Podcasts about g you

Track List L.I.N.G - You're Not Alone (Original Mix) Body and Soul (Roll Deep mix) L.I.N.G - La Da Da Da (Re-Edit) ROSBERN - Untitled Song Lies - Max Telaer - Dysfunction INCUS (UK) - Fix Up The Beat Jeremy Sylvester & DJ MJ - Devotion Don Swing - Oh Why (Original Mix) DJ Caspa, Mad Villains - Sounds of the Underground (Original Mix) Clark Street Dubs - Strange About You

Welcome to Episode 24!“Entrepreneur Chat with Multipassionate Creative and Owner of 3 Businesses, Bailey Aro Hutchence.” This chat can help you all through the entrepreneurial hard parts and the stuck parts….for those of you in ANY stage of business. Whether it's opening your first business, your second, or even your third; tune in. You'll benefit from YEARS OF KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE in today's episode! Today's Podcast is for you if:A- You're currently feeling stuck and alone because it's lonely at the top and you want to feel like someone gets you….and has been where you are.B- You want to hear from someone who has started and runs 3 solid businesses while still taking time off to travel, write, and go deep with special projects and planning.C- You want to hear from someone who THINKS BIG!!D- You have a business, and you need some KEEP GOING energy!!! E- You want to hear what it's really like to run 3 companies at one time. F- You're ready to open your second or third business, and you want to hear from someone who's currently doing it.G- You want to know how coaching can help you open your first, second, or third business.H-You're curious about the ROI of coaching.I- You want to hear from a business owner who has a soulful, purposeful business mindset. Meet Bailey! She is a shining example of a brilliant creative. Bailey is a multi-passionate entrepreneur born & raised in Duluth, MN. She is the founder of three companies: Bailey Aro Photography, White Spruce Market, and Cedar Bound. As a small business owner for over 12 years, Bailey has fallen in love with not only the creative side of her work, but also the joys (& challenges) of building heartfelt brands. In addition, she loves to teach & coach small business owners on mindset, marketing strategy, client experience, and navigating entrepreneur life. She's a fierce believer in the power of community, and loves helping others move through challenges, whether it's overwhelm, imposter syndrome, or even moments of defeat.When she's not working on fun business projects, you'll find her dreaming up the next travel adventure, reading or writing her booty off, and hanging out in the woods with her bearded British husband & their two giant lap dogs, Summit + Mowgli. Episode Takeaways:●      Bailey's success might have something to do with the depth of purpose she has in all 3 businesses ●      Being ALIGNED with your work is KEY for the long hau●      There's another way to think about work…it could be kind of easy, there's another way to think about your work●      When you love your work, so much goodness is possible…and it's available to you.●      Writing and journaling helps you move forward!!!!●      When you feel stuck, use the question: What Would It Take to ______?●      When you feel confident about your purpose, other's negative opinions just don't affect you as much●      Systems and routines are helpful right away in your first years of business And lastly, here's a quick commercial: It's almost here! Our Life by Design Course, where people learn how to design a life they love. It's for those of you who are ready to get to the next level…and maybe love life just a little bit more. Get more information at www.angstocke.com/lifebydesign. ACCESS ALL of BAILEY'S WEBSITES HERE:https://baileyaro.com

The Opening quote was from Kamaron Grey's Sermon, Common Objections to Postmillennialism, at the Purchased Victory Conference. View at link Below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9zRk-C_FX0 Thanks to Brandon Scalf of Cruciform Ministries for the permission to use! http://www.cruciformministries.org   In this first of the year/season of the T.A.G You're It! Podcast, Dave, Ray  Ray, and T.A.G. Fellow Josh Jenkins tackle a prejudicial Got Questions? article that is supposed to explain Postmillennialism. They also ask for S. Michael Houdmann, founder, president, and CEO of Got Questions Ministries, to graciously provide an answer for the public he seeks to help while maintaining the integrity in representing the best of Postmillennialism with citations (for and against).

We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, and concerns for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Mentioned in this episode: Glitter + Ashes edited by dave ring Silk & Steel edited by Janine A. Southard  Grace's Links: Website ArtStation portfolio Twitter Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. R: Today we are talking to Grace Fong about book art. Now we've had someone on in the past to talk about cover art and art-directing a commissioned cover. However, I think Colin would forgive me for saying that you do not want Colin to do the artwork. Kaelyn: He would, yes. R: Yes. [laughing] Would you like to introduce yourself? Grace: Hi, I'm Grace! My pronouns are she/her, I work on the narrative design team over at Wizards of the Coast for Magic: The Gathering. I am also a sometimes-writer, and for the past five years I've been doing illustration work for various speculative fiction magazines, such as Strange Horizons, and some anthologies like Silk & Steel and Glitter + Ashes. K: Rekka this is our first like, real artist. R: It is difficult to get an artist on a podcast. I have tried - K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: - for this podcast and the previous one and it is a tricky business. So Grace, you live up to your name in showing up. G [laughing]: We don't like talking to people, we just like sitting at our computers. R: I completely understand, but doesn't mean I'm gonna give up trying, so. We've finally done it. K: Awesome. So I have been involved in some cover art not as the primary person but as the editor, where I have to look at it and go ‘yeah okay that kinda tracks with what's happening here.' We have talked a lot on this podcast before about what to expect out of your cover art, and how involved the writers are going to be in it, and the answer is typically not very, at all. So, when you're doing this, who is it that you're primarily working with? G: When I do work for magazines and books I'm usually working with the editor of the publication, so for the anthology it's usually an anthology editor, or for a short fiction magazine it is usually the art director of the magazine or the editor of the magazine. K: Can you walk us through the process of how you get started on this? They're obviously not coming to you with a blank slate, they're coming to you with a series of stories that may or may not have a theme. How do you get started working with this editor? G: It really varies, depending on the type of publication. So for anthologies, because they cover a lot of different narrative ground, usually we try to come up with an image that encapsulates the theme of the anthology. Like for Silk & Steel, I was doing one of the promotional postcards for them. We knew we were doing femme-femme, high fantasy, sword-and-scorcery kind of stuff. So I knew that those characters would have to be reflective of the book's content. Sometimes editors will give me a particular story that they aim to showcase for the publication, in which case I'll usually read the story if it's under 6,000 words, and try and come up with a composition that fits it the best that I possibly can. This is how I work with Strange Horizons. K: At what point do you usually come into the process? Are you typically involved right from the get go, or do they kind of wait until they have most of the story material? G: Usually when editors are doing their selections, they will wait until they have the written content first, because the written content is gonna dictate which artist they're gonna go to, to look for. Whose style best captures the feeling of their product? It's actually similar to traditional publication as well. The art directors at major publishing houses usually have a manuscript or summary for new debut authors whose manuscripts are already completed, and then they find an artist based off the existing manuscript. Some covers are completed beforehand, if the publishing house knows the author, knows the brand of that author and knows the kind of proposal or piece they are in the middle of working. K: You're gonna be sitting down with the editor, they're gonna give you a story that they particularly wanna feature, they're gonna give you an overall feeling or theme or - how much creative license do you get? R: I wanna interrupt because you just skipped like a really huge part: the creative brief. K: Yes. R: So what you just said, they're gonna give you a mood, they're gonna give you a theme or whatever, this is a whole step. Don't smooth it over like that. And this is something that actually Grace's got a little bit of a reputation for her knowledge on. So Grace I know you in, I believe it's November, are doing the Clarion workshop about creating a brief for a cover artist, right? G: Yes. R: So let's give this the spotlight it deserves! [laughing] G [overlapping]: Okay. K: Yeah, I've written a couple, I shouldn't have skipped over that, so apologies. G: I mean it's a specialized skill not everyone has to do them, so yeah. R: Well I definitely want to highlight it a bit, ‘cause you helped me with one - G [laughing]: That's true! R: What goes into the creative brief? Kaelyn named a couple of things, and this sort of forms the silhouette around which Kaelyn's question pivots, which is how much creative control do you get as an artist? So what's in the brief that you consider sacred, and what's in the gaps that you get to play with? G: So, that - K: Well first, and I'm sorry to cut you off - I'm sorry - can we say what - [laughing] R [overlapping]: I'm gonna interrupt you back! K: That's fair, that's fair. Can we kind of say what a creative brief is? G: Oh yeah, sure. So essentially when you are starting to work with an artist, an artist does not have the time to read an entire manuscript of 400+ pages. Their pricing is usually based off of the time that they're gonna spend creating your artwork. So you need to provide them with what is known as a creative brief, or art brief. And these are small documents that are very instructional, no more than like a page or two long, that explains the kind of image and feel that you are going for, for this assignment. The assumption is that you would have done your research and sent this brief to an artist that you think would do a good job for the publication that you're sourcing art for. So you're not gonna go to someone who does only black and white work if you want to sell your book with a big, bright, neon, 80s kind of cover. G: ‘Brief' is kind of the keyword here. You're essentially writing instructions for an artist. Don't try to lead them in using prose writing, tell them what they're gonna be drawing. It's a bit like a recipe list. So if it's a story about vampires and you want your vampire main character on the cover, you would specify that that's what you're looking for. Or, let's say you're trying to sell more literary up-market fiction, which doesn't use as many figurative images. Then you would maybe make an explanation about like ‘oh this book is about a woman's time when she was living as a child in Philadelphia.' In which case you would sometimes kind of refine that into a visual or item metaphor that you would ask the artist to render in a specific way that captures the mood and feel of the book, and leverages the imagery that's common to that market, so that it can reach the correct audience. K: Gotcha. Okay. So then you're gonna get this brief, and presumably dig into it. Do you ever receive a section of text, if there's a scene in particular that they'd like illustrated? G: Specific scene commissions tend not to be used for covers, because they're not very good at selling a publication. Scene work tends to be done for interior illustration. So these the the images that go along in the story; you look at these images as you are reading these scenes. But for the front cover you're trying to provide one image that sells the entire mood of the story to a particular audience. So in general you want to avoid using specific scenes, unless that scene comes in very early, because you don't wanna spoil the ending of the book. You only have one picture to play with for a cover, meanwhile with interiors you tend to have a series. You can do like a chapter header, like in the original Harry Potter American versions. K: It's funny you say that, because I was thinking about how I remember when the Harry Potter books were coming out, and there were always the American and the British cover versions, and everyone would be over-analyzing and try to pick apart ‘okay what's in the background here, what's happening in this scene.' But yeah because those covers were all more or less specific scenes from the book. They were a little abstract. G: Exactly, but it's - the keyword as you just said it is that they were scenes but they were abstracted. Actually tapping into that same visual metaphor that I mentioned earlier, for literary up-market, it's just because they're cramming so many things - what they're actually doing is creating one image that forces you to look harder at it to find all of those metaphorical connections with the story inside. If it has the hippogriff on it and the Chamber of Secrets journal and the Goblet of Fire, these are all singular items that you don't actually see in those covers how they relate to the story, but you know that this is an important item in the story. Ergo, which Harry Potter volume this cover revolves around. K: Do you get scenarios where somebody says ‘I want you to draw exactly this and I want it to look like this,' or do you generally give them a few different ideas or rough sketches and then go from there? G: Generally the things that I like to have control over are color palette, camera angle, the stuff that would be considered very technical for an illustration. Perspective. Whether things are shot from above, shot from below, because these are all illustrator tools that help dictate the mood of a painting. And the mood is actually the thing that I usually ask my clientele for. Mood translates to ‘how are we supposed to feel when looking at this?' Because feeling is very closely tied to genre. G: So, what kind of book am I trying to sell? Is it a horror book? That dictates what kind of colors, what kind of camera angles that I'm going to use. But if somebody tells me ‘I want a top-down shot of something-something,' then that feels a bit invasive to me because I feel like if I am an artist then I can select the camera angle to best convey the drama that you're asking for. But the things that are really good for me are the object or character or focus, and if there is a character the kind of action that is being performed. A lot of times we get character description but no action, and the action is actually what tells us what the character is like, and separates it from the design. K: Yeah so you don't just have two characters just standing there looking straight forward at the camera - G [overlapping]: Yeah. K: - dressed the way they told you to dress them. G: Yes. [laughing] Because basically that would be really difficult to create an interesting illustration for. K: Absolutely yeah. [laughing] G: It's kind of like going to the mall and you see the clothes being sold on mannequins. Like it helps sell you the clothes but it doesn't tell you what the story is behind the people wearing the clothes. It helps to have stuff like props, backgrounds, and actions to help convey like, ‘oh yeah if this character is wearing a t-shirt and jeans, is this t-shirt and jeans part of an urban fantasy? Or is it a part of a YA contemporary romance?' K: How much back-and-forth do you generally have with the editors you're working with? Like what is the first thing you give back to them? G: This generally varies per artist, including the artists I work with. So usually what I do is between one to three thumbnails or sketches that I hand in to the editor and ask them ‘what do you think of these directions,' ‘which one of these thumbnails' - which I then proceed to refine - ‘do you think hits the target best?' Then if it's a very large piece of work I might work on a more refined sketch and pass it in, or like base colors and pass it in, and minimally it's usually the thumbnails plus the finished drawing. So that's two to five back-and-forths, depending on the size of the piece. R: How much do you let the art director or editor you're working with go back to the start? I know you probably don't let them past a certain point, like ok you approved the thumbnail so we're moving forward, we're not going back to thumbnails after that, but what if they don't like any of the initial thumbnails? G: Yeah so basically most artists I know have what are called revision fees, and these are generally written into the contracts that you sign upon working with them. Basically saying ‘you get this many thumbnails, you get to give comments this many times, and if you go over those times there'll be an additional fee.' Because artists are basically charging - it's a service-based industry, and your haircutter charges you per hour, and so does your artist. And generally if they aren't happy with the thumbnails, then I would then incur the revision fee, but also I ask for further information. G: So, if you as a writer or editor aren't happy with what your artist is turning back, you need to be able to explain what you're not happy with. So you can explain like ‘oh I don't think this color palette is appropriate for this target market. Here are some images of other books that have come out in the same area that we think would be good inspiration for you.' The only time that revision becomes really frustrating, outside of a timing frame, is when your client says ‘I don't know what I want but I'll know it when I see it.' R: I knew you were gonna say that. [giggling] As a graphic designer I also hate those words. G [laughing]: Yeah. K: It's like okay I guess I'll just keep throwing paint at the wall and see what happens. G: Like revisions aren't bad as long as the client is able to convey what needs to actually be changed. R: Not a series of no-thank-yous. K: Have you ever come across a scenario where you've kind of had to take a step back from the project and say ‘listen, I think maybe I'm not the right person to do this.' G: Usually I'm good enough at heading that off before a project even begins. K [laughing]: Okay! G: That is something you come to with experience, you understand your style, your way of working as an illustrator, and knowing like ‘hey this type of thing is going to be too out of my ballpark,' ‘this type of thing is not gonna pay enough,' ‘this type of thing is just too much work for what I'm capable of doing right now.' That is kind of like you're responsible, as most freelance artists are independent business owners essentially. They'll usually say so up front minus extenuating circumstances. Like at work we've had people drop out because they acquired COVID in the middle of an assignment, so - K [overlapping]: Oh god. G: - there's really nothing you can do about that. [laughing] K [laughing]: Yeah. Have you ever been presented with a commission, talked to the person, and thought to yourself ‘I don't think they have a good enough handle on what it is they're looking for here, and this may just end up being a headache'? G: Yes. That has definitely happened before, ‘cause I don't have much time. So if I feel like the client either lacks the direction and communication to give me what I need, or if they're simply asking for too much, then I will usually politely decline them, within the first couple of emails. K: Obviously you're not reading all of these books and you're working off the creative brief. Is there anything in particular that you get these, you're trying to make sure you're communicating in the feel of the book rather than an exact representation of what's going on there? G: Yeah. So I'm not trying to recreate a 1-to-1 specific moment from the book. I'm trying to generate a piece that, as you said, evokes a major theme. A lot of times I'm asked to do character work, mostly because that is something that I enjoy doing and specialize in; I love character and costume design. Like you've never seen a spaceship in my portfolio because I'm really bad at it. K: I looked through it, I didn't see one. [laughing] G: Yeah, don't put stuff in your portfolio that you are not good at painting and don't wanna paint. Like people come to me because they're like ‘oh this person does kind of anime-inspired fantasy characters,' and so that's kind of like a niche that you can reach other people who like anime-inspired fantasy characters. So things for me that I consider important is, I like to know a character's build and ethnicity. G: Stuff like ‘oh the character's mouth is a Cupid's bow' or like ‘they have eyebrows that are waxed to a certain angle,' that's a bit too specific. Or like ‘they wear ten rings.' Because if you mentioned that the character wears ten rings, it automatically makes those ten rings really important. And you have to wonder, are those ten rings really important to actually selling who this character is? Do those ten rings have a narrative function in the story? If so, do you wanna include the rest of the character, or do you wanna focus on that character's hands and the rings, as a way to say ‘hey this is what this story is about'? Because it's very hard to include such a small item and such a big item together on the same image. There's a lot of physical limitations to representational art; similar as it is, it's really challenging to get a photo with both your shortest friend and your tallest friend at the same time and not have a giant gap between them. [laughing] K [laughing]: Lot of negative space and awkward positions. G: Yeah. R: Well this is where your control over the perspective comes in, right? So that would be a shot from below. K: Or above! Really above. [laughing] G: Yeah. So one of the things that I like to ask for is no more than two or three key items, I would call them, that differentiate who this character is from all the other characters. Like you can say ‘yes, she is a Black woman' or ‘yes, he is a muscular man of European descent.' But Aragorn is defined by Andúril, his sword. Once you stick that sword on Aragorn, you know ‘hey this is a high-fantasy Tolkienesque property.' So I'm looking for a handful of items like that, to help show who this character is and how they differentiate and help sell the genre, setting, and time period. K: Covers are telling people things without explicitly telling them that. Like you mentioned you give Aragorn his sword or a similar character, you're stating ‘hey this is a high-fantasy book.' If there's a background in it and it's castles built into rolling mountains, that's also indicating things to somebody who might be potentially interested in reading it. Do you spend a lot of time or give a lot of attention to trying to signal to potential readers that this might be something they're interested in, or do you kind of let the cover do what it's gonna do? Like how much do you try to work elements into it that are telling you things about the book without telling you things about the book? G: I usually try to focus on having as I said up to three of those key items - K [overlapping] Okay. [laughing] G: - because, as you said, castles are really common in a lot of European-based high fantasy. So you can leverage that castle, change it up, be like oh is it a floating castle that implies that there's a certain kind of magic? Is it a castle that's built into a hillside that implies another sort of magic? And so when I'm doing that I'm not necessarily looking at other pieces that are within the same genre, because the same genre-ness comes from the castle itself. I'm trying not to make a cover that looks exactly like every other cover out there, because this writing is probably not like every other fantasy story out there. K: Mhm. G: I'm actually specifically looking for those key items that differentiate it within its own genre. K: Any good stories, or interesting things that've happened here, your favorite piece that you've worked on or something that was particularly challenging? Maybe not just cover art but any commissions in general? G: All of my really funny stories are actually just from when I was doing random stuff for anime cons. I've had to draw a woman making out with Loki, but the woman is not herself, the woman is Kate Beckinsale. Fandom's strange. R: So you drew Kate Beckinsale making out - K [overlapping]: Making out with Loki - [laughing] G: Yes. R: And let the woman believe it was her? G: There are certain things you simply cannot draw. You cannot draw the flow of time. If you have a single image, it is very difficult to have anything that goes from step one and step two. [chuckling] And convey two images in a single image. K: Those Animorphs covers used to do that. G: That's true. And they had the little flipbooks in the back. K [laughing]: Remember that? G: Yeah. K: What advice would you have for somebody who, like let's say they're going to self-publish, or maybe somebody who hasn't really done this before but is looking to commission a piece of art - what advice would you have for them? G: For prospective clients, I generally ask that they do their research beforehand, essentially. Like working with artists, we have our own system, our own language, essentially, for technical stuff, for our materials, our use of camera angles, our use of colors. And to kind of understand what is within and without our control. So don't expect an art piece to be able to capture your entire story, because your story has some form of linear time in it, which art inherently will not if it's a single image. And that usually requires a lot of trust on the part of new authors, because this is their baby, right, they spent a lot of time on it and they wanna give it nice clothes. K: I love that by the way - G [overlapping]: [laughing] K: - they wanna give it nice clothes, that's perfect. [laughing] G: And like, a lot of us really understand this, but it's really helpful for us if you are to distinguish things that are and are not concrete. If you have a story that's based on music and you want your cover to celebrate the fact that it revolves around song, artists cannot draw a song. Unless you have synesthesia, you're probably not gonna look at a piece of artwork and hear music. So you're gonna have to come up with concrete visuals to convey this. G: So that main character, how do they produce this music? Are they a violinist? In which case yes, a violin can be drawn, that's very clear, very easy. And so just coming up with those small as I say key items, that would probably be one of them. Coming prepared with those and trusting the artist to interpret that - you can always say ‘hey, my book is about song, that is why I'd like to include these items,' but don't throw them into the wind with ‘my book is about songs' and - K: ‘Draw me a song.' G: Yes. K: You had mentioned revision fees, now again a constant theme in this podcast is contracts and read your contract and check your contract. Typically if you're going to engage an artist they're going to sign a contract with you. By the way, if the artist is not interested in signing a contract with you, and this is a custom piece, maybe that's not the artist to work with. But you're going to have a fee schedule, you're going to say ‘okay up front this is how much I'm estimating this to be but there are additional fees and costs for revisions, for changes, for going back.' K: We've definitely had to, with artists we commissioned for covers, go back and say ‘hey listen, something came up and we need another version of this, can you tweak these things?' And that's fine, it's just an additional charge. Is there anything in particular you would say to the people who are looking to commission an artist to just be aware of and expect, so they're not 1) shocked or 2) completely overlook something, in terms of costs associated with this kind of thing. G: Art is skilled labor. K: Absolutely. G: It's gonna vary per artist. Some people work faster, some people work slower. The type of publication is also going to affect the cost. But do not be surprised if an artist asks for a living wage, in terms of hourly money, because this is what they do; it's generally not a side job. K: Art is a skilled work that needs to be paid accordingly. There's a reason you're having to go out and find somebody you need to do this, because it's not an easy thing to do. G: Yeah, you're gonna be looking at prices significantly over part-time retail, because this is full-time work. Artists pay taxes on top of their stuff, and they are in charge of maintaining their own tax books. The high prices also cover their cost of living, the materials, 30% of it automatically goes to taxes, so those rates are going to be relatively high. A lot higher than I think what people expect. I feel like sometimes when people are new to commissioning, they'll expect it to be something in the price range of like ‘hey, I'm asking someone to in their off-time help me out at home with this, etcetera, or babysit my cat.' R: They wanna pay you 20 bucks and an extra pizza. G: Yeah. K: Well they're looking at it in like hourly rates, not realizing that it's not just hourly. Like you said there's taxes, there's material, there's - you don't get something then immediately sit down and start drawing it, you have to read some things, you have to think about it, you have to process, there's a lot of invisible hours that go into this as well. G: Yeah. R: You might spend - random number - 12 hours working on a cover, but that skill that you developed to create that cover is not 12 hours worth of skill-development, that is the lifetime that you have put into being an artist. So if anybody is thinking that ‘well the cover for my book is just a box I need to check off on my way to publication' - G: Yeah and that high hourly rate encompasses the work of emailing back and forth and sending the revisions and all the administrative stuff that the artist has to do. Artists generally do not have assistant teams, and they are not big publishing houses. K: The phone call was two minutes, it took me five minutes to read this thing, and ten minutes to write a response, but all of the stuff in between is additional time. All of your back-and-forth with your artist, all of the discussion that you're gonna have, all of the time that you the artist have to sit and think about this and do some sketches and stop and walk away and collect your thoughts, all of that is your valuable time. R: We've been talking about hourly rates. But every time, in my personal experience, that I've commissioned a cover, I have been given a flat number and then the contract as we've discussed talks about how many revisions or whatever are included in that number. I assume this is the practice of this person doing covers so frequently that they have a general ballpark of what they need to earn to justify what a cover is. But that's still based on a living wage that they're creating for themselves. G: Correct. That's usually it. R: When somebody gives you a flat rate it's not that this is a flat rate and someone else is going to just give you like ‘$85 an hour please.' G: Yeah. K: Well are you calculating your flat rate based on how many hours you, in your experience, know this takes? G: Yes, that's exactly what most artists do. Because clients tend to not want to bill per hour, because it's a single gig, most artists will give a flat rate based off their previous experience of how long something is going to take, which is why when back-and-forth gets too much, we incur revision fees. Because usually the flat rate is based off of our average experience of a client who spends this much time talking with us, and this much is gonna have to go to taxes, etc. And because flat rate is generally easier for clients and billing as well. R: Yeah rather than an open-ended number where they have no idea, and there's probably some paranoia that if you don't know the person well you might just keep billing them for stuff. G: You're gonna find contracts that specify hourly rates for longer term stuff, like visual developments or several character designs, or if you have a world that you're trying to build out for a TTRPG or concept art for a new video game or something like that. But for single one-off jobs, it's usually the artist will give you a flat rate number based off of their estimation on how long the gig will take, which is why sometimes these flat rate numbers look gigantic. But remember, again, that's based off of an hourly rate. R: Now do you ever get an email from a potential client and you go ‘oh yeah I better double the number, based on the way this email is written'? G: Yes that has happened before; the asshole tax is a pretty common practice - K [overlapping]: [laughing] G: - among artists. We are factoring in how long something is going to take as well. K: And by the way along the flat rates and the contracts and Grace I don't know if this is how you typically handle this, but when we would do book covers it was usually half up front, of the flat rate, and half when the work is finished plus any additional revision fees, which for us was always just a like ‘hey here's the down payment if you will to show we're serious and to get started.' Artists put a lot of time into this, and if you say ‘well I'm gonna pay you when this is done' and then they go ‘I don't like it. Forget it. I don't want it anymore,' that's a lot of time and energy that the artist has now wasted for no return. G: Yup. Most artists will not start without half to full payment upfront. I'd say like 95% of them won't. ‘Cause everybody has been burned very early on in their career by somebody who asked for work and never paid for it. So you only let that happen once. [laughing] Yeah. Always be prepared to have the money ready, like half the money ready, before the artist will start working. If you have a relaxed deadline, a lot of artists are really chill about just letting things kind of be like ‘oh I have this email of somebody who's interested' but it doesn't become real and doesn't actually get scheduled until there's money down. K: Artists have schedules. And they have open time slots and things that they might not be able to fit you into. How much of a lead time would you say they need to leave, in order to have a fully completed piece of art ready to go? G: I'd say at the minimum one to two months. I know people that can turn stuff around in two weeks, but if you're looking to get something done in the one month range, you're probably looking at a rush fee. Artists usually keep one to two jobs forward, like they have something but they're working on something lined up, and they usually have maybe another one lined up. And so if you demand something immediately, then that means they have to rush the next two. K: Mhm. G: So usually they will include a rush fee for that. K: I mean essentially it's overtime - G: Yes. K: - at that point, like I'm having to work extra hours outside of my regular schedule so that I can get to your thing faster. G: Yeah. And the lead time will very specifically vary per artist, because if you're trying to get someone who's like super super popular, who has a large number of clients already, you may be waiting like a year or two. Like. [laughing] K: There're science fiction cover artists out there that, like two years, if you want anything from them. Some of those people have incredibly long lead times on these, and their schedules are just full like over a year. G: Yeah. Like for me, I tend to be booked out about four to five months in advance, personally. But I generally, I will do rush fees and I'll also do smaller client pieces here and there that I know I can fit into a weekend. But again it really is up to that individual artist. I know how fast it takes me to complete a piece, but when I have 50 things going on, yeah it might take 20 hours to do, but if I have ten things that all take 20 hours, then I have a lot of time management that I need to figure out. K [laughing]: Yeah absolutely. When you finish a commission, when you finish a piece, how are you getting it to the person who is actually going to use it then and turn it in for the publication? Because a lot of these pieces are, they're very high resolution, they're very large files, and what does this look like - First of all what kind of a file is it, what does it look like? And then 2) how are you getting it, and how do you set it up so that they can manipulate it the way they need? G: So usually for clients I send a flat image, unless a layered image is requested - R: And let the artist know that at the beginning. G: Yes. K: Yes. G: Yes, layered images will usually incur a higher charge, because it implies that you will be editing the image afterwards. And so basically you need to buy some rights, the editing rights, from your artist. So that'll be a higher charge up front, when you write your original contract. Usually because I do a lot of web work, I just deliver a high resolution JPEG, high resolution PNG, and that's fine for my clients. For other major work especially if you need a layered file, PSDs, Photoshop files, are generally the common way to do it. In which case you upload a massive, massive file to a file transfer service such as Dropbox, or a lot of companies often have an internal file transfer upload - you log onto their system and upload directly to their system. K: If you're getting, especially one of those huge high-res layered images, you need to have a program that can manipulate it. You might need something additional on your end to even work with the image then. But also like, these files are huge. Typically they can't just email it to you. There's actually file transfer services as Grace mentioned, where you drop these and it's just in there for like two days. And you've gotta go get the file within that two-day period. G: Yeah. I think for major transfers I generally lean on Dropbox and actually just sometimes Google Drive. They're not exactly super secure, but like - K: [laughing] G: - few very people are going around sneaking your self-pub cover, like. [laughing] They'll just delete it after you've got it. K [laughing]: Well, you never know, Grace. Maybe someday somebody will steal something that you've done and leak it to the public, and - G: That actually would be really bad. [laughing] I work for Wiz of the Coast, if it happens then it's bad. R: Secure FTPs from here on out. [laughing] K: Multi-factor authentication in order to get these files. G: Yeah. R: So Grace, I happen to know, because I am on the inside, that you are - at the time of this episode coming out - you are the guest art director on the next issue of The Deadlands. G: Yes! Yes I am. [laughing] R: So from the other side of the table, how do you go about picking artwork on behalf of who are essentially clients here for their magazine issue? G: Cool. So, for The Deadlands I worked with Cory, who is the main art director, and I looked through the existing repertoire of work that had already been selected for Deadlands publications. Cory was very helpful too in kind of summarizing up the visual style of the magazine, as stuff that's more dark, more photo-real, lots of use of textured work, and I could see it in all the previous selections that'd already gone through. So based off of that, I was using my knowledge of my time in the art community to find pieces that I thought would resonate with that style. G: I was also provided a showcase short story essentially, for that issue, that they thought like ‘hey it would be good if the cover resonated emotionally with this written piece.' So I was looking for stuff that leveraged the visuals within that story, visuals of growth and forestry in particular, goes with a nice visceral story. They gave me the rest of the stories to read too, but as just more background information. And so I went to the portfolios of some of the artists that I knew worked in that kind of emotional field, like artists that did a lot of dark work, artists that do a lot of work in monochrome spaces, and so I looked in their portfolios for work to license that fit the forest-y theme of the showcase story. G: And so I took a couple of pieces that I thought were good, showed them to Cory, Cory showed them to the editor, and we moved forward with one of them. I contacted that artist; they spoke English as a second language so that's another thing you have to watch out with artists, so you have to be very clear and direct in your emails to make sure that you can be understood when your email gets thrown into Google Translate. And then I put Cory in touch with the artist for final contracts and payment. R: This is coming out on September 14th; the new issue of The Deadlands should be out on the 19th, so make sure you check that out, because you will see the cover that Grace picked, and the art that fit into the style, and I happen to know from behind the scenes that everyone was really enthusiastic about your choices. So you made a small mention, but we should probably highlight just a little bit - this is licensed artwork, the artwork already exists, you didn't commission something new, this is a piece that the artist already created either on commission or just as part of their creative process on their own. And so the artwork is available for license, which means that in a limited capacity it can be used again. Can you explain a little bit more about licensing? G: Yeah. So licensing is essentially buying rights to print an image, whether it be like a t-shirt or whether it be like your book cover, and it kinda goes through a separate route than commissioning. So commissioning essentially you are paying for a service, you're paying for an artist's time to make custom work for you. For licensing, it's closer to buying rights, and you're saying ‘I want to pay you x amount for the right to use this image in my piece. And generally artists are pretty lenient about licensing, especially if you are doing a non-exclusive license. It's basically free money for us, like you're paying us for something that we've already created, there's no additional hourly time that we're gonna have to handle other than administrative fees, which are usually more than covered in the licensing. For that you just generally email them and ask them if they have a licensing fee already, or you can generally look for standard licensing fees for products of the same type as yours. G: Most magazines and such will print how much they pay for licensed covers, in part of their artistic submissions and generally you can offer this rate for similar products within the field. When you are commissioning, though, these rights and usages will actually be factored into the contract. For example, if you want to be the only person who can use this work, you want the artist never to sell this work to another licensee, then this will factor into the cost of your original contract. The flat rate that the artist gives you might be higher, because basically you're saying they can't make future money off of it by licensing it to somebody else. ‘Cause copyright-wise, the image I believe is retained with the artist, unless the rights are completely bought out in the contract. Like I believe most contracts are they pay for the work and they pay to license the work, so an exclusive license would be the license fee but higher. R: Kind of like the layered file, like you know that this person wants to own this image and do whatever they want with it, so you kind of charge extra. G: Yeah. I'll charge even higher if somebody is like ‘you can never show this in your portfolio,' like you can't even use this to get more work later. K: I don't understand why anyone would want that. R: Yeah. K: Ok. G: It really has to do with intellectual property NDA-type stuff, so if they're like ‘this is a super-secret project, this is too early on,' ‘cause usually it's like artists get to post in a portfolio once the thing has been released, but if they're worried a project is gonna be canceled and they wanna hold onto the image in case they wanna use it for another project, then that would bar them from putting it in a portfolio. This is more common practice among artists who work in video games and animation, where their projects are constantly like revolving, canceled, there's a lot more asset reuse, yeah. R: Alright so. There [laughing] is a lot of information on licensing, on contracts, on payment structures. Be nice to the artist, ‘cause look at everything they're already balancing. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: So any final thoughts, Grace? Anything we haven't touched on that is a bugaboo for you, that you wanna make sure we warn people or - G: I feel like we've covered a lot. R: - invite people, it can be inviting too. G: I dunno, come to my class November 13th. It's a free business class on how to write effective art briefs. [laughs] R: Yes, that's through Clarion West. G: It'll be through the Clarion West, yes. R: Yeah, so we will put the link to that in the show notes. Hopefully the - is it unlimited spaces, or is it limited? G: There are one hundred spaces, I think like 40 of them are already taken. R: Okay! So by the time this comes out there'll be less than 60 available, so make sure that you go find that link in the show notes for that free workshop, because I think a brief is going to make you as compatible as possible with the person that you commission. Because you wanna make their job easy, so that they don't wanna charge you extra. K [overlapping]: [laughing] R: And also so that they still love your project by the time they get to the final artwork. K: Yeah, so they don't have some sort of visceral shudder reaction every time the name of that book or project comes up. [laughing] G: Things also go around. Artists talk to each other, so if you give one a terrible time, then a lot of them will not wanna work with you anymore. K: Yeah this is something not just in art and publishing, but I think most industries - people who work in the same field talk to each other. Artists do not exist in a bubble, they are not all hiding in some dark studio bent over an oil painting that they've been devoting their life to - G: I mean we are. K: Okay. G: But we all just have Discord open on the side. K [laughing]: The room has internet access, yes. Grace thanks so much, this was great. I think this was a lot of really good information that people kinda dipping their toe in the water here may not be aware of, or know how to find easily. But speaking of finding, where can people find you? G: Ah, you can find me on ArtStation, at artstation.com/fictograph. It's like pictograph but with an f instead of a p. That is the same on Twitter, where it's mostly cat photos. K: [laughing] R: Alright we will put those links in the show notes too, so you won't even have to spell anything. Just go find a link, and go find Grace because Grace has a lot of amazing artwork to look at, and also might be the perfect artist for a future project of yours!

My guest today is Gatis Zēmanis, co founder of "Kalve Coffee", we are talking about design as a strong component of business from day one.M: Hi, Gatis! Thanks for the coffee which comes from Coffee Roastery KALVE and which has been roasted here, in Riga. You have worked with coffee a lot. Can you tell me a bit about the history? When did you start and how did you end up in coffee?G: Many people have asked “Why coffee? “, and the answer is that this product is important, I like coffee, and it's a very interesting product to work with emotionally and financially, but the connection to coffee most likely are the people from this industry, and what makes this industry cool is its openness and responsiveness on a global level, and it seems that coffee is a massive global business, but while we are on the topic of specialty, you can actually reach any point of the world, farmer or the world's best barista, or a roaster.M: Can you briefly explain what is specialty coffee?G: It differs with quality – there's specialty coffee and there's mainstream coffee. There's an institution called Cup of Excellence who are special certified judges who assess coffee's sensory characteristics and give you points. Specialty coffee means that each bean that's in your package will be free of defects, they will have more or less the same size and gradation, namely, there will be a lot more work put into the coffee to bring out the best of it. Interestingly, if we talk about mainstream coffee… actually the topic of coffee is changing very quickly, and coffee demand globally is growing, and few days ago I had a conversation with a Latvian scientist Ilze Laukalēja who studies coffee and who has research a lot of thing in USA universities, and she had a question from one of the biggest corporate companies of Brazil that produces green coffee about what to do with the mainstream coffee that people need less and less. They found that this coffee has a lot more antioxidants and a lot of good substances, and now there's a big question mark regarding what to do in order to turn this defect into an effect.M: When you started, you were not the first coffee roaster in Riga. I know that historically there have been more than 20 coffee roasteries in Riga, but back when you started there were 2 or 3. When you came up with your offer, what was the essence you put in your brand when you recognized that there's a place for one more roastery and what was the place you hoped to occupy?G: Primarily, me and Raimonds, my partner , saw that we really love the specialty coffee and that we like everything that this specialty coffee offers in the sensory and community sense. And we saw that specialty coffee is not emotionally and financially presented in the way that we see it, that it was more like a niche product. If we would let a coffee drinker, who drinks Italian coffee, try a specialty coffee, he would think it's bitter and expensive etc., so our goal was to make this specialty coffee emotionally and financially available.M: I know that your brand has many values that you strictly adhere to, one that you mentioned was  availability, price. Are there any other values that you identified from the beginning and that you considered as the pillars of your brand?G: We really put in a lot of work in the beginning in order to create a navigation map for us that's based on these pillars – core values. One of them is availability, and it doesn't only mean price availability… speciality coffee doesn't have to cost 50 euros per kilo, it can just as well cost 25 euros per kilo. Or availability of taste, when it doesn't mean that this coffee has a particular, bitter, fruity taste that's not acceptable to an Italian. We are able to create an expresso blend that's specialty, but which is accepted by both an Italian and a specialty coffee drinker. The second value, which is absolutely essential and nowadays topical for almost every company, is sustainability. Sustainable design, sustainable thinking within the company, sustainable delivery or packaging.M: One of the things that separates you from most of the companies, is that you had a strong emphasis on a high quality brand design from day one. There are a lot of beautiful brands, but there are few brands where this has been addressed from the beginning. You are one of the rare companies that has a designer within its founding team. Such brands are not many, Madara Cosmetics is one of the examples and you are also one of such companies that has a designer at hand from day one, and that is obvious. What was the decision on your part when you understood that this is an aspect that is worth paying attention to?G: It was most likely an unconscious choice and coincidence. It was clear that we wanted this to be a high-quality brand not only in the terms of contents, but also regarding design. It had to look really good. Our ambitions were high enough that we saw this coffee brand not in the context of Latvia or the Baltics, but in the context of Europe. Destiny brought us together with this one guy Jānis Andersons, and at the very beginning we had decided that we would not attract investors just so we could sustain the ability to manoeuvre and freely make decisions. So, when we met Jānis and started talking, we understood that we can't afford to pay him for the whole brand development, marketing strategy etc., and through conversations we came to a conclusion that maybe we should be partners.M: You mentioned brand culture and that you had a common understanding about how the company should be created. I know that you work a lot with the internal culture. Maybe you could tell me about your approach to the invisible parts that we don't see on the shelves, but that you work a lot on.G: In reality it's very simple. In the company internally it's important to know the rules of the game for all stages, for example, what do I expect from my partner, what I expect from a colleague, how we as a company want to communicate outwards and how we explain that to baristas. We have invested a lot of time and work in various internal materials, one of them is “The Handbook of Kalve's Values”, where we have stipulated various things, for example, how the brand communicates with a person, the brand being the product and me as a company representative, and the barista, and any product we choose to sell in addition to coffee. How the brand communicates with environment. How we as people should communicate with our clients, our partners, our friends etc. And the other material, which is very good and serves as a bible that should from time to time be read by everyone within the company, is “Ethical Guidelines”. It includes various situations where we have described how we want our clients to be communicated with.M: It think it's very cool that you have done that. Your company is young, and such things often are done only when you are starting to drown, when the company has grown and you realize that you can no longer hold the team in line. You have done it at the very beginning, by writing down your principles as a founder, so afterwards it's easier to scale them and grow bigger. You mentioned the easier route… I have one more question about this topic. Even though you're not a tech start-up, you are trying to implement many things from this field in your daily life. You mentioned KPI, you have talked about the Lean methodology, which normally is language used by tech start-ups. Tell me how you implement it in your daily life and what it means to you.G: A person close to me keeps saying that you should develop a lazy person within yourself, which means you have to arrange your work environment and all systems in a way that actually makes you effective, so that you save time, you save money and resources etc. Lean methodology is one of the methods used in production; I don't think you have to look up what it is. And KPI is a method that helps you find the weak links and work on them.M: A while after founding the roastery, you opened your first coffee shop on Stabu Street. What was the idea behind this coffee shop? Was it marketing? What was the idea then and what is it now?G: If I'm being honest, the expectations weren't great. We knew we wanted to open a cool coffee shop where we ourselves would like to work. The idea was to show how we see a modern, worldly, high-quality, easily accessible café. This is the easiest way to receive feedback from the client, because it's not only a café, but also a store. The barista is able to talk to people, ask what they liked and what they didn't, understand how many people return, how many come once and don't return. It's a platform on which we can measure many different things with our product.M: You talked about things that shouldn't be rushed. You even started your company gradually and deliberately. You said there were no big investments. If I'm correct, you started with a 60 000 starting capital, which isn't a lot for a producing company. There were no big investments from the outside, which means slower growth, but that was a deliberate decision.G: You can quite easily attract certain investments to such a concept as ours, but the question is whether you should. Big investments quite often put you in a losing position, and you lose certain ability to manoeuvre. Whereas, if you grow more slowly, you are able to adapt to the market. If we had invested thrice as much money, would we be able to pay all of it now? Most likely not. Everything has to happen little by little.M: At the beginning of our conversation you mentioned sustainability as one of the main pillars you based your company on. You see that there is a demand for these things, people are willing to pay a little more for a sustainable product.G: Quite often, if you want to change something in your life so that it's in line with the sustainability principles, it most likely requires some changes, and people are lazy when it comes to that. On our part, we actually created a system regarding packaging that works really well, it was really important for us that this packaging differs from anything else on the market and that we combine it with certain sustainability principles. For example, if we look at standard coffee packaging - it's produced from two materials, therefore it doesn't comply with sustainability principles. There are two materials, you can't separate the waste, it means you can't produce it from recycled plastics, so we ended up with this can. A lot of people use the opportunity to refill these packages. The idea is that if you buy a can at our store and pay 10 euros, you can come back and refill it for 6 euros. The idea was not to increase the price so that this sustainable product gets going, but the opposite. We need to create a system based on sustainability principles that makes it easier for people to change their habits. They see they can save 4 euros, which, considering their consumption, would be around 100 euros per year, so they do it. The design-based thinking is not only reflected in the product, but in our every step – how we choose premises, how we furnish the bathroom so that moms can change their babies etc. I think that what separates successful people or companies from less successful ones is decision-making, how successful you are at making certain decisions at a certain time. If we talk about design… my side of the company is the business management side, Raimonds oversees the coffee where I don't even intervene, and Jānis oversees the design side, not only the product, but a wider, strategic design. But when it comes to big, important decisions, we make them together, not separately. I think it's the right way to make a better decision.M: How do people see this small coffee roastery from an even smaller country that's not Italy and is not known for coffee? What's the reaction when such good coffee suddenly comes from this world region?G: I think it's important to set very high goals, set a high bar at the very beginning. Big ambitions in a good sense, but then it's important to check whether you can attain them. It's really bad if you have big ambitions that you can't attain, or vice versa - you have the ability that you can't actualize because your ambitions are too low.M: Then I wish you success in actualizing these ambitions step by step and may your every morning start with a good coffee!Gatis Zēmanis:https://www.linkedin.com/in/gatis-zemanis-25836073/?originalSubdomain=lv--Subscribe to Asketic Podcast on:Spotify:https://open.spotify.com/show/73QSMYK46NHoHCytJYYmPZ?si=Mw4ZLISUSoueh9Es1pCLUgApple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/lv/podcast/asketic-podcast/id1496922775YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQdekksSROS4PCxRV7aqT3QGoogle Podcasts:https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy50cmFuc2lzdG9yLmZtL2Fza2V0aWMtcG9kY2FzdA--Asketic design & branding:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/asketicstudio/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asketic/WWW: http://asketic.com/

The sixth and final step to successfully resign from PPO plans is to add high-value services to your dental practice. People tend to pay for what they want before they pay for what they need, and this is an opportunity for your practice because you can attract patients who have an interest in high-value services that are not covered by insurance. In this episode, Gary will explain the best ways you can use high-value services to increase fee-for-service patients in your practice. 00:01:08 - Intro to today’s topic  00:01:28 - Second Thriving Dentist masterclass!  00:07:52 - Step number six 00:08:13 - What people want  00:14:24 - Run your own race 00:16:14 - Treatment areas to consider  00:19:08 - Your team’s interest Resources REGISTER FOR THE MASTERCLASS! SCHEDULE YOUR FREE MARKETING STRATEGY MEETING LEARN MORE ABOUT COACHING LEARN STEP #1 LEARN STEP #2 LEARN STEP #3 LEARN STEP #4 LEARN STEP #5 Transcript N: Hello everyone welcome, to another episode of the less insurance dependence show, my name is Naren and I am your cohost. We have an exciting topic for you may of you know that Garry decided to do a series where every episode is one of the 6 steps to reducing insurance depended, today is step number 6 and we will include in the show notes all the other episodes links if anybody wants to kind of binge to listen to all episodes together you can, but before we jump in and talk about the 6th step to reducing insurance depended, I want to make an announcement. We just finished our first master class and it was totally sold out – we have a new master class coming out on a new topic, and this master class is going to be coming out on the 31st of March 2021, again 20 seats 3 hours of CE it is a Wednesday night, let Garry tell you a little bit more about what the topic is and what you can expect to learn G: Hey Naren you know this next one we just finished one, we just finished our very first master class the idea was to provide a comprehensive course in a short timeline, in 3 hours. So the cool thing about the master class is that you get three hours of continuing education credits and allows us to take a deep dive into a particular topic. We just finished one, it is sold out – we do limit attendance because we do run it like a workshop not like a lecture so we do strictly limit attendance. This next one on March 31st is titled – a specific plan to reduce your overhead to 60 percent or less, so that will be our next master class - a specific plan to reduce your overhead to 60 percent or less and as my friends in England like to say, we are going to do exactly what it says on the tin – we are going to help your overhead to 60 percent or less, you are going to depart that master class with a very specific plan on what you can do to reduce your overhead to 60 percent or less. Now Naren we might have some listeners and say, Gary, is that even possible today in 2021? And my answer to that is going to be absolute. Why can I say that? You have heard me say this saying before but it supplies here – if it has been done before it must be possible. So not only have we done that in my own practice, but we have done it in hundreds of practices around the country, if it has been done before it must be possible – so come join us for that master class- Wednesday evening, March 31st – 3 hours of concentrated CE that you would depart with all the information you need to reduce your overhead to 60 percent or less. Anticipating that that master class will sell out, go to the less insurance dependence dot com or it is thriving dentist.com/master class so thriving dentist.com/master class there is a counter on that page that will indicate if there are seats left, If there are seat let I would encourage you to sign up because they will likely disappear N: The last one sold out a month before the master class – a month ahead G: Yeah and get excited about that, and also excited about our episode topic today – step number 6 to successfully resign from PPO plans. N: let’s jump in Garry I really enjoyed the first 5 steps and many people wrote to us and talked about various challenges they had with some of those steps so this one I think is going to create the whole flurry of activity because I see many practices today have made a commitment especially post Covid to go out of you know reduce their dependence on insurance so thank you for doing this Garry G: So let’s start by recapping where you know each one of these steps – step 6. Step one know your data – that means we need to know specific data about the plans that you are on so that we can come up with a resignation strategy that makes sense for your practice, number 2 you want to master digital marketing so step 2 is that you master digital marketing, and we need to do that for 2 reasons we need to replace any patients or people we might lose when we go out of network and perhaps, more importantly, you have to replace the flow of patients, that have historically come to you, from the PPO plans, because as soon as you resign that flow is cut puff. It is like applying a tunic kit to your arm, the blood flow stops with a tunic kit, well same thing here, that as soon as you resign you will get no more new patients, from inserting PPO name here haha delta, travelers, blue cross blue shield, you now met life, whatever it is so you have to replace those ahead of time, very important to be proactive with that – a mistake you could make is that you do not do it proactively you do it reactively – you want to replace it ahead of time, absolutely ahead of time – step number 3 strategies to get your entire team on board – your entire team on board – because this is a team sport and we want your entire team thinks of it like a theatric performance, if we go watch something in live theatre there might be featured actress and actresses, but the supporting cast has a very important role and that is why we have to get the entire team on board. Step number 4 we want to install an in-office membership plan – that is a very tactical step, but to want to install an in-office membership plan so that we can roll out the red carpet to attract people in your community who do not have insurance and step number 5 we want to elevate the relationship aspect of your practice – you know that is your secret sauce if we elevate the relationship – what we want it is the famous quote from the poet Maya Angelo and that quote this is what guides us into that step – Maya Angelo said I have learned that people will forget what you said people will forget what you did, but people will never forget the way you made them feel –and if you master that, they will not want to go anywhere else. And if you are thinking yeah Garry we do that I want to introduce a thought and that is that regardless of how well you are doing – we all my practice included can get better – haha can get biter – so it is about elevating the relationship-driven aspect of your practice, which now leads up to step number 6 which is all about adding high-value services to your practice – so step number 6 is to add high valued services to the practice, let’s talk about some of the details around this – and one of the things I want you to think about doctors say you are thinking about those high-value services is that people will pay for what they want before they will apply for what they need – think about that for a minute, it is an absolute human nature truth. people will pay for what they want before they will pay for what they and these high-value services are things that people want and when we are a dental office providing what people want it is a recipe for success, now they will still ask you is covered by my insurance, but it is a pretty easy response, to say well iwis h it did Linda, but your insurance was only designed to cover the most basic things, and this is more advance so your insurance plan ignored it. There is something on a very simple level that people want that many dental offices are just not tuned in to this – last year – excuse me it was 2019 because it was 2 years ago, a survey company was hired to stand on the street corner in downtown Chicago and they asked passer-by people who are just walking by – hey may I ask you a quick question, if there was something you could change about your smile hat would you change? Innocent question N: Mhmm G: Kind of a fun question, and they got over 6000 responses – 85 percent of the people that responded said they want whiter teeth, N: Right G: That they want whiter teeth – 85 percent, now I knew it would be a high number but I did not for a minute think it would be that high, and think abbot it, to every practice offers whitening it should I don’t know why they don’t, even ones that do sort of treat it as just another thing in their wagon and the average number of whitening procedures for offices that proved whitening is 1.2 whitening procedures a month N: Ha ha G: Naren may I be sarcastic for just a minute N: Yes, please G: Wohoo N: Ha ha G: Way to go – you gave it to the one person that begged you for it – now let’s put this in context for a minute and I am going to just make up a number that will allow us to run some math. Let’s say that you have 20 patients in your practice today, say for hygiene or restorative services whatever I am just using a number – 17 of them want whiter teeth N: Right G: Just today – that’s 85 percent of 25 now run that over a 16 day month, N: 16 times around close to 300 – G: So let’s get It exactly – 272 so 2 out of – 272 people want lighter teeth and you did one? Knock yourself out N: Ha-ha just one out of 272 G: That is – what is that? One-third of one percent? N: Yes G: I mean that is pretty bad and you know I have heard it asked – does my insurance cover teeth whitening, and it is a very easy response – no, unfortunately, it doesn’t they call it cosmetic and because this I called cosmetic they don’t cover it – okay can I still do it? Yeah, they still want to have it done – N: Give the pole what they want before you give them what they need – G: And I am not suggesting that whitening is a highly valued service in terms of – when I am thinking of high value I am thinking of something that requires more investment but that is an example of the fact that people pay for what they want – by the way your goal in whitening, I would love you to develop a system in your practice where you’re doing 15 whitening procedures a month, I still think statistically that is not all that remarkable but if you go from one to 15 that is pretty good wouldn’t you say? N: Great great G: And by the way to those 15 are going to lead you it is a gateway service people whiten their teeth and they are going to be interested in lots of other things, so you know just to kind of amplify the concept that people e pay for what they want before they pay for what the need – now let me go to the second point ere, unfortunately, there is no blueprint to follow when it comes to what high valued services you should have N: So let me ask you a question Gary the reason this is so critical is that it is a key step in reducing insurance dependence high-value services because you are going from practice that does to dentistry that is just doing the things that they need to a practice that is catering to what they want, more focused on you know listening to the relationship factor that comes in – G: It is a conditioning exercise Naren because N: Mhmm G: Because most PPo practices, most dentists tell me that there so frustrated when the patient says I am only going to have it done if insurance covers it and as soon as we start to move the needle and get people conditioned to paying for things covered by insurance they are more open and it opens the world of perspective for them even if it is something as simple as whitening, because now all of a sudden they show with their – voted with their feet or their teeth, guess they voted with their teeth to say I am willing to do something nice for myself, that is not covered by insurance, so now it is a condition exercise in a positive way, that they get conditioned to be open to doing things that are not covered by insurance – but there is no blue print to follow – what I mean bit hat there is no generic set of high valued services that all of our listeners should have, most of our listeners will know that I am a endurance athlete I am a long distance runner so I run marathons half marathons and triathlons and there is a saying in the running community that you have to run your own race, don’t run someone else’s race run your own race that is a mantra I have when I am racing and so in the same way you want to run your own race when it comes to deciding what high valued services to add – and rather than doing demographics of saying well, what do people in my community want I would encourage you to approach it ina different way what are you interest in? What are you want to learn about more clinically, what excites you what would have you giddy with excitement to take a CE course that is something clinical you can add to your practice and those are the ones, that you should have. Because if you like it two things are going to happen – you are going to enjoy doing more of those procedures and you are probably going to get really good at it because it is something you enjoy – we are better at things we enjoy – you got to pick the things you like – N: It is part of the transformation right, instead of being dictated right instead of insurance, oh half a dentistry every year to doing things you love as a clinician you know getting deeper and deeper into those things G: Yeah N: And of course sharing that with your patients so they know that you have such a love and commitment to whatever that is, sedation veneers, you are going got be good at it and it is something you are going to enjoy because you want to do it as opposed to another day at the mill G: You know we are in the middle of winner which is different for you in to not that it is for me in Scottsdale –but it is kind of for me like rolling at the top of the hill starting that little snowball rolling down the hill N: Right G: That is what this does it's about picking them – from the man, I am in this to the time you're at the bottom of the hill you have got this big piece of a snowman, that started out a  little baseball sized snow ball at the top of the hill. So let’s talk about some examples of high-value services to consider and gain this is not mean t to be the perfect list, just ideas that we have applied in our own practice and our clients have applied with lots of success. Placing and restoring dental implants – adult orthodontics, adult orthodontics another greet high-value service to add – cosmetic dentistry which could b a lot of things but I tend to thin of veneers and smile designs, great high-value service to add – oral conscious sedation – another great service to add you know 49 percent of all adults out off a visit to the dentist because of fear, 22 percent won't visit the dentist at all because of fear, once we let them know that there is a way for them to be completely comfortable during any vest in our practice, you are going to have a line – you have another high-value service to offer – complex restorative dentistry – many people, people are living longer they are living healthier they want to enjoy great oral health throughout their entire life and they want to be able to eat anything they want. Complex restorative dentistry, diagnosing and treating obstructive sloe apnea, another area that is creating a lot of interest in dentistry and another one just to go in a different direction in states where it is allowed doing Botox treatments, in many states you know check with your state but in many states, we can add Botox as a service in dentistry. And again that is a great example of people being willing to pay for something that they want before they will pay for something that they need, and there is more but that is just kind of a brainstorming list that you can use to think about your own high-value services and there is a need for every one of those, dental implants, seventy-five percent of Americans 35 and older are missing at least one tooth – 75 percent twenty-two percent of Americans are over age 60 are completely denture less – they have no teeth, and dental implant represents a pathway second chance to great oral health anyway I could go on and on, but there is – thin boat what interest you and three is other areas, think abbot what interest you and make your run your own race – you decide you decide what interests you. If it interests you I can assure you it will be successful in your practice, now I want to close this episode, with a tip- that was worth listening to just for this tip – once you become skilled in these areas and you add them to your practice I want to train your team members, on how to create interest in your high-value services, and I want to use it by example and I am going to use adult ortho saws an example – I have a  client that was an Invisalign provider for many years – and when I looked at the data he was doing 3 Invisalign cases a year – historically, Naren I could be sarcastic again here, like the whitening you know their Invisalign cases is kind of like Woohoo way to go N: Ha ha ha G: And the fact that he even said to me, Gary I need to do more Invisalign or stop doing it at all because I do it so rarely I always have to go back and look at my training materials I forget how to do the clan checking it is kind of a nuisance but I like doing it, so I either get to do a lot more of it or drop it – I said you are right, and anyway in the meantime, he had a hygienist that had to relocate sadly her husband was transferred out of state and they had to move and they hired a new hygienist and I am looking at the data – he went from 3 Invisalign cases a year to 1 a week. And this was not just a fluke, it was consistent one a week – hey Naren how about 3 a year compared to 52? N: Yeah that is a 14x improvement G: Ha ha ha N: I mean it is a little bit of you know a measurement to really measure some success G: And it is like a quarter-million dollars in his practice you know that s great – as opposed to before it was like 50 now depending on the price N: Well remember when it used to be a nuisance? It is no longer a nuisance in his practice it is like a cornerstone anyway I said, you know what? What are you doing? He said I hired a new hygienist, and she is doing it and I said well I have got to talk to her and she said well Garry I came from an office that was doing a lot of Invisalign, and here is what I do – she said I approach the patient, and I am looking for crowding or spaces – notice what she is looking for Naren crowding or spaces G: Yeah She is not looking for posterior inclusion. She is looking for crowding and spaces N: Right G: And if the patient has crowding or spaces she said here is what is ay I say Linda if there was a way to correct the spaces, in your teeth – without brackets or braces, would you have any interest in that? Guess what the vast majority of people say? Well yeah, I just did not want to look like I was back in middle school with those brackets – well we offer a service called Invisalign as the name might imply they are like it is a liner and so we can use this orthodontic procedure without brackets and braces when the doctor comes in to do the hygiene exam today I ask him to take a look and see if you are a candidate for Invisalign? Oh please, I would like to know – doc comes in she would make a pass off, Dr. Joe Linda is interested in learning if she can correct the spaces in her teeth with Invisalign – would you do e a favor take a look, and let her know? Of thank you so much for letting them know you bet I will do that and that is what they did to go from 3 cases to 52 cases by the way that has been sustained ever since. And we have seen this in practice after practice after practice, so train your team members on simple verbal skills to look for simple things that we can talk to them about I mean there are all kinds of, I could go through every one of those high-value services and adapt that, but I want to share that as a closing point to show you how you can really turbocharge all of this. Well hey, thanks so much for listening we absolutely love every one of our listeners at the less insurance dependence podcast, rammer Naren mentioned at the benign remember the master class coming up March 31st, specific plan to reduce your overhead to 60 percent or less. As we wrap up today let me simply say thank you we appreciate you, the things you can do to support our work, you can share this episode with a friend, secondly, you can jump on iTunes under less insurance depended and write us a review more reviews means more dentists can find us. The third thing you can do is you can hit the subscribe button on whatever your podcast directory is it could be iTunes it could be Google play it could be spottily it could be apple music, wherever you get your podcast be sure to hit subscribe that means that every Thursday when we upload a new show you will never miss a future episode, hey looking forward to connecting with you on the next insurance dependence podcast.

Alright part two! DJ Double El had to take off but me and Boodah sit down to discuss everything on our minds. We start off talking about his new beat project collaboration with saxophonist Mario. The project is called G-You and is available on all streaming platforms. We play most of that album then get into Nas new album and some music shares by homies and people we like. Lots more conversation sprinkled in there. Including a live phone call from Killah Verse of the Bridge. Check out all the past episodes featuring Boodah! Follow him on instagram and your preferred streaming platform! Big thanks to Boodah and DJ Double El for coming through this week! @Boodah___bridge @grillah_climax @djdoubleel @megalateshow

In this episode, Gary and Naren discuss 6 important factors for your dental practice that should be included in your readiness checklist before you decide to go out of network and how to utilize them along with must-do tactics. Listen to this insightful podcast episode to help make your practice the best it can be as you transition towards a thriving fee-for-service practice. Highlights: Introduction to today’s episode > 00:52 How to avoid the common reaction of impatience > 04:54 Step 1: Develop a Done-For-You Marketing Plan > 06:07 Step 2: Strengthen the Relationship-Driven component of Your Practice > 09:47 Start doing evening “We Care” contact Make sure you have personal digital notes about your patients Make sure you do a Morning huddle and prep doctor and team members on the patients you will be seeing that day using those digital notes Step 3: Add an in-office membership plan so that you can attract people in your community who don’t have insurance > 11:44 Step 4: Do verbal skills training for team members that answer the phone to be able to answer the question “Do you take my insurance?” > 12:39 Step 5: Do verbal skills training for ALL team members to answer the question “How come you're not taking my insurance anymore?” > 16:52 Step 6: Ten Reasons why a patient should choose your practice > 20:34 Resources: DOWNLOAD REGISTER NOW SUBSCRIBE GRAB THE FREEBIE! × Fill out my Wufoo form! No spam. We promise Podcast Transcript N: This is the less insurance dependent podcast with my good friend Gary Takacs and myself Naren Arulrajah. G: We appreciate your listenership, we appreciate your time, we appreciate your intention to reduce insurance dependence in your practice. Our goal is to provide information to you that will allow you to successfully reduce dependency on insurance and make this your best year yet. Thank you. N: Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Less Insurance Dependence podcast show. Today’s episode is a very powerful episode – it’s called the ‘Your readiness checklist’ but before I talk about that I want to kind of share my thoughts on why this is a powerful episode. See people are either choosing you because you are on their insurance, or people are either choosing you because you are ready to care of them at a level in which that accompany their pay out of their pocket – is ready to take care of them. So your readiness checklist came out of Gary’s time spent over the last 40 years working with private practices to get them ready. So there are lots and lots of different reasons why people chose those practices and why people chose to stay with those practices. For example – 80% of Gary’s patients toady are not on insurance vs in 2007 80% of them were on insurance. So how did all these other people who don’t have insurance plus the people who do have insurance decide to go to Gary even though they are not in the network? So it is a great episode and if you want to get a crash course on how this happens and you are not one of Gary’s coaching clients I would recommend you take the MBA. There’s one coming up in July – go to the ThrivingDentist.com/MBA. Its 2 evenings, 2 Friday evenings – check it out. There are also other dates and formats – pick the one you like. So Gary lets jump into today’s topic ‘Your readiness checklist’. G: You know Naren I wish that I would have had this readiness checklist when we started to go out of network in 2007. I wish I would have had this because it’s almost like a- imagine you are building a house and you don’t have a blueprint. How would that go? *laughs* Not really well. Why do you need the blueprint? Because you need all the details - I wish I could have this when we were out of the network I 2007 – we didn’t have that – I discovered this after the fact but the great news is our listeners can jump in on our shoulders because we now know what this checklist is – we’ve done this many times and we’ve refined it – we’ve continually refined it and it’s all about being ready. I’ll use another analogy so that our listeners know that I’m a long-distance runner. Imagine Naren that someone decides they want to run a long-distance marathon – now a marathon is 26.2 miles N: Right. G: Imagine they don’t prepare for it – now they really want to run, they’ve always wanted to run a marathon – bucket list kind of thing and they decide I’m going to run for a marathon and they have good intentions for it but life gets in the way and they don’t prepare for it. How do you think that would go on race day? If they go without preparation – 26.2 miles – how do you think that would go? N: it going to be a disaster *laughs* G: They might make it to the first water stop *laughs* and that’s just a mile. N: Exactly. G: You know there are book out there – where you can sign up for 16-week preparation to successfully run a marathon – a 24-week program to successfully run a marathon or whatever it is – plug in whatever time frame and if you follow it guess what your success rate is going to be? It’s going to be much more likely, isn’t it? N: Yeah G: Imagine - I happen to have one I’m looking over at it in my bookshelf and it’s called the ‘Hansen Method’ – the coach’s last name is Hansen and its literally a 16 week programmed with prescribed training for every week to successfully run your first marathon and I did that, and I was prepared. So we are going to do the same thing for our listeners in the form of a readiness checklist. One thing I want to help our listeners evade is the common reaction of impatience. Dentists can get impatient – we all are people and let’s just say people can be impatient – and I get it it’s like Naren I have this conversation with dentists weekly – I just had it and I’m going to resign I’m going to pull the plug from all these plans and just let the cards fall where they fall. Don’t do that – don’t do it because we can do it in a relatively short period of time but when you have successfully passed each benchmark you have enhanced your success and what I mean by that is that you are going to retain more of your existing patients when you go out of network by following this readiness checklist and Naren I have 6 specific steps – can I dive into those 6 parts of the checklist? N: Absolutely Gary. G: and I’m going to number these because in this case they aren’t numbered in order. No.1 – develop a done for you marketing plan that consistently provides X number of new patients constantly each month – X number of new patients each month. Now I’m using the generic term X for the podcast interview because I don’t know enough about each one of your listeners’ practice to actually plug in a number but Coaching work – we actually define that number. Let me tell you how we define it – we define it by the number of new patients that come into that practice historically because you are in that network so for example let me just use an example taken from our client base today. This was a solo doctor’s office – one doc and 30 new patients a month came into his practice because he was in-network – collectively in all the different plans. Delta travelers – this was a dentist with 14 PPO plans and historically over time 30 new patients came in a month because it was on network – so the number we out in on his marketing plan was 30 and here’s why that’s so important – because he or she has already replaced the course of new patients with marketing – you’ve already replaced it. So if he/she was seeing 30 new patients a month from the 14 different plans as soon as they have 30 new patients a month from digital marketing where they are choosing him for reasons because he is influencing them. He’s independent of the insurance because he has replaced them already. Now he still wants to maintain as many existing patients as possible but he’s already replaced the flow N: Right. G: That’s how you calculate it – go back and calculate historically how may a month and that becomes your number to replace the done for you digital marketing plan so that’s No.1 And you want to replace it ahead of time so that you are operating from a position of strength and not a position of weakness. N: Makes total sense Gary G: And Naren let me just ask for your comment on that because you are the marketing wizard on this. Am I thinking in the right way or is it the right priority to lead with this? N: Absolutely it is. The only comment I will make is that I think you added a buffer. AN insured patient is only paying 40% less right so 30 insured patients are equal to If I were to do the math – 18 noninsured patients – assuming they are all paying full price and insurance guys are paying 40% less. Yeah, so I think if you are getting paid in new patients who are not choosing you because you are not of their insurance it’s like time and a half what you would if you were to get 30 non-insurance patients – again it’s a great place to start. G: Naren I’m so happy that you did the math because you are absolutely right. You know if you are writing off 40% you can see 20 new patients and be better off but you out a buffer in there to sort of propel the practice to new levels of success and leave it to the math guy to figure that out, thank you Naren! N: *Laughs* G: No.2 component is to strengthen the relationship-driven component of your practice. Strengthen that - because that’s why they will stay with you. N: Right. G: and I will give you three specific things to do within those checklist items – 3 sub-points number 1 – start doing the evening we care contact for any patient who got an injection that day – any of your new patients, and any patient that got an injection to make an evening we care contact – could be a call could be a text message depending on what effective communication your patient likes. Number 2 – make sure you have a section in your computer for personal digital notes about your patients and that’s where you put spouse’s names, kid’s names, hobbies interest and events in their life, and so on. Don’t count on your memory is the system for that because ultimately that will break down somewhere plus the other reason why you are having this computer is that you invite your team members whenever they learn something about your patient have them supplement your notes so it becomes part of your records. And number 3 – in the morning huddle, now make sure you do a morning huddle; prep doctors and team members on all the patients you are seeing today from those digital notes. Remember, ‘Oh yeah Gary has an anniversary coming up – be sure to mention that when you see him today’ So those three sub-points strengthen the relationship part of your practice. Number 1 – start doing the evening we care contact for any patient who gets a shot Number 2 - make sure you have a place in your computer where you can put digital notes and Number 3 – consult those digital notes in the morning to prep the team for the patients you are seeing that day. Number 3 – add and in-office membership plan as part of your practice so that you can figuratively roll the red carpet out for patients from your community who don’t have insurance. So add an in-office membership plan so that you can literally attract people in your community that doesn’t have insurance and I’m going to suggest a goal – a goal of 10 new patients a month. New patients coming from your membership plan so now add the number from step 1 on our digital marketing add 10 more that are coming from digital marketing and you have a robust flow of new patients coming in – none of which are tied to your insurance. Makes sense Naren? N: Absolutely. G: Number 4 - do verbal skills training to any of the members who would answer the phone on how to answer new callers on ‘do you take my insurance’ – we’ve done entire episodes on this Naren – but I want to emphasize this – if you skip that step and they start getting calls from people ‘do you take my insurance’ and the team hasn’t been trained what will 99% of team members, how will they respond when they haven’t had training, ‘do you take my insurance’ N: ‘Nope’ G: ‘Nope’ – now your marketing worked but your conversion didn’t work. So we’ve done episodes on those go back and revisit those on less dependency insurance, but let me go ahead and wordplay that – here’s how that should go: ‘I’m so glad you called, we love seeing new patients, my name is Carly – who am I speaking with?’ ‘Naren it’s great to meet you – I look forward to meeting you face to face. Naren let me answer your question; although we are not contracted with Delta you can absolutely use your insurance at LifeSmiles Dental Care. Not only can you use it but you are going to meet Meg when you come in. Meg is our insurance coordinator and she is going to do everything possible to help you get every dollar of benefit that you have from your dental insurance. Think of her as your advocate towards the insurance company to get every dollar of benefit that you have. Naren we actually have many patients who have the same Delta insurance that you have. Do you like mornings or afternoons?’ There’s the script here’s the guideline for that verbal skill training. N: This is really really important Gary see because there are the emergency patients who give them reasons not to come in. hey are going to come in regardless they have already decided. Then there are other patients who are non-emergency who have done a lot of research and who have decided. But then there is a majority of patients who have decided that maybe 70% -they are not 100% yet. They are picking up the phone and calling to get over that hump and they are saying, ‘yeah let’s book an appointment’. If your team is not trained unfortunately I would say 80% of the teams are not trained – not at the level at which LifeSmiles is trained, I would say even 90% of the teams even - G: I think you might be understating it at 80 - N: Yeah at least 90%, so think of it like this – I remember you used an analogy when you first purchased this practice that was insurance dependent, you said certain types of providers you are better off telling the patient to go away and also giving them a 50 dollar or a 100 dollar bill because you end up saving money by not treating them. G: The worst one for us Naren was MetLife. Now that may or may not be the worst one for you because it depends on the fees and states and so on, but every time we did a crown on a MetLife patient it cost Paul and I a 138 dollars. Now I’m not saying an opportunity cost Naren – it cost us 138 dollars out of pocket to do a crown for that patient. N: Right G: We would have been better of handing them a 100 dollar bill and say, ‘Hey Naren please go somewhere else’ *laughs* N: Exactly G: Here’s a 100 bucks! Not that’s silly but it would have cost us less money we would have lost less money if we did that. N: Yeah so the point that I’m trying to make is if this part of your business is not fine-tuned it’s like you’re taking a 100 dollar note and burning it because the phone is ringing, marketing is ringing but the majority of people who are not totally convinced yet – they are not booking and I have done the analysis – we listen to calls and provide feedback. Analysis on many many clients and many of them a literally leaving like 500 extra clients on the table every year. Some are 100 some are 200, but it is unreal the number of clients that have been left on the table. G: Yeah that so true. Why don’t we go to the next verbal skill training? That was number 4 on the checklist, let’s go to number 5. Now I want you to do verbal skill training for all team members. 4 was about training your team members on the phone, handling inbound calls – the next one 5 has to do with verbal skill training for every team member to answer the question, ‘How come you are not taking my insurance anymore?’ Now I asked in a very blunt way but I want every team member to be able to have some level of conversation with a patient with that question. Now they don’t have to be the expert at it but I want them to have some level of communication because patients do not discriminate who they asked the question to. They will ask that question from whoever happens to be next to them. Now I don’t want any team member just folding their tent, ‘I don’t know I’m an assistant’ because hat message does that communicate to the patient? It wasn’t a confident message! So I want any team member to be able to say Naren I’m so glad you asked that question. You know let me show you – first of all every patient in our practice is important Naren to our Doctor and the team – you are important to us. Now remember if you have been working on the relationship side of your practice – that’s a true statement. You will feel that – would you agree Naren? We’ve done the things that make a relationship practice when I say you are important to us, in your mind you are thinking, ‘yeah I get that I get it’ and if you haven’t done that then that’s an issue. N: Absolutely. G: Naren you are important to us and we have determined – now I’m going to put those in Covid19 context. ‘You see all the things we are doing to make this a safe environment for you Naren. You see all the additional PP, all the additional steps that we take to make this a safe environment and you have to understand that the Doctor – his number 1 priority is your safety. We would ever compromise that in any way. This is a safe environment for you, for the doctor, and for the team members. The doctor determines that if he was to continue to be in-network with Delta we couldn’t do that and that was not acceptable to him. So he made the difficult decision to gout of the network to deliver on the promise to always make this a safe environment. Now Naren here’s the great news, even though we are out of network you can still use your benefits in our practice not only can you use them, Meg’s going to continue to file your insurance like she always has – she’s going to be your advocate to help you get every dollar of benefit that you have, and it is our fondest hope that you appreciate our priority of your safety. We hope you appreciate the way we invest in technology, for your benefit. We hope you appreciate the individual benefit you get from the doctor and the team. Appreciate the way we treat you as if you were a family member and our fondest hope is that you continue to come here for your care. Now I want every team member to be able to have that level of discussion. Now if it does get deeper and they want to know exactly what goes on and so on then we can say, ‘You know what you are asking the right questions – here let’s go over and talk to Linda. Linda is our insurance coordinator, Meg is our insurance coordinator – I want to make sure that you get all the right answers, let’s go talk to Meg.’ I want that first level of discussion to come from every team member. In training, in practice, in role-play – that’s step number 5. And finally step number 6 – are you ready for step number 6? Are you ready for this Naren? N: Yes. G: Doctor I want you to rattle off improvisationally- its right off the tip of your head, 10 reasons why a patient should choose your practice. Give me 10 reasons right now and I want every team member to be able to rattle off 10 reasons why. If you can’t give them 10 reasons why – you aren’t ready. It’s just like – I’m going to skip week 12 to 16 for the training of my marathon, I’m ready to just run it I’m done with training. I’m going to go run it. What’s going to happen? *laughs* you are not going to be prepared! Naren what are the reasons, let’s try a role play – why don’t you come up with 5 and I’ll give you 5. Give me 10 off the tops of your head reasons why you would choose a fictitious office we are just thinking in our head. N: I’ll think of LifeSmiles *laughs* G: Think about Life N: I mean I don’t live in Phoenix but I’ve read the reviews so I think the number one reason people chose you guys is both Paul and Tim treat every patient like it’s one of their family members. Number 2 reasons I believe they chose your practice is it’s not Paul and Tim but it’s the person answering the phone – it’s the patient care coordinator, it’s the insurance coordinator who’s going to get everything- so these are multiple reasons right G: So you just named a third. N: Yes – the insurance coordinator who’s trying to get every penny from the insurance company for you. When I walk in here I see those beautiful smiles of after pictures though out where I can start visualizing myself or my husband looking like that 65-year-old instead of who he actually looks like *laughs* G: Give me one more you’ve got all 4, give me one more and then ill roll more from there. N: Yes I think the other reason why people choose you is because I think the care calls you guys make – I think even today I think you are like 6 7 ties bigger than what you used to be still every single day Paul and Tim call those patients they want to call that evening so that’s fine. G: Let me keep rolling – we offer hours aside from normal work hours. We are open from 7 am to 4 pm, and many of our patients love the 7 and 8 am appointments because they can come in and not take time from work. It’s an absolute state of the art office; we have every piece of technology known to mankind in dentistry because that’s what we would want if we were a patient. We use the highest quality of material. We wouldn’t put anything in the patient’s mouth that we would not put in our own mouths. Number 4 – we stand behind our work. If something isn’t right, we redo it and we redo it at no charge and number 5 – my hygienists are not only thorough but gentle at the same time. There are 10 reasons. Now Naren – true confessions. N: Yes G: I didn’t prep you ahead of time now did I? N: No and I didn’t think of LifeSmiles until I thought ‘who do I think of’ *laughs* so anyways G: So doctor I want you to be able to rattle off ‘Give me 10 reasons why I should want to come to your practice’ and I want your team members to repeat yours and they can come up with roughly as you go around the room you should actually end up with 30 or 40 or 50 reasons why they should come to you. N: Now one point I want to add is- I know Gary’s modest so he will never say this but this is not stuff he makes up. Go and read the reviews, just type in LifeSmiles Dental Care – Phoenix Arizona. This is what the patients say about the practice. 530 5 star love letter reviews. G: There could be some other ones – Doctor and team members listen to me. They take the time to listen to me. You know that could be another one. We offer services that pretty much for the most part that they can have all their dental care taken care of within our dental practice. N: Now there are a few things- G: Say that again Naren... N: You didn’t mention sedation G: So we offer all kinds of sedation and other benefits. We are totally synced into the oral systematic link – so we are helping our patients improve their health. So let’s go back over those 6 items on the checklist and again ill number them and just repeat them summarized here. Number 1 – Develop a done for you marketing system that provides X number of new patients each month. You can peel your own net – X based on the current number that you are seeing from being n network. Number 2 – you strengthen the relationship component of your practice and you do that by your evening we care contact, by your personal notes in the computer that are updated by both you and the team members that you consult before you prepare for your patients every day. Number 3 – have an in-office membership plan to figuratively roll the red carpet out, to attract new patients that do have insurance, and as part of that have a goal of attracting 10 new patients every month from your in-office membership plan. Now Number 4 - you have verbal skills training for your team members on the phone when a new patient calls and says, ‘Do you take my insurance’ do you know how to answer that. Number 5 – you have full verbal skills training for the entire team to answer a question from the patient, ‘Hey how come you are not taking my insurance anymore?’ and Number 6 – you and your team members can quickly rattle off 10 reasons why a patient should choose your office. It’s almost like you’ve now completed the 16-week training program to successfully run your marathon. You are ready for that starting gun. You’ve done those, you are ready. So how long does it take? Well, you are going to answer that yourself. How long – answer that yourself, this readiness checklist can be done fairly quickly if you stay on task. N: Right. G: But pass the litmus test, make sure you are not skipping steps because it’ll result in more attrition than what we’d like. You want to keep as many of the existing patients as possible. Naren why don’t we do him – could we put this checklist in the form of a PDF for our listeners so that their team members could be in a team meeting and that they could really make this episode come alive in the practice, could we do that? N: Absolutely Gary Absolutely. G: As we kind of come to the finish line here on the day that we are publishing this – July 2nd some of you may have some trips coming up and if you do you may not have had the chance to listen to the entire library of our less insurance dependency podcast. You can download all of the episodes going back to the episode Number 1 and they are all free and they can be downloaded on iTunes, they can be downloaded on Google play, or they can be downloaded on the Less Insurance Dependency podcast. SO if you have some travel coming up this might be a good way to spend your travel time getting caught up on some episodes to further strengthen your strategies as you further go out of network. Ok, thank you, thanks in advance for those of you who have written good reviews. If you haven’t the jump on iTunes and write us a review on the Thriving Dentist and we appreciate each and every one of you as a listener. Thanks for listening and giving us a chance. Thank you bye.

In this video, you will learn how to properly pronounce the /dʒ/ sound in English. The two English letters that make this sound are: J, G You will also learn with examples of how to use it in the beginning, middle, and end of a word. There is also some bonus practice for you as well! .................................... Join me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/english_teacher_monica/ Join me on my English Channel: https://t.me/englishmonica English Podcast: https://englishteachermonica.com/english-podcast/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/englishteachermonica Pre-register for the English listening course here: https://www.americanenglishacademy.us/listening-course --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/englishteachermonica/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/englishteachermonica/support

Go to https://www.808Podcast.com or I'll delete all your Facebook Bots! Victor tells you how to use Facebook Bots in your "5 Day Challenge". He also doesn't tell Bob he's a horrible person by littering. G You can check him out at https://www.VentoBot.com/ to get his Chatbot Challenge Checklist

Raymond: I'd like to make a reservation to Los Angeles for next Monday.我要预订一张下礼拜一去洛杉矶的机票。Ground Staff: Just a second and I'll check the schedule.请稍等，我查一下时刻表。R: I'll need an economy ticket with an open return.我要经济舱，回程时间不定的往返票。G: American Airlines has a flight leaving at 9:25 a.m. 美国航空公司有一个早上9点25分起飞的航班。R: I guess that's OK. What time should I check in?这个可以，我应该什么时候去办理登机手续？G：You have to be there two hours before departure time.你要在飞机起飞前两小时到达哪里。最新的节目更新请搜寻订阅“学英语环游世界”专辑，或Fly with Lily系列专辑，喜欢就订阅分享，还有一个五星的评价，会让我继续努力！FB/IG/Line@：flywithlilyWebsite: flywithlily.com公众微信：iflyclub、englishfit

有人曾经问我说，你为什么喜欢英语。很简单，因为的英语的动画片实在是太好看了！为了能脱离字幕看这些好看的电影，也要学会英语吧！欧美动画电影的画面，剧情，配乐，真的很优质。而且大多数较好的动画在看完之后，内心总是暖暖的，充满了力量。《海绵宝宝》是我很喜欢的一个动画片，海绵宝宝总是很积极的去面对自己的生活和工作，单纯和热情而且很细腻。电影《长发公主》里面的歌超级好听，几乎每一首我都会唱。《冰雪奇缘》就更不用说了，除了唯美的画面，特别是在Elsa用冰造城堡的那一幕，真的好美好美。还有好听的Let It Go,我们在《早餐英语》中也教唱过。这些动画片不仅好看，而且当中人物所说的话，虽然简短，但却让人深思。今天我们来看一下部分动画人物所说的，非常值得我们借鉴的关于人生的一些建议。New Words:define美 [dɪ'faɪn] vt. 定义；规定element美 ['ɛləmənt] n. 元素；要素；Inifinity 美 [ɪn'fɪnəti] n. 无穷；无限大；无限距The Flash: Life doesn't give us purpose. We give life purpose.闪电侠：生活不会给我们目标。我们赋予生活目标。Olaf: Some people are worth melting for. 奥拉夫：有些人值得让我为他融化。Merida: Our fate lives within us, you only have to be brave enough to see it美利达：我们命运就在自己手里，但你要有勇气看到它。SpongeBob Square Pants: I'm ready! I'm ready! I'm ready!"海绵宝宝：我准备好了！我准备好了！我准备好了！Wreck-It Ralph: There's no one I'd rather be than me.拉尔夫：我更喜欢做自己。Chef G: You must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul.厨师长：你不能只因你的出身就随意让别人定义你。只有你才会限制你自己。Alice: I can't go back to yesterday-because I was a different person then.爱丽丝：我不能回到昨天，因为我已经和以前不一样了。Elsa: Let it go, let it go.埃尔莎：随它吧！随它吧！Mary Poppins: In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.玛丽.波平斯:在每一个必须完成的工作中，总有能找到乐趣的地方。Anna: Love is an open door.安娜：爱是一扇敞开的门。Buzz Lightyear: To infinity and beyond!"巴斯光年：飞向无限！

有人曾经问我说，你为什么喜欢英语。很简单，因为的英语的动画片实在是太好看了！为了能脱离字幕看这些好看的电影，也要学会英语吧！欧美动画电影的画面，剧情，配乐，真的很优质。而且大多数较好的动画在看完之后，内心总是暖暖的，充满了力量。《海绵宝宝》是我很喜欢的一个动画片，海绵宝宝总是很积极的去面对自己的生活和工作，单纯和热情而且很细腻。电影《长发公主》里面的歌超级好听，几乎每一首我都会唱。《冰雪奇缘》就更不用说了，除了唯美的画面，特别是在Elsa用冰造城堡的那一幕，真的好美好美。还有好听的Let It Go,我们在《早餐英语》中也教唱过。这些动画片不仅好看，而且当中人物所说的话，虽然简短，但却让人深思。今天我们来看一下部分动画人物所说的，非常值得我们借鉴的关于人生的一些建议。New Words:define美 [dɪ'faɪn] vt. 定义；规定element美 ['ɛləmənt] n. 元素；要素；Inifinity 美 [ɪn'fɪnəti] n. 无穷；无限大；无限距The Flash: Life doesn't give us purpose. We give life purpose.闪电侠：生活不会给我们目标。我们赋予生活目标。Olaf: Some people are worth melting for. 奥拉夫：有些人值得让我为他融化。Merida: Our fate lives within us, you only have to be brave enough to see it美利达：我们命运就在自己手里，但你要有勇气看到它。SpongeBob Square Pants: I'm ready! I'm ready! I'm ready!"海绵宝宝：我准备好了！我准备好了！我准备好了！Wreck-It Ralph: There's no one I'd rather be than me.拉尔夫：我更喜欢做自己。Chef G: You must not let anyone define your limits because of where you come from. Your only limit is your soul.厨师长：你不能只因你的出身就随意让别人定义你。只有你才会限制你自己。Alice: I can't go back to yesterday-because I was a different person then.爱丽丝：我不能回到昨天，因为我已经和以前不一样了。Elsa: Let it go, let it go.埃尔莎：随它吧！随它吧！Mary Poppins: In every job that must be done there is an element of fun.玛丽.波平斯:在每一个必须完成的工作中，总有能找到乐趣的地方。Anna: Love is an open door.安娜：爱是一扇敞开的门。Buzz Lightyear: To infinity and beyond!"巴斯光年：飞向无限！

Christine wonders if her startup idea for Listfully, a digital wishlist platform, is “good enough” in the eyes of Swedish angel investor Hampus Jakobsson, a successful founder who has invested in dozens of companies. He tells Christine what makes a good startup idea and why starting a startup is like jumping off a cliff. After getting a reality check in a meeting with an angel investor, Christine seeks a confidence boost from Cindy Gallop. Cindy is the founder of Make Love, Not Porn and believes that fear of what people think is BS. Will Christine just get over it and be able to really own her idea and ambition? 6 Months to start a startup is a Shifter Media podcast, and is produced by Benjamin Ulstein. It is made possible by communication and technology company Itera. Itera is named one the most innovative companies in Norway – across all industries. If you’re looking for a career in a tech company that thinks differently and moves quickly, go to itera.no. Special thanks to Joyful Noise Recordings and Surfer Blood for letting us use their song “Six Flags in F or G” You can subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Raymond: I'd like to make a reservation to Los Angeles for next Monday.我要预订一张下礼拜一去洛杉矶的机票。Ground Staff: Just a second and I'll check the schedule.请稍等，我查一下时刻表。R: I'll need an economy ticket with an open return.我要经济舱，回程时间不定的往返票。G: American Airlines has a flight leaving at 9:25 a.m.美国航空公司有一个早上9点25分起飞的航班。R: I guess that's OK. What time should I check in?这个可以，我应该什么时候去办理登机手续？G：You have to be there two hours before departure time.你要在飞机起飞前两小时到达哪里。谢谢大家的收听，别忘了，加Lily的公众账号：贵旅特，喜欢Lily的节目，请“按赞”、“评论”学到的英语或问题、“转发”给更多的好朋友！我们明天见！