whatever, now I make fun of planes if somebody can afford that, that's awesome, but you know they are just trying to build it before. I'm gonna have all these things and because of that you know I'll end up working.Max: I see what you're saying. So they are so obsessed with self promotion that they are putting pictures of themselves in front of jet planes but then asking you for a 50K job.Doug: There you go. Yeah that's right. They will build it and they come you know after the fact, yeah. I just need one break, Doug and then I can start buying all these things that I want instead of you know the success let them attain it.Max: If hiring people who are in a commercial role but who are not over selling, over promoting, or pushing the envelope too far and threatening the trust of your brand, maybe a good tip there is go take a look at their social media profile and yeah see if this holds up.Doug: And are they the same person all the way through,right? Are they trying to figure out their identity on social media?Max: RightDoug: Are they kind of fake on Instagram, but then you know on Linkden they are another human being, on Facebook where their family might be they really can't quiet brag as much asMax: I agreeDoug: as much as they lie during an interview, that kind of thing. Just you know we are in a mostly who we hire is commission based folks so that trust level, and it's somebody's home we have to be very careful that they're gonna handle it in a professional manner that isn't all about just the commission.Max: Right.Doug: and can they do the right thing if no one is looking is a potent quality for what we're doing.Max: So you have it. In a world where people are hiring increasingly work from home commission based folks, trust and consistency of character is more important than ever, so Doug some really good actionable tips here for our listeners. Thanks for sharing and thanks for coming on the show.Doug: Yep and a Happy Birthday. Celebrate well my friend and I appreciate you having me on.Max: Pleasure. Thank you. I'm really go and celebrate.Doug: There you go. Appreciate you. Thanks guys so much.  

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...

Key Takeaways:02:10 - Restoring the Trust of your Guests inside Your Salon04:28 - Salons are Super Safe Place06:31 - How To have a Successful Salon while Staying Safe14:43 - Make Safety as Your Top Priority18:22 - Four Best Places To Communicate for UnityQuotes:“The fact is the salon is probably one of the safest places that you can be. Everybody's wearing masks, everything's getting wiped down, we got sanitation everywhere.” (02:59) (Doug)“It's building that trust. And like anything, it takes time to build it.” (17:01) (Doug)“You're registering this stuff in the background and it's building trust without a two way communication. It's not like I said, "Trust me," now you trust me. It's like, you ever walked in somewhere and it's dirty, or you walked in somewhere and it's just gross? Not to bring up a whole topic, but like gas station bathrooms, not a pretty place to go pretty much anywhere.” (20:57) (Jason)

Key Takeaways:03:42 - The Value of Backstory in Every Salon Business09:28 - Dreaming and Believing Make Things Happen15:27 - Turn your Dream into Reality21:38 - Success Tip: Step Out of Your Comfort Zone23:20 - Surround Yourself With People Who Push You To Achieve Your DreamsQuotes:“You got to have that dream and that drive that you want something more than where you are.” (09:10) (Doug)“You got to figure out what motivates you.” (16:40) (Jason)“By putting yourself in that different situation, all of a sudden your body starts believing that it can do things that it never thought was possible. Your mind starts believing things differently. And it just makes such a difference in how you operate as a person when you start believing things that you didn't believe before.” (22:43) (Jason)

Key Takeaways:3:13 Getting Staff ready prior to salon opening back up6:50 Getting your guest ready for the new procedures inside the salon10:05 Conversations on social distancing in salons15:01 Discuss the topic that “Salons are going to be slower than ever before”18:24 Discussing the topic of whether it is a good idea to have services on sale for reopening22:50 Control the attitude and energy of your salonQuotes:“I think salons are going to be busier than ever when they open back up, I don’t think being slow is going to be an issue!” (15:11) (Jason)“Your job is to serve your client’s beauty needs, don’t get lost about what your job is, to help them to look beautiful and they’ve been suffering for the last 4 to 6 weeks, so serve them.” (20:05) (Doug)“You will control the attitude and energy at which you look at reopening  you salon” (22:50) (Jason)

Key Takeaways03:15 – How salon owners can stabilize, organize and capitalize during these times of uncertainty09:17 – Why now is the time to serve, not sell13:16 – Explaining and learning how to apply the 80% Done Rule18:26 – Where to look for the opportunities, as opposed to the obstaclesTweetable Quotes“What we’re trying to pay attention to right now is what can we do to keep you focused and keep you moving on and getting strong.” (06:55) (Jason)“So, if you’re busy out there and you’re putting on all these, ‘Hey please buy from us,’ and you’re begging your clients and customers for money, that’s not the direction we want you to go in. What we want you to do is serve your community like you’ve never served them before.” (09:34) (Jason)“I remember when we first opened our salon, I was everything. I was the janitor. I was the handyman. I was HR, the whole nine yards.” (11:34) (Doug)“I wouldn’t let go of things until they were 100% perfect, and I wouldn’t hand things off unless someone could do it 100% perfect. And, what I realized is that not only was that holding me back, but I was stealing people’s future from them.” (12:24) (Doug)“You either choose to look at the opportunities right now, or you choose to look at the obstacles.” (19:51) (Jason)Links MentionedHigh Performance Salon Academy Website – [https://www.highperformancesalonacademy.com/]

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

This morning, I got up after a rough night. Our son just wasn't sleeping well so my wife and I were up and down throughout the evening. And when I finally got up to start my day, I went downstairs and noticed that the coffee hasn't been prepped. Now, I thought about it the night before, I thought about it before going to bed, "You know what, Doug? You should just prep the coffee. Grind the beans, get the water ready. Get it all ready, so all you have to do is hit a button when you come down."   ***Subscribe --- Episodes up DAILY***

Free LinkedIn Infographic http://szeak.com/profile-infographic/ Contact Doug Brown doug@szeak.com Doug's 5 steps for LinkedIn contacts: Profile Find Your “Perfect Customer” Contact Requests Contact follow-up Message Move Conversation Outside of LinkedIn Nonprofit Chat with Doug Brown The Interview Transcript Hugh: Greetings. Russell Dennis and Hugh Ballou are back. As normal, we are interviewing someone that has really good content. Tonight, our guest is Doug Brown. Doug is an expert in a number of areas. I have known him for a few years. Every time that I have a conversation with him, I learn a lot of stuff. I want you to take notes. There will be some infographics and other things you will be able to take advantage of. Go to nonprofitchat.org if you want to see the notes and the transcript. Doug Brown, welcome to the Tuesday nonprofit chat. Doug: Thanks, Hugh and Russell. It is a pleasure to be here tonight. Hugh: Tell us a little bit about you. You run Newswire, and you have this really secret power with LinkedIn. Give us a sense of who you are and what your skills are. Doug: Well, I have been in Internet marketing since there has been Internet. Our first project was in 1995, and that is about the start of Internet marketing. I have been around the Internet and trying to figure out how to capitalize on the resources there for a long time. I hate to date myself, but I wasn't really young when I started doing that either. At any rate, in 2003, we started a company—I was involved when it started—of Newswire Network. Newswire is a press release distribution program. It goes to Google News. It syndicates press releases on behalf of other people across the web and in the real world also. Newswire has been a fairly successful company. It has been around for a long time. We experienced some meatier growth in the last few years, and almost all of that is attributable to what we did in LinkedIn. You and I have been talking about that a little bit, and I appreciate the chance to share what we have learned about LinkedIn and connecting and social marketing. I think all those things are applicable to anyone who is trying to form relationships and trying to monetize their relationships, whether it's in a for-profit setting, a nonprofit setting, or just about anywhere else. That is my background. I have been in journalism and Newswire almost exclusively for the last 13 years. But like I say, part of running any business is finding people to pay you to use your service. We figured something out about LinkedIn that may not be totally unique. I am sure other people have figured out similar ways to utilize the platform, but maybe what is unique is I am willing to sit here and talk about it. Hugh: That's awesome. I see a lot of people on all social media, and LinkedIn is no exception. It is social. Social means relationship. I get tired of people hammering me with stuff. The expertise that you bring to clients is how to build relationships and how to build your sphere of influence because in charities, we want to have donors, we want to have board members, we want to have volunteers, we want to have stakeholders who are participating. That ain't going to happen if we haven't built a relationship and understand what their passion is. Russell has spoken about that in previous sessions, about how do we connect with a passion of the people who really could serve us well. We are going to talk primarily about LinkedIn tonight… Doug: Let me just pick up on that and emphasize that that is exactly true. When we started seeing some growth in our business is when we decided we are going to start forming relationships with people rather than just trying to present them with *audio issue* And that is what social networking and specifically LinkedIn is great for. We talk about some of the differences between LinkedIn and other social networks. It really is social first, and you have to remember that. Hugh: It is. There are so many people who don't understand that. We actually repel the people we are trying to attract. Before we get into this LinkedIn, I have some questions for you. Doug, let me touch on Newswire for a minute before we go to LinkedIn. Newswire.net is the site. What problem are you solving for people with Newswire.net? Doug: Newswire is a way to communicate your events, your news in your words to the media. Even more specifically, to your target audience. There has been a real change in the way media is consumed and distributed. Like a lot of people listening, I used to read two or three or four newspapers a day. Gee, reading three newspapers a day would take 15 minutes now because my local paper went from hundreds of pages down to maybe tens or fives of pages. News is different than it used to be. Even Google News has changed a lot in the 10 or 12 years it's been out there. It used to be an idea that a press release was prepared and sent out to the local newspaper, the local TV station, the local whatever with the idea that it was going to be republished in the local paper. In a really few number of years, that has changed, almost because there is nobody home at the local newspaper. People consume their news online, and that is one of the great things about Newswire and Google News specifically. Newswire specializes in putting the news of our subscribers into Google News and places where they can communicate their story directly to consumers without having to hope and pray that somebody at the local paper picks it up and republishes it. We are just a publication service. We are a way for people to disseminate the news about their organizations out to the public directly. Hugh: I would encourage people to look at it because it's very cost-effective. Your reach is enormous. You can audit where it shows up online so people can see all the places it's been published. Doug: Through the last 15 years, Newswire has created its own weather system, so to speak. We have over 100,000 page views a day on Newswire. A typical release will get 1,000 or more views right on our site in addition to what it gets elsewhere. A lot of the views on our site come from Google News. We are indexed on Google News. People come searching for whatever keywords you happen to use, find it, come to our site, and read the post. We try to design our site in a way so that it's sticky and people can see related stories. They may come to see someone else's story and end up on yours. People read on average about four stories every time they visit Newswire. It's a great way to get your information out there. Like you said, it's very cost-effective. Hugh: 100,000 views a day? Doug: A day. Yeah. Hugh: You slipped that in there. Newswire.net. We will put the link in the notes for today. I've experienced your work with LinkedIn to be a refreshing change with some of these tools that people are using that says, “Hi, I'm so-and-so. Let's have a conversation. I want to sell you something.” Let me ask you the same question with LinkedIn. This whole thing is creating your position of influence in connecting the people that matter. I reframe the stuff that you sent to me because that is what we are doing with charities. We don't know how to get out of our own way and tell our message. There are lots of nonprofit leaders and business leaders. LinkedIn is a really good platform. What people are you solving for people with LinkedIn? Then we will go to why it's different. Tell us what problem you're solving for people with LinkedIn. Doug: The rest of the resume, the thing that I didn't really continue on, was we were so successful in building some tools and some ways to do things for LinkedIn that we have taken a few clients that we do this process for. You know a couple people I've done that for. Just to continue on there, the problem that we solve through LinkedIn is we help people make the right kind of connections. We help them connect with their target audience. We sometimes call it your ideal or perfect customer. We help them identify that perfect customer and help them create a relationship with that person that over time can be turned into a business relationship of some sort or another. That could be inviting someone to participate on a board or in an event, or identifying and creating a conversation with someone you may not otherwise have had an opportunity to get in touch with. Maybe they run in a different circle or live in a different city, state, or even country for heaven's sakes. There is half a billion people almost on LinkedIn nowadays. It's a very different place than the other social networks. You have big numbers on Facebook that LinkedIn will never match, but the difference is that LinkedIn is all about business and for business. Let me throw a couple of statistics out off the top of the head. The people that live in the United States that are LinkedIn members have an average income of $110,000. Hugh: Oh my word. Doug: Yeah. Isn't that amazing? It's not a bunch of teenagers. It's not people sharing kitty pictures. They are about business, and people are there to do business and to connect for business. Yes, the problem that we solve, and the mindset—without getting too far ahead of ourselves here—I'd almost venture to say that 90-some-odd percent of people who are listening to this, if you go back and look at your LinkedIn profile, it reads like a resume. Hugh, that might hit a little close to home. You and I worked on your profile a while ago. Hugh: Yeah, that was a paradigm shift for me. Doug: The first thing to recognize is that unless you are a job hunter, which is a legitimate thing to do on LinkedIn, but unless you are there to hunt for a job, your profile shouldn't look like a resume. It shouldn't be a resume. It should be like every other landing page. This has been something I have been doing for 20 years—like every other thing on the Internet. It ought to have benefits. What do I get out of connecting with Hugh Ballou? What's in it for me? That's what everybody at the end of the day wants to know: What's in it for me? So that's really where we start with all of the people that we deal with and where I will start with our free session tonight. Let's make sure that your profile is something that invites the right kind of people to connect with you. Telling people that you are the CEO or Executive Director gives them no reason to want to connect with you. If you tell them what you can do for them or what you do for others, now you are starting down the right track. We can talk more specifics with that, but that is the first problem we solve. Trying to get people to use LinkedIn correctly and not as a spot to host their resumes. Hugh: That is a paradigm shifter right there. This has brought out potential conflict in my mind. I have a Hugh Ballou profile on LinkedIn, and I have a SynerVision Leadership Foundation page. Should I have a separate profile for SynerVision? Or is a different page under Hugh Ballou okay? Is that wrong? Doug: I think that's the right way to do it. I would imagine that a lot of people on this call have connected with Hugh on LinkedIn, and if they haven't, I invite people to go look at Hugh's profile on LinkedIn. You will get a good idea of where to start because we spent some time thinking about that and working on it. We have an infographic we will share that gives you that information. It starts with your title. If you scroll through your friends on LinkedIn, you will see titles that say “Managing Partner, Accountant, Business Manager,” all those things. They are resume things. Those things don't do anything for anyone. Unless they are looking to find an accountant, you better not have Accountant in your profile, even if you are the world's greatest accountant. Even if you are an accountant and you are trying to make a profile, you probably should do something like, “I save people tax dollars,” or “I help people pay the right amount of taxes.” Give them a benefit. Don't just give them your resume. Tell them why you are worth connecting to. Why are you worth knowing? Hugh: Yeah. There are people commenting on Facebook about how good this is. Shannon Gronich was here a couple weeks ago talking about her piece on publicity. You are going to be back with us on this on the 25th of July. Doug: I am going to shift hats and put on the PR hat. Hugh: You will be back here with some good folks. You helped me fine-tune the Hugh Ballou piece. So I'm thinking that I haven't even thought about the piece for my nonprofit. That would apply to that as well, wouldn't it? Doug: It kind of would. The thing you have to realize is that even if you are General Motors, your company page is not very well viewed on LinkedIn. People are on LinkedIn to find out about other people and not to find out about companies. Your company profile is in my opinion better served through your webpage, so link your profile to your webpage. If you do multiple things, link multiple web pages. The bottom line is still Hugh Ballou is worth knowing because of the benefits you can bring to people, not because you went to MIT. I don't know where you went to college, I'm sorry. But your resume and where you worked last year is not why they want to know you. They want to know you because of what they can learn from you or what they can get out of you. That is what we focused on. We took a quick run through your profile the other day. That is the way it is. That is what it's all about. That is what the profile is all about, letting people know the benefits, not the features. People don't want to know the features. Nobody wants to know where you went to school, what your job title was at your last four jobs. Those are features. They are important to you and probably important to your wife, so I am not trying to take those things away from anyone. But me, Doug Brown, if I want to connect with you, I want to know what I get out of it. What do I get out of it? What are the benefits, not the features? Where you went to school, your last three job titles does not really interest me in connecting with you. Hugh: We had David Corbin on brand slaughter last month and David Dunworth before that. Both of them talked about how we as leaders present the brand. If I am the executive director, or if I am the founder, like I am of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, I represent that brand because we are the nurturer organization for other charities. We help people build their skills, strategy, team, and income. I find that there is so many people. I am coming to Salt Lake City. But Russ has ben a presenter in Florida and in Denver at these one-day leadership empowerment events that I do. I find that leaders are overwhelmed. They have too much on their plate. They want to connect with other people, but they have trouble getting to events. The system you have developed is really brilliant because it helps people form relationships with people who have a similar passion or similar interest, or there is a chance to collaborate and bring people together in a reasonable conversation. You pointed out that Facebook is the social stuff, the kitty pictures, the family shots, and all of that. Twitter, which I like a lot, I have 200,000 people on Twitter, and I have made some significant connections on Twitter, but it is a distinctively different niche. LinkedIn, I have not mastered. If I am hearing you right, it stands out because it's where business people do business. Doug: That's exactly right. Everything has its own spot. I have over a million followers on Twitter, but I use it really just to broadcast Newswire news. That is not the same as making connections with people. I put out news, legit news, through my Twitter feed. I don't use Facebook at all. That is not to say there is not a spot for Facebook for lots of things, but there is not a spot for Facebook in what I think that I do. That is okay. I understand Facebook is well over a billion nowadays, so that would say that a lot of the people who are on LinkedIn are also on Facebook. I'm not trying to draw that kind of distinction and say there is no way to make meaningful relationships there. Obviously there is. But the distinction with LinkedIn is that people are there for business. If you start posting kitty pictures on LinkedIn, you will never hear the end of it. It's not what it's there for. It's there about business. It's there about being better at business, being a better business leader, finding resources. I could spew amazing statistics all day long, but 72% of business to business purchases right now are preceded by a LinkedIn search. If you are buying a copier, you are going to figure out who that is that you are buying a copier from, or you will find the copier guy. It's about business to business. I wouldn't take nonprofit out of that because that is still business to business with a different slant. But the principles are exactly the same. I wouldn't draw a distinction there. Hugh: We have been preaching that. It's a business. We have more rigid rules with the IRS. Doug: If you aren't going to run it like a business, you won't be around very much longer. Hugh: Amen. As a matter of fact, I had an interview a while ago with somebody up in Michigan, and she had looked at my LinkedIn profile. Glad I fixed it before she looked at it. Doug: Just to bring that home for you, whether you know it or not, 72% of the people who are going to do business with you have looked at your LinkedIn profile. Hugh: 72%. If somebody is going to donate to my charity, they are going to check me out. Doug: No question about it. And you hope they don't check you out on LinkedIn and find your kitty pictures. You want to be a serious person that has something serious to offer, whatever your niche is. That is not the same as sharing your family fun on Facebook. Again, I'm not here to bash Facebook. There is a spot for it. If people are going to do business with you, 72% of the time they will precede that with looking at your LinkedIn profile, so it better be pretty good. Hugh: A different mindset. Doug: It fills a different purpose. To call them both social networks, while it's true, is misleading because they are as different as night and day. Russell is agreeing with me there. Hugh: Let's bring Russell in. He is radically polite, but he has good stuff to say. Russell David Dennis, weigh in. You are very successful on LinkedIn. You write blog posts. What is your experience with LinkedIn? Russell: I made a go at it because it was meant for business. I thought I should get serious with it. I bought some additional services with the profile so I could contact more people. I went north of 3,600 followers. They changed the look and feel, but according to the old look, they said I had what they call an All-Star profile. That is pretty good. But I connect. I have a lot of face-to-face meetings with people. I have even been in touch with people I have talked to lately. I dropped in here because I have a lot of people in here and I wanted to see how many of them fell under nonprofit. Probably about a quarter of them do. I did a company page, but it didn't seem to have the look and feel I thought it would. It's not like a typical web page. I managed to use Facebook to create a page and some roots, too. Everything has its place. Twitter drives traffic. The place where the rubber meets the road as far as face-to-face is LinkedIn. Doug: That is my experience. Hugh: Russell takes the edited video and puts it on his LinkedIn page. You have a following with these interviews. Give us a highlight of what that experience has been like. Russell: Typically about 10% of my followers will watch an average post. Most of them are 1st connections, but that is typical. It depends. When we had Thyonne Gordon talk about boards, boards are something that people are very interested in. Those particular posts have had more traction. That was the one instance where a podcast had more people go to it than the video. I am trying to look at putting some of our podcasts out there. I could probably go back and put some shows that we have had before because this content is evergreen. People like the podcast, and they like to download it. They can go see other podcasts. That is a habit I think I am going to get into: putting the podcast up so that people can have access to whit ile they are driving. I listen to audiobooks in the car and learn a lot in my car because I spend a lot more time than I thought about. Doug: It's a great place. I am an NPR guy, but podcasts and NPR… Hugh: Russ, you publish articles. I want to have some dialogue with Doug. Doug, Russ is a very good writer, and he writes some very relevant stuff. He posts it on LinkedIn. He also posts on the SynerVision blog, and Doug, you are certainly invited to contribute to the magazine, Nonprofit Performance, and our blogroll on our SynerVision leadership site. Russ, you have created some articles. What do you think that does to help you connect with the tribe? Russell: People get a sense of what I'm thinking. More importantly, I get a sense of what sort of things people are concerned about based on the response to those articles. Typically, I have a response rate of anywhere from 3% to the article that I had the largest percentage of my followers drew about 20%. I posted that, and I don't think I posted that on LinkedIn. It was on another site. I shared it to my LinkedIn, and the question was who is responsible for fundraising? I had quite a few comments on that. I talked about boards there. There is a lot of interest around that. People want to know how to go about finding board members who can really add some juice to what they are doing, whether that is through skills or networks. The thing that LinkedIn has is you can talk about charitable opportunities and what matters to you in the platform and let people know that you are available to sit on boards. It is a good place to shop for board members. If you can take the time to reach out to a few people and see what is on their minds, you can find out what resonates with them. Hugh: I want you to think about a hard question for our guest. I am going to go back to him and weigh in some of the stuff we talked about, and then we will come back and let you give him a zinger question. Doug: I do have a couple things that I'd like to weigh in there. I do think that it is important for you to continue to publish on LinkedIn, but don't make the mistake of thinking that is how you are creating contact. Your contact base will grow a little bit from those things, but the truth is, and I am probably going to say something that is a little unorthodox here, we like to use LinkedIn for contacting or identifying contacts, and then our goal is to take the conversation outside of LinkedIn. I'll tell you why that is. Most people, and probably including you guys and most people here, look at LinkedIn somewhat rarely. Maybe that is once a day, once a week, once a month, as opposed to your email. I finally have my telephone set to not giving emails between midnight and 5 am. Other than that, I am basically responding to emails 20+ hours a day. Most businesspeople are like that. One of our goals is to take the contacts we make on LinkedIn outside of it. I just sent you something privately in the chat, Hugh, but I have this six-step process we follow. The steps to making it work is to work on your headline, work on your profile; use LinkedIn to identify your perfect customer; request contact them; do one or two follow-up messages on LinkedIn; and move the contact outside of the site. We found that far more effective. Whether that's a phone call or an email or a text, however you normally communicate. If I were to ask you, Hugh, how often you message with someone on LinkedIn, the answer will probably be, “Seldom.” What we have found and what we recognize, and those steps I just gave, are we use it to identify, we use it to connect, we use it to start a conversation, but as soon as possible, we get it outside of LinkedIn and back into the way people are used to communicating. Hugh: It does bring it front and center. You have shown me ways to find people in a geographic area or demographic or psychographic. You can sort people. Russ has far more advanced skills than I do. Go back to this how often I check it. Are you on LinkedIn every day? If so, how much? Doug: Are you asking me? Hugh: Outside of the work you do for other people, but personally, how long do you work it every day? Or do you work it every day? Doug: The answer is we do this for our salespeople. It's a great question to ask me, but I don't get in there as a consumer but maybe once a week. I think I'm fairly typical. Part of what we do with LinkedIn involves some of our staff all day every day, but that is different. In terms of me checking up on my friends and randomly reading posts and reading what my friends have posted, not a lot. Some, but not a lot. In that respect, I think it's very different from Facebook. I won't name names, but I have adult kids that spend way too much of their life in my opinion on Facebook. People don't do that on LinkedIn. It's not the time-killer, or as sticky as Facebook. Is that a nice way to put it? We have found by far a lot better success in using it as a tool to identify, to start a conversation, but taking the conversation outside of LinkedIn has been much more successful for us. Hugh: Scott Riches sends his greetings, saying, “Two of my favorites, Doug and Hugh.” Doug: Scott lives across the street from me, and I see him about once a blue moon. Hi, Scott. Hugh: He is on the webinar. Doug: Or come across the street and we will say hi. Hugh: You never know. It's interesting, Doug. I'll be speaking to a group, and they will point to me and say, “As you said on your podcast.” You were talking about how we influence people. It's interesting how we impact other people with our thoughts and our comments and how it either connects to people or it doesn't. We can have negative impact or positive impact on our social media. Doug: That's another great point I want to shove home in this conversation. Hugh and I are part of a training/connecting group that I go to every month, and sometimes I go to national things a few times a year. If you are really dogged, you might meet ten people a day. You have to be really at it. The chances of one of those ten people being the right person is whatever the chances are. You can do ten times that in an hour on LinkedIn. Just the odds of connecting with the right kind of people, you can put it in hyperdrive and still take those pre-qualified leads back into how you would connect otherwise and connect outside of LinkedIn. You can use it as a huge filter. You can filter through hundreds of people instead of the people you can run into at a social event. Hugh: Some of the people that I know I referred to you and you started working with say they are amazed at the number of people who want to talk to them. You have done a good job of helping them present themselves in a way people want to talk to them. Those of us doing sales call them leads. But we are always, if we are running a charity- I like the word “charity” because “nonprofit” is such a stupid word even though that is the name of this thing. If we are running a charity/nonprofit, we should focus on profit, but we should focus always on cultivating relationships, maintaining the existing relationships, and continuing to build new relationships. Let me contrast the brand slaughter thing that I mentioned earlier. We can do and say anything we want as leaders, but there is negative impact. If you are in the wrong setting, that is a negative. You can post things that- like somebody we know in Washington tweets things that get in the news. That is not necessarily good for those of us running a charity. What are things we should not do on LinkedIn that have negative impact for us? Doug: Right off the top of my head, and I have seen this happen a couple of times in fact, one of our mutual friends really blew his entire social network apart by taking a political stand. Hugh: Oh yes. He told me he lost half his followers overnight. Doug: That is a good example of what not to do. We can be Jews or Mormons or atheists or Muslims, but that is not relevant to our business situation. We can be Republicans or Democrats. We can be anarchists; we can be anything we want to be. It's not relevant to your business setting. Keeping those kinds of things as far away from your social- Again, that is very different than what people do in a lot of social networking settings. People have Twitter followings based on a distinct and a niche point of view. Your Facebook friends are probably down with you on some niche point of view. That is not relevant to business. What not to do: Don't do it. Talk about your benefits in terms of what you can bring to someone in business. Keep your political views, your religious views, your sexist views, your gun views, I don't care what it is, it's not relevant to your business. You have to realize that every time you express a view like that, you alienate some huge portion of your potential contacts. If you are a Trump guy and spout Trump, you have now limited yourself to 38% of the people in the United States. If you are a gun guy and spout guns, you eliminate half the people. If you are an anti-gun guy and spout anti-gun stuff, you have eliminated half the people. Hugh: Russ spent some time working of the IRS. There are some pretty strict guidelines, unless they get changed under Trump, mentioning him, that you can't really take a political position as a 501(c)3 because you can lose your tax exemption. Doug: I'm not really talking about just your- I'm talking more about your posts on LinkedIn and your profile on LinkedIn, just in terms of inviting people to connect with you. You want to be as specific as you can be in terms of your benefits, what you can do for people. You want to be as obtuse as possible about whatever your views are, realizing that whatever your most heartfelt view is will alienate half the people you could potentially connect with if you express that, no matter how dear it is to you. Unless you are selling guns, maybe. I don't know. I hope the point is understood. Hugh: The point is well understood. Doug: I'm being facetious to some extent, but I think you get it. Hugh: You're not. It's a serious topic. We don't take it seriously. I want to get to some tactical questions about identifying and connecting and messaging, and then I want to talk about this awesome infographic. But I want to see if Russell has come up with a really hard question for you. I want to see you sweat. Russell: People find out that I worked for the IRS, and I'm not nearly as scary as people want me to be. Hugh: He took this Colombo position in asking dumb questions, and I can picture him in that trench coat. Russell: It really worked best on $500 an hour attorneys, but that is another story for offline. In terms of really getting connected with people on LinkedIn and creating a message, when I started, there were people out there that I just didn't know. I looked for people in certain niches and went out there. That was a little scattershot. I got somebody to help do that. I learned the concepts of going into groups and engaging. Now I found myself in a lot of groups. How would you parse out your engagement on LinkedIn? I have probably 40 different groups. How would you go about dividing that and conquering it? It's almost too much of a good thing in some ways. It's hard to be engaged in that many places. How would you go about separating that? Doug: I'm not a fan of groups. Maybe one or two groups if they are really specific to your niche and what you are doing. Let's for example take the idea that you are trying to find some directors for your nonprofit. A group is not going to help you there at all. Like you said, it creates some noise that maybe you don't need to deal with. I would unjoin every group that I was in if I were you that wasn't specific to what you are trying to accomplish today. In terms of your old connections, one of the other things that I am pretty careful about and ask our guys to be pretty careful about is not to mix- One of the things that a lot of people do when they start at LinkedIn is import their address book out of their mail processor or email app. LinkedIn encourages you to do that. That gets you Mom and sisters and nieces and aunts and uncles and neighbors down the street, and all sorts of stuff that is irrelevant. You probably can't do anything about that if you have done that already, but don't do it anymore. Russell: I haven't done that because there are too many that just don't belong. Doug: The challenge is that for people who have more than one business, that is tough because you mix stuff up. But most of us have one business and one thing we are trying to accomplish. When you get a LinkedIn request from someone, unless it is someone you think you would have sought out, don't accept it. There is a limit to how many LinkedIn connections you can have; it's 30,000 right now. That may sound like a lot, but I went past that a long time ago. It's not a lot. Over the course of a couple of years of using LinkedIn, you can easily suck up that many. Be selective about who you contact. Make sure they are people who fit your criteria. After that, they can follow you. That is when your strategy of posting comes more into play. 30,000 contacts is enough to make a lifetime out of, so use them carefully and wisely. I heard a little saying the other day that I will pass on: Your net worth is now your network. Your net worth is your network. Use it carefully. Don't just accept people for whatever. There is a code you will see in LinkedIn every now and then: LION. People will put that in their profile. Stay away from those people unless you are barely starting out. LION is a LinkedIn Open Networker. That is not a bad thing. Those are the people that will connect with anybody and the idea they are trying to make a huge network with no selectivity. If people have LION in their profile, you probably want to stay away from them, not that they are bad people. They are not specific. You only have 30,000 of them. Russ, you're sitting there at 3,500, and Hugh, I remember you are at 5 or 6,000. 30,000 may seem like a long ways away, but it's not. Use them carefully. Maybe someday LinkedIn will open that back up a little bit more. Hugh: I didn't realize that. I wondered if there was a cap. Before I go to the tactical questions, let's talk about the kinds of relationships we want to cultivate. I could say we could create a peer-to-peer group with other nonprofit directors who are having the same problems that would be a support group, maybe a mastermind connection. I could see we could connect with businesspeople geographically that could be candidates for our boards. I could see that we could connect with marketing people in companies to start talking about how it would benefit their brand to be a sponsor for our nonprofit. Do you have any comments on those, or are there other kinds of connections people might want to make?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Doug: You might go directly for people that share your interests, whatever the interest is of your nonprofit. If you are in kitty rescue, out of half a billion people, you can find a lot of people that share your specific interest. If it's macramé that is your interest, you will find thousands of people who love macramé. If you are doing great work in a niche, then you want to connect with other people who are interested in that niche and see where it goes. Some might be donors, some might be business partners, some might be board members. As long as someone shares your interest, that is a great place to start. It'd be hard to name another place that gives you another way to search for people that shares- Whatever esoteric interest you might have, you can find a list of people on LinkedIn that self-classify as sharing that interest. Hugh: That's a good segue. We have a quarter of our interview left here. How do we identify those connections, and how do we contact them? How do we use the messaging piece to stay in touch with them? Doug: There are a bunch of questions there. Let's talk about them one at a time. Let's go fairly quickly. Let's put up the infographic and talk about it in the barest details for a minute or two. Hugh: There is a downloadable brilliant infographic. Doug: This thing is about five times as tall as it is wide. You are only seeing a portion of it. This first portion has some important things. Russell, you used to pay for that background image, and now everyone gets that for free. You can put a background picture here in your profile. You need to put a good business picture in your profile. It is just astounding that people are four times as likely to connect with someone who has an image than with someone who doesn't have an image. Then the headline- that is the most important thing. This one is “I help B2B companies save money through outsourcing solutions.” That is a silly example, but the important things are there. You have identified who you help and how you help them. That is the important part of the headline. That will let people self-qualify as to whether or not they want to connect with you and whether or not you want to connect with them. If people know what you do and what you do it for and want to connect with you, then you are halfway home. They already know what you're about, and if they want to connect with you after they know what you're about, then you at least have a start. If you say you're an accountant, you might get other people who want to connect with you because they want to be part of the brotherhood of accountants, but that is a long way from having someone who wants to do business with your nonprofit. I'm going to leave it at that and let everybody go through the download themselves. On the website, there is a post about doing headlines. I can't think of anything more important than your headline. There is a place that calls them Snaps. Whatever you call a headline, an elevator pitch, whatever it is, you should be able to communicate what you do, who you do it for, and what they get out of it in a few words. You should put that as a bumper sticker, on your business card, tattoo it on your forehead, whatever. But they might be the most important 10-12 words you ever come up with in your life. For lots of different things, not just your LinkedIn profile. Feel free to download that infographic and play with it, and that website has more pieces that might be helpful to you. Hugh: That is an interesting name. Szeak. How do you say that? Doug: Szeak. Hugh: This will all be in the show notes. Does that mean anything? Doug: Nope. It's a five-letter domain. Hugh: Give us some tips on how to find people. Doug: There are tools inside of LinkedIn. Russell, I think you were making a reference to this also, but if you are going to get serious about LinkedIn, you need to pay for one of their premium programs, which is called Sales Navigator. They may have changed the name on it now, but it's a program inside of LinkedIn. It's $80 a month. You can do most of the same stuff without paying for that, but LinkedIn will throttle you down. LinkedIn will only let you do so many contact requests. I don't know what the number is. It's probably a couple hundred a month, whereas if you pay them, they are more than willing to let you do as much as you want within some reason. This isn't the time, and it's not graphical enough for me to teach you how to do that right now, but there are lots of good tutorials on LinkedIn about searching. There are actually 24 criteria in Sales Navigator that you can search on. One of them is Ebullient Search, which means you can use plus, minus, words, quote marks, all those things. You can do a lot more than just the 24 things. They are things like geography and job title and number of employees and those kinds of things, which are all great. But you can add Ebullient Search to that. If kitty rescue is your thing, you can find thousands of people who have that in their profile. Again, I'm not trying to be flippant. It doesn't matter what your niche is. You can use LinkedIn searching to identify other people who have that same interest. Hugh: That is a powerful tool. Doug: It's unbelievable. Hugh: I got that navigator for a little while, but I couldn't figure it out, so I stopped it. Now I have to go back and find some tutorials. If I heard you right, there are tutorials on LinkedIn on how to do this? Doug: There are. We occasionally run webinars, too. You can put my email in the chat if you want. It's doug@szeak.com. Reach out to me and I will let you know the next time we are having a webinar on the hands-on use of the tools there. Just through the search functions in regular LinkedIn, you can start to get a feel for it. There are half a dozen criteria that you get for free. You get an idea of what that search starts to look like. By the way, it's free for a month. If you are getting semi-serious about it- You do put your credit card in, so you have to remember to cancel or else they will hit ya. But you can get in there and play with it for free and look at what it looks like. The #1 thing is to fix your profile and make sure that you have your profile in a way, starting with your headline, that lets people self-qualify. If kitty rescue is your thing, put it right in there. You get the idea. That works to help people self-qualify. About half the people you send a request to that do connect with you will just say yes, but the other half will look at your profile. That turns your profile into a really important thing. You can get thousands of people looking at your profile. Start thinking about what that would cost you if you were in pay-per-click or that kind of business. Make that profile an engagement piece. Realize that literally about one out of three people that you send an invitation to- first of all, you qualified who you are, so you have a good idea they are the right kind of people. A third of those people are going to look at your profile page, and half of those people will connect with you and half of them won't. At any rate, you could be paying ten dollars a click in a lot of niches to get people to come to your page, and you can get that for a lot less money, even with the $85 a month to LinkedIn. Headline, profile, then the search thing. Figure it out. One way or another, you can find some help on that. It's fairly self-evident. Send your requests. Let me talk about that. What we found is that the best contact request is a very generic one. Once you identify a prospect, you send them something that says- I need to back up again. You can only do these contact requests to second-level connections. In other words, I know Hugh and Hugh knows Russell so I can send Russell a contact request. From that point of view, it does make a lot of sense to have thousands of potential people because every time I connect with someone like Hugh who is in the right business, I get access to his hundreds or thousands of clients that hopefully are also in the right business, not just his grandma and his aunt. You can send out those requests to second-level people. The wording for those things is generic. We call them by name. “Hey, Russell. We both know Hugh, or we have some mutual friends. I see we are both interested in kitty rescue. Would you be interested in connecting with me on LinkedIn?” We don't say that we are selling them something. We don't say we are looking for a board member. We don't say we are looking for volunteers. We say we have mutual connections and mutual interests; would you like to connect? You will find that about 40% of the people you send that request to will connect with you. If you can get yourself in the habit of doing 100 of those a week, that is 40 new people. That is a lot of new people that you connect with every week that are now qualified. They are not random people. You searched for them by a criteria. You invited them based on a criteria. Most of them have come and looked at your profile page so they know what you're about before they connect with you. Right there, you are halfway home. At least halfway home. You have people who know who you are, why you have asked them to connect. You have prequalified them with the search to get them in the right spot. We send that thing. We follow it up with a next message that is very generic that says, “Thanks for connecting with me. Looking forward to staying in touch.” Just that simple so there is an acknowledgement they have connected. You say, “Hey, I would like to know more about what you do. Do you mind if we connect outside of LinkedIn?” You can download your list of people from your contacts. You can download their phone number. You have these people at this point. You have their phone number and their email, where they work, their job title. Whatever your connection funnel is. From that point on, there is a whole different conversation: how to take people from contacts and leads into customers. That is a topic for a different day. This is the start of your sales funnel or contact funnel. With a couple of hours a day or week, you could be adding 40-50 people a week to your top end of your contact list. Now you have to have a way to deal with those people. That is a lot of people. You have to have a way to take them from Point A to Point Z. But in terms of making connections and finding who you should be connecting with, there is nothing like LinkedIn. Hugh: The Meyer Foundation did some research and found that 45% of nonprofit executive directors are facing burnout. 75% are looking at the door out. As you were talking, finding people with common interest, you could find people who are retired and looking for something meaningful to do who could be part of your solution. They could help manage your social media. They could take things off your plate. Putting on your weekly schedule some time to grow your sphere of influence on LinkedIn might be a good way to get your head around how to get out of this dungeon of being burned out and having too much to do. Let them help you. Ask them. Doug: The thing I would caution everybody on on this is not to be too general and jump ship too many times. You need to know what you want and have a way to get it. If you get into LinkedIn and say, “I want to find an executive committee of 14 people who live within 100 miles,” go do that. That will be a different conversation and profile than, “I want to tap into other nonprofits that contribute in my niche.” Don't try and do everything at the same time. That is just a general focus thing. My wife and I have a running joke. We have grandkids. A few years ago, we watched Up, the cartoon movie. I don't know if you have ever seen it, but in Up, there is a talking dog. In the middle of the conversation, the dog turns its head and says, “Squirrel!” Hugh: The dog is an entrepreneur, right? Doug: That is a running joke around our house and one that you could take home with you. Don't get squirreled. Have one thing you want to do. Do it until it's done. Then move on to the next thing. That is true with everything, including LinkedIn. If I need 20 things and am looking for 20 kinds of people, that is a way to get zero done. If you say that I want this one thing and want to go find that person, and then once I find that person, I will move on, that will work. But if halfway through, you go, Squirrel! Don't do that. Don't get squirreled. Hugh: Stay focused. That is good general advice. As far as what you are saying here, that is prudent. One of the reasons we may be burned out is we are doing the squirrel thing too much. Doug Brown, owner and manager of Newswire, which is a brilliant PR platform to get your releases out there, and this whole track with LinkedIn, you have given us amazingly useful information. Doug, if you do a webinar, let me send it to the group of people here. Doug: I'd be happy to do that. Thanks for the chance to talk. Everybody loves the sound of their own voice, so thank you. Hugh: I'm going to make you listen to it. Doug: I don't love it that much. Hugh: Thank you so much. Russell: I just had someone ask me about broadcasts I'm in. I do this. I do Nonprofit Culture Success broadcasts, which are going to become more frequent. They asked me if I listen to my own podcast. I said, “No,” and they said that I should probably start. Watch what you're doing. Doug: See how to make it better right. Hugh: Last time somebody told me, “Hugh, you ought to be on television.” I said, “Really? Why?” “So then we could turn you off.” Thanks for this broadcast, Doug. Thanks, Russ, for co-hosting with me. Doug: Thanks for having me guys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices