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“Manager and leader”? What's the difference. During my conversation this time with Scott Hanton, our guest, we will discuss this very point along with many other fascinating and interesting subjects. As Scott tells us at the beginning of this episode he grew up asking “why” about most anything you can think of. He always was a “why” asker. As he tells it, unlike many children who grow out of the phase of asking “why” he did not. He still asks “why” to this very day.   At the age of 13 Scott decided that he wanted to be a chemist. He tells us how this decision came about and why he has always stayed with it. Scott received his bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Michigan State and his PHD from the University of Wisconsin. Again, why he changed schools for his PHD work is an interesting story. As you will see, Scott tells stories in a unique and quite articulate way.   After his university days were over Scott went to work, yes as a chemist. He tells us about this and how after 20 years with one company how and why he moved to another company and somewhat out of constant lab work into some of the management, business and leadership side of a second company. He stayed there for ten years and was laid off during the pandemic. Scott then found employment as the editorial director of Lab Management Magazine where he got to bring his love of teaching to the forefront of his work.   My hour with Scott gives us all many insights into management, leadership and how to combine the two to create a strong teaming environment. I believe you will find Scott's thoughts extremely poignant and helpful in everything that you do.     About the Guest:   Scott Hanton is the Editorial Director of Lab Manager. He spent 30 years as a research chemist, lab manager, and business leader at Air Products and Intertek. Scott thrives on the challenges of problem-solving. He enjoys research, investigation, and collaboration. Scott is a people-centric, servant leader. He is motivated by developing environments where people can grow and succeed, and crafting roles for people that take advantage of their strengths.   Scott earned a BS in chemistry from Michigan State University and a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an active member of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Society of Mass Spectrometry (ASMS), and the Association of Lab Managers (ALMA). As a scientist Scott values curiosity, innovation, progress, and delivery of results. Scott has always been motivated by questions beginning with why. Studying physical chemistry in graduate school offered the opportunity to hone answers to these questions. As a professional scientist, Scott worked in analytical chemistry specializing in MALDI mass spectrometry and polymer characterization.   At Scott married his high school sweetheart, and they have one son. Scott is motivated by excellence, happiness, and kindness. He most enjoys helping people and solving problems. Away from work, Scott enjoys working outside in the yard, playing strategy games, and participating in different discussion groups.   Scott values having a growth mindset and is a life-long learner. He strives to learn something new everyday and from everyone. One of the great parts of being a trained research scientist is that failure really isn't part of his vocabulary. He experiments and either experiences success or learns something new. He values both individual and organizational learning.   Scott's current role at Lab Manager encompasses three major responsibilities: ·      Writing articles and giving presentations to share his experience with lab managers. ·      Driving the creation and growth of the Lab Manager Academy (https://labmanageracademy.com/) that currently contains three certificate programs: lab management, lab safety management, and lab quality management. ·      Helping people through his knowledge of science, scientists, management, and leadership. He is very happy sharing the accumulated wisdom of his experiences as a researcher, lab supervisor, and lab manager. Each article posted on Lab Manager addresses a decision that a lab manager needs to make. Lab management is full of decision-making, so helping people make better, faster, more complete decisions is very satisfying. Ways to connect with Scott:   https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-hanton/   About the Host:   Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/ https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can subscribe in your favorite podcast app. You can also support our podcast through our tip jar https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/unstoppable-mindset .   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.       Transcription Notes:   Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:20 Well, welcome to another episode of unstoppable mindset where inclusion diversity and the unexpected meet, and mostly we get to deal with the unexpected, as opposed to inclusion or diversity. But that's okay, because unexpected is what makes life fun, and our guest today, Scott Hanton, will definitely be able to talk about that. Scott has been a research chemist. He comes from the chemistry world, so he and I in the past have compared notes, because, of course, I come from the physics world, and I love to tell people that the most important thing I learned about physics was that, unlike Doc Brown, although I do know how to build a bomb, unlike Doc Brown from Back to the Future, I'm not dumb enough to try to go steal fissionable material from a terrorist group to build the bomb. So, you know, I suppose that's a value, value lesson somewhere. But anyway, I am really glad that you're all here with us today, and we have lots to talk about. Scott, as I said, was in chemistry and research chemist, and now is the editorial supervisor and other things for a magazine called lab manager, and we will talk about that as well. So Scott, welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad   Scott Hanton ** 02:38 you're here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this conversation with you today.   Michael Hingson ** 02:43 Well, I think it'll be a lot of fun, and looking forward to it. Now, you're in Michigan, right?   Scott Hanton ** 02:48 That's right. I live in South Lyon, Michigan,   Michael Hingson ** 02:51 ah, what's the weather back there today?   Scott Hanton ** 02:55 It's probably about 55 degrees and cloudy   Michael Hingson ** 02:58 here today. Well, it's still fairly sunny here, and we're actually, according to my iPhone, at 71 so it was up around 80 earlier in the week, but weather changes are still going to bring some cold for a while   Scott Hanton ** 03:15 in here in Michigan, I visited a customer earlier this week, and I drove by about 1000 orange barrels on the highway, which means it's spring, because there's only two seasons in Michigan, winter and construction.   Michael Hingson ** 03:29 There you go. Yeah, I know. I went to the University of California, Irvine, UCI. And if you ask somebody who doesn't know that UCI stands for University of California at Irvine. If you ask them what UCI stands for, they'll tell you, under construction indefinitely. Sounds right? Yeah. Well, it's been doing it ever since I was there a long time ago, and they they continue to grow. Now we're up to like 32,000 fresh, or excuse me, undergraduates at the university. And when I was there, there were 2700 students. So it's grown a little. That's   Scott Hanton ** 04:05 a lot of change. I'm used to big universities. I'm a graduate of both Michigan State and the University of Wisconsin. So these are big places.   Michael Hingson ** 04:13 Wow, yeah. So you're used to it. I really enjoyed it when it was a small campus. I'm glad I went there, and that was one of the reasons that caused me to go there, was because I knew I could probably get a little bit more visibility with instructors, and that would be helpful for me to get information when they didn't describe things well in class. And it generally worked out pretty well. So I can't complain a lot. Perfect. Glad it worked well for you, it did. Well, why don't you start, if you would, by telling us kind of about the early Scott growing up and all that sort of stuff.   Scott Hanton ** 04:49 I grew up in Michigan, in a town called Saginaw. I was blessed with a family that loved me and that, you know, I was raised in a very. Supportive environment. But young Scott asked, Why about everything you know, the way kids do? Yeah, right. And my mom would tell you that when I was a kid, why was my most favorite word? And most kids outgrow that. I never did, yeah, so Me neither. I still ask why all the time. It's still my most favorite word, and it caused me to want to go explore the sciences, because what I found, as I learned about science, was that I could get answers to why questions better in science than in other places.   Michael Hingson ** 05:34 Yeah, makes sense. So what kinds of questions did you ask about why? Well, I asked   Scott Hanton ** 05:43 all kinds of questions about why, like, why are we having that for dinner? Or, why is my bedtime so early? Those questions didn't have good answers, at least from my perspective, right? But I also asked questions like, why is grass green, and why is the sky blue? And studying physical chemistry at Michigan State answered those questions. And so   Michael Hingson ** 06:03 how early did you learn about Rayleigh scattering? But that's you know?   Scott Hanton ** 06:07 Well, I learned the basic concepts from a really important teacher in my life, Mr. Leeson was my seventh grade science teacher, and what I learned from him is that I could ask questions that weren't pertinent to what he was lecturing about, and that taught me a lot about the fact that science was a lot bigger than what we got in the curriculum or in the classroom. And so Mr. Leeson was a really important person in my development, and showed me that there was that science was a lot bigger than I thought it was as a student, but I didn't really learn about rally scattering until I got to college.   Michael Hingson ** 06:43 But at the same time, it sounds like he was willing to allow you to grow and and learn, which so many people aren't willing to do. They're too impatient.   Scott Hanton ** 06:58 He was a first year teacher the year I had him so he hadn't become cynical yet. So it was great to just be able to stay after class and ask him a question, or put my hand up in class and ask him a question. He also did a whole series of demonstrations that were fabulous and made the science come to life in a way that reading about it doesn't stir the imagination. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 07:23 I had teachers that did that too. I remember very well my freshman general science teacher in high school, Mr. Dills, and one day, and he loved to do kind of unique things, just to push the boundaries of students a little bit. He came in one day and he said, I got a pop quiz for everybody, which doesn't help me, because the pop quiz was in print, but he handed it out. And then he took me to the back of the room, and he said, You're not going to really be able to do this quiz. Let me tell you why. And he said, Oh, and one thing he said is, just be sure you follow all the instructions and you'll be fine on the test to everybody. He brought me back to the back of the room. He says, Well, here's the deal. He says, if people really read the instructions, what they'll do is they'll read the instruction that says, Read all the questions before you start answering, and if you get to the last question, it says answer only the first question, which is what is your name and and sure enough, of course, people didn't read the instructions. And he said, so I wouldn't be able to really deal with you with that one, with that whole thing, just because it wouldn't work well. And I said, I understand, but he loved to make students think, and I learned so much about the whole concept of realizing the need to observe and be observant in all that you do. And it was lessons like that from him that really helped a lot with that. For me,   Scott Hanton ** 08:48 I had a high school chemistry teacher named Mrs. Schultz, and the first experiment that we did in her class, in the first week of classes, was she wanted us to document all of the observations that we could make about a burning candle. And I was a hot shot student. Thought I, you know, owned the world, and I was going to ace this test. And, you know, I had maybe a dozen observations about a burning candle, and thought I had done a great job describing it, until she started sharing her list, and she probably had 80 observations about a burning candle, and it taught me the power of observation and the need to talk about the details of those observations and to be specific about what the observations were. And that experiment seems simple, light a candle and tell me what you see. Yeah, but that lesson has carried on with me now for more than approaching 50 years.   Michael Hingson ** 09:47 Let's see, as I recall, if you light a candle, what the center of the flame is actually pretty cool compared to the outside. It's more hollow. Now I wouldn't be able to easily tell that, because. Is my my process for observing doesn't really use eyesight to do that, so I I'm sure there are other technologies today that I could use to get more of that information. But   Scott Hanton ** 10:12 I'm also sure that that experiment could be re crafted so that it wasn't so visual, yeah, right, that there could be tactile experiments to tell me about observations or or audible experiments about observation, where you would excel in ways that I would suffer because I'm so visually dominant. The   Michael Hingson ** 10:33 issue, though, is that today, there's a lot more technology to do that than there was when I was in school and you were in school, but yeah, I think there is a lot available. There's a company called Independence Science, which is actually owned and run by Dr Cary sapollo. And Carrie is blind, and he is a blind chemist, and he wanted to help develop products for blind people to be able to deal with laboratory work. So he actually worked with a company that was, well, it's now Vernier education systems. They make a product called LabQuest with something like 80 different kinds of probes that you can attach to it, and the LabQuest will will provide visual interpretations of whatever the probes are showing carry, and independent science took that product and made it talk, so that There is now a Talking LabQuest. And the reality is that all those probes became usable because the LabQuest became accessible to be able to do that, and they put a lot of other things into it too. So it's more than just as a talking device, a lab device. It's got a periodic table in it. It's got a lot of other kinds of things that they just put in it as well. But it's really pretty cool because it now makes science a whole lot more accessible. I'm going to have to think about the different kinds of probes and how one could use that to look at a candle. I think that'd be kind of fun.   Scott Hanton ** 12:15 And it's just awesome to hear that there's innovation and space to make science more available to everybody. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 12:23 the real problem that we face is the one that we mostly always have faced, which is societal attitudes, as opposed to really being or not being able to do the experiments, is people think we can't, and that's the barrier that we always, usually have to overcome.   Scott Hanton ** 12:39 What I find in my time as a coach, mentor, supervisor, is that if somebody believes they can't do it, they can't do it. Yeah. And so it's often about overcoming their own mental limitations, the limitations that they've placed on themselves,   Michael Hingson ** 12:56 and that's right, or unfortunately, the limitations that other people place on us, and we, all too often and weigh too much, buy into those limitations. So it's it is something that we, especially in the sciences, should recognize that we shouldn't be doing so much of. I know that when I was at UC Irvine as a graduate student, I learned once that there was a letter in my file that a professor wrote. Fortunately, I never had him as a professor, but it and I was in my master's program at the time in physics, and this guy put a letter in my file saying that no blind person could ever absorb the material to get an advanced degree in physics at the University. Just put that in there, which is so unfortunate, because the real thing that is demonstrated there is a prejudice that no scientist should ever have.   Scott Hanton ** 13:51 I'm hopeful that as you graduated, there was a retraction letter in your file as well,   Michael Hingson ** 13:57 not that I ever heard, but yeah. Well, I'd already gotten my bachelor's degree, but yeah. But you know, things happen, but it is a it is a societal thing, and society all too often creates limitations, and sometimes we don't find them right away, but it is one of the big issues that, in general, we have to deal with. And on all too often, society does some pretty strange things because it doesn't understand what science is all about. I know when we were dealing with covid, when it all started, leaving the conspiracy theorists out of it. One of the things that I learned was that we have all these discussions about AI, if you will. But AI was one of the primary mechanisms that helped to develop the mRNA vaccines that are now still the primary things that we use to get vaccinated against covid, because they the artificial intelligence. I'm not sure how artificial. It is, but was able to craft what became the vaccine in a few days. And scientists acknowledged, if they had to do it totally on their own, it would take years to have done what AI did in a few days.   Scott Hanton ** 15:13 The AI technology is amazing and powerful, but it's not new. No, I met a person who shared her story about AI investigations and talked about what she was doing in this field 30 years ago. Yeah, in her master's work. And you know, I knew it wasn't brand new, but I didn't really realize how deep its roots went until I talked to her.   Michael Hingson ** 15:37 I worked as my first jobs out of college with Ray Kurzweil, who, of course, nowadays, is well known for the singularity and so on. But back then, he developed the first reading machine that blind people could use to read printed material. And one of the things that he put into that machine was the ability, as it scanned more material, to learn and better recognize the material. And so he was doing machine learning back in the 1970s   Scott Hanton ** 16:07 right? And all of this is, you know, as Newton said on the shoulders of giants, right, right? He said it a bit cynically, but it's still true that we all in science, we are learning from each other. We're learning from the broader community, and we're integrating that knowledge as we tackle the challenges that we are exploring.   Michael Hingson ** 16:27 So what got you to go into chemistry when you went into college?   Scott Hanton ** 16:33 That's a good question. So when I was 13 years old, I went on a youth a church group youth trip to another city, and so they split us up, and there were three of us from our group that stayed overnight in a host family. And at dinner that night, the father worked in a pharmaceutical company, and he talked about the work he was doing, and what he was doing was really synthetic chemistry around small molecule drug discovery. And for me, it was absolutely fascinating. I was thrilled at that information. I didn't know any scientists growing up, I had no adult input other than teachers about science, and I can remember going back home and my parents asking me how the trip went. And it's like, it's fantastic. I'm going to be a chemist. And they both looked at me like, what is that? How do you make money from it? How do you get that? My dad was a banker. My mom was a school teacher. They had no scientific background, but that that one conversation, such serendipity, right? One conversation when I was 13 years old, and I came home and said, I'm going to be a chemist, and I've never really deviated from that path. Did you have other siblings? Younger brother and another younger sister?   Michael Hingson ** 17:54 Okay? Did they go into science by any remote chance?   Scott Hanton ** 17:58 Not at all. So they were both seventh grade teachers for more than 30 years. So my brother taught math and English, and my sister teaches social studies.   Michael Hingson ** 18:10 Well, there you go. But that is also important. I actually wanted to teach physics, but jobs and other things and circumstances took me in different directions, but I think the reality is that I ended up going into sales. And what I realized, and it was partly because of a Dale Carnegie sales course I took, but I realized that good sales people are really teachers, because they're really teaching people about products or about things, and they're also sharp enough to recognize what their products might or might not do to help a customer. But that, again, not everyone does that, but so I figure I still was teaching, and today, being a public speaker, traveling the world, talking, of course, about teamwork and other things, it's still all about teaching.   Scott Hanton ** 18:57 I think I've always been a teacher, and if you talk to my coworkers along the way, I enjoy helping people. I enjoy sharing my knowledge. There's always been a teacher inside but only in this job as the editorial director at lab manager have I really been able to do it directly. So we've developed what we call the lab manager Academy, and I create e learning courses to help lab managers be more successful, and it's been a passion project for me, and it's been a load of fun.   Michael Hingson ** 19:30 And it doesn't get better than that. It's always great when it's a load of fun, yes,   Scott Hanton ** 19:35 well, so you left college and you got a bachelor's and a master's degree, right? No masters for me, that step you went right to the old PhD, yeah. So I went straight. I went graduated from Michigan State. So Michigan State was on terms back in those days. So graduated in June, got married in July, moved to Wisconsin in August. To graduate school at the end of August at the University of Wisconsin. Okay? And my second year as a graduate student, my professor asked me, Do you want to stop and complete a master's? And I said, Wait, tell me about this word stop. And he said, Well, you'd have to finish the Master's requirements and write a thesis, and that's going to take some time. And I said, Do I have to and he said, No, and I don't recommend it. Just keep going forward and finish your PhD. So that's   Michael Hingson ** 20:30 and what does your wife do?   Scott Hanton ** 20:33 So my wife also is in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin, and she decided that a master's degree was the right answer for her, because she didn't want to be a PhD scientist in XYZ narrow band of science. She wanted to be a master of chemistry. Okay, and so we took different paths through graduate school, but each of us took the path that worked best for us, and each pass has great value, so we're both happy with the choices that we made,   Michael Hingson ** 21:06 and complement each other and also give you, still lots of great things to talk about over dinner.   Scott Hanton ** 21:12 Absolutely. And she took that master's degree, went into the pharmaceutical industry and largely behaved as a librarian in her first part of her career, she wasn't called a librarian, but what she really did was a lot of information integrating, and then moved into the Library Group, and was a corporate librarian for a long time, and then a community librarian. So that path worked brilliantly for her. She also has a Masters of Library Science. So I have one PhD. She has two Master's degree. I have one bachelor's degree. She has two bachelor's degree.   Michael Hingson ** 21:50 Oh, so you can have interesting discussions about who really progressed further,   21:54 absolutely.   Michael Hingson ** 21:57 Well, that's, that's, that's cute, though. Well, I I got my bachelor's and master's. My wife, who I didn't meet until years later, wanted to be a librarian, but she ended up getting a a Master's at USC in so in sociology and and ended up getting a teaching credential and going into teaching, and taught for 10 years, and then she decided she wanted to do something different, and became a travel agent, which she had a lot of fun with. That is different, it is, but she enjoyed it, and along the way, then we got married. It was a great marriage. She was in a wheelchair her whole life. So she read, I pushed, worked out well, complimentary skills, absolutely, which is the way, way it ought to be, you know, and we had a lot of fun with it. Unfortunately, she passed now two and a half years ago, but as I tell people, we were married 40 years, and I'm sure she's monitoring me from somewhere, and if I misbehave, I'm going to hear about it, so I try to just behave. Sounds like good advice. Yeah, probably certainly the safe way to go. But we, we, we had lots of neat discussions, and our our activities and our expertise did, in a lot of ways, complement each other, so it was a lot of fun. And as I said, she went to USC. I enjoyed listening to USC football because I thought that that particular college team had the best announcers in the business, least when when I was studying in Southern California, and then when we got married, we learned the the day we got married, the wedding was supposed to start at four, and it didn't start till later because people weren't showing up for the wedding. And we learned that everybody was sitting out in their cars waiting for the end of the USC Notre Dame game. And we knew that God was on our side when we learned that SC beat the snot out of Notre Dame. So there you go. Yeah. Yeah. Oh gosh, the rivalries we face. So what did you do after college?   Scott Hanton ** 24:09 So did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin. And one of the nice things, a fringe benefit of going to a big, important program to do your PhD, is that recruiters come to you. And so I was able to do 40 different, four, zero, 40 different interviews on campus without leaving Madison. And one of those interviews was with a company called Air Products. And that worked out, and they hired me. And so we moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania to go to work. I went to work at Air Products and and Helen found a role in the pharmaceutical industry at Merck. And so we did that for a long time. I was initially a research expert, a PhD expert doing lasers and materials and analytical stuff. And over the years. I progressed up the ladder from researcher to supervisor to what did we call it, group head to Section Manager, to operations manager, and ultimately to General Manager.   Michael Hingson ** 25:13 Well, at least being in Allentown, you were close to a Cracker Barrel restaurant. Yes, that is true. That was the closest to one to where we lived in New Jersey, so we visited it several times. That's how I know   Scott Hanton ** 25:26 about it. Maybe we were there at the same time. Michael, maybe this isn't our first. It's   Michael Hingson ** 25:31 very possible. But we enjoyed Cracker Barrel and enjoyed touring around Pennsylvania. So I should have asked, What prompted you to go to the University of Wisconsin to do your your graduate work, as opposed to staying in Michigan. So   Scott Hanton ** 25:47 my advisor at Michigan State, our advisor at Michigan State, told us, here's the top five schools, graduate programs in chemistry, apply to them all. Go to the one you get into. And so I got into three. Helen got into two. The one that was the same was Wisconsin. So that's where we went, yeah?   Michael Hingson ** 26:09 Well, then no better logic and argument than that.   Scott Hanton ** 26:14 It was a great Madison. Wisconsin is a beautiful city. It one of the things I really liked about the chemistry program there then, and it's still true now, is how well the faculty get along together so many collaborative projects and just friendliness throughout the hallways. And yes, they are all competing at some level for grant support, but they get along so well, and that makes it for a very strong community,   Michael Hingson ** 26:41 and it probably also means that oftentimes someone who's applying for something can enlist support from other people who are willing to help.   Scott Hanton ** 26:50 And as a graduate student, it meant that I had more than one professor that I could go to my advisor. There was a whole group of advisors who ran joint group meetings and would give us advice about our work or our writing or our approach, or just because we needed a pep talk, because completing a PhD is hard. Yeah, right, so that community was really important to me, and it's something I took away that when I started my industrial career, I had seen the value of community, and I wanted to build stronger communities wherever I went, yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 27:26 So what does a company, does air products do   Scott Hanton ** 27:31 that's sort of in the name, right? They're an industrial gas company. Got some of their big, biggest products are taking air and separating it into its components of nitrogen, oxygen, oxygen, argon, whatever, right? But at that time, they also had a chemicals business and a semiconductor business, or electronics business. So there was a lot of chemistry going on, although a lot of my work colleagues were chemical engineers who were working on the gasses side of the business, we had significant number of chemistry, sorts material science, sorts of people who are working on the chemicals side. Now, over time, Air Products divested those businesses, and now it's much more of a true industrial gas company. But I had the opportunity to work in an integrated science company that did all sorts of things.   Michael Hingson ** 28:23 Yeah, and as as we know, certainly a little helium never hurt anyone.   Scott Hanton ** 28:30 No little helium, you know, raises people's spirits, it   Michael Hingson ** 28:34 does and their voices, it does. I I've visited helium tanks many times at UC Irvine when they had liquid helium, which was certainly a challenge because of how cold it had to be. But occasionally we would open a valve and little cold but useful helium gas would escape   Scott Hanton ** 28:56 very cold. Please be safe. Cryogens are are dangerous materials, and we gotta make sure we handle them with due respect.   Michael Hingson ** 29:05 Yeah, well, we, we all did and and didn't take too many chances. So it worked out pretty well. So you stayed in Allentown and you stayed with Air Products for how long   Scott Hanton ** 29:19 I was in Air Products for 20 years. So the analytical group that I was part of, we were about 92 or 93 people when I joined the company, when I just left after earning my PhD. After 20 years, that group was down to about 35 just progressive series of decisions that made the department smaller, and as the Department got smaller and smaller, we were worried about our abilities to sustain our work. And so a dear friend and a key colleague, Paula McDaniel, and I, worked to try to see what other kind of opportunities there were. Yeah. And so we reached out to a contract research organization called Intertech to see if they would be interested in maybe acquiring our analytical department. And when we called them, and by the way, we called them before we talked to our boss about it, she forgave us later, but when we called the guy on the end of the phone said, Wait a minute, let me get your file. And it's like, what you have a file on Air Products, analytical, really? Why? Well, it turned out that they had a file, and that they had an active Merger and Acquisition Group, and they wanted an integrated analytical department on the east coast of the US. And so we engaged in negotiation, and ultimately this analytical department was sold by Air Products to Intertech. So on Friday, we're a little cog in a giant engine of an global, international company, and our funding comes from Vice Presidents. And on Monday, we're a standalone business of 35 people, we need to write quotes in order to make money. So it was an enormous challenge to transition from a service organization to a business. But oh my goodness, did we learn a lot,   Michael Hingson ** 31:13 certainly a major paradigm shift,   Scott Hanton ** 31:18 and I was lucky that I lost the coin flip, and Paula won, and she said, I want to be business development director. And I said, thank God. So she went off to be the key salesperson, and Paula was utterly brilliant as a technical salesperson, and I became the operations manager, which allowed me to keep my hands dirty with the science and to work with the scientists and to build a system and a community that allowed us to be successful in a CRO world.   Michael Hingson ** 31:49 So at that time, when you became part, part of them, the new company, were you or the standalone business? Were you working in lab? Still yourself?   Scott Hanton ** 32:01 Yes. So I had the title Operations Manager and all of the scientific staff reported into me, but I was still the technical expert in some mass spectrometry techniques, particularly MALDI and also tough Sims, and so I still had hands on lab responsibility that I needed to deliver. And over time, I was able to train some people to take some of those responsibilities off. But when the weight of the world was particularly heavy, the place for me to go was in the lab and do some experiments.   Michael Hingson ** 32:34 Yeah, still so important to be able to keep your hand in into to know and understand. I know I had that same sort of need being the manager of an office and oftentimes working with other people who were the engineers, coming from a little bit of a technical background as well. I worked to always make sure I knew all I could about the products that I was dealing with and selling, and my sales people who worked for me constantly asked, How come, you know, all this stuff, and we don't then, my response always was, did you read the product bulletin that came out last week? Or have you kept up on the product bulletins? Because it's all right there, whether I actually physically repaired products or not, I knew how to do it. And so many times when I was involved in working with some of our engineers, I remember a few times our field support people, and we were working out of New Jersey, and then in New York at the time, in the World Trade Center, we had some customers up at Lockheed Martin, up in Syria, Rochester, I think it was. And the guys would go up, and then they'd call me on the phone, and we'd talk about it, and between us, we came up with some bright ideas. And I remember one day, all of a sudden, I get this phone call, and these guys are just bouncing off the walls, because whatever it was that was going on between them and me, we figured it out, and they put it in play and made it work, and they were all just as happy as clams at high tide, which is the way it ought to   Scott Hanton ** 34:13 be. It's great to work in a team that finds success. The longer I was in technical management, the more I enjoyed the success of the team. It didn't need to be my success anymore that helping the scientists be successful in their roles was truly satisfying,   Michael Hingson ** 34:33 and that helped you, by definition, be more successful in your role.   Scott Hanton ** 34:36 And no question, it could be seen as a selfish byproduct, but the fact is that it still felt really good.   Michael Hingson ** 34:43 Yeah, I hear you, because I know for me, I never thought about it as I've got to be successful. It's we've got problems to solve. Let's do it together. And I always told people that we're a team. And I have told every salesperson. I ever hired. I'm not here to boss you around. You've convinced me that you should be able to sell our products, and sometimes I found that they couldn't. But I said my job is to work with you to figure out how I can enhance what you do, and what skills do I bring to add value to you, because we've got to work together, and the people who understood that and who got it were always the most successful people that I ever had in my teams.   Scott Hanton ** 35:30 One of the things I strive to do as a leader of any organization is to understand the key strengths of the people on the team and to try to craft their roles in such a way that they spend the majority of their time executing their strengths. Yeah. I've also discovered that when I truly investigate poor performance, there's often a correlation between poor performance and people working in their weaknesses. Yeah, and if we can shift those jobs, change those roles, make change happen so that people can work more often in their strengths, then good things happen.   Michael Hingson ** 36:07 And if you can bring some of your skills into the mix and augment what they do, so much the better.   Scott Hanton ** 36:16 Yeah, because I'm just another member of the team, my role is different, but I need to also apply my strengths to the problems and be wary of my weaknesses, because as the leader of the organization, my words carried undue weight. Yeah, and if, if I was speaking or acting in a space where I was weak, people would still do what I said, because I had the most authority, and that was just a lose, lose proposition   Michael Hingson ** 36:43 by any standard. And and when you, when you operated to everyone's strengths, it always was a win. Yep, which is so cool. So you went to Intertech, and how long were you there?   Scott Hanton ** 36:57 I was at Intertech for 10 years, and work I can if you know, for any listeners out there who work in the CRO world, it is a tough business. It is a grind working in that business, yeah? So it was a lot of long hours and testy customers and shortages of materials and equipment that was a hard a hard a hard road to plow,   Michael Hingson ** 37:22 yeah, yeah, it gets to be frustrating. Sometimes it's what you got to do, but it still gets to be frustrating gets to be a challenge. The best part   Scott Hanton ** 37:32 for me was I had a great team. We had senior and junior scientists. They were good people. They worked hard. They fundamentally, they cared about the outcomes. And so it was a great group of people to work with. But the contract lab business is a tough business. Yeah, so when covid came, you know, the pandemic settles in, all the restrictions are coming upon us. I was tasked as the General Manager of the business with setting up all the protocols, you know, how are we going to meet the number of people this basing the masks, you know, how could we work with and we were essential as a lab, so we had to keep doing what we were doing. And it took me about a week to figure non stop work to figure out what our protocols were going to be, and the moment I turned them into my boss, then I got laid off. So what you want to do in a time of crisis is you want to let go of the the general manager, the safety manager, the quality manager and the Chief Scientist, because those are four people that you don't need during times of stress or challenge or crisis. On the plus side for me, getting laid off was a bad hour. It hurt my pride, but after an hour, I realized that all the things that I'd been stressing about for years trying to run this business were no longer my problem. Yeah, and I found that it was a tremendous weight lifted off my shoulders to not feel responsible for every problem and challenge that that business had.   Michael Hingson ** 39:14 And that's always a good blessing when you when you figure that out and don't worry about the the issues anymore. That's a good thing. It was certainly   Scott Hanton ** 39:25 good for me. Yeah, so I'm not going to recommend that people go get laid off. No world to get fired. But one problem that I had is because Paula and I worked to create that business, I sort of behaved like an owner, but was treated like an employee. And my recommendation to people is, remember, you're an employee, find some personal boundaries that protect you from the stress of the business, because you're not going to be rewarded or treated like an owner.   Michael Hingson ** 39:58 Yeah, because you're not because. Or not.   Scott Hanton ** 40:01 So I got laid off. It was in the height of the pandemic. So, you know, I'm too busy of a human being to sort of sit in a rocking chair and watch the birds fly by. That's not my style or my speed. So I started a consulting business, and that was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing the consulting work, but I learned something really important about myself, and that's that while I can sell and I can be an effective salesperson, I don't like selling, and as a company of one, when I didn't sell, I didn't make any money, yeah, and so I needed to figure out something else to do, because I really hated selling, and I wasn't doing it. I was procrastinating, and that made the business be unpredictable and very choppy   Michael Hingson ** 40:51 in that company of one, that guy who was working for you wasn't really doing all that you wanted.   Scott Hanton ** 40:56 Exactly the Yeah, you know me as the founder, was giving me as the salesman, a poor performance review was not meeting objectives. So I had a long time volunteer relationship with lab manager magazine. I had been writing articles for them and speaking for them in webinars and in conferences for a long time, probably more than 10 years, I would say, and they asked me as a consultant to produce a a to a proposal to create the lab manager Academy. So the the founder and owner of the the company, the lab X Media Group, you really saw the value of an academy, and they needed it done. They needed it done. They couldn't figure it out themselves. So I wrote the proposal. I had a good idea of how to do it, but I was new to consulting, and I struggled with, how do I get paid for this? And I had four ideas, but I didn't like them, so I slept on it, and in the morning I had a fifth, which said, hire me full time. I sent in the proposal. An hour later, I had a phone call. A week later, I had a job, so that worked out fantastic. And I've really enjoyed my time at lab manager magazine. Great people, fun work. It's really interesting to me to be valued for what I know rather than for what I can do. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 42:23 the two relate. But still, it does need to be more about what you know, what you really bring, as opposed to what you can do, because what you can do in general probably is an offshoot of what you know.   Scott Hanton ** 42:38 So this gives me the opportunity to help lots of people. So on the outside of the company, I'm writing articles, creating courses, giving talks to help lab managers. Because I was a lab manager for a long time, yeah, over 20 years, and I know what those challenges are. I know how hard that job is, and I know how many decisions lab managers need to make, and it's wonderful to be able to share my experience and help them, and I am motivated to help them. So was it hard? Oh, go ahead, on the inside, I'm literally an internal subject matter expert, and so I can coach and teach and help my colleagues with what's the science? What do lab managers really think? How do we pitch this so that it resonates with lab managers, and I think that helps make all of our products better and more successful.   Michael Hingson ** 43:31 So was it hard? Well, I guess best way to put it is that, was it really hard to switch from being a scientist to being a lab manager and then going into being a subject matter expert and really out of the laboratory. So   Scott Hanton ** 43:48 people ask me all the time, Scott, don't you miss being in the lab and doing experiments? And my answer is, I miss being in the lab. And I do miss being in the lab. You know, on very stressful days at Intertech, I'd go in the lab and I'd do an experiment, yeah, because it was fun, and I had more control over the how the experiment was run and what I would learn from it than I did running a business. But the flip side of that is, I do experiments all the time. What I learned as the general manager of a business was the scientific method works. Let's data hypothesis. Let's figure out how to test it. Let's gather data, and let's see if the hypothesis stands or falls. And we ran a business that way, I think, pretty successfully. And even now, in in media and publishing, we still run experiments all the time. And it's kind of funny that most of my editorial colleagues that I work with, they think my favorite word is experiment. My favorite word is still why, but we talk all the time now about doing experiments, and that was a new thing for them, but now we can do continual improvement more in a more dedicated way, and we do it a lot faster. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 45:00 yeah. So what's the hardest thing you think about being a lab manager?   Scott Hanton ** 45:06 I think the hardest thing about let me answer that with two. I'm not going to be able to narrow it down to one, so I'll give you two. The first one is you transform, maybe one day to the next, from really being in control of your science and working with whether it's animals or rocks or electrons or chemicals, whatever you're working with, having a great degree of knowledge and a lot of control, and the next day, you're hurting cats. And so it's about that transition from having control over your destiny to influencing people to get the work done, and working with people instead of working with experiments, that's really hard. The second is, as a lab manager, there's endless decisions, and so combating decision fatigue is a big deal, and everybody in the lab depends upon you for the decisions you make. And it's not that every decision has to be perfect, you know, that's just a different failure mode if you try to make perfect decisions, but every decision needs to be made promptly. And as a scientist, I could always make more data in order to make a better decision, but as a lab manager, I would often only have maybe 40 or 50% of the data I wanted, and a decision had to be made. And getting comfortable making decisions in the face of uncertainty is really hard.   Michael Hingson ** 46:29 So certainly, being a lab manager or Well, dealing with managers in the way we're talking about it here, has to be very stressful. How do you how do you cope with the stress?   Scott Hanton ** 46:42 So I think ways to cope with the stress successfully is, first of all, you've got to take care of yourself. You know, we've all flown on airplanes, and what is the safety person in the aisle or on the video? Do oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling, and what do we do with them? We put them on before we help somebody else, right? We all know that. But in the workplace, especially as a manager, it's hard to remember that as we care for our team and try and take care of our team, there might not be enough time or energy or capacity left to take care of ourselves, but if we don't fill that gas tank every day doing something, then we can't help our team. And so one way to deal with the stress is to make sure that you take care of yourself. So   Michael Hingson ** 47:28 what do you do? How do you deal with that? So   Scott Hanton ** 47:31 for me, ways that I can reinvigorate is one. I like being outside and get my hands dirty. So I'm not really a gardener, but I call myself a yard dinner. So I grow grass and I grow flowers, and I trim trees, and I want to go outside, and I want to see immediate return on my effort, and I want it to be better than when I started. And it's good if I have to clean from under my fingernails when I'm doing it. Another thing I like to do is I play all kinds of games I'm happy to play, sorry, with little kids, or I'll play complicated strategy games with people who want to sit at a table for three or four hours at a time. Yeah? And that allows my brain to spin and to work but on something completely different. Yeah. And another thing that's been important for me, especially when I was a lab manager is to be involved in youth coaching, so I coached kids soccer and basketball and baseball teams, and it's just beautiful to be out there on a field with a ball, with kids. And you know, the worries of the world just aren't there. The kids don't know anything about them. And it's fun to work with the ones who are really good, but it's equally fun to work with the ones who have never seen the ball before, and to help them do even the most basic things. And that kind of giving back and paying it forward, that sort of stuff fills my tank.   Michael Hingson ** 48:51 Yeah, I empathize a lot with with that. For me, I like to read. I've never been much of a gardener, but I also collect, as I mentioned before, old radio shows, and I do that because I'm fascinated by the history and all the things I learned from what people did in the 2030s, 40s and 50s, being on radio, much Less getting the opportunity to learn about the technical aspects of how they did it, because today it's so different in terms of how one edits, how one processes and deals with sounds and so on, but it's but it's fun to do something just totally different than way maybe what your normal Job would be, and and I do love to interact with with people. I love to play games, too. I don't get to do nearly as much of it as I'd like, but playing games is, is a lot of fun,   Scott Hanton ** 49:52 and I agree, and it it's fun, it's diverting, it's it helps me get into a flow so that I'm focused on. Me on one thing, and I have no idea how much time has gone by, and I don't really care. You know, people who play games with me might question this. I don't really care if I win or lose. Certainly I want to win, but it's more important to me that I play well, and if somebody plays better, good for   Michael Hingson ** 50:14 them, great. You'll learn from it. Exactly. Do you play   Scott Hanton ** 50:18 chess? I have played chess. I've played a lot of chess. What I've learned with chess is that I'm not an excellent I'm a good player, but not an excellent player. And when I run into excellent players, they will beat me without even breaking a sweat.   Michael Hingson ** 50:34 And again, in theory, you learn something from that.   Scott Hanton ** 50:37 What I found is that I don't really want to work that hard and yeah. And so by adding an element of chance or probability to the game, the people who focus on chess, where there are known answers and known situations, they get thrown off by the uncertainty of the of the flip the card or roll the dice. And my brain loves that uncertainty, so I tend to thrive. Maybe it's from my time in the lab with elements of uncertainty, where the chess players wilt under elements of uncertainty, and it's again, it's back to our strengths, right? That's something that I'm good at, so I'm gonna go do it. I've   Michael Hingson ** 51:20 always loved Trivial Pursuit. That's always been a fun game that I enjoy playing. I   Scott Hanton ** 51:25 do love Trivial Pursuit. I watch Jeopardy regularly. A funny story, when we moved into our new house in Pennsylvania, it was a great neighborhood. Loved the neighbors there. When we first moved in, they invited my wife and I to a game night. Excellent. We love games. We're going to play Trivial Pursuit. Awesome like Trivial Pursuit. We're going to play as couples. Bad idea, right? Let's play boys against the girls, or, let's say, random draws. No, we're playing as couples. Okay, so we played as couples. Helen and I won every game by a large margin. We were never invited back for game night. Yeah, invited back for lots of other things, but not game night.   Michael Hingson ** 52:06 One of the things that, and I've talked about it with people on this podcast before, is that all too often, when somebody reads a question from a trivial pursuit card, an answer pops in your head, then you went, Oh, that was too easy. That can't be the right answer. So you think about it, and you answer with something else, but invariably, that first answer was always the correct answer.   Scott Hanton ** 52:32 Yes, I'm I have learned to trust my intuition. Yeah. I learned, as a research scientist, that especially in talking to some of my peers, who are very dogmatic, very step by step scientists. And they lay out the 20 steps to that they felt would be successful. And they would do one at a time, one through 20. And that made them happy for me, I do one and two, and then I'd predict where that data led me, and I do experiment number seven, and if it worked, I'm off to eight. And so I they would do what, one step at a time, one to 20, and I'd sort of do 127, 1420, yeah. And that I learned that that intuition was powerful and valuable, and I've learned to trust it. And in my lab career, it served me really well. But also as a manager, it has served me well to trust my intuition, and at least to listen to it. And if I need to analyze it, I can do that, but I'm going to listen to it,   Michael Hingson ** 53:31 and that's the important thing, because invariably, it's going to give you useful information, and it may be telling you not what to do, but still trusting it and listening to it is so important, I've found that a lot over the years,   Scott Hanton ** 53:47 Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink, where he talks about the power of the subconscious, and his claim is that the subconscious is 100,000 times smarter than our conscious brain, and I think when we are trusting our intuition, we're tapping into that super computer that's in our skulls. If you want to learn more, read blank. It's a great story.   Michael Hingson ** 54:10 I hear you. I agree. How can people learn to be better leaders and managers?   Scott Hanton ** 54:18 So I think it's there's really three normal ways that people do this. One is the power of experiment, right? And I did plenty of that, and I made tons of errors. It's painful. It's irritating, trial and error, but I used to tell people at Intertech that I was the general manager because I'd made the most mistakes, which gave me the most opportunity to learn. It was also partly because a lot of my peers wanted nothing to do with the job. You know, they wanted to be scientists. Another way is we, we get coached and mentored by people around us, and that is awesome if you have good supervisors, and it's tragic if you have bad supervisors, because you don't know any better and you take for granted. That the way it's been done is the way it needs to be done, and that prevents us from being generative leaders and questioning the status quo. So there's problems there, too. And I had both good and bad supervisors during my career. I had some awful, toxic human beings who were my supervisors, who did damage to me, and then I had some brilliant, caring, empathetic people who raised me up and helped me become the leader that I am today. So it's a bit of a crap shoot. The third way is go out and learn it from somebody who's done it right, and that's why we generated the lab manager Academy to try to codify all the mistakes I made and what are the learnings from them? And when I'm talking with learners who are in the program, it's we have a huge positive result feedback on our courses. And what I talk to people about who take our courses is I'm glad you appreciate what we've put together here. That makes me feel good. I'm glad it's helping you. But when these are my mistakes and the answers to my mistakes, when you make mistakes, you need to in the future, go make some courses and teach people what the lessons were from your mistakes and pay it forward. Yeah. So I recommend getting some training.   Michael Hingson ** 56:17 What's the difference between management and leadership?   Scott Hanton ** 56:21 I particularly love a quote from Peter Drucker. So Peter Drucker was a professor in California. You may have heard of him before.   Michael Hingson ** 56:29 I have. I never had the opportunity to meet him, but I read.   Scott Hanton ** 56:34 I didn't either material. I've read his books, and I think he is an insightful human being, yes. So the quote goes like this, management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right things. So as a technical manager, there's a bunch of things we have to get right. We have to get safety right. We have to get quality right. There's an accuracy and precision that we need to get right for our outcomes and our results. Those are management tasks, but leadership is about doing the right things. And the interesting thing about that definition is it doesn't require a title or a role or any level of authority. So anyone can be a leader if you're consistently doing the right things, you are exhibiting leadership, and that could be from the person sweeping the floors or the person approving the budget, or anyone in between.   Michael Hingson ** 57:33 Yeah, I've heard that quote from him before, and absolutely agree with it. It makes a whole lot of sense.   Scott Hanton ** 57:41 Other definitions that I've seen trying to distinguish management and leadership tend to use the words manage and lead, and I don't like definitions that include the words that they're trying to define. They become circular at some level. This one, I think, is clear about it, what its intention is, and for me, it has worked through my career, and so the separation is valuable. I have authority. I'm the manager. I have accountability to get some stuff right, but anyone can lead, and everyone can lead, and the organization works so much better when it's full of leaders   Michael Hingson ** 58:21 and leaders who are willing to recognize when they bring something to the table, or if someone else can add value in ways that they can't, to be willing to let the other individual take the leadership position for a while.   Scott Hanton ** 58:40 Absolutely, and you know that really comes down to building an environment and a culture that's supportive. And so Amy Edmondson has written extensively on the importance of psychological safety, and that psychological safety hinges on what you just said, right? If the guy who sweeps the floor has an observation about the organization. Do they feel safe to go tell the person in charge that this observation, and if they feel safe, and if that leader is sufficiently vulnerable and humble to listen with curiosity about that observation, then everybody benefits, yeah, and the more safe everyone feels. We think about emotion. Emotional safety is they anyone can bring their best self to work, and psychological safety is they can contribute their ideas and observations with no threat of retaliation, then we have an environment where we're going to get the best out of everybody, yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 59:46 which is the way it it really ought to be. And all too often we don't necessarily see it, but that is the way it ought   Scott Hanton ** 59:53 to be. Too many people are worried about credit, or, I don't know, worried about things that I don't see. Yeah, and they waste human potential, right? They they don't open their doors to hire anybody. They they judge people based on what they look like instead of who they are, or they box people in into roles, and don't let them flourish and Excel. And whenever you're doing those kinds of things, you're wasting human potential. And businesses, science and business are too hard to waste human potential. We need to take advantage of everything that people are willing to give. Yeah,   Michael Hingson ** 1:00:33 we've been doing this for quite a while already today. So I'm going to ask as a kind of a last question, what, what advice do you want to leave for people to think about going forward in their lives and in their careers?   Scott Hanton ** 1:00:48 So I was participating in a LinkedIn chat today where a professor was asking the question, what sort of advice would you wish you got when you were 21 Okay, so it was an interesting thread, and there was one contributor to the thread who said something I thought was particularly valuable. And she said, attitude matters. Attitude matters. We can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we deal with it and how we respond, right? And so I think if we can hold our attitude as our accountability, and we can direct our strengths and our talents to applying them against the challenges that the business or the science or the lab or the community faces, and we can go in with some positive attitude and positive desire for for change and improvement, and we can be vulnerable and humble enough to accept other people's ideas and to interact through discussion and healthy debate. Then everything's better. I also like Kelleher his quote he was the co founder of Southwest Airlines, and he said, when you're hiring, hire for attitude, train for skill. Attitude is so important. So I think, understand your attitude. Bring the attitude you want, the attitude you value, the attitude that's that's parallel to your core values. And then communicate to others about their attitude and how it's working or not working for them.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:31 And hopefully, if they have a positive or good enough attitude, they will take that into consideration and grow because of it absolutely   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:41 gives everybody the chance to be the best they can be.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:47 Well, Scott, this has been wonderful. If people want to reach out to you, how can they do that?   Scott Hanton ** 1:02:51 So LinkedIn is great. I've provided Michael my LinkedIn connection. So I would love to have people connect to me on LinkedIn or email. S Hanson at lab manager.com love to have interactions with the folks out there.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:08 Well, I want to thank you for spending so much time. We'll have to do more of this.   Scott Hanton ** 1:03:13 Michael, I really enjoyed it. This was a fun conversation. It was stimulating. You asked good questio

Jos Van Ewijk bor nord for Rødekro med sin familie. Han er uddannet maskinfører af selveste HK, som vi havde besøg af for nogle uger siden. I 1993 flyttede han, som 12-årig, med sine forældre til Danmark. Forældrene købte en kvæggård ved Viborg, men Jos var altid mest vild med maskinerne og markarbejdet. I 2004 flyttede han sydpå til Sønderjylland, hvor han fik mulighed for at blive en del af Lerskov Maskinstation. Efter 4 år som en del af ejerkredsen på maskinstationen, var han kørt død, så han ville prøve noget nyt. Han oprettede et momsnummer og begyndte at købe- og videresælge maskiner. I 2010 flyttede han ind på en nedlagt ejendom og startede i den forbindelse J-Maskiner, som han driver i dag. Men i 2012 løb han tør for maskiner, som han tidligere købte i Holland, så han begyndte at køre til Polen og købe forskellige skovle, som han solgte her hjemme. I dag forhandler han nye maskiner fra InterTech og Agro-Tom. Jørgen Boiskov, der har arbejdet med maskiner hele livet, og Peter Zilmer, som de fleste måske kender som "Bøvle Kaj", sidder klar bag rattet. Det skal handle om alt det der sker på en maskinstation - selvom deres syn på hverdagens små udfordringer ikke altid er helt ens. Fra diskussionen om traktorens farve - til hvordan man får parforholdet til at hænge sammen, når man bruger MANGE timer i maskinen!
 Programmet præsenteres i samarbejde med: Rostgård Maskinstation & Rytter Maskiner.

• Discussion of Jeff's Bagel Run and its rotating bagel flavors • Mention of carrot cake bagel with cannoli cream cheese • Dan tried hot sauce Cheez-It bagel, Maisie's favorite • Fruity Cereal and Sprinkles bagels featured for the weekend • Encouragement to use the Jeff's Bagel Run app and hashtag TDBagel • Listeners sharing their bagel experiences post-runs • Shoutout to Jeff and the value of listener feedback • Dan and Maisie love the pimento cream cheese • Show begins from the Just Call Moe Studio • Reference to a viral baby whale video clip • Dan and Andrea celebrate 15th wedding anniversary at Otto's High Dive • Otto's praised for oysters and Latin food vibe • Dan jokes about telling Andrea to “hop up on this baby whale” • Dan introduces the “going crazy” 2025-26 plan: ponytail, gold/platinum tooth, face tattoo • Sabrina from News Junkie consulted about gold tooth • Heinz Brazil makes gold teeth bottle openers for condiment packets • Joke about Dan being on the cutting edge of weird trends • Chatroom comment compares Dan to the fat kid from Hook • Brendan playfully defended as the coolest guy in the room • Mention of BDM Appreciation Party happening tomorrow • Shoutout to Danger Brain for branding and BDM shirt design • Appreciation of sponsors: Just Call Moe, Fairvilla, Pyro Spot, White Claw, Todd Burney, Marshall Bone Construction • Listener Justin flew in for the BDM event • Listener Suzette flying in, excitement over community gathering • Dan reflects on listeners traveling in for the event as deeply meaningful • April Jennifer Troy to perform a whip and magic show at the party • Jokes and confusion around “erotic whip show” phrasing • April described as magician, whipstress, scientist, and beautiful Asian woman • Dan says April and her wife seem very happy and successful • Mention of a “skidoo” and Dan being high • April asked if she could wear a “bikino” to the event • Term 'bikino' invented by Tom and Dan — possibly a male bikini • Recap of Moe's Celebrity Bowling Tournament • Brendan wore a Moe jumpsuit • Tom and Dan's outfits debated — Barf vs. Splinter • Dan jokes about shaving pubes with a BIC razor and baby oil • BDM show shoutout with Sam and Ross • Brendan teased as Oompa Loompa • Dan says Brendan trained fans to roast him like a cuck • Praise for Jason Guy's kindness and memory for details • John Busteker roasted for snark and fake parking promise • Dan made a 'Pop That Bussy' shirt of Busteker with crazy teeth • Brendan skipped drag for a conservative event • Brendan avoids fake breasts outdoors for safety • Brendan says recent sex was disappointing due to soreness and pubes • Dan emailed his surgeon sarcastically: "dear butcher" • Dan wants Dansby's paw prints tattooed under his eye • Discussion of Dan's transformation and ponytail plan • Dan frustrated by post-surgery recovery • Dan jokes about having sex while sore, calls himself "The Littlest Mummy" • Discussion of Canadian Easter vs. Dan's church-filled childhood Easter • Brendan recalls water guns and egg hunts inside • Dan got an AR-style Intertech squirt gun with banana clip • Realistic toy guns discussed — police stories and orange tip laws • Men slapping balls in parks as part of new "rewilding" trend • Will Blunderfield's semen retention yoga and pee drinking • Dan jokes about "gooning" and a man named Nautica Malone dying • Chatroom jokes about "goonicide" and "gunneral" • Debate about flashing in bikini café drive-thru and intent • Dog the Bounty Hunter blamed orange juice for public masturbation • Locker room story: Antonio drying off while playing big band music • Dan compares himself to Darkman during awkward anniversary sex • Bungalow on the Bus recorded live with Tom and Dan • Andrea lost 17 lbs with Dr. Powers' InBody program • Dan lost 15 lbs doing macros • Dr. Powers confirmed for BDM Appreciation Event • Brendan called "erroneous" by City Hall • Campo Fiore café blocked by scaffolding — faux marble failing ### **Social Media:**  [Website](https://tomanddan.com/) | [Twitter](https://twitter.com/tomanddanlive) | [Facebook](https://facebook.com/amediocretime) | [Instagram](https://instagram.com/tomanddanlive)   **Where to Find the Show:**  [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-mediocre-time/id334142682) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2FtZWRpb2NyZXRpbWUvcG9kY2FzdC54bWw) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Mediocre-Time-p364156/)   **The Tom & Dan Radio Show on Real Radio 104.1:**  [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-corporate-time/id975258990) | [Google Podcasts](https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkLnBvZGJlYW4uY29tL2Fjb3Jwb3JhdGV0aW1lL3BvZGNhc3QueG1s) | [TuneIn](https://tunein.com/podcasts/Comedy/A-Corporate-Time-p1038501/)   **Exclusive Content:** [Join BDM](https://tomanddan.com/registration) **Merch:** [Shop Tom & Dan](https://tomanddan.myshopify.com/)

In this episode, we're giving you the best Amazon and Walmart strategy clips of 2024 so that you can start off 2025 with a leg up on your competition. ► Instagram: instagram.com/serioussellerspodcast ► Free Amazon Seller Chrome Extension: https://h10.me/extension ► Sign Up For Helium 10: https://h10.me/signup  (Use SSP10 To Save 10% For Life) ► Learn How To Sell on Amazon: https://h10.me/ft ► Watch The Podcasts On YouTube: youtube.com/@Helium10/videos Welcome to this special annual recap episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast, where we bring you the most impactful strategies from the past year to give your e-commerce business a competitive edge in 2025. Join us as we explore the essentials of selecting verified manufacturers and the importance of third-party verification in ensuring accurate information. We'll discuss the advantages of trade assurance for payment protection and the significance of management certifications like BSCI and ISO, which indicate high-quality factory standards and social compliance. Additionally, we touch on regional manufacturing specializations, exemplified by the production of egg dispensers, and the importance of measuring the halo impact of ad strategies on total sales and rankings using metrics like TACoS and cost per customer acquisition. Listen in as we discuss strategies for international Amazon success, highlighting a thriving American brand's expansion into Amazon Japan. We'll explore the strategic benefits of entering the Japanese market, such as lower PPC costs and favorable tax conditions, which contribute to higher profit margins. Patience, quality products, and strong supplier relationships are emphasized as key differentiators from competitors. We also explore optimizing Amazon PPC campaigns with lifecycle-based rules and the power of using index images with numbered benefits to effectively communicate value in product listings. Discover effective strategies for online marketplaces as we recount past challenges and successes in sourcing and selling products in the U.S. market. Learn about creative approaches to finding less visible suppliers and the importance of clear communication and relationship-building. We also highlight the effectiveness of Target's marketplace and the strategic advantages of being indexed on Google to enhance Amazon rankings. Finally, we'll cover the critical importance of using correct HTS codes to avoid costly import tariff mistakes, sharing a personal experience that led to significant cost savings. Tune in and equip yourself with these valuable insights to kick off 2025 strong. In episode 628 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, we discuss: 00:00 - SSP Top 20 Strategies of 2024 02:02 - Selecting Verified Manufacturers for Trust 09:53 - Keyword Analysis and Visibility Tracking 12:25 - Strategies for International Amazon Success 19:36 - Effective Strategies for Online Marketplaces 20:06 - Leveraging Google for Business Growth 23:43 - Optimizing Amazon Listings for Google Images 25:40 - Optimizing Amazon Listings for Sales 32:12 - Enhancing Amazon Listings With COSMO 33:29 - Avoiding Costly Import Tariff Mistakes Transcript   Bradley Sutton: Today we're giving you the best strategy clips of the year so that you can start off 2025 with a leg up on your competition. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show. That's a completely BS-free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And, like we do every year and we have been doing this since we started in what was it 2018, 2019? we do a recap episode where I handpick some of the best strategies of the entire year. Every year, we go through about 100 episodes a year, not including the weekly buzz, where we have a lot of guests and everybody has great strategies. It's really hard to pick some of the top ones, but what I did is me and the team got together and pulled out some of the top strategies that you guys had talked about in social media and such that you liked, and we put it together so that you could get a leg up on the competition now that we're at the beginning here of 2025.   Bradley Sutton: And so these are strategies that are not out of date. They're still valid. There are some that already, within a few months, became out of date. They're still valid. There are some that already, within a few months, became out of date. We're not including them here. So, guys, I hope you enjoy this episode. Get your pen and paper out. I want each and every one of you to make it your homework to pick five, at least five of these that we're about to get. I think we're doing about 20 here, but do five that most apply to you and your business. Not everything applies to everybody equally. Pick five out of these and implement it this month in your business, or at least make a plan for it. All right, so let's go ahead and see the top strategies of the year.   Kian Golzari: So the first thing you did was you selected verified manufacturers. And what's that for? It means any information that they provide on their listing, whether it be number of years in business, how many staff they have, what certificates they have, what patents they have, what products they have, what does their production line look like, the images and videos in the factory. That's all been verified by a third party, meaning InterTech, SGS, TUV. One of these very reputable companies have gone in and verified all the information is true, whereas if we didn't work with verified suppliers, then whatever information they want to put there, we just have to sort of take their word for it. So verified is the most important thing to search for first. Then, on the left-hand side of the page, you'll see trade assurance right, I would always click that as well and trade assurance just means that your payment is protected. So if you've ordered an egg dispenser which holds, you know, 20 eggs and you do the production and you receive one which only holds 10 eggs, then the trade assurance will protect you and it will refund your order because you've selected that right. That's just a little bit of a safety net important for, like you know, new sellers, right. And then, as you scroll down on the left-hand side of the page, you'll see something that says management certification, right. And if you scroll down a little bit more, yeah. So you see like BSCI and you see Zedek, you see ISO. I always like to select BSCI and ISO. So BSCI is your business social compliance initiative and ISO is just a really high-quality standard and this just basically means these are factory certificates that they have. So, uh, BSCI will go in and they'll check, like you know, um how many years you've been in business. Do you have, like, fire extinguishers? Do you have adequate lighting? Do you have safety exits? Like we've checked the dormitories, we've checked like the canteen where the workers eat. So it's kind of like gives you confidence that you're working for a very, very good factory, right. So now, if we go back to the top of the list, right, we've. Now we've searched by manufacturers, we've got verified manufacturers, we've got trade assurance and we've got factories which have, you know, BSCI and ISO certification. So now, as I'm scrolling down the list, like if you zoom in on the company names, like the first word in the company name is always the city or the province in which that factory is located.   Kian Golzari: So sometimes, like the factories, like electronics are made in Shenzhen, backpacks are normally made in like Shenzhou. Like furniture, like steel tubing for furniture, chairs is made like Yongkang. So I'm just trying to get familiar. Is there an area which specializes in egg dispensers? Maybe not because it's such a niche product, right, that maybe you could make it, make it anywhere. But as I scroll down, I'm trying to see, like, is there one name that pops up more frequent than others and in that area which specializes in that product? But I see Ningbo has probably popped up a few times, right? So, but anyway, it doesn't matter. If Ningbo had popped out like eight out of nine times, I would say, right, well, that's the region we need to be ordering from.   Bradley Sutton: Interesting.   Gefen Laredo: You know ACOS is great, but obviously this is TACoS Tuesday and TACoS is the metric of your total sales.   Carrie Miller: Yes.   Gefen Laredo: And so when we're looking at total sales something that we brought in and I know it's a little vague, but we really looked at the halo impact of ad strategies and how they impacted ranking and total sales, right. And so when we focused our ad strategy, maybe on a cost per customer acquisition model, maybe on a TACoS model, and we look to really prioritize, hey, where are we showing up, right? So, if, if, if we're driving all this traffic and we have a 20 percent conversion rate, let's say, on this keyword, are we tracking using, using uh, using a Helium 10, of course, um, are we tracking that ranking properly? To say, hey, we started running these ads aggressively on August 1st and if we have been tracking ranking on that keyword for the last two months since going aggressive on that term, where are we ranking now and how have sales changed? and are there broader KPIs that we're measuring outside of just direct ad revenue? And that worked really well for us because we centered that around tentpole events and this is a really big strategy of ours. That is incredibly complex, it takes a whole village to actually execute. But when we focus our customer acquisition and ranking models around major times in the year so think Prime Day, think Fall, Prime Day, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, holiday and then, of course, if you're a one-off brand, if you I don't know are ski related, then obviously your season is January to March. You know like there are differences, but really peak seasons. If you're able to focus your growth model around the times that are going to give you the most reward, then that worked really well for us last year and we expect to see a lot more of that this year, especially as we all expect people are going to be more deal oriented. It's a constant battle for margins, so the better rank you are, the more organic sales you drive, the better your TACoS is.   Ben Webber:                           Several years ago we were about to stock out of as you know, we sell a lot of fourth quarter products and kind of joke toy products and we're about to stock out of one that we sold between 800 and 1000 units a day of which is a fairly substantial issue. So we actually loaded up a cargo van and drove the cargo van to Amazon, talked our way through the front gates to deliver it and they took it, and so we did that once, then we did it again and we got through again. The third time they're like no, you can't do this, and so like okay, but somehow, like no, you, you can't do this, and so like okay, but somehow, we have to be able to do this. So we looked into carrier central and figure out how we could become a last mile rider, which is incredibly easy it takes about 15 minutes to fill out a form and then you have to show that you can back in and out of a parking spot incredibly, incredibly easy. But so in that January we bought a truck and the rest is history from there. But it came about because we were about to stock out and panicked and we're like, well, what's the worst that can happen?   Silas Moestrup Pedersen: And one of the things that I recommend to every time that we have a new client or meet someone is to narrow in on fewer skills. It sounds quite simple, right, but what we do every time is that if you have a big catalog A, B, C and D products and then A products they get a special treatment compared to B, C and D. It could even be, if your catalog is massive, you only focus your ad spend on A products. Same thing from a content perspective. Those are the ones that get the most love in terms of title, bullet point, backend attributes, et cetera, descriptions. So it's just having that focus on fewer products, I think, is number one. Then, if you can automate your reporting, we have that in Looker automated so that you don't have to necessarily sit and look at the data and pull Excel spreadsheets et cetera it just saves you so much time. If you're capable of doing it and spending time on it, then I think. Thirdly, we talked a little bit about it, but I think taking the time to do super solid keyword research from the get-go Like get into Magnet, get into Amazon's data sources, get into Cerebro, look for all your competitors' keywords et cetera understand what those A keywords are, and those A keywords are the only thing that you focus on in the start. Those are the ones that go into your rank campaigns, that they go into your manual campaigns, et cetera, and that those are the ones that just like where you track everything through Like a little hack could be for your A products. Every week you use a repro. Every other week you put in your A product and then you export all the data for that. You take a spreadsheet. In column A you say this is the date when I pulled the. This is the date of either. I pulled the data, this is the ASIN you put in the ASIN that you pulled the data for. Then you make a formula.   Silas Moestrup Pedersen: You can just ask ChatGPT where, based on the paid and organic rank, you say whether you classified the keyword as being on page one, two, three or four, and then you pull this data in this way every single week for maybe two months when you're running a new test or something like that. You take all the data, you put it into a pivot table and boom, then you would have an overview and a graph of how many like your all your page one, two, three, four positions across your entire catalog and you could even put a filter on up in the top and then you can sort by ASIN and then you basically have your own visibility tool where you can see your paid on your organic visibility on a weekly level at an Asian level. And you can use that to take all those keywords If you're ranking let's say page three or two or something like that put them into a rank campaign. If you feel like they're good, you can take all the keywords where you're on page two, maybe put them in the title, et cetera. So, like building those systems, that allows you to scale something consistently.   Bradley Sutton:                           What was your gross sales yesterday, last week, last year? More importantly, what are your profits after all your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me forward slash profits.   Cara Sayer: So one of the biggest things was the fact that I do think a lot of Amazon sellers don't really have a brand. They just have a name for a business or a name for something that they use and they don't really have a what I'd call a true brand. And they don't always. I think sometimes also, existing only on Amazon makes you lose perspective on you know how normal businesses work, like businesses that aren't based on Amazon, and so you know a lot of businesses. I mean, I think throughout life, people buy from people and I think that's so important to remember that, even on Amazon, one of the reasons why Amazon focuses so heavily on A plus listings and now they're bringing in the premium A plus and all the rest of it because Amazon knows right. You know me quite a few years now and I've always banged on about brand. I've always banged on about having a story. Tell your story. It doesn't have to be your story necessarily, it could be the product story, but you need to have something that differentiates you. And even then, I was chatting to someone at the conference earlier on and I was saying the thing is that sometimes it's not even the fact that you're selling different products, it's the way that you curate them right. So it's the collection of products that you've chosen to sell under your brand name says something.   Nick Katz: So one of our clients is an international brand. They're an American registered company and they last year they cleared seven figures and we're definitely looking to do a lot more this year. That's in two years. They're doing very, very well in America, they sell in Europe and they sell in Canada. But the Japanese sales are now almost comparable to the to the us sales, but the profit margins are a lot higher.   Bradley Sutton:                           That was about my second question.   Nick Katz: Yeah, because you know things like the PPC is a hell of a lot cheaper. The ACOS for the account is about uh, I think it's about eight, nine percent now. The TACoS is about three or four percent. It's the kind of figures you can't really get in the US. So actually in theory you could sell a lot less in Japan and still end up with the same kind of profit as you could in the US. But obviously if you're getting sales close to the US you're probably going to have much, much higher margins. Japan generally is cheaper. It's cheaper tax as well if you are off the threshold to pay tax. But if you're under 10 million yen, which is probably about 60,000, 70,000 US, if you're under that in sales, you don't have to pay consumption tax. There is no tax. So anybody like me selling in Europe who gets absolutely lost by the tax authorities there, paying 19, 20, 21, 23% in some of the regions in Europe, you could be selling 50, 60,000 US in Japan and not have to pay any consumption tax whatsoever. So there are definite advantages to selling in Japan.   Bradley Sutton: What are some of the things that set you apart from maybe the 10 other matcha people who maybe have started and gone out of business, you know, because they didn't have your strategy? What do you think set you apart from others?   Sam: Well, I think a handful of things. The first one is okay, so I think you can use. You can rely on Amazon PPC. You can look at your search term impression share reports, you can look at your keyword ranking and all that kind of stuff and that will help you in the short run. But honestly, the thing that really helped us the most was patience and making sure that your product is on a sensory level it's actually good and people like it. Once you have those two things covered, then you just need to get people to try it, get them to tell their friends, and then their friends who are interested in Marchable buy. Then they are buying again and then this whole thing kind of grows by itself. Your PPC and all of these other tools that you have are really just like fuel that you add to this engine.   Singchuen: And on the other side of things is, obviously you kind of need to make sure that you treat your suppliers well as well. Make sure that they understand what you're going through and make sure that you try to understand what they're going through. If language is a barrier, hire an interpreter, right, it's not too difficult. Decency goes both ways. So you may be pressed, but you've got to recognize that the factories themselves, they are pressed as well. So working together for a compromise, understanding each other and not throwing too much Just to be a little bit more understanding towards each other, goes a long way. A bit more understanding towards each other goes a long way. I think what tends to happen is that if you're not patient, as Sam has mentioned, you may cut off communications with factories that may help you in the future, and you don't want to do that.   Destaney Wishon: I think the biggest things that we look at is we create rules for the different outcomes we want. If we're launching a brand-new product, then we're creating rules that are based off sales. So we're going to be taking a deep dive into, hey, what is the conversion rate and what is the sales? And we're going to build rules for maximizing that increased bid when I have a certain conversion rate. On the flip side, if our goal is profitability, we're going to work backwards from our ACOS or RoAS goal. We're going to say, hey, let's build rules that are based on lowering bids when our ACOS is too high, and maybe layering in our conversion rates also low, let's go even lower, right. So those are the two simplest ones that we look at, but it really needs to be strategic. You can create rules that are based off the phase your product's in, whether it's launch, consistency, profitability, organic rank. You can create rules based off your overall business outcomes. Which is always an important one is what is that key RoAS that you're going to optimize for all of your campaigns, but just making sure not to overcomplicate it in the beginning, right. Once you start to understand the correlation between CPC and RoAS, then you can start building in a little bit more customization around lifecycle and things like that.   Kevin King: This is how you been converting like crazy with what? what do you call an index image? This he calls it the uh, it's the image in your listing that will be the top reasons why your product is the best. This is not your main photo. This is not your photo number one. This is what he calls this photo number two and it's an index of of your products is why I think it's why he calls it the index image, and what he says is you need to number the benefits. A lot of of people are using call-outs, they use infographics, but they don't number them. So you want to actually have numbers like this. So this should be something like this should be your second image the five reasons you love, or the seven reasons or the three reasons.   Odd numbers are always better than even numbers. Three, five or seven or nine always work the best. But here he's got the five and look, there's big, there's numbers. That's important. He just doesn't list them. People like order and when they see numbers, their mind can sort it and they can read it quickly and it makes sense to them. So the numbering system here is critical, not just the fact that he put the main point, the main benefit and capital, and then explained it in. I mean in bold and a little bit larger than explained everything else below it in light blue, but he's got these numbers. That's the critical thing is numbering it.   Bradley Sutton: Maybe this is a little bit of the sexy side of patents, but you've talked before about how patents doing patent searches can actually be a form of product research and finding a product to sell on Amazon. How in the world is that possible?   Rich Goldstein: Yeah, absolutely it's true, because the way that the patent system works, once a patent expires, it's fair game for anyone to use it. So a utility patent lasts for 20 years and a design patent lasts for 15. But once that patent expires, anyone can make that product and, at the same time, keep in mind that a lot of people have an idea for a product, they get it patented, but they never do the research, they never learn about the process enough to actually get that product launched, and so there are a lot of great ideas that have been patented that are just in the patent archives and they've never actually been put on the market. There are some lousy ideas, but there are also some great ideas, and so if you know how and you search the patent record for expired patents, you can find ideas for really great potential products.   Tom - Honest FBA: We dabbled with the US a few times in the past and Thomas Net is really popular. You see, it's spoken about quite a lot as a place, as a resource. Honestly, we never had any success there. There was a time when we were the MOQs are always insanely high and there was a product previously that we agreed to the MOQ. It was something like 10 or 20,000 units. It was pretty high. And there was a product previously that we agreed to the MOQ. It was something like 10 or 20,000 units. It was pretty big. And we were like, okay, we'll go for it, but can you just repackage them into a different kind of mix? And they just said, nah, nah, don't fancy it. And we were like, right, okay. So we kind of banged our head against the wall. So now a little-known site called Google is honestly the best bet, so like, but I'm not talking page one at Google. You've got to dig. So put on a VPN. If you're somewhere like we are, like in Spain, put on a US VPN and then get down to like pages five, six, seven, eight, get in there. And then I just hammer a lot of emails out, but a lot of the websites that you find down in those stages or those pages. They're not good at SEO, they're generally kind of old sites, but you're finding older, established businesses so and often you'll find a phone number. So one of the best lessons I say is like get on the phone and just ring them up and you can save months of time, like the guy who ended up.   Tom - Honest FBA: One of the guys who ended up working with had a phone call with him on the first day. I found it and we ended up. We're now doing two products with him already. We've got another three lined up and he had nothing to do with the niche we're in. He was in so we're in pets. He was in humans. He was in food. I just gave him a call, explained the brand vision, what we're trying to do. He got really excited. He's now helping us source new ingredients. He's coming to me with product ideas. He's now going to do a whole range of products for us. So that was one of the beauties is like having that communication line and being able to really explain yourself has been massive. We are still sourcing in China, by the way. We still think it's a really viable option, but having this US option as well, there's so many benefits to it.   Grace Kopplin: In terms of Walmart, that's always been a strategy for us. Transparently, Walmart just hasn't been a volume driver for us. It's been steady but it hasn't really been a place that's warranted a ton of focus for us. But another marketplace that has been great for us is actually Target's marketplace, target Plus and that's been a key, key piece of our success, especially with working with brands who are looking for store placement at Target. For example, we've had a few items that we've listed on Target's marketplace that have done really well, that have gotten the attention of a buyer and actually got store placement, which is really exciting. And, at the end of the day, getting an item placed on shelves most of the time can drive more volume than a mid-tier listing on Amazon. So we tend to try to use that strategy.   Bradley Sutton: How do you get on target these days? Wasn't it invite only back in the day or now that Target is adding that 360 or some kind of like yeah.   Grace Kopplin: I think it might still be invite only, but I know they've been actively adding a lot of sellers. I know that their backend is still quite archaic compared to what Amazon is. It's probably what Walmart was like four years ago. But I think it is still invite only, but definitely something to reach out to your connections and see if you can get a connect with a Walmart e-comm buyer.   Leo Sgovio: So there are a few reasons why you want to be indexed on Google, and for the most, let's start from the most advanced ones, right? Advanced sellers they normally try to send traffic to Amazon, especially during the launch period, using external traffic, right? So Google, we know, is a good referral that tends to help your rankings, and so Amazon tends to reward you if they see traffic coming from Google. So if you're not indexed, you lose a chance to show Amazon that you are getting traffic from Google. Now, I have a theory that paid traffic has a little bit more weight than organic, but the reason why you want to be indexed and the reason why you might want to be indexed for certain keywords is so that when you drive traffic through the URL to Amazon, you can actually give attribution to that keyword. That's number one, right? So you can actually use these URLs as your two-step.   Leo Sgovio: Number two if you do a good job with your indexation and your listing is optimized, you actually also appear in the images, right? And so if people are looking for specific products, sometimes I search on Google using images because I'm looking for specific products that might be hard to find on Amazon. But if I look through the Google images and I find the product, then I go to Amazon and so if you're not indexed, you're also not going to be able to be found there, and Google images actually gets a ton of traffic. So here are some of the reasons why, two of the reasons why. I can think of many more, but the most important are these ones. Google is still one of the largest search engine, and so missing out on that opportunity search engine and so missing out on that opportunity, I'm afraid it causes a lot of missed visibility for an Amazon seller at a listing level.   Carrie Miller: I think one of the things that sets us apart is that when I've created our listings, or whenever I create our photos, I think about what are the main benefits of the product, the main selling points of it, and I realized this isn't something that everyone can easily do, and so the way I kind of have been teaching it is that you can take your competitor's listing, download their reviews, download their best reviews, their five-star reviews, and say ask ChatGPT, like, what do people like most about this product? What are the benefits of this product according to reviews? What do people like? Basically, ask a bunch of questions to ChatGPT and you'll get a bunch of kind of selling points and you'll kind of see a trend of like the top selling points or top benefits of your product. And that's what you want to focus on is like what's in it for the customer? You've got to kind of appeal to their emotions. How is it going to make their life better, easier, are easier, are they going to be more beautiful? Are they going to you know what? What is it, what's in it for them?   Carrie Miller: And I think that that is going to be the key that sets you apart, and I know it's. It sounds pretty basic, but I've actually been doing some looking at different listings. People have been asking me hey, can you take a look at my listing? And when I look at the listing, I'm like, well, these aren't, these are not actually selling points or benefits. Like, these are features of the product. Right, you can always put the features in right later on, but how are you appealing to the person when you were? If you're telling somebody about your product, are you being like oh hey, the dimensions are 14 by 14. Like that's, that's like an afterthought, right? You, you want to. However, you would even just sell to a person, like talking face to face. That's how you're going to do that. Your first image shouldn't be a dimension photo. It should be a selling point, your main, like best selling point, main benefit in that first image. So I think that's a huge thing that a lot of people are kind of missing.   Bradley Sutton: What would you say is the most actionable things from search career performance? That kind of closes out like, hey, this is actually something that is not just, oh, it's good to know, but hey, I'm actually going to take action, uh, on this.    Mansour Norouzi: Taking action. I would say, even when I look at my own brand one is that for the main keywords, what I actually I do this on a weekly basis I have a list of the main keywords which is for my, for one of my aces are like 10 uh, 10 uh keywords and actually I go into the detail of week over week what is happening to my click share for those keywords, because they are very important for me and I want to be on the top and like top five for these turns. I want to be aware of what is going on with my competitors and what's my need. So if I see I have a track of my click share for the keywords, if I see it is going down, right away I'll figure out what's going on and maybe push with my advertising, for that for me would be our main keywords and what's going happening for my click share rate, conversion rate and click share just on my top keywords. Honestly, I will go, I think, by myself going with all for all the keywords, just like top five to 10 keywords, what they are, and I'll keep it very close overview and monitor them to see exactly what's going on, because you see that search volume going up or down, but I want my click share and my conversion share that I have I'm generating. Either they are consistent or going up. So if I see this trend is down, right away I start doing maybe I run coupon code or I push with my advertising to make sure I'm getting them back into track.   Bradley Sutton: What is your favorite? Helium 10 tool Ksenia or function of a tool.   Kseniia Reidel: Probably the audience. That's the one that I use all the time. Is it called audience?   Bradley Sutton: Yeah, the split where you ask the questions to the people and say, how are you using that Like for your images, or just for product ideas, or what are you using that?   Kseniia Reidel: Honestly for everything. For both for the product ideas, for your images, or just for product ideas or what are you using that? Honestly for everything. But both for the product ideas, for the images, because I just think it's so easy. You know, when you're thinking about like the product we find, then I usually do um, like the drawing and uh, 3d, you know the 3d image of the product that doesn't exist yet. Then usually all my products are like, really designed differently, that's what's on the market right now, and I just upload the image there and I see what people say and ask them would you buy this product? And if you wouldn't buy this product, why, why not? Or what would you change in this product? And sometimes I see the things that I didn't even you know, I didn't even think about that.   Bradley Sutton: So you're launching just the 3d rendering and just asking a question on that image, or you're launching it like, or you're launching it, you're putting it in a poll next to like existing products and asking them, or which one are you doing?   Kseniia Reidel: I'm doing both. Actually, the first, I just do the rendering and ask them would you buy this product? And if you would not buy this product, what would you change Like? How would you make it better for you? And then sometimes I also compare it to the other products that are on the market and ask them which one would they buy?   Bradley Sutton: Interesting.   Kseniia Reidel: And a lot of times I do the changes on the product based on what the people say.   Bradley Sutton: What was the results of those search, find, buy in order to send those relevancy signals? Again, not for rank, but to send those relevancy signals to Amazon. Take a look at this when I ran in Cerebro on June 19th, just three days after they did that relevancy single, you know, push those three coworkers here at Helium 10,. Take a look now at the Amazon recommended rank. Remember how it was only showing two keywords for Amazon recommended rank. Now it was showing multiple ones and it put that keyword that I sent the relevancy signal for egg holder countertop. It had Amazon recommended rank number three, which basically means that that was the third most important keyword according to Amazon for this product. Now do you remember what I was getting for impressions in PPC? Like 200 total impressions over three days. What did sending those relevancy signals to Amazon do for my PPC impressions? Take a look at this. To amazon, do for my PPC impressions. Take a look at this.   The next three day period from June 19th when my relevancy got fixed to June 21st instead of 200 impressions, 5 000 impressions, 4 000 of that. How? What keyword was it for? Egg holder countertop, that one that I sent those relevancy signals to Amazon for? This works, guys.   Ryan King:                          So Walmart has the equivalent would be brand portal, and I would absolutely recommend, if you're the seller, if you're the brand, to register through brand portal, and the main reasons are there are certain advertising opportunities that are only available to brand registered brands, so sponsored brand videos, sponsored brand ads that go across as banner displays. Another major one would be brand shops, brand shelves we can talk about later as well and then IP protection, and so the advantage of being registered in Brand Portal is that you can file IP infringement claims, and in this case, the most successful one to do is to file claims against those alternate listings for using your copyrighted imagery, and so we see success of getting those pulled down within 48 hours, typically when that happens. Now you can still file that IP claim even if you're not registered through Brand Portal. There's a link to file that claim, but you can't track its progress, you can't see the history, all those kinds of things. So it just gives you greater credibility in those and greater ability to look back at the progress. And the last one I'd say is if you're a registered brand, it's going to give you the highest content ranking for your listing. So even if there are other sellers that have tried to change that listing content. You're going to outrank them as the registered brand and chances are you're not going to have to deal with things changing on your listing in that regard.   Kevin Dolan: Cosmo is a specific tool and I think that the function that it performs is valuable to enhancing Amazon's understanding of a listing. So I certainly would not be surprised to see Amazon implementing this in a production capacity on a large swath of searches. That would not be surprising to me, but it's not as massive as the shift that we've seen into semantic-focused search. Cosmo in particular discusses essentially a mechanism for enhancing Amazon's understanding of a product by taking into consideration things that aren't expressed in the query and things that aren't expressed in the listing. The example that they use in the paper, the canonical example, is if you're looking for shoes for pregnant women, a listing might not literally say shoes for pregnant women. It might produce a specific type of open toed shoe that has good support, good comfort. That might not literally be listed as a keyword in the listing, but it might be something that the system can infer based on its knowledge of the universe, about what it's like to be a pregnant woman and the types of products that they might benefit from.   Norm Farrar: Out of everybody that we've looked at, it was up to 80. But 70% of Amazon sellers do not have the proper HTS code. They let their Chinese seller set an HS code and it's wrong. So when they get in here and guess what, nobody, nobody is calculating that as a part of your cost of goods. So they're going out, they're sourcing in China, they're not calculating, and this could be as high as 400%. Now, I've never seen it that, but it can be. So you know you're 25, 40% of your cost of goods. Is that not something that should be calculated? And like for me, I was doing natural soaps and I was paying 17%. So we were taking a look at it and Afolabi says can you consider this Castile soap? And I said yeah, it's olive based. And he goes well, how about I give you some good news. Pay zero. I just stuffed 17% back in my pocket. So out of the 70% of people that are missing the boat, they don't have the proper tariff code and the average person that gets the proper tariff code on an order the average that we've been able to calculate has been $7,800.

Today's episode is brought to you by The College Dude. If you need help paying for college, or a strategy to pay off student loans, visit TheCollegeDude.com   Click here to learn more about today's featured scholarship: https://nodebtcollege.substack.com/publish/post/142613287?back=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fscheduled   Graduation season will be here before you know it! Celebrate your student's accomplishments with a custom diploma frame from Church Hill Classics. Take $15 off $100+ orders at diplomaframe.com by using promo code Dave15 at checkout.   To enjoy ad-free podcasts, Dave's tips and suggestions for every featured scholarship, and special discount offers, become a Podcast Patron for as little as $5/month. Go to https://patron.podbean.com/YourDailyScholarship to learn more.

In this podcast we have Bill Brooks talking energy storage system (ESS) Codes, with emphasis on the National Electrical Code (NEC). Be sure to get Sean and Bill's latest book, which is the 3rd edition of PV and the NEC, based on the 2023 NEC. To find where to get different versions of the NEC including the 2023 NEC for free check out the NEC tab at solarSEAN.com.  Disclaimer: This podcast was recorded in 2021. Keywords NEC Article 706 for Energy Storage Systems, UL 9540, Article 480, nominal voltage, cycling batteries, UL 1973, residential code, UL 1989, AHJ, inspector advice, communications between battery and inverter, flywheels, flow batteries, UPS, Australia and Hawaii, NexTracker, inverter output circuit, nameplate on ESS, apparent power, fault currents limited, maximum output current definition, LG chem battery, power converter, OSHA NRTL, ETL, Intertech, UL, SMA, UL standards writing entity vs. UL testing entity, 2021 International Residential Code, Tesla Powerwall, storage inverter, Ginlong, 9540A, liquid cooled vs. air cooled, Enphase Barbecue, Enphase in boiled water, ESS disconnecting means, readily accessible, unbalanced interconnections, single-phase inverters on 3-phase services, voltage rise, 705.12 Load-Side Connections, 710 Stand Alone Systems, plaque or directory, wire sizing, ampacity, overcurrent protection device, rounding up wire size to common overcurrent protection device size, energy storage is a source and a load, using continuous current instead of surge current, inverter input circuit current, diversion loads, C40 charge controllers without maximum power point tracking and diversion loads, energy storage as a diversion load, hot water loads, pulse with modulation (PWM), 150% correction factors for diversion loads, dc-to-dc converters, required ampacity for continuous current vs. continuous current, commercial and industrial (C&I). Links: Bill Brooks, P.E.: www.brooksolar.com www.solarSEAN.com www.HeatSpring.com/SEAN 

As we move into 2023, edge computing will become increasingly popular to power solutions and drive down costs while improving performance across the board. The field is rapidly evolving and is set to become even more critical in the future as more and more industries adopt IoT and edge computing technology.Jim White has over 25 years of experience in software development for IoT Edge systems, enterprise application integration, and mobile applications. Most recently, Jim was a Distinguished Engineer and Director of the IoT Platform Development Team within the IoT Solutions Division of Dell Technologies. He was the chief architect for Dell's largest open-source effort to date, EdgeX Foundry™. EdgeX is an open framework for building industrial IoT Edge computing systems and is now a Linux Foundation (LF) Edge project. Jim will continue to serve as Vice Chair of the EdgeX Technical Steering Committee. Before Dell, Jim was a partner at Intertech, specializing in Java and .NET application development. Jim is co-author of 'Java2 Micro Edition: Java in Small Things', a Lynda.com author, and a frequent conference speaker.IOTech develops market-leading 'open' edge computing and management software products for the edge software infrastructure market. Their software products are embedded into the edge solution offerings of major OEMs and Systems Integrators to accelerate the development, deployment, and management at scale of edge applications within their customer base. Their channel partners include; Schneider Electric, Accenture, Johnson Controls, Mitsubishi Electric, Intel, and others, and growing. They have established a strong reputation within the Industrial Edge ecosystem because of their early involvement and material contributions to EdgeX Foundry – the largest open-source edge software platform (10 million+ downloads) and their deep OT and middleware expertise within the management team.

Er staat weer een nieuwe Maritieme Podcast voor je klaar! Dit keer gaat het over zakendoen in Duitsland en waarom SMM een maritieme beurs is waar je bij wilt zijn. In deze aflevering deelt Alexander Kühne van Intertech B.V. zijn ervaringen met de SMM beurs in Hamburg en waarom juist deze beurs zo belangrijk is voor hun bedrijf. Michel Koopman, Marktanalist bij NMT, deelt waardevolle informatie over de markt in Duitsland en vertelt waarvoor je zeker in Duitsland moet zijn. Joëlla, Trade Promotion Coördinator bij NMT vertelt over SMM en waarom het goed is om op het NL Paviljoen te staan. Dit alles in een goed gesprek met gespreksleider Michel Revet, Teamleader Communications bij NMT. Stream snel de Podcast via de link hieronder, of zoek hem op in Apple Podcasts of Spotify!  

https://make-your-pitch.com The Co-Sponsor for this Episode is B.E.T. A business platform that gives you all the information and tools you need to advance your business as well as the understanding of how to run your business most effectively and profitably. To learn more check out the: Video: https://bit.ly/368rSKk Website: www.yvrbet.com The Co-Sponsor for this episode is CRM Engine. A Customer Relation Management system that provides a 4 Module Solution, Standard Customization by the CRM Engine Team, Unlimited Users, Unlimited Data, Unlimited Records, Cloud Hosting, Security Updates, and Daily Backups as well as On-Going support (Usually Same Day) Go Here to Learn More: Website: CRMEngine.co.uk/makeyourpitch Our guest is Alvin Sun Thank you, Christopher. Thank you, Ellen, for inviting me here today to on speak your podcast. So truly an honor. Yeah. So my name is Alvin. I am the CEO of ore brains and we are dedicated to creating a sustainable eco-friendly PPE, specifically face masks made here in the US. The technology behind our masks was born from a material science research company, Vioxx that came from a UC Berkeley accelerator. And later on into an indie bio cohort, we have been focused on developing eco-friendly everyday products in filtration, specifically in filtration products. So that is with air and water filtration. When the pandemic came early year, last we had an opportunity to incorporate some of our technology into creating a better product to service the demand of face masks from last year. You know, we saw the huge disruption in the supply chain, both on the medical field and the on consumer end, something that we've always covered is world-class here in America. We saw that disrupted greatly, and that there was a huge issue to get quality products and quality information out there year. last You know, people were getting a lot of different mixed messages. What should we be wearing? What be we should doing to protect ourselves from this virus? We were able to do, bring, bring a market, a product to market largely through a Kickstarter online platform, and really build out a brand and a presence last year, fast forward to right now, we do with the success that we've seen on the consumer end with our online market. We are doubling down on our production, our capability to produce single-use disposables using the same filter technology our, and we're our goal is to really introduce our tech, which is more efficient at the filtration, more breathable and more lightweight than the average N95 respirator that you see in hospitals and et cetera. So our mission right now is to really build out our capability to produce these N99 masks and provide them to all the markets and the consumer market that is in need of these products. Did we, or it's still mine. Now you have, you've developed this over a period of time. What is the development process? Why is yours different from anybody else's? Is it a disruptive product or is it one that's that you've engineered? That just is a tad bit better. Tell me, tell me a little better wine. Sure. So yes, this is a, when, when COVID came out and we saw like a huge influx of a lot of mass-based big smash products, what really allows us to stand above the crowd is we, we are scientists at heart, essentially, at least the founder of the company. When we designed this product with the technology, with the ethnicity in mind, it wasn't just another cutesy product that you can put over the face and cover and fulfill requirements to be able to enter buildings or to be able to move around freely. But we, what we wanted to do is really create the best product out there. And we believe we had that with the technology that we have, the material in the way that it is woven allows for 99% of filtration of airborne particles. Whereas the standard N 95 is only filtering out larger particles at a 95% efficiency. The reasoning for that is, you know, the traditional respirator at the N95 is what we considered the gold standard these days. Those weren't developed with a consumer, consumer use in mind, you know, these are, we're back developed in the 19 hundreds, early 19 hundreds for chemical warfare, for industrial work, for medical work. it And wasn't really designed with an idea a of everyday American, everyday person wearing it throughout the day, whether it's in the office or out, out, out in public. So on that end, you know, there wasn't much design or thought in terms of the usability or the comfort of everyday use. So we developed, we, we thought that there was a huge opportunity to be able to innovate upon a decades-old design and bring out something better for the consumer and for the traditional industrial commercial applications well. as Okay. Go ahead. I'm sorry, please. Go ahead. Okay. I was going to say one of the first things I noticed about your mask is that it's stylish. Okay. It doesn't sit on the nose like current masks do. There seems to be something inside that helps it sit up off of the nose so that you're able to breathe while you're still wearing the mask. Was that purposeful in your design? Yeah. So every part of it was done designed for the purpose of having an efficient mask without sacrificing the aesthetic and the comfort. The idea is that this is a mask that you will be able to wear throughout the day without feeling the need to adjust or play around with it because it's uncomfortable. So the nose bridge, we have a medical grade nose bridge and the top of the mask so that it will hold it to contour fit to your face. However, it is put behind a mesh layer so that it's not uncomfortable, like pinching answered knows throughout the day. Okay. Mr. Fair. Have you had any, Oh, testing is done as far as its reliability, its percentage. Do you have any real, real-life testing from a lab or anything yet? Sure. So we've had some independent testing from third-party testing from labs, such as Nelson lab Intertech. And so we have the L we've put them through the ringer essentially, you know, we send, we've had samples tested or destroyed and just put through, put through a lot of rigorous tests. We are currently undergoing certifications with Nyasa and FDA, and we're confident to able be we that will surpass it, to fulfill the requirements, to get the certifications of the N 95. It's just a matter the of going the red tape had going through the process. Currently, the CDC, the FDA, they're all, they've all been notoriously slow in the process. And with the crisis of last year, it just adds a few more in months the process. However, fortunately, we are able to sell these more regulated products under what's called the EUA emergency use authorization, which is what was announced and what was declared early last year. And that allows a lot of mass products to be introduced to the market. Unfortunately, you also have a lot of bad actors which have made it difficult for more legitimate enterprises to really saturated the market. However, that's the case with any crisis, so to speak? Well, I, I often wonder not, not often wonder, but I wonder when we're talking about this type of product, of course, there's a, there's a lessening demand in the general population. And so how's that going to affect your sales, your sales projections, have you, have you decided which direction to take it in order to maintain profitability? Sure. So understandably, you know, with increased vaccinations throughout the world, there will be a lessening of demand. However, we still foresee that for the next couple of years, there will still be an inflated demand for face masks, you know, and I think there's a larger consumer awareness in terms of air filtration, air quality, and that will still be here like there. That will still be the case after the worst has passed, you know, people going on air travel, there will probably be a need for, or a want, a demand for protection while in these enclosed spaces. Because if it's not, COVID, there's always to going be something that, that is out there. That's just the nature of, this is the reality of the world. You know, we've seen it in the past decade that there been has multiple diseases, although not any as impactful or as harmful in terms of like the global scale as COVID, but you've seen for the last year, you know, Zika, H one, None, SARS, there has always been harmful. There's always been a need for this kind of protection. And especially in certain areas, such as traveling air travel, I do not foresee that those requirements will go away. Even if the general population like you don't to have be wearing one to be outside or to be in enclosed spaces. I still see there will be a huge demand at that respect, but that being said, you know, we are, as I mentioned, we were not originally a mass company, right? We, we were a science or research development company and we just so happened with the timing of our first launch to release this mass product. That being said, we're committed to being the best bet best mask product. There is out there. One of the products that we are excited to continue to work on and to launch in the near future is our biodegradable bile Palmer plastics, which has huge applications in the food and the packaging industry. That was something that we were very excited and very close to launching prior to COVID, which forced us to make a bit of a shift in our go to market strategy, you know, but we are excited to continue to fund and redevelop our research and development side to develop this biopolymer plastic, which we will plan to also incorporate within our own product line and make an effort towards our sustainability mission of creating a zero waste product. Well, I can see it as Helen was talking about your background, And so forth. I, I assume it's not in science, right? That's correct. Yeah. So the founder of the company and my business partner and or brands, she comes from a science background, she has a master's in material science from UC Berkeley, and she was the founder of, or brands and bikes technologies, which is the research and development arm of the current venture. Okay. And who else is on your team right now? Alvin? Sure. So currently it's Vivian and me. We have built out our manufacturing capacity here in Nevada. And so we've built out an engineering staff and team as well to manufacture and fulfill our mass orders. And right now we have a team of about 8 people and that's spread out between the engineering, the manufacturing, marketing, and sales, and just administrative stuff. Okay. Now, With that being said, now let's move over into, are you pre or post-revenue right now? We are post-revenue. So a lot of last year, we've been focused on doing a lot of the research and development in terms of the product design. And we've, we're able to do a couple of hundred thousand in sales last year on our consumer product alone. This year we're continuing that trend of strong demand for our consumer product while also introducing our disposable products, which we hope, we believe we'll have a lot of higher demand and application and more traditional industries. As I mentioned that have used PPE in the past and are interested in a better alternative. So you have your construction companies, hospitality and food packaging industry. Those are current customers in those, in, in the commercial space. Now Alvin, for people who are just becoming familiar with the aura brand on your website, you show the mass structure and the design of it. My question is what happens when a person comes to the website and they're interested in investing or purchasing a mask. So, and that's something that we should probably add to our website as well, but you can reach out to me directly. And as you mentioned before, my email is alvin@auramasksorataurabrands.com and happy to have the conversation to be a part of the team is join our efforts here. Okay, good. It's, it's a unique construction that you've, your company has created. What other things are in your pipeline that you can talk about? Sure. As I mentioned before, we are largely an eco-friendly green tech filtration at company our, at its core. And on the, in that direction, we are excited to be working on a fully compostable face graphs product. Obviously, that isn't something that's going to be used in a medical or more, more industrial setting. However, for a very socially conscious environmentally conscious consumer, you know, this is what we're very excited to offer this product in the near future, you know, with the increase of usage of face mask for the past year, we see that all over the place. You know, you see that in our parts and see that in our oceans, a there's a huge impact in the plastics and other harmful polymers out in our We environment. hope to use some of our material, right, dairy milk to material, to create safe and effective mask that can also be biodegradable and compostable. So after someone is done using it, they can, you dispose of it properly. And then basically it go will back the into earth it where came from essentially. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. How long have you been in this field without having a science degree? So in terms of this mentoring manufacturing, this space, it's been about a year, you know, previously my business partner brought me in to operate, be on more of the operational and the finance and to run the day-to-day mechanisms of the company. So that was sort of my background in my previous career and what I'm working on to continue to grow the business in that sense. Okay. All right. Do you have any, well, I know you must sales projections on what you think the masks will bring in terms of revenue in the next year? Yeah. So we've set a goal to sell 5 million masks this year. And we think with our current projection, we will be able to hit that in terms of production and sales. Our short-term goal is to be able to achieve a quarter million in sales, selling a quarter-million masks a month by the beginning of Q3. So that's currently what we're targeting for and aiming to achieve. Now, when you said the masks are contoured to the face, I immediately thought of people who do gardening or people who are susceptible to allergies, like pollen and that kind of thing. And it seems like your mask would fit that solution for people who have allergies. Yes. You know, obviously, you know, it's, it was designed with the idea of having, having the effectiveness without sacrificing the comfort and the aesthetic as I mentioned before, and additionally, to the way that most masks are designed or woven, it does not really filter out many parts well. It would probably be effective enough to filter out most like pollens or larger particles such as that. But what's great about what we have done is we have a non-woven material that will do what's called surface filtration, meaning it will be blocking any incoming harm, potentially harmful particles from entering or coming in through the mask. You know, a lot of the guidance that we have been receiving is that these mats, the mask mandate, isn't so much to protect the mask wear in terms of, you know, these masks are designed to stop viral particles. It's more to prevent the mask wear from transmitting through coughing or like sneezing part of harmful particles into the, their environment, into people they're associated with. What we have created with the non-woven build is that it is filtering it at the surface so that the harmful particles are not coming in and affecting the mask Interesting what's on the horizon for your company. Well, currently, you know, we're working on building out our manufacturing capability and our sales channels through to these companies so that we can provide people with a safe, alternative, safe option to get back to work, essentially. And again, once we get our research and development backup in full gear, we are looking to continue to build out the compostable products and find different applications for our technology. You know, there's a filter tech is also has great applications in HVAC and home filtration as well. So we're exploring some options of incorporating our filters into an HVAC product. Additionally, we are also working on some water filtration technology that we will probably be exploring more further down the line, Quite a mix of products. And of course, I think when we talk the first time, my, my suggestion was can you make grocery Bags, plastic grocery bags with your biodegradable products. So, you know, when you decide to do that, let me know. I'll be happy to be your representative For sure. Yeah. I mean, like I said, with the bio, biodegradable plastic biopolymer plastic, there are multiple applications in multiple industries. So we're really excited to dedicate our efforts to building that out in the near future. Right now. You're, you're asking for what now? What do you, what do you want to, what do you need, what's your ass? I, I'm digressing a little bit, but I'm sort of touching a little bit on my motivation and what insight, insight excited me about working with this opportunity with my business partner in this mass product, in this manufacturing project as a whole. Okay. But did you, didn't, you didn't talk numbers with me though. I need to know the numbers and what's in it for them and what are you gonna spend it on? Gotcha. So we are currently raising about a million, 1.5 million. And what that will do is that will allow us to continue to build out our sales and marketing, to put our message out there, to build brave awareness, and to increase our sales channels. Part of it will be dedicated to our manufacturing capability. We have some equipment that we have on hand that we're looking to acquire that will bring down our cost of goods. If are we able to bring our supply chain fully in-house vertically integrated in-house. We're looking to increase, decrease our cost of goods by half. And that requires a substantial capital investment at the beginning. But however, that will allow us to achieve our revenue goals early in the year. And additionally, as I mentioned in the past, we are looking to jumpstart our research and development division to be able to introduce new products, product cool lines to, for the Okay. And your, your investment is structured, how We're currently using a safe note or convertible note based on our current evaluation. Okay. And your current evaluation is what We are currently evaluating it based of, on our previous pre-seed angel investment round at 5.5 million. Okay. And we think that's a discounted valuation rate. It's just currently, it's early stage discount evaluation. Okay. All right. Very good. Very good. All right. Ellen, anything there from your side? No, I, I like the company. I like the product and I think they have an interesting future ahead. Yeah. I agree to that because of that diversity of the product area, although it falls in the same basic categories, it's a very diverse selection of various types of things that they can do with the same type of technology. Now, yeah. Alvin, is there anything you'd like to say to the investors before we close out this episode of make your pitch anything you'd like to say to them that you think will make them want to take a closer Yeah. I think we're in a great space here with the manufacturing mass here in the US you know, there's a lot of cool things that we're doing here with our product. And we believe that that truly has the opportunity to really disrupt a very archaic industrial sector. And with that, there's a lot of opportunities once we get the word out, essentially, that there is a better alternative to what's currently the gold standard. And we are looking to replace it, disrupt that in many places, more places than one. And we are very excited for the opportunity to build this operation here in the US and remain competitive to through automation, supply chain efficiencies, and just continue to innovate on a superior product. So that's Very, very, very good, very good. You know, there are, as we, as we wrap up this episode, Alvin, thank you so much for being a part of a baker pitch. We appreciate your joining us and spending some time with us and telling us about what you have going on because it is, it is a disruptive product and Ellen and I love disruptive products. So thank you for being a part of this podcast today, Alvin. Thank you so much. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Ellen. Have a good one. You too, Be definitive when you make your pitch.

Anita Zucker, Chair and CEO of InterTech Group, is a former educator and prominent philanthropist of educational endeavors. She shares her concerns regarding the state of education and says the time for innovation is NOW. The SC billionaire also talks about the pandemic's impact on business investments, the need for rural broadband, and diversity and inclusion in the full Executive Profile.

Welcome to Growth Everywhere. Today we’re interviewing Intertech CEO Tom Salonek. Tom has been named as one of Minnesota’s top business leaders under 40 and has twice been named to Inc. 500 fastest growing companies. As a technology and consulting firm, Intertech teaches companies how to make software and also makes software for clients like the government. Click here for show notes and transcript. Leave some feedback: Who should I interview next? Please let me know on Twitter or in the comments below. Did you enjoy this episode? If so, leave a short review here. Subscribe to Growth Everywhere on iTunes. Get the non-iTunes RSS feed Connect with Eric Siu: Growth Everywhere Single Grain Twitter @ericosiu

In this episode we welcome Christ Howard, a co-leader from Intertech LGBT+ Diversity Forum. We have a fascinating discussion with Chris as he takes us through the work he and Intertech do and their specific approach to diversity, inclusion, and transformation. We are also delighted to welcome back Erica Quessenberry as our co-host today. One of the reasons and a major impetus to invite Chris to be a guest was the recent address he made at the Umbraco conference and he walks us through the enlightening exercise with which he opened that talk.

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Czech techno DJ and producer Malda is playing since 2000. He is a part of well known techno project Jamal DJs and founder of Techanalitic production group. Many years of DJing and organising parties kicked him to the position of quality DJ and he plays on bigger and bigger events. Later he started with the music production and after some releases he founded label Unaffected records, which is the best in Czech Republic now and has many quality releases including big names in techno scene. He became a part of techno production team F@ckers! together with Alen Milivojevic and Crazyteck and in this time he has done many tracks released on many labels such as Intertech, Techment, Keep On Techno, Guilhottina, Valvula, ThreeSoul... etc. This year Malda was working hard on his LIVE performance and now it's time to check what he can do with the music.

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This presentation is an introduction to Windows Azure Web Roles. This session includes coverage of basic role configuration, DevFabric, and local debugging. Intertech's Oxygen Blast Podcasts include coverage of Java, .NET, XML, and all that is software development.

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Representatives of Intertech, a product-testing company, discuss their methods of testing.

Transcript -- Representatives of Intertech, a product-testing company, discuss their methods of testing.

Representatives of Intertech, a product-testing company, discuss their methods of testing.

Transcript -- Representatives of Intertech, a product-testing company, discuss their methods of testing.

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