Podcasts about jason thanks

From the symphony of cicadas that had locals dialing 911 to the somber discussion of responsibilities in public service, this episode weaves tales of the quirky and the critical. As we kick things off, you'll be entertained by our countdown escapades, and we get personal, sharing HM's own strides toward a healthier lifestyle complete with a switch to blonde ale and a toast to MC's wife's impressive six-month sobriety milestone. Diving into our "Stump MC" segment, I bring you the most peculiar news stories—like the great cicada mix-up—that challenge our understanding of emergency services and certainly keep things interesting.On a more serious note, we tackle the heart-wrenching conviction of Kansas City firefighter Dominic Biscari and the consequences of his fateful decisions. We explore the weighty implications of operating public vehicles and reflect on the policies that govern them. Then, shifting to a celebration of life, we recount a spur-of-the-moment wine country retreat, honoring a friend's memory and embracing the present moment. As a bonus, we celebrate the joys of gaming and companionship, sharing laughter and games across generations, from the adrenaline rush of Hell Divers to the pride of grandparent gamers. Join us for an episode that's a rollercoaster of emotions, from chuckles to contemplation.Insights Into TeensA father and daughter discussion about the everyday struggles of teens in today's...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the Show.Join our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Every parent has that moment of heart-stopping panic when your child's school goes into lockdown. We share our own nerve-wracking experiences and how our kids are becoming all too familiar with these threats, blending solemn reflections with a chuckle or two about the epidemic of "senioritis" striking ever younger students. Amid the more serious discussions, we can't help but debate the finer points of Australian slang and get caught up in the whirlwind of graduation parties and summer plans set to unfold for our own brood.Remember those iconic college films that seemed to define a generation? We're diving headfirst into the days of Savage Steve Holland classics and "PCU" shenanigans, sparking a wave of nostalgia that's sure to bring back a rush of memories. At the same time, we're navigating the choppy waters of college decisions with our kids—will MC number one lock in her choice before diving into camp counselor life? Strap in for a heartfelt ride through the rocky yet exhilarating terrain of young adulthood and the big choices that shape their paths.Wrapping up, we pull back the curtain on our personal lives, from the minor tragedy of a forgotten book to the triumphs over tabletop beasts in Arkham Horror. And as one of us steps into a new chapter in corporate security, we chat about the refreshing simplicity and autonomy this change brings. It's a mix of the personal and the universal, the poignant and the playful—a conversation that mirrors the multifaceted journey of life itself. Join us for the laughter, the learning, and the leaps into new adventures!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

As Justin was wrangling with a stubborn shower drain last weekend, a twinge in his back had him reflecting on the physical toll of the years—and it's not just home repairs that can catch us off guard. Stretching beyond the comfort zone of his tool belt, we engage in a heartfelt conversation about the unexpected risks in seemingly routine situations, whether it's deciphering the term "rat bag" or discussing the very real dangers first responders face on a daily basis. A New Jersey officer's recent brush with peril on a 911 hang-up call serves as a stark reminder that vigilance is a must, even when the task at hand seems as mundane as a welfare check.We then shift gears from the frontline of emergency services to the literary frontiers of Stephen King's Dark Tower series, celebrating milestones and the solace found within the pages of a good book. But it's not all about the printed word; we wrap up our session with a journey back in time, not just through the stories we love, but with the magical restoration of the iconic DeLorean from "Back to the Future." It's a tale of community, dedication, and a little bit of movie magic that reminds us why some slices of pop culture are worth preserving. Strap in for an episode that traverses the spectrum of human experience, from the daily grind to the extraordinary moments that define us.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Imagine standing at the helm of a crisis, where a split-second decision can mean the difference between safety and calamity. That's exactly what we tackle in our latest episode as we venture into the heart of emergency scenarios, from the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge to the peculiarities of halting a colossal ship in its tracks. We peel back the layers of complexity in these high-stakes situations, sharing the gravitas and the quick thinking required when public safety hangs in the balance.But it's not all tense deliberations and infrastructural failures. We lighten the mood with a side-splitting foray into the quirks of language, unearthing the true meaning of 'doona' and debunking 'Illywhacker' as a mere linguistic mirage. Tales of family life mayhem and the juggling act of work draw laughter and nods of understanding, while a surprise package from a listener infuses our discussion with the joy of simple pleasures. Through it all, we celebrate the spirit of community that buoys us, be it through shared challenges or the communal lifting of a White Claw in solidarity. Join us for an episode that's as heartfelt as it is humorous, and as informative as it is entertaining.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Dance your way into our latest podcast, where we kick things off with a chuckle over the mythical "unfunky chicken" and the equally elusive Ikea boogie. But it's not all fun and games; we segue into a heartfelt celebration of Arizona's commitment to the families of law enforcement and correctional officers by spotlighting the full college tuition scholarships up for grabs. For our listeners hailing from the Grand Canyon State and beyond, we're discussing the real game-changer these programs present, not just for the wallet, but for the future of the beneficiaries and their communities.Ever wondered about the gritty details of a Drug Recognition Expert's role? Strap in as I draw from my own experiences, analyzing the tricky business of handling incidents involving psychedelic substances. We critically examine Denver's decriminalization efforts and the resultant shifts in law enforcement strategy. The conversation gets heavier as we dissect media portrayal of police actions, zooming in on a recent California shooting. It's a sobering look at the vital role of mental health professionals working alongside officers, a partnership that could mark a new era in policing.As the episode winds down, we pivot to the Pittsburgh Police Department's bold new approach to handle only in-progress emergencies, a decision that's raised more than a few eyebrows. We're weighing the pros and cons, discussing the potential impact on crime reporting, community safety, and overnight police presence. Wrapping up with a personal triumph, we share a friend's acceptance to San Diego State University and her dream to teach. It's a reminder that individual achievements can invigorate community dreams, proving that every step forward is worth celebrating. Join us for an episode that's equal parts laughter, learning, and life lessons.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever wondered how the buzz and cheer of a stadium crowd could squeeze into the pixelated realm of vintage video games? Join us, Justin the Happy Medic, and me, MC from MCPD studios, as we wander through the labyrinth of nostalgia, starting with the iconic Intellivision gaming system. We also decode the mysterious Australian term 'Iliwacker' and share how it ties back to my policing days, encountering some of the most cunning characters you could imagine. The tales continue with our recent spring training baseball adventure, where we not only got to bask in the love of the game but also navigate the comical chaos of flying with Frontier Airlines—because, let's face it, when your baggage fee outdoes your airfare, you know you have a story to tell.Then, we shift from the outfield to the gritty dynamics of selling law enforcement equipment. With my own transition into a new security role on the horizon, we dissect the merits of commission-based work versus the steady paycheck of a salaried job. Listen in for insider details about blending in and interacting with the public on duty, and the anticipation of training for this new chapter in my career. Wrapping up, we ponder over life's little trinkets versus the practical things we need, all while keeping our feet firmly planted on the ground—no 'Iliwhacker' ventures here. So, buckle up for a rollercoaster of memories, insights, and good company with all the laughter and camaraderie you could ask for—more of which we promise in future episodes!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

When acorns attack! You won't believe your ears when we recount the wild tale of a Florida deputy whose trigger-happy response to a falling acorn turns his patrol car - with a handcuffed suspect inside - into an unintended target. Then, we're cracking open the mysteries of Australian slang, where phrases lost in translation lead to a whirlwind of hilarity and bewilderment. Our special guest, Jeff, brings a seasoned perspective to the mix, adding depth to our discussion on the critical elements of law enforcement training and the razor-thin margins between sound judgment and knee-jerk reactions.Navigating the minefield of birthday presents, we share heartfelt and humorous experiences about the sentimental journey of gift-giving. From the peculiar charm of crumpled dollar bills to the exhilarating dread of a mosh pit, join us as we reflect on the milestones that mark our lives and the gifts that resonate beyond the fleeting thrill of material possessions. And for those who geek out on board games and superhero mayhem, stick around as we delve into 'Legendary,' the Marvel-themed game, and the animated series 'What If?'—because who doesn't love a good alternate reality?Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Caught between the joy of a gaming win and the sorrow of a message never meant to be sent, our latest episode is a journey through life's highs and lows. We kick off with a celebratory moment, one of our kids achieving an impressive feat in Fortnite, and then pivot to a somber discussion about the consequences of texting while driving. It's a reminder that, with four new drivers in our homes, the stakes are high. The conversation takes an unexpected turn into the whimsical world of Australian slang – a laugh is had by all, but we don't shy away from the sobering news out of Tennessee, where a deputy and Tabitha Smith met their tragic end.The heart of our episode lies in Tennessee, where the gravity of life's unpredictability is felt through the chilling narrative of a submerged patrol car and its two occupants. We explore the deputy's nascent career, the enigmatic final text, and the significance of vehicle data in piecing together this puzzle. As we reflect on the six children left behind, the weight of the unfolding drama reminds us of the preciousness of human life.As we wrap up, we shift from the somber back to the supportive strains of emergency radio communication. Drawing from my own experiences, I underscore the importance of clarity and presence of mind when every second counts. Sharing stories from my early days on the job, we discuss how mental preparedness can make or break critical moments in the field. Whether it's bonding through late-night gaming or the shared adrenaline of a live concert, we close on a note of connection and the reminder to stay alert, to the rhythm of life and the road alike. Join us, Motor Cop and my friend Justin, the Happy Medic, as we navigate the intersections of joy, tragedy, and the resonance of the Nyckelharpa.X3 Bar - The ONLY gym gear you need Slash your workout time and triple your gains. Use "MotorCop" for $50 off!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Savvy property management entrepreneurs are always on the lookout for new ways to expand their services and better serve their clients and residents. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull chat with Nick Friedman, founder of College Hunks Hauling Junk and Trash Butler. You'll Learn [02:08] Becoming an entrepreneur [09:14] Daily trash removal for multifamily communities [16:45] A butler service for trash? How does it work? [19:47] Vetting team members [27:50] Junk removal services for property managers Tweetables “Property managers are that front-line resource for all things community.” “We've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results.” “Culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results.” “Execution is a differentiator if you can out-execute everybody else.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Nick: I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. Execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else.  [00:00:14] Jason: All right. Welcome DoorGrowers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing a business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower property managers, love the opportunities, daily variety, unique challenges and freedom that property management brings. [00:00:39] 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 business owners and their businesses. [00:00:56] We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management growth experts, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow and Sarah Hull, the co owner and COO of DoorGrow. [00:01:12] Now let's get into the show. All right. And our guest today is Nick Friedman. Did I say your name right?  [00:01:20] You got it right.  [00:01:21] Cool. And Nick has two different businesses. And why don't you introduce the two businesses and then I'd love to get into your background of how you got into entrepreneurship. [00:01:30] Nick: Absolutely. So two businesses that are relevant to property management, one is a doorstep amenity for apartment complexes called Trash Butler. It helps increase revenue and net operating income for the communities while also providing an amenity for the residents and that kind of incubated out of our first company that we launched, which is a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk and Moving. I'm a little more widely known for that business that I started back in college. It's a moving and bulk removal service that now has over 300 franchises across the U.S. So it's been a fun journey and a very entrepreneurial journey to say the least. [00:02:08] Jason: Awesome. So Nick, when did you first realize you were an entrepreneur that you were a little bit weird?  [00:02:13] Nick: I would have to say in retrospect, it was all the way into my early days of childhood. My sister had a lemonade stand in front of our house. She wanted to charge 25 cents for lemonade. I went out and started a competing lemonade next to hers and I wanted to charge a dollar for my lemonade because I thought my lemonade was better and I think we probably sold the same amount of cups, but I made four times the amount of money than she did because I was charging a dollar then she was charging 25 cents. So in hindsight, I think I would always do some out of the box things. My teachers would call me a little bit restless. But really our business innovation took place when we were in college. Because we had always been brought up and told to follow the more traditional career path, work hard in school, get good grades, get a job after you graduate, climb up that ladder. [00:02:56] And the summer before my senior year of college. My buddy's mom had a beat up cargo van from her furniture store and she said, "why don't you guys go do something with the van? You guys could move furniture, haul trash, you guys could be like college hunks who haul junk," and we just started laughing about it decided to put that on flyers and the phone started ringing so we were in business and realized that the name was catchy. [00:03:18] People appreciated quality service and and that was the light bulb moment for us to pursue a career of entrepreneurship and not the traditional path.  [00:03:26] Jason: There you go. So thank goodness for that truck, right? That's right. Changed your life.  [00:03:31] Nick: Totally changed our life. We credit her with the name. Yeah. [00:03:34] Jason: Competing with the sister. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think for me, it was my entrepreneurial mom who was a real estate agent. She just, she was always hustling, trying to figure out how to make money. And she would have us fold flyers for her and canvas neighborhoods.  [00:03:50] Nick: And that's really when we realized the niche for us is very much so within property management, right? [00:03:56] Because. A homeowner or business might move every couple of years, might have junk to be removed every so often, but property managers are that front line resource for all things community, whether that's residents who are moving in and out, whether that's bulk trash is being left behind and needs to get turned around for the next move in. And then that ultimately, as I mentioned, incubated our Trash Butler business, which is more of a recurring revenue model, but it produces income for the apartment complexes that we partner with. It was an evolution for us. I always tell the story when we 1st started, we were doing all the work ourselves. [00:04:29] So we went out and we bought an 800 number. And we slapped it on the back of our truck, trying to make ourselves look bigger, but it was still routed to our cell phone. And so people would call to complain about erratic driving and we'd be in the driver's seat answering the phone, pretending like we weren't, saying, "Oh yeah, we'll fire those guys when they get back on the road, yeah, they're the worst." Yeah. Yeah. "We don't condone that driving in our company." So we probably fired ourselves at least three or four times. And I'm sure, your property manager listeners can relate to that. When they first started their business, you're doing all the work yourself. [00:04:59] You're fixing the doorknobs, you're changing out the light bulbs and everything in between. And one of our mentors recommended to us that we read a book called the E Myth Revisited, it's by a guy named Michael Gerber. And in it really emphasizes the notion of working on your business, not just in your business, creating systems and processes for the business to scale, which is obviously what you're doing for folks. [00:05:20] And so I think that was the next light bulb moment for us is if we're ever going to have another truck. Let alone another location, let alone eventually a second business. We've got to start documenting how we do everything.  [00:05:31] Jason: Yeah. And is that what kind of helped it take off? [00:05:34] Nick: I describe ourselves as a 20 year overnight success because it feels like it took that long for us to get to where we are. [00:05:40] It really did. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of business owners and leaders have a level of impatience, which is good. But I always preach to our team, we've got to have urgency of effort, patience for the results, because if we get up every day, grind it out, and then we look a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, based on that consistent grind, we're going to see long term results start to manifest. [00:06:03] And so none of it happened overnight but it was a process and it was putting systems in place, aligning ourselves with great people and just being committed to our purpose and our vision.  [00:06:14] Jason: Yeah, I love it. I think I love that. Urgency of effort, patience for the result. [00:06:18] I think as entrepreneurs, nothing's ever fast enough for us.  [00:06:22] Nick: No, and that's a good and a bad thing as a business leader and an entrepreneur is, if we weren't optimistic, we would never start the business in the first place because we believe that the business is going to be successful. [00:06:34] We may minimize how hard it's going to be. We may minimize some of the challenges that we're going to encounter along the way. And that sort of maybe, cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call it, getting into business, I think is a good thing, but you then have to then have the grit and the resilience and the sophistication to muscle through the challenging times. [00:06:56] But I don't think I've ever met an entrepreneur that says, "I made more money faster than I expected to." It's usually longer. "I didn't make as much as I had hoped for when I first started out." And when reality sinks in, some people give up and go back to their corporate grind and other people just stick it out and keep pushing forward. [00:07:13] Jason: Yeah, I call that the fantasy stage of entrepreneurship. That's the beginning. We only see upside. It's all upside. It's going to be a success. I get property managers coming to me, potential property managers are like, I'm going to start a property management business. I'm like, "Oh yeah, how are you going to do this?" [00:07:28] And they're like, "it's going to be amazing because all the other companies in my market suck. And I'm like, "okay, what are you going to do different?" "We're going to charge less. And we're going to provide better service." I'm like, "okay, good luck with that."  [00:07:38] Nick: So yeah, that's a tough recipe. Look, I have come to realize, because we're in a blue collar industry ourselves, moving furniture and picking up trash at residents' doorsteps. And execution is a differentiator if you can out execute everybody else. It's not easy. It's not the flashy, shiny objects that entrepreneurs like to chase, but we, coming through this past year, obviously, the market has shifted its leads aren't falling from the sky like they used to, we've had to assess are we doing everything that we're supposed to with every client touch point? [00:08:09] Are we consistently delivering the service that we preach in all of our markets across all the apartment communities that we service? And that I think is something that that takes reinforcement and repetition. And sometimes it can be a little bit boring, but it matters because that does make a difference. [00:08:25] I wouldn't charge less than everybody. That's not a sustainable business strategy. But if you can consistently out execute everybody else, that is an advantage.  [00:08:34] Jason: Yeah, if you can out execute everybody else, then you can probably out price everybody else, too, the leader gets to dictate the price, I think. [00:08:41] Nick: That's right, and usually it's going to cost us more to be able to out execute everybody else, unless you've got just, these magic employees that are willing to take less money to provide a better experience for the customer so that you can charge less it becomes a difficult equation. [00:08:56] Jason: Yeah. It's not too difficult to close the deal when somebody comes to you and says, "I want the other company's price, but I want your level of service." [00:09:03] Nick: That's right. That's right. And that is hard to explain in the sales process. If they, having, don't have the relationship or don't have the trust built that, that takes time. [00:09:14] Jason: Cool. Explain how Trash Butler works for people that have multifamily communities.  [00:09:19] Nick: Yeah, so as I mentioned, it incubated out of our college hunks business. We recognize this opportunity in the apartment space, particularly in a multifamily communities where there's a long walk for the residents to take the trash out. [00:09:31] If you think about the garden style apartments, even mid rise or raps, where there's a long walk to the trash room or trash shoot. And so this industry has emerged doorstep trash service, where we've signed a contract with the apartment complex and then 5 nights a week, the resident can simply put the trash in front of their door and recyclables in some markets, and then our Butler will come by and take the trash and the recyclables to the onsite compactor, which is provided by the 3rd party hauler. So it saves the resident a trip to the dumpster or the compactor each night or every other night. There's a safety component for the residents, an amenity component for the communities and looking to try to enhance the their quality of life for the residents. [00:10:10] And then it actually becomes an income producer for the apartment complex. I know that there's some, skepticism about upcharging services in the industry right now. We're staying very close to that legislation, but let's say we charge $10 a month per door to the apartment community. [00:10:24] They have the ability to, charge anywhere from $20 to in some cases, $30, $40 a month per door to the residents. So it becomes an NOI. Producer, net operating income producer for the community, and it's an amenity for the resident, many times an expected amenity for the resident. So currently, we're the second largest provider in that industry. [00:10:41] We service about 300, 000 doors nightly. We're the national partner with Graystar, of course, the big 800 pound gorilla of property management. And we started out as a side venture has all of a sudden, blossomed into a meaningful business that we've actually brought in some private equity money to help sustain that growth. [00:10:58] Jason: Yeah, brilliant. So yeah, I've lived at a complex for a while, and I had to walk forever to go drop my trash off. I hated it. It was super annoying. So I had to have some sort of stupid cart or something just to carry all my trash and like...  [00:11:12] Nick: I used to live in an apartment complex that did not have this service, and I would put the trash either on the hood of my car or in my trunk at times to drive it to the compactor, and one day, I actually forgot that I put it in my trunk, and so I passed by the compactor and this was a hot day in Florida in the summertime. [00:11:30] So of course, when I came back to my car at the end of a long work day and realized that I had failed to take the trash bag out of the trunk, it was a direct trip to the trash compactor and then the the car dealership. Oh yeah.  [00:11:42] Sarah: And then this is a service that the tenants pay for. Yes?  [00:11:46] Nick: It is. [00:11:47] So we contract directly with the community, but the tenants pay for it through their lease. So what we do when we sign up a community is we have a what we call phase in pricing where it steps up over the 1st year of the service. And so the community is never out of pocket. It's never a cost to the community. [00:12:03] The residents are either just paying a pass through, or even an upcharge to the community so that it becomes a profit center for the community. Yes, it does become an ancillary income stream for the apartment complexes. The resident is paying for it. It's part of their lease. It's not something that's opt in, opt out, but if they haven't had it before, it'll wait till the lease renews for it to be added in. [00:12:24] And so we're not charging full rate during the first year. We're stepping it up during month one, month two, month three in order to ensure that the residents are all paying for it by the time we're fully phased.  [00:12:34] Sarah: Oh, very nice. And then is this nationwide? If someone were like, "Hey, I think that's a great idea. Can I?" [00:12:40] Nick: It is. Yeah. So we're in about 30 states right now. Usually when you have a national partnership with a company like Graystar, they point to that direction and we run in that direction. So we opened up in the Northeast, we opened up in California. Our biggest presence is in the Southeast, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Carolinas. We've got a pretty big presence in Arizona. I know that's where you guys are. We're all over. We got boots on the ground. That business is not franchised. Our college hunks business is a franchise model that we have independent operators, but our Trash Butler business is all corporately operated. [00:13:12] So we have managers and and sort of area supervisors in each market that we service.  [00:13:17] Sarah: Oh, very cool.  [00:13:18] Jason: Got it. Yeah. All right. And is there a lot of competition for Trash Butler?  [00:13:22] Nick: Trash Butler and College Hunts has a lot of competition. What I always like to say, there's low barriers to entry, but high barriers to scale. [00:13:29] So there's probably a lot of similarities with the property management business as well, right? Any mom and pop can go out, hang a sign out or get a truck and say, "I'm in business." and you can do that with one or two communities or maybe one market. But when it comes to scaling out that infrastructure and providing a consistent level of service nationwide there's only a small handful that have done it and that's because it costs a lot of money to get to that scale. You've got to have software. You've got to have great people in every market. You've got to have accountabilities in every market. And that's been good and bad. There's always the people that will come in and try to undercut what we're charging or what their competitors are charging, but they can do that on a one off community or two communities. [00:14:09] But at some point their systems are going to break because they're doing all the work themselves. Like we did when we first started.  [00:14:15] Jason: Yeah. And I'm sure occasionally you see the cheap, dumb property manager that wants to like, "Oh I'll just do this myself. And I'll just make my team members, I'll make my gal at the front office desk go haul garbage." [00:14:26] Nick: And, we all know that employee retention is one of the hardest things right now to keeping good people. And you want your good people doing high value activities. At the property management level, you don't want your good people picking up trash from, 100, 200, 300 units every single night. [00:14:42] That's a surefire way to lose your good people. We think of us as an outsourced arm of property management. We pride ourselves on being an extra set of eyes and ears because we're walking the communities in the night. Night walks and when we're doing our patrol, so we're able to report back if we see a safety hazard or we see anything, suspicious activity, we can report that back in our reporting tools. [00:15:03] And so it becomes an extension for property management, not a cost center. And that's, I think, the most important piece. And there's redundancy. We've got backup butlers if a butler misses because he's sick or, has a wedding or something, I don't know. And so we send people in their place and that redundancy is important because, the residents will let you hear it if the trash gets missed. [00:15:22] That's for sure. Yeah. And they're paying for it. So they expect it to get picked up every night that they put it out there.  [00:15:28] Jason: Yeah. If trash day gets missed, there's going to be some pretty unhappy people. It's just sitting on their porch for a week. "Do I bring this back inside? Where do I have to walk it over myself?" [00:15:37] So how small of a complex do you guys take on? Like what are your sort of limits here?  [00:15:42] Nick: To be honest with you, the sweet spot for a trash butler is really a hundred units and greater. So I know there's a lot of property managers that manage smaller facilities or single family properties. [00:15:52] Usually communities like that it's smaller communities, it's more difficult to create a scalable model for the nightly doorstep trash pickup service. But we do see a lot of partnerships with our College Hunks business and the single family rentals the smaller apartment complexes where there's tenant leave behinds, or they want to have a move in special, so they'll contract with our College Hunks location in their market to move the resident in or move the resident out because the move in and the move out are two very critical touch points of the overall living experience as it relates to a community. And so I think the property manager may, in some cases, undervalue the importance of that high touch experience, especially on the move in when they're moving out, unless they're moving to another 1 of your properties. "Have a great day. Sorry to see you go." But when they're moving in, you really want to make that a special, memorable, positive experience so that then it reinforces the positive experience they have while living there.  [00:16:45] Jason: Now, normally trash pickup by the garbage companies is weekly, but you get, you mentioned nightly that you're doing this. [00:16:52] Nick: So we're doing the butler service nightly. We're not taking the trash off property. We're taking it from the doorstep of each resident to the onsite compactor. So if you think about it, the compactor pickups are still going to be weekly but the trash can be picked up from the residents doorstep on a nightly basis, typically 5 nights a week. [00:17:09] This kind of industry standard is Sunday to Thursday night. And so that's where this is becomes a very attractive amenity because if your trash fills up, you got to take it out and you want to wait until the trash day or whatever. You can put it out five nights a week and the butler's gonna take it to the onsite compactor. [00:17:24] Jason: Nice. . Yeah, that makes it really convenient. Okay. Got it. Cool. What do property managers typically. Ask about this service that I haven't asked yet? [00:17:35] Nick: Ah, so what we like to do is we boil it down to three very simple things. What's most important in this service, the doorstep amenity is the trash going to be picked up on time? [00:17:45] Is it going to be consistent? And is it going to be clean? In other words, is the trash butler not going to leave a mess or loose trash and all those sorts of things. And so we actually have what we call A 3x guarantee of Trash Butler, where we guarantee that those 3 things are going to be 100 percent consistent. [00:18:02] If not, we're going to make it right financially by reimbursing for the night, or in some cases, the week. And so I think that's really important. Another question that we actually make sure we emphasize is that there are some companies that do this that will use independent contractors and we recommend steering away from that because there's a level of liability and also accountability that's missing if you've got independent contractors picking up the trash five nights a week on your community. And so having a W 2, uniform, background check butler that's walking the hallways, walking the breezeways, picking up the items is really critical as well. So those are usually the most consistent questions. [00:18:41] I think not a lot of not all property managers really know how to charge the residents back for the service. So we try to pride ourselves on being revenue consultants and sustainability consultants as well. Not just the doorstep vendor for picking up the trash. And so I think, creating that partnership with any of the vendors is really critical, for your listeners not just our category but anybody who they're working with is having that trust and go to relationship. [00:19:04] That they can, rely on. It's not just an invoice, it's not just a contract, but there's actually a relationship there to ensure that, stuff is getting done when it needs to get done. And again, that goes with maintenance, that goes with roofing, that goes with insurance which I know is a huge issue, with properties these days. [00:19:21] And I think that we want to be a piece of that overall equation.  [00:19:24] Jason: Yeah. One bad independent contractor story could probably destroy a property management company. It certainly could destroy a relationship with one particular multi family complex or with that particular owner, but it could destroy a business if it were serious enough. [00:19:41] So that's right. That's right. Yeah. So related to that, how do you vet your butlers?  [00:19:47] Nick: So we prided ourselves both in our college hunts hauling junk business and our trash butler business on really being a culture first team member driven organization. And what I mean by that is we want to get great people. [00:20:01] It's a blue collar industry, but we want to get people to have pride of ownership of the work that they're doing. So it starts with the recruiting, our job posting, our recruiting machine, our interview process, our background checks, our reference checks, and then our onboarding. Our onboarding and retention is all about, we say, enrolling our team members in either the Trash Butler way or the College Hunks way of doing business. [00:20:24] And so I think it's important anytime you're hiring employees that you've got a system and a process. For identifying who are the type of people you want to bring into the organization because that's going to help define the culture and we always say culture drives behavior. Behavior drives results. [00:20:38] And so if you're just picking up any body off the street to fill a hole, you might get somebody good, but chances are, they're not going to be. Aligned with the core values of the company, the purpose of the company. And so we've viewed ourselves as our secret sauce as being able to recruit a widespread labor team decentralized across the country, train them, onboard them and retain them to go out and provide a good service on a consistent basis. And so I think again, relevant to your listeners and their businesses as they think about who they're hiring or teams that they're developing having a set of core values that you would abide by having a long term vision of what you're trying to become as an organization, what you want to be recognized for as an organization. [00:21:21] And then and then work to the present, the action items that you're going to take to, to ensure that those values are upheld and that the vision is becoming a reality.  [00:21:30] Jason: Yeah, that's that's so in alignment with the stuff that we teach, you mentioned culture, behavior results. [00:21:35] And when we focus on helping clients figure out their hiring systems, we focus on what I call the three fits, which is culture first personality fit, which relates to behavior and then skill. And skill's the only one that you really can move the needle hugely on. Usually it's about finding people that match your culture, that share your values, and then finding somebody that is the right personality fit to succeed in the role, and then you can train them. [00:22:01] But most business owners do the opposite. They're like, let's just find somebody with the skill.  [00:22:05] Nick: Somebody who knows how to do it. Yeah you're 100 percent right. There's a mantra. I'm sure you've said it probably is, you hire for attitude, you train for skill. And if you can hold true to that now, look, obviously they have to be capable and competent of learning the skill. If you're providing them the tools to do the work and they still can't do it, then there's a competency gap there that's missing. And you, you have to have, we like to say results based, performance based objectives, but you also have to have good people who align with your values because, if you've got somebody who's not good at the job, but a really good person, ideally, you could train them or find a seat for them to fill. If they're a bad person, but good at their job, then you feel handcuffed and it becomes this poison seed and an apple pie that ends up making the whole thing rotten. [00:22:56] Yeah, I want a team that can perform on the field, but you've got to have a good dynamic locker room. You can't have somebody in there that's upsetting the team dynamics, and that's where leadership comes in. That's where the leader of the organization has to champion the values, has to champion the vision, has to champion the culture, has to hold people accountable, especially their fellow leaders about, what are the behaviors that we value in our organization that matter to us? [00:23:24] Jason: Yeah, love it. It's got to be pretty daunting task to run a large empire, especially in a blue collar industry of people to make sure you've got good leadership. Managing good people and a good hiring process.  [00:23:38] Nick: Yeah. It's like I said it was a 20 year overnight success for us and it never gets easier. [00:23:43] Maybe, new level kind of different devil, but it's it's a lot of fun growing a business and embracing those challenges along the way. But, you hit it on the head, having the right leadership team to help support the founder of the entrepreneur in the journey. [00:23:58] And another thing that I think your listeners probably can relate to is along the way as their business grows is sometimes you're going to outgrow your leadership team, which we've gone through, multiple layers of that. And it's not easy because somebody who helps you get from, 0 to 20 properties may not be able to take you from 20 to 100 properties or somebody who took, in our business that took us from, 0 to 50 franchises or or what have you. [00:24:22] And there's a lot of parallels between our trash Butler business and property management. And so I'm sure we're facing the same sort of things and, making sure that you've got folks that... that's probably the hardest part is when they fit the culture, but the business starts to outgrow them. [00:24:33] And so that's why leadership development is very critical and also identifying the skill sets to make sure they're built for the longterm.  [00:24:41] Jason: Yeah. It said that the number one indicator of success is actually intelligence. And if somebody has enough intelligence, they can rise to different levels of competency and improve. [00:24:53] For example, like somebody might have a good executive assistant and maybe someday they're CEO, but I've had some assistants in the past that were not capable of that. They just weren't right. And then I've had some that were able to rise to different levels of, management. [00:25:06] And I think being able to, I think it's a knack or a talent to be able to identify that light because you can't just give people intelligent tests.  [00:25:14] Nick: Although they, they do have some different tests out there. Now there's the wonder liquid, which I think is what the NFL uses. [00:25:18] We use predictive index, which has a cognitive test and then also a personality profile matching, it's not an exact science, but it definitely provides another data point. Because hiring is probably the toughest thing. Even the sports teams get it wrong half the time, they can actually see the person playing on the field and they know from the other coaches, what type of person that individual is. [00:25:40] And yet they still draft the wrong player or sign the wrong position. And we got to give us, give ourselves a little bit of a break too, because our managers and our franchise owners who view the leadership role as a blessing rather than a burden, I think are the ones that are going to see the most success because they embrace the challenges of turnover. [00:26:01] They embrace the challenge, teaching their team members or empowering their team members to tackle new obstacles. They embrace the fact that maybe certain individuals on their team might have to be layered underneath the next layer of leadership. And so I think that's I think that's something that we got to keep reminding ourselves also as entrepreneurs. [00:26:17] Jason: We've, we partnered here at DoorGrow for DoorGrow Hiring with an AI assessment company before AI was big. And it's pretty spot on and amazing at identifying people that are the right culture, personality, and intelligence level. I used to use Myers Briggs, human design, Wonderlic DISC, and I would get a pretty decent picture of a person incorporating all of these things, but I had to know all these different systems and and I can hire with pretty good accuracy. [00:26:46] And so we started testing against this AI tool and it got the right candidate every time. And it was pretty obvious in the tool. We now use it with clients and it does a really good job. So it's pretty awesome. Very cool. That's how I got my current assistant, Mar, who's awesome. And I think all of our last several team members. [00:27:03] Nick: So yeah, it's pretty cool. Are you able to share the AI tool or is that proprietary to you guys now?  [00:27:08] Jason: So we've partnered with a company called BRYQ, B R Y Q. And yeah, it's super cool. So it's usually not affordable for the small business owner.  [00:27:17] Nick: Got it. So you guys have like an enterprise platform for, because you do recruiting as well? [00:27:22] Jason: Yeah, we help property managers with the hiring and recruit recruiting piece. 'cause if you get that wrong, that's a $10,000 minimum mistake. Minimum. And plus the opportunity cost of the money that you're just not going to get because they didn't do as good of a job. And I've seen it at the multimillion dollar level, most business owners just doing Russian roulette in hiring until they finally get a good team after a decade,  [00:27:41] Nick: I've been guilty of that myself.  [00:27:42] Jason: So me too. Yeah we're the summation of our mistakes when it comes to success. Super cool to have you here on the show. What should property managers know about the College Hunks Hauling Junk? How could that benefit  [00:27:54] Nick: them? [00:27:54] Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that our college hunks business is nationwide. We have almost 300 franchise owners in that business. We're in about 40 States. And so that business is local moving as well as we call bulk trash removal. So it's not just homeowners that we're moving. [00:28:10] It's not college campuses that we're moving, but we're moving anybody that's moving from point A to point B, whether that's a business, an apartment, a resident, a homeowner. And everything in between and we also do junk removal or bulk trash removal. So we're really the only one stop solution that can do both the move and the bulk removal as one brand, one company. [00:28:30] And I think it's important for apartments and multifamily in general, because you want to know that the individuals and the companies that are coming onto your property are insured, have a reputable, accountable brand behind them. And so we've started to see a lot of traction with apartment partnerships where we've become this preferred mover for them to recommend to the residents in the moving leasing packets. So they know that, the trucks are going to be branded. The property is going to be protected. The elevators or stairways are going to be, wraps that are not damaged. The individuals are going to be properly insured, so there's no injury, no injuries, properly trained. [00:29:09] We're not going to be blocking resident cars with the moving van, which, makes everybody upset. We've got a whole national platform and local platform for partnering with property managers. To be their go to solution for moving the residents in and out as well as the tenant leave behind the bulk trash removal, clearing out, for the turns. [00:29:28] And whether that's, corporate removal or just furniture removal, we have a partnership with goodwill where we can donate anything it's reusable. So I think that's something that maybe a lot of property managers don't realize is our College Hunks Hauling Junk and moving business is a great resource for property management in general. [00:29:44] Sarah: That's awesome. That was one of the things that was so frustrating is just waiting on the junk removal. Like it's finally vacant. Go! And sometimes they're like, "yeah, I'm a week out."  [00:29:55] Nick: Yeah. And we can do same day, next day. And look, there's going to be a wide range of prices on junk removal. I know that, there's a budget consciousness and property management. [00:30:03] I get that. Anyone with the truck can come and claim to do junk removal, but he might not answer the phone the next time you call him, or he might be a week out or he might say he's coming and not come. We've got a national call center, a national booking platform, a national accounts program. [00:30:18] So we've got responsiveness and that's something else again for your listeners. Nine out of 10 service companies don't even answer the phone. And so it's something as simple as just making sure the phone gets answered when people call if you've got a property management company, making sure your phone, you have somebody, even if it's an outsourced third party, answers the phone when your residents call or answers the ticket when, the client calls. That goes a long way. It's simple and often overlooked, but it gets back to what we talked about earlier about just being able to out execute what other people aren't doing.  [00:30:48] Jason: Yeah. That's the foundation of decent customer service is accuracy and availability, according to the Gallup polls customer satisfaction pyramid that they had in one of their books. [00:30:59] And if you're perfectly accurate and perfectly available. They don't notice you like that's just default. They just assume that should be done. So it's a math that it's partnership and then advice. And so when you get to that level where you're giving advice, like you had mentioned, like helping them with their fees and helping them figure out how to make money off of this and get the NOI, that's where you're at an exceptional level is when you get to that peak of partnership and then advice. [00:31:25] Nick, this has been a really cool, appreciate you coming here on the show. How can people get connected to College Hunks Hauling Junk and a Trash Butler?  [00:31:36] Nick: So the best way for Trash Butler, really simple, TrashButler. com and for our College Hunks hauling junk and moving business, really simple, CollegeHunks. com. So TrashButler. com, CollegeHunks. com, that's for the doorstep trash and recycling amenity as well as the moving and junk removal partnership opportunity and and look, I appreciate you having me on. I think it's awesome what you're doing to help, empower and motivate and inspire and elevate the property management industry because it's a great industry. And it's one that is right for people to continue to elevate and improve upon.  [00:32:07] Jason: Awesome. Thanks, Nick. Appreciate you being here on the DoorGrow show.  [00:32:10] Nick: Thank you.  [00:32:12] Jason: Thanks for being here. All right. So if you're a property management business owner, you're wanting to grow and scale your business. [00:32:18] Reach out to us. You can check us out at DoorGrow. com or go to join our community and hang out with a bunch of property management entrepreneurs and find out if we're legit and see what everybody else is doing. Go to DoorGrow club. com, and hopefully we're talking and working together soon. Bye everyone. [00:32:36] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. 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!  [00:33:03] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: 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 doorgrow.com, and 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.

Witness the raw reality of public festivities gone awry as we recount the gripping tale of a Super Bowl parade that descended into chaos when gunfire erupted. Navigate the complexities of emergency response and public safety with us, as we dissect the layers of protocol and preparation inherent to these situations. Joining us from the land of kangaroos, our mate Jeff injects a dose of Aussie slang into the conversation, offering both comic relief and an educational glimpse into cultural colloquialisms.Amidst the sounds of celebration turned sour, we tackle the contentious debate surrounding gun control laws and their influence on youth violence. The episode strips back the layers of fear and misunderstanding that proliferate in the wake of a crisis, analyzing the implications of open carry in personal interactions. We share candid insights from armed traffic stops and sift through the ashes of misinformation to reveal the importance of clear communication and community support systems in the healing process. Our discourse doesn't shy away from the somber reflection on the 'human problem' at the heart of such tragedies.As the confetti settles, we question the value of large-scale public events against the backdrop of potential risks, weaving through the legal, social, and financial complexities that they carry. Yet, life's unpredictable nature gifts us with stories of serendipity, like a Super Bowl Sunday errand that culminates in an unexpected treasure trove of bargains. And as we bid you a safe adieu from the MCPD Studios, we eagerly anticipate our next session with Jeff, with the promise of diving into a world of baseball experiences and movies that bring us together, regardless of the hemispheres that separate us.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever reminisce about the 'good ole days' of the internet when your blog was your kingdom and a custom email was your scepter? Join me as we stroll down memory lane, chuckling over Australian slang and unpacking the relevance of personal websites in an era where Buzzsprout and the like reign supreme. We'll explore whether these digital homesteads are still the cornerstone of content creation or if they're now just quaint relics in our social media-centric world. It's a conversation packed with nostalgia and practical insights, as we weigh the worth of personal websites against the slick efficiency of today's hosting platforms.Then, we'll crack open the debate on the future of weekly emails—do they still kindle the spark of audience engagement, or are they just another unchecked task on our infinite to-do lists? Without skirting around the subject, we talk about the potential fallout of hitting 'unsubscribe' on this once-personal tradition. And as a bonus, I'll share my latest solo adventure in culinary delights with the instant pot—because sometimes, the best company is your own. So, settle in for an episode where we honor our digital roots while eyeing the horizon of online evolution. Cheers to you from MCPD Studios—here's to staying safe and sated until we meet again on our next digital adventure.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Several property managers find themselves feeling alone in their difficult market. It might feel impossible to grow after being stagnant for so long. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with DoorGrow client Brian Bean to talk about how he grew his property management business despite the challenges he faced. You'll Learn [01:55] Getting started in property management [06:20] Making business partnerships work [09:47] Shifting from real estate to property management [18:21] What's next for your property management business? Tweetables “It's really difficult for partnerships to be successful because for most people, the ego is getting in the way.” “What you focus on is what you get.” “Until we learn how to get and find people that we feel safe with, I don't think we're supposed to trust.” “When you get really great people, it's not hard to trust them.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Brian: After 10 years of just being flat from 30 to 35 units. And then now literally doubled it last week. And that's been from following your instruction, your philosophies and you know, focusing on building this business.  [00:00:15] Jason: Welcome DoorGrowers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently then you are a DoorGrower. DoorGrower, property managers 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 business owners and their businesses. [00:00:58] 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, along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:18] So our guest today we're hanging out with Brian Bean, who is one of our clients and Brian your company is Dream Big Property Management.  [00:01:28] Brian: That's right. We're in Merced, California.  [00:01:30] Jason: All right. In Merced, California. So Brian welcome to the show. Oh, Riverside. You said Riverside. [00:01:37] Okay. Got it. I know this area. So yeah, I grew up in Rancho Cucamonga. So just a little bit near there. So Brian tell us a little bit about your journey and how you got into property management and then eventually how you stumbled across DoorGrow, I guess.  [00:01:55] Brian: Right, so, I was a newspaper editor and reporter and I got a job, grew up in the Pacific Northwest, got a journalism degree, got a job in Palm Springs on the Daily Newspaper, and moved to California in the 80s. [00:02:11] And so I did that for 13 or 14 years toward the end I, you know, coming from an entrepreneurial background, my uncle gave me my first, second, third job when I was a kid he owned a, like, old style service station. So I grew up in that small business atmosphere. And when I went to work in newspapers, you know, I had these lofty aspirations, these utopian ideas, you know, you're getting your twenties about doing something to change the world or, you know, to have an impact. And I found out after about 10 years, that was just, it's just another corporate job. And so I was looking around for something else and I looked at a lot of different businesses. [00:02:55] And I ended up coming upon real estate and I was able to, while I was a newspaper editor, I was able to buy five, two five unit apartment buildings in Palm Spring. Nice. And that was my introduction to property management. I was pretty much doing that during the day. We were putting out newspapers in a, from like three in the afternoon to midnight, you know, the press would roll at midnight and and I did it all, you know, I, from everything from dealing with the tenants face to, you know, patch and drywall to whatever collecting rents, chasing rents, made all the mistakes. [00:03:33] And I was, it was self education trial by fire. And then a few years later, I went into real estate full time and sales. I had a partner in the apartments who was actually the listing agent on those apartments at the time, but he invited me into real estate full time in 2001. [00:03:49] And then we were off on a, and it was a run. And so I, I did property management for a while from on our own properties. And then I've just morphed into sales and we were pretty successful and very busy and then the market crashed, and you know, we just kind of moved with the market.  [00:04:08] Jason: And when was that? [00:04:09] Like 2006,  [00:04:11] Brian: maybe, or?  [00:04:11] Yeah. So 2006 at least in our area, it was August, 2006 when we peaked sales wise. And in 2007, we had, I don't know, a dozen listings and nobody, you couldn't buy a showing, you know? And so 2007, it was the real estate market was, you know, dead man walking. It was, there was nobody really knew what was happening? Well, the masses, right? Some people knew, right? There was stuff going on obviously on wall street, but, the masses didn't know what was happening. Prices stayed up for awhile and they were, it was just like that, that hovering just before the, you know, you throw a ball in the air and it just kind of floats at the apex for a moment right before 2008 and then wow. [00:04:54] Right. Who knew? Yeah. So, You we just kind of morphed with it. I've worked, I did a lot of, I helped a lot of people with short sales, we worked in foreclosures and. And then I met my current business partner in sales working in an REO house as a buyer's agent. And we started our own company, Dream Big Real Estate, and that was 2008, 2009. [00:05:15] So from there, a couple of years later I just happened to say to my partner, you know, even though we were very busy, I said, "I really think we should launch a property management division" because at that time, my mentality was, it's a place where we can create sales listings, right? [00:05:35] And so we did that for a few years. And, you know, the interesting thing about it was that we didn't do any marketing. It was just really word of mouth, but. The day that I mentioned that to my partner, Tim, he just said, "yeah, cool, whatever." Right. he knew I was going to probably be working on it because I had the background in it, but I didn't tell anybody. [00:05:55] And the next day the phone rang and our first property management client just was calling out of the blue. Still have them, still work with them. [00:06:03] And then a week later, somebody else called. And it was the same thing, and that was our second client. Still working with them as well. And the, you know, I'm not into rubbing crystals or sleeping under pyramids, but you know, you ask the universe and the universe will provide. [00:06:19] Jason: One of the things that you mentioned, Brian, that I think's really interest is, it sounds like part of your journey, like there's this importance you've probably realized in partnerships. [00:06:28] because you've mentioned multiple times, you know, you partner with the listing agent and then eventually you partner with Tim. And so how is finding the right partners been instrumental in your growth and your progress? [00:06:41] Brian: Well, I will say this is that later on more recently, this year, they have broken out the property management business that was running as part of our real estate sales business. I've broken that out separately, and I'm now solo doing that. Right. Have had partners in the past, and I have found working with partners to be that there's advantages and disadvantages. Totally. It's hard to find, it's really difficult for partnerships to be successful because most people, the ego is getting in the way or, you know, there becomes a battle about, you know, who's doing what, who deserves this, who deserves that. [00:07:24] Yeah. Personality wise, I'm kind of roll with it person, you know? I'm more of a solution oriented person. Just what we need to get from point A to point B, what's the best way to do that? What for the good of the company, not necessarily for what's best for me personally. Yeah. So I've gone through a couple of partnerships with different people, I have been able to make that work from my point of view, because. [00:07:49] Because of my personality type, I think, but it is not for the the weak hearted, you know, I mean, it is some days are a lot harder than others.  [00:07:58] Jason: I've seen some of the most successful I've seen have really healthy partnerships in some of the worst situations I've seen where they couldn't grow because one was like an anchor, not willing to move and they had just as much decision making power and until they were able to get that partner out of the business, they weren't able to progress. So it can be a boost in the positive, but it's really difficult to find a really good match. [00:08:24] Brian: Yeah, and that's the thing is like, I'm more of a behind the scenes person, just in general, I'm more like I can implement. I generally will have the ideas as well, but I'm the one that I'm kind of a control freak, quite frankly, and so one of my character flaws is right now that I'm trying to work on is feeling like I need to touch everything, you know, because that's that is a throttle in the business. [00:08:48] Jason: Well, I think we all start there. Every entrepreneur starts there, so everybody listening should be able to empathize with that because you know we want to do a good job because we care. We want to look good. We care about how we look right like whatever it is. The challenge with being a control freak is trust and until we learn how to get and find people that we feel safe with, I don't think we're supposed to trust, you know. We're not supposed to just trust blindly. We need to find people that deserve to be trusted and know how to build that team. And that's probably kind of the next level, right? Is for you maybe is to build that team of people that you trust because when you get really great people, it's not hard to trust them. [00:09:30] Yeah. But they need to match you. Like they need to be a good coach. And then it's a lot easier to trust them. And so in this journey, you split out your business and then you have a property management business. It's all yours. You're still doing real estate stuff also? You still connected to that? [00:09:47] Brian: I am, but my mentality has shifted. It's probably been more than two years since the first time I talked to someone from your company and yet we didn't start with your company until, when was it, March this year? It was a two year lag of wrapping my mind around the philosophy of, Just making the shift, right? [00:10:06] Because property management always for us was a, just a holding place for future sales listings. And now, it's the business. Property management's the business and sales is ancillary benefit.  [00:10:21] Jason: So what prompted that shift? How did your brain work that out eventually?  [00:10:25] Brian: I think it's a combination of a variety of things. Having now 20 plus years in the business, I've been through an up and a down and an up and a flat, right? Who knows what the next one looks like. Is it eighties, nineties, or is it two thousands downturn? Yeah. And where I am in life, right. And I mean, do I want to work forever? Just slinging, right? Do I want to be out there, you know, showing, opening doors at, you know, 68 years old? [00:10:57] Jason: And chasing deals? Yeah.  [00:10:59] Brian: So mailbox money, right. Building a business that's sellable. Right now, or up until this point, I should say, it has been 100 percent every dollar that comes into our house is product of my labor, and that is a train coming down the track. [00:11:19] Right. So I needed to make some changes now that would have dramatic impacts on my future. If I wanted to change what I was doing, you know. [00:11:27] Jason: Yeah. Got it. Yeah. That switch from kind of recognizing you're kind of trading time for dollars to realizing, "Hey maybe I want to build something." [00:11:36] I mean, it's really tempting because you close one real estate deal, that can be a lot of money, but eventually I think there's a lot of real estate agents that wake up to this, that they're like, "Hey, if real estate kind of takes a nosedive or do I want to do this forever?" Maybe not. [00:11:52] Property management might be a really great business model.  [00:11:55] Brian: Like I said, we did our sales under under Better Homes and Gardens now, and I don't know, did I say that? Maybe in my own head. So the property management is under my own brokerage. The sales that we do, we work under Better Homes and Gardens. [00:12:10] I, you know, Tim and I as sales agents here until this year, we've been the number one agent, like since we came here. So seven, eight years, however long it's been. I do see the changes. I have seen the changes come in and perhaps it's a little bit of you just mental scar tissue from the crash of, you know, '8, '9, '10, ' 11. Yeah. It's just, you know, because the cracks have been forming in the foundation of this real estate sales market for a few years. Right. And it's been propped up artificially by government policies. Yeah. For three, four years. Right. And so, I've been waiting for a shoe to drop quite frankly. [00:12:51] And so two years ago a guy used to work for you, Jon. I called Jon back in like February this year. "Hey, Jon, you still working over at DoorGrow?" Jon was actually the one who said to me two years ago, two and a half years ago now, " if you do this, our expectation is that you're going to change your philosophy. You're going to be a property manager who doesn't do sales." What? That took me a while to embrace.  [00:13:17] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Jon's a good friend of mine. We just went out to lunch recently. He's really sharp, dude. So, you know, I'm really curious, Brian, this journey from being a reporter for a while to real estate, to now shifting your identity into being a property manager, and that's the focus. How do you feel the reporter in you helps the property manager?  [00:13:44] Brian: Yeah, perfect proving ground. It's who I am is based on education, information gathering, being an advocate for consumers, right? [00:13:56] That's what I was trained to be as a reporter and editor, as a journalist, and that just morphs perfectly into what I do now, which is to look after my client's financial well being, right? And it doesn't hurt that I tend to over explain things, right? Because that's what I do, right? Is my job is to go out and gather information and then provide it in an objective way so that people can then make the best decisions for them and their family, right? So that's being a reporter, right? It is to shine a light on the facts so that people can decide. I mean, sometimes you got to take them by the hand and lead them down the path, right, educating them along the way. Yeah, for sure.  [00:14:37] Sarah: So what was the thing that made you go, "all right, I'm finally going to do this. Like I'm going to jump on board, get involved with DoorGrow and start really focusing on this property management thing? [00:14:49] Brian: Yeah. So earlier this year I had been kicking around, you know, you're looking at numbers, right? Kicking around the idea of "how much more time do I want to do this?" [00:14:59] And there were some personal things that got into it too, because you start looking at relationships and your family and looking at the things that are most important in your life. And priority wise, where have they been on your list? And so I decided I wanted to make some changes and then I lost some friends and family members just in the past year. [00:15:25] And so, one of the things that I picked up in the newspaper was Spending too much time in the office and and spending the less time seeing family and, you know, coming out of COVID and just, it's just like a combination of a lot of things all crashing together at one time.  [00:15:41] Sarah: We are under attack in our house right now. [00:15:43] We have groceries being delivered.  [00:15:45] Jason: Dogs are going nuts. [00:15:49] Our professional podcast, everybody, so.  [00:15:53] Brian: Anyway, so that was you know, some personal stuff came up and I decided to reevaluate. Now, in the past 10 plus years, I've been doing property management. [00:16:04] providing a supply of say two to six listings a year and making that shift. I don't know, it was a conversation with my wife and you know, running numbers and trying to figure out like, is it even possible? And there's a transition period because what you focus on is what you get. Right. So if I start focusing a hundred percent on property management, and how is that going to affect my income for people? You know, because what I do today in sales, that's not income for 90 days. Right. So at some point you have to be able to make that transition. And so, you know, it was a bit of a leap of faith. [00:16:42] And so, like I said, when I called Jon to ask if he was still working with you guys, then he said, no. He called me back though, but he said no, but he then referred me over to somebody. So, but making that switch, it wasn't an overnight decision by any means. [00:16:58] I agonized over it. It was sleepless nights, some nights. But I knew that I had to do something.  [00:17:04] Jason: So, well, you took a big risk then this leap of faith and then jumped on board with DoorGrow, decided to focus on property management. You feel like you made a good choice? [00:17:14] Brian: Yes. You don't know what you don't know. And so, I've been on a journey of learning what other people are doing, best practices, ancillary services to go along, you know, support type pieces of everything from other streams of income that are related that are, you know, not just management fees and placement fees, right? [00:17:37] I mean, there's a variety, but it's crazy what I've implemented just in the past six months, it's just been an insane pace and now I'm like eight days away from moving to a new, property management portal, and that will be the cherry on top, really. Most of the footwork of putting the foundation together will be mostly done, and then it's digging into processes. [00:18:02] Jason: Awesome. Yeah. So. Yeah. So you've made a lot of changes to your business and you said you've been learning it at an insane pace. So hopefully we're not making you bored with all this stuff. We've got plenty of stuff, right? It can be a bit overwhelming. We give the feedback on. So Brian, well, what's what's next for you in the future? [00:18:25] Brian: Right now I'm just trying to continue to learn from you and I'm just focusing on growing the number of doors that we manage and creating a business that will have sustainable and continuous growth and then part of the process has been, yes, putting the tools in place and doing the things that you know, I've been advised to do to create this and grow this business. [00:18:53] But when you start, you don't necessarily believe it, right? It truly is that leap of faith. And over time, my belief is starting to catch up with my activity. And so, you know, to go like when last week we literally hit the doubling point of when we started with you and after 10 years of just being flat from 30 to 35 units. And then now literally doubled it last week. And that's been from following your instruction, your philosophies and you know, focusing on building this business.  [00:19:30] Jason: Yeah. Well, I'm glad that the next 30 doors didn't take 10 years. That's awesome. Doubling in four months and I think things will speed up from here. So, well, I think that's a good place to end on. I think that's really awesome. So we appreciate you as a client. It's been great seeing your progress. You know, I think there's a lot of property managers out there that are like you, they come from the real estate industry. They want to get out of the hunt and the chase. Maybe they've been doing property management for even a decade, but you know, they haven't really made progress in their growth significantly in the last year or two or three or 10, you know, and and now maybe it's time, maybe it's time. [00:20:10] So maybe some parting words, Brian, what would you say to those that like they've been watching DoorGrow for a while? What would you say to them?  [00:20:17] Brian: Don't wait. You know, where would I be if I'd started two years ago? . I think about that occasionally, and then I have to stop myself because that just takes me off track. [00:20:26] And you get into that regret, you know, loop in your head. Like, no, I don't have time for that. I am where I'm now. And everybody is where they are now, right? And so you can either take action today or not, your results will reflect that. Yeah.  [00:20:42] Sarah: And you're exactly where you're supposed to be in that moment. I can do that to myself too. I can go back and go, "Oh, what if I did this sooner? It could be so much farther." Right. But I think that things just tend to work out the way that they're supposed to work out and things kind of line up. And I think you were prepped, right? [00:20:59] You knew about DoorGrow. You were kind of checking it out. You weren't sure if you were going to make that jump and you did when you were ready and it paid off.  [00:21:06] Jason: Yeah. So, there's a cool book called the gap and the gain. And the idea is that it's so easy for us as entrepreneurs to focus on the gap between where we should be by now. Where our dream or what we could have done. And that's not really an effective comparison psychologically. Like that, like doesn't make us feel super great about ourselves. But what is effective though, is to look at the gain. How far have we come? And I mean, four months. You've come a long way. [00:21:34] And so the next year, I think it's going to be really awesome for you. So I'm excited to see what you do, Brian. So thank you. All right. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow show.  [00:21:44] Brian: Glad to be here. Thanks.  [00:21:46] Jason: Thanks again. All right. If you are a property management entrepreneur, you're wanting to grow your business. [00:21:51] Maybe you've been sitting stagnant for a while. You haven't had significant progress in the last year, maybe the year before that you might even be a really large company and you're not making progress. I've talked to several with thousands of doors in just the last week. We just got one of them on as a client and they've been struggling to figure out how to grow and they cannot even spend any more money on ads to get any more clients.  [00:22:13] It's not working. If you want to figure out how to start moving your business forward significantly, we can easily help you add 100, 200, maybe even 300 doors in a year. And it's without wasting money or spending money on advertising. And that might sound ridiculous, but Brian's going to do it. [00:22:29] Like we're seeing people do it all the time. So reach out, you can check us out at doorgrow. com. We would love to help you grow your business. Talk to you soon. Bye everyone. [00:22:39] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. 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!  [00:23:06] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: 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 doorgrow.com, and 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.

Ever wondered just how critical the role of an emergency dispatcher can be? Strap in for a riveting exploration of the thin line between life and death, guided by the voices that first responders rely on in the clutch. Our episode peels back the curtain on the sometimes chaotic, always essential world of dispatcher communication, where every detail matters and a single lapse can have devastating consequences. We weave through the hazards of dispatchers providing too much, too little, or just plain wrong information, underpinned by a chilling case from El Monte, California. Brace yourself for a story that's as instructive as it is harrowing, and gain new respect for the unsung heroes behind the headsets.Laughter may be the best medicine, but when it comes to anticipating the unpredictable effects of street drugs like PCP and methamphetamine on emergency scenarios, there's no room for frivolity. Our conversation tackles the razor's edge that officers walk, where every call could escalate into chaos, and how the evolution of vehicle safety and tactical decision-making play pivotal roles in outcomes. We're not just sharing war stories; we're unpacking the profound responsibilities shouldered by dispatchers and emergency responders alike, the importance of adaptability, and the protocols that can mean the difference between a close call and a tragic one.As we wrap up, we turn reflective, drawing on personal dispatch experiences to illustrate the weight of each question asked and the vital cross-training that could enhance on-street performance. Our commitment to learning from past incidents injects an earnest call for progress over defensiveness within agencies. And for a bit of levity, we tease the arrival of an Australian voice to our lineup, promising to shake things up with fresh perspectives in the episodes to come. For those who serve, those who care, and those fascinated by the inner workings of emergency services, this episode is an unmissable journey into the heart of high-stakes communication. Stay vigilant, stay informed, and above all, stay tuned.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Have you ever been handed a speeding ticket and wondered where this all started? Buckle up and get ready for a historical thrill ride as we zip back to 1896 England, where we spotlight Mr. Walter Arnold and the world's first ever speeding ticket. It's not just about the speed - we'll unravel the quirky details of Arnold's run-in with the law, from the absence of a horse to the peculiar requirement of displaying one's name on a "locomotive." As we navigate through today's traffic laws, we'll chuckle over the evolution from Arnold's era to our own, while also basking in the aftermath of the San Francisco 49ers' win and the Detroit Lions' noteworthy season. Then, we shift gears to probe some of life's oddities, like a Colorado man's simultaneous bout with third-degree burns and hypothermia. We'll discuss the ironic turns of emergencies and society's sometimes paradoxical responses, which can range from the bewildering to the comic. Our exploration takes an unexpected detour into the realm of math, challenging norms with a light-hearted debate on the concept of zero. This episode is a blend of the curious, the historical, and the downright entertaining - a perfect primer for what season six has in store. Join us for a session that's as much about learning as it is about laughing at the wondrously weird world we navigate every day.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

G'day, listeners! Ever wondered how the word 'bog' could send a room into fits of laughter or what it feels like to capture the raw emotions of sportsmanship through a camera lens? Season six springs to life with our trademark humor, as we reminisce about the early days of our podcast and get cheeky with some Aussie slang. The camaraderie is in full swing as we navigate the nuances of words that leave us in stitches, and share touching tales from the rink where hockey players make a stand for young fans. It's a ride through the heartfelt and the hilarious, and you're invited to join the fun.We're not just here to crack jokes, though. We've got a former motor officer and collision investigator who's now providing security for the media, sharing the inside scoop on law enforcement and emergency services with a grin. His stories zigzag from the chaos of crash scenes to the protocol of delivering the toughest news. The chat gets real as we talk about the remnants of tragedy and the emotional toll it takes on those who serve. It's a candid look at the less-discussed side of the badge, served up with a side of laughter and a dash of solemnity. Strap in as we tackle the serious, the absurd, and everything in between.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

When you are creating a team in your property management business, the culture that you create will make or break your business and your ability to grow and scale. In this episode, property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull sit down with property management entrepreneur and DoorGrow client Brian Mullins to talk about hiring, culture, and processes. You'll Learn [05:33] Why culture is important in a business [12:07] Importance of humility and showing gratitude as a business owner [19:48] Having processes makes everything easier! [24:18] Setting goals in your business Tweetables “If I could just clone myself, then all my hopes and dreams would come true because I would make that clone of me do all the stuff I don't want to do. Guess what? They wouldn't want to do it either.” “People that can do everything do not make great team members. They make great business owners.” “Don't be the property manager, be the property management business owner. Hire the property manager.” “Whatever we focus on with our team and are grateful for, they get better at that.” Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] Jason: They say pride cometh before the fall. So if you're not humble in business, usually you get your ass handed to you at some point, and then you are forced to be humbled. And so you either humble yourself or you get forced to be humbled.  [00:00:12] Welcome DoorGrow property managers to the DoorGrow show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, impact lives, and you are interested in growing in business and life, and you're open to doing things a bit differently, then you are a DoorGrow property manager. DoorGrow property managers 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, business owners, and their businesses. We want to transform the industry, eliminate the BS, build awareness, change perception, expand the market, and help the best property management entrepreneurs win. We're your hosts, property management, growth experts, Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of DoorGrow, and Sarah Hull, co-owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:19] And our guest today is Brian Mullins. Brian, welcome to the show.  [00:01:24] Brian: Thanks for having me.  [00:01:25] Jason: Cool. So Brian, give us a little bit of background on you for those listening, how you got into property management, why you decided to do that crazy thing, and yeah, share a little bit about your journey in entrepreneurism. [00:01:39] Brian: Okay. Well, it goes back a long ways. I I'd always had an interest in real estate. I grew up in high school during the ramp up to the great recession and was fascinated by it, and graduated high school, wasn't sure exactly where I wanted to go. I was leaning towards technology or entrepreneurship, finance business, and started computer science, said, "Oh, hell no, I'm not doing this," and then switched over to finance. And in that time, I was also working for a collection law firm as my college job. So I switched to finance, fell in love with that, and then I got an opportunity to take some electives in finance, and real estate was actually one of the departments under finance. [00:02:20] And so, like, well, I can get a minor and fulfill my electives in real estate, or in finance. And so I took my first real estate class, and that was the point which I decided that this is where I wanted to be, and this would have been in 07, 08, and I set myself as a goal to go through college, graduate college, work five years for somebody else, and then start essentially a investment brokerage, doing property management acquisitions, the whole nine yards. So I went all the way through school, graduated in 2010, which is a really crappy time to find a job and I said, "I'm not going to go do some of these jobs that are actually available," and I went and got my MBA instead, graduated in 2012, worked 5 years for a regional automotive group, and I was in charge of all their real properties, and so I was doing a lot of commercial real estate at that point, building buildings, and also managing the various assets that they owned. And then after one week, should I have my five year anniversary? I quit, made a little bit of a shift. In hindsight, probably wasn't the best idea. I went more towards retail brokerage, and ran with that, never had a ton of success, survived made a decent chunk of change, but I was never super satisfied with it, recruiting agents is not my jam.  [00:03:32] And so during COVID, I saw the handwriting on the wall, I knew that the market was going to collapse, you know, you can't live with interest rates as low as they were, and it's a pendulum that's going to swing the other way, and so we made the conscious shift at that point, and I took a few key members of my retail brokerage and said, we're going to go into property management, and this was in early 2021. So, at that point, I had, I owned like 17, 15, 17 doors, something like that myself. I managed a couple others, so we're at about 20 doors. And then we quickly expanded, we got up to our peak was about 150 doors that we got up to, and then that was about the time that we joined DoorGrow and we ended up firing our largest client. [00:04:14] It was an apartment complex, but it was just an absolute nightmare, and then we've been rolling ever since. And then also during this. I actually had an investor reach out to me and say, we want to grow a real estate portfolio, and so we shifted from when we originally signed on with DoorGrow to really looking for clients to more, we need the process and the culture so we can grow this business because we've got essentially, you know, a big portfolio of properties coming on and we need to be able to scale it. So that's the short story of how I got into it. I've always loved it. All my work history has led up to this. Working collections for 10 years through high school and college is a really good transition into property management because it's the same thing. [00:04:54] Yeah, it is. You're dealing with the people who don't pay their debts are a lot of mostly tenants, you know, to somebody. And so you have to deal with that type of clientele, and it's that balance. And I really appreciate my lawyer that I work for. He really taught me a lot of like, how do we balance being compassionate, but also being firm because that you can be a jerk, right? Or you can be a, you know, somebody just gets rolled over. It's like, you need to find that in between. So I learned a lot from that and working real estate from five years and then even doing, I learned a lot being on the retail brokerage side. [00:05:27] Jason: Awesome. Yeah. So it sounds like you have a lot of experience that you really can leverage to benefit your clients. So the topic we are discussing today's how process and culture can make or break your organization. So what what have you learned about process or culture related to this? What conclusions have you been arriving at? [00:05:47] Brian: So, yeah, so for me, I'm an only child. I was always raised, you know, very independent, and I can do it myself. The problem is I can't grow an organization like that. Yeah. The kind of my first real inclination of this was like when I read the book Good to Great, right? It's, you know, and then that's even on a big scale, but like, how can I be a leader to grow an organization because I can't do it all myself? I could, but I'm never going to be able to scale to where I want to. I'm always going to be capped out and I'm going to have a job and not a business. And so, you know, whenever this investor came on and we were really starting to grow, like we were at 150, we were feeling the growing pains and we noticed this like with the retail brokerage, like keeping people was harder. Like I could recruit, I'm a good salesperson. Whatever I want to do, I can get somebody in the door. But then keeping them long term because people are looking for something different than what I would be. That's one of the biggest lessons I've learned is that not everybody's like me. If I'm an employee, I don't care as much about culture. Even though I do in the background, but like, that's not my main thing. Like I'm very goal oriented enough. I'm going to get my job done, but that's not what the majority of people are looking for. And so we need to be able to set that culture. [00:06:59] And so that was the first piece that we were noticing, but we didn't really realize it. And so like when we came to DoorGrow and especially when I got this investor, it was processes too, because I, like you said, I have so much experience and all of this, and I've done this for so long. I'm a hell of a property manager. I can manage all day long. I don't like doing it necessarily, but I can't grow, I could probably manage a hundred 150 doors on my own. But then I'm tapped out. And so how do I take what I'm doing and make it a process so I can replicate it? And once I replicate it, you know, even here in this market, how it should be something I can replicate in other markets as well. [00:07:39] So that's where we've been going and we've been working really hard at getting those processes documented, getting as much automated as possible. So that way we don't have to worry about it. The system just runs on its own and, you know, and we're getting to that point now, and once we fully execute everything and we feel really confident in that, it's just going to be plug and play on grip. [00:08:01] Jason: Yeah, yeah. I think it's a big mistake that entrepreneurs make early in their journey. And it's super common to assume that people are like them, right? We all start there. A lot of times that's our goal with hiring in the beginning, I call it the clone myth. [00:08:15] It's this belief, maybe those of you listening right now are thinking this, "if I could just clone myself, then all my hopes and dreams would come true because I would make that clone of me do all the stuff I don't want to do." Guess what? They wouldn't want to do it either. [00:08:27] And so they go out hunting for a clone. They're like, "I need to find somebody like me because I can do everything. If I just had somebody amazing like me, they could do everything..." and then leave and go start their own business is the reality, right? And so, but everybody thinks this and you can wear every hat in the business. [00:08:44] Entrepreneurs generally can do that. We're very adaptable. But people that can do everything do not make great team members. They make great business owners and you don't love doing everything right? Like you just said, I don't like being a property manager, which for those listening could mean two different things, right? Your clients would probably not want to hear that, right? But when you say that, you like having a property management business. I like dealing with the owner. In which you're a property manager, but then for some, being the property manager means doing the actual property management work, which is the property manager you hire as a property management business owner. [00:09:18] Yep. Well, those are two different statements, right? And so we encourage everybody listening, like don't be the property manager, be the property management business owner. Hire the property manager. So you've gone through this journey. You started working with us and defining your culture, getting your culture materials defined, and in the beginning, you're like most entrepreneurs. They're like, "what's this culture stuff? This sounds like fluffy woo woo BS. Like I don't need this. I just, I want results. Get the job done. I pay you. Just do the effing work." So, yeah. So what conclusions have you come to then with your team and with culture? [00:09:52] How does this shift your team and, or how does this shift who you hire? Like, what have you realized?  [00:09:56] Brian: So, we've been working really hard on that hiring piece. And so whenever we're looking to hire, like we've got to make sure we hire the right person. And, you know, we've had like some team players that, you know, maybe aren't the best team players. [00:10:10] And then you try to hire someone that can put up with them. Well, that's not a good option because you end up hiring somebody just like that. And then you've got two people that are like that. And you're like, we can't do this. You know, that doesn't really work in the organization and it's going to completely destroy stuff. [00:10:23] So, you know, we have to look for people who are willing to be team players. And so there's a book that I read The Ideal Team Player by Patrick Lencioni, and he mentions in the book three virtues. And I think it's a really good summation of what we're looking for when we hire. And those three are humble, hungry, and smart. We'll start at the bottom. So smart is not intelligence. It's emotional intelligence, right? It's can you handle yourself with clients? Can you handle yourself with the coworkers? Do you know how to make a smart response to things? And hunger obviously drive. You know, we don't want people that are just here to get a paycheck and go home because that's not going to succeed. [00:11:00] We're not an assembly line and this business is a 24/7 business. So I don't need someone at 5 o'clock that they fall off the face of the earth and maybe they're the only ones with an answer that we need to get ahold of. And then humble is the hardest thing to hire for and humble is where I struggle the most because naturally I am not a humble person my wife likes to make fun of me about that. But it's true. I'm not. I've always known that I'm decent at what I do and I walk and talk like it. So those three things is what we're looking for. And so we're very intentional when we're hiring now at looking for these aspects because you're right. When I first started hiring, I wanted to hire people like me, but all that would do is create tension, and they would eventually leave and start their own business and that's not a way to grow the business. I need people that fit in their role, who know their role, but also there's only so many people that can be the entrepreneurs only some people that can be the leader, right, of the organization. That's just the way the world turns. And so, like, we're hiring people on culture. We're also hiring people for the right position that fits their personality.  [00:12:07] Jason: So let's talk about humility. Let's talk about this. because I think this is a challenge and there's benefits to being humble. There's significant benefits to being humble. [00:12:16] Humble means that you are teachable. It means that you are able to get new information. They say pride cometh before the fall. So if you're not humble in business, usually you get your ass handed to you at some point, and then you are forced to be humbled. And so you either humble yourself or you get forced to be humbled. [00:12:34] And so the advantage, and a lot of people think humility is debasing yourself or putting yourself down or saying that you're not great. And I don't think that's what real humility is. That's like false humility maybe. I don't think that's what humility is. I think my definition or how I define humility is that you have the ability to recognize others hand in your own success, whether it's God, whether it's your team, whether it's your mentors, just being able to recognize that other people played a part in your success is the key to humility and it's also what opens the door to you being able to be more successful because if you think it's all you, you always are limiting your ability to have more success.  [00:13:20] Brian: Yeah. It's the people that are around you and that's why whenever I hire somebody, like if they think they're all that and that no one can touch them, they will never work because they lose their hunger too, right? Because they think it's all them and they lose their smart communication. They think they're all that and that they're always right with how they communicate. And that's not true. Everybody makes mistakes. I make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes. And you have to be able to admit that humbly. And, you know, one of the things that we've always done, even from day one is I want to make sure the client's taken care of, and that is being willing to admit when we've effed up and take the hit, there have been real estate deals in retail time, there's been, you know, there was a tenant that we placed recently that just went completely downhill real fast and within like a month and we took the hit on that, but that's not my client's fault, right? Should we have done that? I don't know. It's a really good client but you know, we need to make it right to the client and we need to say, "hey, we shouldn't have placed this tenant in here," and I told the client that, and I told him "we'll make sure you're taken care of so and that's what we do.  [00:14:32] Jason: Being transparent. I think you know, I put a lot of research into this a long time ago because, you know, I grew up in this religious culture in which you were always taught to be humble. But I was like, how do you humble yourself? Like, how do you become humble? And eventually, I had this epiphany if humility is recognizing other's hand in your success, the secret key to unlock humility and all the juicy benefits that everybody talks about that humility gives you true humility is gratitude. And so just learning to be grateful. And the way I think we can facilitate that with our team is to recognize their hand and to be grateful. So one of the things we do in almost all of our team meetings, especially our daily huddle, we do 'caught being awesome' or gratitude and like, 'what are you grateful for?' [00:15:16] And in our daily planning that we give the clients to do, we're like, what can you appreciate? And there's a double entendre there or meaning right of increasing in value, but also recognizing gratitude. And whatever we focus on with our team and are grateful for, they get better at that. [00:15:33] Brian: And for me, like it was, it's not my natural instinct to say, "Hey, you did a good job." I have forced myself to be like, "Hey, you've done a good job," and then I make sure my management team below me does the same thing with their people. We're not big enough that I don't see it, right? Like they're pulling around the office and I hear it and I will call the manager out and say, "Hey, you know, you should talk to your people and make sure they know that, you know, that they did a good job." [00:16:01] Sarah: That's one of the things we do in our team review meetings. Well, I run them. But like, I talk about like, "hey, you know, what's going well. And then are there any challenges?" And then I always just leave space at the end. Like, "do you have just any ideas?" Because maybe every day you do this thing and you're like, "Oh, it would be so much better if we could do it like this," or "it would be easier if we could do it like this." [00:16:23] Well, tell me that. And then I always want to make sure that I'm bringing out. Like, the opportunity just to be thankful for what they do. And especially because I don't have to do it. So if I didn't have you on my team, it would be me, it'd be me and Jason. So like I'm appreciative, you know, for the team members that we have and for the care that they really show our clients. [00:16:45] And that to me is big. But our team members consistently, like they just go above and beyond like all of them and they'll be like, "oh no, I already handled this" or, "oh, well, hey, I found this problem, and then I figured this, and then I just took care of it" and we're like, " okay, we weren't even involved in that. Thank you for doing that." And I think that's a really good, like the daily huddles are great. And then that one on one too is also really really important for them to just to hear that because it's always nice to hear "thank you," and especially in an industry like property management, where your tenants are not calling you going, "Hey, Brian, I just wanted to tell you how amazing you are. Thank you so much for being so great. I really appreciate everything you do. I've never had a property manager that really cares like this." They're like, " why wasn't this done? And I'm angry about this and rah!" Right? Like this is what we deal with. And this is what our front end staff deals with. So having something to counterbalance the like ball of hatred that's presented to us every day is huge in this industry. [00:17:46] Jason: Yeah. I think what's really cool when Sarah's running our meetings, what we'll see because we've led it by example, and Sarah's much better at this. She points out every team member that like, "thank you for doing this" and this sort of thing. The team now do it for each other. So when we have our little stage in our morning huddle that we do, it's, you know, caught being awesome or, you know, anyone do anything praiseworthy? Then, you know, team members now are calling out other team members. [00:18:17] "Hey, thank you for Adam getting answers to me so quickly. He's always so responsive," things like this. And so the good in that in being grateful, you're magnifying all the good. And so all my team members want to do more. They're getting rewarded. And what I find most team members want more than money. Most team members want recognition more than money once their basic needs are met. And that's weird for us. That's weird for us because we like money, right? We like money probably more than recognition. We're like, "well, let's get paid. You know, cool. I have some accolades. Get me paid, right?" Salespeople may be like that. The rest of your team probably really would just like to be recognized, but everybody likes being recognized. [00:18:58] So I'll recognize her. She runs our meetings and does an amazing job and I would not be nearly as good at this. And she facilitates this and gets everybody talking. Sometimes I don't even talk like the whole huddle was like, "Hey, everyone," you know, and I'm not as connected to a lot of the team sometimes. [00:19:16] So I can't even think of things sometimes to call people out for being awesome because I'm probably mostly interacting only with my assistant or sometimes with Sarah. And so, you know, that's it. And so my team members calling each other out creates this sort of culture of gratitude and appreciation, which increases the positivity and the positive results and that work environment, it becomes this almost like a feedback loop, a positive feedback loop. It grows my team members' skill and ability.  [00:19:48] Brian: And I think with this, like, because yeah you have to have your team and you will retain your team more, but then that also goes ties into the process side of things, because if you do lose a team member, if you have your processes lined out. [00:20:00] It's not as stressful if somebody were to leave because it's plug and play, right? Like, "okay, this is your job." And we've been working on recording videos of how you do certain things. And they're short. We try not to make them, you know, an hour long videos. And that way it's like, you know, you can go find that little piece that you need instead of having to like watch hour long video, but you find that and then now it's plug and play. And so that way you can easily hire somebody that maybe they're not, they don't have the perfect skill set, but they have the humility, they have the hunger, they have the smarts, they have the right culture for your organization. [00:20:35] And then the process is there. Where if they have that culture piece, they can be trained pretty easily in the process if it's documented properly.  [00:20:44] Jason: Very cool. So what's next for you in systems, process, developing your culture? What do you see on the horizon for your team?  [00:20:52] Brian: So, right now, what we're working on is finalizing everything that we have been working on. I've got an intern who's been incredibly helpful and getting everything set up. And so here in the next month or so, I'm going to have him sit down and go over everything that he's built in the process. And we're going to tweak it. But we've got everything written down on paper, and we've gotten most of it into the computer systems. [00:21:14] And then we're going to have a team meeting and make sure everything is running like it should. And then from there, we're going to make sure all those videos are up and going. And then we're going to work on expanding the team. So the thing is like with my investor who wants to really push this, like he wants to get in multiple markets. [00:21:31] And so what we're going to be doing is expanding with him. And so what we're doing is we're going to be looking for acquisitions. So we're hopefully we'll start with an acquisition and somewhere in our market. Because that way it's a little easier. I don't care how huge it is, even if it's 30 to 50 doors. [00:21:48] That would be stellar because it gives us an opportunity to learn the acquisitions piece. And then the next thing is we're going to go, because we're in Oklahoma City, next thing we're going to go up to Turnpike and start looking for acquisitions in Tulsa. And then we'll essentially set up a separate base in Tulsa. [00:22:03] But once we have all of our systems here and our cultures here. You know, it's going to be pretty easy to set. It's a 90 minute drive up there. So it's not the end of the world to have to run up there. And then from there, we're going to be going into other markets out of state. And that becomes more of an issue because we have different brokerage laws and I don't sit for my broker's exam or someone who would in another state. [00:22:23] So that's where we're continuing to grow is to go regional with this. And, you know, and the side that doesn't, isn't directly related to property management is like. We're tasked with bringing on doors. And so these things, the same pieces, the culture and the process follow with any business, it's not just property management. [00:22:42] And so like me and Mallory, my operator, we are having a meeting this morning. It's like, "okay, we've got this ball rolling. We need to start looking at the next thing, which is how do we increase our acquisitions of properties?" Not of actual real estate acquisitions. And so we're taking these exact same pieces and say, "okay, we need to line out the process," and then we can hire people to do it because the two of us can do it. [00:23:06] We don't have the time to do it. We need to get the processes lined out so we can put the right person in the seat and make it happen.  [00:23:12] Jason: Yeah. So we've touched on the three systems that are really needed to make the business infinitely scalable, as I say. So you need really good people. You need a good people system, need a good process system, and then the next big piece is a really good planning system. Sounds like you have a plan and getting that plan built out in DoorGrow OS so that it's no longer just your vision and you have the entire team helping you move this forward will take a lot of weight off your shoulders and allow your operator to make sure that this all happens. [00:23:44] And then you have a predictable future, which is really amazing. It's like, you can see the future and you can see the future growth of the business and your team helped make it all a reality.  [00:23:54] Brian: So one of the things that I really took away from the regional automotive group that I worked for the founder of it he passed a few years ago, but I got to know him. He was essentially retired, but I got to know him. And one thing he always did, and this is obviously before computers, because this was in the 70s, or what we have today, he wrote, I think it was three to five goals, and he wrote it on a piece of paper, and those were his goals for the next year. [00:24:18] And he would accomplish them and it's easier to accomplish what you have set. I had a teacher in junior high and she told me, and it's always stuck with me. You will get further if you set your goals high and don't reach them versus setting your goals low and easily reach them. And so that's the philosophy I've taken with my whole life. [00:24:40] Like, I'm going to set these goals, and whether I get there or not, you know, I'm sure going to try, but I know I've made it further than if I set my goals really low.  [00:24:48] Jason: Yeah, it's like the old quote, it's better to aim for the stars and miss than a pile of manure and hit, right? I love this idea for entrepreneurs. [00:24:58] The challenge though, a lot of times with team members, one of the things we coach on is that can sometimes demoralize the team because they have to be winning. And so I say entrepreneurs set your big hairy ass goal, keep it a private from your team. And then with your team set a goal that there's zero chance they can not hit by the end of the year, zero chance that they don't hit by the end of the quarter. [00:25:19] And that they're very likely hit by the end of the month. And it's because you want to teach them to be winning constantly. And this gives them you the ability to recognize them. And they actually increase their results because they're winning. And if they learn to lose, teams get very comfortable with losing very quickly, right? [00:25:38] They don't hit a sales goal that month. "Well, we'll get them next time," you know, and then they just get worse and worse. And so really big, I'm making sure like hit those goals, but back the goals down low enough that you'll hit it for sure by the end of the year and then see as a team, can you hit it sooner? [00:25:55] Then. Winning bigger.  [00:25:56] Brian: Yeah, I think that comes to knowing your people too, because there's some people that are going to be more ambitious, right? And so you can maybe knock circles up a little bit more than you would somebody that needs that fulfillment that, "hey, I've accomplished my goal." [00:26:08] And so that all comes with knowing your people and pushing that down the line as, you know, for me as entrepreneur and owner, pushing that down the line to the rest of my team members and my management team, and they push it down.  [00:26:20] Jason: Cool. Well, Brian, we appreciate you being in the program. Do you want anyone to reach out to you from this or get in touch with you or..? [00:26:27] Brian: Yeah we're in Oklahoma City Metro. If you have anybody that is looking to expand their real estate portfolio, feel free to give us a holler. You can find us in 1907investments.com and, or you can find me online. I'm all over the place. And you know, we really take pride and take care of our tenants, treat our tenants as clients, because then you're going to have a more successful business. [00:26:47] Because if you want your real clients, your owners should succeed. You got to make sure the tenants stay in and are happy.  [00:26:53] Jason: Awesome. Well, Brian, you're a sharp guy. We appreciate you being in the program. Thanks for coming on the DoorGrow show.  [00:26:58] Brian: Appreciate y'all.  [00:26:59] Sarah: Thanks, Brian.  [00:27:00] Jason: Thanks. See you. All right. [00:27:01] So if you are a property management business owner, and you are at the place where you are stressed out, you're struggling, you're frustrated, maybe you're thinking like, "what's my business worth?" Keeps coming up in your head because you're like, "maybe I should exit this." You want to get out of it. Maybe in the next two to three years is your plan because you don't really see a light at the end of the tunnel, then reach out to us at DoorGrow. We can help you get out of that, out of a business that you don't enjoy and turn it into the business of your dreams, a business that you do enjoy. Help you get the right systems installed so that it becomes easy, comfortable, and maybe even fun, right? Let's have a little fun. [00:27:39] And if you would like that, reach out to us at doorgrow, you can check us out at doorgrow.com. Bye everyone. [00:27:44] you just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. 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!  [00:28:11] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: 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 doorgrow.com, and 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.

As we close the curtains on another season, our latest podcast episode is a tapestry of reflection and anticipation. We're toasting to the milestones hit and the guilty pleasures that kept us afloat this past year. Picture this: a dusty garage sale, an unexpected treasure found—a quarter for a copy of "Wizard and Glass." It's moments like these, shared in our 'Favorite Memories and Future Plans' segment, that unfurl the stories of serendipity and the simple joys that make life richer. And as we look ahead, the excitement bubbles over for the adventures that await, from the crack of the bat at spring training games to the historic steps we'll take on the Hadrian's Wal with family in tow.Ever found solace in the soothing sounds of Yacht Rock, or discovered a surprising family connection through a game of Fortnite? We've got a confessional booth ready in our 'Yacht Rock and Guilty Pleasures' chapter, where we laugh over our shared indulgences and the unexpected ways they've turned into family bonding sessions. I even unveil my gaming alter ego, MCSoulCrusher, and extend an invitation for listeners to join the fun. Plus, we dig into the unexpected educational twists from the latest video game titles that turned virtual worlds into classrooms of history and cooperation.But it's not all play; we're also taking a moment to honor the personal victories and the new passions that have shaped us. In 'Accomplishments and Hobbies in 2024,' we celebrate a daughter's scholarship success amid skyrocketing education costs and HM's journey through therapy toward resilience. We also delve into the fulfilling world of vintage booth setups and the culinary conquests unlocked by the magic of an Instant Pot. From Chicken Alfredo triumphs to therapeutic hobby chats, this episode is a melting pot of the experiences that define us. So, whether you're seeking laughter, inspiration, or just good company, our season finale has a seat at the table just for you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever swerved from the fast-paced lanes of law enforcement into the equally challenging private security profession? We, Motor Cop and Happy Medic, do just that—swapping tales with our guest, Alex, about MC's transition from retired cop to a private security pro. We unravel the challenges of acquiring permits, especially the notorious security guard card and a carry concealed weapon permit, and share some hearty laughs on our journey in sunny California.The episode takes a deeper dive as we tap into the necessity of gun qualifications and some of the unique job opportunities available for retired officers. We take you on an anecdotal journey through our experiences, the importance of online test-taking skills, and some hilarious moments pondering about possible call signs— "White Claw One," anyone? As we journey further, we venture into the exhilarating world of private security for media events. Alex, our expert on the matter, gives you a glimpse into his unique experiences, including his unexpected calls to rub elbows with celebrities and his rather unconventional wardrobe choices. As we round off our conversation, we touch on the complexities of paramedic licensure and certification, emphasizing the importance of medical professionals during film and television production. And just when you think we're done, we circle back to the 90s comedy show, In Living Color, reminiscing about its impact on its participants, encouraging listeners to revisit this iconic show. Sit back, enjoy the journey, and prepare to be entertained and enlightened in equal measure as we navigate the exciting world of law enforcement, private security, and pop culture.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever tried to cram a can of White Claw into a custom 3D printed fire alarm box? Well, our long-time listener and friend, Alex, did as he presents us with this surprisingly amusing gift as the starting point for a wild and humorous ride. We get lost in the absurdity of the moment, illustrating the unexpected roles of White Claw in fire inspections and sparking a hilarious debate on Episcopalians and pescatarians. Tune in for a burst of laughter and a hearty dose of our unique camaraderie.Hold on to your seats as we recount our uproarious attempts at fitting that stubborn can into the fire alarm box. We've got power tools, a butane torch, and a whole lot of determination in our arsenal. We assure you, this episode isn't just about our hard-earned victory over the can, but also includes our humorous takes on the Siri mishap and an enlightening discussion about the alcohol content of White Claw. Closing our eccentric episode, we ponder over 3D printed White Claw holders and discuss bizarre sightings of a mysterious light. Remember, watch out for bikes and planes! Join our laughter-filled conversation with Alex, and let's make your day a little brighter.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Imagine being stuck in rush-hour traffic, only to find out the hold-up is due to protestors strategically blocking the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge. We promise, this episode is more than a routine analysis of traffic chaos. In this episode, we dissect the planning, coordination, and the rather puzzling decision to discard car keys, during this striking protest. Plus, we tackle the intriguing legal implications when rental cars become tools of civil disobedience.Then, do you crave for thought-provoking film theories? Hold on to your seats as we weave through the imagined realities of beloved movies. From the Fight Club-esque theory about Ferris Bueller's Day Off, to the unlikely link between The Little Mermaid and Frozen, and even to the post-apocalyptic scenario in Cars, we leave no stone unturned. Not to mention, get a glimpse of the much-anticipated Harry Potter TV series and the fascinating fan theories surrounding Neville Longbottom. Remember, sometimes, to truly decode the secrets of the silver screen, you need to hit the books. So, tune in for an episode brimming with curiosity, controversy, and a bit of cinephilia!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Brace yourselves for a wild ride into the outlandish world of Australian slang, joined by our ardent fan, Abigail, er...Alex. Unravel the mystifying semantics of "cossie" and "togs," and chuckle your way through the intriguing tale behind Abigail's peculiar moniker. And guess what? Our beloved guest also strums the banjo! As we meander down memory lane, we reflect on the surprising fact that our meeting with Abigail and his family was six months ago. Sounds like yesterday!As we progress into the latter half of our jovial powwow, we delve into the time-honored tradition of gift-giving during the festive season. Relive the childhood suspense of guessing the contents of our wrapped presents and our parents' cunning tricks. But, hold your horses! There's an unexpected twist; a gift from one our guest. With a dash of humor around knife safety, we strive to unbox this enigma, leading to a hilarious discussion on assemblage. So, buckle up for an episode brimming with laughter, nostalgia, and a sprinkle of mystery!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

We're inviting you to our fireside chat with JW Jarvis, the author famed for his gripping storytelling. He spills the beans about his upcoming book, The Phantom Firefighter, and the real-life inspirations that fueled its creation. Jarvis' respect and admiration for first responders kindled the narrative of this engrossing tale. With the book subtly rooted in his own experiences, JW hopes to inspire younger readers to consider the challenging but rewarding path of first responders. He also gives us an exclusive sneak peek into his next venture, The Phantom Enforcer, an intriguing tale focused on the unsung heroes of law enforcement.Jarvis' meticulous research to ensure the authenticity and precision in his books adds a layer of realism that is sure to captivate his audience. He shares his fascinating research process, from extensive online studies to engaging conversations with a Sheriff friend, all to craft believable and relatable characters and scenarios. A man of varied interests, JW also indulges us in a lively discussion about his favorite thrillers and exciting TV series and movie updates. From the new Thor movie to the forthcoming Star Wars series, Marvel's Miss Marvel series, and more, our chat with JW Jarvis is loaded with insightful banter and loads of fun. Grab your headphones; this episode promises to be a treat!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Do you ever wish you could teleport yourself to the glitz and glamour of Vegas? Well, strap in, because we're about to take you there virtually as we reminisce about our recent adventures in the city of sin. MC regales us with tales of his exhilarating trip to Vegas with Jeff and the unique experience of the Sphere concert hall...at least from the outside. We share our awe at the Bellagio lobby and fountains and discuss how F1 racing has transformed the Vegas strip into a spectacle of its own.Imagine standing in a shop and contemplating whether to splurge on a $10,000 chair or a framed picture of the original Saturday Night Live cast. Yes, we were in that exact situation during our Vegas shopping spree and let's just say things got quite interesting. We also debate the idea of bringing a fleet of massage chairs to the firehouse. So, if you are ever at one of our family get-togethers, you know what to expect!Our conversation then takes a fascinating turn towards our visit to the Flight Deck at the Venetian and our dart-playing adventure in a unique venue in Las Vegas. Come join in our laughter and fun as we take you through Vegas like you've never experienced before!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Fancy a thrilling survival tale straight out of the Australian waters? Buckle up for a wild ride as we unravel the gripping story of Tom Robinson, a 24-year-old adventure junkie, who nearly met his doom while trying to break a world record. Get an insight into the chilling details of his maritime misadventure and the heroic rescue by [redacted]. But that's not all, we also delve into the frightful effects of dehydration and sunburn, a chilling reminder of nature's fury.In the lighter side of things, we're also sharing some rib-tickling tales from the land Down Under! Brace yourself for a hearty laugh with our segment on Aussie accent auditions gone hilariously wrong and amusing Aussie phrases. We pay tribute to the stunning Margot Robbie, who's not just a pretty face but also a wizard with accents. As we wrap up, we'll touch upon the serious consequences of agricultural strikes in Victoria - a stark reminder of the real-world issues. Also, we bid adieu to a friend who's leaving the studio, with a little cautionary note to not "Van Halen" our beloved space.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Let me introduce you to Garrett TeSlaa, one of our favorite guests, and host of his own podcast, The Squad Room. Garrett is up to something awesome - he's partnering with Man Uncivilized to lead an amazing retreat in November in South Park, CO.Yes. THAT South Park.Designed specifically for first responders and veterans, this retreat aims to provide a healing space. It's fascinating how Garrett tackles the issue of loneliness within the first responder community through retreats and introspection. He also enlightens us about the "Badges" model and how mindfulness techniques can help induce needed transformation.From serious discussions, we shift gears to engage in some light-hearted banter. Garrett shares some delightful experiences about his recent trips to concerts and sporting events, his current reads, and even recommendations for our next binge-watch. In addition, we catch up with our Australian pal, Jeff, and share his visit to Alcatraz and a movie recommendation. It's an episode filled with wholesome insights, laughter and camaraderie, celebrating the resilience of our first responders and veterans. So, tune in for this enriching journey where we mix entertainment and inspiration in equal measure.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

How do you decide to differentiate yourself and your business from your competitors? There's only so much you can offer to owners and tenants before you completely burn yourself out. What if there was a way to benefit you, your client, and the tenants all at the same time while increasing your profit margin? Join property management growth experts Jason and Sarah Hull as they chat with Andrew Smallwood from Second Nature. Learn how a resident benefits package can create a win-win-win scenario for you and your clients. You'll Learn [04:56] Is it Possible to Double Profit Per Door? [07:13] What is a Resident Benefits Package? [21:37] Ways to Protect Your Investors/Owners [25:19] The Pitfalls of DIYing Resident Benefits Packages [32:07] Increasing Profitability with Resident Benefits Packages [39:31] At What Stage Should You Implement a RBP Tweetables “Property managers don't just have one problem. They have a thousand.” “If we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business.” “It doesn't matter how many doors you have if you're not taking anything home.” “It's important for property managers to keep the main thing, otherwise it's so easy to get distracted as an entrepreneur.”   Resources DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind DoorGrow Academy DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrowClub DoorGrowLive TalkRoute Referral Link Transcript [00:00:00] [00:00:00] Jason: If we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business.  [00:00:15] Welcome DoorGrow Hackers to the DoorGrowShow. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors, make a difference, increase revenue, help others, Impact lives, and you're interested in growing in business and in life, and you're 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. [00:00:52] At DoorGrow, we are on a mission to transform property management business owners and their businesses. 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 along with Sarah Hull, co owner and COO of DoorGrow. Now let's get into the show.  [00:01:18] All right. So our guest today is Andrew Smallwood of Second Nature. Andrew, welcome to the show.  [00:01:25] Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me excited to be here.  [00:01:28] Jason: So we were talking beforehand and I was expressing how jealous I am of his amazing digital SLR camera. That's so zoomed in on his face. So you look really good today.  [00:01:37] Andrew: Well, we'll keep it on the face because I've still got some like summer workout to do the summer bods. We'll keep it the neck up here.  [00:01:44] Jason: Got it. All right. Yeah, I'm working out too. All right. Cool. So our topic today is doubling profit per door with a resident benefits package. You guys, your name has come up— Second Nature— over and over again related to this topic. So I'm excited to get into this before we get in though. Why don't you share a little bit about yourself? How did you get connected to property management? I doubt you woke up when you were a little kid and said, "property management" Second Nature... this is my dream future. This is what I want to be doing." So there's always a story of how people get into this industry, so.  [00:02:19] Andrew: You know, that's true, Jason, although if I think about every five to 10 year period of my life and where I may have predicted I would be five to 10 years from now, I don't think I've ever gotten that answer right, to date. So, I think I'll probably just stop trying, but really have enjoyed— you know, since 2017, actually is when I found the company at the time. It was called FilterEasy. A couple of years later, we rebranded to Second Nature as we saw our customers were looking at, you know, they had more than just one problem to solve. I think you guys know probably better than anybody property managers don't just have one problem. [00:02:52] They have a thousand. [00:02:53] You know, customer said, "Hey, we love the way you're working with us on this. Like, is there more that we could do there?" You know, rebranded to Second Nature, but I'll be quick with my personal story because I think probably other things would be more relevant to the audience wants to hear, but my background came up and coming up in sales was in sales and sales management for 10 plus years, also got into the nonprofit space involved with the Front Row Foundation, which is a cause I'm still passionate about. They put people battling life threatening illnesses in the front row of their dream live event. And so I'm the board chair for the Front Row Foundation today. I've been involved with them in various roles before finding my way to property management. And yeah the CEO and founder of Second Nature, Thad Tarkington, and I actually worked in the same company, although we didn't know each other super well. We were acquaintances in our previous company. And and I was looking to get into B2B from where I was. And that's what attracted me into the cool business. I saw it was a really great product. The customers really loved it. And that's what attracted me to the industry and I've loved it ever since. [00:03:57] Jason: So what do you think the major difference you see between B2C and B2B? What like really was driving that decision?  [00:04:06] Andrew: Yeah, I think, you know, in B2C, it was very transactional, like, have one meeting. And it was, you know, this was like a luxury house where items just to put that in perspective. And so it was like, you know, an order might be a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars, and it was like, if you didn't have an order form in 20 minutes, then you didn't have an order, right? Yeah, there wasn't a decision at that point. And, you know, I got a lot of like professional foundational skills that I really appreciate from those experiences. But, you know, what I appreciated was developing relationships and continually, you know, working to drive success right over a longer period of time with customers. But that was more interesting and more fulfilling and also would involve developing new skills and learning new things. And so that, that's what attracted me to B2B.  [00:04:56] Jason: Awesome. All right. Cool. So let's get into the topic at hand. So doubling profit per door with the residence benefits package. So is it possible to double their profit per door? [00:05:10] Andrew: Yeah, it better be, right? If that's the title of our episode. So, yeah, I mean, fortunately, Second Nature works with a little over 1500, just shy of 2000 management companies across the United States. And if you believe the, you know, studies that have been done out there and benchmarking a lot of property management companies can see their profit per door, you know, somewhere in the 10 to 15, you know, per unit range, obviously some less than that, right. And it's sort of some more than that, but a lot of companies we encounter, that's the range, you know, oftentimes when we encounter them, and the cool thing about a resident benefits package is in 30 days or less, they can be adding, you know, oftentimes $17 in profit per door, sometimes more, sometimes less. We can get into the details of why that can vary, but it can be a really dramatic move. And if it's a fully managed resident benefit package, it can actually be a very easy one to get going. So a powerful step to take.  [00:06:08] Jason: Yeah. I think a lot of property managers maybe don't see this. They don't realize this. We get so focused as business owners in the beginning of just trying to get revenue up, trying to get in revenue, and the challenge is: if we can move the needle just slightly to increase revenue, but also just slightly to decrease operational cost, right, it's very easy to double profit margin in a business. And Sarah had ridiculous profit margin in her business because she's ridiculously efficient. What was your profit margin?  [00:06:41] Sarah: On a bad month, it'd be like 60%.  [00:06:43] Jason: Yeah, so. Wow. And the big secret was she just wouldn't talk to people on the phone. Like that's a big part of it. And still had to talk to people. Yeah. So she's been able to do some amazing things with our clients in increasing profit and profit really per door is the thing that property managers should be taking a look at because it doesn't matter how many doors you have if you're not taking anything home. So let's talk about how they can increase this using a resident benefits packages. Let's define a resident's benefit package for those that have never heard of this idea. Let's start there.  [00:07:17] Andrew: Yeah. So the way we think about the resident benefits package, and I'd say, this is a generally accepted definition in the industry— is this is a suite of products and services that elevate and professionalize the resident experience, right? And so that's the 1st thing that it does, and it's creating an experience that residents will pay for, and that they'll stay for a recurring monthly charge, right? Alongside rent, there's the costs, right, of all these ancillary service. We can get it into examples of what those different products and services are in a minute. But that's what the property manager is doing. They're saying, "we're going to bring a different level of service. There's value in that service." and if there's a cost associated with that service as well, that's how they drive that as a profit center, but 1. That is bringing value to the resident, also protecting the investor from risk, and then the property manager benefiting as well. We call that a triple win. And that's what we focus on.  [00:08:13] Jason: Nice. Yeah. Value to the resident, protecting the investor and what was the third one?  [00:08:19] Andrew: Yeah. And the property manager should be reducing costs and adding a profit center as well.  [00:08:25] Jason: Love it. Okay, cool. So those are three awesome benefits. Now maybe we'll get into some specific examples, but let's go to this first one, the value to the resident. And does this work only in— because I know some property managers right now are listening and "this won't work in my market. My residents are cheap or my residents don't want extra value  [00:08:48] Sarah: or they don't care." [00:08:49] Jason: Yeah, you just want the lowest price possible maybe. So let's tackle the value to the resident. [00:08:55] Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think first i'd like to acknowledge some of the truth in that, which is that if I look at different asset classes, right, and you look at like multifamily, which has really done a lot of investment, like you think about class A multifamily major MSAs and like there's golf simulators and bark parks and like, you know, three water fountains and like all kinds of investment. [00:09:19] Right. And then generally the way you see them monetized is both as a part of the rent— they've figured out how to, you know, classify their property to place where they can actually monetize that in the rent itself. It's amenitized and then also their services like valet, trash and other things like that, right, that are going to be charged as a separate ledger line item there. And so when we think about single family and smaller boutique, multifamily and scattered site properties and third party managers, you know, and I think about the resident profile of who's running the class A, you know, golf simulators place we were just talking about is probably that's probably different value for that person than, like, you know, your typical couple in their 40s with a couple of kids and a dog right in the suburbs, like they're not looking for the same things, right? And what would be valuable and important to them? [00:10:09] So, I think it's okay to acknowledge that different resident profiles may value different things, right? Where we started. Where we started with this was, okay, we see a future where there's actually a really and truly incredible resident experience. I mean, dozens of dozens and dozens of products and services and bucketing them into what's already required in the lease. Right and so we started with that before going to "hey, what's like standard, but could be opt out or what might be really cool for some residents?" like, you imagine lawn care as an example. That's probably not something that every resident would pay for. And some would choose to do it themselves and. You know, but there's probably a small percentage of residents that really would appreciate having that kind of service done and coordinated for them. And there could be a great revenue opportunity there. So we're working towards that, but starting with the mandatory stuff, that's things like renter's insurance is generally a requirement of the lease, right? That they have it. When you think about paying rent on time, like that's an essential responsibility. [00:11:10] So how can we make things easier by creating a reward system by every time someone pays their rent on time, it actually boosts their credit score, right? Automatically this is happening. It's almost crazy to think that somebody's largest monthly expense is the only one that they aren't getting rewards points for and that they aren't getting credit, you know, benefits of their credit score for. We obviously started with filter delivery service. [00:11:32] Like, they got to change the filters on time, but how do we make that so easy to do? It's going to happen the vast majority of times versus all the friction that gets in the way but otherwise, and on down the list. So, hey, we've kind of tackled these things that are core least responsibilities first, and what we've seen is: yeah, occasionally a resident might say 'Hey, I'm not sure about the value of this," and they need some additional explanation. But when it's properly priced, when it's properly positioned and you've got the right product mix, right, with those things all done together... extremely effective, right, for property managers that hasn't gotten in the way of being able to perform, you know, and drive their core leasing KPIs and things that would create a trade off or a compromise for investors or the managers. So that it keeps that triple win intact.  [00:12:19] Jason: Got it. So what are some of the things that might be included in a residence benefits package?  [00:12:28] Andrew: Yeah. So we just alluded to rent reporting. Every time someone pays their rent on time, what we do is we actually help take that information. Get it to the credit bureaus so that it's building the resident's score and to give an idea of the impact of that, you know, it's common to see 20 30 40 point bumps. There's some incredible you know individual kind of outlier cases where we've seen 70, 80 point increases, right, in individual profiles. People who did not have a credit score before actually establishing the credit score, right? Which is a big deal and when you think about You know, especially today where interest rates and everything has gone like— the cost of credit has just. Like, if you look at the interest rates on auto loans, they've doubled in just the last few years. Obviously, everyone knows what's happening, probably, you know, with mortgages, right? And what's happening the rate on the home loan and credit card, right? Credit cards. Those are really the big three. And you look at the savings. Over somebody's lifetime of having a 40 point higher credit score, they were at some point to purchase a home, purchase one or two cars, right? And, you know, carrying the average credit card debt that American family has. It's 6 figures, right? It's 6 figures in savings of their lifetime. So it's a really big deal. So that's exciting. The rewards points that we mentioned every time someone's paying on time, they're getting cash value, which they can go then redeem in a marketplace where there's hundreds of brands, right? That they can go redeem that everything from practical stuff of Starbucks, gift cards do like, I actually redeemed for some like bamboo pajamas. I don't know if you guys have seen this or any listeners have seen it, but this bamboo— I'm a sucker for like soft material, like tactile stuff. So anyway, I got the bamboo pajamas. That was my thing, but there's wine, there's dog food, like all kinds of stuff from really practical every day to kind of fun and luxury spend, right, that people can leverage that for, and they can use it right away or they can save it up and bank it. They don't lose it over time. You know, the other things we were talking about was on time filter delivery. So as opposed to "Hey," putting it in the lease and saying, "this is your responsibility." but then residents don't know what their size is. They don't know what quality to buy. They don't really know how often to do it, or they're not going back to page 18 at least to remember that. There's all these things that get in the way. And typically it's your residents who have been homeowners previously. That would be like probably the best at doing this. They felt the pain, you know, themselves, or they've replaced or paid for HVAC, you know, bills or oil cleanings or what might you you know, those are generally your best change, but that's, it's a small percentage. Most property managers report 5, 10, 15, maybe 20 percent of residents are changing exactly on time with the exact right filter, exactly the way the property manager would want them to. [00:15:06] So what we did, it's not perfect. You know, Jason and Sarah, it's not like, okay, a hundred percent of the time it works every time. But we actually did a study with the national rental home council across 8, 000 single family rentals, 18 months. And we looked at four operators. And it was A B test, right? So some it's hey, you're relying on the resident to do it in some cases, even leaving some in the closet for them to change. Right? Most of the time they're right at move out right where you left them versus a delivery program where they're being delivered every 2 to 3 months. Exactly when they need to change, and what we saw was a 38 percent reduction in HVAC work order volume, right? Between those getting delivered and those not. And the reason that happens is because you go from, you know, 10 or 15 percent changing them to all, but 10 or 15%, right, change them. That's what drives different resident benefits because they're saving on their energy bill and they're breathing clean air and it's as easy as opening their front door now to take care of that lease responsibility. [00:16:07] So, that's a great one. I'll pause here for a second, but we could talk about renters insurance, which is a big one, ID protection, on demand pest controls, actually the newest feature that we've rolled out most recently, so that's a newer one. A fresher one. Yeah. Happy to dive in more if you guys feel that's appropriate. [00:16:23] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, people understand the list of all the things their brain starts to go, Oh, I could see how this would be beneficial. This would add value to the resident for sure.  [00:16:33] Sarah: So if you if you had a property management company that does not have a resident benefit package currently, and they're looking to implement one, but they're like, "I just don't know, like what I should put in there. Should I put everything? Should I put like just one thing?" Like what is some advice that you have on like what to include and why?  [00:16:52] Andrew: Excellent question. So we can provide a link, I think to you guys the other show, but rbp.secondnature.com, right, is a place that people can go. And we've actually built a contact form there where people put in the state that they're in, sarah. It'll actually pull up the calendar of the person on our team who works with property managers in that area. And so what we generally do in a call is talk about what are their company goals, like what are they trying to optimize for, right? That's the first thing we'll consider. But then really define what you want your resident benefits package to do for you and your residents, investors. Map out that triple win. Once that's clear, the next thing we will do is kind of share, like, Hey, in your market, like your resident profile, your property type, right, your area, here's the product mix, right. And pricing and presentation, right, that we are saying that's a. Compliant, right. Compliant with your local laws and regulations. And then B. You know, is getting the best business results, you know, for that. And so we provide that kind of consultative approach and it can vary. [00:17:55] I mean, the fact of the matter is filter delivery in Orlando, Florida, right, is a different problem than in San Diego, California. Right. So we're not going to recommend the same thing in two different places. We take a kind of like value based approach. Once we help work with the operator to figure out, you know, what that's going to be and what the right fit for them is. [00:18:17] Sarah: That's awesome. Super helpful. And I like that it's like, very customizable because I think this is something that people just, they hesitate on a little bit because there's so many options. And especially when we take clients through pricing. Like, what do I include in my high plan? What do I not include? Like, what are the things that I should— and these are always where we see people get stuck is like, what are the benefits that we should include? And if there's something that really helps them figure out, like, am I compliant? What am I actually looking to do and like what in my area seems to be working well already? I think that would be huge for people. So I'm really glad you brought that up. Thank you.  [00:18:54] Andrew: You know, I'll jump in with 1 thing, and then I think Jason was going to go maybe towards the investor side. If that's where we're going next, but something we saw included in benefits packages early. That we've started to see phase out. Like maybe that could be interesting for people if they've heard about the past, you know, keeping up with this is originally before we had a lot of what Second Nature and other point solutions have been able to do and really productizing and scaling some of these services is. You know, problem is we're figuring out, well, what can I do on my own? And I think some of that is still relevant of communicating anything that differentiates you from a for rent by owner, right, versus a professional management company that you have multiple payment options, right? Maybe you have 24/7, you know, maintenance coordination that somebody can file a maintenance request at any time versus I remember one of my first early renting experiences, you know, I rented from a dentist who had four rental properties and it was like two weeks to get ahold of him to let him know that it was freezing cold in DC. Yeah, I was a college kid that like wore flip flops when it was 10 degrees outside. I didn't complain too much, but you know, thinking about those kind of experiences being a professional, like probably the people listening to this, I would never have that experience, right, working with their company. And so, hey, we do think it's important to communicate those things. Even if you don't monetize them or necessarily charge them in your RBP, it's a good place in the RBP to communicate those differences between a professional property manager and the FERBO. But the one that I've seen phased out were these kind of like early on before there were things like filters and insurance and credit and stuff that felt like really tangible to bring in. We often saw things like, hey, here's a get out of jail free card on late rent, right, or an NSF fee. And the reason we saw that early on is because it was so easy for a property manager to say, hey, this is worth $50, right? Or worth 40. It's like this tangible value of what you're giving, right? As a part of that and communicating it. Because they felt like they didn't have a lot of substance up front. But as more substances come in, we've seen that phase out because people started to realize, well, if I'm incentivizing, you know, on time rent, is that really a triple win for like my team that has to deal with that? Is that a win for the investor? That's not getting their rent on time. And so it's really about how do we incentivize the right behaviors, right? That's good outcomes for everybody. And so that's, that is something that we've seen change over the last couple of years, some of that stuff kind of phase. [00:21:26] Out and focusing on a more proactive and incentivizing what you want to have happen type of approach.  [00:21:32] Jason: Yeah. Incentives matter a lot, especially with tenants. Okay, cool. So let's get into then protecting the investor. So, I mean, I can see how some of these things, just if the tenants are behaving better, it's going to protect the property better, like getting filters changed, things like this. [00:21:51] But maybe you can provide some more detail on that.  [00:21:54] Andrew: Yeah, I mean, I think you know, a huge one is if you think about in single family rental and that investor profile, you know, in particular, I think about how important it is to keep the property occupied. Right? And you know, if you can keep a resident happy and renewing, right, renewing their lease, then yeah, that's a big win for the investor versus all that. It's not just the vacancy cost, right? It's also all the maintenance and repairs and everything that has to happen during that time. And so we, I mean, we have a client. They've got a scaled single family rental organization, over 7,000 units that they manage in a few markets, right? And their average their average tenancy is just under seven years. Wow, which is like really incredible, right? And that's not just because they have a resident benefits package. It's more than that. But it's really interesting to see a lot of the property managers really pushing for "how can I drive a great resident experience?" That people will pay for and that they'll stay for right and extending you know, attracting great residents and then keeping them longer. How that drives investor value. And then while they're there in the property, they're taking better care of it. The filters are getting changed on time. There's less HVAC expense, right? 38 percent less HVAC bills eliminates 38 percent of those bills that it makes an investor question, you know, "I got into this for predictable and like risk adjusted returns and then boom, I have this 7,000 expense." [00:23:23] Maybe I'm thinking about selling or do I really want to stick through this or I just ate up the rest of my year's returns, right? You can eliminate those kind of moments. That's really what we're after, right? How do we attack those kinds of moments that you know, create those emotional kind of negative experiences for investors that would make them say "you know, I want to, maybe I want to put my money somewhere else, or maybe I'm not up for continuing this." so we think about how do we create a resident experience so good. Residents don't want to leave. How do we create an investor experience so good, they don't want to sell? They want to buy more. How do we create a team experience so good, the talent wants to be in this industry and wants to grow in this industry forever. And that's that kind of flywheel of what a triple win experience creates.  [00:24:07] Jason: Yeah, I like it. They're increasing the lease renewals. They're lowering their operational costs by not having those happen as often and because they're taking better care of things, there's going to be less maintenance challenges, et cetera, better property care, lower HVAC expenses. [00:24:23] I mean, this sounds like an investor benefits package.  [00:24:26] Andrew: Yeah. I mean, if you look at, if you were to Google resident benefits package, You'll see Second Nature's content, but you'll also see a lot of property managers. And of course, property managers, their website and their content is often generally pointed at property owners, right? And you'll see a lot of the results are like, "Hey, our resident benefits package, how it benefits investors". And you'll just hear it from their mouths, right? It's the things I mentioned and more, like if all of your residents have renters insurance. Guess what? You can get a lower cost on your property insurance as a property owner and investor, right? If that's the case because you're protected from liabilities, especially if there's a master policy in place that has special coverages that protect the investors. Like our insurance products and others that offer great insurance products in the industry. So, whether you're working with Second Nature or not, you know, bringing these kinds of programs and designing things to be a triple win is something we'd, we really encourage people to pursue.  [00:25:19] Jason: Now, if somebody were trying to design this on their own, then they're probably going to have to source several different tools and services, which I'm guessing you guys like have aggregated and some of this stuff is in house, like the filters and some of this you've partnered, I'm guessing, but you've already brought all of this together. So, one of the challenges or one of the concerns is in those situations is the business owners thinking, "well, I'm going to be cheap. I can do this for less if I go and source all these components myself. Is that accurate?" [00:25:51] Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Great question. You know, it's funny. I think I was telling you, we had our whole team in Nashville this past week. And we actually brought a couple of our customers in, three customers to have just like a customer panel. It was great for people not in sales and account management roles, like people in finance, people in technology, IT, to really hear directly what it's like to be a property manager and everything else. And Kevin Patterson was with us. He's a property manager, manages about a thousand units out of California. And Kevin was talking about it. He's like, yeah, "I saw what you guys were doing. I'm like, 'I can do this.'" And he is like, "so I bought pallets of filters, right? And had them shipped to my office. And then we realized, oh my God, like now we have to store all these filters and inventory. What a mess. Yeah. I still have some too, you know, two years later." [00:26:33] So, I mean, here's the thing. I would say there's probably a percentage or two, like my observation is there's a couple percentage, you know, of companies out there who are wired in such a way and just so passionately logistically detailed that if they wanted to do, you know, a couple of these things really on their own, they probably could do it. [00:26:53] But I think most property managers recognize. That, "Hey, if I can make $17 in profit per door, I don't have to add to my head count. I can have this whole thing up and running in 30 days and bring that impact to my business." Right. You know, fortunately Second Nature hasn't lost. I can probably count them on a hand or two, customers out of 2000, right? That we've signed over the years. And that's our job, right? It's to continually provide a competitive rate that's attractive, that would make people want to pick us, but I will say this: we've advised a couple of companies who just say, "I want to try it and go on my own." And sometimes with Kevin, like we give them some advice, they end up working with us later. A couple of them have been able to make it successful on their own. We're happy to help, you know, in either case you know, and provide some insight and help avoid some heartburn. I think some things are harder than others, like insurance. Like if you're going to build your own insurance products, you've got to get certain licenses. [00:27:47] And I want to set up a whole different entity and everything else, you know, for that, but you know, some things are easier than others. Some things are harder than others. So it kind of can just depend what we decided to put together.  [00:27:59] Jason: Yeah. I think it's important for property managers to keep the main thing, otherwise it's so easy to get distracted as an entrepreneur. We're like, "let's add this and let's do this," and then suddenly the main thing starts to slip. So you're like, "cool. I'm going to beat that $17 that Andrew Smallwood's going to get me per door. I'm going to get it to $20 or to $30," or whatever. And then they're losing out on hundreds of dollars because they're not getting more clients. They're not focused on the main things in the business and retaining clients. And they're like, "Oh, now we have to do this," because you know, in order to do all of this, it's building another business. Building another business in the business. And one of the biggest problems I see with entrepreneurs, especially in early stages of their development is this idea that they need to just keep doing more stuff themselves and they start like expanding, doing other businesses. They have 20- 30 things. The most efficient model for an entrepreneur is one business. That's the most efficient. Generally, all these billionaires scaled one business, right? They cause they have so much focus. And I think focus is the most important of all five currencies of time, energy, focus, cash, and effort in relation to scaling or growing a business it's focus. That laser focus. And so keeping the main thing I've made that mistake, you know, doing my first conference, what I call my $2 million mistake, because we were growing at a healthy pace and then 300 percent a year, and then it was like, let's do this crazy, big, expensive conference and then sales marketing, like everything had to go towards this conference and it distracted the business because we were on the hook. You're on the hook with hotel. You're on the hook with the vendors, like everything that's going on. And that was really difficult. And that was a big lesson to me that the main thing has to stay the main thing. [00:29:51] It's super important.  [00:29:52] Andrew: Yeah. I mean, you said it so well, like when I think of Second Nature's own outsourcing decisions, right? Like I look at it through three lenses: so one is scale, right? Do I have scale or does the partner of scale? Who's going to deliver value through scale? Right? Second is skill, right? You know, do I have a certain skill or competency? Do they have a skill or competency, right? Who's going to drive more value that way? And then the third is time, which we were just talking about of like your opportunity cost and your focus on what you do and you know, I suppose there's a probably a fourth dimension there of just control of like ultimately the customer experience that you're trying to create can't be created reliably by an outsourced partner. And they're not dedicated and committed to that, or you're not aligned on that. Yeah. That would be another reason to do it yourself. But but yeah, it's, man, I take your point, Jason, of just, it's so easy to be ambitious and want to take a lot on and not stay focused on here's my core competency that I can continually leverage, to drive a lot of value. And here's how I can bring in complimentary pieces around it to create something bigger than that.  [00:30:58] Jason: Yeah. I mean, a big part of what we do at DoorGrow is just getting entrepreneurs to focus and then they start to scale really rapidly. So, I mean, in this industry, it could be diluted focus on different types of properties they're managing because each different type is almost like a different business. They're like, "I'm going to do commercial, I'm going to do associations," and then they're like trying to run multiple businesses with team members that are trying to jump into multiple businesses. And then it's a mess. And they're just not going as fast. And so this I view as, this is like adding on another business, and if you can strap on these tools from vendors, other companies, and get these resources, you can go a lot faster and keep the main thing. So, yeah, love it. So the third thing we talked and we've touched on this in a few instances of how this can help, but the third thing was increasing profit. So, I mean, there's the obvious bump that you're charging a fee for this and you're get convincing the residents. And for the residents, I think a lot of this would sound like a no brainer. They're getting more value in their mind than what they're going to be charged, and then it becomes a no brainer for them to do this. [00:32:03] And it protects them and it helps them get better credit. But let's talk specifically about profitability, like increasing profit.  [00:32:11] Andrew: So, yeah. So I think, you know, at Second Nature, like we do care about the experience and providing convenience to people, but it's also really important to us that there's a strong economic case for all parties. And so the way we often design and the recommendations we make on pricing. I mean, listen, it's a property manager's business. So Sarah, we're going to let them choose, right? Here's it's their pricing that they're charging their customer. We're not going to get in the way of that. That's in their control. But when we make recommendations, which I'll say nine times out of 10, right? If not more. It's set up in such a way where a resident is saving over $100 per year compared to what they're already spending right on the same expenses if they were to go with the status quo, right? Versus being enrolled in the benefits package. And then we make that as easy as signing their lease. There's a clear economic benefit, right? For the resident for the investors with HVAC savings. Everything else we're talking about earlier. Well over a hundred dollars per year in annualized savings for the investor. And then for the property manager, as we were talking about, well over a hundred dollars per year. Right. And so that's when you create new value. The way we think about it is you have a bigger pie that can be shared right across all parties, as opposed to taking the same pie and saying, "how do I shave off a little more for me?" but then you're cutting into the very relationship that you kind of depend on to support the business. And so how can we find new ways to add on and expand the value and share in that value because that makes it really sustainable and that builds trust while also building your balance sheet and so that's the focus and approach. You know we recommend that property managers take when they approach pricing and the other thing I'd probably give advice on here is that some property managers will go about this and then recognize very quickly, "oh, this is the thinking. I can't—" it's so frustrating, right? When I see an owner do this, you know, like, cost based pricing or a cost based approach as opposed to a market based approach. And what I mean by that is, "hey, here's all my costs. I want to make $17 per door. So here's what I'm going to charge, right?" [00:34:21] It's kind of like a investor saying, "well, here's my mortgage and all of my expenses, and I'd love to cashflow $800 a month. So I'm just going to charge this for rent." At which point Sarah tells them, regardless of what the market dictates, "yeah, your property is going to sit vacant for six months or it's only going to be vacant for two days and you way underpriced." [00:34:39] Right? And so the point is, "Hey, here's actually a market based approach to pricing that drives fair value and a good value proposition to everybody." Is the main encouragement we take. And again, if somebody wants to talk to Second Nature, whether they work with us or not, we're happy to advise on what we observe and see is happening in that market as it relates to pricing. [00:35:00] Jason: Yeah, ultimately the market's King. However, there are different segments of the market. So if people are targeting people at the end of the sales cycle that are searching on Google for property management, for example, the market is going to pay less there, because now you're a commodity. Whereas if you capture people in the blue ocean that are not searching on the internet, which there's a lot more of those, then you can charge more, have more fees, et cetera. And they're easier to close, right? And so the other factor lever that we've noticed with our clients at DoorGrow, increasing their profitability is increasing their ability to sell. So their ability to sell services and to sell the value and to create the pain gap between where people are and where they want to be, what value they want. [00:35:46] That ability as well as another lever in which they're able to charge more than their competition and close deals more easily. And there's some other levers as well. And so there's the market's one of the factors, but there are some levers that can be leveraged as well. And depending on who you're targeting in your audience, then you also can charge more money. [00:36:08] So that's something to keep in mind. So, yeah, this is super interesting. So everybody wants to increase profit if they're smart, those of you listening, if you're smart, you want to increase profit, you want to protect your investors, that's like your business, what you do, and you want to provide value to the residents. [00:36:24] So why would people just not do this? Why? Like have they just not heard of a resident benefits package or why would they not be doing this?  [00:36:32] Andrew: Yeah, I mean, there are definitely people that fall into that camp, and I'm sure there's probably going to be at least a couple people listening to this who haven't heard of a residence package. I also think over the last few years, this has been a really hot topic that's been talked about a lot, and people are seeing it more and more. As more companies adopt it, they just see it. Like they see our flyers in the Zillow listings, you know, the second photo, you know, beyond the thumbnail, it's like, here's a list of all these benefits, right, that people are putting in the marketing language or listing language or on their competitor's websites. And so I do think awareness is rapidly growing here. I mean, 101% empathy is property managers are often so busy, right? like just to do the kind of like table stakes of property management. It can take a lot of investment into their systems, into their process. I know that's something that you guys offer to folks and help them with. It can really feel like it's hard to implement a change in my business, let alone, you know, I think this is where Second Nature saw a real problem to solve. Like, how am I going to go through seven different sales processes, right, which is really like 21 to 30, if I want to look at more than just one vendor for a service, right? Go through all those processes, line up all my agreements, get those executed, and get my onboarding and implementation set up at the same time. [00:37:53] And align everybody the same, like consistent experience on going throughout it. That feels like going to Mars, you know, it's like a real big thing to tackle. So that's where we really just wanted to be like the easy button for that and drive, you know, "Hey, we've got a million plus residents on our platform, you know, thousands of property managers that we're working with. And, you know, can we drive some efficiency and pass that benefit alone to the customer," you know, is core to our value proposition. And so that's, I think what has brought, you know, a lot of people to us while we're growing very fast, have earned the reputation that we have, and at the same time we don't take it lightly. There's a lot more work to do. There's still still more change that needs to happen here, but I think the big thing is just the anticipation of all the effort and just the hard work of making any change in your business, right? Is a lot of times what people come up against.  [00:38:43] Jason: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of property managers, people have heard me talk about the Cycle of Suck on the show before. There's a lot of overwhelm. There's a lot of stress, a lot of property managers struggling. They're in a race to the bottom in terms of pricing. They're focused on internet marketing, SEO, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, which is the bottom of the barrel owners that are the ones left over, the crappy scraps that fell off the word of mouth table. Like there's a lot of challenge there, by the way, we can help you with that. Reach out to us at DoorGrow. So that may be a big reason why they're just not doing these things that are in their mind, ancillary, auxiliary, and they're not adding this additional value and they're leaving money on the table because they're just too focused on trying to just get their business to eke out a little bit of dollars and, you know, they're stressed.  [00:39:31] Sarah: So I've got a question that Andrew if you have a recommendation on, at what stage would this be easiest for a property manager to implement? Is it easiest right off the bat when they're starting and they have no doors or a few doors? Is it easiest when they have maybe 100? Is it easiest when they get to the 500 plus mark? Or is there a stage at which it's like, maybe it's just in their mind, it feels too hard, and you're like, "Oh, actually, it's really easy, and here's why."  [00:39:59] Andrew: Yeah, great question, Sarah. I mean, here's the thing. Second Nature works with customers who have as little as their first one to two doors and are just getting started, right? A lot of our customers have hundreds or a couple thousand doors, and we work with a few clients that have 80,000 plus units in their portfolio. So we've worked with people at all sizes who have come and started all sizes. I will say this though. I think if somebody has under 20 to 30 doors, even as simple and easy as Second Nature makes it, you know, probably that person would be better served as they're getting their first couple of dozen doors on in focusing on their core operations, their core systems, their accounting platform getting set up. I would recommend probably holding on the— I'm sure my S and B reps are going to be listening to this and being like, "what are you saying, man?"— [00:40:47] And jokes aside, like I have talked to a few people where I've like pushed them on it a little bit. Like, "Hey, they've got eight doors," and I'm like, "okay, so here, this handful of hours, right, that you could spend doing this. Let's add $17 per door times your eight doors. Like, here's the business impact to this, and then what are you going to do with that amount," so to speak, right? And "how are you going to reinvest that in your business? Like, how do you see that as the best use of your time versus spending that going and doing, you know, business development or, you know, generating realtor referrals or whatever your strategy is for growing?" Okay. Your business to kind of that you know, initial point of profitability to support yourself. Like, how are you seeing that? And in one case, he said, "this is my differentiator. This is what I get to talk about in my market that I do that others don't. So it's actually going to help me attract more owners. I really want to do this now." Cool. Like I wouldn't stop that person from working with us, but I'd say generally, probably somebody in their first couple dozen doors is better focused on growing that and getting their core processes in a really stable place.  [00:41:47] Jason: Sure. They can add like one door and make what they would make if I had $17 times eight, right? So if they're focusing on that, but yeah, I get that. So I would imagine then maybe right around that 50 door stage is a really good place. This is where a lot of people start to stack and add vendors and get sort like. Then it starts to make sense to get some leverage because this is a lot of times I call the first sand trap where they start to get stuck between 50 to a hundred, because they're doing everything themselves. And this is probably where they can start to get some additional leverage and add some additional services. [00:42:18] Andrew: So if I can compliment you guys real quick, I saw like the DoorGrow code thing, and I think part of it may have been blurred out, but I think I got like the gist of it, I remember seeing, you know, how you guys had kind of stages. I'm like, wow, that is so cool. And if I was a new property manager, I would love having and seeing a resource like that of just, "man, here's like what I can focus on at this time that's right for me. It's going to get me to the next phase and then what to focus on here to get to the next one." Like what a helpful and useful tool. [00:42:47] So I just wanted to say kudos to you guys for putting that out there.  [00:42:50] Jason: Yeah, thanks. If anybody wants that for free, like they can go to DoorGrow.Com. Click the big pink button on the homepage. 'I want to grow.' And on that page, there's three steps. The third one is a YouTube video, 95 minute training called the DoorGrow Code. It's all about it. So it'll show you how to scale. And we're confident we're doing this with clients that we could take any business from zero doors to a thousand doors in five years or less. If they just listen to us and do what we say at each stage. Yeah. Very cool. So thanks for plugging us. Appreciate it. [00:43:25] Andrew: So I'm solicited. Yeah. Yeah. But it felt right in that moment.  [00:43:29] Jason: Yeah. There's very specific things that happen at different stages. And I think if you are at least at that 50 door stage or beyond, like you'll be crazy not to do this. And I love the idea of getting your resident benefits package as a unique differentiator just to stand out, which will give you more confidence in sales. And when people need confidence, the most is when they have the least doors. This is where confidence is a huge factor for them. Like when we take them through our process of cleaning up their brand, their website, all of this, we're really just helping them with their confidence level to go out and sell. [00:44:04] And they can go out and sell without all that stuff. They don't even need a website. They just need clients. Right. But doing these things helps them. And this is something else I think they can boost their confidence a little bit. And that's worth it. That's worth it for sure. So, well, cool, Andrew, anything else we're missing about this? And if not, then how can people get in touch with you or with Second Nature?  [00:44:25] Andrew: The only other thing I'd say is anybody who's made it right to this point, 45- 50 minutes in, like, I feel like you deserve a medal or something like that with attention spans, considerations fans. So thanks for sticking with us. I hope you got some value today. Sarah and Jason, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you guys. I really enjoyed our conversation. I love you guys' energy and vibe you know, excited to get to know you guys better. And and I'd say this if people are looking for you know, more resources and things like that, we've got at rbp.secondnature.Com, there's a bunch of things, we've got articles, we've got the triple win podcasts that we record a bunch of episodes there that people can check out. If that's of interest to them, we've occasionally got events, digital events and things like that, that we're putting on, if they're just looking to learn more, we've got some of those kinds of resources, or if they're looking to talk to someone specifically about what we talked about here today they can find a contact form to do that as well. [00:45:16] And just want to express appreciation to you guys. Again, really appreciate you inviting me on and having a chance to do this.  [00:45:21] Jason: Cool. Thanks for coming on the show.  [00:45:23] Sarah: Yeah. Thanks for being here. I think this is something that if you don't have it, just look into it. I feel like there's not a downside in this anywhere. So just look into it. If this was something that I had known about when I owned my business, man, would have done that in a heartbeat, but, I really think it's something that can like benefit all parties. It can like help set you apart from other people that maybe don't know about this or just aren't doing it yet. [00:45:50] And it sounds like they make it easy for you. I think that you're probably right, Andrew. Like you hit that right on the nose. Like they're busy and they're like, "Oh, this is hard." It sounds like they understand that and they'll work with you to make it easy.  [00:46:04] Jason: Yeah. Yeah I love that you guys are helping people through this process and making it easy. So We'll definitely be pushing our clients to take a look at this episode so that they can start getting the stuff implemented Thanks for coming on the show. Appreciate you. Awesome.  [00:46:17] Andrew: Thanks guys.  [00:46:18] Jason: Thanks. All right So if you are a property management entrepreneur that's wanting to add more doors grow your business reach out to us at DoorGrow We would love to help you out anything else we should say All right, then until next time to our mutual growth. [00:46:31] Bye everyone. [00:46:31] You just listened to the #DoorGrowShow. We are building a community of the savviest property management entrepreneurs on the planet in the DoorGrowClub. 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!  [00:46:58] At DoorGrow, we solve your biggest challenge: 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 doorgrow.com, and 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.

Ready to lace up your cleats, strap on your helmet, and step onto the field with us as we connect the dots between sports and public service? We start with the NFL Players Association survey, a fascinating deep dive shedding light on player satisfaction levels within the league. As we analyze the survey results, we draw some compelling links to our own fields - Police, Fire, and EMS, offering a unique perspective on the commonalities shared by both professional athletes and public servants.Now, imagine you're an NFL player, dealing with the realities of training facilities that fall short, lack of dedicated family areas, and questionable team management. We spotlight the alarming conditions some players face, including the startling revelations about Kansas City Chiefs' facilities. So, as we weave through the intricacies of player facilities and amenities, we invite you to ponder on the direct parallels that exist within our public service professions.As we navigate this thrilling journey, we draw an eye-opening comparison between choosing a football team and selecting a firehouse. Factors like response district, community engagement, and shift hours form part of this compelling discussion. You wouldn't want to miss our frank analysis of NFL players' accommodation conditions and the impact that it can have on career decisions. We wrap things up with a lively Netflix documentary recommendation and an amusing banter about Australian toilets. So, pull up a seat and join us as we take you through this insightful and entertaining episode.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Buckle up for a captivating encounter with our long-time listener from down under, Jeff Sinfield. We delve into a decade-long journey that started in 2008 when Jeff first discovered our blog, and how it helped him navigate through a tough patch. We raise a toast to his brother Mike, who recently hung up his boots from the police force and gear up to decipher the hidden secrets of Australian slang during Jeff's extended stay in the U.S.That's just the tip of the iceberg or should we say, just a kangaroo hop in Jeff's fascinating world!  We compare notes on the weather of the Pacific Coast and Perth and explore all things San Francisco. If you think it ends there, hold your breath as Jeff takes us on a virtual Australian wildlife tour, from angry wombats to bird-eating spiders, it's an exhilarating ride. As if this wasn't exciting enough, we shift gears to explore local experiences. Imagine savoring the ambiance of open-air bars with rotating taps or relishing the never-ending breadsticks at Olive Garden, it's all about celebrating the simple joys of life. We share our experiences of beer tasting and supporting local craft breweries. Lastly, we share some fun facts about OzzyMan, the Aussie Youtube sensation and decode the origins of the phrase "Fair Dinkum". So, tune in for an adventure-filled conversation that promises to be as thrilling as a roller-coaster ride.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever found yourself stuck in a seemingly never-ending commute? We did too, and that's how we ended up with Happy Medic's hilarious tale of his Prius being just nine inches too wide for his new workspace! We navigated the perilous world of street parking, old firehouses and their original doors, and the diamond lane sticker that promised a faster commute - if only the car could fit somewhere! In true Motor Cop fashion, we found humor in adversity and a story worth sharing.Now, if you've ever toyed with the idea of getting an electric scooter, hold on to your helmets because we're going on an exhilarating ride! We took the challenge head on, looking at the best models available, their top speed, range, brakes, tires, and mechanical systems. And as we zipped through safety concerns and sidewalk etiquette, we somehow ended up chatting about Kazakhstan! Trust us, this is a discussion you don't want to miss.Then, we took a turn into the world of football, scooters, and tickets. We chatted about Brett Goldstein's amusing antics with a whistle - and the potential of using one to clear pedestrians out of your scooter path! We also chewed over the return of football season and commiserated over the Chiefs' Thursday night loss. And if that's not enough, we strategized over board games like Pandemic, Gloomhaven, Frosthaven, and Arkham Horror. And to top it all, we're buzzing with excitement for Jeff's upcoming visit to the studio. So, if you're looking for a lively chat about life, scooters, board games and more, this episode's got you covered!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever wondered what a college degree guarantees in the realm of public service? This episode takes a deep dive into the heart of this, starting with the Pennsylvania State Police's game-changing decision to drop the college credit prerequisite for applicants. What does this new policy mean for the future of law enforcement and other trades? Is it a threat to quality or does it pave the way for greater accessibility and diversity? We assess the tangible and intangible implications, considering the role of trade jobs and the historical significance of the trades to our society.In the same vein, we explore physical fitness standards in the fire service and law enforcement. Fitness tests - are they a true measure of suitability for these roles? Could incentivizing physical fitness lead to healthier public service employees, fewer medical services, and even better job performance? We dissect these theories, debating if and how performance standards could be better enforced.And we haven't forgotten the lighter side of life. We share a laugh over the great scooter debate - should you buy one, what's the maximum speed and is it worth the investment? Plus, we unfold a personal story of a family's daunting walk through the college application process, and there's a peculiar tale of a motor partner and supervisor faced with an unusual task. Finally, we end on an essential note - never let the beer run out! Tune in for an episode that's more than just talk - it's a deep, insightful, and sometimes humorous journey into public service, education, and life itself.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Who's to blame when a self-driving car has an accident? This question isn't just hypothetical anymore. We'll unravel this fascinating legal conundrum, fueled by a recent incident involving an autonomous vehicle's failure to yield. The incident gave birth to a new classification of vehicles by the State Department of Motor Vehicles, adding a fresh layer to the traditional fault allocation debate. Plus, we'll deal with the amusing paradox of road rage with driverless cars!The second part of our conversation dives into the troves of data autonomous vehicles gather and how it can be a game-changer for people with medical conditions. However, we'll also tackle the ethical dilemmas tied to such data collection and its potential use as evidence in court. As we navigate the intersection of technology and law, we delve into the unique challenges of integrating these AI-driven vehicles into our roads. From exploring the technicalities of training these vehicles to discussing their potential role in assisting those with medical conditions - we cover it all. So, gear up for an engrossing ride into the world of autonomous vehicles!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ever wondered what goes through a cop's mind when he's in a high-speed chase? Ever pondered the intricacies of law enforcement response to potential situations of danger? Join us, your hosts Motor Cop and the Happy Medic, as we dissect these themes while we chat about a recent amusing incident in Georgia involving a black F-150 doing donuts in the middle of an intersection. Discover the behind-the-scenes decision-making process of the police officer, the challenges encountered, and the potential implications of his response. All while we share a laugh over Officer Daniels' amusing social media posts related to the incident.But hold on, we're not just about the giggles and gaffes. We also dive deep into the serious side of law enforcement. We examine the policies of the Georgia State Patrol, discuss the potential for a lawsuit from the suspect, and even navigate the sensitive topic of racial bias in law enforcement. So, strap in and get ready for an entertaining, insightful, and thought-provoking episode where humor and serious discussions collide. Whether you're in the law enforcement field or just a curious listener, we promise this episode is one you won't want to miss!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

This week on Stump MC...What happens when the protectors become the perpetrators? Tune in as we explore the nail-biting case of Tina Height, who took legal action against an Arkansas deputy after a bullet meant for her [redacted], grazed her instead. With the People Magazine shedding light on this incident, we'll sift through the gritty details of the bodycam footage, the deputy's actions, and the subsequent lawsuit, promising you a riveting analysis.Transitioning from the streets of Arkansas to the bustling lanes of San Francisco, we delve into the potential future of transportation. Picture a city dominated by autonomous vehicles and robots, thanks to the expansions approved by California for Cruise and Rainbow. But are we, as a society, prepared for this driverless world? We don't just stop at questioning the possible risks, we even touch upon some peculiar weaponry being utilized in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Lastly, we have a treat for all the movie aficionados. We journey through the intricate universe of Skynet from the Terminator series. Engage with us as we untangle the time loop conundrum and applaud the staggering performance of Joseph Gordon-Levitt. For those curious about the creative process, we spill some beans on our writing experiences and the challenges it presents. And to add a personal touch, we share some anecdotal tales. Join us with our special guest - Justin, the Happy Medic, as we navigate these intriguing topics. From the courtrooms of Arkansas, the tech-laden streets of San Francisco, to the apocalyptic world of Skynet, we promise an entertaining and insightful ride!Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Imagine the adrenaline rush of your child stepping onto the stage for an audition. That's exactly how we felt as we witnessed MC lit number two's audition for a competition team. Brace yourself for a roller-coaster ride as we navigate through the back-to-school season, career transitions, and even sprinkle in some hilarious traffic incidents. We promise, by the end of this episode, you'll have a newfound respect for creative problem-solving.Switching tracks, ever wondered how an island community copes with a catastrophe like a raging fire? We delve into the heart-wrenching Lahaina Fires, discussing its devastating effects, and the resilience of those affected. But it's not all gloom. We end on a lighter note with an amusing tale surrounding a Michael Douglas movie. So sit back, tune in, and join us on this journey filled with insights, laughter, and some truly touching moments.Tickets for 1st Responders Concerts, Sporting Events, Comedy Shows and more at INCREDIBLE discounts!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Are you ready to venture into the stormy seas of Elon Musk's audacious moves post his $44 billion Twitter acquisition? We're going to navigate you through the tumultuous tides of this tech giant's rebranding strategies, logo backlash, and the digital landscape that's been left in his wake. Musk's genius has transformed Twitter into X, leaving us all on the edge of our virtual seats. Following this thrilling journey, we switch gears and enter the fascinating world of cruise trips. Picture this: You're a beach bum on board, running out of white flour and suddenly find yourself avoiding an elderly man zipping around on his scooter. From these unforgettable encounters to the delightful discovery of hidden ducks on the ship, cruising through the waters is an adventure like no other. We're here to share these amusing tales and the intriguing process of making new friends among the waves.Now, imagine you're lounging on the deck, a book in one hand, a backgammon die in the other. That's our final destination for this episode. We'll take you through the struggle of finding a die, the joy of backgammon, and the eclectic mix of books available on board. From paddling boats to the ship's library, the cruise life is a rollercoaster of experiences. So are you ready to sail away with us? Let's embark on this journey of tech talk, cruise stories, and fun-filled games. Trust us, you don't want to miss this voyage!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Could an AI ever really make art? In the midst of testing Buzzsprout's Co-host AI, we push the boundaries of this question as we discuss AI's recent foray into surrealist painting. We're captivated by the precision of this technology as it accurately crafts our podcast episode descriptions, and we're equally excited about the potential it offers for our friends with hearing impairments. But we're not without reservations. It's one thing for AI to generate an episode description—quite another for it to generate a painting. Shifting gears, we chat about AI's real-world applications and potential to mimic human behavior. We're not talking about just any behavior, but the kind of behavior that's downright bizarre—like an African-American wrestler squirming at an autopsy. Yes, you heard it right! And if that's not enough, we even venture into the realm of AI-powered translations and their impact on knowledge sharing. Let's just say, it's been an interesting journey! Lastly, we dip our toes into some amusing incidents and discussions about working at Subway and Togo's. And yes, that does include an AI making a sandwich—and a phone that found its way into a port-a-potty. We wrap up with a debate about AI taking over the bottle (whatever that means), and a reminder about the book you'll want to have on your nightstand this week. All in all, we promise it's an episode that will not just tickle your funny bone but leave you pondering some very thought-provoking questions!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ready to challenge your views on drug policies, law enforcement, and the devastating impacts of fentanyl? Hold on tight, because this episode is guaranteed to rattle your perception. We kick off with an intense discussion on the role of the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and the California National Guard in battling drug trafficking, using California's "toxic pipeline" as a case study.Can you imagine how your favorite TV shows mirror real-life situations? You're in for a treat as we draw parallels between Breaking Bad and real-world drug trafficking scenarios. As we switch lanes to politics, we dissect Governor Gavin Newsom's decision to classify hard drugs as misdemeanors, and its potential ripple effects. The debate gets heated as we argue on the impact this might have on drug usage rates. But it's not all about politics; we also stress the need for proper resources for those battling substance abuse.Brace yourself for the grand finale as we tackle the grim reality of fentanyl, a drug deadlier than you might think. We draw comparisons with other substances and discuss the criminal justice system's approach to drug abuse. As we wind up, we ponder the miscommunication that might happen as officers climb the law enforcement ladder. It's a rollercoaster ride through the intertwined world of drugs, law enforcement, and politics. So, buckle up, and let's dive into this thought-provoking journey.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Ready for a dose of adrenaline, sprinkled with laughter and garnished with strategy? Brace yourself as we embark on this rollercoaster of a ride, featuring none other than Stump MC and Studley McBadge Face. This dynamic duo joins us once more to unravel layers of emergency services and disaster preparedness. As we serve tricky questions from real-life stories involving Fire, Police, EMS, military, and disaster preparations, will our guests predict the unpredictable? Only one way to find out!Here's a teaser for you – ever wondered about the connection between the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, Mr. Powers Cat, and the villainous Omar Epps? As we shift gears into the realm of teamwork and strategy, we make pit stops at the most unexpected destinations. All while keeping the banter light and engaging, we take a detour into the perplexing world of Raleigh's transforming mustache. But remember, amidst all the shenanigans, some serious topics are brewing in the background.In the final stretch, we dissect the enigma of thousands of 911 calls at Bonnaroo and the issues plaguing NYC's EMS. The discussion culminates in a tribute to our guests, Studley McBadge Face and Stump MC – their bragging rights, the mascots on the truck, and their contribution to what has been a thrilling ride. As we wrap up this episode, get ready to explore heavy topics with a light-hearted twist, all in the spirit of camaraderie and shared experiences. Tune in and let the adventure begin!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

We're thrilled to have Studlee McBadge Face back on the show! Brace yourselves as we exchange insights on the fun and fraught aspects of our work, from dealing with HVAC repairs to the crucial process of carrying a weapon. There's never a dull moment, whether we're discussing serious improvements to the studio or sharing laughs over MC's Pomeranian-filled heater and rat infestation.Join us as we journey through the life of Studlee, a modern-day Jack of all trades! We unravel the intriguing world of freelance gigs and executive protection work, revealing the rugged training, personal discipline, and unique public perception that come with the job. But it's not all serious; we mix it up with light-hearted banter, exploring the grittier side of home repairs, the cost of canine surgeries, and yes, even the love for a good bourbon.We cap off our conversation with a lively discussion on the Jack Reacher series, as well as other shows and books we've been hooked on. From voicing our thoughts on Tom Cruise's casting to exploring our current bedside reads like the David Goggins book and Lincoln Lawyer series, we keep the dialogue engaging. As we bid farewell to Studlee, we toast to the future of the podcast and anticipate the riveting conversations in our upcoming episodes. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy this whirlwind episode filled with enlightening discussions, hearty laughter, and engaging camaraderie.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

How often do you find yourself in situations where self-defense is crucial, or in need of refreshment and inspiration from a watermelon? Join us for an enlightening discussion on these unique topics, as well as the challenges faced by first responders in emergency situations. Plus, a special shoutout to our friends at patreon.com/wye for providing us with the thirst-quenching Watermelon Dorado double IPA from Ballast Point Brewing.Handling difficult situations in emergency response is part of the job for EMTs, paramedics, and firefighters. We share our experiences and advice on running interference, dealing with interfering individuals, and protecting oneself in the event of an altercation. Learn how to ensure your safety and the well-being of those around you while remaining professional and efficient in the field.Lastly, we delve into the evolving culture of law enforcement and how policy and procedure impact officers' responses to calls. Staying up-to-date on current policies is crucial for maintaining safety and effectiveness on the job. We also discuss potential threats and how to ensure the safety of officers and medical personnel. Tune in for valuable insights and engaging conversation - don't miss this episode!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

What if you discovered that surveillance technology could transport you back in time to solve crimes and uncover hidden truths? Join us as we explore the eerie similarities between real-life surveillance and the movie Deja Vu, discuss our thoughts on privacy issues, and even touch on the outsourcing of data analysis to inexperienced analysts.We also reflect on the advancements of surveillance technology and its impact on personal privacy. Learn how it plays a role in deterring crime and aiding investigations, and even enjoy our humorous take on teenage criminal masterminds. But with great power comes great responsibility - we delve into the potential misuse of this technology and the importance of individual rights in today's increasingly surveilled world.Finally, we examine the implications of surveillance technology on privacy and consent during searches, considering power dynamics between civilians and law enforcement. Are we willingly sacrificing our privacy for the sake of security? Tune in for a thought-provoking discussion on the balance between privacy and surveillance, and don't forget to catch up with us next week for another exciting episode.BOLOThe Cabinet of Dr LengThe Last Argument of Kings by Joe AbercrombieSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Scene: Interior Game show set 22A (the one with the black mold)Cue Applause trackAnnouncer: "And now it's time to play everyone's favorite Fire Police EMS gameshow!"Prerecorded studio audience at considerable expense: "STUMP...M...C!!"Applause track fades awkwardly, giving away that it isn't live. The announcer can be heard picking up a cocktail with ice and mumbling "I need a real job..."Cue show:3 more stories from the land of first responders are on the show this week including 90s musical stylist Afroman, a pretty expensive something for public safety and the most recent challenge to the Duke Boys we've seen in many years.Trust us when we say you'll want to see the show notes for the video. X3 Bar - The ONLY gym gear you need Slash your workout time and triple your gains. Use "MotorCop" for $50 off!Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

You've heard them talk about it before but the boys are finally back in town (Thin Lizzy anyone?) from the Strawberry Music Festival and they have ALL the stories to tell.While seeing some bands they've known such as AJ Lee and Blue Summit, Yonder Mountain String Band, Della Mae and Suitcase Junket the guys were enamored with new sounds from bands including Big Richard, Quote the Raven and of course Jimbo Scott and Yesterday's Biscuits.Yes, that is the real name of the band.This week they talk about their high and low moments as well as the things about this music festival that keep them coming back year after year. This week we ponder:What the actual speed of Sully Tuttle's hands areWhy Justin wore nothing but bluegrass band T-shirts all weekendWhat band happened to be playing in the campsite behind us all weekendWhat ever happened to Andy, the Sheriffs wifeSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

No one is in Police, Fire, EMS or the Military for awards and commendations. We do it because it is what it is expected of us. Sure some recognition is nice, but when is it just too much?This week is EMS week and your pals at WYE stocked your local EMS break room with 4 LOCOs and pamphlets about other agencies hiring in the area. But really, what does a week of recognition mean? Awards? Medals? Lunch? Do they matter?This week the guys ask what is it really all about and why is it always Scott and Gary gunning for the big award this month/year/etc, and not the folks actually making a difference.While your hosts have their own accolades to hang on the wall, they discuss the importance of recognition but also the risk of over rewarding mediocrity.Then they're off for their own recognition, a 36-hour stint away from the families at the Strawberry Bluegrass Music Festival.This week we ponder:Why does Scott always seem to be getting awards and medals?Is it OK to avoid the recognition or should we lean into it?Have your hosts ever earned a medal?What is a Dadberry?Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

MC has had one hell of a week, gang.First a hot water pipe in his garage bursts, on his birthday no less, costing a few hundred bucks. Then Rory, the eldest of the MC dogs, starts having leg issues on a weekend so needs to be seen at the urgent care. There goes even more cash out the door.Then...termites. Since we were getting ready to record when the "pest guy" climbed into the attic and did his thing, a thing neither of us had ANY interest in doing, we sat and waited. Then he climbed out with a smile on his face.After watching MC deal with this emergency and having the responding expert infront of us, why not fire up the mics and interview him?"Connie" is 25 and has been in the pest control business for 5 years. He has been in attics, basements, crawl spaces and, while doing so, has come into contact with every imaginable species of creepy crawly, opossum and aggressive rats. So why does he do it and keep smiling? Have a listen and find out! This week we ponder:What kind of training is required to work in pest control?How does one get started?Is MC's problem small, standard or big?That ants and termites will battle to the death just like rats and squirrels.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Frank Abagnale is famous for being a confidence man, a thief and is convicted of bank fraud. Before being caught he allegedly passed the Georgia bar exam, served as a Doctor and most famously logged millions of miles posing as a Pan Am pilot needing a ride from town to town. Of course in each town he made and cashed fraudulent checks and committed other crimes, many of which are now in question, but the claims are monumental. His story was told in the motion picture "Catch me if you can" featuring Leonadro DiCaprio as Abagnale, Christopher Walken as his father, Charlie Sheen as his prospective father in law and little known actor Thomas Hanks as the FBI agent tracking Abagnale's cons and schemes through the 1960s.So why is this mentioned on WYE? Well, because a recent story broke about a man impersonating a Paramedic and we just LOVE drama here. And a good flick.From WOWK comes a story of mystery, intrigue, and a couple of Volunteer Fire Departments a little too quick to take someone at their word. Apparently Christopher Lee Lin (or as he apparently referred to himself to remain incognito, Christopher Beckinsale, no apparent relation to the movie star) wandered into a West Virginia Volunteer Fire Department and mentioned he was a Paramedic from elsewhere. The Chiefs gave him gear, including, a $15,000 breathing apparatus, and then found out later...well...maybe he isn't who he claims to be.This week we ponder:How does one fake being a Paramedic?How does one not ask around or perhaps ask for proof of said Paramedic certs?Exactly what does a $15,000 breathing apparatus look like?If the real Frank Abagnale made up many of his exploits, does that make him a better con man in the end?BOLOPicard Season 3 on ParamountThe Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady HendrixSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

For those of you still in the 3rd grade, let it be known that there are 2 Kansas Cities. Not, like you know, 2 cities in Kansas, but 2 metropolitan hubs named Kansas City. And they are of course easily distinguishable by the *checks notes* 6 minute drive across the Kansas river from each other. *tosses papers*It takes your hosts 11 minutes just to get to a decent freeway to get anywhere.Well, this time news breaks from Kansas City Kansas about the resignation of Fire Chief Michael Callahan who has been battling issues from staffing to salary to working conditions and not exactly making friends at the union hall. The curious part about his resignation is that it comes not amidst charges of corruption, wrong doing or incompetence, but the enforcement of a residency requirement. In addition to those shenanigans, Justin is in Indianapolis for FDIC and has some sweet swag for our listeners!This week we discuss:Why Kansas City can't take a break and let someone else in the newsHow you need to be careful what rules you demand be enforcedWhy you should find out if someone at the table is teaching at the conference you're dissingHow part of MC's famed beard is goneSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

As you may have heard, hosting a podcast isn't free anymore. When we first started podcasting over a decade ago, you just recorded some audio, uploaded it to the Library of Congress and posted a link on MySpace or the Community Bulletin Board (Remember those!?). To make sure the show can be heard on a variety of platforms at the same time we needed to pull together some scratch every month. As more of you began listening we needed to get more bandwith, yada yada yada, it got expensive for a couple of civil servants telling war stories. Instead of charging a subscription to listen, we decided early on to let you the listeners decide what you want to send to the show to keep it going. These folks are our patrons.From time to time we post comments, photos or videos to the patron website and have recently enjoyed doing a live chat with as many as we can get to just sit down and have a talk about what's going on in our lives.However, we decided there needed to be something else, something more, to give our patrons other than just our remarkably clever phrases and humor: Doubloons.This week, we turn the WYE Radio gameshow Stump MC on it's head and turn the microphone to our patrons for some listener competition!Justin has pulled 3 headlines from the WYE universe and let's see how careful our patrons are paying attention to the world around us all!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

EXPLICIT CONTENT AND PARENTAL WARNINGThis episode uses adult language and discusses addiction and suicide. Parental discretion is advised.If you're new to our podcast you may be thinking we have it in for the Kansas City Fire Department since we seem to gravitate towards stories surrounding strange goings on in that organization.Then this happens.We just this week learned the results of a lawsuit filed in 2018 by KCFD Paramedic Giovanna Vittori who had been reassigned due to a traumatic incident. While many of us applaud the organization for taking this step, what happened next turns our stomachs. The supervisor she was assigned to, according to the lawsuit, terrorized Giovanna by constantly reminding her of the event and "trying to make her deny it happened."The guys discuss the clearly marked line between good fun, hazing and bullying (no it isn't) and they can't seem to escape how something that started so positively ended so poorly. You see, even though Giovanna won the case in the end, it didn't happen until after her apparent suicide. She was found near a fitness report that had been reportedly altered by the Department and an eviction notice. We will never know the demons others are facing.Justin shares a lyric from a song that seems appropriate:You've got your hunger and some problems that are real,and you're dealing with some demons who are driving you insane,and I've seen them drag you screaming down the hallways of your brain. - The Devil Makes Three "Chase that Feeling"While the song mainly addresses addiction, the symbolism of being dragged away by demons seems accurate here. She was reassigned for a good reason, then everything went wrong. We like to say that no one knows what we are going through but some of us seem very fast to assume what others are going through.On our minds this week:Being able to look back and realize we were not our best in the momentCreating neighborhoods of commonality we can feel seen inHow easy it is to destroy those around us if we simply ignore realityWhy so many things could have saved Giovanna, but didn'tSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

EXPLICIT WARNING - This episode contains descriptions of a shooting from a Police video and expletive language. Parental discretion is advised.By now you've heard the news out of Nashville about the shooting that killed 6, including 3 children, at Covenant School.This week the guys watch the body cam footage provided by the Metro Nashville PD. In the video linked HERE we watch as 4 year Officer Rex Engelbert goes from putting his vehicle into park to engaging the shooter inside of three and a half minutes. Shortly after that we see the footage from another Officer, Michael Collazo, as they rapidly redeploy after hearing shots fired.Watching this video isn't easy and perhaps listening to us critique it isn't easy either but this is the closest you'll get to being on the line for an active shooter before being there yourself.We at WYE are proud to vaguely associate ourselves with these brave Officers and know full well how foolish we sound days after the fact from the comforts of our homes. We also know how important it is to share real life experiences, not just the same drill over and over and over again. But judging from what we saw, that training is paying off.Great work Officers, first round is on us when you're in town.This week we discuss:How methodical Engelbert is when forming his team, gathering intel from the woman outside and grabbing keys to the buildingThe hand signals and physical indicators of team movementJust how fast we've become as a professional in addressing this kind of threatWhy it was so important for NPD to release this video so quicklySupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

FDIC 2023 in Indianapolis is rapidly approaching and your favorite co-host is excited to be presenting for the 8th year in a row. No, not that one, the other one. Sheesh.Justin, our Fire and EMS expert is back presenting Mass Casualty (MCI) response for first in firefighting companies and shares a few new elements of his presentation that the New York Times called "Please stop emailing us random things to review."Specifically, they discuss the fact that there isn't always safety in numbers, especially when trying to evacuate an emergency and the guys discuss the stampede in South Korea that reinforces that reality.You can catch Justin's presentation on Thursday the 27th at 330. If you're in Indy and spot him, make sure to use the code word "Jason's hair" for a free beverage.Also, stick around for the end of the show for a "Kansas City Special" featuring Tom Jones. Not a euphemism.This week we discuss:The importance of anticipating egress when responding to an emergency sceneWhy setting up casualty collection early is a priorityHow and when most people will exit a building in an emergencyWhat. The. Hell. Is. Going. On. In. KCFD?Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

You know what's great about batch recording? When you realize it's the day of the week where we're supposed to publish a show, but don't have anything in the hopper...unless we totally do!That's right, a few months back, we recorded one of our favorite schticks here at WYE Radio, "Stump MC"!What questions did HM ask MC? Beats us...it was months ago!Maybe MC will actually listen to his own show in order to see if this show can stump him again. (Because odds are he remains light on doubloons.)Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

When we mention Kansas City, there's a good chance your mind immediately tracks to the Super Bowl Champion Kansas City Chiefs or even Big Jim Slade, former tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, but lately your feed may include the 2 stories the guys are tracking this week and think of just one Kansas City Chief: The Fire Chief.First from the Kansas City Fire Department: the Paramedic seen on camera chasing, and then hitting a patient with the laptop computer used to document patient care has been reinstated. I can hear your questions already, but the local union claims he deserves his job back for two reasons. First, this apparently happens all the time and others don't get fired and, second, it was self defense.Then your hosts cross the globe to...*checks notes* the Kansas City Fire Department where a Firefighter who pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter has been sentenced to probation and, wait for it, the union wants his job back as well. From the same folks who brought you "everyone else is doing it" comes an explanation that there wasn't a proper investigation completed prior to the termination. For those wondering, the driver was doing 51 in a 35 and blew through a red light, killing 3 and it turns out this wasn't the first time this employee had been speeding, according to the Department.Once again it looks like the hardest part of this job is showing up in the morning.This week we discuss:How and when self defense turns into assaultThe difference between an assault and PD witnessing an assaultWhen doing 51 in a 35 is appropriateWhy Jason has a massive new game in the studioSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Justin and Jason are pioneers in podcasting. You know it, they know it, and the world knows it, mainly based on the evidence presented in the title of this week's show.That's right, Justin is called the Happy Medic and his father, retired Fire Captain Jerry Schorr, is known as...wait for it...the Angry Captain. No joke. This week Jerry is in town so we have to fire up the mics and get him to play America's fastest growing internet game show featuring fractions of doubloons as prizes: Stump WYE.Jason is quizmaster this week and he has 3 questions for this retired fireman that he was sure would stump him. Did he? Listen in to find out, as well as learn what the heck this show title even means.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

In the noted cinematic masterpiece "The Princess Bride", Billy Crystal's character,  Miracle Max, is asked to assess a dead body to see if he can perform a miracle and bring the body back to life. He pokes and prods rather randomly, then declares, "Lucky for you he's only *mostly* dead."In the Monty Python film "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" a man collecting bodies during the plague is met by a man trying to pass an obviously alive relative as dead. "There...he says he's no dead..."In the remarkably family friendly children's film Django Unchained, Django is asked if he is positive a man riding away is the man he is searching for to be killed. After a rifle shot brings the man down Django casually says "I'm positive he dead."Sadly, a version of these scenarios played out in Clearwater Florida recently where Paramedics declared a man dead then left the scene. A short while later a Sheriff's Deputy who remained on scene for the medical examiner noticed the 65 year old "dead" man breathing. He was later treated and remains in the hospital as of the time of this recording. We also do an amazing recreation of the likely radio traffic between the Deputy and dispatch. How we haven't been nominated for an award is beyond us. Something to ponder indeed.This week we discuss:Is it really that hard to know if someone is alive? What about using a mirror?What criteria must be followed to declare someone deadWhat are the wrong things to say when making the notificationHow did MC even function with 3mbps internet? That isn't a typo. 3.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Marc Hildebrand is a life coach, podcaster, best selling author, father, husband and retired LEO. And while you may look at that list and think "OK, cool" just wait my friends.This week Jason and Justin welcome a man who looked at himself about to become a father and heard a voice tell him he could do better. Struggling with leadership issues at his agency, Marc went into overdrive, picked up up a P90X DVD and shed 100 lbs on his way to personal growth.We love making little excuses for ourselves from time to time and your hosts, and Marc, are no exception. If you're feeling like you need someone to help you move forward, reach out to Marc and see what he can do.Learning points for this week's quiz include:When to know when you've hit rock bottomHow changing one thing at a time isn't a bad place to startHow adorable retiring after only 20 years isWho you can talk to when ready to take that first step towards tomorrowSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

You read that right, listeners. Your hosts have lined up yet another amazing international guest in the field of fire, police, EMS and Emergency Planning. Friend of the show and public health expert, Aram Bronston, is with us this week to talk about how he went from snuggled in bed in Northern California to suddenly sitting in Christchurch, New Zealand, on his way to Antarctica.We had a blast talking to Aram and learning all about what fills his sun drenched days (and nights) and the guys learn all about penguins, after hours entertainment and even touch base on some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the giant island of ice floating at the bottom of the globe.If you're looking for the link Aram mentions about job openings, look no further than HERE.This week your hosts learn:What it takes to get screened to work at McMurdo Station, AntarcticaWhy the janitors are likely to have graduate degrees at the bottom of the planetHow to be careful when answering questions about aliensWhy climbing a mountain to see the sun set for 11 minutes is such a big dealBOLOAram provides our BOLO this week with 2 books he's reading:Lighter by Young BuebloBlue Mind by Wallace NicholsSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

After a heavy show last week with a total of 7 public safety officers charged with murder, we decide to decompress a bit and fill you in on some local happenings.First off, both of the boys are following in the shoes of Rodney Dangerfield and are heading back to school! Jason is studying music mainly, although Justin thinks some of the classes he's taking are made up, Jason fell asleep while Justin described his courses in the MPH program at Michigan as well as a statistical modeling course that...oh shoot, you fell asleep, too?Well then wait until you hear about this fascinating thing that is picking up speed. Folks buy pallets of returned items, working or not, then dump them out for you to search through. But here's the wrinkle: On the first day they set everything out, everything is $10. Then each day the price goes down until Thursday when everything left is just $1. Justin has gotten some interesting things super cheap but just people watching is worth it.They wrap up discussing the Assassins game at the local high schools and why all the kids are buying NERF guns. Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

It is very unusual to see a story in the feeds as clear cut as the story coming out of Springfield, Illinois, where Paramedics Peggy Finley and Peter Cadigan were arrested and charged with murder after the death of Earl Moore Jr, a patient under their care. Yes, you read that right...murder.Officer Axon is always watching...It turns out these two decided it would be a good idea to approach Mr. Moore, who was having an encounter with local law enforcement. While witnesses state it was alcohol withdrawal, the coroner places the cause of death as traumatic asphyxiation, meaning it was the archaic methods of restraint used by this pair that killed him and, since PD had their cameras running, every comment was caught on camera. While we still don't know *exactly* what happened, the video is damning and shows practices that we've known are dangerous for 50 years.Since recording the pair has pled not guilty but has not posted the $1,000,000 bail in the case.After that story we fly over to Memphis, TN for the JEMS story about two Memphis EMTs who are on administrative leave following the death of a patient they treated. While we assumed this case would be similar to the open and shut case as before, the more we read the more interesting the story gets.Two EMTs are placed on leave, but there is no mention of their omission or commission of care that led to harm. Instead we learned that their patient, who died 3 days after being admitted to the hospital, we tazed, pepper sprayed and suffered multiple traumatic injuries at the hands of five Police Officers, who have all been fired, according to the story. Perhaps this is just a CYA maneuver to protect the employees from constant questions?Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Unless you've been under a giant rock you're aware that Buffalo Bill's Football player Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest during a game against the Bengals recently. While the dark web is flush with conspiracies about the cause, your hosts Jason the law enforcement expert and football fan, and Justin the medical expert and irregular spectator, have narrowed things down and have answers to many outstanding questions.While we're aware much of our audience may be familiar with the specifics of the event, as of recording of this show Hamlin is recovering at home and no formal diagnosis or cause has been officially released.However, based on the incident and the swift recovery the overall pre-hospital medical community has it narrowed down to a condition called Commotio Cordis. While a pre-existing condition or other event may yet be identified as the cause, what we do know is that Hamlin was involved in a tackle causing significant pressure to the chest, arose, took a step, then collapsed. Not unlike having your wind knocked out of you, at a certain point of refraction of the ventricles, there exists a moment where the sodium...sorry...got carried away there for a second. There's a certain point where if you get hit in the chest it can mess up your heart, seen most commonly in baseball players...pitchers mostly, when they get hit by a line drive.It was Buffalo Bills' Assistant trainer Denny Kellington that is credited with recognizing a possible cardiac arrest and starting CPR. As we mention in detail in the show, CPR is not a magic solution for everything but it also isn't hard to learnSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

The boys are back in town and they've got some amazing and fun stories to share about their Christmas breaks! While MC was driving north to spend time with his retired Fireman dad (and 3 kids and 3 dogs in 1 car) HM was headed South to warm temps and a respiratory infection mixed with flight delays.In the end they received some fun gifts from family and friends and have a chance to share how their patrons at Patreon.com continue to support the show moving in to 2023!They've also announced the return of the Patch Coaster program!So thumb a couple bucks to keep the show free for everyone,Buy us a beer or two,Or just continue to enjoy the shenanigans of the world's first, best, and still ONLY Fire, Police EMS podcast!Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Your expert hosts have come to the studio with memories of Christmas past to share and wrap up the year. Stories of having dads in the firehouse, traditions added from in laws and practices long past and forgotten. They discuss their favorite Christmas memories and give you a little taste of next season here at WYE.From all of us to all of you, have a Merry Christmas, Blessed Solstice, Joyous Hannukah and a Happy New Year! See you next year!Check out the website for photos from your hosts enjoying the holidays during their, shall way say, formative years?Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

In the epic film This is Spinal Tap, the filmmaker notices the band's amplifiers go past 10 to 11. He asks why and they answer, "Well, it's louder, isn't it?"This appears to be the thought behind a new FDA approved medication called Kloxxado, a name HM totally didn't make up on the spot. Kloxxado, aside from having 2 x's in it, is simply...wait for it...Nalaxone in a higher dose. A non profit in, of all places, Florida is giving this out to local businesses to combat the opioid crisis. Klaxxado is an 8mg intra nasal dose of Nalaxone, or "Narcan." So, essentially, what this program is doing is taking a questionably useful application of an extremely useful medication and doubling it. Narcan is available in a 4mg nasal spray, this new drug is 8mg.HM asserts this is foolishness since we are already dumping 12+mg of Naloxone on OD patients without applying positive pressure ventilation (you know, breathing for them...their actual problem) and this simply makes no sense. However, in true HM style, he waits until the very end to say he hopes he's wrong.This week, we cover:How turning up the dosage won't help if it isn't applied properlyThat the number of cops passing out from fentanyl hysteria seems to have decreasedThis program is geared towards downtown clubs and restaurants, not the homelessThat HM believes Nalaxone should be aerosolized in some neighborhoodsSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

This week, we dive into the headlines and find a disturbing thread at the top of most of the feeds: We're shooting each other. Both firearm examples today are from the great state of Texas while the honor of having a Battalion Chief punching a subordinate falls to Pennsylvania.First, we visit the parking lot of the Palestine TX Fire Department where one member was so excited to show his gun to a buddy he forgot to make it safe first. This led your hosts on a tangent (I know, big surprise) about firefighters carrying weapons on duty.Then we talk about the PA Fire Chief who "slugged" a subordinate at the scene of a fire, apparently over a command decision.Then to wrap it up on a positive note the guys discuss an Officer shot with a live round at a training exercise at a school being released from the Hospital.This week, we cover:Should firefighters be carrying loaded weapons on duty and why or why not?Procedures for ensuring a safe exerciseThat there was far more to the relationship in PA than professionalism (or lack thereof)That Justin was dared to start a spreadsheetSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

It's Friday night in the summer of 1972 and a new NBC show called "Emergency!" captivates Americans with the idea of little half trained Doctors called "Paramedics" treating patients before taking them to the hospital. For decades we were told they were the first, the OG, the father's of modern EMS.But did you know they weren't even close to the first?Father of CPR Dr Safar and Freedom House ParamedicsThis week we invite EMS educator, Paramedic and historian Kari Dickerson to discuss the Freedom House Paramedic program launched in 1967, a full 5 years ahead of those Hollywood fellas out west.Freedom House trained 25 men and women, all African American, to serve the Hill community in Pittsburgh, PA since local authorities were not sending resources into this community of color.After all, it isn't like 1967 was a troubling time to talk about, right? Smack dab in the middle of the Civil Rights movement a community came together to help their own and, in doing so, changed countless lives and saving, arguably, millions.Have you met the first Cop? The first Firefighter? Of course not, those tasks have been around for hundreds of years. Our guest this week has met the First Paramedics and that's just amazing.You can learn more about Freedom House HERE and get involved in sharing the story. This week, we cover:How shaking Setla's hand means you are an EMS OGThat EMS was born out of the battlefields of Korea and VietnamWhy Freedom House existed and how they got into the ambulance businessLearn your history, share it. It matters.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Justin got an interesting question at the firehouse recently so of course he waits until the microphones are on to Ask MC the same question.On the way to that question we get sidetracked in true WYE fashion and discuss a video sent in from Brendan about never talking to the Police as well as more hilarious things MC has been offered, for free, as part of his Amazon reviewing spree.This week's shenanigans include:Reality vs expectations looking backwards over 20 years of serviceHow we aren't paid to do certain tasks, we're paid to be ready to perform any taskThat the bit about remaining silent in the Miranda Rights is importantWhat MC might do with a cattle prodSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Just in case you thought our semi regular series on cops behaving badly was taking a hiatus, in comes some news from a couple of PDs local to the studio.According to the story on Police 1 and in local media outlets, a few Officers have found new and interesting ways to screw up. From the investigation into possibly conspiring to assault people comes evidence of theft of firearms, falsifying police reports to steal and resell firearms and even one Police volunteer who simply walked off with "thousands of gun parts and ammunition".This week's story reminds us that this job can be easy if you let it.This week, we cover:How working a single overtime will likely net you more than selling a stolen ARWhy hiring screening isn't catching these criminals before they get a badgeThat this is not, guaranteed not, the first time they've tried thisHow stupid you have to be to text on a department phone about committing crimesSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

We've all seen the stories about the emotional support peacocks and little fluffy emotional support purse sized dogs but are there any actual regulations when it comes to service animals? Indeed there are and, like most encounters with the public, the first person to say they know the law is usually wrong.This week we find out because Justin (the one who isn't retired) had a call with a very angry person who was convinced any animal can be a service animal if you want them to be. And while your hosts are the first to acknowledge the therapeutic benefits of having a furry friend to talk to, they are also the first to remind you that therapy dogs are not service animals, no matter what tag or harness you find online.This week we cover:Jason's new Amazon ordering hobbyWhat the ADA has to say about service animalsHow Justin sat and watched a movie with a patientWhy calling animal control isn't always the best solutionSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

In a TED talk in Scotland, Elizabeth Loftus shares some of her research about memory, explaining how a man was accused and convicted of rape despite no evidence other than the victim saying initially "He looks the most like the guy." Trouble is, come trial and the victim is 100% sure it was a man who didn't commit the crime. He is convicted and spends a year in prison before the true assailant is found by a journalist, not police. How can that be? Well, it turns out, humans aren't very good at recollecting things AS THEY HAPPENED. Loftus goes on to explain how memory is more like Wikipedia, in that it can be changed and influenced from both inside and out. Check out the TED talk here.On the heels of this revelation about the brain, we also discuss the writings and research of Dr Saul Kassin and his amazing data about false confessions and why so many people, including jurys, believe them over anything else.It really makes you wonder what can be trusted, if anything at all. This week we cover:Research that shows memory is more like WikipediaExamples of when witnesses were entirely wrong, yet convinced they were correctThat PD can lie all they want during interviewsSometimes getting the case moving on isn't worth an innocent lifeSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Old friend and friend of the show, Sean Eddy first met us back in the Chronicles of EMS days as a Paramedic. Skip ahead a decade and he's living his best life as a Police Officer in Texas while still working EMS on the side. Add to that an impressive stretch as a guitarist and musician and he's the perfect guest for WYE, especially with a recent rant about TikTok lawyers.In Sean's post he mentions that his job would be so much easier if driver's weren't taking bad advice from Tik Tok Lawyers and the comments were hilarious so we fired up the microphones and got him to elaborate on some of the interactions that keep him scratching his head.This week we talk about:How the people who scream "I know my rights!" usually don'tWhen and how to finally pull over if signaled to do so by lights and sirenThat Texas is a big, odd place, especially at 3 AMThat your hosts can almost predict your car and clothing based on your interaction with PoliceSupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Suicide.It isn't an easy topic to talk about for sure but one that needs to be referenced from time to time. There are 3 distinct viewpoints on suicide with small variations but your opinion on suicide boils down to 3 main categories:It's a selfish thing to do and no one in their right mind would do it.Everything would just be better without me around.You're not 1 but you can see how people believe 2.Suicide doesn't come from horrible thoughts, hopelessness or anything else you can define. We all have demons we're fighting, some are just bigger and friendlier than others.If you believe you may be close to considering self harm, please reach out to get help. Dial 988 for emergency help or reach out to strangers for guidance. They can get you away from that number 2 option above. There is nothing wrong with having these feelings, but the longer you keep them inside the more chances they have to steer you away from a healthy resolution.National Suicide Prevention Hotline: 800-273-TALK (8255)This week we talk about:The increasing volume of military and law enforcement suicidesThe spectrum of feelings that can lead to acceptance of self harm as an optionWays to reach out and ask for help, even if it just means talking to someoneAll joking aside, if you've reached option 2 call the number above. We'll be glad you did.Support the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

For years, Fire and EMS expert and co-host of the show, Justin Schorr, has been in and out of stressful situations, therapy, you name it, trying to recover from a variety of issues. While the issues are complex, the solutions seemed to be simple:Get a hobby."Sure, that's easy, I'll take up knitting or start scoring baseball statistics. For years I never had a hobby. I'd go to work, get stressed, then write about it on my blog. Well, that came to a sudden stop and this podcast isn't about all of my problems."Justin at his antique boothThis week, law enforcement expert Jason Hoschouer asks about Justin's new hobby and golly, Bob, Howdy is he going big with it. This week we talk about:The importance of an escape from work and family lifeFinding that thing you don't think of as a hobby and making it more purposefulYou don't have to monetize your hobby to be happyHow Justin is totally monetizing this hobbySupport the showJoin our Facebook Community!Buy us a beer!Email Us! (Justin or Jason)Thanks for listening and please share the show!

Jason Swett is the author of the Complete Guide to Rails Testing. We covered Jason's experience with testing while building relatively small Ruby on Rails applications. Our conversation applies to just about any language or framework so don't worry if you aren't familiar with Rails.A few topics covered:- Listen to advice but be aware of its context. Something good for a large project may not apply to a small one- Fast feedback loops help us work quicker and tests are great for this- If you don't involve things like the database in any of your tests your application may not work at all despite your tests passing- You may not need to worry about scaling at the start for smaller or internal applications - Try to break features into the smallest pieces possible so they can be checked in and reviewed quickly- Jason doesn't remember the difference between a stub and a mock because he rarely uses themRelated Links:- Code with Jason- The Complete Guide to Rails Testing- Code With Jason PodcastTranscript:[00:00:00] Jeremy: today I'm talking to Jason Swett, he's the author of the complete guide to rails testing, a frequent trainer and conference speaker. And he's the host of the code with Jason podcast. So Jason, welcome to software sessions. [00:00:13] Jason: Thanks for having me. [00:00:15] Jeremy: from listening to your podcast, I get a sense that the size of the projects you work on they're, they're relatively modest.Like they're not like a super huge thing. There, there may be something that you can fit all within your head. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit to that first, so that we kind of get where your perspective is and the types of projects you work on are.[00:00:40] Jason: Yeah. Good question. So that is true. Most of my jobs have been at small companies and I think that's probably typical of the typical developer because most businesses in the world are small businesses. You know, there's, there's a whole bunch of small businesses for every large business. And so most of the code bases I've worked on have been not particularly huge.And most of the teams I've worked on have been relatively small And sometimes so small that it's just me. I'm the only person working on the application. I, don't really know any different. So I can't really compare it to working on a larger application. I have worked at, I worked at AT&T so that was a big place, but I was at, AT&T just working on my own solo project so that wasn't a big code base either.So yeah, that's been what my experience has been like.[00:01:36] Jeremy: Yeah. And I, I think that's interesting that you mentioned most people work in that space as well, because that's basically where I fall as well. So when I listened to your podcast and I hear you talking about like, oh, I have a, I have a rails project where I just have a single server and you know, I have a database and rails, and maybe I have nginx in front, maybe redis it's sort of the scale that I'm familiar with versus when I hear podcasts or articles, you know, I'm reading where they're talking about, oh, we have 500 microservices or we have 200 instances of the application.That's, that's not a space that I've, I've worked in. So I, I found it helpful to, to hear, you know, from you on your show that like, Hey, you know, not everybody is working on these gigantic projects.[00:02:28] Jason: Yeah. Yeah. It's not terribly relatable when you hear about those huge projects.And obviously, sometimes, maybe people earlier in their career can get the wrong idea about what's applicable to their situation. I feel like one of the most dangerous kinds of advice is advice that's good advice, but it's good advice for somebody else.And then I've, I've. Been victim of that, where I get some advice and maybe it's genuinely good advice, but it's not good advice for me where I am doing what I'm doing. And so, I apply the advice, but it's not the right thing. And so it doesn't work out for me. So I'm always careful to like asterisk a lot of the things I say where it's like, Hey, this is, this is good advice if you're in this particular situation, but maybe not for everybody.And really the truth is I, I try not to give advice these days because like advice is dangerous stuff for that very reason.[00:03:28] Jeremy: so, so when you mentioned you try not to give advice and you have this book, the complete guide to rails testing, would you not describe what's in the book as advice? I'm kind of curious what the distinction is there.[00:03:42] Jason: Yeah, Jeremy, right after I said that, I'm like, what am I talking about? I give all kinds of advice. So forget, I said that I totally give advice. But maybe not in certain things like like business advice or anything like that. I do give a lot of advice around testing and various programming things.So, yeah, ignore that part of what I said.[00:04:03] Jeremy: something that I found a little bit unique about rails testing was that a lot of the tests are centered around I guess you could call it like a full integration test, right? Because I noticed when working with rails, if I write a test, a lot of times it's talking to the database, it's talking to if, if I.Have an API or I have a website it's actually talking to the API. So it's actually going through all the layers and spinning up a database and all that. And I wonder if you, you knew how that work, like each time you run a test, is it creating a new database? So that each test is isolated or how does all that stuff actually work?[00:04:51] Jason: Yeah, good question. First. I want to mention something about terminology. So I think one of the most important things for somebody who's new to testing to learn is that in our industry, we don't have a consensus around terminology. So what you call an integration test might be different from what I call an integration test.The thing you just described as an integration test, I might call an acceptance test. Although I happen to also call it an integration test cause I use that terminology too, but I just wanted to give that little asterisk for the listener, because if they're like, wait, I thought an integration test was this.And not that anyway, you asked how does that work? So. It is true that with those types of rails tests, and just to add more terminology into the mix, they call those system tests or system specs, depending on what framework you're using. But those are the tests that actually instantiate a browser and simulating user input, exercise, the UI of the application.And those are the kinds of tests that like show you that everything works together. And mechanically how that works. One layer of it is that each test runs in a database transaction. So when you, you know, in order to run a certain test, maybe you need certain records like a user. And then I don't know if it's a scheduling test, you might need to create an appointment and whatever. All those records that you create specifically for that test that's happening inside of a database transaction. And then at the end of the test, the transaction is aborted. So that none of the data you create during the test actually gets persisted to the database. then regarding the whole database, it's not actually like creating a new database instance at the start of each test and then blowing it away.It's still the same database instance is just the data inside of each test is not being persisted at. [00:07:05] Jeremy: Okay. So when you run. What you would call, I guess you called it an acceptance test, right? Where it's going, it's opening up your website, it's clicking through the website, creating records, things like that. That's happening in a database instance that's created for, I guess, for all your tests that all your tests get to reuse and rails is automatically wrapping your test in a transaction.So even if you're doing five or 10 database queries at the end of all, that they all get rolled back because they're all within the same transaction.[00:07:46] Jason: Exactly. And the reason why we want to do that. Is because of a testing principle that you want your tests to be runnable in any order. And the key thing is you want your tests to be deterministic. So deterministic means that the starting state determines the in-state and it's the same every time, no matter what.So if you have tests a, B and C, it shouldn't be the case that you can run them in the order, ABC, and they all pass. But if you do it CBA, then test a fails because it should only fail. If something's actually wrong, it shouldn't fail for some other reason, like the order in which you run the tests. And so to ensure that property of deterministic newness we need to make it so that each test doesn't leak into the other tests.Cause imagine if that. Database transaction. thing didn't happen. And it's, it's only incidental that that's achieved via database transactions. It could conceivably be achieved some other way. That's just how this happens to work in this particular case. But imagine if no measure was taken to clean up afterward and I, I ran a test and it generated an appointment.And then the test that runs after that does some tests that involves like doing a count of appointments or something like that. And maybe like, coincidentally, my second test passes because I've always run the tests in a certain order. and so unbeknownst to me, test B only passes because of what I did in test a that's bad because now the thing that's happening is different from what I think is happening.And then if it flipped and when we ran it, test B and then test a. It wouldn't work anymore. So that's why we make each test isolated. So it can be deterministic.[00:09:51] Jeremy: and I wonder if you've worked with any other frameworks or any other languages, and if you found that the approaches and those frameworks or languages is similar to rails, like where it creates these, the transaction for you, does the rollback for you and all of that.[00:10:08] Jason: Good question. I have to plead ignorance. I've dabbled a little bit in testing and some other languages or frameworks, but not enough to be able to say anything smart about it. [00:10:22] Jeremy: Yeah, I mean in my experience and of course there are many different frameworks that I'm not familiar with, but in a lot of cases, I I've seen that they don't have this kind of behavior built in, like, they'll provide you a way to test your application, but it's up to you if you want to write code that will wrap everything in a transaction or create a new database instance per test, things like that.That's all left up to you. so I, I think it's interesting that that rails makes that decision for you and makes it to where you don't really have to think about that or make that decision. And for me personally, I found that really helpful.[00:11:09] Jason: Yeah, it's really nice. It's a decision that not everybody is going to be on board with. And by that decision, I mean the general decision of rails to make a lot of decisions for you. And it may not be the case that I agree with every single decision that rails has made, but I do appreciate that that the rails team or DHH, or whoever has decided that rails is just going to have all these sensible defaults.And that's what you get. And if you want to go tweak that stuff, I guess you can, but you get all this stuff this way. Cause we decided what we think is the best way to do it. And that is how most people use their, their rails apps. I think it's great. It eliminates a lot of overhead and then. Use some other technologies, I've done some JavaScript stuff and it's just astonishing how much boiler plate and how many, how much energy I have to expend on decisions that don't really matter.And maybe frankly, decisions that I'm not all that equipped to make, because I don't have the requisite knowledge to be able to make those decisions. And usually I'd rather just have somebody else make those decisions for me. [00:12:27] Jeremy: we've been talking about the more high level tests, the acceptance tests, the integration tests. And when you're choosing on how to test something, how do you decide whether it should be tested that, that level, or if it should be more of a unit level tests, something, something smaller[00:12:49] Jason: Good question. So I want to zoom out just a little bit in order to answer that question and come at it from a distance. So I recently conducted some interviews for a programmer job. I interviewed about 25 candidates, most of those candidates. Okay. And the first step of the interview was this technical coding exercise. most of the candidates did not pass. And maybe, I don't know. Five or six or seven of the candidates out of those 25 did pass. I thought it was really interesting. The ones who failed all failed in the same way and the ones who passed all passed in the same way. And I thought about what exactly is the difference.And the difference was that the programmers who passed, they coded in feedback loops. So I'll say that a different way, the ones who failed, they tried to write their whole program at once and they would spend 15, 20 minutes carefully writing the program. And then at the end of that 20 minutes, they would try to run it.And unsurprisingly to me the program would fail like on line 2 of 30, because nobody's smart enough to write that much code and have the whole thing work. And then the ones who did well. They would write maybe one line of code, run it, observe what happens, compare what they observed to what they expected to see, and if any corrections were needed, they made those corrections and ran it again.And then only once their expectations were satisfied, did they go and write a second line and they would re repeat that process again, that workflow of programming and feedback loops I think is super important. And I think it's what distinguishes, Hmm. I don't exactly want to say successful programmers from unsuccessful programmers, but there's certainly a lot to do with speed.like, think about how much slower it is to try to write your whole program, run it and see that it fails. And then try to find the needle in the haystack. It's like, okay, I just wrote 30 lines. There's a problem somewhere. I don't know where, and now I have to dig through and find it It's so much harder than if you just write one line and you see a problem and you know, that, that problem lines in that line, you just wrote.So I say all that, because testing is just feedback loops automated. So rather than writing a line and then manually running your program and using your own judgment to compare what you observed to what you expected to see you write a test that exercises your code and says, I expect to see this when this happens.And so the kind of test you write now to answer your question will depend first on the nature of the thing you're writing. But for like, if we take kind of the like typical case of, let's say I'm building a form that will allow me to create a customer in a system. And I put in the first name, last name and email address of the customer. that's a really basic like crud functionality thing. There's not a lot of complexity there. And so I am, to be honest, I might just not write a test at all and we can get into how I decide when to write a test and when not to, but I probably would write a test. And if I did, I would write a system spec to use the rails are spec terminology that spins up a browser.I would fill in the first name field with a first name, fill in the last name field with the last name, email, with email click, the submit button. And then I would assert that on the subsequent page, I see some indicator of success. And then if we think about something that. Maybe more involved, like I'm thinking about some of the complicated stuff I've been working on recently regarding um, coming up with a patient's balance in the medical system that I work on.That's a case where I'm not going to spin up a browser to check the correctness of a number. Cause that feels like a mismatch. I'm going to work at a lower level and maybe create some database records and say, when I, when I created this charge and when I create this payment, I expect the remaining balance to be such and such.So the type of test I write depends highly on the kind of functionality.[00:17:36] Jeremy: So it sounds like in the case of something that's more straight forward, you might write a high level test, I guess, where you were saying I just click this button and I see if the thing I expected to be created is there on the next page. And you might create that test from the start and then just start filling in the code and continually running that test you know, until it passes.But you also mentioned that in the case of something simple like that, you might actually. Choose to forego the tests and just take a look you know, visually you open the app and you click that same button and you can see the same result. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you decide, like, yeah, I'm going to write this test or no, I'm just going to inspect a visually[00:18:28] Jason: Yeah. So real quick before I answer that, I want to say that it's, it's not one of the tests is straightforward or the feature is straightforward that determines which kind of test I write, because sometimes the acceptance test that I write, which spins up a browser and everything. Sometimes that might be quite an involved test and in complicated feature, or sometimes I might write a lower level test and it's a trivially simple one.It has more to do with um, What's, what's the thing that I care about. Like, is it primarily like a UI based feature that, that is like the meat of it? Or is it like a, a lower level, like calculation type thing or something like that? That's kind of what determines which kind of right. But you asked when would I decide not to write a test.So the reason I write tests is because it's just like cost prohibitive to manually perform testing, not just in monetary terms, but like in emotional pain and mental energy and stuff like that. I don't want to go back and manually test everything to make sure that it's still working. And so the ROI on writing automated tests is almost always positive, but sometimes it's not a positive ROI.And so when I don't write it down, It's if these conditions are true, if the cost of that feature braking is extremely low. And if the I'll put that if, if the consequences of the feature breaking are really small and the frequency of the usage is low and the cost of writing the test is high, then I probably won't write a test.For example, if there's some report that somebody looks at once every six months and it's like some like maybe a front desk person who uses the feature and if it doesn't work, then it means they have to instead go get the answer manually. And instead of getting the answer in 30 seconds, it takes them five.Extremely low cost to the failure. And it's like, okay, so I'm costing somebody, maybe 20 bucks once every six months, if this feature breaks. And let's say this test is one that would take like an hour for me to write. Clearly it's better just to accept the risk of that feature breaking once in a while, which it's probably not going to anyway. So those are the questions I ask when I decide and, and to, to be clear, it's not like I run through all those questions for every single test I write in the vast, vast majority of cases. I just write the test because it's a no-brainer that it's, that it's better to write the test, but sometimes my instincts tell me like, Hey, is this really actually important to write a test for?And when I find myself asking that, then I say, okay, what's the consequences of the breakage? How hard is this test to write all that. [00:21:46] Jeremy: So you talked about the consequences being low, but you also talked about maybe the time to write the test being high. What are the types of tasks that, that take a long time to write?[00:21:58] Jason: Usually ones that involve a lot of setup. So pretty much every test requires some data to be in place data, either meaning database, data, or like some object structure or something like that. Sometimes it's really easy sometimes to set up is extremely complicated. and that's usually where the cost comes in.And then sometimes, sometimes you encounter like a technical challenge, like, oh, how do I like download this file? And then like inspect the contents of this file. Like sometimes you just encounter something that's like technically tricky to achieve. But more frequently when a test is hard to write it's because of the setup is hard.[00:22:49] Jeremy: and you're talking about set up being, you need to insert a whole bunch of different rows into your database or different things that interact with one, another things like that.[00:23:02] Jason: Exactly. [00:23:03] Jeremy: when you're testing a system and you create a database that has all these items in it for you to work with, I'm assuming that what's in your test database is much smaller than what's in the real database. So how do you get something that's representative so that if you only have 10 things in your tasks, but in production, there's thousands of them that you can catch that, Hey, this isn't going to work well, once it gets to production,[00:23:35] Jason: Yeah. that's a really interesting question. And the answers that I don't like, I usually don't try to make the test beta test database representative of the production database in terms of scale, obviously like the right data has to be there in order to exercise the test that it has to be true. But I don't, for example, in production at this moment I know there's some tens of thousands of appointments in the database, but locally at any given time, there are between zero and three or, or So appointments in any particular test, that's obviously nowhere near realistic, but it's only becomes relevant in a great, great minority of cases with, with regard to that stuff, the way I approach that is rather to So I'm thinking about some of those through the, for the first time right now, but obviously with performance in general premature optimization is usually not a profitable endeavor. And so I'll write features without any thought toward performance. And then once things are out there and perform it in production observe the bottlenecks and then fix the bottlenecks, starting with what's the highest ROI.And usually tests haven't come into the picture for me. It's cause like, okay. The reason for tests again is, so you don't have to go back and do that manual testing, but with these performance improvements, instead of tests, we have like application performance monitoring tools, and that's what tells me whether something needs an issue or people just say like, Hey, this certain page is slow or whatever.And so tests would be like redundant to those other measures that we have that tell us if there's performance.[00:25:38] Jeremy: Yeah. So that sorta touches on what you described before, where let's say you were writing some kind of report or adding a report and when you were testing it locally, it worked great generated the report. Uh, Then you pushed it out to production. Somebody went to run it and maybe because of an indexing problem or some other issue It times out, or it doesn't complete takes a long time, but I guess what you're saying is in a lot of cases, the, the consequences of that are not all that high.Like the person will try it. They'll see like, Hey, it doesn't work. Either you'll get a notification or they'll let you know, and then that's when you go in and go like, okay, now, now we can fix this.[00:26:30] Jason: Yeah. And I think like the distinction is the performance aspect of it. Because like with a lot of stuff, you know, if you don't have any tests in your application at all, there's a high potential for like silent failure. And so with the performance stuff, we have other ways of ensuring that there won't be silent failure.So that's how I think about that particular.[00:26:56] Jeremy: I guess another thing about tests is when you build an application, a lot of times you're not just interacting with your own database, you're interacting with third-party APIs. You may even be connecting to different pieces of hardware, things like that. So when you're writing a test, how do you choose to approach that?[00:27:23] Jason: yeah, good question. This is an area where I don't have a lot of personal experience, but I do have some there's another principle in testing that is part of the determinism principle where you don't want to involve external HTTP requests and stuff like that in your tests. Because imagine if I run my test today, And it passes, but then I run my test tomorrow and this third-party API is down and my test fails the behavior of my program didn't change. The only thing that's different is this external API is down right now. And so what I do for, for those is I'll capture the response that I get from the API. And I'll usually somehow um, get my hands on a success response and a failure response and whatever kind of response I want to account for.And then I'll insert those captured responses into my tests. So that then on every subsequent run, I can be using these canned values rather than hitting the real API.[00:28:37] Jeremy: I think in your um, the description of your book, you mentioned a section on, on stubs and mocks, and I wonder what you're describing here, which of those two things, is it? And what's the difference?[00:28:53] Jason: Yeah. it's such a tricky concept And I don't even trust myself to say it right every time that I want to remind myself of the difference between mocks and stubs. I have to go back to my own blog posts that I wrote on it and remind myself, okay, what is the difference between a mock and a stub? And I'll just say, I don't remember.Because this isn't something that I find myself dealing with very frequently. It's something that people always want to know about at least in the rails world. But I'll speak for myself at least. I don't find myself having to use or wanting to use mocks and stubs very much.I will say that both mocks and stubs are a form of a testable. So a mock is a testable and a stub is a testable and a testable. It's like a play on stunt double instead of using a real object or whatever it is, you have this fake object. And sometimes that can be used to like trick your program into behaving a certain way or it can be used to um, gain visibility into an area that you otherwise wouldn't have visibility into.And kind of my main use case for mocks and stubs when I do use them, is that when you're testing a particular thing, You want to test the thing you're interested in testing. You don't want to have to involve all the dependencies of the thing you're testing. And so I will like stub out the dependencies.So, okay. Here's an example. I have a rare usage of stubs in my, in my uh, test suite and dear listener. I'm going to use the word stub. Don't give too much credence to that. Maybe. I mean, mock, I don't remember. But anyway, I have this area where we determine a patient's eligibility to get a certain kind of medicine and there's a ton that goes into it and there's all these, like, there's, there's these four different, like coarse-grained determinations and they all have to be a yes in order for it to overall be a yes.That they can get this medicine. It has to do with mostly insurance. And then each one of those four core course grain determinations has some number of fine grain determinations that determines whether it is a yes or a no. If I weren't using mocks and stubs in these tests, then in order to test one determination, I would have to set up the conditions.This goes back to the setup, work stuff we talked about. I'd have to set up all the conditions for the medicine to be a yes. In addition to, to the thing I'm actually interested in. And so that's a waste because that stuff is all irrelevant to my current concern. Let me try to speak a little bit more concretely.So let's say I have determinations ABC. When I'm interested in determination, a I don't want to have to do all the setup work for determinations, B, C, and D. And so what I'll do is I'll mock the determinations for B, C and D. And I'll say for B, just have the function returned true for C same thing, just return true for D return.True. So it'd like short circuits, all that stuff and bypasses the actual logic that gives me the yes, no determination. And it just always gives me a yes. That way. There's no setup work for B, C, and D. And I can focus only on.[00:32:48] Jeremy: And I think it may be hard to say in this example, but would you, would you still have at least one test that would run through and do all the setup, do the checks for ABC and D and then when you're doing more specific things start to put in doubles for the others, or would you actually just never have a full test that actually did the complete setup?[00:33:14] Jason: well, here's how I'm doing this one. I described the scenario where I'm like thoroughly testing a under many different conditions, but stubbing out B, C and D. They don't have another set of tests where I thoroughly test B and stub out a C and D. And so on. I have one thorough set for, for each of those. If you're asking whether I have one that like exercises, all four of them, No.I just have ones for each of the four individually, which is maybe kind of a trade off. Cause it's arguable that I don't have complete confidence because I'm never testing the four together. But in the like trade off of like setup?work and all that, that's necessary to get that complete con confidence and the value of that, like additional, because really it's just like a tiny bit of additional con confidence that I would get from testing all those things together.In that particular case, my judgment was that that was not worth [00:34:19] Jeremy: yeah. Cause I was thinking from their perspective of sometimes I hear that people will have a acceptance test that covers sometimes you hear people call it the happy path, right. Where they everything lines up. It's like a very straightforward case of a feature. But then all the different ways that you can test that feature, they don't necessarily write tests for those, but they just write one for the, the base case.And then, like you said, you actually drill down into more specifics and maybe only test a, a smaller part there, but it sounds like in this case, maybe you made the decision that, Hey, doing a test, that's going to test all four of these things, even in the simplest case is going to involve so much setup and so much work that, that maybe it's not, not worth it in this case.[00:35:13] Jason: Yeah. And I'd have to go back and refresh my memory as to like what exactly this scenario is for those tasks. Because in general, I'm a proponent of having integration tests that makes sure multiple things work together. Okay. You might've seen that Gif where it says like um, two unit tests, zero integration tests, and there's like a cabinet with two doors.Each door can open on its own or, or maybe it's drawers. Each drawer can open on its own, but you can't open both drawers at the same time. And so I think that's not smart to have only unit tests and no integration tests. And so I don't remember exactly why I chose to do that eligibility test with the ABC and D the way I did.Maybe it was just cost-prohibitive to do it altogether. Um, One thing that I want to want to comment on regarding mocks and stubs, there's a mistake that's made kind of frequently where people overdo it with mocks and stuff. They misunderstand the purpose. The purpose again is that you want to test the thing you're testing, not the dependencies of the thing.But sometimes people step out the very thing they're testing. And so they'll like assert that a certain method will return such and such value, but they'll stub the method they're testing so that the method is guaranteed to return the same value and that doesn't actually test anything. So I just wanted to make, mention that as a common mistake to avoid [00:36:47] Jeremy: I wonder if you could maybe give an example of when you, you have a certain feature and the thought process you're going through where you decide like, yes, this is the part that I should have a stub or a mock for. And this is the part where I definitely need to make sure I run the code.[00:37:07] Jason: Well, again, it's very rare that I will use a mocker stub and it's not common that I'll even consider it for better or worse. Like we're talking about. The nature of rails tests is that we spin up actual database records and, and test our models with database data and stuff like that. In other ecosystems, maybe the testing culture is different and there's more mocks and stubs.I know when I was doing some coding with angular, there was a lot more mocking and stubbing. But with rails, it's kind of like everything's available all the time and we use the database a lot during testing. And so mocks and stubs don't really come into the picture too much. [00:37:56] Jeremy: Yeah. It's, it's interesting that you, you mentioned that because like I work with some projects that use C-sharp and asp.net, and you'll a lot of times you'll see people say like you should not be talking to the database in your tests. And you know, they go through all this work to probably the equivalent of a mock or a stub.But then, you know, when I, when I think about that, then I go like, well, but I'm not really testing how the database is going to react. You know, are my, are my queries actually valid. Things like that, because all this stuff is, is just not being run. in some other communities, maybe they're they have different ideas, I guess, about, about how to run tests.[00:38:44] Jason: Yeah, And it's always interesting to hear expressions. Like you should do this or you shouldn't do that, or it's good to do this. It's bad to do that. And I think maybe that's not quite the right way to think about it. It's more like, well, if I do this, what are the costs and benefits of doing this? Cause it's like, nothing exactly is a good thing to do or a bad thing to do.It's just, if you do this, this will happen as a consequence. And if you don't this won't and all that stuff. So people who don't want to talk to the database in their tests, why is that? What, what are the bad things they think will happen if you do that? The drawbacks is it appears to me are it's slow to use the database in any performance problem.Usually the culprit is the database. That's always the first thing I look at. And if you're involving the database and all of your tests, your tests are going to be much slower than if you don't use the database, but the costs of not talking to the database are exactly what you said, where you're like, you're not exercising your real application, you're missing an entire layer and maybe that's fine.I've never tried approaching testing in that way. And I would love to like, get some experience like working with some people who do it that way. Cause I can't say that I know for an absolute fact that that doesn't work out. But to me it just makes sense to exercise everything that you're actually using when the app runs.[00:40:18] Jeremy: what's challenging probably for a lot of people is that if you look online for how to do testing in lots of different frameworks, you'll get different answers. Right. And it's not clear what's gonna fit your situation right? And you know, to, to give an example of, we've been talking about how rails will it, it predominantly focuses on tests that, that talks to the database and it wraps everything in a transaction as we talked about before, so that you can reset the state and things like that.I've also seen in other frameworks where they'll say like, oh, you can run a database test, but you use this in-memory version of the database instead of actually talking to a real MySQL or Postgres instance, or they'll say, oh, for this test we're going to use SQLite in place of the Postgres database you're actually using in production.And it, it makes the, the setup, I suppose, easier. Um, And maybe it makes the tests run quicker, but then it's also no longer the same as what you're really running. So there's like a lot of different approaches that, that people describe and take. And I think it can be hard for, for people to know, like what, what makes sense for me.[00:41:42] Jason: Yeah. And this is another area where I have to plead ignorance because again, I don't have experience doing it the other way. Logically, I feel like my way makes sense, but I don't have empirical experience doing it the other way. [00:41:57] Jeremy: we've talked a little bit about how there's cases where you'll say I'm not going to do this thing because it's going to take a lot of time and I've weighed the benefits. And I wonder if you could give some examples of things where you spent a lot of time on something, and then in hindsight, you, you realize like this really wasn't worth it.[00:42:18] Jason: I don't think I have any examples of that because I don't think it tends to happen very much. I really can't emphasize enough how old, the case where I choose not to write a test for something is like a one in 5,000 kind of thing. It's really not something I do frequently. The mistake is overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.Like somebody may, maybe I will get lazy and I'll skip a test and then I'll realize, oh yeah, This is why I write tests because it actually makes everything easier. And uh, we get pain as as a consequence when we skip tests. So that's usually the mistake I make is not writing a test when I should, rather than writing a test when I should not have [00:43:08] Jeremy: So since then, in general, you, you said that not writing it is, is the, the mistake. How do you get people in the habit of. Of writing the tests where they feel like it's not this thing that's slowing them down or is in the way, but is rather something that's helping them with that feedback loop and is something that they actively want to do.[00:43:33] Jason: Yeah. So to me, it's all about a mindset. So there's a common perception that tests are something extra. Like I've heard stories about, like somebody gives a quote for a project and then the prospective client asks like, well, how much, if we skip tests, how much less would that be? And it's like, oh, it wouldn't be less.It'd be like five times more because tests are a time saver. So I want to try to dispel with that notion. But even so it can be hard to bring oneself, to write task because it feels like something that takes discipline. But in my case, I don't feel like it takes discipline. Because I remind myself of a true fact that it's actually the lazy and easy way to code is to code using tests.And it's the harder, more laborious way to write code. Not using tests because think about what's, what's the alternative to not writing tests. Like we said earlier, the alternative is to manually test everything. And that's just so painful, especially when it's some feature where like, I'm sure you have experience with this, Jeremy, you, you make a code change.And then in order to verify that the thing still works, you have to go through like nine different steps in the browser. And only on that last step, do you get that answer you're after. That's just so painful. And if you write a test, you can automate that. Some things that might present friction in that process, or just like a lack of familiarity with how to write tests and maybe a um, a lack of an easy process for writing tests.And just to briefly touch on that, I think something that can help reduce that. Is to write tests in the same way that I write code in feedback loops. So we talked about writing one line, checking, writing, another line, checking that kind of thing. I write my tests in the same way. First I'll write the shell of the test and then I'll run just the shell, even though it seems kind of dumb to just run the shell cause you know, it doesn't do anything. I do that just to demonstrate to myself that I didn't like make some typo or something like that. I'm starting from like a clean baseline. And then I'll write one line of my test. Maybe if I'm writing a system spec, I'll write a line that creates a user of rum that I know that nothing's going to happen when I run the test, but I'll run it just to see it run and make sure there's no errors.And then I'll add a line that says, log the user in and then I'll run that. And so on just one line at a time. There's this principle that I think is really useful when working, which is to separate the deciding what to do from the actually doing it. I think a lot of developers mixed those two jobs of deciding what to do and doing it in the same step.But if, if you separate those, so you'd like, decide what you're going to have your tests do. And then after that, so like maybe I'll open my test and I'll write in comments what I want to achieve, not in technical terms necessarily, but I'll just write a comment that says, create a user, right? Another comment that says, log in another comment that says, click on such and such.And then once I have those, there, I'll go back to that first line and convert that to code. Okay. My comment that says, create a user, I'll change that to the syntax that actually creates a user and again, using the feedback loop. So I'll run that so that I can, you know, once I'm, once I'm done writing all those comments that say what the test does, I'm now free to forget about it.And I don't have to hold that in my mental Ram anymore. And I can clear my mental RAM. Now all my mental RAM is available to bring, to bear on the task of converting my steps that I already decided into working syntax. If you try to do both those things at the same time, it's more than twice as hard. And so that's why I try to separate.[00:48:04] Jeremy: So that's interesting. So it's like you're designing, I guess, the feature, what you want to build in the context of the test first it's would that be accurate?[00:48:19] Jason: that certainly can be the case. So much of this is context dependent. I very regularly give my self permission to be undisciplined and to go on exploratory spikes. And so if I have like very, if I have a really vague idea about what shape a feature is going to take, I give myself permission to forget about tests and I just write some code and I feel cause there's two reasons to write code.You know, a code is not only a work product code is also a thinking. so I would let go into a different mode, I'll say, okay, I'm not trying to create a work product right now. I'm just using code as a thinking medium, to figure out what I'm even going to do. So that's what I'll do in that case. And then maybe I'll write the test afterward, but if it's very clear, what the thing is that I'm going to write, then I'll often write the test first again, in those two phases of deciding what it's going to be and the deciding how it works.And I won't do a thing where, where, like I write 10 test cases and then I go through one by one and write code to make them pass. Usually I'll write one test, make a pass, write a second test, make it pass and so on. [00:49:38] Jeremy: okay. So the more exploratory aspect, I guess, would be when. You're either doing something that you haven't done before, or it's not clear to you what the features should be is, is that right?[00:49:58] Jason: Yeah, like maybe it's a feature that involves a lot of details. There's like a lot of room for discretion. It could be implemented in more than one way. Like how would I write a test for that? If I don't even know what form it's going to take? Like there's decisions to be made, like, what is the, the route going to be that I visit for this feature?What am I even going to call like this entity and that entity and stuff like that. And I think that goes back to my desire to not juggle and manage. Multiple jobs at the same time. I don't want to, I don't want to overly mix the design job with the testing job. Cause testing can help with design, but design in like a code structure sense.I usually don't want to mix testing with like UI design and not even UI design, like, like design in the highest sense. Meaning like what even is this thing? How does it work? Big picture wise and stuff like that. That's not the kind of design that testing helps with in my mind of the kind of design that testing helps with again, is the code structure.So I want to have my big picture design out of the way before I start writing my test. [00:51:21] Jeremy: and in terms of the big picture design, is that something that you keep all in your head or are you writing that down somewhere? I'm just wondering what your process is.[00:51:34] Jason: Yeah, it can work a number of different ways in the past. I've done usability testing where I will do some uh, pen and paper prototypes and then do some usability testing with, with users. And then I will um, convert those pen and paper prototypes to something on the computer. The idea being pen and paper prototypes are the cheapest to create and change.And then the more you cement it, the more expensive it gets to change. So only once I'm fairly certain that the pen and paper prototypes are right. Will I put it into something that's more of a formal mock. And then once I have my formal mock-up and that's been through whatever scrutiny I want to put it through, then I will do the even more expensive step of implementing that as a working feature.Now having said all that, I very rarely do I go through all that ceremony. Sometimes a feature, usually a feature is sufficiently small, that all that stuff would be silly to do. So sometimes I'll start straight with the the mock-up on the computer and then I'll work off of that. Sometimes it's small enough that I'll just make a few notes in a note-taking program and then work off of that.What is usually true is that our tickets in our ticketing system have a bulleted list of acceptance criteria. So we want to make it very black and white. Very yes, no. Whether a particular thing is done and that's super helpful because again, it goes back to the mixing of jobs and separating of jobs.If we've decided in advance that this feature needs to do these four things. And if it does those four things it's done and it doesn't need to do anything more and if it doesn't meet those four criteria, then it's not done then building the thing is just a matter of following the instructions. Very little thinking is involved.[00:53:45] Jeremy: depending on the scope of the feature, depending on how much information you have uh, you could either do something elaborate, I suppose, where, you know, you were talking about doing prototypes or sketches and, and so on before you even look at code or there could be something that's not quite that complicated where you have an idea of what it is and you might even play with code a little bit to get a sense of where it should go and how it should work.But it's all sort of in service of getting to the point where you know enough about how you're going to do the implementation and you know enough about what the actual feature is to where you're comfortable starting to write steps in the test about like, these are the things that are going to happen.[00:54:35] Jason: Yeah. And another key thing that might not be obvious is that all these things are small. So I never work well, I shouldn't say never, but in general, I, don't work in a feature. That's going to be like a week long feature or something like that. We try to break them down into features that are at most like half.And so that makes all that stuff a lot easier. Like I use the number four as an example of how many acceptance criteria there might be. And that's a pretty representative example. We don't have tickets where there's 16 acceptance criteria because the bigger something is the more opportunity there is for the conceive design to turn out, not to be viable.And the more decisions that can't be made, because you don't know the later step until the earlier decision is made and all that kind of stuff. So the small size of everything helps a lot.[00:55:36] Jeremy: but I, I would imagine if you're breaking things into that small of a piece, then would there be parts that. You build and you tasked and you deploy, but to the user, they actually don't see anything. Is that the appraoch?[00:55:52] Jason: definitely, we use feature flags. Like for example, there's this feature we're working on right now, where we have a page where you can see a long list of items. The items are of several different types right now. You just see all of them all the time, but depending on who you are and what your role is in the organization, you're not going to be interested in all those things.And so we want people to be able to have check boxes for each of those types to show or hide those things. Whereas checkbox feature is actually really big and difficult to add. And so the first thing that I chose to do was to have us add just one single check box for one type. And even that one, single checkbox is sufficiently hard that we're not even giving people that yet.We coded it so that you get the check boxes and that one checkbox is selected by default. When you uncheck it, the thing goes away, but it's selected by default so that we can feature flag that. So the checkbox UI is hidden. Everything looks just the way it did before. And now we can wait until this feature is totally done before we actually surface it to users.So it's the idea of making a distinction between deployment and release. Cause if we try to do this whole big thing, it's, it's gonna take weeks. If we try to do the whole thing, that's just too much risk for something to go wrong. And then like, we're going to deploy like three weeks of work at once.That's like asking for trouble. So I'm a huge fan of feature flags. [00:57:35] Jeremy: Interesting. So it's like the, it's almost like the foundation of the feature is going in. And if you were to show it to the user well, I guess in this case, it actually did have a function right at you. You could filter by that one category. [00:57:52] Jason: oh, I was just going to say you're exactly right. It wouldn't be a particularly impressive or useful feature, but what we have is complete it's it's not finished, but it is complete. [00:58:06] Jeremy: I'm not sure if you have any examples of this, but I imagine that there are changes that are large enough that I'm not sure how you would split it up until you, you mentioned like half a days worth of time. And I, I wonder if either have examples of features like that or a general sense of how, what do you do if you, you can't figure out a way to split it up that small.[00:58:34] Jason: I have yet to encounter a feature that we haven't been able to break up into pieces that are that small. So, unfortunately, I can't really say anything more than that because I just don't have any examples of exceptions [00:58:49] Jeremy: For, for people listening, maybe that should be a goal at least like, see if you can make everything smaller, see if you can ship as little as possible, you know, maybe you don't hit that half a day mark, but at least give it a, give it a try and see what you can do.[00:59:10] Jason: yeah. And the way I care would characterize it, maybe wouldn't be to ship as little as possible at a time, but to give a certain limit that you try not to go over. And it's, it's a skill that I think can be improved with practice. You learn certain techniques that you can use over and over. Like for example, one way that I split things up sometimes is we will add the database tables in one chunk. And we'll just deploy that, cause that presents a certain amount of risk, you know, when you're adding database tables or columns or anything like that, like it's always risky when you're messing with the structure of the database. So I like to do just that by itself. And it's kind of tidy most of the time because because it's not something that's like naturally visible to the user is just a structural change.So that's an example of the kind of thing that you learn as you gain practice, breaking bigger things up into smaller pieces. [01:00:16] Jeremy: so, and, and that example, in terms of whatever issue tracking system you use, what, what would you call that? Would you just call that setting up schema for X future features, or I'm just kinda curious how you characterize that.[01:00:35] Jason: yeah, something like that. Those particular tickets don't have great names because ideally each ticket has some amount of value that's visible to the user and that one totally doesn't, it's a purely nuts and bolts kind of thing. So that's just a case where the name's not going to be great, but what's the alternative can't think of anything better. So we do it like that. [01:01:02] Jeremy: you feel like that's, that's lower risk shipping something that's not user-facing first. Then it is to wait until you have at least like one small thing that, you know, is connected to that change.[01:01:19] Jason: Yeah. I had a boss in the past who had a certain conception of the reason to do deployments. And, and her belief was that the reason that you deploy is to deliver value to the user which is of course true, but there's another really good reason to deploy, which is to mitigate risk. The further production and development are able to diverge from one another, the greater, the risk.When you do a deployment. I remember one particular time at that job, I was made to deploy like three months of work at once and it was a disaster and I got the blame because I was the one who did the work. And quite frankly, I was really resentful that that had. And that's part of what informs my preference for deploying small amounts of work at a time.I think it's best if things can be deployed serially, like rather than deploying in patches, just finish one thing, deploy it, verify it, finish the next thing, deploy it, verify it. I have the saying that it's better to be a hundred percent done with half your work than halfway done with a hundred percent of your work. For, for the hopefully obvious reason that like, if, if you have 15 things that are each halfway in progress, now you have to juggle 15 balls in your head. Whereas, if you have 15 things you have to do, and then you finish seven of them, then you can completely forget about those seven things that you finished and deployed and verified and all that.And your mental bandwidth is freed up just to focus on the remaining work. [01:03:10] Jeremy: yeah, that, that makes sense. And, and also if you are putting things out bit by bit, And something goes wrong, then at least it's not all 15 things you have to figure out, which was it. It's just the last thing he pushed out.[01:03:26] Jason: Exactly. Yeah. It's never fun when you deploy a big delta and something goes wrong and it's a mystery. What introduced the problem? It's obviously never good if you deploy something that turns out to be a problem, but if you deployed just one thing and something goes wrong, at least you can. Roll it back or at the very least have a pretty decent idea of where the problem lies. So you can address it quickly. [01:03:56] Jeremy: for sure. Well I think that's probably a good place to leave it off on, but is there anything else about testing or just software in general that you, you thought we should've brought up?[01:04:09] Jason: Well, maybe if I can leave the listener with one thing um, I want to emphasize the importance of programming and feedback loops. It was a real eye-opener for me when I was interviewing these candidates to notice the distinct difference between programmers, who didn't program and feedback loops and programmers, who do I have a post about it?I'm just, it's just called how to program and feedback loops. I believe if anybody's interested in the details. Cause I have like. It's like seven steps to that feedback loop. First, you write a line of code, then you do this. I don't remember all seven steps off the top of my head, but it's all there in the blog post.Anyway, if I could give just one piece of advice to anybody who's getting into programming, it's a program in feedback loops. [01:05:00] Jeremy: yeah, I think that's been the, the common thread, I suppose, throughout this conversation is that whether it's. Writing the features you want them to be as small as possible. So you get that feedback of it being done. And like you said, taking it off of your plate. Then there's the being able to have the tests there as you write the features so that you get that immediate feedback, that this is not doing what the test says it should be doing.So yeah, it makes it, it makes a lot of sense that basically in everything we do try to get to a point where we get a thumbs up, we get at, this is complete. The faster we can do that, the better we'll we'll all be off. Right.[01:05:46] Jason: exactly. Exactly. [01:05:50] Jeremy: if people want to check out your book, check out your podcast, I think you even have a, a conference coming up, right? Uh, where, w where can they learn about that.[01:06:02] Jason: So the hub for everything is code with jason.com. So that's where I always. Send people, you can find my blog, my podcast, my book there. And yeah, my conference it's called sin city ruby. It's a Ruby conference. This will only be applicable dear listener, if you're listening before March 24th, 2022. But yeah, it's, it's happening in Las Vegas.It's going to be just a small intimate conference and it's a whole different story, but I kind of put on this conference accidentally. I didn't intend to do a conference. I just kind of uh, stumbled into it, but I think it will be a lot of fun. But yeah, that's, that's another thing that I have going on. [01:06:49] Jeremy: What, what was it that I guess. Got you into deciding this is, this is what I want to do. I want to make a conference. [01:06:58] Jason: Well, it started off as I was going to put on a class, but then nobody bought a ticket. And so I had to pivot. And so I'm like, okay, I didn't sell any tickets to this class. Maybe I can sell some tickets to a conference. And luckily for me, it turns out I was right because I was financially obligated to a hotel where I had reserved space for the class.So I couldn't just cancel it. I had to move forward somehow. So that's where the conference came. [01:07:28] Jeremy: interesting. yeah, I'm, I'm always kind of curious. How people decide what they want to attend, I guess, like, you know, you said how you didn't get enough signups for your class, but you get signups for a conference. And you know, the people who are signing up and want to go, I wonder to to them, what is, what is it about the going to a conference that is so much more appealing than, than going to a class?[01:07:54] Jason: Oh, well, I think in order to go to a class, the topic has to be of interest to you. You have to be in like a specific time and place. The price point for that kind of thing is usually much higher than for, for a conference. Whereas with a conference it's affordable to individuals, you don't have to get your boss's permission necessarily, at least not for the money. It's more of like a, you don't have to be a specific kind of person in a specific scenario in order to benefit from it. It's a much more general interest. So that's why I think I've had an easier time selling tickets to that. [01:08:31] Jeremy: Mm, mm. Yeah, it's, it's more of a I wanna get into a room with a bunch of people and just learn a bunch of cool stuff and not necessarily have a specific specific thing you're looking to get out of it, I guess.[01:08:46] Jason: Yeah. There's no specific outcome or anything like that. Honestly, it's mostly just to have a good time. That's the main thing I'm hoping to get out of it. And I think that is the main draw for people they want to, they want to see their friends in the Ruby community form relationships and stuff like that. [01:09:07] Jeremy: Very cool. Jason good luck with the conference and thank you so much for coming on software software sessions.[01:09:13] Jason: Thanks a lot. And uh, thanks for having me. 

In this episode, we cover: Introduction (00:00) How Chris got into the world of chaos and teaching middle school science (02:11) The Cengage seasonal model and preparing for the (5:56) How Cengage schedules the chaos and the “day of darkness” (11:10) Scaling and migration and “the inches we need” (15:28) Communicating with different teams and the customers (18:18) Chris's biggest lesson from practicing chaos engineering (24:30) Chris and working at Cengage/Outro (27:40) Links Referenced: Cengage: https://www.cengagegroup.com/ Chris Martello on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermartello/ TranscriptJulie: Wait, I got it. You probably don't know this one, Chris. It's not from you. How does the Dalai Lama order a hot dog?Chris: He orders one with everything.Julie: [laugh]. So far, I have not been able to stump Chris on—[laugh].Chris: [laugh]. Then the follow-up to that one for a QA is how many engineers does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is, none; that's a hardware problem.Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about reliability, quality, and ways to focus on the user experience. In this episode, we talk with Chris Martello, manager of application performance at Cengage, about the importance of Chaos Engineering in service of quality.Julie: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose. We are joined today by Chris Martello from Cengage. Chris, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself?Chris: Hey, thanks for having me today, Julie, Jason. It's nice to be here and chat with you folks about Chaos Engineering, Chaos Testing, Gremlin. As Julie mentioned I'm a performance manager at Cengage Learning Group, and we do a fair amount of performance testing, both individual platforms, and coordinated load testing. I've been a software manager at Cengage for about five years, total of nine altogether there at Cengage, and worn quite a few of the testing hats, as you can imagine, from automation engineer, performance engineer, and now QA manager. So, with that, yeah, my team is about—we have ten people that coordinate and test our [unintelligible 00:01:52] platforms. I'm on the higher-ed side. We have Gale Research Library, as well as soft skills with our WebAssign and ed2go offerings. So, I'm just one of a few, but my claim to fame—or at least one of my passions—is definitely chaos testing and breaking things on purpose.Julie: I love that, Chris. And before we hear why that's your passion, when you and I chatted last week, you mentioned how you got into the world of QA, and I think you started with a little bit of different type of chaos. You want to tell us what you did before?Chris: Sure, even before a 20-year career, now, in software testing, I managed chaos every day. If you know anything about teaching middle school, seventh and eighth-grade science, those folks have lots of energy and combine that with their curiosity for life and, you know, their propensity to expend energy and play basketball and run track and do things, I had a good time for a number of years corralling that energy and focusing that energy into certain directions. And you know back, kind of, with the jokes, it was a way to engage with kids in the classroom was humor. And so there was a lot of science jokes and things like that. But generally speaking, that evolved into I had a passion for computers, being self-taught with programming skills, project management, and things like that. It just evolved into a different career that has been very rewarding.And that's what brings me to Cengage and why I come to work every day with those folks is because instead of now teaching seventh and eighth-grade science to young, impressionable minds, nowadays I teach adults how to test websites and how to test platforms and services. And the coaching is still the same; the mentoring is still the same. The aptitude of my students is a lot different, you know? We have adults, they're people, they require things. And you know, the subject matter is also different. But the skills in the coaching and teaching is still the same.Jason: If you were, like, anything like my seventh-grade science teacher, then another common thing that you would have with Chaos Engineering and teaching science is blowing a lot of things up.Chris: Indeed. Playing with phosphorus and raw metal sodium was always a fun time in the chemistry class. [laugh].Julie: Well, one of the things that I love, there are so many parallels between being a science teacher and Chaos Engineering. I mean, we talk about this all the time with following the scientific process, right? You're creating a hypothesis; you're testing that. And so have you seen those parallels now with what you're doing with Chaos Engineering over there at Cengage?Chris: Oh, absolutely. It is definitely the basis for almost any testing we do. You have to have your controlled variables, your environment, your settings, your test scripts, and things that you're working on, setting up that experiment, the design of course, and then your uncontrolled variables, the manipulated ones that you're looking for to give you information to tell you something new about the system that you didn't know, after you conducted your experiment. So, working with teams, almost half of the learning occurs in just the design phase in terms of, “Hey, I think this system is supposed to do X, it's designed in a certain way.” And if we run a test to demonstrate that, either it's going to work or it's not. Or it's going to give us some new information that we didn't know about it before we ran our experiment.Julie: But you also have a very, like, cyclical reliabilities schedule that's important to you, right? You have your very important peak traffic windows. And what is that? Is that around the summertime? What does that look like for you?Chris: That's right, Julie. So, our business model, or at least our seasonal model, runs off of typical college semesters. So, you can imagine that August and September are really big traffic months for us, as well as January and part of February. It does take a little extra planning in order to mimic that traffic. Traffic and transactions at the beginning of the semester are a lot different than they are at the middle and even at the end of the semester.So, we see our secondary higher education platforms as courseware. We have our instructors doing course building. They're taking a textbook, a digitized textbook, they're building a course on it, they're adding their activities to it, and they're setting it up. At the same time that's going along, the students are registering, they are signing up to use the course, they're signing up to their course key for Cengage products, and they're logging into the course. The middle section looks a lot like taking activities and tests and quizzes, reading the textbook, flipping pages, and maybe even making some notes off to the side.And then at the end of the semester, when the time is up, quite literally on the course—you know, my course semester starts from this day to this day, in 15th of December. Computers being as precise as they are, when 15th of December at 11:59 p.m. rolls off the clock, that triggers a whole bunch of cron jobs that say, “Hey, it's done. Start calculating grades.”And it has to go through thousands of courses and say, “Which courses expired today? How many grades are there submitted? How many grades are unsubmitted and now I have to calculate the zeros?” And there's a lot of math that goes in with that analytics. And some of those jobs, when those midnight triggers kick off those jobs, it will take eight to ten hours in order to process that semester's courses that expire on that day.Julie: Well, and then if you experience an outage, I can only assume that it would be a high-stress situation for both teachers and students, and so we've talked about why you focus so heavily on reliability, I'd love to hear maybe if you can share with us how you prepare for those peak traffic events.Chris: So yeah, it's challenging to design a full load test that encompasses an entire semester's worth of traffic and even the peaks that are there. So, what we do is, we utilize our analytics that give us information on where our peak traffic days lie. And it's typically the second or third Monday in September, and it's at one or two o'clock in the afternoon. And those are when it's just what we've seen over the past couple of years is those days are our typical traffic peaks. And so we take the type of transactions that occur during those days, and we calibrate our load tests to use those as a peak, a one-time, our performance capacity.And then that becomes our x-factor in testing. Our 1x factor is what do we see in a semester at those peaks? And we go gather the rest of them during the course of the semester, and kind of tally those up in a load test. So, if our platforms can sustain a three to six-hour load test using peak estimate values that come from our production analysis, then we think we're pretty stable.And then we will turn the dial up to two times that number. And that number gives us an assessment of our headroom. How much more headroom past our peak usage periods do we have in order to service our customers reliably? And then some days, when you're rolling the dice, for extra bonus points, we go for 3x. And the 3x is not a realistic number.I have this conversation with engineering managers and directors all the time. It's like, “Well, you overblow that load test and it demonstrated five times the load on our systems. That's not realistic.” I says, “Well, today it's not realistic. But next week, it might be depending on what's happening.”You know, there are things that sometimes are not predictable with our semesters and our traffic but generally speaking it is. So, let's say some other system goes down. Single-sign-on. Happens to the best of us. If you integrate with a partner and your partner is uncontrolled in your environment, you're at their mercy.So, when that goes down, people stop entering your application. When the floodgates open, that traffic might peak for a while in terms of, hey, it's back up again; everybody can log in. It's the equivalent of, like, emptying a stadium and then letting everybody in through one set of doors. You can't do it. So, those types of scenarios become experimental design conversations with engineering managers to say, “At what level of performance do you think your platform needs to sustain?”And as long as our platforms can sustain within two to three, you know, we're pretty stable in terms of what we have now. But if we end up testing at three times the expected load and things break catastrophically, that might be an indication to an architect or an engineering director, that, hey, if our capacity outlives us in a year, it might be time to start planning for that re-architecture. Start planning for that capacity because it's not just adding on additional servers; planning for that capacity might include a re-architecture of some kind.Julie: You know, Chris, I just want to say to anybody from Coinbase that's out there that's listening, I think they can find you on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophermartello/) to talk about load testing and preparing for peak traffic events.Chris: Yeah, I think the Superbowl saw one. They had a little QR code di—Julie: Yeah.Chris: —displayed on the screen for about 15 seconds or so, and boy, I sure hope they planned for that load because if you're only giving people 15 seconds and everybody's trying to get their phone up there, man I bet those servers got real hot real fast. [laugh].Julie: Yeah, they did. And there was a blip. There was a blip.Chris: Yeah. [laugh].Julie: But you're on LinkedIn, so that's great, and they can find you there to talk to you. You know, I recently had the opportunity to speak to some of the Cengage folks and it was really amazing. And it was amazing to hear what you were doing and how you have scheduled your Chaos Engineering experiments to be something that's repeatable. Do you want to talk about that a little bit for folks?Chris: Sure. I mean, you titled our podcast today, “A Day of Darkness,” and that's kind of where it all started. So, if I could just back up to where we started there with how did chaos become a regular event? How did chaos become a regular part of our engineering teams' DNA, something that they do regularly every month and it's just no sweat to pull off?Well, that Day of Darkness was 18 hours of our educational platforms being down. Now, arguably, the students and instructors had paid for their subscriptions already, so we weren't losing money. But in the education space and in our course creations, our currency is in grades and activities and submissions. So, we were losing currency that day and losing reputation. And so we did a postmortem that involved engineering managers, quality assurance, performance folks, and we looked at all the different downtimes that we've had, and what are the root causes.And after conferring with our colleagues in the different areas—we've never really been brought together in a setting like that—we designed a testing plan that was going to validate a good amount of load on a regular basis. And the secondary reason for coordinating testing like that was that we were migrating from data center to cloud. So, this is, you know, about five, six years ago. So, in order to validate that all that plumbing and connections and integrations worked, you know, I proposed I says, “Hey, let's load test it all the same time. Let's see what happens. Let's make sure that we can run water through the pipes all day long and that things work.”And we plan this for a week; we planned five days. But I traveled to Boston, gathered my engineers kind of in a war room situation, and we worked on it for a week. And in that week, we came up with a list of 90 issues—nine-zero—that we needed to fix and correct and address for our cloud-based offerings before it could go live. And you know, a number of them were low priority, easy to fix, low-hanging fruit, things like that. But there were nine of them that if we hadn't found, we were sure to go down.And so those nine things got addressed, we went live, and our system survived, you know, and things went up. After that, it became a regular thing before the semesters to make sure, “Hey, Chris, we need to coordinate that again. Can you do it?” Sure enough, let's coordinate some of the same old teams, grab my run sheet. And we learned that we needed to give a day of preparation because sometimes there were folks that their scripts were old, their environment wasn't a current version, and sometimes the integrations weren't working for various reasons of other platform releases and functionality implementation.So, we had a day of preparation and then we would run. We'd check in the morning and say, “Everybody ready to go? Any problems? Any surprises that we don't know about, yet?” So, we'd all confer in the morning and give it a thumbs up.We started our tests, we do a three-hour ramp, and we learned that the three-hour ramp was pretty optimal because sometimes elastic load balancers can't, like, spin up fast enough in order to pick up the load, so there were some that we had to pre-allocate and there were others that we had to give enough time. So, three hours became that magic window, and then three hours of steady-state at our peak generation. And now, after five years, we are doing that every month.Jason: That's amazing. One of the things you mentioned in there was about this migration, and I think that might tie back to something you said earlier about scaling and how when you're thinking of scaling, especially as I'm thinking about your migration to the cloud, you said, “Scaling isn't just adding servers. Sometimes that requires re-architecting an application or the way things work.” I'm curious, are those two connected? Or some of those nine critical fixes a part of that discovery?Chris: I think those nine fixes were part of the discovery. It was, you can't just add servers for a particular platform. It was, how big is the network pipe? Where is the DNS server? Is it on this side or that side? Database connections were a big thing: How many are there? Is there enough?So, there was some scaling things that hadn't been considered at that level. You know, nowadays, fixing performance problems can be as easy as more memory and more CPU. It can be. Some days it's not. Some days, it can be more servers; some days, it can be bigger servers.Other times, it's—just, like, quality is everybody's job, performance fixing is not always a silver bullet. There are things like page optimization by the designers. There's code optimization by your front-end engineers. And your back-end engineers, there are database optimizations that can be made: Indexing, reindexing on a regular basis—whatever that schedule is—for optimizing your database queries. If your front-end goes to an API for five things on the first page, does it make five extra calls, or does it make one call, and all five things come across at the same time?So, those are considerations that load performance testing, can tell you where to begin looking. But as quality assurance and that performance lead engineer, I might find five things, but the fixes weren't just more testing and a little bit of extra functionality. It might have involved DevOps to tweak the server connections, it might have involved network to slim down the hops from four different load balancers to two, or something like that. I mean, it was always just something else that you never considered that you utilized your full team and all of their expertise and skills in order to come up with those inches.And that's one of my favorite quotes from Every Given Sunday. It's an older football movie starring Al Pacino. He gives this really awesome speech in a halftime type of setting, and the punch line for this whole thing is, “The inches we need are everywhere around us.” And I tell people that story in the terms of performance is because performance, at the software level, is a game of inches. And those inches are in all of our systems and it's up to us as engineers to find them and add them up.Julie: I absolutely love everything about that. And that would have made a great title for this episode. “The Inches we Need are Everywhere Around Us.” We've already settled on, “A Day of Darkness with Chris Martello,” though. On that note, Chris, some of the things that you mentioned involve a lot of communication with different teams. How did you navigate some of those struggles? Or even at the beginning of this, was it easy to get everybody on board with this mindset of a new way of doing things? Did you have some challenges?Chris: There were challenges for sure. It's kind of hard to picture, I guess, Cengage's platform architecture and stuff. It's not just one thing. It's kind of like Amazon. Amazon is probably the example is that a lot of their services and things work in little, little areas.So, in planning this, I looked at an architecture diagram, and there's all these things around it, and we have this landscape. And I just looked down here in the corner. I said, “What's this?” They said, “Well, that's single-sign-on.” I says, “Well, everything that touches that needs to be load tested.”And they're like, “Why? We can't do that. We don't have a performance environment for that.” I said, “You can't afford not to.” And the day of darkness was kind of that, you know, example that kind of gave us the [sigh] momentum to get over that obstacle that said, “Yeah, we really do need a dedicated performance environment in order to prove this out.”So, then whittling down that giant list of applications and teams into the ones that were meaningful to our single-sign-on. And when we whittled that down, we now have 16 different teams that regularly participate in chaos. Those are kind of the ones that all play together on the same playing field at the same time and when we find that one system has more throughput than another system or an unexpected transaction load, sometimes that system can carry that or project that load onto another system inadvertently. And if there's timeouts at one that are set higher than another, then those events start queuing up on the second set of servers. It's something that we continually balance on.And we use these bits of information for each test and start, you know, logging and tracking these issues, and deciding whether it's important, how long is it going to take to fix, and is it necessary. And, you know, you're balancing risk and reward with everything you're doing, of course, in the business world, but sometimes the, you know—“Chris, bring us more quality. You can do better this month. Can you give us 20 more units of quality?” It's like, “I can't really package that up and hand it to you. That's not a deliverable.”And in the same way that reputation that we lose when our systems go down isn't as quantifiable, either. Sure, you can watch the tweets come across the interwebs, and see how upset our students are at those kinds of things, but our customer support and our service really takes that to heart, and they listen to those tweets and they fix them, and they coordinate and reach out, you know, directly to these folks. And I think that's why our organization supports this type of performance testing, as well as our coordinated chaos: The service experience that goes out to our customers has to be second to none. And that's second to none is the table stakes is your platform must be on, must be stable, and must be performing. That's just to enter the space, kids. You've got to be there. [laugh].You can't have your platform going down at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night when all these college students are doing their homework because they freak out. And they react to it. It's important. That's the currency. That is the human experience that says this platform, this product is very important to these students' lives and their well-being in their academic career. And so we take that very seriously.Jason: I love that you mentioned that your customer support works with the engineering team. Because makes me think of how many calls have you been on where something went wrong, you contacted customer support, and you end up reaching this thing of, they don't talk to engineering, and they're just like, “I don't know, it's broken. Try again some other time.” Or whatever that is, and you end up lost. And so this idea of we often think of DevOps is developers and operations engineers working together and everybody on the engineering side, but I love that idea of extending that.And so I'm curious, in that vein, does your Chaos Engineering, does your performance testing also interact with some of what customer support is actually doing?Chris: In a support kind of way, absolutely. Our customer call support is very well educated on our products and they have a lot of different tools at their disposal in order to correct problems. And you know, many of those problems are access and permissions and all that kind of stuff that's usual, but what we've seen is even though that our customer base is increasing and our call volume increases accordingly, the percentage decreases over time because our customer support people have gotten so good at answering those questions. And to that extent, when we do log issues that are not as easily fixed with a tweak or knob toggle at the customer support side, those get grouped up into a group of tickets that we call escalation tickets, and those go directly to engineering.And when we see groups of them that look and smell kind of the same or have similar symptoms, so we start looking at how to design that into chaos, and is it a real performance issue? Especially when it's related to slowness or errors that continuously come at a particular point in that workflow. So, I hope I answered that question there for you, Jason.Jason: Yeah, that's perfect.Julie: Now, I'd like to kind of bring it back a little bit to some of the learnings we've had over this time of practicing Chaos Engineering and focusing on that quality testing. Is there something big that stands out in your mind that you learned from an experiment? Some big, unknown-unknown that you don't know that you ever could have caught without practicing?Chris: Julie, that's a really good question, and there isn't, you know, big bang or any epiphanies here. When I talk about what is the purpose of chaos and what do we get out of it, there's the human factor of chaos in terms of what does this do for us. It gets us prepared, it gets us a fire drill without the sense of urgency of production, and it gets people focused on solving a problem together. So, by practicing in a performance, in a chaos sort of way, when performance does affect the production, those communication channels are already greased. When there's a problem with some system, I know exactly who the engineer is to go to and ask him a question.And that has also enabled us to reduce our meantime to resolution. That meantime to resolution factor is predicated on our teams knowing what to do, and how to resolve those. And because we've practiced it, now that goes down. So, I think the synergy of being able to work together and triangulate our teams on existing issues in a faster sort of way, definitely helps our team dynamic in terms of solving those problems faster.Julie: I like that a lot because there is so much more than just the technical systems. And that's something that we like to talk about, too. It is your people's systems. And you're not trying to surprise anybody, you've got these scheduled on a calendar, they run regularly, so it's important to note that when you're looking at making your people's systems more resilient, you're not trying to catch Chris off guard to see if he answered the page—Chris: That's right.Julie: —what we're working on is making sure that we're building that muscle memory with practice, right, and iron out the kinks in those communication channels.Chris: Absolutely. It's definitely been a journey of learning both for, you know, myself and my team, as well as the engineers that work on these things. You know, again, everybody chips in and gets to learn that routine and be comfortable with fighting fires. Another way I've looked at it with Chaos Engineering, and our testing adventures is that when we find something that it looks a little off—it's a burp, or a sneeze, or some hiccup over here in this system—that can turn into a full-blown fever or cold in production. And we've had a couple of examples where we didn't pay attention to that stuff fast enough, and it did occur in production.And kudos to our engineering team who went and picked it up because we had the information. We had the tracking that says we did find this. We have a solution or recommended fix in place, and it's already in process. That speaks volumes to our sense of urgency on the engineering teams.Julie: Chris, thank you for that. And before we end our time with you today, is there anything you'd like to let our listeners know about Cengage or anything you'd like to plug?Chris: Well, Cengage Learning has been a great place for me to work and I know that a lot of people enjoy working there. And anytime I ask my teams, like, “What's the best part of working there?” It's like, “The people. We work with are supportive and helpful.” You know, we have a product that we'd like to help change people's lives with, in terms of furthering their education and their career choices, so if you're interested, we have over 200 open positions at the current moment within our engineering and staffing choices.And if you're somebody interested in helping out folks and making a difference in people's educational and career paths, this is a place for you. Thanks for the offer, Julie. Really appreciate that.Julie: Thank you, Chris.Jason: Thanks, Chris. It's been fantastic to have you on the show.Chris: It's been a pleasure to be here and great to talk to you. I enjoy talking about my passions with testing as well as many of my other ones. [laugh].Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

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Thanks for watching and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe! **For VFTV Merchandise head over to our site: https://viewsfromthevault.com/ Remember to join us and other fitted cap enthusiasts on the Fitted Hat Society (FHS) Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/37247...You can catch more of our hosts at: https://www.linktr.ee/Thecappedwonder (Pierre) https://www.linktr.ee/U037 (Leon) https://www.instagram.com/hatcrawler/ (Jason)  Thanks again to our sponsors: Good Hats - https://goodhats.coThe Capologists - https://www.thecapologists.comHat Crawler - https://releases.hatcrawler.com/Over Your Head Caps - https://www.overyourhead.caStay Fitted!

Thanks for watching and don't forget to like, comment, and subscribe! **For VFTV Merchandise head over to our site: https://viewsfromthevault.com/ Remember to join us and other fitted cap enthusiasts on the Fitted Hat Society (FHS) Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/37247...You can catch more of our hosts at: https://www.linktr.ee/Thecappedwonder (Pierre) https://www.linktr.ee/U037 (Leon) https://www.instagram.com/hatcrawler/ (Jason)  Thanks again to our sponsors: Good Hats - https://goodhats.coThe Capologists - https://www.thecapologists.comHat Crawler - https://releases.hatcrawler.com/Over Your Head Caps - https://www.overyourhead.caStay Fitted!

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction 00:03:20 - VMWare Tanzu 00:07:50 - Gustavo's Career in Security  00:12:00 - Early Days in Chaos Engineering 00:16:30 - Catzilla  00:19:45 - Expanding on SRE 00:26:40 - Learning from Customer Trends 00:29:30 - Chaos Engineering at VMWare 00:36:00 - Outro Links: Tanzu VMware: https://tanzu.vmware.com GitHub for SREDocs: https://github.com/google/sredocs E-book on how to start your incident lifecycle program: https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/ebooks/establishing-an-sre-based-incident-lifecycle-program Twitter: https://twitter.com/stratus TranscriptJason: Welcome to Break Things on Purpose, a podcast about chaos engineering and building reliable systems. In this episode, Gustavo Franco, a senior engineering manager at VMware joins us to talk about building reliability as a product feature, and the journey of chaos engineering from its place in the early days of Google's disaster recovery practices to the modern SRE movement. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for another episode. Today with us we have Gustavo Franco, who's a senior engineering manager at VMware. Gustavo, why don't you say hi, and tell us about yourself.Gustavo: Thank you very much for having me. Gustavo Franco; as you were just mentioning, I'm a senior engineering manager now at VMware. So, recently co-founded the VMware Tanzu Reliability Engineering Organization with Megan Bigelow. It's been only a year, actually. And we've been doing quite a bit more than SRE; we can talk about like—we're kind of branching out beyond SRE, as well.Jason: Yeah, that sounds interesting. For folks who don't know, I feel like I've seen VMware Tanzu around everywhere. It just suddenly went from nothing into this huge thing of, like, every single Kubernetes-related event, I feel like there's someone from VMware Tanzu on it. So, maybe as some background, give us some information; what is VMware Tanzu?Gustavo: Kubernetes is sort of the engine, and we have a Kubernetes distribution called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, one of my teams actually works on Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. So, what is VMware Tanzu? What this really is, is what we call a modern application platform, really an end-to-end solution. So, customers expect to buy not just Kubernetes, but everything around, everything that comes with giving the developers a platform to write code, to write applications, to write workloads.So, it's basically the developer at a retail company or a finance company, they don't want to run Kubernetes clusters; they would like the ability to, maybe, but they don't necessarily think in terms of Kubernetes clusters. They want to think about workloads, applications. So, VMWare Tanzu is end-to-end solution that the engine in there is Kubernetes.Jason: That definitely describes at least my perspective on Kubernetes is, I love running Kubernetes clusters, but at the end of the day, I don't want to have to evaluate every single CNCF project and all of the other tools that are required in order to actually maintain and operate a Kubernetes cluster.Gustavo: I was just going to say, and we acquired Pivotal a couple of years ago, so that brought a ton of open-source projects, such as the Spring Framework. So, for Java developers, I think it's really cool, too, just being able to worry about development and the Java layer and a little bit of reliability, chaos engineering perspective. So, kind of really gives me full tooling, the ability common libraries. It's so important for reliable engineering and chaos engineering as well, to give people this common surface that we can actually use to inject faults, potentially, or even just define standards.Jason: Excellent point of having that common framework in order to do these reliability practices. So, you've explained what VMware Tanzu is. Tell me a bit more about how that fits in with VMware Tanzu?Gustavo: Yeah, so one thing that happened the past few years, the SRE organization grew beyond SRE. We're doing quite a bit of horizontal work, so SRE being one of them. So, just an example, I got to charter a compliance engineering team and one team that we call ‘Customer Zero.' I would call them partially the representatives of growth, and then quote-unquote, “Customer problems, customer pain”, and things that we have to resolve across multiple teams. So, SRE is one function that clearly you can think of.You cannot just think of SRE on a product basis, but you think of SRE across multiple products because we're building a platform with multiple pieces. So, it's kind of like putting the building blocks together for this platform. So then, of course, we're going to have to have a team of specialists, but we need an organization of generalists, so that's where SRE and this broader organization comes in.Jason: Interesting. So, it's not just we're running a platform, we need our own SREs, but it sounds like it's more of a group that starts to think more about the product itself and maybe even works with customers to help their reliability needs?Gustavo: Yeah, a hundred percent. We do have SRE teams that invest the majority of their time running SaaS, so running Software as a Service. So, one of them is the Tanzu Mission Control. It's purely SaaS, and what teams see Tanzu Mission Control does is allow the customers to run Kubernetes anywhere. So, if people have Kubernetes on-prem or they have Kubernetes on multiple public clouds, they can use TMC to be that common management surface, both API and web UI, across Kubernetes, really anywhere they have Kubernetes. So, that's SaaS.But for TKG SRE, that's a different problem. We don't have currently a TKG SaaS offering, so customers are running TKG on-prem or on public cloud themselves. So, what does the TKG SRE team do? So, that's one team that actually [unintelligible 00:05:15] to me, and they are working directly improving the reliability of the product. So, we build reliability as a feature of the product.So, we build a reliability scanner, which is a [unintelligible 00:05:28] plugin. It's open-source. I can give you more examples, but that's the gist of it, of the idea that you would hire security engineers to improve the security of a product that you sell to customers to run themselves. Why wouldn't you hire SREs to do the same to improve the reliability of the product that customers are running themselves? So, kind of, SRE beyond SaaS, basically.Jason: I love that idea because I feel like a lot of times in organizations that I talk with, SRE really has just been a renamed ops team. And so it's purely internal; it's purely thinking about we get software shipped to us from developers and it's our responsibility to just make that run reliably. And this sounds like it is that complete embrace of the DevOps model of breaking down silos and starting to move reliability, thinking of it from a developer perspective, a product perspective.Gustavo: Yeah. A lot of my work is spent on making analogies with security, basically. One example, several of the SREs in my org, yeah, they do spend time doing PRs with product developers, but also they do spend a fair amount of time doing what we call in a separate project right now—we're just about to launch something new—a reliability risk assessment. And then you can see the parallels there. Where like security engineers would probably be doing a security risk assessment or to look into, like, what could go wrong from a security standpoint?So, I do have a couple engineers working on reliability risk assessment, which is, what could go wrong from a reliability standpoint? What are the… known pitfalls of the architecture, the system design that we have? How does the architectural work looks like of the service? And yeah, what are the outages that we know already that we could have? So, if you have a dependency on, say, file on a CDN, yeah, what if the CDN fails?It's obvious and I know most of the audience will be like, “Oh, this is obvious,” but, like, are you writing this down on a spreadsheet and trying to stack-rank those risks? And after you stack-rank them, are you then mitigating, going top-down, look for—there was an SREcon talk by [Matt Brown 00:07:32], a former colleague of mine at Google, it's basically, know your enemy tech talk in SREcon. He talks about this like how SRE needs to have a more conscious approach to reliability risk assessment. So, really embraced that, and we embraced that at VMware. The SRE work that I do comes from a little bit of my beginnings or my initial background of working security.Jason: I didn't actually realize that you worked security, but I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and you've got a long career doing some really amazing work. So, you said you were in security. I'm curious, tell us more about how your career has progressed. How did you get to where you are today?Gustavo: Very first job, I was 16. There was this group of sysadmins on the first internet service provider in Brazil. One of them knew me from BBS, Bulletin Board Systems, and they, you know, were getting hacked, left and right. So, this guy referred me, and he referred me saying, “Look, it's this kid. He's 16, but he knows his way around this security stuff.”So, I show up, they interview me. I remember one of the interview questions; it's pretty funny. They asked me, “Oh, what would you do if we asked you to go and actually physically grab the routing table from AT&T?” It's just, like, a silly question and they told them, “Uh, that's impossible.” So, I kind of told him the gist of what I knew about routing, and it was impossible to physically get a routing table.For some reason, they loved that. That was the only candidate that could be telling them, “No. I'm not going to do it because it makes no sense.” So, they hired me. And the student security was basically teaching the older sysadmins about SSH because they were all on telnet, nothing was encrypted.There was no IDS—this was a long time ago, right, so the explosion of cybersecurity security firms did not exist then, so it was new. To be, like, a security company was a new thing. So, that was the beginning. I did dabble in open-source development for a while. I had a couple other jobs on ISPs.Google found me because of my dev and open-source work in '06, '07. I interviewed, joined Google, and then at Google, all of it is IC, basically, individual contributor. And at Google, I start doing SRE-type of work, but for the corporate systems. And there was this failed attempt to migrate from one Linux distribution to another—all the corporate systems—and I tech-led the effort making that successful. I don't think I should take the credit; it was really just a fact of, like you know, trying the second time and kind of, learned—the organization learned the lessons that I had to learn from the first time. So, we did a second time and it worked.And then yeah, I kept going. I did more SRE work in corp, I did some stuff in production, like all the products. So, I did a ton of stuff. I did—let's see—technical infrastructure, disaster recovery testing, I started a chaos-engineering-focused team. I worked on Google Cloud before we had a name for it. [laugh].So, I was the first SRE on Google Compute Engine and Google Cloud Storage. I managed Google Plus SRE team, and G Suite for a while. And finally, after doing all this runs on different teams, and developing new SRE teams and organizations, and different styles, different programs in SRE. Dave Rensin, which created the CRE team at Google, recruited me with Matt Brown, which was then the tech lead, to join the CRE team, which was the team at Google focused on teaching Google Cloud customers on how to adopt SRE practices. So, because I had this very broad experience within Google, they thought, yeah, it will be cool if you can share that experience with customers.And then I acquired even more experience working with random customers trying to adopt SRE practices. So, I think I've seen a little bit of it all. VMware wanted me to start, basically, a CRE team following the same model that we had at Google, which culminated all this in TKG SRE that I'm saying, like, we work to improve the reliability of the product and not just teaching the customer how to adopt SRE practices. And my pitch to the team was, you know, we can and should teach the customers, but we should also make sure that they have reasonable defaults, that they are providing a reasonable config. That's the gist of my experience, at a high level.Jason: That's an amazing breadth of experience. And there's so many aspects that I feel like I want to dive into [laugh] that I'm not quite sure exactly where to start. But I think I'll start with the first one, and that's that you mentioned that you were on that initial team at Google that started doing chaos engineering. And so I'm wondering if you could share maybe one of your experiences from that. What sort of chaos engineering did you do? What did you learn? What were the experiments like?Gustavo: So, a little bit of the backstory. This is probably because Kripa mentioned this several times before—and Kripa Krishnan, she actually initiated disaster recovery testing, way, way before there was such a thing as chaos engineering—that was 2006, 2007. That was around the time I was joining Google. So, Kripa was the first one to lead disaster recovery testing. It was very manual; it was basically a room full of project managers with postIts, and asking teams to, like, “Hey, can you test your stuff? Can you test your processes? What if something goes wrong? What if there's an earthquake in the Bay Area type of scenario?” So, that was the predecessor.Many, many years later, I work with her from my SRE teams testing, for my SRE teams participating in disaster recovery testing, but I was never a part of the team responsible for it. And then seven years later, I was. So, she recruited me with the following pitch, she was like, “Well, the program is big. We have disaster recovery tests, we have a lot of people testing, but we are struggling to convince people to test year-round. So, people tend to test once a year, and they don't test again. Which is bad. And also,” she was like, “I wish we had a software; there's something missing.”We had the spreadsheets, we track people, we track their tasks. So, it was still very manual. The team didn't have a tool for people to test. It was more like, “Tell me what you're going to test, and I will help you with scheduling, I'll help you to not conflict with the business and really disrupt something major, disrupt production, disrupt the customers, potentially.” A command center, like a center of operations.That's what they did. I was like, “I know exactly what we need.” But then I surveyed what was out there in open-source way, and of course, like, Netflix, gets a lot of—deserves a lot of credit for it; there was nothing that could be applied to the way we're running infrastructure internally. And I also felt that if we built this centrally and we build a catalog of tasks ourselves, and that's it, people are not going to use it. We have a bunch of developers, software engineers.They've got to feel like—they want to, they want to feel—and rightfully so—that they wanted control and they are in control, and they want to customize the system. So, in two weeks, I hack a prototype where it was almost like a workflow engine for chaos engineering tests, and I wrote two or three tests, but there was an API for people to bring their own test to the system, so they could register a new test and basically send me a patch to add their own tests. And, yeah, to my surprise, like, a year later—and the absolute number of comparison is not really fair, but we had an order of magnitude more testing being done through the software than manual tests. So, on a per-unit basis, the quality of the ultimate tasks was lower, but the cool thing was that people were testing a lot more often. And it was also very surprising to see the teams that were testing.Because there were teams that refused to do the manual disaster recovery testing exercise, they were using the software now to test, and that was part of the regular integration test infrastructure. So, they're not quite starting with okay, we're going to test in production, but they were testing staging, they were testing a developer environment. And in staging, they had real data; they were finding regressions. I can mention the most popular testing, too, because I spoke about this publicly before, which was this fuzz testing. So, a lot of things are RPC or RPC services, RPC, servers.Fuzz testing is really useful in the sense that, you know, if you send a random data in RPC call, will the server crash? Will the server handling this gracefully? So, we fought a lot of people—not us—a lot of people use or shared service bringing their own test, and fuzz testing was very popular to run continuously. And they would find a ton of crashes. We had a lot of success with that program.This team that I ran that was dedicated to building this shared service as a chaos engineering tool—which ironically named Catzilla—and I'm not a cat person, so there's a story there, too—was also doing more than just Catzilla, which we can also talk about because there's a little bit more of the incident management space that's out there.Jason: Yeah. Happy to dive into that. Tell me more about Catzilla?Gustavo: Yeah. So, Catzilla was sort of the first project from scratch from the team that ended up being responsible to share a coherent vision around the incident prevention. And then we would put Catzilla there, right, so the chaos engineering shared service and prevention, detection, analysis and response. Because once I started working on this, I realized, well, you know what? People are still being paged, they have good training, we had a good incident management process, so we have good training for people to coordinate incidents, but if you don't have SREs working directly with you—and most teams didn't—you also have a struggle to communicate with executives.It was a struggle to figure out what to do with prevention, and then Catzilla sort of resolved that a little bit. So, if you think of a team, like an SRE team in charge of not running a SaaS necessarily, but a team that works in function of a company to help the company to think holistically about incident prevention, detection, analysis, and response. So, we end up building more software for those. So, part of the software was well, instead of having people writing postmortems—a pet peeve of mine is people write postmortems and them they would give to the new employees to read them. So, people never really learned the postmortems, and there was like not a lot of information recovery from those retrospectives.Some teams were very good at following up on extra items and having discussions. But that's kind of how you see the community now, people talking about how we should approach retrospectives. It happened but it wasn't consistent. So then, well, one thing that we could do consistently is extract all the information that people spend so much time writing on the retrospectives. So, my pitch was, instead of having these unstructured texts, can we have it both unstructured and structured?So, then we launch postmortem template that was also machine-readable so we could extract information and then generate reports for to business leaders to say, “Okay, here's what we see on a recurring basis, what people are talking about in the retrospectives, what they're telling each other as they go about writing the retrospectives.” So, we found some interesting issues that were resolved that were not obvious on a per retrospective basis. So, that was all the way down to the analysis of the incidents. On the management part, we built tooling. It's basically—you can think of it as a SaaS, but just for the internal employees to use that is similar to externally what would be an incident dashboard, you know, like a status page of sorts.Of course, a lot more information internally for people participating in incidents than they have externally. For me is thinking of the SRE—and I manage many SRE teams that were responsible for running production services, such as Compute Engine, Google Plus, Hangouts, but also, you know, I just think of SRE as the folks managing production system going on call. But thinking of them a reliability specialists. And there's so many—when you think of SREs as reliability specialists that can do more than respond to pages, then you can slot SREs and SRE teams in many other areas of a organization.Jason: That's an excellent point. Just that idea of an SRE as being more than just the operation's on-call unit. I want to jump back to what you mentioned about taking and analyzing those retrospectives and analyzing your incidents. That's something that we did when I was at Datadog. Alexis Lê-Quôc, who's the CTO, has a fantastic talk about that at Monitorama that I'll link to in the [show notes 00:19:49].It was very clear from taking the time to look at all of your incidents, to catalog them, to really try to derive what's the data out of those and get that information to help you improve. We never did it in an automated way, but it sounds like with an automated tool, you were able to gather so much more information.Gustavo: Yeah, exactly. And to be clear, we did this manually before, and so we understood the cost of. And our bar, company-wide, for people writing retrospectives was pretty low, so I can't give you a hard numbers, but we had a surprising amount of retrospectives, let's say on a monthly basis because a lot of things are not necessarily things that many customers would experience. So, near misses or things that impact very few customers—potentially very few customers within a country could end up in a retrospective, so we had this throughput. So, it wasn't just, like, say, the highest severity outages.Like where oh, it happens—the stuff that you see on the press that happens once, maybe, a year, twice a year. So, we had quite a bit of data to discuss. So, then when we did it manually, we're like, “Okay, yeah, there's definitely something here because there's a ton of information; we're learning so much about what happens,” but then at the same time, we were like, “Oh, it's painful to copy and paste the useful stuff from a document to a spreadsheet and then crunch the spreadsheet.” And kudos—I really need to mention her name, too, Sue [Lueder 00:21:17] and also [Yelena Ortel 00:21:19]. Both of them were amazing project program managers who've done the brunt of this work back in the days when we were doing it manually.We had a rotation with SREs participating, too, but our project managers were awesome. And also Jason: As you started to analyze some of those incidents, every infrastructure is different, every setup is different, so I'm sure that maybe the trends that you saw are perhaps unique to those Google teams. I'm curious if you could share the, say, top three themes that might be interesting and applicable to our listeners, and things that they should look into or invest in?Gustavo: Yeah, one thing that I tell people about adopting the—in the books, the SRE books, is the—and people joke about it, so I'll explain the numbers a little better. 70, 75% of the incidents are triggered by config changes. And people are like, “Oh, of course. If you don't change anything, there are no incidents, blah, blah, blah.” Well, that's not true, that number really speaks to a change in the service that is impacted by the incident.So, that is not a change in the underlying dependency. Because people were very quickly to blame their dependencies, right? So meaning, if you think of a microservice mesh, the service app is going to say, “Oh, sure. I was throwing errors, my service was throwing errors, but it was something with G or H underneath, in a layer below.” 75% of cases—and this is public information goes into books, right—of retrospectives was written, the service that was throwing the errors, it was something that changed in that service, not above or below; 75% of the time, a config change.And it was interesting when we would go and look into some teams where there was a huge deviation from that. So, for some teams, it was like, I don't know, 85% binary deploys. So, they're not really changing config that much, or the configuration issues are not trigger—or the configuration changes or not triggering incidents. For those teams, actually, a common phenomenon was that because they couldn't. So, they did—the binary deploys were spiking as contributing factors and main triggers for incidents because they couldn't do config changes that well, roll them out in production, so they're like, yeah, of course, like, [laugh] my minor deploys will break more on my own service.But that showed to a lot of people that a lot of things were quote-unquote, “Under their control.” And it also was used to justify a project and a technique that I think it's undervalued by SREs in the wild, or folks running production in the wild which is canary evaluation systems. So, all these numbers and a lot of this analysis was just fine for, like, to give extra funding for the scene that was basically systematically across the entire company, if you tried to deploy a binary to production, if you tried to deploy a config change to production, will evaluate a canary if the binary is in a crash loop, if the binary is throwing many errors, is something is changing in a clearly unpredictable way, it will pause, it will abort the deploy. Which back to—much easier said than done. It sounds obvious, right, “Oh, we should do canaries,” but, “Oh, can you automate your canaries in such a way that they're looking to monitoring time series and that it'll stop a release and roll back a release so a human operator can jump in and be like, ‘oh, okay. Was it a false positive or not?'”Jason: I think that moving to canary deployments, I've long been a proponent of that, and I think we're starting to see a lot more of that with tools such as—things like LaunchDarkly and other tools that have made it a whole lot easier for your average organization that maybe doesn't have quite the infrastructure build-out. As you started to work on all of this within Google, you then went to the CRE team and started to help Google Cloud customers. Did any of these tools start to apply to them as well, analyzing their incidents and finding particular trends for those customers?Gustavo: More than one customer, when I describe, say our incident lifecycle management program, and the chaos engineering program, especially this lifecycle stuff, in the beginning, was, “Oh, okay. How do I do that?” And I open-sourced a very crufty prototype which some customers pick up on it and they implement internally in their companies. And it's still on GitHub, so /google/sredocs.There's an ugly parser, an example, like, of template for the machine-readable stuff, and how to basically get your retrospectives, dump the data onto Google BigQuery to be able to query more structurally. So yes, customers would ask us about, “Yeah. I heard about chaos engineering. How do you do chaos engineering? How can we start?”So, like, I remember a retail one where we had a long conversation about it, and some folks in tech want to know, “Yeah, instant response; how do I go about it?” Or, “What do I do with my retrospectives?” Like, people started to realize that, “Yeah, I write all this stuff and then we work on the action items, but then I have all these insights written down and no one goes back to read it. How can I get actionable insights, actionable information out of it?”Jason: Without naming any names because I know that's probably not allowed, are there any trends from customers that you'd be willing to share? Things that maybe—insights that you learned from how they were doing things and the incidents they were seeing that was different from what you saw at Google?Gustavo: Gaming is very unique because a lot of gaming companies, when we would go into incident management, [unintelligible 00:26:59] they were like, “If I launch a game, it's ride or die.” There may be a game that in the first 24, or 48 hours if the customers don't show up, they will never show up. So, that was a little surprising and unusual. Another trend is, in finance, you would expect a little behind or to be too strict on process, et cetera, which they still are very sophisticated customers, I would say. The new teams of folks are really interested in learning how to modernize the finance infrastructure.Let's see… well, tech, we basically talk the same language, with the gaming being a little different. In retail, the uniqueness of having a ton of things at the edge was a little bit of a challenge. So, having these hubs, where they have, say, a public cloud or on-prem data center, and these of having things running at the stores, so then having this conversation with them about different tiers and how to manage different incidents. Because if a flagship store is offline, it is a big deal. And from a, again, SaaS mindset, if you're think of, like, SRE, and you always manage through a public cloud, you're like, “Oh, I just call with my cloud provider; they'll figure it out.”But then for retail company with things at the edge, at a store, they cannot just sit around and wait for the public cloud to restore their service. So again, a lot of more nuanced conversations there that you have to have of like, yeah, okay, yeah. Here, say a VMware or a Google. Yeah, we don't deal with this problem internally, so yeah, how would I address this? The answers are very long, and they always depend.They need to consider, oh, do you have an operational team that you can drive around? [laugh]. Do you have people, do you have staffing that can go to the stores? How long it will take? So, the SLO conversation there is tricky.a secret weapon of SRE that has definitely other value is the project managers, program managers that work with SREs. And I need to shout out to—if you're a project manager, program manager working with SREs, shout out to you.Do you want to have people on call 24/7? Do you have people near that store that can go physically and do anything about it? And more often than not, they rely on third-party vendors, so then it's not staffed in-house and they're not super technical, so then remote management conversations come into play. And then you talk about, “Oh, what's your network infrastructure for that remote management?” Right? [laugh].Jason: Things get really interesting when you start to essentially outsource to other companies and have them provide the technology, and you try to get that interface. So, you mentioned doing chaos engineering within Google, and now you've moved to VMware with the Tanzu team. Tell me a bit more about how do you do chaos engineering at VMware, and what does that look like?Gustavo: I've seen varying degrees of adoption. So, right now, within my team, what we are doing is we're actually going as we speak right now, doing a big reliabilities assessment for a launch. Unfortunately, we cannot talk about it yet. We're probably going to announce this on October at VMworld. As a side effect of this big launch, we started by doing a reliability risk assessment.And the way we do this is we interview the developers—so this hasn't launched yet, so we're still designing this thing together. [unintelligible 00:30:05] the developers of the architecture that they basically sketch out, like, what is it that you're going to? What are the user journeys, the user stories? Who is responsible for what? And let's put an architecture diagram, a sketch together.And then we tried to poke or holes on, “Okay. What could go wrong here?” We write this stuff down. More often than not, from this list—and I can already see, like, that's where that output, that result fits into any sort of chaos engineering plan. So, that's where, like—so I can get—one thing that I can tell you for that risk assessment because I participated in the beginning was, there is a level of risk involving a CDN, so then one thing that we're likely going to test before we get to general availability is yeah, let's simulate that the CDN is cut off from the clients.But even before we do the test, we're already asking, but we don't trust. Like, trust and verify, actually; we do trust but trust and verify. So, we do trust the client is actually another team. So, we do trust the client team that they cache, but we are asking them, “Okay. Can you confirm that you cache? And if you do cache, can you give us access to flush the cache?”We trust them, we trust the answers; we're going to verify. And how do we verify? It's through a chaos engineering test which is, let's cut the client off from the CDN and then see what happens. Which could be, for us, as simple as let's move the file away; we should expect them to not tell us anything because the client will fail to read but it's going to pick from cache, it's not reading from us anyways. So, there is, like, that level of we tell people, “Hey, we're going to test a few things.”We'll not necessarily tell them what. So, we are also not just testing the system, but testing how people react, and if anything happens. If nothing happens, it's fine. They're not going to react to it. So, that's the level of chaos engineering that our team has been performing.Of course, as we always talk about improving reliability for the product, we talked about, “Oh, how is it that chaos engineering as a tool for our customers will play out in the platform?” That conversation now is a little bit with product. So, product has to decide how and when they want to integrate, and then, of course, we're going to be part of that conversation once they're like, “Okay, we're ready to talk about it.” Other teams of VMWare, not necessarily Tanzu, then they do all sorts of chaos engineering testing. So, some of them using tools, open-source or not, and a lot of them do tabletop, basically, theoretical testing as well.Jason: That's an excellent point about getting started. You don't have a product out yet, and I'm sure everybody's anticipating hearing what it is and seeing the release at VMworld, but testing before you have a product; I feel like so many organizations, it's an afterthought, it's the, “I've built the product. It's in production. Now, we need to keep it reliable.” And I think by shifting that forward to thinking about, we've just started diagramming the architecture, let's think about where this can break. And how we can build those tests so that we can begin to do that chaos engineering testing, begin to do that reliability testing during the development of the product so that it ships reliably, rather than shipping and then figuring out how to keep it reliable.Gustavo: Yeah. The way I talked to—and I actually had a conversation with one of our VPs about this—is that you have technical support that is—for the most part, not all the teams from support—but at least one of the tiers of support, you want it to be reactive by design. You can staff quite a few people to react to issues and they can be very good about learning the basics because the customers—if you're acquiring more customers, they are going to be—you're going to have a huge set of customers early in the journey with your product. And you can never make the documentation perfect and the product onboarding perfect; they're going to run into issues. So, that very shallow set of issues, you can have a level of arterial support that is reactive by design.You don't want that tier of support to really go deep into issues forever because they can get caught up into a problem for weeks or months. You kind of going to have—and that's when you add another tier and that's when we get to more of, like, support specialists, and then they split into silos. And eventually, you do get an IC SRE being tier three or tier four, where SRE is a good in-between support organizations and product developers, in the sense that product developers also tend to specialize in certain aspects of a product. SRE wants to be generalists for reliability of a product. And nothing better than to uncover reliability for product is understanding the customer pain, the customer issues.And actually, one thing, one of the projects I can tell you about that we're doing right now is we're improving the reliability of our installation. And we're going for, like, can we accelerate the speed of installs and reduce the issues by better automation, better error handling, and also good—that's where I say day zero. So, day zero is, can we make this install faster, better, and more reliable? And after the installs in day one, can we get better default? Because I say the ergonomics for SRE should be pretty good because we're TKG SREs, so there's [unintelligible 00:35:24] and SRE should feel at home after installing TKG.Otherwise, you can just go install vanilla Kubernetes. And if vanilla Kubernetes does feel at home because it's open-source, it's what most people use and what most people know, but it's missing—because it's just Kubernetes—missing a lot of things around the ecosystem that TKG can install by default, but then when you add a lot of other things, I need to make sure that it feels at home for SREs and operators at large.Jason: It's been fantastic chatting with you. I feel like we can go [laugh] on and on.Gustavo: [laugh].Jason: I've gone longer than I had intended. Before we go, Gustavo, I wanted to ask you if you had anything that you wanted to share, anything you wanted to plug, where can people find you on the internet?Gustavo: Yeah, so I wrote an ebook on how to start your incident lifecycle program. It's not completely out yet, but I'll post on my Twitter account, so twitter.com/stratus. So @stratus, S-T-R-A-T-U-S. We'll put the link on the [notes 00:36:21], too. And so yeah, you can follow me there. I will publish the book once it's out. Kind of explains all about the how to establish an incident lifecycle. And if you want to talk about SRE stuff, or VMware Tanzu or TKG, you can also message me on Twitter.Jason: Thanks for all the information.Gustavo: Thank you, again. Thank you so much for having me. This was really fun. I really appreciate it.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

* Email from Rasmus: Purchasable thread items from earlier editions? * Armor layering or stacking? * Dwarves getting lower initiative penalties for armor? * Flame Weapon on arrows? * Multiple Wounds from high damage results? * Chain casting-type ability for extended duration talents? * Creature Challenge Ratings? * Email from Jason: Thanks for the show. * Email from Shane: Taildancer tongue twister. * Email from Jonathan: Visibility of an active Bone Circle? * Picture or imagery for a bone spirit? * Why can't wing rats from Travar be used as animal companions? * Perspective of Journeyman following other paths. * Journeyman path talents and karma usage. * Dragons in Review: Vestrivan * The Horror marked dragon. * Vasdenjas's sibling, twin-shelled eggs. * Curious like his brother, reached out to the Horrors on purpose to learn more about them. * Thought by the Outcast to be two minds in one body—the dragon and the Horror. * Despoiler's lair in the Twilight Peaks, leads a cult of Horror worshippers. * Possible story hooks involving Vestrivan and his cult. * Vestrivan's game statistics and possible powers. * Vestrivan's appearance in the Second Theran War. Email: edsgpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @EDSGPodcast Josh on Twitter: @LoreMerchant Dan on Twitter: @boice_voice Get product information, developer blogs, and more at www.fasagames.com FASA Games on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fasagamesinc FASA Games Discord Channel: https://discord.gg/uuVwS9u Earthdawn Guild Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/earthdawnguild Earthdawn West Marches: https://discord.gg/hhHDtXW

About JasonJason is now the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures.Links: GitHub: https://github.com/ @jasoncwarner: https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner GitHub: https://github.com/jasoncwarner Jasoncwarner/ama: https://github.com/jasoncwarner/ama TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Jason Warner, the Chief Technology Officer at GifHub, although he pronounces it differently. Jason, welcome to the show.Jason: Thanks, Corey. Good to be here.Corey: So, GitHub—as you insist on pronouncing it—is one of those companies that's been around for a long time. In fact, I went to a training conducted by one of your early folks, Scott Chacon, who taught how Git works over the course of a couple of days, and honestly, I left more confused than I did when I entered. It's like, “Oh, this is super awful. Good thing I'll never need to know this because I'm not really a developer.” And I'm still not really a developer and I still don't really know how Git works, but here we are.And it's now over a decade later; you folks have been acquired by Microsoft, and you are sort of the one-stop-shop, from the de facto perspective of, “I'm going to go share some code with people on the internet. I'll use GitHub to do it.” Because, you know, copying and pasting and emailing Microsoft Word documents around isn't ideal.Jason: That is right. And I think that a bunch of things that you mentioned there, played into, you know, GitHub's early and sustained success. But my God, do you remember the old days when people had to email tar files around or drop them in weird spots?Corey: What the hell do you mean, by, “Old days?” It still blows my mind that the Linux kernel is managed by—they use Git, obviously. Linus Torvalds did write Git once upon a time—and it has the user interface you would expect for that. And the way that they collaborate is not through GitHub or anything like that. No, they use Git to generate patches, which they then email to the mailing list. Which sounds like I'm making it up, like, “Oh, well, yeah, tell another one, but maybe involve a fax machine this time.” But no, that is actually what they do.Jason: It blew my mind when I saw that, too, by the way. And you realize, too, that workflows are workflows, and people will build interesting workflows to solve their use case. Now, obviously, anyone that you would be talking to in 2021, if you walked in and said, “Yeah, install Git. Let's set up an email server and start mailing patches to each other and we're going to do it this way.” They would just kind of politely—or maybe impolitely—show you out of the room, and rightfully [laugh] so. But it works for one of the most important software projects in history: Linux.Corey: Yeah, and it works almost in spite of itself to some extent. You've come a long way as a company because initially, it was, “Oh, there's this amazing, decentralized version control system. How do we make it better? I know, we're going to take off the decentralized part of it and give it a central point that everything can go through.” And collaboratively, it works well, but I think that viewing GitHub as a system that is used to sell free Git repositories to people is rather dramatically missing the point. It feels like it's grown significantly beyond just code repository hosting. Tell me more about that.Jason: Absolutely. I remember talking to a bunch of folks right around when I was joining GitHub, and you know, there was still talk about GitHub as, you know, GitHub for lawyers, or GitHub for doctors, or what could you do in a different way? And you know, social coding as an aspect, and maybe turning into a social network with a resume. And all those things are true to a percentage standpoint. But what GitHub should be in the world is the world's most important software development platform, end-to-end software development platform.We obviously have grown a bunch since me joining in that way which we launched dependency management packages, Actions with built-in CI, we've got some deployment mechanisms, we got advanced security underneath it, we've Codespaces in beta and alpha on top of it now. But if you think about GitHub as, join, share, and see other people's code, that's evolution one. If you see it as world's largest, maybe most developed software development platform, that's evolution two, and in my mind, its natural place where it should be, given what it has done already in the world, is become the world's most important software company. I don't mean the most profitable. I just mean the most important.Corey: I would agree. I had a blog post that went up somewhat recently about the future of cloud being Microsoft's to lose. And it's not because Azure is the best cloud platform out there, with respect, and I don't need you to argue the point. It is very clearly not. It is not like other clouds, but I can see a path to where it could become far better than it is.But if I'm out there and I'm just learning how to write code—because I make terrible life choices—and I go to a boot camp or I follow a tutorial online or I take a course somewhere, I'm going to be writing code probably using VS Code, the open-source editor that you folks launched after the acquisition. And it was pretty clear that Atom wasn't quite where the world was going. Great. Then I'm going to host it on GitHub, which is a natural evolution. Then you take a look at things like GitHub Actions that build in CI/CD pipelines natively.All that's missing is a ‘Deploy to Azure' button that is the next logical step, and you're mostly there for an awful lot of use cases. But you can't add that button until Azure itself gets better. Done right, this has the potential to leave, effectively, every other cloud provider in the dust because no one can touch this.Jason: One hundred percent. I mean, the obvious thing that any other cloud should be looking at with us—or should have been before the acquisition, looking at us was, “Oh, no, they could jump over us. They could stop our funnel.” And I used internal metrics when I was talking to them about partnership that led to the sale, which was I showed them more about their running business than they knew about themselves. I can tell them where they were stacked-ranked against each other, based on the ingress and egress of all the data on GitHub, you know, and various reactions to that in those meetings was pretty astounding.And just with that data alone, it should tell you what GitHub would be capable of and what Azure would be capable of in the combination of those two things. I mean, you did mention the ‘Deploy to Azure' button; this has been a topic, obviously, pre and post-acquisition, which is, “When is that coming?” And it was the one hard rule I set during the acquisition was, there will be no ‘Deploy to Azure' button. Azure has to earn the right to get things deployed to, in my opinion. And I think that goes to what you're saying is, if we put a ‘Deploy to Azure' button on top of this and Azure is not ready for that, or is going to fail, ultimately, that looks bad for all of us. But if it earned the right and it gets better, and it becomes one of those, then, you know, people will choose it, and that is, to me, what we're after.Corey: You have to choose the moment because if you do it too soon, you'll set the entire initiative back five years. Do it too late, and you get leapfrogged. There's a golden window somewhere and finding it is going to be hard. And I think it's pretty clear that the other hyperscalers in this space are learning, or have learned, that the next 10 years of cloud or 15 years of cloud or whatever they want to call it, and the new customers that are going to come are not the same as the customers that have built the first half of the business. And they're trying to wrap their heads around that because a lot of where the growth is going to come from is established blue chips that are used to thinking in very enterprise terms.And people think I'm making fun of them when I say this, but Microsoft has 40 years' experience apologizing to enterprises for computer failures. And that is fundamentally what cloud is. It's about talking computers to business executives because as much as we talk about builders, that is not the person at an established company with an existing IT estate, who gets to determine where $50 million a year in cloud-spend is going to go.Jason: It's [laugh] very, [laugh] very true. I mean, we've entered a different spot with cloud computing in the bell curve of adoption, and if you think that they will choose the best technology every time, well, history of computing is littered with better technologies that have failed because the distribution was better on one side. As you mentioned, Microsoft has 40 years, and I wager that Microsoft has the best sales organizations and the best enterprise accounts and, you know, all that sort of stuff, blah, blah, blah, on that side of the world than anyone in the industry. They can sell to enterprises better than almost anyone in the industry. And the other hyperscalers—there's a reason why [TK 00:08:34] is running Google Cloud right now. And Amazon, classically, has been very, very bad assigned to the enterprises. They just happened to be the first mover.Corey: In the early days, it was easy. You'd have an Amazon salesperson roll up to a company, and the exec would say, “Great, why should we consider running things on AWS?” And the answer was, “Oh, I'm sorry, wrong conversation. Right now you have 80 different accounts scattered throughout your org. I'm just here to help you unify them, get some visibility into it, and possibly give you a discount along the way.” And it was a different conversation. Shadow IT was the sole driver of cloud adoption for a long time. That is no longer true. It has to go in the front door, and that is a fundamental shift in how you go to market.Jason: One hundred percent true, and it's why I think that Microsoft has been so successful with Azure, in the last, let's call it five years in that, is that the early adopters in the second wave are doing that; they're all enterprise IT, enterprise dev shops who are buying from the top down. Now, there is still the bottoms-up adoption that going to be happening, and obviously, bottom-up adoption will happen still going forward, but we've entered the phase where that's not the primary or sole mechanism I should say. The sole mechanism of buying in. We have tops-down selling still—or now.Corey: When Microsoft announced it was acquiring GitHub, there was a universal reaction of, “Oh, shit.” Because it's Microsoft; of course they're going to ruin GitHub. Is there a second option? No, unless they find a way to ruin it twice. And none of it came to pass.It is uniformly excellent, and there's a strong argument that could be made by folks who are unaware of what happened—I'm one of them, so maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong—that GitHub had a positive effect on Microsoft more than Microsoft had an effect on GitHub. I don't know if that's true or not, but I could believe it based upon what I've seen.Jason: Obviously, the skepticism was well deserved at the time of acquisition, let's just be honest with it, particularly given what Microsoft's history had been for about 15—well, 20 years before, previous to Satya joining. And I was one of those people in the late '90s who would write ‘M$' in various forums. I was 18 or 19 years old, and just got into—Corey: Oh, hating Microsoft was my entire personality.Jason: [laugh]. And it was, honestly, well-deserved, right? Like, they had anti-competitive practices and they did some nefarious things. And you know, I talked about Bill Gates as an example. Bill Gates is, I mean, I don't actually know how old he is, but I'm going to guess he's late '50s, early '60s, but he's basically in the redemption phase of his life for his early years.And Microsoft is making up for Ballmer years, and later Gates years, and things of that nature. So, it was well-deserved skepticism, and particularly for a mid-career to older-career crowd who have really grown to hate Microsoft over that time. But what I would say is, obviously, it's different under Satya, and Scott, and Amy Hood, and people like that. And all we really telling people is give us a chance on this one. And I mean, all of us. The people who were running GitHub at the time, including myself and, you know, let Scott and Satya prove that they are who they say they are.Corey: It's one of those things where there's nothing you could have said that would have changed the opinion of the world. It was, just wait and see. And I think we have. It's now, I daresay, gotten to a point where Microsoft announces that they're acquiring some other beloved company, then people, I think, would extend a lot more credit than they did back then.Jason: I have to give Microsoft a ton of credit, too, on this one for the way in which they handled acquisitions, like us and others. And the reason why I think it's been so successful is also the reason why I think so many others die post-acquisition, which is that Microsoft has basically—I'll say this, and I know I won't get fired because it feels like it's true. Microsoft is essentially a PE holding company at this point. It is acquired a whole bunch of companies and lets them run independent. You know, we got LinkedIn, you got Minecraft, Xbox is its own division, but it's effectively its own company inside of it.Azure is run that way. GitHub's got a CEO still. I call it the archipelago model. Microsoft's the landmass underneath the water that binds them all, and finance, and HR, and a couple of other things, but for the most part, we manifest our own product roadmap still. We're not told what to go do. And I think that's why it's successful. If we're going to functionally integrate GitHub into Microsoft, it would have died very quickly.Corey: You clearly don't mix the streams. I mean, your gaming division writes a lot of interesting games and a lot of interesting gaming platforms. And, like, one of the most popularly played puzzle games in the world is a Microsoft property, and that is, of course, logging into a Microsoft account correctly. And I keep waiting for that to bleed into GitHub, but it doesn't. GitHub is a terrific SAML provider, it is stupidly easy to log in, it's great.And at some level, I wish that would bleed into other aspects, but you can't have everything. Tell me what it's like to go through an acquisition from a C-level position. Because having been through an acquisition before, the process looks a lot like a surprise all-hands meeting one day after the markets close and, “Listen up, idiots.” And [laugh] there we go. I have to imagine with someone in your position, it's a slightly different experience.Jason: It's definitely very different for all C-levels. And then myself in particular, as the primary driver of the acquisition, obviously, I had very privy inside knowledge. And so, from my position, I knew what was happening the entire time as the primary driver from the inside. But even so, it's still disconcerting to a degree because, in many ways, you don't think you're going to be able to pull it off. Like, you know, I remember the months, and the nights, and the weekends, and the weekend nights, and all the weeks I spent on the road trying to get all the puzzle pieces lined up for the Googles, or the Microsofts, or the eventually AWSs, the VMwares, the IBMs of the world to take seriously, just from a product perspective, which I knew would lead to, obviously, acquisition conversations.And then, once you get the call from the board that says, “It's done. We signed the letter of intent,” you basically are like, “Oh. Oh, crap. Okay, hang on a second. I actually didn't—I don't actually believe in my heart of hearts that I was going to actually be able to pull that off.” And so now, you probably didn't plan out—or at least I didn't. I was like, “Shit if we actually pulled this off what comes next?” And I didn't have that what comes next, which is odd for me. I usually have some sort of a loose plan in place. I just didn't. I wasn't really ready for that.Corey: It's got to be a weird discussion, too, when you start looking at shopping a company around to be sold, especially one at the scale of GitHub because you're at such a high level of visibility in the entire environment, where—it's the idea of would anyone even want to buy us? And then, duh, of course they would. And you look the hyperscalers, for example. You have, well, you could sell it to Amazon and they could pull another Cloud9, where they shove it behind the IAM login process, fail to update the thing meaningfully over a period of years, to a point where even now, a significant portion of the audience listening to this is going to wonder if it's a service I just made up; it sounds like something they might have done, but Cloud9 sounds way too inspired for an AWS service name, so maybe not. And—which it is real. You could go sell to Google, which is going to be awesome until some executive changes roles, and then it's going to be deprecated in short order.Or then there's Microsoft, which is the wild card. It's, well, it's Microsoft. I mean, people aren't really excited about it, but okay. And I don't think that's true anymore at all. And maybe I'm not being fair to all the hyperscalers there. I mean, I'm basically insulting everyone, which is kind of my shtick, but it really does seem that Microsoft was far and away the best acquirer possible because it has been transformative. My question—if you can answer it—is, how the hell did you see that beforehand? It's only obvious—even knowing what I know now—in hindsight.Jason: So, Microsoft was a target for me going into it, and the reason why was I thought that they were in the best overall position. There was enough humility on one side, enough hubris on another, enough market awareness, probably, organizational awareness to, kind of, pull it off. There's too much hubris on one side of the fence with some of the other acquirers, and they would try to hug us too deeply, or integrate us too quickly, or things of that nature. And I think it just takes a deep understanding of who the players are and who the egos involved are. And I think egos has actually played more into acquisitions than people will ever admit.What I saw was, based on the initial partnership conversations, we were developing something that we never launched before GitHub Actions called GitHub Launch. The primary reason we were building that was GitHub launches a five, six-year journey, and it's got many, many different phases, which will keep launching over the next couple of years. The first one we never brought to market was a partnership between all of the clouds. And it served a specific purpose. One, it allowed me to get into the room with the highest level executive at every one of those companies.Two allow me to have a deep economic conversation with them at a partnership level. And three, it allowed me to show those executives that we knew what GitHub's value was in the world, and really flip the tables around and say, “We know what we're worth. We know what our value is in the world. We know where we sit from a product influence perspective. If you want to be part of this, we'll allow it.” Not, “Please come work with us.” It was more of a, “We'll allow you to be part of this conversation.”And I wanted to see how people reacted to that. You know how Amazon reacted that told me a lot about how they view the world, and how Google reacted to that showed me exactly where they viewed it. And I remember walking out of the Google conversation, feeling a very specific way based upon the reaction. And you know, when I talked to Microsoft, got a very different feel and it, kind of, confirmed a couple of things. And then when I had my very first conversation with Nat, who have known for a while before that, I realized, like, yep, okay, this is the one. Drive hard at this.Corey: If you could do it all again, would you change anything meaningful about how you approached it?Jason: You know, I think I got very lucky doing a couple of things. I was very intentional aspects of—you know, I tried to serendipitously show up, where Diane Greene was at one point, or a serendipitously show up where Satya or Scott Guthrie was, and obviously, that was all intentional. But I never sold a company like this before. The partnership and the product that we were building was obviously very intentional. I think if I were to go through the sale, again, I would probably have tried to orchestrate at least one more year independent.And it's not—for no other reason alone than what we were building was very special. And the world sees it now, but I wish that the people who built it inside GitHub got full credit for it. And I think that part of that credit gets diffused to saying, “Microsoft fixed GitHub,” and I want the people inside GitHub to have gotten a lot more of that credit. Microsoft obviously made us much better, but that was not specific to Microsoft because we're run independent; it was bringing Nat in and helping us that got a lot of that stuff done. Nat did a great job at those things. But a lot of that was already in play with some incredible engineers, product people, and in particular our sales team and finance team inside of GitHub already.Corey: When you take a look across the landscape of the fact that GitHub has become for a certain subset of relatively sad types of which I'm definitely one a household name, what do you think the biggest misconception about the company is?Jason: I still think the biggest misconception of us is that we're a code host. Every time I talk to the RedMonk folks, they get what we're building and what we're trying to be in the world, but people still think of us as SourceForge-plus-plus in many ways. And obviously, that may have been our past, but that's definitely not where we are now and, for certain, obviously, not our future. So, I think that's one. I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor.I think it just has an unfortunate naming convention, as well as, you know, PRs, and MRs, and Git and all that sort of stuff. But we take very different views of the world in how we're approaching things. And then maybe the last thing would be that what we're doing at the scale that we're doing it as is kind of easy. When I think that—you know, when you're serving almost every developer in the world at this point at the scale at which we're doing it, we've got some scale issues that people just probably will never thankfully encounter for themselves.Corey: Well, everyone on Hacker News believes that they will, as soon as they put up their hello world blog, so Kubernetes is the only way to do anything now. So, I'm told.Jason: It's quite interesting because I think that everything breaks at scale, as we all know about from the [hyperclouds 00:20:54]. As we've learned, things are breaking every day. And I think that when you get advice, either operational, technical, or managerial advice from people who are running 10 person, 50 person companies, or X-size sophisticated systems, it doesn't apply. But for whatever reason, I don't know why, but people feel inclined to give that feedback to engineers at GitHub directly, saying, “If you just…” and in many [laugh] ways, you're just like, “Well, I think that we'll have that conversation at some point, you know, but we got a 100-plus-million repos and 65 million developers using us on a daily basis.” It's a very different world.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: One of the things that I really appreciate personally because, you know, when you see something that company does, it's nice to just thank people from time to time, so I'm inviting the entire company on the podcast one by one, at some point, to wind up thanking them all individually for it, but Codespaces is one of those things that I think is transformative for me. Back in the before times, and ideally the after times, whenever I travel the only computer I brought with me for a few years now has been an iPad or an iPad Pro. And trying to get an editor on that thing that works reasonably well has been like pulling teeth, my default answer has just been to remote into an EC2 instance and use vim like I have for the last 20 years. But Code is really winning me over. Having to play with code-server and other things like that for a while was obnoxious, fraught, and difficult.And finally, we got to a point where Codespaces was launched, and oh, it works on an iPad. This is actually really slick. I like this. And it was the thing that I was looking for but was trying to have to monkey patch together myself from components. And that's transformative.It feels like we're going back in many ways—at least in my model—to the days of thin clients where all the heavy lifting was done centrally on big computers, and the things that sat on people's desks were mostly just, effectively, relatively simple keyboard, mouse, screen. Things go back and forth and I'm sure we'll have super powerful things in our pockets again soon, but I like the interaction model; it solves for an awful lot of problems and that's one of the things that, at least from my perspective, that the world may not have fully wrapped it head around yet.Jason: Great observation. Before the acquisition, we were experimenting with a couple of different editors, that we wanted to do online editors. And same thing; we were experimenting with some Action CI stuff, and it just didn't make sense for us to build it; it would have been too hard, there have been too many moving parts, and then post-acquisition, we really love what the VS Code team was building over there, and you could see it; it was just going to work. And we had this one person, well, not one person. There was a bunch of people inside of GitHub that do this, but this one person at the highest level who's just obsessed with make this work on my iPad.He's the head of product design, his name's Max, he's an ex-Heroku person as well, and he was just obsessed with it. And he said, “If it works on my iPad, it's got a chance to succeed. If it doesn't work on my iPad, I'm never going to use this thing.” And the first time we booted up Codespaces—or he booted it up on the weekend, working on it. Came back and just, “Yep. This is going to be the one. Now, we got to work on those, the sanding the stones and those fine edges and stuff.”But it really does unlock a lot for us because, you know, again, we want to become the software developer platform for everyone in the world, you got to go end-to-end, and you got to have an opinion on certain things, and you got to enable certain functionality. You mentioned Cloud9 before with Amazon. It was one of the most confounding acquisitions I've ever seen. When they bought it I was at Heroku and I thought, I thought at that moment that Amazon was going to own the next 50 years of development because I thought they saw the same thing a lot of us at Heroku saw, and with the Cloud9 acquisition, what they were going to do was just going to stomp on all of us in the space. And then when it didn't happen, we just thought maybe, you know, okay, maybe something else changed. Maybe we were wrong about that assumption, too. But I think that we're on to it still. I think that it just has to do with the way you approach it and, you know, how you design it.Corey: Sorry, you just said something that took me aback for a second. Wait, you mean software can be designed? It's not this emergent property of people building thing on top of thing? There's actually a grand plan behind all these things? I've only half kidding, on some level, where if you take a look at any modern software product that is deployed into the world, it seems impossible for even small aspects of it to have been part of the initial founding design. But as a counterargument, it would almost have to be for a lot of these things. How do you square that circle?Jason: I think you have to, just like anything on spectrums and timelines, you have to flex at various times for various things. So, if you think about it from a very, very simple construct of time, you just have to think of time horizons. So, I have an opinion about what GitHub should look like in 10 years—vaguely—in five years much more firmly, and then very, very concretely, for the next year, as an example. So, a lot of the features you might see might be more emergent, but a lot of long-term work togetherness has to be loosely tied together with some string. Now, that string will be tightened over time, but it loosely has to see its way through.And the way I describe this to folks is that you don't wake up one day and say, “I'm going on vacation,” and literally just throw a finger on the map. You have to have some sort of vague idea, like, “Hey, I want to have a beach vacation,” or, “I want to have an adventure vacation.” And then you can kind of pick a destination and say, “I'm going to Hawaii,” or, “I'm going to San Diego.” And if you're standing on the East Coast knowing you're going to San Diego, you basically know that you have to just start marching west, or driving west, or whatever. And now, you don't have to have the route mapped out just yet, but you know that hey, if I'm going due southeast, I'm off course, so how do I reorient to make sure I'm still going in the right direction?That's basically what I think about as high-level, as scale design. And it's not unfair to say that a lot of the stuff is not designed today. Amazon is very famous for not designing anything; they design a singular service. But there's no cohesiveness to what Amazon—or AWS specifically, I should say, in this case—has put out there. And maybe that's not what their strategy is. I don't know the internal workings of them, but it's very clear.Corey: Well, oh, yeah. When I first started working in the AWS space and looking through the console, it like, “What is this? It feels like every service's interface was designed by a different team, but that would—oh…” and then the light bulb went on. Yeah. You ship your culture.Jason: It's exactly it. It works for them, but I think if you're going to try to do something very, very, very different, you know, it's going to look a certain way. So, intentional design, I think, is part of what makes GitHub and other products like it special. And if you think about it, you have to have an end-to-end view, and then you can build verticals up and down inside of that. But it has to work on the horizontal, still.And then if you hire really smart people to build the verticals, you get those done. So, a good example of this is that I have a very strong opinion about the horizontal workflow nature of GitHub should look like in five years. I have a very loose opinion about what the matrix build system of Actions looks like. Because we have very, very smart people who are working on that specific problem, so long as that maps back and snaps into the horizontal workflows. And that's how it can work together.Corey: So, when you look at someone who is, I don't know, the CTO of a wildly renowned company that is basically still catering primarily to developers slash engineers, but let's be honest, geeks, it's natural to think that, oh, they must be the alpha geek. That doesn't really apply to you from everything I've been able to uncover. Am I just not digging deeply enough, or are you in fact, a terrible nerd?Jason: [laugh]. I am. I'm a terrible nerd. I am a very terrible nerd. I feel very lucky, obviously, to be in the position I'm in right now, in many ways, and people call me up and exactly that.It's like, “Hey, you must be king of the geeks.” And I'm like, “[laugh], ah, funny story here.” But um, you know, I joke that I'm not actually supposed to be in tech in first place, the way I grew up, and where I did, and how, I wasn't supposed to be here. And so, it's serendipitous that I am in tech. And then turns out I had an aptitude for distributed systems, and complex, you know, human systems as well. But when people dig in and they start talking about topics, I'm confounded. I never liked Star Wars, I never like Star Trek. Never got an anime, board games, I don't play video games—Corey: You are going to get letters.Jason: [laugh]. When I was at Canonical, oh, my goodness, the stuff I tried to hide about myself, and, like, learn, like, so who's this Boba Fett dude. And, you know, at some point, obviously, you don't have to pretend anymore, but you know, people still assume a bunch stuff because, quote, “Nerd” quote, “Geek” culture type of stuff. But you know, some interesting facts that people end up being surprised by with me is that, you know, I was very short in high school and I grew in college, so I decided that I wanted to take advantage of my newfound height and athleticism as you grow into your body. So, I started playing basketball, but I obsessed over it.I love getting good at something. So, I'd wake up at four o'clock in the morning, and go shoot baskets, and do drills for hours. Well, I got really good at it one point, and I end up playing in a Pro-Am basketball game with ex-NBA Harlem Globetrotter legends. And that's just not something you hear about in most engineering circles. You might expect that out of a salesperson or a marketing person who played pro ball—or amateur ball somewhere, or college ball or something like that. But not someone who ends up running the most important software company—from a technical perspective—in the world.Corey: It's weird. People counterintuitively think that, on some level, that code is the answer to all things. And that, oh, all this human interaction stuff, all the discussions, all the systems thinking, you have to fit a certain profile to do that, and anyone outside of that is, eh, they're not as valuable. They can get ignored. And we see that manifesting itself in different ways.And even if we take a look at people whose profess otherwise, we take a look at folks who are fresh out of a boot camp and don't understand much about the business world yet; they have transformed their lives—maybe they're fresh out of college, maybe didn't even go to college—and 18 weeks later, they are signing up for six-figure jobs. Meanwhile, you take a look at virtually any other business function, in order to have a relatively comparable degree of earning potential, it takes years of experience and being very focused on a whole bunch of other things. There's a massive distortion around technical roles, and that's a strange and difficult thing to wrap my head around. But as you're talking about it, it goes both ways, too. It's the idea of, “Oh, I'll become technical than branch into other things.” It sounded like you started off instead with a non-technical direction and then sort of adopted that from other sides. Is that right, or am I misremembering exactly how the story unfolds?Jason: No, that's about right. People say, “Hey, when did I start programming?” And it's very in vogue, I think, for a lot of people to say, “I started programming at three years old,” or five years old, or whatever, and got my first computer. I literally didn't get my first computer until I was 18-years-old. And I started programming when I got to a high school co-op with IBM at 17.It was Lotus Notes programming at the time. Had no exposure to it before. What I did, though, in college was IBM told me at the time, they said, “If you get a computer science degree will guarantee you a job.” Which for a kid who grew up the way I grew up, that is manna from heaven type of deal. Like, “You'll guarantee me a job inside where don't have to dig ditches all day or lay asphalt? Oh, my goodness. What's computer science? I'll go figure it out.”And when I got to school, what I realized was I was really far behind. Everyone was that ubergeek type of thing. So, what I did is I tried to hack the system, and what I said was, “What is a topic that nobody else has an advantage on from me?” And so I basically picked the internet because the internet was so new in the mid-'90s that most people were still not fully up to speed on it. And then the underpinnings in the internet, which basically become distributed systems, that's where I started to focus.And because no one had a real advantage, I just, you know, could catch up pretty quickly. But once I got into computers, it turned out that I was probably a very average developer, maybe even below average, but it was the system's thinking that I stood out on. And you know, large-scale distributed systems or architectures were very good for me. And then, you know, that applies not, like, directly, but it applies decently well to human systems. It's just, you know, different types of inputs and outputs. But if you think about organizations at scale, they're barely just really, really, really complex and kind of irrational distributed systems.Corey: Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you're up to, how you think about the world, where can they find you?Jason: Twitter's probably the best place at this point. Just @jasoncwarner on Twitter. I'm very unimaginative. My name is my GitHub handle. It's my Twitter username. And that's the best place that I, kind of, interact with folks these days. I do an AMA on GitHub. So, if you ever want to ask me anything, just kind of go to jasoncwarner/ama on GitHub and drop a question in one of the issues and I'll get to answering that. Yeah, those are the best spots.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to those things in the [show notes 00:33:52]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Jason: Thanks, Corey. It's been fun.Corey: Jason Warner, Chief Technology Officer at GitHub. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review in your podcast platform of choice anyway, along with a comment that includes a patch.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

About JasonJason Yee is Director of Advocacy at Gremlin where he helps companies build more resilient systems by learning from how they fail. He also leads the internal Chaos Engineering practices to make Gremlin more reliable. Previously, he worked at Datadog, O'Reilly Media, and MongoDB. His pandemic-coping activities include drinking whiskey, cooking everything in a waffle iron, and making craft chocolate.Links: Break Things On Purpose podcast: https://www.gremlin.com/podcast/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitbisect TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored by ExtraHop. ExtraHop provides threat detection and response for the Enterprise (not the starship). On-prem security doesn't translate well to cloud or multi-cloud environments, and that's not even counting IoT. ExtraHop automatically discovers everything inside the perimeter, including your cloud workloads and IoT devices, detects these threats up to 35 percent faster, and helps you act immediately. Ask for a free trial of detection and response for AWS today at extrahop.com/trial.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by LaunchDarkly. Take a look at what it takes to get your code into production. I'm going to just guess that it's awful because it's always awful. No one loves their deployment process. What if launching new features didn't require you to do a full-on code and possibly infrastructure deploy? What if you could test on a small subset of users and then roll it back immediately if results aren't what you expect? LaunchDarkly does exactly this. To learn more, visit launchdarkly.com and tell them Corey sent you, and watch for the wince.Corey: Jason, thanks for joining me.Jason: Thanks for having me, Corey.Corey: So, you're one of those people that we've always passed at conferences and other events, sort of like ships in the night. We hang out in group settings, but strangely, for whatever reason, despite traveling in the same circles for years now, we've never really sat down had an in-depth conversation with each other to the point where I feel like both of us are sort of wondering on some level, “Does he just not like me?” It's been one of those items for me of, I want to catch up with Jason at some point and learn what makes him tick. And then pandemic happened. Well, no more. Thank you for talking to me.Jason: Yeah. And again, thanks for having me. I've always felt the same way. We're always at these speaker dinners, or just hanging out with friends, and for some reason, I'm, like, at one end of the table, and you're at the other. And we've just never had this opportunity.Corey: Exactly. Because you actually do a lot of good in the community, and I'm usually at the kids table. Which is, frankly, what happens, and honestly, it's the right call. But you and I, I guess, are aligned in a few weird and interesting ways. And—well, let's talk about what you do. You're the Director of Advocacy at Gremlin. What is Gremlin, first off, and then what is a Director of Advocacy really do?Jason: So, Gremlin is a chaos engineering platform, or a reliability platform as we're trying to sell it now. Because we started out doing chaos engineering, so some of the folks that were doing chaos engineering back at Netflix and back at Amazon, decided, most people aren't Netflix, most people aren't Amazon; let's build something that everybody can use. So, Kolton and Forni, our founders, got together, they started this up. And the idea is really, how can we help people make things more reliable? And obviously, chaos engineering is one of those ways, so that's what they started off with.And we've got a platform that really just makes that easy and safe to do. So, the second question about what is Director of Advocacy? I know you like to make fun of AWS naming, and I feel like it is sort of a weird, nonsense name because it doesn't actually explain anything. But essentially, it's developer relations. So, I have the task of talking to all sorts of folks who aren't customers—really, just anybody in tech—about chaos engineering and why they should be doing it, and how to make applications and systems more reliable.And then, aside from that, I also get to interact with our customers and help them out. So, I'm a combination of customer success or success engineer slash support slash the advocate side is advocating for their needs within the organization. So, when they make a product request, I pass that on, see what we can do about that. So, it's sort of a mishmash of all these different roles.Corey: I want to draw a bit of a parallel that DevRel slash advocacy slash evangelism universe to the sysadmin world where then we started calling ourselves DevOps and that led to an enormous schism around is DevOps a job title or not? “No, but it pays a lot better, so yes.” Then SRE. “Well, you're not real, SRE,” and the rest. It comes down to quibbling over definition of terms instead of, you know, doing work. And I feel like, on some level, the whole DevRel space has, in some respects, gotten twisted around something that resembles the same axle. Is that unfair?Jason: No, that's absolutely correct. There is that question of what is DevRel? How do you define it? And part of that is how do I justify my job? And on top of that, how did—at least pre-pandemic, how do I justify the company spending tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, not only for my salary but to fly me around the world to get on stage and say things.Corey: Right. And it looks from a distance, an awful lot like, okay, you cost as much as an engineer, you don't write any code to make what we do any better. Your expense budget is about the same as your salary in some cases, and then you travel far away to what looks like a giant party to hang out with your friends. And you get on stage and say, “I work at company X. Thanks. They're great. Now, for the next 45 minutes, let's talk about the right standing desk for you.” And it becomes a very difficult sell internally. And for a group that prides itself on advocating for its company. They don't often seem to do as good of a job advocating for themselves, internally.Jason: Absolutely. There's always the discussion of KPIs. How do we measure the impact of what developer evangelism, DevRel does? And it's a hard thing, partly because every company is a little bit different. Because nobody's really defined this, DevRel often is very fluid and just fills in the cracks of whatever a company needs.So, for some companies that might be doing support, right? I've heard people being called DevRel, and they literally are just on forums all day answering questions, or writing documentation, or speaking. So, it's really just this nebulous thing of whatever a company needs.Corey: It becomes almost this weird expression, in some respects, of marketing. Of course, a lot of DevRel folks will scramble at the objection, “Oh, we are not in marketing.” And that's always said with a very sneering tone towards marketing because those people are terrible. I argue that marketing is, A) wildly misunderstood, B) incredibly valuable, and C) where DevRel in many respects finds its spiritual home because it's very hard to tie your marketing budget as a company to definable results and do attribution effectively, but there's clear value to the company in things that can't necessarily be measured, or at least not without a heck of a lot of work. That is the piece, in many respects, the DevRel is missing. But the first thing that they want to make clear is that we don't work for marketing. It's a very weird feeling.Jason: It's very weird because as I explain that DevRel often is filling in the cracks and is very fluid, that's because my personal perspective of DevRel is inclusive. I try to get involved in as many teams as I can, so I'm constantly working with engineering, and with marketing, and with customer success, and really everybody. And then on the flip side, you have people that define it by what it's not. I'm not marketing, I'm not this. And you end up cutting yourself off.Corey: And neither are you an accountant, but I didn't ask if you were, so yeah.Jason: But at the same time, you're not an accountant, but you should have some sort of notion of what the finances of the company are because that gives you some sort of indication on whether you're going to get laid off, for one, but also just for the success of the company. And I think maybe it's just the engineering mindset that I've had from being an engineer of you take everything that and you try to learn everything that you can and put it together. And so, for me, that comes from having experience working in marketing, having experience working in engineering; how can I put these things that I know together to solve a problem? So, rather than saying, “I'm not marketing,” I'm going to ignore that because as you mentioned, marketing's super valuable, especially the way that they've done data-driven marketing now. It used to be like madmen days, you'd throw up a billboard, and who knows if it works, but you paid a bunch of money for it. And now they're so data-driven, and everything's tracked. And, yeah, you may not be able to directly connect a few things, but you get a much better sense of where your value is, and where your time should be spent.Corey: Absolutely. And you can get—I don't know—the 80% of the way there, and then the last 20% will drive you mad, so at some point, you just shrug, give up, and that's okay. Similar in many respects to an AWS bill. It just becomes such a weird process to explore. And from a certain lens, when you have those cross-cutting functional types who are doing DevRel, they start to sound almost enthusiastic amateurs in the various disciplines that they bring together.“Yes, I'm an engineer, but not as deep on the engineering side, as some of my colleagues who do engineering 40 hours a week and then some.” “Oh, we're part of product.” But strangely, to work in product you usually have significant experience and training in how to conduct user experience studies and user interviews, whereas an awful lot of the DevRel input back to product is ‘word on the street style' stuff.Jason: Yeah. And both are extremely valuable. It's obviously very valuable to have that process of doing user studies and actually getting that hard data, but as we all know, that word on the street and what's the general vibe of folks at a conference or folks at a meetup really informs things that usually doesn't get asked in those formal user studies.Corey: Completely. And telling stories from my own world, back when I was, you know, having a real job and able to be fired by a whole bunch of different people—and was—there was the constant justification story of why should you go to that conference and speak? Why would we spend that money? Why shouldn't it just be a personal thing that you take vacation for? Now that I own the company, it's a different story because I know that when I go out and participate in the community, good things happen, but I don't have the need anymore to justify it, other than to myself and possibly to my business partner.There are very real stories that I've looked at here where I go to a conference, I start talking to someone, we keep in touch, they wind up changing companies, we continue to talk, suddenly, they have an AWS bill problem, and now they become a customer. Yeah, it turns out that's super hard to predict when you're looking at flight prices to go to that conference in the first place. And there are many other conferences that nothing came out of it, I think, but you never really know.Jason: Yeah. One of the nice things about my job and one of the reasons that I joined Gremlin was the idea that chaos engineering is still pretty new. And so in my past experience with DevRel, it very much was your exact experience; how has what you said on stage or the introduction of our brand to an audience made an impact? And since chaos engineering has been so new, I've gotten to take a little bit of a step back from that. Obviously, I want people to get Gremlin or to try Gremlin, but even if folks just try chaos engineering and have a better understanding of it, that's a big goal of my job. That means that I win if you try chaos engineering, even if that's with an open-source tool. So, that's one of the reasons that I'm super happy about where I'm at right now in terms of DevRel is, I get to be DevRel for an entire practice, rather than just a company.Corey: And, on some level, you get to define what success and failure looks like among your team. But turn it around for a second; how do you wind up articulating the value and story of what you do to the larger business? Because I've seen the approach if you can't measure DevRel that way—regardless of what that way is—and it's always this, don't ask us for metrics. Don't ask us to really, functionally, be accountable for much. And from a business strategic point of view, where you're not deeply involved with aspects of what that leads to, “Okay, so it rounds to zero, and wow, I'm spending an awful lot of money on something that doesn't really add any value. I could spend that money on things that do instead.” And then you see a bunch of negative things happen. Like, as soon as there's a layoff or a downturn, that entire group winds up getting decimated in some cases, even when, in reality, that's the thing that should be invested in the most.Jason: Absolutely, yeah. One of the things that I've always loved is people talk about metrics. And yes, we definitely get that from the marketing side. And so I do have metrics on things like how many workshops we run. And those people are obviously, we capture those leads, they go through the marketing funnel, et cetera, et cetera.But then there's the idea of how many engineers out there have those same metrics? We always complain about you shouldn't count the number of lines of code because that's stupid. You shouldn't count all these other things. But generally, most engineering teams are working off of quarterly OKRs or some sort of time period, what those goals are and the product that they're going to ship. And so I've tried to adopt the same thing in every DevRel organization that I've been in, is what are the high-level goals?And if you can get leadership to buy off on those, for example, we're currently working on an online learning platform. We don't have tight metrics about how many people should be registered and complete the course and be certified yadda, yadda, but we have a good sense that if we build this, it's going to be very beneficial in a number of ways. And leadership agrees, and they've bought off on that, and they've signed their names to it. And so for us, what does success look like in terms of this is actually implementing that and shipping it.Corey: It's a really strange and really powerful thing, but you take a look at so many different companies who have done well and companies that haven't done well, and the way that they engage not just with the ecosystem, but with the community specifically, in many cases seems to be the path that it follows. I mean, not to pick on them unnecessarily, but Chef had a wonderful community; they engaged absolutely flawlessly, from what I could tell, even when I didn't agree with people or particularly like them in some cases, the people who worked at Chef almost demanded respect, and it was pretty clear, even as someone who didn't use it myself, that they were a force to be reckoned with. And then they wind up effectively losing a lot of the people that made it special, the community moved on, they sold it to a company no one had ever heard of, and now it's one of those, oof, they deserved a better end. Maybe that's unfair, but that is the perception.Jason: Yeah, I would say the same thing sort of happened with Puppet, the idea that they built a nice community, and back to my point of, like, you have a project, you work on shipping that, you don't really track those numbers. That's what I saw from both communities Chef and Puppet is they had these strong communities, they were doing things, and the goal was the community. And I don't know—I haven't talked to Nathan, I haven't talked to folks at Puppet, but I suspect that they weren't simply about how many people—like, what's the total number of people that we would say are in our community? There was a value on, we want to do this thing and we have a sense of the quality of the community, and how much people just are engaged, and interested, and want to help each other.Corey: The piece that also gets lost as well is companies are out there to turn a profit. And building a vibrant open-source community who loves your open-source offering but aren't in a position to either champion or purchase the thing is often viewed as a complete waste of time by the business. So, they in turn, then pivot business models and do things that insult or alienate the community, and suddenly are perplexed by the massive groundswell of negative publicity they get, of people actively advocating that companies not use them. And their position is somewhat understandable in a form of, “What the hell is this? You weren't spending money on us before. Now, you're still not spending money on us, but you hate us. What gives?” Community is a weird thing to wrap your arms around.Jason: Absolutely. I would say it's hard to wrap your arms around it when you're not valuing the relationship. It's like any relationship where you have ulterior motives. If you can't actually connect with people, it's never going to go right.Corey: No. And it also can't be self-serving, or seem to be self-serving—spoiler, the best way to make sure you're not perceived a certain way is to not actually be that way—we take a look at Last Week in AWS, my newsletter, it is explicitly aimed at people who want to keep up with what's going on in the world of AWS, which is fair. It is not aimed at people who have a big AWS bill and don't know what to do about it. And sure I reference periodically in that newsletter what I do, but it's not a sales piece. It's not every week hammering home, buy whatever it is I'm selling because that's how you alienate and lose the audience.I've always felt that by being top-of-mind for the problem and reminding people I exist every week with something that's useful and ideally a bit funny, then, when they have that expensive problem, they'll think of me. That was my theory four years ago, and I'm still here, so apparently, it wasn't completely off base.Jason: Yeah, well, that works, right, because nobody wants to subscribe to a newsletter to hear about the service. If they knew they needed your service, they would just buy your service. So, what's the value of the newsletter? What's the value that you're offering to people? And that is, well, the fact that there's so much freaking news about AWS every week that it does require a newsletter.Similarly for me, what's the value? Well, if people knew that they needed Gremlin, they would just come talk to me. But they don't. They were concerned about the needs that they have, about how do I build a more reliable application, “My stuff's always breaking. I'm having too many incidents. I've done everything that I can think of. What's next.” So, it's just offering that.Corey: If your mean time to WTF for a security alert is more than a minute, it's time to look at Lacework. Lacework will help you get your security act together for everything from compliance service configurations to container app relationships, all without the need for PhDs in AWS to write the rules. If you're building a secure business on AWS with compliance requirements, you don't really have time to choose between antivirus or firewall companies to help you secure your stack. That's why Lacework is built from the ground up for the Cloud: low effort, high visibility and detection. To learn more, visit lacework.com.Corey: And let's be very clear here, you have a much harder challenge than I do. Because it turns out that you don't need to be deep into the weeds of corporate finance, to understand the concept of wasting money on the AWS bill might not be the best thing in the world. Once you get more into the nuances, you start to realize, “Oh, being able to predict the AWS bill sounds super awesome, too.” But none of those are a particularly heavy lift, whereas, “Wow, your site is crappy and falls over a lot. Have you considered breaking it on purpose?” Sounds deranged the first time someone hears it.Jason: Absolutely, yeah. That's the number one thing that I hear all the time is—and people joke about it. I don't need chaos engineering; I do regular deploys.Corey: That sounds almost like someone was sitting in a blameless post mortem and got carried away trying to keep it blameless because otherwise, it was going to be their fault, and accidentally invented entire field.Jason: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's definitely blameless if everybody is causing things to break; then we all share the blame. It is a funny thing. It's a tricky thing to sell the people and I think it's tricky because we have these misconceptions about what that actually means, the idea of breaking things on purpose. And trying to move away from that because the breaking really isn't the goal.And oftentimes, they're not actually even breaking things; you're stressing them out or you're simulating things, so nothing's really broken. But once you start thinking of it as that idea of I'm going to test my assumptions, right? I think that things work this way, but I don't know, I'm not super confident that it actually will do that. And we do that all the time when we're developing applications or infrastructure. I set things up, I'm pretty sure that it's going to work a certain way.Documentation says that this app works this way. Does it actually do that? Well, I can either find out when it doesn't do that at some random point, or I can actually try to force it to act in that way, or to encounter that bad environment that I'm a little suspect about. And so we do this all the time with other things. And oftentimes, we'll do this just mentally as, “What would happen if—” and you kind of play it out in your mind.And that's actually a great way to start with chaos engineering, rather than actually doing it, just that mental game. “What do you think would happen if this goes wrong?” Play that out in your head? Cool. Once you're comfortable with that you're like, I think this is what my next steps would be. I'm pretty sure there's documentation here, or I've gone and checked and assured that there's docs, or run books, or whatever, why not give it a try?Corey: It's one of those areas where what have you got to lose? I mean, as you just said, your site breaks all the time anyway, before you even touch it's stability, what happens if the database just suddenly increases latency through the roof? What happens if suddenly all of us-east-1 is hard down? In many cases the answer is, we don't really care about our website anymore because the world is not going to care about the internet not working that day, in the context of what we do. In other shops, yeah, that matters, and we kind of still need the power grid to work.So, there's a definite question of what failure modes are worth planning for and what aren't, but even going through that exercise is fantastic. I used to do things like that from a sysadmin perspective, asking companies when I was asked to build out a mail server. “Great, how much downtime is acceptable?” And they said, “Absolutely none.” I said, “Great. I'll need a budget of $20 billion to start, and when that runs out, I'll come back for more.” And they said, “Wait, what are you talking about?”And we said, “Oh, now we're negotiating with the business.” And it turned out what they really meant was, “It would be nice if the mail server worked during business hours most of the time.” And, “Oh, okay. I can do that for slightly less.” And it really just came down to what do you value? What is important to your business?Jason: Yeah. How much reliability do you need? Although one of the key things that I always point out is, a lot of times people are like, “Oh, you don't need 99.9% reliability; you could probably get by with less than 90 because people aren't using your application at night, they're not using it on the weekends, yadda, yadda.” The other problem with that, though, is you rarely control when those outages happen.So sure, if it happens in the middle of the night, and nobody's using it, great. Just keep sleeping. As you start to work on this, though, there is the idea of it could happen at any time, so let's actually test things to ensure that if it happens at the least opportune time, things actually work the way that we expect.Corey: And that's an incredibly valuable thing. See, you're already convincing me on this. And clearly, you're very effective at that advocacy role. How do you hire and how do you determine who's a great fit? Because I'm imagining that bringing someone in, in an advocate role, and their position being, “Oh, at no point, can you ever measure me on any context, and just assume that what I'm doing is amazing and great.”That becomes a hard thing to do. When I was talking to companies about possibly doing evangelist style roles, years ago, I asked, “How will you know if I'm being successful in this job?” And one of the answers was, “Well, you speak at a certain number of tier-one conferences a year.” “Cool, what are those?” And, they listed off a bunch and cool, there's only one in that list that I'm not scheduled to speak at this year, so do I get a raise?People try and aim at the wrong thing in their quest to articulate what they really value, but what they really value is hard to measure. So, how do you evaluate people on a basis of are they doing what they should be doing, or are there ways that they can be coached to improve, or are they just not effective in the role at all?Jason: Yeah. Well, I think you mentioned two great things, are they doing what they're supposed to be doing? And it comes back to every quarter, we're laying out the goals of what do we want to accomplish this quarter? And we make them achievable, so hopefully, by the end of the quarter, you've achieved this thing that not only the team, but senior leadership has decided is a good thing for the company. And to that point, if it's not, if we do that thing and nothing happens, and it's—or it's bad for the company, at least we can say, “Hey, senior leadership, you are the people that thought this was a good idea, too.” But that said, we try not to do the blame. We try to iterate on things and experiment a lot. Especially at Gremlin, we're all about experimentation, so we're constantly trying things. But ultimately, it's are you getting this thing done that we've agreed that we're going to get done?But you also mentioned that second thing about growth. I think that's something that I always look for with anybody, whether that's DevRel or engineering. I want people that are interested enough in the job that they want to do it well. There's something about it that they really love or they're really into, and they want to master that. And so part of my goal as a leader is trying to help people along that path of what do you find interesting? For example, last year, we were working on those tiers, as we're trying to figure out what does it actually look like. Because we're really small team at Gremlin, and so as I'm starting to consider how do I promote people?What are the various, like, levels or tiers of going from an advocate, to a senior advocate, to whatever is beyond that? So, I asked the team, really, “What do you think that would look like? What do you think the next level for your career is? What is the thing that you want to master?” Because ultimately, people have more investment when they're choosing their destination and they're choosing their direction.And so if I can help people do that, just define what's the next thing that you want to tackle? What do you think mastery or the next level of your career looks like? How can we help you get there? So, that's what I am for.Corey: For better or worse, it seems to be working. I remember back when Gremlin was a rando startup idea a couple people had and now I'm starting to see you folks, basically everywhere.Jason: Yeah. Again, we've got a small team, but it's a great team. So, Ana Medina has been on the team, actually, before I joined, but she's been doing a fantastic job and she has been working on a lot of our educational outreach. And then Pat Higgins on the team actually started on the engineering side. So, he was one of our front-end engineers; he's been working on a lot of really great tools.He helped me restart the Break Things On Purpose podcast. So, we're into season two of that now—and by the way, we should have you on that show as well. But yeah, we're doing a lot of fun stuff, and folks are happy. So, try to keep them challenged, and we'll see what's next.Corey: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing how the story continues to evolve. It's a fascinating field that went from, “That is ridiculous,” to, “Oh, that's great but it would not apply to what I do,” to, in my case, it actually would not help me in any way with what I do because it turns out, well, what if an AWS region goes down and you can't produce your newsletter the usual way? Oh, I'll write it by hand that way because suddenly I have a much bigger story to talk about that week.Jason: I am curious, though, speaking of having you on the podcast. Oftentimes, we talk about reliability, and having never had to deal with AWS bills because they always go to somebody else in finance, I am curious how reliability ties into the cost of what you're paying for AWS? Because I can imagine things like—a common thing that we hear about is, “I'm moving a lot of stuff to Lambdas.” Like, great. Serverless. It's cool, it's hot. How is that charged?Corey: Right.Jason: Obviously, by time.Corey: Oh, yeah.Jason: So, if it's charged by how long something takes, what if your latency goes up? What if your resources are constrained? How does this actually affect things? And how does that impact how you think about reliability not just from a is it up or down? How's my customer looking at it? But maybe from what your AWS bill looks like?Corey: I love where you're going with that. And it's the conversations everyone loves to have as about three levels beyond where most companies actually are. Easy example that sounds like something in the distant past, but it's very real today: I want to store data in multiple availability zones for durability purposes and making sure that we are reliably up. Well, every time a gigabyte crosses an availability zone boundary, that cost two cents. And then you have to pay to store it twice.So, there's a question of how much is having multiple sets of that data worth? And the cloud-native answer to that is, “Oh, put it in S3. There's no cross-charges there. Their durability is ridiculous, and you can access it a whole bunch of different ways, provided your application supports it.” But that's not a fit for everything.And you find that saving money, and being reliable, are at some point completely at odds with each other. And this is incidentally, why we don't do this as a tool, we do it as a consulting engagement. There are times where, for business purposes, you will want to spend more on reliability. Because saving money that accidentally takes your company down for a month is not money you should be saving.Jason: Yeah.Corey: Now, the real fun thing I want to see from Gremlin one of these days from a implementation perspective is, just for fun, we're going to run a chaos injection experiment where we decide to cancel the credit card tied to the account and then also remove the increasingly frantic alerts from your email when that happens, and see how long it takes you to realize the giant single point of failure that no one really thinks about existing, but absolutely does.Jason: So, I am curious, for folks that are listening who are engaged with the chaos engineering community, or at least follow Corey's newsletter and have seen updates, AWS has announced their own chaos engineering tool, the Fault Injection Simulator, which to Coreys skill of poorly named things, that actually isn't a simulator. It does inject real faults, so it may be—S should be service. One of their faults, though, that they can do is API throttling, which essentially could simulate the idea of, you haven't paid your bill; we're turning things off. So, Gremlin is working with the AWS folks, we're trying to figure out great ways that we can work together so that people can use both Gremlin and AWS FIS. So, I'll let you know if that becomes a thing, and maybe we can get some API access to billing as well.Corey: I'd love to see it. Please keep me looped in. Thanks so much for taking the time to basically go all over the world of DevRel and probably make some lifelong enemies in the process. If people want to hear more about what you have to say, where can they find you?Jason: Yeah, I'm on Twitter. My Twitter handle is @gitbisect—and by the way, if anybody tweets about Git bisect, it is a fantastic tool, fantastic utility within Git—oftentimes, I will respond. But that's where to find me on Twitter. Otherwise, you can find me on [unintelligible 00:31:30] podcast, Break Things On Purpose. It's available in all the platforms.Corey: Excellent. We will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:31:37]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really do appreciate it.Jason: Yeah, thanks, again. It's been long overdue, and I'm glad we finally made it happen.Corey: Awesome. Jason Yee, Director of Advocacy at Gremlin, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment saying that the best thing to test breaking in production is your DevRel team.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

What stock market myths should be abandoned for a more profitable future? ================ LISTENER QUESTION/COMMENTS ================ How do I set myself up financially if I'm getting married soon (Dani) How do you pick a good insurance company if you don't like their quarterback (Jason) Thanks for the motivation to spearhead our 401(k) at the office (Ryan) ================ TOPICS ================ Bitcoin Bonanza! Read between the lines before you believe the hype. RED ALERT WARNING - New email scam for virus software. ================ ENCORE ================ Get your questions answered on the show: GoAskScott.com Schools Don't Teach About Money. Make Sure Your Child Doesn't End Up A Money Moron. Click To Learn More: https://BestMoneyAcademy.com?utm_source=libsyn  

Mini malls, shopping centers, and large department stores all still exist and remain popular despite their digital counterparts But online marketplaces are where more and more brands are gathering to not just sell goods, but to get a better 360 view of their customers, and gain access to sell products from other big name brands that fit their marketplace niche. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, I explored that idea a bit more with Jason Wyatt, the Executive Chairman at Marketplacer, a business dedicated to creating marketplaces. We dove into the various ways that Jason has seen marketplaces evolve, especially in recent years. Plus, Jason talked about some of the incredible innovation that he’s seen take place  thanks to marketplaces — including the birth of Providoor, an Australian marketplace for restaurants that was built as a reaction to COVID-19 and reached a $100 million run rate within 12 weeks. We talked about how the marketplace connections made that possible, and also how the B2B landscape can be revolutionized thanks to marketplaces. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Getting The Bigger Picture: By creating a marketplace, businesses can get a much deeper picture into the attributes of their customers, while also gaining access to inventory and products to sell from big name brands. The key to success? Curation.We Have A Connection: One of the greatest advantages of a marketplace are the connections that can be formed within them. Especially from a B2B perspective, because for so long those buyers have been left out of the ecommerce equation. They desire the same level of connection and ease that those in B2C have come to expect though, and marketplaces have provided a way to create community and engagement that has made B2B selling and buying much easier.Long Live Loyalty: Big brands have long tapped into loyalty programs as a way to earn customer trust and keep them coming back. By expanding point systems to usage within a marketplace, brands are now becoming even more trustworthy and respected in the eyes of consumers, who can all of a sudden get more bang for their buck. Additionally, the rise of wide-ranging marketplace loyalty strategies will likely become a new way for retailers to attract customers to newer marketplaces.For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we’re ready for what’s next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, I'm Stephanie Postles CEO at mission.org and your host of Up Next in Commerce. Today on the show, we have Jason Wyatt, who currently serves as the executive chairman of Marketplacer. Jason, welcome.Jason:Hi Stephanie, thanks so much for having me on the show today.Stephanie:Thanks for hopping on at 7:00 am. I think you're one of the earliest guests I've talked to over in Australia, so I appreciate you coming on and joining me for a fun chat.Jason:No worries at all. It's just a pleasure to be on the show and talk to your community.Stephanie:I was hoping we could start back in your... way back in the early days when you were 13, because I saw a fun story about what you were doing back then and a little entrepreneurial spirit that was going on, and I was hoping you can kind of share what you're doing back then so people can get to know you a bit before we dive into Marketplacer. This is all around a loan that you got from your dad if you know what I'm talking about.Jason:Well, I might, I was actually... I was a mad sports fan, as the majority of Australians are in this country. And I was playing tennis at the time, if I'm on the right track with this story. And we used to play a lot and pretty competitive. But my brother was a lot better than me, but I used to sort of grab onto his heels, but we constantly used to break racket strings. And we didn't come from this massive affluent family. We come from a family of just, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But dad, what he did do is he loaned us the money to buy our own stringing racket. He just said, "If you keep breaking these strings, well you got to fix them yourself."Jason:My brother and I took advantage of that situation. We figured we had an unfair advantage versus the other tennis players within the group. And then what we actually did is we turned that into a little tennis racket stringing business. So at the age of sort of 13 or 14, we were making a hundred bucks a racket, stringing out sort of four rackets a night and we had a little good business going on. I suppose the entrepreneurial spirit sort of started at a very, very young age where we had a problem to solve and then we solved it for other people.Stephanie:I love that. It definitely rang close to home because I was out in my neighbor's yard, raking, weeding doing anything I could just to earn $5 here and there. And I love hearing about how other people had that itch early on too, and seeing what it turned into later on in life.Stephanie:I'd love to jump into Marketplacer a bit and hear what is it? When did you create it? And what are you guys up to today?Jason:Marketplacer is probably the most fascinating business that I've ever been associated with, because it enabled so much global connection and enables people and businesses all over the world to sell things they don't own and to really supercharge commerce. And the story started back when my co-founder and I, Sam Salter, we just had a simple idea 13 years ago to make it easier for people to buy and sell bicycles. And we created a business called BikeExchange. Think of cars.com for bikes. You're buying a new bike and you want to see everything in one single destination or you're selling your bike and you want to sell it to a community that's a trusted community, has a sense of belonging behind it. And we created BikeExchange. But in doing that we had some really, really big, tough entrepreneurial problems to solve.Jason:We had to come up with a sales and marketing plan. We had to come up with a customer success program, but most importantly, the technology never existed. So, we not only have to be great salespeople, not only a great customer focused, but we had to become technologists at the same time. And we just thought, in everything, in creating a business, in creating a marketplace on a global scale it's a problem that we could help other entrepreneurs or other businesses now actually start to use a platform to enable them to be able to create it. So the story was born out of solving our own problem, out of eating our own dog food in a technology term. But now we help people all over the world in 10 countries solve that marketplace journey, of really just making it easy to connect a customer and community to make it easier for them to sell things they don't own and to supercharge commerce. And I'm sure we're going to unpick what that means in a lot more depth over the next hour or so.Stephanie:That's awesome. What's wild to me is that building a marketplace is notoriously like the hardest thing you can do in commerce. Everyone struggles with supply side, demand side, how to build which one first, and you're not only doing it once. You're replicating it, using your software and doing it with multiple industries. How do you even go about approaching it, especially if it's a new marketplace?Stephanie:You had your bike one, I know earlier you were talking about meal delivery from restaurants, how do you even think about building a new marketplace and solving for both sides of the market?Jason:It's a really good question because we always identify what we consider to be an unfair advantage when we help our clients and customers really figure out whether it's a worthwhile strategic project for them. Because it's a strategic project to go through, that marketplace journey. And the unfair advantage has really been always anchored around two core elements. The first being an existing community or audience or customer base that you know they want to buy more things from you. Or you know you can connect them up in a single destination to improve that customer experience. And the second is more often not the ability to have an in-depth knowledge of the supply base, a connectivity into that supply base and product base. You can actually really exploit the now and explore the future around connecting those two sides of those marketplace journeys.Jason:The evolution and the story of a marketplace has really evolved over time too, from the humble beginnings of a BikeExchange when we first started. It's now in 10 countries, and now we're out around the world and listed on the Australian stock exchange in January of this year.Jason:Thank you, awesome team effort by the team. To really large retailers and brands and, and all types of traditional types of business saying, "Hey, I've actually got one or probably two of those unfair advantages and how can I make it easier for me to grow and drive growth within my existing customer base, without the limits of capital and without the limits of actually producing all of the products, but enhancing my customer experience along the way?"Stephanie:How do you figure out, I mean, how I'm envisioning is that you would probably have like a lead brand who's for the bike one or for the meal delivery one you'd have to have kind a lead person who's owning that marketplace and then they're onboarding other brands as well. And other customers, is that how I'm thinking about it? Because I can't imagine having 20 BikeExchanges where every bike company is, "Well, I want my own marketplace. And I want mine." It seems once you have one, it's probably good enough and you have to be a part of that one.Jason:It's a really, really good question.Jason:There's different types of marketplaces, but the evolution that is really happening at the moment is, take SurfStitch for example. SurfStitch is actually a commerce cloud customer. They're a pure play surf wear brand. They sell hard goods, soft goods and clothing and bus fashion around it. But they've got this community, this tribal community of surfers and they're really a successful business, great growth really, really well leveraged on the commerce cloud stack. But when they looked at their business and they looked at their strategic path, they're constrained by warehouses, they're constrained by the capital, but they had in the back of their mind that they thought that, if we could have the full range of surfboards, instead of only taking 20% of the range of surfboards in all sizes, by connecting up to the wholesaler warehouses.Jason:And then to unpick that to the next layer, when you think about it, a surfer is quite a soulful person. They love the outdoors and are they only surfing? Or are they going hiking on the weekend? Are they exploring the outdoors as well? But I don't want to put a hiking gear in my warehouse. That's too risky, but I could go and connect up to Patagonia to take a full range extension from Patagonia without owning the inventory. So by taking a marketplace strategy or really a growth strategy, what they were really able to do is make it easy for them to connect that to a supplier base, to improve their customer experience and really enhance that 360 view of what that customer is trying to do. Not only from a data perspective, but a product and an experience perspective.Stephanie:Got it. That makes a lot more sense now. And it also just seems the role of curation is so important and whoever's curating the best products and not just throwing a thousand things into one marketplace, really thinking, like you said of, okay, you might be hiking, but you're probably not cooking too. Like I'm not going to put cookware in my marketplace with Patagonia stuff and surf boards. It seems like curation is huge when it comes to that. And also knowing what's trending and what their customers will like is a big part.Jason:Yeah, but it also enables this strategy, the ability to fail fast within there as well. If you put it a camping stove on there or a shower after you go for a surf, to clean yourself off, you haven't bought it. You've had a go at growing in there. It didn't work customers didn't like it. So just turn it off.Jason:With Marketplacer what we really focus on as well, is a really strong vetting engine for the sales force customer and any of our customer community so that they... it's just not a free for all, for all of the products flowing through. It's that ease of connectivity into the supplier base. And then it's the strict controls and measures that you can put in place to enable your customer experience within the marketplace strategy, not just "the everything for everyone" experience. If that makes sense?Stephanie:Yeah, it makes sense. I was going to ask when it comes to marketplaces, how do you guys think about marketplace or versus the Amazons and the eBays and Etsy's of the world that seem like they are kind of creating custom curated collections in a way too. But not as much of a niche level where I would say "Okay, we're going to be doing bikes and here's your community and your people." How do you think about the landscape of marketplaces right now?Jason:It's a very interesting landscape, because it's kind of a bit of a cross matrix at the moment, Stephanie. In that there's B to B, B to C and B to B to C plays within what we're trying to do. And then if you take the types of marketplaces the other way, so all three of those really go across all three gamuts. And then if you take the types of marketplaces, you've got the niche and the tribal based marketplaces, and we put media organizations into that bucket. If you imagine all of the great magazines, like we power lots of magazine marketplaces, where Time+Tide is a good example of a watch marketplace, where they have the beautiful content, they have the trust within the industry. They had a community of people looking to buy watches, but they didn't have that connectivity into the supply. But now they've got it. Another really great example is FishBrain, which is the world's largest fishing marketplace.Stephanie:Didn't know that existed. That's awesome.Jason:I'm not a big fishing person, but think of Strava fishing. Think of a really, really large... I think they've got over 13 million users within the United States now. They wanted that into a commerce play, but they didn't want to own inventory. They didn't have a buyership, they didn't have product developers. It was too difficult to do it. So what they did is they partnered and they connected into the world's best fishing suppliers to create a marketplace. Now that has over 60,000 products to sell that you can just buy.Stephanie:Is there ever a chance of them getting lost. When I hear 60,000 products within a fishing marketplace, how do you get found in that big marketplace?Jason:That's an interesting one. So fishing is probably the best industry to do it because what I have learned about fishing is there's lots of micro products for the local areas. So there's lots of little lures and lots of little different tackles setups, the different communities and different areas. There's lots of niche products within the niche. That one makes a ton of sense to have a really big, broad breadth of inventory within that.Jason:So if you think of the tribe, the addressable market behind people trying to take that convergence of content into commerce and contextual commerce, that space is born for a marketplace. Isn't it? It's an affiliate 4.0 where it can connect into the supply banks. Then you look at brands and retailers and franchise groups and cooperatives. If you actually look at the structure of all of those businesses... Co-operatives and franchise by default are marketplaces. They're a masthead brand their third-party inventory is owned by their franchisees groups. What we're finding in this space is we're just increasing the offering that they can have.Jason:We connect up their franchisees group into a single destination. For example, actually within Australia, we run the largest tire business called Bob Jane T-Marts and Bob Jane T-Marts are a really large franchise group. They're a $600 million business. And tires are a complicated product. They seem simple, but they're incredibly complicated because you've got to match every tire to every car to every wheel ever made, ever sold.Jason:But by creating a marketplace strategy within that, they're really famous for solving one problem. We connected up all the franchise groups via our marketplace technology. But if you think about it, what they really have is car data and car ownership data. What else could they sell a person at the BMW, other than tires and wheels that could enhance their car driving experience? You'll start to see lots of these franchise groups, not only connected in unifying their customer experience, but actually starting to think about how can they enhance their customer experience without the cost of capital burden placed that amongst their franchisees group or cooperative structures and buying groups are in the same bucket.Jason:Then if you just think of traditional retailers, whether they're a pure play or a bricks and mortar or a blend of both. Which the world has a blend of both now, right? There's no real, just pure play or bricks and mortar retailers anymore. So the problem they're trying to solve is exactly that problem we talked through with SurfStitch. How do they enhance their customer experience in store or online. Where they can range extend or category extend, to supercharge their commerce journey within that.Jason:And that last sort of bucket within that is that brand or wholesaler journey. And the brand and wholesaler journey is a really interesting one because it does really touch on those three sort of core verticals that I said at the start being B2C, B2B and B2B2C within that.Jason:The first one's pretty obvious from a B2C perspective, if you're a brand and you can see a perfectly complimentary product, why would you want them to leave your platform to buy it from another platform? Why wouldn't you just connect it up to enhance your customer experience?Jason:If you sell shoes for example, I'm going to dumb it down, but if you sold shoes, how could you connect up with a sock company that had the best brand to associate the shoes with socks without actually owning all of those imagery behind it? And we've seen lots of great examples of that. We actually power the Nokia marketplace. If you're thinking of buying the phone, what other connected product and you put in within that connected ecosystem and Google are a partner of Nokia phones globally now, and all of the Google products is going to be available on the Nokia marketplace.Jason:You can start to see this connectivity piece really, really drive home within that. And then from a B2B2C perspective is how do you not cut out your stockists? How do you find a way as a brand or a distributor in a modern world not to cut them out. Whether it's a marketplace, a unified experience, but what our marketplace platform can do is connect it all up. You can cut your retailer into these third party product sales, but without, without actually going against your traditional business model. And we're seeing a fair bit of that momentum behind it as well. Then the growth space and it's going to be really interesting, because I think that the world is saying how, from a B2B perspective, from a traditional brand, when you're selling to retailers when you're consolidating in a B2B industry, how does a marketplace make sense?Jason:There's Alibaba and then there's not much. The interesting play within there is the unfair advantages to businesses is pretty similar then than it is to a B2C perspective. Their unfair advantage is really anchored around their existing stockists or retailer base that they sell into. They've got a great community of sales representatives or sellers on the floor, who are going around and servicing them. How can they then connect up to other suppliers in other industries that could actually self to that community and we make it easier to do that. And there's a really sort of large demand at the moment behind B2B marketplaces as well. It's an interesting thing to call these things marketplaces. They're not all marketplaces, but what we're doing is we're connecting the world to enable supercharged commerce.Stephanie:I love that. I want to hear a little bit about the revenue numbers. When brands embark on this marketplace journey, what are some stories when a new company starts revising your guys' tech?Jason:It's a really interesting story and journey behind it. I'll give you one example during, during COVID, the world's a different place and we all know that, and there's not much point in delving into what's next after COVID. I think everybody's thinking about what's next after COVID but what we fundamentally know today. It's just a different world. It's a different world than it was in the past. And the power of connection during COVID in a digital sense, drove some of the greatest innovation stories that I've seen for some time. And I'll share the story of Providoor. In Australia, this is a case study we rolled out.Jason:It's nearly exactly this week, last year to the day and a great friend of mine, but a celebrity chef Shane Delia. He owns some of the best restaurants in Melbourne and he's got cooking shows on TV and big personality, vibrant, enthusiastic. Had 150 staff behind his restaurant business at four restaurants, one at the airport. The institution restaurants you know, think of Mamasita in New York. These are like famous restaurants within this country. And he emailed me and he just said, "Jason, I'm stuffed. I've got all of these people, I've got food, I'm just throwing into the bin. I've got leases that I've got to pay, but I've got this one glimmer of hope."Jason:"I've just done a trial where yeah, I'm doing ready, sort of made precut food where the customer just has to finish it off at home. So it's like they're getting the magic of a restaurant quality experience in their home."Jason:And he said, "I've done it for a couple of weeks and I'm selling like $5 to 6,000 a day." And I said, "Well, talk me through the problems that you've sold." And he said, "Well we've solved this packaging, we've figured out how to I get it to the customers with the boxes." He did this in a week, like extraordinary innovation. He's, he's sourced the products, the lined boxes, he's got the dry ice, he's fixed the packaging for this. So the tumor is sort of doing, you know, that those types of volumes in a small way. And I said, "How are you delivering them?"Jason:He said, "Well I've got no choice. My chefs are preparing it, My chef's are driving at 35K around Melbourne, to drop it off at people's doorsteps at 4:00 am in the morning." And I said, "Well, you've probably got to solve your logistics problem in a real quick way. But there's something in this, because there's a demand." You're not doing any marketing, your unfair advantage is you're... I call him a B grade celebrity, he probably thinks he's an A grader. But he's got this celebrity audience that he can tap into. He's got trust within the community. The other chefs will trust him. He's never gonna do anything wrong by that industry or community and customers just loved it. If we could solve a couple of problems, i.e, how do we make it easy for all restaurants to sell in the same way and create a marketplace around it.Jason:And then how can we make it easy for people to get the delivery experience behind it? I think you've got the bones of a really good business. Shane's a pretty good hustler. And five weeks later, we'd pulled every string in the world to get Providoor live. Where the best restaurants within the Melbourne CBD was selling to a 35 kilometer radius of the Melbourne CBD, get it delivered in two delivery slots AM and PM. They would cross stock. The trucks would drive around Melbourne pick up every box. Cross stock it into a single parcel. So you would only get a single parcel. You could order from all the restaurants in one. If you were entertaining in your home or just wanted to release from COVID, or you had a birthday party, or mum and dad couldn't get to the restaurant, then you could actually experience it. And after a 12 week period he was on a $100 million rate. Solving those capital problems.Stephanie:And this was from other restaurants as well that he onboarded onto essentially the marketplace that he created. It started with his restaurant. He brought on others as well. What does the cut look like for him versus the restaurants that are also selling on the marketplace that he essentially established?Jason:Yeah, it was again, really interesting. Shane took, I think it was a 15% slice of the pie. So he actually...Stephanie:Who decides, or you decide when you create the marketplace how much you...?Jason:Yeah.Stephanie:Nice, okay.Jason:It's part of the marketplace platform, when you create a marketplace. We solve all of those commission calculations and you choose, as running that marketplace, what each seller gets, and you can change it by product or category. Now you can do really complex commission calculations, but we also manage all of the seller payouts. You imagine that volume in that period of time, if you're cutting checks, so you're doing individual payments it's un-scalable. So that's why he had to... besides the fact that's why you needed a marketplace platform to, to scale at that rate, but it just shows you if you can leverage those couple of unfair advantages and pull it together in a really neat way and solve a problem, how big you can get quickly.Stephanie:That's crazy. It sounds like you kind of want to make sure you have an audience first or partner with someone who does already have, like you said, that tribe, who's kind of waiting that you can tap into that. How do you go about even convincing customers to come and buy on a marketplace? Are you doing anything around exclusivity where it's if you're selling your bikes or your box meals or whatever on Marketplacer, you can't also sell, I don't know, on DoorDash, do you have DoorDash in Australia? Or something similar.Stephanie:How do you think about creating that moat around the market places that are building up?Jason:I think any business, whether it's a marketplace or not a market place, you create moat. And if you could get the number one selling product of the world and get it exclusive to your business, whether you own it and send it yourself, or whether it comes direct from the supplier. I would a hundred percent recommend that every single day of the week.Jason:In Shane's situation and in Providoor's situation he solved some pretty big problems. No one else in the world, in my opinion, in a five week period could have created this marketplace. And then secondly he partnered exclusively with the logistics company that was an under utilized fruit. You imagined it was a fruit delivery business where they were delivering to corporates, their fruit boxes. And they went from a hundred percent capacity to 0% capacity, but then Shane took them back to a hundred percent capacity. So you've got to, you have to find very innovatively, underutilized, cold, refrigerated delivery network in a really short space of time. He created a couple of really, really solid moats that enabled it, nearly impossible for somebody else to do it in that period. But they were just extraordinary. But the short answer to your question, I'd always promote a moat.Stephanie:So try and make things exclusive, if possible. How do you bring... what are some of these brands methods of bringing their customers onto a new platform? Because that does kind of feel like it could be an experience that might cause a bit of friction of like, "Oh, I'm always used to either just buying directly from your website or just buying from Amazon." What kind of tactics should a brand use if they're trying to convince someone to come and buy on a new platform that maybe they haven't heard of before.Jason:You're talking from the end consumer experience when they're buying from you. It's all around trust in the process. It's in that front end customer experience or any communication around it, it's about building trust and rapport around building a marketplace community. And there's many techniques you can use around that.Jason:Some companies choose not to even say who the seller is on the marketplace. They take a really hard supplier agreement and they say, here's your SLA supplies. If you don't supply under these terms and conditions in these ways, then we're going to exclude you from our community, moving forward. Other marketplaces take the opinion of, "I'll let you rate my supply. I'll let you rate your seller." So it's going to be a customer led trust build up around it.Jason:Other marketplaces over time have put their own sort of ratings and experience... the one thing I'll say around the customer journey when you don't physically own the product is you've got to be really clever and your communicative style. The items might not appear in one parcel, items maybe sent at different times. And if you can bring your customer and community along that journey, they're very attuned to it in this world that you don't get one single parcel from one single vendor every single time and boxes can appear on different days, just as long as the communication strategy around when they're turning up. I mean, the timelines as a customer's experience is really well handled. I think it's a problem that's that's well solved in market.Stephanie:Always good to make sure you're doing it in a trustworthy way where your customers are like, of course I'll go where something's being sold and there's good curated products there. What are some best practices around developing that community and keeping your community engaged and making them want to come to your marketplace that you built up. What kind of tactics do you see happening behind the scenes that are working?Jason:We're seeing at a little bit of scale at the moment, the loyalty programs being attached back into the marketplace strategy. And I think it's a space that's going to be really interesting moving forward, whether it's loyalty or membership economies or subscription economies around it, it's something that's definitely an interesting space.Jason:Take Myer's another example within our region, but Myer's a really large department store. It's the Macy's of Australia. It's the number one department store. They've had some really challenging times, pre COVID and obviously during COVID. Big box department stores, lots of inventory, really expensive leases. And they've kind of been kicked off from every corner. Right. But what they did have is they had an incredibly loyal customer base that actually had a brand affiliation with Meyer, but most importantly had a really strong brand affiliation with the Meyer loyalty program, because it was such a good rewards program.Jason:When they launched their marketplace, they actually gave the customer base the same points that they would earn on Meyer across all third party marketplace products. And you could use your points to buy from all of the third party products.Stephanie:That's imposing.Jason:Exactly. And we won a, I can't say who, but we've won a major global airline at the moment where instead of just being able to book airfares using your airline points, now you can buy 40,000 products using your points, promote burn perspective from your airline miles. So I think what you're going to find is this community of traditional loyalty programs or earn and burn points systems, being able to tap into really broaden their range to become really big, meaningful marketplace strategy, loyalty program.Stephanie:That's super smart. The one thing that's coming to mind is thinking about data privacy and how does the sharing work, especially if you're onboarding other brands onto your platform, I'm guessing I would want access to that customer data. I'd want to be able to talk to them, especially if I'm shipping something to them, or even someone's viewing me as a person that's shipping it to them, even if I'm not really in the backend. What does the sharing of the, maybe customer information look like, in a way that's probably protected and keeps everyone safe.Jason:Say for example, we're talking to the commerce cloud community. If you're a commerce cloud customer, you're the merchant of record in that instance, aren't you? You're always controlling the customer record. You're controlling, you're receiving the funds yourself. But you do have to share the customer address and you do have to share some details of that customer because they've got to receive the items. You've really got to make sure your supplier agreements are quite stringent around data privacy. And then within the marketplace platform, there's a couple of configuration points where you can mask email address and not mask email address. So there's configuration around customer privacy settings that gets forwarded through to that end seller within there as well. But what we actually find is that the broader supplier or seller community is unbelievably respectful of the end customer because they're attuned to selling in this methodology now, and they know if they break or breach those privacy laws or those privacy policies that you set up as a marketplace operator, is that they're going to be cut off and, and they're going to lose that whole channel.Jason:We've had basically no problems of that over the journey of Marketplacer. It's something that's a very small, minimal risk.Stephanie:Amazing. Let's talk a little bit about ads. And I'm thinking about you're this big marketplace. Maybe if you're the fishing one, you've got 60,000 products, I could see you guys having an entire ad unit or the person who maybe is owning the marketplace, starting to create a demand side platform when it comes to delivering ads. And how are you guys approaching that right now with all the brands that you're onboarding?Jason:The world of relevant display and sponsored contents and contextual commerce, back in to market places is a real interesting space. Because if you can not only just send your products to a third party marketplace, but then you can buy specific media around it and launch products within it. It's super exciting. We're actually integrated into Google DMP, and all of those great ad serving systems within that. And what you'll find especially as the world moves into a headless commerce situation, is that the brands can put whatever DMP they want into the commerce cloud headless stack. They can be really quite innovative around, not only just creating traditional revenue streams for the product they own. Not only creating modern revenue streams in the fact that they can sell things they don't own, but now they can actually turn their traditional retail businesses into a media business as well, which obviously comes at a much higher gross margin than physically owning the inventory.Stephanie:Any innovative stories that you see happening around the advertising space within Marketplacer? That brands are maybe trying just new and different things because of the operating model of this new business they didn't have access to before?Jason:The obvious one that just comes to mind is actually BikeExchange. BikeExchange does exactly that every single day of the week. It connects live into all of the retailers. As part of the Marketplacer platform... because some of the problem in the marketplace scenario is how do you make it easy for your sellers to connect? How do you make sure that the inventory is accurate and live? How do you make it so that when a retailer of stock list receives the order, that they can just seamlessly process it, without having, necessarily a billion spreadsheets rolling every direction for everything they sell. We sold that in a really nice, elegant way where if you're on... and if you've got an existing POS system, so point of sale system or an existing e-commerce engine, we built pre-built connectors for the majority of them in the world.Jason:If you're a bike seller selling on BikeExchange and you're on Lightspeed and you wanna send your inventory into the BikeExchange marketplace, it takes minutes. What would typically take hours? Why is this important from a media perspective? It's because then the brands on BikeExchange or Specialized or Trek, or any of the big brands when they're launching a new product, they can actually drive the leads into stores that have stock available today. You can get very clever around your display and media allocation and where you drive the sales to. And a physical stockists level within that marketplace strategy, which is pretty cool.Stephanie:That's huge. I think about the times I try and order stuff Home Depot. And it takes me 15 minutes trying to find what store you can go to pick it up. I'm like, why is this so hard? Just don't show it to me if it's not within 20 miles of where I'm at.Jason:Exactly. And that sort of relevance posts, zip code, allocation and inventory allocation is something that comes out of that marketplace assistant, but it's all structured around live connectivity back into the source seller system. Obviously if a seller wants to connect manually and they've got a few products or they've got a CSV uploader, or they've got a great API, but it's this pre-built connector platform that's enabling our marketplace at the scale at a rapid rate.Stephanie:That's awesome, so where do you all want to be in the next two to three years? What are you planning and prepping for and building for right now, other than scaling and IPO'ing and doing all the fun, things like that.Jason:I think what really drives us at Marketplacer is we just want our customers to grow and to grow in a really sustainable way. Where they can, they can enhance their customer experience. So we've really launched hard within the United States today. We've announced that Salesforce ventures has actually bought a stake in Marketplacer and that enables us... yeah, we're so humbled by it. It's such a great experience to deal with that Salesforce community, but what that enables is any commerce cloud customer globally to now really look at Marketplacer as the way to significantly grow your business and grow your customer experience within that.Jason:It gives us deep access to the Salesforce product team. Gives us deep access to the implementation partner community. It gives us deep access to the actual Salesforce customer success team. What that really enables us to do is to help that Salesforce commerce cloud community grow and connect up to all of these great suppliers, make it easy for you to supercharge that business. And it's a core focus of ours over the next sort of 12 to 18 months, for sure.Stephanie:That's awesome. After hearing all this I'm like, why wouldn't you try this out? Why wouldn't you want to be a part of a marketplace, start a marketplace, so many opportunities and easy ways to scale that maybe it would be hard for single brands to do on their own. That's amazing. Congratulations. That's huge.Jason:No thank you so much and it's a big shout out to how the commerce cloud Salesforce, commerce cloud leadership are thinking at the moment. They're really putting that customer lens first and, and you're trying to grab those trends and you build it back within their community as well.Jason:It takes a little while for you to get your head around it. But when you dumb it down, we make it easy for you to sell products that you don't own. So you can supercharge commerce and grow. That sort of one line, and that sentence can start to really resonate with you. And maybe out of today you're not thinking this is my path, but it might just get those thought bubbles going to say, Hey, what about this supplier? What about this supplier? And if I only had those products, I'd love to try that one, but I don't want to buy it. It starts to connect it all up.Stephanie:Really good way to explain it. All right let's jump over to the lightning round. The lightning round is of course, brought to you by our friends at Salesforce commerce cloud, which they got many shout outs well-deserved throughout this interview. So that is great. This is where I'm going to ask you a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready Jason?Jason:I'm ready.Stephanie:We'll do the hard one first. What, one thing will have the biggest impact on e-commerce in the next year?Jason:I'd like to say the evolution of Marketplacer.Stephanie:That's okay. You do you. You can say whatever you want.Stephanie:What's one thing from 2020 that you hope sticks around throughout 2021?Jason:The ability to put the customer first and solve problems from a customer lens, when there was no other way to do it. And I think that transformative thinking of traditional businesses in that lens is going to put them in a really good light moving forward. We saw the acceleration of five or six years of thinking and thought, and decision-making in the space of six weeks. And just, don't let that go. Don't let that go. Let that stick with you forever. Because I think it's a unique opportunity.Stephanie:What's one thing you don't understand today, that you wish you did?Jason:French. No, I actually don't personally know how to program. I've never been a programmer and it's been to my advantage because I've never got sucked into it, but one day in life, I'd love to actually learn how it all stitches together and works.Stephanie:There you go. Well, that's a good skill to have these days. Let me know if it's hard, I'm guessing it is. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be?Jason:It would probably be about surfing to be honest. And it would have to be Kelly Slater.Stephanie:There you go. That's a good one. And then the last one what's up next on your reading list?Jason:It's actually interesting, because I bought it yesterday. I'm actually reading about gut health at the moment and the benefits of gut health. So I bought the CSIRO gut health book to understand how that can have benefits right throughout your life, from sleeping patterns to energy, to that holistic sort of view that the power of food and what it can do for you or, or can't do for you.Stephanie:Good, you can send me a TLDR of what I should be doing and I'll just listen to you.Jason:It doesn't mean I'm going to do it though Stephanie, this is the problem with reading. You don't always do what you should.Stephanie:We will do it. We will manifest it into our life. We will do it. All right Jason, this interview has been so fun, really a good time hearing about Marketplacer and where you guys are headed. Thank you for coming on, where can people find out more about you and Marketplacer?Jason:Traditional channels marketplacer.com and Jason White on LinkedIn and Marketplacer on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Amazing. Thanks so much.Jason:Thanks so much Stephanie, appreciate your time.

About Jason McGeeJason McGee, IBM Fellow, is VP and CTO at IBM Cloud Platform. Jason is currently responsible for technical strategy and architecture for all of IBM’s Cloud Platform, across public, dedicated, and local delivery models. Previously Jason has served as CTO of Cloud Foundation Services, Chief Architect of PureApplication System, WebSphere Extended Deployment, WebSphere sMash, and WebSphere Application Server on distributed platforms.   Twitter: @jrmcgee LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jrmcgee/ IBM Cloud Code Engine: Learn more during this live virtual event on April 14th (also available on-demand after April 14th) Read more: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/code-engine Get started today: https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/codeengine?topic=codeengine-getting-started Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/yH_mgW2kGzUThis episode sponsored by IBM Cloud.Transcript:Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm joined by Jason McGee. Hey Jason, thanks for joining me.Jason: Thanks for having me.Jeremy: So you are an IBM fellow and the VP and CTO of the IBM Cloud platform. So I'd love it if you could tell our guests a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do at IBM.Jason: Sure. I spend my day at IBM worried about developers and platform services on our public cloud. So I'm responsible for both the technical strategy and the delivery of our Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms, our serverless environments, and kind of all the things that surround that space, logging, and monitoring and other developer tools that kind of make up the developer platform for IBM Cloud.Jeremy: And what about yourself? What's your background?Jason: Been a software, kind of middleware guy, my whole life. I used to be the chief architect for WebSphere app server. So I spent the last 20 plus years working on enterprise application platforms and helping companies be able to build mission-critical business systems.Jeremy: Awesome. So I had Michael Behrendt on the show not too long ago and it was great. We talked about a whole bunch of different things. IBM's point of view of serverless. We talked a little bit about the future of serverless and we talked about the IBM Cloud Code Engine, which I want to get into, but for the benefit of our listeners and just because I'm so fascinated by some of the things that IBM is doing now with serverless, it's just super interesting. So could you sort of give me your point of view or IBM's point of view on serverless and just sort of refresh the listener's memory sort of about how IBM is thinking about serverless and how they're probably thinking about it maybe differently than some of the other cloud providers?Jason: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's such a fascinating space and it's really changed a lot, I think, over the last five years or so from its kind of maybe beginnings in being very aligned with serverless functions and kind of event-driven computing and becoming a more general concept about how developers especially can consume cloud platforms. I think if you look at the IBM perspective on serverless, there's a couple layers to the problem that we think about. First is we've been pretty clear that we think Kubernetes and distributions of Kubernetes like OpenShift are kind of the key foundation compute environment for developers to use going forward. And we've done a ton of work in kind of building out our Kubernetes and OpenShift platforms and delivering them as a service on our public cloud. And that's an incredibly flexible platform that you can really build any kind of application. I think over the last five years, we've proven we can run anything on Kubernetes databases and AI and stateless apps and whatever you want.Jeremy: Right.Jason: So very, very flexible. However, sometimes flexible also means complicated and it means that there's lots to manage and there's lots of concepts to get your head around. And so we've been thinking a lot about, well, how do you actually consume a platform like Kubernetes more easily? How does the developer stay more focused on what they're really trying to do, which is like build application logic, solve problems? Now they don't really want to stand up coop clusters and configure security policies. They just want to write code and run code and they want to get the power of cloud to do that. Right? And so I think serverless has kind of morphed to be, for us, more about the experience that we can build on top of that container platform that's more oriented around how developers get work done and allows them to kind of more easily take advantage of the scale and power of public clouds without having to kind of take on the burden of a lot of that kind of work and management.And so the work that we've been doing is really aligned in that direction, that we've been working in projects like Knative, in the open source community to build simpler abstractions on top of Kubernetes. And we've been starting to deliver those in our cloud through things like Code Engine.Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that's interesting too because I always have, this is probably the wrong way to say it, but it's sort of a chip on my shoulder about Kubernetes because it just got so complicated. Right? It's just so many things that you have to do, so hard to manage. And as a serverless guy myself, I love just the simplicity of being able to write some code and just get it out there, have it auto scale, tie into all those events. So I think that a lot of cloud providers have sort of moved that way to say like, "Well, we're going to manage your Kubernetes cluster for you." Right? Which essentially is just, I think moving backwards, but also moving forwards at the same time, if that makes sense. But so in terms of the use cases that this opens up because now you're not necessarily limited to a sort of bespoke implementation of some serverless platform, you have a lot more capabilities. So what types of use cases does this open up?Jason: Yeah. I mean, I may have a couple of comments on that. I mean, so I think with Kubernetes, you have the complexity of managing the Kubernetes environment, but even if that's totally taken care of for you, and even if you're using a managed Kubernetes service like the things we offer on IBM Cloud, you still have that kind of resource burden of using Kubernetes. You have services and pods and replica sets and namespaces and all kinds of concepts that you have to kind of wrap your head around and know how to use in the right way. And so there's a value in like, "Can we abstract that? Can we move away from that?" And it's not like this idea hasn't been tried before. I mean, we've had paths platforms, like kind of Cloud Foundry style, Heroku, very opinionated paths environments in the past and they definitely simplify the user experience. However, they came with this negative, which is if you don't fit within the box of the opinion ...Jeremy: Right.Jason: ... then you can't do what you want to do. And the cost of going outside the box was super high. Maybe you had to completely switched platforms. You were completely blocked. You to switch to some other approach. And so part of what's informing us and as we think about this is how do you have more of a continuum? You have a simple model. It's aligned around what you're doing. Just run my source code, just run my container image. I want to run a batch job, but it's all running on one platform. They're running next to each other. You can drop down a layer into Kubernetes if you want to. If what you're trying to accomplish needs some of that flexibility, you should have access to it without having to kind of start over. And so that's kind of how we've approached the problem a little bit differently is bringing this all together into kind of one unified serverless environment on top of Kubernetes.And that lets us handle different use cases. That lets those handle kind of stateless, data processing and functions. That lets us handle simple web apps. That lets us handle very data-intensive, high-scale computation and data processing, async processing like batch all in one combined way.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And I think it's interesting because there are artificial limitations may be put in place sometimes on serverless platforms. If you think about AWS Lambda, for example, you get 15 minutes of compute and they bumped things up. So now, and again, I've just sort of grew up in the AWS environment, but they have things like 10 gigs for a function or something like that. And so they've increased these things, but they are sort of artificial limits that I think, depending on the type of workload that you're doing, they can really get in your way, especially if, like you said, you're doing these data-intensive things. So from an IBM perspective, I mean that's sort of gone, right?Jason: Right. Exactly. That's a great, very concrete way to look at the problem. The approaches that have been taken in some of the other cloud environments is these different use cases like serverless functions, single containers, batch processing, they're different services. And every service has its own kind of limitations or rules about what you can and cannot do. How long your thing can execute, how big your code can be, how much data you can transfer. We've taken a different approach to say, "Let's eliminate all those limits and let's have one logical service, one environment that supports all those styles." We can still expose a simplified kind of consumption model for the developer like just give me your source code or just give me your image, but I can run it in a way that doesn't have those computational limits, and therefore I can do more. Right? I can run more kinds of workloads. I don't run up against some of those walls that kind of stopped me from getting my work done.Jeremy: Right. Right. Yeah. And I like that approach too because I'm a big fan of managed services. I think that if you have a service that does image recognition for you, that's great. And do you have a service that does queuing for you? That's great. But in some cases, you start stringing together so many different services and I feel like you lose a lot of that control. So I like that idea of just basically being able to say, "Look, I've got the compute. I can do whatever I need to do with it. It will scale to whatever I needed to scale to." And I think that's where this idea of IBM Cloud Code Engine comes in, which just became GA so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners exactly what that is.Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So, so Code Engine is the new service that we launched that makes some of these concepts I've been talking about real. It is a service that allows developers to deploy functions, containers, source code, batch jobs, into IBM Cloud. The entire environment behind that application is managed for you. So we handle you don't manage clusters, you don't provision infrastructure. You can scale all the way to zero. So you can literally only pay for what you're using. You can scale up to thousands of cores that are in parallel processing your application and we manage that entire runtime environment for you. So you can think of it as a multi-tenant shared Kubernetes-based runtime environment that you can run your workloads on that presents to you the personality that you need for different workloads. And because it's all in one service, if you have an application that's like a mix of some single containers and batch jobs, they can actually talk to each other, they can talk to each other over a private network connection. They can work together instead of being kind of siloed in these completely different environments.Jeremy: Right? Yeah. And so from the developer, I guess, perspective, you had mentioned that you can deploy just code or you could deploy a container if you want to. So what does that developer experience look like? So is this something where I could just say, "Look, I don't need to have a whole ops team now managing this for me. If I just want to write code, deploy it into these things, I'm sure there's some things I need to know," but for the most part, what does that developer experience look like?Jason: Yeah. So you absolutely could do it without a whole ops team. The experience right now, there's like maybe kind of three basic entry points. You can give me source code and we will take care of compiling that source code, combining with a runtime, executing it for you, giving it a web end point, scaling it. You can give me some hints about kind of how much resource you think you need and things like that and we can scale that up and down and manage it for you, including all the way down to zero. That's nice if you're coming from maybe a historical paths background or it's just like, "Here's my code, run it for me." You can have that experience with Code Engine. You could also start with a container image. So lots of developers now, because of things like Kubernetes and Docker, are very familiar and comfortable with packaging up their application as a container image, but you don't want to then deal with creating a cluster and dealing with Kubes.So you can just say like, "Here's my image, run it for me." And one of the advantages we have with Code Engine is we can really do that with any container image. You don't have to have a container image that follows some particular framework that's built in a very special way. We can take any container image and you can just literally point me at the image and say, "Run this for me," and Code Engine will execute it and scale it and manage it for you. Or you can start with a batch job interface. So like a more of an async kind of parallel job submission model. So maybe I'm doing Monte Carlo simulations or data processing and I want to parallelize that across a whole bunch of machines and cores, Code Engine gives you an interface for that. So as a developer, you kind of start with one of those three entry points and let Code Engine take care of how to run that and scale it and keep it highly available and things like that.Jeremy: Right. So I love the idea of the batch jobs. I want to talk about that a little bit more, but let's go back to some of the use cases here. So what if I was building just like a REST API, that seems to be a very popular, serverless use case, what would I do for that? Do I need to have some sort of an API type gateway type thing in front of it? Or how does that work?Jason: No, Code Engine provides all that for you. So you would literally either just take your implementation and package it in a container or point us at your source code directory. If you have source code, we use things like Paketo Buildpacks to build a runtime around that source code. And so you can use different languages. So you can either point us, with our CLI tool, you point us at the source code directory and we'll build it and package it in a runtime and run it for you. Or you point us out a container image that you've uploaded to our container registry or to your container registry of choice and then Code Engine will execute that for you. It will give you that web end point, right? So it'll give you a HTTP end point that you can use to access that service. And it will watch the demand on that system and scale it up and down as needed. And by default, we'll just scale it to zero. So it'll just be kind of registered in the system and it'll take care of scaling it up as needed to handle the demand on the app.Jeremy: All right. Cool. And then what about these batch jobs? So I talked a little bit about this with Michael and this idea of being able to run massively parallel execution. So how does that all work?Jason: Yeah. So similar, obviously with batch, there's a little bit more kind of metadata that you have to provide to describe the job and what you want to execute and how things relate to each other. So there's some input data you provide along with the implementation of the batch job, which itself could just be like a container image and you submit that job. So the CLI interface is a little bit different. You're not standing up a long-running REST end point, you're submitting a job to Code Engine for execution, and it will go take that job and execute it and parallelize it for you. You can also use Frameworks on top. One of the things we've been doing a lot of work on, maybe Michael talked about it a little bit when he was here, is some work we're doing around Ray. Ray is a really interesting new project that lets you do kind of distributed computing, especially around data workloads in a really easy way.And so you can actually stand up Ray on top of Code Engine and so Ray acts as kind of the application interface for the developer to be able to easily parallelize their code, particularly Python code, and then Code Engine acts as the runtime below it. And you can take a simple function in Python, mark it as Ray remote and it'll now execute on the cloud and distribute itself across a thousand cores. And you get your answer back 20 times faster than you would have running it locally. And so you can have those kinds of async environments as well.Jeremy: Awesome. And so what about some customers? So do you have customers that are having success with this now?Jason: Yeah, we have a number. I mean, we have the European Microbiology Laboratory, which is using it to do science processing and provide access for scientists to the large-scale compute environments of the cloud. We have some airlines that are leveraging this. The airline scenarios, I think, the scenario is actually kind of interesting because it shows the power of combining REST end points, more interactive workloads with batch workloads. In their case, they're exploring using it to do dynamic pricing. So if you think about how you do dynamic pricing, there's kind of two dimensions. It's like, there's a very interactive, somebody is getting a price on a ticket or a route, and you want to be able to present them with dynamic price information as part of that web interaction. But then there's like a data processing angle.You're looking at all kinds of data coming from your backend systems from route data, from the fleet and historical information. And you're trying to decide what the right price table is for that route. And so you're doing batch processing in the background, and then you're doing this interactive processing. You can implement both halves on serverless with Code Engine and they scale as needed. If you're getting a lot of traffic on the web front end, it scales up as needed without you having to do anything. So they can kind of combine both halves in one environment.Jeremy: Right. Right. And so in terms of, I think we kind of talked about this a little bit, but when you see all these different services, right, and no matter what it is, whether it's Google's Kubernetes engine that they run or it's EKS on AWS or something like that, I think a lot of people look at these and like, "Oh, it's just another managed Kubernetes cluster." Right? So what are the major differences? I know we talked about it a little bit, but maybe you could just be a little bit more succinct and sort of talk about why is it so different than other sort of previous generations of tools or some of the other competing products out there.Jason: Yeah. So if you look kind of behind the curtain on Code Engine, you'd see a couple of things. One is there is Kubernetes there, there is a Kubernetes environment there. The differences that Kubernetes environment is completely managed by the Code Engine service. So we're not, if you look at, in IBM Cloud, we have the IBM Cloud Kubernetes service and our Red Hat OpenShift service. So in those services, we're managing a cluster on your behalf, but we give you the cluster. It's like, "Here's your Kube cluster. We'll manage its life cycle, but you have direct access to it." With Code Engine, we have Kube cluster there, we completely manage it in all respects. You have no kind of direct access to it. That allows us to manage scale and capacity. We run that in a multi-tenant way. I mean, we have security and isolation between tenants, but logically you can think of it as like a big Kube cluster that lots of users are sharing, which is how the pay as you go model ultimately works because we're keeping track of what you're actually running and just charging you for that.So one part of it is fully managing that runtime environment. We've layered on top of that things like Knative so that we have that developer abstraction like a simpler way to define services, to do the source code and image stuff that I talked about. That's coming through largely through things like Knative, which again, we're completely running for you, but it gives you some of that simple interface now that we talked about, and we're doing that in an open-source way with the community. So it's not like proprietary to IBM Cloud. And then on top of that, we built kind of the batch processing system. So batch scheduling and some of these unique interfaces, the command line interface and the user experience to get into that environment for the different workflows that I talked about. And one of the cool things is, because we built it on top of that Kubernetes layer, we can also expose the Kubernetes API if we want.So like the Ray example I gave you, Ray doesn't really know anything about Code Engine, but Ray knows how to deploy and leverage a Kube cluster. So we're able to actually hand Ray the Kubernetes API server end point inside of Code Engine for your instance. And that framework can use Kubernetes to stand itself up. And then you can use the kind of simple abstractions on top, and that's still all in Code Engine. It's still pay as you go and it still scales to zero. And so that's what I meant by this you can kind of blend the lines and drop down to or the framework can drop down to something like Kubernetes as needed to give you that flexibility.Jeremy: Yeah, that's awesome. So you mentioned you have a fully managed Kubernetes service and then you also have a bunch of other serverless services that run within the IBM Cloud. So OpenWhisk or, I guess, IBM Cloud functions now. And then also, I mean, you mentioned Cloud Foundry, which is sort of a pass, but it also sort of an easy-to-use serverless environment in a sense. Right? And so I guess, is this like an evolution? Is this where you suggest people go?Jason: Yeah. Yeah. So I think the simplest way to think about it is yes, Code Engine is the evolution of those ideas. It doesn't necessarily have a direct technical lineage, always, between those projects, but the problem that functions with IBM Cloud functions that Whisk was trying to solve and the problem that Cloud Foundry was trying to solve with source code, start from source code paths, are both represented in what we're doing in Code Engine. So Code Engine will be the kind of natural evolution path for those workloads and for the problems that those users are using those platforms for. The Cloud Foundry one, I think, is super interesting, in the sense that with the rise of Kubernetes has clearly pivoted many people who were doing Cloud Foundry into doing Kubernetes.Jeremy: Yeah.Jason: And people are using Kubernetes as their foundation and the Cloud Foundry project, which we're deeply involved in, has done a lot of work to kind of realign Cloud Foundry with Kubernetes in a better way. But what never went away, what people always still saw value in with Cloud Foundry was the simple push my source code developer experience. Right? And so that still carries forward. And with Code Engine, we're taking that same experience that we had in Cloud Foundry, and we're bringing it into this new service and bringing it onto Kubernetes seat, so the developer still gets that similar experience, but without the boundaries that we talked about. The challenge with Cloud Foundry was always like, oh, as soon as you want to do stateful things, or you want to do async jobs, Cloud Foundry didn't solve that problem. Go use a Kube cluster or go use some completely different environment. And so it's kind of the same experience with the boundaries removed and that's where we would see people go.Jeremy: Right. So if I'm in one of those services, now, if I've got things written in Cloud Functions or in Cloud Foundry, and I've hit some of those limits, or I just want to take advantage of some of the cooler things that Code Engine does, is there a simple migration path for those?Jason: Yeah. In general, yes. For Cloud Foundry, for sure. It's pretty straightforward to take the same source code directory that you have and just push it to Code Engine instead. Right? So I think the path for a Cloud Foundry, I mean, there's edge cases with everything obviously, but the base of workflow is the same. You can use the same source input directories. We mapped to Paketo Buildpacks, which Cloud Foundry, a lot of that stuff came out of Cloud Foundry. And so that has a really clean path. For Cloud Functions. There's a little bit of a timing thing in general, yeah, you can take your same functions. You can run them on Code Engine. OpenWhisk has some advantages still that we haven't quite gotten built into Code Engine yet. It's got faster startup times, for example, right? The runtime model behind Code Engine, we're still starting a container, like a full container.In OpenWhisk we had done a bunch of work on warm start of containers and container pooling so we can get like small number of milliseconds startup times on those functions. And some of that hasn't worked its way into Code Engine yet. So there are still some cases with Cloud Functions where it has some capability that doesn't quite exist in Code Engine yet, but over time that will get filled in and there'll be a simple path there to move all those workloads over to Code Engine as well.Jeremy: Right. So with Code Engine, because you mentioned this idea of sort of like the cold starts. So does Code Engine keep containers warm for a certain amount of time or is it always a cold start?Jason: It is, in general, a cold start. It can keep some of them, like in the scale up scale down cycle, it may keep them around for a while, so it doesn't be overly aggressive about scaling them down and bringing them right back. But it's not doing some of the warm start tricks yet that OpenWhisk was doing where we have a pool of primed container instances, and then we're injecting code into them and running them. That's work-in-progress. There's work to do both in Knative to improve that stack and then stuff to do in Code Engine. There's a balancing act there too ...Jeremy: Yeah, definitely.Jason: ... on things like network isolation and getting on customer VPC networks and other things which are harder to do in that warm start model.Jeremy: Yeah, definitely. All right. So if somebody wanted to get started with Code Engine, what's the best way for them to do that, just sign up and start writing some code or how do they do that?Jason: Yeah, kind of. I mean, obviously, we've been talking a lot about how developers use these things. And so I always think the best way to get started is either to build something on it or to try out some specific source code project. We have a lot of things that we've done to try to make that easy. So there's a Code Engine landing page on IBM Cloud. It has some great examples to guide you through those three starting points I talked about, start from source code, start from image and do batch. We have some really nice tutorials, like specific text analysis tutorials, for example, that'll show you how to build applications on Code Engine. And we actually have a pretty cool Git repo, which will take you through tons of samples of how to use Code Engine to solve all kinds of problems.So there's a lot of really good code assets out there that a developer could go to and actually try something real on Code Engine and the getting started experience is super easy. You've got IBM Cloud, you log in and you go to Code Engine, you create a project, you push an image and then a couple of minutes you'll have something up and running that you can play with.Jeremy: Amazing. All right. So I love watching the evolution of things and again, just this different way that, that IBM is thinking about serverless and, again, trying to make it easier. Because I always look back and I think of Lambda when it first came out, I was like, "Oh, it's so easy. You just put some code there and it's just done for you." And then we got more and more complex and more and more complex. And not that we didn't need to, I mean, some of this complexity is absolutely necessary, but I'm just curious, seeing the evolution and where things have gone, I talked to a bunch of people earlier about, Roger Graba, for example, who was one of the first people involved with the IBM or the OpenWhisk project, I guess it was Apache OpenWhisk or it became Apache OpenWhisk, whatever what it was, seeing that evolution and seeing the changes that these different cloud providers have gone through, seeing the changes that IBM has gone through and where you sort of are now with Cloud Code Engine.I'd love to get your perspective here on where you think this is going, not just maybe what the future is for IBM, but what you think the future of serverless is and just cloud computing maybe in general. I know that's a lot of question.Jason: I'll give you a long answer.Jeremy: Perfect. Jason: So that brings to mind two things. First, let me talk about the complexity thing for a second. Managing complexity is always hard. You are so right. That many things start out with a value prop of like, this is easy. And then as people use, the more you add more, and then three years later, we're like, "We need a new thing that's easy because that other thing is too hard now." And there's no magic pill for that. That's always a hard problem to manage. However, one of the things I like about the approach that we're trying to take with Code Engine is because we've layered it on Kubernetes, It gives us a way to kind of decide where we want that complexity to show up. When we had a Cloud Functions OpenWhisk stack and we had a Cloud Foundry stack and you had a Kubernetes stack, you had to try to solve all problems within each stack.So each stack was getting more complex because you were trying to like, "Oh, I need storage. And I need like private networking. And I need all these things." With Code Engine, I think we have an opportunity to say, once you cross some line, we're just going to ask you to drop down a layer and go use it directly in Kubernetes, right? You can push some of the complexity down and that allows us to hold a harder line on complexity in the developer layer on top. So it's the balancing act we're trying to play is because we built it on a common platform, we don't have to solve all problems in Code Engine directly.Jeremy: Right.Jason: So that's kind of my viewpoint on the complexity problem. On the evolution, it's really interesting. So one of the other things that my team's working on and launched recently is this thing called IBM Cloud Satellite, which is about distributing cloud outside of cloud data centers so you can kind of consume cloud services anywhere you want. So cloud computing in general, and this is not just an IBM thing, in the industry cloud computing is diversifying to be kind of omnipresent. You can consume cloud on-prem, at the edge, in our cloud data centers, wherever you want. There's a programming model dimension to that problem, too. As you specially go to the edge, you kind of want some of these simple to consume, easy to deploy, scale to zero, resource-efficient, you need some kind of model like that because at the edge, especially, you don't have 2000 cores worth of compute to go deal with.You have one box in a retail store, or you have two servers in the back of the distribution center. And so I think things like Code Engine layered on top of distributed cloud and in our case, things like Satellite, is actually a really powerful combination. I think we're going to see serverless become the dominant application development and deployment model, especially for these edge use cases, because it combines ease of deployment and management with efficiency and scale to zero footprint, which are all really attractive when you get outside of a mega data center like you have in cloud.Jeremy: Right. Right. So I love this idea, too, about sort of expose the complexity when the complexity needs to be exposed. I love this idea of sort of creating same defaults, right? If you could default Kubernetes to do all the optimal things that you would need it to do for use case X, if you could just do that for me and then if I say, "Oh, I want to tweak this one thing," then be able to kind of go down to that level. But I love this idea of you mentioned about edge too because that's one of those things that I think, from a programming model, as you said, how do you write code that's sort of, I guess, environment-aware? How does it know what's running at the edge versus running in a data center versus running maybe in a hybrid cloud and partially in your own private cloud or your own private data center? That model, just wrapping your head around it from a developer standpoint, I think is incredibly complex right there.Jason: Yeah. It is. And sometimes it's like, how do they know? And then sometimes it's like, how do I just operate at a high enough level of abstraction that like the differences between those environments can get handled below me? If I'm consuming Kubernetes clusters directly, the shape of that Kubernetes cluster in like a retail store or a telco data center in Atlanta somewhere or in the cloud are going to all be different because you have a different amount of capacity. You have a different networking arm. So you're going to have to deal with the differences. If I'm giving you a container image and saying, "Run this," the developer doesn't have to deal with those differences. The provider might have to deal with those differences but the developer doesn't have to deal with those differences. So that's where I think things like serverless and approaches like Code Engine really come to be much more valuable because you're just dealing at this higher level of abstraction and then Satellite and Code Engine and other services can kind of magically deal with the complexity for you.Jeremy: Yeah. And so I know we talked a lot about Kubernetes and what's running underneath a lot of these services. Is that something you see, though, as being that sort of common format across all these different services, or do you think that something will evolve beyond Kubernetes to become a standard?Jason: Right now, I really think that Kubernetes will become the base platform. What Kubernetes is will probably keep evolving. And I'm not saying it's Kubernetes forever, but I don't think we should underestimate the power of the kind of industry-wide alignment that exists around containerization and Kubernetes as the next infrastructure platform, if you will, because that's kind of really what it is. And I told you at the beginning, I used to build webs for apps servers. So I was like very involved in the whole Java app server era, the late 90s and early 2000s. And at that time, the industry kind of aligned around two platforms, Java and .net, as the two dominant, at least enterprise, application platforms. We have everyone aligned on Kube. Literally, there's nobody in the industry who's not like, "Kubernetes is the platform." So I think it will be the abstraction for infrastructure in all these environments. The question will be, how do you consume it? Who manages it? How's it delivered? How does it optimize itself? And then at what level do you consume?And I don't think Code Engine is the end of it at all. I think there's lots of room for improving the consumption experience on top of Kubernetes for these developer use cases.Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually was going to be my next question, sort of where do you see, what's the next evolution of Code Engine, right? So is that going to be kind of driving into specific use cases more and trying to solve those or becoming more flexible? How do you see the developers, I don't know, in five years, maybe this probably a hard question, but in five years, how are we going to be writing cloud applications?Jason: Yeah. It's a great and super hard question, but I think projects like Ray, I think, are an interesting forward look into where this might go. One of the things that I've always felt like, if I look at the whole history of paths in particular over the last five, six, seven years, paths has always been about simplifying the experience for the developers, but fundamentally, most paths environments don't change anything about how you write the code. They change how you package the code, how you deploy the code, how the code is executed, and how the dependencies of the code are satisfied. But the actual code you write probably wasn't any different. Right? And that's where I think there's the next step is like, how do we actually get into the languages, into the code structure itself to be able to take advantage of cloud capacity, to be able to take advantage of scale and there's lots of projects that have taken attempts at that.Ray, as an example, I think is a particularly interesting one, because there's some good examples where you can take a Python function, you literally add like one annotation to it in the language, and now it becomes remotely executable and horizontally scalable for you.Jeremy: Right.Jason: It's that kind of stuff that I think three or four years from now, there'll be a lot more of, where we're actually changing how code is written because that code can assume there's some containerized, scalable fabric out there somewhere that it can go execute on top of.Jeremy: Right. Yeah. And I think that that pendulum swing for developers, especially, well, developers in the cloud, who's they used to be writing a bunch of code, whether it was JavaScript or Python or Java, whatever it was and then all of a sudden now they have to switch context and be like, "All right, now I have to write a YAML file in order to configure my cloud resources," and that sort of back and forth. So yeah, that marrying of basically saying like a programming language for the cloud is a really interesting concept.Jason: And I think the distributed cloud notion, funnily enough, is a big enabler of that. Because, I don't know, the other tension I see right now is like, let's say you wanted to use Lambda or you want to use serverless functions. That only works in your cloud environment, but you're also running something at the edge or you're running something in your data center, so you're forced to kind of use different approaches, which tends to force you to kind of some common denominator models.Jeremy: Right. Right.Jason: And so you're kind of holding back from really adopting some of these newer models because of the diversity. Well, if cloud goes everywhere and those services go everywhere, then now I can just say, "Well, I'll use the serverless model everywhere. And so I can really deeply adopt it." So I think the distributed cloud thing will open up the opportunity to embed these approaches more deeply in kind of day-to-day development activities.Jeremy: Yeah. No, I love that. I'm all for that approach because I think this split-brain sort of approach to it is getting very complex and it's not super easy. So is there anything else that you'd like to let the listeners know about IBM Cloud Code Engine?Jason: No. I mean, I think we touched on a lot of the motivation behind it and the kind of core capabilities. I would just encourage you to go check it out, go check out the space, go give it a try and love to hear people's feedback as they do that.Jeremy: Awesome. Well, first of all, I got to make sure I thank IBM Cloud for sponsoring this episode because just the team over there and everything that all of you are working on is amazing stuff and I appreciate the support. We appreciate the support in the community for what you're doing. So if people want to find out more about you or more about Cloud Code Engine, how do they do that?Jason: Yeah. And you can find me on Twitter, JRMcGee, or LinkedIn. For me personally, I love to talk to people. For Code Engine, I think the best place to start is the product page, which is ibm.com/cloud/code-engine. And from there, you can get to all of the code examples I talked about.Jeremy: Awesome. All right. Well, I will put all that stuff in the show notes. Thanks again, Jason.Jason: Yeah. Great. Thanks, Jeremy.

Welcome to the The Voice of Retail, I'm your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada and with the support of omNovos, Canada's digital customer engagement company. omNovos make Personalization EASY by helping you engage the right customer, with the right content, at the right time. Find out how you can get started quickly and affordably so you can focus on doing what matters most--driving revenue and margin growth at www.realcustomerengagement.comThe Voice of Retail is also supported by Raange.  Raange helps brick and mortar brands turn store visitors into digital customers. Learn how Raange added 1 million new subscribers to a retailer's CRM in just 6 months by texting “Data” to 55055 and unlock the strategy to massive database growth.In this episode I'm in Ottawa talking with Lee Valley Tools President & CEO Robin Lee and Jason Tassé, Chief Operating Officer about the rich heritage of this Canadian retailer, their unique retail format and adapting to the COVID-19 crisis with innovations such as the new Contactless Shopping Capability for Stores Across Canada   Next, veteran urban planner and author Joe Berridge talks about what makes our cities great, the current and potential impacts on cities with the massive changes happening today brought on by the COVID-19 crisis, and all about his recent book, Perfect City.But first, let's hear from Robin and Jason******Thanks to Robin, Jason and Joe for being my guests,  plus omNovos and Raange for their support on this episode.  If you liked this podcast please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or your favourite podcast platform,  rate and review, and be sure and recommend to a friend or colleague in the retail industry.  I'm Michael LeBlanc, Founder and President of M.E. LeBlanc and Company Inc. and you can learn more about me on www.meleblanc.co or of course on LinkedInUntil next time, have a safe week!

Thank you for bearing with me as I roll out podcasts. Some of you had trouble subscribing to get these podcasts in your regular player. You have a few options. The simplest way is to just add the RSS feed to your player (link). You can also find the podcast the way you find any podcast. Here is the link to the larger players: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. The “best” way to subscribe is a little more complicated. Click on the little grey link above (or here). It will give you a URL for a “private RSS feed”. If you ever subscribe to Marketing BS+ this will allow you to get the premium podcasts directly into your player (and all the non-premium ones in the meantime).Sorry for the confusion yesterday. I am figuring this stuff out as I go along. (Fun fact: The idea of public “beta” software originated with Netscape, October 13, 1994. It has been growing strong ever since.)Onto Part II. of my interview with Jason Goldlist, former head of marketing for WealthSimple. Yesterday's Part I covered Jason's career. This part of the interview dives into the (unusual) marketing channels and techniques Jason used to scale WealthSimple into the largest “roboadvisor” in Canada. I particularly like the billboard stunt. As always the entire transcript of the conversation is below, but I recommend listening through your podcast player.Transcript:Edward: This is part two of my interview with Jason Goldlist. Today, we're going to dive into his experience as Head of Marketing at Wealthsimple. First, Jason, can you describe what Wealthsimple is for those who do not understand?Jason: Wealthsimple is a leading financial technology player in Canada that helps make personal finance really simple and really powerful. It's a robo-adviser, so it helps automate investments. It's a savings platform, helps you save your cash for the future, it lets you buy and sell stocks, and even buy and sell cryptocurrency.Edward: Is it like a combination of Betterment with Robin Hood?Jason: And Coinbase.Edward: Got it, and is that a good description or is it something different? Again, if those three companies were to merge, that's Wealthsimple?Jason: Sure. Wealthsimple operates predominantly in Canada and the Canadian financial services market is totally different than in the US. What happens in Canada is you've got five big banks that completely control Canadians' finances. Wealthsimple is hoping to be that sixth alternative bank that's going to come in and shake up the entire industry. We think that there is a whole slew of financial products that consumers need, that they want, but they aren't getting from the big banks.Edward: Got it. I think that's super helpful and sets the groundwork. I want to dive into your biggest marketing channels, which I think are fairly unusual for a company of that size. Let's start with offline partnerships. What were you doing there?Jason: I was lucky enough to join Wealthsimple at a very early stage. I was the 10th employee of Wealthsimple, leading marketing, building that team essentially from scratch, and when I left Wealthsimple, it was several hundred employees managing billions of dollars with a really large, robust marketing, product, and brand team.The channels that we focused on changed throughout the evolution of Wealthsimple. You can imagine at the beginning when I joined, we had only raised, I think, less than $ 2 million Canadian. There wasn't a lot of money to go out and spend. We were really scrappy with each and every customer. At that time, adding 10 customers, adding 100 customers was a big win. Later to the end of my 10 years at Wealthsimple, of course, adding 10 or 100 customers happened in the blink of an eye. We were looking for new ways to grow customers by thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands at a time. What we looked at evolved over time, but we've always been looking at channels that aren't the easy ones. I've always had this feeling that if it was an easy channel, the return isn't going to be there. You've got to pioneer a channel in order for it to be really unique and interesting to your business. Because every business is a little bit different, I also think you want to create your own little bit different channel. Just because these big channels, whether it's traditional channels like television, Facebook, or Google work for other people, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you. I think the process of thinking deeply about what it is that makes your business and your customers different and then going out and creating your own channel for it, can make a world of difference.Edward: When you say offline partnership, what does that mean?Jason: One of the channels that we cultivated was, as you mentioned, offline partnerships. What that means to us is how could we find other brands or other organizations that had large customer bases that wanted to share those customers with us. This would be not through a platform, not through a marketplace, but actually going directly to other brands, finding, and building relationships that were win-win and mutually beneficial. As an example, one of the earliest partnerships we did was with Airbnb. We looked at the landscape of brands and said the brand that we aspire to be and that our clients aspire to use would be a brand like Airbnb. I think I went on LinkedIn and I think I just typed in Airbnb and I use the geography filter for Canada. I was like, who is running Airbnb in Canada? We traded some emails and we sort of said we think there's this opportunity. Let me understand your goals better and maybe there's something that we can do with a campaign to actually go out and help you with your goals, and at the same time raise Wealthsimple's brand awareness with our target market and also acquire new customers.They said one thing that we're really trying to do is get people to use Airbnb for the first time. I think this was in 2015. They were still growing in new markets. We said, okay, cool. Do you have a financial incentive for new customers? They said, yeah. We pay $200 to acquire new customers so we can pay that out.So I said if we were to go out and spend some money on channels and incentivize people to try Airbnb, that would be helpful for you, right? They're like, yeah. And we were able to make this channel. We're able to leverage Airbnb's brand to go to market with an offer to attract people to use Wealthsimple and it became a new Wealthsimple client that got some of that and an Airbnb client. They got some of that Airbnb money deposited directly into their Wealthsimple account. That's an example of an offline partnership that worked really well for us and not only did it work in the direct channel and that there are lots of customers that responded to campaigns that we were able to attribute to that partnership, but also in the mind of the market. We were now hanging with the Airbnb brand and it set the idea that we were an innovative company, a young company, an emerging company that had the same brand DNA as Airbnb, and opened up the floodgates of being able to partner with lots of other organizations in Canada as well.Edward: Sounds to me that there are two parts to that. There was the halo effect or the fact that your brand is getting affiliated with Airbnb, and then there's Airbnb giving you the $200 or whatever you negotiated that you could go and drop into your customer's accounts. But you still need to have a marketing channel now to go and attract that customer. It just makes it easier to make that marketing channel work now, right? Now you have $200 additional monetization for any customer that you attract.Jason: That's right. Now we've got a great concept for a campaign and the question is, how do we want that campaign to live in the world? Most of my campaigns are going to be across multiple channels. There'll be different places that I'm going to share that with the market. The first place that I'm looking to, especially with a partnership like this, is to leverage Airbnb's channels. Now, here's an opportunity for them to also incentivize their followers. Maybe it's an email list of non-converters, maybe it's their social media to go and check out Wealthsimple for this benefit. At the same time, I can also go to the market and put some money behind it. Maybe we'll even co-market it together in the sense that maybe Airbnb will chip in some marketing dollars for me to go and put this on Facebook and retarget some visitors, or put it through a social channel like Twitter in order to get more people, or run an email campaign or something in order to get people to convert. Certainly, there's a bunch of different moving parts here. I love that you brought up that there's the halo effect and there's the direct effect. I think almost all of my campaigns fall into one or the other or a combination of both. Starting with what you think success is going to be on those different dimensions can really help you make sure that the campaign from end-to-end achieves the right objective.Edward: Let's talk a little bit about that. So you're Airbnb, Airbnb has a list now of users that have not converted. What's their incentive to target that list with a Wealthsimple offer versus just saying, hey list of people who haven't converted, we'll give you $200 that you can spend on Amazon. Why partner with you on that deal?Jason: There's a bunch of different ways that the value gets created. One of them is that there is a bit of a quid pro quo when you're negotiating a partnership like this. At the time, our Canada list was a lot bigger than their Canada list. For a brand like them who's trying to build a new market, we're excited to reach their list and they were excited to reach ours. So there is a bit of a trade that happens there and it's a win-win as long as the brands are aligned and customers aren't confused as to why it's happening. You need to create a great story, a little bit of a landing page collateral to make sure that the story's well-articulated. But there are other offline partnerships that were really successful where it's even plainer the benefit. I'll give you an example of a partnership that we did together with Zipcar, Ontario.Zipcar has members and they have a specific member benefits portal. They're always looking for interesting opportunities to put into their member benefits portal that's going to reward Zipcar members in Ontario. That was an easy one where they actually have planned activities to email their entire base about new offers in their members' benefits. They're just looking for the right members' benefits to be there. We were able to approach Zipcar and show them how our audiences would overlap, and we had a really interesting and compelling on-brand offer for them to share with their mailing lists.Edward: How many of these types of partnerships did you have? Between Airbnb and Zipcar, how many of them existed at that scale?Jason: Well, in the beginning, there was the first one. Of course, we found success with them. One of the reasons that we did find early success with them is, as we were growing, we were trying to convince larger brands to use us and to partner with us. We were able to reach wide audiences without typically a cost of acquisition. Now, the cost was the hustle, originality, creativity, and the relationship-building that it takes to make this, but there wasn't an incremental cost to it, which is why we liked it. What happened is as we got bigger, first we expanded the portfolio and then we actually contracted it. The reason that we contracted it is that as we grew bigger, it was no longer so helpful to get dozens of new clients from a channel.It was only really worth our time to get larger ones, so we had to create partnerships with larger organizations that had a broader reach. Now when I think about the partnership opportunities in the landscape for Wealthsimple today, they look a lot more like large telcos, other large financial institutions that maybe aren't related, other consumer retailers like a grocer, gas, or pharmacy that really reach millions and millions of Canadians. That would be an opportunity that would get me excited today, but it just started with members' benefits of Zipcar.Edward: That makes sense because I think initially, if it's quid pro quo, if you have no email list, you don't have anything to offer a really big partner. Then, as you get bigger through leveraging, it's almost a ladder up strategy of starting with smaller partners, use that to get to scale so you can trade for bigger partners.Jason: That's exactly the strategy. What's interesting about this is that there isn't a website that you can go and log into, then just put your credit card down and get these partnerships up and running. These are partnerships that require you to go and meet with real people, create something out of nothing, and you've got to demonstrate and establish trust. You've got to follow through for your partners. You've got to do awesome tracking for them. You've got to make them feel really special. I think to my point I made earlier, they're not easy because there isn't a directory of them to take off. But I think to the point of creating new channels, I think these are the kinds of channels that I love creating. Something that didn't exist before, something that's uniquely your brands and something that's really effective for both sides.Edward: Let's talk about public relations. That was another big channel for you.Jason: It sure was. One of the things that's interesting about public relations or I call it earned media, is that similar to these partnerships, you're not paying cost per acquisition for each customer. Of course, there's an investment that you make in time or if you hire an agency and you can tie it back, but ultimately if you do it well, you're able to get low cost, ongoing inbound traffic. I remember sitting around the table with the early team, and if we would just get a mention on the national news, in Canada, it's the CBC. The phone would start ringing. It was like magic and we didn't pay anything for it. A reporter got us, we reached out to a reporter, and then suddenly we got new clients. It was always exciting to see the traffic volume spike on the website when something as boring as an article in the local newspaper came out. But I think that showed us really early on the power of doing this well.Edward: How did you do it well? PR is one of them, obviously. You can optimize page search to death and there are agencies that can optimize television spend. How do you optimize PR? How do you know you're doing it well? Jason: First we didn't do it well. I think sometimes it takes not doing a channel well first to learn a little bit more about how to do it better. The first thing that we did is we hired a firm that specialized in financial services public relations, to help us with this. I think that playbook was irrelevant to us. We paid them a retainer every month, and every month they've got to get some relationships with the journalists and they go through all their client list. At the end of the day, that wasn't differentiated, it wasn't interesting, and it didn't get us the results that we needed, but we had that early taste even before I think we were working with an agency of what PR could do. So when we set out to do a real earned media campaign, we tried to think a little bit differently. We try to think about a couple of different ways to do it. For example, you can create data and then share that data back with publications. You can capitalize on emerging news trends and then use that to get into the news cycle. There's a whole bunch of different tactics and we would think of interesting and differentiated tactics to do it. I'll give you one of my favorite stories. One of my favorite stories of an earned media tactic that worked really well for us was in Canada, there was a large tech company that had IPOed called Shopify. We, of course, in the wealth management business, love when big tech companies IPO because that means a lot of wealth is typically created. We'd like them to park their wealth with us. During the IPO, it was really hard to cut through the clutter of that news cycle and get earned media for different tech companies' IPO. What we found was there was going to be a different date that was less celebrated and it typically is never celebrated in the media, but it could be, which is the expiry of the IPO lockup period. Not a super sexy date, but nine months after the IPO, that's when the insiders can actually sell. That's when the wealth is realized, not just created. What we did is we created a campaign around the expiry of the lockup period that would educate Shopify employees on how to get a diversified portfolio out of their holdings. We created a little ebook, we made a landing page on our website, and we actually took out a billboard across the street from Shopify so that you could see both the billboard and the Shopify building in the background. We hired a photographer to take the picture, and then we shopped and pitched that story to the media. We said, hey, are you covering the Shopify lock-up period? You should be thinking about what happened nine months ago. Now is the time all this money is liquid. Oh, by the way, here's a photo, a Wealthsimple guide that we've made to help Shopify employees manage their wealth.Can you believe it? Articles were written about the story, we did the journalists' work for them, our photo ran as the photo in the article, and there was a great mention about how companies like Wealthsimple were helping employees at Shopify manage their wealth.Edward: That's fantastic. I believe that there's something to this new way of marketing, which is this combination of PR and paid media. In that example, you use paid media to presumably acquire some Shopify customers but then accelerated with PR.Jason: And the loop doesn't even end there, Ed, because once that's done, you take that article that's being published by reputable news media, then you go and you put some dollars behind it on social media to amplify it even more. That, actually, I think goes beyond that. From there, we actually got some inbound traffic. I believe Toby, the founder and CEO of Shopify, messaged us and said, "Hey, great campaign." That opened the door for us to actually get into Shopify and start managing their employees' retirement plans, which was fantastic and it involved us bringing out our wealth advisors to help manage their employees. I believe for a long time, Shopify was the number one source of clients at Wealthsimple by employer by a large margin, even though they only employed several thousand people, our percentage of Shopify employees using Wealthsimple was astronomical.Edward: If we were to break that particular campaign down into (say) four parts, which was number one, was the billboard and the marketing to get Shopify customers to come on board. Number two is the PR push around that was targeted more broadly and far more than just Shopify customers. Number three was the paid acceleration of number two and then number four, was the enterprise sale effectively that you got to Shopify. Roughly, how much impact did those four things have? Was it 25, 25, 25, 25? What's your best estimate?Jason: I love that you say best estimate because some of those things we can directly track and of course many of those things we can't, but we know they're there. If I were to do my estimates, I actually think the last one, the halo effect we got inside of Shopify's hallways, of them talking about us, of them referring their friends, of them trying us, and then bringing and consulting their wealth with us over the years was so much bigger than the direct effects of (say) having the billboard in the first campaign. I think that the fourth one is only possible if you get number two. So, you need that multiplier. I think if you have that campaign without that endorsement or thought that earned media pick up, I think that would be a failure of the campaign. But once you've got number two that allows you to unlock number three and number four (if you can), it becomes even more successful than you imagined.Edward: If you hadn't got them all, like if you'd only gotten number one or only gotten number two, would it have been ROI positive or would have been negative, and you needed those three and four in order to get it over the top? Jason: They're not really expensive ideas and the truth is, we're talking about one that works for everyone that worked. Of course, there's a whole bunch that don't work and that we don't talk about as guerrilla campaigns or earned media opportunities that didn't work out. But if you look at the direct costs of doing that, we recycled some content. We wrote some original content. We're talking about hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars. We chased down that billboard. Hard work especially because we need it on short notice, but we got it. We're talking about single digits, thousands of dollars. We're talking about a campaign that was a few thousand dollars. At the time, if that hadn't worked out, we'd be totally fine. But I think there was an ROI on that that was well beyond the five digits or maybe even six digits on it, so the percentages return on that campaign like that were fantastic.Edward: What does growth hacking mean to you?Jason: I've never described myself as a growth hacker and I don't have a stock definition. But what it makes me feel is that how do we do alternative things to drive the adoption of the product. One of the things it does sort of bring up for me are the viral loops. How do we get the customers that we have today to maybe adopt another product, increase their usage of the product, or tell others themselves about the product, too?Edward: So when you talk about growth hacking at Wealthsimple, is Shopify an example of that or is there something different?Jason: Probably in the broadest sense, but I think in the more narrow sense of how do we have a virality coefficient that supports growth without (for example) creating new campaigns or without (for example) spending money on social channels. That is sort of what growth hacking would mean to me more so. I think we are really lucky at Wealthsimple in that for whatever reason, your wealth advisor and some other financial products do tend to be products that people talk about, and especially if you do them different or better, save people money, and make their life more effective and efficient, you share it with family and friends. For a long time at Wealthsimple and hopefully to this day still, that was the number one way that people found out about us, by referring Wealthsimple to their friends and family.Edward: That's great. Hey, thanks so much for coming on today, Jason. Before we go, tell me about your “quake book”.Jason: My quake book, of course. I'm always thinking about my quake book. What did I tell you my quake book was, Ed? Edward: Fooled by Randomness. Jason: Oh, yes. Are you a fan of Nassim? Edward: Nassim has blocked me on Twitter. Jason: There you go. Well, that's all you need to know. Hopefully, he hasn't blocked you from reading his books, though. What I love about Fooled By Randomness is that sometimes we see patterns where there aren't patterns. Certainly, as an analyst starting my career, all the time I think we talked about things that maybe weren't there, but we hoped were there. I think reading that book is one of the eye-opening opportunities, along with the rest of Nassim's writing, to help you really understand the way the world works and not the way that you hope the world works.Edward: Thank you for that, Jason, and really excited to have you on the show. Jason: Thanks, Ed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

This episode, we’re talking about people who are coming to Pittsburgh, whether it’s for work or just visiting.We’ll break down a report that suggests the city might be a better fit for tech workers than the mecca of the digital economy, Silicon Valley (gotta love our standard of living). We’re also talking about a recent article that probes the need for a new hotel at the convention center. (Hint: The answer isn’t very simple.)In between, we welcome the Breaking Brews Podcast’s host Jason Cercone for a chat about the business of beer and Pittsburgh’s place in the industry.This episode is sponsored by WordWrite:Centuries before cellphones and social media, human connections were made around fires, as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today, stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts, minds and inspire action.At WordWrite, Pittsburgh’s largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand before you sold any product or service, you had a story.WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S Story – the reason someone would want to buy, work, invest or partner with you through our patented StoryCrafting process. Visit wordwritepr.com to uncover your Capital S story.Logan:You are listening to the P100 podcast, the bi-weekly companion piece to the Pittsburgh 100, bringing you Pittsburgh news, culture, and more. Because sometimes 100 words just isn't enough for a great story. Logan:Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of the P100 podcast. You're here with myself, Logan Armstrong, and co-hosts Dan Stefano and Paul Furiga. Guys, how are you doing?Paul:Great, Logan.Dan:Emphasis on the co-host there. You're the host with the mostest there.Logan:I try to be. I do what I can, but-Paul:Yes he does and he does it well.Logan:I get my mostest from the people I'm surrounded with. On today's episode, we're going to be examining tech jobs in Pittsburgh, and there have been a few recent articles for some vying to leave and some vying to stay that you may have seen. So we're going to be talking about that and seeing how Pittsburgh ranks compared with cities and metros around the country in tech jobs.Logan:Then we're going to bring in our good friend Jason Cercone from the Breaking Brews podcast. He takes a drink from breaking, excuse me. He takes a break from drinking beer and talks about the business side of it.Paul:Wait a minute, that wasn't in this segment. There was no beer drinking?Logan:Unfortunately no.Logan:We asked him about it and he said that he'd be happy to rejoin us.Dan:Logan, let's remember we're talking to the CEO of our company within the office, so no. There's no-Paul:Well that's fine. Let's chat.Dan:We don't have a video of this, but if you could see the winking eye. No, there is no-Logan:No beer during this segment.Dan:Drinking during this segment.Paul:Of course not.Logan:Okay, and then finally we're going to wrap up with what's missing from downtown.Paul:Oh.Logan:Indeed, mysterious.Paul:Question.Logan:That's right. You'll have to stick around to see what we're talking about, but we're in for a great episode so we hope you stick around.Dan:I hope it's not my car or anything.Paul:Okay guys, time to do one of our favorite things on the podcast. Talk about Pittsburgh getting another great national ranking.Dan:Another list, right?Paul:We're on another list.Dan:Yeah.Paul:This one's a good one. Although, if you're in the Silicon Valley area, maybe not so good.Dan:Right.Paul:A couple of weeks ago, Wallet Hub, which is an online service provider that looks at financial things, very popular with millennials.Dan:They make many lists.Paul:They make many lists of many different things. Top places to live in the country for tech workers. Pittsburgh, number five. Silicon Valley, not so high, which caused the San Jose Mercury News, which San Jose's a community that's smack in the middle of Silicon Valley, to write sort of a cheeky little article. Pittsburgh is better for tech workers than Silicon Valley? Question mark. Well, yes, if you want to live affordably, apparently it actually is.Dan:That's completely accurate. Yeah. The Bay Area, it's got to be one of the highest costs of living-Paul:It is actually.Dan:In the country.Paul:It has the highest cost of living in the country. And Logan, you were looking inside some of the rankings, and Pittsburgh ranked in the top 15 in a number of categories, right?Logan:Yes. So the three categories were professional opportunities, STEM friendliness, and quality of life. And Pittsburgh ranked 13th, 14th, and 11th in those, respectively. And some of the reasons that places like San Francisco and the Bay Area didn't rank so highly is that they would rank very high in one or two of these categories. So for example, San Francisco ranked third in both professional opportunities and STEM friendliness but then ranked 63rd in quality of life for reasons we were alluding to earlier. So it's good to see that Pittsburgh ranked in these lists as being as an all around. Maybe it's not top five or the best in STEM friendliness or professional opportunities, but it's well-rounded and our quality of life here is, according to this list, far better than some of our counterparts.Paul:And certainly as the community here has continued to transform, and I'm thinking now of Uber, and Apptive, and Apple's got a good presence in the city. Facebook's virtual reality company, Oculus, is wholly sited here in the Pittsburgh region. We're trying to attract more tech workers and we've got these great university programs, CMU and Pitt at the head of the pack, but others as well, where we're building this tech community. And I guess it does still surprise people in the more traditional communities, but it's legit. There's something going on here.Dan:Right. For better or worse, Pittsburgh will always kind of bring that blue collar atmosphere, that blue collar mentality, a bit rough around the edges. I talk about it all the time, but my wife's family, who, they grew up in California, they all lived in California for a while. They came to Pittsburgh here and they said, "Wow, I had no idea it was this green." So there's always going to be a bit of a stigma that the city carries around, but I think these lists show that to that the news is catching on here. And Pittsburgh is basically known now for the meds and eds and now tech. The reputation is definitely growing here and starting to overcome that stigma.Paul:That perception.Dan:Yeah. But there's ... Well, not to be Debbie Downer or play devil's advocate here, there are still the legacies of that history here that carries on, especially in our environment.Paul:Yeah. We still have work to do, that's for sure. I can remember when I first moved back to this region from the Washington DC area. I had a job in the south side and what is now South Side Works was still a working steel mill, and as I would drive across the Birmingham Bridge every morning, the smell of burning coke was my appetizer before breakfast.Logan:Morning coffee.Dan:That'll wake you.Paul:And there's been plenty of coverage, and legitimately so, that we still have environmental problems in the region. And certainly one of the reasons why the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, is disadvantaged on a list like this, is because there's such a huge economic disparity there. It's the most expensive metropolitan area in the country. Ours is not. Part of the reason Pittsburgh's so affordable, the collapse of the steel industry and heavy industry. So there's all this housing stock and we didn't have the kind of inflation maybe that a place on the coast like San Francisco has had, but we have economic disparity too, and that's something that we have to work on too.Dan:Right. I think that's being recognized now. We talked about a couple episodes ago here, that the city is starting to take a hard look at itself, especially in terms of the racial inequalities that exist here.Paul:Yes.Dan:Again, the three of us aren't the best people to speak to this. We don't live the same experiences that a lot of people do in this city, but we can play a role by listening and being active and playing a part in recognizing that. And trying to create opportunities, being part of the solutions here. It's going to take a long time for Pittsburgh to completely shrug off some of the legacies that came from the 20th century here, some of the stuff that might be dragging down the city, but we can do it.Paul:We absolutely can. And if we can, we'll put in the show notes, there have been a couple of interesting public source articles that have dug into some of these issues, and I was reading-Dan:Quite a battle in tech, here.Paul:It was a battle in tech, and there's one written by a fellow named Noah Theriault, I believe that's how his name is pronounced, and he's at CMU. And the conclusion of this article, which you found, Dan, I thought was really interesting. He said "Here many of us who come here for opportunities in the city's universities, hospitals, and tech firms, do so in a state of willful ignorance. We take advantage of the low cost of living, we relish the walkability of the neighborhoods. We gentrify. Many of us smugly believe that we are the city's rebirth, the salvation from rust and blight. Too few of us learn about the historical and ongoing realities that make it most livable." And I think that's something that's really at the heart of what we need to remember. It's great to be on lists like this, but really there is no Nirvana -Dan:Right?Paul:That exists among places to live in this country. We have work to do too.Dan:It's hard to put a number on somebody's personal experiences here. I think that's the crux of what you were talking about there.Paul:Exactly. Exactly.Dan:All right. We're here with Jason Cercone. He's the chief brand officer at Breaking Brews, also the founder there and they're a content network and digital resource platform for people in the beer industry. Not only that, he hosts the Breaking Brews podcast, which takes a pretty unique look at the beer industry. They focus a lot on the business side of things. So Jason, thanks for being here.Jason:Thanks for having me guys.Dan:Awesome. Okay. As we mentioned, what you like to do with Breaking Brews your podcast and kind of spins off of your business. You look at a pretty different side of things in the spirits industry, in the alcohol industry there, that people don't think of all the time and that's actually selling the stuff and getting it out there, right? Yeah.Jason:Yeah. What I discovered was there are a lot of podcasts dedicated to drinking beer and reviewing and having fun and those podcasts are all great, but I wanted to bring something different to the podcast world. And I started looking at the fact that we don't have a ton of podcasts that are dedicated to the business side. Which talks about sales and marketing and distribution, all those different facets that are very important and very critical to the beer world. That was where it really started to ... or where I really started to make it take off. And I talked to a lot of industry professionals that felt the same way. They said when they're cleaning kegs and doing some of the horrible work that goes on in the brew houses that they want to put on a good podcast and listen to something that they can learn from, and that was the resource I wanted to put out there for them.Dan:Right, well the industry's really exploded as far as the craft production or the craft beer segment goes. I think ... I'm just looking at some facts here from the Brewer's Association, retail sale dollars of craft beer in 2018, I think the most recent year of stats was $27.6 billion. You said you've seen that since you started the Breaking Brews podcast yourself, you started about four years ago, or is that just your business?Jason:Breaking Brews itself started back in 2014. This is actually my third iteration of a podcast. I actually did one, like I was saying before, where we just sat around and drank beer, and that got old after a while.Dan:Why aren't we doing that right now?Jason:That's a very good question. I know. I was quizzed on that when I walked in the door, why I didn't bring beer and I'm starting to regret that.Dan:We'll just have our first kegger podcast, here.Logan:Yeah, well that'd make for some good conversation, that's for sure.Dan:That's a great idea.Jason:I'm always happy to come back for a second round if you guys want me to bring some-Dan:Right.Jason:Good drinks.Dan:Great idea. But yeah, as we were talking about the industry is just enormous right now. We're seeing that too in Pittsburgh, right?Jason:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean when I started things in 2014, there was probably maybe a dozen local craft breweries and now you look at the landscape, there's over 50 throughout the region. It's incredible. So many of them are doing great products and getting it out to bars around the area and also creating an awesome taproom experience too.Dan:Why do you think that is?Jason:Pittsburgh loves its beer, man.Dan:Yeah.Jason:But overall I think that ... I mean we haven't ... we hear the talk about the bubble a lot and has craft beer reached its saturation point. And I've always been a firm believer that we haven't even come close because we're not even close to the number that we had, or number of breweries we had before prohibition.Dan:Yeah.Jason:I mean we're creeping up, we're getting close, but the population of all these different cities and states across the country is so much higher. And when I go out to events and I do samplings and I talk to beer drinkers, a lot of folks still really aren't aware of what's going on in the craft beer industry. So there's still a lot of education that we can provide and that was one of the main drivers of Breaking Brews was putting some education out there so people can better understand what's going on in the industry and what's going on with these products.Logan:That's an interesting benchmark that you mentioned there that the number of brewers before the prohibition. Is that a common milestone in the craft beer business? And are there things that were happening back then that are happening now? The same way?Jason:I think it's, it's obviously changed a lot in regards to how beer is made. Brewers have pushed the envelope to the furthest degree possible and then a little bit more. You see a lot of crazy ingredients going into beers that probably pre-prohibition they weren't putting donuts into stouts and Twinkies-Logan:What were they doing?Jason:Breakfast cereal. I know it's like they weren't living their best life at all. However, a lot has changed. It's just the question of people's tastes have changed too and it's what do they want? And that's what these brewers are constantly trying to stay on top of, is what does the beer consumer want to drink today? And that's why I think you see such a variety out there in the market.Dan:Is it fair to say that it's easier to start a brewery round now or at least, somebody can be in their basement and actually trying to kickstart their own beer?Jason:That's probably the biggest misconception is that it's so easy to start a brewery because it's like any other business.Dan:Look, I've seen the Drew Carey show and he had a brewery in his basement. I know how this works .Jason:That's one of the big problems when you see some of these breweries that come out and their beer really isn't that great. They're standing around with their friends in a circle and all their friends are drinking their beer saying, "This is the best beer I've ever had. You need to start a brewery." And that's all well and good, but if they don't have a business sense that goes along with making a good product or even a subpar product, if they don't manage it properly, it's just not going to succeed. So it's just like anything else. I think that the barriers to entry are a little bit less because a lot of people have done it, but the smart thing to do would be go into it knowing that it's a business and you have to do all the things that you would normally do to run a business, or partner with somebody that can handle that end of your business for you.Logan:Partner with someone like Jason, Jason Cercone.Jason:I am for hire. I am here if anybody needs assistance. I'd be happy to help.Dan:Have you ever, you yourself, have you ever actually started ... Well maybe not started your own brewery, but have you ever brewed your own drafts?Jason:I've partnered and done some collaboration beers with a few different breweries across town. I did an event last year where I partnered with Yellow Bridge Brewing out in Delmont. I just went out and brewed with them for the day and I was able to say that I helped and I call that a collaboration. And I've done that with a couple of other breweries too. And that's fun. I mean that's the brewing side of it for me. I've always been more of a beer drinker and I like to obviously talk about it and promote it and market it. Brewing it just wasn't really something I wanted to do full time. It's a hard job. I think that's where a lot of people look at that like a glamorous thing and brewers will tell you, those are long days. It's very industrial and they work their asses off to put together a good product. End of the day, they are dog tired.Dan:Sure.Jason:So yeah, important. If you're going to be a brewer, know you'll be working hard.Dan:Right. We talk about hard work there. We're talking about having a good business sense. What do you see are some of the secrets to say these successful craft brewers and the people that maybe ... even some of these breweries that say are smaller, let's think about Southern Tier years ago, nobody knew who they were. Now they've got their own brewery on the North shore and what are some of the secrets to some of these businesses that have made it?Jason:I think it's understanding how to grow and being very deliberate about it and not trying to just shoot the moon right out of the gate. Obviously you have to establish a loyal fan base and make good product at the same time. But if you try to go too heavy, if you're a small local brewery and you try to make a statewide distribution, your number one priority, chances are you're not going to succeed because you don't have the liquid to supply the markets. So there's a lot of different aspects that you have to look at, but probably the most important is to use a popular phrase of our time, stay in your lane, and understand what it takes to build that brand from the ground up.Jason:Don't try to get too far ahead of yourself before you're ready. And then once the time comes where you've established that brand, then you can start looking at ... popular thing now other than distribution is looking at secondary spaces. We're starting to see some breweries in the Pittsburgh area open up secondary spots so they've proven that their brand is good enough to support it and we wish them the best in carrying that out.Dan:Who would you point to as some really good success stories in the Pittsburgh area then and what they've done successfully?Jason:Oh man, that list is long.Dan:Yep.Jason:Yeah. One of the breweries that I work with, the Spoonwood brewing in Bethel Park.Dan:I was there just this weekend.Jason:Awesome. What'd you think?Dan:I loved it. It was my second time there. I had a great time.Jason:Yeah, they're doing great beer. Great food. It's a great tap room atmosphere. You really can't ask for much more than that. They've been ... they're coming up on five years.Dan:Wow.Jason:And I've been working with them since pretty much the beginning and we've been building that brand and we don't do a ton of distribution, but a lot of the beer that we put out there ultimately was just to build that brand and give people an opportunity to taste it. To where they might say, "Wow, this is in Bethel Park. I'm going to go down there and see what else they have to offer." Another brewery I work with is Four Points Brewing out of Charleroi. They've ... just under two years old at this point, actually just about a year and a half now and they're killing it. They're doing some great beer and then you've got a lot of the names that people hear of all the time, like your Grist Houses and your Dancing Gnomes and Voodoos and Hitchhikers of the world. Again, we could sit here and do a whole podcast where I just rattle off the list because there's a lot of good beer happening.Dan:Well, you're in luck, our next segment, we're going to list breweries for the next 25 minutes. All right.Jason:Yeah. Close off with reading the phone book.Dan:Exactly.Jason:Riveting radio.Logan:Now you've learned a lot of these techniques and methods. You have over 20 years’ experience in marketing and sales. Did that start off in beer, or and if not, how did you navigate into the beer industry from that?Jason:That was ... I mean that was broken compasses for days, man, that was ... No, it did not start in beer. I've been working in the beer industry – counting what I did with starting Breaking Brews – for going on six years now. I sold cell phones right out of college, landed at Enterprise-Rent-a-Car for several years after that. Ran Hair Club for Men here in Pittsburgh for about four years. And with Breaking Brews, when I started it, it was ultimately just to build something that I felt was a good resource that could teach people how to gravitate to these beers in a very approachable way. Because as I learned, a lot of people just weren't aware of what was happening around them. So I was able to parlay my skillset from all my years in the professional world into a business that now I can help the breweries and help the different businesses that I work with do sales and marketing and create a good customer experience. All those good things, all things that are very important to building a good brand.Dan:Bring it back a little bit locally here to ... Pittsburgh I feel like is ... we've got a pretty special relationship to beer here. And it's some pretty big names in terms of, you think of Iron City, Duquesne, there's obviously Rolling Rock used to be around. How do you feel like the city's adopted and adapted to this craft brewing? I don't know if you could call it a Renaissance because it hasn't been around until right now, but this upsurge right now that people are ... they are doing with craft brewing.Jason:Yeah I think with the breweries now, I mean obviously as we spoke about earlier, we've got over 50 across the region now. It says a lot for the fact that people are going to go to a good brewery regardless of where they're at. It's become very neighborhood centric where you look like an old neighborhood pub, that's in some respects, being replaced by the local neighborhood brewery. You're seeing them essentially on every corner, quote unquote. And I think that helps with the fact that these guys are able to grow their brands so well because then it expands beyond their neighborhood as well. But yeah, we have a very rich history here in Pittsburgh with beer going back years and years back to ... I mean, Iron City was the beer.Jason:And I think now you're starting to see more of a shift towards the craft brands and many of them have been here for ... You look at East End, they've been here for 15 plus years now and they really were setting some good trends for what could happen and how people could gravitate towards a craft brand. Same with Penn Brewery. I believe 1986, was when they hit the scene. So a lot of good things have come along that have really helped push it forward. And now Pittsburgh is becoming one of those hot beds and I shouldn't say becoming it already is. And probably our closest rival in the state, just like everything else, is Philadelphia. And I think both of us have a tremendous beer scene that we can be proud of.Dan:Yeah. I think if you ever see a Penguins, Flyers game, it looks like more than a few people have beers.Jason:Well now, you see breweries have gotten in with the rivalries, like Grist House, and I'm forgetting the brewery that they partnered with out of Cleveland, they did a Browns, Steelers rivalry beer.Dan:Oh did they really?Jason:Rivertowne and Sly Fox had partnered up a couple of years ago for the stadium series. And they did a ... Glove Dropper was the name of the beer. And they worked together on that and sold it in both markets and worked out really well.Dan:All right Jason, well thanks so much for being here with us, for everybody at home. If you're listening, make sure to visit. If you're interested at all about starting a brewery and perhaps finding ways to market it and get it out to the world, you can go to breakingbrews.com. Look for Jason Cercone and also look for Breaking Brews podcast. You can find that on all the major platforms including Apple podcast, Stitcher, Google play, Spotify, iHeart, all the big ones where you can find us. And Jason, thanks so much for being here.Jason:Thanks again guys. Appreciate it.Logan:Sure thing.Dan:Great.Logan:Centuries before cell phones and social media, human connections are made around fires, as we shared the stories that shaped our world. Today stories are still the most powerful way to move hearts and minds and inspire action. At WordWrite, Pittsburgh's largest independent public relations agency, we understand that before you had a brand, before you sold any product or service, you had a story. WordWrite helps clients to uncover their own Capital S Story. The reason someone would want to buy, work, invest, or partner with you through our patented story crafting process, visit WordWritePR.com to uncover your Capital S Story.Paul:It's now time to talk about the biggest building that is not in the downtown skyline. We are talking about what is known in the travel trade as a headquarters hotel. In other words, if Pittsburgh were to host a very large convention, a large hotel would be designated as the headquarters hotel. In many cities, this is a large hotel that's attached to the convention center.Dan:Right.Paul:And that typically has somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand rooms.Dan:Right.Paul:Pittsburgh – yinz don't have one of those n’at.Dan:Oh, they do have a hotel connected to the convention center, right?Paul:Yes, yes. We do the Weston and actually Dan, I'm glad you mentioned that.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Because in the original plans for the convention center development, that hotel was supposed to be about twice as big as it is and if it were, it would be the size of a headquarters hotel.Dan:Sure. Well, I think that is, it's interesting that you're bringing this up and I think we rewind a little bit. The reason we're bringing this up is, on February 3rd, in the Post-Gazette, Craig Davis, who used to be the CEO of Visit Pittsburgh.Paul:Yes.Dan:Yeah. Visit Pittsburgh is the local-Paul:It's the Convention and Visitor's Bureau in part supported byPaul:Our tax funds and they promote the city to businesses like conventions.Dan:Right, yeah.Paul:But also to leisure travelers.Dan:Draw people into the city. Yeah, it's important. Yeah. This article, what it did with, again with Craig Davis here, he had a piece of parting advice for Pittsburgh is how Mark Belko, the writer introduced this and he did a really nice job with this piece. Craig wanted to build a convention center hotel.Paul:Right.Dan:And that's what we're talking about here. And there's a lot of back and forth about whether it should be done, whether ... what kind of impact it would bring on the city here. And he had some really good information about it, yourself, but a lot of people, they want to see more here. And that's what we're talking about today.Paul:Right. So in the tourism and convention industry in Pittsburgh, this is the third rail of politics. Nobody really wants to talk about it. And I look at this article in the Post-Gazette, Visit Pittsburgh, great organization. Craig Davis, very effective leader and he's been hired to run a similar organization in Dallas. Smart person. He's in Dallas now, so he can kind of say, what maybe he couldn't say before when he was in Pittsburgh. And for people in his business, his line of work, you need to have a convention center hotel. The thing is, to build that would cost about, Oh, kind of like the same amount of money to build PNC Park or Heinz Field.Dan:Right? Yeah. In this article here, they have an estimate of $350,000 to $400,000 a room to build.Paul:Or in other words-Dan:That's all.Paul:Yeah. $240 million.Dan:Right. That's for a 600-room hotel.Paul:Exactly.Dan:Yeah.Paul:It's a lot of money. And it was not easy to get PNC Park and Heinz Field built. There was actually a referendum on the ballot one year that failed. It was called the Regional Renaissance Initiative. I mean we put renaissance in the name of everything, don't we? And it was after that, that a deal was brokered. A lot of critics said behind closed doors and smoke-filled back rooms that wound up producing Heinz Field and PNC Park. There doesn't seem to be a lot of political appetite for spending that kind of money, again.Dan:Right.Paul:On something like a convention center hotel.Dan:Again here, Mark did a great job with this article here and he put it pretty succinctly here. He said, "In recent years, Davis' pitch has landed with all of the enthusiasm of a root canal."Paul:Yes.Dan:I don't know about you guys, I get too enthusiastic over root canals, but I suppose not many other people do, but the article does bring up a good point. That there's been a recent hotel building boom in the region, in the downtown area, particularly across the river. Some other smaller hotels that have cropped up here and there, the Marriotts and whatnot.Paul:Many. You could throw a rock from where we sit right now, we can hit the Monaco.Dan:Absolutely, yeah.Paul:Throw it across the way, hit the Embassy Suites. We've got the William Penn, which has been here for a long time. The Drury is in the old federal reserve building.Dan:Right and that's just a block away from the convention center. But the kind of full service hotel that, again, this is from the article here that Mr. Davis would see here, that would require huge public subsidies. And that's-Paul:Yes.Dan:I think the sticking point that it comes down to.Paul:That is the third rail part.Dan:Whether we want this here and I think it's one of those things where you balance. You say, "How much are these conventions going to be worth compared to the costs, the investments that you have to make in a city here." And it could take a while until the scales tip one way.Paul:Well, and what's very interesting about this is, there are statistics, there don't seem to be any statistics readily available to say, "Yes, Pittsburgh, you should do this." What we tend to fall back on, are a couple of really great seminal events. First was the Bassmaster Classic several years ago. And still of course people who don't know Pittsburgh want to depict it as a smoky mill town. And we had this freshwater national competition for bass fishing. And it went off really great. And that's led, as Mark Belko's article points out to Visit Pittsburgh getting into seeking sports events. And we've had, I can't believe this, I didn't even realize this number, 22 NCAA championship events have been held in Pittsburgh and we've got more coming.Dan:Yeah. Just recently they had the National Women's Volleyball championship out here.Paul:Yeah.Dan:And I think a big part of that comes down to, they now have a world-class arena to do it in.Paul:Yes.Dan:Where Civic Arena definitely showed its age after a while.Paul:Right.Dan:That plays a different part here. But certainly the downtown hotel building boom assists with that.Paul:Absolutely. Absolutely.Dan:Convention centers is ... that's a little different. And again, I think what, Craig Davis is trying to say here is, having it connected to the convention center, people love that. It's very convenient just to grab an elevator, have a little sky walk over to the convention center. It's not always a feasible immediately though, it's nice to think of these things, but it's hard to find room for it. And whether you're going to supplement what is already there or again, it takes money.Paul:Well, my point about Bassmaster, the other thing that happened of course was the G20 in 2009. Those two events put Pittsburgh, reputation-wise, on a world stage. In the article, Mark Belko talks about Milwaukee, which is a nice enough town and they have a baseball team that has a better record over the last decade of a postseason-Dan:They spend more than the Buccos, but that's a-Paul:They do.Dan:That's a whole other podcast.Paul:However, in terms of the hotel market, not quite the same size as Pittsburgh and they're getting the Democratic convention this year.Dan:Absolutely.Paul:Why does Pittsburgh not have that sort of convention? And if we did, aside from the monetary benefits of the convention itself, what would it do for the city in terms of raising the reputation even more and bringing more convention business to Pittsburgh? It's hard to say. It's also hard to argue that it was really cool to have Bassmaster or certainly the President and world leaders for the G20. That was awesome exposure for Pittsburgh. This is kind of a question of how much is the region willing to spend? And apparently it's going to have to spend something, in order to create that kind of environment.Dan:I think what's important when you look at these national conventions, particularly in the political arena, that is strategic by the parties too.Paul:Oh yes.Dan:Wisconsin's very important in this upcoming election to the Democrats. As is Pennsylvania.Paul:Right.Dan:But they were also in Philadelphia not that long ago, so do they want to spend so much more time in Pennsylvania and look, Wisconsin, the people ... whenever they do the Monday morning quarterbacking of that election, they did not spend all the time there. So it's ... they're showing ... it's a quite a statement that they are spending the time in Milwaukee for this upcoming convention. But it also shows that if Milwaukee can host something like this, then, so can Pittsburgh.Paul:Why not Pittsburgh, yeah.Dan:I think Pittsburgh actually held the very first Republican convention that was back in the 1860s or so. And we had the hotel rooms for that one, I guess. You know.Paul:We did.Dan:Yeah.Paul:Well, country was a little smaller then.Dan:Indeed. Yeah.Paul:Might be a difference, but I think this is a topic we're going to come back to again, so we wanted to put it out there for everybody. Again, props to Mark Belko and his article and the truth speaking, shall we say, of Craig Davis. We'll have to watch the skyline and see where this one goes.Dan:Well, most importantly, just as a final coda to this, and Mark's article did describe this a bit at the end, for the leaders that want to see this kind of change, that want to see a hotel down here, they have to show their work. It has to be ... You have to come to ... with studies from respected institutions, respected people, who are proving that, "Okay, hey, when Milwaukee hosted this type of thing, if they had a hotel here, this is the impact that they would have got."Dan:There are other areas here in Louisville and Columbus that are building hotels. What will those hotels do for their ability to draw conventions? Are they stealing them from Pittsburgh? You have to come up with that information. You have to present it to the leaders, not only in our government, but the community to approve ... like, "Hey, okay, some of tax dollars should go to this."Paul:Absolutely.Dan:And if you can do that, if you can convince enough people, then maybe it happens. But that stuff takes some time too.Paul:Well, and just a final thought on this since Craig Davis left Visit Pittsburgh, they are engaged in a search for a CEO. So I would expect that once a new CEO is named, one of the first things that we should be looking for, is some thinking around this topic.Dan:Absolutely.Logan:And we are well beyond 100 words today. Thank you for listening to the P100 podcast. This has been Dan Stefano, Logan Armstrong, and Paul Furiga. If you haven't yet, please subscribe at p100podcast.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts and follow us on Twitter at Pittsburgh100_ for all the latest news updates and more from the Pittsburgh 100. 

How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? Leads. But it’s impossible for property managers to pursue the blue ocean of 70% self-managed landlords. There's no way to contact them. Until now.  Today, I am talking to Ben Atkin of DoorsUp, a lead generation service for property management entrepreneurs. You’ll Learn... [02:30] Ben’s Background: Grew up surrounded by real estate, property management, and software.  [03:09] 50-unit Student Housing Apartment Complex: Managing students is difficult; Ben moved on to something less stressful and more lucrative.  [03:40] Bootstrap to the Core: Partnered with Coldwell Banker Premier and started property management company from scratch. [04:10] Daily Pre-occupation: How do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management?  [04:41] Database: How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout? How do you contact them?  [05:03] DoorsUp Prototype: Every person in market who owns rental properties and their contact information to track interactions and engagement. [06:20] Secret Sauce: DoorsUp gets information and people ready to sign-up.  [07:37] Grow Doors: Use DoorsUp to pick an area to pursue to contact owners and acquire more properties to manage. [14:20] Future for DoorsUp: Going to NARPM to add service areas.  [16:27] FAQ: Does this have all the data that I can find myself? Data is concise, filtered, and updated regularly to make your marketing more efficient and cost-effective.  [21:14] Bogged Down and Overwhelmed: Grew too fast and doesn’t want to be a property manager!  [22:15] My Thesis: Property management has a serious marketing problem. People cannot find a sustainable way to grow doors.  Tweetables Bootstrap to the Core: Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero Website.  We have a lot of data. Mining and handling data is our expertise. We’re marketing strategy agnostic. Property management has a serious marketing problem. Resources Ben Atkin's Personal Email DoorsUp Ben Atkin on LinkedIn Google Street View Grant Cardone National Association of Residential Property Managers (NARPM) Business Network International (BNI) Cole Realty Resource SmartZip  REDX  DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive DoorGrow on YouTube DoorGrow Website Score Quiz Transcript 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, impact lives, 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. Today, I'm hanging out with Ben Atkin from a new startup, it sounds like, called DoorsUp. Ben, welcome. Ben: Thanks, Jason. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I'm just going to go ahead and say this and geek out out of the way. I've watched literally every single one of your podcast and I can jive so much with that intro. It seems like it's changed a little bit in the last. Did I notice that? You changed that intro to include a couple more things recently? Jason: I have made some subtle changes, yes. Ben: Subtle changes, okay. I love that. I'm really excited to be on this show. I'm just stoked to be here. Jason: Let's get into your background. You've got this startup called DoorsUp, which in my understanding is a lead gen service for property management entrepreneurs, so they can get more owners which sounds very in alignment with what we do to optimize companies so they can handle those leads, so they can effectively, organically, create that business. Tell us how did you get into this space? Give us some background on Ben. Who the heck are you? Ben: Yeah. It's a long long road. I'm a second generation real estate person as well as second generation software developer and software person. My dad has a real estate company, was a real estate developer. The most inopportune time to be a real estate developer in 2006-2007. I grew up surrounded by real estates, surrounded by property management, and also surrounded by software. Anyway, I got my start in actually having experiences in property management in college. I was managing a 50-unit student housing apartment complex. If anybody is familiar with student housing, they know that that is just a difficult job to manage students. 50 units is about 250 leases in student housing. I was looking for something a little bit more lucrative and a little less stressful. I found an opportunity in my local market with a Coldwell Banker property management franchise or Coldwell Banker Premier, partnered with that franchise, and started with a property management company from scratch. Zero clients, zero connections, zero revenue, and zero website—nothing; we just started from the ground. Jason: Bootstrap. Ben: Bootstrap. Yeah, absolute to the core. I have very little experience in property management at that time even though I did my best at pretending that I did. That was our major problem was how do you grow doors? How do you increase the number of units under management? That was my preoccupation daily because I wasn't being paid. You talk about bootstrap, I was living on savings trying to grow a property management company. That was my challenge. That was my problem. I remember speaking to my broker at this franchise. I waited at his office for about an hour. I was brainstorming with him. I said, "How do you identify people who own rental property? Where do they hangout?" It's not like there's this big database of everybody who owns rental property and a way to contact them. That's really was the impetus for what we developed and what we started to pursue. I leveraged a little bit of my connection with my dad and my brothers who were software engineers, I have a software engineering background a little bit, and we built the prototype of DoorsUp, which is exactly that. It's a database of every person in your market virtually who owns rental properties. A way to get their phone number, mailing address, and a way to track their interactions with them as you pursue them to engage with the property management services. Jason: I love it. It sounds like this is almost the equivalent of somebody doing all the manual work to go and find an owner occupied list, then start trying to direct mail to them, and doing all this so manually which works, which can work great to help them grow their business. But it’s a long game. People will try it once and feel like, "I did a mailer, I didn't get anything." But then I hear people that have played this game and they’ll say, "I have clients walk in all the time." They're holding a postcard they did 10 years ago and saying, "Hey, I'm ready, so sign up." Explain how this works. Where are you getting the information? Let's start there. Ben: Sure. I'm going to mention that it's a little bit part of our secret sauce. I don't know if I consider ourselves a big data company. That's kind of a word that people on software throw around to make themselves sound cool, in my opinion. But we have a lot of data. Hundreds of sources, public sources, that's really our expertise is in managing and handling data to be able to target these types of people. Like what you mentioned, let me just make this quick point, mailing to absentee owners is, in some ways, inefficient. How many second home owners who aren't interested in property management are you mailing to? In a market like mine where it's a lot of retirees and it's almost a vacation area, that would be completely ineffective because you'd sent out a thousand mailers and 700 of those would go to people who really have no interest or their daughters' living in that home or whatever. I'm just going to make that point that what we're doing is quite a bit more targeted, and hopefully, should save on expenses, marketing wise and other things. Jason: Explain how somebody could utilize the system growth in their business. Ben: It's a web based application. The first thing that a user would see as they login is they would see a map and filters on the side. They can pick an area that they like to pursue in trying to acquire more properties to manage. Let's say, they've got a neighborhood that they really love, they draw a box on the map, and then they add a couple more filters. Maybe they want to manage only properties that are the 2000s and newer properties, so they don't have to deal with maintenance issues. They hit filter parcels. They'll just see a whole bunch of pins drop on the map, hundreds of pins of rental properties that are algorithms, are big data approach as identified as rental properties. Not just as absentees parcels, but as rental properties. It's really rigorous in deciding what we display as rentals. That's the first step. They filter, they find the rental properties, they can view the properties from the street with Google Street View through our application. It's very easy to see if the property's run down. They can actually look at it from the satellite imagery. They click on the owners name and they click the lookup button. Our system does a whole bunch of secret sauce magic in the background, gives you a phone number, and the accurate mailing address of the owner. As well as information about if they own other rentals. That type of information that they can then pursue that person and try to engage them into a conversation about their property management services. That's the simplest way to explain it. Jason: They sign up for your service, they markout their geographic area, they get some pintabs, they can street view the property, then your system will crawl the magical interweb, pull in phone numbers, email addresses, or mailing address. Then the next step for them would basically, probably be to do some sort of a direct mail campaign, cold calling. Ben: Yeah. We're agnostic to whatever marketing strategy they want to take. We provide the information, we provide the data. They can be as creative as they need to in order to pursue that market. Call, mail, we don't have email addresses, that would be something that they get them on the phone and ask for an email address. Then start them in their sales funnel. A great way to distribute their content, things that you've helped them create, or others who've helped them create, or even knocking on people's doors. That sounds ridiculous in my mind; it sounds ridiculously inefficient. But if you knew that someone had 10 rental properties and those rentals properties were exactly what you wanted to manage, you can see exactly where the homeowner or where the landlord lives or where the rental owner lives, it might be worth dropping off some fudge at the doorstep of their home. That sounds ridiculous, but that's actually something that one of our [...] has done in the past. It's very differentiating as opposed to just this search engine optimization, pay-per-click strategy. It's a little bit closer to a human connection. Jason: Oh, yeah. Realtors still knock doors. Realtors still do this. Property managers have probably really tried to avoid doing that. I've got a client who's in commercial property management. One of the ways he would get clients is he would go bring a candle to their place. "I'm old fashioned here, so here's this candle." He would give a gift, a little gift. The secret is, he'll buy these at the dollar store. This isn't like an expensive thing. But some people are showing up with, I don't know, a bottle of wine or something. It's a dollar of candle and it probably meant something, it felt like something warm to them. I think it's all about connection.  Obviously, if they were really aggressive, they’ve listened to Grant Cardone's 10X, they're like gunho. They wanted to create some business. They just need the opportunities. They go into the system. They may have done a multichannel approach. They're like, "This is my dream list right here. I'm going to call them. I'm going to send them some material. I'm going to nail them on a regular basis. I'm going to go knock on their door." They will get the business. Ben: Here's the thing, like I said, we're marketing strategy agnostic. People are already doing wonderful things to get more doors. They're doing great things. They're setting up landlords seminars, they've got great content, they're trying to push them to these distribution channels, but one of the things that we can provide is a way to reach more and more people. As part of your mailer, send out an invitation to your seminar. It fits really well into the things that people are already doing. If you've got a digital marketing strategy, get somebody on the phone, and say, "We would love to just send you an information in an email about what we do." Just enroll them in an email nurturing campaign that you've already developed, that you've already got going. It seems like organic traffic is a little bit harder to get in our industry for the smaller guys and for some of the companies that are just starting out. They've got to put a little bit of effort into it to start getting those doors, getting the traction that they've got. Jason: Yeah. If we've got roughly 70% that are self-managing in the industry, there's tons of blue ocean. This just helps you to see where the fish are. If you can see them, you can go hunt. It's time. Love the idea. I think this is such a nice match-up between DoorGrow and what you do. I'll be really curious to give feedback to some of our clients on some of the strategies that we teach them if they have these opportunities that they can go after. It's really going to be cool. Ben, what’s sort of the future for DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah, good question. Like you mentioned in the beginning, we're very recently coming out of stealth mode or development mode. We launched just short of a month and a half ago. We’re constrained geographically right now where we can service. Having just barely launched, we are currently servicing customers in Utah and Nevada. I live in Utah, I live right in between Las Vegas and South Lake City, which are two large markets that we wanted to initially, prove the concept of the product and establish a customer base. We are going to be in NARPM, at the NARPM convention conference in October in Arizona. Is that right? It's in Arizona. Jason: Yeah. My assistant schedules it all for me. I just do what she tells me to do. I'll be there. Ben: We'll be there and that's where we hope to add, geographically, another service area. We're going to be growing that way, kind of state by state as we go. That will be determined by the traction we're able to get in different states that we're able to start servicing. If we can grab a couple of customers in one state, that would be enticing enough for us to go through that state and start servicing that area. There's an advantage for our customers right now. They're alone in these sea of data. They're the only people using it. That's a huge competitive advantage right now for the people using it, to be some of the first ones that are using it. As much as we're just coming out of beta and the user interface is not as polished as it should be or could be, but there's a huge advantage for those that are early customers that are starting to use the system and see some results. Jason: What are some of the most common questions that people are asking you about this? I would imagine one question that comes to mind is, "Does this have all the data that I can go find myself?" Or is it missing that? Ben: Right, good question. Essentially, people ask that question. They have a little bit of misunderstanding about what we do. That was an instinct that you had right at the beginning of our conversation is, it's similar to what people are doing which is they're going out sourcing their own data, sending out mail, or sending out stuff like that. That's a very rudimentary version of what we do. The answer to that question is, I guess, the data is so concise, so aggressively filtered, that makes your marketing very efficient, and enables you to do certain things that you never would have time or money to do otherwise. Now, campaign is being an excellent example. The sales cycle for property management is so long. We're not selling toothbrushes. If you ask somebody, "Hey, you want to buy this toothbrush?" They can say, "Yes," and it's done; the sale is done and the service is done. Property management has such a long sales cycle where you get somebody on the phone and you say, "I would love to manage your units." And they say, "Well, it's got a 12-18 month lease on it. I'm not interested unless it's vacant. 12 months from now, call me." I'm being able to keep track on that and being able to keep track of how many times you've mailed to somebody is another really important part of that process. It's integrated into the system right now. People are able to track their leads, they're able to keep track of how many times they've mailed to somebody, keep notes on phone calls that they've had. The other aspect of that is that the data updates. I don't know if you've ever spoken to somebody who has actually tried to implement a long-term mail campaign, but the data, six months out, has changed. People buy properties, they sell property. How do they correlate whether they've mailed to somebody already? Whether they've called somebody already? How do they just track that change over time to be able to spend their time with one person long enough for them to close them given that property management has such a long sales cycle? That's part of the advantage of using a system like ours to do your prospecting and data sourcing. We keep it up to date. The data is updated monthly. The phone numbers, you click the lookup button and it does lookup immediately right then. Very, very fresh data which you're not going to be able to find yourself. Who has time for that anyway? You're going to be managing 200 properties and you're going to be spending time in a big Excel spreadsheet trying to correlate [...]. Absolutely not. I saw as a huge way to be much more effective and to really spend my money where it's going to make the most effect, given that I knew that people have multiple units, and they were units I wanted to manage. I can pursue the market that I want rather than shotgunning a mail campaign or something out in the world and seeing if I got anything I wanted. Jason: Tell us a little bit about some of the early adopters. What sort of experience have they had? Is there a case study or an example you can share with us? Ben: I'll start with myself. I was the first case study. If we go back to that origin story of DoorsUp, I asked my broker, "Where do I find these people?" He said, "I have no idea. No one has any idea." We developed this raw prototype of the system. I got this report. It's so embarrassing to even look at now, it’s this ugly Excel spreadsheet, but it was our prototype. It was the name, phone number, and address of every person in my market who owned rental property. How many rentals they owned, the value of their portfolio, and the addresses of all of their rentals. It was ridiculous to me. To me, it felt like magic. I got straight down and called through that list. After wasting three months getting four or five units, in two months, we were managing about 45 units. I was just bogged down. It was crazy. We grew too fast. I discovered that I didn't want to be a property manager, so I went into software. Jason: Yeah. A lot of people were like, "Why don't you do it, Jason?" I'm like, "Then I can't help everybody else do well." Then, I'll be competing with everybody. I don't think anybody wants that. You're no longer doing that, but you had a really rapid growth initially. I love creating that problem for clients, by the way. I love when they come to me and they're like, "Man, my biggest problem is adding doors and getting doors." Then I say, "Great. Let's get you to problem number two which is how you deal with the growth. Now, you've got doors coming in and you're in pain because you have so much growth." I love creating that problem. Well, anything else they should know about this? If not, how can they get in touch? How can they find out more about DoorsUp? Ben: Yeah. I guess, I'll end with this thought, this is kind of the thesis behind DoorsUp. This is why we got into this space and try to solve this problem. My thesis is, essentially, that property management has a serious marketing problem. I listen to your show a lot and I feel like I didn't steal that idea from you—I sure hope I didn't—but you've taught me a lot about that, but I experienced that myself. People cannot find a sustainable, reliable way, to grow their door count. Profitability aside, that's important. That's very, very important, but top line revenue growth is the thing that we are focusing on helping people to. We don't have, in our industry, any sort of enabling data or service or company like other industries do. For example, if somebody in property management really wanted to spend all day everyday prospecting, if they wanted to do Grant Cardone 10X, they want to not talk to seven new landlords a week, they want to talk to 75 new landlords a week. How would they do that? They would go to Rotary Club and hope that a landlord was there. They would go to BNI, Business Network International, and hope that a landlord is there. Or they'll take a realtor to lunch and pray that he'll give him a referral. How does an aggressively-minded property management company grow quickly? They just need these leads. Whereas in real estate sales, real estate sales and other industries, we've got Cole Realty Resource, we've got SmartZip, we've got the REDX. We've got all these prospecting tools. Property management industry just does not have that, which has made it impossible for property managers to pursue this blue ocean, 70% of self-managed landlords. There's no way for them to contact them. They have no visibility into that market. Just from a very macro perspective, that's what we're trying to provide the industry. To be able to turn the focus from just closing hand razors, people who go on Google and raise their hands and say, "We want your service," to be able to aggressively pursue that market instead of just waiting for leads to come to them. That's what we see. That's my thesis is that there's a problem in property management that they need this data and we can provide it. We're still proving and testing that thesis. But we're very excited to get out there and be able to offer that to people. We've seen some success. If people want to contact me, there are plenty of ways on our website. You can go ahead and email me. My personal email address is ben.r.atkin@gmail.com. That's probably the easiest way to reach out to me personally. Though, I'm also tuned in on the website if you chat with us. It'll be an actual person who answers that. If you're in Utah and Nevada, go online, signup for a free trial. We’d love to have you start using the system. We do a two-week, 30 lead, free trial. Other than that, just reach out to me. I'd love to chat about it, and jive about property management, and see if we can help this industry grow from the 30% penetration to 40% or 50% or 60%. I see there needs to be some sort of change in order to be able to do that. Jason: Cool. Ben, where are you based out of? Ben: I'm in St. George, Utah. Just an hour North of Las Vegas, Nevada. Jason: Got it. I know where it is. I was born in Utah. Alright. We'll connect, I think that I have a lot of clients are at the point where they're ready to be able to leverage their service like this. I think a lot of property managers are not. I think a lot of them really are just not ready to leverage something like this, unfortunately. If that's the case, reach out to DoorGrow. Then they'll see if you're ready. "You're ready. You have the bandwidth to do these kind of things and grow your business. Let's get you connected to DoorsUp." I look forward to watching what you guys do, seeing the progress, and growth of your company. Ben: Thanks, it's a pleasure. Jason: Thanks for coming in this show. Ben: Hopefully, we'll see you at NARPM. Anybody else, hopefully, we'll see in there. Thanks! Jason: Alright. Very cool. If you are a property management entrepreneur, and you are wanting to grow your business, and you want to grow without SEO, without pay-per-click, without content marketing, without social media marketing, without uncomfortable videos, without pay-per-lead services, and they're having phenomenal growth, they're easily adding in a year 100 doors to their business, they're adding $100,000 in revenue to their business annually and you want to do that, maybe you're one of these companies that, right now, is losing more doors than you're getting on right now because it's difficult to try to outpace the market when doors are selling off because the market's good with marketing then reach out to DoorGrow. Let's optimize your business, let's get you ready to use a service like this, and some other strategies, and tactics that we have, that can help you grow your business. Check us out at doorgrow.com. We would love to help you out. We want, like what I say in the intro, we want to impact this industry, and we're excited to find like-minded entrepreneurs like Ben and others that are helping to make this industry great. I think it has massive potential. I believe that property management industry can be as big as the real estate industry; I think it has the potential to really grow here in the US. Let's make that happen, everybody. Make sure, if you're a property management entrepreneur, you join our Facebook group doorgrowclub.com. Get inside the community. Connect with us. This is a group for property management business owners. Get with your tribe. Connect with us, and we'll probably see you in person at some of these NARPM events because I'm hitting as many as I can lately. Hopefully, I'll be connecting with you guys in person and inside the DoorGrow Club. Thanks everybody for tuning in to DoorGrow Show. Until next time, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Did you ever wake up in a cold sweat because you had a dream where your teeth were falling out? Or have you ever dreamt about things that happened to you at a later date? In this episode we discuss the possible meanings behind these bizarre but common dreams. **Also check out a freestyle by the one and only Jason** Thanks for listening!

Searching here, searching there...How do investors find rental properties that align with their financial goals? Is there a way to provide them access to these assets? Today, I am talking with Dan Ganguly, president of HomeUnion and founder of INVESTimate. As an entrepreneur, he’s always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. So, if a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, a property manager needs a feed of investment properties to present to potential buyers. You’ll Learn... [04:05] Questions for Investors: What’s your budget? Risk preference? Age and stage in life? Do you need cash? [05:13] Two Brands Connected: HomeUnion’s where investors search for properties; INVESTimate’s where property managers and realtors work with investors. [06:30] Business Model Change: Internet-only to tool that increases engagement between property managers dealing with investors. [07:43] Where to Start: Build a relationship sooner than later in the sales cycle process. [09:00] Help property managers build better Websites as a front door for people. [13:53] What does the local property manager do? Signs up with service, pays monthly fee, and puts on private/white labels. [14:58] Realtor gets MLS feed for home buying; property manager gets MLS feed with intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. [15:15] Everybody knows their #1 prospect is their existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. [16:12] Other Options: MLS, Zillow, and similar Websites focus on finding stuff (schools, pools, etc.) that get people into a neighborhood. [16:35] INVESTimate: Offers big data platform with 110 million properties, 20 years of transactions, 200,000 neighborhoods, and more than 9 million rentals. [19:30] Is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. [20:15] INVESTimate: Investors get best of both worlds when making a transaction. [21:45] Different risk-reward gradients/categories help people make the right decision. [26:45] Feedback from Property Managers: How has this changed their business? [32:05] Bottom Line: Business owners make money, get a door, and much more. Tweetables It’s a fish net to grab fish, and then we nurture the fish until they buy. Your #1 prospect is an existing customer because they already know, like, and trust you. We can’t force them to buy, but give them a reason and product to buy. Bottom Line: Business owners make money and get a door. Resources HomeUnion INVESTimate MLS Zillow Realtor.com DoorGrowClub Facebook Group DoorGrowLive Transcript 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, impact lives, 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. And today, I have a very special guest. I’m hanging out here with Don Ganguly. Don is the CEO of Homeunion, is that correct? Don: Yeah. I’m the president of Homeunion and founder of Investimate. Jason: President and the founder of Investimate. Don, I want to welcome you to being here on the Door Grow Show. Don: I’m glad to be here. Jason: Don, you have an interesting background. You have a lot of experience in entrepreneurism, I think people would be really interested here some tidbits from you today, and some insights. I’m excited to get it into your business and service. But let’s start with you. Can you give us a little background on you and just some of your experience and what lead you to where you are now in business? Don: Sure. I’m sort of a vocationally reformed engineer. This is my third company. The last one we did was actually an outsourcing service company for mortgage banks and services. We were actually helping originators doing the big boom and people [...] were getting a loan. When everything fell apart we were helping the services service those loans and try to keep people in their houses. We touched I think over $75 billion of service. That company ended up getting sold to Oracle, to a banking software company. But it was the progenitor to this whole Homeunion and Investimate thing that we founded because we were able to see all these properties all over the country that had some pretty decent prices and a good rental price ratio. When we looked at that, we figured there are all these homes that made good investments and people that live in the coast don’t get access to these assets. We looked at that and said, “Is there a way that we could provide access to rental properties the way people buy stocks and bonds?” If you look at the way rental properties are bought, we base them a little how homes are bought. So people go to a listing site, they get a list of properties, they do some back and beyond below calculations, figure out the rent, go to the neighborhood, or pick up the neighborhood, call a realtor, and then bounce around and try to find the right property that they like. If you’re look at an analog to that and say, “Hey, if you go to a wealth advisor and say, ‘I’ve got this much money to invest, what should I buy?’” The wealth advisors are going to say, “Okay. I got some stocks, here’s the idea, and here’s the score, here’s Apple, here’s Facebook, which one of these do you think you want in your portfolio and let’s go through a list.” The question they ask you often is, “Hey, what’s your budget? What’s your risk preference? What’s your age and state in life? Do you need cash?” And then they put a portfolio together that’s got a little bit of this and a little bit of that and it all enlines to your financial goal. We took that playbook and we brought it to this Investimate product that we built which says, “We can ask investors the same type of questions about their real estate investments and then let the system go out and find the right assets and build them a portfolio or a set of assets that need those financial criteria.” The non trivial exercise because to do that, we actually had to calibrate everything from a risk and reward stand point. Right? How risky is this house? And what’s in that house type of thing. That’s how we came to this. As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for a new solution to an existing problem. Often, the existing stakeholders don’t have the answers. You got to think of something a little bit different. That’s how we got into this business. Jason: Help us understand these two brands, how they’re connected first and what they are. Just the overview. Don: No, I’m happy to. Homeunion used to be a retail platform where investors can come in and basically search for properties and invest. The first incarnation of Homeunion, we were actually serving as overall asset managers for these properties and then farming out the actual work to property managers on the ground. And then last year we made the call, it was becoming too big a business for us. We’ve done over 200 other transactions and we didn’t want to be in property management. We ended up giving those properties out to the property managers that were managing it, productized it and provided it as a platform for property managers and realtors that are working with investors. The product itself has been tested for four and a half years, it’d done $200 million of transaction within 5% of forecast and a good use by investors to buy properties all around the country, highly exercised. What we just see is the business model from being an internet only model that brought consumers to my front door to a product that would then serve people like property managers who are actually dealing with investors day to day, giving them a tool to engage with their investors. That’s the connection between the two. The Homeunion brand is an internal user of the investment product. So any leads that come in there are fed to our property management partners in various locations because we are not in the business. When we engage with that investor and they want to buy a property, then that property is managed by one of our partners. Both of them actually feed into the advantage of the property management tool. Jason: Let’s take our typical listeners. We’ve got a property management business owner, they got a small business, maybe they’ve got 100-200 doors on their management. They’re wanting to grow their business, they’re trying to deal with team changes, and staffing, and operations, and trying to systemize things for the first time ever. And then we have these solutions available that they can use to support in bringing investors. Where would they start with your services? Don: Yes. If I look at businesses such as yours and others, you’re helping them grow doors. How do you grow doors? You grow doors by finding more investors and having investors buying more doors, right? The property manager either at the bottom of the food chain which is that when the investors already bought that property, then they put their hand up and compete with four other property managers and say, “I’m the best guy in this market and you should come and put your property with me.” Or they can be more proactive and go up the food channel and up that funnel and have a conversation with the investor when the investor starts looking for that property. Be early in the solutions process. What happened to them is if you’re at that point in the fulcrum then you are actually able to participate in the property management process more naturally rather than doing it after the fact. Jason: If you’re part of this process earlier in the sales cycle then they’re going to have this relationship with you that’s already set and you’re by default mostly going to get the management contract. Don: You got it. Because you've been partnering with them ahead of time. At the same token, let me just take the other side of the coin there, the good work that you’re doing and others are doing is that saying, “Okay, listen, you need to market your business in some fashion. You need to get traffic on your website. You need to put content up.” There are various stakeholders that are helping property managers build better websites, you have a business in that, and a better front door for people to come in. When those people come in, then what do you have for them? That’s where we come in. I’ll give you a simple analog. If you’re a realtor, what do you need? You need an idea speed to your local MLS. Otherwise you can’t show any property. When a company comes in and says, “Hey, I want to buy from you.” If you have a website that doesn’t show any properties or you don’t have an ability to send that buyer of homes to buy then you can’t participate. It’s a minimum stake for a realtor. Jason: [...] tool. Don: If I am an “investor realtor” and that sort of property management, if I’m catering to investors then I need an ability to serve up investment properties or properties that are more likely to be good investment. Or put another way, I need to give you an investment lens through which to look at these properties so that you can then engage in buying a rental property through my system. If I don’t have that then I’m back to the bottom of the food chain because I’m searching here, I’m searching there, I’m doing all of these. If a realtor needs a feed for homeowners, I think a property manager needs a feed of investment properties that it can present to its potential buyer, if the property manager wants to jump up the food chain. That’s what Investimate provides. If you’re a property manager in a particular market and we’re in 15 or 16 markets around the country, we have real time connections to the local lifting services, what we would do is we would white label Investimate for your website so it would say, “ABC Property Manager” with your logo and your color on the front. When you use Door Grow or another service to drive investors to your website, then they come in and they have a way to search for rental properties in your patch or around the country, if you allow them to. Because you still get a referral fee for that and engage with you in that fashion. That’s one part of it. The second part is if you look at the realtors and I go back to the home buying because everyone gets that business. If you go to the home buying end of the business, what happens? The realtors are all over that bill when it reels its head. When a home buyer says I want to buy, you have a short window in which to grab that person and about 20 realtors are all over it from leads, from various places. The name of the game and how quickly can I get that person. On the investment side, nobody wakes up and says, “I just have to buy rental property in the next 24 hours. Otherwise I’m going to have a hissy fit of some kind.” That doesn’t quite work that way. When people make that decision saying, “Hey, maybe I should be in real estate, I know a lot of wealth is built that way. I should be out of the stock market, or I’ve already bought two properties, I think it’s time for me to buy another one. I got some excess cash.” What they need is a steady dive of stuff that fits their preferences and in nurturing. It’s very different from the home buying. The investment platform actually comes with a set of campaign management and a set of investor support services. When you’re under Investimate, and you’re a customer of ABC Property Management. So you come in and say I’m Jason. You register you start using the site, we call you and say, “Jason, we’re investment support with ABC Property Management, we’re here to help you use the system and help you understand what’s in here.” You get acclimatized with the system, you understand what it is, we get an idea of your preferences and the system also captures your preferences. Now, you’ve told me you like sci-fi movies or romcom and I now keep sending you scifi and romcom till one day you watch that movie, because that’s how investors work. They drip feed them until they put their hand up and say, “That’s probably interesting.” Now I got to buy box. Once I get that buy box, then I call ABC Property Manager and say, “Hey, I’ve got Jason who’s got X amount to invest. He’s looking in Austin. This is sort of his buy box, this is the sort of the property he’s looking for. Please help him out and do the local due diligence.” We serve that lead up at that point. It’s the website, it’s a set of intelligence filter that connects to the local listing service, and it’s a whole analytics lens that allows them to search like they would search with stocks and bonds. I can get more into the data side of it, it’s much deeper than that. To answer your question what does that local property manager do? He signs up with the service, it’s a small monthly fee, and he private labels it, white labels it on his website, and he’s off to the races. The way we make money, really, most of it is from when there’s a successful transaction. What we ask for them is to load whatever lead customers they have into that proprietary database that always stays there on and then these people as they come in, it’s a fishnet to grab fish, and then we nurture those fish ‘til they buy. It’s a long term way to keep their brand in front of customers and leads and others. I’ll tell you something that a lot of the property managers are working with, not only loading customers, they’ll think, “Hey, here is a whole bunch of people we touched in the last five years. We didn’t do business with them but we touched them in some fashion. I want those registered to me.” And a lot of them wake up and are prospect of buying stuff. All because once you see the product then they’ll say, “Yeah. I’m interested and I will use this to buy something.” That’s what we bring to the tables. What a realtor gets from a strict MLS feed for home buying, a property manager gets an MLS feed with a bunch of intelligent filters and big data for investment buying. That’s what we’re doing. Jason: I love the idea. Everybody listening knows or should know that their number one prospect is your existing customer. They already know you, trust you, and like you. You’re already probably managing a property for them. They’re one of the most likely to do business with you again, and if you have opportunities, a property’s available and they’re already investors, it would be a very easier thing to get them into an additional property. They’re going to have a high level of trust with you. If you have this easy pull of properties that they could see and view and they’re getting dripped, and they’re getting notified, and they’re in your funnel and system here, then eventually something is going to grab them. They’re going to go, “Hey, this looks like a deal I could sink my teeth into. I’m going to go for this.” For the skeptics that are listening, you’ve got the property managers that also do real estate and they’ve already got the MLS and they’re like, “Wow, why don’t I just put the MLS on.” And they can just look for property, any property. Let’s really clarify the difference between just having the MLS and having the Investimate tool. Don: Great question. The MLS or Zillow or Realtor.com or any of these sites, are geared towards you looking for school pools, stuff that gets you into a neighborhood to live in. What we did is we created a big data platform where we have 110 million properties, we have the entire US Housing Stock, we have 20 years of transactions. We have 200,000 neighborhoods, we have an initiative here with University of California where we collect over 9 million rentals all over the internet so we could put that into our model, and we do a couple of different things with it. We process over $200 billion of properties to bill them out. What we do with it is first thing we’ve done is we calibrated neighborhoods from A to D as a neighborhood investment grading. Think of this as a bond grading so the D is not, we’re not in D neighborhood. C is not necessarily saying it’s a bad neighborhood, it just says it’s a neighborhood that’s a little bit more volatile, you get in with the lower quantum of money, it’s a high yield property, that neighborhood property isn’t going to give you as much growth. But you can pull me a portfolio depending on what else you’re trying to buy. An E neighborhood has a higher quantum of investment. It’s a more expensive neighborhood, view is not going to be that great, and you are going to see a lot more growth. The question is should I buy Apple stock at $800 and buy five units of Apple stocks or should I buy something that’s $50 and buy hundred units of it? Or should I do a little bit of both? We’ve given them a risk reward calibration so they can look at both of these things. Then we forecast, we have a model that estimates the rent. We have a rent valuation model, we have a cascade waterfall where we compare to [...] and a bunch of other things to say here’s a range of the rent. We then estimate the price and see if it’s above or below what we model the price to be at. Based on that we come up with a big range on their property. Then, we provide a con of rich neighborhood information on the renter. If you go to an investment, you’ll see how much money do the renters make, what’s the average income, how come they can afford the rent, where are the rents on this neighborhood, am I an outlier rent? Once my renter goes, “I’ll never be able to fulfill it because I’m the only guy in that neighborhood where my renter’s paying higher among everybody.” There’s a ton of good strategic data and there’s price trends and rent trends on that neighborhood. When investors go in, it’s a shame when you look at the stock. What’s my risk in this stock? What’s the previous growth has been? What’s my dividend play? What had done historically? What is it expected to do? What other research can I get around it? It’s that one place where all that information is encapsulated. The potential rental property buyers are doing what [...]. They’re going to go to Zillow, find new property, we’re doing a back of the napkin, going to a rental meter, finding the rent and then coming back, going to a realtor, looking at the neighborhood, they don’t like it, go to another one. We put all of that into one piece on the back of big data. Like in many model, is everything 100% accurate? No. Property is highly individual. You and I may be living next door to each other and you’ve done a lot of great things in your property. You may be a little bit different than mine. How do we do that? The property manager solved that last mile problems. The model, the data helps them create a buy box, instead of guard rails, instead of neighborhood, it’s a type of property. And then the property manager goes and then says, “Yes, the data is right on this one. The renter’s exactly what we said.” or “You know what, this property is gutted on the inside and it’s not going to work.” It’s a combination of that site, of the platform, and the local property manager at the point of purchase. Investimate, you get the best of both in terms of making a transaction. Now, why is the property manager the best partner? Because he or she has to manage that property afterwards. They’re not going to go in and say yeah, the rent’s going to be $2,000, no problem. The moment it closes, then they come back and say the rent’s $1,500, that’s the beginning of the end as far as their whole credibility goes. All that big data is underlying the investment lens of [...], just going in that a little bit more. When we look at the MLS, we pull the listing services every 30 minutes. It’s real time. We apply 50 to 60 different filters to pull stuff in. We exclude stuff. If they’re common, if we don’t like them, we exclude those things, exclude D neighborhood. There’s a set of filters that go in, then we [...] the rich data, then there’s a que where a set of eyeballs do a quality check. Then, it makes it into the platform. It’s a highly curated investment focused platform that’s available for the property manager to showcase to his or her client. Jason: Alright, that was a great explanation. Basically, what I’m hearing is this is like MLS. It includes all the MLS stuff but it’s better. It includes more tools, more resources geared specifically towards the investor, and they’re able to make decisions. This is maybe a random question but I’m really curious about these different gradients or different categorizations that you have of risk reward and how are people making this decision whether they want As or Ds? Don: It really depends on the risk profile, at the end of the day. If you go for a C property, when do you buy a Triple C bond? A Triple C bond is a high yield bond for sure, because it’s not an A bond. But when you buy Triple C bond, you also know that there could be defaults, there could be things that wreck your returns. You’re getting that high yield to compensate for the risk. When you buy a Triple A bond, it’s more deterministic. In a higher end neighborhood, you’ve got rents that are not quite as high to the ratio of the property price, but you’ve got renters that tend to be more stable, that have been there longer period of time, and their homes tend to appreciate. But it requires more money to get in. It all depends in the investor’s personal preferences, are they looking for money now, are they looking more to build a portfolio and after 15 years when it’s all paid off that’s [...]. Are they looking for growth where they wanna spin around and flip it in five years? That’s a whole different discussion, they you go after more growth properties. You need at least five years for real estate before you cover all your transaction costs, or three plus years. It just totally depends on the investment and their requirements. They might buy some properties for cash flow, they might buy some for growth, and they might buy some that’s in between. We hear investors say hey, I need cash flow, that’s my number one determinant. Other investors might say I don’t really need any money right now, but I wanna build up a portfolio that will grow and be safe. Others will say I need to cover my mortgage, and maybe make a little bit of money, then the balance in the middle, but I really need properties that are going to appreciate. I don’t really care about cash flow, but I don’t want to be out of pocket. Those decisions then drive the type of properties, neighborhoods, locations, cities they end up with. Jason: In your platform, curious, what do you see being the most popular for the investors that are typically using this with property managers in that categorization? Don: Where people buy, 40% is what I call the B neighborhoods, 40% are on the C neighborhoods which are the high yield neighborhoods, and 20% are the As. As are obviously more expensive, and your buy will shrink when you get to the A neighborhood. That’s roughly what I see. Jason: Got it. This would obviously work for non-property managers that are using it. Maybe their intention is just to use and look at this for their own stuff, or to look for flips, or turnkeys, or different types of deals than just some sort of long term management situation. Don: It would work for realtors, any realtors that’s dealing with investors, they are also using the platform. We’ve got a number of realtors that signed up. The realtor piece is a little bit different. I’d sell you a home and you’re not going to buy another home from me for the next 7 to 10 years typically, I’m not going to come every year and sell you a home. Once I sell you a home, if I’m smart, I know you could be a potential investor. I say hey, if you’re looking for rental properties now, here’s a site that gives you local and national rental properties, and I’ll help you out with it. For the realtor, it becomes a cross sell. For a property manager, it’s an upsell, it’s one more property or a new guy coming in. But for the realtor it’s a cross sell to a customer or lead that already spent the money getting that customer or the lead. Now you say what else can I get out of their wallet? And this product does that. In terms of flippers, we’re not really geared towards flippers. We’re not showing the big distressed assets out there that you can find and rehab. The big thing for the flippers are rehab numbers. How much do I have to put into this property to actually make money on it? I’m buying it $40,000 on the market, I put $20,000 in it so I’m already in $20,000. I can make another $20,000 because I can sell it at market. That requires on the ground running around and understanding what those rehab cost. They can use the system to identify stuff, I’m sure. But at the end of the day, I think these are people driving around neighborhoods or trying to find distressed assets that need that. There’s not an inordinate focus and people on that on that platform, just because our partners are not really chasing those types of deals. We need a partner on the ground for this, solving the last model. Any investor can come in and use it for sure. Jason: Property managers that are already working with you and using your system in doing this, what sort of changes or feedback or results have you been hearing from them? What are they noticing and how has this changed their business? Don: One thing a lot of them are noticing is that a lot of their customers or their leads are waking up and they are engaged in looking at properties. There’s two, three things they’re saying. One is they’re making offers and new properties, in some cases they’re selling properties to the system which helps the property manager get a listing. They get that listing, and if the investor is selling the property, they can get to keep the property management because it’s a rental property that they’re selling it as and they’re not kicking out the renter going to a homeowner. I think a lot of people like that because there’s no erosion or churn of their portfolio from that perspective. Jason: What’s happening is even though properties are selling, which would normally turned into a property management business, they’re able to retain the management contracts and keep the tenants in place. Don: That’s right. Jason: Love it. Don: For those investors that are willing to do that, there’s some that will want to sell in the open market for whatever reason. I think if we can increase the velocity of this, and as more and more people get connected to the investment network when you push something into that, it goes across, gets eyeballs everywhere. It may move a lot faster because the investment on the other end will want a rental property that’s already rented with a track record of history from that property manager, because the property manager will be able to give us what’s been happening in the last two or three years in performance on this property. That becomes a lot more attractive than to buy a new one and then do all this stuff to it. Jason: So this is a proven property, they’re able to see that it’s rent rolled effectively, and this extends the reach then of this ability far beyond what the local MLS would provide because investors would be out of state and beyond are able to see this opportunity. Don: And realtors are not that interested in selling rental properties to investors. The MLS and stuff like that, they get the least amount of attention from realtors. Putting it on this platform puts many more eyeballs. We get 120,000 users on the platform today. Remember, we’ve been at this for four years, four and a half years. As the assigning of these property managers, they’re going into this. The [...] account is increasing dramatically month over month. Out of that, not everyone’s a buyer today but big enough sample size there that people would look at it and say this is something I want to buy. And the more product you put in there, the better you are. Jason: Say they sign up, how easy is this to get connected into the website? Is it just some javascript code snippet that would be added to a page, or just some HTML like an iframe… Don: Good question. It’s not iframe, it’s a hyperlink linked with their subdomain that gets added to their website and we can put it right over… For example the DMI franchise is rolling this out to a lot of their franchisees. We spoke to their website company and made sure that the logos and the colors and all that was consistent in how they wanted the brand to look for all DMI franchises and put it out there so they have the same experience, it’s stuff like that. It’s not a massive task, it’s a quick task of getting it up and running. They don’t even need someone familiar with website development on their end to put it up. Jason: Fantastic. I would imagine besides that, they’re able to feed in maybe their list of clientele, or how do they get clients using or into this system? Don: They send a file of their clients and their leads, and we separate the two. That gets loaded and tagged to them in the CRM for good. Anytime they do anything, they’re forever tagged to them. We look at the clients one way, we look at the leads one way, and they get a mail from Jason at ABC Property Management saying hey, we just implemented this new tool, come check it out, here’s all that it’s got. A series of mails inviting them to come check out the tool, what’s in it, and then we engage with them as investor support for Jason’s property management company, help them utilize the tool. That’s all branded to Jason, it’s not branded to anything else, it’s all branded to Jason. The backend calls are made to investment support to help them use the system, that’s all Jason. Then, they start receiving some weekly properties that are hot in their particular market. If they put their hand up, we answer questions and take [...]. Jason: Great. The bottom line, everybody listening, that business owners are all thinking is this makes me money, right? They’re getting the real estate deals, they’re getting commissions on the real estate deals, anything else that I’m missing? Don: They get a door... Jason: And they get property management contracts. Don: Yup, and let’s say for example we have property managers in California. A California property manager’s customer wants to buy in Austin, so the Austin person then can get a referral from the California buyer because the California buyer is not finding something in the price range they want in California. One thing they always ask, our customers, is do you want to show only your market or do you want to show all markets? There’s pros and cons to it. If you only show your market, then that investor can only buy in your market and that’s all they get and you always get the door. The con is if they ever decide to buy somewhere else, they’re not going to buy through you because you didn’t show that. Or, you show all markets and then if they do decide to buy somewhere else, then you get a referral fee from that. By the same token, you get inbound traffic from someone else. That’s the idea of that. But we give people that option, because we can show one, or two, or all. Most people tend to keep it fully open, but when you have people that say I don’t want to show anything other than my city. We’re okay with that as well, it’s the business owner’s choice. Jason: So this has other potential benefits of really setting up a referral network, getting some deals. Don: Yup. We’ve had situations where property managers just got a door, because somebody is buying a property. Then the person says they need a property manager, so then we get the door. Sometimes, they get the whole thing. If an investor wants to buy in their market, then they become the buyer’s agent, obviously they give up a referral fee back into the system so others can get paid. They get the door and that commission. At the same token then, they refer someone, they get a fee from that person from the door and the commission; it works both ways. Jason: Alright. Don, this sounds fantastic. Is there any other common questions or things that you think people listening might be curious about related to this? And then how can they find out more? Don: I think one thing we had expectations on, this is a long term relationship with your investors. Let’s say you’ve got 400 doors and 150 investors, the investors get exposed to it. It’s not that okay. In 60 days, they all come in and say great, now that you’ve given me this, here are 10 properties that I’m going to buy. They will buy over time, but what’s important is they are now much more connected with your brand and you start seeing deals happening with these investors when they decide to buy. We can’t force them to buy, but we give them a reason to buy, and we give them a product to buy. That’s the one thing. The second thing is we do need the property management person trained on the system. We have a training program and all of that. When we transfer that investor in the right time, they need to be able to use the system to find the next property and the next one if this one doesn’t work out. Because ultimately, they’re the one fulfilling that. A property management company sometimes has not been in the sales process, they’ve always been at the other end of the food chain. They’ve got to think that if they want to climb the food chain, they do need some competence and strive to be able to go and get that property and close the property with the investor. Although we’re taking a lot of the analytical work in a way by systems giving them all of that. They get a very clear buy box, but they still need to fulfill that buy box. Jason: Let’s wrap this up, how would people find out more about your Investimate product, and how would they demo this and learn more about the business, and how do they get started? Don: They would go to investimateroi.com, in there is a little video that talks about the product, an explanation of what it does for property managers and realtors, and an ability to set up an appointment for a demo. The best thing to do is always look at a demo. If they go there and they schedule a time, just like we’re doing here, we’ll get them on an online webinar and we’ll take them through the product and explain what it does, and see if it’s a fit for the business. It’s simple enough, yeah. Jason: Fantastic. Don, this has been really interesting, really insightful. I think a lot of people’s wills returning as they listen to this. I think that you’ll probably be getting some demos of people checking it out. Don: Great, thank you. Jason: Thanks for being on the DoorGrow show. Don: Glad to be here. Jason: You can check that out at investimateroi.com. I appreciate Don being on the show. If you are a property management entrepreneur that wants to add doors and make a difference, then make sure you check us out at doorgrow.com. If you want to join the most awesome community of property management entrepreneurs on the planet, we are hanging out inside the DoorGrow Club. It is a free Facebook group, you can go to doorgrowclub.com, make sure you join the group. We will see you next time on the DoorGrow Show. Until then, to our mutual growth. Bye, everyone.  

Sam, Donald and Jason discuss some of the news of the day, including Marvin Bagley III leaving for the NBA and Jeff Capel leaving for Pitt. They also recap the McDonald's All American Game and Mama Carter discussing the business that is the NCAA. Finally, they review their season predictions, hand out player of the year awards and end with Parting Shots. Timestamps 0:00 Byrd Campbell! 0:20 Hello everyone! Sam’s in charge 1:23 Jason’s here…he’s drunk lit! 3:14 Marvin Bagley’s gone…we react very quickly 4:02 We deal with the real big news - Jeff Capel takes the Pitt job 4:15 Sam recaps all the coaching news 6:16 Donald’s shocked, but it’s a great move for Capel and for Pitt 7:15 Donald - “Capel had become the guy Coach K relied on the most” 8:52 Jason - “Nolan Smith is going to follow Jeff Capel to Pittsburgh” - we speculate 10:42 Donald says the most surprising thing is Capel leaving for an ACC school 11:23 Jason notes this move must mean that Coach K is staying for a while 14:00 Jason speculates that Capel may not have received assurances he was the man to take over yet 15:40 Sam forgets his thought, leading Donald to ask whether Capel would have taken the UConn job if Dan Hurley went to Pitt 18:01 Sam discusses Nate James’ role and why he’s being elevated to co-associate head coach 22:17 We discuss the McD game! Jason was at the Tuesday practice and tells us about the guys 23:20 Jason starts with the 4 guys together and how close they are 24:58 The Text Chain that dominated ESPN was what brought them together and how they all helped each other commit to Duke 26:45 Jason starts with Zion Williamson - He’s short, but an unreal talent 29:19 Zion has great ball handling skills and can shoot from the perimeter! Him, RJ Barrett, and Cam Reddish can rotate positions with each other 30:26 Sam asks how all 3 can play together 34:14 Jason: Cam Reddish and Tre Jones are special passers 34:45 Donald gives his take on the McDonald’s All American game, starting with Tre Jones 37:48 Donald wants to know how these guys will fit in with the current players - Cam Reddish is the glue guy (think a more athletic Theo Pinson) 38:43 Donald: RJ Barrett has a smooth game similar to Kevin Durant 39:46 Zion Williamson had to leave the game due to an injured thumb, but he’s powerful with his off hand 41:16 Jason discusses EJ Montgomery, the last person Duke is recruiting - it may depend on Bolden coming back 42:16 Is Bolden ready for the NBA? This may affect whether EJ Montgomery commits 47:00 Jason: Bryce Drew will be the coach of the year next year - Vandy could be stacked 49:08 The guys discuss Wendell Carter’s mother and her thoughts on the NCAA 52:09 Donald suggests that Mama Carter may think Harvard is far removed from the business of the NCAA and that’s why she preferred it 55:23 Jason: Mama Carter reveals the absurdity of the one-and-done system 59:12 Byrd Campbell - thanks for your sponsorship! 59:42 We reveal the results of the stats prediction game - Sam wins! 1:11:48 Who’s going to win the bracket challenge? Find out this weekend! 1:13:22 Jason: Marvin Bagley, Donald: Grayson Allen Marvin Bagley, Sam: Marvin Bagley 1:16:17 Parting Shots 1:16:23 Donald: Mookie Betts ain’t getting this one, boys 1:17:49 Jason: Thanks to all who listened to our last podcast and for the lovely notes! 1:19:14 Sam: It’s baseball season now, this is how he copes with Duke losing 1:21:19 We’re out…Duke Band! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Former professional basketball player and current email copywriter, Big Jason Henderson, joins Rob and Kira for the 43rd episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Jason shares how he went from Australian basketball star to highly paid email copywriter and in the process talks about: •  the too-easy-to-believe advice for writing great emails •  how he keeps his emails personal by writing to “one” person •  the recommended number of links that should go in every email (jk) • the tools he uses to track clicks and revenue •  his go-to writing formula for emails •  what it means to sell the click vs. sell the product •  which is the better motivator—the carrot or the stick •  why there’s no such thing as an email expert, and •  how he manages stress and overwork (when he doesn’t sleep for two days) Another eye-opening episode packed with lots of lessons, tactics and strategies you can use in your own copywriting business. Click the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Sponsor: AirStory MECLabs Marketing Sherpa Email Summit Gary Halbert Caleb O Dowd Scott Haines Revolution Golf Clicky Email Response Warrior Course Clayton Makepeace Dr. Flint McGlaughlin Tepsii Arman Morin Seminar GKIC (Dan Kennedy’s events) Ryan Deiss Russel Brunson Tony Flores John Carlton’s Simple Writing System Samuel Markowitz Amit Suneja UFC Parris Lampropolous David Deutsch Shortcutcopywritingsecrets.com Tim Ferris Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group Intro: Content (for now) Outro: Gravity Full Transcript: The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by Airstory, the writing platform for professional writers who want to get more done in half the time. Learn more at Airstory.co/club. Rob: What if you can hang out with seriously talented copy writers and other experts, ask them about their successes and failures, their work processes and their habits, then steal an idea or two to inspire your own work, that’s what Kira and I do every week and The Copywriter Club Podcast. Kira: You’re invited to join the club for episode 43 as we chat with email copywriter big Jason Henderson about what he has learned about sending more than a billion emails, creating high performance email funnels, the things you should do with email that the experts tell you not to do, and why your value proposition is the most important element for increasing conversation. Rob: Hi Kira. Hi Jason. Jason: Hi, good to be here. Kira: Great to have you Jason. Jason: Thanks for having me. Rob: Jason, I think we really want to start with your story, but before we get into that, I got to know how big are you? Jason: I’m only about 6'11". Rob: Okay, so not that big then. Kira: Not that big. That’s nothing. Rob: Yeah, why don’t we start with your story. You’re famous for email, tell us how you got started as an email copywriter? Jason: In 1996, I was playing professional basketball in Australia, and it was really laid back so I had plenty of free time and the local universities let me go into their computer labs, so I was just going around and I started with Acl and local businesses, and I started doing email and e-commerce back then. Little did I know, that e-commerce was going to be huge, I should have stuck with it. Yeah, I just started with that and I became ... Have you heard of the about.com brand? Rob: Yes. Jason: So back then, they were the mining company and I was the exercise guy. So they basically worked with us to drive as much traffic as possible, so they were teaching us about building email lists, writing articles, attracting free traffic, and for email all they said was, “You know it’s like having a one on one conversation, so if you can do that, then you can write an email.” And that’s basically all I knew. I was like, “Yeah, I can do that.” I think that’s an advantage for me starting way back then ...

I am so excited to introduce my guest. I got introduced to him only a few months ago and it feels like I have known him for a long time. I instantly could feel his light just radiating. I could feel how much he was willing to give and share and contribute to others. I was so attracted to his being. I am so excited that he has agreed to be my guest today. Jason Freeman equips people to do their imperfect best. I love those words. In their professional and personal lives. He is a bravery coach and inspirational speaker. He inspires people to get off of the sidelines of their lives and do their imperfect best. One of the expressions I say all of the time is that we are all perfect with our imperfections. So it’s so beautiful to have a guest who gets my philosophy. Welcome Jason. Jason: Thanks for having me today. Terri: I thought we could begin with your story and then your why as to what you are doing. Jason: When I was born, I lost a little oxygen when I was little and developed a speech impediment also some coordination. For years, I was down about them. I then realized that all I had to do was my imperfect best to move forward and my outlook on life has transformed and so I want to share that with other people that whatever their problem is, that change can happen. Terri: I love this because as you shifted and accepted imperfection is perfect, you were able to not only amp up your life and the quality of your life, but now you can make an impact on others, yes? Jason: Definitely. Terri: When you speak and when you are out there as a bravery coach, who do you like to speak to and what is the big message. Jason: I love to speak to people who are willing to make a change in their lives. The big message is not to sit on the sidelines and keep planning to add one day and take small imperfect steps to gain momentum in the direction in the way you want to do. Terri: Beautiful. I was thinking about this when I was introducing you. You are a bravery coach. I have trained over 5000 coaches in my training school. I have an email of 25,000 coaches, I have never in all of my experience meet anyone who has come across my path and said they were a bravery coach. How did you come up with that? Jason: I came up with it because I realized that bravery is where people most need to listen to themselves. There are no excuses. Why things are possible and it takes true bravery to cut through the excuses day after day and take the smallest steps forward. Terri: Beautiful. I heard somebody say something and I thought about you. They said, I always say yes, even if I am scared. Even if I don’t know how or think I am going to fumble or mess it up. I always go ahead and say yes. It made me think of you. Can you relate? Jason: I think it’s important to say yes to the things we really want to do in life. But by the same token, I firmly believe we need to be clear on what we don’t want to do in life and say no to going down those paths. Terri: Thank you for that. Say yes to the stuff that is juicy and exciting and challenges us, and then also have your clear boundaries on what doesn’t feel good or right. Perfect. If someone is tuning in and they are not so happy with their business or their life. What is the best piece of advice you can give them in this moment. Jason: Life is about change. That change is possible. Their unhappiness isn’t permanent. They have frustrating circumstances and they are not permanent. They just need to the very next right thing. I think so often we look at the five year picture of whatever, and we get really overwhelmed. Terri: What great advice. It has been my experience too. Something could seem like its going wrong or its overwhelming, and just that shift in my mindset, Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join Heartrepreneur® Radio community today: heartrepreneur.com Heartrepreneur® Radio Facebook Terri Levine Twitter Terri Levine Instagram Heartrepreneur® Radio Pinterest Terri Levine YouTube Terri Levin LinkedIn

This week we catch up with Jason Wachob, founder of the health and wellness online media giants MindBodyGreen. The independent media brand is dedicated to wellness with over 10 million monthly unique visitors! He has been featured in The New York Times, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, Goop, and Vogue. We cover his personal journey of health transformation inspired him to start MBG, his health discoveries, meditation, stress-reduction strategies, his brand-new book 'WellTH', the power of the breathe and even Wim Hof the Iceman! Use Snapchat? Follow me at: GuyL180 Questions we ask in this episode: What was the defining moment to make you reevaluate your own work-life-health balance? What do you think will be the next big thing in wellness? What ‘one thing’ do you think can have the most positive impact on our health? Why did you write your new book - Wellth? What does true wealth look like to you? What are your non-negotiables to be the best version of yourself? And much much more… Video Version & Transcript: http://goo.gl/R15oxn Hey, this is Guy Lawrence from 180 Nutrition and welcome to today's health session, where we cut through the confusion by connecting by leading global health and wellness experts to share the best and the latest science and thinking, empowering people to turn their health and lives around. We're doing it this week with the awesome Jason Wachob. He is the founder and CEO of mindbodygreen. If you're not familiar, they are a health and wellness company, media company, that is, and they now have I think over 12 million hits a month. They're big in the industry, they've influenced my life and they've influenced many people's lives around the globe with their message. It was fantastic to have Jason on today. We get into lots of topics, we discuss his new book, Wellth: How I Learned to Build a Life, Not a Résumé. We also dive into his own personal journey, meditation, breath work, and how he actually manages as an entrepreneur with so many situations going on, keep everything and his health in check and all the rest of it. I thoroughly enjoyed today's interview. He's a top guy, and there's lots of wisdom for sure in this podcast, no doubt. If you're on Snapchat, I actually joined a couple of weeks ago, come and say hi. Just look at the user name GuyL180. That's my user name. Come and check it out, say hi. Always great to meet like-minded people. I share behind the scenes of what I'm doing, even with these podcasts, how I'm filming, what's in my day as well. I'm enjoying this so far, it's a lot of fun. Anyway, let's go over to Jason. Enjoy. Hi, this is Guy Lawrence. I'm joined with Stuart Cooke, as always, hi Stuart. Stu: Hello, mate. Guy: Our awesome guest today is Jason Wachob. Jason, welcome to the show. Jason: Thanks for having me, guys. Guy: I really appreciate it. Jason, just to start the conversation. If you were sitting on an airplane and a complete stranger sat next to you and said, "Hi, what do you for a living?" How would you answer that? Jason: Wow. I would say I run a health and wellness media company called mindbodygreen. Guy: Perfect. My next question would be to you is just to get familiar with our listeners as well, is what is mind, body, and green, and what inspired you to start it in the first place, because it's obviously a big mission. Jason: Sure. I'll start with the story. I'm 6'7". I played basketball college a long time ago, I'm 41 now. Back then, this was 1998, there were no startups, guys like me either ... if they had grades, maybe they went to law school. If they had an aptitude for science and wanted to help people, they went to med school. Or if they had none of the above, they went to Wall Street, so I became a trader. Largely because I grew up with no money and always wanted money. I saw money as freedom, I saw money as something that I could pay off my college debt ... and so I went on to Wall Street and was able to do well enough to pay off my debt, bought my mother a car, probably a little freedom. While that was happening, at the same time, finally I reached this financial success and it was the worst month of my life because a relationship was falling apart. Very sharp contrast, here all I want is money, and I'm miserable. I saw really quickly that money did not buy happiness. 9/11 happened a little after that here in America. It really changed my perspective and it sort of led me down this entrepreneurial path. Fast forward to about 7 or 8 years ago, I was running a startup, doing a lot of flying. I flew almost 150,000 miles domestic in a year. 6'7" me, coach seat. Do the math, not so great. It turned out that I had an old basketball that was exacerbated by all the flying and stress. I was stressed in my mind at the time. I had two extruded discs pressing on my sciatic nerve, L4, L5, S1. My right leg was like a lightning rod. I could not walk, it was terrible. I went to a doctor, he said, "You need surgery. It's not negotiable." I don't think surgery's necessarily a bad thing, but it's just something I wanted to avoid. I sought a second opinion, and he said the same thing. Then it was almost like an afterthought, he said, "You know, maybe some yoga or therapy might help." I was like, "Okay, I'll give this yoga thing a shot." I started doing some really light yoga in the morning, in the evening, like 10-15 minutes. I started to feel better over the course of a few weeks, and over the course of a few months, I completely healed, so I never got surgery. It was like, "Holy cow!" This started to get me down this path and I started to look at things like stress and the mind and nutrition and the environment and all these things played a role in health, and I was like, "Holy cow, everyone's got health wrong." It's not about just vanity and weight loss, it's this lifestyle. Mind, body, green. That's how I got the idea for mindbodygreen quite literally, so that's how it all started. Video Version & Transcript: http://goo.gl/R15oxn