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Nick Norris is a former United States Navy SEAL, now the CEO and co-founder of Protekt Products. He is a graduate of both the United States Naval Academy and Basic Underwater Demolition / SEAL (BUD/S) Class 247. Upon completion of SEAL training in 2004, Nick assumed progressively higher positions of leadership within Naval Special Warfare. Nick is sharing how his leadership training in the SEALs can help entrepreneurs excel in business. Subscribe Apple | Spotify | iHeart Radio | Stitcher | Radio FM 3 Golden Nuggets We are only limited by our minds. Most of what stands in our way is head trash and it just takes a shift in mindset in order to push yourself and succeed. Have humility and be humble enough to know you're not the expert in all things. This gives you the insight necessary to put the right people in the right seats and trust them to do their job effectively in order to grow your business. Preparedness is the key to conquering stress. Training scenarios and mission planning are at the core of what Navy SEALs do so they aren't caught off-guard by any situation thrown at them. Entrepreneurs should tackle business the same way in order to be successful. Sponsors and Resources Verblio: Today's episode of the Smart Agency Masterclass is sponsored by Verblio. Check out Verblio.com/smartagency and get 50% off your first month of content creation. Our team loves using Verblio because of the ease in their process and their large pool of crowd-sourced writers. Show Transcripts Jason: [00:00:00] On this episode, I talk with him former Navy SEAL, Nick, who goes through how they would make decisions, how they apply that to the civilian world, how you can be a better leader and get out of stressful situations. It's a really amazing episode. I'm so honored to have Nick on the show and you guys are going to really love it. Hey Nick, welcome to the show. NIck: [00:00:29] Well, thank you for having me, Jason. Jason: [00:00:31] Yeah, I'm excited to have you on, so tell us who you are and what do you do? NIck: [00:00:35] Oh, my name is Nick Norris, I guess I would be known as a former SEAL by a lot of people, right? That's why I've connected with people, but I currently am an entrepreneur. Uh, I have a company called Protekt Products and, and we are in the wellness space, producing supplements and sun care products. And our supplements are geared toward improving people's hydration and helping them sleep better. Jason: [00:01:04] Awesome. Fantastic. Well, first off, thanks for your service, especially for all the people that I've ever served. So thank you very much, but what made you decide to be a Navy SEAL? NIck: [00:01:15] Uh, so I wanted to do something difficult, you know, when people ask me that question and I've thought a little bit about it now because the question comes up often, I always was looking for something that was personally challenging. I wasn't the most naturally talented person athletically growing up, I had to really work hard and I wanted to find something that I could apply myself to that required a tremendous amount of personal discipline and that commitment and personal discipline would be. The thing that would drive success, not necessarily innate athletic ability or just innate talent. So I gravitated towards the SEAL teams because it was really difficult. I knew I could apply myself diligently in a disciplined way and get results. And that happened, I kind of fixated on it early in life or right around seventh grade. When a friend of mine had told me about the community and how difficult it was to enter that community specifically. Did someone tell you if you can never do it, is that what pushed you to do it? So my, the initial friend, a guy named Mike Hurley, who's a police officer in Chicago. He's the one that brought it up to me. He was a big fan of the Marine Corps. He wanted to be in the military and he mentioned the Seal teams and he was always super positive. But the second that I latched onto that concept and I was actually pretty vocal about it, you know, growing up seventh, eighth-grade high school. But I, I definitely had people close to me that told me. Dude, you're crazy. There's no way you're going to do that. And if it added fuel to the fire, right, that's typically what happens, right. People that are very driven get told that they can't do something and then you want to prove them wrong and improve that you're capable of controlling your own destiny. Jason: [00:03:02] Yeah. I remember, uh, I came back from college one time and my dad used to run all the time and we used to run this like one and a half-mile loop. And he was like, Hey, can you with me? I was like, yeah, I'll run with you. And literally, we passed right in the very beginning, we pass this old guy just walking. And when we got back around this loop, my dad was way ahead of me. And I was so embarrassed. I remember walking by the old guy and the old guy was like, well, you better get them next time or something. And then. I saw something where people were doing this triathlon. And I told my dad, I said, I'm going to do a triathlon. Or maybe I told him I was going to do an iron man or something. And, uh, and he was like, Oh, you can't do that. And literally it fueled me and I was like, I just finished under the cut. NIck: [00:03:49] Yeah. Yeah, it's good. Right? That, that external motivation is, is motivation and powerful motivation on the left. Yeah. Jason: [00:03:57] So I heard something, I guess you guys have, or maybe it's a rule it's like a 70/30 or something where you feel like your body's like completely shot, but you still have a ton to go. Is that true? Or is it there's a 70/30 rule? NIck: [00:04:13] So I, I haven't heard of it specifically like that, but it definitely makes sense. I mean, generally speaking, we're limited by our mind, not by our body and you know, I, I've gone through a bunch of stuff in my personal life that has shown me that, I mean, growing up as an athlete and not being as talented as everybody else and knowing that I could dig deep and that my, you know, my mind wanted to tell me to stop. And, and to keep going and then going into buds was another very pointed example of that, that whole program, you know, the SEALs, selection and training program, which is called BUD/S., Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL training is structured to break every single person down to a point where you are not physically capable of doing it on your own, and you're not physically capable of just crushing it the entire time. It gets you to a point where you have to dig deeper, you have to face kind of those mental barriers and then draw, I passed them. And in doing so you find out that. You are capable of doing so much more than your mind is telling you you're capable or your body's capable of, uh, so much more than your mind thinks it is. Jason: [00:05:32] I can only imagine that's gotta be a humbling experience because I would think obviously I was not in the military and it's a regret I've had, but I can only imagine. The people that go through BUD/S, they're probably at the top of their game, on the physical ability. And then just to be broken down and to have to depend on other people, I guess that's the whole design of it. So that's, um, it's really pretty cool. We had to, I mean, a huge amount of people that were tremendous athletes, I mean, very talented, like Olympic caliber athletes that faltered, when things got really tough. You know, and, and not necessarily the, on the physical side of things, but immersion in cold water is something that's a big part of our pipeline, our selection pipeline. And, you know, there's really nothing you can do. It's like physically, yeah, you might be a bigger guy and you might be more insulated than, than the guy that's, you know, 130 pounds next to you. But both of you will get to a point where you're going to get cold. And that's where like you really have to dig deep. I mean, that's where kind of that mental toughness and kind of that ability to kind of drive past discomfort and push yourself beyond where you think you can go, uh, comes in. So I saw guys that were tremendous athletes, you know, falter in that regard. And then I, you know, the counterpoint to that is I saw guys that you would have bet everything they would have failed because they just were not. You know the most impressive physical specimens and they were the toughest guys that I went through training with and the polar opposite of what you would imagine a SEAL candidate to look like. You know, they were maybe 15, 20 pounds overweight, not athletic, you know, struggled in most of the physical evolutions, but could just crush it when things got extremely tough. That's awesome. So let's talk about high pressure situations because obviously, running an agency is very different than being in the military and you guys have gone through a lot of high pressure situations, being a SEAL and a lot of agency and entrepreneurs that think they're in high pressure situations for their business. And I've always found when there's emotion or a lot of stress, or I guess stress creates emotion, which emotion creates bad decisions. How did you guys learn how to deal with that and to get that under control in order to make the right decision? NIck: [00:07:56] Yeah. I mean, so just dealing with stress, right? I mean, stress is stress regardless of where the origin of that stress is coming from, you know, whether it be high-risk financial decisions as an agency owner or an element leader in a SEAL platoon in combat. I mean, you're still going to be exposed to stress and in our community, you know, we, we train a lot. We train significantly more than the time that we actually spend in direct combat operations. Um, I mean there's guys pre 9/11 that didn't really get to see any combat and spent 20, 30 years in training, basically preparing for that opportunity to excel in kind of the high-stress kind of game-day scenario. And I would say that that extreme level of preparation or commitment to preparation, uh, becomes a stress inoculator. The training that I went through and I've referred to this example several times and it, and I will continue to refer to it. Jocko Willink, who is a very well-known SEAL owns Echelon Front, which is a consultancy here in the States. Jocko was my sister troop commander. He also put me through training when I was a platoon commander and he was running our training detachment on the West coast. And I specifically remember multiple times during my training where I felt significantly more stress because I knew I was being critiqued by someone that I respect. And I was being critiqued by my peers in that kind of a high-performance training scenario. I felt more stressed there than I did an actual combat operations. And I have memories of being in uh, direct engagement with the enemy, you know, receiving incoming enemy fire and making calls and making decisions on the battlefield and feeling more comfortable and more confident because of the training that high stakes, high level, high stress training that I went through. So, you know, it's a testament to the fact that you know, preparation breeds inoculation distress. And will allow you to control those emotions that seem to overwhelm people that are ill-prepared. Jason: [00:10:16] Yeah. Whenever I think about the points in my life, when was the most stressful, it was really, it came down to being prepared or not being prepared. Like I just was like, ah, kind of wing it. I'll be good at that pitch. And then I would go in and be like, Holy cow, but then if I look at situations where I felt totally relaxed, it was, I've done this a thousand times. Like you were saying that repetition and I was just prepared and I was just like, No. Now I can get on, like, I look at getting on stage because a lot of people fear getting on stage. And I remember when I ran the agency, I would get on stage and I would talk about stuff I really didn't know about just to get on stage.  But then now I get on stage and talking about, you know, running an agency I'm like, ask me anything. Like, I feel totally prepared. Like there you can't throw me any curveballs. That is so true. NIck: [00:11:09] There is no easy solution. Right? You got to put the work in, you have to be well-prepared and it was evident in every single thing that we did in the SEAL teams. You know, whether it was the training scenarios, uh, whether it was our mission planning and kind of the preparation prior to going out on an actual real-world operation, you know, we prepared diligently. Uh, we exhausted every scenario that we possibly could think through in order to contingency plan, plan, and really try to have, have the answers before the tests. You know, we, we tried to go through everything and come up with theoretical problems and solutions and did it in a manner where everybody on the team understood what those scenarios could be and how we would potentially address them. And 99% of the time, we never even had to address those contingencies on the actual operation. The operation, typically it would just be easy, right. But it's that 1% opportunity where something bad goes wrong and you have to deal with it. And if you know what you are going to do ahead of time, because you've already talked through it with your team. Emotion doesn't even play into it. You go into autopilot and you just start addressing the issues and taking care of business. Jason: [00:12:35] Other than just putting your team through repetition, repetition, and let's think about it on, on a business front, right? Because a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of leaders, you know, they hear that, you know, they hear you talking about them and they're like, well, it's a life-death situation. Like they have to do it all. But a lot of business leaders and including me sometimes, and I'm actually going to think about the way I do it is like, we don't have time to plan for every single result. We'll just go. We'll react and then we'll react to however happens, which is probably the wrong way. Cause if you told people like, Hey, your life depends on this. Don't you want to think of every result? Like what do you say to those people? NIck: [00:13:17] Yeah, I mean, but I mean, even as a, as a business leader, you have the opportunity to put systems in place, right? I mean, you know, let's say on the sales front, you know, you can put together your targets, you can talk about how you approach those targets, the way that you're going to pitch certain people. Cause it's different. Every single time you're going to bring different people on your team to certain pitches because they're going to be received better by certain demographics that you're pitching to. And. You can plan all of that stuff. And it's not a waste of time and energy to do that. I mean, you're going to know your team better by doing that by digging in and understanding what strengths each and every person on your team has. You're going to be able to tap into those strengths easier. Uh, more fluidly and be able to apply those strengths from your team appropriately in the right pitches. And then, you know, the, the actual pitch itself, it becomes pretty robotic and pretty structured. You know, it's not like there's a tremendous amount of variance in kind of pitching to a new client. You can really lay that stuff out well, and, and even, you know, you should be practicing that you should huddle as a team. You should have people practicing their pitch, the way that they converse with you as the way they converse with the client. So, you know, I know people may say, yeah, you know, we, we just read and react and, uh, and we don't have the time to do this, but I don't think you have time not to do that because if you get in front of somebody, That's a decision-maker. I mean, that's life and death, financially. I mean, people will downplay it and say, Oh yeah, well you're in combat. Yeah. It is life and death. Yeah. True. You know, you're not going to die in a pitch if you lose, but you know, if you lose a big pitch and you're in financial dire straits, I can say this. I said this before we started our call, I would be more stressed. And I probably would allow that to impact me more emotionally if I was in a situation where I, I felt out of control and  I lost my financial security and I couldn't take care of my family. That still produces an extremely high level of stress. So I think it all, it's all relative. Jason: [00:15:29] Yeah, I totally agree. And I remember one time we, we over-prepared for this one pitch going in and I remember just going in there, like yeah, we'll decide with you. I'm like, but I was thinking in my mind, we were so prepared. You need to ask us this question so we can like it. Wasn't waiting for time. It wasn't wasted. We made us that much better for the next pitch, the next campaign, the next, you know, initiative that we needed to do. Let's change, focus a little bit around building your team and being a good leader. How did you guys select who you wanted on your team and really kind of get them to the next level where everybody was in sync, because it's the same within business. Like you have to get the right people in the right seat, all that believe in that certain vision or mission ahead of you. NIck: [00:16:17] Well, so in the SEAL team, it's actually easier because we all go through the same selection process. For the most part, you get a tremendous product. On the backend of that selection process, and you get sent to a SEAL team and you get put into a platoon and there's really, you don't want people in the, in the background picking these people out, like handpicking them, you just get a bunch of SEALs. You get like you get a rough cut SEAL that has made it through the same selection process that every other SEAL has made it through. So you know what you have to start with. So as a leader, you know, that's easier for me, you know, I think it's actually the leadership in the SEAL teams was easy because of that, you know, as opposed to being in the civilian world where you don't necessarily get that high-level selection process, you know, you get to interview somebody, maybe put them on as an intern and get to see them perform for a period of time, but you don't get to vet them for a year, a year and a half. And, uh, for us, the leadership really. I mean, leadership is always important, but it became critically important in the way that you grew your people, you leverage their strengths and their weaknesses, and you slotted them into the right role with the right responsibilities as part of that team. So. I didn't have a choice as to who I got, but I did have a choice as to where I put those people on my team. Jason: [00:17:48] Man, maybe I need to create BUD/S for agency employees. NIck: [00:17:54] Put them through like a six-month just grinder and just like every like high stress all day. But, but you know what, from a leadership standpoint, to give you more of a granular answer, you know, we trust and respect are two big things. As far as leadership is concerned, successful leadership in the, in any team and also humility as a leader. So being humble enough to know that you don't have all the answers. And even if you're in a position of leadership where you are accountable, you still. Should never say I need to be the end all be all. I need to know everything. I mean, it's great. You should tap in and try to learn as much as you can, but be humble enough to know that you're not the expert. You got people on your team that are absolute experts in the role that they're there to execute. And in the SEAL teams, you know, we had people that breached doors, we had people that were snipers. We had people that were communicators. We had people that conducted all of our medical training and, and cared for our unit from a medical standpoint. And, you know, as a leader, I wanted to know the capabilities that each of those people brought to the team, but they were the expert and I needed to be trusting enough. And confident enough in their ability to perform and to be experts in their field to allow them to do their job effectively, let them lead in their own right in their lane. And then be able to apply those strengths at the appropriate times in order to put together a successful operation. Jason: [00:19:31] Yeah. I think the perception too, and I learned this the hard way, and I guess a lot of people listening, you know, they think of Navy SEALs, all alphas, right. And you probably alphas in your own realm, but I think you mentioned the keyword humility and being humble to know that they don't know everything because I remember. I was looking for this graphic designer many years ago. And I remember coming across, they were the most amazing designer I've ever, ever seen on this one particular thing, but they were the cockiest son of a bitch I've ever met. And I was like, I cannot put this poison in this company, even though they're the best. They're not the best for the team, you know, going forward. Now I heard a story. Now this is not around me, but I want to understand how you guys make decisions as a team. As well, as, as a leader, I was listening to a podcast and Scott Kelly on the, you know, the astronauts lived in space for a year. And I think they had some problems with the heat shield and NASA was like, Hey, you know, it's your decision. And he said, I could have asked everyone in a group setting, you know, what do you guys think we should do? Should we go out and do a spacewalk fix it? Or should we just, which could actually damage it more? Or should we just come down? And he said, he goes, we actually, um, I went to everyone individually and asked them rather than having committee make the decision. What were kind of like your decision process when you were leading your team? NIck: [00:20:58] So I'll refer back to kinda my Afghan deployment, my last active duty deployment as a SEAL, you know, I went into a platoon that had some leadership issues. And I was replacing a, another officer that had been removed from the platoon. So kind of a broken scenario, a lot of distrust, a lot of, uh, internal conflict. And I was showing up from a different theater. I came from Iraq and I was going into Afghanistan and. What I did initially just sit back and listen. I mean, I think it's important when you have the time when you're not in the high-stress scenario is get to know the people that are in your team. Listen to them. Don't just talk, right? The more you can shut your mouth and listen, you learn a tremendous amount. And what I learned in listening is who are the trusted experts, who are the people that really have a finger on the pulse and know how other people in the team are feeling. And, you know, I, I was able to gauge the level of credibility of each individual that I listened to. And by doing that, I basically formed. This, uh, abstract advisory board within my team where when things were, I guess, getting more high pressure and we needed to make some serious decisions and decisions that were going to be high stakes, you know, we're going into a dangerous area, or we were going to do a certain type of operation. I could always go back and I could talk to some of these critical leaders within my element. Because I've already vetted them. And I knew who I could go to, uh, who was credible and who was capable of giving me sound advice. And I think in doing that, I was able to confidently make decisions because ultimately as the leader, the top person in a unit, I'm accountable for the decision. So as much as I want to take the advice of everybody else and the council. When it comes down to it, I need to be confident in making the decision. And I gotta be the one that falls on the sword, if things go wrong, uh, because I'm definitely the one that's getting the credit when things go right. You know, so I need to be willing to accept that level of accountability and stand on my own two feet. Jason: [00:23:17] What were some of the questions that you would ask when you were coming in in order to get them? Just because a lot of times I would think, you know, as a leader comes into an organization that has a little, little fun going on, some people are going to be a little standoffish or be like, what are you going to do for me? What were some of the questions that kind of disarmed that? NIck: [00:23:38] Well, I think empowering people, right? So like giving people the opportunity to say, Hey, like what have you seen go, right? What have you seen go wrong? What are things that you would  change or what changes would you enact? Uh, if you were given the opportunity to do that, and then not just kind of hypothetically talking about it, but actually empowering people and letting them make decisions. As the leader, you don't always have to be the one that's making kind of you're accountable for the final call, but you don't have to be the one that makes that final call. There was a lot of the times that I mean, I say typically our mission planning process was allowing each individual kind of unit or element within the bigger element to actually run the planning process and make decisions as to where they're going to place themselves, how they're going to execute a micro portion of the plan. And they actually go through brief that. And they would brief all the contingencies associated with that micro portion of the bigger plan. So in essence, I'm allowing them, I'm empowering them as leaders in their own right. To make decisions, to build confidence. So they already are like, Hey, you know what? I'm not only the leader. Isn't, uh, you know, the, the high-level leader, isn't just asking me for my opinion, that leader is actually allowing me to make decisions and trust me to make decisions that he's cool with, he's ready to execute on. So I think that's important. It's like, don't just be talk, don't just be kind of, don't give people the warm and fuzzy actually trust people, show that you are confident in their ability to make decisions and execute on things. Jason: [00:25:17] Yeah. I love that. What was the major decision for really kind of leaving the SEALs and going kind of the corporate, the civilian route. NIck: [00:25:29] Uh, so, so I have a bit of an unconventional transition, I guess I came off my last deployment and I think two things for me happened that really changed the dynamic as a SEAL officer. I knew that I was 100% committed to my job to be in a combat leader, leading men well in combat and making sure that I make sound decisions that are going to put them first and bring them home safe. And. My wife got pregnant with our first child, our daughter. And that was, it was a big deal. And not necessarily the. The linchpin catalyst that led to my decision to leave, but it definitely weighed in. And the second major event in my life was my younger brother. My middle brother, Chris was killed in an inbounds avalanche in Winter Park, Colorado. So my little brother left behind a wife and two young kids. And, you know, they were the first ones to know that my wife was pregnant with our first. And it really was a perspective shift for me. You know, I got to see what my brother's family went through in losing him and knowing that I was about to become a father, you know, it was much easier for me to visualize the very real possibility of, of me. You know, being killed or just frankly being taken from my family for long periods of time and training, um, with the, the level of commitment that I owed to the SEAL team. So it was a perspective shift there that led to me saying, okay, I'm going to get out. I want to focus on my family. I want to be there for my family and other loved ones in my life. And at that point I said, I, you know, I wanted to reinvent myself. I wanted to prove people wrong. I wanted to prove that I could do something besides being a combat leader. I wanted to prove that I could actually be successful in a career outside of the military with direct kind of gun toting skills that I was coming to the table with. Jason: [00:27:39] I totally get that. You know, I, I used to race cars and, you know, I started seeing some of our, our friends that I would know would get injured. And I was just, you know, right when I had my second son, I was like, I was like you, I was like, if I get hurt, I get hurt, but it's going to affect my family going forward. And so that's kind of why I kind of hung up the race suit. NIck: [00:28:01] It's always a good exercise to step back and kind of evaluate your priorities at any point in life. And I think the more frequent you can do that exercise the better off you are, because it makes sure that you're staying on track. Right? I mean, if you don't do that exercise. From time to time, you're going to slowly but surely deviate from course to a point where if too much time elapses, you know, you may find yourself in a pretty bad place. And, uh, You know, and I, I wouldn't say I am immune to that because I have, I have spoke very openly and very freely about my own personal struggles and kind of losing course post-transition and it kind of losing focus on the priorities that led me to transitioning from the SEAL teams in the first. Jason: [00:28:51] No, that's great. Last question I forgot to ask was around, have you ever had to replace a teammate? NIck: [00:28:58] Well, so yeah, I mean, in my, on that last. Deployment to Afghanistan. I replaced a teammate that was removed relinquished from a leadership role over in Afghanistan. And that was the biggest learning experience for me as a leader, to be able to step into a broken scenario and have to figure it out, right. Have to win people over that don't necessarily know you very well. And, and kind of when that confidence and that trust, you know, in a short period of time. Well, when you came into that environment though, was there anybody that you had to replace, you know, going in or make that hard decision to be like that person on the team is not the right fit? Yeah. So let me think about it. I, so in that scenario, I was not the one that had to pull the trigger and, and replace that person. We did replace, uh, people in previous platoons and it's never easy. Right? I mean, it's you know, I think the things that we did, right, and we often did this because it was protocol in the SEAL teams is we brought the issue up early and often it was never a surprise for the person. If it was a surprise, it actually tied our hands in our ability to remove that individual from a position, regardless of whether it's a leadership position, a high level leadership position, or just a, a position within a, uh, a SEAL platoon, you know, we, we executed counseling multiple times and everything was recorded. And the person was very clear as to what our expectations were, where they were falling short, because if you don't give people clear expectations and you don't give them defined objectives for them to hit that, our metrics of their performance, how can you hold them accountable? How can you -- I think you are failing as a leader if you're not clear and you're not giving them those well-defined objectives. You know, you should be looking at replacing yourself or counseling yourself if you're not doing that. So if ever if you're pulling somebody into your, office to tell them that you're going to let them go, and that person is surprised or has his hearing those things for the first time, it's absolutely the wrong way to approach that scenario. Jason: [00:31:11] Yeah, looking back, I've done that so many times in the very early years and I'm like, man, why did I have to surprise them? Like if I just kind of let them know my expectation, the whole way and kind of just seed it the right way, it could have turned out totally different. NIck: [00:31:27] Yeah. It's always tough. Right? To be direct. Communication is scary for a lot of people. People don't like confrontation in the outside world. It's difficult to sit face to face with somebody. And tell somebody that they're failing at something, you know, or that, you know, you're disappointed in them. It's easy to tell them when they're, you know, they're... hey there, you're doing a great job and you're exceeded expectations, but people just, they shy away from confrontation and conflict. And, you know, I've noticed, and I've learned this myself because it's tougher on the outside because I, I am dealing with people that I did not. Have go through a selection process, right? So, you know, sometimes I'm bringing people in and I think they're going to be the best person ever to fill that role. And three months later, I'm finding out that they are inadequate, you know, might not have had the skillset that they, they came into it saying they did. And they might even have personality traits that are cancerous within the unit. And, direct communication. The times that I've been direct and very clear with my expectations and kind of clear in their critique of their execution in their role, it's been so much easier than those times where I've shied away from it and they don't know, they can't read your mind. They don't hear the conversations that you're having with your business partners about how you're disappointed in somebody. And it's like, you got to tell people, or they're never going to be able to fix it. Jason: [00:32:57] Well, I think as, as leaders, if I think back at kind of the early years, I think it was, comes down to a couple, I think two things it's comes down to, you don't know the solution that they actually need to go do to fix it. Or you feel like a, a bad leader because you don't know the solution for them. And then just this resentment builds up and then it just pops one day and then you surprise them and then it's just, it's not good for anyone. So it's yeah. It's crazy. Well, this has all been amazing. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners? Oh, I mean, I, it's tough. There's so much to talk about. I mean, we could, we could talk leadership and, uh, in various scenarios all day long, so I'm happy to do it anytime, brother. Awesome. I appreciate it. If anybody ever wants to reach out to you or go to your business or charity, where can they go? NIck: [00:33:51] Yeah. I mean, so for me personally, I'm on Instagram, pretty easy to find there. I think I'm @Nick_Norris1981, and my business is protekt.com protect with a K. And we're @protektlife on Instagram. And then for the charity, I would say the C4 Foundation. It's a charity that I am intimately involved with. I am currently filling the executive director role in combination with my, my efforts as an entrepreneur. And, uh, so I have a little bit going on, but a C4 foundation was named after Charles Humphrey Keating IV. Who was a friend of mine that was killed in combat in the SEAL teams, uh, about four years ago in Northern Iraq. And, the foundation is building a 560-acre ranch about an hour and a half outside of San Diego in order to be a sanctuary for Navy SEAL families to kind of grow connection within their individual family unit. And grow connection amongst kind of other families to kind of build that organic support mechanism for guys and, and their families as they go through their deployments on active duty. And then when they finally leave active duty, they have people that they can lean on. So C4foundation.org is a phenomenal organization that I'm involved with. And, uh, if you want to check it out, there's some really cool videos on the website. Jason: [00:35:19] Awesome. Well, everybody go there. If you guys enjoyed this episode and you want to support the great cause that they do, please go there. That'd be great. Thanks Nick. For everything that you've done and you're doing currently and giving us your most valuable asset your time. And if you guys liked this episode, make sure you guys subscribe. Make sure you guys give it a good rating. And until next time have a Swenk day.

Dogfight, Falsettos, a new EP out this week, movies, plays, musicals, Godspell... THE MAN IS NON STOP. Broadway multi-hyphenate Nick Blaemire is HERE!!! So you know that one friend you always ask for help? That one friend you constantly lean on who asks nothing in return? For us... That's Nick Blaemire. We have asked Nick Blaemire to "help us move" approximately a thousand times. "Hey Nick! We're writing a TV show.. will you help us?!" .. "Hey Nick! I wanna write a movie ... where do I start?!" .. "Hey Nick! Wanna come on our podcast..." Dan and Joe are MOOCHERS. Nick is the greatest guy. This guy writes musicals, tv shows, and movies, he acts, sings, plays music, writes music... he is one of the greatest, most talented men on the planet. And we're thrilled he's here this week. Thank you Nick. We love you. Nick Blaemire is a writer and performer based in Brooklyn. At 23 years old, Nick wrote the score to the musical Glory Days (book by James Gardiner, OBCR on Ghostlight Records). Since its historic one night engagement on Broadway, it has had over 40 productions all over the world. He has also written book, music and lyrics for four original musicals: A Little More Alive (commissioned by Broadway Across America, produced at Williamstown Theatre Festival, Kansas City Rep and Barrington Stage, optioned as a feature film); Soon (premiered at Signature Theatre, won the Stephen Sondheim Young Artist Citation); Fallout (with Kyle Jarrow, in development); and Space Dogs (with Van Hughes and Tina Landau, in development). Other writing projects include the film adaptation of the novel This Song Will Save Your Life and a romantic comedy for Universal Pictures. Nick has released two pop EPs, both available on iTunes and Spotify. As an actor, he recently completed the National Tour of Falsettos as Mendel and was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his performance as Jonathan in the Off-Broadway Revival of Tick, Tick...Boom!. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This podcast covers New Girl Season 1, Episode 11, Jess & Julia, which originally aired on January 31, 2012 and was written by Luvh Rakhe and directed by Jake Kasdan. Here’s a quick recap of the episode:Jess is excited to have another girl in the apartment and wants to bond with her, starting with asking her for help in a legal case. Unfortunately, Julia’s not interested in being friends with Jess and they get into a fight. Meanwhile, Winston’s trying to reconnect with an old flame and Schmidt spends the episode mad about having a damp towel.We discuss Pop Culture References such as:Cocktail - Nick was trying to impress Julia by spinning the alcohol bottle around him and after Nick drops the bottle, the bar manager says “Hey Nick, No Cocktail” referring to how the bartenders in that movie twirl bottles around the bar.Cocktail Bar Scene - https://youtu.be/gyAxE2vS318Teddy Ruxpin - When Jess and Julia are arguing after the courtroom scene, Jess says about herself that she’s “not a Teddy Ruxpin” referring to the 80s storytelling bear.Teddy Ruxpin commercial - https://youtu.be/8EshrR-xk2EKids react to Teddy Ruxpin - https://youtu.be/x_X98A5XJ24Additional Pop Culture References such as:Murphy Brown - When Jess and Julia are fighting outside the courtroom, Jess says that she doesn’t talk like Murphy Brown which is a reference to a sitcom whose main character was a journalist and news anchor. She’s known to be sharp tongued and having a hard-hitting personality but is not known for  being warm or sympathetic.We also cover an honorary “Schmidtism” discussing the final bathroom scene and also talk about Schmidt trying to give Winston dating advice which is also kind of a “Not in 2020” moment. This week’s “Not in 2020” also discusses the way Julia and Jess talk about stepping into each other's careers and workplace culture in general. The Guest Stars we highlighted on this episode were Lizzy Caplan and Kali Hawk.This episode got a 8.5/10 Rating from Kritika and 9/10 from Kelly and we both had the same favorite character: Jess!Additional notes mentioned in podcast:Kali Hawk’s high fashion accessories company: http://www.hcrowne.com/You can find the photo of the citation on our website!Thanks for listening and stay tuned in 2 weeks for Episode 12!Music: "Hotshot” by scottholmesmusic.comFollow us on Twitter, Instagram or email us at whosthatgirlpod@gmail.com!

Nick Schiffer answers your construction, renovation, and business questions in-depth on Coffee Break. If you have a question leave it in the comments below. This week the questions are: 1:05 I have been in the trades for about 17 years now and just starting my remodeling company. I am a licensed general B contractor and was wondering what is the best way to get leads, also would you recommend just doing cost-plus? 8:30 I was wondering about what your company policy is surrounding onsite music. Do you think it's unprofessional? Are earbuds the norm? Thanks and keep the coffee breaks coming! 10:44 Hey Nick, I was super interested to hear about how you bill your labor as time & material. Is the same true for the shop guys? Just curious how you handle that. 3:15 The vanities look great-but I admire your white kitchen cabinet color and sheen. Would you give the paint particulars: primer coat, oil vs. latex, sheen, brand, method of application. Watch this podcast on youtube: https://bit.ly/nsbuildersyoutube For more NS Builders renovations, new construction, custom cabinetry, and woodworking  | @nsbuilders on Instagram Behind the scenes  | @designbuildrepeat For more of our projects check out: www.ns.builders How do we manage our projects from the big picture all the way down to the smallest detail? Learn more here: https://get.buildertrend.com/nsbuilders

Hey Nick, got any tips on how to spice up a presentation? I feel like my speeches are getting a bit dry. 嘿，Nick，关于如何为演讲增添趣味，你有什么建议吗？我觉得我的演讲有点枯燥。 Oh, so like ways to throw in some humor and crack a joke or two? 哦，比如想办法加入一些幽默成分，开一两个玩笑? Yes, or at least lighten the mood. 是的，或者至少活跃一下气氛。 Well, you can always start with an ice-breaker and make a joke at your own expense. 这样的话，你可以先营造一下氛围，开个自己的玩笑。 So, be a little self-deprecating? I guess I can pick something that everyone can relate to. 就是说，自嘲一下？我想我应该能找到一些大家都能产生共鸣的东西。 Absolutely, empathy always works. And while you're at it, add some sarcasm. 当然啦，...

Hey Nick and Steve go on a wild adventure through our Week 4 picks and terrible wifi connection that breaks in and out (sorry, seriously no idea what happened but we love y'all) and studs/duds. Enjoy everybody!

She was a jazz pianist in the 1960s, uninterested in the spotlight. A friend played "Pet Sounds" for her and she became a pop fan, and recorded one of the finest pop records of all time in 1969, "Take a Picture." Radio silence followed, until her music had developed a cult following some 30 years later. Today we focus in on Margo Guryan. Special guest John Rosner gives us the inside scoop. Also, patreon.com/lowfprofile is now active (Hey Nick!)

Listen to part two of my private coaching session with Nic Fitzgerald. The lessons I shared with him here are the same ones I would share with you if we could meet face to face. On today’s episode Russell continues his chat with Nick Fitzgerald and gives him a list of seven things he can do to help his business grow. Here are some of the awesome things to look forward to in this episode: What a few things that Nick got close to doing totally right, but missed a few key elements. How Nick can collaborate with others in the Two Comma Club X to be able to grow his customer list. And how Russell went from being a nobody, to having Tony Robbins call him to ask for help and how Nick can use that advice to advance his own business. So listen here to find out what the 7 things are that Nick and anyone else can do to grow a business. ---Transcript--- Hey everybody, welcome to Marketing Secrets podcast. I’m so excited, I’m here on stage right now at the Two Comma Club X event with Mr. Nick Fitzgerald onstage. A year ago I gave a podcast to him about how to make it rain and this is section number two. Now those of you who don’t know, in the last 12 months since I did that podcast he’s been making it rain and he’s been changing his life, his family’s lives, but more importantly, other people’s lives as well. And it’s been really cool, so that’s what we’re going to cover today during this episode of the podcast. So welcome back you guys. I’m here on stage with Nick Fitzgerald, so excited. So I made a list of seven things that if I was to sit in a room with him in front of a whole bunch of people I’d be like, “Hey Nick, you’re doing awesome, but here’s some things to look at that I think will help you a lot with what you’re doing.” So number one, when Nick first kind of started into this movement that he’s trying to create, I don’t know when it was, if you created this before or after. When did you create the Star Wars video? Nick: This was, we talked in July, it was September/October. So a few months later. Russell: How many of you guys have seen his Star Wars video? Okay, I’m so glad. For those who are listening, about 10% of the room raised their hand, the other 90% who are friends and followers and fans of Nick have never seen the Star Wars video. His Star Wars video is his origin story and it is one of the best videos I have ever, by far the best video I’ve seen him do, it is insanely good. It comes, do you want to talk about what happened in the video? It’s insanely good. Nick: So I told the story of, I’m a huge Star Wars nerd, so if you didn’t know that, now you do. When I was young my grandma who lived in the same neighborhood as me, she took me to go see Return of the Jedi in the movie theater and I was such a Star Wars nerd, even at a young age, that when I was playing at the neighbors house, and you know, it’s the 80s, so mom and dad are like, “Nick, come home for dinner.” That kind of thing, I would ignore them. I would not come home until they called me “Luke”. No lie. I would make them call me Luke, or I would ignore them. I would not hear them. Russell: Had I known this in high school I would have teased him relentlessly. Nick: So my grandma took me and I remember going and it was so fun because we took the bus, it was just a fun thing. And we went and I just remember walking in and handing my ticket to the ticket person. And then popcorn and just the smells of everything. And again, this is the 80s so walking in the movie theater; I almost lost a shoe in the sticky soda, {sound effects} going on. I just remember how my feet stuck to the floor and all that stuff. And then just being so excited to see my heroes on the big screen and Dark Vader, I just remember watching it. This is such a silly thing to get emotional about, but you know I remember the emperor and Darth Vader dying and all that stuff. It was just like, ah. It was a perfect day. Sorry sound dude. But it was just a perfect day with my grandma who has always been dear to me. So the purpose of that video, I’d put it off for a long time. I knew I needed to tell my own story if I’m going to be helping somebody else tell theirs. And I put it off for a long time, because working through things, I was afraid that if it sucked, if the story was terrible, if the visuals were crappy, that was a reflection on me and my skills. I had worked on a bazillion Hallmark Christmas movies, you know how they put out like 17 trillion Christmas movies every year, if one of those sucks, no offense, they’re not riveting television. Russell: They all suck. Nick: That wasn’t a reflection on me, I was just doing the lighting or the camera work. I didn’t write the story, it wasn’t my story. But this was me, so I put it off for a long time because I knew if I didn’t execute how I envisioned it, that it would reflect poorly on me, and it would be like I was a fraud. So the purpose of the video, there were three purposes. One to tell a story and get people to connect with me on a personal level. As I told that story here, how many of you remembered your feet sticking to the floor of a movie theater? How many of you, when I talk about the smell of popcorn and that sound, you felt and heard and smelled that. So it was one thing, I wanted people to connect with me and just see that I was just like you. Then I wanted to show that I could make a pretty picture. So I had that and I used my family members as the actors. And then I went and talked about how…and then I wanted to use it to build credibility. I’ve worked on 13 feature films and two television series and shot news for the NBC affiliate and worked in tons of commercials. So I’ve learned from master story tellers and now I want to help other people find and tell their story. And then I showed clips of stories that I tell throughout the years. So that was, I just remember specifically when I finally went and made it live, I made a list of about 20 people, my Dream 100 I guess you could say. I just wanted to send them and be like, “Hey, I made this video. I would love for you to watch it.” And Russell’s on that list. So I sent that out and made it live and then it was just kind of funny, it didn’t go viral, I got like 5000 views in a day, and it was like “whoa!” kind of thing. But it was just one of those things that I knew I needed to tell my story and if I wanted to have any credibility as a story teller, not as a videographer, but as a story teller, being able to help people connect, and connect hearts and build relationships with their audience, I had to knock it out of the park. So that was my attempt at doing that. Russell: And the video’s amazing, for the 10% of the room who saw it, it is amazing. Now my point here for Nick, but also for everyone here, I wrote down, is tell your story too much. Only 10% of the room has ever seen that video or ever heard it. How many of you guys have heard my potato gun story more than a dozen times? Almost the entire room, for those that are listening. Tell your story to the point where you are so sick and tired of telling the story and hearing it, that you just want to kill yourself, and then tell it again. And then tell it again. And then tell it again, because it is amazing. The video is amazing, the story is amazing. How many of you guys feel more connected to him after hearing that story right now? It’s amazing. Tell t he story too much. All of us are going to be like, “I don’t want to hear the story. I don’t want to tell the story again.” You should be telling that story over and over and over again. That video should be showing it. At least once a week you should be following everyone, retargeting ads of that video. That video should be, everyone should see it. You’ve got 5,000 views which is amazing, you should get 5,000 views a day, consistently telling that story, telling that story. Because you’re right, it’s beautiful, it’s amazing and people see that and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need that for my business. I need to be able to tell my story the way he told that story, because the connection is flawless.” And I think my biggest thing for you right now, is tell your story more. Tell that thing. You’re telling good stories, but that story, that’s like your linchpin, that’s the thing that if you can tell that, it’s going to keep people connected to you for forever. Anyone who’s seen that video, you have a different level of connection. It’s amazing, it’s shot beautifully. You see his kids looking at the movies, with lights flashing, it’s beautiful. So telling your story more, that’d be the biggest thing. It’s just like, all the time telling that story over and over and over again. That’s number one. Alright, number two, this one’s not so much for you as much for most of everybody else in here, but number two is that energy matters a lot. I’m not talking about, I’m tired during the day. I’m talking about when you are live, or you are talking in front of people, your energy matters a lot. I was hanging out with Dana Derricks, how many of you guys know Dana, our resident goat farmer? By the way, he’s asked every time I mention his name is please not send him anymore goats. He’s gotten like 2 or 3 goats in the last month from all of our friends and family members here in the community. Please stop sending him goats. He loves them but he doesn’t want any more. Anyway, what’s interesting, I was talking to Dana, and he’s like, “Do you know the biggest thing I’ve learned from you?” and I’m like, “No. what?” and I thought it was going to be like dream 100 and things like that. No, the biggest thing that Dana learned from me, he told me, was that energy matters a lot. He’s like, “When I hang out with you, you’re kind of like blah, but when you get on stage you’re like, baaahh!” and I started telling him, the reason why is when I first started this career, in fact, I have my brother right now pulling all the video clips of me from like 12 or 13 years ago, when I had a shaved head and I was awkward like, “Hi, my name is Russell Brunson.” And we’re trying to make this montage of me over 15 years of doing this and how awkward and weird I was, and how it took 8-10 years until I was normal and started growing my hair out. But I’m trying to show that whole montage, but if you look at it like, I was going through that process and the biggest thing I learned is that if I talked to people like this, when you’re on video you sound like this. The very first, I think I’d have an idea and then I’d just do stupid things. So I saw an infomercial, so I’m like I should do an infomercial. So I hired this company to make an infomercial and next thing I know two weeks later I’m in Florida and there’s this host on this show and he’s like the cheesiest cheese ball ever. I’m so embarrassed. He asked me a question and I’m like, “Well, um, you know, duh, duh…” and he’s like, “Whoa, cut, cut, cut.” He’s like, “Dude, holy crap. You have no energy.” I’m like, “No, I feel really good. I have a lot of energy right now.” He’s like, “No, no you don’t understand. When you’re on tv, you have to talk like this to sound normal. If you just talk normal, you sound like you’re asleep.” I’m like, “I don’t know.” So we did this whole infomercial and he’s like all over the top and I’m just like, trying to go a little bit higher and it was awkward. I went back and watched it later, and he sounded completely normal and I looked like I was dead on the road. It was weird. Brandon Fischer, I don’t know if he’s still in the audience, but we did…Brandon’s back here. So four years ago when Clickfunnels first came out we made these videos that when you first signed up we gave away a free t-shirt. How many of you guys remember seeing those videos? I made those videos and then they lasted for like four years, and then we just reshot them last week because it’s like, “Oh wow, the demo video when we’re showing CLickfunnels does not look like Clickfunnels anymore. It’s completely changed in four years.” So Todd’s like, “You have to make a new video.” I’m like, “I don’t want to make a video.’ So finally we made the new videos, recorded them and got them up there and we posted them online, and before we posted them on, I went and watched the old ones, and I watched the old ones and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is just four years ago, I am so depressing. How did anybody watch this video?” It was bad, right Brandon. It was like painfully bad. I was like, “oh my gosh.” That was just four years ago. Imagine six years ago, or ten years. It was really, really bad. And when I notice the more energy you have, the more energy everyone else has. It seems weird at first, but always stretch more than you feel comfortable, and it seems normal, and then you’ll feel better with it and better with it. But what’s interesting about humans is we are attracted to energy. I used to hate people talking energy talk, because I thought it was like the nerdy woo-woo crap. But it’s so weird and real actually. I notice this in all aspects of my life. When I come home at night, usually I am beat up and tired and worn out. I get up early in the morning, and then I work super hard, I get home and I get out of the car and I come to the door and before I open the door, I’m always like, Okay if I come in like, ugh, my whole family is going to be depressed with me.” They’ll all lower to my energy level. So I sit there and I get into state and I’m like, okay, whew. I open the door and I’m like, “What’s up guys!! I’m home!” and all the sudden my kids are like, “Oh dad’s home!” and they start running in, it’s this huge thing, it’s crazy, and then the tone is set, everyone’s energy is high and the rest of the night’s amazing. When I come in the office, I walk in and realize I’m the leader of this office and if I come in like, “Hey guys, what’s up? Hey Nick, what’s up?” Then everyone’s going to be like {sound effect}. So I’m like, okay when I come in I have to come in here, otherwise everyone is going to be down on a normal level. I have to bring people up. So we walk in the office now and I’m like, “What’s up everybody, how’s it going?” and I’m excited and they’re like, “Oh.” And everyone’s energy rises and the whole company grows together. So l love when Dave walks through the door, have you guys ever noticed this? When Dave walks through the door, I’m at a 10, Dave’s like at a 32 and it’s just like, he wakes up and comes over to my  house at 4:30 in the morning to lift weights. I sleep in an hour later, and I come in at 5:45 or something, and I walk in and I’m just like, “I want to die.” And I walk in and he’s like, “Hey how’s it going?.” I’m like, “Really good man. You’ve been here for an hour.” And all the sudden I’m like, oh my gosh I feel better. Instantly raised up. It’s kind of like tuning forks. Have you noticed this? If you get two tuning forks at different things and you wack one, and you wack the other one, and you bring them close together, what will happen is the waves will increase and they end up going at the exact same level. So energy matters. The higher your energy, the higher everyone else around you will be, on video, on audio, on face…everything, energy matters a lot. So that’s number two, when you’re making videos, thinking about that. Alright number three, okay this, you were like 90% there and I watched the whole thing and I was so excited and then you missed the last piece and I was like, “Oh it was so good.” So a year after that Facebook message came, you did a Facebook live one year later to the day, and he told that story on Facebook live. And I was like, “Oh my gosh this is amazing.” And he told that story, and he was talking about it, and I was emotional, going through the whole thing again. This is so cool, this is so cool. And he told the story about the podcast, and this podcast was an hour long, and the thing and his life changed and all this stuff… And I know that me and a whole bunch of you guys, a whole bunch of entrepreneurs listened to this story and they’re at bated breath, “This is amazing, this is amazing.” And he gets to the very end, “Alright guys, see you tomorrow.” Boom, clicks off. And I was like, “Aaahhh!” How can you leave me in that state?  I need something, I need something. So the note here is I said, make offers for everything. Think about this, at the end when you ended, and everyone’s thinking, I want to hear that episode, where is that? How would it be? Now imagine you take the opportunity at the very end that says, “How many of you guys would like to hear that episode where Russell actually made me a personal podcast? And how many of you guys would actually like if I gave you my commentary about what  I learned and why it was actually important to me? All you gotta do right now is post down below and write ‘I’m in.’ and I’ll add you to my messenger list and I’ll send you that podcast along with the recording where I actually told you what this meant to me.” Boom, now all those people listening are now on his list. Or they can even go opt in somewhere. But all you did was tell the story and everything and we were all sitting with bated breath and I was just like, at the end make the offer. You guys want the stuff I talked about, you want the thing? You want the thing? And then you send them somewhere and now you captured them and consider them longer term and you can do more things with them. It was like, hook, story, dude where’s my offer? Give me something. But it was awesome. How many of you guys felt that way when you listened to that thing and you’re just like, “I don’t even know where to find that episode. Russell’s got eight thousand episodes everywhere, I don’t even know where to look for it.” You could have been like, here’s the link. Just the link….if you guys can’t figure out how to make an offer, go listen to a whole bunch of stuff, find something amazing and be like, “oh my gosh you guys, I was listening to this Tim Ferris podcast, he did like 800 episodes, every one is like 18 hours long, they’re really hard to listen to, but I found this one from 3 ½-4 years ago where he taught this concept and it was insane. It was amazing; I learned this and this. How many of you want to know what that is? Okay, I have the link, if you message me down below I’ll send you the link to exactly where to find that episode.” Everyone will give it to you. You’ll be like, “But it’s free on the internet Russell.” It doesn’t matter. You know where it’s at and they don’t. They will give you their contact information in exchange for you giving them a direct link to the link. Back before I had anything to give away for opt ins, guess what I used to do. I used to go to YouTube and I would find cool videos from famous people. One of my favorite ones we did was I went and typed in YouTube, “Robert Kiyosaki” because he was one of my big mentors at the time. And there was all these amazing Robert Kiyosaki videos on YouTube for free. Tons of them. Hour long training from Robert Kiyosaki. Four hour long event from Robert Kiyosaki. All this stuff for free listed in YouTube. So I made a little Clickfunnels membership site, I got all the free videos and put them inside a members area and just like, “Tab one, Robert Kiyosaki talking about investing, Robert kiyosaki talking about stocks, Robert Kiyosaki talking….” And I just put all the videos in there and made a squeeze page like, “Hey, who wants a whole bunch of free, my favorite Robert Kiyosaki videos?” and I made a little landing page, people opt in, I give them access to the membership site, and then I went and targeted Robert Kiyosaki’s audience and built a huge list off his people. Dream 100. Imagine with Dream 100 instead of doing just one campaign to all the people, if each person in your dream 100 you made a customized membership site with the free content right now, be like, “Hey, you’ve listened to a lot of Grant Cardone, he’s got four podcasts, 5000 episodes, there’s only four that are actually really, really good. Do you guys wan tto know what they are? Opt in here, I’ll give you the four best episodes of all. I currated all these for you to give you the four best.” And target Grant’s audience with that, now you got all his buyers coming into your world. Is that alright, is that good. Alright number four ties along with this. Number four, start building a list ASAP. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you do a call to action to get a list anywhere, have I? After today’s session you’re …..just build a list. If you got nothing from this event at all, every time you do a hook and story, put them somewhere to build a list, because that’s the longevity. Because that’s where if Zuckerberg snaps his finger and you lose all your fans and followings and friends, and all the sudden you’re trying to build over somewhere else, it won’t matter because you’ll have those people somewhere external and now you can message them and bring them back into whatever world you need them to be at. But that’s how you build stability in business. It’s also how you sell this time, you want to sell it the next time and the next time, the list is the key. Funnel Hacking Live, the first Funnel Hacking Live it was a lot of work and we sold out 600 people in the room, and we kept growing the list and growing the list, the next year we did 1200. Then we did 1500, last year was 3000, this year we’re going to be at 5000. We’re building up the list and building up pressure and excitement and then when you release it, it gives you the ability to blow things up really, really fast.  Okay, that was number four. Okay number five, I wrote down integration marketing, adding to other’s offers to build a buyer list. So this is a little sneaky tactic we used to back in the day when I didn’t have my own list, but I had a couple of skills and talents which you do happen to have, which is nice. If you have no skills this won’t work, but if you have skills you’re lucky. So Frank Kern used to do this as well. Frank is sneaky. He used to do this all the time and I saw him doing it and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, he’s brilliant.” So Frank did a one hour presentation somewhere and he called it Mind Control, it wasn’t Mass Control, but it was something like about how to control the minds of your prospects through manipulation and something sneaky. And the title alone was amazing. It was a one hour presentation he gave somewhere. And he put it on these DVDs and what he did, he went to like Dan Kennedy and he’s like, “Hey Dan, you have all of your buyer and you send them this newsletter every single month,” at the time they had 13000 active members, these were their best buyers. He’s like, “This DVD I sell for like a thousand bucks. Do you want to give it to all your people for free?” And Dan’s like, “sure.” And all the sudden the next month, Franks got his best CD with his best stuff in the mailbox of the 13000 best customers, every single person that Dan Kennedy’s been collecting for the last 15 years. So think about this. With your skill set, look at the other people in the market, all the dream 100 who are doing things and how do you create something you can plug into their offers, and every single time one of those people sell a product, your face is popping up as well. It’s called integration marketing, my first mentor Mark Joyner wrote a book called Integration Marketing, it’s a really fast read. You can read it in an hour, but it will get your mind set thinking about it. How can I integrate with what other people are always doing? Because I can go and make a sell, and make another sell, but I was like, when we launched Clickfunnels I was like, “How can I figure out other people’s sales processes that are already happening and somehow inject myself into all these other sales processes?” That way every single time Steven Larsen sells something or someone else sells something, or all these people are selling something, it always somehow gets flown back to me. I want every product, every course, everything happening in the internet marketing world to somehow have people saying my name. That’s my goal. How many of you guy have been to other people’s events and I’m not there and they say my name? It makes me so happy. I get the instagrams from some of you guys, “Hey so and so just said your name.” I’m like, that’s so good. How have I done that? I spent a lot of my life integrating into everybody’s offers. Initially when I first got started, every single person who had a product, I was an interview in everyone’s product. I was like, looking at people launching a product, specific product launches coming, I’d contact them. Product launch is coming up, “Hey man, is there any way I could do a cool thing for your people? I could create this and give it to you and you could plug it into your product?” and everyone’s like, ‘Sure, that’d be awesome.” And all the sudden, boom, they get 5000 new buyers came in and every single one of them got my thing. They’re hearing my name, hearing my voice and it’s just constant integration. I think about how I met Joe Vitale, I talked about that earlier with the greatest showman. He was in an interview in a course I bought from Mark Joyner, I listened to it, fell in love with Joe Vitale, bought his stuff, given him tons of money over the years, a whole bunch of good stuff because he was integrated in that. So looking at other ways to integrate, the skill set that you already have into other people’s marketing channels because then you’re leveraging anytime any of these partners make a sell, you’re getting customers coming through that flow as well. Cool? Nick: Yeah. Russell: That was number five. Number six, I call this one rainmaker projects, because we talked about rainmaker during the first podcast interview. So rainmaker projects are, and again when I first started my career I did tons of these, where it’s like, I was really good at one piece. For you, you’re really good at video and story telling. And I look out here and be like, okay who is someone else here that is awesome? So and so is really good at making a product on Facebook ads. “You’re really good at Facebook ads, so I’ll do the video for this course, you do the Facebook, you do the actual ads for us.” And then, you’re awesome at doing the traffic and you bring in four or five people, like this little avenger team, and you create a cobranded product together and you launch it and everyone makes a bunch of money, split all the money, 50/50/50/50, that makes more than 100,but you know what I’m talking about, everyone splits the money, everyone splits the customer list and all the sudden you’ve all pulled your efforts, your energy, your talents together and everyone leaves with some cash, and you also leave with the customer list, and that’s when you start growing really, really rapidly. When I started I didn’t have a customer list, I had a very small one. But I had a couple of skill sets so that’s why I did tons of these things. That’s like, if you guys know any of my old friends like Mike Filsaime, Gary Ambrose, I could list off all the old partners we had back in the day, and that’s what we did all the time, these little rainmaker projects. We didn’t call them that back in the day, but that’s what it was. It was just like, we all knew what our skill sets were, and it’s like, let’s come together, let’s make a project. This isn’t going to be how we change the world, it’s not going to be something we’re going to scale and grow, but it’s like, it’s going to be a project, we put it together, we launch it, make some money, get some customers, get our name out in the market, and then we step away from it and then we all go back to our own businesses. It’s not like, that’s why it’s funny because a lot of times people are scared of these. Like, “Well, how do we set up the business structure? Who’s going to be the owner? Who’s the boss?” No, none of that. This is an in and out project where all the rainmakers come together and you create something amazing for a short period of time, you split the money and you go back home with the money and the customers. But it gave you a bump in status, a big bump in customer lists, a big bump in cash and then all those things kind of rise and if you do enough of those your status keeps growing and growing and growing, and it’s a really fast easy way to continue to grow. How many of you guys want to do a rainmaker project with Nick right now? Alright, very, very cool. Alright, and then I got one last, this is number seven. This kind of ties back to dream 100. The last thing I talked about was, and again this is kind of for everyone in the group, is the levels of the dream 100. I remember when I first started this process, I first got the concept and I didn’t know it was the dream 100 back then, but I was looking at all the different people that would have been on my dream 100 list. It was Mark Joyner, Joe Vitale, all these people that for me were top tier. Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, and I was like, oh, and I started trying to figure out how to get in those spots. And the more I tried, it was so hard to get through the gatekeeper, it was impossible to get through all these gatekeepers, these people. I was like, “Man don’t people care about me. I’m just a young guy trying to figure this stuff out and they won’t even respond to my calls or my emails. I can’t even get through, I thought these people really cared.” Now to be on the flip side of that, I didn’t realize what life is actually like for that, for people like that. For me, I understand that now at a whole other level. We’ve got a million and a half people on our subscriber list. We have 68000 customers, we’ve got coaching programs, got family, got friends. We have to put up barriers to protect yourself or it’s impossible. I felt, I can’t even tell you how bad I feel having Brent this morning, “Can you tell everyone to not do pictures with me.” It’s not that I don’t want to, but do you want me to tell you what actually happens typically? This is why we have to put barriers around ourselves. Here’s my phone, I’ll be in a room, like Funnel Hacking Live and there will be 3000 people in the room, and I’m walking through and someone’s like, “Real quick, real quick, can I get a picture?” I’m like, “I gotta go.” And they’re like, “It’ll take one second.” And I’m like, ahh, “Okay, fine, quick.” And they’re like, “Hold on.” And they get their phone out and they’re like, “Uh, uh, okay, uh, alright got it. Crap it’s flipped around. Okay, actually can you hold this, my arms not long enough can you hold it? Actually, hey you come here real quick, can you hold this so we can get a picture? Okay ready, one two three cheese.” And they grab the camera and they’re off. And for them it took one second. And that person leaves, and guess what’s behind them? A line of like 500 people. And then for the next like 8 hours, the first Funnel Hacking Live, was anyone here at the first Funnel Hacking Live? I spent 3 ½ hours up front doing pictures with everybody and I almost died afterwards. I’m like, I can’t…but I didn’t know how to say no, it was super, super hard. So I realize now, to protect your sanity, people up there have all sorts of gatekeepers and it’s hard. So the way you get through is not being more annoying, and trying to get through people. The way you get to them is by understanding the levels of that. So I tried a whole bunch of times, and I couldn’t get in so I was like, “Crap, screw those guys. They don’t like me anyway, they must be jerks, I’m sure they’re just avoiding me and I’m on a blacklist….” All the thoughts that go through your head. And at that time, I started looking around me. I started looking around and I was like, “hey, there’s some really cool people here.” And that’s when I met, I remember Mike Filsaime, Mike Filsaime at the time had just created a product he launched and he had like a list of, I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4 thousand people. And I remember I created my first product, Zipbrander, and I was all scared and I’m like ,”Hey Mike, I created this thing Zipbrander.” And he messaged back, “Dude that’s the coolest thing in the world.” A couple of things, Mike didn’t have a gatekeeper, it was just him. He got my email, he saw it, and he was like, “This is actually cool.” I’m like, “Cool, do you want to promote it?” and he’s like, “Yes, I would love to promote it.” I’m like, oh my gosh. I had never made a sale online at this point, by the way, other than a couple of little things that fell apart. I never actually made a sale of my own product. Zipbrander was my very first, my own product that I ever created. So Mike was that cool, he sent an email to his list, his 5000 person list, they came over, I had this little pop up that came to the site and bounced around, back in the day. I had 270 people opt in to my list from Mike’s email to it, and I think we made like 8 or 10 sales, which wasn’t a lot, but 67 that’s $670, they gave me half, I made $350 on an email and gained 300 people on my list. I’m like, oh my gosh this is amazing. And I asked Mike, “Who are the other people you hang out with? I don’t know very many people.” And he’s like, “Oh dude, you gotta meet this guy, he’s awesome.” And he brought me to someone else, and I’m like, “Oh this is cool. “ and Mike’s like, “Dude, I promoted Zipbrander, it was awesome, you should promote it.” And then he’s like, “Oh cool.” And he promoted Zipbrander. I’m like, oh my gosh, I got another 30-40 people on my list and there were a couple more sales. And then I asked him, “Who do you know?” and there was someone else, and we stared doing this thing and all the sudden there were 8 or 10 of us who were all at this level and we all started masterminding, networking, figuring things out, cross promote each other and what happened, what’s interesting is that all of our little brands that were small at the time started growing, and they started growing, and they started growing. All the sudden we were at the next tier. And when we got to the next tier all the sudden all these new people started being aware of us and started answering our calls and doing things, and Mike’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I met this guy who used to be untouchable.” And he brought him in and brought them in and all the sudden we’re at the next level. And we started growing again and growing again. And the next thing we know, four years later I get a phone call from Tony Robbins assistant, they’re like, “Hey I’m sitting in a room and I got Mike Filsaime, Frank Kern, Jeff Walker, all these guys are sitting in a room with Tony Robbins and he thinks that you guys are the biggest internet nerds in the world, he’s obsessed with it and he wants to know if he can meet you in Salt Lake in like an hour.” What? Tony Robbins? I’ve emailed him 8000 times, he’s never responded even once, I thought he hated me. Not that he hated me, it’s that he had so many gatekeepers, he had no idea who I was. But eventually you start getting value and you collectively as a level of the dream 100 becomes more and more powerful. Eventually people notice you because you become the bigger people. And each tier gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So my biggest advice for you and for everybody is understanding that. Yes, it’s good to have these huge dreams and big people, but start looking around. There are so many partnerships to be had just inside this room. How many deals have you done with people in this room so far? Nick: Quite a few. Russell: More than one, right. Nick: Yeah, more than one. Russell: Start looking around you guys. Don’t always look up, up, up and try to get this thing. Look around and realize collectively, man, start doing the crossings because that’s how everyone starts growing together and there will be a time where I’ll be coming to you guys begging, “Can you please look at my stuff you guys, I have this thing called CLickfunnels. You may have heard of it. Can you please help me promote it?” And that’s what’s going to happen, okay. So the level of the dream 100 is the last thing, just don’t discount that. Because so many people are like swinging for the fence and just hoping for this homerun like I was, and it’s funny because I remember eventually people would respond to me, that I was trying for before, and they’d contact me. And I was like, oh my gosh. I realized, I thought this person hated me, I thought I was on a black list. I was assuming they were getting these emails and like, “oh, I hate this. Russell’s a scammer.” In my head right. They never saw any of them. Until they saw me, and they reached out to me and the whole dynamic shifted. So realizing that, kind of looking around and start building your dream 100 list, even within this room, within the communities that you’re in, because there’s power in that. And as you grow collectively, as a group, everyone will grow together, and that’s the magic. So that was number seven. So to recap the seven really quick. Number one, tell your story way too much, to the point where you’re so annoyed and so sick and tired of hearing it that everybody comes to you, and then keep telling it even some more. Number two, in everything you’re doing, energy matters a lot. To the point, even above what you think you’re comfortable with and do that all the time. Number three, make offers for everything. Hook, story, don’t leave them hanging, give them an offer because they’ll go and they will feel more completed afterwards. Number four, start building a list, it ties back to the first thing. Make an offer, get them to build your list, start growing your list because your list is your actual business. Number five, integration marketing. Look for other people’s marketing channels and how you can weave what you do into those channels, so you can get free traffic from all the people who are doing stuff. Number five, create rainmaker projects, find really cool things and bring four or five people together and make something amazing. Share the cash, share the customer list, elevate your status, elevate your brand, and it’s really fun to do because you get to know a whole bunch of people. And Number seven, understanding the levels of the dream 100. Find the people at your level and start growing with them together collectively as you do that, and in a year, two years, three years, five years Tony Robbins will be calling you, asking you to make his video and it will be amazing. Does that sound good? Awesome.

Click above to listen in iTunes... I LOVE video…. And traffic. I have over 200 videos on Youtube now and here's what I wish I'd known… Steve: Hey, everyone. This is Steve Larsen. Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio. Announcer: Welcome to Sales Funnel Radio where you'll learn marketing strategies to grow your online business using today's best internet sales funnels. Now, here's your host, Steve Larsen. Steve: All right, you guys. Hey, I'm super excited. I'm super pumped for today because we get to talk about something that has always intrigued me. It's actually kind of the way it got started in internet when I first started working for Paul Mitchel and driving internet traffic with one of my buddies. Since then I really haven't done much so I'm excited to welcome on to the podcast an expert in this area, thank you so much, Nick Arapkiles. How are you doing? Nick: I'm great, man. Thanks for having me on. Steve: Hey, thanks. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on. I was just looking through Facebook messages before you and I got on here and I didn't realize I think you had asked if we could push the time back and I'm such a morning person, thanks for getting up this early to do this. Nick: Hey, no problem at all, man. I'm happy to do it. Like you said I'm not much of a morning person, but when someone like you gives me an opportunity like this I'm happy to get on. Steve: It's nice that you did, I appreciate it. For everyone listening, this really is probably the first time, I mean, this is the first time that we'd really spoken like this. The guy that connected us is Ben Wilson obviously. Ben is the guy. He and I we're doing that things, Paul Mitchel and several other companies just think the world of him. He sent me a message and he goes, "Dude, I got this awesome guy. He's the man." I think I still have the message just to put it on the podcast or something. It's pretty funny. He's like, "This sweet guy, man, he's this genius and he said he wants to come." "Hey, sweet." I'm always looking for talent, for people because I get boring for everyone I'm sure. I'm excited to have some mix out. Nick: It's kind of a funny story. I met him at an event here in Colorado and then I actually ran into him at the Rockies, in the baseball game. Then he messaged me about you and here we are. Steve: Dude, that's great. What event was it? Nick: It was actually for a book publishing event ironically ... Steve: He told me he's going to that. Okay, cool. That's fantastic. It's funny this whole internet marketing world, it's actually a lot smaller than people think it is because people get in it, they'll get out of it, they'll get in it but the people that stick around I don't think there's ... Anyways, get around quick. What is exactly that you're doing then? You told me that you're awesome with YouTube which is awesome. Most people forget you can even advertise there I feel like but what is it that you're doing? Nick: Basically, I've been doing this stuff for a lot. Do you want me to just go on to my story a little bit? Steve: Okay, man. Let's hear it. Nick: Okay, cool. I've actually been online for about six years now and two and a half of those first six years were complete and utter struggle. It's usually the case with a lot of people's stories. I don't think I'm too much different... Steve: Anyone who says otherwise I feel like they are just lying or throwing a sales video. Nick: Yeah, I mean, it sucked at the time. Obviously it sucked at the time not having, you always expect when you get started you're thinking you're going to make money in your first day, first week, first month at least but it was tough man, it really was. I forfeited a lot of things going on. I was actually in college at the time... It was the summer before my last year of college so all my friends were going out partying and going to pool parties, different stuff like that. I was just dedicated to this thing. I essentially locked myself in my room that whole summer and I was dedicated to making it work and I didn't even make it work that entire summer and even years after that. It just led me on this path I think once you get into this like you're essentially infected with the entrepreneurial bug as I like to call it. You can't really go back from that. I mean, I kept on trying different things. I even went into the trading Forex and stuff like that but eventually came back into the marketing realm and that's where I am now like you're asking I've done a lot of YouTube stuff. That's the big thing is I really always focus on driving traffic because if you can drive traffic then you have a business. You really can do anything, it depends on what traffic you're using. Most the time I promote different funnels like business opportunities or just affiliate programs... I haven't really dove into much of my own stuff. I just leverage other systems that people put out and that's pretty much what I'm doing but it all stems from driving traffic and then calling people from YouTube into my world. I like to really call it my world more so than my list. I think a lot of people say my list or build a list. That's great, obviously you need to build a list but I think it helps me come from a better mentality than it's I'm building a list of people or a list. It's more so I'm building an audience of people, they are in my world now. Because I think a lot of people secure a list and they just think of numbers and what it really comes down to is that these are people that are interested and they want to connect with you and they want to learn more. You have to treat them as such and I think when you do that you get a lot better results. Steve: Interesting. That's interesting. A lot of people I know will talk about, they'll have you fill out something. Who are you trying to attract? What's their likes? What's their dislikes? What do they hate? Sometimes I feel like that gets pretty artificial after a while. You're just targeting people like yourself. I feel like it's the easiest way to go... Nick: Yeah, to be honest I didn't express this fully but basically what I do right now is I don't actually do too much advertising where I'm paying for the clicks and stuff like that. It's mostly just all organic. I've done a little bit of advertising here and there but the big thing is just putting content up. I know you're asking if I could drop some nuggets for YouTube and stuff like that but the biggest thing is just to continually put out content just like any other type of platform whether that's Facebook, Instagram, even Snapchat now. It's just continually putting out content because the more content you have out there, the more likely people are going to find you... I mean, there are some videos that I have that have seven views but there's also other videos that have 100,000 views. You never really know exactly which videos are going to hit. You might have an idea depending on the keywords and how optimized your videos are but the biggest thing that I stress and every day I learn more and more, I'm always learning is the fact that you never really know exactly until you start putting up content which videos are really going to stick and gain some traction until you upload them. Steve: That's interesting you say that. Back in college also I started really, really diving into this also, same thing. I sucked at it. There's a guy I listen to and he was saying, "You should always be publishing. Try and get a way to be in front of your people. Produce content." Just exactly what you're saying. I started doing that and making all these Periscope videos and I would put the recordings on YouTube. I can't tell you how cool that was. Stuff started happening when I did that. The exact reason you're saying. I had some videos that were terrible but then others were completely surprising to me. People started watching them and pushing them around. What the heck is this? My products started getting sold organically. I was like, "This is kind of cool," I totally agree with that but I have to ask though, you're putting YouTube videos out. Try to put as many up as you can. How do you rank a YouTube video? It's hard to... these words for spiders to go crawl and stuff like that like a blog post. What are some strategies you use to actually try and get them out there? Nick: It almost feels like it's changed throughout the years, I think the algorithms and everything. I'm not that geeky like that but I just noticed some trends here and there. As of late, I've noticed that a bigger channel with more subscribers and just a little bit more authority, maybe it's been on for a little bit of while or a little while, those are the videos that's pushing up towards the top of the search engines. You can pull back links. I know that probably gets a little bit more complex. I don't know if you're familiar with back linking. Steve: 100%, yeah definitely. Nick: Okay, I just didn't know if your audience would or not but that's basically you can go out there and get some other people to put your video in a bunch of different places. The idea behind that is that the search engines see your video all over the place and they are like, "This must be a video that is good. Let's start pushing it up towards the top of the search engine." Especially a couple of years ago that was huge and it definitely got me a lot of results but the thing again that I've noticed lately is that just having a big channel and having some decent subscribers and having people actually watch majority of your video is what's really pushing your videos up. I've had some videos where I just started making videos and they don't get much traction at all but then I have one of my bigger channels and I just put it up and I don't really optimize it at all, I don't really do anything to it and right away it's like one of the first videos on the search engine. Steve: I hear of Traffic Geyser. Nick: Yeah the name sounds familiar. Steve: These sites where you just submit your video and they'll just blast it across the internet so that you could get more views. I mean, totally spam-my stuff, you know what I mean? It's the dream for every entrepreneur or internet guys to just put your stuff everywhere. What strategies do you use for finding people to put your videos up? You know what I mean? Did you have to find related channels to yourself? Nick: Not necessarily. I use a website called Fiverr a lot of the times or at least I used to. I haven't been using it as much lately but it's a really cool website. You're obviously familiar with it but I'll explain it for your audience. Basically, it's just a website. It's called fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R dot ‎com and basically it's a site that has a bunch of people doing a bunch of different gigs. They'll literally do anything for you for $5. I think there's a processing fee now for like 50 cents. Essentially people will do anything for you on the internet. I should be more specific with that. Steve: It's funny though because I've had people like, "Rap my name." I've had people, "Beat box stuff," they'll do anything for five bucks. Nick: Exactly, there's a lot of different stuff that you can do. Basically I just go on there and look for back links or maybe social signals and it's not to complicated. I mean, you just have to find someone with good rating, good track record and just test them out and that's the whole thing that I always tell people too is that you just have to test things out. You'll never really know what's working, what's not working until you go out there and actually apply it yourself... I think a lot of people are always asking me for the secret, asking me for different things that are just going to make it click and they're going to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's really never the case. You know this just as well as anybody is that you actually have to go out there and do the work, see what's working, see what's not working and then throw out the stuff that's not working and then just ramp up the stuff that is working... Steve: This is one of the reasons why I laugh so much when you brought up Fiverr because it started out as a great class. I'm sorry if anyone's listening that was in that class. It was like an SEO class in college and it started out great. We're learning all these cool strategies for SEO and things like that. Then it just got like the strategies were really old. I've been doing it long enough by that point that I just knew that what I was earning wasn't significant or anything. He's like, "Hey, what you're all going to go do is you got to go create a YouTube video and think about a topic a lot and the competition in the class to see whose video can get the most views." I was like, "I could totally game that." We went and we made this, you know that, "Do you even lift, bro?" Those videos that are out there right now, have you seen it though? Nick: I'm not sure. Steve: "Bro, do you even lift?" Nick: Okay, yeah. Steve: The next Star Wars is coming out and we said, "Do you even Jedi, bro?" We made all these funny videos of people. It was pretty cool but I totally went to Fiverr and I paid this dude $5 to send like 10,000 bot clicks. For no views at all to just this massive spike and we went and we gave the ending presentation stuff like that like we have over 10,000 clicks on this thing and everyone's like, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing." It's in the last few weeks and what's funny is that we ended up getting contacted right before the class ended by this ad agency. They were like, "Hey, we want to use your video to promote Star Wars stuff on." I was like, "Okay." None of them knew that this were like ... I'm sure that 50 of them were real clicks out of the ... Maybe. What's funny though is that obviously YouTube after a while can start to see if that's crap. The views on the bottom went from 0 to 10,000 to 12 and it stayed there. We're looking at the analytics for a while and then just totally drop. They took away all of them all the way back down to 3 views or something like that after the class was ended. Anyways, the only reason I bring that up is because A, it was a total failure and I knew what happened. I knew enough about that world that time but it was I mean, how do you go through Fiverr and figure out who's going to be sending you real clicks and not. You know what I mean or who's going to be pushing your video around the right way or not? Because most of it ... I like Fiverr for testing a lot of the lower level stuff but it sounds like you've got a cool way to do it that isn't that way. Nick: Yeah, that's actually a good point... I'm glad you brought that up because that's very important that you find good gigs because if you are sending a bunch of fake traffic to your YouTube videos it can get your video shut down and even your account shut down because YouTube will recognize that and they see that you're just throwing all these views on there and they are all fake. They don't like that. I've had the experience of getting a lot of my stuff shut down because of that in the early stages. Anyone listening, make sure that you're not sending crap gigs over to your videos because YouTube will shut that down real quick. In terms of finding good stuff, basically I just make sure that the vendor has a good track record. There's one specific guy that he's probably one of the bigger gigs. He's got so many different gigs on there. I'll just let you know his name is Crorkservice. Steve: Crorkservice, you know, I might actually seen him before. Nick: I'm sure you have. Honestly he's probably one of the best out there and he's got the best ratings. He's like the top of the top sellers... I mean, it's no hidden secret. You just have to go through his gigs and figure out what exactly it is that you want. If you are going to purchase views I really haven't done that in a long time. I know there are some people that do it and they do actually have success because again like I was saying before, if you can get high retention views where people are watching the majority of your video, that actually can really, really help you with ranking your video on YouTube in specifics. Just make sure that is a high retention view and again it has a good track record because that can definitely help with rankings on YouTube. Steve: Interesting, okay. What are you doing? I heard some people talk about we’ll give some formula or outline for what to make, what to put in the video to make sure that they’ll push pass minute seven or whatever it is. Do you have anything that you would recommend there? Nick: Yeah, for sure. There’s a couple of things. The first thing that you definitely need to know, basically how I get all my traffic for the most part is it’s all based on keywords. People come into the search engines and this is just like general in terms of search traffic. Basically people will come in, they’ll be searching for something, I mean you and I have done this just as much as anybody else is that they have a concern, they have an issue, they need help with something. They come into the search engines and they start typing it out whether that is how to lose weight, how to grow tomatoes. It doesn’t really matter, it just pertains to whatever your business is but they’ll start searching things in and then they’ll find your videos if you start uploading videos, you do it on a good channel, you start optimizing it. Your videos are going to start rising towards the top of the search engines. What you need to do when you’re making your videos is that you need to let your viewers know that they are at the right place. Let’s say for example that you did make a video about how to grow heirloom tomatoes for example. What you need to say in the beginning of the video, you need to let your viewer know that they’re in the right place at the right time. You say, “Hey, you probably landed on this video because you are looking, you started searching out how to grow heirloom tomatoes,” right then and there they know that they are at the right place. That's what starts it out and then if you can get technical and say, you need to say this, you need to say this, but I think it ultimately comes down to is that you need to let them know that they’re in the right place and then give them value. I know it sounds stupidly simple but I think there’s many people out there that just like they’re trying to heighten all this traffic, all this stuff through your website. People are smart, you can’t bullshit people... When you’re genuine, when you give value and you’re just a real down to earth person then that’s when people recognize that. People will connect with you just on that fact based alone, they might be coming searching for information they want to learn how to grow tomatoes or lose weight or whatever it is. A lot of times people just want to connect with somebody and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had that happen where people just, they’ll hit me up on Facebook and they’re like, “Yeah, I mean, your video is great and all that but you just seem like you’re a down to earth person, you seem like a good dude and that’s why I came out and connected with you.” Steve: Interesting... I have had it happen before also and I never realized that that was probably it. I’m trying to be authentic on camera, you know what I mean? I’m just being myself and I have people come back and say, “Hey, you’re the man. I have this feeling when I was talking to you I should reach out to you,” and I was like, “What kind of feeling? All right, thanks.” Interesting. Yeah, that’s cool you bring that up... There really is as simple as that just answer the question, let them know that they’re there and then connect with them. There’s a guy I was listening to and he was saying something like, “The first 20 seconds you have to do something crazy to keep their attention. The next 60 seconds then you got to teach a little nugget then the final two minutes do something that’s also a little crazy to make sure they come back next time.” I was like, “Man, that’s a lot. All right,” but that’s so much more simpler route to do that. What kind of timeline do you usually look at when you’re trying to rank a video? You know what I mean, like how long it usually take? Nick: Again, it’s kind of goes along the same thing I was talking about just before and there’ll be a lot of people that say, “You got to make two to four minutes.” I certainly agree to that to an extent because like I was saying before it’ll help you start ranking your videos a little bit more if people are watching more of your video. If you have a shorter video it’s more likely that people are just going to watch more of it. If you have an 11 minute video then obviously less people are just going to watch it just because everyone has shorter attention spans. It does depend on the video that you’re doing because specific keywords especially like I do a lot of reviews. I’ll be honest that’s where a lot of my traffic comes from, a lot of my buyer traffic. That's just kind of a nugget right there. If you can start doing some reviews like that’s going to be some of your best traffic out there. I’ve got review videos that are like 10, 11, 12 minutes long and people watch the majority of it because buyers, think about this, buyers will watch, they will watch everything and they’ll read everything because they're thinking about it from your perspective. If you’re going out there and let's just say for example you want to buy a new MacBook or yeah, let’s just go with that example. Are you going to go to the website and just like look at a couple of pictures and then buy? No, you’re probably going to be going, you’re going to watch the hour long keynote presentation, you’re going to watch the ten minute video that shows all the details and all the benefits and features on the MacBook. You’re going to be talking to people, you might even reach out to a support. Buyers they will do their research. To just tell you, “You have to have it four minutes long,” or, “You have to have it ten minutes long,” I can’t really tell you that exactly because if you just target keywords that are buyer keywords, people are going to be searching that stuff until they make that buyer decision. Does that all makes sense? Steve: Yeah, it does. That’s a great insight. It’s not like a two to four minutes, there's not a hard fast rule, it's just hey whatever is … Make sure first that you’re actually delivering value and answering the question and coming back to them. Nick: Yeah, and if you’re asking for a short answer, I would say keep it shorter if you can but if you need more time to explain everything that you need I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Steve: What kind of buyer keywords? I mean is there’s a trend in good buying keywords, you know what I mean that you’re saying? Like across mostly internet or things that will pull your videos apart because those keywords are more valuable or you know what I mean? Nick: I’ll just be honest, review videos are probably the best videos that you can possibly make. Steve: Really? Nick: Yeah, because the reason people are coming and looking for reviews is because they saw a video or they saw a product and they’re a buyer. They’re looking for more information on that, they want to get everything they can possibly know about that. Once they figured out, once they see your video, once something clicks and they make sure it’s the right product for them then they’re ready to buy right there. Does that makes sense? Steve: Interesting. Yeah, 100%. I was just thinking too I’ve got like, I don’t know, 150 videos on YouTube but 90 of them are unlisted or whatever so that I can put them inside of websites and things like that. Do you have a preference at all? Have you found that there’s any kind of, I don’t know. I don’t even know, favoritism given to people who stay on the YouTube website versus watching YouTube video embedded on a page? Nick: I haven’t really done too much embedding on different pages so I can’t really speak for that. One other thing I was going to touch is the fact that you can actually look at your analytics too and you can see which videos people are watching longer. You can see the average duration on how long your viewers are staying on your video... Steve: Yeah, I love the stat section in the back of YouTube, it’s nuts. Most people don't look at that by a part but it’s pretty fascinating. Nick: Yeah, it’s great stuff and I actually just like within the last few months I’ve really started looking at that stuff a lot more and it’s really helped me. We just go back to the whole thing about testing seeing what works and then start doing more of what works. That what I was doing is I was really taking a look at the analytics, see what the videos that people are staying on for a long time and then just making more of those videos. Because there’s some videos where people are staying on for less than a minute through an average of 10,000 views. I’m like, “Okay, that obviously didn’t work so let’s throw that away. It was a good test, that was some good feedback, I won’t do that anymore so let’s move on and let’s find something better.” Steve: I just wanted to touch on something because this really matters a lot in kind of my world. I build funnels all day long, just tons of sales funnels and that’s kind of what I was looking through on your site mentorwithnick.com which is super cool, everyone should go there, mentorwithnick.com. You’ve got a quiz there and we’re a huge a fan of quizzes, it kind of pre-frame people. You got a welcome video from you and automated email that I got and then a link over to $1 offer. Kind of a cool biz opportunity there or business product I should say. Usually what we do when I build these types of funnels. You just kind of took me through in that mentorwithnick.com is we’ll always take those videos and enlist them and put them inside a funnel. I mean, I never let people just sit inside of YouTube format. I think it’s interesting that you just said … I mean it sounds like almost all of your review videos they’re all on YouTube anyway which makes sense. That’s what people are searching. That’s fascinating though. I guess I’m just recapping that. That’s cool though. Do you ever embed it all I guess, I mean you obviously did on that welcome video with Mentor With Nick. Nick: Yeah, that is one place that I do embed, I kind of almost forgot about that but those are like the only places. Mostly just like welcome videos or I like to call as bridge pages, like you said I do promote different things, different opportunities and stuff like that. What a lot of people will do is they’ll just send traffic directly to an offer and while that can work for sure like I’m not saying it can. Steve: It’s rough though. Nick: Yeah, pre-frame that a little bit and kind of just introduce them, kind of welcome them into your world. That’s a big thing it’s just like saying, “Hey, I’m here for you,” like, “I got your back,” like, “Don’t worry,” like, “We got this taken care of and you know I’m going to introduce you to this thing and you can certainly take us up on that but if not, you know, just connect with us.” So many people just want to connect with somebody, that’s what my whole video is about and after they opt in it’s just kind of saying, “Hey, I’m here,” like, “If you need anything from me you’ll be receiving some emails from me and you know I’m here to help you out.” I think that’s just a lot better way to do things instead of just like hard driving traffic to offers... My honest opinion that’s going to drop convergence but it’s also going to drop your audience where they just think that you’re just trying to sell them all the time. Steve: Yeah, 100% I agree with that and I was impressed with that video that you put out there, I thought that was really good. I always draw out funnels like crazy and in my world we call it funnel hacking. I was going through your funnel and drawing all that out, the emails that came, things like that and it’s not like you need that welcome video, the one from you. Technically you don’t but I thought it was interesting and cool that you put it in there because I watched the whole thing and it made sense to me is like, “Hey, there’s a lot of trust and there was a lot of ...” What’s the word? I can’t think the word. After watching the video I was like, “Hey, this guy is real. That was cool. What a good video,” and it set me up because I have to tell you when the next video started I was like, “Eh.” I don’t know but because I watched you, I was like there was a lot more trust, like a lot more stock in that video. Anyways, great example right there, I thought that was fantastic... Nick: Thank you. I appreciate that. Steve: Yeah, everyone go checkout mentorwithnick.com, that’s an interesting process for a bridge page right there. That’s really good. Nick: Thank you. Steve: Do you send people to quizzes a lot also? Nick: I use that capture page right now because it seems to be converting the best. I’ve noticed that in the past like I even got opt in pages like that up to like 50% opt in rate for all my traffic which is really good. Right now I’m sitting at around like 39%. I mean that’s for the best that I’ve done. I’ve tested with a lot of different stuff and everything else have been kind of sitting around like 32 to 33 maybe like a little bit higher than that. I just use that because it just kind of like gets them invested... They have the two step opt in and you are obviously very familiar with all this stuff and that works really well where you have to click on something that makes it a little bit more congruent. They’ve already invested a little something to make sure they put their email address in but the survey just kind of adds a little bit more like they’re taking a quiz and then they’re like, “Okay.” Now, they need to put their email address in and they’re already a little bit more invested so they’re more likely to continue with that action, that whole congruency. Steve: 100% plus then you can follow up with them, you got their email address and you can re-market to them and ask them if they got the trial. Yeah, great for you, great for them. Yeah, I completely agree with that too. I had this quiz who’s probably about 50% also, same thing. It’s just quizzes are great things for people. It was only like four questions but it set them into my … It was the same thing that you did which is what I was laughing at, “Where did you hear about us from?” and it was like, “Facebook, Oprah, Obama mentioned me,” and then other. I’ve never been on those things before but because they heard those names first and then your name last or even other, it’s a lot more stock also. Just increases your authority like crazy, not that you want to be deceptive but it does give you more authority. The next question was like, “What age range are you in?” and these are questions that sometimes don’t even matter or you can ask questions that just kind of poke them in the eye a little bit. “How much do you make on your side business every week?” “Zero. A hundred bucks,” and then just, “I got to choose the lowest one.” For a weight loss product, “How many products have you tried?” but at the time your solution comes up they’re like, “Man, he’s right. I fail every time at this. I do need to buy this product.” That’s interesting though. Cool. Hey man, I don’t want to just keep taking your time. I appreciate you getting up early to do this with me. Where can people learn more about you and join your world like you were saying? Nick: You can add me on Facebook, that’s a good place. I am kind of maxing that out now. Lately I’ve been going pretty hard with getting people add me and everything like that. My friend list is kind of maxing out right now so I did also start up a new Instagram account, a new Snapchat account which my usernames are Mentor With Nick, just kind of goes along with my website. You can also go to my website like you mentioned before which is mentorwithnick.com. Steve: Mentor With Nick Instagram and Snapchat, mentorwithnick.com also and then also on Facebook. Hey Nick, I appreciate it man. Thank you so much for taking the time again and for dropping all the nuggets you did. Nick: Yeah, for sure man. It was fun. I always love getting on with like-minded people and just chat marketing something I’m very passionate about. Steve: Yeah, I appreciate it. Everyone else usually who talks about it, sometimes they feel alone in this world. Anyways, it’s cool to meet you man and I do appreciate it. Nick: No problem, man. Happy to be on. Steve: All right, talk to you later. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Have a question you want answered on the show? Get your free t-shirt when your question gets answered on the live Hey Steve Show. Visit salesfunnelbroker.com now to submit your question.

Niklas Lollo interviews Hawaii Wildfire Management Organization Community Outreach Coordinator Pablo Beimler, who works with government agencies, nongovernment organizations, and communities on collaborative wildfire protection efforts across the Hawaiian Islands. HWMO's prevention, preparedness, and mitigation efforts are making a difference to bring all stakeholders to the table with the common goal of reducing the growing wildfire hazards statewide.TRANSCRIPTSpeaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX, Berkeley Showcasing Bay area innovators. I'm your host, Nicholas Thalo. And this week we are visited by Pablo Byler, the community outreach coordinator with the Hawaii wildfire management organization. Tell us about the work his organization is doing to combat wildfires in Hawaii and landscape more commonly thought of as a tropical paradise than [00:00:30] one that shares the same afflictions as California drought and wildfire. Hey, Pablo, welcome to the show. Hey Nick. Thanks for having me. Uh, it's pretty much a paradox like Hawaii, we think of this place as a tropical paradise, yet it has a large proportion of wildfires. Why is that? Speaker 2:Yeah, no, it's indeed true. There's a misconception that, you know, Hawaii is, like you said, tropical wet all year round. Um, but in the, in reality, [00:01:00] um, every island in Hawaii has a leeward and windward side. And on those leeward sides, you get these really dry conditions. You get some areas that actually are drier. Um, they get less rainfall than Tucson, Arizona. Um, and we actually have this wide range of, um, different climate zones within even these leeward areas and on the windward sides. Um, so for one we have a very diverse landscape, so you'll see landscapes that you have, um, here on the mainland that, um, are mirrored [00:01:30] back on the islands and to go along with that. We also have this year long growing season for plants to thrive. Um, even on the dryer, dryer sides. And unfortunately the plants that do grow on those dryers sides are mostly invasive fire prone, um, plants. Speaker 2:And what we've seen is this kind of increase in the amount of wildfires all across the state really. And even in the Western Pacific too, um, where we're getting, you know, [00:02:00] more, more wildfires, partially because of the types of vegetation that are there, but also because we're having an influx in population and from a lot of the data that we've been working through, we've basically been able to identify it that, um, indeed wildfires are correlated to people. About 99% of our ignitions are actually started by people. So you have the fuels, you have the ignitions, and of course we have plenty of wind that blows through our islands. So [00:02:30] when you have those three, they make up the fire triangle. And that's why we're getting all these wildfires. Speaker 1:And you said that wildfire is an introduced concept to the ecology of Hawaii. Um, can you speak more about that? Speaker 2:Sure. Yeah. So there's a lot of debate in terms of how much fire was used during the, um, kind of pre pre-contact era. Um, native Hawaiian. There are records of native Hawaiians using fire to help and native grasses [00:03:00] such as Pili Grass, um, which is a very important cultural, um, uh, grass for the native Hawaiians. Um, and then you have natural ignitions from lightning strikes. But of course we're, you know, pretty unique being out there with an active lava, an active lava source, um, constantly spewing out from, um, currently the big island. And so we've, you know, seen fires that have sprouted from lava ignitions, but in general, fire was not really part of the, [00:03:30] the natural ecology and most of the islands. And it's more of a recent, over the past hundred years or so where we've really seen a major uptick in the amount of wildfires and the sheer size and fires. Speaker 2:Um, you go back to 19 of 1901 and there was a fire that burned 30,000 acres on the Hamakua coast, which is a pretty wet area on the big island. That kind of sets a precedent. It shows that areas that are wet could actually burn too if [00:04:00] given the right conditions. You know, during the drought period when all of this vegetation that has been so lashed and growing for so many years, all of a sudden it becomes dry, becomes a burnable. Um, all you need is one spark and then you have a wildfire. So, um, kind of going back to that question, um, a lot of our native ecology is not used to wildfires. A lot of the native plants there are not adapted to fire. And now that it's part of the current ecosystem, um, unfortunately the native plants can't keep up with all the other plants [00:04:30] that have been. Speaker 2:Um, you know, a lot of the invasive fire prone plants that have come onto the islands, um, basically thrive. They reproduce after wildfire. And so the native plants really have no chance to come back in competition with, um, with the new plants that are on our islands. And then you start seeing, um, a loss in our native forest ecology, which then damages our watersheds and our ability to keep water on our lands. It ends up, you'll have days where [00:05:00] after a wildfire or even months after a wildfire where, um, we'll get a heavy rainfall event, which is pretty typical in Hawaii. Um, and it'll wash a lot of that top soil that's not being held down by what formerly was a forest. It goes out into the ocean and then pollutes our coral reefs, which then of course has other implications with our coastal resource management and impacts the fisheries and impacts the local fishermen and impacts to our tourism. Speaker 2:So there's this whole [00:05:30] wide, wide range of impacts that can happen from, from this introduced wildfire system that we have. And so it's an introduced system. How did you first, or how did Hawaii first start managing, um, fire? It's a very good question. It's a, um, again, wildfire management. It's a pretty new concept relative to, um, you know, a lot of other places in the world. And especially in the u s where, you know, [00:06:00] over a century ago, wildfire suppression only was really the, the main focus on the mainland. And that's kind of what we're seeing now with these major Yosemite fires and, um, these uncontrollable fires that are not really natural parts of the mainland ecosystems. Um, but it was that mentality of constantly suppression and keeping, keeping all that growth, not keeping that growth at bay basically, and having this massive amounts of burnable timber and plants and shrubs that usually would burn [00:06:30] 20, 30 year intervals. Speaker 2:And so some of that kind of mentality had carried out to, um, to the Hawaiian islands. So, you know, suppression only tactics not focusing on the prevention side, not focusing on pre fire management. So what you do to change the landscape in order to reduce the fire threat around an area. And, and a lot of it actually, um, there, there's a lot of, um, there were [00:07:00] a few guys who were in the business that were very forethinking and they thought, okay, how do we address this issue? We're not getting any funding to do anything outside of fire suppression. What do we do? And, um, over a decade ago, back in before 2000 when our organization formed a group of, um, fire chiefs and heads of the land, the land management agencies, they got together to f to think how are we going to address this issue? And they formed [00:07:30] this group called North Kona Fire and fuels group. Speaker 2:And it was really just the way to focus just in this specific area in North Kona on the big island. Um, the dry part of the, yes, exactly. So North Dakota and south Kohala is basically the hotbed, no pun intended, too many fire puns in this world. Um, but, uh, we, you know, we had, um, a growing wildfire problem in these areas and these guys were wondering what, what can we do to actually [00:08:00] make it so that we're not spending so much money, so much effort and risking our firefighters lives to fight these major fires that are starting to happen. And they decided to create that group, the North Kona Fire and fuels group, which then emerged into a formal organization, West Hawaii wildfire management organization just to focus on that area. But to create a nonprofit that would actually help start bringing funds in that will, um, you know, federal funds that can actually help [00:08:30] implement, um, you know, on the ground, pre fire management, outreach and education and even post-fire rehabilitation of our lands. Speaker 1:So you were saying earlier that, um, you weren't receiving federal, Hawai'i wasn't receiving federal funds to subdue anything besides fire suppression. Why was this organization able to receive federal funds now for doing these other steps in the fire Speaker 2:management system? Yeah, again, a lot of it ties into that [00:09:00] nonprofit, um, status. Having a nonprofit entity that can actually spend time grant writing and um, putting out proposals to various federal agencies and federal, federal grant programs to start bringing funding to Hawaii cause we really weren't getting any federal funding for anything outside of that. And did it also mark like a shift in the federal government's priorities? Definitely. Where people beginning to understand fire ecology better. Yes. A it partially is that [00:09:30] again, you know, you have these guys like Wayne cheering for one, he's this magician and really helped start this wildfire management program for the division of Forestry, the state division of Forestry and Wildlife, um, agency in a way and you know, really, really started to institutionalize wildfire management as part of, as part of their scope of work. And you know, people like that have really pushed the envelope in terms of getting Hawaii to be more forward thinking in terms of fire [00:10:00] suppression. Speaker 2:And then we have, um, like a lot of our grant funding actually has been coming from the US forest service. They have a grant program called the wild land urban interface, um, competitive grant program. And they'll assist, um, organizations like ours to, to implement projects that are more focused on pre fire management and outreach education and that sort of scope of work. What does community outreach look like? You know, depending on the grant, my, my project plan will change [00:10:30] accordingly. But the way it's changed has been very innovative. I give a lot of credit to our executive director Elizabeth Pickett and our board of directors who have really, and technical advisors who have really helped reshape how, how we focus on outreach and education. So originally it was, you know, we started by really just getting awareness out there because again, you know, a lot of travelers who come there don't know that there's wildfire issues and they might park their car and drive grass and then you have a sudden fire. Speaker 2:Um, [00:11:00] and then there's that awareness level from people who live there too, whether it's the actual awareness that there are fires in the area or an awareness that they can actually do something to protect themselves. Um, so that's kind of where we started. And over the years we've really grown to start, um, start actually empowering communities to actually act, act within themselves, act within the group to implement their own projects, start their own community groups, really, you know, [00:11:30] kind of like a neighborhood watch program, but bonusing on wildfires and wildfire projects. So whether that means, you know, having a chipper day where we contract the chipper out for for a two day period and people can help each other out, clear their yards of any flammable debris. And then we're, we're in this mode right now where we're working with communities statewide to help them become firewise communities, which is a natural national program through the National Fire Protection Association. Speaker 2:And it's a way to kind of validate [00:12:00] these efforts and also opens up funding opportunities for them as well. And so these are communities in the, like Peri urban or rural, um, areas, um, that included like a lot of ranchers. Um, what does that lifestyle look like? Or yeah, these look like. So every community we work with is quite different. And, um, you know, that's part of what makes my job really special and what I really enjoy about it is to get to meet really every type of person that [00:12:30] lives in the Hawaiian islands. And you get a whole range, you know, you get people who live, who come there to retire, right? And I'm starting to do life in Hawaii. Some people go out there to have a self sustaining life. Um, and then your of course have native populations there too. You have a very high pop, um, percentage of native Hawaiians that live still on the Hawaiian islands. Speaker 2:And, um, and the, you know, there's a lot of, um, historical kind of precedent for how these communities emerged and how each [00:13:00] one interacts. Um, but you know, our organization itself where, you know, we're nonpartisan, we're, you know, we work with anyone, literally anyone who has a wildfire problem, whether you're homeless, whether you have a home, whether you have $1 million home, you know, our whole goal is to protect your homes and communities from burning. And that also goes along with your natural landscapes. So that means, you know, if you're a rancher and you have, um, a a hundred thousand acres that you need to upkeep and, you know, you're getting fires that are burning constantly, [00:13:30] how can we help you use more strategic grazing practices that will actually manage the fuels around you? Um, the other thing we really stress is you don't have to go it alone as a community. Speaker 2:And so that's, that's the next step we're taking as an organization is how do we innovate new approaches to get not just the community involved, but every single stakeholder involved. And that's a practice that's being, and what that really means, again, is you need to have the politicians on board. You need to have planners [00:14:00] need to have educators and designers and every part of society involved in the process in order to actually have effective, meaningful project implementation that'll protect people from public safety hazards. And you've spoken a bit about, um, I mean, including all these stakeholders on one of those, but obviously be scientists, um, fire ecologist. Um, but you've spoken a little bit about how that's been a tricky, um, bridge to, uh, create, [00:14:30] um, say more. Sure. Um, so nationally it's uh, um, you know, nationally you have this divide between the research world, the academic world and people who are out on the ground. Speaker 2:Um, you know, quote unquote managers, right? Land managers, you know, it's neither is wrong or right. You know, there, um, there's just this disconnect in the communication between the two, the research. Um, [00:15:00] you know, the academic side is not getting down to the management level for various reasons and that's even more amplified on the islands because there are other things like race and ethnicity that also play a part in that. But the main thing is, you know, you're, um, a lot of the research that's happening won't necessarily tie into what the managers actually need on the ground. And so what our organization did, um, working with the US Forest Service in Hawaii, the IPOC office there and University of Hawaii [00:15:30] and then Hawaii wildfire management organization and kind of as a three legged stool to help create this program that will bridge the gap between science and management in the wildfire world. Speaker 2:And so in Hawaii, a lot of that means, you know, the conservation world, how do we get conservation minded people to create research that will have applications for fire managers or ranchers who need to know how they can create a fuel break that I actually protect their, their ranch lands. And it's of course the challenge. It's a very unique [00:16:00] opportunity and it's a way that the wildfire world can help demonstrate a process that other gaps between research and management, whether that's, you know, coastal restoration or you know, you can even take it into urban designed to, or there's a lot of applications and, um, and it's all through this program called the Pacific Fire Exchange, which is, has been taken off lately and there's been a lot of great, um, products that have been coming [00:16:30] out to help start getting that information from that, you know, academic world into the hands of land managers. Speaker 2:And then, um, it's not just the Pacific. We have, it's all part of this consortium called the, um, joint fire science program, which, um, you know, the, the entire nation is covered by various different consortia that are not based on the state's, um, boundaries, but actually based on the ecological boundaries of each, um, eco [00:17:00] biological areas across the state. Um, it's been highly successful. It's been really great to see nationwide, um, coming together of people in these various worlds to actually start sharing information. And so how did you come to the wildfire management scene? It was very serendipitous. It was, um, so I went to school at UC Berkeley, graduated back in 2012. The fire component actually came [00:17:30] really randomly. I didn't have enough coursework. Well, I couldn't get into a bunch of courses. I was kind of, I'm always behind because I was at spring admit, so it was always hard for me to get into certain courses and there was one semester where I just could not get into, um, the courses I needed. Speaker 2:So I decided, well, there's this fire ecology course. It sounds really interesting. It's already four weeks in, but I'm going to take it anyway. And I ended up taking the course under the wing of, um, Kevin Crosno [00:18:00] who was a, um, working on his doctorate at the time. And he really helped kind of catch me up with the class and I really started getting involved in the work he was doing. And this was all under Scott Stevens fiery college course. And then sure enough, the next semester I worked in the fire lab looking at tree ring tree rings for four hours straight. And um, you know, seeing what year as fires happened during certain years cause you can actually use tree rings to date fires going [00:18:30] back hundreds of years. Um, and again, that was another eye opening experience and I just started learning more and more about fire. Speaker 2:And then I ended up graduating and working for cal fire as a forestry assistant and I would actually go out with a team of three other people out in Lake Tahoe and assess different homes, um, for their defensible space measures to see how basically burnable their home landscape is. And under California regulations if you're in certain [00:19:00] areas that are um, your wildfire pro and you actually have to have defensible space. So we went around and kind of, um, mostly educated, uh, committee members about what they can do to, to fix some of their problems that we assessed. And that then kind of led me out into the wildfire world out in Hawaii. And the rest is history Speaker 1:in Lake Tahoe. How, where the existing practices of creating defensible space? Speaker 2:So one of [00:19:30] the major differences is again, the types of vegetation that you have, um, in Tahoe versus in Hawaii. So until her, you have conifer forests that are part of the native ecosystem and um, you know, you get a lot of leaf litter, um, a lot of pine pine needles that'll build up near homes or on gutters. So people will actually, um, you know, in order to have the principal space, you want to make sure a lot of that litter is cleared around your home. We generally say, um, you need to have at least 30 feet of spacing, [00:20:00] the first 30 feet around your home. Basically, you want to do more intensive, um, management of your landscape to prevent fires from spreading. Right, right to the edge of your home and just keep going out from there. But you really start close to the home. What can you focus on your home structure itself to prevent embers from flying? And Speaker 1:what did you see? Were a lot of people practicing this? Speaker 2:Yeah, it was, it was spotty and it depended on the communities. Um, you know, you could go to some communities and you would see that, [00:20:30] you know, almost everyone had leaf litter on their improves, which is a major threat because the roof is actually going to be your most vulnerable part of your home during a fire. And I think that then ties into the culture of it. So if you're in a community that has a culture of that, you don't see other people taking steps and measures to prevent wildfires from, um, you know, um, burning your home, um, it kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So that's then something [00:21:00] that we take into mind when, where you work with communities. We're trying to build culture shifts rather than just programs or, um, you know, small projects in there. We really are trying to shift communities to take proactive action versus reactive comprehensive projects, not incomplete projects. Speaker 2:Um, and really just kind of get to this point where fire is always on the mind, whether that's in Tahoe, whether that's in Hawaii, we're living with fire in these wildland urban interfaces, [00:21:30] but it's not like a fear based thing. It's more of like, right. Risk Management, right? You have to have a little fear because you know, it is, it is a fear, you know, to have your home burn. No one wants to see their home burn, no one wants to see their community burn your neighborhood, your businesses. Right. So wildfire is unique in that sense. Um, in that it's very apolitical. Everyone can agree on, you know, not wanting to see your community burn down. And it really helps create this lead in into other projects that the community wants to do. So we've [00:22:00] seen communities who take, you know, they'll take the wildfire actions that they need to take and they start having community bonding and then they actually start working on other projects that they might not necessarily have been able to do before because there might've been political challenges or social challenges within the group. Speaker 1:You also grew up in La and you were educated in Berkeley, if not, you're kind of as a city boy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and you're going and working with largely rural communities [00:22:30] or more on the rural edge, um, in America as we've seen, there's a rural urban divide. Um, how has that been for one educating you on, um, that divide and also how have you tried to bridge that? Hmm. Okay. Speaker 2:It's a very good question. I haven't done a lot of reflection in that, so this'll give me a chance to kind of explore my mind and, and my experiences, but has definitely been an exciting challenge for me to, [00:23:00] um, you know, kind of deconstruct my urban, my urban mind really, and start thinking about how rural landscapes work and how people work with the landscape and in various ways to achieve, you know, multiple goals in general. I mean, I always grew up around nature. I always, um, you know, my parents always tried to expose me to the natural world, but I never thought it would actually be a career of mine. And I never thought that I would actually be living in a tiny town, you know, of a couple of thousand people [00:23:30] versus a few million people. Um, so that has been a challenge in itself, but I really have noticed that I thrive more in those environments and I really enjoy, um, human interactions. Speaker 2:I really enjoy working with people. Living in rural areas really gives you that chance to develop relationships that you might not normally have in certain urban settings where it might be a little more isolated. Even though there's more people. It's kind of that weird paradox in the rural areas. You see [00:24:00] pretty much everyone right every day, whether they're at the store or just an informal or informal settings. But, um, you have to really be careful about your interactions to you. Um, you have to be a little more careful about what you say or what you align with. Um, still be true to yourself, but also understand that your actions will have impacts on how other people react to it or perceive certain issues. So again, with wildfire, you know, we're always being careful about how we introduce, [00:24:30] um, wildfire outreach to communities because what we might say to one community about not using this material might actually be a problem for communities that can't afford to use certain materials to build their homes. Speaker 2:Um, so it's, it's been a great challenge and I really have appreciated working with Hawaii wildfire management organization to, to learn how I can better interact in, in that rural landscape. And I think you talked about this a little bit, but [00:25:00] it's also like solving the problem of scientists or policymakers, what not coming from the urban areas and saying, here's what you need to do. But it sounds like you're maybe trying to have something more collaborative where both sides can learn from one another. Right? That is a huge part of our organization. Um, we don't do any project unless we have buy-in from not just agencies, not just from the academic side. There needs to be buying on [00:25:30] the community side too. And we've built in a process within our organization to actually incorporate all of that within our governing bodies. So we actually have a technical advisory panel that will, um, that are, you know, fire chiefs and ranchers and all these experts all across the state who can help guide our vision towards certain projects and help kind of give, um, agency basically to a lot of our, um, the project ideas. Speaker 2:But it also needs to have support from [00:26:00] community members, from um, landowners down on the, on the ground level. Um, and when we have that buy in from all sides, we have really seen our projects take off because when you have that, that sort of buying, you have projects that are effective, efficient, they are meaningful, grounded. And so that's where the word collaboration really is an important part of our organization. And we've really tried to own that word. You can't, you can't succeed in this modern, [00:26:30] ingrained world if you don't have collaboration on all parts. And we hope that's a message that carries out to not just everyone else in the wildfire world, but really the rest of the world. And we need more to solve our, our, um, wicked problems. Speaker 1:Hmm. Have talked a little bit about like receiving federal funding. Um, and I don't know how much your organization sort of relies on that. And is the funding for fire prevention and management, um, [00:27:00] a political or do you expect anything to change with a, um, new administration Speaker 2:in general? Again, wildfire is a little more of an a political issue. You get, um, you know, even in the u s you'll get a lot of bills that get signed with both parties supporting it. Um, when we have political change or new political atmospheres, of course there's always concern. Um, no matter what side, um, takes power. You, you don't know wildfires [00:27:30] not always up first thing that you hear during a campaign. Right? Or we didn't hear it at all during the election season. So, um, you know, we don't know what'll happen, but climate change or climate change, which is actually an important part of the equation for us to and our widely, um, so that's a, that's a concern. Certainly if climate change is not being addressed, um, in the new administration, um, that might close the door for a lot of other funding options. Um, you know, climate change has big impacts on the Hawaiian islands. Speaker 2:You can't ignore it. It's happening [00:28:00] all around. Um, whether you believe it's human caused or not, it's happening on the Hawaiian islands. And so we really need to start addressing it because it has major impacts on our, our wildfire behavior that we've been seeing. We're getting more in longer drought periods, heavier, you know, bigger storms. We've had record, um, storms hit our islands the past few years, which means more rainfall, more growth. And then you have these long drought areas, child periods that um, basically exponentially create a bigger [00:28:30] wildfire threat. So if the funding isn't matching that, then we're going to have some real serious issues. Speaker 1:Yeah. And I think I saw on the news today a, there was a fire in Oahu. Speaker 2:Yeah, correct. There was one western Walker and actually have some friends that live in the valley that was burning this last night and this morning. And um, it was a harrowing experience for them. Um, cause especially interesting because we just did outreach at the, the school [inaudible] um, academy that's um, right in that valley where the fire [00:29:00] was, um, was burning. And they actually closed the school today because the smoke was this right turn tense for the kids to be around. And so one of my friends, um, Joe actually gave me a call and asked, you know, what do I do? What do I do during, you know, um, when, when this is happening, what am I supposed to do around the home, um, to start preparing if I need to evacuate. That's the kind of mindset where you want to see, um, from people before the fire, before the fire happens, right. Not when the fire is actually happening. Speaker 1:[00:29:30] So, um, do you have a website or any, any way people can reach you if they have any additional questions or interests? Speaker 2:Yes, so we do have a website. It's Hawaii wildfire.org and it's all spelled out who I, wildfire.org and um, we have an email address that you can reach us at two, it's Admin administrations or ADM, I n@hawaiiwildfire.org and you can connect with us. Doesn't matter if you don't live in Hawaii, if you're just interested in the work we do or you want to contribute [00:30:00] somehow. We're also a nonprofit so we always are welcome to donations to help with our work, to protect our communities, lands in our waters. It's also a great tool for people in Hawaii who are looking for resources. We have a whole plethora of resources out there to help you, um, take action around your own home with your own family and also with the rest of your community. Well, Pablo, thank you so much for coming in and telling us about wildfire management. Thank you. It's so good to be back in [00:30:30] Berkeley. Hello. Huh? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Green Meadows Beef is an unique family business providing grass feed beef direct to the consumer. This is the story how the Carey family have built their business of providing raw materials to the end user and the way they have used social media to take it to market     Today’s guest is Nick Carey, Director and General Manager of Green Meadows Beef based in Taranaki.  Green Meadows Beef is a unique family business who have built their business primarily using online and social media platforms.  The business has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years.  Craig and Nick talk about what started as an offbeat idea that has become big business for his family.   In 2012, his family decided they wanted to add value to their products.  This propelled them to launch a paddock to plate system.  This involved shipping products from their farm through their own processing and distribution channels.  Their direct-to-market through online sales has formed a big growth part of their business.   Nick’s father, suggested for them to try and market their beef product directly to the consumer.  They sat together as a family and formed a new way to get their products to the market, and soon, they recognized the opportunity of selling online. This propelled them to launch a paddock to plate system.  This involved shipping products from their farm through their own processing and distribution channels.  Their direct-to-market through online sales has formed a big growth part of their business.   Nick started his career as a commercial lawyer in Wellington and New Plymouth His role in this new family business was in the development, branding, and logistics.  Soon enough this was taking most of his time and he eventually decided he needed to quit his job as a lawyer.    That was a leap of faith for Nick, who has had to adjust to being an entrepreneur.  There were four key problems Green Meadows Beef was solving for the consumer.  These were (1) Time saving (2) Ease of purchase (3) Quality assurance, (4) Provenance.   Nick and Craig also talk about how wildly successful My Food Bag has become.  It is a website that allows it’s customers to order a food bag for a varied number of people.  It is also customized for them in terms of the number of people and their diet.  My Food Bag has revolutionized the industry.  Countdown eventually came up with a similar concept of online selling.  There was a big shift in the market of people being more open to purchasing food products online.  That assured Green Meadows Beef of its market.    In terms of marketing research, they were lucky that Green Meadows Beef was nimble enough to adapt their offering as well.  This included having to tweak their operations on the way.  They started out selling bulk-frozen packs and delivering them through chilled or frozen trucks.  However, it has now evolved to a point where they can customize their own products and deliver them the next day, chilled, through a courier.   Nick’s journey has not been without challenges.  One day, his company’s freight company informed him that they were no longer going to deliver Nick’s frozen meat packs.  As a result, he was forced to change his business model, which led to better results because they are now selling fresh produce instead of frozen produce.   Another challenge Nick has had to face was the price of raw materials.  Over the last three to four years, the price of raw materials has almost doubled.  At the same time. One of the things that has raised the price of the raw product is the price that it can otherwise be sold elsewhere.  Export of demand has been high.   They now run their farm as a separate business from their meat processing.  Each company has different governance, advisers, and processes.  Ensuring that the two businesses were independent of each other will help with succession planning and will force each one to be profitable on its own.  .  However, with the easing off of demand in the United States, the farm gate prices have been affected.    Nick learned to focus on the role of governance and the value of the right independent advice.  Another crucial area that Nick has focused on is being able to get accurate and timely business information, dealing with changes in technology and how scalable that is, and finally, achieving a profitable core business before evolving into other paths.   Another thing that Nick has focused on is learning how to work with his people.  Getting the right staff onboard has been a good learning experience for him.  He makes sure his employees have clearly defined roles, responsibilities, and reporting lines so that he could focus on working on the business and growing it.  Nick has been able to retain his staff for 4 years now.  He hardly needed to do cold hires because he utilized the benefits of his networks.   As for online selling, Nick uses mostly social media such as Facebook and Twitter to connect with people and to build an audience.  They do mostly paid advertising now.  He initially did everything in-house but has started outsourcing it already using a marketing consultant who works remotely for them.   In terms of content, Nick suggests that you keep it personal, relevant, and fun to keep his customers engaged.  With competition sprouting up more, there is a need to ensure that you get heard.  Nick’s friend once said that content is king but engagement is queen and she rules the house.  You need to be able to engage your followers.    Currently, they are on Pinterest and Instagram but it has been a challenge to maintain everything.  They use third party tools to help with the marketing side.  They also use cloud based systems that help cut costs and get things done.   What Nick enjoys about being in business is building something from the ground up, seeing the evolution of that business, and having a chance to enjoy its success.    As a lawyer, Nick had a structured and disciplined career.  At the moment, he says he has very little structure in his life now.  Working with creative types, for example, causes him to work longer hours and deadlines extended.  He deals with it by communicating well with his people.  He says that if you spend a good portion of your day through communicating, it makes the day go so much better. This goes back to having structures in place so the rest of the team can function harmoniously while you’re communication with them.    Nick’s challenge working with his family is ensuring that there is regular communication in terms of what’s happening in the business as well as asking for feedback.  He suggests that there has to be a clear distinction of business and family time.  It is important that everyone gets their chance to have a say but at the end of it, they are able to sit down and have dinner together.   In terms of having external professionals and mentors for his business, Nick says that one of the critical things is finding the right independent advice.  His solution has been to persevere until you find exactly what you need at a particular time.  As your business continues to change, so does the levels of advise.  Nick has found that having an independent director has helped him fill the skills gap.  Engaging the services of experts can be beneficial to his business as well.    Nick does not dwell on the past.  His company has a year end review where they identify what worked and what didn’t so that in the future, they can learn from these experiences. Nick says that in hindsight, he would have focused on margin analysis in his business and having a better handle on his cash flow and budget.  This has become one of their strengths and has allowed them to diversify the business for a more consistent cash inflow.   Being content in terms of business and the industry that you’re in is a mistake that business owners make.  As an example, the evolution of online selling has had an effect on traditional purchasing.  Nick suggests that you need to stay on top of things and not rest on your laurels because you don’t know what’s around the corner.   Strengthen your core business and ensure that it is profitable and sustainable before you venture out into other business opportunities.  At the moment, there is a need to develop relationships with consumers because people want to know where there food comes from, how it’s produced, and what’s going on.    Visit www.GreenMeadowsBeef.co.nz for more information.   TRANSCRIPT NICK CAREY    Craig: Hi guys!  Craig here from The Project Guys. Today in our podcast, really happy to introduce Nick Carey.  Nick is a Director and General Manager of Green Meadows Beef based here in Taranaki.  Green Meadows Beef is a unique family business who built the business primarily using online and social media platforms.  They specialise in suppling New Zealand consumers’ grass fed premium beef, where you online, and delivered to your door in twenty four hours.  And their business has experienced tremendous growth over the last five years.  What started as an offbeat idea and working from home office is now having their own dedicated butchery and retail premises and offices.  So, welcome Nick.   Nick: Thanks Craig.  Thanks for giving me the opportunity to tell a little bit about our story.    Craig: No drama at all! . Tell us a little bit about your background and why you decided to go into business.   Nick: Well, my background was as a commercial lawyer for a few years both in Wellington and New Plymouth.  We as a family, I guess, back in 2012, decided that we wanted to add value to the products we were producing which was mainly meat or beef and as a way to, I guess, cement the family farm and those plans through a formal succession plan, we decided to launch an integrated pallet to plate business which is shipping products from our farm through our own channels and processing channels, as Craig mentioned, direct consumers New Zealand wide through the different channels we utilise it at supermarkets, restaurants, and caterers and of course, direct-to-market through online sales, which is our biggest growth part of the business.   Craig: So, you’ve mentioned that you were a lawyer and then from a lawyer to an entrepreneur, it’s not a traditional path, was it your idea to do businesses with family?  How did it all sort of evolve?   Nick: Yeah.  Evolve is probably the right thing to say.  It was my father’s idea to try and market the products.  Obviously, we soon recognised online was a much easier path than let’s say the traditional paths of standing at farmer’s markets or carport sales or whatever it may be where other people are maybe trying to sell similar products.  So it’s at that time, all of us, I’ve got two siblings.   We all became involved to help form a plan to get the products to market and I helped here on the side with development and branding and things and arranging all of that and then once we launched the business, it became pretty evident that I wouldn’t be able to continue in my day job and helping out with the business.  So it was about, I guess, 3 months in that I gave up…   Craig: Oh, that quick! Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: Yeah.  Yeah.…full-time paid employment to jump into the business.   Craig: To be poor for a couple of years.    Nick: Yes!  Yes!    Craig: [laughs]   Nick: Forever.    Craig: Forever.  [laughs] Yes!  Yes!  So, when you started, obviously, it was just quite a bit different and there’s a new concept.  Get away from the farmer’s markets or selling to a wholesaler, direct….did you guys do any market research and that actually work out where you had a legitimate market and business…   Nick: Uhm…   Craig: And what are the problems you’re solving which are and I suppose were time saving and ease for the purchaser, wasn’t it?   Nick: That and also quality and provenance.  So those are I guess the 4 key messages or key problems we’re solving for the consumer.   Craig: Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: In New Zealand, at that time, there was a limited range of producers doing what we were doing.  Certainly that landscape has changed now and more and more are coming on board to be…whether it’s in meat or other ___ farm products or whatever.  The launch of things like MyFoodBag and you know and the whole…   Craig: Which is wildly successful.   Nick: Exactly.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And a great example of success in this market.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So I guess in…when the business was in its infancy, there was only a couple of competitors in New Zealand.  I don’t even think Countdown had really launched their…   Craig: Right.   Nick: Online sales at that time so obviously, we’ve noticed a big shift in the market and people being far more open to purchasing food products online.  So, with our research, it was really based on looking at producers in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, seeing what they were doing, what offerings they had.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And obviously, because we…we were selling online, just online only at the start, it did allow us some chance to scale as time went on so there was no pressure of having products ready to go with no markets.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So I guess, we…we are currently on to building website number three.   Craig: Right.   Nick: So there has been multiple chances to refine the offering based on our own learnings…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: Rather than…than doing too much…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: market research at the beginning, I guess, which  potentially a pitfall…   Craig: Yeah.  But…   Nick: that were fallen into but we’ve been lucky that we’ve been nimble enough to be able to adapt that offering to…   Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah…   Nick: to see that…what does that mean?   Craig: Yeah.  Oh, it’s a case sometimes of getting that ___ to market and then work out having to… and having to tweak everything on the way, isn’t it…   Nick: Exactly.  We’ve started out in our industry selling bulk frozen packs and delivering it via the chilled or frozen trucks…   Craig: Yes.   Nick: all over the country where it could take anything from a week to two weeks.   Craig: Right.   Nick: To be delivered to the model that we have now and it’s evolving as you can customise and pick and choose your own products…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …and it’s delivered the next day, chilled via courier, so…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: You know, there’s different challenges that come at you and one of that for example was the freight company telling us, “No, we’re no longer gonna deliver your frozen meat packs.”  So…   Craig: Oh, is that right?   Nick: So your business if often forced to change…   Craig: Yes.   Nick: …which can obviously lead to better results…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: …because the consumer appreciates…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: fresh produce versus…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: frozen produce.    Craig: So there.  So tell us a bit more about the challenges and the learnings you had in those early years and maybe also the challenges you’re facing now and how that evolved?   Nick: Definitely.  I guess the critical challenge for us been the price of our raw materials.   Craig: Alright.   Nick: Just to put them in a little bit of context and background, we run the farm as a totally separate business from the meat processing…   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: Different governance, different advisers, everything and we thought that was a critical distinction from a…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: …a governance point of view particularly in the family situation so that we had two separate business which were hopefully, hopefully independent of each other, both supporting…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: …themselves.  So…   Craig: Also that.  I guess it also helps with succession planning too.  Exit strategy is one [incomprehensible]…   Nick: Exactly.  And obviously that’s what we’re focusing…   Craig: Uhm…   Nick: The meat processing business now is taking on a life of its own with contract manufacturing…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …and things like that so…obviously anytime, I mentioned it at the start that the farm is very much part of the succession plan but if there were something that caused the farm to go, well, we’ve got another business…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: And vice versa, we could always onsell the meat processing side of things.   Craig: Uhm…uhm…uhm…   Nick: …and keep the farm…   Craig: That’s right.   Nick: But so…part of it is that the farm must obviously make a profit…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: So we have to purchase the animals that we’re using through the Green Meadows Business from the farm at the prevailing market rate…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: Over the last three to four years, that price of raw materials has almost doubled…   Craig: Oh sh….   Nick: Without a corresponding rise in meat prices at the consumer end…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: There’s still a certain barrier at the consumer end as to what a sausage or whatever may cost so I guess that’s been the critical challenge that we’ve face and we’ve had to really adapt and change our product offering.  So…   Craig: So what’s driven the price of the raw product up?  Is it the price on the farm to produce that product?   Nick: No, it’s the price that it can otherwise be sold elsewhere...   Craig: Oh, okay.   Nick: So, export demand, primarily out of the U_S where ground beef, easier ground beef is exported…   Craig: Okay…   Nick: …to the U_S and it’s been in quite high demand in particularly out of China as well…   Craig: Right.   Nick: So, depending on what’s happening in those markets, I’m assuming we’re seeing an easing off in the United States at the moment on demand which, of course, is then having a…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: …a correlation back to farm gate prices here.   Craig: Cool…   Nick: So I guess with that challenge, we learned quite a lot and kind of like it’s focused a lot on what’s happened in the business so there are a couple of points off the top of my head…   Craig: Yes…Yeah…   Nick: I guess the role of governance and the value of the right independent advice has been a critical things that we’ve taken from it, I guess the information we’re pulling out of the business in terms or accurate and timely…   Craig: Yup…   Nick: …business information, technology and how scalable that is, what machines can really make our day better…   Craig: Right.   Nick: Versus culling out some of those manual processes, cause obviously, bearing in mind making food can sometimes be a relatively manual process…   Craig: Yup!  Yeah…   Nick: And then it all comes back to achieving a profitable core business before evolving into other paths.  So, we’ve really focused over the last year or two on what is our core business, how to make it profitable before launching into some other opportunities as well.    Craig: So how do you take yourself out of the business to work on the business around those things you just…   Nick: Yeah, well, as the businesses continue to grow, we’ve been able to put staff into roles that I was otherwise doing, so for example, we’ve just taken on an operations manager who is handling most of the day-to-day production and supply side of the business whereas I’m just handling the demand side and obviously everything else.  So the finances and working on the business so, I guess that’s been a good learning is getting the right staff on board, making sure that they have clearly defined roles and responsibilities and reporting lines so that that then frees you up to do as you say, “working on the business,” and growing it.  So we have that clearly…clear definition of okay, operations manager was gonna focus on the supply side and production, I was gonna handle the demand, so that’s where my focus is now…is on the demand side and when you’ve got the right people and the right positions, everything is fine and it works well.    Craig: So, you’ve gotta run on a fierce podcast business and about staffing.  How’d you go and find the right staffing?  How’d you know?  Do you know?  [laughs]   Nick: I guess, that’s a good question, “Do you know?”   Craig: Cause that’s critical, isn’t it?   Nick: It is and we are fortunate that in nearly 4 years, we’ve retained all our staff which I guess, obviously speaks of our environment also.  The direction that we’re pushing the company.  It…it’s…I guess it comes down to clear jobs…just clear job descriptions when you’re going so you know exactly who you’re looking for so when you find them, you know, they tick all the boxes and utilising the benefit of networks because all of our staff have been knowing to….   Craig: Someone…someone…   Nick: Yeah.    Craig: Someone who knows somebody…Yeah…   Nick: Exactly, so now I’m doing that thing with cold hires but I can see that the next thing we’re already looking for our next staff member, which is scary…   Craig: Yeah…   Nick: But I can see that that will be a cold…a cold hire so I guess that will come down to getting clear…clear pre-employment checks and questions and also making sure they’re the right fit for the…   Craig: thing…   Nick: Exactly.   Craig: Cool.  Awesome.  So, you have used a lot of online tools and platforms that you’ve touched on before to build the business to where it is.  Tell us about the strategy and has that changed over the years and if so, how or….yeah…   Nick: Yeah…It’s a different __part obviously with online selling.  You wanna connect with customers in real time and I guess social media in particular is great for that.  We’ve primarily used Facebook and Twitter for the connecting with people and building an audience at the beginning.  I guess how that’s changed is we’ve now moved from just connecting with customers and building that brand and that relationship through the more paid advertising now.  So we do a lot of online marketing in terms of ECO and pre marketing and also direct marketing through the likes of Facebook.  So, I guess it’s building a network and a platform, which would then turn into an opportunity to market, so…   Craig: Did you do all that in-house, or do you outsource it?   Nick: We did start all that in-house but now I’ve outsourced it.  We have a marketing consultant who works remotely for us, who handles all that ECO and ECM marketing.   Craig: And what about all your Facebook engagement?  Cause I know when you first start your business, you’re massive on engaging with your audience, you do a lot of that at the start.  Is that still done in-house?  Or…   Nick: It’s still done in-house and obviously that’s been one of the challenges I found is that I handle that role as the businesses grow, keep it…personal, and keep it relevant and keep it fun which is how we engage with our customers and perhaps that’s something I could be doing better.    Craig: [incomprehensible]   Nick: I think as we came and set the so high with using that as a focus, it’s kind of…you can easily fall by the way, so…   Craig: That’s so much of a big challenge, isn’t it because that’s how you built the brand and showing you some of the loyalty stats.   Nick: And I’m definitely seeing that with other influences that I follow that they came out with a good solid two years of social media engagement and then now it’s sort of dropped back…   Craig: Yes…   Nick: And I don’t know whether that’s just the maturing of the market and there are a lot of these platforms now and monetising, they’re successors, so it now makes it difficult to instigate…seen whereas in the beginning it was relatively easy but I think you raise a good point about engagement because a lot of the focus on social media a few years ago was all about content and posting the right sort of content but now, I know a person who writes and used to podcast a lot of Facebook.  She said that content is king but engagement is queen and she rules the house.   Craig: Yes…   Nick: And it’s sort of something that’s always always stuck with me because you can have great content but if you’re not getting anything back from the people you’re publishing it to, what’s the point?   Craig: Yeah, you could have 100,000 followers but if you’re not engaging them, what’s the point?   Nick: Yes.  So I think, you know, that’s a key thing to keep it at the back of your mind because it’s not a question of numbers because it’s like you said, it’s how they’re engaging.    Craig: You said when you sell your products you use Facebook and Twitter, yet have you tried the other platforms at all?   Nick: We do have a little bit on Pinterest, obviously we’re in a food business and Instagram, but it’s again, it’s the challenge of maintaining everything.  We do use a lot of third party tools to push the marketing side of things which we find works well and we obviously into the day to day side of things prefer to use online tools for managing the business, whether it be accounting software, our website is all run on a third party CMS which is obviously cloud based and what else do we use in the cloud?  Design tools and everything like that that’s all accessible now which really help (a) cut costs and (b) get things done.   Craig: So what do you enjoy most about being in business?  What strokes your ties?   Nick: Tough question, but I guess it’s with building something from the ground up and seeing the evolution it’s having the chancing to leap at success.  There are days obviously that I don’t enjoy leading.    Craig: You wish you were a follower there mate? [laughs]   Nick: Yeah.  Exactly.  When you bring in HR and customer issues and things like that.  Obviously, you want to do a good job, whether it be your staff or your customers but I guess that’s the critical thing is having that chance and opportunity which I do feel fortunate for that you know, we’re in a position that I was able to leave my fulltime employment to follow something which I could see working and it…with just a few challenges and refinements.  We’re now well on a path to making a success.    Craig: Yeah.   Nick: So that’s pretty special and something that I hold dear and try not to abuse really but it is a bit of a privilege to do this so if I can keep looking at it like that, then it’ll keep me focused and also keep me grounded.   Craig: Grounded, which is what New Zealand ___ is all about.  Cool, you hear that?   Nick: Yeah, I guess we at the start to kinda pushed the business and I do believe in it is we did a lot of PR work which is obviously the opposite to the grounded because you’re having to put yourself out there and tell your story and that can be difficult at times especially when you get…things like TV involved, so yeah, I think that’s a good balance to have.    Craig: So, ____ what have you learned from you know, five or six years ago, when you left the safe little confines of a lawyer’s office…   Nick: To me, just by one and a half years…whatever it was…   Craig: You were very structured and disciplined to doing this.  What have you learned as a leader?  Here, professionally and personally?   Nick: Yeah, I guess a couple of things, you do mean structure, I have very little structure in my life now.    Craig: [laughs]   Nick: Just by trying to plan things, you know, obviously things never really go to plan.  So that’s been difficult in terms of deadlines and things like that as I’m understanding how things work in the real world versus a lawyer’s world where 5 o’clock Friday was your excellent deadline and you wouldn’t dare go past 5 o’clock Friday whereas when you start involving perhaps creative types into the mix and deadlines can often extend.    Craig: Yes.   Nick: So that’s been one challenge for me personally and also from a managing or leadership type of thing.  Communication and understanding the importance of communication internally and externally and you can never really over communicate particularly with staff and things of concerns.    Craig: Yeah.   Nick: I guess that’s another that I’ve really learned is you spend a good portion of your day through communicating and it makes the day go so much better.   Craig: Yes.   Nick: But then it comes back to what I mentioned earlier about having the structures in place so that the rest of the team can function harmoniously while you’re communicating with them…the team…   Craig: Yeah.  And what about the family dynamic, isn’t that communications is key?  Sometimes, the family businesses, they can either go really well which is good or goes real bad because one of the first rules of business is don’t ever do business with family members, isn’t it?   Nick: It is.    Craig: Yes, back to the question.  Sorry about the rain everybody!  So I asked Nick about the dynamic of working with some family members.  One of the first rules of business is don’t go into business with family.  So I guess it has worked here.  From a leadership point of view, the communications point of view, have you managed that?   Nick: Yeah, it has been both a benefit and a challenge to go into business with family.  On a daily basis, I work with both of my peer, so on a day to day to basis, I mean, both of my brothers work externally from the business so two problems obviously, or challenges working with family day in day out but also having family interested in the business but not having the experience or benefit of seeing what’s happening day to day so we have pretty regular communications between in terms of what’s happening in the business, asking for feedback that they’re both very helpful and useful, these are my brothers who don’t work in the business.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: But balancing that you also have a clear distinction of what’s business time and what’s family time because there’s always that tendency to make family time always business time and I think that’s critical particularly in terms of my own domestic situation as well, I’ve got a partner who doesn’t work and the person that’s end to end in terms of say my parents with their grandchildren and things like that.  It’s still got to operate in a normal situation and we are very open with each other so there’s never any issues in terms of overstepping lines or boundaries.   Craig: Yeah.   Nick: And I think it’s really important that everyone gets their chance to have a say but at the end of it, we still sit down for dinner.   Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Cool.  Cool.  So you’ve always had external professionals and mentors for your business and I believe now you’ve got a Board of Directors and an independent director tell us about what made you decide that you needed this and the benefits of using these strategies and advise that is out there around using mentors or Board of Directors, etc.    Nick: I guess one of the critical thing is finding the right advice, independent advice and it can be a struggle at times, so I guess what I sort of found is keep persevering until you find exactly what you need at that particular time and your levels of advice and who can advise you changes as the business continues to change…and…   Craig: Evolves.  As the business evolves…   Nick: Exactly, so I think the best thing you can do is get out there and take advice as step one but then if you’re not getting the right sort of advice is going out and looking for some different advice.   Craig: Yeah.  Yeah.   Nick: So, we’ve had, as you mentioned, a range from formal strategic planning with our accountants through the business mentors through to now an independent director who I work with closely on a daily basis and they’ve all had their uses and purpose but having an independent voice daily looks like some of the skill gaps that we have or that I have as well is really important and I guess that’s what I see the benefit…the main benefit of the independent board is to plug the skill gaps and I mean we are looking now at maybe bringing another independent onto the board who has some different skill set that none of us have secure around dealing with marketing to the end consumer…   Craig: Right.   Nick: And events cg and things like that so it’s…   Craig: So it’s skill gaps or experience gaps?   Nick: I guess both are incredibly relevant because you get the skills from experience so I think yeah.  I think both are intertwined.   Craig: And you said before that when you first started out your sort of a range of advisers, I mean, it’s the right advice.  When you start out were you ever nervous and scared about what’s going on.  So how do you know if you get some right advice?  If you’re speaking to for example an accountant and they say you should be doing this strategy, how do you know, is that the gut instinct or it is…how do you know if it’s the right one or the wrong one?   Nick: Yeah, it’s a good question because I guess when you go into business you’re always confident and pigheaded and you don’t really wanna take advice.   Craig: No.   Nick: And then to sit over the table with someone and, no offence when you’re listening to maybe to sit over the table with someone, no offence to any listeners who may be in the accounting profession or something.   Craig: Someone’s profession…   Nick: Who’s telling you you’re doing this wrong, you’re doing that wrong.  You know, it can be difficult so I think it’s not a case of knowing or choosing what that right advice is at the start but getting a lot of advice and really going out there and getting as much in as you can and taking bits and pieces from different sources to kind of form that plan because you and only you, I guess will know exactly how the business is going internally or what your dreams and goals and things are but it does help to get as much advice from them.   Craig: So that could be what we’ve talked about accountant, but there could be other business owners that could be lawyers, other professionals, and that’s where networking comes in, isn’t it?  You realize that when you network, you understand that same…your peers to having the same issues you have even if they might be in a different industry.   Nick: Exactly and as many people you can speak to as possible.  You know, whether it’s just a friendly ear or someone that you admire, in your industry or a different industry.  It can be really beneficial to have that engagement.    Craig: Awesome, so the benefit of hindsight, we all do this.  What would you do differently?   Nick: Hindsight, oh yeah, it’s a great thing.   Craig: No, it’s not.  It’s a terrible thing!   Nick: I guess that’s one thing our plan is not to dwell too much on the past.  We do a year review the end of each year and pick out the points of what went good and bad and then put it together and then don’t really dwell on it too much because again, it’s what you’re looking into the future that really controls things.  So I guess with hindsight, what I would do it has been more of a focus on margin analysis in our business, so which products work well, where we can extract the most value and also a better handle on cash flow and budget so that financial side of the business from the get-go.  I spend a lot of focus now on cash flow and planning cash flow a couple of months in advance and…   Craig: So you turned into an accountant?   Nick: Yeah, well, I…   Craig: [laughs]   Nick: I think maybe I’m turning into an accountant but that was a chance to really tighten the skill gaps that I had.   Craig: Right.   Nick: In the financial management side of things and now that’s one of our strengths where a lot of similar sized businesses I see don’t have a handle on cash flow, which in my business, can actually be quite difficult with online selling because we don’t know when people are gonna bulk buy meat packs and what’s gonna happen which is why we’ve diversified the business from just straight online sales to other traditional sales so that we’ve got consistent cash flow coming in.   Craig: A little bit of advice to people.  Look after your cash flow and mind your  budget, sounds like you’re good at. A couple of hours a week takes to analyse what else has happened that week which is critical.    Nick: I guess that’s one thing that having an independent director allows me to do because we have a phone call every Friday afternoon, which…   Craig: Hi guys, so from your experiences, what are some of the mistakes that you see business owners are making.  So, we talked a little bit about cash flow.  Anything else that…   Nick: Yeah.  I guess, something a little different and that I can see out there I see is that they are content both in terms of their businesses and their industries and not pushing their boundaries and or doing the… trying alternative ways to do things and obviously in the retail side of things.  I guess something else I am saying is people being content in terms of their…inside their businesses and in terms of marketing their businesses as well so obviously, the example is that the evolution of online selling and the effect it has on traditional purchasing, and brick and mortar stores and it kinda seems like…to some of them that it’s come out of nowhere whereas the evolution of online selling has been happening in time over the last ten years or so.  So I think, I see that both as established businesses and the traditional business being content can often come back to hurt them later on.  So, i mean, that’s something else we noticed and why we’re doing things differently as well.   Craig: So, the moral of the story is don’t be scared of pushing the boundaries and thinking outside the square box, just give it a go.   Nick: And also staying on top of things and not just resting on your laurels because you don’t really know what’s around the corner.   Craig: Don’t be scared of what’s around the corner.    Nick: Yeah.  That’s just saying a little bit no matter how established you are.   Craig: So is that the sort of advice you’d give to…if you were to mentor for a better general word, either both established or a startup…what other things would you…   Nick: Yeah, it’s different keeping on top of thinss, looking overseas, seeing what’s happening whether you’re selling shoes or cats, or whatever.  It’s…there’s a lot to…we’re fortunate in this part of the world that we’re a little behind as well.   Craig: Yes, yes…I was gonna ask that.   Nick: So, it’s kind of a good thing I think for us because we can have a look and see what’s happening overseas.   Craig: You think sometimes, people fall into the trap of going overseas either to Europe or America, seeing something, trying to do it New Zealand but they’re too soon   Nick: And obviously given our market size as well as the other key issue here, and also how spread out the market is.  It’s a long way from the top of the North Island to Steward Island.  Yes, I know, I definitely think that’s true and that’s where the difficulty, I guess comes in with what I just see is…do you become an adopter or do you follow…   Craig: Become second tier.   Nick: Yeah and there’s lot of risk, in obviously going out and being an early adopter and it falling in your face which…   Craig: But then fortune favours the brave and…   Nick: But again coming back to what I mentioned earlier on in the podcast is that’s where you’ve got a profitable and sustainable core being you’ve got those opportunities to go out and expand and you’ve still got that core business to I say loosely, to fall back on but you know…   Craig: Yeah.  To pay the bills…   Nick: Yeah.  Yeah.   Craig: Yeah.  Cool.  Awesome.  And so where do you see your industry going in the next five to ten years?   Nick: Yeah, well in the markets, the direct food market, there’s differently more choice for quality and more relationships with…between consumers and producers so I definitely see that as an important step in what we’re trying to stay ahead of because people increasingly do want to know where their food comes from and how it’s produced and what’s going on so I think it’s only gonna get more and we’re gonna see return as one kind of crystal ball return to a lot traditional ways of doing things because the end user or consumer’s putting a price on all those so in our case, it’s manufactured products and more real products and people are prepared to pay more even though it costs more to produce but that’s where I see it headed.   Craig: Alright.  Cool.  Awesome!   Nick: And you’ll be more disrupters, I’ve already talked about MyFoodBank and seeing markets online so we find those disrupters coming into the market so I guess, listening to my own advice that’s where I need to stay ahead of and say exactly what’s happening in the market and what trends are coming up.   Craig: Awesome.  Awesome.  Hey Nick, we’ll wrap it up.  Thanks very much for your time.  .  How do we find you?   Nick: Yeah so we are an online business.  Our website, so you can check out our products at greenmeadowsbeef.co.nz and find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram with our page will get you there.   Craig: Awesome!  Right.  Thank Nick!  Good stuff!   Nick: Sure!    

Dan Faggella sent me an email last month that essentially said, "Hey Nick, I'm a fan of the show. I have some expertise in email marketing, and I know many of your listeners are working to build their online presence and their email lists. Would it make sense to do an episode on some list building and email best practices?" And then he added the kicker: "I'm making $50k/mo selling martial arts training videos right now, and I have other businesses as well..." OK, I'm listening!