Podcast appearances and mentions of jason freed

Today is Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, Rad and Hop are talk with Brainerd football head coach Jason Freed.  Featuring Conrad Engstrom and Wade Haapajoki, Dispatch Sports Wrap with Rad and Hop is a product of Forum Communications Co. and is brought to you by TeeHive, Caliber Collision, Rafferty's Pizza, Shannon's Auto Body and the sports department at the Brainerd Dispatch. Find more sports coverage throughout the day at BrainerdDispatch.com.

Today is Thursday, Aug. 29, 2024, Rad and Hop are back from summer and ready to tackle fall sports with Brainerd football head coach Jason Freed. Featuring Conrad Engstrom and Wade Haapajoki, Dispatch Sports Wrap with Rad and Hop is a product of Forum Communications Co. and is brought to you by TeeHive, Caliber Collision, Rafferty's Pizza and the sports department at the Brainerd Dispatch. Find more sports coverage throughout the day at BrainerdDispatch.com.

Jason Freed LOVES Lake Vermilion, which is why he heads all the way up there to guide every summer. He's got all the details on a very hot bite...for everything! Walleyes, bass, muskies, panfish...it's all ON. Plus a little Brainerd-Bemidji Football talk (of course) and a Fast Five. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jason Freed LOVES Lake Vermilion, which is why he heads all the way up there to guide every summer. He's got all the details on a very hot bite...for everything! Walleyes, bass, muskies, panfish...it's all ON. Plus a little Brainerd-Bemidji Football talk (of course) and a Fast Five. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have a great one for you all this week. Ha, like we'd tell you if we thought it'd suck. Which, we usually think. Meanwhile PR champ CJ Arlotta returns as does Jason Freed of Otelier to share the Night Auditor of the Year Award!

Jason Freed from Leisure Outdoor Adventures guide services this weeks guest on the JMO Podcast. Freed is a school teacher and HighSchool football coach while in the summer he guides mainly for walleye on both Leech lake and Vermillion in northern Minnesota. Jason is a talented guide and angler and truly takes his time on the water seriously each and every day. In this fishing podcast we hear all about his career and how great the fishing is on a few of Minnesota's walleye factories.Flop Box - https://www.flopindustries.comScheels - https://www.scheels.com/c/fishingNorthland Fishing Tackle - https://shop.northlandtackle.com/kits/eye-candy-kit-102-kit-assorted/Website - www.jmopodcast.comFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/JMOFishingPodcastInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/the_jmopodcast/

Click to Subscribe: https://bit.ly/Youtube-Subscribe-SoapDirt General Hospital Week Ahead Spoilers April 1st - 5th, 2024: Monday, April 1, 2024 (Season 61, Episode 144) -Natalia Rogers-Ramirez takes over negotiating Blaze's contract. -Diane Miller helps Alexis Davis work on her appeal for her law license. -Jason Morgan comes to see Elizabeth and Jake Webber. -Dante Falconeri reveals the truth about his shooting. Dante encourages Sonny not to write off Jason. -Anna Devane warns Sonny Corinthos. Tuesday, April 2, 2024 (Season 61, Episode 145) -Dex Heller has a job interview at the PCPD. -Drew Cain checks in on Nina Reeves at work. -Carly Spencer and Michael Corinthos each confess something. -John Cates has a new plan to take Pikeman down. -Jason reveals some info to Anna. Wednesday, April 3, 2024 (Season 61, Episode 146) -Tracy Quartermaine and Stella Henry cross swords. -Chase and BLQ need a favor from Dante. -Blaze tells Kristina Corinthos about her new job. -Sasha Gilmore and Cody Bell finally talk about their feelings. -Finn talks to Liz about his dad – he opens up. Thursday, April 4, 2024 (Season 61, Episode 147) -Sasha shows off her cooking skills. -Dr Terry Randolph has advice for Tracy Q. -Josslyn Jacks is in shock about something. -Curtis Ashford comforts his daughter Trina Robinson. -Kevin and Laura Collins come to check on Heather Webber post-op. Friday, April 5, 2024 (Season 61, Episode 148) -Sam McCall worries about Danny Morgan. -Drew Cain chews out Jagger. -Anna questions Jack Brennan about Pikeman.  -Joss argues with Kristina again. -Lois Cerullo helps BLQ who's having a crisis with her wedding dress. -Sonny and Natalia get to know each other better. Thanks for checking out the General Hospital weekly spoilers 4/1-4/5/2024. Visit our General Hospital section of Soap Dirt: https://soapdirt.com/category/general-hospital/ Listen to our Podcasts: https://soapdirt.podbean.com/ And Check out our always up-to-date General Hospital Spoilers page at: https://soapdirt.com/general-hospital-spoilers/ Check Out our Social Media... Twitter: https://twitter.com/SoapDirtTV Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SoapDirt Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/soapdirt/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@soapdirt Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/soapdirt/

Jason Freed is a first-time guest who's been around the hotel business in a variety of content creating capacities. He joins Glenn, Craig and Producer Dave in a battle of wits. Shouldn't be a problem for him at all with this crew.

Today is Tuesday, Sept. 5, Rad and Hop sit down with Brainerd Warriors football head coach Jason Freed. He talks about the opening win against Mahtomedi, previews the upcoming contest against Elk River and what he did for fun this summer. Featuring Conrad Engstrom and Wade Haapajoki, Dispatch Sports Wrap with Rad and Hop is a product of Forum Communications Co. and is brought to you by Shannon's Auto Body and the sports department at the Brainerd Dispatch. Find more sports coverage throughout the day at BrainerdDispatch.com.

Lake Vermilion has it all...walleyes, bass, northerns, muskies. And it's been a good year. We get all the details and some football talk too with Brainerd Warrior Head Football Coach AND Leisure Outdoor Adventures Guide Jason Freed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Lake Vermilion has it all...walleyes, bass, northerns, muskies. And it's been a good year. We get all the details and some football talk too with Brainerd Warrior Head Football Coach AND Leisure Outdoor Adventures Guide Jason Freed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when you combine journalism, technology, and the hospitality industry? You get an insightful conversation with our guest, Jason Freed, the Hospitality Data Evangelist at MDO. In this episode, Jason shares his journey from reporting to exploring the exciting intersection of technology and pricing in the hotel sector, emphasizing the importance of revenue management technology in creating memorable guest experiences and keeping businesses profitable.The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly left a lasting impact on the hotel industry, but with challenges come opportunities for innovation. In this episode, we discuss the role hospitality technology played in navigating these trying times and the birth of Hotel Recovery 2020, a resource aimed at helping hoteliers make informed decisions during the pandemic. Discover how the crisis accelerated advancements in both front-of-house and back-of-house technology, improving hotel operations and efficiency.As data becomes increasingly relevant in the hospitality industry, we delve into the world of data evangelism with Jason. He enlightens us on how MDO's digital document management and business intelligence systems are empowering hoteliers to make better decisions. We also explore the potential of AI in the travel planning process and the exciting future of technology in both back-end and front-end processes, such as personalization and the connected trip. Don't miss this engaging discussion on the ever-evolving world of hospitality technology!Links:Follow Jason on LinkedInLearn more about MDOJason's latest report: Data-driven Strategies to Move Beyond Rooms Revenue.Total Profit Optimization - Billy Copelan, Sea Island Resorts & Jason Freed, MDOIt's time we celebrate Night Auditors: The unsung heros of hospitality - Jason Freed & Eduardo BurkardWhat did you think about this episode? Join the Hospitality Daily community on LinkedIn and share your thoughts. If you care about hospitality, check out the Masters of Moments podcast where Jake Wurzak interviews top leaders in hospitality. His conversations with Bashar Wali and Matt Marquis are a great place to start, but also check out his solo episodes such as how he underwrites investment deals and a deep dive into GP fees you know about. Music by Clay Bassford of Bespoke Sound: Music Identity Design for Hospitality Brands

This episode is sponsored by MDO and their new report, Data-driven Strategies to Move Beyond Rooms Revenue.Are you making the most of your business's revenue sources? All of them? Jason Freed, Hospitality Data Evangelist at MDO, and Billy Copelan, Director of Revenue Management at Sea Island Resorts, share their insights on unlocking the full potential of total revenue optimization. From Jason's background as a former journalist to Billy's passion for data and revenue management, their experiences have led them to explore the power of data to grow profitability.Delving into the world of business intelligence and revenue management strategies, we uncover how Sea Island Resorts is using data to optimize its total revenue. Jason and Billy discuss the importance of combining data from all revenue sources, and how Sea Island increased its golf course revenue through customized packages and strategic tee times. Plus, learn how accurate forecasting and understanding ancillary spending can boost profits, like predicting the number of steaks sold each night and identifying which servers excel at upselling.But it's not just about profits; providing value is equally important. We explore how Sea Island Resorts is using data analysis to offer incentives like "Member Monday" and additional discounts at specific times to drive business during slower periods. Discover how they leverage tools like PowerBI for interactive reporting and revenue management strategies to enhance membership experiences and optimize revenue.  What did you think about this episode? Join the Hospitality Daily community on LinkedIn and share your thoughts. If you care about hospitality, check out the Masters of Moments podcast where Jake Wurzak interviews top leaders in hospitality. His conversations with Bashar Wali and Matt Marquis are a great place to start, but also check out his solo episodes such as how he underwrites investment deals and a deep dive into GP fees you know about. Music by Clay Bassford of Bespoke Sound: Music Identity Design for Hospitality Brands

Opening weekend was a bummer for Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures. But after getting the boat fixed, all has been well since then. The Leech Lake bite is awesome and he's headed north to Vermilion soon. We cover it all, along with the obligatory Bemidji-Brainerd football talk and a fast five.

Opening weekend was a bummer for Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures. But after getting the boat fixed, all has been well since then. The Leech Lake bite is awesome and he's headed north to Vermilion soon. We cover it all, along with the obligatory Bemidji-Brainerd football talk and a fast five. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored by MDO's Night Auditor Appreciation Day.The Night Auditor plays a vital, yet often overlooked role in running a hotel. In this episode, Jason Freed and Eduardo Burkard from MDO discuss the range of responsibilities this role typically covers while working overnight: from checking people in to covering the kitchen to processing important data for every function of the hotel. While the working hours and wide range of jobs to be done can be tough, this role is often where hotel leaders begin their careers, as it provides exposure to all areas of the business.Jason, Eduardo, and the team at MDO are organizing a campaign to help us show appreciation for these critical members of the hospitality industry, and in this episode share ideas for celebrating and showing appreciation for the people working in this role. Learn more at HotelHeros.org What did you think about this episode? Join the Hospitality Daily community on LinkedIn and share your thoughts. If you care about hospitality, check out the Masters of Moments podcast where Jake Wurzak interviews top leaders in hospitality. His conversations with Bashar Wali and Matt Marquis are a great place to start, but also check out his solo episodes such as how he underwrites investment deals and a deep dive into GP fees you know about. Music by Clay Bassford of Bespoke Sound: Music Identity Design for Hospitality Brands

Today is Tuesday, April 4, 2023, today's episode features an interview with Brainerd football head coach Jason Freed. Featuring Conrad Engstrom and Wade Haapajoki, Dispatch Sports Wrap with Rad and Hop is a product of Forum Communications Co. and is brought to you by Shannon's Auto Body and the sports department at the Brainerd Dispatch. Find more sports coverage throughout the day at BrainerdDispatch.com.

Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures is back on the show. Jason's been guiding up on Vermilion and has the details on this unique Minnesota lake. Walleyes, bass, muskies...we cover it all along with The Fast Five and Jason engages in a bit of "coach speak".

We check in with Leisure Outdoor Adventures' Jason Freed. He's also part of the Walleye Alliance and will be working hard at their annual spring banquet Thursday night. He talks about the Alliance and its goals, what's happening Thursday night, and the upcoming (alleged) soft water season.

Great fishing minds on today's show to get you ready for the weekend. Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures talks Leech and Vermilion. Charlie Worreth of Charlie's Gone Fishing Guide Service on the Winni, Deer River and Grand Rapids areas, and Mandy Uhrich talks Brainerd Lakes fishing and this weekend's Cross Lake Lions Multi-species tournament.

Remington Hotels named Sloan Dean president and CEO just a few months before the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. and decimated its hospitality industry. Dean, a self-described millennial, said the lodging sector is taking on a new look as companies restructure their executive and line-level ranks and leisure travelers hit the road. The post-pandemic world requires new ways of doing business, Dean said, noting new labor models and the emergence of a chief commercial role to oversee all aspects of revenue. Episode 3 of Lodging Luminaries features host Jason Freed and Dean in a thought-provoking conversation about what's ahead for hospitality.

Daniel Del Olmo has led a storied career in hospitality leadership. Today, Del Olmo is president and COO at Sage Hospitality Group, a third-party manager. He joined the company just a couple months before the coronavirus pandemic struck the U.S. and gave the hospitality industry its biggest crisis and comeback challenge ever. In Episode 2 of Lodging Luminaries, host Jason Freed talks with Del Olmo about what keeps him up at night as Sage Hospitality crafts its recovery strategy in an era of uncertainty. Key ingredients, says Del Olmo, are passion for the industry and care for its people.

Raul Leal had been in leadership roles in the boutique lodging sector for 15 years when he first met Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, which includes Virgin Hotels. In a conversation with Lodging Luminaries host Jason Freed, Leal shares his first meeting with Branson more than a decade ago when the business magnate asked him to manage the hotel brand that was just a molecule of an idea at the time. Leal also talks about the future of hospitality industry, how the coronavirus crisis threatens the survival of branded legacy hotels and why everybody wants to work at Virgin Hotels, even during the coronavirus pandemic. Long Live Lodging produces Lodging Luminaries in conjunction with Hotel Recovery, a website and daily newsletter providing resources for hoteliers to get back on their feet.

Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures checks in from Lake Vermilion. We planned on talking Leech Lake, but since he's vacationing on Vermilion we talk Vermilion angling. We also add in some Leech talk, and we have to talk High School Football. Jason and Bemidji Lumberjack Coach Brian Stoffell have a lot in common. The Bemidji-Brainerd rivalry is classic and they know each other well. On top of that, both are long time assistants who are in their first year of head coaching at a very difficult time. We've heard from Stoff on High Noon. Today we'll find out Jason's thoughts on a football-less autumn and playing in the spring.

Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures talks Leech Lake fishing. The walleye bite is going strong and everything else as well. Jason has all the details. Plus the upcoming Ultimate Fishing Camp and he talks a little football with Kev as well. Kev is a Bemidji Lumberjack fan and Jason, after many years as an assistant, is now the Head Brainerd Warrior Football Coach...so it couldn't be avoided.

Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures shares fishing opener tips for success on Minnesota's Leech Lake.  

With Minnesota Fishing opener right around the corner we thought it would be great to sit down with a few of Minnesota's top fishing guides Toby Kvalevog and Jason Freed from Leisure Outdoor Adventures and talk fishing tactics for opener. Not only do the boys chat about fishing opener, we get to hear about both Jason and Toby's story growing up and how they became professional fishing guides today. A long one, but a good one, check it out!! #TeamABOOutfitters #Podcast #walleyeopener #fishing #TheGuideLife

Do you have a coach to help guide you to grow your property management business? If you want to excel at what you're doing, you must have somebody who's playing a bigger game than you. Today, Jason Hull and Jon Ray of DoorGrow continue their discussion on premature expansion in property management. Besides putting planning and process documentation systems into place to be more efficient, they focus on the third system: Communication (internal and external).  You’ll Learn... [01:33] Interruptions and Inefficiency: Every interruption costs 18 minutes of productivity.  [02:13] Pay to Play: Learn from coaches how to protect and guard against interruptions. [02:40] Cut the Slack: Chat tool that creates interruptions and crushes team productivity.  [03:15] Under-Communication: Creates interruptions that prevent momentum and flow. [04:07] Communication System: Only involve those internally that need to know, and find ways to improve external client communication. [06:01] Organizational Structure: Clear line of communication for delegation. [08:15] Who does what? Pair effective visionary with brilliant operator to get things done. [18:18] Sales solves all problems—not always true. Growth feeds business. [19:25] Get things in place, and then it's not premature. [21:00] Jack of All Trades, Master of None: Entrepreneurs find opportunity everywhere.  [25:34] DoorGrow OS: Consolidate systems, processes, professionals to be successful. [31:10] Three Currencies: Growth involves time, money, and effort. Tweetables Every interruption costs about 18 minutes of productivity for one team member.  Under-Communication: Creates as many interruptions that prevent momentum and flow. Every team member you add lowers your pressure and noise. Every team member you add makes your job and life easier.  Get things in place, and then it's not premature. Resources Intercom Help Scout Voxer Process Street Jason Fried of Basecamp Warren Buffett Slack Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)/Traction Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Growing Firm HireSmartVAs Anequim with Mexican VAs DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive DoorGrow Website Score Quiz DoorGrow Cold Leads Calculator Transcript Jon: I have worked with coaches for the past 20 years. I believe in them wholeheartedly. If you're going to excel at what you're doing, you have to have somebody who's playing a bigger game than you. Jason: Welcome, DoorGrow Hackers, to the DoorGrow Show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, and you are interested in growing your business and life, and you are open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow Hacker. DoorGrow Hackers love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges, and freedom that property management brings. Many in real estate think you’re crazy for doing it, you think they’re crazy for not because you realize that property management is the ultimate high-trust gateway to real estate deals, relationships, and residual income. At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management businesses and their owners. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. I’m your host, property management growth expert, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow. Now, let’s get into the show. I’m hanging out here with someone else from DoorGrow, Jon Ray. Jon: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Jason: The third system that's necessary so that you can avoid premature expansion is you need an internal communication system. If you're still operating on sneakernet, or constant interruptions like sneakernet as they walk into your office all the time and interrupt you, then you're operating really inefficiently. Every interruption costs you about 18 minutes of productivity for one team member. If one team member interrupts another team member that's 18 minutes times 2. I don't know what that is, but it's more than a half-hour. Jon: Thirty-six minutes. Jason: Too many minutes, like 40 minutes down the drain because two people decided to talk to each other, or one person interrupted somebody else. You have to protect and guard against interruptions. All of this stuff is stuff that has to be learned. It's stuff that I've had to pay lots of money to learn from different coaches.  I had met with Jason Freed, the creator of Basecamp, and hung out with me on a call like this for 90 minutes. He cut my staffing costs in half overnight. We're high tech. We were using all kinds of technology. He pointed out how we are using this chat tool that had group rings. It was causing everybody to interrupt everybody all the time. Everybody feels like they had to read everything. It made our entire business completely inefficient. The software was Slack for those of you that are big Slack fans. Slack was absolutely killing and crushing our productivity as a team. It is basically an endless diarrhea without context or stream of information for every single project. Everyone on the team felt like they had to read every single thing. Jon: One of the things that entrepreneurs are aware of is that when a team is under communicated, that's not a good thing. But there's this idea that maybe over-communication is the way to go. That's actually just as bad, if not as bad, because it creates so many interruptions that then prevent people from finding the momentum and flow that allows them to be most efficient. Jason: The reason it costs you 18 minutes of productivity is because that's about how long after somebody that causes interruption, regardless of how much time they're spending with you. They might spend 15 minutes with you, and then it's 18 minutes. It takes time to get back into the flow. What was I doing? How do I rebuild this house of cards that I was building before Steve came in from finance and interrupted everything? There needs to be an internal communication system that works effectively for the team that only involves the people that need to know or deal with a certain thing at a certain given time, rather than everybody needing to see everything. If you're a control freak as an entrepreneur, and you need to know everything, and see everything, you're probably the biggest bottleneck in the company. You need a planning system, you need a process and documentation system, you need an internal communication system. The other system that you need is you need an external communication system. You need a client communication system that makes it easy. We use Intercom. Some people will use HubScout. You also might use your property management software in some ways for this. You might have phones, but you have to clearly have an effective client communication system. That's something we're always working on improving is client communication. We use Voxer internally as a team, and some of my coaching clients will use that as well. We've got a lot of tools that we use to increase communication, but most of it is one-on-one. It's not causing big group interruptions or situations like that. Jon: An important thing to reference here—when it comes to creating the right communication systems—is that there has to be clear lines for delegation. Part of your process documentation needs to be letting each employee at each level and in each role understand what type of tasks are appropriate to delegate up to you and what needs to be delegated down. Jason: All that comes with the process documentation, but planning helps with that a lot at that system, and then you need an internal communication system. As part of that, that's kind of the organizational structure. There needs to be a clear line of communication where somebody reports to somebody. I was talking with a property manager the other day. They had their part of another business. What she said is that this other business that she's a part of—outside of a property management business—that there are three bosses. Over one department there's two managers. I said, “Well, how did the team members know which one to go to?” I said, “Are they very different personality-wise? Do they get different answers?” She's like, “Absolutely.” So then, how do they know which one to go to? There's so much confusion in this entity. She could see it. Me hearing about it just made my skin crawl because I was like, “I would feel so crazy and uncomfortable because it sounds like a nightmare.” There's all this infighting and politics and all the stuff going on because nobody has any clarity. People don't even know. She said somebody got promoted in this business and everybody said, “Hey, congratulations.” There was a celebration. Jon: I’m going to take this time and just pause you. I know that there are people out there that are saying, “This sounds like a lot of work. I'm already too stressed out.” There's so much resistance to putting in this work. What we're talking about is do you want to win at a new level of the maze? Do you want to be a high achiever? Because if you're satisfied with being in this mediocre average zone of success, then maybe you don't need all of this. If you ever want to get to a level where you're dominating your local marketplace, and you're running a business that isn't just growing but is growing comfortably, these things are mandatory, right? Jason: Yeah. I can empathize with that strongly. The little story—just to wrap it—was everybody was congratulating this person. They were asking him, “Cool. What are you going to do now?” He said, “I don't know. I’ll figure it out as I go, I guess.”  Anyway, let's go back to the question. What was the question again? Sorry, I have to finish the thread. Jon: There's so much resistance around showing up and having to actually do all of this stuff. Maybe you can talk about why it's important to push through that resistance, or how to do that? Then why ultimately, the short term resistance and discomfort leads to a more comfortable, more profitable, and more fun business down the line? Jason: I just would rather kill the resistance. Here's what I realized. I had a ton of resistance. When I started working with some of the best operational companies, ­­I was working with probably the best operational coach that might exist in the business world. I had already studied traction, and EoS (end of sale), and I'd heard of the Rockefeller Habits, and scaling up, and I went to this thing called warrior. There are other systems out there similar to the 90-day year. All these planning systems have some commonalities between them, which I sort of outlined when we discussed the planning system. I felt a ton of anxiety when I was going and learning this stuff. You want to know why? Because I'm not the person that should be doing that stuff. That kind of stuff is stuff that operationally minded people love. I can geek out on a system like I could see the genius in it, but me doing it, and me implementing it, me running meetings, I'm not the person to do that. Most CEOs and entrepreneurs are the worst to run team meetings, to manage their team, to manage operations, to manage operational processes. That's why you'll see almost any visionary—that's really effective—paired up with some sort of person that's operationally brilliant. It gives them the freedom to create ideas, create a vision. The operator helps them make that stuff come true and happen. Jon: If I'm a property manager and I'm still in that first sandtrap, and maybe I'm not even doing more than a quarter-million a year in revenue, and I don't really have the budget to bring these people on. Can you talk about what it would look like to start thinking about a hiring trajectory and mapping out some of the milestones of how I can get to this place? Jason: This is a learned process to know clearly where your time is going, how you're the biggest bottleneck in the business, what needs to happen next? This is stuff that we teach, but it's a process. There's a system for knowing exactly what you need next to take the business to the next level. It's part of the stuff that we teach clients.  Ultimately, for those that maybe they’re the lower level like, “I can't hire a COO. I can't hire an operational manager. I can't even hire an operations assistant yet.” Maybe they just get a personal assistant, executive assistant, somebody that loves planning. They love process. They love documenting things. They love systems. They geek out on these things. They like calendars and spreadsheets. They'd love to color coordinate sock drawers. Their closet is organized. Their desk is spotless. These are not typical visionary entrepreneur personality types that are high-driven types of people. If you are not that personality type—now on property management, you do get some operationally-minded people, but they might not also be the driver. They may need to get a BDM (business development manager) in the business. Somebody that's out there crushing it, and closing deals, and aggressive because maybe they're that operationally-minded person. That's why I think every business needs to be built around you, the entrepreneur, but if you're hearing this and you're getting anxious. You're like, “All these systems, all this stuff,” and you're overwhelmed. That probably means you're not the operations-minded person. The operations person, they probably have some of these, and they get excited about that. Those property managers are the ones that are like, “I can't grow yet. We're working on all of our systems and processes first,” and they have 10 doors. They're documenting everything and getting everything dialed in and then you have the opposite. You have to figure out which type are you? The other thing to point out is this stuff doesn't make your life crazier, and it doesn't make your life more chaotic, and it doesn't feel it's not more work. Because when you start to get these things implemented, and you're offloading, and you're systemizing, and you have planning, and you have vision, your team can actually help you do all of this. Every team member you add actually lowers your pressure and noise. Every team member I've added to the team has made my job and life easier. I'm doing less. Every day I'm doing less. Every new person—I brought you on—I’m doing less. What that allows me to do is to do more of the things that I really should be doing, the things that I'd really love, the things that really make me feel alive. I'm to the point now that I enjoy doing sales, but you've taken that off my plate, and you're taking some of the marketing stuff off my plate. I enjoy doing marketing, but there are things that I now want to do more than those things. As you build out your team—the very first person you need usually is an assistant, very first person. Hopefully, that's a person that you can grow into the role of being an operations assistant, an operations manager, maybe a COO of your company at some point if they’re brilliant and effective enough. Because that's going to lower your pressure significantly, and they're going to help you get all of this stuff dialed in and implemented. Jon: I know a lot of people have hired somebody at $10 an hour to be a personal assistant. They've had a bad experience, or that person just didn't really do what they were supposed to do. Is there some way to think about bringing on a personal assistant where that's actually going to be a successful relationship? Jason: Oh man. We've had people in the show like HireSmartVAs and Anequim with the Mexican VAs. If you're not an expert, and you don't know how to answer that question, and you want to just get a virtual assistant like those, or a great assistant we've had on the show—if you want a US-based assistant, you need help. Because you don't know how to identify these people. The mistake we make as entrepreneurs is we tend to hire people we like or that are like us. That's not the person you usually need. You usually need a person that's somewhat your opposite that can balance you out, and handle the things, and take things off your plate that gives you more pressure noise. We have a process we take people through to identify that so that you can build up the ultimate job description for your dream team member. The silliest thing I ever hear—and I mentioned this in some of the system shows—is when an entrepreneur starts asking around, “What do you have your assistant do?” That's like walking around the grocery store asking people, “Hey, what do you eat? What are you having for dinner?” Because they have no clarity. You're not ready to hire. It's not what they can do, it's what do you need? You have to get really clear on what do you not enjoy? What drains you? What's sapping your energy? What is that has alignment with you personally? That's one of the things we get people really strong clarity on is who they are, what they should and shouldn't be doing, so the business can be built around the entrepreneur instead of built around somebody else's system, or somebody else's process. This is my major problem with traction and some of these other systems. It’s building according to somebody's ideal system, which ironically is a system that requires some special coach that's super expensive that you have to do it that one exact way. You need this thing called an integrator that is only one that can do it. Jon: I was going to say I think the people that I see who are the worst at delegation are really nice people. Because really nice people hate asking other people to do stuff that they don't want to do themselves. The misconception there is that other people like the same type of work that you like. You can always find somebody who loves to do the things that you hate to do. That's how you should be thinking about hiring. Let me find somebody that I can bring on as an assistant who can start to help me offload all the things I don't want to do, but they love doing those things. Jason: The biggest mistake we can make as an entrepreneur in our business—when it comes to team members—is to assume that our team members think the way we do. Almost none of them do. They're very different. Otherwise, they'd be entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are just different. My team members love being told what to do each day and having clear ideas of what to do. Me, I want freedom and I want autonomy. There are huge differences. You need to recognize that the stuff that you hate doing, somebody loves doing that. I don't like calendars. I don't like staring at spreadsheets all day. I don't like doing graphic design in front of a computer all day. Can I do these? Can I enjoy them sometimes? Yes, but that doesn't mean that that's my best use in the business or in life and that I want to do that. My team members that love those things, they love those things. They could do that every day. That's just fun for them. I don't ever have to motivate them. That's how I know I've gotten somebody in the right position because they love doing what they're doing. Without getting too far off-track—because we could do a whole episode just on hiring, planning, whatever. Jon: How does all this tie back into premature expansion and whether or not I as a property manager am ready to expand? Jason: The one other system we didn't mention is you need a sales process and system. You need some growth system that's feeding the business. This might be the most important. Some say sales solves all problems. Not totally true, but without sales, you don't have a business. There's no revenue. You can't pay your team members. Things get scary. You can't pay your mortgage, or rent, or whatever you’re doing, you can't pay the lease on your building. Sales have to be happening. Bit growth has to be happening in the business. All of these things go together. You need all these different systems in order to work. If you have all these systems, then you almost have a franchise model in which you can open up another office, or a new location, expand into a new market. Ultimately, you're going to want to keep as much as possible—probably centralized—to lower operational costs, to reduce redundancies, and get what you need to support that new location. Then you know, all right, this is not premature. We've thought this out. The baby is ready to be born. This is all set up. The reason I call premature expansion because there's nothing premature that is usually considered positive. Anything that's premature—whatever you can think of—is usually a bad thing. I wanted people to understand it's too early, it's too early. You don't have things in place. Get the things in place, and then it's not premature. Does that mean you're going to learn? Yeah, you're still going to learn. Are there going to be mistakes? Absolutely. Is it going to be messy sometimes? Sure, but that's running a business. Perfect businesses don't exist. That's part of just what's going to happen. If you're dealing with that, the idea of starting this new location expanding everything else and everything else is already a mess, you're just pouring gasoline on a fire that's already there and it's just getting worse. Jon: These processes and systems really give you a leverage that allows you to be really successful in a lot of different styles of expansion. Whether that's opening another office, or acquiring something. The best investors in the world—like Warren Buffett—are essentially people who are really good at systems and processes. When they go and acquire a business that's in chaos, they know that they can immediately implement the right systems, processes, and management team, and that business will become profitable very quickly. It puts you in a position where you have a huge competitive advantage over anybody who's just bootstrapping it or shooting from the hip. Jason: Another form of premature expansion is death by opportunity. Entrepreneurs, we see opportunities everywhere. You know you're the opportunist type of property manager or entrepreneur business owner if you are like, “We can start a roofing company. Let's start a maintenance company and we could serve these other companies. Let's do roofing. Let's get a house cleaning business. Let's do carpet cleaning.” I know business owners that they have new property management, and they have seven or eight other businesses. Jon: It's like the jack of all trades, master of none. Jason: Some of them can be good. They can build out teams, they can have things really well dialed in. If you learn to do it for one—like you we're saying—you can do this for all of these businesses and make sure that it's going well. But if one's a mess, you're just adding more problems and making it more challenging. What it does is it dilutes focus. Focus is one of the key ingredients for making money. If you want to make a certain amount of money, and you're like, “Well, let's add more services.” You would think that would add more money. What it usually does for most entrepreneurs is it just dilutes what they can already do. It just divides that up and it becomes more and more challenging. It's a lot easier to make a million dollars in one company than a million dollars to 10 annually. That's another form of premature expansion. That all comes back to the planning system. The planning system, and our vision, and goals as a company give me constraints as an entrepreneur and as a visionary. I'm like, “We could do this and we could do that.” My team is like, “We can't. We've got all these goals that we’re working towards. We've got this, we got this. Maybe we can make room for that next quarter or next year.” This protects them from the grenade when I come back from the conference and I have all these ideas and want to change everything. They'll say, “I can see that I don't want to lose sight of what we have going already and destroy that momentum. I want to achieve these objectives. It's going to get us money. It's going to get us making a difference. All these things that I want. We need to keep that going. Then we can figure out where that can fit in.” It just allows us to not just go through the buffet line, throw a ton of stuff on a plate, and then end up not being able to utilize even half of it. Jon: Once everything that you're talking about—the communication systems, the processes, the systems—once all that's in place, it also gives your staff and your employees a mechanism for delivering feedback to you, even if that's uncomfortable feedback. Almost always—maybe not almost always, but at least in the businesses that I've run as a high-level manager—the employees who are actually doing the operations a lot of the time have really solid ideas on how to make things more efficient, but they feel afraid of communicating those up. By opening up those channels of communication and making it so that it's not uncomfortable for a lower-level employee to give a great idea and have that idea be received, you can actually empower your team to fix a lot of the inefficiencies. Jason: Here's a real simple thing that I thought of that you can recognize if you're ready for premature expansion. If you are the one running all your team meetings, and you're the first to speak in all those meetings, you're already losing. Have you noticed that I'm not running the meetings, and everyone asks me what I think less? “Hey, are you stuck on anything?” I'm the last one to go. Because it's so easy for us as entrepreneurs to say, “Hey, here's my idea. Everyone should do this.” Then when you ask your team members they're going to go, “Yeah, what the boss says. He pays me. That sounds like a good idea. I'll go with what he says. That's the safest answer.” Jon: Growth in all levels—personally and it when it's directly related to revenue—means that there has to be an integration of discomfort sometimes. The proper communication levels mitigate and buffer the discomfort that employees have for communicating good ideas. Oftentimes, the people on the ground level are the ones most capable of finding the thing that's going to work for your current team dynamic. Jason: This is something we've been thinking about a while. We run our business using a system that we called DoorGrow OS that I feel like is one of the most brilliant planning systems out there. It's a consolidation of several different planning systems, operational coaches I've worked with, having brilliant operators on my team. It's something I built out even software-wise that we use internally as a team. You've just started to get a taste of this. There's clarity. There's communication. Everyone knows what they're doing. We're hitting targets, and goals, and objectives each week. The momentum is strong. This is how we grew 300% in a year. Jon: It's a really interesting way of running a team. I've run a lot of teams that have a lot of branches underneath the management. This just provides a level of efficiency and oversight that still makes upward and downward communication very feasible and very easy. Maybe at some point, I'll convince you to share that system with the rest of the world, but right now, it's been really interesting for me to understand some of those principles and see how the years and years of working with all these coaches have been baked into some of these ideas and the things that you're identifying as the ways to know whether what you're doing is premature expansion or actually profitable growth. I don't know if you have anything else on your list, but I know that we're starting to get a little bit long. Maybe we could just recap what we’ve talked about. I'll turn it over to you for any final words of how somebody can take what we spoke about in this podcast and make it actionable. For somebody who has nodded their head to at least one or two of the things that you said during this podcast, what should be their next step for starting to figure out how they can start to tweak the knobs and levers of their business in order to be more in line with what will actually make them successful? Jason: Every business owner is doing the best they can with what they know. Every person on the planet really is doing the best they can with the limited access to knowledge and resources they currently possess. If you knew better, you would do better. There's a lot of things I don't know. There's a lot of things that I can't see. My best feedback is—you've probably heard a lot of ideas on this recording. Maybe you were nodding your head, but ultimately, if you feel stuck, or you don't feel like you're going as fast as you want, or you don't feel like your company's in momentum, then you need help. You need to reach out. That's one of the scariest things for us to do as entrepreneurs, but I do it. I have coaches that I pay. I go and I get help. If I don't know something, I hire a coach. I've got an event I’m planning on going to in March to learn something that I feel like I'm weak at in the business. Normally I would hand up to other team members but something I've avoided that I need to know more about. You need to have enough vulnerability to recognize that you can't do it all on your own. You're not Atlas holding the entire globe on your back. You need to get support.  If you don't feel like you have support, if you don't feel like you have somebody in your corner, if you feel like you're the smartest person in the room in your company, and everybody's just going to say yes to whatever you throw at them, there's a big problem. You've got big blind spots. You need to reach out. You need to get help. That could be us at DoorGrow. Set up a call with us, reach out. We can help you identify some of the blind spots, some of the leaks, some of the inefficiencies, and get you into a high state of momentum. We start in those five core functions at the very beginning. Jon: I want to just mention—because I can feel that somebody just had some resistance to, “You can't do it on your own. You need a coach.” That almost sounds too salesy. Maybe we could alter that statement and soften it for that person who feels resistance to that because you could do it on your own. You could go to the bookstore. You could buy all the books. You could read through them all. You could slowly implement things, and see what works, and what doesn't work, and it would take you forever, or you can work with a coach and collapse time. For people who are looking to collapse time, that's when it becomes incredibly valuable to work with somebody who's already done all of that research and extracted the best practices, split testing all the ideas and figured out what works. Now, you can have a roadmap for how to get to success in the quickest way possible instead of having to trial and error your way down the road. Jason: I am a big fan of trial and error, but I do also like collapsing time. My coaches have helped me collapse time dramatically. I was that guy. I was for many years. I was the guy that thought I could watch another Youtube video, or read another book, and I could figure out on my own. It took a ton of time. You have to recognize there are at least three currencies. If you want growth, it involves time, it's going to involve money, and it's going to involve focus, or energy, or work, or effort, whatever you want to call it. Those could probably be broken up even further, but you've got these three currencies. If you use all three and invest all three you can grow faster. If you decide, “I'm not going to invest money. I don’t want to go hire a coach. I don't want to pay DoorGrow. I don’t want to go spend money on this.” Then you can go buy cheap things like books, and watch free YouTube videos, and get a lot of some good stuff. Some stuff that's leading you the wrong way but you don't know. They're experts so maybe they'll be telling the truth. You try it out. Then what ends up happening is it's just going to take infinitely more time. That was my challenge. I spent a massive amount of time. It was painful. When I finally started to invest serious money towards the best that I could afford at the time, I collapsed time dramatically, and I always made that money back. Not even just made it back. I made it back monthly. I was making more than I paid the coach. That's almost been my experience with every coach. I've got so many coaches that I paid $5000 a month. It gets ridiculous, but do I make more of that in a month? Absolutely. Jon: One of the things that I hear on the calls is if someone isn't seriously setting goals for their business, it feels to me like it's because they're afraid that they're not going to hit them. If they don't say them out loud then they don't have to suffer the defeat of not hitting it. One of the reasons to work with a coach is to have the accountability and the hand-holding required to get you over that resistance and that hump so that you can actually start hitting those numbers. The first time that you hit one of the goals that you set, you get addicted to it. You want to keep hitting goals, but because people have set so many goals in the past and then failed at hitting them, they don't set goals anymore. Jason: They don’t trust themselves. Jon: One of the things that a good coach can do is get you back in alignment with your goals so that you recognize that that vision is possible to hit. That's part of that collapsing time. There's a ton of great business books out there, there's a ton of great niche courses out there. You can throw money into a million different ways to “grow your business,” but if you're not looking at your business holistically, and you're just looking to fix the symptom with some kind of a band-aid, you're never going to be an A-player in anything that you're doing. There's an opportunity to level up by working with a coach—whether that's DoorGrow or somebody else. I have worked with coaches for the past 20 years. I believe in them wholeheartedly. If you're going to excel at what you're doing, you have to have somebody who's playing a bigger game than you. Jason: That's very true. I agree. Let's end on that note. Jon, I appreciate you and hanging out with you again. Those that are watching, make sure to—if you're watching this on Youtube—subscribe, like us. If you're hearing this in iTunes, please, be sure to leave us some feedback. We want to hear your real feedback there. Leave us a review. That helps us out. Jon: I’m also going to say before this goes out. Join us in the Facebook group because this can be an ongoing conversation that we have in the Facebook group. We have so many stellar examples of property managers who are doing all the right things there. You can interface with them, you can interface with the people on our team, and you can tell us what's working, not working in your business. Then if you disagree with everything that we just said, we invite you to come and have that conversation as well. Because any type of conversation whether you're praising what we're doing or trying to chip it down with an ax is going to allow us to grow, and iterate, and become better. We want to have you in that group. Jason: Well said. Until next time, everybody. To our mutual growth. Bye, everyone. You just listened to the DoorGrow Show. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet, in the DoorGrow Club. Join your fellow DoorGrow Hackers at doorgrowclub.com. Listen, everyone is doing the same stuff. SEO, PPC, pay-per-lead, content, social, direct mail, and they still struggle to grow. At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge in getting deals and growing your business. Find out more at doorgrow.com. Find any show notes or links from today’s episode on our blog at doorgrow.com. To get notified of future events and news, subscribe to our newsletter at doorgrow.com/subscribe. Until next time, take what you learn and start DoorGrow hacking your business and your life.

I think you'll agree with me when I say, it's essential to have a large organization and a ton more employees to be one of the industries included in the Inc 500, or is it? Well, it turns out that you don't really need to be that massive. In this episode, learn how Matt Laird changed the entire scope of the oil industry with just a simple step and an overhead of less than 10 to hit the Inc 500. ----- Automated Transcript Below: Dean Soto 0:01 Hey, this is Dean Soto, founder of freedominfiveminutes.com and prosulum.com, P-R-O-S-U-L-U-M.com and we're here again with another freedom in five minutes podcast episode. Today's topic is this, disrupting the oil industry with Matt Laird. That and more coming up. Cool! So today I have a very, very, very, very special guest. Someone who is near and dear to me and who is also completely disrupting a, an industry that is, for lack of a better word, extremely archaic, but still extremely profitable and brings in a lot of revenue. I'm here with Matt Laird from Camrock Oil & Supply. Matt, how are you doing my friend? Matt Laird 1:02 Man, life is good Dean. Thanks for having me. Dean Soto 1:04 Oh, no problem. It's, it's a long time coming I've, I've been wanting to interview Matt for quite some time, but I wanted things to be like perfect man. Always, I'm always like, okay, well I want it, I want, I want a lot of people to hear him. I wanted a lot of people to hear your story and, and what all the stuff that you've been able to do. And because it really is truly amazing what you're able to do right now. And but all that being said, how in the heck, to first tell us a little bit about yourself and what industry you're in and how did you end up being a part of the whole oil industry in general? Matt Laird 1:48 So, to start now with, with who I am. So, I'm a father of three beautiful daughters, from ages 16 down to five. Dean Soto 1:55 Nice. Matt Laird 1:56 Have an amazing wife, who's, who's from this part of the world which we'll get into why I'm here. But just to start out early so soon as I graduated out of high school and started looking for, for things to do, I found that I wasn't near as good at sports as I, as I had once thought. So I found the next best thing, so I found a drilling rig. So, basically, over the course of the next 20 years, I worked my way up into the drilling ranks. So I started at the bottom, rose about, worked my way all the way up to where I was a drilling consultant. I actually own the company who had several drilling consultants. So I was basically, my job was to manage the people who ran the entire drilling operation well. Really good money, really fun job. Basically, really hard job to raise a family. So when you wake up and you realize it for, for 19 years you've been away from home 300 days a year and nights. Dean Soto 3:02 Holy moly. Matt Laird 3:03 Basically, you have to find your way, right? So, about five years ago, we, we made some, some partners, started a business using Dave Ramsey's logic. We went to build the boat and get the boat close enough to the shore to step off and not make a huge jump. So we, we started a business in the lubrication and filtration business, industry. So, servicing the oil for was our original goal. We were, we're basically a full on, lubricant like motor oils and greases, full line lubricants and then filtrations, just being like your air filters and oil filters similar to what you would put on your car but in a little bit bigger scope. So that brings us up. We've had some really good successes over the last five years. Good enough that I was able to actually sell my consulting company and come on full time so that I'm home every night. If, if I'm not home at night is because I'm on vacation. So, that's where I'm at today so wherever you want to take it, it's yours. Dean Soto 4:12 So, for a little bit of background for those listening, I, so I always pride myself on making very fast decisions like five minutes decisions and, and doing things that will allow me to have more time or whatever, whatever it might be. Matt is on a whole another level. So, that was, that was definitely a, an amazing background. Now, one thing that people don't realize is that, that you, that the consulting side of things, you were making a lot of money which you said and you, like you said you were gone pretty much the entire year away from your family but you very quickly, given the data that you had and, and everything, you very quickly made that decision to let go of that whole entire thing which was bringing in a lot of revenue for you, you know? Matt Laird 5:07 It was, yeah, it was. It was a lot of money to walk away from but at some point, you had to realize what your family's worth. If I didn't make a decision really quickly, I would have just had a lot of money in a empty house. Dean Soto 5:22 I love it. Like, see this is, this is, so from here on out now that you're, you know, while you're listening to this, this, this is the type of man that Matt is and so just keep that in mind as we move forward through all of this. So, it's just absolutely amazing what he, what he and that just quick decision, literally it was like an overnight decision where he's like, I'm done. So it's, it's absolutely just inspiring. So all that being said, give me kind of the day to day with Camrock Oil & Supply and, and we'll talk about how you've been actually disrupting the industry. Like when you first built this business, like, like, what, what were some of likes, kind, kind of what's you in a typical day? Like, what are you servicing? What are you typically doing? Matt Laird 6:12 So early on in this business, we were just primarily a filtration company. So we just had a whole bunch of filters and a whole bunch of people that needed filters. So we've got really big trucks and we fill them up with filters. And we, we drove around and, and realized pretty quickly that those filters are mostly air and there wasn't enough margin, huge invoices but no margin. So we began to, to seek out something that was more profitable, that is more needed in the market that would fit really well with our filter company. So as we added the bulk lubricants, we were able to definitely get into a niche. So we're, we're one of our own, so there's not many small independent lubrication filtration company. So there is some small independent oil companies. And then there's some parts houses, there's not really a, a merger between the two of lubrication filtration. But once we've realized that these two works so well together, we're able to infiltrate these markets that the person who's selling just oil couldn't get into with a person that's just selling filters or truck parts getting into. So basically what we are is when we walk in the house, walk into a shop. We've got a full line of outside sales people who do excellent job at getting us into facilities. But when we walk in the door, we can pride ourselves to say that we're going to get the best service, you're going to get the best overall products because we're able to, to cover needs and niches that no one else can do. So, as far as Camrock as a business, we're a full outside sales. Full delivery business that covers all lubrication filtration. But as far as what I do every day, all I really do is just grow the business. So I spend approximately two hours a day working in the business, you know, about eight to ten hours working on the business. So basically, I pulled myself out of operations so that I can focus on going forward and moving the needle, disrupting the industry not just selling more cardboard boxes, actually finding a way to change the entire scope of the industry. Dean Soto 8:37 That's it, that, that so, so in this industry, because I remember you'd went to a conference not too long ago and you're like, holy crap, like it's, yeah, people tend, in your industry tend to be doing the exact same thing like what differentiates you from, say, your closest competitor with, what is like the big key factor that, that you're doing in this whole filtration and lubrication business that people, if they were if you know if the old school oil type were looking at you they'd be basically say, you know, that's impossible? Matt Laird 9:17 So basically, the way that this deal works is that I'm an old industry. I'm in an industry where there's no influx of new people because the cost and the, just the ability to get into this industry is so expensive and so time consuming. There's not really a big welcome party for new distributors in the market. So my closest competitor in the lubrication side does over a billion a year. So they're a huge, big company that's not nimble, that doesn't care about their quality, doesn't care about their personal services. They're more worried about how many gallons they can sell all these big accounts so, so with this big company growing bigger, and essentially just through acquisitions and mergers taking over all of the small companies, it's just leaving a huge gap for me to get in with a little better service. Maybe not even as well as good a price but just a better service of better customer relationship and a little more technology. Basically, at the point where I'm at now, if I could do something, you know, maybe I don't put my guys on a route, maybe me I go and get people their stuff when they need it coz I'm not worried about every single penny. I could charge a little more margin. And then on my filter side, in our truck parts as well. We've figured out ways through the market that we can offer a product at basically a more competitive price than, than what your auto parts stores can do because of the sheer volume that we do. So, in our market, we have two small auto parts stores, and one decently sized truck parts store. So, I do more in filtration sales per month than the three of those do combined. So, just in the sheer volume that I move in my filtration I'm able to use my 10 or 12 x buying power to push down the, the cost of the point where I'm competitive so that I can cover my entire market with lubrication filtration. So, for what, I do a little better on my lubrication side than what the competitor does as far as quality goes, but my price is slightly higher, but my pricing on the other filtration covers that gap. So it's basically, if you use me for, for all of these product lines that I offer, my price is competitive with what you're paying across the board, yet you're getting a far superior service. Dean Soto 12:05 Hmm, hmm. So that's, that's amazing. Because, because, essentially it's the choice between do, do I go with this big huge company to service all of the, the things that I need who doesn't care about me because I, you know, I'm just one of maybe thousands or one of maybe 10,000 accounts, and they just want to sell me stuff. And that's about it and take it or leave it. Or, I can get the same or better discount from you and know that I'm actually being taken care of. Like that to me is like a huge, huge thing, which has always been good for at least my business has been that ability to scale personal attention and the fact that you can with what you're doing compete with this billion dollar company who's your next biggest competitor. There's very, you have no other competitors, because the barriers to entry, and yet you're able to be small enough to give that, that scale personal attention. That's, that's huge. And do you see, like with your customers, you see a, do you see in them, like a, like appreciation of that? Matt Laird 13:30 So I mean, I would just assume that appreciation or voting is done with your checkbook. So in the, in the five years we've been in business, we've lost a few customers to mergers and acquisitions, but as far as retaining a customer, there's only two customers in the history of our entire company that have actually gone somewhere else. Dean Soto 13:52 Wow. Matt Laird 13:53 Though, of every customer I've ever sold a product to, I've only had two of the hundred or probably pretty high in the hundreds that have ever actually quit working, quit using me and went somewhere else. So I think that our, our culture and our customer focus in our pricing structure and everything else is really, once someone comes to us and learned the way we do things, and learns our culture and realize that we do care is not just something we sell from the street. They never leave. Not to this, up to this point, it's been scalable, so it was scalable at one customer, scalable at 60, scalable at 200. And we just continue to just push that culture into our salespeople. So everyone that touches my customer knows the culture, knows that it's our determination that they do right. And I also have several of my salespeople that, that will follow up and actually we'll cross pollinate between customers just to make sure that there's not any issue. Dean Soto 15:06 Wow. Dude, people would kill for that churn rate, man. The, I mean, most you know a lot of service businesses that you're looking at, 10 to 25%, you know, churn rate people leaving and, and for you to have you know below, below 2%? I mean, it depends on how many hundreds you have like that's a super low and super high, you know super high retention rate that, that a lot of companies would die for. Oh my gosh, that's, that's, that's absolutely amazing, dude. Like so, with like, without that being said this, so a lot of people would think, okay well yeah, well, it's because Matt is, you know, you know smaller company and, and yeah, you know smaller companies, you're able to have the the more personal attention and yada, yada and but, but one thing that people might not realize is that you actually recently hit the Inc 500, right? Matt Laird 16:12 We did we, we hit Inc 500. Number three in the state of Oklahoma. I believe it was 36 in the energy sector. Dean Soto 16:20 Wow. See, look at that. So, how in the heck man, how do you? I mean, I know because you, you follow, you know, books and thoughts like Jason Freed's and David Hannah Meyer Hanson's rework and a whole bunch of other really, really. Matt Laird 16:39 That rework is sitting on my desk right now. Dean Soto 16:40 Yeah, that's why I love you. So, like, you have to grow, right? These days, you know, contrary to popular belief, you know, or you know, I shouldn't say contrary to popular belief, but popular belief is that you have to be this in order to hit the Inc 500 at all, you have to be this huge organization with you know, hundreds of employees, you know how many hundreds of employees you have, man? Matt Laird 17:06 I have about three. Dean Soto 17:10 Not 300? Three employees, right? Matt Laird 17:12 No, no, I have three employees and then I have four outside sales that are, they're contracts that they have other, other lines that they sell other than just mine so, and then my wife and I. So there's essentially less than 10 people in the whole building and then I'm running two, one part-time and one full-time VSA that do all my background stuff, everything that nobody, nobody sees, I have VSAs doing it. Dean Soto 17:38 So cool, dude. Yeah, so then that's, that's, that's one of the reasons why I was so excited to have you on is just how, how you are able to do all of that with such a small amount of overhead when it comes to at least payroll, you know. So what, so like, what one, how, how did you go about structuring that to where you know your next biggest competitor, I'm sure has way more employees than you do because most Inc 500 companies do have a ton more employees like, what, what was going through your mind? And how did you actually make it a reality to have such a small organization that's, that is able to deliver such value that you're able to hit the Inc 500? Matt Laird 18:28 Ok, so there's a lot of pivots along the way. But when we originally started the company with myself and two other partners, we started the company as an investment that we would oversee not as a business we would run day to day. Basically everything was put in place from day one that basically we started with The E-Myth Revisited, right? So the first employee was day one and that employee had to do this, this and this. And then as we grew, we're going to add another, we're gonna add another, we're gonna add another, that didn't work. So it didn't work at all. Basically, this was about three and a half to four years of me working my other job, and then putting in 40 to 50 hours a week on this job plus my business partners as well. I had three different times. I hired someone who was Six Sigma, or what's this? Had all the abbreviations in front of their name and basically, I hired three different people at three different times to try to grow the company. And I had zero success with any of them. So, every single time I would grow up to 8,10, 12 people, then I would go back and realize that this isn't working, that we're, we're losing money, that we're failing that, you know that this is not the path we need to be on. So there was three times In the growth of the five years that we actually ended up back with one employee. Dean Soto 20:04 Wow, wow. Matt Laird 20:06 And one sales person, other than myself. Dean Soto 20:09 Yeah. Matt Laird 20:11 But over the course, so what I finally realized was that, it's not the people, right? So the people that I hire aren't bad people. What I realized was that there's no way I can increase the, increase the ability of my company if I cannot get beyond two to three people, and my culture shift. So basically, that's where I realized that everything had to be documented. Everything has to be written down, checklist. Everything has to be repeated. So how do we, how do we go to a customer today? And we drop off their products and we throw them in the middle of the floor, and they're super upset and then the next day we go back and we put them all on the shelf. Well, that was happening at some point, right? So, maybe not that dramatic but there was, at one point there was no system. There was no follow up, there was no, there was no way that anybody other than my one delivery guy that's always been with me. Dean Soto 21:15 Yeah. Matt Laird 21:16 And my one employee that's always been with me in the office. So if those two people weren't doing it. If anybody else was doing it, they would get sloppy? Dean Soto 21:24 Yeah. Matt Laird 21:24 Well, I just realized that those people aren't training because they don't have any guidelines to train off of. Dean Soto 21:30 Yeah. Matt Laird 21:30 So I've trained them so they know. But it's just the carbon copy effect. And every time I get to the next person, it's lesser of a solid line. Dean Soto 21:39 Yeah. Matt Laird 21:39 And then I get to the next person, then it's a dotted line, and then I get to the next person, and the next person is costing me more money than they're making. So it's, it's basically, I went through this transition three different times and realize that in each of those times, I could have been well-rounded. I think the people would have probably done, done an excellent job, had my training been better. So basically, I was able to come in at that point using first I tried to do it myself, PowerPoint. Tried to build these processes. I spent hundred hours and got three processes documented maybe. It was a, it was definitely a terrible, terrible thing, but. Dean Soto 22:23 I know the feeling, dude. Matt Laird 22:25 Yeah, so then. So then after, Dean and I were talking and he was able to bring his guys in. Basically, it was pay-per-click on these processes and I would spend my day from 4pm until 5pm every day working on the one thing that I never wanted to do again. So whatever I did today between 4pm and 5pm, I didn't ever want to have to do it again and I wanted it to be done correct. So all I would do is, is follow Dean's programs. So basically jumped in, jump on Loom, record that process exactly like you would want it done. Because you, you have a system, your system may suck, but you have a system. So record your system exactly like it is on Loom every day, whatever that process is and I would email it to, to Dean and Dean finally got tired of me emailing him and then he gave me somebody else's email. But I, every day at the end of the day, between four and five, I would email my whatever that process was over to Dean and he would send to his guys. The next morning when I got back to the office. The next morning sometime, I would have a full process document that was just prim and proper. I would look through it very few times that I even have to correct anything on there which is perfect. And then I was able to use that as training. So I would basically start training my staff as I was growing. And then I lost the girl that was working for me, that was my bookkeeper/ receptionist. When I lost her, I decided to give the VSAs a try. And I was able to not only would have the VSAs do what I had primarily been doing, but also what she was doing. And then a few weeks later I lost another employee. And then, so now I have one and, essentially a full-time and a part-time VSA that do the work of the three people that I lost, including myself, which pulled me completely out of the business. Dean Soto 24:39 So cool. Matt Laird 24:40 So that I can just spend a couple hours in the morning checking on things and then off to disrupt the industry. Dean Soto 24:49 That's awesome, dude. I love it. I love it. So like what, like what that's so cool that you won, that you felt the pain of documenting a processes is that like is the worst, man. I mean, because, but it's what was necessary, obviously, you know, any, any real business has to have those documented processes. Like, with, like with, with all of those the, the one of the things that you just what you, you said that we had talked about in private before is that you said that you had systems. Like the systems could have sucked, but you had systems and you document it in any way. Like, that seemed like it was a pretty big game changer, right? Like rather than trying to create a new system that you don't know is proven. Matt Laird 25:34 Yes. So I mean, just one system I use, right? So instead of having some fancy software for my inventory, I use QuickBooks, alright? And I mean, I could use something else and I may at some point use something else but right now I just use QuickBooks. QuickBooks Platinum has an inventory feature. And I have Bernadette, who's my full time VSA. She creates an Excel spreadsheet that I basically I recorded one afternoon when I never wanted to do it again. She jumps onto my QuickBooks. She has full access to my inventory on my QuickBooks. She builds this spreadsheet. She runs through the spreadsheet and, and knows exactly when how long it takes to order something. She knows how long it takes to come in, and then minimum order amounts. And then she will actually take that spreadsheet that I generated, that I taught her how to do on a Loom video. She actually takes that, creates purchase orders in my QuickBooks then puts the, a suffix on the end that, that has the purchase order number with the "-INC". So when I get to the office in the mornings, it's already ready. I open up my open purchase orders folder on QuickBooks. Anything that says "INC" suffix after that, that part. It means that, that has not been ordered. So all I have to do instead of the 45 minutes to an hour it takes me to run through that spreadsheet every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Now I get to the office, open up my QuickBooks, and I can look and see that oh, this particular vendor, I know I need to get to 1500 dollars to get free freight. It's at 1411, I can either throw on one or two, one or two items or I can just wait and then the following when Tuesday or Monday, Wednesday or Friday, I know it'll get over 1500 bucks. So, and then, so I never had this system before. This is something new that just happened to come up. Whenever I was making the videos, once I started making a video, I felt more comfortable and then I was able to, to be more creative as I was doing it. And, and one real big thing that just the straight game changer was that I know that I'm not gonna have to do this process. I may add steps that make it easier for me to go back later. Because I know I'm not the one doing it every day. So there's been several times where I'm, I'm just generating a new process or a process that I'm already doing. And there's stuff that I've always known that I needed to be doing, but I've just been kind of skipping. Dean Soto 25:36 Yeah. Matt Laird 26:21 When you make that process document, you add all that stuff in. Dean Soto 28:33 Yeah. Matt Laird 28:33 And now that stuff that you always wish you would have done is now being done. Dean Soto 28:37 That is so cool. Yeah, I love it. I love it. So I want to ask the, the big question, which is the question I asked everyone during this. So if you had five minutes and it was like a life or death situation so to speak, what's what's this, what is something, strategically if somebody were to implement whatever it might be? What would be something that, that you could strategically give someone or that would absolutely change their life in five minutes if they made the decision to actually do it? Matt Laird 29:25 So if, if I had five minutes to explain it or if they had five minutes to do it? Dean Soto 29:28 That's it, both, five minutes to explain it, five minutes to explain it. Matt Laird 29:32 Oh man, Russell Brunson gave people 30 days for his, at five minutes? Dean Soto 29:38 That's how we roll here man, we're lazy. We need to do something fast. Matt Laird 29:41 Yeah, I really think in, obviously, I'm, I'm kind of biased right now because I've been going through so much of this, this new training to get to mass market. But today I would say if you want to do something to get your life in order or, or would it, would you want it to be life or is it just something that someone could do that? Dean Soto 30:07 Maybe any, it could be, it could be business, it could be life, it could be absolutely anything. Something that's just like that, that is super impactful. It's not like, it's something that, that that you know, you know, would or has made a big difference in your life. Matt Laird 30:24 So, I'm gonna have to go with, with more than one thing. So the most impactful thing that I've ever had in my life is getting my morning routine dialed in. So without my morning routine my days are, are essentially garbage, right? So I'm just chasing that sanity that I would have had with, with my morning routine. So I spend an extra hour a day getting ready to play, you know, getting ready to to win. Dean Soto 30:53 Yeah. Matt Laird 30:53 If, if I don't spend that hour, hour and how long it takes getting ready in the morning , I might as well just stay in bed. That's my number one life hack of today. Dean Soto 31:09 I love that, like go, so and then you can tell me the, the number two after this but so what is your morning, normal morning routine like, like what do you do personally? Matt Laird 31:19 So, so I think you know it personally but, but I'll go through it. So the first thing I do is I get up. Use the bathroom, wet myself, brush my teeth, make a coffee with one teaspoon of either grass-fed Kerrygold butter, unsalted or ghee, whichever I have there. One tablespoon of MCT oil. I use the Brain Octane which is, I've been using it for years, I love it. And while that's brew and I take a scoop of the either Organifi or green smoothie. I use the, I've been using the Oreo brand lately just because it, it tastes so much better. Crush the green smoothie that's still in my, you know, I'm still in my pantry, pop a couple of Nootropics, Alpha Brain or, or whatever I'm on that. I cycle through them a lot. So whichever Nootropics I'm gonna popped that. Dean Soto 32:25 Dude, yeah, you, you got me back on to that, by the way, and it's made a huge difference. Matt Laird 32:30 I mean, I'm 100% it gets the brain impulse. Dean Soto 32:34 Oh my gosh, it's, it's the way I like, so I mean, I was doing the Qualia for a while and that, that would just make me really anxious for whatever reason, but I've been using, I know you've used the, the Thrivous, whole stack that they have. That's what I've been using too and oh my gosh, they had the difference, man. Matt Laird 32:51 It's good thing. Then I, and I come into my office. So in my office, I have four by six index cards, random assortment of colors. So I have my three daughters and one wife. So I'll write them a note to each of them every day. On my note, I'll say something like, had a great time at the movies, can't wait to go, we're going to go to the movies this week, wherever my daddy daughter date or my wife and I date is for the week. Sometimes I'll bring up a unique memory that we share together. You know, I put something on a card, not a whole bunch coz I write with a permanent marker. So it's big, takes up the whole card, boom, kinda in your face. And then I take those into, my oldest daughter charges her phone in the living room, so I will have it in that room. I put her card under there. My two youngest kids, I put them where they eat their breakfast and then my wife I put about the coffee pot. So that's done. Got all my family stuff out of the way just so that when they wake up they know even though I'm not here, I do love them. And then I have, come back into my office, I'll throw on, hit record, I am blogging a book. So I'll do five, seven minutes, 5 AM on my book then I'm dressing out the door, jump in my truck, turn on the Through The Word App, TTW. Right now, coz actually tomorrow I'm finishing up the In Times, which was 70, 70 days worth or something. Dean Soto 34:29 Wow. Matt Laird 34:30 Soon as I pull up at the office. My office isn't very far. So usually I can go through that five to six minutes on the way to the office, go to the office, all ready to kick all the heaters on in the office coz it's cheap. So I turn all the heaters off at night. My staff is in, in the Philippines anyway, so they don't need it at night. So and then I'll jump back in my truck. And so as soon as I get back in my truck, I'll, I'll go through what's called the Stack, which is an app put down by the Warrior, which is Garrett J. White. Dean Soto 35:04 Yep. Matt Laird 35:05 Basically it, it ask yourself a lot of open-ended questions. Dean Soto 35:08 Yep. Matt Laird 35:10 Steady, so there's like 15 different questions it asks you and then it asks you the question, how you feel about what you just said and it was really good app, Warrior brotherhood, Garrett J. White. Dean Soto 35:20 Yeah. Matt Laird 35:21 And then, kick on Headspace. So right there in my truck in the parking lot at work, 10 minutes today, I actually stepped it up to 20 minutes of Headspace. Dean Soto 35:31 Wow. Matt Laird 35:34 Basically do a bunch of, right now I'm doing one of their programs that go through right, so it's like a 10 day challenges or something. And then I'm good enough. It's about 6:10, office is already warmed up. I'm already at the office. I've already had my first coffee and then I'm ready to go. So I skip, I don't do any fitness in the morning. Which to someone who doesn't work out a lot, I would recommend fitness in the morning but for me it just doesn't work with my schedule because I have a hundred plus minute workout regimen that I have to do all together. I would have to get up at three o'clock in the morning so we don't do that so but that's it. I mean, I'm in the office and I'm usually sitting at my desk at 6:15, levelled, centered, I've already pre planned my entire week on Sunday. So I have my schedule lined out in 30 to 45 minute increments and I'm ready to go. Dean Soto 36:37 I love that. Oh man, the and that, that that is why, that is definitely why it's super important as far as the the five minute strategic thing that is, that is awesome. All the stuff that you're able to pack in to an hour and a half. You know obviously a lot of that comes from the, the Warrior stuff that's, that's actually how Matt and I had, had met. We actually did warrior week with, through Garrett J. White's program. Matt Laird 37:07 We're Week 57 man. Dean Soto 37:08 57. Matt Laird 37:09 Most uncomfortable the human body could do without dying. Dean Soto 37:12 I know it was crazy, man. And it wasn't just the physical as all the, all the emotional stuff too man, like it's crazy. The, so yeah, dude. So that, that, that was one you were, you said that you, there was two things. So there's one was the getting your morning routine down, which you out of everybody, you definitely are so structured with that, with that morning routine and actually doing it on a regular basis. I have a morning routine that, that relatively mimics what you're doing. But sometimes it's at six, sometimes it's at eight. Sometimes it's at seven, sometimes it's at nine. My dream is to, to just make it six o'clock from here on out, but we'll see if we can make that happen so. Matt Laird 37:57 Oh, you know, I've been chasing a morning routine for years. Dean Soto 38:00 Really. Matt Laird 38:01 Funny enough, it doesn't, that you wouldn't think that you would. But so like I've heard people talk about their meditation practices and their morning routines. I read Elrod, Miracle Morning, like three or four years ago. And I've always been trying to get it primed and get it right. I just didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle. But it is super important at this point to have all of that correct. Dean Soto 38:26 You know, you know, I love it, man. I love it. It definitely makes a huge difference. Like I got every Monday we have our little, our group that we, that we talked about, that we meet that you're a part of and every time because I have to be on at around, wake up at 4:45 and be on at five. Like, I've gotten so much done today. Like way more than I normally do during the week and I'm like, oh I gotta do this everyday but then Tuesday comes around, and it's kind of harder, harder to wake up. But yeah, so what's this? What's the second thing, man? You mentioned two, you got me all. Matt Laird 39:01 Yes, so, so the second, second thing is where I'm going right now, man. It is, it's the niches. I mean, it's not mass market. I mean, it's obviously mass market. You don't want to be in a, you know the small area. But it's just to get into that niche, right? So you want to find your customer in the niche, in the niche, in the niche. So you want to know, basically, your customer, you want to be able to draw that avatar on a piece of paper. You want to know how many kids they have, you want to know how many trucks they have, or you want to know how many rakes they have or whatever it is that you do, you need to find out what your current customer is. And I have done some soul searching lately and I realized that a majority of the customers that I work with now don't fit into my perfect customer bubble. Not to say that it doesn't work but I do know that the ones that do fit into my customer bubble feel better with my service. They feel better with me as a person, and I like being around them. So you can't force yourself to go to work when you're actually going and it's people you like to be around, it's people you like to serve. But I really think that finding that niche the people you want to work with and finding where they're at inside of their niche is super important. Dean Soto 40:28 That's awesome man. And I, when, so you recently put out a, a funnel and, and a video and when I, even when I heard the video that you did, it was so specific to problems that you face that, that you, that you know, others face those exact same problems that it got me interested and hooked like right away. And, I definitely don't have those problems, but it was, it was as if I was in the room and you were speaking to a friend of mine that was in the oil or, or had a, you know, fleet of trucks, but wasn't big enough to, to be you know, to get the discounts that a lot of these big distributors and so on are able to get. And you, the way that you talked on this video, it was so narrow and specific in the pain that the person's feeling that it, that it was contagious. And I just thought that, like I, I've, the, the fact that you're able to go that deep definitely tells, tells the person listening that you know. You know if they are going to, you know if they are actually going to be a customer, you know, the pain that they're going through and then you have the path and the, the possibility of helping them to get past that pain that they're currently in right now. It's, it was pretty amazing. Matt Laird 42:02 Well, we're hoping to actually launch today, funnel launches today, I'm just finishing up but this would be my first, funny enough, Inc 500 going on probably two years in a row, and I've only spent $250 my entire career in advertising. So, my first funnel launches today and sad to say that as soon as I hit click, it's gonna double my ad spend for my life. Dean Soto 42:31 Oh poor guy, poor guy, dang, dude, so, so all that being said, like, how, how can people reach you? How can people connect with you, whether they're customers or strategic partners? Any? How can, how can people work with you? Matt Laird 42:48 Yeah, so basically, I'm available email or LinkedIn. I see only two platforms that I use. I, I don't do social media. I don't have any of the Instagram, Tick Tock, whatever the newest thing is. LinkedIn or email. So my email is matt.laird@camrocksupply.com and my, my name is Matt Laird on, in LinkedIn. Dean Soto 43:15 Oh, I love it. Let me, I'm going to grab your LinkedIn profile link real quick, hold on one second so, so when my guys are doing the, the blog post for this, they can link to you. You heard that guys, thank you so much for doing my blog posts for me by the way as you're hearing this. So linkedin.com/in/matt-laird-77540b59, okay? Cool, so you can go there and then you can actually go to, what was your website, it was Camrock? Matt Laird 43:54 Camrock Supply.com Dean Soto 43:57 Camrocksupply.com as well. So go check that, C A M R O C K supply.com. Dude, you're amazing. And I would love to have you on again and talk specific things, operations wise and things like that later, but I really wanted to get, get you on just to introduce you and show people that you're able. You're, I mean if you're able to hit Inc 500 with the overhead that you have, and with the flexibility that you have in an industry that is absolutely archaic and old. It, it shows what you're able to do, that you, that you don't have to go with the flow and stuff like that. So it's just amazing to have you on man and see all the things that you're doing. Matt Laird 44:43 Oh man, I appreciate it. Yep, let me know whenever you're ready. I do know that. After the 21st, when I go live with my new project, I would definitely like to talk on how that things go and we're going to disrupt the industry. Dean Soto 44:59 I love it man. Matt Laird 45:00 Wanna keep up with 2020. Dean Soto 45:02 I love it. Well how, how can people get to your, to your funnel? Matt Laird 45:07 It's not launched at the time but the regular email address for that will be fleet, F L E E T E X.net. Dean Soto 45:20 Cool, perfect, fleetex.net, cool. So by that, yeah, by the time this is on, it should be up and running man. That's great. Cool. Well, it's great having you on brother. I appreciate it. And guys, go check out Matt Laird. If, if, and he is just an absolutely amazing, amazing person and then go check out camrocksupply.com and also fleetex.net. Until then, guys, this has been the freedom in five minutes podcast and we will check you out in the next freedom in five minutes podcast episode.  

David Stephenson, Ph.D., is the author of Big Data Demystified, a guide for executives that explores the transformative nature of big data and data analytics. He’s also a data strategy consultant and professor at the University of Amsterdam. In a previous life, David worked in various data science roles at companies like Adidas, Coolblue, and eBay. Join David and I as we discuss what makes data science projects succeed and explore: The non-technical issues that lead to ineffective data science and analytics projects The specific type of communication that is critical to the success of data science and analytics initiatives (and how working in isolation from your stakeholder or business sponsor creates risk)) The power of showing value early,  starting small/lean, and one way David applies agile to data science projects The problems that emerge when data scientists only want to do “interesting data science” How design thinking can help data scientists and analytics practitioners make their work resonate with stakeholders who are not “data people” How David now relies on design thinking heavily, and what it taught him about making “cool” prototypes nobody cared about What it’s like to work on a project without understanding who’s sponsoring it Resources and Links DSI Analytics Website Connect with David on LinkedIn David’s book: Big Data Demystified  On Twitter: @Stephenson_Data Quotes from Today’s Episode “You see a lot of solutions being developed very well, which were not designed to meet the actual challenge that the industry is facing.” — David “You just have that whole wasted effort because there wasn’t enough communication at inception.” — David “I think that companies are really embracing agile, especially in the last few years. They’re really recognizing the value of it from a software perspective. But it’s really challenging from the analytics perspective—partly because the data science and analytics. They don’t fit into the scrum model very well for a variety of reasons.” — David “That for me was a real learning point—to understand the hardest thing is not necessarily the most important thing.” — David “If you’re working with marketing people, an 80% solution is fine. If you’re working with finance, they really need exact numbers. You have to understand what your target audience needs in terms of precision.” — David “I feel sometimes that when we talk about “the business” people don’t understand that the business is a collection of people—just like a government is a collection of real humans doing jobs and they have goals and needs and selfish interests. So there’s really a collection of end customers and the person that’s  paying for the solution.” — Brian “I think it’s always important—whether you’re a consultant or you’re internal—to really understand who’s going to be evaluating the value creation.”— Brian “You’ve got to keep those lines of communication open and make sure they’re seeing the work you’re doing and evaluating and giving feedback on it. Throw this over the wall is a very high risk model.” — Brian Transcript Brian: David Stephenson is the author of Big Data Demystified, and he’s a consulting data strategist primarily working out of Europe. I’m excited to have my chat with David on the show here today because I think David has a really good way of connecting a highly technical background with the business and kind of act like a bridge between these two departments. Brian:    All right. David, are you on the line? David:  Yes, I’m here. Brian:    I’m super excited to talk to you. So we have David Stephenson, the consultant and author of Big Data Demystified. we met through, somehow we met, I think it was on LinkedIn originally. And you also run Predictive Analytics World Conference, in the UK edition, correct? David:  Yeah, that’s right. Brian:    Awesome. Tell people a little bit… I gave you an intro there, but it’s always better from the horse’s mouth. So tell, tell us a little bit about what you’re what you’re up to. David:  Yeah, sure. Um so I used to run global uh business analytics for the eBay classifieds group and then uh started off on my own a couple of years ago and have been doing consulting uh mostly around Europe in uh data strategy, data science program developments. And then recently uh published a book also on the topic uh with Financial Times Press called Big Data Demystified. I was just doing a lot of work between speaking and teaching and training and consulting with companies, really focused on uh developing how they use data and analytics and helping them reach the next steps in that. So it’s been keeping me, keeping me quite busy recently. Really enjoy it. Brian:    Nice. And how did you get involved with the… I don’t know if, do you guys say PA or predictive analytics? David:  Yeah, yeah. Predictive analytics world. Yep. Brian:    How did you get uh involved in that? David:  Yeah, I’d been speaking at quite a number of conferences and the um the PA conferences were some that I was speaking at. And I’d spoken with the organizing company, Rising Media. I’d spoken on three of their conferences and at some point they contacted me and said, “You know, we’ve enjoyed having you speak with us all this time and we’re looking for a new conference chair for the London uh predictive analytics world. Are you interested?” And uh after you know so many years of going to conferences and thinking, what would I do better? What would I do better? I thought this is finally my chance to, to do everything that I’ve wanted to do to make conferences better. Uh yeah, so I said yes. So I’ve been doing it now, I’m going on my second year. Brian:    Nice. And like could, even though we’re probably not going to go way deep into PA, but what did you want to make better or what have you made better? Like what was wrong and that you wanted to change? David:  I was frustrated with the combination of the choice of who would be on stage. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So there’s a lot of emphasis on just let’s get you know a well-known company or someone who just has the name recognition without really focusing on quality contents. For me as a practitioner, I really wanted to make sure, look we’re going to have two days to select speakers. Let’s get speakers up there who are really going to give valuable content. Because I was frustrated in going, I’d go to so many conferences where out of you know out of 15 talks there’d be one or two that I thought were valuable. And I thought, okay, I’m going to get a conference going where almost all the talks are really high valuable talks. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So that was for me the big opportunity. Brian:    Make it the conference you want to go to kind of thing. David:  Exactly, yeah, exactly. Brian:    Be the change you want to see in the world as they say. David:  Yeah, no it was a good opportunity. It’s been a ton of work, but um yeah I’ve enjoyed it. Brian:    Excellent. Excellent. Cool. So jumping in, I have a ton of questions for you. I hope we can we can fit them all in. Uh you came recommended to me um from a previous guest and friends and I was excited to talk to you. So I also notice you know in your work you practice design thinking. So I want to jump into that in a little bit. The first thing I wanted to ask you though is, um there’s so there’s a lot of technical knowledge required to do you know data science and analytics effectively. Can you talk to us a little bit about the nontechnical knowledge that’s required to make solutions that are obvious, they’re usable, useful value is created, that kind of thing. What’s missing here? There there’s a high failure rate in this industry for projects. Talk to us about these nontechnical skills that are also required. David:  Yeah, I know that’s a great question and I think that’s where we’re having a lot of trouble when we look at the industry, right? The stakeholder management is really difficult because, you know as you’re a technical expert, you’re really focused on how to do these you know very technical, whether it’s an analytic model or some type of software design or software implementation. But so much of what we do in a business environment, in an enterprise environment is understanding the stakeholders, understanding what the real challenge is, and then also communicating with them throughout the process. Especially at the beginning with this design element where you’re really understanding what’s happening and your starting to produce the right solution. And you see a lot of solutions being developed very well, which were not designed to meet the actual challenge that the industry’s facing. So yeah, that’s a that’s a huge thing. Brian:    You don’t have to state any names or anything, but can you give an example of a… You said something was being designed well, which I assume means technically it was being designed properly, but it wasn’t communicating its value. Its value wasn’t inherent, uh inherently obvious to the consumer. Have you had a situation where you’ve come in and it’s like, whoa. And then like what would that before and after kind of look like? David:  Yeah, no, there’s quite a bit quite a bit of that. Um like for example, you’ve got, I had one situation where the customer said, “Look, we need a certain solution to advise on how to change a product. You know we have limited resources for enhancing a product in different areas. Can you advise-” Brian:    A digital product? David:  No. No, actually um a physical product. Brian:    Okay. David:  Um and so they said, “Look, we’ve got limited resources for enhancing these.” And then you know you’d start to work on this or you know third parties would start to work on this challenge and then they’d deliver it maybe two months later and say, “Here’s our recommendation of what to deliver.” And then you’d speak with the person who would actually implement that solution and they’d say, “Oh, I didn’t mention to you that you know here’s an additional limitation on which products we actually physically can improve.” And you just have that whole wasted effort because there wasn’t enough communication at inception. Brian:    Throwing it over the wall kind of model. David:  Yeah, yeah. Brian:    Like let us know when it’s done. David:  Right, right. Brian:    Yeah. David:  And then they end up delivering something which wasn’t practically usable. Brian:    Got it. So how, how do you approach this with… You know you hear this repeated problem, which is a lot of places want to jump into using advanced techniques you know or the business stakeholder might request machine learning or request AI. And so, and then maybe there is an opportunity to actually use that tool for a good reason. But then it’s like, “Oh wait, we don’t have the data infrastructure in place to do any of that.” So like level one is like now we have to create the pipelines and all this kind of technical stuff that needs to be built out. How do you approach, because you’re talk… I know design, so this is preloaded with the fact that you know something about design thinking and and that you probably know about moving in small increments. So how do you how do you show value soon and maybe work in a small increment where progress can be seen when there is maybe a large technical requirement that needs to be there before any of the quote useful cool stuff can be delivered. How do you do that? David:  Yeah, no that’s great. And that’s super important to show value soon. Um and again, I mentioned this also like in one of the chapters in my book and there’s a couple of reasons for that. You know one is because um the more often you cycle back to your stakeholder, the more closely aligned you are with their needs. But also if they haven’t communicated clearly to you and you start to give them intermediate results, that gives them a chance to refine what they want and to clarify that and to kind of keep thinking with you, right? Uh so you really want to get back to them as quickly as possible with small results, right? And there’s different ways to do that. Typically what you do is you take a small sample of the data or a small subsection of the challenge. David:  Uh for example, instead of covering you know the whole world for a company, you know all the different markets. You say, “Okay, I’ll take this one small market, um you know this one European country in this one product. You know two weeks from now I’ll give you an estimate of what your solution would look like in this one limited area.” And then you do that and then you get some iterations and then, then you say, “Okay, we’ll do a pilot stage from the proof of concept.” And go to a pilot stage, where you’ll say, “Okay, I’ll give you the full solution just for this market, but it’s the full solution.” And then you iterate into kind of finally production for the full range and such. But this iteration going from proof of concept to pilot to full deployment to automation uh is a way to kind of step through that process. Brian:    Yeah. This kind of reminds me of, I think it’s the thirties Jason Freed quote, like build half a product, not a half assed product. David:  Yeah. Brian:    And also this concept of agile, right? Which you know I saw this really well illustrated one time and it was like, it was a picture of a car from an agile perspective and like stage one of the car was like the Flintstones car, right? David:  Mmhmm. Brian:    And then stage two was the automobile we picture in our head. The non-agile way of being a car with no front wheels. Like it’s David:  Many axles no front wheels. Brian:    Wheels… But it’s all polished. It looks like a modern automobile, but it’s not, it’s not a working, there’s no value there, right? You can’t actually drive and you can’t transport yourself somewhere with that. So that’s not, you know anyhow. So that kind of reminds me of what you’re saying there. Showing showing some value on a small scale. Um you know- David:  No and I think that companies are really embracing agile, especially in the last few years, right? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  They’re really recognizing the value of it from a software perspective. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  But it’s really challenging from the analytics perspective Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  For a couple of reasons. Partly because the data science and analytics, they don’t fit into the scrum model very well for a variety of reasons. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And the other thing is, uh people who really love this field, they want to do the cool work, you know they want to do deep learning, they want to do advanced models. Brian:    Right. David:  And when you tell them like, “Hey, just give me you know a really super simple data driven model that you know meets 60% of the solution.” Um a lot of these guys who are just focused on machine learning, that’s not what they want to do. They want to jump straight to the cool stuff. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So I find in the projects that I do at the beginning, a lot of it is just kind of talking people down and saying, “Look, let’s start simple. Let’s not boil the ocean at once. Let’s not start with the most advanced models.” For some people that takes a bit of convincing. Brian:    Is that cultural at all? Is it tied to the amount of academic background they have? Like do you see a pattern that goes with that or is it just a seniority thing? I hear that tends to be more at a more junior level people that are closer to being out of school. Do you see a pattern or trend there? David:  Yeah, no that’s a good question too. There’s two things. Um sadly, part of it is simply that uh a number of people I’ve talked to would say, “I only want to do interesting work.” Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  You know their goal is not to first and foremost bring business value, Brian:    Right. David:  But they want to do work that’s interesting for them. And for some people that’s simply it, and as a manager, as a leader, you have to get people in place who are aligned with your business needs. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Because not everyone with the skills is. You know? And some of them will be very forthright about it. They’ll say, “Look, I’m not interested in that work because it’s not interesting.” And the other thing is the seniority. I think the longer people are around, the more value they recognize. Two things. One is from the basic models. You know just there’s so much work that’s, so much so many projects that’ll work fairly well with just a simple regression or Bayesian model. And the other thing is just taking the time to say, “Hey, I’m you know I’m going to do the simple iteration uh and not spend three months developing something before I deliver it.” Brian:    Yeah, I can understand that. So I’m curious, do you feel the solution when that kind of problem happens uh is to train and assist those technical people in learning how to broaden their skill sets so they realize you know value was not entirely driven by the technology portion? Or is it like you really just need to bring in a different role entirely, like or meet in the middle somewhere? Like how do you address that? David:  I think at a leadership level you have to find the leaders who already understand that. Um and then the people who are more junior, those are the people who need to learn it. I mean, I’ll just give you a basic example. I mean in years past I worked in quantitative finance, right? So we would um we would value these financial products like interest rate swaps and you know foreign exchange swaps and such. David:  And I remember valuing some of these and there would be two parts of it. One was the foreign exchange and one was the interest rate for uh cross currency swap. And the one part was super hard to do and the other part was really easy to do. And I’d get stuck on the really hard part. You know I’d be focusing all my time on that. And at some point my manager who was an MBA and not super technical you know came to me and said, “Look David, you know this, the simple part that’s 98% of the risk, you know and the complex part you’re focusing on, that’s only 2% of the risk. So you know it doesn’t matter if there’s a huge error with that part, just get the simple part right and we’ll essentially get most of the risks um quantified.” Brian:    Right. David:  So that for me was a real learning point. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  To say, okay, understand what’s the hardest thing is not necessarily what’s the most important thing. Brian:    Right. Not to mention most places are happy with a 98% test score. David:  Exactly. In this area, right, right. Brian:    We’ll take 75 actually. David:  No, and that’s the thing, and that’s important to know you’re uh you’re stake owner too because you know if you’re working with marketing people, you know an 80% solution is fine. Um if you’re working with finance, you know these are the guys who really need exact numbers. Um so really you have to understand what you know what your target audience needs in terms of precision. Brian:    Yeah. Yeah. Tell us a little bit then about, uh so I brought this up earlier, the concept of design thinking and how it can apply to you know data science and analytics work. How are you applying that in your in your consulting work? David:  Yeah, no this is something really I’m focusing more and more on now because you’ll see this… Gartner has a nice visualization where they show design thinking, uh iterating into um uh the prototype phase and then iterating into the production phase. And the idea is that um you know we all sort of know, have proof of concept is important the prototype before we go into production. So we’ve all recognized that. But what we’re really missing a lot is, is that initial stage, where you’re this design stage where you’re saying, “Look, what is my real business challenge um and what’s the solution that’s really going to address that?” And taking time to get the right people in the room to get the right processes in place so that you’re starting down the right path even before you start to build a prototype. Because just from experience, I’ve seen this where, you know I was all proud of myself a few years back because I made this awesome prototype Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  You know of something very quickly, very powerfully. David:  And I thought, “Oh, this is great. I’ve done such a great job with this.” And then by the time we went to deploy it, a few months later, they shut it down because it wasn’t meeting the need of the company. And I thought to myself, you know if I’d really taken the time um rather than just going with what the company asked me to do, because you know the CTO had said, “Let’s build this.” And so I was like sure, let’s build it. It looks cool. If I’d instead stopped at that point and said, “Look, let’s first go through the design process,” and figure out what we really should be building before jumping straight into the prototype. We would have saved a lot of time and effort. Brian:    Yeah. One thing I fully agree with this, this process. Have you ever tried using, um you know for example if you’re building a predictive model for something, is prototyping something out that doesn’t even use data like and I’m particularly thinking about solutions where there’s going to be some type of visible user interface here, but actually using mock ups of the of the design in order to tease out whether or not the intended end user might use this. How are they going to react if they see a number that they don’t expect or it’s unbelievable information so that you can figure out how might we need to present this in a way that they will actually believe it if the real data actually ends up generating these kinds of results so that you can plan for that kind of contingency ahead and you don’t end up you know with the head scratch or the unbelievable reaction. Is have you worked that approach before? David:  So that I haven’t done in terms of you know testing the end user’s response. Brian:    Uh huh. David:  There’s definitely this method, you know the smoke testing where you put a feature out that doesn’t really work just to Brian:    Right. David:  To see what kind of leverage it generates and such. And we’ve done other work where instead of using a model, we used user responses to gather information Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  In various ways. There’s several ways we’ve done that. Um but just what you’re describing now, I don’t think I can’t think of a case where I’ve done that particular application. Brian:    So when you talk about needs and you know empathizing with the customer, can you talk about like the end customer versus the business sponsor? I feel sometimes that when we talk about, “The business,” sometimes people don’t understand that the business is a collection of people. Just like a government David:  Mmhmm. Brian:    Is a collection of real humans doing jobs and work and they have goals and needs and selfish interests and all these kinds of things. So there’s really a collection of end customers and the person that’s you know paying for the project. Brian:    Do you integrate that in your work and how do you how do you think about that when you’re when we think about empathy, you know which is early upstream in the design thinking process. David:  Yeah, no that’s a good question alright. Um and as a consultant, it’s always a bit tricky. I once did a project where I misunderstood who my actual budget sponsor was. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And I found that out a little bit too late. So, you know I spent all my time kind of tailoring to the needs of one person when you know and then several weeks or months later another person informed me like I’m actually you know your budget sponsor here. Um yeah. Brian:    And did they have different needs? It was like they had different needs. David:  Well but also it’s… Yes, slightly different needs, but also it’s very important that you maintain close communication lines. Brian:    Sure. David:  Right? Um so I find for myself, typically when I’m on a project I’ll have uh I’ll have projects who have different stakeholders than necessarily the budget holder. Uh and that’s typically, you know I’ll work with a budget holder to clarify expectations. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  You know where should my priorities be. Um but the stakeholder for a specific project is typically the person who I’m aiming to make sure I satisfy you know their requirements and such. Because what we normally establish is that look, if this stakeholder is happy with the results then the budget holder will also be happy. David:  Uh the difficulty happens when there’s a conflict of interest there. Brian:    Right. David:  You know and one person is clear about wanting one thing and the other person has a different view on it. That doesn’t happen so often, but from time to time it does. Brian:    I’ve been in that situation before. And you know engineering’s paying, you’re paying for your nut and you’re working with product management or you know some other department and because of those lines. But I think it’s always you know important whether you’re a consultant or you’re internal to really understand kind of who’s who’s going to be evaluating the value creation here and understanding what they’re looking for is definitely important. David:  Absolutely. Brian:    Or else your chance of failure is is high. David:  Yeah absolutely. Brian:    And it shouldn’t be silent, be be uh suspicious of silence. And when there’s not a lot of communication that’s… It’s always a risk for me. I just literally checked in with a client today because I’m not working with you know the stakeholder the main stakeholder, I’m working with her team and everything was fine. But it’s you know when you’re not hearing questions and stuff that’s, it’s you got to keep those lines of communication open and making sure they’re seeing the work you’re doing and evaluating and giving feedback on it. Uh this throw over the wall thing is a very high risk model. David:  No, it’s totally true. And I do, one of the things I do is I train uh junior data scientists. I do that on a regular basis. And one of the things I tell all the classes is, “You know make sure you put in a recurring appointment with um you know the project owner, Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  The sponsor um and if it gets canceled, you know reschedule it,” Brian:    Yeah. David:  Because you can’t you can’t afford to lose contact like regular contact with a sponsor. Brian:    Mmhmm, Mmhmm. We talked a little bit about this when we originally got on the phone about you know what’s going on in the industry with selling products and platforms versus you know focusing on outcomes and results. Uh the industry helps us build things. Um things don’t always turn into value. So do you have some advice on how to approach this? And I’m not saying that all products are bad and platforms. I mean without some of these this new technology, none of this would be possible. At the same time, you know in the conference halls and you know a lot of people that I’ve talked to feel like, you know basically that the large platform providers are making out like bandits and yet every year at Gartner is like, “Oh, 86% of projects will fail this year.” And it’s like, “Hmm, someone’s making out really well here. What is going on here?” Like- David:  Yeah. I think part of the issue is that you know it’s this thing where you can delegate um authority but not responsibility. You know and people, it’s really tempting just to say, “Okay, I’m going to pass off this challenge to a product. You know um I don’t really understand how to address this product or to address this challenge. So I’m going to buy a product which says it’s going to meet the needs.” And then later… And you don’t even know how to evaluate it because you didn’t know how to do the problem in the first place. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So I think that’s definitely dangerous. Um and you see different tools. I don’t want to name any tools, but there’s definitely tools out there that sell sort of the AI solutions. David:  Um and when you back test them, you’re like, well, what is this really providing me? You know it’s perhaps it’s a terrible model. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Um and maybe the vendor even knows it’s not a good model, but it’s their model, they’re selling it and we’re buying it. Um that being said, I mean if you understand the challenge and you know what you’re buying, then it is a way to move very quickly. Brian:    Right. David:  You know, it’s a way there’s certain tools which will let you automate repetitive work um and that’s you know that’s a big payoff, right? If you know what you’re getting. But there’s definitely a lot of snake oil being sold now in the market and I see that come up also. Brian:    So let’s jump over to um skill gaps. You were talking a little bit about some of the training that you offer so what if you’re offering training, it generally implies that there’s something missing there. What’s missing that needs to be filled in? David:  Yeah. There’s a couple of things. One is that there’s a tremendous number of people, at least over in Europe who um haven’t been really trained solidly in analytic skills, Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  But they sort of go through bootcamp and then crossover into this analytics slash data science space, right? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So these guys are missing a lot of fundamental skills in terms of mathematics, statistics and computer programming, right? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So that’s the basics. I don’t do a lot of training in that myself Brian:    Uh huh. David:  Just because there’s so many people who can do that. Uh what I focus on more is the business skills of you know once these guys are coming out of a highly technical program or bootcamp um or straight out of university, how can they place themselves within an organization and be effective? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And there’s several aspects of that. One of which is understanding that the larger enterprise around them, understanding how different people think, how the nontechnical people operate, what’s important to them. So that that sort of empathy and understanding your place in the company. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And then the other thing is communicating. You know and these guys, they tend to have a lot of challenges communicating around them, both in terms of orally but also visually. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And part of that is because they’re used to functioning within an analytic ecosphere. You know, communicating with other people like them Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  You know in their programs and such. Um and a part of my training is really to help them understand, look, when you’re doing emails, when you’re doing presentations, PowerPoints, or charts and graphs to people in outside departments, um what is a way to communicate very effectively? Brian:    Are there any particular like repeated things that come to mind in terms of guidance that you give? You know the five bullets or something that you kind of see as a repeating theme around the communication, particularly the visual, but also the you know written? David:  Yeah, no there’s just a lot of different stuff I cover uh to be honest. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  I mean a lot of it just boils down to understanding the perspective of the people around you. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  But that encompasses a tremendous amount of of different training materials that I have. Brian:    Right, right. When you have team members that are coming from that background, how do you and the solution that you’re working on has a software component, particularly you know some type of visual component, what is their role and how do you get them up to speed or how do you work with them if they’re going to be involved in that solution that’s going to go out? Is it just take a guess and try? Like if you’re starting out from a pure data science or stats math background, how do you get to that point where you can deliver a solution that may require a software interface? What’s involved in that process? David:  Yeah, so it depends on sort of how it’s being deployed. Um if you’re looking at something that’s going to be deployed as part of a production stack, Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  That’s a long road to travel if you don’t have the software backgrounds, right? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Because then you have to know all this stuff about you know the testing, the unit testing, um Brian:    Right. David:  Regression testing, um sort of everything that a developer knows in order to create robust code. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Um even then further monitoring and such. Uh and if you come out of a math program or something and you don’t have that software development experience, um that’s quite a bit of training. And that’s actually a big stumbling block Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  For these guys because they know the machine learning techniques and they want to deploy something. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  uh and they’ll start hacking stuff together with whatever code and then they’ll go to the development team or the IT and they’ll say, “Hey, I built this cool model. Can you deploy it?” David:  Um and there’s no way that’s going to get deployed because it doesn’t meet the rigorous standards that are necessary. Brian:    Right. David:  So on the flip side though, when you have the software developers who already know you know how to make things um robust and such, and these guys say, “Hey, you know I want to try building a regression, building a vision network or something,” um there’s almost a better chance for them to be able to build something that’s deployable Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Because they at least had that foundation. Brian:    Mmhmm. The um, how does this tie into… Uh so so another kind of topic that’s just been in the ether I guess around me right now is this topic of model trust. Um if you’re coming at it from that technical standpoint uh and if you think or believe that uh model trust is an issue. So this is do my stakeholders believe what I’m showing them. How does that play into your process? Um how do you how do you get to the point where you don’t wait until you have a great model David:  Mmhmm. Brian:    But then you find out someone won’t use it? Um David:  No, that’s a great question. That’s a great question. Um in the past uh I worked with a forecasting project at a client and I had a third party working on something and they went to you know they developed some cool model and they went to the stakeholders and they said, “Look, here’s our forecasting model.” And the stakeholder looked at it and said, “Yeah, okay, that’s kind of interesting. I’m never going to use it.” Right? And then later on when I was supervising a forecasting uh project myself, what I did is I you know I told my team, I said, “Look, the first delivery we give to the stakeholders, make sure it’s something super basic and super obvious you know so that they know exactly what we did, why we did it, and they look at it and say, yeah, that makes complete sense. That’s what I would have done.” David:  You know give them just a basic regression or basic Arma one one model or something, not no bells or whistles. And from there, the next iteration make it a little more complex Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  And then a little more complex because you have to get them on board and they have to be nodding their heads, um either asking like one question at each iteration, like, “That doesn’t make sense.” Or nodding their heads and saying, “Yeah, that makes, makes complete sense.” But if you jump into, if you go all the way to an advanced model, like you said, and try and throw that at them, if it doesn’t make sense and it doesn’t agree with what they already saw, then you’ve completely lost them. Brian:    Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get in touch early. David:  Yeah. Brian:    Stay in touch. You know that’s kind of the kicker there. Do you think this overall trend of success or lack there of, in the industry of, you know, formerly it was big data projects, now it’s AI. Is this trending in the right direction? Like the success rate? I mean it’s been consistently low for a long time. Where’s it going? David:  Yeah, I mean there’s two things to that. One is that there’s always a natural sort of failure rate even with well intentioned and well designed projects. Brian:    Uh huh. David:  But then the second thing is we’re having this difficulty, having a difficulty because we used to be a bottom up push for data science projects where you know, the developers would say, “Hey, I’d love to do this, I’d love to do this.” And the management said, “Stop bothering us and just do your job.” Uh recently what’s happened is it’s been a top down, right? Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  So from board level they’d say, “Hey, we need to start doing something with AI, you know um with machine learning, with big data.” And they’ll start throwing budgets at it. But what happens then is that you’ve got a you know couple hundred thousand or a couple of million from board level coming down to start hiring a team and buying technology. David:  So, these budgets that are made up you know at an annual level, after one or two years of you know building a team of 20 people or 30 people, then the budget’s being renewed and people are going to start asking questions, “What value did we get?” Well, even at the inception, Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  A lot of these teams, there wasn’t a clear mandate for them. There was a top down hope that we could leverage and buzzword, right? Brian:    Right. David:  But two, three years down the line, we spent the millions and we’ve bought the systems and everything. We weren’t really sure from the start why. Um so, of course there’s not tangible value after two or three years and there’s still no tangible direction. And then you start to see these things burnout. You know and you’ve seen, I’ve seen some programs already where after a year or two it’s sort of like where are we going with this? What’s happening? But of course those that really understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, of course for these there’s a very real chance of seeing value and you’re seeing a lot of the large companies really capitalizing on these efforts when they initiated the efforts with a clear vision and a clear purpose. Brian:    Following onto that then, do you do you think there’s a place for, sometimes, I call it laboratory mode, right? Which is maybe the business stakeholder understands that you know we’re also a data company. You know everybody says that now. I know we need to be doing something with this, but I don’t understand the technology. I want to know that we’re flexing this muscle, we’re rehearsing, we’re playing scrimmage games. David:  Mmhmm. Brian:    Even if we don’t create value. Is there something there to be to having a laboratory kind of model, which is maybe you do let some of your top talent go try to build a you know a deep learning network or something like that, back out a project from something, not exclusively in their work, but this is like the only 20% time kind of concept. Is there some value in that or do you think it’s unnecessary to be totally playground uh with no no dirt? David:  No, no, absolutely right, absolutely. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  But this goes back to your design thinking, right? So you want to have that initial impetus. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Like why are we doing this? You know where might it go? Brian:    Okay. Cool. David:  Yeah. Brian:    Awesome. This has been like super good talk. Do you have any like closing advice for for listeners? You know we’ve got an analytics data science, technical product managers, some designers. Like I know that’s a wide group of you know listeners, but if you had some closing advice for them. David:  Yeah, I would say just as much as possible to, you know for people who are in the field and looking to bring value in the companies, as much as possible talk to people around you, you know talk to people outside of your team. Brian:    Mmhmm. David:  Outside of your department. Um understand what they’re doing, why they’re doing why they’re doing it, and how you can help or how the tools that you have could potentially help. Because there’s a lot of opportunities you know within companies. It’s just, there’s not that communication between departments. So yeah, I would just really encourage people to keep that communication open. Brian:    Nice, nice. And by the way, how’s the mandolin going? David:  The mandolin, I’m not getting a whole lot of time with it, but I was thinking about it today. So uh more focused on the guitar these days. Brian:    Oh okay. David:  But um yeah, yeah, it’s a really a real source of potential that I’m not tapping into. Brian:    Excellent. Well, keep practicing. David:  Yeah. Brian:    Tell us, obviously I’m going to put a link to your book in the show notes, but where do you publish uh social media, LinkedIn, any of that stuff? Where can people find you? David:  Yeah. I used to be a little bit better at publishing blogs on LinkedIn and on my website. Brian:    Okay. David:  To be honest, I’m really behind on that now. I’ve been so busy with other things, uh but hopefully at some point I’ll start uh blogging some more. Brian:    Nice. Excellent. And you’re, if I recall, it’s DSI analytics, right? David:  That’s it. Yeah. DSI analytics. Brian:    Awesome. So I’ll, yeah, I’ll put a link to that and your LinkedIn profile as well. And thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been a really good conversation. David:  Yeah, no, thanks for inviting me. I’m glad to be here and look forward to uh seeing you in London soon. Brian:    Awesome. Yeah, I’m looking forward to speaking there. So take care.

Jason Freed of Leisure Outdoor Adventures joins us to talk Leech Lake fishing. What's working now, and what will work when the bug hatch comes. Great info and advice from a great guide!

Kev Jackson will be joining Chip Leer, Bro Brosdahl, Jason Durham, Jason Freed, Dick Beardsley and more at the First Ever Park Rapids Fishing Expo Friday, April 12th. Today, Kev talks with Pastor Chip, one of the organizers, about this big FREE event!

Are you missing out on big opportunities to grow your business with new or existing clients?In episode 179 of the Bokeh Podcast, Allison Hopkins discusses the importance of looking at every opportunity and deciding how you can grow from it. Listen in as she shares ways you can better serve your existing clients, evaluate and utilize your strengths, and capitalize on opportunities in your business.The Bokeh Podcast is brought to you by Photographer’s Edit: Custom Editing for the Wedding and Portrait Photographer. You can also subscribe to the Bokeh podcast on the Apple podcast app, follow on Spotify, add to your playlist on Stitcher, or listen on Overcast.Time Technique:1. Schedule your time.2. Get massages ones a week.Brand Position: A Cleveland based wedding and lifestyle photographer focused on unscripted, artful moments.The Gear Bag: 85mm 1.4 & Nikon D850Principals To Taking Advantage of Opportunities:1. Serve your clients first.2. Manage your down time to learn. Ex: Listen to podcasts while commuting.3. What are you strengths outside of being photographer?4. Continue to grow the connections you have made.Links:Allisonhopkins.cominstagram.com/allisonhopkinsphotographyExpensify.comQuickbooks.comTim Terris with Jason Freed: tim.blog/2018/07/23/jason-fried/Time Ferriss - 4 Hour Work Week: bit.ly/bp-4hr See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Looking to drive results for your business? Click here to learn more. Duetto’s Jason Freed on Content Marketing and Future Trends: The Thinks Out Loud Interview (Thinks Out Loud Episode 228) – Headlines and Show Notes What Makes Duetto Unique… The post Duetto’s Jason Freed on Content Marketing and Future Trends: The Thinks Out Loud Interview (Thinks Out Loud Episode 228) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Looking to drive results for your business? Click here to learn more. Duetto’s Jason Freed on Content Marketing and Future Trends: The Thinks Out Loud Interview (Thinks Out Loud Episode 228) – Headlines and Show Notes What Makes Duetto Unique Content by Jason Q. Freed, Managing Editor SoloSegment: Site Search Analytics and AI Driven Conversion […] The post Duetto’s Jason Freed on Content Marketing and Future Trends: The Thinks Out Loud Interview (Thinks Out Loud Episode 228) appeared first on E-commerce, Internet marketing and business strategy consulting | Tim Peter & Associates.

Special Guest Jason Freed and....Jig Raps! by Dan Ryan and Wil Neururer

John Dainsberg, the on-site tournament director, gives us the details on the big Leech Lake Walleye Tournament coming June 2nd-3rd. Plus, last year's champion Chuck Hasse (well, half the champion anyway...Jason Freed, too!) gives us a Leech Lake update.

The Season 2 crew reunites. Laracon Venue: The Museum of Science and Industry Evan You Ryan Holiday / Conspiracy Jocelyn K. Glei / Hurry Slowly / Unsubscribe Marvel.app Zeplin.io Laravel: Up and Running A Brief Introduction to Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs Marcus Aurelius book - Meditations The Daily Stoic AWS Lambda Esther Perel - sample TED talk: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship The Imposter's Handbook The Millionaire Next Door The Simple Path to Wealth Editing sponsored by Larajobs Transcription sponsored by GoTranscript.com [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast season three. It's season three but it feels like season two. Stay tuned. [music] Matt Stauffer: Welcome back to a special edition of the Laravel Podcast. This is season three but I wouldn't hold it against you if you got surprised because I have two guests with me. Not only do I have two guests but I have the OG two guests. Can you guys say hello to the people? Jeffrey Way: Hey, everybody. I'm Jeffrey Way. Good to be back. Taylor Otwell: I'm Taylor Otwell. Matt Stauffer: You may have heard of Taylor. We got Jeffrey Way, the creator of Laracasts and bringer of many of us to Laravel and then Taylor Otwell, OG Laravel Podcast, OG Laravel. We figured it's time for a little bit of a breather in season three with all these episodes and just catch up and see how the crew is doing and catch up on things. Stuff we've got on our plate for today is definitely talking about how Laracon is looking for this year, what's going on with the development of Laravel and Laracasts and everything like that. I figure the easiest and most concrete thing for us to talk about is Laracon. What is going on? How is ticket sales? How is speaker lineups? How's the venue looking? How's Chicago looking? How's everything going for Laracon right now. Taylor Otwell: I think it's going pretty well. The venue is the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago which is a really large museum. On the South side of Chicago. We'll be in their auditorium and the ticket sales are going really good. We already sold out. That's about 850 attendees, about 50 of those attendees are going to be speakers and sponsors and then around 800 of them are going to be actual ticket purchasers from the community. This will definitely be the biggest US Laracon. It'll probably be the biggest Laracon yet so far. Although Laracon EU is usually a little bigger, so I wouldn't be surprised if they sold more tickets this year. I'm pretty excited about it. All the speakers are pretty much lined up. Some of the big name speakers that people may have heard of so far. Of course, I'll be there. Creator of Laravel, Evan You creator of Vue will be there. Uncle Bob Martin who's famous for writing some very popular programming books and just being a programming teacher will be there. Ryan Holiday, the author of several books that people may have heard of. His latest book is called Conspiracy but he also wrote The Daily Stoic, Perennial Seller, Obstacle is the Way, Ego is the Enemy. Some pretty popular books actually. Who else? Adam Wathan will be there. Several other community members will be there. I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be a great talk. Right now, what I'm working on is just ironing out food, drinks, all those extra things you have to do for a conference. T-shirts, about to order those probably. Sponsors, we'll have 11 sponsor tables at the venue. We have quite a few sponsors again this year. It's going to be a packed house. Jeffrey Way: I always wonder how you keep track of everything. Matt Stauffer: Yes, me too. Jeffrey Way: Do you ever get close to the conference and think, "Oh, my god. I didn't even do that yet?" Taylor Otwell: One way I-- Matt Stauffer: Do you have a checklist? Taylor Otwell: One way I keep track is I have a spreadsheet from last year with every expense. That actually serves as a checklist. Like, "Hey, badges are on here as an expense. I should probably order those for this year." I just duplicate that every year and then I type in the new expenses and it also serves as a projection for profit and loss on the whole conference. It serves a dual purpose as a checklist and as a profit estimator for how the conference is looking to make sure I'm not way overspending. Especially, on speakers this year. We've spent probably $50,000 on speakers this year just because we several speakers that have a speaking fee and then we try to pay every speaker at least a few thousand dollars to make sure they're not just losing money coming to the conference which can happen. I don't know if you've spoken at conferences. As a listener, you may know that often it's a breakeven or maybe even a losing affair. Trying to make it somewhat worthwhile. Jeffrey Way: I've been to some where you don't get anything and that's just how it is. Look, you can come and speak but we're not giving you a penny. Taylor Otwell: [chuckles] I feel like I usually lose money. Matt Stauffer: That's most of them. Jeffrey Way: I used to go to a lot of WordPress conferences. What were they called back then? WordCamp? Taylor Otwell: Yes, WordCamp. Jeffrey Way: Maybe. With them is like they just don't have the money. They don't have the budget. You're doing that all on your own dime, if you want to go. Matt Stauffer: I'm looking through this list of speakers. There's quite a few people who I don't know of, but I've heard you guys talk about them. Jocelyn Glei, maybe? Ryan Holiday, you've mentioned him being an author. Then, there's one other person who I didn't know. Who do I not know? I guess it's just them. I think everyone else here is either, Jason Freed or Bob Martin or Evan Yu or people who are pretty reputable members of the Laravel community. Although we do have a few first-time speakers, TJ Miller, Caleb Porzio, Colin DiCarlo are all speakers-- Taylor Otwell: Collin DiCarlo is not. Matt Stauffer: He's not-- Geez, I thought he was-- Taylor Otwell: No. I think he's a 2016 Louisville speaker. Matt Stauffer: That was the year I was at home with the baby, so my bad. Caleb and TJ. Jocelyn, you mentioned Ryan. He's written a couple books. I need to go check those out. Can you tell us a little bit about Jocelyn? Taylor Otwell: Jocelyn runs a podcast called Hurry Slowly where she talks about work, productivity, burn-out, stuff like that. She's actually interviewed Jason Freed on the podcast. She also wrote a book called Unsubscribe which is on Amazon. You can check out. It's just about the overabundance of notifications and busy-ness that's prevalent in our tech world especially. I think she's going to talk about similar topics at the conference. I entirely forgot Jason Freed would be there. That's kind of a big deal. [laughter] I've been so busy with other stuff. Matt Stauffer: Let me ask you. Do you guys feel overwhelmed sometimes by all of the work you have to do? Do you feel that you can manage it fairly well day-to-day? [crosstalk] Jeffrey Way: I'm often overwhelmed by the work on my plate. My life is a constant battle of trying to figure out whether I'm overwhelmed because I don't have everything settled on my side or whether it's because we need to readjust the company a little bit. There's always a the, "Oh, Dave quit and he used to do all this high-level administration stuff so I took on all of his jobs for a while. We need to hire a new Dave." That was the thing for the longest time. "Oh, we've got four more developers than we did a year ago so there's a lot more management" or "This one client is requiring all these needs." Sometimes, it's process stuff. Sometimes, it's just I need to stop screwing around in my free time and actually, work through my email backlog, or I need to figure out how to handle my tasks better. Right now, I'm actually doing really good. It's because I've spent the last couple of weeks really putting in a concerted effort. We also have hired someone who is not joining us until mid-May, who's going to take probably a third of my job off my plate. It's funny because I was actually-- That whole thing, there was this guy, Dave, who managed all this. A lot of those responsibilities are going to be back off my plate soon, so I'm getting to that point. I usually can tell, "Do I finish my day with an empty email inbox and a task list with a couple items left on it and a clean desk? Do I finish my day with 70 emails still in my inbox, 20 things in my task list, a big pile of paper on my desk." Usually, those are the signs for me of, "Am I struggling to keep up, or am I actually on top of my life?" Matt Stauffer: What about you, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: I was just thinking I feel less overwhelmed by the work, and more overwhelmed by the expectations of everything. Because I don't really have that much I have to work on every single day, like Forge is going to run so I just have to answer the emails. It's a little different, I guess, because you probably want to crank out videos. I don't know what your schedule is and then, Matt probably has his daily tasks. For me, it's this expectation of somewhere out in the future, I have to do something impressive again. Matt Stauffer: Do something amazing. Taylor Otwell: I have to get up on stage and speak about it and it has to not fail. That's the pressure I feel really-- weighs on me every day, basically, because at Laracon, there has to be something cool to unveil, which, nobody panic, we are working on something but things can come up, or problems can arise. It could be buggy, it may not be finished in time, and that stuff's really overwhelming, more so than just the daily routine. Like Laracon itself could-- There's expectations there for it not to suck, for people to have a good time, for the food not to be terrible, for the speakers to do well, all that stuff is high expectation, too. Matt Stauffer: Had you guys seen the grid of urgent versus important? I'm trying to remember who it is, but somebody from a long time ago, basically, drew a grid and any given thing that's on your plate as a pressure should be doing can be urgent or not urgent, and important or not important. The really interesting thing is that you can put all the things that are pressing on you into that grid and figure out which of the quadrants they find themselves in. The things we're mostly like to do that are most wasteful is the urgent and not important. The things we're least likely to do that sounds like, really, what's on your plate a lot, Taylor, is the important and not urgent. It's the things that don't have that immediate time pressure but are the most important. It sounds like a lot of your life is important but not urgent which I know those are the hardest things to have the discipline, the focus on. Is that something where you have developed practices to make sure you're not just letting that stuff slip? Taylor Otwell: Past couple of years it's been trying to start really early on stuff like Horizon and then the thing I'm working on for this year's Laracon. I don't know. I do agree because Mohammad's going to take care of a lot of Forge stuff for me. I don't really spend a lot of time working on those features lately. I would say yes, you're right, it is important but not urgent. That is a challenging spot to be in. Jeffrey Way: Plus you have so many products. I wonder does it ever get to the point where you think "Well, I'd love to do another one but I just don't have the capacity to maintain yet another project" Taylor Otwell: Yes. There is a sense of when do you say "I did what I set out to do." This is what success is, basically. I should just maintain what I have and be happy that it got this far and not really try to overwhelm myself with a new impressive thing year after year because-- Most people will never reach the popularity of something like Laravel ever. I should just enjoy that maybe and not really try to stress out about creating the next big thing all over again, every single year. Which I think there's some merit to that as well but people don't really like that I guess [laughs]. Matt Stauffer: It's a little bit of the Apple thing, right? Is a WWDC where they don't completely blow your mind an acceptable WWDC? I would say "Yes man, I'm happy with what I've got. Just don't break it". Taylor Otwell: Yes. I remember Steve Jobs saying not to compare Laravel to Apple in any way really but he said something like most companies are lucky to ever invent one amazing product, They had invented the iPhone, the mac itself was amazing and then iPhone and iPod and all the stuff that came with it. I don't know. At some point, there's only so much you can do. I'm going to keep trying this year we'll see. Matt Stauffer: Jeffrey, what about you? Jeffrey Way: I'm okay right now but it's more of the anticipatory type of thing because my wife's pregnant so we're going to having a second child. We're not going to be having two children. Matt, I know you have more experience with that than me but it's stressing me out a little bit. Then, also this is the first year I've been working with a UI guy. I don't know what you call him, a designer or UX, I don't know what the terminology is anymore but he's doing really great work but every time he cranks out something new it ads to the backlog of stuff I have to implement, which I'm very thankful for but I'm kind of anticipating an insane amount of work in the next five months. I was just curious how you guys handle it. Then, there's also that thing where I worry sometimes when you feel stress and anxiety it's like to some extent you're creating it yourself and it's hard to determine, is this something I'm just doing myself and I am entirely in control of or are you not in control of it? That's something I think about a lot. Is there a way to turn that switch off when you need to? I don't know. Matt Stauffer: I know that you have at least some, like talking about that urgent versus not urgent thing. I know you have some urgency because there's this expectation of a certain timeline for delivering videos. Are there a lot of things on your plate, for work, that are in the longer terms? You mentioned one thing being the implementation in the UI. I know that you do visual refreshes occasionally, although in your latest podcast you talked about how a lot of that was early days and it probably will be a little bit less the case going on where you feel like you're getting more of a handle on things. Do you have a lot of things that are in the longer term bucket? Or are most things still locked in the immediate video production timeline? Jeffrey Way: Most is in the immediate. The UI work we're doing will probably be next year or at the end of this year. That's probably the most long-term work thing I'm doing. Most of it is immediate. It's very difficult to crank out content all of the time. Sometimes if I go even four days without something new I will get a tweet or somebody is complaining. It's like, you have to understand I've been doing this for three years, there's like thousands of videos. At some point, I'm going to have trouble thinking of new stuff to cover. I'm amazed every week I'm able to, I'm not complimenting myself, but I'm amazed th I'm able to think of something to publish every single week but that does wear on me a little bit to finding things to cover every week. Matt Stauffer: I hit episode 100 of the 5 Minute Geek Show and I just was like you know what I've talked for 10 to 15 minutes at a time for about 100 episodes and I don't have anything else stuff to say. People keep saying bring it back. I'm like-- Jeffrey Way: Yes and I think that's-- Have you close that down? Is it done? Matt Stauffer: It's not over. It's just on the hiatus. It's on hiatus until I come up with something else to say. You know what I mean? Jeffrey Way: Yes. Matt Stauffer: I'm not saying it's over because I'm sure that moment will come again, but right now, I'm just like, "I don't have anything else to say." If I felt that pressure like you do, to keep saying things, man-- granted, everytime the new tech comes out you can choose to go learn that tech and go to it. There's some things you can reach for, but still, I totally identify with what you're saying. It's just at some point, I just might not have anything else to teach right now. [laughs] One real quick, on ask for a pro tip, two kids. The big shift for two kids for me-- Taylor, I want to hear if you have the same perspective as-- With one kid, there's always the possibility for one parent to be taking care of the kid and the other parent being an adult. With two kids, there's now-- Even if one parent takes care of the kid, the other parent is taking care of another kid. All of a sudden, those rests that you get-- What I can imagine is, once you have three kids, it's even crazier. Because now, all of a sudden, there's never a one on one. That was the big shift that I noticed with the second kid was. Let's say, the other parent is feeding the baby or something like that, you're not cleaning up, you're taking care of a three-year-old or whatever else it ends up being. That's the biggest shift for me for a second kid. Jeffrey Way: Sounds stressful. Matt Stauffer: [laughs] It's not that bad. It's just a perspective shift, I think. Jeffrey Way: I have heard one bonus is that, like in your case, Matt, your oldest probably helps entertain your youngest quite a bit more, whether or not, depending upon you and your wife at all times for entertainment. Matt Stauffer: The older she gets, the more they play with each other and the more moments we get where they're playing together in the toy room for 45 minutes. We go, "Oh, my gosh." We sat down and had an adult conversation. That's definitely, definitely a boom. All right, that's what's going on with Laracon. You said the tickets are already sold out. Do you have a waiting list like you have previous years, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: There's not really an official waiting list right now. As people email me, I actually do put their name in a little file. I have sold a few tickets that way, but there hasn't been a lot of cancellations lately. There's not really any tickets to give out right now, anyway. Matt Stauffer: Got it, all right. I have a couple questions, but before we do that, let's talk Laracasts real quick. What kind of stuff have you-- let's say, anybody who hasn't been to Laracast for a little while, what have you been covering? What's your latest technologies that you've been looking at? Is there anything exciting you want to share with people? Jeffrey Way: Yes, sure. Let me take a look. Been doing a bunch of things lately. I finally covered Laravel Echo in full. Somehow, that was one of the things that I just missed a year ago. I went through that top to bottom. I think if you're intrigued by that, on how to communicate with the client, I think that would be really useful. It's a series called Get Real With Laravel Echo. Some things, I just have to refresh. That's one of the worst parts of my job is, even if it's from 2014 and it still works, it's like, there's just a few differences where you sort of have to record it all over again. That's the worst part of my job. Other than that, one of the things we're working on right now which I'm excited about, it's a series called How To Read Code. The whole point is not for me to write code, it's to work through the process of how you learn from the code that other people have written. There's that phrase about, "If you want to become better as a developer, you have to--" I can't remember what it is. You have to read a lot of code, you have to write a lot of code, and you have to learn, I guess. A lot of times, I think young people really get into the learning phase where they're reading the books and they're watching the videos, but they're not actually taking enough time to read code that other people have written. I notice that's sometimes a black box. People are afraid to dig behind the scenes and learn how these things are constructed, so they stay away from that. Then, also, they end up not writing as much code as they should, because they don't know what to build. This is the thing that comes up a lot. I learned this from students, is they don't know what to build. They haven't been hired yet, they're trying to think of projects they can flex their muscles on, and they have no idea where to start. With the How To Read Code, Taylor, we're actually going through the Laravel.com source code. I haven't told you about this. Taylor Otwell: Nice. Jeffrey Way: We're just pulling it up on GitHub, and we're figuring out every step, like, "Okay, if there's this repository for the markdown files, well, how is this project getting access to those markdown files and how is reading it and parsing it and replacing the URLs? How is versioning being handled?" What's fun about it is I don't have any experience with that codebase, so it's how I would exactly figure out how things are constructed. It seems like the feedback's been pretty good. Once again, I think, for so many, it's a black box. You're kind of scared to dig in because you don't know where to start. I encounter this a lot, so I hope it's useful. Then, other than that, I've been working with this UI guy. It's been fun because most of the time, I do things myself. That's a lot of coding in the browser, writing a lot of CSS and zeroing in on something that doesn't look horrible, which I'm not very good at. He is so much more systematized. He has me set up with this-- what is this app called? Marvel? Are you guys familiar with this? Marvelapp.com. It's new to me. It's amazing. He'll share a link with me and it's like an interactive website where he can swap things out, he can show me interactions and animations. Then, once I signed off on it, he sends me a link to this Mac app called Zeplin, zeplin.io. It's amazing because I'm so used to-- When extracting designs, I use Photoshop. If there's some SVG, I have to cut it out and save it as SVG. Very hard, creating new layers all the time. With this, everything is just clickable. If I need a particular icon, I click on it, and there's a button that says "Save as SVG." This is all new to me. I don't have any experience with tools like this. It's been a huge benefit to me in the last couple of months. I love it. Matt Stauffer: It's very cool. I'm going to try and go back through, listen to this, put all this in the show notes, everybody. Well, real quick going on with me. I'm updating Laravel, up and running for 5.5, so that's exciting. We finally got approval - actually, 5.5 or 5.6, I'm not sure I remember. I think we might be doing 5.6. I was going to do LTS and I think we've picked 5.6. Finally got my editors to sign off in doing that. I've got Wilbur Powery, who's doing some of the groundwork for me, and just reading through all the change logs, and making a list of all the things that are out of date, so that I don't have to do that work, so that he can just give me that list, and I'm going to sit down and write. The hope is for that to be some time in the fall for us to have edition two, so that's fun. I just left a project where I had been writing code, basically, for 20 to 30 hours a week on top of doing my normal job at Tighten just because we had a project that hit a point where no BLs was available. I felt that I just needed to fish it out. That's part of why I'm feeling so good right now because I'm going back to being a real boy again. [laughs] I'm not going to make any promises I keep making like, "I'm going to blog again. I'm gonna newsletter again." I'm actually feeling this possibility, especially when that new employee joins in May that I might actually start being a human again. I have said that at three or four times since my daughter was born two years ago and it hasn't happened yet. Who knows? Maybe that day will come. Jeffrey Way: That's great. It's great news. Matt Stauffer: Yes. That's very exciting. Okay, so I have a topic for us to talk about. I didn't prep you guys for this, so sorry about that. There's a couple of topics of conversation that have been coming up really recently at Tighten about - and if anybody listens to Twenty Percent Time podcast, you'll know at least a little bit about this. Talking about JavaScript versus PWAs versus straight Blade apps versus Blade apps that have some JavaScript components. First off the bat, before we go to the deeper conversation, I want to talk about PWAs. I want to see, have you guys dug into that at all? The iOS has just pushed out some of the core features that would make it so that you can actually write a PWA and have it work on iOS. This is the first day where you can actually even realistically consider building one that would work on the most modern devices. It's like when Flexbox first finally actually worked versus like, "This has been a thing for a while." We haven't written any production PWAs for anybody, but it's finally a point where we're like, "We can." Is that something you guys have dug into that you're even interested in or is it like, "Hey, it just became legitimate a week ago, so now, maybe, I'll put my brand on it"? Jeffrey Way: Yes. Beyond a blog post or two, I have no experience with that at all. Like you said, it's always tricky. Do I try and invest my time in this if I can't use it too much yet? It sounds like it's now becoming a possibility, but, for now, I have no experience at all. Taylor Otwell: Yes. Me either. Matt Stauffer: Okay. Well, I have no experience other than I did a whole bunch of research to write that blog post, November 9. Jeffrey Way: Right. It's one of the ones I read [chuckles]. Matt Stauffer: Yes. Nine months ago I did all that and then, basically, I said, "I'm going to go build some." Then, I discovered that it didn't even work on iOS, and I said, "Well, maybe I'll hit pause and all that until iOS supports it." They do, and I know that Keith, who works at Tighten, has been doing a lot more thinking about that than I have. I've been pushing him to-- with all his copious free time he's on at this point, he and Samantha are nearly as busy as I am - to see if he can do a part two write-up now that it's viable. I'll see if he can do that. Jeffrey Way: I'm curious to what extent it's viable. In the latest browsers, that's the idea? Matt Stauffer: Yes. Basically-- Jeffrey Way: What's the fallback look like? I wonder. Matt Stauffer: In theory, PWA should work on fallback browsers. In theory, it's not like it's not going to work, but it's more like it's just going to be a website with JavaScript versus the value that a PWA is going to provide. You don't want to really go hole-hogging to something, expecting it's going to be a PWA where people can use it offline, they can use it when their internet goes out, it's going to save stuff, stuff like that, and then have it not work on the major browsers. We're basically at a point where all the major mobile browsers are going to be little work with it. I don't know what the whole mobile Opera situation is like because I haven't dug into that. I know that we're at a point where literally all iPhone users couldn't even use PWAs up until a week ago. It was very non-viable up until a little bit ago. Now, your mobile Chrome, and your mobile Safari, and all those are all possible to use it. The biggest thing with the PWA is just it's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, and it's a lot of learning, and it's a lot of different ways of thinking about things because you're having to make things, basically, function regardless of whether or not the internet is there. It's that biggest shift in perspective over anything else. There's a lot of complexity in architecture that you need to introduce to make that happen. The good thing is, people are building tooling to make that easier, but it's something where you're not going to do it unless the client definitively needs it. I can imagine maybe you eventually building a Laracast PWA if you really wanted to so people could go on a Laracast, open up the PWA in their phone, in their iPad, and then tap the seven videos they want to download so they can watch them on a plane or something like that. That might be the possibility for it. But I still think the vast majority websites won't be PWAs because it's cost and you got to be sure that you're actually getting the benefit. Like you said, if most major browsers can't use it, then you're not going to get that benefit. We're now to the point where most major browsers could get the benefits so people should start learning about it. But again, it's just really early days right now. Jeffrey Way: Okay. Yes, I find in general, most of the apps I build are that combination you said. A little Blade, a little Vue, sometimes they're interconnected, that and something that the sort of apps I build. Although I find it gets tricky. I find that I do want to reach for something a little different. I do sometimes feel like, "If I just built this as an SPA entirely, this would be a lot cleaner." I think a lot of Laravel developers probably end up in the same boat where you're trying to do both at the same time. It gets tricky because you often end up reproducing the same logic in two different locations: one for the comments side and one for your back end. I think it's a common thing developers in our space are going through right now. Matt Stauffer: That's the second part of this conversation so I'm glad you transitioned to it. We're having this internal chat where Daniel Coborn is basically saying, "Look, most of the sites were hired to do or eventually are going to have some JavaScript so why don't you just go whole hog in the first place?" Caleb is saying, "I want to build Blade apps that have little widgets, and I'd rather explicitly do all the work in my controller and then pass it in these props to the Vue, which is when it comes up." I'm saying, "I want to do all Blade until I find a definitive need the JavaScript's going to happen. When that happens, then I'll modify it the way it should be. We have this kind of continue or whatever. We chose as a different side. I wanted to hear from you guys. If you were to start a new app today, are you in the world where you say, "You know what? I'm going to do Blade and then I'll modify it." Are you in the world where you're like, "You know what? I'm just going to do single-page app all the way." Or are you somewhere in between? Jeffrey just answered a little bit so I guess Taylor, what's your approach right now? Taylor Otwell: The latest thing I wrote which hasn't been unveiled yet, I did basically build it as a single-page app using Vue and Vue Router. Honestly, I really like it. I think Vue Router is pretty nice and easy to use. I think for this particular use case, it just solved the bunch of problems that we would have had trying to make it all Blade. I feel like my use cases, both times I've interacted with Vue Router, which is Horizon as a single-page app, basically, and the new thing. But then, there are unique situations where I wasn't having to duplicate a lot of rules on the front end. Either you authenticated to view the whole thing or you're not. There wasn't a bunch of other authorization that had to happen for various little features. That made it a little simpler, I feel like, to build it as a single-page app because I wasn't having to duplicate a bunch of junk. But if I was going to build something like Forge as a single-page app, I probably would have a little more duplication on various things. I don't know, man. I see Daniel's point to an extent that it does feel good to just go whole hog and embrace it because it feels nice to do it all in JavaScript if you go down that path. I don't know. I think Caleb's point, I feel that pain most often on authorization. I feel like than anything else. Jeffrey Way: Yes, absolutely. Matt, I'm curious about your point. Because I have seen a bit of a backlash to JavaScript in general, where people think, "Okay, you're getting some extra interactivity but the complexity you introduce to make all of these work is sometimes insane." Just the fact that Mix has to exist to make that build process somewhat easy to understand, shows how complicated this stuff can be. I understand exactly what Taylor's saying but I also get the angle of, "Let's put this off as far as we possibly can." Has your thinking on that changed in the last year? Matt Stauffer: Yes. I would say that I love Vue, I love React, I love single-page apps when they're appropriate. I think that knowing what a lot of projects Daniel has spanned recently, and that type of thing that I know Taylor is working on right now. I would pick SPA. I pick Vue Router SPA and I'd pick an API first in that context but I think that we can do that and we can then assume that that is always the right way to go forward. To me, that's not the case at all because of what you just said. I think testing is harder. I think debugging is harder. I think NPM and all the node modules issues breaks more. I think the entire complexity of this system is significantly higher. I think onboarding new developers in the system is more complicated and I want to make sure that it's not because I know PHP better than I know Javascript. I've been writing Javascript for as long as I've been writing PHP. Granted I haven't been writing React and Vue as long as I've been writing Laravel. I think I understand them relatively well and just the whole system everything is more complex than an all Javascript app. I am willing to make that statement and so to me- Taylor Otwell: The testing is definitely more complex. Jeffrey Way: Yes. Matt Stauffer: Yes. So to me, if I'm in a place where I can accomplish it with Blade then I'm not going to introduce any Javascript. If I can accomplish with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget then I'm going to use it with Blade and the occasional Javascript widget. That doesn't mean I don't believe that there are plenty of apps that are better as all Javascript or maybe even not using Vue Router or whatever but like a Javascript page that navigates to another Javascript page so you're doing your React containers or whatever else it ends up doing. I'm 100% on board with that possibility but I need to be convinced that that's the way to do it before I go there. Jeffrey Way: Taylor, for the SPAs you're building, when it comes to testing, are you doing endpoint testing for your backend code? In addition to that, how much client-side testing are you doing? Do you have tons of [crosstalk] Taylor Otwell: I wrote all of the endpoint test and there's hundreds of them for a new project and then we haven't even written the front end test yet, mainly because I'm working with other people on this. Of course, I have Steve, my designer, and then I have another person working on front-end stuff. It's also complicated by the fact that this is a package, it's not an app that Dusk is really easy to pull in to and so we haven't really toyed around with making Dusk work in a package environment yet. I don't know what Dusk's going to look like. We may end up using some kind of Javascript solution. There's just so many little subtle interactions on the front-end that are going to be one, important to test and two, hard to test I think. I don't know, we'll see I haven't gotten there yet. Jeffrey Way: Yes, I'm curious to see how you figure that out. Taylor Otwell: I would like to pull dusk in and just use it to test the package. Ideally kind of like the test bench for the back end which I used to write all my endpoint tests. Hopefully something similarly -- we can do something similar to that with Dusk, we'll see. Matt Stauffer: I hadn't thought about that because I was like, "Oh yes, Javascript just use Java--" but it's not, it's multiple pieces. We have found that once you put the work into the Javascript testing if that thing is full-on Javascript you can get it to be tenable? I feel like Javascript testing is, in our world, is probably the next great hurdle for us to make simple for people. Basic Laravel testing was one hurdle and then, what do you call it?, your package Jeffrey that was eventually pulled in the core like application testing that was the next hurdle. Gulp was a hurdle and Mix was a hurdle. These are hurdles where they're really complicated things that we look at and said, "You know what? People in the community are needing this to be simpler" and someone sat out usually one of the two of you sat out to make it a lot easier. I know that there's at least two people talking at Laracon about testing. Testing in Javascript and stuff like that. I'm super excited about the possibility that -- I thought there's two. I know that Samantha is at least. Her talk is about full-stack testing strategies. The reason for this is because at Tighten we're always asking this question of, what are our different ways of testing the whole way up and down the stack? Samantha's our resident React guru and we've had quite a few React developers at this point but she's the lead in thinking there and she's been asking this question a lot of like, "What does testing look like?" what I told her was like, "I'm going to wait until you give this talk to demand this of you of you but I want you to make it really easy for me and any app to write a Javascript test" I know Dusk and I know Laravel and PHPUnit but I want you to make it super easy for me. I'm hoping that that's what her talk is going to do for me and for everybody else. No pressure, Samantha. [laughs] Jeffrey Way: That would be great. I think so many times developers don't think about that. I think maybe they get too deep in the woods thinking, "okay, this is quite you have to do. You got to get this and this and this and this and this and then pull in these 8 dependencies then you're ready to go." They forget that to a newcomer that's horrible it's so frustrating. The view test utils library works great but just to get to the point where you can start writing your first test it's a lot of work. In many cases like this, it's not spotlighting them specifically but in so many cases like this you find situations where, "This could be significantly easier to get started" and it's not a badge of honor that you have to go through so many hurdles to write your first test, it should be easier. Matt Stauffer: I like that as a metric. I would like to have the ability to write a Reactor Vue test out of the gate. The same way that with a new Laravel app, I can write a test out of the gate without. I literally open up example test and just change some letters and I'm writing my test, that's brilliant. That was not what writing tests in PHP unit used to be like. It's not as if PHP unit is easy to bootstrap but Taylor and company did the work to make that easy, and you did the work to make it easy with application testing upon the core. I'm hopeful that we're we're moving in that direction. Alright. JavaScript, backends, Laracon , Laracasts, Laravel up and running. What are you guys learning these days? Are there any books you're reading? I know Taylor you've been talking about stoicism a lot. I started that one book, the really old one is it Marcus Aurelius or something like that? Taylor Otwell: Yes. Matt Stauffer: I started the book and I'm just moving really slowly through it. Could you could you give me the TLDR elevator pitch for stoicism? Is that is that possible? Jeffrey Way: What is stoicism? Matt Stauffer: Yes. What is stoicism, Taylor? Taylor Otwell: I think the one-sentence thing is this? It reminds me of that serenity prayer, I don't know if you ever heard that where stoicism is very focused on not worrying at all about the things that are out of your control. They define the things that are in your control as only your own boss, basically. Your health is not in your control, your job is not really, it's influenced by external factors. That was a little confusing to me at first because some things, say you're in a tennis match and you're facing someone, and whether you win or not is partly in your control, but it's partly not. I was always confused by that from a stoic perspective. There was one book that helped me resolve that situation, where it was like, You want to internalize your goals a little bit. To succeed at the tennis match is basically to give it your best so to speak. Whether you win or lose, is out of your control at that point, but you're still succeeding as long as you prepare and practice to give it your best shot. That's the main gist of Stoicism is not worrying about anything that's out of your control. Only worrying about the things you actually can control. Everything revolves around that. Matt Stauffer: I like that. Taylor Otwell: Basically Marcus Aurelius' book re-visits that theme a lot in various circumstances. One of the other popular stoic books, probably the other most popular Seneca's letters. He visits that topic on a variety of issues. Death and dying, sickness, what it means to be wealthy, and be a stoic because he was pretty wealthy. Of course, Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor so he was extremely privileged and wealthy. I think Marcus Aurelius' book is surprisingly relatable for a Roman Emperor that lived 2,000 years ago. [laughter] A lot of the things he mentions struggling with are very relatable. I was surprised at how modern it all came across really for someone that you would think would be very disconnected from our life experience. Matt Stauffer: Did I remember you saying something along the lines of Ryan Holiday, the guy who's speaking doing something about stoicism? Taylor Otwell: Yes, he wrote the Daily Stoic which is a really popular book. There's 365 little chapters, every day it's like a little daily reading. He expounds on it in a couple paragraphs. It's a pretty cool little book. Matt Stauffer: Cool. Taylor Otwell: On the tech side what I've been looking into a lot recently is containers, AWS, deployment, stuff like that. Serverless stuff like AWS Lambda. I feel there's gold in those hills somewhere. [laughter] I just feel like it's not really being presented and packaged up in a very approachable way right now. Because AWS feels very low level, it gives you all the tools you need to make things happen but you still have to tie them together in pretty complicated ways to build something useful. Probably the person that ties that kind of thing together the best is something like Heroku but just playing with some of those technologies. I think AWS Lambda is really cool. I really love the idea behind it, where basically you start out with just a function. By default, it's just like a JavaScript function that receives some arguments. You think of it like a little artisan command that receives a payload from the command line. You can invoke this function and pass it, little arguments. Then you can do whatever you want, you never really have to think about the underlying server. I think their concurrency limit is like 1000 concurrent tasks running at a time. It's pretty scalable for most situations, but you can actually do pretty interesting things like you can run a Laravel app on AWS Lambda which I actually did this week. I'm using some tutorials that people had written. It's a really interesting technology and like I said I feel like there's cool stuff there that just needs to be mined out, repackaged, and presented to people in this sort of digestible way. I've been trying to digest it myself and it's very complicated and there's actually a real lack of quality, like guides and documentation on how to do anything actually useful. There's lots of like, "Let's deploy a hello world" nginx page to elastic container service but how do I do zero downtime deployments reliably? How do I set up all my key workers reliably?" All that stuff is not there. Jeffry: You guys are making me feel bad. I'm trying to think of what I'm learning right now and the answer is nothing. I can't think of anything. Taylor Otwell: I've been playing Rocket League like an hour and a half a day. [laughs] Jeffrey Way: I think sometimes it's good to not always reach for something new but to get yourself in a habit of just a daily routine of every single day I'm going to chip away at this. There have been plenty of times where I'm really pushing my boundaries for a little bit trying to learn something new but I can't say that right now. I'm feeling horrible right now. Matt Stauffer: I can tell you, Jeffrey, I'm not learning anything about code right now so don't feel horrible. Jeffrey Way: Really? Matt Stauffer: I'm learning things. Let me tell you the things I'm learning and I bet you you'll have something related. I'm listening to this woman, Esther Perel, who's this relationship expert. I'm listening to her stuff nonstop. My wife and I are both listening to all her stuff. It's really good. It's like this progressive thinking about relationships but every time I've listened or read to people who are talking about this type of relationship stuff they're like, "By the way, you should just have open relationships and be married to 20 people and have sex with all of them. It's no big problem." I'm like, "That's not me so much." But she has progressive thinking that kind of throws of some of the old croft that we brought along with us but stills very much focused on, "Well you're married to this person, stay married to this person." It's helpful. It's like opening up my mind a little bit. The other thing I'm thinking about is money. I may have talked to you guys a little bit I've been- Jeffry: Yes, you're into that lately- Matt Stauffer: I'm so into it. I just got obsessed with how much I hate having a mortgage. It became this massive thing for me. I literally just looked at my mortgage statement and I think this is it, beginning balance, applied balance, and ending balance. I lived in my house for I feel like several years now. It's atleast one year and it might be two years. I'm paying thousands of dollars a month towards my mortgage and I've applied $5,000 to my balance because I'm paying everything to the interest this whole time. I just feel like I'm in this awful system. You guys know this but I've been listening to these audiobooks. One of them is the millionaire one, what's it called? The Millionaire Next Door and then the other one is The Simple Path To Wealth and just focusing on like really simple investment strategies, really simple decisions you can make. I'm not going to talk about -- I could talk to you guys your ear off in the next half hour but to me, the two things I've been learning about are simpler, healthier approaches to money and investment. Then relationship stuff where it's kind of like helping you understand what kind of garbage you're bringing into your marriage or your relationship but in a way that is for the focus of you staying there, to that person long-term versus a lot of the other alternative. You know, half ways to thinking about it. Jeffrey Way: I live everything you say on the finance stuff because you think the more you can simplify your financial situation the better it's going to improve your relationship as a result, too. I think it's the number one or the number two cause of fighting in relationships, is financial issues and of course, not everyone is in control of it. The more you can simplify your finances then and not buy a new car and instead buy an older car or something you can afford. The more you can simplify it, the better it's going to improve your relationship with your wife or your spouse and your kids. I see nothing but good things there. One thing I am doing, though -- This may interest you, Matt, when we had the Laravel podcast months ago I said, "Years ago I stopped playing guitar and the interest I had left" it's come back in the last couple of months. Matt Stauffer: That's awesome. Jeffrey Way: I know and I'm very happy about it. I went and bought a guitar and an amp. I've been playing lately. You can maybe see it in the back there and it's funny to see the parallels with code. I'm kind of getting in -- I'm approaching guitar from a more mature point of view, I guess. I'm getting more into this idea of like, "Okay, every single day I'm going to be working on this. I'm going to take a very fundamental approach to building up skills, whereas when I was a kid it was more, "I want to learn how to do this. Let's figure out how to do this as quickly as possible." Now, I take a very different approach to it, which I feel all of this parallels with code. It's very funny. I noticed on Twitter the other day a bunch of people were talking about how many coders have some interest in music or have some experience with music. It's interesting, the overlap there. Matt Stauffer: I just read the intro to this Imposters Handbook thing that I tweeted out. I wish I could remember the guy's name because he's a well-known software author but he's talking about being a saxophone player. I remembered having read a book by him in the past where he is making a lot of those parallels. Do you know who that is what is? Jeffrey Way: What is it? Hanselmann? Matt Stauffer: It wasn't Hanselmann. He wrote one but then it was the one after that. You guys would definitely know who this guy is but I just remember that he had studied saxophone. I remember him talking about that in his book that I read but yes, who knows who wrote that. Anyway, I'm only a chapter into this Imposters Handbook but I like that. Jeffrey Way: Very cool. Matt Stauffer: We are at 50 minutes, which is usually when we start ramping it down. Is there anything else going on with you guys, anything you've been thinking about or learning or exciting about that you want to get a chance to chat about? Taylor Otwell: Not for me that I haven't already discussed, I don't think. No, just what I already discussed but we're working on new Forge things, trying to make people's lives easier and Envoyer is getting redesigned, which it hasn't gotten since I originally wrote it in bootstrap, so that will be nice. Other than that, I think that's about it really on my end. Jeffrey Way: Matt, can you share any news about who's coming up on the podcast? Matt Stauffer: Oh man, I don't actually know who's next but let me go pull up my Trello board real quick. Basically what I'm trying to do is, I've been a little sneaky on this but I'm trying to mix up people who everybody knows, who everyone's been waiting for because every once in a while people are like, "Why has Adam not been in the podcast or whatever". I'm trying to mix up those people who I know that people are anxious about, for the people who they're not anxious about but I know that they're going to be really excited when they hear it. There's a couple of people who I know everybody want to hear and I'm trying to spread them out like every three or four guests and then be like, "Yes, but there's these other people that you don't know are super awesome." Some of my favorite responses have been people like, "I've never even heard that person's name before and now I want to be their best friend", I'm like, "Yes, I did my job well." Of course, the well-known names in Laravel are all going to get interviewed. I've got a list of dozens and dozens and dozens of people. I know that Adam's going to be coming up soon for sure and your Eric Barnes and your Chris Fidao's and them are going to be up in there, of course, as well and Freek and folks like that. One of the things I did also, was I didn't interview anybody from Tighten because I didn't want to seem like it was nepotism, but there's quite a few really interesting people at Tighten, so I think the Tightenites are going-- I'm going to start slipping in some Tightenites and some Vehikl and Spatie folks. I'm going to start slipping in some of those folks as well too. There's a huge list, I mean, you guys, I could do dozens and dozens and dozens of more just from the list I originally spit out before even touching any of the suggestions I got on Twitter. There's a lot of good ones coming. Jeffrey Way: I'm excited. It's been fun hearing from people that I'm not overly familiar with. I think that's a very wise choice you've made. Matt Stauffer: I'm happy to hear it, I had so much fun. Of course, I miss you guys which is why we're back here for today. I figured we can do this one, every dozen or something like that, keep that lines of communication going. Jeffrey Way: Yes. Cool. Matt Stauffer: All right guys, feeling good. Anything else? Jeffrey Way: That's it. Matt Stauffer: It was a ton of fun talking to you guys and I can't wait to see you in a couple months. Until then, thanks for hanging out and we'll see you all later. Taylor Otwell: Alright. See you. [music]

Brainerd Outdoors Radio is THE place for everything hunting and fishing in the Brainerd Lakes area and beyond. On this weeks show: Jason Freed from Leisure Outdoor Adventures talks sight fishing for perch, Matt Breuer recaps his turkey hunt in Florida, and has the latest on Rainy River, Plus MN DNR Fisheries chief Don Pierra weighs in on the slight change to Mille Lacs walleye regs for open water.

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) – 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Leech Lake) – 3:35 – Jason Freed – www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:20 – Josh Hagemeister – www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:40 – Todd Heitkamp – www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) – 0:50 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Leech Lake) – 4:30 – Jason Freed – www.leisureoutdooradventures.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 6:30 – Todd Heitkamp – www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:05 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:05 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:30 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 11:05 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River.   We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:10 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:10 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 4:50 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa Great Lakes (Okoboji Area) - 7:25 - Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 9:40 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:340 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:05 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:25 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:05 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:05 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:30 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa Great Lakes - 7:45 - Doug Burnes - www.fishnfunokoboji.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 11:05 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:20 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com South Dakota (Central) – 4:50 - Brian Bashore - www.thewalleyeguys.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:25 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 2:40 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 4:35 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:00 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 0:50 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:50 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:15 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:40 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:40 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:40 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 7:55 - Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:05 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:15 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 6:45 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 8:55 - Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 10:55 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 0:50 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:10 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:30 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 7:15 - Brian Bashore - www.walleyeguys.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 9:15 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 0:50 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:30 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:45 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 8:20 - Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 10:05 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 1:05 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:10 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:00 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 7:30 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

Minnesota (North East) - 1:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:00 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:30 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 7:45 - Brian Bashore - www.walleyeguys.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 10:00 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North East) - 0:50 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:30 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Iowa (Iowa Great Lakes) - 5:50 - Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 8:35 - Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 10:30 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (Walker Area) - 1:40 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 3:30 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:50 Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 8:05 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (Walker Area) - 0:55 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 3:20 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 6:00 Josh Hagemeister - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 8:25 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (Walker Area) - 0:25 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 3:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:40 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 8:40 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (Walker Area) - 1:00 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 3:20 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5:35 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 8:35 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Dakota - 0:15 - Shantel Whittstruck Iowa - 3:50 - Kabele's Trading Post & Lodge - https://kabeles.com/ Minnesota (Walker Area) - 5:15 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 7:55 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 10:30 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) - 12:50 - Jeff Sundin - www.jeffsundin.com SouthDakota (Western)- 16:05 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa - 1:05 Kevan Paul - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 2:55 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 5:30 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 8:10 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) - 11:10 - Jeff Sundin - www.jeffsundin.com SouthDakota (Western)- 14:30 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 17:00 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (Walker Area) - 2:00 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 5:05 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 7:30 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com SouthDakota (Western)- 10:40 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 13:40 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa - 2:05 Kevan Paul - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:35 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6:25 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 9:10 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) - 11:40 - Jeff Sundin - www.jeffsundin.com SouthDakota (Western)- 14:50 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 17:30 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: https://goo.gl/uQ9vNA Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa - 2:05 Kevan Paul - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 4:11 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6:35 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 9:30 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) - 12:28 - Jeff Sundin - www.jeffsundin.com SouthDakota (Western)- 15:40 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 17:55 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa - 0:40 Kevan Paul - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:00 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 5:00 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 7:20 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com SouthDakota (Western)- 9:45 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 12:05 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa - 0:38 Kevin Paul - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:52 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 6:05 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 8:42 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa -0:48 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (Walker Area) - 3:11 - Jason Freed - www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 5:32 Jarrid Houston - www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 8:00 Josh Hagemiester - www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) – 10:03 - Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ SouthDakota (Western)- 13:11 - Craig Oyler - www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) – 15:38 - Todd Heitkamp - www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): http://apple.co/2eVfjqP Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Minnesota (North Crentral) - 1.00 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –2.49 Josh Hagemiester www.minnesotaguideservice.com Minnesota (Northern) – 5.02 Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) –8.14 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes –.58 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 2.58 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 4.55 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –7.30 Josh Hagemiester www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) –10.21 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes –.39 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com Red River of The North -2.14 Brad Durick www.redrivercatfish.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 4.26 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6.26 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –8.39 Josh Hagemiester Minnesota (Northern) – 11.08 Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota (Eastern) –14.22 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa -.52- Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Red River of The North -3.29 Brad Durick www.redrivercatfish.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 4.57 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6.53 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Lewis & Clark and Francis Case - 10.02 Brian Bashore www.walleyeguys.com SouthDakota (Western)-12.10 Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –14.57 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes –.45 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com North Central Iowa -2.39 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 4.14 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6.22 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –8.30 Josh Hagemiester Minnesota (Northern) – 11.28 Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ www.minnesotaguideservice.com Lewis & Clark and Francis Case - 14.42 Brian Bashore www.walleyeguys.com SouthDakota (Western)-17.00 Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –20.05 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes –.45 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com North Central Iowa -1.50 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 4.47 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 6.44 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –9.00 Josh Hagemiester Lewis & Clark and Francis Case - 11.54 Brian Bashore www.walleyeguys.com SouthDakota (Western)-14.47 Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –18.00 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes –.50 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com North Central Iowa -2.00 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Red River of The North -4.00 Brad Durick www.redrivercatfish.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 5.11 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 7.57 Jarrid Houston www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –10.03 Josh Hagemiester Minnesota (North Central) – 12.10 Tony Mariotti www.detroitlakes.com Minnesota (Northern) – 14.41 Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ www.minnesotaguideservice.com SouthDakota (Western)-17.55 Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –20.39 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. North Central Iowa -.41 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 3.41 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) –5.51 Josh Hagemiester www.minnesotaguideservice.com Lake of the Woods – 8.52 - Jace Louma – www.lakeofthewoodsmn.com SouthDakota (Western)10.31 Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –13.16 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Red River of The North -1.13 Brad Durick www.redrivercatfish.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 3.05 Jason Freed www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 5.33 Josh Hagemiester Minnesota (North) - 8.01 Matt Breuer www.northcountryguides.com Minnesota (North Central) – 9.40 Tony Mariotti www.detroitlakes.com Minnesota (Northern) – 11.53 Jeff Sundin – www.jeffsundin.com/ www.minnesotaguideservice.com Lewis & Clark and Francis Case - 15.09 Brian Bashore www.walleyeguys.com SouthDakota (Western)18.12Craig Oyler www.coldsnapoutdoors.com South Dakota (Eastern) –20.42 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

We are now covering Iowa, Minnesota, Lake of the Woods, North Dakota, South Dakota and the Red River. Iowa Great Lakes – 1.05 – Doug Burns - www.fishnfunokoboji.com North Central Iowa - 4.15 - Kevan Pauls - www.paulsfishingguide.com North Dakota - 6.16 John Adams www.fishingguidedevilslake.com Minnesota (North Crentral) - 7.36 Jason Freed http://www.leisureoutdooradventures.com Minnesota (North East) - 10.05 Jarrid Houston http://www.houstonsguideservice.com Minnesota (Southern & Central) – 12.31 Josh Hagemiester www.minnesotaguideservice.com South Dakota – 15.09 Todd Heitkamp www.dakotaangler.com Listen/Subscribe iTunes (iOS Devices): itun.es/us/OkRW-.c - Stitcher (Android Devices): goo.gl/gO5A5n YouTube: goo.gl/YbpluX Like Us on Facebook www.facebook.com/midwesthuntfish Visit our website www.midwesthuntfish.com fishing report

  Jason Freed from Leisure Outdoor Adventures gets us a fishing report from the central lakes area and Joe Henry has a Lake of the Woods update. Listen to Jason and Joe here.