Podcasts about ian you

Anne is joined by special guest, Ian Russell, a multi-award-winning voice actor. They discuss his career in the voice over industry, including his journey to success. They talk about the importance of social media and authenticity in character creation. He advises aspiring voiceover actors to be careful not to violate non-disclosure agreements and to use social media to support their profiles. Anne and Ian also discuss the importance of respecting specified ethnicities and the limitations of casting notices. They highlight that authenticity and believability are essential in video game casting, and that having an acting background is a serious advantage. Tune in to hear the full conversation.    Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.   Anne: All right. Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am so excited to bring very special guest Ian Russell to the podcast. Hey Ian. Yay.   Ian: Hey, Anne.   Anne: welcome. For those of you BOSSes out there, we'll tell you a little bit about Ian, and then he's gonna continue on telling us about his journey, he is a, a multi-award winning, seasoned voice actor working in commercial, corporate, video games, audiobooks. His voice can be heard for companies including Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nestle, Heineken, Club Med, Phillips, and a bunch more. He was the recipient of the One Voice Male Voice of the Year 2020 award. And also in that year, he was also best character performance. Is that correct?   Ian: Animation, yeah.   Anne: And then continuing in 2021, he won Gaming Best Performance for One Voice Awards. And in 2022, the SOVAS Outstanding International Audio Description, Museums and Cultural Sites. Wow. That is fantastic. Ian, so honored to have you here on the show to talk about your journey and your wisdom. So , let's start.   Ian: Well, good luck with that.   Anne: Well, let's start telling people about your journey. How did you get into voiceover, a little bit about yourself and how you got into voiceover.   Ian: It's a long and winding road, which is a Beatles reference, but the first ever voiceover I ever, ever did was for a radio station in Liverpool. And it was a friend of mine worked at the radio station, and they had a pre-recorded interview for Paul McCartney when he bought and set up the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts in Liverpool. It was his old school. And rather than having a boring interview where it was just Paul McCartney and some radio guy , he asked me. I was, we were in a local acting thing together, and he asked me to be the voice of Paul McCartney's teacher.   Anne: Wow.   Ian: When Paul McCartney was a kid. So we linked the questions, you know, and it  was like, oh yes, that McCartney he was always playing around with a guitar. He'll never amount anything. So it was that kind of -- we made it funny. I didn't even know what voiceover was, but I did it anyway. And it was fun. I didn't get paid or anything. I was doing it for a mate, but I still have the magnetic cassette tape, shows how long ago it was.   Anne: Yep. There you go. .   Ian: And then 30 years go by, and I get married, and my wife's stumbling around for what she can buy me. And we, because you know --   Anne: What happened 30 years though? That was a long time.   Ian: Oh, sorry. I, I went off and got a real job. I was, I was working in sales and sales management in the northwest of England and in Belgium and Holland and in and around Oxford.   Anne: So International for sure. Yeah.   Ian: Yeah. That's a whole other story, which we could get into another time. But that would use up our 30 minutes, would be nothing left . So anyway, so my wife's like, oh, well what do I buy him for Christmas this year? And I had done a bit of sort of community theater stuff as a young man, just explained with the Paul McCartney thing. And so she found a one day introduction to voiceover.   Anne: Uh-huh.   Ian: In London. It's a place called the Show Reel. And she bought me that for Christmas 2012. It's 10 years almost to the day.   Anne: Wow. Yeah.   Ian: And then two years later, we've had the credit crunch and the bank -- I was working for a bank at the time and they were trying to offload people, and I had to reapply for my own job multiple times. And in the end I'm like, I volunteer as tribute . Let me go, you know, I'm done here. I'm older than all these young guys. I don't want to be rushing around half of the UK seeing multimillionaires coming home at night, barely seeing my kids, writing reports 'til midnight, and then doing the same rinse and repeat tomorrow. I'll have a heart attack and die. Let me go. And two years later, they eventually let me go. And so my wife's American and we said, well, what are we gonna do now? ? Well, let's sell everything and move to America. Be near my dad, says my wife. So that's what we did.   Anne: I love that. Let's do it.   Ian: And I said, well, what am I, what am I gonna do?   Anne: Let's sell everything and move.   Ian: I'll give that voiceover thing a go. And I went to the guy in London and I said, does anybody get hired for this? And he went, yeah. And I said, would anybody hire me? And he went, I don't see why not. And that was the ringing endorsement that I had to come off and start. So 2014 I started properly, I would say.   Anne: Wow. Wow. And so when you started, what was it that -- I assume you, you got coaching, you got a demo, and then you started working, and so you started working and were successful in which genres?   Ian: I think I'm a product of the internet age. You know, I live in the metaphorical middle of nowhere. And everything I do is via the internet, pretty much. So I started probably the way a lot of people start. I didn't know anybody and I didn't know anything. I had some experience, life experience that helps for sure, the sales and having done a bit of community theater and all that. But I knew no one and I knew nothing. So I started searching on the internet, and I paid money down to online casting and, and started throwing mud at the wall. And I think in that market you do a lot of explainers. You do a lot of corporate. You do a lot of e-learning, e-sort of things that, that sort of thing.   Anne: And of course in the States now, you know, that accent of yours doesn't hurt you. I had a very good friend when I started and she was hired all the time for e-learning. Because I think for us listening, and you gotta have some sort of interesting -- like an American accent is, we hear it all the time. But a British accent might be something that, oh, that makes it more interesting. And so she was high in demand for e-learning and, and those explainers and corporate things. And she was always so wonderfully like natural and conversational about it. And it was just a pleasure to listen to her all the time. And I remember thinking, gosh, I wanna aspire to be that relaxed and that friendly in my voiceovers. And so I can totally see where that just, it lends it. It's also a very large market. And so everybody kind of gets there, and it's a good, good place to start off. And I know a lot of students that I work with, they start off in corporate or e-learning.   Ian: Yeah. There's masses of it. And it's relatively easy to find.   Anne: Exactly.   Ian: You might not get the best rate, but it's relatively easy to find.   Anne: Now, you won these awards, but these awards were not for corporate or e-learning. It was for gaming and character performance. And so let's talk about, 'cause I know when people start out, they're very concerned about you know, what's my niche? Like, where do I start and how do I know what I'm good at? You evolved into becoming an award-winning voice talent in gaming and characters.   Ian: Yeah, I know.   Anne: So let's talk about that.   Ian: How does that happen?   Anne: Yeah. How does that happen?   Ian: I'm gonna say I got lucky, but we all know that that's hard work meets preparation and all of that. But in 2015, so a year after I'd started, I booked a role in a significant video game called Payday 2. And the role is utterly -- it's this South African mercenary. He speaks like that, he's Locke, his name is Locke. And I have been performing Locke for Starbury Studios for seven years now.   Anne: Oh wow.   Ian: And it was the performance of Locke that won me the video game award last year. And we're still making content. And at the end of this year, we have Payday 3 coming up.   Anne: Ooh. Get ready, BOSSes.   Ian: And so there's a lot of chatter around who's gonna be in Payday 3. You know what it's like with a lot of --   Anne: NDAs.   Ian: -- casting for voiceover. It's --   Anne: You can't tell --   Ian: -- NDAs -- Well, well, if I knew something, I'd be able to tell you, but voice over casting often happens right at the end. So nothing, I can't say anything. I don't know anything. So.   Anne: So seven years.   Ian: I'm like a mushroom.   Anne: Wow.   Ian: Yeah. So, so that was my first video game thing. And I think a lot of younger folk, they're growing up now with video games and animation and it's a very aspirational genre for people to get into. And I think I got one, and I'll keep the story very short, but Locke, the character, has his own Twitter account, which now has almost 12,000 followers.   Anne: Do you have input into that account?   Ian: It's mine.   Anne: Okay. Okay.   Ian: It's all mine.   Anne: Now, was that something that maybe was requested of you through an agent or the company or --   Ian: No.   Anne: -- you just created it? That's a very interesting marketing um   Ian: Well, it was suggested to me because I went on a charity stream as Locke for Payday, and the guys that were running it said, you might want to set up a separate account because you don't want your personal account flooded with teenage boys --   Anne: Yeah, that makes sense.   Ian: -- swearing at you. Frankly.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Ian: Asking you about Locke, you know, what's your favorite color, that kind of thing. So I set up a separate Twitter account for him then; that was 2017-ish. And that, that's kind of just grown from there. And I don't just use it for Locke. I use it for Locke. But I, all my video game stuff I promote on there because they're all video game players. So they're interested.   Anne: I love that I'm talking to you about this right now because I wanna know, is the content monitored at all by the game company or the people that hire you at all? Or if you were to say something that maybe wouldn't be appropriate for your character, I would imagine that that's kind of a line that you walk.   Ian: For sure, it is. I'm pretty sure there have been several occasions where I've written something, and I've had the wherewithal to go, no, don't do that. Don't say that. That would be silly . The only thing that Starbury said is, because they own the character, they own the IP of the character, that I can't monetize it for myself. I have run charity fundraisers and things like that, but if I'm gonna do anything out of the ordinary, I go through them and say, hey, I'm thinking about about this; what do you think? I don't think they've ever said, no.   Anne: That's something that's so interesting for those BOSSes out there that are thinking about getting into video games or character animation. I mean, there really becomes -- it can have a celebrity attached to it, and that becomes more than just voicing. Right? That is voicing. And then also it becomes a marketing effort. It becomes something that is outside of your voiceover persona that is of concern, I would think, for you to make sure that you're not gonna say the wrong thing or make sure you're not gonna do something that spoils any new things coming out or disturbs any NDAs.   Ian: Yeah. I just basically assume that everything I've ever done is under NDA until it's public.   Anne: That's very wise, very wise.   Ian: I really don't, you know. It's just, it's easier to do that than to go, oh, I've been cast, I can't...   Anne: I think no matter what we do, we should consider that, even doing a lot of corporate work and e-learning, it really all should be considered.   Ian: It is one of the challenges with video games, because whilst we get cast often towards the end of the process, it can be months before the game is actually shipped. And I have got the list, but I've got games coming out this year with my voice in them, and I am burning, burning up with desire to tell people because I am so excited about it. And I just can't. And it's just really, really one of the hard things, you know, that you have to bury that.   Anne: Yeah. Yeah. So you got hired for this one game, it became something --   Ian: Yes. So the thing about the Twitter was, so a little while after that I had auditioned for a role in a Warhammer game called Inquisitor Martyr for one of the -- there were only gonna be three player characters. It was one of the player characters. And I got shortlisted, and they asked me for a second audition and I did that. And then they came back and they said, okay, it's down to two people, so can you do a third audition? I'm like, I almost didn't want to know. You know, me or the other guy. And if I don't get it, I know the other guy got it. And I'm like, I was so close. But , what I did say was, look, you must make the right casting choice for your game. But please know that I have a Twitter account with 10,000 followers who are all game players. And I promote any game I'm in on that Twitter account. So I just want you to know that.   Anne: I like that.   Ian: Don't let that influence your casting decision in any way at all, but know that I've got it.   Anne: Hey, that 27 years in sales, I think it served you well. I think it served you well. That's fantastic. I love that.   Ian: So I booked that. I don't know that, that's why I would like to think it was just because of my awesome acting talent. But it taught me a lesson that you can use these things to help support your profile, particularly in a high profile thing like animation or like games. You see like the anime guys that are doing that; they're always at cons promoting themselves. And you know that the anime companies are loving that. Because that sells more anime. And the video games is the same. So.   Anne: Now would you say that your award also was something you were able to use as a marketing for more characters and more work?   Ian: I'm gonna put it the other way around. I can't draw a direct line to -- I won this award in August last year in video games, and then suddenly I get cast in a lot of games. What I think happens, this is what I think happens, a lot of casters in video games are younger people. I mean, there are older ones as well, but they're very tech savvy. And I think that you --they get their auditions in, and if you get shortlisted, and you may not know you've been shortlisted, but they're gonna create a shortlist, and I think they pop over onto Instagram or onto Twitter --   Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely.   Ian: Right?   Anne: And look at your profiles and --   Ian: They wanna, who's, who is this guy? Is he an umpti or whatever. And they see the awards and they see the interaction with a game community from my case. And they go, oh, he knows what he's doing. He's obviously done it before. You know, and you can say that til you're blue in the face in a pitch proposal, but nobody reads them, I don't think. But when they see it on Instagram or they see it on Twitter, it makes a difference.   Anne: Yeah. It's validation for them.   Ian: Yeah. It's that whole trust.   Anne: Right? That maybe they're picking somebody that has that little bit of trust. Yep. That you've got these experience.   Ian: Well, and you think how many -- as, as the game studios get bigger, how many multimillions of pounds they've got invested in a game. And it has to ship successfully, otherwise the company goes pop.   Anne: Absolutely.   Ian: That narrative story to a two or three talent generally telling the story is a big decision for them. So I do think they check. I have no evidence directly for it, but I absolutely think they check.   Anne: Especially I think as a lead character. Right? I mean, there's more responsibility than just the voicing of it, because like I said, there's a persona attached to it, that can be attached to it, and the potential for that character to be able to sell more game, new releases of games.   Ian: I kind of figure if I can help sell 10 or 20 or 30 copies of the game, I'm getting out someway towards paying my own fee.   Anne: Now -- right? Now, lemme ask you though, in terms of, let's say compensation for games, right? What are your thoughts about that? I mean, do voices for big games get paid better? There's really no royalties, residuals, like that kinda sucks.   Ian: No. It does. Yeah. If I was being paid union royalties for Payday 2, I'd be a wealthier man.   Anne: Yeah.   Ian: It's just the, that's the way it is, Anne. I don't have any control over it. So all I can do is negotiate the best fee I think I can for each individual one. But that's the other thing you've got, if you like AAA games at the top of the feeding frenzy, and they can afford to pay a great deal more. And at the bottom, you've got one guy with a 40-watt light bulb who's making a game, and he wants to get a voice in it, and he just doesn't have the budget. So you have to ask yourself then, is this a game that will further my profile? Do I want my -- you almost, you talk about the celebrity element of it. Do I want my name attached to this game?   Anne: Absolutely. Yeah.   Ian: And there are games I want attached. There are a lot of games out there that the content is marginal, should we say? Not safe for work is the phrase. . And there is no value to me as a talent in attaching my name to a game like that, because it would impact -- if I wanna be in a big AAA adventure game, I think it taints a little bit, my profile. So I, there are games that I will avoid and I will ask. There's one game I'm in and they have a safe for work version and they have a non-safe work version. And I said, uh, nothing to -- if you want this character in both versions, count me out. But they said, no, we can just write you into this one. So, they did that.   Anne: That's great. Look at that. That, you know, and that's interesting that you bring up these things that I never would've thought of, because obviously I'm not doing video games, but I love that you brought that up.   Ian: But you could, Anne.   Anne: Well, I could if I wanted to. I mean, you did it. So what made you, I'm gonna say, what made you audition for that first game? Did somebody suggest it to you? Did they say, oh, we're looking --   Ian: The Payday one? No, it was an open audition. It said South African mercenary.   Anne: And you said, oh, I can do that. Right?   Ian: Yeah, absolutely. I was so naive that I thought I could do everything.   Anne: So you said, I could do that.   Ian: Yeah, I can do that.   Anne: Okay. So I have to tell you my little story.   Ian: They cast me so great.   Anne: That's fantastic. I have to tell you my story. My story was a long time ago, like when I first started, I was on one of the pay-to-plays and they had a audition out, and they said it was for a phone system and it was for a British accent. And I thought, well, I can do that. I was naive , and I got it. And literally I worked for that company for 10 years. And it wasn't until like I actually spoke to somebody on the phone, because we had communicated, got jobs from them all the time onto this. And then it became not a cool thing to do because what accent am I doing? And it started to become that sort of a thing. Well, you're not a native. They didn't know. They said, oh my God, we thought you were native --   Ian: Oh, really?   Anne: -- British. And, and it was because I just, I didn't know any better, and I made the mistake. I didn't read that where it said they wanted native. And I said, oh, I can do that. I'll give it a shot. I'll throw my audition in. And I got it. And they employed me for a good 10 years before it was like, oh, now Anne, we just need your English. You know? Not, not your British. So, but it's so interesting that you kind of on a whim just did it. And I think that really speaks to having the confidence to kind of just put yourself out there, and even for things that you don't think you're good at, because they think when people get into this industry in the beginning, they're so concerned about, oh my God, I think I should do this, and I'm no good at character, or I'm no good at -- and I think that really, you don't really know until you try.   Ian: Well, let me share another quick story for you.   Anne: Sure.   Ian: So I auditioned for another game called Road Redemption, which is a motorcycle game. And you drive along the road and you have an iron stick and you're trying to hit other people off their motorbikes. And I auditioned with a sort of a Ray Wins, yeah. Come over, we all gonna hit you with a steel bat, you know, that sort of thing. And I thought, yeah, that'll work. And they decided that they liked my take on the character. So we got together on Skype . Who remembers Skype? And we are chatting, there's three of them, and there's me here. And they're like, what's your Australian accent like? Alright, where's that, right out of left field.   Anne: Where'd that come from?   Ian: Where'd that come from? And he said, because it's this sort of Mad Max kind of feel to the game. And they said, you know, what's your, and I said, very bad. I said, any Australian will immediately notice. You know, I can put another prawn on a barbie kind of thing. But everybody will, they will know, he's not from Australia anyway. So then we're on Skype and you hear tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And they've sent me a line on the, in the chat. Read that in your Australian accent, whatever it was. Hey, I'm gonna hit you in me iron bar, mate, you know, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Read that one in your Australian -- yeah, this shrimp's gonna really get you, you know, anyway. And at the end of it, they said, yeah, okay, we're gonna use you for the game. And I said, okay, do you want the Ray Winston thing or do you want this? Oh, we want the Australian thing. Okay. Well, I, like I said, they went, yeah, but Australia's such a small market for us. We're not worried about that.   Anne: We're not worried that people in Australia are gonna complain . Well, it's true.   Ian: Right. And Locke's the same thing with his South African. And where it led me to in my head was video games, even if they're sort of set in an earth-like environment, are fiction. And I think a lot of game makers now particularly, but certainly back then as well, the acting performance of the character outweighs --   Anne: Is more important.   Ian: -- the absolute accuracy of a given accent.   Anne: Very interesting. Especially now because now it's a casting thing. Are they casting a native UK or a native Australian? And I think that we are all in a spot, like are we going to audition for that? Ian: Well, with that rider of there are accent issues and there are ethnicity issues.   Anne: Yes. Absolutely.   Ian: You know, I absolutely would not put myself forward for a British SWANA or MENA or -- I can't say African American because that's American.   Anne: Yeah, no, I get, I get that.   Ian: British Black, I think.   Anne: I think if they're, if they're specifying -- yes. If they're specifying ethnicity, then I think, yeah, absolutely. It's something that we respect.   Ian: PGM, person of global majority.   Anne: Yep. Absolutely.   Ian: That's, that, that works well for me. So there are things that I just will walk past now that maybe 10 years ago would've been acceptable.   Anne: Sure. Yeah. Things have definitely changed over the past just a few years.   Ian: This could be quite controversial, but I've seen casters ask for a minority ethnicity, and then in the sides it makes reference to, I don't know, America or Great Britain or whatever. And you're like, the ethnicity of of this character does not match the character in the script that you are portraying. And I fear a little bit, what's been the motivation for that?   Anne: You know what, interestingly enough, I know that you say that that's a very inter -- I had that with an e-learning, believe it or not, they had the characters, it was a character based e-learning, and they were all different ethnicities. And mine was a mixed ethnicity, but then they said, don't perform it in any kind of accent. And so I thought, well what is that there for then? You know what I mean? And that was a few years back now. I would kind of hope that if they're specifying ethnicity, that they try really hard to get that so that there can be authentic and genuine. Yeah.   Ian: Yeah. And at the top end, some casting directors at the top of the market will challenge that sort of thing. They'll go back to the studio, they're in a strong enough position to go back to the studio and go, really? Does that work? Are you sure? And they will challenge that if you like the mass market, often the person hiring the voice and directing the voice is a part of the studio itself. So. Johnny at the back, go and get a voice actor, will you, for this character. I think a lot of that is kind of left to the voice actor to work out for themselves. If you have an any kind of an acting background, and you are auditioning for particularly indie video games, you are already streets ahead because the guys in the studios have never hired anyone before. They don't know who to hire really. It's kind of like, we'll know it when we hear it kind of thing. So if you can make a performance, if you can create a character that's believable within the universe of the game, you are already streets ahead.   Anne: It's very interesting that you bring up the casting directors for video games. And you know, it's not necessarily, I think, the talent agents of today that you think of for commercial and broadcast. For video games, you do have to make it authentic and believable. And these people may only be casting for their game, and maybe they've never cast for another game, or they don't have a lot of experience . But that's a great point. And so I think that even more so now, the marketing that you employed, having followers on Twitter, maybe putting your awards on your website so that it's out there and it's known, that definitely has an impact. Because your casting directors may or may not be as experienced as somebody who's casting like 10 commercials a day. Right? That's all they do. That they listen for voices and they cast, whereas games, they're so into their game that they know their characters, and they're listening for just that character to come alive, what they believe the character is like.   Ian: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. I had a beautiful testimonial from an indie guy, he put on Twitter, it was on Twitter, his casting notice. And he said, the character is 60 and British from the southwest of England, and he's got early signs of dementia. And he said, but there aren't many older British actors. You know, I've always found it a struggle to cast older actors. So when I wrote to him, I said, , I am 60.   Anne: I'm old. .   Ian: So anyway, so I got cast of that surprising, surprise me though. He actually cast me as a second character that he was struggling. I said to him, you said you were struggling to cast this. Have you've got anything else that you're struggling to cast? So he sent me, said, yes, I'm struggling to cast this. And he sent it to me, and I thought, I can have a go at that. So I sent it back and I said, do you mean something like this? So I didn't put it as though I was auditioning. I just said, do you mean something like this? And he went, oh great. Was that you? And I went, yes. He went, okay, yeah, you are hired.   Anne: I love it. I love it.   Ian: I booked two characters. But he said, you might just, it's a real kind of bigging myself up, but you might be, he said, the best actor I've ever auditioned.   Anne: Awesome.   Ian: And I'm like, aww.   Anne: What a wonderful, what a wonderful compliment.   Ian: Oh. That is on my Instagram. If you check -- care to go.   Anne: Yeah. There you go. . So I love that.   Ian: Oh, and I know, what did I wanted to say about, you talked about casting directors. So Bianca Shuttling, who's one of the big casting directors in LA, she goes looking on Instagram. She's very open about that. If she's not got someone in her little pool of people where she goes, she gets -- she doesn't go to agents, she goes to Instagram.   Anne: Wow, there you go.   Ian: That's where she goes.   Anne: There you go. I love that.   Ian: There, you learnt it -- you heard it third or fourth here. .   Anne: So let me say, because I really think that there's that business savvy that you have, which, BOSSes out there, do not discount the value of being business savvy and marketing savvy. Because I think that that's gonna get you opportunities that otherwise you would not already have. But I do wanna address the acting part of it because you don't just get these roles over and over again if you're not a great actor. So what do you attribute your acting prowess? Have you, just because you've been doing it for years, have you been working with coaches or what do you attribute it to?   Ian: I owe it all to my mum.   Anne: Ah, okay. Well, there you go. , I'd like to thank my mom and my .   Ian: Well, yeah. But in this case, my mom was a very prolific community actress herself.   Anne: Got it.   Ian: So my first living memory is a smell, and it's not the smell of the grease pain. It's that kind of musty damp wood smell that you get backstage in an old theater. And I have the image that follows it, but -- and I must have been maybe around two or three years old. There's no words involved in this memory. So I basically grew up --   Anne: In the theater.   Ian: -- in the backstage. Yeah. One of those things. So it was happening all around me all the time. And I did try and become a proper professional actor as a young man, but I couldn't figure out how to earn money doing it . So.   Anne: Same thing when you start off doing voice acting, right? It's kind of hard sometimes. How do I even get money? How do I even get started? Yeah.   Ian: Yeah, yeah. It took me another 27 years of sales and management --   Anne: Well, there's your overnight success. Right? And I love telling that to people. They're like, you're so successful. Like, how did you do it? And people think it's overnight, but I think obviously you've evolved so nicely into your success, and it well, well deserved.   Ian: And now it pays two -- pays me and I hired -- my wife works for me now.   Anne: There you go.   Ian: So that Christmas present 10 years ago has employed both of us now.   Anne: Yeah. So that 10 year overnight success in voiceover, I mean actually, actually it was a little less than that.   Ian: Yeah, that's interesting. Because I got my first nomination, and I was --   Anne: In 2020, right?   Ian: -- 2019, I got nominated. I didn't win anything that year, but I thought I was ahead of the curve at that point. You know, and then it all went a bit quieter after that. But the last two years, so years nine and ten, or if you count it from 2014, years seven and eight, really have my career, iIt just looks entirely different now. And it is for the people out there, the BOSSes out there, you know, if you are three, four, and five years in and you're making your way, keep going. Because it is my view that in another two or three years, if you are booking regularly, suddenly something will click, something will change, and bam, away you go.   Anne: I was just gonna ask you what's your best advice? But I'll tell you what, that was a golden nugget of wisdom right there . I think so many people, they give up so quickly, and they get their demos, and they're like, well, why am I not working? And they get so frustrated and down and yeah.   Ian: Took me three months to get my first booking. I worked for three months for nothing.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Ian, it has been such a wonderful pleasure having you in here.   Ian: Are we done?   Anne: Yeah.   Ian: Already?   Anne: Well, I, I can probably talk to you for another three hours, for sure. But I appreciate you coming and sharing your journey. I think ,BOSSes out there, you can learn a lot from this wonderful gentleman. And thank you so much for being here with us today.   Ian: You're very welcome, Anne. Anytime.   Anne: I'm gonna give a great big shout out to my sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect and work like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And then also I'd like to talk to you about 100 Voices Who Care. It's your chance to make a difference in the world and give back to the communities that give to you. Find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. All right, you guys, have an amazing week. Ian, thanks again, and we'll see you next week. Bye-bye.   Ian: Bye-Bye.   Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

This episode of the Live Better Sell Better Podcast features Ian Koniak, Dean of Enterprise Sales School for Pavilion and the Founder and President of Ian Koniak Sales Coaching Inc. When you execute what you plan and accomplish all you set out to do, you allow yourself to be fully present in your life outside of work. It is all about working smarter, not harder. You have to set boundaries for the time you work and plan out your weeks and days.HIGHLIGHT QUOTESWork during work hours to be fully present outside of work - Ian: "The quality of time you work determines both the quality and quantity of time you have outside of work."Set time boundaries for work and work according to it - Ian: "You have to set boundaries for the time you work. That's the number 1 thing I do. Now there's a Parkinson's Law that says work will expand to the time allotted, so if you don't have boundaries, you'll work 70 or 80 hours a week, and that's just stupid."You can find out more about Ian in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iankoniak/Website: https://www.untapyoursalespotential.com/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/IanKoniakConnect with KD in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kddorsey3/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/insidesalesexcellenceLive Better. Sell Better. is sponsored by our proud partner:Rocket Reach | rocketreach.com

Few terms are thrown about as freely now as “Fascist” but what does the ultimate political condemnation really mean? Where did Fascism come from? Are all Fascists Nazis, and were the Nazis even Fascists themselves? From Mussolini and Nietszche to Adolf Hitler, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey delve into fascism's primordial stew of violence, racism, antisemitism, mysticism, anti-intellectualism and bizarrely modern aesthetics. They discover a brutal, anti-rational creed that is equally obsessed with futurist technology and ancient myth – and which inevitably drives itself towards war. Get next week's episode right now when you back us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when told they are superior.” – Kurt Vonnegut “Except in struggle there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.” – Filippo Tomasso Marinetti “The fist is the synthesis of our theory.” – Italian fascist, 1920 “Germans would even dream of the state interfering in their lives. The Nazis had infiltrated even their sleep.” – Ian “You can't have a violent rebirth without the sense that you've been oppressed and put upon.” – Dorian Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for an episode of virtual time travel to visit Hatfield Forest, Essex and explore over 2,000 years of rich history. As we journey through this outdoor museum, we chat to Tom Reed, a Woodland Trust ancient tree expert, and Ian Pease, a National Trust ranger, who explain why the wildlife and cultural value of these trees makes them irreplaceable. Discover why ancient trees are so important, what makes a tree ancient, how people have lived and worked with them through the centuries and the urgent need to better protect them. Don't forget to rate us and subscribe! Learn more about the Woodland Trust at woodlandtrust.org.uk Transcript You are listening to Woodland Walks, a podcast for the Woodland Trust, presented by Adam Shaw. We protect and plant trees for people to enjoy, to fight climate change and to help wildlife thrive. Adam: Well, today I am off to Hatfield Forest, which is the best-preserved medieval hunting forest in Europe, which has a very rich history stretching back, well, a very long time, some 2,000 years or so. Now, the forest itself is actually managed by the National Trust, but the Woodland Trust works very closely with them. In particular, the reason I'm going there is to look at and talk about ancient trees, their importance to people and landscape, and of course, how old you have to be to be ancient. Ian: My name is Ian Pease, and I'm one of the rangers here for the National Trust at Hatfield Forest. Adam: And so how long has your association been with this forest then? Ian: Well, it's getting on for 30 years. Adam: You're looking good on it. Ian: Thank you. Thank you. [Laughter] Adam: That's very cool. Now look I have met you by this extraordinary, well, is it a tree or is it two trees? Inaudible just describe where we are standing. Ian: So, we are standing just to the left of the entrance road as you come into the forest and this is a magnificent hornbeam, er and although, like you say Adam, it looks like it's two trees it is actually one. Adam: How do you, how do you know? Ian: Well, it's done what's called compartmentalise. So, what happens when trees get to this age –and this tree is without a doubt probably around 700 years old – is the heartwood falls away and you're left… Adam: The heartwood's in the middle? Ian: The heartwood, the heartwood in the centre falls away, and what you're left with is the living part of the tree, which is the sapwood and what you can see there is that what trees do, trees are very good at adapting when they get older. And they are generally very good at adapting throughout their lives. So, what has happened here is this tree has stabilised itself by compartmentalising, so sealed off these two halves to stabilise itself and you can also see what we call aerial roots starting to come down from the canopy which gives the tree the rigidity and strength. Adam: So, where is that? I can't see, let's have a look, what do you mean? Ian: Yeah, so let's have a closer look. Adam: I've never heard of aerial roots. Ian: You can see these structures… Adam: Yes, I see. Ian: …these structures are what we call aerial roots. Adam: Yeah, they do look like… but they're not in the ground, they're in the air. So where are they...? What function are they serving? Ian: Well, they're basically supporting the tree and what's happened here, this is an old pollard, so originally, they'd have been what we call bowling in the top there, and the roots would have gone down into that sort of composted material that was captured in the bowling, and as that's gradually fallen away that's what you're left with at the top there. Adam: So, these roots are supporting the tree as opposed to bringing it nutrients or anything? Ian: Well, they are supplying nutrients for it from this compost material… Adam: Oh, I see, which is still there. Ian: You can still see some of it there. What's happened obviously is as the trees aged, it's fallen through. Um and you can see the compartmentalisation on the edges there. A sort of almost callous effect. Adam: Well, amazing, well look I gotta get a photo of you by this which I will put on my Twitter account. Do you have a Twitter account? Ian: I haven't, but I've got Instagram and Facebook. Adam: I'm sure we'll put it on all of those things so you can see what Ian is talking about. Fantastic, well look, this is just the beginning. And you said it was the ancient way, the ancient tree way? The road? Ian: Er no this isn't the ancient way. This is, this is the vehicle accessway into the forest. But having said that Adam, there is stagecoaches who used to travel from the east heading to Bishop… sorry, heading down to London, would cut through Hatfield Forest to cut out Bishop Stortford. Adam: [laughter] Okay right. An ancient cut-through. There we are. Ian: That's it. Adam: There we are. Not quite up-to-date traffic news, [laughter] but if you're a time traveller, that's a bit of traffic news for you. Look, my first visit here, we've come on an amazing day, I'm very, very lucky. What would you suggest I look out for here? Ian: Well certainly if you go for a walk through… what I, what I sort of advise people to do is to go for a walk around the lake area to start with because that way as you go down to the lake area you go through the medieval landscape. And what's nice about the lake area is you've got the 1740s landscape, so that's the Capability Brown heart to the forest. He was employed here in the 1740s before the National Trust had the forest. It was owned by the Houblon family, and he developed, formed the lake down there and built a shell house next to the lake. So, you could almost go on a bit of a time travel, you know virtual time travel, by walking through this wood pasture where we are now amongst these stunning ancient trees. Take yourself into the 1740s and walk around the lake and then and then go from there. Adam: Brilliant. I'm heading off to the 1740s, what a fantastic bit of map reading that will be. Thank you very much, Ian. Really, really nice to see you. Ian: You're welcome, you're welcome. [Walking noise] Adam: Well, I'm just walking out actually, into a bit of open field here. Ooh look wild mushrooms… must avoid that. Don't want to trample on those. And beneath one of these trees is Tom from the Woodland Trust, and he is going to be my guide to the rest of this amazing forest. [Walking noise] Adam: So, Tom, I assume? Hi! What an amazing place, amazing place isn't it? Tom: An amazing place Adam, hi, nice to meet you. Adam: First of all, this is an unusual forest in terms of the Woodland Trust because it's actually the National Trust, but you sort of… this is a joint project or, explain the relationship? Why this is different? Tom: So, the National Trust and the Woodland Trust are both really passionate about seeing the protection of ancient and veteran trees, are interested in studying them and knowing where they are. So, when… we're here today because the National Trust and the Woodland Trust have been working together, well, for quite a few years actually, we've been working together to map ancient and veteran trees to our Ancient Tree Inventory. And also, in the past year and a half, we've also been working with the National Trust on a project called the Green Recovery Project, which was a Challenge Fund that we, both organisations, were working on. This was actually one of the sites, in fact, I was here just six months ago where I got to see first-hand some of the restoration work that was being done to some of these trees, some of the historic pollarded hornbeams for example. We got to see how they are now being managed and cared for here by the Trusts. Adam: And it is an amazing place. I mean we're lucky to be here on a great day. Oh! You can hear… we're near Stansted, so you might hear an airplane in the background there. Oh, but we've come out of this lovely, sort of, bit of woodland into this amazing open area here and it's, it does feel a very mixed sort of landscape doesn't it? Tom: Absolutely, I think if, if you're walking here with your dog or just on a fun day out, you might just think to yourself ‘ah this is a field or some nice trees here'. But actually, when you stop and look around you can see these living links to the past, and what we, walking through here is a medieval landscape where you've got a mixture of ancient trees, we can see some decaying oaks in the background over there. We've actually just walked past some large hornbeam pollards. So, these are trees that were working trees, hundreds of years ago that were managed as part of this landscape to provide timber for those who manage them, worked and lived in the area. So, to be able to walk past trees like that and, you know, to touch them – these living monuments – is just a real privilege. Well, we've got a mix here, we've got a mix of young trees, mature trees, ancient trees, and this area that we're stood on now is called, referred to as wood pasture because it was historically a wood landscape, where you had both a mix of livestock agriculture and also tree management as well. Adam: Well look, it's amazing just to our left there's two lovely trees, and I… I don't know what they are… but they're so lovely two people have stopped to take photos of them and I mean just a measure of how beautiful some of these, this landscape is. What… just a quick test… do you happen to know what that tree is? Tom: Yeah. So, we've got two, sort of, mature hawthorns there, so erm elsewhere in the forest there are actually some much older hawthorns… we have some ancient hawthorns here that would be several hundred years old. These are probably mature, probably over 100–150 years old… Adam: And they got lovely sort of red, red splattering over them. It just looks like someone's painted that, it's quite, quite an amazing sight. So, you talk about ancient trees. So what? What classifies a tree as ancient then? Because if [laugh] these were young and they're like 100 or something. So, what's ancient exactly? Tom: So, it's a great question. So ancient trees are those that are in their third and final life stage essentially. So, the sort of, the age at which we call different species ancient is different because different species have different life expectancies, and they have different growth rates. So, for example, if we look at yew trees, we make all those ancient from around about 400 to 500 years plus. If we look at hawthorn, for example, we would say they're probably ancient from around about 200 years of age. So, it does vary depending on which species you are referring to, but essentially the ancient phases, the third and final life stage… and very few trees actually live old enough to become ancient. It's only sites like this where the trees have been retained where, you know, these trees not been disturbed, they've not been felled, there's been no development here. So, these trees have survived in the landscape and been allowed to survive and that's why we can enjoy them today. So yeah, that's what an ancient tree is. Adam: And I mean, obviously there's almost a sentimental reason you, you don't want to destroy something which is 700 years old. But from an environmental perspective, do ancient trees offer the environment, do they offer animals something more than a younger tree does? Tom: Absolutely. I mean, I like to think of ancient trees as being like a living oasis for wildlife essentially. So, these are areas where you've got a huge variety of habitats both, you know, within like the tree structure, in the roots, in the canopy, even within like the heartwood and the hollows. So, ancient trees offer huge benefits for wildlife. Adam: But sorry, you're saying that's more… a 700-year-old tree would offer more environmental benefits than a 100-year-old tree. Is that what you're saying? Tom: Yeah, if you are comparing trees of the same species. Adam: So why is that? What is happening in that period that offers that benefit then? Tom: So, the reason really is owed to the decaying wood habitat. So as a tree ages, you get natural decay that's often caused by special heart rot fungi that can decay the tree. So, as it's standing it's decaying slowly over time, and by – that decaying wood – it kind of creates a load of microhabitats, so you get huge benefits for invertebrates. In fact, the site we're on today is one of the top ten sites in the UK for rare invertebrates because of the decaying wood habitats that are here. If you imagine a decaying tree with hollows and cavities and water pockets… imagine if you're an invertebrate, you know, you're such a small organism and you've got this huge ancient tree with all this variety of habitats. I mean you've essentially got… your whole world is in this tree, it's a whole universe of habitats. So, that's why they're important. Adam: So, it's quite poetic, isn't it? In its decay… the very fact it's decaying offers new life. Tom: Absolutely, exactly. So, they become, you know, just… they just transform into these oases for wildlife and it's owing to the decaying habitats that they have. Adam: And what's the oldest trees that you've got around here then? Tom: Yeah. Well, so some of these trees may well be in excess of 700 to 800 years of age. Adam: And are they yew? Because yew trees tend to last the longest don't they? Tom: Yeah. So, a lot of the oldest trees on this site will be pollards. So pollarding is where you cut the branches of a tree above head height. This was a historic, sort of, tree management practice – essentially the people who used to live and work here wanted to farm their livestock, and in order to make sure that they didn't, sort of, graze on the trees that they also used to harvest timber from, they were able to cut the tree above head height, typically above two metres in height. And what that does is quite two things. For the people managing these trees, it means that they can easily harvest the timber because in absence of power tools… imagine they were using hand tools and as the tree gets cut back it regrows into sort of finer, smaller stems that can be more easily harvested. Adam: And that's the sign of pollarding, isn't it? If you're a tree detective and you see these, sort of, small stems all coming up it's a sign it's been a pollarded tree. Tom: Absolutely, typically it will have, like, a fluted form cut around about two metres at head height and you'll see like a typical pollard knuckle, which is where you see all of these stems converging on the same point. But pollarding does actually bring some benefits to the tree as well and that's why some of the oldest trees here will be pollards because it has the effect of almost stabilising the tree. It means that the tree doesn't get too top-heavy and then collapses and dies. Instead, it keeps the trees more typically smaller and if they're regularly cut that keeps the tree in that stable form. So even the sort of the trees here which are, you know, extremely hollow, they look like, you know, how are they even still standing, because, like, what's supporting them? Because they're being managed as pollards. And then, you know, there are some sites where pollarding has stopped, you know, for example at Burnham Beeches is a site where you can see a lot of the pollards have not been pollarded for a long time and they've started to become top-heavy now, so and that presents a risk that you get greater wind loading and then they fall. So going back to what we were talking about the Green Recovery project that we are working on with the National Trust. And like I said, I was here six months ago, and we got to see some of the tree management here and we got to see some pollarding essentially. So, they were sort of cutting back the… some branches in the canopy to basically continue the pollarding management to try and replicate what was being done hundreds of years ago to make sure that these trees can survive for many years to come. Adam: Amazing that. Ian. Ian promised me some time travel. He pointed me towards the Capability Brown landscape. Do you know which way that is? Tom: Yeah, that would be straight back down the track. Adam: I was going to say, it's going the other way. Okay, but do you think we should head this way first? Tom: Yeah. Well, I mean, we can. We can go. Adam: I'm going with you. I'm going with you and will… I'm definitely going to see the Capability Brown later, but you lead me on. Tom: We can certainly make our way back there. Adam: So, tell me about where we're heading. Tom: So now we're just, we're walking through a sort of former medieval landscape. So, we've got a variety of trees here, we've got some oaks, we've got hawthorns, we've got field maples, we've got hornbeams. And if we're walking here, we can just see the sheer variety of trees in the landscape. So, when I'm walking through this landscape and I can't help but think about, you know, the people who were working here and living here and the way that this, the site, was managed. We can hear overhead planes are leaving Stansted Airport and I can only imagine what those people would have thought about that [laugh]. And it just, it just makes you think about the changes that this landscape has seen. And erm obviously the reason that we have ancient trees here is because this part of the landscape has remained unchanged. So, whilst there's been a lot of change around this site, this area has survived and that's ultimately enabled these trees to survive as well. Adam: Now you look after a lot of woodland. What separates this from lots of the other things that you've got an association with? Tom: So, I suppose what's really interesting about this site is that it's a former forest and then when we think about forests, people typically think about trees and they probably picture woodland, but actually… Adam: That's fair enough, isn't it? Tom: It's fair enough, but forest actually has a very different meaning in terms of the medieval sense. So, a forest was essentially an area of land that was subject to special hunting laws and these new areas were preserved really for the royals and, well, the royals and their sort of associates to hunt deer and enjoy riding through the landscape and they liked this kind of open landscape where the trees were kind of scattered. So, when you think of forests, like people typically think of dense woodland, but actually, it's more like this. It's big trees in a sort of sparse landscape where deer are allowed to run around, and the royals could be… were there on horseback sort of chasing them and hunting them. It was sort of a sport for them. And in a lot of sense, the commoners, if you like, were kept away from sites like this. An erm, but then the kind of, the legacy has been preserved. Adam: And it's interesting, isn't it, that because we think of these as natural places, they are natural places, that's what's important about them. But they're not unmanaged. It's not like the hand of man has not had a role in shaping this has very much been a man-made, a man-shaped environment. Is that fair? Tom: That's absolutely fair, yes. If I was… what's interesting when we look at ancient tree distribution more generally, there is a clear link between humans and where ancient trees are. So, for example, you might find ancient yew trees often in a churchyard setting, coz often…, well, ancient yews were respected by sort of earlier civilizations, the early Christians, even before that, the Druids respected ancient yews, which is why they've kind of been retained and associated with places of religious worship, you know, so there's always those kind of links between where humans have been and where ancient trees are now. And it just shows that really throughout history we've respected our trees, you know, other civilizations and cultures have respected these trees and you know, now we need to respect them too and continue their legacy. Adam: And I suppose one of the things that's striking for me is that although we are near Stansted, although it hasn't taken me long to drive from London, as far as you can see, you can't see anything. It's sort of trees for as far as you can see. It's a remarkable oasis in a rather heavily developed part of the UK. Tom: Absolutely. You know, to be able to come to this site only like an hour away from London is quite remarkable really, that places like this have survived. It's like a living outdoor museum almost. You know, you can go up to some of these trees, put your hand on them and these were the same trees that were being worked on over 500 years ago. You know… how many elements of nature can you say that about? You know, it's a remarkable privilege to be able to go and visit trees like that. That were managed hundreds of years ago. Adam: OK, now there is a suitable bench almost shaped fallen branch, so maybe we can head over there for a sit down and a chat. Tom: Sounds good. Hey, got some good sort of… at the top of the tree there, you've got something called retrenchment which is basically where the tree is dying back essentially. Adam: Right. Tom: So, over time like the canopy sort of reorganises itself. And then the tree kind of grows downward eventually. So, trees don't grow infinitely up and up and up, they tend to get… they die down and they get broader over time. Adam: So that's the sign of a change in its lifestyle… life stage sorry? Tom: Absolutely. Adam: So, we can see some sort of dead branches at the top that means it's coming into another stage, it's probably going to thicken out a bit. Tom: Exactly. Yeah. So, what I mean… what's happening essentially as the tree reaches a sort of theoretical maximum size… eventually, the tree can't transport that water from the roots. That kind of hydraulic action becomes limited. It can't pump water to the very top of the tree and so it, kind of, stops investing in those branches. It's grown to a good height, it doesn't need to compete with other trees around it, so it starts to reorganise itself. And those branches at the top start to die back and instead the tree invests in some of those like low… what were lower branches and they become more dominant, and the tree becomes broader in profile. The trunk becomes much wider as well. So, it's a typical sign of an ancient tree that they will typically have a large girth for their species. Like the trunk will have a large circumference for its species. That's like a key sign. Adam: Alright, look, this isn't… I can't quite sit on this one, but this is a very very pleasant place to stop. So, one of the big projects from the Woodland Trust is this Ancient Tree Inventory and I think you're sort of… you're in charge of that. So, what is that? Why is it important? Tom: So, the Ancient Tree Inventory is a citizen science project. So it's something that anyone can take part in and essentially what it seeks to do is to map ancient, veteran and notable trees across the UK to an online interactive map that everyone can, sort of, see, use, and enjoy. It started as a project called the Ancient Tree Hunt and essentially it was just to get ancient trees on the radar really, to get people inspired by them, to get people out there recording them. And in that project alone they mapped over 100,000 trees. But since then, it continued under the name of the Ancient Tree Inventory, and we're continuing to map trees on a daily basis. So, we have a network of volunteers around the UK who are more expert volunteers who are called verifiers, and what they are doing is going out and checking trees that members of the public have added. So, if people have been on a walk and have seen a big tree or a tree that looks like it's old – might be ancient, might be veteran – they add it to the map, that gets recorded as an unverified tree and then one of our volunteer verifiers comes along, they'll visit the tree and they'll assess whether they think it's an ancient tree or a veteran or a notable. They'll also maybe take some extra measurements of the tree, they'll check that it's been recorded in the right place and that the species has been identified correctly, things like that. Essentially what we're trying to do with the Ancient Tree Inventory, as well as raising awareness about ancient and veteran trees, is also, erm, our role in terms of research and understanding their current distribution. But also, from their protection point of view, the Ancient Tree Inventory is actually a really useful resource for the likes of people doing environmental impact assessments. So, we get a lot of requests for data from ecological consultants, from arboriculture consultants, even the local authorities that want to know where are the most significant ancient and veteran trees in their county or on a particular site, so that that can then be used to help inform, you know, planning decisions and, you know, we'd like to think that that is going to grow more that when, for example, there's a development or, you know, some sort of proposed change to an area that people will consult the Ancient Tree Inventory and they'll consider, sort of, changing plans if ancient or veteran trees are going to be harmed. We really just want to make sure that there is no loss… further loss of ancient and veteran trees essentially. Adam: And what sort of protection do ancient trees have? Do they have… like a listed building you get listed protection so you can't mess around with it. You can't knock it down, can't alter it. Does a 700-year-old tree get the same protection as a 700-year-old piece of brick? Tom: Well, I'm afraid to say the answer to that is no. So, none of the ancient trees, don't have any legal protection in the UK. As you say, some of our most treasured monuments and buildings benefit from scheduled monument status, but for ancient trees which may be of, at least the same age if not older, they don't have any protection. In fact, I remember on a recent visit to a churchyard where we went to see a really remarkable ancient yew tree, I think someone jokingly said at the time that the wood in the beams of that church are probably more protected than the wood in the trunk of that ancient yew tree. And that, kind of, really opened my mind to that whole debate on making that comparison between built heritage monuments and ancient trees. And we really want to see ancient trees be more considered as features of our cultural heritage, archaeological heritage, you know, they really are these living monuments and we need to look after them. Adam: Do you get a sense that public opinion is swinging in that direction to support ancient trees? Tom: Yeah, I think it is. I mean, you know, based on my role of working on the Ancient Tree Inventory, I've the fortune of speaking to members of the public about their ancient trees. And we do get lots of concern expressed to the Woodland Trust about, you know, what's happening to ancient and veteran trees in their area. But there is actually something that we're doing at the moment at the Trust which is our Living Legends campaign that launched earlier this year. So, we're actually making an attempt to gain stronger protection for ancient and veteran trees. We have a petition that's live at the moment and the campaign has a lot of different activities happening at the moment, but one of the headline things anyone can do is sign our petition where we're calling for stronger legal protection, for that to be reflected in policy so that there is basically legal protection to stop any harm to the trees. Adam: Okay. So, if someone's interested in being a volunteer and, sort of, adding to that inventory, how do they go about it? Tom: Yeah, so anyone can take part in the Ancient Tree Inventory. All they need to do is go to the Ancient Tree Inventory website where they'll be able to register, and they'll be able to create a free account. Essentially that means that when you sign into your account, you can just record the trees. The main things that you'll need to record are things like, you know, where the tree is so you take like a grid reference. Erm, if you can record the girth of the tree – so, this is the circumference of the tree – of the trunk itself… Adam: So, you need a long tape measure? Tom: Yeah, we typically suggest having a tape measure around about 10 metres where you can often get like a surveyor's tape from your local hardware store for example. And you can measure the trunk, normally about one and a half metres from ground level for consistency. You're really looking for the narrowest girth of this trunk. So, if the tree has like a big, sort of, burr, or if there's like a low hanging branch, then just record underneath it to try and get the narrowest measurement. So that… and that's essentially the most technical elements. If you can just record as well the species of the tree, whether it's on public or private land, do make sure to record some photos as well. The key things that we're really interested in looking at with a tree when we're assessing whether it's ancient or veteran is our veteran features or decay features. So, these are the kind of decaying wood habitats, for example, if the tree is hollowing, if the tree has decaying branches… so the tree behind me here has some deadwood in the top of the crown – this is what we call retrenchment. And any other kind of deadwood cavities, water pockets, holes, that sort of thing is all great to capture, both in the record itself, but also in the images too. Obviously, the more that people can tell us about trees, the more we know. And then it makes it a much more valuable resource. So, we always encourage people to submit as much information as they can. Adam: And if I mean like me, I'm very bad at spotting tree types. If you don't, if you see an old tree and you think I wanna record that, but I don't know what sort of tree it is, is that a problem or can you just go look, here's a photo, you'll probably know better than I do? Tom: Yeah. So, it is possible to record the species as unsure. It might be that you know that it's an oak, but you're not sure if it's pedunculate or sessile, so you can just record it as oak. We have a network of volunteer verifiers who are sort of ancient tree experts who will check… Adam: Check your homework for you. Tom: Yeah, exactly. Adam: And if you can't spot the tree type, there is actually a Woodland Trust app, isn't there? Tom: Yeah, that's right Adam, we have a… the Woodland Trust has a species identification app that you can use as well. The good thing is that for our ancient trees, most of the time they are actually native. So, the common native species are typically going to be, you know, oaks, beech, ash, hornbeam, yew trees. So, you know, these are species that most people are quite familiar with cause they tend to be native. Adam: We should do a podcast on that, sort of, how to spot the top five native UK trees. An idea for another podcast… you may be dragged back into this. Fantastic. Tom: Sounds good. [Pause] Adam: So, we've been walking through a beautiful sort of woodland glade, a very covered area. And what is typical of this particular site is that you do come out into so many different landscapes and so we've come out into this very open area, all of a sudden with this extraordinarily large lake. I think there's something suspiciously like a tearoom next door which might attract my attention in a moment… and a couple of seats finally to sit down. So, Tom, now… It's a beautiful place. I mean we're, we're... The weeds rustling in the wind, framing the lake in front of us… There's some ducks and some rowing boats and this is a wonderful place. But I… the feature here is ancient woodland, so is there a way of sort of measuring the value of a particular tree? Do you… is it very just sort of thumb in the air, sort of thing, in the wind… or is there a more scientific approach you can take? Tom: Yeah, I think there are lots of ways in which different people value their ancient trees and so one acronym we tend to use to capture, sort of, the main themes of why we value our ancient trees, can be thought of as ABC. So that stands for aesthetic value, biological value and cultural value. There is also historical value, which I'll talk about in a moment, but think about, sort of, aesthetic value and why our ancient trees are important, you know, can you imagine, sort of, walking through the landscape that we're walking today without the ancient trees? They do provide, like the character of this site, you know, walking and seeing these big hollowing living monuments – they're almost like sculptures. And, you know, not just on these sorts of sites, but if you think of what would our churchyards look like without our ancient yews? Or what would our hedgerows look like without those old hawthorn trees? Or what would our, sort of, the Highlands of Scotland look like without those, kind of remarkable lone standing-proud alders, and rowans and hollies that are like really typical of that landscape? So, because ancient trees form, like, a really important part of the overall character of our landscape that's one way in which we value them. The other way, of course, is biologically, so they provide immense habitat variety for wildlife and a single tree can support thousands of species and that's owing to the decaying wood habitats that they have. So as a tree ages it naturally hollows, starts to break down, you get hollowing in the branches, in the trunk, you get hollowing around the base of the tree – what we call buttressing. All of these create pockets and habitats and even microhabitats for wildlife, so it can be used by a range of organisms from birds to reptiles, to mammals like squirrels, badgers. For example, with birds, as well, owls will use them, they will actually use the cavities found in the canopies of ancient trees, they make their nests. Same for woodpeckers, which will use decaying wood to make their nests and bore for invertebrates. And of course, the invertebrates themselves – the opportunities provided to invertebrates by ancient trees is remarkable. There's a special term to describe invertebrates that depend on decaying wood, and that word is saproxylic. So, saproxylic invertebrates are those which depend on this decaying wood for a part of their life cycle. And then there is also the cultural value that we place on our ancient trees. Adam: So, that's the C. Tom: That's the C in our ABC. Adam: So, tell me about the cultural values. Now actually… that must be a hard thing to measure? Tom: Absolutely so, it's not always clear, in fact, that some trees you may walk past and not know that that tree has been, or you know what it's seen in its life and how other people in the past have interacted with it. For example, ancient trees in the churchyards, so it is often that you find ancient yew trees linked with former sites of religious worship because the… our early ancestors, the druids, and the sort of, early Christians had a… they saw, essentially, ancient yew trees as a deity, they worshipped them, they respected them. And as a result, those ancient yews persisted in that landscape. Adam: The cultural aspect, there's a cultural aspect, but there is also, it doesn't run from the alphabet [inaudible] ABC H, there's an H isn't there? A historical reference here, because these trees have been around for 700 years, 1000 years – kings and queens will have wandered under these trees, important decisions would have been made. Historic really, really historic decisions would be made. And under the boughs of these trees. Tom: Absolutely. And so, there are some trees around UK which we refer to as heritage trees that have… that we know have bared witness to some important historical moments. Or that well-known historical figures that visited those trees. For example, we have the Queen Elizabeth Oak or we have the Tolpuddle Martyrs' Tree which is thought to bear witness to the start of the trade union movement in the 1800s, and we have the Ankerwycke Yew that bared witness to the signing of the Magna Carta by King John, under that very tree. And it's still there today, a tree that is over 2,000 years old has, you know, such important historical values – irreplaceable in fact. That is probably the one word that we would like people to associate with trees – is the word irreplaceable. Because if that tree was to be lost, you would lose all of that historical reference. Adam: Fantastic. You know this site well, I mean you've come a long way to see me today, so I'm super pleased and very grateful for the guide. But I know you love this place, don't you? Tom: Absolutely. I need no excuse to come here. I think it just feels like walking back in history essentially. And there's just an amazing variety of trees. Yeah, I could just spend the whole week here. Adam: I think my family might miss me in a week, but who knows? They might not… they might not notice. But they're certainly not going to notice for the rest of day, so I'm going to take the rest of the day here. Thank you very much. Well, my thanks to Ian from the National Trust and Tom from the Woodland Trust but most of all, I suppose, thanks to you for listening. Now do remember if you want to find a wood near you, well, the Woodland Trust has a website to help. Just go to woodlandtrust.org.uk/findawood. Now you can find a wood near you. Well, until next time, happy wandering. Thank you for listening to the Woodland Trust Woodland Walks. Join us next month when Adam will be taking another walk in the company of Woodland Trust staff, partners, and volunteers and don't forget to subscribe to the series on iTunes, or wherever you're listening to us, and do give us a review and a rating. And why not send us a recording of your favourite woodland walk to be included in a future podcast? Keep it to a maximum of five minutes and please tell us what makes your woodland walks special. Or send an email with details of your favourite walk and what makes it special to you. Send any audio files to podcast@woodlandtrust.org.uk and we look forward to hearing from you.

"Last year is when NFT started taking off and more of that aspect of things, that's the part that actually really drew me in because that to me from a technologist perspective, from a software developer perspective, that is where it connects to our world. And I can see the value in digital ownership and things like that."- Ian Landsman Watch this episode on YouTubeIan Landsman:Ian's Company: HelpspotIan on Twitter: @ianlandsmanBrian Casel:Brian's company, ZipMessageBrian on Twitter: @casjamThanks to ZipMessageZipMessage (today's sponsor) is the video messaging tool that replaces live calls with asynchronous conversations.  Use it free or tune into the episode for an exclusive coupon for Open Threads listeners.Quotes from this episode:Quote 1:Brian: I'm still learning and I'm still trying to figure out what I think about all that. I do think that there seems to be an opportunity in what people are calling Web3 and like "tokenization" and...  Ian: Right.  Brian: And and it does like there are like to me, there are like glimpses of, of potential possibilities of what this stuff could mean, like, you know, in terms of like smart contracts and how something can, like, grow in value. I like to think back to like an artist, especially like a musician. But I guess this can go for any kind of art where the original creator can be paid as their art continues to be bought and sold over time, which is like fundamentally not possible with like physical paintings. Right, right, right. That seems interesting.And then I'm then I wonder how that can make you adapt to other use cases.Ian: You know, I sort of see I mean, the three main areas I'm interested in and there are lots of other edge cases and people have all kinds of things they're attempting to do. Right. But the three main ones are I guess you have like the what is the most visible aspect is like the art, right? And you know, you have the one side that loves that.You have other many people who make fun of it like you monkeys and dragons and whatever, right? Like digital art. And you have people who are very mainstream, but he's making still pretty weird art, Elon Musk naked and whatever. All kinds of stuff that he does not.Brian: Even know about. These people are probably the most famous.Ian: Right, right. Yeah. He's done he does one every day. And anyway, so it's like the pure there's the pure art aspect of like artists doing one of art. There are artists doing these collections like bored apes and things like that that people are probably heard of. And yet so what you're referencing there is and when you resell this art, the royalty a percentage of the sale goes just automatically to the.And there are some details around that, whatever. But ultimately a percentage of that goes to the artist. So that's not just like when the artist is dead, maybe it becomes worth something or like whatever. Or they're forced to keep creating stuff because that's the only way to live. Like you could create a couple of things that are huge hits and make a lot of money, you know, ongoing because people are reselling them.Quote 2:Brian: If a software startup is going to become like Web3 enabled or whatever like associated with Web3, it means that they are at some point going to offer a token like from their brand.Ian: Potentially.Brian: And users of their tool. Like the more they use it or the more they help grow the tool and its user base, they gain ownership of this token. And I guess externally the token could be bought and sold just like any other token. A Bitcoin or Etherium or Solana. Mm-hmm. And that's the idea is like you're building it's almost like like the only parallel I can think of is like a publicly-traded company. Right? Like. Right. Like, I use an Apple Computer, but I could also own Apple stock. And but I guess the idea for this...Is that you're it's more intertwined where, like, the more you use it, the more stock you gain in this equity that you gain.Ian: Right, earning it for it. And like, it. Yeah, exactly.Brian: So it's which in turn, like raises the value of that coin or that. Right?Ian: Right. So I think there's this example of like you, you know, the way it works now is you go and get investment from rich people, but you're literally limited to people who make more than $200,000 a year or $3,000 a year. We can invest in private companies essentially as like an angel or things like that or VC. And so you get a handful of those you raise some money, then you start your software business and your customers have nothing to do with any of it.They don't your first customers get none out of it other than being the first customers. Which is great. If they like your product, that's fine. But we all know that the first customers are actually super important. Like they giving you the most important feedback. They're taking the biggest risk because you're probably going to go out of business is the reality.So like they're taking the risk, putting their time and effort into participating in your software product at very early stages. So they're not, you know, compensate for any of this. They can't even buy shares in your company because you are not a publicly-traded company. Yes, with Apple, I could buy shares but I can't buy shares in your early startup.It's literally impossible. Right. And so like against the law, like you can't even offer its not offer-able. So I think that's where it's interesting because, with the coins, you do have this at least potential. I think there are not a lot of places that have realized that potentially it's still super early. But the potential idea of like both raising money for more people and then also rewarding early customers in tokens so that it's almost like growth participation.Brian:Yes, I think it's like a user activation play, marketing play for on the user side and then on the company side, it's like financing.Quote 3:Brian: What about getting back to basics of like you have to solve a problem that people actually care about? How does tokenization even help solve that problem or make it easier or, you know, aside from just giving users equity or giving them more of a stake in the early part of a company by using the product?Is there anything else like functionally that a token could potentially do, you know? Ian: Well, some yeah, there is like and so like in the horse racing game, I'm involved in. The token is going to be like how you buy and sell things in the game. There are two tokens actually, and one of them is the transactional token. So it allows things like super low-cost transactions like there's no 3% stripe involved there. Now all the in-game transactions are basically free, even though there's real money moving back and forth between them. So like that would be like one example of like in the application, there's some benefit. So yeah. Oh, I don't think in this way always has to.To me, like it's still interesting just in the like, is this a way to do equity that's better, which is where what I was saying before like I think you could just as they could just change the laws and make it so I could just issue stock to all my early customers like that could be a thing, right? Like it's not a thing.I can't actually do that. But it could be a thing if we change the laws to make it a thing and then that would be a thing. And I think that would be you know, it's not a path for everybody. Just like this Web3 stuff wouldn't be a path for everybody, but it might be a path for certain kinds of businesses to raise money.

This episode of the Live Better Seller Better Podcast features Ian Koniak, Dean of Enterprise Sales School for Pavilion and the Founder and President of Ian Koniak Sales Coaching Inc. Every single one of us want to get more done in less time without running ourselves to the ground.Ian digs deeper into working smarter and harder to drastically improve not just your work, but also all other aspects of your life. He discusses key tactics and resources that will teach you to finish your tasks in the most time-efficient ways possible. HIGHLIGHTSThe "ADHD brain" in salesTactics to get into a deep work state and get more doneResources for time management and habit improvementWhat work-life integration means for efficiency overall QUOTESIan: "Number one is you have to set boundaries for the time you work. Work will expand to the time allotted. So if you don't have boundaries, you'll work 70-80 hours a week and that's just stupid. I don't want someone working that many hours."Ian: "You have to give yourself grace. Progress over perfection. Making sure you realize these habits have been ingrained with you your whole life so you're not just going to be able to flip the switch and turn into a robo-productive KD or Ian Koniak right out the gate."Ian: "When you build the identity of being a hard worker, that is an identity that needs to stay with you in all areas of life. You don't just stop becoming a hard worker. So I'm a hard parent, right? Not hard as in strict but I am really trying to be present with my kids." You can find out more about Ian in the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iankoniak/Website: https://www.untapyoursalespotential.com/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/IanKoniak Live Better. Sell Better. is sponsored by our proud partners:Vidyard | vidyard.comDooly | dooly.aiChili Piper | chilipiper.com

The one where Doctor Who finally asks, "can we change the future?" And there's a museum....in Space! Like a "Space Museum?" Commentary and analysis.Team TARDIS arrives at a planet where they seem to be invisible and incapable of touching anything. Then, our Fearsome Foursome sees themselves as future exhibitions at a museum! Realizing they have skipped a time track and had a glimpse into the future, the Doctor, Vicki, Ian, and Barbara "arrive" at the museum where they are now visible to their future captors, the Moroks. Now, all four must attempt to prevent the future they have already glimpsed....DOCTOR: All we have to do is to wait here until we arrive.BARBARA: I beg your pardon?DOCTOR: You see, my dear, before they actually put us in those glass cases, we must have arrived here sometime in the Tardis. These people saw us and thought we were worthy people to be put in their Space Museum--BARBARA: I see! I think.DOCTOR: But nothing has happened to us yet. What we are doing now is taking a glimpse into the future, or what might be or could be the future. All that leads up to it, is still yet to come._____BARBARA: But Doctor, what can we do now?DOCTOR: My dear Barbara, you must try and remember, the short time we've been on this planet, we've met people, spoken to them and who knows, we might have even influenced them.VICKI: That's what I was trying to say, Doctor.DOCTOR: Yes, I knew you were, child, yes. Yes, I knew you were.IAN: You mean we don't necessarily have to change our own future. It could be changed for us.DOCTOR: Quite so, yes, quite so, my boy.NEXT TIME:For Classic Who: The Chase (Episodes: "The Executioners," "The Death of Time," "Flight Through Eternity," "Journey into Terror," "The Death of Doctor Who," "The Planet of Decision")--Monday, January 10thFor New Who: Review of "Eve of the Daleks"-- January 5thHannah & Brianna Talk Doctor Who: The Flux--January 10thSpecial thanks to Cathlyn "Happigal" Driscoll for providing the beautiful artwork for this podcast. You can view her work at https://www.happigal.com/ Do feel free to get in touch to share the love of all things Doctor Who: throughthevortexpodcast@gmail.com

No digital transformation is the same, but when a massive B2B organization embarks on that journey, you better believe that there will be a lot of lessons learned that can be applied to any other company. That’s why we wanted to talk to former Chief Digital Officer at Univar Solutions, Ian Gresham, who led the digital transformation and ecommerce implementation at this $9 billion multinational industrial distribution business. Look around at the things around you, make up, dish soap, skincare, solvents for your car. Univar probably has a part to play in that. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Ian tells us about the experience of bringing a massive organization into the world of digital commerce, and he reveals some of the biggest learnings from the experience that he is using now as an executive advisor to multiple businesses. For example, how should ecommerce leaders frame the building of a platform to get buy-in from the top down, and what kind of strategies should you implement to drive adoption of your platform? Interestingly, it’s a combination of moving fast but also taking it slow — tune in to learn what that means in practice. Plus, Ian shares more tips and discusses some of the insider details on the projects he’s currently working on. Enjoy! Main Takeaways:If You Build It, They.. May Not Come: When going through a digital transformation, many companies fall into the trap of believing that if they simply build and launch an ecommerce website, their customers will flock to it. In reality — and especially in the B2B space – there is an education and adoption phase that needs to happen to actually make an ecommerce site successful.M-V-P!: It’s wise to take an MVP approach to building an ecommerce platform because it forces you to focus on one specific feature that you can provide that solves a problem for a customer reliably well over and over. By offering that one solution, you can drive faster adoption of the platform because you are not overwhelming customers with a multitude of features, some of which they don’t want or need. New features can come down the road, but adoption needs to come first. And the entire organization needs to be on the same page that building a platform is an ongoing process with no set start and end date because there will always be new things to add or improve.It’s About The Journey: In businesses that rely on face-to-face interactions, the omnichannel experience is becoming more important than ever. To digitize some of the interactions and drive the adoption of more online tools, you have to start from the bottom up and understand every kind of customer and customer journey that exists within your business. From there, you can start reallocating headcount to digitize certain processes and send other resources to handle high-value customer interactions so that you know you are investing in the parts of the customer journey that are most in need.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone. Welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles, your host and CEO at Mission.org. Today on the show we have Ian Gresham, Chief Marketing Officer and Digital Officer, and currently an Executive Advisor to multiple businesses. Ian, welcome to the show.Ian:Thank you very much, Stephanie. It's great to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you here. I just was looking through your background and we did not cover on our call that I thought you went to University of Maryland, which I am from Maryland, so-Ian:That's right. Go Turts. Fear the turtle.Stephanie:This is already off to a wonderful start now that we have that connection. I love that. I wanted to kind of start with your background. I see you've been in a lot of marketing roles, and I wanted to hear how you got interested in marketing, what that journey looked like.Ian:Yeah, sure. I don't remember exactly how marketing became an interest. In business school, I was looking at a number of things. I think perhaps that it was the fact that it was pretty people-oriented, and it's sort of an extrovert function in business if you will. That was pretty exciting to me. There were some pretty school businesses in the Maryland area that were recruiting at the business school there, and ultimately I ended up starting my career with Black and Decker. I worked on the DeWalt brand, and it's just a great place to learn a ton of great marketing and sales skills, and get out there and interact with the world.Ian:They put you out there on the street selling and talking to real people very quickly, and it was a lot of fun.Stephanie:Are there any lessons from Black and Decker where you still use them today, or you think back to advice you got or campaigns you were running? Or is it totally different now?Ian:I guess I think that for one, they set the standard very high for brands to create excitement and create products and experiences that their customers love and are loyal to. We used to get on the DeWalt brand pictures of people who had DeWalt themed weddings. I have had the good fortune in my career to work on a few other brands like that with Craftsman and later... And Sherman Williams, we had a brand called Purdy, which is a brand of paint brushes and applicators. They make these paint brushes here in the US by hand, and painters can tell a Purdy in their hand when they're blindfolded. They know the feel of the wood. They know just how these things feel and work, and they believe in them.Ian:Anyway, to be able to work on a brand like that at Purdy, we got a video of a guy who had a funeral for a paintbrush that he had used for years and years. When it finally just wouldn't go any further, he filmed a little memorial service and buried it in his yard.Stephanie:Oh my gosh.Ian:Anyway, DeWalt's the same way. Black and Decker, they just set the bar very high in terms of brands that create amazing loyalty and amazing customer experiences, which I have tried to carry through my career as well.Stephanie:I want to dive into your time at Univar, because that company is obviously huge. I think it's what, a $9 billion company, Fortune 500.Ian:Yep.Stephanie:9,000 employees or so.Ian:Yep. Yep.Stephanie:I want to hear about your work there. First of all, what is Univar and what did your role look like there?Ian:Sure. Univar, now Univar Solutions, is a pretty global multinational industrial distribution business. So, very B2B. We sold chemicals and ingredients into many different industries, everything from food ingredients to food manufacturers, to ingredients to personal care product companies like cosmetics companies, shampoos, sunscreen, lotions, paint and coatings, adhesives, industrial use. It was just a super diverse customer base. Thousands and thousands of customers, hundreds of thousands of products, and just millions of transactions. Lots of repeat business.Ian:Some of the products we sold were very commoditized. Some were highly specialized and patent protected, and exclusive ingredients that took a much different sales approach. The customer experience around that was very different too.Stephanie:What was your role when you first started at Univar? Then where did you transition to over time?Ian:Yeah, so I spent a couple of years as the first CMO at Univar, and put in place the first global corporate strategy, built out a lot of the core marketing frameworks with market research, with brand standards, articulating our value proposition, enhancing the value proposition, and aligning how we were communicating that and the brand identity globally. Then after a couple of years somewhere along the way I picked up a responsibility for ecommerce. A couple of years into it, the CEO talked to me about this opportunity to become the first Chief Digital Officer.Ian:When we had that conversation, he made the point that he really didn't want a technical person in this role. He wanted a commercial person in this role who could think about value creation and how we leverage digital to create value for our customers and suppliers, and to differentiate ourselves in a pretty fragmented marketplace with a lot of competitors of all different sizes. To me, this was really exciting. If I think about my whole career, I'd spent time in these companies like Black and Decker, Sherwin Williams, companies that made mostly consumer-facing products that really thought a lot about innovation.Ian:Then to make the transition into B2B distribution, one of my observations was innovation was not as common as daily there as it was in these manufactured product companies. I think a huge opportunity that I saw was with digital this is a way for a distributor to innovate around customer experience. A distributor doesn't typically make products. What they make is a unique customer experience, and they deliver on that better or worse than their competition. Digital is a way for that type of business to really create a better customer experience and solve problems that have remained somewhat unsolved.Stephanie:Very cool. Were you nervous taking on not only one, taking on a role where you're really the first CMO, and now it's like and now you're going to be the first Chief Digital Officer, were you hesitant to take on a new role that the company had not had before?Ian:Yeah. When I had the conversation initially, one of my thoughts was I don't know if I'm the right person for this. But that conversation around wanting somebody who had the commercial mindset rather than a technical mindset was reassuring. I think if you look at chief digital officers as a position and the people that sort of reside in those roles today, there are few different walks of life that find people there. Sometimes it's a technical leader. Sometimes it is a commercial leader, and maybe sometimes it's a transformational sort of complex project leader type person.Ian:It's not uncommon to have a marketer in that type of a role. As I think about marketing as a field and CMO as a role, what's clear in today's world is that digital is becoming really important to marketers. It has already, but the CMO role in general has evolved a lot and it continues to evolve. Much of the change is around digital and the power of data. As I thought about this role, to me it felt very relevant to my career, and it felt like the right skill set to be adding to my toolbox.Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah, very cool. What did it look like behind the scenes when you were entering into this new role? After you started observing for a bit, what did the process look like and where did you want to evolve it to?Ian:We had already started someone. We had an ecommerce platform we had just launched, and we had some analytics work that was already underway. We had some thoughts on how digital would help in supply chain and some other ways. The idea with creating this chief digital officer role was to put it all together to create a bigger wholistic vision, to prioritize and think about which of these things do we really want to do, and what sequence do we want to do them in, and how much are they all worth to us, and what is the investment going to require?Ian:The first thing to do was start to put the elements together and continue progress for accelerated progress in the things that we already had started. Fortunately, I really enjoyed a lot of the work we were doing there. It was very customer-facing. It was on the commercial side of the business, so we had an advanced analytics team that we rapidly were growing. We were doing AI and machine learning. We had a ton of transactional data, very good CRM data, and we were able to create a lot of value out of that by identifying insights that were commercially actionable.Ian:We had a couple of marketing automation systems in place, and we were choosing and moving to one. We were using that pretty effectively to reach out and activate with our customers as well as the ecommerce platform itself. We were still really trying to drive adoption of the ecommerce platform. I guess one of the lessons we learned was we were moving.... There assumed to be a lot of pressure to have a website, an ecommerce system, a customer portal where our customers could transact. There was a bit of a race to build it and launch it. We did.Stephanie:[crosstalk] you launch it, and what did your tech stack look like? What was the perfect fit for a company of Univar's size?Ian:We were using very heavily the Salesforce B2B commerce stack. That's what we built our commerce platform on, which was originally CloudCraze then became B2B commerce for Salesforce. I'd say we had a pretty good experience there. We were able to launch a platform in weeks, not months.Stephanie:Wow. [crosstalk]. That's super fast for a company that size, because we've talked to other people who were like, "Oh, 28 weeks." It's a whole thing.Ian:It was incredibly fast. We had both a strong internal team using very good development processes, and moving fast. Also, we used outside support for the build as well. We spent some money on it. Speed and money sometimes are inversely correlated. This was kind of an example, but we built it. I guess the story that I think is relevant here though is that... Let me just say, my story is one of helping lead a company that's pretty early in a digital transformation stage, not the bleeding edge. I think that looks like a lot of the companies out there who see digital transformation as an opportunity, but an overwhelming one. Where do we start? How do we get our house in order to get going?Ian:We just knew we needed a platform and there was a race to launch it. We launched it. What we learned was the Kevin Costner movie, "If you build it they will come," Field of Dreams, is not necessarily the case in ecommerce. You have to drive adoption. You have to have a great product that makes something better for customers to use it, prefer it, and stick with it. But also, you got to do some hand holding with some of these customers that have been doing things the same way for a long time. Digital transformation is about leaving an old state of affairs and moving to something new and better, but change requires support and communication.Ian:Honestly, we had to do some handholding with customers to show them what's possible, show them how easy it is, and then once they've used it a lot of them feel like "Yeah, this is great. I like this. I didn't know this was that easy." They're just not even open to thinking about something new because they have a habit in place.Stephanie:Yeah. How did you scale that adoption? Because when I'm looking, I think you have over 100,000 customers. How do you scale adoption? Are you giving them training videos? Other than the [crosstalk] handholding, what did you guys do to really pull them onboard?Ian:Yeah, we did do some one-on-one calls. We had some webinars. We had programs where we were getting our Salesforce and customer service reps to have the same conversation on scale across all of their customers. We were trying to activate it across all our touchpoints to introduce it to customers and have that conversation with them. If they needed more support, we could put them on the phone with somebody who could help them answer questions and demo it. We had automated or sort of recorded demos they could watch online.Ian:All of that still felt like it wasn't as fast as we had hoped it would be, adoption. That was one of the lessons that we learned. I guess another thing I would suggest is it's really helpful to know what are your most valuable features, and focus them on that first. If customers need to... One of our most popular features was having a library of customer documents where they could access at any time. In the past, they had to call somebody, they had to email somebody, they had to wait. Well, this is 24/7 that they could go access documentation, is a regular thing that customers needed.Ian:Once we introduced that, it became a no brainer for a customer to say "Oh, okay. That's where I go? Thank you. That's a solution to a problem that I've been less than satisfied with in the past." I've talked to other companies that maybe handling payments was their way in, where once they started taking payments online and managing payments online, adoption went through the roof. It was one feature that customers really felt was superior to the old way of doing things, and that helped to drive adoption.Ian:There were a few things like that where we zeroed in on key features. Another key feature that we had a lot of popular success with, and was highly used on the site was Two Clip Reorder. 80% of our business was repeat purchases. For a customer to log in and then see their last several orders and be able to immediately access those and reorder turned out to be a very popular feature. I guess for a company starting the work, that it was important to do is, to really think about the customer journey today and what are those moments along the customer journey that you can make better quickly, and focus in on those and try to create the right solution that'll drive adoption around those features, is my takeaway from that.Stephanie:Yeah, and that's such a good reminder for a platform. I would see a lot of people, if you try and throw all the features, most people are probably not ready to get power user of a brand new platform and they're like, "I want to know every single feature on here," so just presenting them with the things that are pretty uniform, like you said, payments are a big thing, reordering is a really smart way to get people in the door. Then start maybe dripping out the extra features that would overwhelm them from the start.Ian:I would take it further upstream than that too, Stephanie, which is to say maybe you don't need to build a platform with all of those features on it out of the gate. If you take a true MVP view, focus on what are the moments in the customer journey that you can digitize successfully and give them a superior experience, and start there. Maybe you don't need as many features on your platform to start with, but build something that does perform very well and earns their adoption, and then add other features as you go. Beyond adoption, it's even how do you start faster and get out of the gates with some traction on it earlier?Stephanie:Yeah. Did you have any surprises from either customers or maybe your internal employees who you were also trying to train up on this new platform? Anything that you look back and you're like, "Oh, we should have probably done it this way. We could have avoided this if we would have approached it a little bit differently"?Ian:Boy, there's probably a good list of things that we would have... We learned along the way by doing. I guess I would say one of my biggest takeaways was probably we could have started smaller and been a little more rigorous or embrace that MVP concept even more.Stephanie:Rolling it out for a pilot group type of thing? Like smaller in that sense? Like don't do it [crosstalk] on there?Ian:Or is less complexity to begin with. An even simpler platform and prove that you can drive adoption around that, it's easier to explain, it's easier to build. Then there's less to change and iterate as you learn more about how to make it even better platform. But one of my takeaways I think is really embrace that idea of MVP. You can think about narrowing the scope of the customer base you launch it to. You can think about limiting the products. You can think about a lot of things to make it smaller and more manageable, and get it out the gate and just have data coming in on what's working and how is it generating value. Then build complexity around that. Know what works, and build on success rather than... This is what makes it intimidating for people who are starting the journey is, seeing the complexity of all the problems that need to be addressed, or all the features that you need.Ian:If you compare yourself with Amazon, yes it's going to be a very expensive, very big project. But you don't necessarily need to have all of the features and benefits to start with. Start small. Move fast. And work in the world of results to understand what's working and where to double down on success and invest in scale.Stephanie:How would you get your leadership team to agree on "Here's the five features that we know that maybe 80% of our customers want," how do you get everyone in the same room to all agree when everyone probably has very different customers and they all heard different things, even if it's one off their like, "I know this is important to a customer. It's very big revenue-wise for us." How do you [crosstalk] agree on something?Ian:First, I think it helps to start with a long range vision. I guess one of my other learnings would be that I've seen companies that become system-focused like "We need a platform. Let's build it. Let's turn it on. It's going to cost us $X million and take a year and a half to build." They think about it as a project with a start and an end. The reality is, you need to just think about how fast can we get to the starting point and how do you make that as fast and reasonably good as possible for their MVP. Then assure people that this is not a project that has a start and an end.Ian:It is a journey that has a starting line, and MVP is sort of how you're racing to get to a starting point. Then a multiyear potentially perpetual journey building that out. I think when you get the team in the room, you've got to have some data. You need to have data around your customer segments, around their preferences and needs. You need to sort of have an understanding of the customer journeys that exist. I think it's important to realize that it's easier to digitize simple processes than complex ones. There's a logic to we got to start small. Let's take recurring purchases with existing customers who know exactly what they want, and they buy it regularly.Ian:How do we just automate a repurchase? That's super simple. The customer would prefer to do it that way anyway versus... Later, you to get to things like troubleshooting or selling differentiated products that are a first time purchase to our customer that has a high performance need. Leave the high value add complex work to people and start with simple processes. Add complexity as you go. I think you can, between using real customer insights and the logic of what is possible in the digital world in terms of solution creation, and using a longterm like a three to five year journey map or a journey roadmap. We can assure people, "We can't get to you first, but these are the building blocks that we have to put in place in order to get to that level of complexity," and something that serves that unique customer need.Stephanie:Yeah.Ian:But there may be some things that'll never be digital or in the foreseeable... They're just too complex and they don't have the scale. You may have some one-off customer problems that only occur several times a year, and it just doesn't make sense to invest the kind of cost and a digital solution for some things. People might need to hear that too along the way.Stephanie:Yeah. What did the change management when it came to employees look like? Was there any pushback? Because I could see as an employee being like I always talk to my customer like this, we're on the phone, I do the order for them. We have this relationship. Don't mess with that. What was that like behind the scenes trying to train the employees up, get them onboard, and what kind of things [crosstalk]-Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:[crosstalk] for that.Ian:I think there are two great things to discuss on that. Great question. First, I would like to talk about Agile and how Agile played a role in adoption in our own employee environment. Second, really we had a very robust change management approach going into place at Univar Solutions that is worth talking about. First of all, Agile, this is where I became a real believer in Agile and certainly there was a lot of resistance. There were sales people who said "I don't want anybody touching my customer without me knowing about it. You shouldn't go take them a price or an offer, or anything like that without me approving it first."Ian:A lot of businesses out there are like that still today. There's a lot of trepidation about change. Really, we just had to find a support somewhere in the business who believed that they had an opportunity. The reality is that the speed you can move in digital is an opportunity. We could touch the entire national customer base for a given product in seconds, where it might take weeks for our traditional Salesforce to get out in front of those customers. We found somebody who wanted to work with, and try, and experiment. We put together a plan to target the right customers with the right offering given out there via marketing automation.Ian:We started at a very small scale, and it was to be honest, so small. We knew going into it, this is not going to move the needle at all. It's just too small. Everyone was being too cautious. But we ran the experiment and it came back, and sure enough we just didn't have enough scale to get any movement. But that was what we learned from it. We took it as a learning. We started too small. We need to open the target zone here of customers. The second trial we did, very quickly with a larger customer base, we started to see some progressing results. We picked up a few other learnings. So, we quickly ran a third iteration of it, and by that time we sent this experiment out, this message to customers, and we got real traction on it.Ian:The conversation which started from "Wait a minute. I don't know, why are we messing with customers without salesperson involvement?" to within about three to four weeks having results that were very promising. The conversation flipped, and the business team was saying to the digital and marketing team, "How can we do more of this? What do you need from me to do more of that? Because that felt good. That was a great solution that aligned with my business themes." In that sense, Agile, this idea of start small, run real experiments to get real data, and then once you prove a hypothesis about something that works, the discussion about investing and scale is much easier and you actually have a pull for the solution rather than pushing it into the business teams.Ian:I think first, Agile is a great adoption tool and a process for working cross-functionally with the rest of the business to help drive adoption of digital solutions. Second, I wanted to talk about change management. I would say I commend Univar Solutions for the approach here where part of this came in as well as it relates to an acquisition, and a lot of change that we were rolling out, because we were integrating two companies. I guess I would say as companies think about investing in digital, they're really thinking about how they spend every penny and they make those pennies go as far as they can.Ian:Usually, it is not natural to say "We need to hire people to help communicate." Meaning, communicate through and train our employees, communicate and train our customers. It feels like can't we just have existing people have that conversation? But the reality is, we did hire a change management leader. We started staffing out change management roles to integrate with customer service, to integrate with sales and to interact with customers. I guess a learning, looking in the rear view mirror was, that is the way to do it.Ian:You might even want to have customer adoption teams or cross-functional teams that involve adoption leaders throughout the company.Stephanie:What did this role look like? I mean, you're bringing someone in. Their role is to do change management. What does their day to day look like? How are they supposed to be partnering with teams?Ian:We had a leader at Service Central level who was thinking about putting together training programs, putting together communication, and coordinating timelines and rollout structures, and plans. So, full-time they were... Now, they weren't just working on digital. They might have been rolling out other major changes in the corporation, but digital transformation is something that fits that bill. My point is to have a dedicated structure in place, probably with a leader whose overseeing it, and potentially ambassadors in a variety of cross-functional teams or functions, like sales, customer service, sales ops, and even customer-facing adoption sort of agents is very fruitful.Ian:If you've invested and you believe in an ROI that will come with this, then adoption is an important factor that limits your ROI. I would just suggest that the company starting and going down this journey are thinking about all the investment and systems, and infrastructure of digital. Don't spare too much on adoption in favor of technology because you will be spending money on technology that's poorly used. It's worth the investment to drive timely, effective adoption and satisfaction with everybody in the ecosystem.Stephanie:One point I'm thinking about is all these things are changing, and a lot of the managers... I mean, I've seen this in the past companies I've worked for, well we need more head count. We always need more head count. For what's happening behind the scenes here, you just need to throw more people at it. How did you approach your teams who probably were all saying something similar I would assume? Did you supply more heads to try and solve problems? Or were you like "Hey, let's rework the talent pool. Let's put people on different roles." What did that look like?Ian:Yes. The answer is yes. No, certainly, you are thinking about head count, but this is where as a B2B business we started talking about omnichannel and sort of reconfiguring how we handle customer needs. In a business that has traditionally been very sales driven and relied on field sales reps to deal with face to face with customers for a lot of things, which many businesses out there still do, we started to think more about these customer journeys. There's simple, there's more complex, and there's very complex types of customer journeys, or events on a customer journey that need support.Ian:How do you start digitizing from the bottom up, the most simple, and how do you drive adoption of those? You can build a plan that drives the customer to self-serve options in order to reallocate head count into new... Sort of reinvest it into higher value activities from handling regular orders and replenishment orders to digitizing that and then thinking about how are we reallocating head count to digitize more complex processes, or to handle more high value added customer engagement opportunities. You can go from customer service handling manual work to more sales reps that are technically proficient and able to go sell a high value customer on a high value solution.Ian:As you up the continuum of complexity with digital, you're continually reinvesting head count by creating a self-serve option, driving adoption, and then moving head count into a higher value space.Stephanie:That's great. Yeah, I can see a lot of companies struggling with that now, and thinking how do I put these people in new roles, and then train them. Is it worth all that? Or should I hire someone who's already done this before? Tricky place to be, but I like that.Ian:Yeah. You can think too in today's world post-COVID, I think there's a continuum from digital to sort of inside... Or let's say digital, customer service, inside sales and then your outside sales or national count. Sort of that hierarchy of the types of resources you're applying against customer needs. The inside sales team becomes an even more potentially bigger team. They make more calls a day than outside sales rep can, and in an omnichannel environment they have the tools that you're investing in with ecommerce and digital to be even more efficient and have more intelligence at their fingertips to handle those customers as well.Stephanie:Thinking about intelligence at your fingertips, I want to shift back to the topic of AI. I know we mentioned it earlier that you guys are starting to experiment with that. You have a really big catalog at Univar. You have high frequency of transactions, a lot of stuff going on. What did that look like, introducing that into some of your processes? What did that world look like?Ian:Yeah, sure. Let me say, I am such a huge believer in AI and machine learning, and the opportunity here. This is sort of a revolution that's just starting. We were building out AI and machine learning use cases and deploying those, and integrating them with our entire sales and customer service ecosystem sort of. I think first, if there are companies out there that are wondering about this, I would say a lot of people quickly go to debates about is it AI or not? Or is just a formula?Ian:I saw a couple authors of a book Competing in the Age of AI. I saw them speak recently and one of the authors said "Look, you can get into a debate if you want to. I suggest that you just forget about that. It's not even worth debating. The reality is, if it is, if you're using algorithms and automation to do something a human used to do, let's call that AI." AI isn't all about sort of recreating human-centric consciousness or something, or super complex. More and more, the vast majority of AI application is going to be in super focused problem solving sort of settings.Ian:That's what we are looking at, at Ford. I would say any company out there that has lots of transactions, lots of customers, lots of products, any of those combinations probably has a great opportunity here because if you've got the data from transactions, from your CRM system, and especially if you have a large catalog and you're only selling a portion of that to most of your customers, there are insights hiding in all that data. In a B2B environment, it can be very valuable to understanding and optimizing your pricing.Ian:Pricing is hard to manage, and there are a lot of variables. AI can allow you to put many variables together and create some really sophisticated ways to monitor competitive things, or going on regents to look at how you're pricing customers across your own business, but bring some timely intelligence and automation to recommending optimum prices. AI allows you to predict and prevent customer turn. You can put together dynamics across a variety of variables that might indicate when a customer's regular purchasing cycle is changing, and there may be other factors involved that would indicate that this customer is likely to leave us.Ian:We've had a few things that are not correlated with success here and retention. Certainly, everybody has experienced as a consumer going online and seeing customers like you also bought. AI allows you to see and make those connections with more certainty and a higher understanding of what's the probability of success on these things in order to invest in automation and turning that into a feature, or marketing automation.Ian:This was super exciting, and we had success building teams out internally, bringing in data scientists and setting them loose on different business opportunities where they could build an algorithm and then we connected it through marketing automation or ecommerce to drive real financial benefit and results for the company.Stephanie:Yeah, that's awesome. What kind of insights did you get, or "aha" moments where you're like, "We never would have stumbled on that without building out these algorithms"?Ian:An example would be that we had a customer segmentation model in place but AI created an outcome that had 34 micro-segments of customers that was driving certain activity that was really generating value. No human could manage coming up with 34 micro-segments of customers based on many different variables. That's an example of how AI is able to piece together insights that just humans wouldn't get around to and couldn't connect on the right kind of actions probably with that in place.Ian:Like I said before, if you're a business that has a lot of transactional data, AI might be for you. If you have a lot of customers, a variety of customers, AI might help you. If you have a big catalog that you're trying to sell to a lot of customers, AI might help you. I think that there are plenty of businesses that think it's too farfetched or too sophisticated. I'm a believer that it's more within reach than people think, and that that's not just for any one business but it's already starting to change everything about online merchandising for some businesses, and marketing automation.Ian:It's worth diving into.Stephanie:Awesome. I spent a lot of time diving into Univar because obviously the company is amazing. Your story there, all your stories, are awesome. I also want to hear about what you're doing today. I know you're advising, an investor. Tell me what are you up to these days?Ian:Yeah, so I've started working with another sort of distribution business that is starting their own digital transformation, a very similar story. I believe that there are plenty of them out there. Also, I've been helping a business where I'm an investor that is called Parcel Home. This is an IOT connected device. It's launching in Europe. It's been in Europe for a couple of years and we're getting ready to launch it in the UK. Essentially, it's a delivery box that install outside your home on your front porch or out by the street. It's IOT connected, so with your phone you can access and monitor it. You can delivery people codes, so like if you were to purchase on Amazon, you'd just go in your delivery instructions and instruct them to use a code on the box.Ian:When they get there, they punch in the code. It unlocks. They leave your packages in the box. They close it. Then as you get home it notifies that you have received packages today. Make sure you go get them. You can enable other people in your home to use it, and you can set one-time codes for somebody who's just coming by to pick something up or drop something off. Or set it up as a recurring solution for all your deliveries.Stephanie:I can't believe that [crosstalk] haven't had that yet. I'm just thinking about how archaic dropping off a box of Amazon, there's a $500.00 item in there potentially, and it's just sitting on my front porch for [crosstalk].Ian:I know. I had the same thought. People buy multi expensive things, and then the package gets left on your front doorstep and it feels like really I think in that situation it's like security is essentially the fact that it's concealed in paper or cardboard. The only thing protecting it is the fact that somebody's not sure what it is, but it's sitting out there outside your home for a while.Stephanie:Could be a baby bottle. Could be a high end TV. I don't know.Ian:Yeah, $500.00 handbag or something like those, yeah. We see and there are some sort of online communities for neighborhoods where we see people talking about package theft. We know that's an issue.Stephanie:Oh, I know that from being in the Bay area.Ian:Weather is an issue. If it's left outside and you have precipitation or things like this, it can damage packages. I think now there are places where it's just not okay to read the package because of threats of theft or something, so they have to ring the bell or knock on the door and interrupt now what are Zoom or Microsoft Teams, or whatever online meetings. It's a nuisance as well.Ian:Anyway, this is a startup business that has been active in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and launching in Denmark here this spring as well as UK later this year. And really, direct-to-customer. So, building out regeneration assets and processes, a sales and marketing funnel and the processes to support that, and thinking about, as many companies are now, living in an almost purely digital environment and interacting with customers in that way.Stephanie:Yeah, that's awesome. Do you feel like you have certain lessons from the past that you're able to bring to this company to kind of help accelerate their progress? Or is it just such like a different field and startup where you're really having to kind of relearn the industry and what startups are doing versus really large Fortune 500 type of companies?Ian:I think it's some of both. It is. As you're launching, there are some fundamentals that even startups may or may not have the talent or resources in place. They just need to do some of the blocking and tackle about marketing and PR as you're entering a new market. How do you approach PR? There are some basics about press engagement for instance, that I can help with, but we're also learning about influencers, micro-influencers, and how to... That's an ever-changing game. There are new sort of marketplaces of influencers where brands can go and evaluate who are the influencers with audiences that matter to me, and how do I transact with them, or come to a mutually beneficial agreement to work with certain influencers? How do I scale that kind of work and what kind of investment do I need to do that?Ian:It's an important way that brands are reaching people now. Every moving target, with new platforms: TikTok, et cetera. It's a combination of executing on known best practices and staying in touch with what's working today. In a startup, you have a business that in the course of a year their commercial processes may change many times over. You add one additional person into the working team, and suddenly new processes emerge, or people reallocate different tasks. So, it's a very dynamic environment in that way.Stephanie:That's awesome. Yeah, I will be watching them closely. I'll be excited to see them expand, and hopefully they come here.Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:Well, let's shift over to the lightening round. The lightening round is brought to you buy Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I ask a question, and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready, Ian?Ian:All right, I guess I am ready. I didn't even know about the lightening round.Stephanie:It's easy [inaudible]. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Ian:I honestly think we'll see... If we rewind, people have entrenched behaviors. Take my family for instance, we were buying groceries online from a source. Everything got disrupted. We were a loyal online customer, but certain products and processes changed and we had to change to adapt to what our needs were. Many customers change brands and change their choice of where they purchase these things in the last year. I think the question will be, where did things land? Do people stick with the new brands that they've adopted? Or do brands settle back into a way that they win their customers back who've experimented and gone somewhere else? I think we're still in the turbulence of COVID.Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), yep. I agree. What do you predict then? Do you think people go back to kind of what they knew before? Or do you think now it's so ingrained with the new stuff they've been doing that that's the new way of living?Ian:I think more and more people will stick with their new solutions. To me, some of that is surprising because honestly we have bought through Amazon and Whole Foods, which I would think Amazon has got this under control, but for certain reasons a Target has over-delivered on new solutions and the product is [inaudible]. We had stopped buying from them. That's an example where competition moved fast and have different relationships with some of those customers now. I think that businesses better get used to where things are now, and it's going to be hard to re-win customers that they've lost.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah, same thing with Walmart. I feel like they've stepped it up in a huge way-Ian:Yes.Stephanie:On very quick delivery. I ordered a planter the other day and it showed up the same day. I didn't really understand the delivery process because it seemed like just some random person, but I'm like, "Hm, my planter's here," in that same day.Ian:Yeah.Stephanie:Which made me kind of rethink where before I'd be like, "Yeah, I'm not going to Walmart because it could take a couple of days, and shipping and all this." But yeah, they stepped it up.Ian:Yeah. I totally agree. They've done a great job.Stephanie:What's the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Ian:The nicest thing anybody's ever done for me? Whoa, that's tough. Other than my wife bearing children? I would say that [crosstalk]. That's a big one. It's hard to beat that.Stephanie:That is a good one.Ian:I don't know if I could top that. That's a big deal. And as a father, there's this moment where you're like you're going into that experience and you realize "I really don't control anything about the things that matter most to me. I just have to sit here and hope it all goes well."Stephanie:Yeah. Yeah. If you were to have a podcast what would it be about, and who would your first guest be?Ian:I think I'd have to have a podcast about what people are passionate about, and the lengths that they will go to to pursue their passions. I don't know who my first guest would be, but I think that the most interesting conversations are when you talk to people about stuff that they really love, that they love doing, and that they... That's what lights people up. I think I might start with unexpected guests, people that are sort of somebody in your own neighborhood that nobody knows, but there are amazing things happening that people are...Ian:I love these sort of stories of real humans of, kind of stories where somebody just went to great lengths. I read a great story that's a good example. A little restaurant in Baltimore that made Fusion Asian food, there's a woman who came to visit her kids in Baltimore regularly. Loved a certain dish they had there. Then she came down with terminal cancer. She lived in Connecticut there in Baltimore, and the kids this woman had called the restaurant and said, "Hey, can we get the recipe? We'd just like to prepare it for her in her final weeks."Ian:The owner of the restaurant was like, "You know what, where does she live? We'll be there." They drove six or seven or eight hours and prepared it on the back of the tailgate of their truck, and knocked on their door and brought this food to her. Anyway, that sort of thing is... That makes for great stories.Stephanie:Oh, goosebumps over here. That's amazing.Ian:Yeah, totally.Stephanie:We need that podcast. Someone sponsor this. Ian needs a sponsor. Oh yeah, that's really great. I'd definitely listen to that. What one thing do you not understand today that you wish you did?Ian:Let's focus it back on ecommerce.Stephanie:Okay.Ian:A big question that I don't see an answer to that I really think is a big opportunity is, if I think about real world brick and mortar shopping it's a very rich experience. If you think about walking in a store and walking back to the department you're going to, you past thousands of products and many, many, many opportunities for a retailer to sell something to you: visually, stimulations, [inaudible] signs, POP, that kind of thing. Digital ain't there yet.Ian:It's a long way away from it. At best, we're saying customers like you also bought, or... You know what I mean? It's a cross merchandising that gets relegated to a side banner or below the fold kind of merchandising. It's hard to imagine replicating the richness of an in-store experience, but I'm really curious to see how that evolves because brick and mortar is becoming less and less... It's not going away, it's just that's a rich experience of hard to replicate, and how many online browsing occasions do you need to replicate or replace all of those stimulus that retailers or brands can present you with in-store effectively?Ian:I guess I'm wondering, without that in place what's the output of the whole system here? Do people become just way more replenishment purchase-oriented and less new purchase? Or can we find other ways to effectively introduce people to products they didn't know they were looking for?Stephanie:Mm-hmm (affirmative), that's a good one. Definitely something that I'll be watching closely over this next year, because I love retail. I love going into stores, especially if they have a good experience, good curation, the collection. I feel like you can't beat that, even in a digital world and things like... Yeah, it's hard to get there.Ian:The real world shopping can also be a social experience that online is not anywhere close to replicating either. How you share it with somebody, it's a little different experience online too.Stephanie:Yeah, and you go with someone and... Yeah. Well, that is a great answer. Ian, thank you so much for joining us on the show today. It's been a pleasure having you. Where can people find out more about you and your work?Ian:Reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's LinkedIn slash in/slash... Whatever. IanLGresham.Stephanie:I'll link it up. [crosstalk].Ian:Yeah, there you go. I'd love to connect with you. If there's anybody that has questions about digital transformation or how to connect with customers in that way, I'm happy to have a good conversation about it. Thank you, Stephanie, for having me today. It's been a great conversation.Stephanie:Thanks so much.

Phil’s guest on today’s show is Ian Reynolds, a Partner and the Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek, a software development company focused on helping businesses build custom software.   He has spent the better part of his career in consulting covering a diverse range of industries, including Finance, Oil & Gas and Healthcare. He now helps companies to solve their core business objectives with agile software development.   Ian talks about the importance of reading, and of constantly feeding your knowledge base. He also discusses the value of recognising your individuality, and always pushing yourself to see what you’re capable of.   KEY TAKEAWAYS:   TOP CAREER TIP You have to constantly read. Books should be your perennial companion. Reading leads to success. On average, the wealthiest Americans read 22 books per year.   WORST CAREER MOMENT In an early job, Ian encountered an employee with behavioral issues. Rather than confront the issue, Ian chose to leave the job – decision that has caused him regret ever since.   CAREER HIGHLIGHT The highlight so far has been the acquisition and growth of Zibtek, along with the success achieved and the improvements made along the way. Many more ambitions has since been realized, with many more to come.   THE FUTURE OF CAREERS IN I.T In terms of IT’s life in the world, we really are at the “Stone Age” period. The potential for how IT will change the world is staggering and infinite. To be at this crucial stage in its history is exhilarating.   THE REVEAL What first attracted you to a career in I.T.? – Ian recognized the changing world of IT, rapidly evolving from day to day, and aspired to be a part of its evolution. What’s the best career advice you received? – Don’t be afraid to try new things. What’s the worst career advice you received? – To not stand out. We must always endeavour to be the brightest talent out there. What would you do if you started your career now? – Ian would embark upon business acquisition strategies far earlier. What are your current career objectives? – To expand knowledge on particular subjects, with a current focus upon banking, legal and finance items. What’s your number one non-technical skill? – Enhanced emotional intelligence. It is good to be non-emotional at times, but emotion can also propel us forward when needed. How do you keep your own career energized? – Keeping dialogue channels open with family and friends allows Ian to experience new perspectives. What do you do away from technology? – Aggressively reading!   FINAL CAREER TIP Don’t compare yourself to others. Compare yourself to yourself and push yourself to see what you’re capable of.   BEST MOMENTS   (6:30) – Ian - “You are doing yourself a disservice if you are not constantly learning” (9:20) – Ian - “In business, you’ve got to separate some degree of the emotional from the rational” (9:59) – Ian – “Failure is not failure unless you fail to learn from it” (18:03) – Ian – “Talking with people about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, has been the most helpful thing in keeping my career energized”   ABOUT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS   Phil Burgess is an independent IT consultant who has spent the last 20 years helping organizations to design, develop, and implement software solutions.  Phil has always had an interest in helping others to develop and advance their careers.  And in 2017 Phil started the I.T. Career Energizer podcast to try to help as many people as possible to learn from the career advice and experiences of those that have been, and still are, on that same career journey.   CONTACT THE HOST – PHIL BURGESS Phil can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   Twitter: https://twitter.com/philtechcareer LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/philburgess Facebook: https://facebook.com/philtechcareer Instagram: https://instagram.com/philtechcareer Website: https://itcareerenergizer.com/contact   Phil is also reachable by email at phil@itcareerenergizer.com and via the podcast’s website, https://itcareerenergizer.com Join the I.T. Career Energizer Community on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/ITCareerEnergizer   ABOUT THE GUEST – IAN REYNOLDS   Ian Reynolds is a Partner and the Chief Solutions Architect at Zibtek, a software development company focused on helping businesses build custom software.   He has spent the better part of his career in consulting covering a diverse range of industries, including Finance, Oil & Gas and Healthcare. He now helps companies to solve their core business objectives with agile software development.   CONTACT THE GUEST – IAN REYNOLDS   Ian Reynolds can be contacted through the following Social Media platforms:   Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/just_solve LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianjhreynolds/ Website: https://www.zibtek.com/

Ian Garlic is CEO at authenticWEB. He started his career in marketing about 15 years ago as a consultant for one of the world's largest information companies – back when good video production required hiring high-end, expensive, technically-savvy videographers. When Google purchased its video competitor, YouTube ten years ago, Ian saw opportunity, left the information company, and started authenticWEB. As a video marketing agency, authenticWEB crafts journey-stage-specific, people-story videos designed to reach “the right customers at the right time.” The goal: to engage potential customers with emotionally riveting content to “earn their love.” For each client, the agency develops 10 to 100 video packages from micro content to 15- to 20- minute mini-documentaries. The different types of videos they produce include:  the overview video (most people's commercials),  service commercials (covering the different services provided),  how-to videos,  process videos (explaining complex processes so people understand what happens at different times),  topical video blog posts (including social),  videos covering frequently asked questions,  About Us videos (Ian notes that “About Us” is the second most useful page on a website, an important page for conversion, and that people usually go from the “About Us” to making contact with a company), and video case stories. The most effective video case stories involve interviewing a client's customers and searching for that gem of a story that will evoke a positive response in viewers. Ian says there is no way of telling who will give a good interview and who won't. From raw footage, authenticWEB parses different edits and formats for different clients at different stages of the customer journey. Ian develops videos content to help customers identify a client's business as an “authority” and “a new best friend.” The agency's clients include attorneys, doctors, dentists, and other agencies (because agencies often have a hard time marketing themselves).  YouTube: The Next TV In this interview, Ian elaborates on the increasing importance of YouTube in marketing outreach – he likens it to “the next TV.” YouTube videos need a “to be on point, perfectly messaged, and . . . delivered at the right time.” A website only gives you a piece of the interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data: including total and percent view time. That kind of feedback facilitates cross-platform video and content improvement. Online video production does not require the same high-end equipment used in the past. Ian notes that today he does his own videography and that he travels “light.” The production process is simpler, so that the focus stays on story and editing the story for the audience. Ian recommends reusing content. He explains, if you drive traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube will increase your rankings. YouTube's search engine is second only to Google. A Google search will start a well-indexed video at the exact moment in the recording where the answer to the searcher's question is provided.  Some people think they can buy YouTube followers . . . enough to get their own URL. Ian reminds us, “You can't buy love.” Purchased followers won't necessarily view your content, so view time is sacrificed. Ian also discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of some of the online production tools. He can be reached on Linked in or on his agency's website at: https://authenticweb.marketing/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by Ian Garlic, CEO at authenticWEB based in Orlando, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, Ian. IAN: Rob, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. I think you've got a very distinct perspective that our audience will enjoy. Why don't you start off by telling us about authenticWEB and what your superpowers are? IAN: We've been around for a little over 10 years. We are a video marketing agency. We do some other stuff too, but it's all around delivering people-story video. We're really good at finding that story, understanding how these videos have to be crafted depending on where they are in the customer journey, and then crafting them to deliver and get a response. We create anywhere from 10 to 100 video packages for clients, and then ongoing we create video, do video SEO. Really, what we do is, like really good marketers, we help connect the client's story to their prospect's story and make them the authority. When someone walks through the door, they feel like already they're their best friend and the authority, and that's what the video does for our clients. So that's what we've been doing for about 10 years. We've worked with all sorts of professionals. We work with attorneys, doctors, dentists, and we're working with actually a lot of other agencies now. We have a lot of other agencies, which is fun, because the agencies have such a tough time marketing themselves. I have that problem. It's nice for us to help other agencies market themselves. ROB: Fascinating. I think I heard you say 50 to 100 video packages. That sounds like a lot. Is that different formats for different platforms, different edits? Or is that just that much content? How do you put that together? IAN: It's a little bit of all of it. It's different edits, different formats. You've got to consider where they are in the customer journey. One of the things we're known for is our video case stories. People fly me around to interview their clients to get that story out. I don't try to make people cry, but I kind of do. When you can ask the question the right way, you get that emotional response from your customers, and you have this powerful tool. We get these 30-minute interviews with their customers, and parts of that story need to be used in different ways, in different parts of the journey, from early on, just to get attention and awareness, to longer form customer stories. We're doing some 15-20 minute ones, like mini-documentaries. And then pulling micro content, little clips out of there. Plus, we make essentially 9 to 10 different types of videos. We make your overview video, which is most people's commercials. We make this thing called a service commercial – because most of us have different services, and we want to have a little commercial for each service. How-to videos, which are important, especially on YouTube. Video blog posts, where someone's discussing a specific topic. Under that video blog post, I consider a lot of social posts. We just call it video blog posts. Frequently Asked Questions are a big one. The core videos that we make besides those are micro content, but besides that, we're really known for video case stories and About Us videos. That's the second most useful page on a website. Most people throw up either a bio or some funny video, but really it's a converting page. If you look at your analytics, it's not only going to be in your top three or four pages – it can be out of there depending on what you're doing, but it's top three or four pages. But where people usually go after that is some sort of contact. So really having a converting video on there. And then process videos. We make a lot of process videos because people don't know what happens at different points. The more complex it is, the more people need to understand what's going to happen next and how this is going to look. When you add it all up and you do all the different points and all the different variations, it really quickly adds up to a ton of content along the customer journey. ROB: I've talked to people where they feel like they're intimidated to ask their customer to be on this sort of video. What have you found in terms of overcoming that fear? Is it ever really well-founded, or would people be surprised that more of their customers are willing to get on camera than they might ever expect? IAN: They'd be surprised. There's people you'd think would be great on camera that aren't. It's a numbers game. There's people you'd think would be poor, but have these amazing stories. One of the other things we do is audio interviews like this and then make them into videos with pictures, so it makes it a little easier. But it's the timing of asking, it's how you're asking. One of the things I always tell people is never ask for a testimonial. I don't even like using the word “testimonial” because that's when people really freeze up. If you've done an amazing job for someone and they're really, really happy and you ask them for a testimonial, it's like, “Oh my God, these people did such a good job for me. I'm really nervous about screwing this up for them.” They get nervous. So, I always tell people to ask someone for their story. Talk about something specific that you know is important. That will help. But this is the number one piece of advice I can give for anyone's marketing: install asking for those stories into your process at different points. People want to know what the onboarding is like. What is it like right after the sales process? What's it like if you have a strategy? What's it like a year after you're done with your project? Ask along the way. And you can ask the same people multiple times. You've got to dig for those, though. You've got to make it a habit. ROB: You mentioned you have been at this for a little bit. I think you said around 10 years. Talk about the difference in – I think there used to be a perception of video as being expensive, and it's probably still more costly than some methods of marketing. You mentioned I think a little hack in there of being able to take audio and turn it into a video. But how has your production process changed with the advance of different production equipment and tools over your time running the business? IAN: When I started 14-15 years ago now in marketing, I was in New York, and I would hire high-end videographers. I saw that, especially when we came online, we didn't need that high-end production. Now, I think production value is very important, but I see it inflate a lot because people are like, “I need this gear and this gear and this gear.” I've definitely trimmed down our production gear. Especially since I travel, I like it light. [laughs] I would say that's the number one thing. It's gotten lighter and easier to set up. There's a lot of cool things you can do now, especially with B roll, to make it interesting. So, it's easier now to – everyone can have a gimbal, everyone can have a slider. There's a few of these other things – you can get a nice 4K camera inexpensively. So we're doing a lot of that stuff still, but as far as the production process, we tweak it, but for the most part we've just been improving how we get the story, how we edit the story, what parts need it. I would say the biggest evolution – I started really in video around when YouTube was purchased by Google. That's when I was like, “Hey, this is going to be a big thing. This is going to be huge. You're going to have this search intense, and people are going to be able to find things on Google and find your video right at that perfect moment.” At that point, we still edited really well. We had a process for editing, but our editing process has evolved and evolved and evolved because now there's so much content out there. Your video needs to be on point, perfectly messaged, and needs to be delivered at the right time. Those are the things that we constantly improved, adding more copywriting principles into our video process and that type of thing. Those are the big ones, and then post-production has definitely evolved. We've evolved the post-production side and we're constantly talking about that. What can we do to make this look different, be exciting, be entertaining on the post-production side? ROB: There's a lot of acquisitions that show up as sort of interesting. What do you think it was about Google acquiring YouTube that really made you sit up and pay attention? IAN: (A) It was Google, and (B) video was just happening. There was this idea that you can get your face and your voice in front of someone using video. We can do that, but now Google was not going to let YouTube – that was doing okay at the time; it was having these moments – it wasn't going to let it go away. Then when they started blending the YouTube videos into the Google search results, that's when I was like, this is going to be a game-changer. If you get a video thumbnail into the Google search results, you can be anywhere on that page and people are going to click on it. They're going to recognize your face. They're going to recognize your voice more often. I knew that was going to be the game-changer. Google wasn't going to let that not happen. ROB: In hindsight, the acquisition price was significant. I think it was around $1.5 billion or so. What I think is interesting there is there's actually a cohort between them, Twitch, and Instagram. All of them, I think, were around $1+ billion in acquisition and all of them are probably right in the middle of what you do every day now. IAN: Yeah, for sure. Look at the YouTube acquisition; at $1.5 billion. Of all the acquisitions, that was a steal. It's the second most used search engine. We're putting all of our time and effort into YouTube because it's going to be the next TV. It already is. My son watches it. He's 6 years old. He knows exactly how to navigate it. My niece wants to be a YouTube star. She asked me all about the stats, and she's 10 years old. “What's the view time? How many subscribers does that person have?” At 10 years old. Other stuff will come and go; YouTube is not going away, and if anything it's an essential part of our life. ROB: Just got to keep her away from the comments a little bit – but we probably all should stay away from the comments. IAN: [laughs] For sure, for sure. ROB: Ian, what led you down this path to start authenticWEB in the first place? What were you doing before, and what made you head in this direction, which can be a little bit intimidating at times for some people? IAN: When I first moved to New York, I was still getting back into working in a hedge fund. Worked for one for a little bit, didn't like that. I worked simultaneously in commercial real estate. I was trying to decide – and I worked at one of the top restaurants in the world, actually, as a bartender. Just like, “Okay, what do I want to do when I grow up?” type thing. I was looking at the theme, and the theme was always marketing. I loved marketing, and I always loved digital. I've been on a computer since I was like 6 years old, which is a big deal because I'm not a millennial. [laughs] It all made sense. So, I went to work for one of the largest information companies as a marketing consultant. Loved it, but the advent of Google and YouTube I knew was going to be a huge thing, and also, I saw them not spending time getting to know the client story and really making good marketing. Everything looked and felt the same. It really did an injustice to especially the smaller people with the smaller budgets, because at that point it was who threw the most money at that search channel or whatever. Now, we separate it out and go, “I can serve and connect people with their perfect clients, and when they do that, they're going to love their business so much more. When people walk through the door and they know them already, they're going to love their business.” That's really cool when I get that phone call. It's like, “Man, you're right. People feel like they know me when they walk through the door, and it changes how we run our business,” which I always love. I knew we could do it better, so I started the agency, and yeah, it was easy since then. No, I'm just kidding. [laughs] Not easy. It's always this endless cycle of – you get the improvement, everything's awesome. It's a rollercoaster. We improve with systems and stuff over the years. Spent a lot of money on consultants, spent a lot of money on a lot of information, and it really improved and created all of our systems. That's helped a lot, but there's always things that are going to come up. But I always know, too, all I have to do is go look at LinkedIn one time and look at jobs and I'm like, “I cannot imagine having to go to a job.” I mean, I guess a lot of people aren't going to a job now, but I cannot imagine someone telling me what to do. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] A couple of looks at a job posting and maybe whatever some people have to wear to their office when they go to offices and that's enough? IAN: Yeah. I just look at LinkedIn for a few minutes and I'm like, “Oh no, I could never do this.” I could never go for another job interview. I'm officially unemployable. ROB: I think I heard you speak a little bit about discoverability within YouTube and video. You could sort of call it SEO, with YouTube, as you mentioned, being the second largest search engine. We've talked a good bit about the evolution of SEO for web on this podcast; we haven't really talked a lot about the evolution of search on video. Is search on video still fairly understandable? Are there hacks that people used to use that are busted and gone and bad tactics to listen to if you hear them? IAN: Yeah. There's hacks, but unlike a website – a website you kind of get some interaction data. YouTube gets all the interaction data. Yes, keywords are still important – matching up the keywords, understanding the keywords, going for the longtail – but getting that view time – that's why I talk about getting that reaction, getting them to take action. Total view time and percent view time are huge, huge things. So really understanding those “content hacks” of getting the view time is super important. Those are the big ones. I actually had someone the other day like, “I think I'm going to buy followers so I can get my own” – because when you get to I think 1,000, you get your own URL. I'm like, “But if you go and buy followers, on a percentage basis you lose that view time because they're not going to watch your videos. You're going to have these followers that aren't watching your videos and aren't interacting and you're going to lose that visibility.” Those are some big ones.  I would say those are the big things. And then always be reusing your YouTube content. One of the things I see so much that people don't do is they don't use their YouTube content in other places. You can email it out on a regular basis. If someone has seen it before, they can see it again, as long as it's not just a straight-up ad, if it's informational. Send that content back out. Those are the big ones because if you're driving traffic to your YouTube videos, YouTube is going to reward you with higher rankings. ROB: Got it. In some ways, Google may have seen this on YouTube first, because now in search they'll look at where you land; if that site is running Google Analytics and you stay there longer, they'll consider that as a search ranking factor. But it may have almost been inspired from the video realm. IAN: Yeah, the scroll and everything. It's a lot of the same stuff, I'm sure of it. They can't actually tell what you read, but they can tell what you scroll through. Also, now with YouTube, they're now indexing inside of the videos, and if you add the different parts of your video into your description with links to it, you can actually get indexed for that exact moment inside of Google, which is pretty cool. So if you answer one question in there, Google could pop it up and show – I'm sure we've all seen this now – where it starts the video at 3 minutes in because you answered this one question I just googled. That's another little bit of a hack I think everyone needs to be doing. ROB: That seems true certainly across really almost anywhere Google is doing structured meta data. They don't collect that data for nothing, and if you see them start to add that sort of meta data – they do this for recipes, for song lyrics, for your sitemap – they're going to use it at some point if you give it to them, it seems like. It's great that that makes sense on video as well. Ian, you've been doing authenticWEB for a little while now. If you were starting over today, what are some things you've learned along the journey that you might do differently if you were starting fresh right now? IAN: I would've niched down faster and harder. People fight the niching down, and I think it's more important than ever. I would've gone into paid ads for us faster, I would've been emailing my list more, and I would've spent more time on my sales through onboarding systems. We did a lot on our backend systems. I was always big into that. Within a couple years, we had it down to almost an assembly line. Obviously, there's art inside of there, but it allows us to fix things when they go wrong. But I didn't spend enough time on my sales and onboarding systems, and I've really nailed that down and it makes such a difference. ROB: What made you realize that you needed to focus? Was it outside feedback? Was it one day where you realized for the bajillionth time you didn't have quite what you needed? How did you come through on that? IAN: All of the above. I'm constantly looking at the business as a whole. Yes, I'm the technician and I like to know a lot about marketing. I love it. I have a podcast, the Garlic Marketing Show, and I'm always learning stuff. We just did the Giants a video learning from 40 experts' techniques. But really working on the business as a whole is a constant, constant struggle. Not a struggle, but it's exciting. It's like, “Hey, what can I tweak here? Where did this go wrong and how can in fix this?” That's a big, big thing. I've been in masterminds. We've had consultants. I'm still in a lot of groups. I talk to other agency owners all the time. And that's another mistake I made, too: thinking early on that I needed to do this all on my own and that everyone was my competition. Now I don't even view people inside that do the exact same thing as my competition. It's the same thing I told my clients Day 1, and I didn't listen to myself. We all want to work with someone slightly different, and if you market yourself right, you're going to get that person. The more of a community you can develop around yourself, the better you're going to be. ROB: That part definitely makes a bunch of sense. Ian, you've been in this for a while; there's always talk about new platforms, new exciting things. What is coming up for authenticWEB or maybe video marketing in general that you're genuinely excited for and think is worth paying more than a little bit of attention to? IAN: I still think it's YouTube. Honestly, I think using YouTube – here's another shift that we did. Once again, it wasn't in production, but it was a distribution shift. I'm always looking at how we're distributing the videos. YouTube used to be the platform that we'd put on the website and people would watch the video there. Now we're really trying to drive people onto YouTube as a whole because we want to get them into those suggested videos. We want them to watch more of our content. They want to watch video content. And when you're a professional, if you're an agency owner, if you're any type of service business, and you get people to see your face and hear your voice on a constant basis, that is the best marketing out there because you get that mere exposure effect. They will trust you more and more. YouTube is going to keep evolving it. They're getting better and better and better. They're changing around the algorithms, and it's hooking people more and more and more. I think TikTok is evolving, and if they don't completely screw with it with the government, I think it's got some legs now. But as far as really marketing a business and becoming an authority, I think it's all-in on YouTube. The other part is it's really hard to get spammed on YouTube because there's no messenger or anything. LinkedIn feels like it's gotten almost too spammed. I think people are going to have a tough time killing YouTube. ROB: Sure. It's certainly 5 to 10 requests a day that are straight-up pitches for business, at least, in my experience. IAN: Yeah. ROB: Are there any platforms – you mentioned TikTok; TikTok seems promising but early for both paid and organic. YouTube is pretty mature for both. Are there any platforms that are maybe not primary for organic content that you still see as being pretty effective for paid, even if that gets into ad insertions in other digital formats? How are you thinking about that? IAN: I honestly think TikTok for B2C, almost everyone needs to be there. If you think that moms and dads are not there, they are. They're watching their kids and then they're getting hooked. I think organic-wise – they have this crazy algorithm, too, that's so good at suggesting stuff for you. I think it's a great place also to test. But as far as other platforms go, then moving back to webinars, I think webinars are coming back. Using Zoom in a different way, using more of this course work, and we're going to figure out new ways to have groups on and have smaller groups. I think webinars are making a resurgence because so many people are now used to being on Zoom for a little while, where they weren't before and they couldn't really pay attention. Now they're used to it and you can really control the messaging there. ROB: Got it. I heard you mention Zoom, and I was wondering – is Zoom especially good at the webinar thing, or is it simply that the average person's familiarity with Zoom at this point is so common that it's not even worth trying to force them to learn something else? IAN: I think it's the latter. Everyone's on Zoom all the time. I remember with GoToWebinar, you have to download software and whatever, and some of these other webinar platforms are really glitchy. Zoom, yes, it had a shutdown recently, but for the most part it's pretty smooth. I think other things will evolve out of there and we'll get used to them, but Zoom works well for livestreaming. I personally use Ecamm, which I love, but Zoom is easy for people to use. I think that's the big thing. ROB: I'm not as familiar with Ecamm. For those who aren't, what does Ecamm bring to the table that's worth paying attention to? IAN: I've been doing a lot more livestreaming. The algorithms are really paying attention to the livestreaming. Plus, if you do it right, Ecamm allows really high quality, almost like a TV show, to your livestream. You can add text overlays really easily. You can do different scenes, you can do an intro. You can essentially be your own TV show manager with Ecamm. I loved it. It does really, really cool stuff and makes your livestreams that much more interesting. You can pull people in, pull people out. The other day I was on a livestream with Gino Wickman from EOS and people were making comments, asking questions. You can instantly pull their questions up from the comments onto the screen, which is really nice interaction. I do love things like Zoom and livestream because of that. We're seeing this hyper-personalization. And that leads into the other one, stuff like Bonjoro that make it really easy to hyper-personalize videos for clients and send them to them right away. That's where I'm seeing things going, this interaction – because you get that feedback and then you get improve your videos and improve your content and get across a few different platforms, getting that feedback and improving your content constantly. ROB: You're talking about that live TV show. One thing I just started playing around with a little bit, and I wonder if you've seen this and how it compares – have you seen this package called Mmhmm? It's very hard to pronounce. IAN: Yes, I have seen it. I haven't used it yet. I have seen it. It's similar to what Ecamm does. I think it has a few different features. But yeah, that's the kind of thing I think we're going to see more and more of, because you've got to keep them engaged. Those tools allow you to add that to your livestream videos. It's not just the livestream; you can keep them engaged and do a lot of those cool things. ROB: Right. The tools just keep on getting more impressive. Certainly, at the beginning of this pandemic, some good news was it was filmed from a home, but it was filmed with a real production team behind it. But the tools keep on getting pushed down and simpler, and you start to be able to imagine producing this Daily Show-looking production just with you and a pretty simple piece of software. It's shifting. It's remarkable. IAN: It is. That's where we have to get better at the content, which is great for everyone. It has to be more about the content, understanding who you're talking to, getting niched down and super specific about who you're talking to. It's not just about having video. ROB: That's true with search, that's true with video, and it's true with the production quality of the video. Everything seems to keep coming back to content and all the little tricks. You can play a trick on TikTok and get somebody to loop your video one more time than you thought by lying to them, but it's all going to catch you in the long run unless you make good content. It sounds like that's what you all at authenticWEB are focused on doing. IAN: Yeah, always making it better and better, figuring out better ways to get it, better ways to deliver it. That's what we do. ROB: Brilliant. Ian, when people want to find you and authenticWEB, where should they go look for you, other than sending a spammy LinkedIn request? IAN: You can send me a LinkedIn request. Just don't make it spammy. Tell me who you are. Tell me you heard me here when I was talking to Rob. That's a great way. Or you can go to authenticweb.marketing, check out our website, and hit me through the form there. Seriously, if you want to open up a conversation and text me on LinkedIn, go ahead and do it. Now, I do get a lot of LinkedIn messages every day that are 90% spam, so if I don't respond to you for some reason, I apologize. Feel free to follow up and say, “Hey, I just wanted to make sure you saw this.” ROB: Fantastic. Ian, thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you for sharing that journey and so much excellent knowledge, especially thinking about how to go deeper on YouTube and realizing that that ship has not sailed, that game is not over, and good content can still win there. IAN: Yes. It was great. Thanks for having me on, Rob. I appreciate it. ROB: It's a pleasure. Be well. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

  News -  Alan - Additional case of COvid-19 confirmed in Toronto. Pt. had returned from China recently and was likely not contagious. https://news.ontario.ca/mohltc/en/2020/02/ontario-confirms-presumptive-case-of-covid-19.html In something that should shock no one, the government messed up and licence plates can’t be read in low light conditions. It’s going to take 3M some time to build another quarter million plates and redistribute them. In the meantime, the 407 and red light cameras can’t read the plates at night https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/ontario-drivers-still-receiving-licence-plates-despite-admitted-flaws-1.4823045 Two off-duty cops foil robbery. Once again, good guys with guns defeat bad guys with guns https://www.npr.org/2020/02/21/808016607/2-off-duty-police-officers-foil-robbery-during-their-date-night Ian -  Bird flu in Hubei Province killing off chickens again….. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3048566/china-reports-outbreak-deadly-bird-flu-among-chickens-hunan https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3050856/china-lifts-import-ban-live-poultry-us-bird-flu-threatens Pig Ebola killed off ¼ of the world’s pigs….. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/opinion/china-swine-fever.html Quebec and East low on propane again…. 2nd time since November  https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/critical-propane-shortage-in-quebec-forces-companies-to-ration-supplies   Eric -  Nebraska doctors are providing coronavirus patients with chicken soup and Tylenol   https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/18/health/nebraska-coronavirus-unmc-chicken-soup/index.html PUC & Community Partners Announce Emergency Preparedness Open House on February 18th    https://saultonline.com/2020/01/puc-community-partners-announce-emergency-preparedness-open-house-on-february-18th/  Ended up canceled due to weather. . . Ironic? Rescheduled to Feb 25th  Tyler - Update on the Virginia gun fight: https://www.foxnews.com/media/va-democrat-joins-gop-in-voting-against-gun-control The proposed assault weapons ban - one of several Virginia bills that prompted protests at the state Capitol earlier this year - ended in committee this past Monday. Four Democrats broke ranks with their party to help reject the bill in a 10-5 vote and send it back to the state's Crime Commission.  PODCAST CHALLENGE Even the city of Vancouver has gotten on board, and allows 6 chickens per  household. Consider getting a few hens for your backyard…… Or roosters if you don’t like your neighbours... Day olds are available  Barring that, source a local small egg producer to get better eggs for cheaper, while building community and supply preference.   Upcoming events Ian - Podcaster Charity Shoot.  Hosted by Slam Fire radio. July 4th, 2020.  Balmoral, NB (Restigouche Gun club)   https://www.rodharquailmemorial.com/rod-harquail-fund   Tickets on practi-score soon.  Register for free.   https://practiscore.com/   Eric - Annual Preppers meet - second week of July , Desboro, ON   Alan - Emergency preparedness week May 3-9   TACCOM Canada 2020 - Sept 11-13. The Canadian Pro-Gun Podcasters Network will be in attendance at TACCOM 2020. Your favourite Podcasters will be on hand throughout the show, so make sure you stop by the booth to meet your favourites and pick up some swag. You can see details for the show at the Ticket link - https://taccomcanada.tix123.com/?refer=CanadianProGunPodcasters Tyler - If you have any questions or advice for me, you can Email me at tyler@prepperpodcast.ca. Ian - You can reach Ian directly, by emailing me at theislandretreat@gmail.com .  Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or you can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca (while still buying prepper gear at Rapid Survival)  

  Eric –Welcome to episode #51   of the Canadian Prepper Podcast, recorded Sun Jan 19,  2020. News - Ian - https://bc.ctvnews.ca/thousands-stranded-after-third-day-of-bc-ferries-cancellations-1.4764238   https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/metro-vancouver-snow-jan-15-1.5427351   Electric busses can’t get over a bridge LOL.   Chinese SARS spreads  - https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/18/china-reports-number-of-new-sars-like-virus-cases-has-risen.html   Newfoundland - https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/01/18/newfoundland-historic-snow-blizzard/%3foutputType=amp Eric -    Southern Ontario sees first significant snowfall in 2020, records set https://www.theweathernetwork.com/ca/news/article/in-photos-snowstorm-hits-southern-ontario   City of Victoria offers free emergency preparedness workshops   There will be six workshops between January and March https://www.vicnews.com/news/city-of-victoria-offers-free-emergency-preparedness-workshops/   Hugues -    https://globalnews.ca/news/6434019/newfoundland-snow-environment-canada/   Last week…   Cosmoline - history of……Ointment, antiseptic, udder-ly awesome.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmoline   https://www.cosmolinedirect.com/cosmoline-black-rust-veto-344/?gclid=CjwKCAiAmNbwBRBOEiwAqcwwpY5owFmrwuxFemMVcsPl3B_yoqcfDithnFp6YL-eUmJWYddFTTMiqRoCNHEQAvD_BwE   Ballistol - same idea.  As good as windex    https://www.ballistol-shop.de/History-of-Ballistol:_:86.html Ian - History of Defense Condition levels - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEFCON   Norad -  DEFCON 1   COCKED PISTOL   Nuclear war is imminent or has already started   Maximum readiness. Immediate response.     DEFCON 2   FAST PACE   Next step to nuclear war   Armed forces ready to deploy and engage in less than 6 hours     DEFCON 3   ROUND HOUSE   Increase in force readiness above that required for normal readiness   Air Force ready to mobilize in 15 minutes     DEFCON 4   DOUBLE TAKE   Increased intelligence watch and strengthened security measures   Above normal readiness     DEFCON 5   FADE OUT   Lowest state of readiness     PODCAST CHALLENGE   Make a list of what would trigger your conditions to change.  Ie outbreak within 100 miles, etc.     come down with some prearranged rally points and triggers for leaving.     Send us your best DEFCON list! Upcoming events   Ian - 10th annual Podcaster Charity Shoot.  Hosted by Slam Fire radio. July 4th, 2020. Balmoral, NB (Restigouche Gun club)   Camping available in nearby Dalhousie   Steel pistol bay, trap and a fun shoot,   Stop the bleed course   Facebook under 10th annual podcaster charity shoot   Eric - Annual Preppers meet - second week of July , Desboro, ON Alan - Emergency preparedness week May 3-9   TACCOM Canada 2020 - Sept 11-13. The Canadian Pro-Gun Podcasters Network will be in attendance at TACCOM 2020. Your favourite Podcasters will be on hand throughout the show, so make sure you stop by the booth to meet your favourites and pick up some swag. Or drop by while we do our special live broadcast where we will be talking to event organizers, guest speakers and vendors about all of their new and must-have product. You can see details for the show at www.taccomcanada.com  And stay tuned for ticket release details! You can find the podcast on Itunes, Podbean, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.  Please help us out; take a few minutes and submit a review! It helps other people find us.  You can also find us at prepperpodcast.ca and on Facebook!   Alan - We record these shows live on Facebook AND Youtube.  If you want an early peek at the shows, please subscribe to the YouTube channel “Canadian Prepper Podcast“, and click the notifications tab.  That gives you alerts when we are going live. We also can be found on our Facebook page, “Canadian Prepper Podcast” You can contact me directly on Instagram, @ PPSWO   Hugues - I can be reached at hfxprepper@gmail.com and I have my own YouTube Channel, just search “HFX Prepper”. Ian - You can reach Ian directly, by emailing me at theislandretreat@gmail.com .    Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while  Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode,    Nuclear accident preparedness  

  News -   Alan - https://www.cp24.com/news/man-accused-of-robbing-sexually-assaulting-63-year-old-woman-in-etobicoke-1.4731287 - 3:20pm, home invasion/sexual assault. It can happen at any time to anyone..   https://nationalpost.com/news/world/north-korea-conducts-new-test-at-rocket-site-aims-to-overpower-u-s-nuclear-threats - North Korea advancing their missile tests   https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3042190/chinese-ambassador-accused-threatening-german-car-industry-if -China threatening sanctions against Germany if Huawei is prohibited from operating Germany   Bill blair mandate letter….bullet point one   https://pm.gc.ca/en/mandate-letters/minister-public-safety-and-emergency-preparedness-mandate-letter   On a Completely unrelated note….   Venezuelans regret gun ban    https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/world/venezuelans-regret-gun-prohibition-we-could-have-defended-ourselves.amp   Minister of cdn heritage   https://pm.gc.ca/en/mandate-letters/minister-canadian-heritage-mandate-letter   Second bullet point  3000 Truck drivers laid off as trucking giant dies   https://www.businessinsider.com/celadon-trucking-bankrtupcy-truckers-stranded-2019-12?utm_content=bufferfc10b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-bi Search and Rescue Group in Mississauga is recruiting.   https://www.rsar.ca/join?sfns=mo And Arrowsmith local to me    www.arrowsmithsar.ca   Eric -    Tyler - https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/national/us-economy-shakes-free-of-recession-fears-in-striking-turnaround-since-august/ar-AAK9ByW   https://www.gunsamerica.com/digest/prepping-101-off-grid-heating-with-diesel-and-oil/   Princess auto wood stove + Metal sleeve insert for woodstove in window hole. Princess Auto 68 buck wood stove : https://www.princessauto.com/en/detail/wood-burning-camp-stove/A-p8790057e   PODCAST CHALLENGE   Alan - Come up with a plan to secure your home from freeze damage, and heat at least a portion of your home to a habitable level. Assumption is the coldest weather of the year, for two weeks.    Upcoming events Ian - Podcaster Charity Shoot.  Hosted by Slam Fire radio. July 4th, 2020.  Balmoral, NB (Restigouche Gun club) Camping available in nearby Dalhousie Steel challenge (22 pistol, 22rifle, PCC or pistol) Steel pistol bay, trap and a fun shoot, Stop the bleed course Charity TBD Eric - Annual Preppers meet - second week of July , Desboro, ON Alan - Emergency preparedness week May 3-9 Shout Outs Eric - Maintainers of https://the-eye.eu/public/    Ian Tracey wilson and the CCFR. 3 letter challenge.  Firearmrights.ca  Alan - We record these shows on Streamyard.  If you want an early peek at the shows, please subscribe to the YouTube channel “Canadian Prepper Podcast“, and click the notifications tab.  That gives you alerts when we are going live.You can contact me directly on Instagram, @ PPSWO   Tyler - If you have any questions or advice for me, you can Email into the show at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca. Ian - You can reach Ian directly, by emailing me at theislandretreat@gmail.com .    You can also find me on Canadian Patriot Podcast, also available on Itunes and Youtube.  There you will find us discussing more government waste, squirreling off on the odd firearms related banter, and exposing the daily loss of freedoms we’re facing.   Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or you can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca (while still buying prepper gear at Rapid Survival)  

https://streamyard.com/iaCXhA8HC3   INTRO Eric –Welcome to episode #41  of the Canadian Prepper Podcast, recorded October 24, 2019. My name is Eric, and I’m the host of the show.  I am based in southern Ontario. I’m a hunter, target shooter, HAM radio operator (VE3EPN), and computer geek. I got into preparedness when I was working front line in emergency services and witnessed an over reliance on Emergency Services during major events, such as ice storms, power outages, etc. I started a small preparedness company to help get people prepared and able to look after themselves for at least 72 hours, if not longer. Alan - I’m Alan, and my friends and family call me a safety nerd. My background as a Medical First Responder developed a mind for safety. I teach first aid and coach family and friends to be better prepared. I'm a locksmith by trade and have worked in the physical security industry for more than 20 years now. Guest Spot? Eric- Want to help support the show and keep the Canadian Prepper Podcast on the air? Buy a Canadian Prepper Podcast T-Shirt at www.rapidsurvival.com. All proceeds help keep the lights on, and the backup generator fueled!   Alan- If you’re enjoying the show, please take a few minutes and like us on Facebook, facebook.com/CanadianPrepperPodcast and submit a review on itunes. Also we want your feedback, good or bad! Let us know if there is a topic you want us to cover, or if you like or dislike something we’re doing, email us at  feedback@prepperpodcast.ca  Eric – We have some Ruff content for you in this episode,  We’re going to start off with some preparedness related news articles. Next we will be letting you know how we’ve improved our preparedness since our last episode.  Then we’ll get into the main topic for this episode - Dogs in a preparedness role.     News - Alan - https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/hybrid-wild-pigs-a-growing-menace-in-southwestern-ontario Puumba gone wild in Southern Ontario. No one is safe.   https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/expect-wind-snow-and-winter-like-conditions-soon-environment-canada-1.4652616 Early winter expected for the Praries, be ready! https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/salmonella-sausage-1.5333466 salmonella outbreak causes illness in 12 people in ontario and quebec   Ian - Seymour schulich drops a zimbabwean note on the news.  Tells us thats where we’re heading:) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_5fP8Zo1ZE https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7590423/Commonwealth-Bank-outrage-continues-workers-left-without-weekly-wages.html?ito=social-facebook_Australia Eric -  Record one million take part in B.C. earthquake preparedness drill https://www.ohscanada.com/record-one-million-take-part-b-c-earthquake-preparedness-drill/ What P.E.I. residents should put in emergency kits   https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-emergency-kit-hurricane-sept-2019-1.5271754 Hugues -    WHAT WE’VE DONE LATELY for preps   Sponsor?   Hugues -  Eric -  Ian -   Alan - Not much this week sadly. Was invited to join the local Community Emergency Response team which helps manage shelters and recovery efforts in the event of a disaster. More to come on that, but I’m seeing an opportunity to educate others about the importance of preparedness   Main Topic -  Eric - Alright, it’s time to move onto the main topic of the show. (Each host insert talking points here) Ian -  Eat ‘em:) Flushing game Retrieving game Guard dogs Early warning Companion / Emotional support   Hugues -  Alan - My little 6lb Maltese won’t do much flushing or retrieving, but he’s an excellent alarm system. With him around, I know when anyone’s within a hundred yards of the property. Being so small, he doesn’t eat much and is easily portable in the event of a bugout.    Eric - Make sure all collars and tags are up-to-date with identification information. Your ID tag should contain name, telephone number and any urgent medical needs. Be sure to also write your dogs name, your name and contact information on your carrier. Always bring your dog indoors at the first sign or warning of a storm or disaster. Dogs can become disoriented and wander away from home in a crisis. Bug Out Bag for your Dog - They can carry it themselves if big enough   Pet first-aid kit and guide book (ask your vet what to include) 3-7 days’ worth of canned (pop-top) or dry food (be sure to rotate every two months) Liquid dish soap and disinfectant Disposable garbage bags for clean-up Dog feeding dishes and water bowls Extra collar or harness as well as an extra leash Photocopies and/or USB of medical records and a waterproof container with a two-week supply of any medicine your dog requires (Remember, food and medications need to be rotated out of your emergency kit—otherwise they may go bad or become useless) At least seven days’ worth of bottled water for each person and dog(store in a cool, dry place and replace every two months) A traveling bag, crate or sturdy carrier, ideally one for each dog Flashlight Blanket Recent photos of your dog(in case you are separated and need to make “Lost” posters)        Extra leash, toys and chew toys, cage liner   PODCAST CHALLENGE Teach an old dog a new trick. . .   Episode Closing Upcoming events Shout Outs Alan - Shout out to Barry the Wonder Dog, who waits patiently at my side during recordings and dances for treats Eric -  Ian -  Email / Itunes reviews? Alan -  Ian -   Hugues -    Outro Eric -  I’m going to bring episode 41  of the Canadian Prepper Podcast to an end.   You can find the podcast on Itunes, Podbean, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.  Please help us out; take a few minutes and submit a review! It helps other people find us.  You can also find us at prepperpodcast.ca and on Facebook! Alan - We record these shows on Streamyard.  If you want an early peek at the shows, please subscribe to the YouTube channel “Canadian Prepper Podcast“, and click the notifications tab.  That gives you alerts when we are going live.You can contact me directly on Instagram, @ PPSWO Hugues - I can be reached at hfxprepper@gmail.com and I have my own YouTube Channel, just search “HFX Prepper”. Ian - You can reach Ian directly, by emailing me at theislandretreat@gmail.com .  You can also find me on Canadian Patriot Podcast, also available on Itunes and Youtube.  There you will find us discussing more government waste, squirreling off on the odd firearms related banter, and exposing the daily loss of freedoms we’re facing. Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or you can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca (while still buying prepper gear at Rapid Survival) Eric - Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode, winter car kits Eric - Until next time, be prepared, stay safe, and (Alan) keep learning!

Flash flooding in the new york area.      https://www.google.org/publicalerts/alert?aid=d34321b1ced894b8&hl=en&gl=US&source=web   Ship blows its lid in the vancouver harbour .     https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/vancouver-harbour-explosion-ship-1.5238278   Parents encouraged to include Back-to-School emergency preparedness plan https://khqa.com/news/local/parents-encouraged-to-include-back-to-school-emergency-preparedness-plan Manhunt update: Bodies believed to be teen murder suspects found in Manitoba   https://bc.ctvnews.ca/manhunt-update-bodies-believed-to-be-teen-murder-suspects-found-in-manitoba-1.4540064 !!NEW!! Sponsor. . . What we’ve done lately is brought to you by Get Out Stay Out Canada. They are the creators of the Get Out Stay Out Campfire Grill, they can be found at http://www.getoutstayout.ca    TACCOM show in Toronto Sept 6/7 . https://www.taccomcanada.com/ PODCAST CHALLENGE   Identify your style of prepping, are you somewhat on the lazy side? If you are find a way to prep that doesn’t take much effort and tell us about it! Ian - You can reach Ian directly, by emailing me at theislandretreat@gmail.com .    Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or you can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca (while still buying prepper gear at Rapid Survival)   Eric - Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode,  Wildfire preparedness.

Ep 8 - First Aid Eric –Welcome to episode #8 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast…First Aid!  My name is Eric, and I’m the host of the show. I am based in southern Ontario. I’m a hunter, target shooter, HAM radio operator (VE3EPN), and computer geek. I got into preparedness when I was working front line in emergency services and witnessed an over reliance on Emergency Services during major events, such has ice storms, power outages, etc. I started a small preparedness company to help get people prepared and able to look after themselves for at least 72 hours, if not longer. Ian – My name is Ian, co-host of the show.  I live on Vancouver Island, on a small hobby farm.   I am an outdoor enthusiast, target shooter, reloader, and my farm’s designated handyman. I have had a lifelong interest in preparedness, and I am gladly learning new skills on a regular basis.  My professional background has allowed me to see pretty much every province and territory in Canada. It also has taught me to prepare for various unexpected situations daily. Andrew Intro - My name is Andrew and I can usually be found hosting Canadian Patriot Podcast live on Youtube monday nights at 9pm eastern. In addition to recording the number one podcast in Canada, I run a firearms training and accessories tax shelter, Ragnarok Tactical. We deliver training for competition shooters, first aid training, and sell everything from boots to barrels, to tourniquets and and tacos.In real life I work a 9-5 job leading a team in information technology and raising a young family. Eric – We have some great content for you in this episode, We’re going to start off with some news articles relating to preparedness and the outdoors. Next we will be letting you know how we’ve improved our preparedness since our last episode, ,  and then were going to get into the main topic for this episode, First Aid and its role in preparedness. WHAT WE’VE DONE LATELY for preps   Andrew - I just had some forced leave from work so we installed new networking equipment at home including a battery backup, and prepped a few thousand 223 cases for reloading. We also cleaned and reorganized our cold room and removed all the “expired” food and made sure that all the shelf stable items were organised so the items that would reach end of life soonest are at the front. We also rotated and verified the water storage, we have 1 week on hand and are working towards 2 weeks .   Ian -  Holiday season slows down most preps.  Solstice dinner got cancelled, but still had to run our gift day and feeding with no power.  Got to do a dry run on a ‘grid down’ scenario due to the power outage we will talk about below.  Cut up a few trees with the help of a neighbour that fell. Topped up feeders and waterers. Bucked up the trees also downed by the arborist from last episode.  No shortage of firewood this year! Tested the efficacy of my backup water system. Shortcomings noted in power cable line for genny, and using the UPS for cell phones.  Fridges were fine. My mother mentioned I should get a genny… Clearly not watching the podcast….   Eric -  I filled a pile of orders for Rapid Survival, the Christmas rush is officially here. . . So that cleared out a bunch of room for some new toys. Did some research on new gear and will be bringing in some new radios for the new year. Of course one or two of those will need to make their way into my packs.   News - Ian - https://www.narcity.com/ca/bc/vancouver/news/150000-people-in-bc-are-affected-by-power-outages-right-now-due-to-high-winds-up-to-100kmhour Ironically podcast delayed due to power outage.  Solstice dinner got cancelled due to about 200+ trees in my neighbourhood going down.  Friends still without power. Major grid damage on the island. Eric - https://www.richmond-news.com/news/richmond-school-district-to-put-350-000-towards-emergency-preparedness-1.23535369 Dec 13, 2018 Richmond School District to put $350,000 towards emergency preparedness. By the end of February, supplies are expected to be distributed to all Richmond schools and will ensure they are prepared for multiple days following an emergency. Supplies will include water, food, rain ponchos, solar blankets, first aid and staging area supplies. “Since September 2018, meetings have been held with school district administrators, health and safety committees, parent advisory committees, stakeholders, the City of Richmond Emergency Preparedness Team and the R.C.M.P,” said a statement from the Richmond School District. Main topic- Basic and advanced First Aid (Subject matter expert imported for this one) Intro to Andrew - Andrew’s background / bio / qualifications   So I was in the Canadian Forces for about 5 minutes, I didn’t do anything cool and I never deployed. I did however take the Army’s idea of a first aid course. I also keep my Red Cross Standard First Aid up to date with a renewal every 2 years, I’ll be recertifying in January or February. I have to have that to run ranges on military bases which I do regularly for the Ontario Rifle Association, plus it probably helps to have for my day job. Advanced first aid courses I’ve taken Spent Brass Training Solutions LLC Tactical First Responder Trauma Course – 2018 American College of Surgeons Bleeding Control Basic v 1.0 – 2018 Questions we plan to ask:) -What is the minimum qualification level a prepper should aspire to reach?   WCB level 1? EMT Training?, is CPR C enough etc? A - As much as possible. College Paramedic courses are probably overkill and requires 2 years of study. Standard First Aid, Wilderness First Aid, Stop the Bleed/Bleeding Control Basic are probably going to cover 90% of what you can expect to deal with day to day. But more is always better. -What is the Minimum equipment list, other than the standard ouch pouch?  Ie: stacks of gauze , truck kits, Chest seal, Medical stapler, israeli bandage, (sprinkle on Hemo agents)  Explain the utility and likelihood of need for each. Maybe Epi-Pens? A - Please don’t use sprinkle on Hemostatic agents, the technology is out of date and less effective.As with most things it depends. 3 Factors Cost Size Scope of Practice 1 Cost How much can you afford to buy? How many kits do you need? Are they different? I keep 3 different IFAKs. CarEnough for 1 to 2 people with major trauma likely to be encountered in a Motor Vehicle Collision Work/Range BagEnough for 1 person with major trauma Range beltSmall on my belt enough for one person with a small trauma, like 1 bullet hole We’re also working on building home and vehicle trauma kits with more stuff to deal with greater number of casualties following the use of an IFAK, basically additional trauma supplies plus supporting tools for longer periods of care. IFAK - Individual First Aid Kit - Contents Airway (training)Nasopharyngeal Airway, 28 French + lube BandageEmergency Bandage aka Israeli bandage 4” or 6” CuttingShears - airport friendly HemostaticQuikClot Combat Gauze Celox Gauze Occlusive DressingsFoxseal PPEGloves TourniquetCAT 2 Size How big is the kit? Can you carry it with you? Does it stay at home or in a vehicle? The largest kit in the world is not helpful if its 100 yards away and you’re bleeding out. 3 Scope of Practice What are you trained, comfortable, and “allowed” to perform? What about keeping things that you can’t use but a Doctor, Nurse, or EMT could? What if you’re SOL and have to do it to save a life? For example I will not do rescue breaths on non-family members. I’ll do compressions or what ever but I don’t know where they have been. The time to figure this out is now, not when you come on to a scene.   Ian -  (Fentanyl second hand poisoning)   -Cheap place to buy bulk consumables such as gauze?  Brands to avoid?   Ian - (Ono Safety supply)   -Combat first Aid courses, any in Canada?  Describe what is taught…. A - Ragnarok Tactical partnership with Spent Brass Training Solutions LLC Tactical First Responder Trauma Course Last year it was two days of scenario based and hands on training. This year we’re likely to get Val back up to do two 1 day courses early in the year. Dates and cost TBD. Topics of Instruction Combat Mindset Physiological Response to Combat Preventing and Treating Common and Non-Combat Related Injuries Litter, Drags and Carries Basic Anatomy and Location of Major Arteries Identifying and Treating the Different Types of Bleeding Identifying and Immobilizing Broken Limbs SCAB and Treating Compromised Airway Treating Gun Shot and Knife Wounds Improvised Treatment Methods Constructing your Personal IFAK   Dispel some myths.   Tampon and Maxi-pad use:) FIsh Antibiotics as a field expedient amoxycillin? Ian - Some recommended books. Where there is no Doctor  - David Werner Where there is no dentist -  Murray Dickson Medicinal herbs - Rosemary Gladstar John “Lofty” Wiseman - SAS and URBAN survival manual First AId Manual Ian - PODCAST CHALLENGE   INVENTORY OF FOOD, EXPIRY DATES.  You will need the space! Good idea of what you have. Chance to clean house and organize. Rotating food to use oldest first.  Give almost expired stuff you will never likely use to food bank. …...Food good past expiry, Only buy what you will use.  Ie spam? Shout Outs. Ian -  The travelling prepper.  Always keeps me on my toes with good challenges and questions Eric - Dean from Canadian Prepper Network, we’re working on getting him on to discuss HAM radio. Episode Closing Eric - Listener Email Review, and answering of questions sent in.  If you want to send in a question, email, or suggest a topic. Email from Alan -   Good afternoon Eric and Ian,   Just wanted to say thanks for putting this out!   I'm also a Southern Ontario Native (west of London). Haven't had my HAM licence for a few years but interested in  getting it back.   I've been prepping at various stages and phases for nearly 25 years now. It started in scouts when I got lost in the woods on a hike and had to spend the night.   In my 'spare time' I hunt, fish, teach first aid, and build towards self-reliance.   I truly appreciate the Canadian perspective of prepping. I listen to a few American podcasts as well. The differences are STAGGERING.   One of the first times I ever put my plans into place was during the 2003 blackout. I was a 2nd tier responder affiliated with local fire and EMS teams (volunteer) and spent almost 48 hours helping prevent life-threatening emergencies.   EDC, first aid, and SIP preps  are my primary areas of focus.   Keep up the great work. I appreciate the effort you guys put in. I'm looking at rapidsurvival.com right now and planning my first purchase!   Thanks guys,   Alan Ian - Itunes review?   Outro Eric -  I’m going to bring episode 8 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast to an end. . . Ian where can people find the show online? Ian- You can find the podcast on Itunes and Podbean, and spotify.  Please help us out take a few minutes and submit a review! It helps other people find us.   You can also find us at prepperpodcast.ca.  Our Youtube live shows are now available, please subscribe to “The Island Retreat “ and click the notifications tab.  That gives you alerts when we are going live. Eric –Ian how can people reach you? Ian -  theislandretreat@gmail.com,   Andrew - Contact info? https://ragnaroktactical.ca/ and http://canadianpatriotpodcast.com/ Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or just can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca Eric - Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode, where we will talk about Water needs, storage, and disinfection..   Eric - Until next time, be prepared, stay safe, and (Ian) keep learning!

  Ep 7 CDN vs American Prepping Eric –Welcome to episode #7 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast…CDN vs American Prepping….My name is Eric, and I’m the host of the show.  I am based in southern Ontario. I’m a hunter, target shooter, HAM radio operator (VE3EPN), and computer geek. I got into preparedness when I was working front line in emergency services and witnessed an over reliance on Emergency Services during major events, such has ice storms, power outages, etc. I started a small preparedness company to help get people prepared and able to look after themselves for at least 72 hours, if not longer. Ian – My name is Ian, co-host of the show.  I live on Vancouver Island, on a small hobby farm.   I am an outdoor enthusiast, target shooter, reloader, and my farm’s designated handyman. I have had a lifelong interest in preparedness, and I am gladly learning new skills on a regular basis.  My professional background has allowed me to see every province and territory in Canada, and has taught me to prepare for various unexpected situations daily.  I should also add this podcast has taught me I talk fast, and that I need to enunciate…... Eric – We have some great content for you in this episode, We’re going to start off with some news articles relating to preparedness and the outdoors. Next we will be letting you know how we’ve improved our preparedness since our last episode, ,  and then were going to get into the main topic for this episode, Differences in prepping between the US and Canada. NEWS:   This may take a while.   Riots in France, and Europe (Not really about a gas tax, is it?) -grey man’s worst case scenario -Caught in a crowd, separated from loved ones worst case trampled (Stanley cup riots) - use of incapacitating gas or microwave/ sonic crowd dispersers -Avoid a criminal charge (maybe No PAL)  Definitely No NICS -will affect your job or social standing -provides a cover for other crimes to occur   IMF heads says we are heading for a depression, and are not prepared for it. https://www.cbc.ca/news/thenational/national-today-newsletter-imf-warns-kevin-hart-grow-light-1.4939070 Inflation hits over 1 million % in Venezuela https://www.rt.com/business/446144-venezuela-hyperinflation-over-million-parliament/ (But you can always buy a “Petro” cryptocurrency LOL) Gas is paid for by items, not cash….. WHAT WE’VE DONE LATELY Ian - IP/plastics for some gamma lids and buckets, to compliment the rice we bought and the  Mylar bags I ordered. Had an rare meetup with a local prepper.  Turns out we have known each other for over 20 years.   Arranged with a local arborist to remove a couple high risk trees.  Removes potential fire hazard/ builds fire break, increases wood stockpile, and reduces the chance I will damage my house when knocking it down :). Peace of mind, cost savings for heat.  Wood shavings & food for the alpacas. Target shooting….Got cancelled due to a minor SHTF moment, had to get a new passport. Importance of community, etc Eric -  Got out the range last night for the first time in ages. . . put 100 rounds of 9mm down range and mostly on target! Completed the podcast challenge, have enough fuel stored now Main topic- Differences between countries in prepping.  (Thx to Brad) -right vs privileges to bear arms -property rights, emergency management act, and your supplies. -likelihood of running into a CCW, whether good or bad guy.  More people with truck guns. -education level.  Ignorance of world events versus local Material costs for prepping ?  Ammunition, food, etc. amazon.com vs .ca Even availability of books! Trespass laws - Castle law versus “citizens self defense and protection of property act” Less of a social stigma in the US towards prepping Variety of climates in both.  To generalize the lower 48 has water and heat issues.  We have cold and growing season issues. Solar efficiency better in the US,  basic angles. Seasonal changes minimized Food storage climate friendlier in Canada.   --Politeness level?  Stuck by a roadside, etc?  Police average interaction level of tension…. -Open spaces.  Population density is lower, so once out of major cities the chance for solitude is higher, but in a harsher environment.  (Muskeg, tree line, -(Vic prepper) Differences between states in firearms laws, water collection bylaws, etc.  Here it is more uniform across the board. -bail in legislation in Canada   -MJ usage, Federal crime in the US, not so much in canada…. Response to “Travelling prepper”  email question - Travel friendly EDC.  Outside of clothes and toiletries Here’s exactly what I dumped out of my carry on bag. Bag- Rush 24.  I was wrong. Get a swiss gear from costco instead.  Cheaper, and warranty just as good. Lifetime warranties are my weakness... Baseball cap, Visor mounted flashlight, spare CR2032 batteries Dollar store expandable mini towels. Fox whistle - free from preparedness stand at local fair Bike trail Map - city of Vancouver (free) Earplugs - Free Facebook - branded lit up screwdriver pen. (Free) Sewing kit, bar of soap from hotel (free) 2 bic lighters tied off. Quality sunglasses   First Aid kit (Ouch pouch, Immodium, ear and eye drops, moleskin, nail file, tylenol, BZK wipes, rubber gloves, triangle bandage, cough medicine, pressure dressing, large gauze, medicla tape, blister band aids, AQUA TABS, feminine napkin) Lucky duct mini tape roll Compass cards X 2 Tenacious tape repair tape Flashlight and 3 batteries 550 cord, bracelet, justificcation book Zip ties Real watch, battery powered Currency - lots Touch knife - ceramic MORA brand spork X 2, plastic knives Bottle and can opener Snacks, nuts, kind bars, epic bars,suzie’s good fats, Kirkland protein bars Blunt weapon….. If not going to the US - Knife less than 2.36” or 6 cm   Thanks to him, I need to add  - mylar blanket N95 Fold flat masks - Aura 1870+ ****SHTF happens, don’t forget to raid the hotel room.  Facecloths, balnkets, coffee filters, etc Ian - PODCAST CHALLENGE   TWO DAYS/TWO HOURS till SHTF,  what would you go out and buy? Ie critically short food supply fixes, gear (tactical or practical) .  Ie , beans, band-aids, bullets. Extra point if you start recording the cheapest price available for each item, and wait for sales. Feedback Good evening Eric and Ian, Andrew from Canadian Patriot Podcast here.  I travel a fair bit for work especially in 2018. I still tend to have most of my EDC with me when I'm on the road. Day to day I work in Information Technology and its not uncommon for me to have to travel with tools, when I do I get to check a bag with screwdrivers, and other things I can't carry on. That will include a less expensive pocket knife, usually a small Gerber. The rest of the time I'm knifeless. My regular travel is US and Canada with the majority now being Canada only. I have a bag that I always have for work and that includes the majority of my EDC gear. The bag and contents stay the same from day to day and don't change much when I'm traveling. The "prepper" specific stuff follows. This is stuff I know that my co-workers generally do not carry. I also carry several hundred dollars in cash, more when I travel then when I'm at home. 5.11 Rush 12 Backpack HSGI Multi-Mission Medical Taco CAT Tourniquet QuikClot Combat Gauze 6" Israeli Bandage Nasopharyngeal Airway & lube FoxSeal Decompression Needle Shears Sharpie Nitrile Gloves Fenix LD22 Flash light spare AA Batteries Soluser 25000mAh Portale Solar Power Bank Belkin 3-Outlet SurgePlus Mini Travel Swivel Charger Surge Protector with Dual USB Ports 1L Nalgene - empty before crossing security at airports 2000 calories of food. trail mix, beef jerky, licorice. Snack sizes or small bags. Toiletries kit Paper Notebook & assorted pens I'm usually somewhere for a week or more. So I'll buy food to eat and re-stock what I keep in my bag. I'll also pick up a few bottles of water to keep in the hotel room, and keep my water bottle full to keep with me. If its just a day trip I don't bother with extra food or water. I also keep printed copies of all my paperwork in my notebook; hotel, car, airline. Its worth mentioning that I do a virtual recce of any city I have not been in before using google maps and street view. By the time I travel I already have planned a primary and alternate route from the airport to the hotel, the hotel to work locations. Found nearby restaurants, grocery stores, and hospitals. I print google maps with the routes and points of interest. This is all backup to my phone. Regarding hotel rooms I request second and third floor rooms away from the elevators. This is high enough to discourage casual break and enters from outside access and low enough to easily escape in the event of a fire or other emergency. I also walk the ground floor of the hotel prior to check-in to assess any unusual activity; open doors, loiterers, etc. After check-in I make sure the room is all set and then walk to the parking lot using two different routes whether I need that many trips to the car or not. The point is to become familiar with the route and identify any obstacles or anything unusual. Probably sounds extreme to the casual outsider, but nothing I travel with has caused problems with airport security, TSA, or CBSA. Trip planning usually saves me time as I already know where to eat so I don't spend time trying to find a place when I'm on-site. The extra work in the hotel only takes a few minutes longer. Andrew   Shout Outs. VicPrepper11.  Had the pleasure of a FTF, gave him a tour. The travelling prepper.  Always keeps me on my toes with good challenges and questions Episode Closing Eric/Ian - Listener Email Review, and answering of questions sent in.  If you want to send in a question, email, or suggest a topic. Itunes review?  (Eric) Outro Eric -  I’m going to bring episode 7 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast to an end. . . Ian where can people find the show online? Ian- You can find the podcast on Itunes, Podbean, and spotify.  Please help us out take a few minutes and submit a review! It helps people find the podcast. You can also find us at prepperpodcast.ca.  Our Youtube live shows that help us create the podcast are now available, please subscribe to “The Island Retreat “ and click the notifications tab.  That gives you alerts when we are going live. Eric –Ian how can people reach you? Ian -  theislandretreat@gmail.com, and as mentioned on youtube at ‘The Island Retreat’ Channel Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or just can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca Eric - Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode, where we will talk about basic and advanced first aid training as well as recommended supplies with a special guest .   Eric - Until next time, be prepared, stay safe, and (Ian) keep learning!  

Intro Eric –Welcome to episode #5 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast… Post Deer Hunting. . . My name is Eric, and I’m the host of the show.  I am based in southern Ontario. I’m a hunter, target shooter, HAM radio operator (VE3EPN), and computer geek. I got into preparedness when I was working front line in emergency services and witnessed an over reliance on Emergency Services during major events, such has ice storms, power outages, etc. I started a small preparedness company to help get people prepared and able to look after themselves for at least 72 hours, if not longer. Ian – My name is Ian, co-host of the show.  I live on Vancouver Island, on a small hobby farm.   I am an outdoor enthusiast, hunter, reloader, my farm’s designated handyman. I have had a lifelong interest in preparedness, and am gladly learning new skills on a regular basis.  My professional background has allowed me to see pretty much every, province and territory in Canada. It also has taught me to prepare for various unexpected situations daily. Eric – We have some great content for you in this episode, We’re going to start off with some news articles relating to our hunting trip and the outdoors. Next Ian and myself will be letting you know how we’ve improved our preparedness since our last episode, ((((we have some listener feedback to cover off hopefully))))), and then were going to get into the main topic for this episode, Post Deer Hunting.   News Eric – Calgarians found themselves navigating a nasty drive home on Friday as a band of snow blanketed the region.   Swap go bag gear. . . https://globalnews.ca/news/4696025/calgary-record-breaking-snowfall/   Ian – California Wildfires.  I had the opportunity to literally pass right over Malibu this week. While it was night, didn’t see much.  WHat did impress me was the level of smoke in SFO Watching ews - Need for a proper Bugout / INCH bag becomes crystal clear at this point.  Residents had minimal time to leave, and had nothing to come home to. Halifax - Small earthquake in Mexico.  Series of them this week in the Province of Oaxaca, 200 km away.  Sitting underneath Popocatepetl, feeling a jiggle; prepper’s bad sleep scenario….   Eric – Episode’s topic. Post Deer Hunting Eric – Day 1 all setup, some communication glitches and a deer blasted past all 3 of us… Rest of the week lots of signs but no deer. I left on Thursday, Sat morning the guys got one. Clarify the carrying first aid stuff on person. Ian –  Absolutely skunked.  Not alone, as was everyone else. Sighted two off the ferry, good start!  Saw one doe in fast flight jumped in front of my truck near campground. Sweet!  Nothing after. Island much busier than expected, and we had to ensure everyone had their own patch to cover.  Saw zero grouse, or even songbirds. My partner had mechanical and logistical issues, and came late. Busy enough during the weekdays.  We called it before the weekend rush arrived. Take aways – Ian-  We have the tech for now, use it.  Free GPS aps, (Maps.me) or paid ones such as iHunter. Testing your gear is key.  I ran into people who had not sighted in their rifles prior to going. There is no such thing as overdressing for weather.  Most guys I ran into had proper gear and were functioning well.  Layering is the most adaptable style of dress for changing conditions. Even in good times, people vs animal population is not good.  Imagine when food is tight. Jacklighting, etc would work short term, then deplete populations even faster. Sleep is key to fast response and sighting ability.  Don’t ruin it by boozing too much after dark. Afternoon naps helped a lot with alertness during dusk time. Different catch methods ensure SOME success.  My hunting partner ensured we didn’t get ‘completely’ skunked during the trip by catching and releasing a small lake trout.  Good for morale and a real time test for his gear & loadout! My own failings: I used riflescope to glass some areas.  Bino would have been better. Packing light versus utility of tools.   Should have briefed partner on use of walkie talkies during bush push. Running late, Had them, didn't use them. Safety as well as efficiency issue. Pounds equals pain.  Can’t stress the importance of lightweight gear. Physical fitness.  Feel better after my daily hikes. How we’ve prepped this week Ian – Unpacked from hunting, and topped off some feeders/waterers.  I bought some feed to keep the stockpile up, had to head off to work.  Been at work since. Ordered online some used night vision Black friday sales Eric- PODCAST CHALLENGE Eric – LA Fires inspired us for this one Ian – Rather than online shopping and pimping out your SHTF rifle…. More realistic use of time beforehand would have been making copies of critical documents .  Passports, marriage / birth certificates, bank accounts, titles to property, serial numbers of valuable items, and pictures for insurance purposes of stuff you would want replaced in case of a major fire. Eric - Avg Jump drives hold 64 GB of memory.  You could hold all your favorite pics and documents fairly easily on one. Ian – So your challenge is, to make an I’m never coming home (INCH) USB thumb drive .  Good to use in a hotel business center, friend’s laptop, even staples if need be. Ludicrously light, and preserves wealth and validates any claim you have on property. Expedites insurance claims in good times. Eric - Let us know anything we should, or you did, add to it, as far as proof ownership, maps, owner’s manuals, etc. Episode Closing Eric/Ian - Listener Email Review, and answering of questions sent in.  If you want to send in a question, email Itunes review?  (Eric) Shout outs – The actor James Woods!  When the California fire hit, He stayed up for 36 hours straight, coordinating Fire response efforts from NYC.  He used his million+ twitter followers to help pass messages and reunite people separated from each other. Not a fan of social media, but here is a solid use demonstrating its utility!  A solid demonstration of having a non-local communication relay that was not bogged down by overwhelmed cell and land lines! https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2018/11/10/james-woods-uses-social-media-to-help-find-missing-people-in-california-wildfire/   Ian – Dana, a hunter I met on the ferry to the island, and subsequently ran into repeatedly.  Solid guy, as most hunting folks are. -agreed on territory we would each cover.  Or had covered -shared sightings or lack thereof, -offered assistance, etc. Short term MAG.   Eric - Outro Eric -  I’m going to bring episode 5 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast to an end. . . Ian where can people find the show online? Ian- You can find the podcast on Itunes and Podbean, please help us out take a few minutes and submit a review! You can also find us at prepperpodcast.ca. Eric –Ian how can people reach you? Ian -  theislandretreat@gmail.com Eric – Please  check out Rapid Survival www.rapidsurvival.com and get me there on live chat while buying some prepper gear, or just can also email me at feedback@prepperpodcast.ca Eric - Thanks for joining us, and tune in for the next episode, where we will talk about getting the wife and kids involved in preparedness.? Eric - Until next time, be prepared, stay safe, and (Ian) keep learning! Ep 6 Spitballs   Getting the wife and kids prepared   -Relate current news events to what you would do in the same situation -Emphasize the slow gov’t reaction to provide aid. -Gently mock the lineups at the gas station. First Aid course. - Gentle intro into the world where all is not clean or safe.  You have to fix things, not someone else. Sell it as:   Means of gettign a raise at work. (WCB level 1, etc) Less need to run to emergency room First responder capability if you see someone in the ditch. Kids get it and get babysitting jobs more easily. Also helps for their resume seeking first real job. -Target shooting, removes taboo around the house.  Use intereactive targets like clays, balloons, and steel.  Tannerite :) Start with a .22 Always!   Thus leads to hunting, cost savings, healthier food choices, emphasis on need for nutrition.  Renewable food source. Start with grouse, rabbbit, etc. Don’t start with deer.   Varmint removal if you have problem animals. Leads to  Live trap intro.   leads to self defense.  Protect what you have in the worst case scenario.  If you don’t need a gun when times are bad, then you don’t need a fire extinguisher either.  Just know that in ‘ROL’ any use of a firearm in Canada guarantees a large legal bill, even if in the right.   Groceries as ‘food insurance’.   Works for car, house, etc. Why not food? Start with buying in bulk to save money.     Peace of mind to avoid the rush.  Plenty of black friday videos to draw from Buy things on sale only.   Bulk barn bigger discounts by the bag versus bin   Ghosting.

Intro   Eric –Welcome to episode #4 of the Canadian Prepper Podcast… Pre Deer Hunting. . . My name is Eric, and I’m the host of the show.  I am based in southern Ontario. I’m a hunter, target shooter, HAM radio operator (VE3EPN), and computer geek. I got into preparedness when I was working front line in emergency services and witnessed an over reliance on Emergency Services during major events, such has ice storms, power outages, etc. I started a small preparedness company to help get people prepared and able to look after themselves for at least 72 hours, if not longer. Ian – My name is Ian, co-host of the show.  I live on Vancouver Island, on a small hobby farm.   I am an outdoor enthusiast, hunter, reloader, my farm’s designated handyman. I have had a lifelong interest in preparedness, and am gladly learning new skills on a regular basis.  My professional background has allowed me to see pretty much every, province and territory in Canada. It also has taught me to prepare for various unexpected situations daily. Eric – We have some great content for you in this episode, We’re going to start off with some news articles relating to hunting and the outdoors. Next Ian and myself will be letting you know how we’ve improved our preparedness since our last episode, we have some listener feed back to cover off (hopefully), and then were going to get into the main topic for this episode, Pre Deer Hunting.   News Eric – Since this episode is going to be focused on hunting I thought an article about hunting would make sense to talk about. Oct 27 2018 - MNRF laid 132 charges in 10-day period at start of moose and deer season. During a 10-day period from Oct. 13 to Oct. 22, conservation officers checked 4,768 hunters from Ontario and the United States and laid 132 charges and issued 329 warnings. The fact that there are more warnings vs charges is good to see, education always makes a big impact vs charging. Some of the charges and warnings that were issued included failing to wear a proper helmet on an ATV, having open liquor in a vehicle, having a loaded firearm in a vehicle, not wearing proper hunting orange, night hunting, shooting from the road, and trespassing for the purpose of hunting. Safety is key, alcohol and hunting just doesn’t mix. Not wearing orange (common sense), and trespassing. https://www.tbnewswatch.com/local-news/mnrf-laid-132-charges-in-10-day-period-at-start-of-moose-and-deer-season-1100849 Ian commentary– province differences.  No orange required here. Lower population density.  Interesting in the lack of caliber restrictions here too. Boozing it up leads to accidents, maybe requiring first aid / IFAKs.  Do you sell those? Plan to handle first aid issues?  What first aid do you bring?   Ian -. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/man-shoots-grizzly-video-bella-coola-bc-1.4875956 Man shoots grizzly mom in front of house. Eric – Safety around wild life? Bears in camp, around when hunting. . . Talking points: -Who has the right of the space?  He erred leaving her in his yard for a while. -Protection of family versus public outcry.  Totally different when times are bad. -Charged outside with no real plan. -Backup plan for when she charged was a complete fail. Ian - The inevitable bear defense debate!   CGN is full of threads on this. .308 / Buckshot/45-70/50 BMG

Guys, honestly, it’s almost 10pm, and I’ve been up since like 5am and I’m pretty tired so I’m not going to dedicate too much time to writing this description. So, generally speaking, this episode sounds like this: Ian: Subscribe and rate our podcast! Kelsey: it’s ya boi, Kelsey! Ian: -eye roll- Kelsey: Do you want to go first? Ian: You go. Kelsey: No you. Ian: No, you. Kelsey: I always go first. Ian: Fine. -funny story- Kelsey: -laughter- Ian: -tongue click sounds- Kelsey: -funny story- Ian: -laughter that’s too loud for our iPhone recording- Cat: meow AD BREAK Kelsey: -next funny story- Ian: We’ve been doing this for like 45 minutes, should we stop? Kelsey: Keep going, we’re fine. Ian: -less funny story because he’s obviously getting a little tired. Yeah, he’s doing that thing where you can tell he’s trying to be funny, which he is being funny, but like, in a way where it feels a little forced- Kelsey: Thanks for listening! Ian: Subscribe and rate our podcast! Cat: Meow again. Follow Ian on Instagram: ianblevine Follow Kelsey on Instagram: kelseykraz www.waytpodcast.com All Music by Ian Holiday (Instagram: enholiday) Recorded August 20th, 2018

Today we have Dallas based agent and real estate investor Ian Flannigan. From an investment real estate agent to Ian has been in the real estate industry for over 15 years and has come a long way gaining a diverse background around investment property sales and distressed properties and has become an expert at it travelling around the country speaking on creative financing and topics.  Ian talks to us about what attracted him to EXP and his transition coming out of a franchise system and joining EXP. He touches on the things that led him to decide to move all of his businesses including his investment business his brokerage business etc. over to EXP Realty  He brings a business owners perspective not just a listing and selling agents perspective.  Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly.     In this episode. The Investor & Business Owner's Perspective  Creating Cashflow and building assets Benefits the Cloud provides Equity and revenue share Being the exponential earner Getting awarded EXP shares and becoming an EXP icon The compound effect on my revenue share & referrals  Predicting your income   Want to Learn More about eXp Realty? If you are interested in learning more about eXp, reach out to the person who introduced you to eXp or contact Ian to inquire or ask questions. Contact Ian: Text at  214 213 1737  Links: www.EXPCloud.com   Take away "you borrow capital you'll leverage it against a property and then you receive that cash flow. The reality is not too many people ever get to that point" Ian Flannigan   Podcast Transcription Kevin: Welcome back to another episode of In The Cloud the EXP realty explain podcast I am host Kevin Cottrell. Joining me today is Dallas based agent and real estate investor Ian Flannigan Ian is going to tell us about his transition coming out of a franchise system and then working for a transaction based brokerage to decide to move all of his businesses including his investment business his brokerage business etc. over to EXP Realty and why he did that. He brings a business owners perspective not just a listing and selling agents perspective. Ian and I are going to talk about things ranging from equity revenue share and the other things that attracted him to EXP realty. Please stay tuned for my interview with Ian Flannigan. Welcome to the show Ian. Ian: Hey how's it going. Kevin: It's going awesome. I'm looking forward to our conversation now for any of the listeners the podcast that may not be familiar with you once you take a minute and give your background and history as far as real estate. Ian: I've been in real estate for almost about 15 years and I was a young hairdresser in my past life. We all have that story right? So you know I read that book Rich Dad Poor Dad and made me realize that I was you know spinning my wheels as a self-employed business owner. I didn't own a business I owned a job and just like you know we have friends that are attorneys you know real estate agents. Well you know all that stuff that they had these commission businesses and stuff like that so I knew that I had to make a change so I started studying real estate and I started flying around the country go into seminars was like a lot of people I didn't come into the business through the licensing side I came through the investing side which I really cherish that information because I have a very intimate knowledge of how the legal process works with pre foreclosures. We know probate houses people losing their houses the tax liens. I mean I've bought fire damaged houses all kinds of very interesting distressed property situations. I've become an expert at it and I've traveled around the country speaking on creative financing and topics like that because I ran a big seller financed real estate model for quite a long time and like I said I wasn't licensed I leveraged to brokerage's one in Oklahoma City one here in Dallas and we used all of our marketing and we ran all of our leads through them. I learned the business on both sides so when I was drafting my own contracts two years before I ever got a license so you know the market changed and I felt like I left a lot of money on the table so I started. I realized that like look I'm going to get go ahead and get my license because I'm processing so many deals through my investment company. So I might as well do it so you know I got my licence I hung out with Keller. Keller was a great company at the time, for me it wasn't a good fit. When I moved my licence over to a 100 % shop and it was a much better fit for my needs at the time but I had a big exit out of my investment company and everything that I had built over the last nine years kind of came to an end and I knew that I needed to buy and sell houses I knew I needed to list and sell houses but I also knew that I had to build more cashflow and I needed to build more assets because I just made an exit out of a company and it was a very interesting time in my life because I went through a legal divorce. You know I went in business with these wealthy individuals that were coming out of it luckily everything the dust settles all right. I came out OK but you know I knew that I had to build something again and when I saw the model with the EXP I was like oh my gosh this is interesting because there have been nothing like it that I've ever seen. So that's how I got to be. Kevin: Great! So you have a diverse background especially around investment property sales and distressed properties. When you looked at EXP you mentioned like myself I was a team leader at Keller Williams for a long time great company but the EXP is.. You know especially and I want to chat about this for a minute. It's a different model. When you talked about Rich Dad Poor Dad in thinking like a business owner that I think the industry has seen so there's a lot of noise and information out there that is confusing for real estate agents. In other words I want you to take a few minutes and talk a little bit about how you process this as a investor slash business owner because for real estate agents listen to this a lot of them have a commissioned sales job and they need some help understanding how to think like a business owner. Ian: You know that that couldn't have been the more perfect way to explain that because you know being an investor we have to think about OK how are we going to get money out in the market. This is how our thought processes we have X amount of capital we can leverage capital and we're going to put that money out into the market either short term or long term and then we're going to get a return on it's going to be a four month timeline a six month timeline. So that's what we're doing when we're buying and selling houses right we're thinking of it as a business it's not on the other side of the track where when you're listing agent it's a different experience because you don't own the house you're not responsible for the repairs utilities all that other stuff it's just a different ball game but it's a great way for someone to be able to get into the market and that's what almost drives me crazy about getting a real estate licence. Was I did that in a couple of weeks it took me almost a year to get a licence to cut hair in the state of Texas as it was mindblowing how different it was but my point is you know getting into real estate is the barrier to entry isn't that you know it's not very difficult. So there's a lot of people coming in and they don't really think of it like a business. They don't know that they have to put themselves out into the marketplace and sell themselves as a business owner so they get stuck in just that hamster wheel of the commission side of the business still thinking of it from an investment standpoint is like like oh my gosh this company... Forget the name forget all of it just look at your balance sheet and what are you doing on your balance sheet. Right you've got income expense asset liability what are you doing to create income in your business that you only have a commission type of business you only have one source. So this is the way that I see it because I built a seller financed model by leveraging capital we would raise millions of dollars actually. We didn't raise millions of dollars until after we placed it because one of our limited partners was our lender. So we had in-house lines of credit and I was buying you know five to 10 houses a month that I was selling them on owner financing and carrying back a note and we were archiving basically building a big huge spreadsheet of notes right. So once my mind opened to that like I knew that there were so many different ways to make money in real estate but once you find one model that you can't replicate and duplicate... And that's what exactly what I was doing with seller financing I was buying a house. I was renovating that house and that I was selling it and carrying back a note. And the more notes that I could create the more money I could borrow because we had we were building. A balance sheet of. Assets. Yes we had debt on it but. Our cash flow was compounding. Our interest was compounding. So having that experience with selling houses in volume like that and then carrying back notes like a bank that's what expanded my mind into understanding how to create massive amounts of cash flow and that's traditionally how you do it you borrow capital you'll leverage it against a property and then you receive that cash flow. The reality is not too many people ever get to that point even when they've been in real estate 15 20 years especially if they're coming from the licensing side of the world unless they have some mentors and coaches that were great that helped them put money back in you know build assets outside of their license that would be great. But most people never experience that. So when I saw EXP I really understood like oh my gosh like I got it immediately. Not only could I you know sell houses I could get you know software and technology to plug into to sell more houses because the training in EXP is you know second to none which people don't realize is the support and the training in the cloud is 100 times more effective more efficient. I mean the words just go on and on and on that describe how well you know it is and how easy it is to plug into the cloud. It's... The support and training is you can access it from anywhere in the world any time. There are no restrictions on getting in your car driving down to the road like that is gone that is over we plug into the cloud. So. That's one of the biggest takeaways of you know. Jumping into that is the time right we're all trying to... Maximize our time. So you know not driving down to offices. I had a huge office on the eighth floor overlooking. Downtown Dallas and I hated it because I had to get my car. I had to drive down to the office. Much more efficient with the home based office than I'd take my laptops and I got my Wi-Fi. So when I travel. I'm connected so. That I was the one thing is offloading that big expense of an office so that's the biggest thing that the cloud provides. And you know. To grow business you've got to reduce your expenses and grow your cash flows. And grow your transactional cash flow too. Kevin: So let me ask you a question regarding the business small as a business guy. You know so when you're traditionally a commission based business you know like you said that's one stream of income. When you look at the two big plays that EXP let's talk about the one being equity and the other being revenue share. The market really doesn't get this from the standpoint of the way startups work in Silicon Valley that's where I come from. You know so they look at it. I'm a real estate agent. I'm at XYZ brokerage I'm at independent it could be a big franchise. I go through my business I sell own a bunch of houses every year and either take listings and so on will get buyers at the end of the year or if I run my business well like you said I make a little bit of money. Ian: Yeah. Kevin: Now meanwhile there are people like Sherry Elliott who you know because she's in your marketplace that come on the podcast and go Hey by the way I'm buying a EXP stock for 20 % below on the commission plan. I've also been awarded it as an Icon for several years. You know I look at my account and I've got seven hundred thousand dollars in equity and if you'll look around a big franchise market center or office I would challenge you and you know this because you're in the marketplace. This is where the market doesn't get it right. There are not people running around with 150000 like I met an agent here in Austin or 700000 like Sherry Elliott where this is just occurring on automatic investment because the average agent just at the end of there like oh how many units did I sell. Ian: Exactly. That's you know the biggest part of about the business model is. Having that that potential to be what we call the exponential earner right. How you can scale a business. And adding stock and equity to your balance sheet. You know it's like sitting down with a financial planner and saying hey we're going to take a little bit of your cash we're going to put it here again take a little bit more your cash. We're going to put it here and then over time we're going to let this grow. And that's what people don't understand is. EXP offer's.... It's almost like a 401k for real estate agents. So as they're closing transactions moving forward paying into the brokerage we're actually getting a return on the money we're paying in. Right. Especially with the stock program that we have you know there's actually you know there's six different ways to get stock. One is to buy over the counter. Another is when you close your first transaction with the EXP you'll get awarded I believe it's 50 shares right now that could be off because the numbers are changing so fast I can't keep track of them but you'll get awarded shares of stock when you close your first transaction and then when you cap once you sell you know two point six six or about three million depending on what commission structure you're on 2.5 or 3 % whenever you cap you'll get more shares of stock I believe around 100 shares right now and then here's the cool part is if you sell 20 houses after your cap which a lot of team leaders do and a lot of brokers do they do a lot of volume or if you're a commercial and you sell about half a million then you can qualify to become an Icon. And then there's a panel that vote you and once you get qualified. You can receive your entire cap backing company stock which is sixteen thousand dollars just awarded back to you in company stock and that is pretty darn amazing. Because think about that. All the other franchise models that are out there there are great companies. You know. Nothing has changed in real estate in the last hundred years. Now the Internet has finally caught up with the brick and mortar real estate model. And no longer are agents being you know paying every dime in you know into their brokerages and not seeing a return on it. So it's a completely different mindset from this day forward of technology and growth and all that it's just changing the game in you know the billion dollars in expenses that all the big companies have. What do you think they're going to be in five and 10 years. I mean the internet has completely changed everything. But but that's why it's so important to build a future. And we haven't even talked about the revenue share. I mean you know as you're closing transactions you can be accumulating stock just through production. So every transaction you close your laying stock you have to think about that is building assets on a balance sheet. So back the very first thing we first started talking about where is why is what attracted me was understanding that I could build and compound more and more line items of assets on my balance sheet like in a spreadsheet. When you see cash flow coming at you in a spreadsheet and you see a total at the bottom and that total gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger by adding more line items of assets to your balance sheet. When I saw the revenue share model my mind was blown. And I've been in the company two years in what I've seen happen in the last two years. I mean I just stopped telling people the numbers because they're so big it just It's not relevant to them right. How does anyone relate to the kid that won the 450 million dollar Powerball in Florida. Like how is that relevant to me right. That's a massive amount of cash. It's like you know it's just one of those things. What do you think about that. Kevin: It's exactly what people miss. I talked to somebody last weekend. She's in Southern California and I'm glad you brought up the Icon program because as I started to ask her questions I could see that because she comes from a big franchise system that she was confused by the noise and information and other words they're trying to basically make it not clear that you're getting an equity award if you qualify for the Icon program of 16000 and that that's highly highly difficult to actually obtain that. Well as you mentioned either based on GCI or 20 transactions above capping. Ian: That's right. Kevin: There are very clear terms on how you qualify for this. So in her case she's got a big presence right. So I asked her some questions and just to clarify for our listeners in her case I said well how many referral fees on top of capping right she does about four or five million dollars a year. So she easily qualifies based on capping and she's in a high priced market in Southern California. I said well how many referrals did you do. She said I did I think somewhere around eight or nine referral fees that I got paid back to me last year. I said do you do any leases you're in a pretty high price market you've got to have people that are looking to lease houses and she goes I did it at least 10 of those on top of my real estate transactions. I said well just the referral fees and the leases are 18 transactions. How many did you do above. Approximately three million in volume. She goes well I have like another six transactions on top of that based on her pricing. I'm like OK well in our model you would be an Icon. Ian: That's right. Kevin: She's like I have no idea. I'm like yeah that's exactly how this program works. And assuming that you want to participate you're going to get all of your money back after you basically qualify based on transactions and you know the other structure and then for anybody listening to this you can certainly reach out we'll have some more information about the Icon program in this and other episodes. But don't let the marketplace confuse you. This is a real program. We can refer you to plenty of icons within EXP to talk to them about qualifying. Some of them have qualified for more than one year. In other words this isn't some promo special like you'd have at the car dealer where they're doing it once right. We have icons that have been here for more than two years that have qualified. Every year their hair. So the whole purpose of this podcast and I'm glad you brought this up is to have people understand because as a business owner at most brokerages there is no way to qualify to get your company dollar back. Right they just don't offer programs like that specially around equity which is an appreciating asset in most entities like this. So you absolutely are in a position to create value. I mentioned two numbers and now I want to tie this down. There is a agent I met at one of the meet greets right one of the EXP explained meetings and when this came up about Sherry Elliott in the conversation she said well I don't have a big mega team right. I'm a Capper. I do business and I've been investing in EXP stock through the program that Ian talked about where you can divert 5 % of your commissions. She said I have a hundred and fifty five thousand dollars in less than two years in my equity account. I would challenge any listener here if you're in a franchise or even an independent brokerage. Go look at your equity account and go ahead and send me a message if you have a hundred and fifty five thousand of your company's stock in there. And I think you and I know the answer is not unless you're buying at the market and you happen to work for a company that's traded right there's companies like Real Ajee or Remax or others out there that you could buy stock but you're not buying it for 20 % below market. Ian: Now you've got to buy it at today's value which it's been going down. Kevin: Let's transition a little bit to revenue share I'm going to give you my perspective and then I want to hear yours as a real estate investor so Gene-Frederic and I come out of the team a role or the regional owner role if you will at a big franchise system Keller Williams in particular but they all work the same way right. So one of the big things that were trying to basically make sure that agents understand is in a franchise system and if you are lucky enough to be around Keller Williams in the early days and this would be in the 90s right Gene-Frederic and Susan joined in the early 90s. They along with others had the opportunity to invest and buy regions right Gene-Frederic in particular with a couple of partners own Northern California Hawaii. Ian: I actually hung my license at DPR and live right down the street from where they used to live in Plano Texas. Kevin: That's awesome. And so for anybody looking at this the way regional owners are paid in franchise system and I'll speak specifically for Keller Williams is the royalties are taken off the top and they are paid half to the regional owners and have to the regional operating company in Austin. Right. So half and half. So one of the interesting variants of information out there in the marketplace is taking money off the top. It's not sustainable. Well if Remax does it if Keller does it. If all of the real Ajee franchises do this and if they have a regional operating partners or owners they're all paid this way then I challenge anybody that has been told that to go back and ask the person that told you this is this not how our franchise system the regional owners get paid. And the answer I'll just give you the answer is yes. So don't let anybody tell you that paying money off the top out of the revenue stream is not sustainable. This is exactly what EXP is doing. They don't have regional owners. From the standpoint of anybody buying in and owning Northern California Hawaii like Gene and Susan did with their partners. You are paid as a regional owner any EXP so to speak and I'm using that term broadly and loosely but it's the same concept off the top. Based on agents that are attracted to the company they become like your regional owner group. So with that as a precursor so people understand the concept here. This is not any different than what the franchise are doing. Ian what's your perspective on this as a business opportunity. Ian: So the way I see it and then you can correct me if I'm wrong that you know this is a big referral type of based payment right. Everyone understands. Getting a referral you mentioned the referral a moment ago. I have someone in California. I have a lead in California. I'm in Texas. I contacted agent say hey I have a great lead for you. They're jumping up and down because it's a five million dollar acquisition. So they think I've hung the moon. And I come and I go back to that same age and I say Hey. Here's the business model. That I'm operating around the entire country if you're interested in it and you're attracted to it and you like it. I could sponsor you into this model and then I could show you how to expand that. Across the entire United States as well. So now I sponsor that age in California. Now every time they close the transaction I'm going to get paid a referral fee. How cool is that. Right. And then every time they attract somebody. Into the company underneath them they could be in Seattle they could be and. They could be in. WASHINGTON They could be in Florida. They could be down in Alabama taxes Arizona. Every time those agents close transactions not only is that agent that I sponsored in California are going to make a referral now I'm going to make a referral fee off of another 20 agents. And wow the crazy thing about this model is every single person is on the same plan and they all want to expand their business so now I get organic compound and kind of like compound interest. So I'm getting a compound effect on my revenue share because now I've gone from two agents to 4 agents to eight agents to 12 to 24. I've expanded my revenue share business into 14 states and Canada and I just hit 84 agents and almost 30 of them hit my team in the last 60 days. So I'm now getting the organic compound effect of the duplication of what makes this lucrative revenue sharing model so amazing. Kevin: I've interviewed several independent brokers because their business owners right? They get blown away with is all of a sudden like Mitch Ryback and Florida they wake up and they're in 32 states in two provinces in Canada and they're adding more people per month than they had in their brokerage when they converted to EXP. Now you started from scratch right. You didn't convert a brokerage but for any agent listening here it doesn't matter if you're a single solo or and an agent that operates by themselves. You're a team and you're the rainmaker. You have an opportunity just to have when people ask you and I'm sure this happens right. And they like Tell me about the EXP. Why are you with EXP. You know somebody is going to listen to this podcast or other episodes and get it right. You're going to be able to have people have an understanding of the reality of EXP and to tie this down. From the standpoint of my comment earlier in the down markets right there is a several franchise systems including a very large one that operates on profit share. The regional owners and I'll speak to Gene-Frederic and his partners in Northern California. We're making a enormous amount of money in that 0 8 0 9 downturn. Most of the market centers we're not profitable for obvious reasons right. People's production were down however... because it's paid off the top the regional owners were making money like they were printing money and they felt guilty frankly about it. If you ever hear Gene interviewed about it he talks about the fact that they felt fairly guilty about the fact that if you're out there and you're thinking that it's all about profit share that's your reality check. We are going to go through another business cycle correction and you're going to see that when something is paid off the bottom at a profit. There's nothing wrong with that. It works. I'm invested removed partner. I was at Kellems for more than three years so to speak. And so I'm vested. I get paid profit share every month. So does Gene-Frederic. So do plenty of people. Now the difference is we're now comparing revenue share the profit share and it's a completely different model revenue share. Just to make it really easy is paid off the top like original owner. Like. I described earlier. Ian: And it's 100 % transparent. Kevin: It's very predictable. In other words.. Ian: You know exactly how much it is you can calculate it on your own. Kevin: And you can build a business around it in other words you've got to look at it like Ian talked about if you've got 80 people you've got 100 people if you've got like Pat Hays you have 800 people. You can predict very accurately. But here's what I expect at a minimum I'm going to make. And usually the numbers end up higher than what people are estimating. So let me ask you this before we wrap up today if somebody is listening to this and they want to do some due diligence obviously they can listen to this or any of the other episodes they can click on the link and watch that seven minute intro video that's in the show notes. What would you advise them to do as far as due diligence to really understand what the EXP is about. Ian: I would just refer you to some Web sites like you can really learn about the company. Number one is we're a publicly traded company right. That's one of the big game changers about this and why Glenn Sanford created this because he wanted everyone that was contributing to the growth of the company to be an owner and to be rewarded with it. So EXP world Holdings Inc. Is the site that you can do your due diligence and you can see our balance sheet. You can see everything about the company we're very very transparent. That's number one and that's the myth that everybody that's listening maybe for the first time or have heard something negative from someone else about the company like just forget all that. Do your due diligence were a publicly traded company EXPworldholdings.com The next thing that I would say is maybe we could take him over to the cloud side so they can see the training schedule they can see the agent handbook at EXPCloud.com. That's what I like to refer people to you know if you scroll down on that site you can see the agent handbook and you can read this and you can see exactly what the financial model is. And you can read through it. There it is it's right there in PDF form you can download it you can read it all the contact information for everybody in the company not everybody as far as the agent count goes. But now it's got Vicki in there it's got Jason Guessing in there. It's got you know Glenn its got their e-mail addresses in there. Everybody in this company is 100 % transparent. That's the great thing that I love about it so EXPCloud.com that you can see the agent handbook there. Kevin: Excellent.. which are the two suggestions I would give. I also would like to state this and I know that we're going to get your contact information before we wrap up. And when you're introduced to EXP the person that introduces you to EXP can get you in touch with Ian or anybody else or any of the people you interviewed on this podcast ask for references if that's what you need as far as your due diligence. There may be somebody that's from the same franchise you are with that you can chat with maybe you've never met them maybe you admire them and you respect them completely. That is the culture. As owners of this business that's also not apparent from the outside. In other words he and I'm sure you've had this happen we're all of a sudden you have somebody that needs to chat with somebody that's in another part of the country you reach out and say Hey John this person is from the same franchise that you were with. They want to talk with you. The answer I found 100 % is yes sent them my way and I'll be happy. Yeah. And it's not that clear from the outside. And so now with that even if somebody listens to this and they want to chat with you a little bit more directly what's the best way to reach you. Ian: I mean best way to reach me is by text at 214 2131 737 and I'm in the Dallas market. This is my backyard and I've had a lot of fun. I still do tons of fix and flips I actually have some pretty huge renovations that I document put on Facebook and LinkedIn and stuff like that and I invite people to come out and check them out when I'm done. Kevin: Fantastic. Appreciate you coming on the show. Ian: Thanks buddy. Thank you.

Jetta Review - Real Test-Driver from Riverside, California  Ian Duarte came from Riverside, CA to test drive the all-new 2019 VW Jetta at Ontario Volkswagen. And he was so impressed, that after doing so, he sat down to share his thoughts on the iDriveSoCal Podcast. Technically, Ian rode along with his friend Michelle Bentley.  And, the two diehard Volkswagen fans had nothing but high marks for the latest innovation from their favorite automaker. Continue reading or click play below to hear Ian's Jetta review - from a Riverside commuter. ***Transcript*** Recorded  @ Ontario Volkswagen More Real-Driver Jetta Reviews: Riverside Driver Loma Linda Driver Family from Corona Inland Empire Driver 2019 Volkswagen Jetta Review From Riverside, California Ian: I think the MQB platform has actually given the interior of the car more space, basically, without making the car bigger. Virtual cockpit, really cool. A lot of nice little things to mess with. Center Stack Angled Toward the Driver I definitely love the taillights and the headlights on these cars. Riverside VW Enthusiast Ian Duarte at Ontario Volkswagen Tom: Welcome to iDriveSoCal, a podcast all about mobility from the automotive capital of the United States, southern California. I'm Tom Smith and we're at the Ontario Volkswagen 2019 Jetta launch party, and joining me is Ian Duarte from- Ian: Riverside, California. Tom: Okay, Ian's Jetta Review from Riverside, California. Ian just got back with Michelle from a 2019 Jetta test drive. So, tell me what you thought. 2019 VW Jetta Ian: Well I can give you a different point of view over here, 'cause I was sitting in the back seat as she was driving, yeah. Tom: So Michelle, did she let you drive? Ian: I let her drive, yeah. Tom: Ah. Ian: You'll see you get a different perspective here. Tom: Absolutely. We need that perspective. I'm just putting the relationship together. Like, all right, Michelle's the driver, Ian's in the backseat. The all-new VW Jetta has gotten bigger! Ian: Back seat driver. Tom: So, how was the trunk, Ian? Ian: The trunk is actually pretty roomy. Luxurious And Spacious Jetta Interior Tom: It is. I was just kidding. How was the back seat? Tell me about the ride. Ian: It was actually pretty roomy, honestly, because like I've said, I've sat in the back of her GLI. And, I think the MQB platform has actually given the interior of the car more space, basically, without making the car bigger. Smoother All-New 2019 Jetta Tom: I love all the technology, innovation, including how they're innovating with engineering the interior of the car. What else do you think? Ian: I really like the virtual cockpit. Tom: So, did you get to drive, or you just got to see the virtual cockpit? Ian: I just got to see it. Tom: All right, yeah. It is pretty cool. What else? Ian: Well, I like the way the leather felt. Jetta Digital Cockpit Tom: Yeah. Ian: Because hers, SEL, being leather seats as well, I feel like they did a little nice update on their leather, as well. Tom: Very high quality. Ian: Yeah. "...I think the MQB platform has actually given the interior of the car more space, basically, without making the car bigger." Tom: With the pinhole and everything. Ian: Oh, yeah. Tom: It was like, all right, I'm getting into a quality car. To me, it felt like a lot more car than the price point. Riverside Commuter Jetta Review - Better Interior, Exterior And Performance Ian: Oh, yeah, of course. If you're gonna look at the competitors, obviously, you have a way nice interior, exterior, and performance, versus the competitors. Tom: Okay. All right, so, it sounds like you're a bit of a car guy, as well as Michelle's car girl. "...you have a way nice interior, exterior, and performance, versus the competitors." Ian: Oh, yeah, of course, oh yeah. Tom: All right, so then,

2013 has given Australian music icon, Russell Morris, an unexpected hit record some 44 years after his first national number one smash with pop-psychedelic smash, The Real Thing. I produced this music feature with Russell in 2014, although I first met him in about 1992 when I interviewed him in Hobart. He's smart, funny, brilliant and has always been just bloody fabulous and generous to me. Except for that time he rang my show to wish me a happy birthday and I thought he was JPY! Sorry, Russell! xxAustralian music industry icon Russell Morris joined Carol Duncan's program while doing a series of performances in Newcastle and surrounds. (Carol Duncan:Carol Duncan)"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I'd always wanted to do a roots and blues album.""I chose Australian history because I've always loved any type of history. You'd think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn't done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening.""Producer Mitch Cairns' foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back.""At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, "You've gotta do something or we won't have any work!" And I said, "Well, I've got the blues album," and he said, "Well, FINISH IT!""It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went 'bang', but the commercial stations just didn't want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country.""If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you'd have put me at the bottom of the list.""I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it's from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don't listen to it.""I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, "We'll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW." Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I'd heard him on the radio station and I said, "Well how are we going to do that?" and he said, "We'll just go up to the radio station!""So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, "We've got this, what do you think?" and Stan said, 'Love it, I'll play it.'And that's what it was like.""Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we're lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.""We'd have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we'd have made the money back." Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it's around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000.""When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it's been a great experience for both of us.""We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10."Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success."I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they'd ever heard.""EMI didn't want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, "Can I speak to the program manager," "Here's the song, what do you think, our record company think it's a load of rubbish, would you play it?" 'Of course we'll play it, will you sign that?'"So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren't getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air."Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums."They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I'd always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it's actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in 'Sweet, Sweet Love' and you'd think, 'Who's this syrupy guitar player?' and it's Phil Manning!""It's (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, 'You've got to produce another hit!' and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.""I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don't think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we'd sort of split.""He's still my best mate but we'd had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia's Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.""But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I'd started it earlier then it wouldn't have worked.""I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn't like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we'd done 'Only A Matter of Time' which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, 'This is rubbish, we're not going in the direction I want to go,' I said, 'I'm not John Farnham, I'm not Ronnie Burns and I'm not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn't even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let's go psychedelia, let's go into something more band oriented than a pop single.'"Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, 'You're right, they're not different enough."Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn't good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing."EMI had gotten a record producer and he'd gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, 'I don't know if this is the right thing ...' and they don't listen, they don't listen ... and all of a sudden they go, 'You know what? Scrap it.' And that's what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, 'I'm not releasing it."Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing."We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don't think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.""I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.""A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn't know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it's right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he'll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, 'No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!' And that's what happens."In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive."He wasn't putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.""I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.""Ian had the master tapes and he said, 'Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you're going home?" So I left. "He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he'd catch some extra rays of sun. He's got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.""He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he's great now.""It was funny. They (the hospital) said, 'Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can't go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital.""It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!""I said, 'Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone's given me such a hard time!' And he said, 'Oh they're all such pains in the ....' "And they'd said to me, 'You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.""My 20 minutes came up and I said I'd better go but he said, 'Don't be ridiculous!" "I ended up staying for two hours.""I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd's partner who's great friend of Ian's, and it says, 'What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he's disappeared?""After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can't get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won't let you out.""He conjured this story and told told them, 'I've decided to do physio' which he'd been refusing to do, and they said, 'Oh that's great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?""He said, 'I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.'" So they took him.""They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.""They couldn't find him!"

2013 has given Australian music icon, Russell Morris, an unexpected hit record some 44 years after his first national number one smash with pop-psychedelic smash, The Real Thing. I produced this music feature with Russell in 2014, although I first met him in about 1992 when I interviewed him in Hobart. He's smart, funny, brilliant and has always been just bloody fabulous and generous to me. Except for that time he rang my show to wish me a happy birthday and I thought he was JPY! Sorry, Russell! xxAustralian music industry icon Russell Morris joined Carol Duncan's program while doing a series of performances in Newcastle and surrounds. (Carol Duncan:Carol Duncan)"This album (Sharkmouth) was done out of a labour of love because I like roots and blues music and I'd always wanted to do a roots and blues album.""I chose Australian history because I've always loved any type of history. You'd think the two kisses of death for a gold album would be blues and Australian history, so it wasn't done with the intention, it was just done as a labour of love which has proved to be really enlightening.""Producer Mitch Cairns' foresight was out of desperation of staying alive. At that stage, Brian Cadd who I was working with, had decided that he was going overseas and he dropped the bomb on us that he might not be coming back.""At that stage Jim Keays was very sick and Mitch said, "You've gotta do something or we won't have any work!" And I said, "Well, I've got the blues album," and he said, "Well, FINISH IT!""It is a great thing (the success of Sharkmouth) and I have to thank particularly the ABC because they ABC embraced it from day one and just went 'bang', but the commercial stations just didn't want to know. The ABC just broke it right across the country.""If anyone was going to have a gold record this year you'd have put me at the bottom of the list.""I think what happens with a lot of my peers, a lot of people will see a new record and whether it's from Joe Camilleri, Daryl Braithwaite - they pre-judge it and don't listen to it.""I remember when we first started in Melbourne, Ian Meldrum said to me, "We'll go and see Stan Rofe at 3AW." Stan Rofe was a big star to me, he was on air and I'd heard him on the radio station and I said, "Well how are we going to do that?" and he said, "We'll just go up to the radio station!""So we went up to the radio station and walked in and Stan came down and had a cup of tea with us. Ian said, "We've got this, what do you think?" and Stan said, 'Love it, I'll play it.'And that's what it was like.""Well, Mitch and I spoke about it (initial expectations of Sharkmouth) and I said if we're lucky we might sell 5,000 copies, if we can get an independent release.""We'd have sold them at gigs to try and get our money back and if we had a small deal with a company and sold 5,000 or 8,000 we'd have made the money back." Gold status is in 2013 is 35,000 and Sharkmouth is now creeping up towards platinum - it's around 60,000 now and platinum is 70,000.""When I did the unplugged album with Liberation it sold around 8,000 so it's been a great experience for both of us.""We signed to an independent record company and they took it and then rang me up, the first time it went in to the charts at about number 89, then it jumped to 49 and I was over the moon. I rang Mitch and we celebrated, and then the next week it jumped 20 places again and it just kept going right up into the top 10."Russell has continued a great tradition started by The Beatles of being turned down by every record company in the country and then having a success."I tell you what is ironic, The Real Thing was turned down as well. EMI hated it, they thought it was the biggest load of rubbish they'd ever heard.""EMI didn't want to release it, they were only going to release it in Melbourne to try and make their money back because I had a following in Melbourne, so Ian Meldrum and I got in a car and drove to Sydney to go and see all the (radio) program managers because at that stage you could knock on the door of these commercial stations before they became corporate and say, "Can I speak to the program manager," "Here's the song, what do you think, our record company think it's a load of rubbish, would you play it?" 'Of course we'll play it, will you sign that?'"So we signed a petition that came out to really stick it to the record company. Radio and record companies at that stage weren't getting along very well. It was just prior to the record ban where radio wanted to stop paying royalties to radio for playing songs on the air."Russell Morris is thought of as having lots of pop hits and a pure voice but he dabbled in blues back in the 1970s when he used musicians from Chain on one of his albums."They were my favourite band. I always use Barry Harvey and Barry Sullivan always, on everything, and I'd always used Phil Manning, so strangely enough it's actually Phil Manning playing all those licks in 'Sweet, Sweet Love' and you'd think, 'Who's this syrupy guitar player?' and it's Phil Manning!""It's (blues) where I wanted to head but I was painted into a corner once I had a pop hit and the record company saying, 'You've got to produce another hit!' and it became a factory after a while. You get caught in it.""I actually wished Chain had been my band because it would have taken me on a whole other direction. I don't think Ian, Molly, would have been too happy although at that stage we'd sort of split.""He's still my best mate but we'd had a couple of professional disagreements. He saw me as Australia's Davey Jones from The Monkees or some such thing and I wanted to go in a different direction completely as a singer/songwriter so we differed on the way we were going and the record company was pressuring for another single, but I really would have loved to be with a band like Chain.""But your fate is your fate. Whatever happens, those doors open and close for a reason and maybe if I'd started it earlier then it wouldn't have worked.""I was happy doing The Real Thing, I quite liked psychedelia. I didn't like pop a lot but I remember Ian (Molly Meldrum) had done a number of songs with me and we'd done 'Only A Matter of Time' which I absolutely loathe, it was on the back of The Real Thing, and a couple of pop songs and I said to Ian, 'This is rubbish, we're not going in the direction I want to go,' I said, 'I'm not John Farnham, I'm not Ronnie Burns and I'm not Normie Rowe. I want to do something that they wouldn't even contemplate thinking about doing. I want to go in that direction. Let's go psychedelia, let's go into something more band oriented than a pop single.'"Ian, to his credit, agreed and said, 'You're right, they're not different enough."Russell Morris actually had a whole album ready to go at one stage and decided it wasn't good enough and he wanted to re-record the whole thing."EMI had gotten a record producer and he'd gotten a head of steam up and away he went. I tend to go along with things and say to people, 'I don't know if this is the right thing ...' and they don't listen, they don't listen ... and all of a sudden they go, 'You know what? Scrap it.' And that's what happened. He went ahead and put strings and brass on everything and it just drove me insane. I said to him, 'I'm not releasing it."Russell Morris on recording The Real Thing."We used 8-track recording for The Real Thing. There was only two tracks for the effects, one for the vocals, everything just kinda got bounced down, I don't think we even slaved another machine to worry about generations. I think we did slave another machine for the effects.""I cannot take any credit for it. Ian Meldrum was the total architect, it was his concept from start to finish.""A lot of it was trial and error, experimentation, but giving Molly his dues he doesn't know what he wants in the studio but when he stumbles across it he knows instinctively that it's right. Everyone else will be nodding off at 3am and he'll have had some poor bloody guitar player out there playing the part over and over, 'No! Try it this way! Try something else! Make it sound like stars!' And that's what happens."In December 2011, Ian 'Molly' Meldrum had a serious fall while at home which for a while it seemed he wouldn't survive."He wasn't putting up Christmas lights. I was with him that day and I think that was a story that got fed around.""I was there that day, the reason he fell is because of him. We were doing a song for Jerry Ryan who was doing The Green Edge, the cycling team, and I was doing a duet with Vanessa Amorosi.""Ian had the master tapes and he said, 'Can you take these down to Sing Sing as you're going home?" So I left. "He was about to head to Thailand and he probably thought he'd catch some extra rays of sun. He's got a latter cemented into the side of his wall which goes up to a sun deck. He was climbing up there with his mobile phone, his cigarettes and trying to juggle those and lost his balance and fell.""He would have died except his gardener, Joe, happened to be there. It was real touch and go as to whether he was going to survive but he's great now.""It was funny. They (the hospital) said, 'Ian wants to see you in hospital. You cannot talk to him about mobile phones. If he asks for your mobile phone you cannot give it to him. If he asks for drinks you can't go and get him one. Do not talk to him about getting out of hospital.""It was horrifying. I thought I was going to get in there and expected to see Ian sitting in a wheelchair and drinking soup through a straw, but I got in there and there he is sitting with his baseball cap on and his tracksuit reading the paper!""I said, 'Ian, I expected you to be sitting here dribbling, everyone's given me such a hard time!' And he said, 'Oh they're all such pains in the ....' "And they'd said to me, 'You cannot stay any longer than 20 minutes and if he shows any aggravation you have to leave immediately.""My 20 minutes came up and I said I'd better go but he said, 'Don't be ridiculous!" "I ended up staying for two hours.""I was also off to Thailand and flew out the next day. I got to Thailand and I got an email from Amanda Pelman who is Brian Cadd's partner who's great friend of Ian's, and it says, 'What have you done? Where is Ian? You were the last person to see him and now he's disappeared?""After I left, Ian started to figure out how to get out of there because you can't get out of the ward without a special card and the nurses won't let you out.""He conjured this story and told told them, 'I've decided to do physio' which he'd been refusing to do, and they said, 'Oh that's great Ian, when do you want to start, Monday?""He said, 'I want to start now, if you want me to do physio I want to go over and have a look and do it now.'" So they took him.""They got a nurse to take him over and took him down the street and as they got to the street he turned one way and just kept walking.""They couldn't find him!"

Out of the gray zone. We’re joined by Chall (@challdreams) who left academia behind as a postdoc and currently a Project Coordinator in pediatric cancer via a job in pharma quality control science. Getting out of the Gray Zone We discuss characteristics PhDs have that might lend them or not to careers beyond the bench. Academia is ostensibly creative and measurements do matter, but in pharma or other fields, precision and accuracy of claims made about products matter and quality testing has to occur. Those cannot be in a gray zone, where in academia, that gray zone may be a hint of something. Similarly, in academia it can be hard to know what your skills are and what value you have. Beyond academia, it becomes necessary to know and assert what you know and the value you bring to a team Chall talks about her career transitions, realizing that any hobbies she had as a postdoc fell away, only to be regained after leaving academia,  being professionally happier, and realizing her value and skills. Having a sense that there is real opportunity beyond academia has also been a confidence booster. Quotes: -“Be able to ask someone else, not you, and go through the experiment with you to see if there’s something you can salvage. Get a pep talk and get someone else to evaluate things” - Chall -“The other thing that makes me more happy professionally is that I see opportunity. Not feeling as unsure now that she’s beyond academia whereas as a postdoc, that was harder.” - Chall -“Believe in yourself and think that you know it” - Chall -“There are multiple paths through the maze” - Ian -“You’re testing and don’t really know what’s going to happen”.- Doctor_PMS Mentioned in the show: Chall’s post on getting promoted and the difference between contentment and complacency. PhDs in microbiology have wide applicability: sterility and environmental quality monitoring, food production, making beer, and more.