Podcast appearances and mentions of greg well

Jay Bryson, Wells Fargo Chief Economist, and David Kelly, JPMorgan Asset Management Chief Global Strategist, break down October's US CPI report that shows a steady easing in inflation. Liz Suzuki, Bank of America Securities Analyst, says consumers are relying on excess savings amid the discomfort of higher rates. Greg Valliere, AGF Investments Chief US Policy Strategist, expects Congress to pass a government funding bill and avert a shutdown. Get the Bloomberg Surveillance newsletter, delivered every weekday. Sign up now: https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters/surveillance  Full transcript:I'm Tom Keene, along with Jonathan Farrow and Lisa Abramowitz. Join us each day for insight from the best and economics, geopolitics, finance, and investment. Subscribe to Bloomberg Surveillance on demand on Apple, Well, Spotify and anywhere you get your podcasts, and always on Bloomberg dot com, the Bloomberg Terminal and the Bloomberg Business App. Is the Fed Done? Is this basically what we're looking at right now? The all clear sign for the Federal Reserve to have to do more. Jay Brison, Chief Economist, it W Wells Fargo joining US. Now I ask that to you, Jay, does this sound the all clear for the FED? It does for right now, Lisa. I mean, you know, these numbers are going to bounce around on a month by month basis. You know, I wouldn't. Our view is that the FED probably is done. But I don't expect FED officials to be coming out just because of this one report saying oh it's all clear, everything's great out there. I mean, I think they're still going to continue to be biased to potentially tightening. We don't think that will happen, but you know, in the next few months, these numbers kind of reverse and they kind of pop up, and the economy expands at a stronger unexpected rate, you could potentially see them going But again, I think that's a that's a high bar at this point. This adds to signs that there is some sort of cool and this is the reason why so many people are talking about a soft landings. You haven't seen the real cracks you'd expect ahead of a massive recession. Jay, do you think that is an accurate categorization of exactly what we're seeing with prices not going up as much as people had expected. Yeah, I think that's right, you know. I mean, if we were still clipping along at a year over year rate on the core of a five percent, we'd be talking about the Fed hiking even more. And when you start to hike even more, that's when you have the problems. So, you know, so the potential for a soft landing is still there. I guess what I'm a little bit still watching and concerned about is that the real FED funds, right, you know, the nominal rate minus some sort of inflation rate continues to drift higher, and that's what matters for the real economy. And so I think the Fed is going to delay easing at this point, and so we may or may not have a downturn early next year, but I think the next few quarters because monetary policy is going to remain restrictive. I think you're looking at headwinds on xanomic growth. Is it mission accomplished? There's a comedy to that, a painful comedy for our geopolitics, our history, Doctor Bryson. What are we getting to a transitory point where this Federal Reserve can say mission accomplished? Well, again, Tom, I don't think they're going to come out and say that right at this point. But you know what I would say is the bar for further rate hikes is getting higher and higher at this point. Many of the members on the FOMC think they have done enough at this point, and you know, today's rally and the tenure notwithstanding, you know, we still have seen you know, relatively high long term rates and so there's a fair amount of headwinds on the economy right now. Again, they're not going to come out and say mission accomplished right now. They need to see a few more months of this before I think they feel confident in that this is certainly a good start in that journey. But I still think, you see, you need to see a few more months of point two's before they say accomplished. Lisa, the mission accomplished December twelfth a CPI report before a December thirteenth FED meeting, and or just to really echo what Jay was talking about that the bar is getting higher and higher for them to go again, evidently the bar is getting a bit lower for them to cut rates. FED dated swaps are now pricing in the first twenty five basis point cut for June versus July. Before we got this print, Jay, there is this issue of what we're going back to. Are we seeing a fast enough pace of disinflation to believe that two percent is very much in the horizon. You and your team have been excellent about the last mile of getting inflation down from three percent to two percent? How far along that process are we? So, you know, I don't have the numbers here in front of me, Lisa, but you know, I think if you look at the three month annualized change in the core, we're probably at three and a half percent right now. So if you want to get back down to two, I mean, what you need is you need a few months of point twos and even point one to kind of get you there. And I'd think we're still looking at a number of months for that. We don't think we're going to be looking at that sort of number until the second half of twenty twenty four. But I don't know if you necessarily need to be two percent annualized for a few months before the FED cuts. I mean, they're going to be looking forward, right and if they are confident that things are really going to slow down, then they could start to cut rates, you know, maybe summer or so of next year, Doctor Bryson, thank you so much. The chief economist of Will's Frogo Ja Brison, David Kelly, will adjust. He's chief Global Strategists at JP Morgan Asset Management. With his years at Putnam knows when the facts change, he will change. David Kelly, how does your analysis change with this shock report? Yeah, so this this report is actually very close to who we're looking for here. As we're tracing as inflation, we can see right down to below two percent on the consumption deflator by the fourth court of next year. I think what's really important about this report is there's a large camp of people who say that the last mile is sticky, getting from three to two is sticky, and we don't see that at all. We're going to step down inflation all the way through the fourth court of next year. And what I think this report is showing is across the board, there's disinflation in the US economy and we're heading back to two percent. So I think that is gradually changing in the minds of the markets. I think that's why you've seen this move here, although it's not necessarily coming with paying David, and this goes to the soft landing Nirvana that Neil Dotta was talking about, that real average hourly earnings increased by zero point eight percent, up from zero point five percent. People's earnings are exceeding at the pace of inflation and in a material way for the first time in a long time. How much does that lead to a stickiness because people have the means to keep paying the prices. I don't think so, because I mean, we've had periods of positive real wage growth before. But what I'm saying looking at the earnings reports from the last quarter is companies are very focused on holding earnings in check. Now, yes, you can say that today's earnings are higher than inflation, but from a worker's perspective, they're not even getting catch up from all the inflation they saw over the last two years. So what you're seeing is partial compensation for previous inflation. But I don't see a lot of evidence that companies are being able to push higher prices the workers being able to push higher wages. So overall, I think what we're seeing we're not seeing a price wage spiral. We're seeing a price wage slinky. They're both gradually coming down the stairs slowly. I think this is just going to continue all the wage two percent, and there's a question mark around Yes, this is definitely good for bonds and you're seeing that rally in a massive way today. Is this necessarily good for stocks over the longer term if it is accompanied with a cooling in the economy. Yeah, I think it is. Now. There are things that could go wrong, and there's certainly parts of the stock market that are overpriced, but I think what's happening is work turning to where we were ten years ago. We're turning to an economy with two percent inflation, very slow growth. That low inflation can allow for lower long term interest rates, which supports all asci prises, bonds and stocks alike. And of course stocks are the ultimate long duration asset, so they will benefit from this lower rate environment. So, you know, soft landings never last forever. They'll eventually the rote and we'll fall into recession. But for right now, this does really show that inflation is steadily coming down, and we've just got to we've got to recognize that's going on. Regardless of Fed officials who occasionally say that we're not there yet or tour into declare victory. Look, I'm willing to say we're going to win this thing. It looks very very likely they're going to win this. In Invation down to two percent by the end of next year, Small Stacks Russell up four percent, NASDAK up one point eight percent, though Nasdaq one hundred, I should say Dow lags up one point one percent, Standard Impores five hundred, up fifty, up fifty five, up sixty, and now up sixty three points one point five percent. Doctor Kelly, I want to sum this up to the angst that Lisa Brambo Bramo Wit says on our nation's debt. If we get inflation down, if we have a successful FED, does that give you confidence that we can have in long term our minus G relationship, our minus G equation, that will mean our debt and deficit is of less fear a little bit. I mean, it's still what you're basically saying is we can service this debt at cheaper prices no matter how large it is. Yes, we can to an extent, But I think the amount of debt we've piled up in recent years is going to mean permanently higher loge of interest rates experienced ten years ago, so that that problem is going to be around for a while unfortunately, I see no evidence that there's any consensus in Washington about doing anything about it about it, so I'm still worried about poppulism. Left of the right just pushing these depths its higher and higher in the years ahead. Doctor Kelly, thank us so much, David Kelly, JP Morgan joining US unapplied mathematics of big box retail. Elizabeth Suzuki joins US at Bank of America Securities. When you were going through polynomials and you know, doing ferrisproof and all that and applied manth, you think you'd be an aisle four at home depot. I did not. I never thought that my work was going to include channel check at stores that I just go to anyway. In fact, now you know, as a homeowner for the last you know, six years, I'm in home depot pretty much every weekend, maybe every other weekend. But I mean it just never stopped. Wonderful. I've never been to the one downstairs Ferrell's down there once a week picking up something. Let me cut to the chase, which is the new post pandemic home depot world and for other big box as well. Can they fix the problem on the income statement? Can they take out expenses like Disney or you name the bank. Sure, you know, I wouldn't really categorize it as a problem on the income statement. When we think about what Home Depot is going to do this year in terms of sales, they're probably going to end up about fifty percent higher than they were in twenty nineteen. And just putting that in context of the broader industry, which is tracking up about like twenty percent versus twenty nineteen levels, that's an amazing amount of market share that Home Depot has been able to take. I mean, we're coming down off of these very very high levels of spend. During the pandemic. Homeowners had you know, easy rates to be able to borrow against. They also had you know, stimulus money to spend. They were moving at much higher frequency. A lot of people moved out to the suburbs during the pandemic. I mean, we've seen a slowdown in that, and you know, I think what's been surprising this year to the downside and just where we've seen that pressure on the top line is really mostly from housing turnover basically coming to a standstill, you know, so as as we expect. Yeah, so I think, you know, as as rates start to moderate or potentially even come down, maybe towards the second half of next year, I think that's going to help spur that housing turnover again and we're going to see more of a return to normalization in terms of that top line salesca Given what mortgage rates are, do you really think we can normalize the fact that some people just locked in their homes with the two three percent mortgage you just aren't moving anytime soon. Yeah, you know. I think it's like once rates really stabilize, maybe come down a tick, you know, a couple of rate cuts, potentially in the second half of next year, then you know the homeowner is saying, okay, like rates are probably not continuing to go up, I can potentially refinance. If I were to move today, I'm locking in a rate that's higher than what I wanted. But I feel like there's some potential for that to come down over time, and maybe it means that people buy a house that's a little bit smaller than what they wanted, or it means that you know, some people who are moving and you know, are going to have to absorb a higher rate. But because households have such high levels of savings they actually can absorb that. It's just it is uncomfortable, right So right now we're feeling that discomfort in terms of existing home sales, which are the lowest they've been in thirteen years. How much does home tapot rely on the housing market versus the fact that people aren't moving they are buying new refrigerators I'm just saying, or they're buying new stoves or new microwaves or other items in the house that might break. I mean at a certain point, does that actually help these companies? Yeah, I mean the sector is not as sensitive to housing turnover as one might think. I mean, when you're seeing these negative data points on housing every day, and if you already have sort of a negative bias, each one of those data points just kind of confirms your bias and you're going to say, of course, things are terrible right now. So what we've done is we tried to look at basically every macro factor you possibly could. And this is really where that applied mathematics comes into play. As we built a proprietary indicator of home improvement demand and we narrowed it down to fourteen different factors that are reported monthly that we can correlate to Home Depot and Low same store sales growth. At the end of the day, that's pretty much what drives these stocks is same store sales growth. So we narrowed it down to these fourteen factors, we built an indicator off of it, and then that indicator helps inform our views where we don't have to be dependent on the company's guidance, we don't have to be dependent on third party forecasts. Like we're able to actually look at the factors that matter, and then months to month we can track each of those factors and not get distracted by the noise that we hear in a lot of these other data correlated as Home Depot to some of the other retailers that are not related to the housing or home improvement sector. Yeah, I mean, that's that's a really interesting question. And I think, you know, when we boil it down and look to look at the broader sector and look at Bank of America's credit card data for the home improvement retailers, which is you know, just very broad category, Home Depot has outperformed that group pretty consistently, like actually very consistently over time, and Low's has as well. By at least two hundred basis points. So you know, the market share gains here are pretty material, and that's something that I want to just continue to kind of hone in on. In this result is even though their sales are down three percent, we've seen the category down you know, mid to high single digits year over year for most of this year. But in terms of correlation to you know, to other retailers, it's it's pretty independent. I mean, it's it's some factor of the broader consumer and the health there, and so obviously there's correlation to like a Walmart and a Target. But because it is related to housing and really home prices are one of the most important factors driving home improvement demand, that's really where it kind of differentiates. We've all been surprised by the strength that is economy this year. There's a bunch of companies that fall under your coverage. We're trying to work out whether we are at the precipice just around a corner from a severe weakning of the economy. Do you see any of that emerging whatsoever going into year end? Yeah, I mean I think that there are categories that we follow that are struggling more than others. You know, appliances, We talked about refrigerators. I mean, appliance sales are down. You know, the volumes have been under pressure. Margins are coming under pressure as well. We saw promotions that started in October for appliances. So if you're you should get on it, if you're you're in the market for a fridge, because I think those promotions are going to be, you know, pretty pretty attractive this year with the cameras. Some impressed. Yeah, I just kind ofd you get no, I just want to hear what you have to say. Carry on. But you know, consumer electronics is another one, right, I mean, as as Home Depot said in their press release or seeing pressure on big ticket consumer discretionary product. So consumer electronics definitely one of those. Appliance is kind of fit in that bucket from New York University just emailed in. So you're sitting here with Ken Langohn, He's gonna go. This is all a lot of great chat. But the bottom line after a three years pandemic and lays let's call it is, can they get back on track to the total return that we were weaned on? Can they get back to sixteen eighteen to twenty percent per year share return. Yes, I think, you know, in this current macro environment, that's tough, you know, because the consumer is pulling back on spending and we are coming off of this you know, sugar high from the last couple of years. But you know, we as we look to twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, we see no reason why there shouldn't still be growth in the home improvement sector beyond the broader economy list. This was great, Thank yous. Going to see in person as well. Greg Fadia joint is right now, the chief US policy strategistic AHF Investments, Greg, in your mind, from your perspective, in your opinion, do you think this pass can pass, can get through Congress this week? I think they can. It's been so humiliating for them for the last few weeks. I think they know they've got to do something. The credit rating downgrade is serious. So yeah, I'm at sixty forty one minutes possible that a handful, once again, a handful of far right radical Republicans could kill this, but I think they want to give at least on this first bill. They want to give Mike Johnson a victory. This is what I was going to ask Greg, who does this particular offer upset more? Is it Republicans within his own party or elsewhere? What's a good point, John, There's so much in the bill to hate. For the Conservative Republicans, there are no spending cuts and they're quite upset over that. For the White House and the Democrats, the fact that there's nothing for Israel or Ukraine is very troubling. And we can say, oh, we'll get them some money in February. Well, they need money now, and I think to not send our allies this money sends a very bad signal. Greg. It's that time of year. Our Greg Durou owns a high ground and keeping track of who's leaving, who's coming, who's going in the House, in the Senate. Juan Williams in the Hill today or yesterday, I should say, really writes it up of the Republicans leaving the House. I think this is underreported. You've got Buck, You've got Granger, You've got LESCo, You've got Sparks, on and on. Is this going to be even a more Trump Republican party? Not in a year, but in a matter of weeks it could be. Yes, and a lot of the names you mentioned are people who are disgusted. They can't take it anymore. I also think there's a growing chance, a very good chance, that the next Senate will elect a year from now, will be controlled by the Republicans. They have, I think, an easy chance to take the Senate. Now, I look at this as wildly underport. You know, we'll focus on mansion and that in Spenberg or Virginia. Have you seen it like this before? Is this normal changing of the chairs to musical chairs or is there something unique here? Well? I tell you, Tom, I think what is unusual is to have Democrats talking now openly about a need to get a different nominee. That's really unprecedented. You probably have to go back to LBJ who lost support in his own party. That makes the Democrats nervous, the fact that they could lose the Senate and lose it convincingly. We'll get back to that in one second, because I do want to get your view on that. But just to build on what you're talking about, the fact that Democrats are joining with Republicans, some of them, to back Mike Johnson's plan. Isn't this what got Kevin McCarthy ousted his House speakers Bingo, that's right, And I got to think that we could have a repeat. You only need like three or four at the most five no votes and this whole thing could fall apart. So I think that Johnson has to worry that he could suffer the exact same fate as Kevin McCarthy. And there's still are nine, at least nine ultra conservatives in his party who are going to vote against this, at least as for now. What's worse though? On an international stage, you were talking about no funding for Ukraine and Israel. Is that worse than a government shutdown in the US. I think a government shutdown has become so ordinary. A brief shutdown wouldn't be as serious as sending a signal to our allies that we can't support them. I mean, this, I think is really very, very unnerving. And one other point I'd make quickly. I do think the final outcome is Johnson having to kind of deal with Democrats. I think that's the only way we're going to get a deal in the next week or two is to have the two parties unite on this. What will be the ramifications of that. I call that doing a John Bayner for an international audience. We've seen this before. But then what is the outcome if he does that? The outcome is going to be an effort to Ouston. I still think it's less than fifty to fifty. I think they want to give him a victory. Tom, but you could see a lot of Republicans say this is totally unacceptable. Great, let's talk about the race for the presidency next year. The field is narrowing on the Republican sign and it looks like Nicki Hade starts to attract some money. What do you make of the moves we've seen in the past week, Greg Well, Tim Scott didn't surprise me in the least. I think that they're the strongest other than Trump, of course, has been Nicki Haley over the last few weeks. She's got real momentum. DeSantis does not. He didn't even mention his endorsement in Iowa from the govern I can't figure it out. That was so Weirch can't just jump in, What was that about? Why didn't that come up in the debate. I don't get it. She endorsed him, I'd be bragging about it, but he didn't even bring it up in the debate. That was mystifying, but it's still trunks to lose. Trump has said some extraordinary things in the last few days about how his opponents are vermin using, really even by his standards, exceptionally harsh language, but his numbers hold up. He still has the base, and that means we need to narrow the field potentially even more for the Republicans. Who's next to drop out? Greig maybe Ramaswami. He's got money, but I could see him drop out. He's got no traction. His numbers don't look good. I think DeSantis and Nicky Haley stay in, and probably Chris Christy stays in, and that's good theater. Well, at this point, maybe the field is narrowing on the Republican side, but in some ways it's actually widening on the Democratic side. You said that there's real fear and there are real calls within the Democratic Party to have some other options than President Biden. How realistic is that? Who is everyone coalescing around? Well, that's the problem, nobody. And I think one of the strongest things that Biden has is the lack of any clear successor, and I think because of that, he will be the nominee. Apparently In the last twenty four hours, he's been very angry, profane, criticizing people like David Axelrod. I think he feels that he should be the nominee. I think he will be the nominee. What do you think he's so upset about, Greg oh mocking him for his age. Probably more than anything else. You can't do much. Can't do much about that, That's true, Greg Valier of Jeff Investments, that any of us can do anything about that. Greg, appreciate you up desa. Subscribe to the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live every weekday starting at seven am Eastern, on Bloomberg dot com, the iHeartRadio app, in in the Bloomberg Business app. You can watch us live on Bloomberg Television and always. I'm the Bloomberg Terminal. Thanks for listening. I'm Tom Keen, and this is BloombergSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Join us for a fun “Getting To Know Hoss” video! We thought we would switch it up this evening with something a little different. We are constantly told that many of you would love to know more about us, so here we go. On tonight's Row By Row Show, we're asking Hoss the tough questions and we're getting to know him a little better! Some may have to do with gardening but others may not! We hope that you will enjoy this video as much as we enjoyed making it for you! We appreciate all of your constant support! Let's Grow Together, Get To Know Hoss and Get Dirty! GET TO KNOW HOSS - Part 1 If you were not an expert in gardening, what is one topic you wish you had more experience in? Greg: I would have to say science, I love science. Maybe some type of biology, soil science has always been interesting to me. I wouldn't classify that as gardening but I would love to be a soil scientist. If you could only plant one thing in the garden, what would it be? Greg: That's a tough one right there, as much as I love tomato sandwiches, if I only had one thing to plant as a food source it would have to be corn. What is your BIGGEST passion in life? Greg: I think a person's passions change during the different time periods in their life. When you're younger you have different passions (in my opinion) than you do as an adult. I would have to say that my biggest passion write now would have to be is helping others. What hobby have you always wanted to learn that you haven't been able to tackle? Greg: Years ago I bought me a violin, I love music and I'm not musically inclined. Some people have such a talent but I did not get that gene. I can play two songs on the violin but it took many lesson and lots of practice. It would be nice to just be able to pick up an instrument and not have to take so much time to learn it. What do you enjoy the most about doing the Row By Row Show? Greg: I think the interaction and the feedback that we get back from everyone is so inspiring. It really lifts your spirits when we get emails, letters in the mail or comments that tell us how we've helped them in gardening and being successful at it. It means that we are doing something right. GET TO KNOW HOSS - Part 2 What are your pet peeves? Greg: I get really irritated with people who have a talent and they don't use it. Whether they are intellectual or they have a specific talent and they don't use it, that really bothers me a lot. If you could have one superpower, what would it be? Greg: I think it would be to turn back time. If you could have dinner with anybody in the world across history, who would it be and why? Greg: I know this may be a strange one but I think I would have to go with President Ronald Reagan in his prime. I think during his "prime time" it was probably some of the most interesting times for America. I would love to have a conversation with him about that, I think that he is one of the Presidents that I look back and admire more so than a lot of the others. What is on your bucket list? Greg: I feel like this has always been on my bucket list somewhat but more lately as I'm getting older but I want to travel more. We're traveling to the Keys this month, Holland for a seed convention later this year and next year we would love to go to Alaska! If you had a warning label, what would it say? Greg: I don't have a clue. Sheila: Do you want me to tell you what it would say? Greg: Yes Sheila: I'm not listening. Greg: Yea, I do have this gift that I can be looking at you when you're talking but when you get done talking I haven't heard a thing you just said. You may think I'm listening but my mind is actually somewhere else thinking of something completely different. GET TO KNOW HOSS - Part 3 What gave you the inspiration to start Hoss Tools and how did it begin? Greg: Well it began with the inspiration of us not being able to source quality garden tools.

We are working at a faster, more rigorous pace than ever before. That relentless push is not how humans were designed to perform. We, as humans, need adequate breaks and recovery. In this episode we speak with performance expert Dr. Greg Well, exploring the question how do we design our days to perform at our best? Learn how to slow down, to speed up.

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I have the honor and privilege of hosting the legendary Greg Savage, who is a principal at the savage truth, a great source of industry commentary on the recruitment and staffing world. Welcome to the show, Greg.  Greg: Thank you Max. It is a pleasure to be here and I think you may have gone a bit big with the word legendary but fine let's all say it then why not. Max: I was told it was legendary when I came down under. I don't know if your brand recognition is as powerful and in all timezones but certainly, in my timezone, it applies. Greg: Well I mean I don't know about brand recognition or anything like that but prior to COVID I used to go to a lot of speaking tours around the world and if you watch the calendar of those speaking to us it always seems to coincide very fortunately with international rugby matches and football matches. But, I can turn up in Manchester or Singapore or Cape Town and we will get three or four hundred recruiters turning up and it's actually a story I tell about brands, because at the end of the day. I'm actually just an aging unemployed extra crud art, and yet I can go to most cities in the world, people will turn up the list, and pay money, still astonishing. Max: Amazing. Well done. I must say. I read your bio you come from Cape Town, right? Greg: Obviously yes. Max: Yes, I made my way to Cape Town or Joburg three years ago to the future of talent event, and it was on my bio I had San Francisco on it, and that opened the doors to the front stage for me and there was an international cache to bring in CEO from an international destination and I was too happy to latch on that. But, yeah, I guess today, the borders are down, the frontiers are down. Everybody can build their brands at the global level because even the advantage of being able to afford a plane ticket isn't an advantage anymore, so there's no more barriers to entry. Greg: That's true. The only barrier to entry into building a brand is that it's very very hard work. And you've got to have a few things in your kit bag including something useful to say, an ability to say in an interesting way and I think then. And if you're consistent and long term. People often say to me, "Well, you're lucky Greg you've got this brand". Well, I've been blogging every week for 15 years mate, 15 years, and videos and Twitter and LinkedIn. So, it is hard work. But the rewards. I've tried to teach my recruitment companies that I advise them there are, and recruiters, that there are devilish rewards to amplify your brand. As long as your inr real life brand is good, you can amplify it online, you can't finish it, long term anyway because people will blame you and call you out. If you're not if you're not authentic. Max: So authenticity, okay prerequisite. How about having something interesting to say, some people will, maybe, of course, most people don't have your experience or humbly I may say, my experience. I'm on the wrong side of that equation right and I've got 20 plus years of work experience myself, so for those in their 20s and 30s, the imposter syndrome must feel so overwhelming. How do you have the balls to pardon my expression. Well it's my show, so I'll pardon, to go out and start to brand yourself as a thought leader. Was there a special moment in your career where you thought okay now I can start to take the front stage, or how did this moment of revelation come to you? Greg: Well, I'm not a great example but I've got some good, I mean that's a great question you asked about authenticity and imposter syndrome, and have I got something to say. Prior to building an online brand I've been in this so long I spent many many years standing on stages at conferences and I really had a bit of kudos around having something to say or maybe that kudos was in my mind, but I thought it had something to say and I had a lot of experience, even when the internet started, so it was a little bit easier for me, but let's come to your point, two little anecdotes. I often find myself walking down the street and a recruiter will stop me, someone I don't even know, and say, 'Hey, I like your blog' and then I go, 'Oh, that's great. And then they say, 'I don't actually agree with you. But what I like about it is, I know what's your point of view, and I love the fact that you tell it the way you see it and that gets me thinking, so you don't have to always try and be I'm not suggesting you be controversial or rude or anything like that. But people value authenticity, they value a point of view. That's the first thing. The second story is about having that same conversation that you raised about. Do you have the balls to do it, etc. With a young recruiter, well she's an experienced woman with a couple of years experience as a recruiter and I was talking to her about her brand and she said, Greg, I've got nothing to say, who would want to listen to me? And I say, well tell me this, what's the biggest frustration you've got with your clients right now and she said, they're taking too long to make decisions. They say they are desperate for talent and then they drag. Max: Sorry Greg, your mic is off. Greg: Oh! I don't know why. Max: You're back now. Greg: Just when I'm telling a great story. I don't know if you're going to cut this or whether you want me, where should I start again with that one? Max: Yeah, we can cut this off, for sure. So Greg you were saying this lady was giving you an anecdote, you had an anecdote about a lady who is saying. Greg: The short version was that she believed she had nothing to say. And I asked her what her biggest bugbear was with a client she said was taking too slow to make decisions and I said, that is an insult. That's the story, just write two paragraphs, it was a LinkedIn post she wanted to write. She wrote a couple of paragraphs about how while she encourages her clients to be fairer, we've got to move the process, otherwise, we lose the best candidates which is true. And it got traction and people commented and I said that's what we did, you do have insights, and my message to a lot of recruiters is you think you don't, but actually you're in the market 365 days of the year, you're talking to candidates, every day. You've got a view. You've got a narrative, you've got a point of view that's valuable. And that's what I comment about. I think too many people on social media are trying to be funny, trying to be provocative. I don't think that's the way to go. I think you've got to be adding value, which reflects on your expertise so that I think is how we got to build a brand in a professional field. Max: There is something about a great family name Mr. Savage and you wrote that one for a long time. I'm just reading the Elton John biography right now. He came up with that name because he thought he had a name that didn't work well to be a rock star. But I guess, for me, that's your brand, your brand is savage, your blog is the savage truth, and it just is very punchy, it's very direct.  Greg: I didn't create my name like Elton John. My name was Reggie Duag, my name was Greg Savage from the very beginning. And I don't think my personality was formed around my name. I think it's just good. If you've got a name like that people are going to ask questions about it and make jokes about it. As I've encouraged my children to do is to embrace it because it's memorable. And in the case of the blog it just seems like the obvious thing right to the savage Andrews I like to speak directly and that's what people like so. Max: I was thinking about what you said for these recruiters who tried to be funny, and instead of trying to be truthful sometimes or direct. I suppose the industry would tend to attract people who are pleasers, who want to be popular, who don't want to make enemies, as opposed to, maybe truth-tellers or people who embrace a more ideological kind of debate, who are willing to take one side of the debate that naturally the industry we kind of attract people who are matchmakers, if you will. So maybe that's why the industry sometimes lacks a little bit of honesty because people are just too afraid to accept their clients. Greg: Well I think it's a good point and I don't believe that we want recruiters as I mentioned, to try and be provocative, or try and be controversial, or to be profane, or to push the boundaries in that way I don't think that's what I'm saying and I don't even advise. I started blogging when I was running my recruitment company. I was actually working for Quint at the time, which was American digital marketing as an international CEO, and then out of that we started, we did a management buyout and I was running my own company fiber and we had to build that brand, this was in about 2010. We had to build that brand without any money because it was a startup and we went to eight countries. So we didn't use what was at that stage the beginnings of social media almost and was very successful and at that point, I was much more careful about the things that I would say because I was trying to build a recruitment business. I am still very careful about the things that I say, but I'm not that concerned if someone doesn't agree with it. I think that a recruiter doesn't have to be provocative. What that secret is that most people go on social media Max, with the mindset, what can I get from it, which I understand, what can I get jobs, fame. You actually want to go on with the mindset, what can I give. Generosity is the fundamental plank upon which a social media brand is built. And I spent hours preparing once every week, hours with videos, hours answering questions. And yes, there is something in it for me, as I've explained, but you give to get and give insights, connecting people, sharing information with people. That's how you build a brand, and I don't think you are in fact still being a people pleaser by doing that is the avenue you want to look at it from. I'm really referring to people posting pictures of cats and trying to compare them to a recruiter's license. I mean, for Christ's sake I am not interested in it. This is bullshit. Max: Yeah gimmicky stuff. On LinkedIn, if anytime I see something with more than 5000 likes. You know, alarm bells go off. This is clickbait stuff and it pisses me off personally. There's a lot of that going on. Great. Well, I hope it's not like that. There are a lot of thought leaders quote-unquote thought leaders in the industry, and we don't want to encourage every single recruiter out there to do that either. Of course, you can be a listener you don't all have to grab a mic, like I did, but for me I get great joy out of talking to people like you Greg and everybody else who comes on my show, and it's an opportunity for me to travel without traveling in a year when I've been locked in. This year has been a transition in the recruitment industry, which used to be a lot of in person meetings and a lot of building relationships, whether you're doing executive level hiring or you're talking to your customers, most of that is gone now. So, I've read an article in the Harvard Business Review and then said that the new leaders of the post COVID world are more introspective are more introverts are better at writing and more analytical. So, kind of, not the traditional qualities we would imagine from your prototypical recruiter. Would you agree with that assessment and what do you think are some of the qualities that are necessary in 2021 for recruits to thrive? Greg: I think there's a natural tendency to view leadership through the prism of where we are right now. And you got to understand that we all have to understand that we're on a journey when COVID started. People were saying to me after a month or two, how far are we through it, and well a blog on it actually and I'd say like I don't know but I reckon we're on a marathon and a marathon is 42 kilometers and if you want me to tell you my feeling is we're on a kilometer five, everyone was shocked. In this country, we have a state New South Wales 10 million people, we've had zero cases of COVID for 23 days straight, there is no one in the state with COVID but one human being. There might be one locked in quarantine when coming from overseas. So we're having meetings I'm in my client's office today. I've had a meeting all morning where we can go see people.  Max: Right.  Greg: So, my point is precisely that Harvard Business Review that said that no I don't agree with that. I actually think that a good leader right now in my city, for example, is actually coaching and mentoring people to get back out in front of people. Here's the irony. The differentiated recruitment down now is those people who do go and engage, because it can be on zoom, can be on the telephone, can hardly be by email but it's better face to face, not everybody but we can do that. And so leadership, to my mind, is, if you want me to sum it up, leadership coming out of post-COVID is a cocktail, a blend of empathy mixed with accountability. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about in the middle of COVID one of my clients said to his staff. They're all at home, they're all working from home was difficult. He just said my message to you all is to do your best. And I took him to the task, I said what kind of leadership is that it's like saying to someone who's about to run out in the Rugby World Cup final a plan, they might bite you and do your best. I mean, for god sake he's gonna do his best, we are all doing their best. What we needed was greater clarity around what in this environment, what does this look like, what should I achieve by tonight. And that may mean different things from pre COVID where we'd like you to make two placements now we just like you to be engaged in candidates of conversation with 10 clients or whatever was right, empathy for the situation, definitely and we need more of that. But outcomes, leaderships about outcomes. So people actually the irony is instead of saying just do your best, you actually need more measurements now, helping people to understand what a good day week or month looks like, and giving them the nurturing mentoring and understanding that they're going through different stages of stress to do that. So I think that's what leadership looks like and I think it will evolve. You know the big thing and I'm conscious of is that we've had to use the word good and COVID in the same sentence Max, but if anything good came out of COVID is the opportunity for us to reinvent our business. I'm encouraging my clients to look at every step in their business and I think I said this to you on the intro 'let's slow these sacred cows'. People are scared of the word, the word to reinvent the business so to disrupt the word that's overused. What disruption means to me is small steps of incremental change. So let's look at why do we pre to COVID before we filled one job out of four. Why is that, what could we do differently? What changes can we make to improve the outcome? So that's what leadership is about to reinvent and some recruitment companies will thrive post COVID with flounder. And it's all about reinvention and changing the way we operate on, that's leadership. Let's take the insight, just empathy and introspection and being analytical trust me, those are good skills but that's not leadership completely. I may have misunderstood this. And who am I to disagree with the Harvard review? I'm sure they're very well but on the other hand, I doubt they've read very many recruitment companies and I've done a lot. Max: Now, they were talking about a style of management, I would say, rather than specific to what recruiters need but it was a style of management that worked best when you're in the office and you've got a team of people listening to you to have a loud voice and a big presence can help, but those attributes are no longer as powerful in a world where people don't need face to face.  Greg: Yeah. Max: New attributes come to the fore. That's all it says, just as slightly tilting towards a different type of communication style seems like.  Greg: You asked me my opinion Max, that was it? Actually looking at leadership to me is action, what you do that counts. And that has to change because you can't be in the same room and we have to understand. Of Course, introspection is important, of course, analytics, we need data we need to understand. But does that impact the guy sitting at home with no clients and no candidate? Leadership is how I impact that person, the conversations I have, the guidance I give, the goals, and the feedback, that is where the value is. And it might stem from introspection. It might stem from analytics, but to that individual, it's how I impact him or her that will decide whether I'm going to get value from the leadership. So I think a lot of leaders, sort of focus on themselves like, how am I behaving. We really got to focus on the impact on the other person because that after all is leadership is how it impacts the other person for the greater good. As we should think more about that. Max: I cannot disagree with you on this 100%. Very easier said than done. But yeah, absolutely. What are some of the other sacred cows we want to slaughter in 2021? Greg: By the way, it is easier said than done, but if it was easy Max, all the older stupid and lazy people would be rich, wouldn't that? It's fucking hard running a recruitment business, it's very hard being a leader, and responding by saying it's difficult is not really. I had a conversation with people the other day. They say in this country we've gone from a job market to a candidate for market we've got shortages of candidates. Recruiters are complaining. I'm saying that is Nevada, having a shortage of candidates, should be dancing in the streets because that is where we can show our value. It's not complaining about having a shortage of candidates. What you gotta do is become the world champion in finding candidates because that's what clients will pay for. A shortage of jobs is the beginning of the end, it will starve and die but a shortage of candidates if you're good you'll thrive. But you asked about disruption. I think we should be looking at the way we pay recruiters bonuses. I think we should be looking at measurements and KPIs. KPIs and micromanaging have got these awful connotations to them, mostly because they're badly delivered; it's a leadership issue. The concept of measuring, there is no one who's good at anything they do doesn't measure their performance, do you think footballers and all the other top performers around the world don't measure what they do and then try to improve those things. We should have that in recruitment but the problem is old-style delivery by management is everyone has the same KPI, the KPIs haven't changed that often not reflecting the market needs. So that's a leadership issue, we should be reinventing the way we market our businesses, we should be much stronger social branding and talk about it for years but people don't do it, you should be looking at reviews, and how do we manage those reviews, we should be looking at connecting with people and creating opportunities, the whole point of marketing is sales, sometimes you just slap people figuratively Max and say. Marketing isn't about a nice brand or a pretty logo, marketing is about whether it opens doors for recruiters to engineer sales and so we need to think of it from that point of view. Excuse me. Other areas that we could look at disrupting is how we train and coach people to work from home needs examination and so does what structure should have consultants doing a 360, everything or should I have sales and delivery or should I have candidates and clients. We should reinvent how we tackle the temporary contract as it is. Yes, it is massive. I've just done a five and a half an hour webinar on this which is actually a commercial enterprise and that later watch a series of it, and that's on this topic.  Max: So, I think people who don't know you by now, have a good idea of the depth of your expertise in the recruiting industry and if they want to get more they can go to gregsavage.com.au and is there another place for them to connect with you? Greg: Thanks, gregsavage.com.au is a good start, and of course I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. I always accept invites from recruiters. And so thanks for mentioning that but I'm not really trying to sell any of our products or anything at all. I kind of actually prefer not to do so much work. I just would love to see us grab this opportunity to make the recruitment agency more functional, it's deeply dysfunctional in many ways, people working in recruitment companies where they fill one job out of five. You think about that Max, they fill one job out of five that means, they are not filling four out of five which means they're failing 80% of the time. Who wants to work in a profession, imagine if I went to a brain surgeon and he told me, 80% of his operations were a failure or an accountant, said 80% of his tax returns were wrong, they wouldn't last in business but we seem to, and the negative is bad service, speed over quality, candidates getting the road end of the deal, so many dysfunction. I mean I love recruitment being in it for 40 years thank you to you all. Don't get me wrong, but I hope we can use this COVID, I said this in the board meeting this very morning. If we go back as the markets pick up, and we go back and do everything they've ever done before the same way, it'll be such a wasted opportunity, now is the time.  Max: Yeah and we can all learn from the power of building a brand in this day and age. I think it's amplified compared to two or three years ago, and it can deliver a lot more business value for an agency, for an individual recruiter. Before we part ways, Greg. One question I love to ask people is to take us back to a time when you hired somebody who you thought was gonna be a total rainmaker and broke your heart. And you don't have to give us names, but tell us the origin of your hiring mistake. Greg: Well, you're talking about a guy who's made more hiring mistakes than anyone that you know. Here is almost 40 years of hiring people and I still get involved in hiring decisions and it's a very difficult thing to do, there are hundreds of those cases but fortunately. I will tell you a story. They're pushing their cases the other way around as well but I've got a story about a woman called, I will mention her name and her name is Julia Ross.  Max: Oh no! Julia.  Greg: Yeah so Julia Ross. I started recruitment solutions in the early 80s-mid 80s-late 80s, and was three years in, we were flying with the $13 million with a revenue of five offices and we're doing accounting recruitment. And Julia Ross lost her job wherever she was, I think it was Upward Mark, this is going to be over 20 to know any of these names anyway, over 20 years in the industry. So she came to see me and she said, I am looking for a job, and I will build a business support clerical, secretarial we call it those days. Secretarial business support recruitment business, leveraging off your clients. I'm good at it and I got well with it, and I thought she was impressive and then I got my two colleagues to see her, my two partners started the business with me and they said, 'Greg, she's good' we should hire. And I wisely said no. I don't think Julia Ross can build a business support recruitment company. And I didn't tell her that but I turned it down and she went out and started her own business and built the company about 10 times bigger than mine and listed it on the stock, and became a zillionaire. So, good old Greg and what an expert he is. You get those situations, but plenty of times I remember hiring somebody to run up and go to carefully because I want to identify anyone who's running one of my overseas offices when I had offices around the world and I was convinced it was the right guy, I've got on with him well. He was a rugby player and a rugby fan and that just endeared him to me because I love the game. And when I look back I was more stuck on that than anything else, and it was a disaster. It wasn't any good and I hadn't done my due diligence and I'd ignored the warning signs that were niggling at me every time Max I've hired someone with something niggling in my belly about it being wrong it's turned out to be wrong. And in this industry we often say, let's give it a go. He'll be right. Max: What are the odds you would have made that mistake if this person was not a rugby player? Greg: I think I would not have made the mistake. I would have been, you know, this is a long time ago, and I can look back at it as charity but I think I would have seen the flaws. I convinced myself he was the right guy, we got all well, so he is a nice guy.  Max: Of Course. Greg: He had done some good things but he couldn't do that size of that job. I convinced myself that he was what, you know and I think it actually leads on to a much more serious topic and leads on to the topic about diversity hiring and I had a conversation with my brother, 10 or 15 years ago which changed my view. He said we were talking about promoting women into jobs. And I said at that time, I have never discriminated against a woman for a promotion in my life and I was convinced that was right, he said well maybe that's true but Greg, how many times have you and other men did about a young man that he's a good lad let's give him a chance, he's not ready but let's give him a chance you've said that right, I said yeah. Tell how many times you've said that about a woman and this was 10 or 15 years ago and since then, I've consciously said yeah she's not ready but she's got potential and with help, she'll do it, and I put them in those roles and I've actually back three recruitment companies run by women like that that have all gone on to be greatly successful I can tell you who they are, consult recruitment in New Zealand. We just sold it to a Japanese company, both from three people to 50 women owners. People to People in Melbourne we started with Aaron Devlin and she put it, and they were women in exactly that state. I wasn't hiring them or did hire them. I was backing them, investing in them, or hiring them, and it was consciously saying, hold on, if this was a guy, you'd say he is a good person with potential let's back him. And that is getting on the dangerous garbage. That's what I think men can play a huge role in getting this thing equalized. You've got to not only say I don't discriminate. You've actually happily weirdly almost, amongst I won't say reverse discriminate but you've got to look for opportunities to promote people who otherwise wouldn't get them and I think that is where we can make a difference, but it's also self-serving because you end up with the best people doing the best thing, that's what we want. Max: You identify your own biases Greg: work against them whether that's against Max: Yeah you work against your biases, whether it's the love of rugby, or your faith in young male talent that you got to go look for the opposite of that and great opportunities will unfold, will arise for you. And maybe next time, a rugby player applies for a job, maybe Greg shouldn't be the one interviewing him at all. Greg: I've lost you can you hear me.  Max: Yes, I think, yes yes you're back. you're back. You're back to back Greg Greg: Can you hear me? I've lost your last couple of sentences sorry.  Max: Well, no worries I was wrapping up to say, yeah, absolutely. You said this work against our biases, make the next time Greg you're interviewing somebody who's a rugby player, maybe let your colleagues take the lead, of course, you've learned that lesson 15 years ago. And thanks for coming to the show sharing your insights and I'm sure you've won a few new followers, with this episode. Greg: Thanks, Max. I want to end by just reminding you that if you've got two equal people, equal in every respect, go with the one who likes rugby, that will be the right one. I'm kidding.Max: Who better to advise us on how to build our personal brand than Greg Savage really enjoyed what he had to share on the topic and the encouragement. I hope that you all got to as well as I did to be bought, to be honest and to be consistent over a long period of time, the best way to build your personal brand and a wonderful tool for anyone in recruitments to start using now.Do you enjoy this content, it's more like it's on the recruitment hackers podcast. Please subscribe and share with friends.

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I have the honor and privilege of hosting the legendary Greg Savage, who is a principal at the savage truth, a great source of industry commentary on the recruitment and staffing world. Welcome to the show, Greg.  Greg: Thank you Max. It is a pleasure to be here and I think you may have gone a bit big with the word legendary but fine let's all say it then why not. Max: I was told it was legendary when I came down under. I don't know if your brand recognition is as powerful and in all timezones but certainly, in my timezone, it applies. Greg: Well I mean I don't know about brand recognition or anything like that but prior to COVID I used to go to a lot of speaking tours around the world and if you watch the calendar of those speaking to us it always seems to coincide very fortunately with international rugby matches and football matches. But, I can turn up in Manchester or Singapore or Cape Town and we will get three or four hundred recruiters turning up and it's actually a story I tell about brands, because at the end of the day. I'm actually just an aging unemployed extra crud art, and yet I can go to most cities in the world, people will turn up the list, and pay money, still astonishing. Max: Amazing. Well done. I must say. I read your bio you come from Cape Town, right? Greg: Obviously yes. Max: Yes, I made my way to Cape Town or Joburg three years ago to the future of talent event, and it was on my bio I had San Francisco on it, and that opened the doors to the front stage for me and there was an international cache to bring in CEO from an international destination and I was too happy to latch on that. But, yeah, I guess today, the borders are down, the frontiers are down. Everybody can build their brands at the global level because even the advantage of being able to afford a plane ticket isn't an advantage anymore, so there's no more barriers to entry. Greg: That's true. The only barrier to entry into building a brand is that it's very very hard work. And you've got to have a few things in your kit bag including something useful to say, an ability to say in an interesting way and I think then. And if you're consistent and long term. People often say to me, "Well, you're lucky Greg you've got this brand". Well, I've been blogging every week for 15 years mate, 15 years, and videos and Twitter and LinkedIn. So, it is hard work. But the rewards. I've tried to teach my recruitment companies that I advise them there are, and recruiters, that there are devilish rewards to amplify your brand. As long as your inr real life brand is good, you can amplify it online, you can't finish it, long term anyway because people will blame you and call you out. If you're not if you're not authentic. Max: So authenticity, okay prerequisite. How about having something interesting to say, some people will, maybe, of course, most people don't have your experience or humbly I may say, my experience. I'm on the wrong side of that equation right and I've got 20 plus years of work experience myself, so for those in their 20s and 30s, the imposter syndrome must feel so overwhelming. How do you have the balls to pardon my expression. Well it's my show, so I'll pardon, to go out and start to brand yourself as a thought leader. Was there a special moment in your career where you thought okay now I can start to take the front stage, or how did this moment of revelation come to you? Greg: Well, I'm not a great example but I've got some good, I mean that's a great question you asked about authenticity and imposter syndrome, and have I got something to say. Prior to building an online brand I've been in this so long I spent many many years standing on stages at conferences and I really had a bit of kudos around having something to say or maybe that kudos was in my mind, but I thought it had something to say and I had a lot of experience, even when the internet started, so it was a little bit easier for me, but let's come to your point, two little anecdotes. I often find myself walking down the street and a recruiter will stop me, someone I don't even know, and say, 'Hey, I like your blog' and then I go, 'Oh, that's great. And then they say, 'I don't actually agree with you. But what I like about it is, I know what's your point of view, and I love the fact that you tell it the way you see it and that gets me thinking, so you don't have to always try and be I'm not suggesting you be controversial or rude or anything like that. But people value authenticity, they value a point of view. That's the first thing. The second story is about having that same conversation that you raised about. Do you have the balls to do it, etc. With a young recruiter, well she's an experienced woman with a couple of years experience as a recruiter and I was talking to her about her brand and she said, Greg, I've got nothing to say, who would want to listen to me? And I say, well tell me this, what's the biggest frustration you've got with your clients right now and she said, they're taking too long to make decisions. They say they are desperate for talent and then they drag. Max: Sorry Greg, your mic is off. Greg: Oh! I don't know why. Max: You're back now. Greg: Just when I'm telling a great story. I don't know if you're going to cut this or whether you want me, where should I start again with that one? Max: Yeah, we can cut this off, for sure. So Greg you were saying this lady was giving you an anecdote, you had an anecdote about a lady who is saying. Greg: The short version was that she believed she had nothing to say. And I asked her what her biggest bugbear was with a client she said was taking too slow to make decisions and I said, that is an insult. That's the story, just write two paragraphs, it was a LinkedIn post she wanted to write. She wrote a couple of paragraphs about how while she encourages her clients to be fairer, we've got to move the process, otherwise, we lose the best candidates which is true. And it got traction and people commented and I said that's what we did, you do have insights, and my message to a lot of recruiters is you think you don't, but actually you're in the market 365 days of the year, you're talking to candidates, every day. You've got a view. You've got a narrative, you've got a point of view that's valuable. And that's what I comment about. I think too many people on social media are trying to be funny, trying to be provocative. I don't think that's the way to go. I think you've got to be adding value, which reflects on your expertise so that I think is how we got to build a brand in a professional field. Max: There is something about a great family name Mr. Savage and you wrote that one for a long time. I'm just reading the Elton John biography right now. He came up with that name because he thought he had a name that didn't work well to be a rock star. But I guess, for me, that's your brand, your brand is savage, your blog is the savage truth, and it just is very punchy, it's very direct.  Greg: I didn't create my name like Elton John. My name was Reggie Duag, my name was Greg Savage from the very beginning. And I don't think my personality was formed around my name. I think it's just good. If you've got a name like that people are going to ask questions about it and make jokes about it. As I've encouraged my children to do is to embrace it because it's memorable. And in the case of the blog it just seems like the obvious thing right to the savage Andrews I like to speak directly and that's what people like so. Max: I was thinking about what you said for these recruiters who tried to be funny, and instead of trying to be truthful sometimes or direct. I suppose the industry would tend to attract people who are pleasers, who want to be popular, who don't want to make enemies, as opposed to, maybe truth-tellers or people who embrace a more ideological kind of debate, who are willing to take one side of the debate that naturally the industry we kind of attract people who are matchmakers, if you will. So maybe that's why the industry sometimes lacks a little bit of honesty because people are just too afraid to accept their clients. Greg: Well I think it's a good point and I don't believe that we want recruiters as I mentioned, to try and be provocative, or try and be controversial, or to be profane, or to push the boundaries in that way I don't think that's what I'm saying and I don't even advise. I started blogging when I was running my recruitment company. I was actually working for Quint at the time, which was American digital marketing as an international CEO, and then out of that we started, we did a management buyout and I was running my own company fiber and we had to build that brand, this was in about 2010. We had to build that brand without any money because it was a startup and we went to eight countries. So we didn't use what was at that stage the beginnings of social media almost and was very successful and at that point, I was much more careful about the things that I would say because I was trying to build a recruitment business. I am still very careful about the things that I say, but I'm not that concerned if someone doesn't agree with it. I think that a recruiter doesn't have to be provocative. What that secret is that most people go on social media Max, with the mindset, what can I get from it, which I understand, what can I get jobs, fame. You actually want to go on with the mindset, what can I give. Generosity is the fundamental plank upon which a social media brand is built. And I spent hours preparing once every week, hours with videos, hours answering questions. And yes, there is something in it for me, as I've explained, but you give to get and give insights, connecting people, sharing information with people. That's how you build a brand, and I don't think you are in fact still being a people pleaser by doing that is the avenue you want to look at it from. I'm really referring to people posting pictures of cats and trying to compare them to a recruiter's license. I mean, for Christ's sake I am not interested in it. This is bullshit. Max: Yeah gimmicky stuff. On LinkedIn, if anytime I see something with more than 5000 likes. You know, alarm bells go off. This is clickbait stuff and it pisses me off personally. There's a lot of that going on. Great. Well, I hope it's not like that. There are a lot of thought leaders quote-unquote thought leaders in the industry, and we don't want to encourage every single recruiter out there to do that either. Of course, you can be a listener you don't all have to grab a mic, like I did, but for me I get great joy out of talking to people like you Greg and everybody else who comes on my show, and it's an opportunity for me to travel without traveling in a year when I've been locked in. This year has been a transition in the recruitment industry, which used to be a lot of in person meetings and a lot of building relationships, whether you're doing executive level hiring or you're talking to your customers, most of that is gone now. So, I've read an article in the Harvard Business Review and then said that the new leaders of the post COVID world are more introspective are more introverts are better at writing and more analytical. So, kind of, not the traditional qualities we would imagine from your prototypical recruiter. Would you agree with that assessment and what do you think are some of the qualities that are necessary in 2021 for recruits to thrive? Greg: I think there's a natural tendency to view leadership through the prism of where we are right now. And you got to understand that we all have to understand that we're on a journey when COVID started. People were saying to me after a month or two, how far are we through it, and well a blog on it actually and I'd say like I don't know but I reckon we're on a marathon and a marathon is 42 kilometers and if you want me to tell you my feeling is we're on a kilometer five, everyone was shocked. In this country, we have a state New South Wales 10 million people, we've had zero cases of COVID for 23 days straight, there is no one in the state with COVID but one human being. There might be one locked in quarantine when coming from overseas. So we're having meetings I'm in my client's office today. I've had a meeting all morning where we can go see people.  Max: Right.  Greg: So, my point is precisely that Harvard Business Review that said that no I don't agree with that. I actually think that a good leader right now in my city, for example, is actually coaching and mentoring people to get back out in front of people. Here's the irony. The differentiated recruitment down now is those people who do go and engage, because it can be on zoom, can be on the telephone, can hardly be by email but it's better face to face, not everybody but we can do that. And so leadership, to my mind, is, if you want me to sum it up, leadership coming out of post-COVID is a cocktail, a blend of empathy mixed with accountability. I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about in the middle of COVID one of my clients said to his staff. They're all at home, they're all working from home was difficult. He just said my message to you all is to do your best. And I took him to the task, I said what kind of leadership is that it's like saying to someone who's about to run out in the Rugby World Cup final a plan, they might bite you and do your best. I mean, for god sake he's gonna do his best, we are all doing their best. What we needed was greater clarity around what in this environment, what does this look like, what should I achieve by tonight. And that may mean different things from pre COVID where we'd like you to make two placements now we just like you to be engaged in candidates of conversation with 10 clients or whatever was right, empathy for the situation, definitely and we need more of that. But outcomes, leaderships about outcomes. So people actually the irony is instead of saying just do your best, you actually need more measurements now, helping people to understand what a good day week or month looks like, and giving them the nurturing mentoring and understanding that they're going through different stages of stress to do that. So I think that's what leadership looks like and I think it will evolve. You know the big thing and I'm conscious of is that we've had to use the word good and COVID in the same sentence Max, but if anything good came out of COVID is the opportunity for us to reinvent our business. I'm encouraging my clients to look at every step in their business and I think I said this to you on the intro 'let's slow these sacred cows'. People are scared of the word, the word to reinvent the business so to disrupt the word that's overused. What disruption means to me is small steps of incremental change. So let's look at why do we pre to COVID before we filled one job out of four. Why is that, what could we do differently? What changes can we make to improve the outcome? So that's what leadership is about to reinvent and some recruitment companies will thrive post COVID with flounder. And it's all about reinvention and changing the way we operate on, that's leadership. Let's take the insight, just empathy and introspection and being analytical trust me, those are good skills but that's not leadership completely. I may have misunderstood this. And who am I to disagree with the Harvard review? I'm sure they're very well but on the other hand, I doubt they've read very many recruitment companies and I've done a lot. Max: Now, they were talking about a style of management, I would say, rather than specific to what recruiters need but it was a style of management that worked best when you're in the office and you've got a team of people listening to you to have a loud voice and a big presence can help, but those attributes are no longer as powerful in a world where people don't need face to face.  Greg: Yeah. Max: New attributes come to the fore. That's all it says, just as slightly tilting towards a different type of communication style seems like.  Greg: You asked me my opinion Max, that was it? Actually looking at leadership to me is action, what you do that counts. And that has to change because you can't be in the same room and we have to understand. Of Course, introspection is important, of course, analytics, we need data we need to understand. But does that impact the guy sitting at home with no clients and no candidate? Leadership is how I impact that person, the conversations I have, the guidance I give, the goals, and the feedback, that is where the value is. And it might stem from introspection. It might stem from analytics, but to that individual, it's how I impact him or her that will decide whether I'm going to get value from the leadership. So I think a lot of leaders, sort of focus on themselves like, how am I behaving. We really got to focus on the impact on the other person because that after all is leadership is how it impacts the other person for the greater good. As we should think more about that. Max: I cannot disagree with you on this 100%. Very easier said than done. But yeah, absolutely. What are some of the other sacred cows we want to slaughter in 2021? Greg: By the way, it is easier said than done, but if it was easy Max, all the older stupid and lazy people would be rich, wouldn't that? It's fucking hard running a recruitment business, it's very hard being a leader, and responding by saying it's difficult is not really. I had a conversation with people the other day. They say in this country we've gone from a job market to a candidate for market we've got shortages of candidates. Recruiters are complaining. I'm saying that is Nevada, having a shortage of candidates, should be dancing in the streets because that is where we can show our value. It's not complaining about having a shortage of candidates. What you gotta do is become the world champion in finding candidates because that's what clients will pay for. A shortage of jobs is the beginning of the end, it will starve and die but a shortage of candidates if you're good you'll thrive. But you asked about disruption. I think we should be looking at the way we pay recruiters bonuses. I think we should be looking at measurements and KPIs. KPIs and micromanaging have got these awful connotations to them, mostly because they're badly delivered; it's a leadership issue. The concept of measuring, there is no one who's good at anything they do doesn't measure their performance, do you think footballers and all the other top performers around the world don't measure what they do and then try to improve those things. We should have that in recruitment but the problem is old-style delivery by management is everyone has the same KPI, the KPIs haven't changed that often not reflecting the market needs. So that's a leadership issue, we should be reinventing the way we market our businesses, we should be much stronger social branding and talk about it for years but people don't do it, you should be looking at reviews, and how do we manage those reviews, we should be looking at connecting with people and creating opportunities, the whole point of marketing is sales, sometimes you just slap people figuratively Max and say. Marketing isn't about a nice brand or a pretty logo, marketing is about whether it opens doors for recruiters to engineer sales and so we need to think of it from that point of view. Excuse me. Other areas that we could look at disrupting is how we train and coach people to work from home needs examination and so does what structure should have consultants doing a 360, everything or should I have sales and delivery or should I have candidates and clients. We should reinvent how we tackle the temporary contract as it is. Yes, it is massive. I've just done a five and a half an hour webinar on this which is actually a commercial enterprise and that later watch a series of it, and that's on this topic.  Max: So, I think people who don't know you by now, have a good idea of the depth of your expertise in the recruiting industry and if they want to get more they can go to gregsavage.com.au and is there another place for them to connect with you? Greg: Thanks, gregsavage.com.au is a good start, and of course I'm on Twitter and LinkedIn. I always accept invites from recruiters. And so thanks for mentioning that but I'm not really trying to sell any of our products or anything at all. I kind of actually prefer not to do so much work. I just would love to see us grab this opportunity to make the recruitment agency more functional, it's deeply dysfunctional in many ways, people working in recruitment companies where they fill one job out of five. You think about that Max, they fill one job out of five that means, they are not filling four out of five which means they're failing 80% of the time. Who wants to work in a profession, imagine if I went to a brain surgeon and he told me, 80% of his operations were a failure or an accountant, said 80% of his tax returns were wrong, they wouldn't last in business but we seem to, and the negative is bad service, speed over quality, candidates getting the road end of the deal, so many dysfunction. I mean I love recruitment being in it for 40 years thank you to you all. Don't get me wrong, but I hope we can use this COVID, I said this in the board meeting this very morning. If we go back as the markets pick up, and we go back and do everything they've ever done before the same way, it'll be such a wasted opportunity, now is the time.  Max: Yeah and we can all learn from the power of building a brand in this day and age. I think it's amplified compared to two or three years ago, and it can deliver a lot more business value for an agency, for an individual recruiter. Before we part ways, Greg. One question I love to ask people is to take us back to a time when you hired somebody who you thought was gonna be a total rainmaker and broke your heart. And you don't have to give us names, but tell us the origin of your hiring mistake. Greg: Well, you're talking about a guy who's made more hiring mistakes than anyone that you know. Here is almost 40 years of hiring people and I still get involved in hiring decisions and it's a very difficult thing to do, there are hundreds of those cases but fortunately. I will tell you a story. They're pushing their cases the other way around as well but I've got a story about a woman called, I will mention her name and her name is Julia Ross.  Max: Oh no! Julia.  Greg: Yeah so Julia Ross. I started recruitment solutions in the early 80s-mid 80s-late 80s, and was three years in, we were flying with the $13 million with a revenue of five offices and we're doing accounting recruitment. And Julia Ross lost her job wherever she was, I think it was Upward Mark, this is going to be over 20 to know any of these names anyway, over 20 years in the industry. So she came to see me and she said, I am looking for a job, and I will build a business support clerical, secretarial we call it those days. Secretarial business support recruitment business, leveraging off your clients. I'm good at it and I got well with it, and I thought she was impressive and then I got my two colleagues to see her, my two partners started the business with me and they said, 'Greg, she's good' we should hire. And I wisely said no. I don't think Julia Ross can build a business support recruitment company. And I didn't tell her that but I turned it down and she went out and started her own business and built the company about 10 times bigger than mine and listed it on the stock, and became a zillionaire. So, good old Greg and what an expert he is. You get those situations, but plenty of times I remember hiring somebody to run up and go to carefully because I want to identify anyone who's running one of my overseas offices when I had offices around the world and I was convinced it was the right guy, I've got on with him well. He was a rugby player and a rugby fan and that just endeared him to me because I love the game. And when I look back I was more stuck on that than anything else, and it was a disaster. It wasn't any good and I hadn't done my due diligence and I'd ignored the warning signs that were niggling at me every time Max I've hired someone with something niggling in my belly about it being wrong it's turned out to be wrong. And in this industry we often say, let's give it a go. He'll be right. Max: What are the odds you would have made that mistake if this person was not a rugby player? Greg: I think I would not have made the mistake. I would have been, you know, this is a long time ago, and I can look back at it as charity but I think I would have seen the flaws. I convinced myself he was the right guy, we got all well, so he is a nice guy.  Max: Of Course. Greg: He had done some good things but he couldn't do that size of that job. I convinced myself that he was what, you know and I think it actually leads on to a much more serious topic and leads on to the topic about diversity hiring and I had a conversation with my brother, 10 or 15 years ago which changed my view. He said we were talking about promoting women into jobs. And I said at that time, I have never discriminated against a woman for a promotion in my life and I was convinced that was right, he said well maybe that's true but Greg, how many times have you and other men did about a young man that he's a good lad let's give him a chance, he's not ready but let's give him a chance you've said that right, I said yeah. Tell how many times you've said that about a woman and this was 10 or 15 years ago and since then, I've consciously said yeah she's not ready but she's got potential and with help, she'll do it, and I put them in those roles and I've actually back three recruitment companies run by women like that that have all gone on to be greatly successful I can tell you who they are, consult recruitment in New Zealand. We just sold it to a Japanese company, both from three people to 50 women owners. People to People in Melbourne we started with Aaron Devlin and she put it, and they were women in exactly that state. I wasn't hiring them or did hire them. I was backing them, investing in them, or hiring them, and it was consciously saying, hold on, if this was a guy, you'd say he is a good person with potential let's back him. And that is getting on the dangerous garbage. That's what I think men can play a huge role in getting this thing equalized. You've got to not only say I don't discriminate. You've actually happily weirdly almost, amongst I won't say reverse discriminate but you've got to look for opportunities to promote people who otherwise wouldn't get them and I think that is where we can make a difference, but it's also self-serving because you end up with the best people doing the best thing, that's what we want. Max: You identify your own biases Greg: work against them whether that's against Max: Yeah you work against your biases, whether it's the love of rugby, or your faith in young male talent that you got to go look for the opposite of that and great opportunities will unfold, will arise for you. And maybe next time, a rugby player applies for a job, maybe Greg shouldn't be the one interviewing him at all. Greg: I've lost you can you hear me.  Max: Yes, I think, yes yes you're back. you're back. You're back to back Greg Greg: Can you hear me? I've lost your last couple of sentences sorry.  Max: Well, no worries I was wrapping up to say, yeah, absolutely. You said this work against our biases, make the next time Greg you're interviewing somebody who's a rugby player, maybe let your colleagues take the lead, of course, you've learned that lesson 15 years ago. And thanks for coming to the show sharing your insights and I'm sure you've won a few new followers, with this episode. Greg: Thanks, Max. I want to end by just reminding you that if you've got two equal people, equal in every respect, go with the one who likes rugby, that will be the right one. I'm kidding.Max: Who better to advise us on how to build our personal brand than Greg Savage really enjoyed what he had to share on the topic and the encouragement. I hope that you all got to as well as I did to be bought, to be honest and to be consistent over a long period of time, the best way to build your personal brand and a wonderful tool for anyone in recruitments to start using now.Do you enjoy this content, it's more like it's on the recruitment hackers podcast. Please subscribe and share with friends.

Dr. Greg Wells studied Kinesiology and did his Masters in Physiology and PhD in Respiratory Physiology. For his PhD, he studied how high level athletes were able to improve their performance through improved breathing.    In this interview, Dr. Greg Wells and Ben Pakulski discuss the extremes through which humans can use their breathing to accomplish whatever the task is, from extreme athletic performance to meditation. They talk about Dr. Greg Well’s newest book: “Rest, Refocus and Recharge” and how small breaks and little tactics throughout the day can help you recover and feel better. And finally, the two get into how to balance radical self-acceptance with the pursuit of excellence and discuss the concept of “thinking about how you think”. To find out more about Dr. Greg Wells, please visit https://drgregwells.comand pick up his books The Ripple Effect and Rest, Refocus, Recharge: A Guide to Optimizing your Life We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. If you did, share it with someone you think will benefit from this information and leave us a review on iTunes. To get in touch with us, you can comment on Youtube or Instagram or get in touch with us via email: anne@muscleintelligence.com    Today’s sponsor is Bioptimizers. Use code MUSCLE10 for 10% off any order. If you’re struggling with getting enough deep sleep, cravings, slow metabolism, anxiety and stress, you may be deficient in magnesium. 80% of the population is deficient in magnesium and while many products on the market either contain synthetic forms or 1-2 forms of magnesium, your body needs ALL 7 FORMS of this essential sleep mineral.Check out Bioptimizers Magnesium Breakthrough - this magnesium before bed helps you relax and wake up refreshed and energized. Use code MUSCLE10 for 10% off any order. Timestamps [00:56] – Sponsorship. [02:22] – Introducing our guest – Dr. Greg Wells [03:15] – Greg’s background. [06:49] – Strategies and devices to improve CO2 tolerance. [13:35] – How Greg trained his athletes. [14:49] – Breathing Impacts on Bodily Performance. [17:52] – Improving Acute CO2 Tolerance. [20:35] – Does repetitive extended breath holds increase blood’s oxygen carrying capacity? [28:05] – Achieving “That” World-Class Performance. [35:01] – Heart-Rate Tracking. [38:34] – Rest, Refocus, Recharge – By Dr. Greg Wells. [42:42] – How do you reimagine the future? [43:50] – Metacognition – Thinking About Thinking. [48:50] – Practicing Radical Attention. [51:45] – Visualization of the event. [56:38] – Radical Self-Acceptance. [01:00:40] – What is Excellence? [01:04:53] – Personalized Medicine – What Future Holds! [01:08:29] – Where to contact Greg and grab his book?  

One of the most vexing questions brands are asking themselves today is how to get a solid ROI from influencer marketing. At Fancy.com, Greg Spillane thinks he has the answer.  When Greg came on as the CEO of Fancy in 2019, he was tasked with re-inventing and rebuilding the brand. Known as the “turnaround guy,” he had experience coming into distressed companies and pivoting them into viable businesses. Fancy was right up his alley. The company was known for lavish parties, and even handing out $1,000 gift cards to celebrities, models, and influencers. After Fancy blew through $100M in investment money, and with no profit in sight, Greg knew there was work to be done. With a new focus on profitability, and building on the impressive technology that Fancy created, Greg figured out a model that created a win-win opportunity for brands and influencers. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Greg discusses how he approached his role when he was brought in to turn around this struggling brand. He details the influencer, channel and email strategies he’s implementing to turn engagement into transactions. Plus, he talks about how to build a sustainable company, the things to consider when building out a board or taking on investment money, and his thoughts on when building an app is beneficial or just a distraction. Enjoy!   Main Takeaways: Influencing the Influencer Market — Most companies have yet to figure out how to get a solid ROI from utilizing influencers. Tune in to hear how Fancy is creating a mutually beneficial relationship by providing a platform that allows both the influencer and the brand to grow and monetize their user bases. Do You Really Need An App?  — When store owners start to have success, many begin to think about that next platform and are eager to jump into building their own app. But Spillane says this may not be the best move for many brands. Before diving into the world of apps, think about what will be different about the app versus the desktop. If the answer is nothing, then you will probably be just fine with a mobile responsive website instead.   Building a Viable Business  —  When taking over as CEO at Fancy, Greg had to re-invent and re-build the business from the ground up and turn the focus toward profitability. Having open and honest communication with the team is crucial during these pivotal times. New CEO? Take it Slow — Oftentimes, new CEOs come into a company and try to do too much too soon. Instead, spend the first 90 days listening, getting buy-in, and letting the problems — and many times the solutions — reveal themselves. For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length. --- Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce --- Transcript: Stephanie: Perfect. Welcome back to another episode of Up Next in Commerce. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder of Mission.org. Today we're chatting with Greg Spillane, CEO of Fancy.com. Greg, welcome. Greg: Thank you, Stephanie. I'm so excited to be here and speaking with you. Stephanie: I know. I'm really excited to have you on. I was going through Fancy.com before this, and I think I've found at least three things that I want to order after the show that I actually have not seen anywhere else. One was an air plant that was on top of an amethyst crystal. I haven't seen that. And the other one was like a chilling beer mug. It looked Awesome. So that's where my mind's at right now. Air plants and beer mugs. Greg: Well, perfect. I'll tell you what, I'll hook you up with a solid discount code and even something you can send out to your audience. Stephanie: Oh, I like it. This interview is already going great. Greg: Yes. Stephanie: So, you have such an interesting story. Fancy is a really good story. I was hoping actually, we can just start and dive right in about what is your role and how did you come to Fancy? And what is Fancy.com? Greg: Sure. Yeah. My background is I guess, little atypical. I mean, I came out of school really as an athlete. I attended undergrad on a football scholarship. So I was a little bit of a meathead type of guy earlier in my life. And was introduced to the internet and really computers really early on. I was one of those guys that had a computer when I was 10 years old, connecting with my 2,400 baud modem to BBST, doing all those types of things. So that's schools, technology is where I studied, I got out. I started my career as an engineer. I quickly realized coding all day is just not for me. And that's kind of where my entrepreneurial journey started. I actually founded an agency. Greg: We were doing customer development for people. A lot of digital transformation stuff really early and sort of the internet booms like early 2000s and built a couple of different products sort of just for happenstance. And I took them to market in a subscription-based model. Well, before SaaS was really even a term. And had some success and had an opportunity to sell that company. So that was great. I decided to go back to business school at that point. And then really spent the better part of the next eight years or so in kind of the management consulting world specific around technology, sort of like big Fortune 100 type of systems implementations, et cetera. And great cushy, all that stuff, like good pay. But I just, I didn't want to be like sort of a cog in a giant wheel. Greg: So a business school colleague of mine had just taken over this company based out of San Diego, was founded by a guy who had already had a billion dollar exit. It's kind of more of an incubator of sorts. Was like four or five companies that had come together and he was asked to run it. And he was looking for a guy who had sort of a tech marketing business development background. And brought me in and I left sort of the cushy corporate world to get back into the crazy world of entrepreneurship. Led that company through a pivot. We ended up eventually rebranding as Events.com. We spun off one of our divisions and sold it to private equity. And it was a nice little ride. And that gentleman ended up moving back into the private equity world and opened up a firm in a venture front and would invest in a number of different companies. Greg: And somehow I became like this turnaround guy that he would bring me in to these companies that had all this potential that they invested in, but for one reason or another was somewhat distressed. And that's ultimately how I got introduced to Fancy. He came in, they sit on the board of directors here, they invested in the company in late 2018 and there were some things that needed to be changed. Obviously, Fancy has been a company, been around for a really long time. So I was brought in, made the CEO in March of 2019. But a little bit more about Fancy, the company itself was founded in 2010, tremendous amount of early success. I think we're talking about people like Jack Dorsey was on the board of directors early on. Even today our board of directors is sort of a who's who of people. Greg: But our company had over 12 million users since our inception. Really found it as more of a social network, Pinterest of sorts. A place to really kind of find and share just really cool and interesting and unique products. And then there was a natural evolution into commerce. And we've had a lot of highs. And the company never had an issue with users or experience, it was really around profitability and finding a way to make this into a viable business model. So we did end up having a situation where there's a couple of insolvency moments which ultimately led to the transition. But I've come in and there's still such a great userbase and foundation in here. And we've sort of been pivoting the company and turning things back around. It's been a fun little ride so far. We're really excited about the future. Stephanie: That's great. So when thinking about coming in and turning around companies, either at Fancy.com or just holistically from like a higher level of what you've done in your past, what is the first maybe 90 days look like when you are looking at a company and figuring out how you want to change it and what's going wrong? Greg: Yeah. Good question. So having done this a handful of times now, I can tell you that I made a lot of mistakes the first couple of times doing it. And I think that it really prepared me for the role I took on at Fancy. I'll tell you what not to do. First, what not to do is go in and start making changes too quickly. To go in and sort of like point out every mistake that the company's ever made. One of the easiest things in the world to do is be a critic. And you can go into a company that's somewhat distressed or has had some issues, and you could just start just tearing things apart. Whose decision was this? Why are we doing this? This doesn't make sense. And even though you can quickly come up with the right direction and the right solution for what you need to do, you can lose your people. Greg: And ultimately, your people are the most important assets you have in many cases. So what you do need to do when you go into a company and you want to turn around, and I think it's something that I was able to do at Fancy even though there were a lot of tough decisions and tough changes, is get the buy-in from your team. A lot of times you do that by just listening and just acknowledging all the great things that they've done in the past. And truthfully, most of the issues that you're going to eventually have to address, they already know they exist and they know what they are. So let them tell you, and you'll start to kind of pull out the solutions. Then when you have to make those really difficult changes that impact people's lives and careers and whatever it may be, the people that you need and people that you keep are on board because they see the rationale and they understand it. And a lot of ways, they're the ones that have kind of helped you, guide you. Greg: So I guess just to summarize that, the one thing that I've learned over time and that I don't think I did really early on in my career is to just take super account of the people and the human aspect of what they're going through and being a new person coming into an established company and having to make change, but doing it in a way that keeps them engaged and let them believe in you and want to continue to be part of the company. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. So when it comes to Fancy.com, it seemed like before you, it was a pretty fancy environment. Like maybe really nice parties and things like that. Did you have any struggles maybe when it came to convincing the employees like we can't keep doing that? Because many employees are probably like, "I'm used to this and I'm very used to going here and interacting with these people and having this kind of swag." I don't know if that's the case for Fancy.com, but did you encounter any of that pushback when you were kind of evolving the environment to focus on profitability? Greg: Yeah. I did. Funny story, at least I think it's funny. We had the storage unit in Manhattan. And I went into it one day and just a bunch of old fancy stuff, swag and different products, people incentives for revaluation. There are just box. And I open up this box and it's got these thick, like metal credit cards. They're the size of credit cards, but they're kind of like solid steel. And it's like, "Thank you for visiting Fancy. We value you. Here's a $1,000 gift credit to use at Fancy, coupon code." And there are like- Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Greg: ... Hundreds of these things. I mean like a stack, like a box full of them, probably even had thousands of them. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. Greg: I'm like, "What is this?" I go, "We were just giving away, like handing out $1,000 gift cards?" And so I went back to the team uptown. And the founders apparently would go to these parties in New York City and they would have models and celebrities and hip hop artists and athletes and et cetera. And they would just walk around the party just kind of talking and they would just give these $1,000 gift cards away to people. Stephanie: Wow. That's super fancy. Greg: That is super fancy. Right. Right. That's how you go through $120 million in capital in a period of time. Stephanie: Is that what you encountered when you came in? It was like $120 million of capital was kind of spent maybe in not the best ways and you had to kind of get out of the hole? Greg: Well, yes and no. So the positive, and this is what really is I think exciting about the opportunity and one of the reasons why I decided to pretty much route my life and spend the last, however many months in New York. I'd been a Southern California guy, is, yes, that a lot of money went to waste. And there was a lot of money spent on parties and those types of things. But along the way, they built an amazing technology platform. So Fancy is all proprietary and really the underlying technology that's built upon... The mobile app that we have is really rock solid. I'm in technology. And I've been in technology throughout my life and our mobile app, we have, I think today like give or take like 2.7 million active installs of the Fancy app, iOS, Android. Stephanie: Wow. Greg: Fancy.com domain name, the site itself is generating however many hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month just to sort of organic and SEO. Our dataset, we've had over 12 million Fancy accounts created. We've done several million transactions. We're working with however many merchants, some 800 merchants. We're a global company. Last year alone, we sold a product to 135 countries. So there was this asset pool that was built with that money that went out that as a startup you would just never be able to replicate. You just couldn't do those things if you were starting from scratch. Greg: But then because of some of the shortfalls of the company, and this is more from a business perspective, the current valuation and as we've raised last money, I mean, we're just closing out a small little bridge note right now and a $12 million valuation, which is insane. I mean, the intrinsic value of our assets far exceeds that number, but because of the situation that's where we're at. So I look at it as a huge opportunity and an amazing asset pool that we sit on. But short answer to your question is there was a lot of money spent on parties that like Tiësto was deejaying at. They had no business rationale really other than just getting the Fancy brand out. Stephanie: Oh my gosh. I mean, I kind of wish I was at that party, but I don't know if I want to be an investor in that company per se or the CEO at that time. So that sounds like a big turnaround project. Maybe to talk a little bit about Fancy, so there's a lot of products on there, a lot of really cool products, was there any business decisions around product selection or how to curate them or personalize things or around like sourcing new products that you're implementing right now to maybe make the user experience better and to not show thousands of products at once and more personalize it to the people when they're coming onto the website? Greg: Yeah. Really kind of all those things in some way or another. And it's still a work in progress. And we're implementing, actually we partnered with a great company, is actually a portfolio company of Raptor which is the investment firm behind Fancy right now called Luminoso. Greg: And they have a bunch of amazing AI technology, machine learning technology that's being implemented in everything from search to recommendation. Sort of a lot in the social aspects we have in our site how we're going to be able to better make recommendations and curate products more effectively. So like all of that stuff has been unchanged. We did a significant culling of the amount of products that we were on our site when I came on board. I think it was, actually like 400,000 products that were live. Stephanie: Wow. Greg: It just didn't really make sense. Like you can't be a curated marketplace or a highly curated marketplace with that many products available. We were much more open earlier on in regards to who we would let come sell on our site. And what that did is, there were some quality issues in regards to who that merchant was and whether they were fulfilling, and is the product really what they said that it was? So we've moved much more towards like a closed marketplace. We do have an internal brand development curation team who thoroughly vets all of the sellers on our site. Greg: And our philosophy, where we're moving towards as a company is this concept of the rise to the direct consumer brand. We just see so many amazing purpose-driven brands. And I think that's the key. Like Amazon has almost been a victim of their own success fulfilled by Amazon and Alibaba and all these different people who are just trying to source product and get in on Amazon and sort of like tweak with the algorithms. Getting like commoditized products that there's not really a brand behind it. A lot of these people, these entrepreneurs who are selling these products never even take possession of the product. They're not designing the products. They're just sourcing them and trying to sell them. Greg: And we're trying to be the anti-Amazon in that regard. So we want to work with the, sort of like the Allbirds of the world before they are the Allbirds. And get those products on. And we look at it as a huge win-win because we know consumers are attracted to those brands and purpose-driven brands. Brands that have a story. Brands that potentially have a charitable aspect or a self-sustainable aspect. And those are the type of products that they want to find. They want to cut through the clutter. I mean, there're sites out there that have this stuff. I mean, you go to Etsy, you're talking millions of products. And it's like, how do you find these products? How do you get through some of the other junk that's out there? Greg: And then on the brand side, customer acquisition is really difficult and platforms like Instagram and Google are really saturated. That's one of the main channels that people have now to reach out to their consumers. Everyone's talking about influencers and how they can leverage influence more effectively. But I don't think anybody's really cracked that code really well. So we have a huge audience and we spend a lot of time trying to build up the products, the brands that we feature. And we come up with a fair and equitable revenue split. And we reach out to the audience. People come to us to find these brands that have been curated and it doesn't cost anything to be on our platform for the brands. So they're guaranteed to make money when we sell products. And we're going to continue to build on that thesis. Stephanie: I love that. So maybe to zoom in a bit on the customer acquisition piece, you're talking about Facebook and Google, they're getting pretty saturated and pretty expensive. What channels are you guys finding success in right now to bring customers to these new brands and products? Greg: Yeah. It's a great question. So we're really lucky because we really, since I've been here, have not spent a ton of money on having to do sort of paid ads. I mean, we do a little bit here and there and we handle retargeting and that type of stuff, but we have a tremendous amount of organic traffic that just finds us. We're a well optimizer, very high search engine authority. So a lot of people come upon Fancy.com and naturally go there. We also have a mobile app that has a very different shopping experience. It feels much more like a social shopping experience where there's dynamic feed of products and people can like and share and then recommendations are made by what they like. Greg: So we do, do some advertising in regards to getting people to download our app. We found that we have a really high lifetime value for people who have downloaded our app. I think right now our average user opens the app like 5.4 times a month or something like that. So it's relatively sticky. We're working on conversions and optimize the conversion rates on that. Because of the social aspect, those are lower than some more traditional Ecommerce. But the area that we're really focused on and really growing is to continue to build upon our influencer model, our affiliate model and partnering with micro-influencers. The technology is on our site in which they help sort of guest curate. Greg: And this is going to be a big part of our upcoming release, guest curate, different selections of products whether it's for home decor, or whether it's fashion-based, whatever it is, with the idea of, we're creating a great experience for our userbase. But then we want to help sort of build their own personal brand with the idea that there's a quid pro quo. We pay them a percentage of sales and we can attribute when they've driven traffic to the site or anything that's been sold which provides an incentive for them to share and drive people to the Fancy platform and then vice versa. Obviously, we're providing them with an avenue to create more exposure for themselves. Because if it's not being hidden, we want people to know who this particular curator or influencer or thought leader in the space is. Stephanie: Cool. I love that. So it's a good segue into influencers because we've had a lot of people in our audience ask about that and wonder how to even... Like, "Is it successful working with influencers? How do you go about engaging with them?" So what does maybe the back-end look like for Fancy when it comes to building up this influencer network and what kind of success are you seeing? And how would you maybe advise a smaller brand to start this, if you think they should? Greg: Yeah. The influencer models can be tough. And it's definitely something we talk a lot about. We've been toying around, we've done a lot of user research and space. What I would say is the traditional influencer model of, "Hey, let me find a micro-influencer. Let me pay him X amount of money, depending on their size. And let me have them do a post talking about our product or driving people to our site." The experience that we've had ourselves and then with brands that we've worked with is, you're really not going to get an ROI there. It's doesn't necessarily pencil. At least that's what we've seen. I'm sure there's some people out there that have been able to figure that out. Greg: So we're looking at it a little bit differently. At least our approach to it is, we want to create more of a platform that influencers can leverage and become a little bit more native in what they're doing that helps them expand their own reach, expand the value to their userbase. And then ultimately monetize that userbase because that's really what the influencers, especially micro-influencers are looking to do. But it has to be done somewhat organically, at least from what I've seen. And if it's just a matter of paying an influencer, because you want them to use your product or post your product or tag you in something like that, I don't know. I have not personally seen that ROI. I think it takes a lot of time and patience. I've seen some companies, some of the brands that you've talked to that have tried it. They've kind of given up after a couple months of doing it because they just haven't seen the return that they've wanted. Greg: So I think that, that's kind of one component of it. I think it can be kind of difficult to go that route. From my experience, some of the influence could be a little bit difficult to work with but not all of them. So we kind of pick and choose. We do a lot of reach out through our own Instagram account. We have about 350,000 followers. So that helps and it gives us some legitimacy. We're usually able to engage and we got some great people who follow us on Instagram. And that's another big advantage as well. So that's typically where we open up discussions. And then we try as much as possible to look at it from a pure win-win perspective. And we want to be a technology company. So we want to be able to provide them with more of a platform that sort of ties into what they're already doing and allows them to effectively monetize their audience to try to do it as authentically as possible. Stephanie: Yep. So how are you building a platform? I'm trying to imagine what that would look like from the influencers' perspective. Like, is it just a platform based around Fancy products? Or is it kind of separate where it's a platform for their them to influence but other products can be there as well? Or how do I think about that? Greg: So the way the platform currently works right now is we can create a profile on Fancy for a particular influencer which they can curate their own lists, different groupings of different products, et cetera, that they like. So what we bring to the table is, a, we bring in the fulfillment infrastructure. We have the relationships with all the different brands. They've already been vetted. We handle all fulfillment. We handle all shipping. We handle all payment processing. We handle all fraud detection, returns, customer support, et cetera, et cetera. And then what we can do with them is we can give them the ability to go on Fancy, create a profile. It can be done honestly, and we have done it in more of a white-labeled capacity in the past, where it looks almost like their own personal website, their own storefront in which they're able to pick sort of unique and interesting products and kind of populate it. Greg: But in a lot of cases, it's done more of in like a traditional profile on our site. And then we have attribution on that. So it works in more of an affiliate model from, any traffic or any users they drag to our site we can track it and ultimately we can pay them per the performance of what they've done. And then, I think what makes us interesting versus like, let's say in Amazon who does some affiliate type of stuff is we do have a little bit more of an authentic kind of lifestyle brand through Fancy and a little bit more legitimacy with kind of being cool and sort of having new, initially unique stuff versus Amazon, which is great for commoditized products, but isn't necessarily where you want to buy your fashion from. Greg: So that lifestyle brand plus the uniqueness of our products, it's something that a lot of times their users and micro-influencer and influencer working with the type of imagery we use, et cetera, is typically more engaging and more in line with what they're trying to accomplish with their own profile anyways. Stephanie: Got it. Yeah. That's really interesting thinking. It's probably easier than for a brand to just work with you guys to then get access to that influencer network and hopefully be chosen to be on one of those lists or whatnot. Greg: Yeah. It's funny you say that. That's something that we have, as a company have done in the past and have done pretty successfully. When I came in, I really wanted to simplify our business model and I wanted to kind of bring out all these sort of different one-off type of deals, but we've had a lot of brands, like big brands. I mean, like global brands that have come to us and have paid us six figures to connect them with users on our site or influencers on our site in kind of joint marketing efforts. You mentioned T-Pain. And you saw that T-Pain- Stephanie: Yeah. I saw he was called the VP of, I think product testing, but VP had quotes around it. Greg: Yeah. So like, he did a big thing with us, Purple mattresses. You've probably heard of Purple. Purple community was however many, a couple of years ago, we did an entire... We sort of middled an entire campaign with T-Pain. And T-Pain did a bunch of different videos and interesting kind of things. It's created a bunch of content for Purple mattresses that of course was featured on Fancy, but then Purple was taking this content and they were repurposing it for their own purposes. Greg: So there are opportunities there. Like I said, it's a little bit of when you come into a company and you're running the turnarounds, you've got to kind of cut. You got to like really focus. So I'm really, I'm trying to focus on just creating a great user experience trading win-win with our merchants and the different brands that we're partnering with. And then do the best that we can in order to help that experience for our consumers be a better experience by bringing in influencers or people who can really create interesting collections of products that we think ultimately people like yourself, the consumers the world will find value in. Stephanie: Yeah, that's awesome. So when talking about building a company now, and we've been talking quite a bit about around, like the turnaround story and how to rebuild it, one thing I have not touched on that I think it would be great too is developing a board of directors. So a lot of brands right now, if they're thinking about raising money and of course, like the board of directors question always comes up of like, "Who do you want on your board?" And I was hoping you could kind of touch on your guys' board of directors and what's helpful? What's that? Like, how should someone think about having a board and putting that together? Greg: That's a great question. Obviously, you want a board of directors that's going to be supportive of you. You want a board of directors that's going to be helpful, right? Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Greg: That has connections. That's going to be involved. I've had boards where it's like all they want is reporting, reporting, reporting, which you're going to provide anyways. I mean, you, of course are providing your reporting to your board. But it's like a really effective board isn't necessarily a babysitter of the money or whatever that's been invested. And just kind of like that. I mean, that's helpful. I guess it helps keep you accountable. But what you really want from a board is a group of people that are willing to get involved and make introductions and are actually taking an interest and listening to what you're doing and provide you with valuable advice and help you answer difficult questions. Greg: And a lot of times you don't get that with your board, especially if you get kind of a fund that comes in and maybe you get someone on the board. It's a board, so you can take over. And you're a part of 100 portfolio companies and they're not even really paying attention. They don't really know what you're doing. They don't know your industry, et cetera. I've been really lucky here at Fancy. We have a small board. It's only four of us, well, were five of us, including myself. The chairman of our board is Jim Pallotta. Jim Pallotta is the owner of Boston Celtics. Just actually recently sold A.S. Roma, which is the Rome Premier League soccer team. He's a billionaire. Extremely accomplished investor based out of Boston. Super well connected. And is just sharp as a tack. Greg: And he's involved just enough. Like the perfect amount. Like wants to make introductions, wants to makes his connections. Has just an amazing Rolodex and he is willing to open his Rolodex at anytime to make a connection for the company. And then we have François Pinault who's basically the chairman of Kering. He's married to Selma Hayek. You might know him. He's the guy who donated like $300 million to the Notre Dame when it burnt down, [inaudible 00:30:38]. And so they own Gucci and lots of gallery, like one of the largest luxury houses in the world. So once again, extremely well connected credibility across the board. When you're talking to brands, we're trying to bring on direct to consumer brands. And one of the largest shareholders of this company and board members say owns Gucci, that goes a long way. Greg: So I'm really lucky, very supportive. There are people who have brought more to the table than just money. Really an active interest in the company and making those things. As far as building your own board, look, a lot of times your board members are going to be your biggest investors and you go out and raise capital and unless you've got an amazing idea or you just really doing something special, as much as you want to say you can go out there and pick your investors, that's a lie. So someone's going to write a cheque and you're trying to raise capital, in many cases, you're going to take that capital. And along with that capital comes board seats. So you don't always have the control that you would like in that situation, but if you do have the ability to pick your board, I think you can pick your advisors a little bit more easily. But you want people who are going to be more than capital to the table. You want people who are going to get actively and involved and they're not afraid to open up the Rolodex and make connections. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. It's something you see at least here in Silicon Valley. Sometimes people are excited maybe about really big brand name, investment firms or large amounts of money. And I've always asked the question of like, "Well, how can they actually help you? Like, can they spend time with you? Can they actually give you introductions? Are they willing to do that?" I think not for certain. At least I've heard certain investment firms, once you get to a certain level, they're not going to spend time with you unless they invest a very large amount of money and they have a lot of skin in the game. And outside of that, it might actually be better to work with someone who's in your industry, knows it, can introduce you to people. So, I completely agree. The same thing with building a board or thinking about that. You might not always have the options to do so, but if you do, choose someone who can actually help you and spend time with you. Greg: That's exactly right. Stephanie: So earlier we were talking about, you guys have an app and your desktop version, how did you go about thinking about building out an app? You said it had a different user experience and buying experience and a lot more of a social aspect there. Like how do you think a brand should think about like, "Should I have an app?" Because I think at one point, every brand probably considers building their own app along with their desktop version. Greg: Yeah. No, absolutely. You know what's funny? Or whatever. Six, seven, eight years ago when these were the app... It got super hot and everybody wanted to build an app. Things were different. And sort of like the technology, especially just around mobile responsive websites was different. And to get a really good mobile experience in a lot of cases it helped have a native mobile app. You were able to tap into so many functions or features that weren't necessarily available with mobile web. But what we see today and where we sit and the kind of conversations we have in our product meeting is, we have a great mobile responsive platform. The mobile experience on Fancy.com is really good in our opinion, or it's as good as you would need it to be, is as good as all the other products that are out there. Greg: So for us to replicate our mobile web experience on app, just to have a couple of different features that you get with native didn't necessarily make sense for us. So we did look at it differently. And with our mobile app, the way mobile is structured right now it's of truly much more of a discovery-based experience. It's the kind of experience that people open up and, "This is what our data shows and the testing that we've done." People open up our app because they're just interested to scroll through and will get really interested in cool and unique products. And we focus very heavily on using lifestyle imagery through that. And these are social aspects. People can like and they can build their lists, and they can share, and they can follow other people and they can get updates of what people who they follow or influencers that they're following have liked other products or other products that are on lists and those types of things. Greg: And that would be really difficult to replicate in like a true mobile lab experience. So when we look at it and we look at our product strategy, we ultimately look at web. So Fancy.com and then our mobile experience for that is a little bit more of a traditional commerce-based experience. You go to it, you have categories, you search and find the things you like, hopefully you transact. Well, we look at mobile as much more of, sort of a stickier, joyous engagement where you just want people to kind of open it up similar to how we open up Instagram 25 times a day. Nobody opens Instagram absolutely because you want to buy anything. You're just kind of opening it up because there's like cool images and there's things that you're going to discover. And it's going to bring kind of a little moment of joy in our lives. Greg: We're sitting there in the bank and... That's a lot of how the experience with the Fancy app has been created. Our thought is that people will discover things and they'll find things and they'll like things and personalization will happen through our mobile app and then many cases, they'll end up going to web to transact. Stephanie: Oh, can they currently transact on the app, or is it more of a discovery platform right now that transfers over to those [crosstalk 00:36:09]? Greg: They can transact on the app. Stephanie: Okay. Greg: A large part of our business still occurs mobile. But definitely the experience that we want to have is... I guess that would be my big takeaway to any company out there that was considering building a native mobile app if they're in the commerce world, is why? Like, what difference are you going to offer on mobile versus you're going to offer on web. Because the truth of the matter is people don't need to download another app. And if they can get everything that they need by just going to your domain name through your Google browser or whatever it is in their iPhone, then save the trouble. Stephanie: Yeah. I love that. So how are you thinking about balancing the social aspect on the app? You had mentioned conversions weren't as high as like traditional Ecommerce sites, which makes sense if people are kind of going on there just to see new things and maybe not always having an intent to buy. But how are you going about balancing that to keep people moving along and get them to check out, but also have fun and engage with other users? Greg: Yeah. The big thing with us right now, and big focus is around, number one, personalization. We're doing everything we can to continue to make the experience more personal. I think that, that's something that... There's been kind of an area where I don't think we've always done a great job on that is that, we've very much had a point of view that Fancy has taken in regards to kind of what we think is cool and what people who we want to think it's cool and that kind of gets pushed out. Where I want to have a little bit more, based on your interactions, based on what you've liked, what you've shown, that I can kind of avoid showing you stuff that isn't relevant to you. Greg: That's a big component of that from that perspective. It's a good question. We really, we're okay with conversions being lower with the app because we also have really high engagement and repeat users. So these are people who are just opening up the app quite frequent, maybe some people open up the app on a daily basis. And those people aren't going to buy something on a daily basis. And they're not necessarily going to Fancy because they want to buy something, but they ultimately do buy. Greg: So I think for us, the more the experience gets better, the more sticky it is, the more people want to open up the Fancy app and kind of just enter into that sort of social commerce world, the more people who are eventually going to transact, even though it isn't a straight kind of equation like on a return on ad spent, like you do with more of a traditional website. We have a particular product, somebody goes to that site because they're looking for that product. And then, thought they converted, but they didn't. They didn't convert. Now we're going to do retargeting. We're working at it as a little bit more of an engaged experience. So it's not a huge concern for us from that perspective. Stephanie: I'm guessing you would have to have a different set of metrics when it comes to, how's the app performing versus how is desktop performing? What kind of metrics are like your go to things to check in on the health of the app versus desktop? Greg: Yeah. No, that's a good question. So we track, obviously, just simple things like total sessions, users, new users, app downloads, uninstalls. My dashboard has all that information. Time on app, number of products they've clicked into. We do look at conversion rates across the board. How many users came in? How many times did they convert? Average order value. Standard stuff like that. But when we think about the app and the experience itself, we're really looking at things like, how many users did we have? But how many sessions did we have? So what's the average session per user, Because in our app experience, it is about having people come back and using the app for multiple times. Greg: And then when they do open up the app, how much time are they spending on a typical basis interacting with the app? What are they doing? So those are a lot of things that we look at. And then from a bigger picture, obviously, we're not spending a ton of money trying to attract you on app downloads, like outward spending, but we still have a tremendous amount of new app downloads that happen on a pretty regular basis. So we look very closely at how many new app downloads and what our uninstall rate is. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah. That's really good. Good to know. When it comes to personalization, are there any tools right now that you guys are really excited about? I know you mentioned one that was maybe within a portfolio company that you guys work with, but are there any tools that other brands should be looking into right now when it comes to personalization? Greg: Yeah. Right now we're spending some time on our ESP or our email service provider. And we're looking at a couple of different providers in that space. But that's something where there's some really cool providers out there that do some amazing stuff in regards to personalization around all messaging, not just email, but also push, because obviously for mobile apps. And that's something that we're probably going to adopt here and if not next quarter the quarter after that, and try to revamp the way we do our outbound. Greg: We have about a million people on our email list right now. We send out a ton of emails. I told you about, it's like 2.7 million active installs to the app where you push notifications. And then that number is from our push notifications. So when we actually do a push notification, It'll tell you how many we've delivered. So that is about 2.7. So we do a lot of outbound messaging and I think there's a huge opportunity for us to do more personalization with that messaging. Stephanie: That's great. Yeah, it'd be really cool to bring you back in a couple months after you've done the email stuff and talk about what you've seen with your app and your push notifications and kind of hear an update on all that. Greg: Yeah, absolutely. Stephanie: All right. So we can have about 10 minutes left. I feel like you're going to have some great answers for the lightning round, so I want to make sure that we have enough time for it. So the lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have one minute or less to answer each question. You ready to go Greg? Greg: All right, let's do this. Stephanie: All right. I'm going to start with the hardest one first because like I said, I think you'll have a good answer. What one thing will have the biggest impact on Ecommerce in the next year? Greg: Oh man. Look, COVID has been terrible but unbelievable for Ecommerce. And I think that the one thing that it's done is it just increase the adoption rate and made it gone through the roof. People like my parents who never bought anything from Amazon, never bought anything from Postmates or anything like that are now just doing it. And even as stores and retail locations of brick and mortar continue to open back up, I think the cat's out of the box. I think the adoption rates are going to continue to rise. I think they're just going to be many more direct consumer brands that are going to continue to come about. Greg: There's going to be new technology that innovative companies out of Silicon Valley are going to come up with that are going just make the experiences better, whether you're talking about augmented reality or different types of things. So I just think that the overall continued adoption of Ecommerce is just going to make the pie, the $7.2 trillion global retail market, the Ecommerce side of that is just going to continue to expand and grow. I don't think, there isn't any stopping site. Stephanie: Yeah. I completely agree. I love that answer. What's up next on your reading list? Greg: Oh, good question. I tend to go back and forth between like more auto, biographical and then just like fiction. I'm a big Stephen King guy. I typically read all his books. I just, whatever, kind of just, moving in, in time. But right now I'm reading Eric Larson's newest book on Churchill, Winston Churchill. And it's really focused on 1940, 1941, in England where the Germans were just bombarding England with bombers and the US hadn't entered the war yet. And Germany was just a powerhouse. I mean, it just looked like they were just trying to bomb them into submission and then Churchill would not submit. And we all know how that ended up turning out. But just so amazing to learn about that guy especially as kind of a CEO of a company where you're faced with, sometimes it just feels like overwhelming odds and you have to be honest with your team and they have to realize the gravity of the situation, but at the same time motivate them and give them the confidence that you can overcome is exactly what he did. And it's been a really good read. Stephanie: Oh, that's good. I will have to check that one out. If you were to have a podcast, what would the podcast be about and who would your first guest be? Greg: So I'm an ex-athlete. I talked to you a little bit about that. So I was actually football player in college. I'm kind of a jock. I still like to do a whole bunch of things. And I learned so much of what I do in a professional world from my athletic career, just dealing coaches and the meritocracy involved and just working hard and showing up on time and competing every day and all those types of things. So I think what I would like to do is, I'd love to have a business focused podcast that had athletes turned business people who are able to talk about their experiences, especially guys in the NFL, experiences [inaudible] of coaches like Bill Belichick, et cetera, and how those principles are translated into the professional world. Greg: I mean, I think someone like a Tom Brady would be a great first guest. He started up his own, [inaudible] TB12, and he's got kind of like a whole supplement line. I'd love to talk about how he's translated, sort of what he's done. Professionally he's the greatest quarterback ever. And how he's having success now and in a business capacity. Stephanie: That sounds like a really good podcast. I will find you a sponsor, Greg, and we will get that off the ground. Greg: Let's do it. Right? Stephanie: Yeah. I like that. That's good. All right. How do you stay on top of Ecommerce or industry trends? What kind of sources are you looking at or tools are you using or resources do you rely on to stay on top of things? Greg: A lot of reading. Yeah, obviously that's the answer anybody would have. Right? But I'm just, I have a number of, sort of hashtags or subject lines that I'm following in my Flipboard account. Every morning I open it up and flipping through and seeing what other people are doing. I also like to read about some of the bigger players in the space that are public. So even following companies like Overstock.com, Wayfair, Etsy, have had tremendous growth in the last several months. I mean, I think Overstock.com stock went from like $3 a share and marched to almost $100 a share most recently. So jumping into their quarterly reports and their 10-K's, as public companies they have to disclose everything. I love to read kind of what they're seeing, what they're doing, where they want to go with things. So that's always helpful pulling a lot of ideas and insights from some of the bigger competitors in the space. Stephanie: That's really good. We haven't had anyone talk about going through their quarterly reports yet. So I love that. That's something I enjoy doing as well, but I thought I was the only one. Greg: No. It's [crosstalk 00:48:32]. Stephanie: Well, Greg, this has been such a good interview. Like I said, we need to bring you back for round two to hear how some of these experiments are going, but where can people find out more about you and Fancy? Greg: Yeah. Well, obviously Fancy.com is the site. You can go into your App Store, Android Store, we'd love for you to download it. You can reach out to me directly. I literally just love people just email me. I get them all the time. So greg@fancy.com. Super easy. One G. And then, like I said, we're raising a little bit of a round of equity right now. We're actually doing it partially through a equity crowdfunding site called Wefunder. So anybody that's says shouldn't learn anymore, wefunder.com/fancy, can see a video and see T-Pain and learn a little bit more about the opportunity. I think it's a pretty attractive investment considering where we're at and what our opportunity is, especially the valuation of our company today. Stephanie: Yep. I completely agree. We will link up that video because it was pretty great. All right, Greg. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. Greg: Thank you, Stephanie. Great being here.

Connect with Instanda on the Azure Marketplace: https://bit.ly/2AKxo9W Greg Murphy is the Executive Vice President, North America of Instanda, a company that provides core insurance capabilities through a SAAS based digital platform that focuses on ease of product creation and dynamic distribution to multiple channels. As part of this discussion, we shared how their partnership with Microsoft, their use of Azure, and the Azure Marketplace has empowered them to scale and grow their business. Contact Greg: Web: https://instanda.com/us/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/instanda/ Twitter: @instandaF2X Contact Avrohom: Web: https://asktheceo.biz Facebook: AvrohomGottheil Twitter: @avrohomg Instagram: @avrohomg INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS: [00:43] Over the past several years, businesses have gone through a process that we call digital transformation. For those that have been slow to adopt new technology, the crisis of Covid19 forced their hand, so to speak, in terms of this digital transformation. Your company, Instanda, serves the insurance industry, which is extremely complex and highly regulated. What are some of the challenges that insurance carriers struggle with as part of their digital transformation experience? Greg: Well, there are, I would say four things that come to mind on this topic. The first one is really, challenging companies to really, truly be transformative. I can't tell you the number of times that I've worked with companies that will say they're trying to be transformative, and the executives are very passionate about this, and have really, really, great ideas. But when you get right down to exactly what are we going to do, a lot of times we're repaving the cow path, so to speak. We're doing the same things we've done before, but with just different technologies. Right? So, really that truly being transformative, I would say, is the number one piece of that. And you have to figure out exactly how do you get into a transformative mindset? How do you think differently? How do you think outside the box? [04:35] What can businesses do to overcome some of these challenges? Greg: Businesses should re-envision the way products and technology are used in the company's value chain. [06:00] Build a solid business strategy first before throwing technology in to fix problems. [07:14] Instanda recently launched a new offering on the Microsoft Azure marketplace, called Instanda. Tell us about it and how it addresses some of the challenges we just discussed. Greg: Instanda delivers immediate product design solutions with the ability to distribute digitally on multiple channels simultaneously. [10:19] How would a company use your solution with Azure? [11:40] How can customers find out more about Instanda, and procure it through the Azure Marketplace? Greg: You can access it via this link: https://bit.ly/2AKxo9W. [12:18] How has partnering with Microsoft helped Instanda scale and grow your business? Greg: Because Instanda is a Microsoft partner, the delivery of complementary capabilities through logic apps and power BI is seamless. [13:49] How do people connect with you? Greg: You can always connect with us via our website, https://instanda.com/us/. We are also very active on social media. A great way to interact with us is via our LinkedIn page, which is https://www.linkedin.com/company/instanda/. You can also connect with us via Twitter at @instandaF2X. [14:25] Do you have any parting words of wisdom that you’d like to share with the audience? #AskTheCEO With Greg Murphy

Dr Greg Hundley: Well listeners, this is Dr Greg Hundley from the VCU Pauley Heart Center in Richmond this week, who is sadly missing his dear friend, Dr Carolyn Lam, who is away for just a week or two. I hope you've experienced a wonderful holiday season and are able to embrace the new year with joy and hope. In our feature article this week, Dr Marcelo Di Carli and colleagues are going to discuss the role of coronary microvascular dysfunction assessed with cardiac stress during PET, as well as left ventricular remodeling assessed with echocardiography and how both of those relate to clinical outcomes in patients with chronic kidney impairment. But first, let's have a coffee and chat about other articles in this issue. We have four original manuscripts, two or more clinical papers, and two from the world of basic science. So let's go to the clinical papers first. And the first emanates from our own associate editor, Dr Sana Al-Khatib from Duke University. Her paper comes from the ARISTOTLE trial, a randomized study of 18,201 participants that compared apixaban with warfarin in patients with atrial fibrillation at increased risk of stroke. And so this sub study included 17,423 patients in ARISTOTLE without severe renal or liver disease. And the authors evaluated the risk of bleeding and major cardiovascular outcomes in patients with atrial fibrillation taking either NSAIDs with therapixaban or warfarin. The authors found that those with NSAID use at baseline, so before starting into the study or incident NSAID use, that is they began an NSAID after initiating this study were more likely, both groups were more likely to have a history of bleeding, nearly a quarter of the patients to a fifth of the patients versus only 15% that had never used NSAIDs either before or after entering the study. In addition, the safety and efficacy of apixaban versus warfarin appeared not to significantly be altered by NSAID use. That is whether you were taking apixaban or whether you're taking warfarin, the impact of NSAID use was not different between either of those anticoagulants. The second original clinical article comes from Dr Audrey Blewer, also from Duke University, and evaluates the variation in bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation delivery and subsequent survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest based on neighborhood level ethnic characteristics. As background for this research, bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation delivery and survival from out of hospital cardiac arrest varies at the neighborhood level, was generally lower survival seen in neighborhoods predominantly with individuals from black race. Despite Hispanics being the fastest growing minority population in the United States, few studies have assessed whether the proportion of Hispanics in a neighborhood is also associated with delivery of bystander CPR or subsequent survival for an out of hospital cardiac arrest. Accordingly, the authors in this study assessed whether bystander CPR rates and survival buried by neighborhood level ethnicity. And they hypothesized that neighborhoods with a higher proportion of Hispanics would have lower bystander CPR rates and overall lower survival. This study was a retrospective cohort and use data from the Resuscitations Outcome Consortium, or ROC Epistry across the United States. So in this study, the authors identified 18,900 cardiac arrests. And they excluded pediatric arrests, EMS witnessed arrests, or arrest occurring in a healthcare or an institutional facility. And they found overall that bystander CPR was administered in 37% of these out-of-hospital arrests. Among neighborhoods with less than 25% Hispanic residents, bystander CPR was administered in 39% of the events, while it was administered in only 27% of the events in those neighborhoods with greater than 75% Hispanic residents. Also, lower rates of survival occurred in neighborhoods with greater than 75% Hispanic residents. And so the authors conclude that these findings suggest there's an important need to understand the underlying disparities in CPR delivery and an unmet CPR training need among Hispanic communities. Well now let's shift to our two original articles that come from the world of basic science. And the first is from Dr Ying Shen from Baylor College of Medicine and reports on the critical role of cytosolic DNA and its sensing adapters sting in aortic degeneration, dissection and rupture. So as some background for this study, recent evidence has indicated that cytosolic DNA and abnormal activation of the cytosolic DNA sensing it after sting, a stimulator of interferon genes, plays a critical role in vascular inflammation and destruction. And so in this paper, the authors examine the involvement of this mechanism in aortic degeneration and sporadic aortic aneurysm and dissections. Just like with our other basic science papers, the authors perform both studies in a small animal model, mice, and also in human subjects. So what did they find? The authors found that in human sporadic aortic dissection tissues, they observe the presence of cytosolic DNA in smooth muscle cells and macrophages. And they had significant activation of this sting pathway. In a mouse model, sting deficient mice showed significant reduction in challenged induced aortic enlargement, dissection and rupture in both the thoracic and abdominal aortic regions. Additional single cell transcriptome analyses were performed and provided some mechanistic understanding for the author's findings. So in summary, for this very interesting paper from the world of basic science, the author's findings indicate that the presence of cytosolic DNA and subsequent activation of cytosolic DNA sensing it after, or sting signaling, is a key mechanism in aortic degeneration. And therefore future studies, perhaps targeting sting, may be performed to see if they could prevent sporadic aortic aneurysm dissection development. The second basic original article in this issue is entitled In Vivo CRISPR CAS9-mediated gene editing and how that ameliorates atherosclerosis in familial hypercholesterolemia. It comes to us from Dr Bin Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. So as background for this study, mutations in the low-density lipoprotein receptor are one of the main causes of familial hypercholesterolemia. The clustered regularly interspace short palindromic repeats of CRISPR and caspase-9 system is an effective tool for gene editing to correct gene mutations and thus ameliorate the disease. So these authors tested whether in vivo sematic cell gene editing through the CRISPR CAS based nine system delivered by adeno associated virus could treat familial hypercholesterolemia caused by the LDLr mutant in a mouse model. Well, the authors ... As Carolyn would ask, so what did they find, Greg? Well, the authors observed some really exciting results. They found that the LDLr mutation was corrected in a subset of hepatocytes after the CRISPR CAS based nine treatment with LDLr protein expression partially restored. Compared with control animals, the CRISPR CAS based nine targeted SGRNA group had significant reductions in total cholesterol, total triglyceride, and LDL cholesterol in the serum while the aorta had smaller atherosclerotic plaques and a lower degree of macrophage infiltration. So this study really implicates perhaps not only a mechanism of disease, but a potential treatment. But with the relatively small numbers in this study, more research is needed to confirm and substantiate the findings from this group. So great original articles in this issue. What else is in the issue? And let's move to those. We have a global rounds feature. Remember, global rounds are investigating how cardiovascular disease is assessed and managed in countries from all over the world. Well, in this global rounds feature Professor Ali Oto from Memorial and Cairo Hospital provides a quick reference to the control and management of cardiovascular disease in Turkey. And the next article, an on my mind piece, Dr Milton Packer explorers whether the conditions of atrial fibrillation and heart failure with preserved ejection fraction are two separate diseases that occur frequently together in patients or alternatively, whether these two adverse clinical syndromes may be parallel manifestations of the same underlying myocardial disease with atrial fibrillation affecting the left atrium and heart failure preserved ejection fraction afflicting the left ventricle. In our what's in the mailbag series, Professor Nicholas Mills from the University of Edinburgh shares in a research letter the relationship between exercise intensity and duration on cardiac troponin release in 10 physically active healthy volunteers averaging 34 years in age. A great read for our readership that is actively exercising. And it looks like in this letter, intensity of exercise matters when evaluating post-exercise serum troponin values. I really encourage everyone to take a look at that letter. And then finally, there's a letter to the editors from Dr Abdallah Fayssoil from the Raymond Poincare Hospital in Garches, France regarding a prior publication related to nutrition and functional tricuspid regurgitation. Well, listeners, that sums up our summary. And I hope you had a great coffee or if you're running on your treadmill, a great run. And let's now move on to our feature discussion with Dr Di Carli. Welcome everyone to our feature discussion and we have Dr Marcelo Di Carli from Brigham and Women's Hospital who's going to be discussing with us a manuscript relating to the measurements of coronary micro circulatory function and how they may impact patients with chronic kidney disease. Also discussing today, we have our own associate editor, Dr Victoria Delgado from Leiden in the Netherlands. Well, welcome Marcelo and Victoria. We're so glad to have the opportunity to speak with you. And Marcelo, could you tell us a little bit about what was the hypothesis and some of the background of why you wanted to perform this study? Dr Marcelo Di Carli: Chronic kidney disease represents a relatively large segment of the population. In the US alone, it's estimated that around 50 million people have the diagnosis of chronic kidney disease. And it's a disease that we all know is associated with a high risk of cardiovascular events. Even in the absence of obstructive coronary disease, it's been shown that the incidents of cardiomyopathy and the absence of obstructive disease, of coronary disease, is pretty high and that associates with a high risk of heart failure and death. The mechanisms related to cardiomyopathy in patients with chronic kidney disease have been debated for a long time. This has been associated with LVH incidents of non-transmittal or non-ST-elevation MIs, also with microvascular disease as a measure of ischemic heart disease, but there's no clear association with how do these features of chronic kidney disease link to each other. And so our objective was to look at the associations between LV remodeling, coronary microvascular disease and adverse events. And we hypothesized that coronary microvascular dysfunction as a more integrative marker of myocardial ischemia and injury would associate with changes in cardiac structure and function and with increased risk of adverse cardiovascular events. Dr Greg Hundley: Very nice. So tell us a little bit, Marcelo, about your study population and your study design. Dr Marcelo Di Carli: Well, this is a cross sectional analysis of a cohort that is well-characterized in our registries. And so it consisted of a consecutive group of patients who underwent both PET scanning for measuring coronary vascular function and echocardiography within 90 days of each other. Could it not have evidence of overt obstructive coronary disease as defined by a history of prior revascularization, prior AMI or an abnormal PET scan indicating presence of obstructive disease. We also excluded patients with severe valvular disease, cancer, severe LV disfunction to try to avoid confounding elements in the associations where we're trying to study. We used echocardiography to assess quantitatively the changes in LV geometry, diastolic function and subclinical systolic dysfunction. Most of our patients have relatively preserved LV function, LV ejection fraction. And so we looked at peak longitudinal strain, global radial strain and circumferential strain as indicators of systolic dysfunction. And of course we also looked at changes in LV mass. Patients were followed a little over four years for the occurrence of death, hospitalization for heart failure or myocardial infarction. And all of these myocardial infarctions were non-ST-elevation MIs, or people might call it type two MIs. Dr Greg Hundley: Tell us a little bit about the results. But before you get to that, how old were these patients and what was their breakdown in terms of race and gender? Dr Marcelo Di Carli: Yeah, so we had a population of 352 patients. The mean age was mid-sixties. not surprisingly, 60% of the patients were female. And this is because we obviously excluded obstructive coronary disease that would be more prevalent in male. They have about a 40% incidence of diabetes, a high percentage of them had hypertension. These are all the features that would typically be associated with chronic kidney disease. The rate of obesity was actually lower in patients with CKD. And we call CKD here as a GFR less than 60. That's the population we're targeting here. And so that's essentially the cohort. Dr Greg Hundley: And what did you find? Dr Marcelo Di Carli: Well, there were essentially three or four main findings. Number one and not very surprisingly, patients with CKD had worse myocardial mechanics that is worse diastolic function and worse systolic strain. In multi-variable models, fully adjusted for a number of clinical covariates as well as ejection fraction, we found that these abnormalities in myocardial mechanics were relatively strongly associated with abnormal coronary microvascular function as defined by PET. So this sort of suggests that the variability that we see in diastolic and systolic function are explained largely by microvascular disease, but not necessarily directly linked to GFR as a mediator. The second finding was that patients with CKD, again, not surprisingly, it showed a higher incidence of MACE, including especially death and heart failure, more than triple the rate of death and doubled the rate of heart failure compared to those without CKD. And in multi-variable analysis, again, MACE was associated with coronary flow reserve as a measure of microvascular dysfunction but not glomerular filtration rate. And there was no interaction between coronary flow reserve and GFR. Interestingly, when we looked at the adverse events subgroup by measures of LV remodeling and we picked three measures. One is changes in LV geometry, diastolic dysfunction, and impaired global longitudinal strain, we found that the incidence of both mace as well as heart failure and myocardial infarction were significantly higher when both abnormal LV mechanics or remodeling were present and the patients also had microvascular disease. So in the absence of either one, the rate of mace was relatively low, indicating that there is a clear interaction between abnormalities in cardiac structure and function and microvascular disease. And then lastly, we looked at mediation analysis to try to investigate a plausible pathway between impaired renal function and events and we hypothesized that coronary microvascular dysfunction might actually mediate at least part of that relationship. And indeed we found that about a third of the relationship was explained by the presence of microvascular disease. Very nice, Dr Greg Hundley: Very nice. Very important work. So now we'll turn to our own associate editor, Victoria Delgado. Victoria, help us put this into perspective for what we know about patients with chronic kidney disease. How does the results of this study really move the field forward? Dr Victoria Delgado: I think that this article brings new evidence on phenotyping of these patients and the factors that influence the cardiac abnormalities that we may see. There are not many studies including patients with chronic kidney disease. These patients are usually underrepresented in randomized control trials. And we know that these patients are associated with an increased mortality and morbidity and mainly heart failure hospitalizations. And I think that this study is showing another piece in the person that can help us understand why these patients are associated with much higher cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. I think that relating the coronary microvascular dysfunction is an important piece and important knowledge because then we may think how to improve the microvascular dysfunction on these patients and see if by improving these microvascular dysfunction, these abnormalities that have been described in terms of a structure and function can be reversed and see how these impacts on the outcome of these patients. Dr Greg Hundley: So Marcelo, just briefly, what do you think is the next study that needs to be performed in this area of science? Dr Marcelo Di Carli: I think that obviously our study has some limitations and the causation. Cause and effect cannot be inferred from our study. So I think the next steps will be to try to demonstrate whether indeed modifying microvascular dysfunction leads to improved outcomes. And I think this will be best done by intervention studies that can be targeted towards improving microvascular dysfunction. We can think of novel therapies as well that have been initially associated with improved renal outcomes. I'm talking about for example, SGLT2 inhibitors that can be potentially of benefit not only on renal outcomes but potentially on cardiovascular outcomes as has been shown in populations largely without CKD. Dr Greg Hundley: Victoria, anything to add in terms of how noninvasive imaging could play a role in some of those next future studies? Dr Victoria Delgado: I think that the point that Marcelo raise on the use of SGLT2 inhibitors is very timely and very appealing because we know that for patients with diabetes who have renal dysfunction and you have EGFR below 35, they may not be eligible for these therapies. But as you can see in this study, the mean EGFR of the patients with renal dysfunction was 41. So there is a wide range of patients that could be eligible for these therapies. How imaging can help to see or to detect the patients that may benefit from these therapies and see how these therapies may improve the structure and the function of the heart. Dr Greg Hundley: Well, listeners, we've had a great discussion today with Dr Marcelo Di Carli from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Dr Victoria Delgado from Leiden. And really trying to understand some noninvasive markers of both micro circulatory dysfunction as well as abnormal echocardiographic assessments of both diastolic function as well as systolic dysfunction and how they forecast adverse events in patients with chronic kidney disease. I want to wish you all a great week and on behalf of Carolyn and myself, I hope to see you next week. Take care now. This program is copyright the American Heart Association 2020.  

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Greg, I know that you travel a lot, so what do you do with your dog when you travel? Who takes care of your dog?Greg: Well, we have very good friends who love to have him. In fact, sometimes my friends offer before we go. They know we're going, "Hey, can we take care of Dancer?" and they take good care of him.Todd: So, have you ever actually traveled with your dog?Greg: Actually, yes. Well, when we travel in Japan, he travels with us almost everywhere we go. He sits in the car and sometimes we camp and sleep in the car with him or we stay in tents and he travels with us ... but we've also traveled overseas with him.Todd: Oh, wow, that's cool, so you've actually ... you've taken your dog on like long trips on the plane?Greg: Yes. We moved from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and he came with us there. We lived there for a while.Todd: Wow. You took your dog to the Emirates?Greg: Yes, and also we traveled into Oman. In fact we did some serious mountain climbing in Oman with him.Todd: So like, how do you take a dog when you travel? What do you got to do?Greg: Well, depending on the country, you have to check into the requirements. He needs a lot of vaccinations. Make sure he's doesn't ... he has to be checked by a vet to make sure he doesn't have any illnesses.Todd: Oh, really? Like how long does that take? I mean, do you have to take him to the vet and do this like a month before, or is it something you just do right before you travel?Greg: Probably a couple of weeks at least is average.Todd: So, how do you take a dog on a plane?Greg: Well, not every airplane company will allow dogs so you have to check into which do allow them and then you have to have a special nice size container and you have to put a little bit of food in them and you make sure that the airline company tells everybody who's working along ... like if there are any stops on a stopover, they have to make sure everybody knows that there's a dog and then they'll take care ... make sure to check the water and make sure the temperature controls in the back of the plane are at the right setting.Todd: When you get off the plane, is your dog kind of freaked out? Is Dancer all stressed?Greg: He is so happy to get off. He hates flying.Todd: So when he sees the cage, does he act funny? Does he act, you know, like with dread, fear?Greg: He looks at me with his eyes and he tries to talk me out of it.Todd: Does he ever succeed?Greg: He succeeds in a lot of things, but if I have to move, I've gotta move and we're a family so he comes with me.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Greg, I know that you travel a lot, so what do you do with your dog when you travel? Who takes care of your dog?Greg: Well, we have very good friends who love to have him. In fact, sometimes my friends offer before we go. They know we're going, "Hey, can we take care of Dancer?" and they take good care of him.Todd: So, have you ever actually traveled with your dog?Greg: Actually, yes. Well, when we travel in Japan, he travels with us almost everywhere we go. He sits in the car and sometimes we camp and sleep in the car with him or we stay in tents and he travels with us ... but we've also traveled overseas with him.Todd: Oh, wow, that's cool, so you've actually ... you've taken your dog on like long trips on the plane?Greg: Yes. We moved from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and he came with us there. We lived there for a while.Todd: Wow. You took your dog to the Emirates?Greg: Yes, and also we traveled into Oman. In fact we did some serious mountain climbing in Oman with him.Todd: So like, how do you take a dog when you travel? What do you got to do?Greg: Well, depending on the country, you have to check into the requirements. He needs a lot of vaccinations. Make sure he's doesn't ... he has to be checked by a vet to make sure he doesn't have any illnesses.Todd: Oh, really? Like how long does that take? I mean, do you have to take him to the vet and do this like a month before, or is it something you just do right before you travel?Greg: Probably a couple of weeks at least is average.Todd: So, how do you take a dog on a plane?Greg: Well, not every airplane company will allow dogs so you have to check into which do allow them and then you have to have a special nice size container and you have to put a little bit of food in them and you make sure that the airline company tells everybody who's working along ... like if there are any stops on a stopover, they have to make sure everybody knows that there's a dog and then they'll take care ... make sure to check the water and make sure the temperature controls in the back of the plane are at the right setting.Todd: When you get off the plane, is your dog kind of freaked out? Is Dancer all stressed?Greg: He is so happy to get off. He hates flying.Todd: So when he sees the cage, does he act funny? Does he act, you know, like with dread, fear?Greg: He looks at me with his eyes and he tries to talk me out of it.Todd: Does he ever succeed?Greg: He succeeds in a lot of things, but if I have to move, I've gotta move and we're a family so he comes with me.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Greg, you got a great dog. Where did you get your dog?Greg: Actually, my dog and I sort of found each other. I was moving from one house to another and as I was moving from the parking lot to my house, I saw this really skinny dog that looked like he really needed food and also affection. I petted him. He followed me back and forth. The next day, he was out in front of the gate to the house. The next day, he made it inside the house to the genkan, the area we leave our shoes. The next day, he made it to the top of the bed.Todd: Wow. So wait a minute. You're saying that you didn't choose your dog. Your dog kind of chose you.Greg: Yes. It was fate. Destiny.Todd: So, what's cool about your dog?Greg: Well, basically my dog is the world's greatest dog. I'm very unbiased. He understands English and Japanese and French. He almost never barks. He likes lots of people. He's very intelligent, sensitive human being ... ah, dog!Todd: So your dog speaks three languages?Greg: He doesn't speak them, but he understands them.Todd: So, can your dog do any special tricks?Greg: Actually, like I didn't teach him to do any tricks, but he's amazing, like I walk him for ... I can walk for miles with him. He's always by my side and I don't need a leash. No leash whatsoever. He listens to me. He stops when I tell him to stop. If I tell him to go quickly, he runs quickly.Dog: Wow! Sounds like a pretty good dog. ... So could you live without your dog? Is your dog invaluable?Greg: My dog is invaluable. Actually, he's getting old now. He's thirteen years old now and I know that some day he will pass away, and when I think of that it makes me really, really sad. I dread it.Todd: Yeah, that would be pretty tough. ... but in the future, you know, maybe after your dog is passed away, would you get another dog?Greg: I think it would take me many years probably to recover from the loss of Dancer. His name is Dancer.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号:VOA英语每日一听Todd: Hey, Greg, you got a great dog. Where did you get your dog?Greg: Actually, my dog and I sort of found each other. I was moving from one house to another and as I was moving from the parking lot to my house, I saw this really skinny dog that looked like he really needed food and also affection. I petted him. He followed me back and forth. The next day, he was out in front of the gate to the house. The next day, he made it inside the house to the genkan, the area we leave our shoes. The next day, he made it to the top of the bed.Todd: Wow. So wait a minute. You're saying that you didn't choose your dog. Your dog kind of chose you.Greg: Yes. It was fate. Destiny.Todd: So, what's cool about your dog?Greg: Well, basically my dog is the world's greatest dog. I'm very unbiased. He understands English and Japanese and French. He almost never barks. He likes lots of people. He's very intelligent, sensitive human being ... ah, dog!Todd: So your dog speaks three languages?Greg: He doesn't speak them, but he understands them.Todd: So, can your dog do any special tricks?Greg: Actually, like I didn't teach him to do any tricks, but he's amazing, like I walk him for ... I can walk for miles with him. He's always by my side and I don't need a leash. No leash whatsoever. He listens to me. He stops when I tell him to stop. If I tell him to go quickly, he runs quickly.Dog: Wow! Sounds like a pretty good dog. ... So could you live without your dog? Is your dog invaluable?Greg: My dog is invaluable. Actually, he's getting old now. He's thirteen years old now and I know that some day he will pass away, and when I think of that it makes me really, really sad. I dread it.Todd: Yeah, that would be pretty tough. ... but in the future, you know, maybe after your dog is passed away, would you get another dog?Greg: I think it would take me many years probably to recover from the loss of Dancer. His name is Dancer.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Greg you taught in the Middle East.Greg: Yeah, I lived in the United Arab Emirates for awhile.Todd: Wow, that's a lot different than most places.Greg: Ah, it's very different. I'm glad I went to experience another culture, another way of life.Todd: Yeah, what do you remember about it?Greg: Well, one thing that's so unique about the United Arab Emirates is that actually there are people from all over the world there.Todd: No kidding.Greg: The native population is maybe 30% of the population.Todd: 30%.Greg: And the rest are foreigners who have come into work in various ways.Todd: Where do these foreigners come from?Greg: From all over the world. You know, you have a lot of English teachers from the U.S. and England and Australia and New Zealand and Britain, and so on. You have a lot of Philippinos working as shopping, in shops, in stores, and you have people from India coming and working in construction. People from all over the world, and actually it's very cosmopolitan.Todd: Oh, what's the biggest city in UAE?Greg: Ah, it's probably Dubai.Todd: What's Dubai like?Greg: Actually, I never spent that much time in Dubai because I lived in Abu Dhab. I just went to the airport in Dubai. Abu Dhabi though, I tell you, it's really amazing. The architecture is really beautiful. The Arabic architecture is just amazing. The mosques. The marble on the building, really, beautiful.Todd: In Abu Dhabi though, did you live in a house, or did you live in an apartment?Greg: I lived in an apartment on the 14th floor.Todd: The 14th floor.Greg: The 14th floor. Oh, it's, Abu Dhabi is amazing. You know, maybe 50 years ago, there were just some small villages, but after oil was discovered, and the country became rich, there was like an explosion in the populationand new buildings were going up every day. They're growing like mushrooms. I could see the ocean, though from my apartment. I remember how beautiful the ocean was.Todd: Hey, what's the cuisine like?Greg: Ah, the food is amazing. Because you have people from all over the world, you have food from all over the world.Todd: What's the local food? Is it rice-based?Greg: Oh, they eat rice, and a lot of, camel meat, camel meat is unusual and the cheeses are really salty.Todd: OK, camel mea, cheese, and rice.Greg: And a lot of Mediterranean foods too. Dates, the dates were fantastic.Todd: Really.Greg: I never liked dates before I went there, and the olives. The olives are also wonderful. Out of this world.Todd: You're making me hungry.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Greg you taught in the Middle East.Greg: Yeah, I lived in the United Arab Emirates for awhile.Todd: Wow, that's a lot different than most places.Greg: Ah, it's very different. I'm glad I went to experience another culture, another way of life.Todd: Yeah, what do you remember about it?Greg: Well, one thing that's so unique about the United Arab Emirates is that actually there are people from all over the world there.Todd: No kidding.Greg: The native population is maybe 30% of the population.Todd: 30%.Greg: And the rest are foreigners who have come into work in various ways.Todd: Where do these foreigners come from?Greg: From all over the world. You know, you have a lot of English teachers from the U.S. and England and Australia and New Zealand and Britain, and so on. You have a lot of Philippinos working as shopping, in shops, in stores, and you have people from India coming and working in construction. People from all over the world, and actually it's very cosmopolitan.Todd: Oh, what's the biggest city in UAE?Greg: Ah, it's probably Dubai.Todd: What's Dubai like?Greg: Actually, I never spent that much time in Dubai because I lived in Abu Dhab. I just went to the airport in Dubai. Abu Dhabi though, I tell you, it's really amazing. The architecture is really beautiful. The Arabic architecture is just amazing. The mosques. The marble on the building, really, beautiful.Todd: In Abu Dhabi though, did you live in a house, or did you live in an apartment?Greg: I lived in an apartment on the 14th floor.Todd: The 14th floor.Greg: The 14th floor. Oh, it's, Abu Dhabi is amazing. You know, maybe 50 years ago, there were just some small villages, but after oil was discovered, and the country became rich, there was like an explosion in the populationand new buildings were going up every day. They're growing like mushrooms. I could see the ocean, though from my apartment. I remember how beautiful the ocean was.Todd: Hey, what's the cuisine like?Greg: Ah, the food is amazing. Because you have people from all over the world, you have food from all over the world.Todd: What's the local food? Is it rice-based?Greg: Oh, they eat rice, and a lot of, camel meat, camel meat is unusual and the cheeses are really salty.Todd: OK, camel mea, cheese, and rice.Greg: And a lot of Mediterranean foods too. Dates, the dates were fantastic.Todd: Really.Greg: I never liked dates before I went there, and the olives. The olives are also wonderful. Out of this world.Todd: You're making me hungry.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听Todd: So, Greg, you are quite the world traveler I hear.Greg: Um, yeah, I love traveling. I've been to probably around, I don't know, 20 different countries. I've lived in Thailand and South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, and four different parts of JapanTodd: Oh, that's a lot.Greg: And of course several different places in the U.S.Todd: Well, for somebody who's going to travel for the first time, what type of advice would you give them, so you know, in case they never get lost.Greg: Ah, getting lost. (Right) Yeah, that happens all the time. You have to prepare for that. Some of them, one of the first things I do, whenever I get to an airport, is I see if I can get a map from the information center. I go to a hotel. I ask if they have a map of the area. When I want to go somewhere, I ask them to write the destination in the local language, and also I practice my pronunciation with them, and sometimes I'll, almost always actually, I get a business card or a matchbook from the hotel to where I'll be returning (right, right) and then I go off on my merry way.Todd: OK, well, let's say that um, you're on business in a foreign country, and it's really busy and you forget to get the business card, you don't have the map, you're trying to find someplace and you're completely lost, what should you do?Greg: Well, of course, you've got to ask people. (Right, right) and it's a good idea to ask a lot of different people because in some countries people don't want to say no, but they don't want to say I don't know, right. They give you some directions, or maybe they don't understand you, and they give you the wrong directions, so even if you think you got good directions the first time constantly check with other people along your way.Todd: Well, so when you're going down the street, and say you are lost, is there a certain type of person you look for like let's say an old lady or children. Is there a certain person who is better at giving directions?Greg: Um, well, if it's a child, and you want to get to a business section or something, probably they don't know. (Right) It's a good idea to ask somebody who looks as if they live in the area, and not just another, sorry, tourist passing through or something.Todd: Right, right, right. So you're talking about people who work in shops and things like that?Greg: Yes, and also though, delivery men are usually very good, cause they have to go all over the city, so they know it well.Todd: Right. So have you actually ever been lost?Greg: Oh, I've been lost all the time. Once I got lost for a couple of hours in Bangkok and it was terrible.Todd: Well, that's pretty, that's a pretty intense city.Greg: Yeah, so after that, it gave me the idea that I should always check for landmarks, you know landmarks are really tall buildings, or a river, something I could always know, I could see easily, and try to remember, "oh the river's on my right side. Ah, there's a hill over there." Keep looking for it. Remember itTodd: Well, it sounds like good advice. Thanks, Greg.Greg: You're welcome.

5 Keys to Happiness - In this episode, I discuss the 5 Keys to Happiness as outlined in Greg Well's book "The Ripple Effect". Please read chapter 6 before next Tuesday!

Welcome to this episode of the Real Fast Results podcast!  Greg is today’s special guest.  He’s known as a master negotiator, and he’s also really good at figuring out body language.  Of course, those two skills go hand in hand.  Greg has been practicing this art form for more than 30 years.  In fact, he spent 20 years studying how body language can affect negotiations. Over the years, he’s participated in many negotiations within universities and governmental establishments, seminars, schools, municipalities, and industrial settings, and he has even served on a number of corporate, business, and governmental boards.  Greg is often sought out for his expertise, and we are thankful to hear what he has to say today.  Thanks Greg… Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode Promise: Successful Negotiations First of all, thank you for the invite.  My tagline is, “You’re always negotiating.” What that means is that the actions you engage in today influences/impacts tomorrow’s potential outcomes.  Thus, the better you can negotiate, the greater outcomes you are going to experience, no matter what it is that you’re trying to achieve in life. [bctt tweet="You should never want a deal so badly that you are willing to cave in, in order to get some aspect of the deal. " via="no"] First of all, you should always gather as much information about any situation that you’re going to be involved in, prior to your negotiations, as possible.  The reason for this is that the more information you gather, the more of a strategy you’ll be able to develop, dependent upon the individual with whom you are negotiating.  That’s to say, you can use the exact same strategy that netted the exact outcome that you were seeking in one particular situation, but because the variable happens to be that you are negotiating with a different person, you would then have to use a different set of strategies. Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode Learn How to handle difficult negotiations How to prepare for a negotiation What makes the other negotiator tick Tips About Body Language Negotiation Escape Routes  How to use these techniques in everyday life Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode How Do I Connect with Greg? Well, again, the current book is Body Language Secrets to Win More Negotiations.  The new book is:  Negotiating with a Bully…  Also, if people wish, they can sign up for my free newsletter that gives out negotiation tips and body language advice.  That’s at www.TheMasterNegotiator.com. Resources Body Language Secrets to Win More Negotiations Negotiating with a Bully… Real Fast Results Community If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!

[paypal-donation] We're continuing our conversation about revelation in the LDS Church.  One of Mormonism's most important and well-known revelations deals with the Word of Wisdom, Mormonism's health code.  Dr. Greg Prince talks about a naturalistic view of how that revelation was received.  I think it's pretty surprising. Greg:  You will hear people still who say the Word of Wisdom proves Joseph was a prophet because it was a hundred years ahead of its time.  It wasn't even a day ahead of its time.  It reflected what everybody already knew.  This was the air that they breathed. The Temperance Movement kicked in in 1826 because there was an epidemic of drunkenness in the United States.  The consumption of distilled liquor over a 30 year period had tripled on a per capita basis.  Drunkenness became a national security issue.  That's why the American Temperance Society was formed in 1826. ... When they said “hot drinks,” it mean drinks that were hot.  It wasn't what was in them. GT:  Including hot chocolate? Greg:  People didn't drink hot chocolate.  They only drank two hot drinks:  coffee and tea.  But it wasn't the content, it was the temperature.  It moved you out of that zone of moderation, out of temperance. ... If there had been iced drinks, probably the Word of Wisdom would have said no hot drinks and no iced drinks because the whole notion was temperance, moderation. ... GT:  Some would say, is that really revelation then, or is that just the thinking of the day? Greg:  Well you get into the circular argument on that.  Is something revelation because we call it revelation, or is the nature of the something what later qualifies it as being revelation?  If you're looking for the splitting the ceiling and the voice of the Lord dropping through-type revelation, how many instances of that do we have within the LDS Church tradition? Hear what he has to say about meat and grains!  We'll also tell some stories about President McKay. Greg:  President McKay looked up at him and said, “What's on the cup doesn't matter so long as what's in the cup is a Coke.” ...I was chatting with one of the secretaries who had worked in President McKay's office...She read that and she said, “That's not correct.” I said, “What do you mean it's not correct?  You know the guy who gave me that story!” Then she said, “Well let me tell you..." It's going to be a very fun conversation.  I hope you join us….. https://youtu.be/LFiDUzhVdjs   [paypal-donation]

What happens when Uncle Goosecock asks Mark the Bagger questions about Cav Faust and Greg? Well find out.

Greg Goldstein, Senior Director of Global Channel Sales and Development for ON24, joins Jen Spencer to discuss mid-market and enterprise consulting partners, business planning for channel managers, partner exit interviews, and more on this episode of The Allbound Podcast. Jen: I'm excited to have you with us, and I wanna share a little bit about ON24 before we dig into channel questions. You guys are the global leader in webinar marketing solutions that drive demand generation and customer engagement, which sounds exciting. I know you've recently joined the ON24 team, but you've spent the last 12 plus years developing channel programs for software companies. Can you tell us a little bit about ON24, about your value proposition, and what brought you to this new team? Greg: Absolutely, for sure. ON24, as you mentioned, is a leader in webcasting technologies. Our overarching goal is to help marketers generate more leads and pipeline, as well as keeping existing customers up to speed on an organization's current deliverables, services and other offerings. Our platform is really about interactivity. It helps companies drive better engagement through that interactivity, and although interactivity and relationships are crucial, it's really how the platform can gather the data from those events, whether they're live events, on-demand events, or even semi-live events. And it's really crucial that as organizations spend time and effort to create these webcasts, that that data is pulled back into their organization and shared with their CRM and marketing automation platforms to really help the sales team just get more actionable activities and information about prospects and customers that they're engaged with. Jen: Well, being a revenue-driven marketer myself, I can definitely see the value there. So let's talk about channel. When you look at those overarching goals that the ON24 team has for the year, that you have, that the executive team has, what role do you think your channel is going to play in helping achieve those goals, both in the next 12 months, but then, looking ahead to even the next five years? Greg: That's a great question. As a channel person who's been in channel for 12 plus years, what's really crucial is, when an organization gets to that inflection point where they realize that channel is really that lever that's gonna help them extend their revenue stream, that they look at where they currently are with their channel. I think that like ON24, they realize that the channel is going to play that pivotal role. So how do you develop a channel in an organization that maybe not necessarily had a consulting partner channel but are looking to do that? And so, ON24 has several different channels, but specifically to this question, the consulting partner channel that I was brought in to develop is something that's going to help open up the market in the short-term and long-term. In the short term, it's building out a channel program that will provide our new partners with a webcasting solution that they can include into their marketing stack. And that's something that we'll talk about a little bit later. But there's this new stack, there's a CRM component, there's a marketing automation component, and then there's the webcasting component that really all tie together to create a unified vision of people, customers and prospects that are engaging these organizations. So my goal in coming to ON24 was to create a channel and create channel partners' success programs that will help these partners develop the tools that they need to be successful. I think in the short-term, the ON24 new partner program, which we've titled SuccessOne, will give these new partners the tools to be successful by also providing ON24 the leverage of having a new and unique devoted channel that will help expand the brand that ON24 brings to the webcasting space. So for short-term, we're gonna be very focused on the partners, but in the long-term, the goal for the SuccessOne program is to really provide ON24 as an organization a larger route to the consumer market than they ever could before with the direct model. Jen: So right now, I'm going to assume that you've got revenue goals that are associated with your partner program. Is that an accurate assumption? Greg: Yeah, of course. All channels will have revenue goals. With the new SuccessOne partner program, this is really a buildout of a brand-new type of partner that ON24 really hasn't engaged in the past. These are mid-market enterprise consulting partners, and of course there are revenue targets. But when you're building a brand-new channel from scratch and you're coming in with a unique new line of business, the most important thing for a channel is that you have the enablement training and go-to market strategies encapsulated into a concept that partners can digest and execute, which is something that overrides the short-term revenue goals. It's really the enabling goals which are playing a more pivotal role. Jen: Got it. So these new consulting partners, how do they differ from, or do they differ from a more traditional value-added reseller? Do you still have those VAR type of partners at ON24 or are you pivoting a traditional VAR program into more of a consultancy type of partner program? Greg: That's another great question. So ON24 has a series of different types of channels, as do a lot of publishers. There's ISVs, OEMs, VARs. In the software world more, I like to call them consulting partners since not a lot of consulting firms like to be called value added resellers. They're truly consulting partners. And so, we do have ISVs, we do some OEM, we do have SIs, and those programs have been with ON24 for quite a while. Those programs will remain as they are. I'm working with the teams that are supporting those partners to look at their strategies, their go-to market strategies, their enablement strategies, their onboarding strategies. And there will be some enhancements to those programs. My goal is to come in and bring in those mid-market, like I mentioned, mid-market and enterprise consulting partners. These are the partners that their predominate core practices revolve around CRM, marketing automation, and ERP. This is a new type of partner, consulting partner that ON24 hasn't truly engaged in the past. But in my history and in my experiences working with either publishers from GoldMine to Sage to SugarCRM to Act-On, these mid-market and enterprise consulting partners are truly the trusted advisors of the target audience that ON24 is going after. Jen: So I wanted to ask you about that, about, some of your past experience. Some of those past experiences that you've mentioned, I mean, you've helped build some pretty phenomenal channel programs over the years, like you mentioned Sage, Sugar, Act-On. So when you first join a software company with that goal of either creating or further developing a channel program, where do you start? Greg: Well, there's a lot of ways to approach this, and I think everybody who's been in channel will look at it from a different perspective. I think, most importantly, if you're channel person, you're looking at an opportunity based on how a partner would approach it. I think there's probably five pillars or five major buckets that you wanna look at. First is, what's the market for that opportunity? What's the market for that platform? Is it a market that is on a growth curve, is it in a maintenance curve, or is it kind of on a downswing? Now, that's a really crucial point when you look at, can a channel be built successfully around the product or services that the publisher is going to market with? That's number one. Number two, fit for the partners. Is it a technology or a solution that the partners in your ecosystem aren't easily adaptable to? The market that I specifically fit into are more those partners that fit around the business applications, the CRM, the ERPs, marketing automation, those consulting firms that are out there to solve the problem for their consumers. So that's the second thing. Is there a fit for a partner channel for that service? Third is what's the current ecosystem of that channel? So if you're talking about webcasting or marketing automation or CRM, what's the channel like? Is there a robust channel? Is it a product that's in demand, that partners realize that they wanna go out and they wanna exploit those needs in the marketplace? So is there a fit in the ecosystem for that product? Fourth is partner profitability. Does that product or service provide the partner with a revenue stream with not only product sales but also in consultative services? These are businesses like all other organizations that have to profit, and they have to be able to utilize their staff to be profitable. So some products have a very low cost point but a high services rate. Other products have a really high price point but very little services. So you have to kind of weigh where you're at with margins and consultative services to really determine, is this a good fit for a partner? And fifth, which to me is one of the most important ones, is partner commitment and organizational commitment. Does the publisher, or is the publisher committed to the success of a channel? If you have an organization, and ON24 has absolutely opened its arms to this new concept of building out a new partner channel, are they committed to doing this? Building a channel is not a one-quarter or two-quarter event, it's a marathon. And a marathon has many steps, right, as you know. It's enablement, it's recruitment, it's onboarding, it's building a strategy that helps partners be effective. But also, are partners committed to this? Do the partners realize or understand or need to be educated that their consumers need that product or service? Do they need it, do they want it? If they don't need it, do they need to be educated as to why they need it? There are a lot of partners, Jen, that look at products and go, "You know what, that's too far ahead of the adoption curve from my install in customer base." That's another component that you also have to consider. Where in the adoption curve is that product or service? So those are pretty much the big five. Jen: These are all great questions to ask before you start digging and building out a program. I mean, you started a company, how do you go about getting answers to all of those questions? Do you have any tips for folks who might be in a similar situation? Greg: I'd been doing this for a long time and that question has come up before. How do you find these questions out? How do you find out if it's an opportunity for a channel lead or a channel sales vendor? My best response is, go talk to partners that you have a great relationship with, find out what their customer base, the spectrum of applications that their customers are using, find out what they're asking their prospects. A lot of the times, partners don't do the due diligence in their own business development. One of the things that I've done in the past, and this is how I gather a lot of this information as to, "Is this a viable product," is when I coach partners or when I build channels, when I work with channels, I require partners to do exit interviews with companies that they've won deals and lost deals. I don't think enough partners in this industry do exit surveys. Why did we not win this deal? Was it based on price? It should never be based on price why you lose a deal. I think exit surveys should ask do you feel that our organization provided you with the information to make an educated response to whether this application fitted your needs? When you start having partners that are at that level of competency of their own organization, go ask them, "Does webcasting fit your profile of applications that your prospects or your customers are asking for?" You really got to out and ask the questions to determine if it's the right fit or not. Jen: That's a really great point, and some of those activities that you're bringing up are good activities, I think, for even direct sales teams to be doing as well. I think, having that open communication with your partners, and when you're saying talking to them, I'm assuming you mean actually either face-to-face or on the phone and not just sending out a survey. Am I correct in that assumption? Greg: Absolutely. As much as I love technology, I am all about that personal touch. In the 15 years that I've been in this business, I have a Rolodex of, gosh, 300 to 500 partners that I know personally. It's been a long time in this industry, and I have another 500 that I can communicate with via electronic means. Communication is key. You really need to be able to understand what makes a partner tick. For all of us that do channels, channel partners are unique individuals, just like they're unique organizations. They all have specific needs that they need to satisfy, whether it's an application that they need to provide to their customers, or how they go to business and how they go to market, how do they engage their customers and prospects. Knowing your partners is not just sending out a survey or assuming that you know what they want, it's asking those questions. I'm a big, big fan of beta testing, and I've been doing that since I started in channels. I will come up with a channel strategy and I will bring in two or three of my closest channel allies, channel partner allies, and ask them, "What do you think of this strategy and can we pilot it with your firm?" Whether it's a marketing strategy, a sales strategy, whatever it may be, being in channel is a great opportunity, because you can test things, you can do A/B split testing on channel strategies. Never assume you know the answer, never assume, always ask the question and get a better response. Jen: I think that's great. I think even from a consumer perspective, when I think about some of the technologies that I use, whenever I'm asked to try something, to be a beta to provide feedback, honestly, I feel special. I feel like, "Wow, my opinion really matters." I feel like I'm truly a trusted partner in that relationship. So it's a win-win, I think, for both parties. Greg: Absolutely. I can tell you, there's dozens of partners that I've worked with that have followed me from even my days at GoldMine to Sage to SugarCRM to Act-On and now to ON24, that have followed me from publisher to publisher because I've made them money. When you make a partner money and make them successful, they trust you. In this industry, being in channel, being a channel leader, trust, integrity, there is nothing more important than that. If you go down that straight path with a channel partner and you tell them the good, the bad, and the ugly, then you're gonna be successful. Remember, these partners that are selling applications, especially when they go from the old-school on-prem perpetual licensing model to a new cloud deployment with software as a service pricing model, their models have changed. That paradigm shift for them, a lot of them had a little trouble with that shift. And now that they've adopted to the new model and the new modern channel partners that are more assertive and aggressive with building out their practices, looking for those new platforms that fill their customers' and prospects' gaps in their solution stack, those are the ones that will be the most forthright with the channel leader to tell you, "You guys need to think about going to market this way, because my customers and prospects are looking at it from a different perspective than maybe the publisher's looking at it." And that's where that relationship and that conversation, Jen, is crucial in building out a successful channel. Jen: So Greg, I have one more question for you, but it's actually two questions in one, I'm totally cheating. So, okay, so the first part of the question is, what do you think is the biggest challenge for sales professionals overseeing a channel program? And then my second, tying it to this question, question is, what do you see is the greatest opportunity for those same leaders? Sometimes those challenges and opportunities can be one and the same. Greg: Yeah. The challenges and opportunities are the same, it's the same coin, opposite sides, where with partners, I always do, I try to do personal business development with my top partners and those partners that raise their hands. And I'm a big fan of old-school SWOT: strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. And I really think not enough channel sales people, channel managers, channel leadership really understand where the partners are in their specific lifespan of their consulting firm. So when you say challenges, I'd probably say understanding what the partners are actually looking to achieve from their own perspective. As a channel leader, I know what my company's looking to do. I know exactly what I am trying to do, build an effective selling machine that is self-sufficient and competent. Okay, so challenges, there's a lot of lackadaisical attitude in channel today and I don't personally understand it. I've been around for a long time and I've seen the most effective channels flutter when the day-to-day business development requirements are taken away from channel sales people. The channel needs to be understood, listened to, and when they have an issue or there's a gap in their go-to-market strategy, they need to be addressed. So I would say, the education from a channel sales perspective as to what each individual partner needs to be successful is probably, in my opinion from a business development standpoint, Jen, a big challenge today, a very big challenge. Jen: Why do you think there's inertia in the channel? You know, because you touched on it, and I see it too. There's a lot of, I don't know if it's inertia, apathy, or if it's just this thing that exists in a company that folks maybe don't seem to wanna dig into. Do you have any thoughts on why that is? Greg: Well, I'll use a phrase I use when I'm bringing on partners, and I mentioned a thing called channel self-sufficiency, which is something that I strive for, for partners to be self-sufficient. I really think there's this phrase, and I use it in a lot of my marketing and a lot of my recruitment, is competency breeds confidence. And I think today there's been a move from, in some areas, from publishers to not bring in people that have strong business backgrounds to manage partners. I think that is where the latency in success is happening, is you have channel sales people that don't take their role seriously. They don't understand the fact that they need to know business, they need to know business development, they need to know marketing, but on top of it all, they need to know the product that they sell. That, right, I can tell you numerous experiences where I've been at publishers where the channel person did not know their platform. I'm sorry, you can be a business development person, you can be a channel marketing person, you can have the best business strategy concepts in the world. But if you can't sit there and have at least an advanced sales rep's skillset around the platform you're selling, you're gonna show weakness to the channel partner. Jen: Or because you... Greg: You need to...go ahead. Jen: No, sorry. I'm stepping...I'm trying to finish your sentence. I just let you finish your sentence. You're making, you're a business adviser in a way, you have to be able to communicate the value of your product or platform and show that channel partner what value that's gonna add to his or her own business. I mean, I agree 100%, you have to know how these systems work and you have to have that business acumen. I haven't had anybody kind of put their finger on that before. So I'm just kind of like bouncing in my chair a little bit. Like, this is it. Yes, Greg. Like, I agree 100%. Greg: A couple of years ago, I did a dramatic change in direction on how I did business development and business planning with partners. And again, lots of publishers, lots of experiences. Business planning with partners is something that is overlooked. And I did an absolute 180 in my strategies. I actually tore up all the 20-page business plans that I had used in the past and I moved to something that I call the a la carte strategy where I actually have between 20 and 25 topics that a partner can actually choose from for their coaching. Of course, there are some mandatory things that I require, and I do a triage level of 1 to 4, right, 1 means we're working on it now, 2 means we're working on it in 60 to 90 days, 3 and 4, putting them in the parking lot. But for partners that get my business planner with my team, they look at us and go, "My gosh, you guys really wanna understand what we are as an organization and where are the gaps." When you bring that type of channel leadership and channel management to the partner ecosystem, they're gonna pay attention to you. They're gonna give you that mindshare, Jen, that you need to be successful. Remember, and this is where channel managers and channel leaders kind of drift off. The top consulting partners, partners at the top 1%, Microsoft partners, Salesforce consulting partners, NetSuite partners, Sage partners, you name the publisher, their top partners, aside from those core applications that they sell, are selling another 20 to 50 other applications. How do you make yourself front-of-mind and get mindshare so that they represent your product before they think about another application that ties into Great Plains or Dynamics or Salesforce? It is showing them that you're absolutely professional and that you're there to help them make money. You're there to help them be successful. You show that with your documentation, with your tools that you provide, your business planning tools, you're gonna get their mindshare. You're gonna get 25% of their marketing time. You're gonna get 25% of their sales time. You're gonna get 25% of their operational and organizational mindshare. You get those components, you get that type of mindshare, you're gonna have a successful channel. But you need to be hiring channel managers that are more business related than they are trying to sell software or sell services. I know that's kind of a shift in thinking, but in my experience, the best channel managers that I've ever had on teams of mine were those that were able to sit down and do business planning and understand what it takes for a partner to be successful. Jen: I think it's really great advice, and I'm excited to see, the growth of the ON24 partner program, this whole ecosystem, as you dig in further. But before I let you go, I know I kind of riddled you with channel questions, I do have a couple of more personal questions for our listeners to get to know you a little bit better. Are you open to answering a couple of easy questions? Greg: Absolutely, absolutely. Jen: Alright, okay. So first question, what is your favorite city? Greg: Favorite city, well, I'm a little biased. I'm gonna say the city that I live in, which is Newport Beach, California. Jen: Well, you just happen to live in paradise. We can't all be so lucky. Question number two, are you an animal lover? Greg: I am. I'm a huge animal lover. I have two crazy dogs that, love to sit in my home office and love to voice their opinions when they don't like what I hear. I also love horses. My little daughter is all about ponies right now. So we spend a lot of time up at a local ranch and she can pretend that she's a cowgirl and really enjoy that. Jen: Lovely. Question number three, Mac or PC? Greg: Oh, that's the big question. I am currently six years on Mac, spent my first 10 years in the industry on PC, and I can go either way. Jen: Really, there's not like one thing you just love more than the other? I mean, if I stuck you on a plane for five hours and I had one in one hand and one in the other, which one would you take? Greg: I'm going Mac. You got me on that one. Jen: Awesome. And last question, let's say I was able to offer you an all-expenses-paid trip, where would it be to? Greg: Wow, all-expenses-paid trip. Gosh, that is a great question. I would probably have to say, given that I have a three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, a Disney cruise. Jen: I hear those are really great. Greg: If it was just my wife and I, I'd probably say Montreal. One of my favorite towns is Montreal. Jen: Nice, nice. Well, I hear Disney cruises are pretty great for adults too, and they've got some daycare too. So that might not be such a bad trip. Greg: Exactly. Jen: Well, Greg, thank you so much for sharing your time, your insights with us today. If listeners would like to reach out to you directly, what's the best way for them to do so? Greg: I recommend that you connect with me on LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, Greg Goldstein, and I respond quickly to messages. And if you have questions about channel, questions about anything, in the industry, I'm always open to giving advice, having dialogue, conversation, love chatting. So if you wanna reach out, LinkedIn. Jen: Perfect. And we'll go ahead and include some social media links to that when we publish this podcast as well. Again, Greg, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. And we look forward to delivering another episode of the Allbound podcast next week. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks for tuning to the Allbound podcast. For past episodes and additional resources, visit the resource center at allbound.com. And remember, never sell alone.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about an authority that tells you what’s allowed, what’s required, and what you can’t do regarding your property. No, it's not the government, or even Charlotte's tree police. We’re talking about private authorities empowered by the government known as Homeowners Associations. HOAs are the focus of WFAE’s Public Conversations forum Thursday at 7 p.m. at Davidson Day School. The program is called: Your HOA and You: Who Rules The Neighborhood? (To register, click here ). WFAE News Director Greg Collard will serve as the forum's moderator. He spoke to WFAE's Kevin Kniestedt to preview the event. Kevin: Sounds like an easy job you have tonight… Greg: Well, the subject of HOAs certainly evokes strong opinions from people who love and despise HOAs, and those viewpoints will certainly be expressed this evening. But there’s also a lot of confusion about HOAs – what are the rights of homeowners, for example? How easy is it for HOAs to impose fines for

At the radio station. Greg: Today we have a special guest from the university who is here to talk to us about the Student Union, and some of its important activities. Welcome, Liz. Liz: Hello Greg, thanks for having me. Greg: Congratulations on becoming the Student Union President. What are your goals for the students for this year? Liz: Three things really. I'm working with the other elected students to increase safety on campus; we'll have visiting speakers from the community who will educate us about safety issues: not walking alone late at night, reporting suspicious behaviors, and keeping personal property safe. Greg: Good, because crime on campus should be unacceptable, don't you think? Liz: Absolutely. We're also organizing a big concert to raise money for a health outreach. Some students deal with depression, drug addiction, bullying. So we want to spend that money on speakers, counselors, and workshops. We're also working with the universituy to see if students can get credit for going to the workshops. Greg: Well that's impressive, Liz. You're trying to solve some very important problems. I wish you all the best. We'll support your efforts by running ads about the concert every day. Liz: Thanks Greg, I really appreciate it.   Click the link if you wish to rate my app or buy it // //   //