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Good journey, Down to Watch listeners, and pew pew to you, we watched 1987's The Masters of the Universe. Dan and Raul have not the just the power but also the opinions regarding the first time He-Man arrived on the silver screens. As the 21st century deploys it's version into theaters, the DtW crew wants to know what happened when Teela and Man-at-Arms were chased by Skeletor from expensive looking Eternia to much more easily filmed Whittier, California. Did Dolph Lundgren and a first time Courtney Cox make history with a StarWarsian, Conan-esque laser barbarian tale or does this movie belong in the cult bin, or worse!?! Listen up, find out if heroism is as lonely as villainy!

Earl Gosick, CTO at ESTI Consulting Services Earl Gosick has been attending Dell’s annual event since the EMC World days, and the ESTI Consulting Services co-founder brought to this year’s Dell Technologies World a perspective grounded in 35 years of building deep technical expertise on the Prairies. ESTI, the Saskatoon-based solution provider that won Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year, runs a pure-play Dell infrastructure practice with particular depth in storage and data center design. Earl also sits in Dell’s CTO Connect program – a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists with early visibility into Dell’s product roadmap and a real voice in shaping it. His framing for the week: AI is fundamentally a data story, and data stories are storage stories. The push toward on-premises AI infrastructure – from deskside devices up through the newly announced Exascale and Rackscale solutions – is being driven as much by data governance requirements and token economics as by raw performance. Organizations that don’t control their data, Earl argues, can’t truly control their AI outcomes. On cyber resilience, he made a point worth underlining for anyone running managed services: ransomware insurance changes the recovery equation in ways clients don’t always anticipate. When a claim is filed, infrastructure gets frozen for forensic analysis. Recovery speed from a clean, air-gapped golden image – built with technology partners like Index Engines – isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game. And to close: Saskatchewan and Alberta may be poised to become Canada’s next significant data center hubs. With regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale facility successfully built in the province and is actively pursuing more, Earl sees a real and growing opportunity – and ESTI is already working to support it. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re continuing our series of conversations from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. This week, we’re shifting from the Dell executive perspective to the partner perspective, and today’s guest has been making the trip to this event since the EMC World days. Earl Gosick is co-founder and senior consultant at ESTI Consulting Services, a Saskatoon-based solution provider that just celebrated 35 years in business and took home Dell’s Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award for Canada last year. Earl also sits inside Dell’s CTO Connect program, a small, invitation-only group of partner technologists who get an early look at where Dell’s roadmap is actually heading – and, importantly, a real opportunity to push back on it. Earl’s a storage specialist at his core, and that turned out to be a useful lens at a conference that was fundamentally about AI infrastructure. Because if you pull on that AI thread long enough, it leads you back to data, and data always leads you back to storage. We talked about what the Exascale and Rackscale announcements mean for real customer deployments, why the cyber resilience conversation is as much about recovery speed as backup integrity, and a genuinely interesting thread about why Saskatchewan and the broader Canadian Prairies may be sitting on one of the most underappreciated data centre opportunities in North America right now. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Earl Gosick. Earl, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Earl Gosick: I appreciate you having me here. It’s always nice to talk about what we’re doing with Dell. Robert Dutt: No doubt, and you guys are doing a lot. I understand this is by no means your first DTW rodeo. Earl Gosick: No, I’ve been coming since the EMC World days, and I’ve never – I missed a year through COVID, that was about it. Robert Dutt: Well, I guess we’ll allow you that. So you’ve got this background here, you do the CTO Connect with Dell. What’s different about this year, if anything? What’s the tone or the energy that tells you something about where the industry is at right now, and not necessarily just where Dell would like it to be going? Earl Gosick: I think the driving factor of today is really the supply constraints. You can see what AI is doing and the effect that’s having across the board on every product that has memory or CPU or flash drives in it – which is everything in technology. So that’s really setting the tone. But it also shows how effective AI is as a market driver, and what people think is going to come out of that technology – which is, I think, very important for people to understand. It’s ubiquitous technology that’s going to drive a lot of change in our industry. And we’re seeing a leading edge of that. And if this is the leading edge, there’s some pretty exciting things coming, I suspect, and it’s going to do some pretty important and probably quite wonderful things for our clients. Robert Dutt: We heard from the main stage the idea of encouraging customers to get their hand up early – to get those orders, or even an inkling of where things are going for orders, in as early as possible – and that that will, in effect, Jeff Clarke was suggesting, get folks the best possible results. What’s the guidance you guys are providing your customers around that whole issue, and thinking about availability and pricing of hardware in this current super-fun environment? Earl Gosick: Our position does align with what we’re hearing from Dell when we’re dealing with Dell Technologies, so we try and pass on the messages as transparently as we can, understanding there are supply constraints coming. And we have to deal with those in the only way we have, and that is to figure out what we need. Let’s plan early. Let’s plan the budgets we have for the year, and we can make some estimates about what’s going to be happening six months from now – but they’re estimates, and they’re going to be higher. So it’s probably going to be cheaper for you to have technology that’s sitting on the floor unused for a few months and waste through some support potentially, as opposed to delaying the purchase for three months. So if we know what we’re going to buy, we should operate in a manner that allows us to order those technologies as soon as possible and make sure you’re not waiting for something that delays your business initiatives. Robert Dutt: You guys won the Data Centre Solutions Excellence Award last year for Canada. Take your victory lap. Tell me – what is it you guys are doing in the data centre space that earned that, and what does winning the award tell you about where your practice is focused? Earl Gosick: I hope it helps demonstrate our success. So what ESTI likes to do as a business – our business model is really to build highly competent experts all the way from solution architecture to implementation of those technologies at the customer site. That takes a lot of effort on our behalf, and so it’s nice to get a reward that says we’re doing the right things. Because if you can build a strong rapport with a client who trusts your experts in their field, that creates long-term relationships – which is what both ESTI and Dell are after, and what our clients want. Robert Dutt: You’re a storage specialist at a conference that has been at its core all about AI infrastructure. But at the same time, you go back to when it was – you said – EMC World, all about storage. The more I heard this week, the more it feels like the AI story is really a data story, and data stories are storage stories to at least some degree. How are you seeing that translate in terms of what your customers are actually asking about, or what they’re going to be asking you about? Earl Gosick: It’s significant. You’re right. In order for any type of artificial intelligence to derive a useful data product out the end, it’s built on the data that you have. So customers are coming to the realization that they have to store everything. So it is driving a lot of demand for storage. It’s driving storage in different ways and they just keep everything. Then there’s another product that comes after that, which is cleaning that data – building the data pipelines. When I talk about storage, it’s really about data, and AI is a data-driven product. So it’s doing great things for the storage industry. But the clients understand that they do have to have the data – it has to be there, it has to be available. And then when they build these data products, they have to protect those data products. They’ve got to make sure they’re secure. So it’s driving a lot of initiatives on both sides of the fence that are good for all of us. Robert Dutt: Especially with new or newer customers, or customers who are looking to expand what they’re doing with AI – and acknowledging there’s going to be a range from folks who have had the religion since day one and folks who’ve just been randomly shoving stuff digitally wherever they can. Where do you find those newer customers are at, generally speaking, in terms of sophistication of data management and data governance and all that kind of fun? Earl Gosick: Unfortunately, I’d like to say there’s a median in there. There is not. Everybody is at a different stage in that cycle for them. So you really have to be a little bit cognizant and ask the questions to find out where they’re at before you can really sort of hold their hands and walk them down the road. Many people who started that journey early – you can learn from them. And so they’re going to tell us to start and do something, and you may fail, there may be some things, but you’re going to learn something from that. The second time will be more successful. Then you take that information, you pass it on to the newer people who are trying to get quick value from those investments they’re making on the AI front. So it could be things about how to connect those various data sources because they’re spread everywhere, to how do they build, or select which ones they put their money and their efforts behind. And so you take from the ones that have been doing this for a while, you pass that information on to the ones that are starting on this journey, and you connect the dots. You provide value and make pain go away wherever you can. And customers appreciate that. Robert Dutt: And that sounds like that’s where you’re kind of bridging that gap that exists and trying to bring customers to the level they need to be at to get something out of this. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. Like I said, everybody’s on a journey at a different stage of that journey. And so you have to communicate well to understand where they’re at and what they’re trying to achieve. Once you know that – we don’t always have the answers, but we leverage great partners like Dell who do have somebody that knows the answer. And so building this sort of ecosystem of potential partners to bridge that gap is great. And Dell does that not just from us and the partner community, but their partner community as well, to support all the component pieces that go together to build these pretty highly complex solutions in some cases. Robert Dutt: Of all the announcements, all the stuff that we heard on the main stage and elsewhere this week, what kind of caught your attention – your major aha moment – the thing that’s going to be interesting going back to your business or going back to your customers with new opportunities or the ability to do something better, faster, more? Earl Gosick: So as we talked about, I am a storage guy. So I look at something like Exascale. They’ve been talking about this for a couple of years now in the CTO cycles that I’ve been to. To see that product sort of come to fruition, where you have something and you can just put a personality on that module and build something out – I think that could be very game-changing, especially for AI. They might want to do a lot of things with file storage today, object storage tomorrow. Being able to build up a cluster and put a personality on it that meets the needs of the day – I think that could be quite interesting. That Rackscale solution you saw on the stage with Michael Dell and Jensen the other day – for the larger clients, something like that could be quite interesting. I mean, we’re building these large data centers right now and trying to fill them. Rackscale infrastructure that helps with power and energy and doing a lot of powerful things is going to probably be a game changer for a lot of people. Robert Dutt: One of the things that struck me here is what I want to call the AI agnosticism, as long as you’re doing it on Dell infrastructure – that Dell is talking about here, ranging from, if you’ve got really basic needs, run it locally on your AI PC, moving up a bit there’s the GB10, which is more of a deskside machine, up to the big old box that Jensen signed on stage. How does that map with what you see in terms of customer needs for AI, and what do you think of that kind of approach to structuring both the data center and broader AI processing across the enterprise? Earl Gosick: I think as we touched on earlier, everybody’s on a different stage in that journey. So if you’ve got a guy that’s working at his desk and he’s trying to do some cool things, but he doesn’t have access to a million tokens – that little GB10 you put on the desk beside him and he’s going to do some development, he’s going to learn some wonderful things. Then as you move up the stack in your journey, you’ve got some big clients who are going to do small proof-of-concept type scenarios where they might want a smaller box and then move up that stack. I think it’s important to have a product that covers a diverse range of those people because nobody’s in that one sweet spot – they’re all over the map. Having that full technology set supports wherever they happen to be in their life cycle. Robert Dutt: You touch on tokens, and Jeff Clarke’s presentation was really deep into tokenomics and the kind of the trap there. I’m curious how that maps with what you’ve seen in customers as they’ve started to explore AI. Are they seeing these same challenges, and how are they thinking about it? Earl Gosick: Tokens are the buzzword of the day, but they’re out there for a reason. Everybody has finite resources to put towards the solution they’re trying to build. They may or may not know what that solution is – they’re working towards something, they need tokens to achieve that. What I find interesting is the people who are very early into the game of AI and building solutions around that – it doesn’t take them long before they’re like, “I’m out of tokens. I need to do some stuff.” So it just comes back to the fact that there are only so many resources to solve the needs you have, and you only have so many tokens, and you’ve got to learn to live within what you can get your hands on. And that’s driving the economy, whether it’s at a data center level or at an internal level for any business. Robert Dutt: And does that in turn drive – which I believe is Dell’s thesis here – does that in turn drive the interest in building out infrastructure in-house, so that the relative incremental cost of those additional tokens goes way down because it’s bought and built versus rented? Earl Gosick: Yeah. I think there’s a step along that AI journey where people have potentially outgrown what they can do in the cloud in an economic fashion. We see the supply constraints are driven by CPU and memory usage. If you look at what the cloud hyperscalers offer, when you get into highly intensive memory and CPU, it starts to get very expensive. A lot of storage, a lot of bits and bytes moving back and forth – very expensive. All those things are prevalent in AI. You’re moving a lot of data back and forth, you’re touching a lot of things, you need a lot of memory at times. So once you get to a point where you’re doing useful things with your AI and building generative models, no matter what you do with inferencing, it starts to get really expensive. Then it becomes a time where you can move those things into a data center you control. You can get some economics from it and you can get some sovereignty out of it. A hyperscaler outside of your control can turn things off – they can’t do that when it’s your data center. So you’ve got a lot of control as well as the economics behind how you’re achieving the outcomes you’re looking to achieve. Robert Dutt: I used a word which is actually where I wanted to go next, which is sovereignty. When we’re talking about data center infrastructure and moving bits around and enterprise storage, how is data sovereignty trending among your customers, especially folks who have regulatory concerns and that sort of thing? Earl Gosick: Being a Canadian company, predominantly, we have a larger focus on sovereignty and data sovereignty and sovereign solutions than maybe you’ll see south of the border here. And we find our friends in the European Union are a little bit different – they’re ahead of us even. But it’s a really big concern, especially when you have any type of government agency that you’re dealing with, or anybody that really has intellectual property that they’re looking to protect. They’ve learned that open AI models may expose things – even if it’s just from how they’re creating their algorithms. But if the data gets out there, it’s a concern. They’re protecting their assets as well. These AIs are delivering very useful outcomes for them. They need to make sure they own those outcomes and that they can actually reach them when they need them. So part of data sovereignty is not just the sovereign part of your data, but it’s the actual access to your data. We’re learning things from not just the AI piece but from ransomware – all of a sudden your data goes away. The same thing could happen with a hyperscaler for some people. Sovereign IT solutions are going to be, I think, increasingly important moving forward. Robert Dutt: On that note, you mentioned ransomware, and data resilience and protection is another area I wanted to touch on. We heard the figure that 97% of cyber attacks are now specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because of the old line about, I forget the particular bank robber’s name, but why do you rob the banks? Because that’s where the money is. Why do you go after the backup? Because that’s where all the data is. Does that match with what you’re seeing, and if so, how does that change how you’re designing and recommending data protection for your customers? Earl Gosick: It is absolutely changing people’s realization of how they need to protect their data. This one doesn’t matter if it’s AI or your regular business practices – your data has value, whether it’s to support applications that are running your critical business or you’re building AI products that you need to protect. That has value and you need to access it. What we’re seeing more and more – and we’ve built a really strong practice around this – is building things like cyber vaults and using Dell’s technology partners like Index Engines, where they come in and they can quickly identify threats inside your environment and act on those. Because these guys loiter around for potentially months at a time. They know how to get to your backups. They know they’re not getting paid if you can recover. So they’re going to do everything they can to try and disrupt that. They have AI engines just like ours, but they have a lot of money and they don’t have the constraints about how they use their AI. I mean, these people are criminals, so they act in a method that makes them money. We’re going to be facing even more potential threats in the future, and some of those are going to be AI-driven. We’re going to have to react at AI speeds. There are changes coming, but certainly people are learning to build protection mechanisms that are air-gapped and can respond very quickly to threats. Robert Dutt: When you’re sitting in front of a client who thinks they’re covered – they’ve got a backup solution, they’ve got someone who’s responsible for it – what are the most common gaps that you find between what they think they have and what they actually have? Earl Gosick: I think for many clients, they don’t really understand how disruptive it’s going to be if they run into a ransomware attack. If you’re a client that may have ransomware insurance, for example, and they get hit – you have to tell them, “Do you understand you’re not going to be able to touch any of that infrastructure? Because your insurance company is going to want to do some analysis on that to see how the threat came in.” That infrastructure is dead and gone. You’re starting from scratch. You need a golden image – you need something you know nobody has touched. Protecting the data is only the first piece. Rebuilding from that data, and how fast you can do that – that’s the very critical component. That’s where an air-gapped cyber recovery solution like Dell Cyber Recovery is critical, because you can understand what data to recover and you can recover quickly. Having the data there – that’s the great first step and that’s where you should start. But following that, that is only the first step. Robert Dutt: Your client base is different from a lot of partners I talk to. Given where you sit and who you’re focused on – not necessarily organizations that are under the same kind of pressure or have the same kind of resources to pursue AI – how do you translate and filter what you hear at a conference like this, where a lot is focused towards big enterprise, to a message that makes sense for your customers and scales to their needs and appetites? Earl Gosick: That’s one I think isn’t really that difficult – it’s not as difficult as you would think. Because everybody has the same problems. They run into the same problems. How they build solutions to those problems might change on the scale, but you just have to understand and recognize that everybody’s having the same problems. You can articulate and communicate to them that you’re not the only one that has this. We can resolve this problem at a large scale, but we don’t have to. You came back to it earlier when we talked about the product sets, from small to large – you just pick the right one to meet the solution that these guys have. How you solve that problem of the day doesn’t necessarily change for a really, really large client versus a very, very small client. It’s really just the scale of the end solution and the architecture that’s put together to solve the need. Robert Dutt: From a Titanium partner’s seat, what did the program changes that we saw rolled out – the agentification of the program, some of the incentive shifts – tell you about where Dell sees growth opportunity, and how does it align with where you’re already going or where it might take you? Earl Gosick: I think you can see very easily that Dell is putting a large focus around AI and what it can do for them to streamline their business and be successful. We, like any other company we deal with, are doing the same thing. What they’re doing with their Dell One program, and having a single operation from lead generation down to quoting and pricing and follow-up – it matches what we’re doing on the back end and trying to automate that. Because as long as we can automate that process and reduce the friction in those programs and dealing with Dell, we can spend that time focusing on our clients’ needs. You see Dell, I think, leveraging the same technologies to do that. And if we’re smart business people today, we’re looking to the people around us who are being successful and trying to do what they’re doing in a sense. That’s true for us and our clients. Leveraging AI and seeing how that’s being successful for our partners is driving what we’re all doing – to drive automation and simplification through the processes that are just painful every day that we have to do better at, to support our clients. Robert Dutt: I’m guessing you guys are pretty far down this road already because you’re pretty much a pure-play Dell on the infrastructure side, as far as I understand. But when a company like Dell rolls out these incentives focused on expanding customer footprints – getting a Dell storage customer into Dell PCs or any of the other solution lines – just curious if that moves the needle for you in terms of the incentive, or is it already baked into what you’re doing? Earl Gosick: It’s baked into what we’re doing. In the end of the day, you are trying to build a rapport with a customer based on being a trusted expert. You’re not going to flip your technologies around based on what’s going to get somebody a little bit more money. You’ve got to do the right thing for the customer today and every time you deal with them. The advantage of dealing with Dell is they typically tie their incentives to the product that they are investing in today – that they see the future growing into. So they usually coincide. They understand the pain points of the year, and the incentives usually match the requirements of the day as well. So they’re really good at that. And then they usually have a lot of tools to support that initiative of IT transformation, whatever it is for that time and place in our industry. Robert Dutt: You mentioned earlier you’re on the CTO Connect program – pretty small room, an exclusive group. Tell me about what that relationship looks like on the inside of the room, and the value that an organization like ESTI gets from sitting in there. Earl Gosick: I guess I’ll put it this way. We deal with some technology providers – predominantly Dell. Dell puts us in a room, they tell us what they’re doing for the next year or two, and they ask us if they’re on the right track. That’s telling to me – they care and they listen. They talk about the technologies that we’re going to see upcoming, so it’s helpful for us to talk to our clients about where the industry is headed. But they do sometimes say, “We’re going to do this,” and the room says, “Oh, no, you can’t do that. Our customers love this,” or, “We like this for this reason.” And they say, “Oh, okay.” And we have a dialogue about those things. So I think that’s one of the most important things that comes out of CTO Connect – we hear about industry trends, but they also ask us our opinion on whether they’re on the right track, and then they listen to that opinion. I think that’s telling for any company you deal with – one that engages not only with their clients, but with their technology partners. It’s one of the things I really like about CTO Connect. Robert Dutt: You guys just turned 35 or so, as I understand, as an organization. That’s a long time to be running a consultancy in any market – and markets move, vendors come and go. What’s the philosophy behind building something that durable in a market that changes so fast, and especially in an area of the country that doesn’t necessarily get as much headline attention from vendors as a Toronto or a Vancouver or a Montreal? Earl Gosick: I think it comes back to what I stated earlier around building strong and capable expertise across the board – and that’s building relationships with the clients, building relationships with partners like Dell to solve the solutions of the day. Our clients respect that because they know they can come back to us again and again and we’ll do the right thing together. So that’s really the crux of it. Our business model is a little different in that we support a little bit more of an entrepreneurial aspect to our business. When young, capable people come on board and they build differentiating products, they get a seat at the table – and that’s critical for ESTI and the way we operate. But it’s really about looking at modern technology solutions and being agile to support those ever-changing technologies. It makes our industry exciting. You’re never doing the same thing every day. And as long as you can recognize the fact that you won’t be doing the same thing tomorrow and you just have to find a way to deal with it – that’s how we thrive in our company, and in working with Dell as well. Robert Dutt: All right, so let’s close with asking you to do a little bit of the impossible, given that pace of change. What’s one thing that you’re thinking about today, but maybe not totally all-in on at this point, that you think is going to be shaping the business for ESTI and your customers when we’re sitting here at DTW 2027? Earl Gosick: Well, that’s a really hard question. On the investment side, we do look at some of the technologies today – and as we talked about, AI is big for us. We need to build services that our clients don’t have. So we spend a lot of focus on where they have skills and where they don’t. We’re going to build a lot of expertise around cleaning data, building data pipelines and that kind of stuff, to focus on the needs our clients are asking us to help them solve. So that’s kind of an easy one because everybody sees that going forward. Beyond that – we’re making a strong effort in Saskatchewan and Alberta to build a sort of data center economy to support a lot of these data centers that need to be built. We already have access to power infrastructure to support those things. That’s going to drive a little bit of a change in our operating model just to support our local governments as they try and take advantage of the differentiators we have. That’ll drive some change for ESTI. And then as we expand across the rest of Canada, different geographies have different requirements as well. So lots of change, lots of new people coming on board all the time – interesting but dynamic. Robert Dutt: That will be an interesting thread to pull on. I remember going to an event – God, it must have been 15 years ago now – talking about how Canada really should be a data center powerhouse. When you consider we have power, clean power in relative abundance, we have cold, which turns out to be important – it sounds like maybe there’s an opportunity to realize some of that with what you guys are doing and what governments are starting to look at more seriously. Earl Gosick: They are. Also, right outside my hometown, they just announced a very large data center which is going to house some infrastructure from CoreWeave – and we’re going to see more of that, I think, because that process went very well. I sat in on a conference a couple of weeks ago where it was government and industry getting together to talk about why they were successful, what they bring to the table. Saskatchewan is unique because they have regulated power, energy, and land. They can guarantee, “We will give you power, we can guarantee you’ll get LNG.” Those types of things are very important for anybody trying to build a data center – it’s the critical piece. And with the government having control over all of those, they can guarantee them. That’s where I think Saskatchewan is going to have a real differentiator to support that technology, and the government is well aware of that fact now. They’re going to want to do more of these things. And then our neighbors in both Alberta and Manitoba are sort of on board as well. Certainly Alberta has done a few key data centers to support AI and those are going to continue to happen. We’re sometimes slow to move because it’s government. But once they realize the differentiators they have and what it can do for the market, I think there’ll be some traction there. Robert Dutt: Should be interesting times, and sitting where you’re sitting sounds like a big opportunity. Earl Gosick: Absolutely. I think it’s a big opportunity for all of us – supporting your community around you as well as building a thriving business. Robert Dutt: Earl, I appreciate you taking the time once again. I hope this has been a good DTW for you. Earl Gosick: It’s been a great discussion and a good DTW, so thanks a lot for having me. Robert Dutt: There you have it – Earl Gosick from ESTI Consulting Services. I’d like to thank Earl for his time last week in Las Vegas. Thirty-five years building deep technical expertise from Saskatoon, in a vendor relationship game that tends to reward proximity to the bigger centres – that’s not an accident, and it came through in the conversation. A few things I’ll take away from this one. First, the AI-is-a-storage-story framing. Every AI product ultimately requires data to be collected, governed, moved, and protected. That’s not news to Earl, but it’s a useful reframe for anyone still trying to connect their existing practice to the AI conversation. The hardware gets the headlines. The data work actually gets the contracts. Second, on cyber resilience – the ransomware insurance point Earl raised is worth sitting with. The moment a client files a claim, that infrastructure gets frozen while the insurance company figures out how the breach happened. Your ability to recover doesn’t just depend on whether the backup is intact – it depends on whether you built a clean, air-gapped golden image that nobody has touched. That’s the conversation. And if you’re not having it with your clients, maybe someone else is. And third, keep an eye on Saskatchewan. Regulated power, guaranteed energy supply, and a provincial government that has now seen a CoreWeave-scale data center get successfully built in the province and wants more of them. Earl thinks that’s just the start of something, and I’m inclined to agree. If you’re enjoying the show, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. We’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and most of the usual podcast directories. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or a review, that really does help folks in the channel find the show. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

This week, DtW answers: What if your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man wasn't so friendly, so modern or so colorful? Spider-Noir is on Prime Video so Dan and Raul can decide what they think about Nic Cage's take on Pet... er, Ben Riley actually! Probably due to contracts, there are no Parkers in this black and white private detective tale that puts the current Spider-Man a 1930s New York City that shoots a lot like modern Los Angeles, but there are plenty of powered up weirdos filling newspaper pages. Some characters are old fashioned takes on previously seen villains like The Sandman, alongside new foes like Tombstone as well as classic Spidey fodder, organized crime. The first two eps covered on this pod give you a great taste of what's to come throughout the series, so come light up your big ol' bug eyes and check it out!

The DtW crew found a June-full of tv shows to share with a select few, and guess what? You made the list! Dan and Raul return to forecasting the next month of noteworthy new and returning television series that will feel like a summer holiday. New vacation destinations include a true story about models doing culty stuff, Larry David's funny history of America stuff and a doc on the King of Pop and whatever he was up to. Over in the land of make-believe we can visit old friends Alice and Steve to see how that friendship is holding up, take in some ambiance and meet friends on Cape Fear and say hello again to Sugar while we wave so long to The Bear. Plenty to talk about, upcoming adventures and off-trail conversations abound, so pack and plan with this pod!

Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve Not every voice at Dell Technologies World last week belonged to a vendor. For a partner perspective on the week’s biggest themes, In The Channel sat down with Nigel Brown, CTO of Microserve – a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider, Dell Titanium partner, and Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Brown walked away from DTW with deskside agentic AI as his headline takeaway, particularly after hands-on time in a Dell lab showcasing NemoClaw – NVIDIA‘s enterprise-governance take on the OpenClaw open-source agent framework. “They’ve set it up closed by default – it can’t leave the box,” Brown says. “That’s a safety net that really opens the conversation.” That said, he’s clear-eyed about where most of his public sector and enterprise clients actually are. “Broad scope, it’s ahead. The hardware is going to follow it.” The tokenomics reality landed hard too. Brown shared a personal story about spending a hundred dollars testing Claude on a single flight – a relatable example he’s started using to frame the real cost implications of unmanaged AI usage, well before any on-premises or local inference conversation begins. On cyber resilience, Brown says he’s had to evolve his approach: “I got to be more of a jerk. I was being too nice.” His firm’s managed backup practice has seen firsthand the damage when clients – and even other MSPs – treat backup as a checkbox. When you show up after a ransomware event to find the backup server was on the same domain and hit just as hard, the conversation changes. And on Canadian data sovereignty, Brown goes beyond the standard data-residency talking points. FISA Section 702 and the CLOUD Act, he argues, represent far more serious legal exposure than most clients realize – even those who believe a Canadian cloud region is sufficient protection. The conversation also covers the AI PC refresh cycle colliding with supply chain pressure, the end-user adoption gap that’s undermining Copilot investments, and what Dell’s revised partner incentive structure signals about where the growth opportunities are. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. Last week, I was at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Dell’s big annual customer and partner event. Over the course of the week, I had a number of conversations that I’ll be bringing here on In the Channel. Last week, we featured three Dell executives. This week, we’re bringing you some partners. Today, we start on that partner perspective, specifically from one of Canada’s top Dell partners. Nigel Brown is CTO of Microserve, a Burnaby, BC-based solution provider that has earned Titanium status with Dell and taken home Dell’s Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada in consecutive years. Microserve serves an enterprise and public sector-heavy client base, which means Nigel’s job is regularly about taking what gets announced on a stage in Las Vegas and translating it into something that makes sense for organizations that don’t necessarily move at conference speed. I caught up with Nigel on site at DTW last week. We covered a lot of ground – deskside agentic AI and what it’s actually going to take to make that real for customers, the very real cost of token economics, why he’s had to be, as he put it, more of a jerk about cyber resilience, and why the Canadian data sovereignty conversation is more urgent than most people realize. Let’s get right to it. My chat with Nigel Brown. Nigel, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Nigel Brown: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: So you guys are here, obviously, as a Titanium-level Dell partner, consecutive years as the Client Solutions Partner of the Year in Canada. What’s your overall read on this week? What made your ears stand up? What caught your attention? What are you taking back to both your team and to your customers when you go back to Burnaby? Nigel Brown: That’s a really good question. It’s also a big one. There’s been a lot of announcements, a lot of dialogue over the last couple of days. I’m trying to process that a little bit, assuming you were going to ask me that. I think the biggest takeaway I had – everybody’s heard of OpenClaw, everybody’s heard all the IT people are terrified of it, so it’s more, how do we get rid of it in our environments? Seeing this whole push around deskside agentic AI, especially given our market where we play a lot with clients – I actually had the opportunity, I did the lab today because I couldn’t resist seeing what it’s like. The governance and security wrapper on it totally makes sense and it’s opened my eyes. I think that’s probably the biggest. Beyond that, I would say the Dell hardware being able to run frontier models, seeing Gemini running local for sovereignty conversations – I think that’s a really good thing to see as well. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, obviously you touched on one of the big stories this week, which is deskside AI – the idea of physical infrastructure that’s at or near the customer’s desk, either in the data center or right there in the PC, that’s processing the models locally. It sounds like something that you’re interested in. I’m curious where it lands for your customers. Is it something that’s a conversation point, or is it ahead of where they are in the AI discussion at this point? Nigel Brown: I would say broad scope – I don’t want to lump all my customers into one bucket – but broad scope, it’s ahead. I don’t think you’re seeing a lot of organizations ready for it. We also deal heavily with public sector enterprise accounts, for example. We’re doing more and more in the commercial market where you’re going to see a little bit more playing and adoption within tech teams. But in ours, yeah, I’d say we’re definitely ahead right now. So it gives you a chance to get in there and pitch the idea as something new and plant those seeds. Once I get it past my IT and security folks, then that’s where it’s all going to start. If I can’t get it through mine in a good conversation, then I’m never going to be able to with our clients. Robert Dutt: But it sounds like there’s at least that – from your comments on OpenClaw, it sounds like there’s that door, that area of interest. Nigel Brown: Seeing it today under the NemoClaw and Viya umbrella – yeah, I think there’s definitely something there. They’ve set it up closed by default. It can’t leave the box. That’s what I saw in the lab today. So until you set up essentially like a firewall rule to allow it to do something, it’s a safety net that I think really opens the conversation and allows the idea of end users actually playing. Those are really early adopters anyway. And how could I integrate agentic AI into organizations? Robert Dutt: Man, how often does it come back down to governance with AI? Nigel Brown: Oh, absolutely. That’s pretty much the name of the game everywhere. And so we’re doing it well, and many are still scrambling. Robert Dutt: You touch on you guys having a lot of public sector, healthcare, education, all those kinds of verticals – not always the fastest to move on new tech. Along the lines of the previous questions, but sort of taken out a notch – how much of what the AI announcements we’ve heard this week translate directly to where your customers are at, versus how much needs to be, shall we say, adapted for the reality of your accounts? Nigel Brown: Well, you go to any of these events and it’s, “We’re behind if we’re not doing agentic AI everywhere.” Reality is, it’s just not true. I think it’s very forward-thinking – or very optimistic – to think we’re all moving that fast. It’s headed in that direction quicker and quicker. Executive tables are always the ones sitting there going, “We want it, we need it in our organizations, we’re going to get left behind.” So it’s very top of mind. But some organizations have very niche deployments – they’re figuring out the right solutions. Healthcare – I’ve seen it, they’ve done some phenomenal things in radiology and other areas. So it’s picking up. We’re dealing with one client right now that’s looking at online pharmacy and they’re looking at a huge Dell compute cluster to run AI on. So you see it, but it’s not commonplace. It’s not every organization. Certainly as you get into municipalities and things like that, it’s Copilot at best – that’s really where they’re trying to play – and their user base just isn’t adopting, not even close. Robert Dutt: So it sounds like there are at least a couple of steps that need to happen to get to the point of, A, using what’s already in place and, B, potentially looking at building out something internally – and the stuff that’s been talked about here a lot, the idea of running those AI workloads internally on the data center side. Nigel Brown: Yeah. I think it’s going to get there for sure. Right now the conversation has to be outcomes – not “I want AI.” And right now it’s so heavily, “Well, I know I need it, I don’t know what for yet.” I’ve seen it even in some peer groups – the dialogue is, “Well, we’re going to do AI, we’re going to build agents.” So, what for? And then there’s a long pause. Driving outcomes conversations is where it’s going to start, in my opinion. The hardware is going to follow it. And that really ties into, well, where are you going to run it? Do you understand token economics – or tokenomics, whatever the buzzword is right now – and that’s a really big deal. For me, getting that message out really loud and clear around the cost of tokens – I’ve done it, I’ve gotten burned. I spent a hundred bucks on a plane because I wanted to see Claude do something cool. And you’re going, wow, if I can do that in 10 minutes, think of what larger organizations will spend if they don’t find a smarter way to run it. Robert Dutt: That’s a good point – it’s not something you necessarily understand, but it’s something you can sure feel if you start to have adventures with the stuff. Nigel Brown: Well, exactly. And all it’s going to take – like I said, a lot of organizations started with Copilot under the Microsoft umbrella, because it was like an easy button. It was there for them, it was already set up. I am worried about some of those days changing, where that subscription turns into usage-based models. And we’ll see where that goes. You’re seeing it with Anthropic, you’re seeing it with Perplexity. I bounce off my limits all the time. Most of what I’m doing I can wait till tomorrow – but it’s easy to get out of control. Robert Dutt: And user computing is pretty core to what you guys do. There are a few things going on there – Windows 11 end-of-life support coming in October, the AI PC push coming from every direction at the same time. I’m curious if those two things are coming together in customer conversations as one refresh decision, or are they still separate tracks – the need to modernize for the Windows upgrade versus the need to modernize to get the most out of AI workloads? Nigel Brown: I think the end-of-support conversation and hardware refresh, honestly, is the biggest driver of the conversation that I’ve seen. And then that leads into, well, do I need an AI PC, and why, and what’s going to run on it? Everybody’s exploring and curious about it. There’s more skepticism about whether you need it now. Robert Dutt: How is that hitting along with the current fun situation with hardware constraints and prices spiking? And we’re hearing pretty directly from Jeff Clarke that, you know, telling customers, let us know what you want as early in the process as you can. I think the natural addendum to that is, make decisions knowing you might have this machine for a little bit longer than you previously expected. Nigel Brown: Totally right. So it’s very much my dialogue with our clients – it’s future-proofing. You better do it now. You don’t want to be stuck with a machine that can’t run an NPU for the next five years. So even if right now there’s skepticism about how much is going to run on it today, I think it is an important conversation to have and make sure that we’re ready for the moments where we’re really seeing workloads and inferencing running on device. You have to have that conversation now and pre-plan for it. But yeah, it’s been – especially in public sector – a hard conversation to have right now. Supply chain – we’re like a broken record. It still surprises me how many clients we talk to that haven’t seen this coming, that don’t know it’s real, or you get the ones going, “Well, I think it’s going to clear up in September, I’ll just wait till then.” Oh man. Brace for it. We’ve got to be ready. It just feels like a conversation on repeat these days – and it’s more than worth it, making sure we’re doing model selection with the future in mind. Robert Dutt: I find it’s a fun time to be a partner in that particular space. Nigel Brown: Well, you know, quote volume has quadrupled, because that same customer deal might take four different passes before they’ve made it through, especially in government. Pricing validity is a real challenge. It’s a moving target – no decision ever gets made fast. Robert Dutt: I want to talk a little about cyber resilience – another big topic here at the event. You guys run a managed backup practice, I understand, and you’re doing a lot of what vendors are asking MSPs to evolve towards. When you get into a customer environment today, what’s the most common gap between what they think their backup situation looks like and the reality of the situation? Nigel Brown: That’s an interesting question. It’s a real mixed bag. I always start with, “How confident are you in your ability to recover?” And most leaders – business leaders, outside of IT – there’s like a long pause. “Well, I don’t know.” Okay. Have you ever tested your recovery capability? No. Well, that’s where we’re going to start. And in other dialogues, they think they’ve got the backups running, but nobody’s been looking at them – they’re coming from doing it themselves, or maybe a mom-and-pop IT person taking care of it. They’re not watching, they’re not looking at tools, they’re not getting alert notifications on whether it’s keeping up and whether they’re protected. So that’s very foundational. Warning new clients – it’s just, let’s take them on that journey, do an assessment of the whole environment, make sure we’re protected. And a lot of conversations are, “Do you know that you’re not protected? Like, if you got ransomware tomorrow, there’s nothing I could do to help you, even though I’m your MSP.” That’s a scary reality. I’ve seen that have to go back to boards and make some tough decisions, find budget and solve it. They usually do – they react fast – but you’ve got to make the risk abundantly clear. Robert Dutt: That makes sense. In talking to Rob Emsley, who’s on the marketing team for the cyber resilience side at Dell, he was saying that 97% of cyber attacks now are specifically targeting backup infrastructure – because it turns out that’s where all the stuff is. Does that match what you’re seeing, and has that shift changed what you’re recommending to customers about what being protected really means for them? Nigel Brown: I wouldn’t say it’s really changed our messaging. I’d like to think we were maybe ahead of the curve in talking about storage and immutability – some of these key elements of, well, you just need it. That’s how we run our hosted service for clients that use it. And if we’re building out an architecture for another client, it’s just fundamental these days. You can’t even consider a solution that doesn’t include immutability protection, being able to spot bad things happening. But I’ve seen it – we’ve come into a disaster client where, “Hey, we got ransomware, can you help us recover?” And you go to the backup server to find out it was ransomwared too. “Do you have any tapes floating around?” It’s a tough chat to have. You see that less these days, but you definitely see the attempts – people trying to do it. And even other MSPs – I hate to say it – they’re not mature enough in how they’re protecting. They took the backup server, joined it to the domain – it’s just another device on the network. And sure enough, that’s exactly what gets hit because they didn’t plan it out. So it’s all planning and doing it right in the first place. Robert Dutt: It’s a checkbox as opposed to something that’s more firmly thought through. Given that, how do you approach it with customers? Do you come at it as, “This is something you should do, these are the reasons why, this is the potential downside” – or is it a thou-shalt kind of conversation? Nigel Brown: You know, a pile of years ago, after seeing an incident hit a new customer, I kind of resolved – I’ve got to be more of a jerk. I hate to say it. I got to be a lot tougher in my stance. I was being too nice. So yeah, in all things on this, my position is to generally take a pretty firm line. It’s all about risk, though. And to business leaders especially, that’s a term they understand. I’m not telling them, “Okay, you need this type of backup solution and it’s going to do these things.” It’s all about, how do we address the risk that you have right now? Leave it to us to figure out the details as we design the solution. Rarely do we get into the weeds of it unless it’s a larger client where we’re dealing with a large IT team that has opinions. But usually in those larger environments, there are groups that are already aligned – they know what they should be doing, maybe just haven’t done it themselves yet. The new architecture is absolutely going to include all those steps. So it’s an easier conversation to have. In some ways, it’s giving them permission if you’re coming in as a new supplier – it’s the stuff they’ve wanted to do, but haven’t really had the air cover to make the case. Robert Dutt: Yeah, you come in as that outside opinion to say, this is how it needs to be. Nigel Brown: And our job is often more of just a translator for those IT teams to their leadership – to help support the business case. Robert Dutt: I want to talk about the Modern Partner Platform and some of the partner program changes that have rolled out this week. One of the big things is obviously the revised incentive structure, with cyber resilience particularly called out as a premium rebate area. From your seat as a Titanium partner, what does the new structure tell you about where Dell sees the biggest growth opportunities for partners? Nigel Brown: Well, I think it does exactly that – it says where the growth opportunities are. And largely there was no surprise. In my opinion, when you look at it, it aligns to how we want to lead deals, it aligns with the conversations we’re already going to have. Now it’s just helping incentivize that dialogue. Nothing surprising there – I just see better alignment. Robert Dutt: Let’s play a little bit of “anything can happen here.” Vendors like Dell are starting to build agentic AI into their programs, their portals, their tools – all the stuff you guys work with every day. Where do you see the most genuine value for an organization like your own in vendors – agentifying, for want of a better word – their partner programs and tools? And the flip side: are there any potholes you’re watching out for as that rolls out? Nigel Brown: You know, the more the merrier – more tools you can bring in is great. We’re always excited to see what they come up with. But to me, the bottom line is back to outcomes. It’s about reducing friction in the sales process. What do we want our sellers to do? We want them out selling. Living in a partner portal trying to find what they need, deal registration, all of those things that can be painful – sometimes it’s just admin work taking you away from conversations with clients. Reduce friction – that’s the name of the game. Do I want to see more AI-generated marketing content? No. We can do that ourselves – one prompt, feed something in, done. To me, the more you can expose what matters to us and reduce friction, the better. It keeps us doing what we should be doing and not sitting there doing admin work. Robert Dutt: It sounds like based on that comment, what Dell and a lot of its peers are doing is already on track – because I’m sure they’re asking these exact same questions of partners around the world right now. Nigel Brown: Oh, they’ve got way smarter people than me working in these massive organizations. They know the outcomes we want to achieve. And I’m excited that we’re at a point in time where we can see some of this come to fruition. Ten years ago, this was never a reality. Robert Dutt: What’s the biggest misconception you think your customers have about what it means to be AI ready right now? Nigel Brown: I think it depends on who the conversation is centered around. If it’s C-suite leadership, it’s back to, “We want AI, I don’t know what for, I don’t know what it is, but I know I need it.” There are tough conversations to be had. AI readiness is really, is your data ready? We heard that on stage this morning. Most organizations we walk into – it turns out they’ve got no data governance. So, let’s define some of this, let’s build some process, look at the right tools. In the Microsoft lens, we do a lot around Microsoft 365 and modern workplace. Well, then it’s a Purview conversation. And they get confused – “Why are you talking about DLP and Purview? I thought we were talking about AI readiness.” That’s exactly what it’s all about. The other big one I think they’re not taking seriously enough is the end-user adoption side. I’ve seen organizations – you go into their portals and have a look with them – their adoption of Copilot, where they’ve spent a whole pile of money, is abysmal. So then the dialogue is, “What you actually need to do is get your users excited. Train them, show them the cool things.” I think we’ve been really successful doing that inside our own organization, and now that’s something we deliver to our clients as well – we need to get your teams ready and thinking differently. At a C-suite level, they’re usually surprised at the path it takes, or in some cases how long it might take to get there. “Your data is in such rough shape – you’re two years away. You need to build a foundation before you can really consume it.” Now, some of the announcements this morning – okay, that starts changing the equation. We could get there faster if we have the right infrastructure in place. Robert Dutt: For a variety of reasons, the Canadian data sovereignty question feels like it’s getting louder. And I have to imagine, especially in your public sector footprint, how are you helping customers think through AI infrastructure decisions when data residency and compliance are an increasing part of the equation? Nigel Brown: It’s a non-negotiable for most of our enterprise and public sector clients. It’s going to run on-prem. They cannot afford to run on cloud. Yes, they want the latest models, the frontier models, the cool bells and whistles as we all do. But really – I presented at a conference last year on exactly this topic, why it’s important to bring it back on-prem. Never mind the tokenomics conversation – now there’s just more ammunition. I chatted with one IT leader, a commercial client, not public sector, who was all proud of how he’d migrated everything to cloud. We were in a session where they talked through the tokenomics challenge and another reason why sovereignty matters. And you watch the look on his face go, “Wow, I’m going to have to start building a data center again. I thought I got out of that.” And he was sitting there with his CEO in the room for that conversation. Kind of a wake-up call. So my dialogue is, let’s talk through what does the Patriot Act mean? What does FISA Section 702 mean? It’s a little bit scary, and people are shocked – “I thought running in Google Cloud or AWS, running it in a Canadian location was good enough.” No. That provider has access to your data. Have you heard of the CLOUD Act? That’s nothing compared to FISA 702 – they don’t even need to ask. They can just go and get it. And that’s pretty scary. So yeah, a lot of our job now is just sharing and communicating the right things to our clients and making sure they’re aware. Robert Dutt: Aside from your efforts to bring that education – do you find that the level of general awareness is on the rise? Are we getting to more of a discussion about how to solve for this, rather than still defining the scope of the problem? Nigel Brown: I would love to say it’s more mature. The reality is no – it’s still early-stage conversations. You get anomalies. We were with some clients who are way ahead and have just deployed Azure Local on Dell infrastructure. They’re doing amazing things, moving fast. So now it’s more, “How can I partner with you to go share this message? Why you went there, why you built it this way, what are you doing about it?” But no, it’s going to be a continued push – much like the supply chain story here – these dialogues just repeat as you walk into client after client. Robert Dutt: Last one for me – along the same lines as the first question, but a slightly different lens. What’s one thing from this week that you think will genuinely change what Microserve brings to customers in the next 12 months? Nigel Brown: I come back to where we started – the whole side of agentic AI. That was not on my radar, not in a serious way. “Let’s play around with this, let’s lab it out, see where it’s getting explored.” When you see a name like Dell behind what we’re doing, that got me more excited than I would have thought. I want to pilot inside our org. And if we can start building something that works here, then absolutely – taking that to clients and saying, “Okay, look at the GB10s, look at the GB300s, let’s move up the ladder.” There’s a tangible path that gives them more value than trying to build massive solutions right out of the gate. There are quick wins there, and that’s what excites me – showing a customer how there could be a quick win if we did this right. And it ties into the last thread we were pulling on – “Okay, you’re telling me I shouldn’t have all this stuff running on public cloud, so where’s it going to run?” And you’re not talking megawatts and massive data centers here. All I want to do is automate tasks and do some of this lower-level stuff. I think that’s going to be an interesting entry point for a lot of clients – making it more accessible. Everybody’s used ChatGPT, Claude, whatever their tool of choice is, so they’re into prompting. Nobody’s really understanding Copilot or understanding agentic – it’s a big buzzword. That’s our job. We can show them a slice of the possible, mock up these use cases, and those are quick wins. Then it is something deployable at scale – you just move it from the little box to a bigger box. The more people take advantage of it and keep moving up the scale, you don’t need to go spend millions upfront to play around with something like that. It’s going to open more doors. Robert Dutt: No shortage of interesting opportunities. Good luck getting out there and chasing those, and thanks again for making the time this week. Nigel Brown: You bet. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Tanoury, senior director of distribution at Dell Technologies Distribution doesn’t get a lot of editorial love. It’s easy to treat it as the background infrastructure of the channel – the warehousing, the credit lines, the logistics layer that keeps product moving. But as anyone who’s been paying attention knows, that picture is well out of date. At Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, In the Channel sat down with Anthony Tanoury, Dell’s senior director of distribution, to talk about what distribution actually looks like in 2026 – and the conversation ranged from supply chain strategy to AI-assisted deal registration to the shifting economics of the partner ecosystem. The headline number: Dell moved approximately ten thousand partners to a distribution-led buying model last year. Partners who previously purchased direct from Dell now route exclusively through distribution. The more interesting data point is what happened next – those partners are growing faster than the ones who remained on a direct model. Tanoury attributes it to the enablement depth that distributors can offer at a scale that Dell simply can’t replicate directly. On the Modern Partner Platform rollout – one of the bigger announcements at DTW this week – the conversation came down to speed. Deal registration that today takes two to three days is being redesigned, with AI-assisted automation in the pipeline to bring that down to two to three hours. The plumbing involves integrating Dell’s systems tightly with distributor platforms, streamlining the multi-system, multi-email-thread process that currently slows everything down. And when asked for the single most underutilized resource available to partners through distribution, Tanoury didn’t hesitate: the AI accelerator programs that distributors have built to help partners get started in the AI practice space. With every partner asking “where do I begin,” the answer may already be sitting in the distributor’s enablement catalogue. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor at ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re continuing our coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, and I wanted to close the series of Dell execs with a conversation that I think will resonate with pretty much anyone who moves Dell product – which, let’s be honest, is a lot of you. Distribution is one of the topics that often gets taken for granted. It’s the plumbing, it’s the logistics, it’s the credit line. Except that’s not really what distribution is anymore, and Anthony Tanoury has about as good a vantage point as anyone to explain why. He spent 30 years in the industry on both the vendor and distributor side of the table, and he’s now Dell’s senior director of distribution, which means he’s the person responsible for making the relationship between Dell and its distributor partners actually work at scale. This week at DTW, Dell announced some significant changes to how it’s thinking about its partner ecosystem, and distribution’s right at the center of that. We talked about the evolution of distribution from warehouse and financing shop to AI enablement engine, what it actually means for partners that Dell moved 10,000 of them to distribution-led buying last year, and what the promise of deal registration in hours rather than days actually requires to make real. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Anthony Tanoury. Anthony, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. Robert Dutt: To kick things off – the definition of distribution, and the definition from distributors themselves of what they do, has changed so dramatically over the last few years, as you’ve been party to on both sides of the fence, vendor and distributor, with your background. Sitting where you are now as senior director of distribution, how do you define the core value proposition for your distribution partners today compared to the way it may have looked a few years ago if you were in the seat, or in a previous seat managing distribution? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, I think 30 years in distribution – dating myself here. The idea of a distributor was warehousing, finance, so on. Really, the way that that’s evolved – and still evolving, because not everyone fully understands distribution and the value of distribution – but it’s really become the engine for all of us OEMs to really dive deep into the mid-market, and as lead generation for all of us. So SMB, mid-market, and then really leveraging their enablement platforms for our partners. So as an example, this week here at Dell Technologies World, we’ve launched our full AI portfolio. And really at the end of the day, it’s a platform to build off of. And our distributors, through our partners, are really enabling those partners – especially in the mid-market. The enterprise partners have hired data scientists and so on. And those mid-market and SMB partners, they need our help. And we really rely on our distributors, who have AI accelerator programs and can really take a partner through the journey of how to look at AI, how to start, and then how to implement and really get started in this space. We’ve met with multiple partners at this show and we’ve had our partner advisory boards. And that’s the number one takeaway when we’re talking to our partners: “How do I get started?” And I think Jeff Clarke and Michael Dell talked about that on stage – it’s really, we’ve got the platform to build off of, and then really rely on our distributors to go enable all of our partners out there to have those conversations, and then to build the proof, the POCs for us with their customers and take it to the next step. Robert Dutt: Let’s talk about this moment in time and managing distribution right now. Whenever I think of running a hardware vendor, running distribution, or being on the purchasing side of the solution provider right now – boy, that’s an interesting challenge – with the supply chain issue, with the pricing issue, with all of that. I guess it boils down to, from your perspective: how are you leaning on distribution differently to help you guys and your partners ultimately, especially the smaller ones, handle this issue of availability, of supply chain, of capacity, as we’ve seen the component price challenges across the industry? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s not unique to Dell. We’re all challenged with the supply chain challenges, and it’s really about having a consistent message to our partner community, to our customers, on how – or why – to partner with Dell in these times. And our distributors have really leaned in with us right now and are getting that message out to our partners that “Dell’s got a plan. Here’s the plan.” And this is how we want you to message that and relay that to your partner community. So as an example, I did a keynote speech at one of our large partner events recently, and my talk track was based on how to navigate those supply challenges with us. I spent a lot of time on that, and had multiple partners come up afterwards, catching me outside. And the comment was, “That’s what we need to hear. That’s our challenge today, and you’re tackling that head on.” So to get back to your question from a distribution perspective – they enabled me to take that message to them, and then they’re expanding on that to their 20,000 partners in their ecosystem. Robert Dutt: As you bring up an interesting thread there – I don’t have time obviously to go through the whole keynote, but the elevator pitch, boiled-down version of it – what’s the advice to partners on tackling it from where you sit and from where Dell sits? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, really leaning in with us and going deeper with your customers. And so that’s where you’re going to work with Dell and get priority allocation – looking long-term versus short-term, “I just need this product in the next week to get through this phase.” Now, let’s look at a long-term solution together and let’s plan two years out. Let’s plan longer in some cases, and then we’ll take it from there. Robert Dutt: And that’s something we heard also from Jeff Clarke in Q&A – that idea of build out those long-term plans, put your hand up as early as you can. Because it sounds like if you’ve got your hand up early, you’ve obviously got the best chance of getting that list fulfilled. Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, whether it’s a customer or a partner – I mean, that’s a true partnership and we’ll lean in when customers want to lean in with Dell. Robert Dutt: I wanted to touch on the changes that are coming to the partner program, specifically as it involves your interactions with distribution. The Dell portal is getting redone and the Dell program is getting redone with the modern partner platform rolling out this year. You guys are baking agentic AI into your partner platform. Meanwhile, your distributors are doing the same thing with their partner platforms. I’m curious – obviously very early in the game – but how are you and your distribution partners thinking long-term about how those various platforms interact with each other, in terms of delineating who covers what base, when it comes to serving the partner and what you may be able to do down the road as a result of having those platforms? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so the key is cutting down on SLAs. How do we take getting pricing out to a partner, out to a customer, from two to three days down to a matter of hours, right? And we’ve worked closely with all of our distributors over the last year or two, because our partners rely on our distributors’ platforms. And how does that integrate with ours? But the key is speed. How do we do things faster? And that is, as you stated, embedding AI into that. And so again, can’t get too far ahead, because we’re still going down this path and things sometimes get pushed out. But we’ve been working on this for a long time with them. We’ve had a lot of meetings with them here. We’ve gone deep into their platforms. They’re all rolling out new platforms as well. So making sure we’re doing it all at the same time, and together, has been key. Robert Dutt: One area I did want to double-click on there. One of the big promises of the new platform is deal-reg approval in minutes, AI-generated demand signals, those kinds of things. As Dell is accelerating its own systems, how does distribution plug into that? How does the distributor help manage and act on those AI-driven demand signals and facilitate a faster quote-to-deal-reg? Anthony Tanoury: Without getting too deep into deal-reg, there are a lot of nuances there. But yes, today where you’ve got multiple partners of record and you’ve got multiple partner IDs – simplifying that down to one or two partner IDs versus 20 today that we have – and then with deal registration, having partner of record is key in that mix, and we do have that today. But the distributors are really where it starts. So a partner comes to the distributor, says, “Hey, I need pricing on this and I want deal registration.” Today it might take the full SLA – the two to three days we just talked about – to get deal registration approved, with multiple systems flowing back and forth. In the future – and when I say future, we’re close, we’ll get there – is having that one stream go, starting from the distributor, through AI, plays into that, where it’ll do the work of looking in and making sure: here’s the partner of record. Is there a partner on record? Does the end user qualify? And without multiple people, multiple email streams going back and forth, it locks it in. And so now you’ve got an answer back in two to three hours versus two to three days. Robert Dutt: A lot of MSPs prefer to consume technology as a service, because it’s kind of in what they do – the name’s kind of on the tin – and bundle that with vendors like Microsoft or security or what have you. How are you working with distributors to make APEX and infrastructure solutions seamlessly consumable within distribution, and particularly on their marketplace? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so that’s a good question. So there’s APEX, right? We have Dell APEX, and our competitors have their own, but we have Dell APEX. But our distributors also have their own versions of APEX, or as-a-service models. And at the end of the day, we leverage theirs just as well as we do our own. And it depends on the customer, depends on the contract situation, but there are multiple vehicles to get an as-a-service deal done today that didn’t exist a year ago, didn’t exist two years ago, right? And then there’s – moving to another topic, and really the same topic – device as a service, right? And that was something we’ve been talking about for a few years now and hasn’t really taken off, but that’s all part of this now. Because the device at the edge is co-mingled now – especially in the new AI world – with your server infrastructure. So it could all become part of a recurring revenue stream for MSPs. Robert Dutt: And I think it makes potentially hardware more compelling to the MSP. When you’ve gotten that tie-in – I know it’s early days and it’s a way off from being fully operationalized – but what you’re talking about, and what Jeff Clarke was talking about today about basically acting as the arbiter, sort of an open orchestration layer, saying “all right, this particular bit is best handled in the infrastructure and the data center, this particular bit is best handled right here on the machine sitting by the desk side.” Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: We’ve heard a lot this week about the focused accounts incentive, rewarding partners for selling across lines of business. And it’s kind of a cliche almost, in that vendors such as yourselves who have multiple lines of business are always looking for great ways to get partners to sell across those businesses. And certainly incentives are a classic way of doing that. How are you using distribution to train, enable, and facilitate partners making that leap across the portfolio – especially as this seems to be something that Denise Millard and the team are putting a lot of the wood behind? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, so you mentioned the partner program – and that’s really what we leverage with the push coming from distribution. You typically focus where you can earn the most dollars. And so we’re putting the dollars on driving all lines of business for us. So today you may have a lot of infrastructure-focused partners – like MSPs, they don’t want to sell the client the edge device. But again, with AI driving from both ends now, it’s become an imperative that they don’t ignore the edge devices anymore. So really leveraging distribution both ways. We’ve got CSG partners that don’t sell storage and infrastructure, and then we’ve got partners that are trying to move in that direction. And then we’ve got other partners saying, “Hey, I’ve got to get on board too,” that are in the infrastructure space and have got to move in the other direction. And that’s where we leverage distribution – they have multiple enablement engines, all of our distributors, to enable those partners to do that. So for us – and again, to the partner program – we’ve announced some changes here at this event, with our partner advisory board meeting coming up. Partner programs, you want to keep them simple, predictable for partners, with tweaks along the way. And AI is one of those tweaks where we’ve got to pull the levers in different directions to get partners and distributors moving in that motion. So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be at Dell with this opportunity in front of us. Robert Dutt: That’s a big tweak – or more accurately, a big series, whole family, whole universe of tweaks to be made. But you don’t want to pull a whole program apart. You’ve got partners that have invested and distributors that have invested in that program. So you’ve got to make sure you do those incremental tweaks when you need them, but not blow up the whole program. Anthony Tanoury: Absolutely. Robert Dutt: You mentioned off the top the classic framing of distribution as the warehouse and the bank kind of structure. Let’s touch on the bank side of things a little bit there. In light of everything that’s going on today, in light of the infrastructure refresh opportunity that’s out there, the constraints in the marketplace – financial engineering is probably more critical than ever. Dell Financial Services is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but how do you view the role of the distributor when it comes to PO financing, terms, bridging the financing gap for complex projects, and helping partners manage this whole multiple-balls-in-the-air situation? Anthony Tanoury: You can’t look at a partner just through the lens of what they do with Dell. The business they have with Dell – partners procure from many places. We love them to only sell Dell for us, but they have other options, other solutions, other areas of the business that we’re not focused on. They procure through distribution. Distributors have huge businesses with a lot of these partners. They have financial terms through the distributors that maybe we can’t offer them through Dell – and leveraging our partner programs to deliver extended terms in this environment. With the supply shortages and lead times getting pushed out, really leveraging distribution with terms that we can’t give them today. There are multiple levels, and they have much higher credit lines with the distributors than maybe we have with them. And then going back to the as-a-service model – really leveraging distributors who have all those options in place for them today, that maybe they don’t have with us. Robert Dutt: When you’re looking at distribution, what’s the one metric you look at first to judge whether a distributor is meeting the bar – is delivering net new value to Dell? Anthony Tanoury: New partner recruitment, right? Multiple lines of business – not just focused in one area of our business, but selling across all lines of business. Then we rely on distribution. We just moved 10,000 partners last year over to distribution-led. Where those partners could procure direct from Dell in the past, now they can’t, and they buy strictly through distribution. Those are our authorized partner community – and potentially in the future, expanding that to other levels of our business and offloading them to distribution. Dell is a more channel- and distribution-friendly company than we get credit for. I think that doesn’t always get seen, and we’re moving that way. Robert Dutt: How did that process go, and any learnings from moving those 10,000 partners that may inform what you do in moving the next group, if there is a next group to be moved? Anthony Tanoury: Exactly, a lot. A lot of that is in data transfer and making sure that the distributors have the right data to target those partners and give those partners the service they need. The distributors all had to ramp up their infrastructure to support those partners – credit line facilities with those partners – because they didn’t do business with those partners before. Onboarding some of those partners as net new to distribution, who had never bought from distribution before. And then again, really letting those partners know the value of distribution. Since we’ve moved those partners over, those partners that have embraced distribution are growing faster than the partners that haven’t. It’s sometimes a lot easier to get that additional support, that additional attention from a disti, than it is to try to navigate that directly. In some cases, they can support them better than we can, and it’s proven out in the last year. Robert Dutt: What’s the single most underutilized resource that you guys have through distribution, in terms of what partners are using? Anthony Tanoury: I would say the AI accelerator programs I spoke about earlier. That’s key. Going back to the enablement piece – I just don’t think a lot of partners understand the value. They come to these events, they make the statements, “Hey, we need help here. We need to leverage distribution for that help.” Especially when you come to a Dell Technologies World, or you go to one of our competitors’ or peers’ events. Our distributors have that enablement piece for you to get started, that you need to leverage, because it’s not just a point-solution type of conversation, it’s broad. Really leveraging them to help. Robert Dutt: Along the same lines, but a little bit different – obviously we’ve touched on the idea of cross-selling, and the idea that, surprise surprise, Dell would like partners to sell more of the portfolio, better together, all that kind of stuff. For an MSP or VAR whose primary look at Dell to date has been selling end devices – laptops, desktops, et cetera – sourced through distribution, what do you see as the most likely next logical step to expand that relationship? To get thinking across lines? What are some of the common threads for the best ways to approach that? Anthony Tanoury: Yeah, that’s a tough question. Common ways to approach how to sell across lines of business – take it back to the customer level. Your customer is buying these products, and they may be buying them from somebody else or they may be buying them online, depending on the size of the organization, so on. Again, the service model – going back to it, it’s another service revenue stream that they can leverage. But I think when you look at the distributors, they have a lot of talk tracks with the partners on how to do that, and frankly do it better than we do. So that’s why we really leverage them. When we say, “Hey, we want to sell more of our client and peripheral devices,” we start with distribution. We start with the partner community, and it’s paid off. I think it’s just – really, don’t leave revenue on the table. We’ve been saying it for years and I think it’s starting to resonate, and leveraging distribution to push that message forward. And I think partners are starting to catch on. Robert Dutt: All right, great insights. Anthony, I thank you for taking the time. I’m sure it’s been a busy week for you here. Thanks for joining us. Anthony Tanoury: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Anthony Tanoury from Dell Technologies. I’d like to thank Anthony for carving out some time in what I’m sure was a very busy week on the show floor here at DTW. Few things from the conversation that I thought were worth pulling out. First, the 10,000 partners that Dell moved to distribution-led buying last year – that’s not a small number, and the fact that those partners are outgrowing the ones who haven’t yet made that transition should be a data point for anyone still on the fence about how they structure their Dell relationship. Second, when Anthony named net new partner recruitment as his primary metric for judging distributor performance – not revenue, not attach rate, net new – that tells you something about where Dell thinks its distribution channel still has room to grow. And third, if you haven’t looked at the AI accelerator programs your distributor is running, that came up twice as the single most underutilized resource available to partners right now. Probably worth a phone call. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated as well. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Today’s headline news for Canadian IT solution providers: Dell PowerStore Elite and the reimagined data center: Yesterday at Dell Technologies World, Dell Technologiesintroduced Dell PowerStore Elite, a new enterprise storage platform delivering up to 3x performance over the prior generation and an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee. The platform packs 5.8 petabytes into a single 3U chassis using standards-based E3 NVMe flash, and introduces Dell Cyber Detect, which identifies ransomware with 99.99% accuracy and pinpoints the last known clean copy for recovery. PowerStore Elite ships in July 2026; Cyber Detect for PowerStore follows in Q3. The broader Day 2 announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix stacks, Dell PowerProtect One for simplified cyber resilience, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform and Dell Automation Studio. Jeff Clarke’s tokenomics keynote: In Tuesday’s Day 2 keynote at DTW, Dell COO Jeff Clarke presented a set of ten fundamental shifts from the past year whose through-line is what he called tokenomics. The math: model prices fell 80% per token; token consumption is up 10x; GenAI software spend tripled. Net effect – AI is getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke illustrated the stakes with a concrete example: one developer running a single agentic use case on the public cloud can burn approximately $3,400 per day in token costs; the same workload runs at zero incremental cost on on-premises infrastructure. Clarke confirmed Dell moved its own operations to on-prem after internal token costs became untenable, and described work underway on what he called “token routing” – an orchestration layer that would automatically direct tasks to either a deskside AI workstation or data center hardware based on workload. He closed with three imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. Intezer launches Amplify Partner Program: Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming channel veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances. The program formalizes Intezer’s channel investment as demand for AI-driven security operations grows and the talent gap in security operations continues to widen. According to Intezer, the program is designed to help MSSPs and solution providers step in where internal security teams lack the capacity to operationalize AI-powered alert triage and threat investigation, translating the company’s platform capabilities into managed and co-managed service offerings. Check Point agentic network security orchestration: Check Point announced an agentic network security orchestration platform on Monday designed to replace decades of rule-based complexity, reducing network policy management from months of manual effort to minutes of verified, automated action. The announcement is part of a broader Check Point push into agentic security capabilities across its Infinity platform. Zendesk unveils Autonomous Service Workforce: At its annual Relate conference, Zendesk announced the Autonomous Service Workforce, a product vision built around specialized AI agents priced per resolution rather than per seat. Key launches include a no-code Agent Builder, omnichannel coverage with shared context, and a real-time Quality Score applied to every interaction – human or AI. Riverbed extends Aternity AIOps: Riverbed has released new Aternity digital experience (DEX) capabilities positioning AIOps as proactive disruption prevention rather than reactive monitoring, giving IT teams predictive intelligence before end-user experience degrades. WinMagic brings zero trust to legacy OT: WinMagic has introduced Continuous Identity Assurance, a hardware-bound approach to endpoint identity that extends zero trust controls to air-gapped systems and legacy operational technology environments traditionally outside the reach of modern identity platforms. Read Full Transcript Welcome to The Buzz from ChannelBuzz.ca, I’m Robert Dutt, today is Wednesday, May 20, 2026, and here’s what’s happening in the channel today. Continuing coverage from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, where yesterday’s Day 2 product announcements shifted the spotlight from the partner program to the infrastructure portfolio. The headline item was Dell PowerStore Elite, which Dell is positioning as a new class of enterprise storage platform built for what it calls an AI-era data center. According to the company, PowerStore Elite delivers up to three times the performance of the previous generation through software-driven improvements, and backs it all with what Dell describes as an industry-best 6:1 data reduction guarantee – up from 5:1 – a number it says carries real weight in today’s supply-constrained flash market. The platform packs up to 5.8 petabytes of effective capacity into a single 3U chassis using industry-standard E3 NVMe flash rather than proprietary drives, giving partners and their customers more flexibility on cost and sourcing. The cyber resilience angle is where it gets interesting for MSPs. Dell is introducing Dell Cyber Detect for PowerStore, which inspects data at the byte level and is positioned as being able to identify ransomware with 99.99% accuracy – surfacing the last known clean copy so organizations can recover fast. That capability will be available in Q3 2026. PowerStore Elite itself is set for global availability in July. The broader data center announcement also included 11 new PowerEdge servers spanning both air-cooled and liquid-cooled environments, expanded Dell Private Cloud support for Broadcom, Microsoft, and Nutanix software stacks, and two new automation products: the Dell Automation Platform, which pairs AI agents with a conversational interface for infrastructure deployment and management, and Dell Automation Studio for building custom, full-stack orchestration workflows. Nearly 20,000 customers already run PowerStore globally, and Dell is emphasizing that existing deployments can cluster with PowerStore Elite without disruption – a meaningful selling point for partners managing live customer environments. The second big story out of Las Vegas yesterday is one that deserves some unpacking. During his keynote, Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clarke laid out what he called ten fundamental changes in the past twelve months – and the thread running through the whole list is a single concept: tokenomics. The numbers Clarke presented tell a story that’s easy to miss if you only hear the headline. Model prices have fallen roughly 80% per token in the last year – sounds like great news. Except token consumption is simultaneously up ten times. And GenAI software spend has tripled in twelve months. The net effect is that AI is actually getting more expensive for most organizations, not less. Clarke made it concrete with a single example: one developer, one agentic use case, building a software tool. On the public cloud, that use case can run up roughly $3,400 a day in token costs. Running the equivalent workload on on-premises infrastructure with local models? Zero incremental dollars. Clarke went further and confirmed that Dell itself made the shift to on-premises AI after its own token costs became untenable – which is a different kind of endorsement than anything you hear from a keynote stage. He also flagged something worth watching: Dell is working on what he called token routing, an orchestration layer that would automatically determine whether a given task is better handled by a deskside AI workstation or by data center infrastructure. He was clear it’s still in development, but it signals where Dell sees the intersection of its PC and server businesses heading. Clarke closed his keynote with three actionable imperatives: know your token consumption, find your super users, and lead the operating model change or be disrupted by it. That first one is the real challenge for most organizations – and the one an MSP or trusted advisor can walk into and own. Away from Las Vegas now, and Intezer has officially launched its Intezer Amplify Partner Program, naming industry veteran Mark Daggett as vice president of global channels and alliances to lead the effort. The program formalizes the company’s channel investment at a moment when demand for AI-driven security operations is accelerating. Intezer’s pitch to the channel is essentially a gap-filling argument: internal security teams are drowning in alert volume while the talent required to triage and investigate those alerts remains in short supply. The Amplify program is designed to equip partners to step into that gap, delivering Intezer’s automated alert triage and threat investigation capabilities as a managed or co-managed offering. The appointment of a dedicated channel VP is the clearest signal yet that Intezer is treating the channel as a primary route to market, not a secondary one. Partners building out managed security or MSSP practices looking to differentiate around AI-augmented SOC capabilities have another option worth a closer look. In Brief –  Check Point launches an agentic network security orchestration platform it says collapses months of manual policy work into minutes of verified action.  Zendesk unveils its Autonomous Service Workforce at the Relate conference, introducing per-resolution AI agent pricing and a no-code Agent Builder.  Riverbed announces new Aternity digital experience capabilities designed to shift AIOps from reactive visibility to proactive disruption prevention.  WinMagic introduces Continuous Identity Assurance, anchoring identity verification in hardware to extend zero trust protocols to air-gapped and legacy OT environments.  Full details and links in the show notes or the blog post. Later today on In The Channel, still from the show floor at Dell Technologies World, I sit down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, on why 97% of cyber attacks now specifically target the backup infrastructure – and what it actually means to build a resilience strategy around the concept of the minimum viable company. And if you haven’t heard yesterday’s episode yet, check out my conversation with Alan Ashby, Dell’s senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales, on the practical infrastructure realities of the AI boom – from a deskside AI workstation for an SMB to consolidating 13 legacy servers into one. That’s how we’re seeing the headlines today. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies For most of the history of managed services, backup has been foundational but frankly unremarkable. You back up the data. Customers sleep better. Everyone moves on. That model needs to evolve. In this episode of In The Channel, recorded at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, makes a compelling case for why MSPs need to reframe their entire backup practice around cyber resilience – and why the opportunity to do so has never been bigger or more urgent. The stat that sets the table: 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. Attackers know that if they can compromise the backup, the game is essentially over. An MSP whose backup practice is not built around isolated, immutable copies is not selling a last line of defense – it’s selling false assurance. Central to the conversation is the idea of the “minimum viable company”: a framework Emsley encourages MSPs to bring to their customers, ideally at the board level. The question is deceptively simple – if everything goes down, what are the absolute minimum systems and data sets required to bring the business back online? Building a resilience strategy around that answer changes how you architect backup, and how you price and position it. Emsley walks through Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, including the Data Domain platform and its multi-tenant capabilities for MSP environments, the Workspace Protection endpoint play, and the new premium rebate incentives for cyber resilience solutions in Dell’s Modern Partner Platform. His most practical advice for the mid-market? Have an incident response plan – and print it out. Because when ransomware strikes, the runbook sitting on the encrypted server is not going to help anyone. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and your host for the show. We’re still coming to you from Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, where AI Factory and agentic AI have understandably grabbed most of the headlines. But while I was on the show floor, I also wanted to bring you a conversation that I think is going to resonate long after the conference fades. The question of how MSPs should be thinking about cyber resilience – not just backup or data recovery, but the full picture of what it actually takes to bring a customer’s business back to life after a ransomware attack – sits at or near the top of virtually every board-level buying agenda right now. And with AI increasingly in the hands of the bad guys as much as the good guys, the calculus around protecting data is changing fast. I sat down with Rob Emsley, director of cyber resilience marketing at Dell Technologies, for a conversation about the difference between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, the concept of the minimum viable company, and why MSPs who are still selling backup the old-fashioned way may be leaving both value and their customers seriously exposed. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Rob Emsley. Robert Dutt: Rob, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. Rob Emsley: Yeah, great to meet you, Robert. Robert Dutt: Director of cyber resilience marketing. You’re sitting in a pretty fascinating place right now, I have to think. Let’s start by sort of setting the table a little bit for an MSP and solution provider audience. How do you define cyber resilience at Dell today and how is that different from what it looked like even a couple of years back? Rob Emsley: Yeah, I mean, for many years, what the portfolio that I market was really the data protection portfolio. And like many vendors in the industry, one of the things that’s dramatically changed over probably the last decade, I would say, is the increase in cyber attacks and really the concern over things like ransomware, over things like insider threats, basically anything where bad actors are going after your data. And over the last probably 10 years, you’ve seen a lot more interest in cyber recovery as opposed to disaster recovery. Disaster recovery has been around forever. Bad things happen to good people. Do I have a set of infrastructure that I can restart from, whether it’s a natural disaster or human error, et cetera, et cetera. And the interesting thing with cyber recovery is the frustrating reality is that your hardware is probably still in good shape. You’re not under five feet of water or your infrastructure hasn’t been destroyed by a tornado. So everything looks as if it’s recoverable, but you know it isn’t because it’s been impacted, it’s been infected, and your good data is now bad data. So many MSPs that work with vendors in this market have seen an evolution of those vendors changing their messaging to certainly become more security companies. And some of that, you could argue, is based on vendor evaluations, especially private companies that are looking to go public or be acquired, et cetera, et cetera. So Dell Technologies was probably one of the last to really make a hard pivot from the products that we sell, predominantly delivering backup and recovery, but really to position those products and market those products as cyber resilience offerings. And cyber resilience really drives us to have new conversations with different parts of the customer’s team. Certainly it’s the old adage that when you’re selling data protection, you take the elevator to the basement to talk to the infrastructure team. When you’re selling cyber resilience, you take the elevator to the top floor to talk to the board, and it really has become a board-level discussion. So I think for managed service providers, the topic of cyber resilience is a much broader conversation that they can have with prospective customers. I think that customers know that there’s only two things that they’re afraid of losing. One is their employees, and two is their data. Losing either of them is really a bad day. So I think that when you look at buying intentions from many analyst firms that do those types of research projects – Omdia, for instance, is one – cyber resilience tops the top three, if not the top two or even top one, buying intentions for the coming years. And it has done for many, many years. So I think that’s why cyber resilience is an opportunity for managed service providers to expand the conversations and the people that they’re talking to, because it’s a horizontally required discipline. One of the things that customers, unfortunately over the years, have overspent on – maybe not overspent, but maybe not got the balance correct – is they’ve spent a lot of their budgets on cybersecurity products, trying to make their environments more secure. Basically build a wall. Firewalls fall into that category of technology, ransomware detection, those types of things. The area where we’ve tried to get a better balance in IT budgets is on recovery and resilience, based on the premise that there’s no such thing as absolute security. So you need to be prepared to have a good copy of your data to bring back to life, to bring your company back to life. Robert Dutt: Obviously, a lot of talk about AI because it’s the 2020s and we’re at a tech conference. Everyone’s going that way, which is good news in some regards and bad news in other regards in the security sphere, because it turns out the bad guys have access to it. Rob Emsley: Yeah. And that’s true for, as you imagine, a lot of technology. If you think about just life in general, there’s a lot of things that are available in the market that can be used for good and can also be used for bad. It all depends on what hands those technologies are in. And certainly, if you look at the use of AI to manufacture more sophisticated cyber attacks, certainly if you think about the use of AI to provide more sophisticated phishing emails, that’s certainly one thing I think we’ve seen. And certainly the concern around using AI to more quickly identify vulnerabilities – that’s been something that’s been top of mind in the news over the last few weeks, a couple of months. But again, I think both of those just reinforce the importance of having a surety that you have a good known copy of your data that you can take to the bank to bring the company back online. And I think from an MSP perspective, offering an infrastructure that gives their customers that assurance is really beneficial to customers. The old adage of customers want to sleep well at night – and if an MSP can help them do that, then a good night’s sleep is worth a fortune sometimes. Certainly my wife would say so. Robert Dutt: I think after 365, backup has been a fundamental underpinning of managed services for such a long time. I’m curious what you think is most common for MSPs to miss in terms of evolving and doing more than just the old-fashioned backup technology and getting more out of that. Rob Emsley: Yeah, I think if you look at a lot of the backup technologies that are available, certainly backup has always been that last line of defense. And unfortunately, being that last line of defense, the bad actors realize that if you compromise the backup infrastructure, you can pretty much do whatever you want. All bets are off. The customer doesn’t have a last line of defense. So if you think about some of the research that’s in the industry, 97% of cyber attacks involve attacking the backup infrastructure. And that doesn’t matter whether or not it’s managed by the customer or managed by an MSP. So I do think that MSPs need to become much more conversant in explaining what they are doing and how they have implemented a backup infrastructure that really is that last line of defense. And that’s something which you start getting into the concept of offering isolated copies of backups – maybe not for every single data type, but certainly we believe wholeheartedly in the concept of the minimum viable company, which really is a discussion to have with the board about when everything is gone, what needs to come back in order for you to be viable. Because I think that’s the killer – some people have a laissez-faire attitude to, well, everything’s important. But if everything’s important, then nothing’s important. So I do think that the MSPs that are in the backup industry need to realize that the backup value has changed. It used to be very much around being there for operational recovery. Having backups is just good hygiene, but having backups that aren’t secure is a no-no in today’s market. So that becomes a very important shift for MSPs that are in the backup market. Because I do agree with you – backup, God bless it, has been a great value creator for MSPs. Many customers realize that they need to back up their data. Subscribing to a service to do that is certainly an easy way to use your resources for more productive work to drive revenue. But at the end of the day, if you’re not secure, it’s difficult to innovate with confidence. Robert Dutt: All right. How does the portfolio that you guys are offering today help partners position their customers to be able to bounce back based on what really happens when they get attacked, breached, when their backup is part of that? Rob Emsley: Yeah. So within the Dell Technologies portfolio, this occurred probably about seven years ago. When I came back to Dell in 2018, we were simplifying the infrastructure portfolio of the company – storage predominantly, servers, and at the time data protection and cyber resilience. So many of our customers and our partners realized we have a portfolio of Power-branded products: PowerEdge, PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerSwitch. And probably in 2019, we introduced PowerProtect. So PowerProtect is the umbrella portfolio for everything we do in that backup and recovery, data protection, and cyber resilience space. Within there, we sell software to create copies of data and store them on hardware. And the hardware that we sell is something that we’ve been very lucky to have ownership of for literally 20 years. It’s an acquisition that was made by Dell Technologies, actually prior to the acquisition of EMC – it was an EMC acquisition, a company called Data Domain. And Data Domain has been really foundational for delivering cyber resilience. It falls into the category of what IDC calls the purpose-built backup appliance market. So unlike general purpose storage that many backup vendors use, this is a storage tier that was specifically developed for the purpose of storing backups. So it was developed with three attributes in mind. One was performance – how fast can I back up, how fast can I recover? It was built on efficiency – backup is a very repetitive process, so how can I store multiple backups in less physical capacity? So data reduction, deduplication. And then scalability – how can I start small and scale? But then overarching to that is how can you make it rock solid and secure? So the security features of our PowerProtect Data Domain appliances are something that’s very advantageous. And many of our managed service providers have stood that up in their data centers and offered that as the foundation for cyber resilience. The nice thing is that Data Domain, as well as supporting Dell Technologies software – so PowerProtect Data Manager, and other software assets that we’ve had for even longer, products like Networker and Avamar – it also has a very healthy ecosystem. There’s a protocol called Data Domain Boost that we use to allow third parties to integrate with Data Domain directly. Because the reality is that an MSP, when they go and talk to a customer, that customer has more than likely already made choices around the backup software that they’re using. And it’s more than likely not just one. And sometimes when they go to the MSP, they’ll say, well, can you basically choose a backup software application? But even the nice thing is, from an MSP perspective, Data Domain is multi-tenant. So you can slice up Data Domain into an ability to serve many MSP customers using different software if the customer so chooses. So if you look at our expo floor this year, we’ve got companies like Commvault exhibiting, companies like Veeam exhibiting. That’s the way that our portfolio is set up to provide that backup infrastructure for MSPs to leverage. Robert Dutt: Obviously, one of the big occurrences here from a partner point of view is the Modern Partner Platform that’s rolling out. And in part of all of those changes, you got the specific call out for cyber resilience solutions as one of the differentiated product areas for premium rebates. That’s a pretty big carrot. What does it say about the signal to the channel about where you see the biggest growth opportunities across Dell? Rob Emsley: Yeah, we have historically done the majority of our business through the channel, but we also recognize that the channel has a lot of choices. Many of our competitors, in fact most of our competitors in that cyber resilience backup solution space, are all pure-play individual companies, most of which have very little direct sales capabilities. So very channel-focused and therefore have blanketed the channel to sell their wares, sell their products. We wholeheartedly believe that the Dell Technologies portfolio, either standalone from a cyber resilience solutions perspective, but also taken in context of the other key elements – you think about things like private cloud and AI – gives a channel partner the concept of delivering secure infrastructure and the opportunity to take advantage of that broader portfolio. And as we talked about earlier, you can’t deny that cyber resilience is top of mind. It’s as high on the board’s agenda as, hey, how are we going to take advantage of artificial intelligence? Some could argue that cyber resilience is either on par or if not, for many customers, more of a concern, because it’s that ever-present danger of – is the infrastructure that I have now, even before I’ve implemented AI, secure enough to allow us to sleep at night? We certainly see the pivot from data protection to cyber resilience fitting well with the other vendors that our MSPs talk to. We certainly have a portfolio that addresses small customer needs to large customer needs, can absolutely be leveraged by our MSP partners to build a practice behind. And also, with cyber resilience solutions, there’s that upfront services component built in – identifying what is the minimum viable company that needs to be the most secure, the most isolated, to give those customers the peace of mind and actually show the MSPs as valued trusted partners. Robert Dutt: So much of the focus is obviously on enterprise data, on the data center, on the infrastructure side. But you also have the Workspace Protection offering going on. How important is securing the endpoint in the overall resilience strategy, and what’s the play there for partners from a resilience point of view? Rob Emsley: Yeah, certainly if you think about the entry point into most networks, the endpoints are clearly the most numerous, just by the volume of endpoints compared to the volume of elements in the data center. So certainly when we look at cyber resilience, we look holistically – not only at the data center infrastructure, but absolutely the endpoints that we sell. We continually look at the elements of security across the portfolio. And there’s a lot of foundational technology across the Dell product line, whether it be in the client space or in the server or storage space. The concept of trusted boot, secure BIOS, really carries forward through the PC line all the way into our server line and then the leverage of those servers into our storage portfolio. And then from an MSP standpoint, when you engage with Dell from a purchase perspective, you gain the advantage of the secure supply chain that Dell uses to its advantage. Our supply chain forever has been an incredible value, not only to ourselves, but also to anybody that buys from us, including our partners. But the fact that the way that we leverage that supply chain securely gives a lot of peace of mind. Because many of our partners, when they’re working with security companies, those security companies are not manufacturing their devices. Certainly they’re not manufacturing endpoints. Most of the time, they’re not manufacturing data center servers and data center storage solutions. They’re buying from somebody else. So the concept of a secure supply chain becomes harder to rationalize when you have multiple suppliers providing your solution. So at the end of the day, one of the advantages when it comes to Dell is that if you choose to work holistically with Dell, you get this foundational benefit across the portfolio of a lot of commonality when it comes to security and resilience. That’s one take-it-to-the-bank benefit that an MSP can achieve when they work with Dell Technologies across the entire portfolio. We’re fortunate enough to be in a position to have that entire portfolio, and long may that continue. And certainly that’s one of the advantages – when we look at security and resilience, we can look at it from the endpoint all the way to the data center and beyond. And I think that’s something that is a big benefit for MSPs to lean into the whole portfolio, as well as the advantages of aggregation of benefits and different tier levels by having a single-vendor, multi-portfolio opportunity, as opposed to slicing and dicing their vendor engagements across half a dozen different vendors. Robert Dutt: What do you see as the most common gap, especially in the mid-market, in terms of incident response plans today? Rob Emsley: I think it’s one, having one that is documented and printed out. That may seem very basic, but… Robert Dutt: Until your systems are locked down by ransomware. Rob Emsley: Exactly. So the very basic advice of have a plan and print it out may sound very old-fashioned and simplistic, but in the mid-market, that is probably something that people should consider. Certainly, practice does make perfect is not a trite saying. Practice, practice, practice in the mid-market becomes important. You don’t want to be developing a plan or using a plan for the first time when the house is on fire. You want to know where the exits are, where the fire extinguisher is, and you want to know how to use it. You want to make sure that when you use it, they work. Something which we can probably all think about in our own home lives, to be honest. So I think that’s probably something which, no matter what size company you are, it comes back to – you don’t want to lose your employees, you don’t want to lose your data. And when it comes to cyber resilience, you’re never too small or too big to take a fresh look at what you do and what your plan is. Robert Dutt: Once again, I appreciate you taking the time. Great chat. Rob Emsley: Great. Thanks, Robert. Robert Dutt: There you have it, Rob Emsley from Dell. I’d like to thank Rob for carving out some time during what has been a very busy week on the show floor at DTW. A couple of things from the conversation that I think are worth mentioning. First, that 97% figure – 97% of cyber attacks now involve targeting the backup infrastructure directly. If you’re an MSP and your backup practice is still built on the assumption that the backup is the safe harbor, that’s a foundational problem. The attackers know exactly where the life raft is. And second, the idea of the minimum viable company sounds simple, even obvious, but it’s actually a board-level conversation that most MSPs probably aren’t having and probably should be. What are the absolute minimum systems, data sets, and processes that a business needs to restart their operations? Answering that question and then building a resilience stack around that answer is the real difference between selling backup and selling business continuity. And his parting advice – have a plan and print it out – almost laughably basic until you consider how many organizations discover their incident response runbook is sitting on the encrypted server when they need it the most. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. Please follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, most directories. Ratings and reviews are always appreciated and always help. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.

Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Today’s episode of In The Channel comes to you from the floor of Dell Technologies World 2026, where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory has been dominating the headlines. But what does that mean for partners who aren’t selling multi-million dollar deployments to the Fortune 500? To find out, we sat down with Alan Ashby, senior director of Americas data center presales and specialty sales at Dell. Ashby breaks down the practical realities of the AI infrastructure boom, explaining how partners can start small by deploying “AI supercomputers” like the Dell Pro Max GB10 directly to SMB desktops to unlock local, highly secure agentic AI workflows. We also dive into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can help customers escape “prototype purgatory” by narrowing their focus, and the massive opportunity remaining in traditional data center modernization—including the staggering claim that Dell’s new 18G platforms can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. We also touch on how Dell is leveraging its Customer Solution Centers to help partners de-risk these complex deployments before the customer signs the PO. Read Full Transcript Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In the Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. We’re coming to you today from the floor of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas where the expansion of the Dell AI Factory and new agentic AI capabilities have completely dominated the Day 1 headlines. But as we know, the keynote hype doesn’t always translate immediately to the loading dock. To understand how partners are supposed to actually size, architect, and sell these new AI infrastructure solutions, I sat down with Alan Ashby. He’s the senior director of Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales at Dell. We dig into the economics of on-prem AI versus the public cloud, how partners can get mid-market customers started with an AI supercomputer right at their desk, and why the traditional data center refresh is still a massive and highly lucrative play for the channel. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Alan Ashby. Alan, thanks for taking the time. Appreciate it. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Robert Dutt: Americas Data Center pre-sales and specialty sales. That’s a broad title. A lot of ground to cover there. To set the stage for MSPs, solution providers, folks listening to this, what can you tell me about what your team actually does kind of day-to-day when it comes to working with partners around infrastructure and AI solutions? Alan Ashby: Yeah, absolutely. So we’ve got a handful of folks that, you know, we’re aligned and dedicated to the partner ecosystem focused across the Americas. We have a couple of primary roles. So from a pre-sales perspective, helping support our partners from a technical enablement, understanding our product portfolio, understanding how to position the products correctly, both amongst the portfolio itself, but also kind of competitively in the marketplace. We also run what we call a technical account plan with our partners. So, you know, supporting them on their certifications, their enablement motions, etc. And then we also run what we have a program we call Heroes for our partners. So Heroes is our foundational enablement motion for partners. We run in the Americas somewhere between 15 and 30 regional face-to-face sessions every single quarter. Those we’d love to see partners participate in, try to do them all over the country. And those are deep dive sessions, you know, going through products and roadmaps and futures and how to position products, etc. And, you know, those have been an enablement motion for the last several years and been incredibly successful. Robert Dutt: All right. We’re hearing a lot this week, obviously, about the expansion of Dell AI Factory and the idea of bringing AI on-premise to the edge, closer to the enterprise itself. And from an infrastructure perspective, you’ve got PowerRack, the pitch there being you go to live customer workloads from kind of the box to deployed in six hours and change. For a partner who’s trying to sell into the mid-market or the enterprise, you know, how does that kind of speed of value fundamentally change the conversation that they’re having with their customer, whether that’s the CEO, CIO, or the business leader? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I don’t think there’s been a more exciting time for our partners with what the market’s putting out there for us. You know, when we look at, you know, you mentioned the mid-market space, I actually think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to go support those customers, especially with some of the agentic workflow processes that we announced today with some of the platforms. You know, it may not be those 100 million, 200 million dollar opportunities, but almost every single small business and medium business, you know, you start with maybe a product like the Dell Pro Max GB10, and you start there and you start building out that agentic workflows, you know, building out automated dashboards with AI assistance built into it. You know, a lot of great things that a partner could go deliver that everybody can see value in. Sometimes in that mid-market space and small business space, it’s easier to get started on some of these agentic flows because they don’t have data that’s kind of messy. They don’t have legacy debt from a data center infrastructure perspective. And then from a larger enterprise or commercial customer, you know, we have seen a number of very good successes across our partner ecosystem with delivering services and value to our customer sets collectively, you know, to help customers really try to find value through their AI journeys. Understanding and identifying key use cases or workloads that they think they can get value out of it, understanding the infrastructure, the architecture that’s designing it right. You know, early days, you know, we had a lot of times where, you know, customers and partners struggle with just, you know, how do we deploy this thing because power and cooling needs are maybe bigger than what I was expecting and, you know, managing through that challenge. So partners have a phenomenal opportunity, I think, to help provide that value to our customers collectively together. You know, every one of our partners, they bring a unique skill set and differentiators on their own to the marketplace and help support those customers to that kind of their own journeys together. Robert Dutt: What is that infrastructure pitch down to that, especially that mid-market or even SMB customer? In the past, there was interest in doing it, I think often they would end up, if they were going to do it, doing it on public cloud, because the alternative was a big old infrastructure solution that doesn’t really fit them, unless maybe a partner can bring it on and kind of do a multi-tenant kind of situation there. But where are we at in terms of having right-fit infrastructure to make that work? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think, you know, even the stuff that we announced today on stage, you know, products we announced at GTC, I think really helped kind of build out that situation and story for a small customer to be able to scale. You think about going back to the Dell Pro Max GB10, you know, you can take that device and you can, you know, run a small business basically off that depending on the concurrent users and be able to move up from that to some of our Pro workstations all the way up to the GB300. You know, we can run a model as big as a trillion parameters, it’s kind of crazy what you can do on a desktop, you know, and that doesn’t require any unique power requirements, I can plug that into a normal outlet. And then I could scale into, you know, actual infrastructure depending on the size of what the need is. And that’s where I think there’s a lot of opportunity for partners to think through, you know, how do they help customers scale through that. And so we talked a lot today at the show around, you know, the economics of everything. And in the long term, it’s going to be very challenging economically to run things in a public cloud. Yeah, on-prem is going to be a massive opportunity. And the fact that Michael today even talked about things about running foundation models and open source models on-prem, you know, your data is fully secure, you manage it all yourself. You know, it’s a lot easier to think about how I actually, you know, pull and extract value out of those different solutions. Robert Dutt: Well, and that’s the pitch right for the desk-side agentic AI solution is the idea, I think that the number was 87% reduction in token cost and in terms of comparing the cost of acquiring, deploying, running the solution on-prem. I think the break-even was three months or something like that against running the same kind of solution in public cloud. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that’s where customers are challenged today is, you know, you can have a lot of different, you know, foundational models and, you know, some of the agentic tools that are out there today that are subscription-based, cloud-based. And you can run through usage real fast without getting a lot of value out of it. When you start thinking about deploying stuff on-prem, you know, you know exactly what your output per day could be, and you can scale accordingly. Robert Dutt: How does that change how a partner approaches both selling and thinking about running, maintaining that infrastructure as opposed to something that’s all outsourced to the cloud and has those significant question marks of cost attached? Alan Ashby: I think there’s a lot of stuff we’re still figuring out, to be honest. You know, I think a lot of partners are trying to understand that and every customer is going to be a little bit in a different spot in their journey. And I think, you know, that’s where some of our partner ecosystems have tremendous value to help meet them where they are and help them take that first or second step forward to try to be able to deliver overall value to the company. Robert Dutt: Do you see that kind of time to value, that reduction in overall costs being something that can get unstuck some of those classic cases of AI workloads that are getting put into prototype, into test phase, but never quite see the light of day, partially perhaps because of that economic headwind that you discover when you start trying to scale these things? Alan Ashby: I think there’s that. I also think sometimes some customers probably try to maybe bite off more than they can chew at one time. And I think when we start thinking about these AI use cases, sometimes we’ll talk with some customers and partners helping them through them. They have, you know, two, three dozen things they want to try to accomplish out of one solution or one opportunity. It’s how do we narrow that down a little bit to where we actually extract value out of that particular use case that you’re trying to drive value with. And we’ve seen some really great success with some of our partners being able to help, you know, negotiate and navigate partner customers through that journey. You know, I think it takes a skill set that’s unique, and we’re starting to see more and more of our partners, you know, invest in and put attention to building out dedicated AI practice teams, helping them understand the skill set. The market’s moving incredibly fast, unlike ever before. And so, you know, it takes somebody who has a real passionate interest and a lot of curiosity to understand how these things all work together and all the pieces fit together and how do you take advantage of everything as you go forward. Robert Dutt: How do you see the co-delivery model evolving over time as you say, things are moving fast. When it comes to deploying AI factories, I think we heard earlier that, you know, the model is sort of Dell handling deployment and management of the overall environment while partners are being asked to focus on the application, the vertical, those kinds of things. How do you see the role of the channel, I guess, especially professional services and advisory-type partners evolving? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think that to your point, I think it’s evolving. And I think that, you know, there’s a lot of opportunities here from an educational services perspective, consulting services perspective, services for our partners, you know, very few customers, especially when you think about, you know, a traditional commercial customer, mid-market customer, know exactly what to do and what to do next. You know, they might have started a pilot out in the public cloud. And then they’re trying to figure out where to go from here. And like, there’s a lot of service opportunity for our partners there. When it comes from, you know, other deployment services, I think there’s opportunities there for our partners, you know, depending on the solutions. When you look at post-delivery of the product into the customer, I think that there’s even more opportunity for partners of how, once things are deployed and installed, what’s next? And how do you help customers really extract value out of the infrastructure they spent a lot of money on, and have pretty high expectations of the ROI and the benefits they get out of it? I think there’s a massive opportunity for partners to help those customers through that journey. I think there’s a big opportunity for partners to take a product like our GB10, GP300 products and say, how do I go show you how to build an agentic workflow on those systems that can deliver value for your customers? You know, those are all going to be partner-delivered opportunities. Robert Dutt: All right. It sounds like even though it’s relatively early in the process, we are at the point where some of those next steps are becoming clear then. Alan Ashby: Yeah, I would say so. I mean, the question is, how fast do things change? You know, and it’s one of those things like I look at the agentic opportunities, probably one of the biggest things that can bring value for our partners. We’re really looking for a partner ecosystem that has the skill sets to deliver those for customers. Robert Dutt: Speaking of things changing, moving from traditional virtualization workloads to AI is a pretty big shift in how you think about structure, infrastructure, especially around storage, IO, networking, GPUs, needless to say. How’s the pre-sales team helping partners to figure out what the right size is for these solutions, both for current state and future state, so that you’re not either over-provisioning or under-provisioning customers? Alan Ashby: That’s a great question, actually. I mean, we’ve done a lot of things internally at Dell to get better ourselves and have the right talent and resources to support the partner ecosystem. You know, we have teams that can help support partners, both from a sizing, scoping of the opportunity, all the way down to configuring and deploying that solution if the partner needs that help. We’re also trying to help up-level our partners to be able to do it on their own. It’s kind of self-service and building the tools to help them through that motion. A couple of years ago, we started launching AI workshops, the different skill sets to help up-level and help that motion for a lot of our partners. The partners that have participated in those have seen a lot more success than those that didn’t. We do those multiple times a quarter and encourage partners to participate through those motions. We have an AI workshop multiple times a quarter in North America, and we go through every step of the phase from how do you have a conversation with a customer all the way through, how do you narrow down use cases, to all the way to how do you actually develop, design, and build the systems for what you need. Robert Dutt: Along those same lines, but a little bit more customer-facing and kind of looking at the economics of it, AI projects carry a lot of financial and technical risk for CIOs. What resources are there, whether it’s proof of concept, technical validation, or specialty engineering teams that partners can tap in to kind of prove the math and de-risk a solution such as AI Factory for customers? Alan Ashby: Yeah, there’s a couple of them actually, and I encourage all partners to kind of look at the options. We have at Dell, we have what we call our Customer Solution Centers, and those Customer Solution Centers have the ability to be able to work with a pre-sales specialist, a pre-sales expert on various different solutions. We have data centers where partners can take advantage of and leverage to be able to do proof of concept for customers, proof of value with those folks, and that can vary from any size of the architecture, from small all the way up to very large, and help support them through that. Also encourage partners to reach out to their Dell teams and how do you take advantage of those CSC resources. It’s a very simple process, but work through Dell teams. Same thing would be to go spend time with us in our labs. We have a great lab up in the Hopkinton area where AI factories are manufactured and built, and love to take partners through that facility to be able to see what’s possible there. We have an AI lab down in Austin to help them through that as well. So there’s a lot of opportunities. I would say the other one is we have a lot of partners also building out their own capabilities, their own labs, and we’ve helped support them through that as well. I think that they’re providing some amazing value to their customers, being able to do their own POCs and demonstrations and whatever it might be to help support that customer throughout the process. Robert Dutt: AI obviously gets the big headlines because it’s the 2020s as it is. But customers still have traditional enterprise apps and aging infrastructure that is going to need a refresh. I guess, how does your team handle guiding partners around going after the new shiny thing, the big opportunity that’s out there versus the kind of day-to-day operational challenge of standard data center modernization and refresh? Alan Ashby: Yeah, it’s hard when they have two of these really big shiny objects out there that have a lot of potential value for customers, both with AI but also just traditional data center modernization. We’ve seen a really great success over the last year of helping customers, I would say, clean up the data center, think through what they’ve got today in there and how to modernize it and right-size everything. When you look at some of the things that we’ll announce here at the show, it’s pretty exciting, honestly. There’s some great announcements we had in the Day 1 keynote, Day 2 keynote will be just as exciting, more from an infrastructure perspective of things. I’m really excited what we’re doing just with traditional servers and we’ve seen a lot of great success by our partner ecosystem over the last several quarters with them going in and helping customers look at consolidation of those environments. Our 18G server platforms, which we’ll announce, can consolidate 13 legacy servers into one. That’s kind of crazy math when you think about that. It’s easy now to think about how do I help customers free up space and modernize things that makes it so AI is possible in their own data centers; consolidating racks in the servers is kind of a crazy concept. Then you think of how we’re looking at modernizing just traditional architecture with HCI architecture and the disaggregated architecture providing real value for customers with right-sizing, both compute capacity and storage capacity to be able to extract as much value as possible across the ecosystem of the portfolio. Robert Dutt: Along those lines, any other, I guess hidden opportunities for partners, things that maybe don’t get the big attention of the desk-side AI or PowerRack or some of those things, but still represent—sort of along the lines of the data center example you just gave—opportunities that are worth pursuing, that are worth looking at, but maybe not quite the highest profile? Alan Ashby: I mean, 100%. It’s easy to get excited with what we’re doing in AI. The market’s obviously kind of dictating a lot of that, but there’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of money to be made for our partners to be able to focus on classical data center architecture. We’ve got some great solutions. Our Dell Private Cloud is one that’s extremely exciting for partners, the opportunity to be able to help those customers through that process and think through that. I also am extremely excited with what we’re doing around the security front with our data protection portfolio, our PowerProtect product lines. Security is one that I think in the age of AI, we need to think through security differently. There’s some additional opportunities for partners to think about how do they provide those services, those extra value pieces to help make sure all of these customers are ready for what could be an AI security threat. Robert Dutt: I assume there’s a better together story to be told there between the hardware, the infrastructure, and the cyber protection. Alan Ashby: 100%. That’s one of the biggest values that we have at Dell. There’s inherent value between the products themselves being able to support each other differently, but also they have the large Dell value prop with the Dell supply chain, our security chain, how we build products. Everything provides value across the entire portfolio. Robert Dutt: What’s the single biggest misconception you see customers have around the idea of deploying on-prem AI in particular? Alan Ashby: That’s interesting. The big one I would say is where do I get started and how big do I need to get started? I think that we saw early days, a lot of customers thought initially you had to just get in line for supply on large GPU systems when you could run a lot of workloads, really interesting and exciting AI workloads on a server with a PCIe-based GPU, and now even more so with some of the other platforms with workstations or GB300, GB10. The biggest misconception is just thinking about how big I have to get started. I would encourage almost every executive, every leader of every company to start thinking differently about you probably should have an AI PC in your office and on your desk. You should have one of our, I always call it an AI supercomputer on your desk with the GB10. It’s about who’s going to be the most curious. There’s nothing that limits you from capabilities with what the models can do today. We really just need people to start using and playing and practicing and helping support the overall value to the customers and to our partners. Robert Dutt: It’s an interesting concept that a computer with a better NPU or GPU on board can unlock that curiosity towards AI and ultimately drag to infrastructure refresh down the road, I think. Alan Ashby: I think the key thing is you don’t have to be a coder. You don’t have to be a developer. Really today, anybody could be a developer. You could build your own application if you wanted to. You can build your own dashboards if you wanted to. You can run it 100% on-prem if you wanted to. You can use a coding assistant to help you manage through that. All you have to do is understand how to talk to it. How do you manage it like an individual and how do you manage it like an agent? It’s a secondary employee that helps you basically give you superpowers. Robert Dutt: If an MSP wants to get serious about the data center and AI with Dell, what’s the first step if they’re already in terms of certification, competency, that kind of thing that they should be looking at? Alan Ashby: Yeah, again, the portfolio is changing very quickly. I would say that table stakes obviously is having a good understanding of our compute platforms with what we’ve got put together with NVIDIA. That’d probably be step one. Step two would be thinking about what you can provide from a storage perspective and how you take advantage of both PowerScale and ObjectScale and all the way up through our lightning file systems, having good understanding how you can deploy that for your customers at scale. Then the other one would be how do you work closely with the Dell teams? That’s one of the things that is always encouraging for partners to think through is Dell has this incredibly large sales force that can help give them scale, give them opportunity. How do you share as a partner? How do you share your value back to the Dell teams? Make sure that they understand where you can be supportive of their customer experience. How do you work collaboratively with the Dell teams across the ecosystem? So forth. Tons of opportunity. We’re always looking for partners that have the right skill sets and the right capabilities. Our Dell teams want to bring them into customer accounts because we need their support. We need their help. Robert Dutt: Acknowledging this might be a wide range, what are some of those common threads that make for a good partner for you in terms of skill sets, areas of focus, that kind of thing? Alan Ashby: Yeah, I think it’s evolving over time. Today, I look at partners that have unique skill sets are incredibly important. Partners that have a competency across our portfolio. Table stakes of having competencies around our compute platform, our storage platforms, but then thinking even deeper, how do you have competency around some of our more isolated platforms like what we do in our unstructured storage space with PowerScale and ObjectScale and access scale that we announced today? Same thing with our data protection portfolio, our cyber resilience platforms, our SRP platforms, like partners that have deep technical specialty expertise in those areas, they’re always going to be needed and valued in our partner ecosystem. AI is one other area to differentiate a partner from, but there’s a lot of those opportunities. Even today with our Dell Private Cloud, I always tell partners that whenever you see a pivot change in our portfolio, like we did when we launched the Dell Private Cloud, this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself as a partner from other partners. To jump in early and be able to build the skill sets that our Dell team is looking for out of a partner to support their customers. Our Dell teams are always looking for those partners that can help lead the charge, especially from a technical perspective with the customers to validate the solution themselves to be able to provide that extensive value to the customer themselves. Robert Dutt: All right. Last one for me, without naming any names or with naming names, should you feel like doing so? What’s the most creative, unexpected, surprising use case for a Dell AI factory that you’ve seen a customer deploy thus far? Alan Ashby: Wow, that’s a hard one. I mean, there’s a lot of really interesting ones I’ve seen. I mean, early days, some of the ones I thought was some of the most exciting stuff that we did with Amarillo County in Texas. It’s a county that there’s a lot of languages natively spoken there and the community there needed to provide basically language services to a very large broad-based set of individuals in the community in their native tongue. And the Dell team worked closely with those folks to make that happen. All the way down there to where we got a number of partners helping small entities, both commercial and public entities, really think about how they can drive agentic workflows and some of the things that are dealing around that with dashboarding. Chat, agents, obviously is an easy one. And then helping customers through kind of how do you do code assist models. Those are probably the really big ones that we see from a use case perspective from our partners. Robert Dutt: No shortage of opportunities. Alan Ashby: Oh my gosh, it’s unbelievable how many there are today. Robert Dutt: Thank you for taking the time. Alan Ashby: Absolutely. This is great. Thank you. Robert Dutt: There you have it. Alan Ashby from Dell. I’d like to thank Alan for his time, carving out a few minutes for me amidst the chaos of day one here at DTW. My big takeaway from that conversation is that you don’t have to be deploying a multimillion dollar PowerRack system to get into the AI game with Dell right now. Between the new desktop workstations running localized agentic workflows and the massive 13 to one server consolidation plays they’re seeing in the traditional data center, there’s a very practical immediate path towards revenue here for partners in the mid market. I’d like to thank you as always for listening to the show. If you’re enjoying our coverage from Dell Technologies World, please do take a second and follow or subscribe in the podcast app of your choice. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you get your audio. And if you have a moment to leave a rating or review, always hugely appreciated. Until next time, I’m Robert Dutt for channelbuzz.ca and I’ll see you in the channel.

Hey hey, it's DtW on the way, and we're setting up shop in Widow's Bay! Dan and Raul are checking out the homey storefronts, the peaceful coast and the one nice diner in a spooky island town on AppleTV. This is a town that has been compared to Pawnee from Parks & Rec by way of Stephen King, and the description is as apt as the town is very cursed but the people are quite kooky. Mayor Loftis, played by Matthew Rhys, is trying to wrangle the odder elements of the isolated community enough to turn it into a tourist destination in an effort to save the floundering town. However, despite his shaky skepticism, the forces of strange and scary are descending on the town like a fog, sometimes literally, and only the quirky loons like Stephen Root's Wyck know how to deal with it. The show is both funnier and scarier than the trailers hinted at, but do these qualities mesh into a solid watch? Listen to this pod and be forewarned!

On this emergency episode of DTW, Brian Kostiw and John Warren react to the breaking news of Alex Cora being fired and the current situation with Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I had one of those mornings that seems small on the surface but ends up hitting you right in the face with a bigger truth. I'm at the gym, finishing up my workout, and I realize I lost my AirPod case. Now this is not new for me. I leave things behind all the time. Normally I just retrace my steps and find it exactly where I left it. But this time, nothing. I checked every machine, every bench, everywhere I had been. It was gone. So I pull up Find My iPhone and start tracking it. It is telling me I am close, then far, then close again. Then I see it say it is moving. That is when I realize someone has it. I follow the signal around the gym, looking like I am on a mission, and finally I lock in. I slow down, I get intentional, and I start narrowing it down step by step. Warmer, warmer, warmer. Until I am standing right over the guy who has it. I ring it. I hear it. It is coming from him. I ask him if he found it. He says no. I ring it again. Still no. Then finally he pulls out two cases, mine and his, and tries to play it off like he thought it was his. Now here is the thing. That moment could have gone a lot of different ways. But what stuck with me was not the situation itself. It was what that little device represents in my life. That AirPod case is not just something I use. It is one of the most valuable tools I have. Not because of what it costs, but because of what I do with it. That is where everything changed for me. That is where the lesson really is. For years, I did not take responsibility for my growth. I did not see it as my job to improve myself as a man, as a husband, as a leader. I reacted to life. I blamed. I deflected. I carried this mindset that if someone pushed me, I would push back. And I was proud of that. That mentality cost me. It cost me peace. It cost me relationships. It almost cost me my life. And when I finally started to change, it came down to one realization. How you do one thing is how you do all things. That hit me hard. Because it forced me to look at everything. Not just my business. Not just my results. But how I showed up in every area of my life. When my marriage was not where it needed to be, I wanted to blame Carla. I wanted to look at other couples and feel like she should be doing more. But when I really sat back and audited myself, I saw the truth. I was not leading. I was not listening. I was not showing respect. I was not doing the things that would create the outcome I wanted. And the same thing shows up in business. Agents say their clients are emotional. Their clients do not respond. Their clients want discounts. But what if we flipped that? What if the real question is how are you showing up? Are you consistent? Are you building trust? Are you sharpening your craft? Are you respecting your own time? Because if you are not doing those things for yourself, you cannot expect others to do it for you. That is the shift. That is the perspective. You start to realize you are the common denominator. Every problem, every frustration, every pattern. You are there. And once you see that, everything changes. Because now the solution becomes clear. You stop blaming. You stop feeling entitled. You stop waiting. And you start doing the work. For me, that meant getting uncomfortable. Learning new things. Spending hours trying to figure things out. Feeling lost but staying in it anyway. Because I made a decision that I am going to be elite in everything I do. Not when it is easy. Not when I feel like it. Every single day. Because when your word becomes solid, when you can trust yourself to follow through no matter what, there is nothing you cannot build. That is the game. And it starts with taking ownership of everything. So as you go into your day, ask yourself where you are out of alignment. Where are you cutting corners? Where are you avoiding growth? Where are you blaming instead of owning? Because that is where the breakthrough is. The same way I had to slow down, lock in, and track that signal step by step, you have to do the same thing in your life. Get intentional. Get aware. Get honest. And then go to work. Questions to Reflect On Where in your life are you blaming others instead of taking full ownership of your results What patterns are showing up across your business, your relationships, and your personal habits What is one area you know you need to improve that you have been avoiding Notable Quotes "How you do one thing is how you do all things." "You are the common denominator in everything that is not working." "When your word becomes gold, there is nothing you cannot do."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

This week, this month, this year! DtW hits 300 episodes and Kevin Smith is here (in spirit!) to celebrate with Dan and Raul. A trip down memory lane is in order as our two hosts have been downing View Askewniverse movies since they first fell in love with the medium. We go one by one through his films and how they do and don't resonate in today's society as well as their impact upon the world of film and those of our hosts as well. Smith has always been a voice of the people, and there's no better filmmaker to dive deep with for our anniversary show. Thanks for listening over the years and don't forget to snoochie boochies! BONG!!!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I found myself reflecting on how easy it is to stay stuck in a version of life that we have simply accepted as truth. And the reality is, most of us are not lacking opportunity. We are lacking perspective. The moment that perspective shifts, everything changes. There have been moments in my life where I thought this is just how it is. This is how business works. This is how relationships feel. This is as far as I can go. And I believed it. I stood on it. I operated from it. But then something happens. Something exposes the truth. And when that truth shows up, you are faced with a decision. Stay the same or flip the switch. That is the moment that defines everything. The story of Paul hit me hard because he was not always Paul. He was Saul. A man with strong convictions, completely convinced he was right, even while he was doing damage. And that is what most people miss. Just because you are convinced does not mean you are correct. Your current results are a reflection of what you believe to be true. If you believe your business is hard, it will be. If you believe your marriage is broken, it will feel that way. If you believe you can only go so far, you will stop right there. That becomes your reality. Not because it is the truth, but because it is the truth you chose. But when you are exposed to something different, when you see what is actually possible, when you see people doing what you thought could not be done, that is your moment. That is where everything can change. That is where you flip the switch. I have lived this. I have seen it in my marriage. I have seen it in my business. I have seen it in how I treated myself and the people around me. Once I realized that the way I was showing up was creating the very limitations I was frustrated by, I had a choice. Go back to that version or step into something greater. And once you truly see it, going back is a decision. Not an accident. A decision. That is why I say it is ignorant to see the truth and still choose the same patterns. From that point forward, it is about staying in it. Fighting the good fight. That means showing up when it is uncomfortable. Showing up when it is repetitive. Showing up when it feels like nothing is working. Because that is where most people fall off. Not because they are incapable, but because they stop. Finishing the race means endurance. It means you keep going regardless of the ups and downs. You do not let one bad week define you. You do not let one slow month convince you that everything is falling apart. You keep moving. And keeping the faith is trusting that everything you are going through has a purpose. That even when it feels inconvenient or overwhelming, you are going to figure it out. That it is only a matter of time. This is where most people struggle. They let their emotions control their actions. They dim their own light. They start questioning everything they once believed in. But the truth is, you already know what to do. You have done it before. You have proven it before. So why go back? I am not going back to who I used to be. That version of me created limits, created dysfunction, created ceilings. Once I saw what was possible, once I saw how I was supposed to show up as a leader, as a husband, as a father, there was no going back. Does that mean I do not get challenged? No. It means I do not turn the switch off. Maybe it dims for a moment, but I turn it right back up. I show up again. That is the difference. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself what version of you are you choosing to be. Because once you see the truth, once you see what is possible, there is no excuse to stay the same. Now the question becomes, are you ready to fight the good fight, finish the race, and keep the faith? Questions to Reflect On What truth have you already been exposed to that you are still choosing to ignore? Where in your life are you operating from old beliefs that are no longer serving you? What would change immediately if you fully committed to not going back to your old version? Notable Quotes "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith." "Your convictions are creating your current results whether you realize it or not." "Once you see the truth, going back is no longer confusion. It is a decision."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery… I was sitting there thinking about how fast time is moving. The first quarter is already gone. And I started asking myself a real question. Not what I want. Not what I hope for. But what have I already decided is done. As I was climbing Camelback this weekend, I caught myself thinking about hitting a billion in sales. And then it hit me. It is already done. That is no longer the question. Now the question is how we get to two. That is the shift. That is the difference. And most people never get there because they stay stuck in wanting. The Problem With Wanting I see it all the time. People want the car. They want the house. They want the business. They want the life. But they never think about the day after they get it. What happens when you finally achieve that goal you have been chasing for years? What are you showing up for then? Most people never get there because they never make the decision. They stay in this cycle of wanting, hoping, waiting for something to click. Waiting for the deal. Waiting for the opportunity. Waiting for something external to validate them. That moment never comes. The real shift happens when you stop wanting and you decide. The Flip Of The Switch I learned this by watching Carla. At first it was a want. She wanted to compete. She wanted to be on that stage. She wanted to earn her pro card. But the moment she said, I am going to get it, everything changed. Her habits changed. Her schedule changed. Her excuses disappeared. No babysitter. She figured it out. Kids at home. She brought them with her. Late at night. She showed up anyway. Early morning. She showed up anyway. There was no more negotiation. No more stories. No more waiting. That is the flip of the switch. And that is when everything starts aligning. The right people. The right opportunities. The right situations. Not because of luck, but because of conviction. Excuses Are The Delay On Your Life Most people are not lacking opportunity. They are lacking commitment. You do not show up because you are not feeling well. You do not show up because a deal fell through. You do not show up because someone said something that got under your skin. And every time you do that, you push your life further away from you. I watched Carla show up with a broken toe. I watched her show up when everything around her could have justified stopping. I even tried to throw her off at times. And it still did not matter. The next day she showed up. That is the difference. I Had To Face Myself There was a time where I was the problem. I would show up until things got hard. Until something went wrong. Until I felt uncomfortable. And then I would shut down. I blamed circumstances. I blamed people. I blamed situations. But the truth was simple. I was not showing up. And when I finally got tired of my own excuses, that is when everything changed. I decided that no matter what happens, I show up. Deals fall apart. I show up. People leave. I show up. Personal problems hit. I show up. Embarrassment. Fear. Doubt. I show up. That is it. Showing Up Changes Everything Showing up is not just about your business. It is about your health. It is about your family. It is about your mindset. It is about your standards. When you decide that nothing is going to take you off your path, everything about you changes. You still feel fear. You still have doubt. You still go through stress. But it no longer controls your actions. You move anyway. And when you do that consistently, your life starts to build in a completely different direction. Make The Decision Second quarter is here. If you are waiting for a sign, this is it. Stop wanting. Stop blaming. Stop sitting on the sidelines. Make the decision. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Not when something works out. Right now. Flip the switch and keep it on. Because the only difference between those winning and those still waiting is that one group decided they were not going to stop. Questions For Reflection Where in your life are you still operating from a place of wanting instead of deciding What excuse have you been using that is delaying the results you say you want If you committed to showing up no matter what for the next 90 days, what would your life look like Notable Quotes "Success is inevitable when you show up doing the right things day in and day out." "The flip happens when it goes from I want to I am getting it." "You do not stop doing what you are responsible for just because things are not going your way." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

It's April and the DtW crew is ready for new TV! Dan and Raul are watching bunnies hiding colorful eggs as well as trailers for new TV coming up in the next month, and have a carefully curated basket of shows that might make Spring a little sunnier. There's some real world business here including Made for March, following teams through March Madness, This is a Gardening Show, where Zach Galifianakis will teach us all about gardening in a funny and charming way, and Trust Me: The False Prophet, a crime doc peeking in on an LDS offshoot. Drama-wise, among the plastic grass we find another season of Beef, a Handmaid's spinoff, a desperate dip into OnlyFans in Margo's Got Money Problems and a series remake of Man on Fire. Plus our hosts are excited about Widow's Bay, a possible Twin Peaks-like story, and more! Come check out this April shower of shows!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I found myself reflecting on something simple but powerful. As we close out the first quarter, the truth is right in front of all of us. Some are winning at a high level and others feel like they are falling behind. And the real question becomes this… how do you keep going no matter where you are? I started thinking about the version of me that refuses to stop. The one that keeps pushing, keeps building, keeps fighting through doubt, fear, and uncertainty. That version did not just appear overnight. It was built through experiences, failures, pressure, and a decision to keep showing up no matter what. One of the biggest realizations for me is this. If you are in business, you have to compete. You cannot sit back and watch others win and convince yourself that their success is not meant for you. That mindset will slowly turn into frustration, then jealousy, then excuses. I have seen it happen too many times. Competing is not about tearing others down. It is about seeing yourself in that same position and deciding you belong there too. It is about waking up with the mindset that no one is going to outwork you today. It is about holding yourself to a standard where your word actually means something. I had a moment recently that reminded me of this. I told a group I would be at Camelback Mountain the next morning and I missed it. No one had to call me out. I felt it immediately. That feeling of not showing up, of going against my own word, it hit me hard. That is what competition looks like. It is internal. It is personal. It is tied directly to your integrity. But competition is not the only thing that drives me. Sometimes it is memory. I go back to the moments where I felt like I was failing. When I questioned myself as a provider. When I felt like everything around me was falling apart. Those were real moments. And instead of running from them, I use them. I remember how it felt to be in that place so I never allow myself to stay there again. Because the truth is, most of the problems we face today do not even compare to what we have already been through. But if we forget that, we start making our current challenges feel bigger than they really are. Then there is discipline. There are days I do not feel like showing up. Days where my mind is somewhere else, where I feel off, where I am not at my best. But discipline creates a minimum standard. It does not care how you feel. It does not care if you are motivated. It just requires you to show up. And that standard matters. Because when you do not have discipline, your off days cost you everything. You stop showing up, you isolate, you slow down your business, you create distance in your relationships. Discipline keeps you moving forward even when everything in you wants to pause. Another thing that keeps me going is the environment. I look around and I see people winning. I see people overcoming things that six months ago felt impossible for them. I get messages, I hear stories, I see growth happening in real time. And it forces me to ask myself… how can I sit here and feel sorry for myself when all of this is happening around me? Sometimes it is not competition, memory, or discipline that gets you going. Sometimes it is simply being connected to people who are rising. And then there is responsibility. At the end of the day, this is bigger than just you. The way you show up affects your family, your kids, your spouse. I have seen what happens when you allow doubt and negativity to take over. I have seen how it changes the way people look at you. I have felt that shift before and it does not sit right. You are responsible for creating a stable, safe, and strong environment. Not just financially, but emotionally. The way you handle pressure, the way you respond to challenges, it all impacts the people around you. There was a moment I remember clearly when I could feel that confidence in me fading in my own household. That look of belief started to turn into doubt. And I knew I created that. That was on me. That was a result of how I was showing up. That is when everything shifted. I stopped blaming circumstances and took full responsibility. Because the moment you do that, you take your power back. And I want to be real with you. Even now, there are days where I am off. Days where nothing seems to click. Just recently, I had one of those days where everything felt heavy. I tried to push through it and nothing worked. So I did something different. I gave myself permission to feel it. I stopped fighting it. I allowed myself to sit in it, process it, and understand it. And instead of letting it take over days or weeks like it used to, it took me about an hour and a half to reset. After that, I was back on my game. That is growth. Not that you never feel it, but that you recover faster. At the end of it all, there is no single thing that keeps you going. It is a combination of competition, memory, discipline, environment, and responsibility. Different things will fuel you on different days. The key is knowing how to tap into them. You already have everything you need. You are not here to watch others build the life you want. You are here to create it yourself. So the real question is… what are you going to use as fuel? Questions to Reflect On Where in your life are you acting as a spectator instead of a competitor, and what would it look like to change that immediately? What past experience can you tap into today that reminds you of how strong and capable you really are? When you are off your game, do your habits protect your progress or destroy it? Notable Quotes " You have to love to compete if you are in business. " " I will never feel that way again. That is not a hope, that is a decision. " " Discipline creates a minimum standard of who you are, no matter how you feel."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

March 27, 2026 ~ Full Show: Kevin covers a busy and news-filled morning on All Talk, featuring politics, sports, and local impact stories. The show includes analysis of Washington developments with political scientist Dave Dulio, and reaction from listeners during open lines. College basketball is front and center with NCAA Tournament previews from former Governors Rick Snyder and John Engler, along with expert breakdowns from WJR's Steve Courtney. The conversation turns local as Romulus Mayor Robert McCraight discusses a federal lawsuit to block a proposed DHS detention center near DTW. Later, James David Dickson examines concerning trends in Michigan's economic rankings, and Taylor Vitany wraps up the show with a look at what's happening around Metro Detroit this weekend. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery There are moments in life where everything feels right. You look around and you realize the work, the sacrifice, and the discipline have created something meaningful. But then something small happens and your mind begins to drift. Fear shows up. Doubt creeps in. Anxiety begins whispering questions that were never there before. I had one of those weeks. It was a roller coaster of emotion. The highest appreciation for the life I have built and then suddenly a wave of fear and doubt. And it reminded me of something that every one of us needs to understand if we want to lead our lives with clarity and strength. A moment in time does not define who you are. Understanding a Moment in Time A moment in time is simply a temporary emotional or mental state that appears in response to circumstances. It is a snapshot. It is not your identity. We experience pressure. We experience success. We experience fear. We experience uncertainty. But those feelings are simply information from our mind and body about what is happening around us. What truly matters is not the moment itself. What matters is how we respond. This realization came to me while I was on vacation with my family in Turks and Caicos. I was sitting on the beach in deep appreciation for everything that had been created in my life. My daughter had just turned seventeen. My other daughter was in Spain. I felt grateful for the journey that had brought us there. And then my mind traveled backward. I began thinking about who I was at seventeen years old. That thought took me back to a moment in my life when I was fighting for my life. I went from appreciation to pain in seconds simply because my mind chose to revisit a story from the past. And I had to stop myself. Why was I leaving a moment of gratitude to relive something that I had already overcome? The answer was simple. My mind was trying to create contrast. It was trying to bring balance to a moment that felt almost too good. But the truth is that we do not have to stay there. Bringing Yourself Back to the Present After that moment I reminded myself of something powerful. I am here now. That phrase changes everything. It reminds us that the past does not control us unless we allow it to. It reminds us that our current circumstances are the only place where we have the power to act. And this lesson showed up again when I returned home. We discovered that one of our dogs was struggling to breathe. We rushed him to the animal hospital and the doctors discovered that his lung had started leaking air. It had happened spontaneously. There was no clear reason. Suddenly the emotional shift happened again. The cost of the treatment was high. My mind immediately started replaying every financial decision I had made recently. The trip. The investments in the business. The new building. The furniture we were ordering. I began questioning everything. But then I caught myself. Instead of going down that road I asked a simple question. What am I going to do next? The answer was obvious. We were going to take care of the problem. We had the resources. We had worked for those resources. There was no reason to sit in fear when the solution was already clear. That was the moment I said something that changed my mindset completely. Thank you God. It was easy to say those words when I was sitting on the beach feeling grateful. But it mattered even more to say them when things became challenging. Because gratitude should not only exist in moments of success. Gratitude must also exist in moments of pressure. The Story We Tell Ourselves Many of the struggles we experience come from the stories we create in our own minds. One moment becomes a narrative. That narrative becomes part of our identity. And before we know it we start believing something about ourselves that is simply not true. I see this happen all the time with people who step away from their goals. Someone stops showing up for a while. They stop posting content. They stop attending meetings. And then they begin telling themselves that it is too late to come back. Weeks turn into months. Months turn into years. But the truth is simple. You can always say one sentence. I am here now. That is all it takes to reset your path. Challenging the Thoughts of Yesterday Years ago in March of 2020 I wrote a journal entry during a very difficult period in my life. There was fear. There was frustration. There was anxiety about the future of the business and the direction we were heading. I questioned myself. I questioned my leadership. I questioned my ability to navigate the challenges we were facing. But in that journal entry I asked myself one powerful question. What would happen if you were free of these thoughts? The answer became my instruction. I would be confident. I would focus on the journey. I would execute. I would love my life. I would stay present with my family. That moment in time did not define my character. It was simply feedback about where my mind had wandered. Since that moment our organization has grown tremendously. Our brokerage has more than doubled. Our agents are producing at levels that we once only imagined. But the most important realization is this. The same thoughts still show up from time to time. The difference now is that I recognize them quickly and I respond differently. Choosing Your Response Growth does not come from learning something new every day. Growth comes from challenging the thoughts that held you back yesterday. When fear shows up you have two options. You can allow that moment to become your identity. Or you can give yourself clear instructions on what to do next. Move forward. Execute. Trust that the work you have put in will carry you through the challenge. A moment in time does not define your life. Your response does. And sometimes the most powerful thing you can do in that moment is pause and say thank you. Thank you for the challenge. Thank you for the awareness. Thank you for the opportunity to grow. Because every moment is simply an invitation to become stronger. Reflective Questions When you experience fear or doubt, do you treat it as a defining moment or simply a temporary state? What story are you currently telling yourself that may not actually be true? What is one action you can take today that would move you forward instead of staying stuck in your thoughts? Notable Quotes "A moment in time is a snapshot of how you feel or think in that instant. It is not your identity." "I am here now." "With God I shall not fear. Without God the world controls my emotions."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

PA grant funding at Carnegie Mellon to fight food insecurity; pushback continues as DTW considers airport cigar lounge; Congress pressed to fund wildlife crossings as FL panther deaths rise; New England and beyond and IN governor refuses to sign syringe program bill.

This week, DtW looks back at the beginnings of a villain so beloved he became the hero! Dan and Raul watched Manhunter, the Michael Mann directed film that introduced the film world to one Hannibal Lecter (Lektor?) and his creepy charisma. While the performance Brian Cox brings to the Cannibal stands in stark contrast to the more famous performance, the whole film is cool and stylish glimpse into a franchise and director both bound for legendary status. Come track down the killer with us! 

If March is supposed to go out like a lamb, the TV studios didn't get the memo because DtW has a bunch of new TV to check out and a lot of it is deep into the month! Dan and Raul have a few selections to start, including a Guy Ritchie style Young Sherlock, a love triange that is DTF St. Louis style and a movie about a Bride! married to a real monster. Midway through the month it's D'arcy Carden and Will Forte falling into comedic crime days and Sunny Nights along with a sequel season called Jury Duty Presents Company Retreat, for fans of the original Jury Duty. Finally we reach late March with returning shows like The Comeback, Daredevil: Born Again and The For All Mankind, shows that The Hosts of this pod find worth mentioning, as well as shiny new stuff like Rhiz Ahmed's Bait and films They Will Kill You and Project Hail Mary. The month marches forward with plenty to keep us excited throughout, so give it a listen and get moving!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I am coming off one of the highest moments we have ever experienced as a team. Ignite 2026 was the biggest one yet. The energy. The recognition. The collaboration. The stories. The numbers. The celebration. I could barely sleep that night because I was watching it unfold from perspectives I do not always get to see. Behind the scenes, Carla and I are focused on execution. But through social media, through your messages, through your faces, I got to witness what it meant to you. And that is when something hit me. Every single year, people walk up to us and tell us what they are going to accomplish next year. Ten million. Fifteen million. Twenty million. And almost every single time, the ones who say it and commit to it actually do it. But here is the tension. There is a difference between declaring something with conviction and announcing something for a dopamine hit. In today's world, you can post that you are starting a diet, running a marathon, building a business, and immediately get applause. Congratulations. Fire emojis. Likes. Validation. And that initial rush can feel just like the accomplishment itself. It feels done before the work even begins. That is dangerous. Because when the lights turn off, when the music stops, when the stage is gone, you are left with the same marriage, the same finances, the same limiting beliefs, the same pipeline, the same habits. And if you are not grounded, that vision that felt so certain at Ignite can feel overwhelming just a few days later. So the real question is this. Who are you when things do not go your way? Right before Ignite started, we realized we had signed off on a much larger expense than expected. A surprise bill. A big one. It would have been easy to get frustrated. To lower my energy. To let it throw off the entire event. But how can I stand on that stage and ask you to go for ten million if I let a surprise expense shake my belief in abundance? The moment tested me. And that is what I need you to understand. You do not become a ten million dollar producer when everything is perfect. You become one in how you respond when it is not. If an appraisal comes in low and you spiral, you are not there yet. If a binzer does not go your way and you shut down, you are not there yet. If one client disrupts your momentum and your energy drops, you are not there yet. The numbers you wrote down at Ignite are possible. I believe that fully. But you have to stop chasing the high and start building the foundation. Events like Ignite are the cherry on top. They are not the foundation. The foundation is built in the in between. It is built in the daily deposits. The power deposits. The purpose deposits. The profit deposits. It is built when you post one video today instead of promising five every day and burning out by Wednesday. It is built when you upload ten contacts into your CRM instead of saying you are going to rebuild your entire database in one sitting. It is built when you follow up today. Not when you feel like it. Not when motivation is high. Today. The top producers who spoke on that panel did not get there by accident. It was strategic. It was methodical. It was disciplined. They got mentally right. Physically right. Spiritually right. Emotionally right. Then they executed. That is not a concept anymore. It is a fact. And the fact is this. You do not need to go chase conferences, happy hours, or environments that sell you a false narrative. You do not need constant highs. You need consistent wins. When I used to chase that conference high, I would come home depleted. Irritable. Blaming my circumstances. Because reality did not match the energy of the stage. That is addiction. That is not growth. Growth is when your baseline is strong enough that even your worst day is still better than your old life. That is what we are building here. Some people avoided Ignite because they were ashamed. Maybe they did not get the award they wanted. Maybe they did not get one at all. But hiding from reality does not help you grow. Facing it does. You should have been on that stage. If you were not, that is not shame. That is information. Now do something with it. Between now and your next review, what are you going to change? Not next year. Not someday. Today. Swing for singles. Get on base. Win today. The grand slam comes when you stack enough singles. If all of you hit the numbers you declared, we are looking at over a billion dollars in production collectively. That is not fantasy. That is math. But math only works when the daily inputs are consistent. You do not work up to a client. You work through a client. You do not stop when you get an appointment. You keep running the race. You do not pass the baton. You stay in motion. And above all, you cannot get thrown off by the small things. The next level version of you does not respond with frustration. They respond with composure. They respond with solutions. They respond with discipline. Ignite set a new bar. But we do not top fire dancers and sparklers with more theatrics. We top it with more of you on stage. That is how we win. Now the question is simple. Are you willing to want it more than I want it for you? Reflection Questions When things do not go your way, what is your automatic response and does it align with the level of producer you say you want to become? What are three small deposits you can make today that move you closer to your declared number? Are you chasing environments that make you feel accomplished, or are you building habits that actually make you accomplished? Notable Quotes "You do not become a ten million dollar producer when everything is perfect. You become one in how you respond when it is not." "Events are the cherry on top. The foundation is built in the in between." "We do not top it with more fireworks. We top it with more of you on stage." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, the conversation centers on something that quietly controls everything in our lives. Our thoughts. Not the loud negative self talk. The subtle limitations we repeat every single day without even realizing it. I talk about how happiness is an effort. It is a conscious decision. It takes just as much energy to live in scarcity and chaos as it does to live in fulfillment and abundance. The difference is what we allow to dominate our mind. For a long time I did not realize that I was creating the very struggle I was trying to escape. I kept telling myself life was chaotic. I kept reinforcing how hard things were. And I kept getting more of that. Whatever you think about often becomes your reality. Not because it magically appears, but because your brain begins searching for evidence to confirm what you already believe. The Subtle Negativity That Is Slowing You Down This episode is not about obvious self hatred. It is about the quiet phrases that sound harmless but destroy progress. It is too early. I am too busy. It is too far. It is too expensive. I will try. We will see. I do not know enough. I am not ready. Those phrases remove ownership. They remove urgency. They remove responsibility. The moment you say something is too hard or too far, you have already decided it cannot be done. And when you remove urgency and ownership, you remove solutions. I had to confront the fact that my instinct was to focus on how difficult something would be instead of how great it would feel to achieve it. I would say I wanted abundance, but my thoughts were rooted in limitation. I would say I wanted happiness, but I kept repeating that I had a hole in my soul. You cannot build abundance from scarcity rooted thinking. From Hope to Certainty One of the biggest shifts is moving from hope to certainty. I hope the offer gets accepted. I hope it appraises. I hope they do not cut my commission. Hope leaves the door open for failure. A player does not operate from hope. A player operates from certainty. I am going to negotiate the heck out of this. I am going to get this deal done. If this one falls apart, I will find another one. That mindset changes your posture. It changes how you speak to your client. It changes how you show up in negotiations. And most importantly, it changes what your brain looks for. If you are constantly thinking about what might go wrong, you will find evidence of what is wrong. If you are thinking about solutions and dominance, you will find evidence of that too. Your Brain Follows Your Instructions I reference The Answer by John Assaraf because it reinforces something powerful. The brain is malleable. Repeated thoughts create repeated pathways. Over time, those pathways become automatic. Your thoughts literally become instructions for what your brain focuses on. If you constantly tell yourself you are not good at sales, your brain will search for evidence that confirms it. If you tell yourself you are confident, capable, and disciplined, your brain will look for evidence of that. But thoughts alone are not enough. You cannot say you want success and avoid the actions that create success. You cannot say you want to dominate and then avoid making the videos, following up, learning the contracts, mastering the skill sets. Intentional positivity must be paired with intentional action. If you want to be successful, you will do what successful people do. You will reach out. You will follow up. You will study. You will improve. You will do the work. Wants Versus Needs Another subtle trap is operating only from need. I just need one deal. I just need to pay my mortgage. If that is all you ask for, that is all you will get. You will find a way to barely survive. But when you shift to wants, real wants, big wants, your thinking expands. I want to dominate. I want to be top one percent. I want abundance beyond my bills. When you raise the standard internally, your behavior starts aligning with it. The Daily Practice This is a daily battle. Even now, subtle negativity tries to creep in. But I combat it with intentional reinforcement. Today is a good day. I am going to dominate this space. I am going to set appointments. I am going to learn the skills required to be a top producer. Little by little, those thoughts shape behavior. That behavior shapes results. And those results reinforce the belief. If you want fulfillment, think fulfillment. If you want abundance, think abundance. If you want success, think success and move toward it with action. Change your mind. Change your actions. Create the life you have always wanted. Reflective Questions What subtle phrases do you repeat daily that are limiting your growth without you realizing it? Where are you operating from hope instead of certainty in your business or personal life? If you truly believed you would dominate this year, what actions would you take starting today? Notable Quotes "Subtle negativity morphs throughout the day unless you intentionally combat it with positivity." "Hope leaves the door open. Certainty creates solutions." "Your thoughts become instructions for what your brain chooses to focus on."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

Being afraid of something doesn't sound preferable, but throughout the Bible we see benefits from fearing the Lord. Find out what that can look like for us today and what we'll experience when we do!Receive The fear of the Lord is the starting place for wisdom and it leads to a never-ending friendship with a loving God. Scripture reveals that fearing the Lord is intended to comfort us not to scare us. Because the more we understand God's character, the more we are compelled to revere Him. God's Word guides us to express our fear of the Lord through right living, rejecting evil, and clinging to what is good.  Reflect Read the verses connected with this episode below. As you reflect on the Scripture, what stands out to you? Matthew 1:20 Matthew 2:22 Matthew 9:1-8 Acts 13:16, 26, 43 1 Peter 1:1 1 Peter 5:12-13 Revelation 19:4-10 John 4:13-18 Matthew 10:26-31 helps the disciples understand how much God cares for them—and how much He's in control, even during tribulations. How does this encourage you to know that God is on your side?  Acts 10:1-2, 34-35 shows that those who fear God leave an openness to be surprised with how He works. How does this encourage you to look for God's mighty presence and expansive invitation in your life?  1 Peter 2:11-17 summarizes a picture of what it looks like to fear God (live in freedom, respect everyone, love the family of believers, honor authority). How does keeping God first in these kinds of ways help you live in the world better? Revelation 14:6-8 shows that the fear of the Lord is linked to God's judgment which can lead to worship and praise. How does this fear of the Lord draw you closer into relationship with Him? Respond (Use this prayer to start a conversation with God) “Jesus, help me demonstrate my reverence for God by living in His freedom, respecting others, loving fellow believers, and honoring the authorities He has placed in my life. Help me see how putting God first in these kinds of ways leads me to live well.”  Discover more about the topics in this episode with these recommended resources Mentioned in this episode: Explore the DTW archives  Listen: Proverbial Wisdom  A Life of Wisdom and the Proverbs 31 Woman  Read: Reverent Fear  Understanding the Bible: The Wisdom Books  Watch: Mount Arbel - Sermon on the Mount and the Great Commission 

This week, DtW is into the superhero-adjacent MCU TV show, Wonder Man! Dan and Raul have Jonnie back to talk more about Marvel as they field another series introducing a lesser-known hero with ionic abilities and killer shades. Yaya Abdul-Mateen II and Sir Ben Kingsley star in this two-hander about hiding your true self, braving the ins and outs of the film industry and most of all, friendship. While Yaya's Simon is desperate to launch a real acting career, his own creative ideas are getting in the way. Meanwhile, Ben's Trevor is navigating life after being the face of terror as The Mandarin and is roped into ensnaring the powered Simon for the shady Dept of Damage Control by appealing to his need for help with his acting career as well as a real friend. Classic setup, but do the burgeoning buddies survive the reveal of the deception and Damage Control coming for them? Is fighting for the role of his dreams what emboldens Simon to take a big step forward in life? I bet these three guys have some thoughts!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I found myself confronting a question that hits all of us more often than we want to admit. Do I really have to do this again. Another video. Another appointment. Another conversation. Another challenge. What I realized, and what I wanted to share, is how easy it is to let the very blessings we once prayed for turn into chores in our minds. That shift is dangerous because it slowly erodes our gratitude, our excitement, and eventually our momentum. I see this play out in business and in life. We convince ourselves that we are stuck, that nothing is changing, that the problems we face today are the same ones we will deal with forever. We start time traveling into the future and magnifying the discomfort of repeating challenges. But when we slow down and take an honest look, the truth is that we are growing. We are becoming more efficient, more skilled, and more capable. The only thing holding us back is the story we keep telling ourselves. I had to be intentional about my own mindset. Positivity does not just show up for me. I have to remind myself to smile more, to enjoy what I have built, and to stop wearing seriousness like it is a badge of honor. Discipline matters, strategy matters, but so does joy. If I do not enjoy my life while I am building it, then I am missing the point. I want to focus on the vision, not just the tasks, and battle negative thoughts with something bigger than the problem in front of me. This became even clearer through watching my daughter step into discomfort. She recently went on her first mission trip to Mexico, despite being afraid that she did not speak the language well enough or know the culture well enough. The fear of embarrassment almost kept her from going at all. That fear is the same fear business owners feel when stepping into higher price points, bigger clients, or unfamiliar opportunities. Once she went, everything changed. She connected, she figured it out, and she came back confident, excited, and ready to go again. The growth was always there. She just needed to step into it. That is what I see happening with so many of you. You say you are not moving fast enough, but the reality is you are not making the decisions you already know you need to make. Hiring help. Raising your standards. Taking risks that align with the bigger vision. The problem is not speed. The problem is hesitation. Once the decision is made, momentum follows, just like it did for my daughter. I want fulfillment, not temporary happiness or avoidance of pain. Fulfillment comes from action, discipline, and alignment with a greater mission. It means understanding that bigger goals bring bigger demands, fears, and sleepless nights, and choosing to show up anyway. When we magnify action, minimize problems, and break through ceilings, the excitement returns. We stop seeing our work as chores and start seeing it as proof that we are building something meaningful. If you feel stuck, it is not because you are behind. It is because you are focusing on the wrong thing. You have been here before. You have figured things out before. And you will do it again, as long as you are willing to step forward instead of waiting for fear to quiet down. Reader reflection questions Where in your life have blessings started to feel like burdens, and how can you reframe them today What decision have you been avoiding that you already know aligns with your bigger vision How would your business or life change if you focused more on action and less on proving why something might not work Notable quotes The same blessings that we prayed for can turn into chores if we are not intentional about our mindset The problem is not that you are moving too slow, the problem is that you are not moving at all Fulfillment comes when we magnify action, minimize problems, and break through ceilings   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about what it really looks like when life starts to feel chaotic even when everything on the surface appears to be moving forward. I share how easy it is to drift off track without even realizing it, not because we lack discipline or desire, but because we allow unchecked thoughts, comparison, and distraction to slowly take control. This episode is about awareness, responsibility, and learning how to bring order back when everything inside feels like it is sitting at a ten. I start by reflecting on how common it is for people to abandon their goals early in the year. Not because they are lazy or incapable, but because distractions quietly take priority. I see it in business, in relationships, and in myself. We put energy into things that do not actually move the needle, and before we know it, we are frustrated, exhausted, and reacting instead of leading. When life is full with business, family, marriage, and responsibility, it is easy to carry unresolved pressure without ever slowing down to identify where it is coming from. I share a personal example involving Carla and how disagreements can escalate even when neither of us can remember what started them. The issue was never the moment itself. I was already operating at a ten. When we fail to check our thoughts and emotions early, we carry that weight into every interaction. One small comment or inconvenience becomes the final straw. This pattern shows up everywhere. In marriages, friendships, parenting, and business decisions. The problem is not the situation. It is the lens we are viewing it through. I explain how comparison quietly fuels this chaos. Watching others move fast or succeed differently can trigger self doubt even when we are doing the right things. That doubt grows when it is ignored. It turns into fear, insecurity, and frustration that eventually spills into areas of life that have nothing to do with the original trigger. When that happens, we start blaming circumstances, people, markets, or systems instead of taking responsibility for our internal state. One of the biggest shifts I talk about is accepting that I am human. Certain things bother me. Pretending they do not only makes the problem worse. Creating space from distractions is not weakness. It is leadership. I share how intentionally muting content and refocusing my attention helped me regain clarity and alignment. When I mind my business, focus on what I can control, and stay present, everything improves. When I avoid the work or escape into comparison and noise, I stay stuck. This episode is a reminder that growth does not come from more information. It comes from action, discipline, and honesty with yourself. The chaos does not disappear by accident. Order is created when we identify our triggers, challenge our thoughts, and commit to doing what we already know needs to be done. Reader Reflection Questions What thoughts or comparisons have been quietly putting you on edge lately Where in your life are you reacting at a ten instead of addressing the root cause early What distractions do you need to create space from so you can refocus on what you can control Notable Quotes "I was already at a ten. The situation did not take me there." "When I stop checking my thoughts, everything around me becomes chaotic." "I do not need more information. I need more action and alignment."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

This week on DtW, we're throwing back to the OG meta-horror flick, 1996's Scream! Dan joins Raul's rewatch of the series leading up to a new 2026, Neve-centered sequel to discuss the first film of the franchise. Veteran horror director Wes Craven helms one of the first films to dissect it's genre within the plot and dialogue with seemingly endless nods to, cameos from and easter eggs related to classic horror from all generations. The film is dripping with 90s personality and stands as one of the prototypical films discussing film within it's story, but is it held up entirely by nostalgia or has it remained relevant 30 years later? Listen in as our hosts take a stab at it!

February 5, 2026 ~ Marie Osborne, WJR's Director of Community Affairs and News discusses the new barricade being put up at DTW and the latest in the skull Goodwill donation mystery. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I open up about something I wrestle with constantly and that is the tension between pressure and gratitude. Running a business, leading a household, being a husband and a father all come with responsibility. That responsibility can quietly turn into suffering if I am not careful about where my mind goes. I talk about how easy it is to get trapped in comparison, future goals, past mistakes, and the weight of everything I think I should be doing. My mind moves fast. Too fast at times. When I let it run unchecked, it creates pressure that feels overwhelming. Not because life is bad, but because I stop being present. I stop checking myself. I forget how far I have come. Marriage and family play a big role in this conversation. What people see from the outside is never the full picture. Carla and I carry a lot together. We take on the challenges of running a large operation, supporting agents, and navigating life as partners. Sometimes the stress leaks into the home. Sometimes we say things we do not mean. I have learned that the real suffering does not come from the situation itself but from holding onto anger, shame, and resentment instead of processing it and moving forward. I share honestly that positivity does not come naturally to me. It is something I work at every day. I wake up and my mind wants to go negative. So I fight back with intention. I listen to books and podcasts focused on awareness and discipline. I move my body. I create space to slow my thoughts down. These practices help but even then it is easy to forget to check the thermometer and realize I am overheating mentally. One moment that stopped me in my tracks came from listening to a story on a podcast while cleaning my car. A forest ranger survived being crushed under a fallen tree in the rainforest. After hours trapped under rubble she survived with barely a scratch. The next morning she was lying in a hammock saying one simple phrase over and over. I am alive. Hearing that broke me open. That moment pulled me back to being seventeen years old after weeks in the hospital not knowing if I would live. I remember driving home and seeing the world differently. The sky was brighter. Everything felt beautiful. I was overwhelmed with gratitude just to be here. I was alive. Somewhere along the way I forgot how powerful that realization is. I reflect on how easy it is to move from praying for a life to rushing through it once you have it. I remind myself that everything I have today was once a prayer. The suffering I create now is unnecessary. It comes from living in the past or racing into the future instead of standing firmly in the present. The solution is not complicated but it does require honesty and action. Be here. Tell your spouse you love them. Tell your kids how proud you are. Call your parents. Look in the mirror and say you are proud of yourself. When I focus on what I can do right now everything else eventually takes care of itself. Life is good right now. The work is learning how to believe that and live from it. Reader Reflection Questions Where has your mind been spending most of its time lately in the past the future or the present What parts of your life were once prayers that you may now be overlooking What is one small action you can take today to be more present with the people who matter most Notable Quotes I do not know if I am okay but I am alive Worry and anxiety are caused by too much focus on the future while guilt regret and resentment come from dwelling in the past Everything I have today was once a prayer Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I want to talk about something that weighs heavier than most people realize and that is the responsibility and guilt that can come with leadership advice and influence. There are moments where my mind feels full because leadership is not just about business decisions. It is about people. It is about hearing their struggles, their finances, their marriages, their health, and still being expected to show up strong. For years I tried to avoid leadership because I thought it was easier to just tell people what to do. What I learned is that real leadership is about empowering others to trust themselves and take ownership of their decisions. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn was separating advice from responsibility. When you give advice based on your experience, it comes from integrity. It comes from wanting others to avoid pain or move faster toward growth. But when someone takes that advice, the outcome is not yours to carry. If you take responsibility for their results, good or bad, you actually disempower them and yourself. I lived this lesson firsthand. After financial failures early in my life, I stopped trusting my own judgment. I leaned on Carla to make decisions and then blamed her when things did not work out. That resentment damaged trust and weakened me as a leader and as a husband. Advice only becomes toxic when it is used as a scapegoat instead of a guide. I realized that advice is information, not a guarantee. It is up to the person receiving it to make it their own and see it through. If they quit at the first obstacle, it becomes easy to call it bad advice. But most growth happens after things get uncomfortable. Everything meaningful in my life got harder before it got better. Marriage. Business. Leadership. Faith. I have given advice about quitting jobs, maxing out credit cards, betting on yourself, and rebuilding relationships. I share what I did, not what someone should do. Leaders mirror what people already feel in their heart and soul. The danger comes when someone wants the result without the responsibility of seeing the process through. Guilt can destroy momentum if you let it sit unchecked. I carried guilt for years over borrowed money, failed ventures, and hard decisions. What finally freed me was understanding that time and integrity bring everything full circle. Debts get paid. Relationships heal. Growth happens. But only if you stay in it long enough. As leaders, parents, and mentors, our job is not to control outcomes. Our job is to speak truth from experience and allow others to take ownership of their choices. And if you are on the receiving end of advice, your responsibility is not to blame but to commit and see it through. Reader reflection questions Where in your life are you blaming advice instead of owning your decision What advice have you taken but not fully committed to seeing through How would your growth change if you released guilt and focused on responsibility Notable quotes "You cannot take responsibility for the outcome of someone else's decision." "Advice is not a guarantee. It is information." "Everything meaningful gets harder before it gets better."   1. Read and Understand the Transcript: * Thoroughly review the podcast transcript to grasp the overall storyline or Storylines and lessons being shared. * Identify the main message, key points, and any personal experiences that are central to the episode.    Important do not use hyphens whatsoever or emojis throughout the entire document. this is an indication that AI was used for the write up. Remove hyphens in the writeup.  2. Draft the Blog Post Summary:  * Introduction: Start with a hook that draws the reader in, setting up the story or lesson in a way that speaks directly to the reader. IN a first-person point of view.  * Body: Summarize the key points of the story, focusing on the lessons derived from the experiences shared. Maintain the flow of the narrative while keeping it concise.  * Conclusion: Wrap up the summary by reinforcing the main takeaway. Encourage the reader to reflect on how the lesson applies to their own life or work.    3. Omit Irrelevant Content:  * Exclude any parts of the transcript that do not contribute to the overall message or lesson. Focus on the content that provides value and clarity to the reader.    4. Include Reader Engagement Questions:  * At the end of the summary, include 3 questions that prompt the reader to think deeply about the episode's content and how it applies to their own situation. These should be reflective and action-oriented.    5. Highlight Notable Quotes:  * Pull out 3 notable quotes from the transcript that capture key insights, impactful moments, or memorable phrases. These should be presented at the end of the blog post, either as a standalone section or integrated into the text.   6. Maintain Consistent Voice and Tonality: IMPORTANT The blog post summaries should maintain the voice, tonality, words and style of the podcaster, ensuring consistency with how the podcast is presented. This way, the written content will align seamlessly with the spoken content, providing a unified experience for your audience.    7. Additional information.  Remember, this is for a blog entry summary of the podcast, so you don't have to say welcome to another episode, I'm A.Z. Araujo, instead say in this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery... Do not use the words, profound, delves, delve, unlock or unlocking or essential, no hyphens no emojis.   8. It is crucial this is communicated in the voice of A.Z. Araujo. Use his way of communicating and conveying the message. Use his vocabulary as much as possible to capture his personality.   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I found myself slowing down and paying attention to something that has shaped every area of my life and business over the years. Self awareness. I walked into the studio a little wired, moving fast, thoughts racing, and it reminded me how easy it is to lose control when you are not grounded. That moment pulled me back to a principle I wrote down years ago. My responsibility is to lead myself, lead my family, lead my team, and lead my business. None of that happens without awareness. As I reflected on what I see every week inside the business, I started connecting the dots between friction and lack of growth. Friction shows up when deals fall apart, when clients lose trust, when agents feel blindsided, and when emotions take over. I see it clearly when I look at cancellations. The majority of deals that fall apart come from newer agents or agents with fewer transactions, not because they are incapable, but because expectations were not set and preparation was missing. When you do not explain the process upfront, when you assume clients understand, you create confusion. And confusion always leads to friction. I have learned that friction is not something to blame on others. It is something to look inward at. Every time I felt emotionally charged, defensive, or frustrated, it came back to my own lack of preparation or communication. When clients question your value or your commission, it is not an attack. It is feedback. It means the foundation was not built strongly enough. Confidence does not come from hoping a deal closes. It comes from knowing you prepared, explained, and led with intention. What changed my life was stacking three things together. Self awareness. Self development. Self discipline. Awareness helps you see where things broke down. Development gives you the tools to fix it. Discipline makes sure you do not repeat the same mistakes. When I stopped reacting emotionally and started responding strategically, everything shifted. My communication became clearer. My leadership became stronger. My results became more consistent. I have learned that it does not matter what you think you said. It matters what the other person heard. If clients are surprised, confused, or defensive, that is on us. Our job is to slow down, explain the process, and make sure they understand every step. When expectations are clear, trust stays intact. When trust stays intact, deals move forward. This is not just about real estate. This is about how you show up in life. If there is friction, it is pointing you to something you need to see. You cannot change what you refuse to look at. Growth begins the moment you take responsibility for your words, your actions, and your preparation. The more aware you become, the less reactive you are. The more disciplined you are, the less chaos you create. And the more intentional you are, the faster momentum builds. Reader reflection questions Where in your business are you experiencing repeated friction and what might it be trying to show you How clearly are you setting expectations with your clients before problems arise What daily disciplines do you need to strengthen to lead yourself at a higher level Notable quotes from the episode "You cannot change what you refuse to see." "If you find yourself explaining or defending yourself, there is a wrench in your system." "It does not matter what you think you said. It matters what they heard."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

Its been 10 years since season 1 of Stranger Things and the last time DTW covered a season of the show...until now! Raul and Dan discuss the epic 5th and final season (focus on the finale ep) of this beloved Netflix TV show, and naturally many of the seasonal ebbs and flows are discussed as certain parts of the season hit more forcefully and meaningfully than others (Will both becomes a sorcerer and comes out in different eps, equally to great effect at both ends of the spectrum; one choice needed to be left in the Upside Down, Duffers...). This oversized pod is proof the boys could not stop blathering on about the show, and it just goes to show, although this series had its ups and downs it will remain a steadfastly successful, immensely entertaining, genre-busting piece of pop culture that will be adored by generations of future TV-watchers for years to come.

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I came into the new year fired up because momentum does not magically appear on January first. Momentum is built by the hours you put in before anyone is watching, by the systems you commit to, and by the discipline to do the work even when it feels repetitive. I have spent decades learning this lesson the hard way, and I am more convinced than ever that systems and consistency are what separate real growth from wishful thinking. I talked about why I am so passionate about building plug and play systems for our agents and why I believe they will continue to pay dividends far into the future. After twenty one years in this business, I know without a doubt that I would not have the results I have today without structure, coaching, and a willingness to listen. I was a student before I ever became a leader. I took notes. I respected the process. I valued the people who were ahead of me and I did exactly what they asked, even when it was uncomfortable. One of the hardest truths I shared is that most people will ask for advice but very few will actually apply it. Overthinking, overanalyzing, and looking for shortcuts becomes a way to stay busy without moving forward. Real change usually comes when the pain gets loud enough that excuses stop working. That is when I invested heavily in coaches and mentors, put my money where my mouth was, and followed instructions without trying to negotiate my way out of the work. When my coach told me to record a video every single day, I did it for over three hundred and fifty days straight. Not because it was easy, but because he had the results I wanted. I also addressed something that needs to be said more often. Accessibility does not mean a lack of value. Just because I answer my phone and pour into people does not mean I operate from scarcity or desperation. I know my worth. When someone asks for guidance and then immediately looks for another opinion without applying what was just given, they are not doing research. They are avoiding responsibility. That behavior breaks trust and eventually closes doors. The lesson is simple but not easy. Stop collecting opinions. Stop asking questions you are not ready to act on. Respect the people who have proven results by actually doing what they say. Consistency builds confidence. Confidence builds certainty. And certainty is the foundation of every top producer I know. If you want more in 2026, there is no secret formula waiting to be discovered. There is only work to be done. Appreciate the access you have. Honor the people pouring into you. And most importantly, show up every day and do the work. Reader reflection questions Where in your life are you asking for advice but not fully applying what you are being told Who in your circle has earned your respect through results and how are you honoring that guidance What consistent action are you avoiding because it feels uncomfortable or repetitive Notable quotes Confidence and certainty are the root of a top producer Just because I am accessible does not mean I do not know my value Stop asking questions and just do more of the work   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I want to slow things down and really take stock of what this past year has looked like. We are in the final stretch of 2025, and if you are anything like me, it feels like it flew by. A lot changed this year. Not just in business or the industry, but personally. Wins, losses, pressure, doubt, growth. Different stories, same emotions. That is the human experience, and it is something we all share whether we talk about it or not. What stood out to me most this year is how extreme the outcomes have been. I have seen people thrive in ways they never imagined, and I have seen others barely hanging on. Some are healthier, stronger, and more confident than ever. Others are exhausted, disconnected, and avoiding hard truths. Marriages strengthening, marriages breaking. Businesses exploding, businesses stuck. When you step back and look at it honestly, there is one common denominator in all of it. Us. Personal accountability is unavoidable. When multiple areas of life feel off, it is not the market, the timing, or other people. It starts with me. I have always had a soft spot for new years. Not because a calendar magically fixes anything, but because it gives people permission to begin again. I know the jokes. The gym fills up. People talk about goals and resolutions like they are pointless. Maybe some people fall back into old habits. I was that person for years. I would promise change, see a little progress, then sabotage it and end the year right where I started or worse. Big wins followed by bigger self destruction. That cycle is exhausting and it limits long term growth. Back in 2014, everything was on the line for me. My marriage was strained. My finances were tight. My health was declining. My mindset was dark. I was not showing up as a husband, a father, or a leader. I was going through the motions, and when you do that long enough, you feel the gap between who you want to be and how you are actually living. That gap is misery. What changed was not motivation. It was responsibility. I learned something critical during that season. Doing the right things today does not erase the consequences of yesterday. You still have debts to pay, relationships to repair, habits to rebuild. Progress does not show up instantly. But it does show up consistently if you stay the course. That is where the idea of the 300 Empire came from. Small daily actions compounded over time. Hours in the gym. Hours studying. Hours sharpening skills. Over time, it changes everything. Not overnight, but permanently. That lesson still applies today. Year after year, the investment compounds. When you put that much time into your mind, body, and craft, it becomes nearly impossible to stay the same. You move faster. You gain confidence. You operate with clarity. The same applies to business. Systems, processes, coaching, repetition. None of it is accidental. It all starts with taking care of yourself first. As we move toward 2026, here is the truth. A new year does not fix anything on its own. Doing the right things occasionally does not either. The difference is doing the right things consistently. When you see people far ahead, it is not because they are smarter or luckier. It is because they are willing to do things others are not. The real question is not what you want. It is what you are willing to do. Peace comes when you stop comparing and start deciding. Decide what you truly want. Decide what success looks like for you. Then commit to the actions that support it. There is no bottom to how bad things can get if you avoid responsibility. But there is also no ceiling on what you can create when you take ownership and stay disciplined. Today is always a good day to begin again. Reader reflection questions What patterns from this past year do you need to take responsibility for instead of avoiding What are the daily actions you know you need to commit to but have been resisting What version of success would actually bring you peace rather than comparison Notable quotes "Rarely does someone destroy their life in a single decision. It is usually a series of small moments ignored over time." "Doing the right things today does not erase the consequences of yesterday, but over time it changes everything." "There is no ceiling to what you can create when you take ownership and stay disciplined."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about momentum, certainty, and why the next level of growth always demands a higher standard from us. As we head into a new year, I can feel it clearly. This organization is not slowing down. We are just getting started. After years of grit, hard decisions, and building when it was uncomfortable, everything is beginning to align. And that alignment comes from one thing above all else. Internal certainty. Over the last decade, I have learned that confidence does not come from positive thinking or hoping things work out. It comes from conditioning yourself to win. Showing up for the small commitments. Executing on what you said you would do. Setting targets and hitting them over and over again. That repetition creates belief. And belief creates momentum. When obstacles show up, and they always do, certainty keeps you grounded because you know it is only a matter of time before you figure it out. As an organization, we are very different than we were five years ago. The systems are sharper. The execution is faster. The scale is bigger. But the core has never changed. The belief system. The faith. The work ethic. What has changed is the number of people willing to operate at that level together. When you surround yourself with individuals who show up regardless of how they feel, momentum multiplies. Wins stack faster. Growth accelerates. And suddenly what once felt impossible becomes the next logical step. Opening a new office is not about convenience or expansion for the sake of expansion. It is a declaration. It is a statement that we are here to build something lasting. That we are willing to take on more responsibility, more pressure, and more challenges because that is what growth requires. I know there will be stress. I know there will be moments where it feels heavy. But I also know that every new standard feels foreign at first. And if you stay consistent, clarity always follows. What I want people to understand is this. Growth is never about becoming someone else. It is about deciding who you are and refusing to shrink back. When you stop challenging yourself, when you choose comfort over progress, motivation fades. The work slows down. And before you know it, you are watching others pass you by. That feeling is far worse than any challenge that comes from going all in. There is a cost to action, but there is a bigger cost to doing nothing. If something is on your heart and soul, and you have done the work to build the foundation, you owe it to yourself and your family to move forward. Not from emotion. Not from pressure. But from certainty. Certainty that you will not quit. Certainty that you will figure it out. Certainty that this is who you are. As we step into what is next, I want people to take an honest look at the environment around them. The support. The leadership. The access. This is not common. And it is not accidental. It is built by people who refuse to slow down, who hold the line, and who continue to show up even when it would be easier not to. That is what creates something special. And that is what makes the next chapter inevitable. Reader Reflection Questions Where in your life or business are you playing it safe instead of stepping into the next standard you know you are capable of What daily commitments are you either honoring or avoiding that are shaping your level of certainty If you truly decided that this is who you are now, what decision would you stop postponing Notable Quotes "Internal certainty comes from conditioning yourself to win on a consistent basis." "There is a bigger cost to doing nothing than there is to taking the risk." "This is not about who I want to become. This is who I am." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I take a moment to reflect on the powerful lessons learned from witnessing a marathon a true test of endurance, not just physically but mentally and emotionally. This wasn't just any marathon; it was a moment of transformation for so many people, a reminder that sometimes life requires us to push through pain and discomfort to discover what we're truly capable of. Over the weekend, I had the privilege of seeing many of our agents and their loved ones cross the finish line of a 26-mile marathon. These individuals willingly chose to endure the physical, mental, and emotional grind of this challenge. To me, it wasn't about the race itself but about what happened in the process. Watching them struggle through the miles, yet still smile despite the pain, was a beautiful display of human resilience. As I joined them, offering words of encouragement along the way, I couldn't help but reflect on my own experiences with pushing my own limits. I've been there, going through moments of deep struggle whether climbing Camelback Mountain or surviving an Ironman 70.3 triathlon. Each of these challenges, no matter how tough, reminds me of something crucial: that life isn't about avoiding hardship, but about leaning into it to grow. The True Value of Struggle It's easy to look at accomplishments as mere checkmarks on a list. But completing a marathon or any tough challenge isn't about the finish line itself; it's about who you become in the process. The real lesson isn't in crossing the line but in what you do after that. What's next? What will you create from the lessons you've learned? This marathon wasn't the end of the journey for these agents. It was just a checkpoint, a milestone that will propel them to greater things in both their personal and professional lives. After all, when you push beyond your limits, it's hard to stay the same. It's not about chasing highs or accolades. It's about developing the discipline to continue growing every day, beyond the big events, beyond the visible moments of success. For many of our agents, this marathon was more than just a race. It was a stepping stone a reminder that in life, the pain we feel in the moment can lead to long-term transformation. The same applies to our everyday struggles, whether in business, relationships, or personal growth. Life will always challenge us, but it's through overcoming those challenges that we discover the depths of our potential. Reflecting on Life's Journey When we push ourselves, we often surprise ourselves. What was once painful becomes something we look back on with pride. In watching others cross that finish line, I was reminded that each of us has a unique capacity for resilience. Life doesn't get easier, but it becomes more meaningful when we embrace the discomfort, learn from it, and use it to raise our own standards. We have to keep pushing. There's no such thing as the "best days" being behind us. Each day is a new opportunity to expand, to grow, and to build on the foundation we've laid. The marathon didn't define our agents; it merely highlighted what they're capable of and how much more they have inside them. And that, to me, is the essence of life. Conclusion So, what happens after the race? That's the real question. As the finish lines fade and the excitement dies down, the work continues. Life doesn't stop at the big victories. It's what we do next that shapes who we truly are. And for all the individuals who completed this marathon, I'm excited to see where this challenge takes them. Because it's never just about running the race. It's about what you do with the strength you gain once it's over. Reader Engagement Questions Have you ever pushed yourself beyond what you thought was possible? How did that experience shape you? What's a challenge you're facing in your life right now that could push your limits? How can you use this as an opportunity for growth? How do you stay motivated after achieving a big goal? How do you ensure that you continue to grow once the excitement fades? Notable Quotes: "It's not just about the finish line. It's about what happens after you cross it, about what you do with what you've learned." "When you push beyond your limits, it's hard to stay the same. You have to intentionally trip yourself up to go backwards." "The marathon wasn't the end of the journey. It was a checkpoint a new standard of what is possible." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery I found myself reflecting on how much can shift in a single weekend. What started as a quick one day trip to see a UFC fight with my daughters turned into a reminder of why I do what I do and why the pressure I carry matters. Being in that arena, watching my girls take it all in, seeing their excitement, their curiosity, and their joy brought me right back to when they were little and would sit next to me watching fights on television. Those were our moments. And now to experience it at this level with them reminding me of our past and showing me what is possible in our future felt powerful. That moment became the backdrop for what hit me on Monday morning. The anxiety. The pressure. The feeling that everything I have built could fall apart in a single moment. It is a feeling I know well, and one that most business owners know too. It shows up even when your life feels like it is firing on all cylinders. It shows up even when everything is going right. And it hit me hard. It was one of those mornings where the weight felt heavier than usual, and even though I pushed through, I had to acknowledge that it was real. What I know now is that this feeling never fully goes away. It is part of the territory when you are building something meaningful. It is part of being a small business owner, a leader, a provider, a person with visions that reach far beyond where you stand today. The fear and anxiety are not signs that something is wrong. They are reminders that growth requires courage. They are reminders that expansion always demands more from you than the last season did. So I journaled, I prayed, I meditated, and I pushed my morning meeting back. Not to avoid it, but to acknowledge it and move through it. Because as uncomfortable as it is, it does not stop me. In fact, it forces me to move. The effort is what makes all the difference. Some days the effort flows effortlessly, and other days it drags. The point is that I keep showing up. What shifted everything for me was hearing Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, speak openly about waking up with fear every single day. He talked about knowing that he must face it head on and take action anyway. Here is a man leading one of the most successful companies in history, speaking the same language that so many of us whisper to ourselves in silence. That interview hit me hard. It reminded me that none of us are broken for feeling fear. We are human. And the people who rise are the ones who continue to move despite it. And it reminded me of why I never let myself forget the lowest points of my life. The years where I felt like I failed my family. Where I felt less than. Where I struggled to see any progress at all. I keep those memories close not because they define me, but because they drive me. They remind me that I never want to go back. They keep me sharp. They keep me aware. They keep me grateful for the chance to lead, to grow, and to build. Everything we experience is part of a never ending story. The fear. The doubt. The breakthroughs. The wins. The losses. It all plays a role in shaping who we are and who we are becoming. And even though it is uncomfortable, I now understand that these feelings are gifts. They create the environment that forces us to expand and forces us to pay attention. They create the space where we learn to respond instead of collapse. As we approach the new year, many people treat December 31 as the finish line and January 1 as the beginning. But it is not. Life and business do not reset. They continue. Your momentum does not disappear because the calendar flips. Your fear does not disappear either. But neither does your grit. Neither does your ability to rise. And when you consistently take the right actions, the results always follow. I believe 2026 is going to require more from all of us. More courage. More effort. More discipline. More vision. And while that is intimidating, it is also exciting. Because everything I have ever wanted has always been on the other side of the unknown. And this next season is no different. The anxiety I felt this morning is slowly shifting into excitement, because I know what we have built, and I know what we can create when we move with purpose. Every time I put my effort into something, I get what I want. That has always been true. And I am leaning into that once again. It is time to rise into the next level of who we are becoming. Reader Reflection Questions Where in your life are you allowing fear or anxiety to slow your momentum instead of using it as a signal to take action What memories or past struggles do you need to revisit so you can use them as fuel rather than as anchors How can you shift your current pressure into purpose and use it to build the next version of your life or business Notable Quotes Everything has a beginning point and a storyline of what it is you want out of every situation The only way to resolve this is through sheer effort and taking action I will never forget how I felt during my hardest moments because those memories keep me sharp and keep me moving Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I walk through a simple weekend that turned into a powerful reminder about standards, responsibility, and what it really means to live with ethics in your business and in your life. I talk about family time, climbing Camelback, and getting invited into a world of supercar owners and high level business players. But the heart of the message is not the cars or the scenery. It is the internal battle we face when we know we are not living up to who we say we are. I tell a story about driving through winding mountain roads with people who had far more experience than I did. I was out of my league. They had done the reps. They knew the roads. They trusted their skill. I did not yet. That experience brought up fear, hesitation, and a deep awareness of how it feels to step into a space where others are operating at a higher level. It reminded me that growth is a process. You earn certainty through practice, not by comparing yourself to someone who has simply done it longer. This became the framework for the larger message of the episode. Most people think ethics is just not lying, not cheating, and not stealing. We equate being a good person with avoiding obvious wrongs. But I push the idea further. Ethics is also about doing what you know you are supposed to do for your family, for your body, and for your business. It is about living up to the standard you set for yourself. And when you do not follow through, when you stop pushing the envelope, when you leave everything as an option, you are stealing from yourself. You are stealing from your family. You are stealing from your future. That is why many walk around with anxiety, restlessness, and constant pressure. It is not the client who might fall out of escrow. It is not the market. It is not the lead who is not answering. It is the burden of knowing you are out of integrity with your own moral compass. You are not doing the things you said you would do. You are negotiating with your standards. You are ignoring the internal cues that used to feel heavy but now barely register. I use the example of overeating during Thanksgiving and how quickly I felt the weight of it. I felt it mentally, physically, and emotionally because I knew it was not aligned with my standard. But I corrected course immediately. I returned to my routine. I shortened the leash. Many people do not. They have ignored the signals for so long that they no longer connect their misery with their behaviors. They have drifted so far from their standard that they no longer see how they are cheating themselves. The same thing happens in business. When you promise yourself that you will prospect, or follow up, or show up to the office, and you do not, that is unethical. When you let everything become optional, when you blame the market or another agent or your clients, you avoid the truth. The real ethical violation is not doing the work. The real theft is the theft of opportunity, progress, and stability from the people who trust you the most. The message of this episode is simple. If you feel uneasy, anxious, or constantly behind, look in the mirror. The gap between your moral compass and your behaviors creates misery. Close that gap. Raise your actions to match your standard. Stop stealing from your business. Stop stealing from your family. And stop lying to yourself about why you are not where you want to be. You came into this industry to prosper. Act like it. Live like it. Hold your ethics to a higher standard and everything in your life will begin to move forward with power and clarity. Reader Reflection Questions Where in your life or business are you leaving things as an option when you know they should be non negotiable What standards have you set for yourself that you have quietly drifted away from How would your results change if you treated every responsibility as a moral obligation to your family and your future Notable Quotes "There are levels to everything and if something is required in your life it is your duty to rise to that level" "Not showing up is not being ethical because you are stealing from yourself and from your family" "The gap between your moral compass and your behaviors is the misery many walk around with every day" Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery... I found myself reflecting on the journey that brought me here. It has been a week filled with gratitude and appreciation for what we are building at A Z and Associates, and the moments that continue to shape who I am. Last week Carla and I had the chance to sit with the Lions team for their meeting, and instead of teaching, we were asked questions. Questions about our past, about the struggles we lived through, and how we found a way to rise. It forced me to revisit what shaped the success we have today, not only in business but in our marriage, in our finances, and in our belief that we could rebuild everything we once lost. When I think about that time, I remember how consumed I was by loss. The debt, the lawsuits, the fear of opening the door, the nights I could not sleep because I was drowning in worry. I punished myself for years, sitting in a dark place where I could not appreciate my life or my family. I missed moments with my daughters because I was stuck staring at everything I did wrong. What I did not realize then was that I was only in my twenties, and my whole life was still ahead of me. Five years later everything changed. Ten years later it changed again. Fifteen years later I could barely recognize that version of me. Every problem had a solution. Every mistake had a way forward. I just did not see it because I refused to get up and keep moving. If I could go back I would tell myself to dust off and trust the process. Life gives us the chance to redeem ourselves, but only if we stop sitting in the pit. That reflection followed me into the next day as we hosted our top producers roundtable. This room was filled with new faces, people who once looked at that lunch on social media and said I want to be in that room. And they are. They stepped toward their vision. They spoke it out loud. They worked until that moment became real. We took the group through a vision plan exercise, something I personally live by. I keep an album in my phone labeled vision plan filled with images and statements of everything I want to build. When I looked at my album from two years ago, I realized I have already accomplished ninety percent of it. Some goals took months, others years, but each one reminded me of what is possible when you see it every day and work toward it with intention. A vision gets you started, but a standard keeps you going. That came up again when I sat in church and listened to the pastor speak about the standards we must set for our own lives. Standards give you the certainty that solutions exist. When I began to create the right habits, when I woke up enthusiastic and ready to compete, I found answers faster. But waking up full of fear, full of anxiety, with no discipline to counter it, only drags you deeper. The prime 3 deposits are a standard. Taking care of your body. Feeding your mind. Becoming a student of your business. Those standards pulled me out of the darkest places of my life. They allowed me to overcome things most people will never experience. Enthusiasm ties it all together. I heard a story on a podcast about how airport dogs are chosen. They are not selected based on breed. They are selected based on enthusiasm. The dogs that pace, bark, jump, and engage with people are the ones they take. Not the ones laying quietly hoping for pity. Enthusiasm fuels curiosity. Curiosity fuels action. Action creates separation. When I look at our top thirty, I see that same energy. They show up hungry. They learn fast. They execute immediately. They do not wait for the perfect moment. They create the moment through action. That attitude compounds quickly and becomes momentum. We are heading into the final five weeks of the year and I see the enthusiasm in those who are still pushing. Some agents are chasing two more deals. Some are chasing four. They want to hit the stage at Ignite. They want to finish the year strong. While the rest of the industry is slowing down, they are speeding up. And because they are moving with intention, they will get what they are chasing. Most agents take it easy during the holidays. They convince themselves that buyers and sellers disappear. But those who outwork, out market, and out focus the competition will dominate the month of December. If you treat these next five weeks with fire, you set yourself up for the strongest start to 2026. I expect next year to bring challenges. I expect competition to rise. That is exactly why I stay in the lab, sharpening every skill, adjusting every system, and preparing for what is coming. That certainty comes from the standards I live by. If you want to rise, you must build the standard long before the results show up. Reader reflection questions What standard do you need to recommit to in order to face your next challenge with certainty instead of fear Where has your enthusiasm faded, and how would your results change if you restored it What is one vision you can bring closer to reality by taking action on it today instead of waiting for the perfect moment Notable quotes "A vision can get you going but a standard is what keeps you going." "Everything has a solution but I wasted years sitting in the pit convincing myself I had none." "Enthusiasm creates separation because it turns curiosity into action." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

This week on DtW, it's all spirit fingers and stolen routines with Bring It On! Dan and Raul caught another anniversary film with the 2000 cheerleading competition flick that is turning 25 this year. Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku and Gabrielle Union all star in this slightly spoofy sports story centered around a suburban championship cheer squad and their new leader finding out their trophy-winning moves were plagiarized from an inner city team. As a film that seemingly bridges classic film tropes and modern cinema sensibilities, it manages to stay entertaining and relevant a quarter century after release and definitely worth a watch. The cheerocracy has declared you listen to this pod!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about what it means to truly be a student of life and business. Every day is full of lessons some that we see right away and others that show up later as the results we experience. Whether it's in our health, our business, or our relationships, everything connects back to the choices we make, the awareness we have, and how willing we are to learn. Becoming a Student of Life I've always prided myself on being the student. Whether I'm talking to a brand-new agent or someone with twenty years in the business, I want to know how they did it how they got that deal, what they said, what they learned. The lessons are everywhere, but only if you're paying attention. Too often people show up thinking they already know. They stop taking notes. They stop asking questions. And that's when they stop growing. That lesson hit home during a dinner with Carla when I met a young realtor from Alabama. He had big goals and a lot going on a real estate business, a logistics company, property management, and even a master's program. But what stood out was how he never stopped talking about himself. He wasn't listening. He wasn't learning. He was chasing acknowledgment instead of wisdom. And I thought to myself, that's where so many people miss it. They think being busy means being productive. But real growth doesn't come from doing more things. It comes from mastering one thing and becoming the best at it. The Power of Intrinsic Value Being a student is what builds intrinsic value your inner worth, your certainty, your standard. It's not what you project, it's who you are when no one's watching. That's why at AZ & Associates, I teach agents to build their personal brand, to show people who they are and what they stand for. Certainty comes from doing the work daily, from sharing what you're learning, from showing up consistently. We push our agents to post videos, to share their lessons, to document their progress because that's how you build trust. But most people miss this because they think they already know. They hear the same message and assume it doesn't apply to them. Yet those same words sound completely different to the person who's actually doing the work. The difference isn't in the message it's in the level of application. Setting the Standard As we head into 2026, the standard has to be higher. Being a student means showing up, asking questions, applying what's being taught, and learning from every situation. It's not just about money or status. It's about character and trust. I only do business with people I can trust people who hold themselves to a standard. Because your business will always reflect your consistency and your character. Don't chase attention or followers. Chase growth. Build certainty. Build intrinsic value. When you do that, you attract the right people, the right opportunities, and the right clients. Conclusion Life and business are about being the student always learning, always refining, always showing up. Be the person who listens more than they talk. Take notes. Apply the lessons. Set a standard that others have to rise to. Because at the end of the day, your results will always reflect how coachable you are and how much you're willing to grow. Reflective Questions Where in your life have you stopped being the student? How can you raise your standard to build more trust and certainty? What lesson is life trying to teach you right now that you've been avoiding? Notable Quotes "A jack of all trades is a master of none. Focus on one thing and become great at it." "Certainty isn't arrogance it's knowing that it's only a matter of time before you figure it out." "Your business will always reflect your consistency and your character." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

This week on DtW, it's holiday travel at it's best/worst in Planes, Trains and Automobiles! Dan and Raul braved the winter wilds of 80s airports and depots to follow fast frenemies Del and Neal played by John Candy and Steve Martin respectively in this classic story about a trip home for Thanksgiving. The two travelers are seemingly as mismatched as their trip is fraught with implausible calamity, but they make an incredible duo on screen and might actually be just what each of these Chicago castaways needs. This one is beloved for a reason, and if you needed a reason to pop this on around turkey time, this podcast serves as an appetizer OR dessert!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery... I shared what it feels like when everything begins to align. There's this undeniable energy right now a momentum that feels like a tsunami of opportunity. And that feeling only comes when you've spent years making small, consistent deposits into yourself. It's about the preparation before the payoff, the unseen hours before the spotlight, and the faith in what you've built when no one else is watching. I used to say it during my Ironman training: we're doing this alone together. That phrase still holds true in real estate, leadership, and life. Each of us has to put in the work individually, but collectively, we rise higher. What I'm seeing right now inside our organization reminds me of those marathon runners who were once out of shape and uncertain, now setting personal records because they stayed consistent. Those daily deposits physical, spiritual, emotional are what build the capacity to lead, to create, and to sustain growth. The truth is, something massive is on the horizon. But opportunity doesn't favor the unprepared. If you're not building yourself daily, that same wave that lifts others could crush you. Many will look for shortcuts or latch onto someone else's success instead of doing the work themselves. But the real growth comes from understanding that it's you who must make those daily choices. It's you who must show up and prove it to yourself before the world believes it. Over the next few months, we're preparing to announce four major moves that will redefine who we are as a company. These decisions are born out of years of preparation out of the same consistent habits we've preached since the beginning. And when I think back on moments like 2020, when others pulled back and we expanded, it reminds me that courage in uncertain times creates legacy. The same principles apply today. I've been revisiting books like Loving What Is and The Big Leap, seeing them through a new lens because of all the growth that's happened since I first read them. What once felt like theory now feels like confirmation. When you evolve, your perspective changes. The same words hit differently when you've earned the experience behind them. This business, this life it's not about luck or waiting for the right moment. It's about building the right foundation so that when the wave of opportunity comes, you're ready to ride it. That's what these last twelve years have been about for me: small daily actions, taken consistently, leading to a lifestyle I once only imagined. From the cars, the home, the Christmas trees we just put up none of it was luck. It was the result of discipline, self-awareness, and faith. And I'm proud of that younger version of myself who refused to give up when things were dark. The guy who felt hopeless but made a decision to change. That decision, followed by daily deposits, changed everything. You have that same power. You can start now, today, right where you are. We're entering a new era one where preparation meets opportunity. Some will rise, others will get swept under. But if you've been doing the work, 2026 will be your year to dominate. So lean in. Revisit the fundamentals. Read the books. Build yourself first, because your growth fuels everything else. We're doing this alone together. Let's ride the wave. Reader Reflection Questions What small deposits are you making daily that will prepare you for the opportunities ahead? How often do you revisit your vision and remind yourself that you're capable of more? When fear or uncertainty creeps in, how do you shift your focus back to discipline and faith in your process? Notable Quotes "We're doing this alone together." "Small deposits create big results." "You can't build a great life without first building yourself." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

2023's greenest night started with Mr & Mrs. DTW getting a chance to listen in on us recording our episodes with Jim & Elaine.  We then head to a pre-party dinner with Stacy & Brett, Mr & MrsDTW, Jim & Elaine, Echo & Falcon.  Back at the Sexpartment, we change  where sneakers replaced heels before heading to the club. One lap around the club, Echo suggests to a wide-eyed younger couple the magic word: orgy. They might not join, but 10 of us do and Elaine wastes zero time dropping between Nessa's thighs while Jim's already tangled with strangers. MrsDTW calls shots like a swinger Spielberg; Falcon rails Nessa while Elaine rides her face. Cross-talk, blindfolds, and the first squirt tsunami hits when Elaine unloads on Jim.  Then G finger-blasts her into a room-crossing geyser that freezes eight other mid-thrust bodies in awe. Post-nut, the room's a puddle. The other couple bolts for a shower.  Falcon yanks on G's boxers, frowns “these don't feel right.” Echo hand him his own pair and Falcon returns them to G soaked. Underwear swap = official. Back at the bar, Curtis & Racheal, Grant & Morgan, Rock & Mandy, everyone lipstick-smeared and grinding. Ride home with Jim & Elaine in the backseat, crossing birthday fantasies off a very sticky list.  Email your questions to Nessa here to be part of "Ask Nessa". Please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. You can catch us on SLSRadio every Wednesday at 4pm Eastern Time. You can find tons of amazing lifestyle show on FullSwapRadio, including our show, Every Wednesday at 6:30pm and Midnight Eastern Time. We are now hosts on the Swinger Society Discord Server as well. If you have your own sexy stories, please call our hotline and share them with us and our audience. 844-4-Hump-Day If you have any questions for us, please email us at humpdayquickies@gmail.com Visit our website as well.  HumpDayQuickies.com Please follow us on all the social platforms: Twitter - HumpDayQuickies Instagram - HumpDayQuickies FaceBook - HumpDayQuickies TikTok - HumpDayQuickies We are adding new content as quickly as we can!

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery... I talk about what it means to take complete ownership of your life, your marriage, your business, and your peace. As we close out 2025, many of us are already thinking about what 2026 will bring, but before we look forward, we need to look back and take inventory of what got us here. For me, the turning point came when I stopped blaming circumstances, people, and markets and started realizing that every result in my life was the direct outcome of my decisions, my habits, and the things I neglected. There was a time when I blamed Carla for how things were going. I thought she wasn't as involved or supportive as I needed her to be. But the truth was, I had stopped doing the small things that mattered. I stopped holding her hand. I stopped saying good morning and good night. I stopped showing appreciation. Those small, unaccounted for actions, or lack of them, nearly destroyed my marriage. The same thing happened in my business. It wasn't the market, the rates, or the clients it was the complacency that crept in when I thought I had already earned the right to slow down. I lost my urgency. I stopped growing. I stopped evolving. Everything begins with the small things. The same way small acts of love can heal a relationship, small lapses in discipline can destroy a business. When you stop doing the things that make you grow, you slowly drift into a state of frustration and resentment. You start to carry anger toward others that really reflects the disappointment you feel toward yourself. I had to learn that awareness and ownership were the keys to turning things around. It wasn't about building vision boards or dreaming of the future it was about fixing the behaviors that led to my pain in the first place. That awareness extended beyond my business and marriage. I started to see how I treated my body, how I fueled myself, how I spoke to myself. I realized that exhaustion, stress, and anxiety were not random; they were the magnified results of what I consumed, what I neglected, and what I allowed to persist. Dysfunction magnifies. Complacency magnifies. But so does discipline, gratitude, and consistency. Today, I rely on habits. Habits keep me grounded when motivation fades. Habits are what saved my marriage, rebuilt my business, and restored my peace. It's the small acts looking my wife in the eye, hugging my daughters, learning something new for my business, or simply telling myself I'm proud that keep me aligned. The person I am today is the man I once prayed to become, and I don't take that for granted. Because everything I have now is the byproduct of the small, unseen, daily choices that compound into purpose. Reader Reflection Questions What small habits have you stopped doing that once made you feel connected, driven, or at peace? In what areas of your life have you allowed complacency or entitlement to replace urgency and gratitude? How can you take ownership today for the results you've created, and what small actions can you commit to changing right now? Notable Quotes "A leader must be a leader in their own world first." "It's never the big thing that breaks you it's the small things you stopped doing that got you there." "The person I am today is the man I once prayed to become, and I won't take that for granted."   Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about what it really means to have it all and the journey it took for me to find peace, purpose, and power in my life. As October comes to a close, I find myself reflecting on the years of growth, the pain that shaped me, and the discipline that brought me to where I am today. Finding Purpose Beyond the Struggle There was a time when every challenge felt personal, when my ego was fragile, and every mistake sent me over the edge. I had no emotional control. I would lash out, lose patience, and feel like I was constantly under attack. But I realized that the constant chaos wasn't life's fault it was mine. I was missing the capacity to lead myself. I learned that hard work and struggle are not the same thing. Hard work builds, but struggle destroys. It wasn't enough to make money or chase success. I needed to find fulfillment, to build character, to become a better man, husband, and father. The moment I shifted my focus from chasing results to developing discipline, everything changed. The Awakening Back in 2013, I was at a breaking point. I was financially progressing but emotionally broken. Depression wasn't something I understood it was a habit I had learned from my environment. I thought something was wrong with me. I told myself I wasn't gifted, that maybe I wasn't built for more. But I began to see that the reason we're here is to create. We were created to create. And through that realization, I started taking control of my life again. I built disciplines that helped me grow in every area: business, marriage, health, and faith. That process became the foundation of what I now call the "have it all" lifestyle. Redefining "Having It All" Having it all isn't about wealth, power, or recognition. It's about having fulfillment in every part of your life. It's about becoming the type of person who can be trusted, who keeps promises, and who operates with integrity. I once thought success meant money first, like Scarface said: "First you get the money, then the power." But I realized true power comes from self-mastery from building yourself mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The Process of Transformation When I first started this journey, everything was on the line my business, my marriage, my sense of purpose. What saved me was a commitment to simplicity. I narrowed my focus to three daily actions: a power deposit, a purpose deposit, and a profits deposit. That became the foundation for the 12 Week Target Journal. Through that journal, I trained myself to stay in the game no matter what challenges came my way. It was about building capacity, not chasing easy results. And it worked. Years later, I sit here in gratitude for the life I've built. I look back and realize that the man I was in 2013 had to die for this version of me to live. The lessons, the setbacks, the breakdowns all of it was necessary. Every hardship prepared me for the expansion I now lead others through. Success as a Responsibility Success is not just a goal; it's a responsibility. It's about how you walk, how you talk, how you lead, and who you become. It's about raising the bar not just for yourself, but for your family, your community, and your team. What we've built here is proof that doing the right things consistently leads to extraordinary results. It's not about luck. It's about patience, consistency, and faith. The "have it all" lifestyle is not easy. It's a slow-moving process that demands your full attention every single day. But if you stay aligned, stay disciplined, and trust the process, the results will exceed your expectations. Reader Reflection Questions What areas of your life are still driven by struggle rather than purpose? How can you begin rebuilding yourself through daily discipline instead of emotion? What would "having it all" truly mean for you beyond material success? Notable Quotes "We were created to create." "Hard work builds, but struggle destroys." "Success is not a goal; it's a responsibility." Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about what it really means to have a renewed vision. After our third quarter review, I walked through the office with a sense of gratitude and energy. The numbers don't lie, and seeing the results reminded me that momentum is not about luck. It's about intention, consistency, and self-awareness. Renewed Vision Comes From the Work What I felt that day wasn't just pride. It was clarity. The kind of clarity that comes when you stop waiting for inspiration and start doing the work that produces it. Momentum fades when we tie our energy only to our results. If we aren't producing, we lose our drive. But if we focus on becoming better on building a career instead of chasing a moment that energy renews itself. Every agent goes through highs and lows. The difference between those who stay in the game and those who fall off is their ability to renew that vision. To say, “I'm not starting over. I'm beginning again with more knowledge, more experience, and more perspective.” What You Stop Doing and What You Need to Start Doing During our third quarter review, I brought in three of our top producers: Rudy, Rio, and Hillary. They shared how they handle slow seasons, and the biggest takeaway was this: they audit themselves. They ask three powerful questions: What did I stop doing that I need to start doing again? What do I need to stop doing that's holding me back? What do I need to start doing that's been on my mind but I haven't executed? Rudy said his biggest issue was losing urgency. From the outside, he still looked productive posting videos, showing up but he knew his intensity was off. That realization alone gave him the spark to change his rhythm. That's what I love about our top producers. They're willing to get in the weeds again. They don't think they're above the grind. They'll roll up their sleeves, work the weekends, rebuild systems, and do what it takes to create momentum. Stop Spectating and Start Creating We can spend so much time watching others that we forget to execute ourselves. It's easy to scroll, compare, and complain but that doesn't close deals. If you find yourself spectating, shift back to creating. If you've been sleeping in, eating junk, or talking yourself out of following up with a lead, start correcting that today. Renewed vision requires physical and mental energy. You can't compete if your body is sluggish and your mindset is negative. Smile more. Appreciate your progress. Stop complaining. Tell your spouse and kids you love them. Gratitude resets your focus faster than any new strategy ever could. Go Deeper Instead of Wider Another point we discussed in our review was the importance of going deeper, not wider. Stop chasing new strangers online and start re-engaging with the people who already know you. Your past clients, your database, your sphere these are your strongest assets. If you're not getting 20 percent of your business from referrals, it's time to evaluate why. Maybe you stopped calling, stopped sending birthday cards, or stopped checking in. These small, intentional actions are what create lasting success. Renewed Vision Means Remembering Who You Are Renewal doesn't mean you're starting from scratch. You already have the experience, the skills, and the track record. You just have to remember why you started. You didn't go through all the hardship just to be average. You didn't sacrifice time with family just to coast. You're here to compete, to grow, and to lead. As we approach the end of the year, this is the time to push. Audit your habits. Ask yourself those questions. Eliminate the distractions. Because what you do today determines how you start 2026. Reader Reflection Questions What is one thing you stopped doing that once brought you success and how can you bring it back starting this week? What habits or distractions do you need to stop that are draining your focus and energy? Who in your sphere do you need to reconnect with today to rebuild momentum for the year ahead? Notable Quotes “Beginning again is not the same thing as starting from scratch.” “Stop spectating and start creating.” “Renewed vision means remembering who you are and what you're made of.” Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: shop.dothework.com

In this episode of Do The Work | Mindset Mastery, I talk about the power of deposits the small, consistent actions that build the life you truly want. The Vision That Started It All This past weekend, I celebrated my birthday surrounded by my family. It reminded me how far I've come from that 16 year old kid who dreamed of owning his first car. Back then, I didn't have the money, but I had a clear vision. I knew exactly what I wanted, and that vision became the fuel that carried me through the work that was required. Every lawn I cut, every car I washed, every dollar I saved was a deposit toward that goal. My parents taught me that work ethic mattered, but I learned early that effort without direction isn't enough. You need a vision to reinforce your actions. That's what kept me going knowing that each deposit, no matter how small, was getting me closer to something bigger. When I finally bought that red 1987 Nissan Sentra, it wasn't just about the car. It was about proving to myself that anything I truly want requires consistent deposits over time. Deposits and Withdrawals That same principle applies to everything in life business, marriage, health, and faith. For years, I forgot that. I worked hard but neglected the deposits that mattered most. In my marriage, I withdrew more than I deposited. I expected peace, connection, and understanding, but I wasn't putting in the daily effort to earn them. The same thing happened in my business. I made the right deposits for a while, saw success, then stopped reinforcing those habits. When challenges hit, I had nothing left to pull from. I was overdrafted emotionally, mentally, and financially. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I realized the pattern. The moments I neglected myself skipped workouts, ignored my faith, avoided hard conversations were withdrawals. Every ignored priority created debt that showed up later as frustration, stress, or failure. The Power of Preparation Life will test you. You can make every deposit and still face setbacks. What matters is whether you've prepared yourself to recover. When I had surgery recently, I was back at the office the next day not because I'm superhuman, but because my body and mind are conditioned through years of consistent deposits. The same applies to business and relationships. You can't expect to withstand challenges if you haven't built the endurance to do so. Most people don't break because of one bad day. They break because of a slow burn months or years of neglecting the deposits that build strength and clarity. That's why I train daily. That's why I eat clean, journal, pray, and stay connected to my purpose. These actions prepare me for the inevitable withdrawals life demands. Living from Surplus The goal isn't just to make deposits it's to create a surplus. When you live in surplus, you operate from overflow, not survival. You can give more to your family, your business, your faith, and your community because you're not running on empty. Scarcity, abundance, and prosperity are all connected. Scarcity is survival mode. Abundance feels good but can vanish with one bad decision. Prosperity is the standard when your deposits are so consistent that even a setback can't derail you. That's what I'm building toward every day. Prosperity in mind, body, and spirit. It's what allows me to show up for my family, lead this company, and continue to grow with purpose. Reflection Questions Where in your life are you trying to withdraw without first making enough deposits? What daily actions could you commit to that would strengthen your spiritual, mental, or physical bank accounts? Are you living in scarcity, abundance, or prosperity and what would it take to reach the next level? Notable Quotes “Anything that I want is going to require deposits.” “Every skipped workout, every ignored conversation, every avoided marketing piece it all adds up.” “The goal is not just to make deposits but to build a surplus that allows you to live from overflow, not survival.” Follow A.Z. Araujo on Social Media: Instagram: @azaraujo Facebook: A.Z. Araujo TikTok: A.Z. Araujo YouTube: Do The Work Podcast   For Real Estate Agents in AZ: Learn more about Do The Work Coaching and A.Z. & Associates: dothework.com/azaa   Upcoming Events: If you're a real estate brokerage owner, sign up for one of our upcoming events. Visit: dothework.com bigmoneybrokerage.com Join my mailing list for updates!   New Do The Work Gear: Check out the latest DTW and Do The Work Gear! Hats, shirts, journals, and more: • • shop.dothework.com