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What you'll learn in this episode:   How Joe's family history in the Thai diamond trade influences his business today How Joe generates publicity for his brand without a large PR budget Why Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry focuses on selling one-of-a-kind pieces to select clients How to wear bold, colorful jewelry without getting lost Why fine jewelry doesn't have to be limited to precious metals and gemstones   About Joe Vilaiwan (Polthakorn Viboonviriyawong) Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry is the work of creative artist and designer Joe Polthakorn Viboonviriyawong, a second-generation jeweler. In his native Thailand, Joe grew up in his family's diamond jewelry business and developed an instinct for identifying quality stones and metals. A natural-born artist, Joe began designing jewelry at age 14, when he created avant grade diamond rings that hinted at his future career.   As an independent visual concept designer for major retailers in the United States and Asia, he quickly became known for his bold, eye-catching store window installations. In 2005 in Los Angeles, Joe returned to his roots and launched Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry, which caught the attention of store buyers who recognized his unique blend of art and ornamentation. His meticulously hand-crafted, statement necklaces, cuffs and earrings became top sellers in museum stores and exclusive boutiques as stylish women in international fashion capitals began wearing and collecting his glamorous wearable arts.   A favorite among fashion editors, stylists and celebrities, Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry has been featured in magazines, on runways and in film. Joe recently collaborated with Disney Consumer Products to create the couture jewelry collection for the major motion picture, “Oz the Great and Powerful.”   Additional Resources: Joe's Website Joe's Instagram Joe's Facebook Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com   Transcript:   Although Joe Vilaiwan is known for creating large, over-the-top jewelry, he insists that anyone can wear his work—and almost everyone has, from Joan Rivers to Iris Apfel. As the founder of Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry, he has made it his mission to find the perfect piece for every client who connects with his work. He joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about how he gets inspired; how he sources the unique materials he uses in his jewelry; and how he has gotten A-list press for his brand without a large budget. Read the episode transcript here.     Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the first part of a two-part episode. Please make sure you subscribe so you can hear part two as soon as it's released later this week.    I was walking through the Beverly Hills Art Show this year. I always said I wanted to go, and this year I finally went. I went in the hopes of finding some unusual jewelry, and that's exactly what I found. If you know me, you know I like statement jewelry, and that's exactly what Joe Vilaiwan's jewelry is. He is the founder and creator of Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry.    If you know me, you know exactly what I like. I couldn't decide what to choose: the over-the-top necklace or the more recognizable pearls with diamonds set in. The pearls were larger than anything you would see in real life, so you immediately knew they weren't real and presumed the diamonds weren't real, either. What to choose, the white pearls or the black pearls? They're both fabulous. Clearly, I wasn't the only one who had to have this jewelry, as the booth was swarming with people. Today, Joe will tell us how he started his business and who his clients are. Also, we'll hear how he comes up with his ideas. Joe, welcome to the program.   Joe: Thank you for having me. My name is Joe Vilaiwan. I'm the designer and owner of Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry.   Sharon: Fine jewelry. I didn't even try and tell you what his real name is because I don't think I could spell it, and I don't know if I could say it.    Joe: Joe is my nickname in Thai because everybody in Thailand has a long, complicated last name. So, it's a last name. Everyone has a big name, so my parents also called me Joe. My friends call me Joe as well. Vilaiwan is actually my mother's name, which means beauty in Thai. I use that to honor my mother, who is my inspiration and who taught me about business. My family had a diamond business in Thailand. I grew up with it, and that's how I learned and got inspired and knew about jewelry.   Sharon: That's really nice, that it means a nice thing in Thai and that you wanted to honor your mother.    Joe: Yes.   Sharon: Did you work for somebody else first or did you come here?   Joe: For the jewelry business, I have to say the only person I worked for is my mom and the other was a cat. When I was 12, I started helping my mom in her jewelry business, in her diamond business. I helped her when I was very young. However, I got my bachelor's degree in advertising. Then I came to the U.S. to continue my education and my master's degree, which is in interior design and research communications. I took my shot at being an interior designer and concept designer for many, many years and got really successful in that field.    I wanted to have something on my own before I'm 30, so I decided that jewelry would be the best business for me. However, growing up, I'm learning about myself. I tend to notice that I've been drawn to big pieces or very bold and strong concepts of art and commercial arts. Therefore, I wanted to do more handmade, fine costume jewelry because I cannot use gems in big pieces of mine. That's how my business started. Vilaiwan Fine Jewelry was started in 2002. So, it's over 15, 16 years ago.    Sharon: I saw that you have done a lot of work, and you've gotten a lot of press for your designs. I can see why that would be of interest to you.    Joe: I'm very, very blessed with all of the praise and everything, considering that I don't have, or I've never hired, a PR firm. All the praise I got, it just went directly to me, with the project we did for Disney for the movie “Oz the Great and Powerful,” with all those fine fashion shows, fashion weeks, the praise all over the world, all the museums that carry my creations. I'm very blessed that I met people who actually appreciate my creations and believe in my talents.    Sharon: Would you say you decided to go after this PR, even though you didn't have a PR firm?   Joe: Yes, I did not have a PR firm. I did not hire a PR firm. I come from an advertising background, so I have a definite perspective about this even though I don't have it. That's why I say I'm very fortunate that those people and those players try to find me and contact me directly. That's how I got all that praise and all those awards.    Sharon: Would you say that most of your jewelry or all of your jewelry is statement jewelry? I thought you had a great definition of it.   Joe: People now come to me, and I will not have simple little things or small, little diamonds or small, little pieces. People come to me because they want unique. Either size, big or small, that I create—the smallest one was too big for some people, but they come to me because it's very special. It's one of a kind. It's the sole concept itself. That's what I'm known for.   Sharon: If I had a special dress and I wanted you to design something for it, but I didn't know who you were or I didn't know anything about your jewelry, what would I do?   Joe: Usually people find me. I have to say I'm very blessed again, because the best thing that happened to my business is actually my clients. Mostly the clients recommend other clients. Good people will bring good people to your life. I have this empire of great clients because my clients recommend clients. When I say my clients, they're not just saying it to be nice, but they seriously make appointments for their friends or make sure their friends make appointments to come see me. Sometimes they even set their appointment so they can make sure that me and the friends come together, and that those friends get in to see my creations. All my creations are one of a kind, so they run out very quickly. They sell out very quickly, so they're always waiting for the new pieces that will come out and try to get them before anyone else. Basically, clients recommend clients.    I also have social media. Do I want jewelry on my Instagram? Do I want fine jewelry on Facebook? People also can find me on those. The reason I don't carry in department stores is because, again, it's one of a kind, so they will run out quickly. I cannot go into the retail system. Also, I want my clients to be special, to be the only person who has the piece. When she wears that piece of jewelry to a particular event, she will be the only one. She would definitely be the star. I wanted to keep that spiritually and to be the lady of my life.    Usually, I never have a client who actually brings me a dress and tells me to design something for that dress. Mostly, they get the jewelry and find the dress to work around my jewelry. If they have the dress and they want to wear that dress particularly, they will come and choose the pieces they already created and I already have. I will help them find the right pieces. I have never done anything custom for a particular dress before. I actually find something I already have, that I already created, and is suited.    So far, for the past 16 years, we've been a success. There's actually an interesting story. Some of my clients who always wear big designer brands—you can name it from the top of the world. She was going to an event. One time, she bought this necklace from me. This necklace was very over the top, and she said she saw my fashion show in August. That one was in Palm Springs. It's called El Paseo Fashion Week. I had a silver and black dress, but it's a very sweet kind of dress, and she asked me, “Who's the designer?” She wanted to get one and buy that dress with my necklace.    So, I sent her the recent necklace she bought with that dress in her size. I did not tell her who the designer was, and she wore it. She brought so much attention, so much praise about it. Finally, she asked me, “Who's the designer?” and I told her that the dress was only $19. I actually bought it in downtown L.A. and it could be worn in five ways. That was a shock to her. Basically, if you have my jewelry, you can honor it with other designer dresses, but you don't have to be caught up to wear something expensive or some very well-known brand. You can buy something very basic and simple. The first thing seen is not my jewelry; it's you. My jewelry is just supporting that dress to help you shine your own light at that particular event.    At the same time, you do not need to wear it so dressy for a night event. Mostly all my pieces are practical because they are handmade. You can actually wear them casually with a T-shirt and jeans, and you will look like a rock star as well. That's why my clients love my jewelry; because they can wear it casually or dressy. Also, that's why they love to collect them. Mostly all my clients are collectors, and they are my clients for at least five or six years. I have many of them that have been my clients for over 10 years. When I say over 10 years, it doesn't mean they buy one time and then in the next 10 years another time. No, they've consistently been buying almost every month or every few weeks for the past 12 years or 13 years because they collect them.   Sharon: Do you have a seasonality? Do they come to you because they know it's the fall season and you're going to have new stuff? Is it something different for Christmas?   Joe: Interestingly, my jewelry doesn't have any season. I don't have a season where this piece will do well, then this piece or something like that. I know for sure that my vacation is during the holidays. Before the holidays, yes, it's busy, but during the holidays, everyone is doing our own thing. I also visit my family, and then it will get picked up again after the holidays in January or February.   I don't necessarily think the world now relies on, “Oh, it's spring and summer. You need to wear bright colors, pastel colors. In fall, you need to wear darker colors and something sparkling.” I don't think those kinds of rules are any expectation anymore. Sometime in summer, I have something in white or something that really sparkles, too. People wear whatever they want to wear, whatever can make them feel good about themselves, whatever they are actually comfortable with.    So, my answer is my jewelry is not seasonal. People will choose and always love what I create. They will wear what they want to wear in any time of their lives, in any season they want. They enjoy it because the most important thing is that when you put the right piece of jewelry on the right person, the combination of the energy of the person itself and the energy of the creator, the designer, the craftsmanship and everything, everything will be in harmony. That makes you grow. The aura comes, and it will make you feel good about yourself.    The emphasis is on that because even though it's a big and bold piece of jewelry, I have to finish everything on the real form. It needs to blend in well with the ongoing structure. It's not going to be something that's big and bold and just attached to your body. It needs to blend in and be a part of your body, so you feel like this is a part of you. It will help complement your energy and your own ability, and that is why it sparkles. The smile will be more beautiful, and you'll become your own self and the best version of you. I think that's my job as a designer.   Sharon: So, people bring their dresses to you, and you make the jewelry. That's what you're saying?   Joe: No, what I'm saying is that mostly they will buy my jewelry and find a dress themselves. Or, if they bring one in, they will find what I already have.   Sharon: I see.   Joe: I will help them in that process, to help them find what I already have that will complement the dress they bring. Does that make sense?   Sharon: Yes, now I understand. Do you find that some people say, “Oh, that's too much. I could never wear that. It's too big. It's too over the top”?   Joe: Yes, I've actually experienced that many times. What I've learned from my experience is they will say that the first time, but once it's on them, once they try them on, everything's just fine. Then they will say, “I could not wear anything small anymore. I want something that's big and bold.” They know it's not the size; it's the personality. That's what is actually more important. If you have a personality that's big enough, that's great enough, that's fine enough to carry my jewelry, whatever size that is, that's what you will find.   I have a client that's very petite and only wears big jewelry. Another client used to be one of my collectors as well before she passed away. She was very petite. Most people have necks that are 15 to 16 inches, but everything she bought, I had to customize the neck for her to be 14 ½. She's very small, very petite, and she only wears big, huge pieces of mine. Another collector only wears huge pieces of mine. Sometimes she will put two or three of my necklaces together on top of each other. It's not about the size, but yes, for people who've never known me, who have not seen my art jewelry before, sometimes the reaction is, “Oh my God, that is so big. That is so sparkling.” I always request them to try them on because you will see that sparkle in the eye. You will know that's the right piece on the right person.   Sharon: Do you ever watch the red carpet, the award shows, and see your jewelry on them?   Joe: Yes. In the business, you basically have to pay for PR for those actors and actresses to wear it. I don't have a lot of PR money. Every season they contact me so I can have my pieces worn on those red carpets, but I don't believe in that. My pieces are doing very well. All my lovely clients, if they want my pieces, have to pay for them. I never give my pieces out for free. Every single client of mine pays the same price as my regular clients. All my clients are the same, as I always say, and I treat them the same. If you love it, you need to respect the artist and you have to possess them. I don't believe in paying someone to wear your jewelry on the red carpet. I don't believe in that. Therefore, when I watch it, it's mostly the brands that can afford it: Chopard, Cartier, expensive, real diamonds or pieces they have the budget to put in.    For me, it's a little bit boring. Once in a while, I will see some pieces that are strong and interesting, but mostly it's not. I have a lot of clients who go to red carpets, not as an actress, but they go there as a producer, their lawyer, their agent and other things. They will buy my jewelry, and they bring more attention from all those stars. I don't attach to those kinds of things, that it needs to be famous on a red carpet. For me, all my clients are the same, whether you are a famous actress or you're a housekeeper. Everyone is treated the same.   Sharon: We will have photos posted on the website. Please head to TheJewelryJourney.com to check them out.  

Linda Gradstein and Noah Efron discuss two topics of incomparable importance and end with an anecdote about something in Israel that made them smile this week. Hear the Extra-Special, Special Extra Segment on Patreon   —The Hell?— After 85 fever-dream days, what the hell just happened? —Has Bibi Lost It?— Is it time to administer Trump's old “Person-Woman-Man-Camera-TV” test to Benjamin Netanyahu? —The Fightin' Joe— For our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters, in our extra-special, special extra discussion: Did Joe Biden just bitch-slap Benjamin Netanyahu? All that and an appreciation of Yiddish poet Riva Basman Ben-Hayyim, may her memory be for a blessing, and the music of Dror Paz!

After holding the first ever #VOBOSS Bilingual Audition Challenge, Anne & Pilar welcome the winners onto the show. Joe Lewis, Milena Benefiel, and Ramesh Mahtani share the process behind their winning entry, what stood out to Anne & Pilar when judging the contest as well as what it means to be a bilingual voice talent in today's industry. Transcript >> It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey, hey. Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today we have a very, very special episode planned for you. Not only am I here with my awesome special guest co-host Pilar Uribe -- woohoo Pilar! Pilar: Hi, Anne. Anne: Thanks for being here. We are so honored to be here with our VO BOSS bilingual audition challenge winners. So a huge welcome to our English audition winner, Joe Lewis. Yay! Joe: Hello. Ramesh: Hello, Joe. Anne: And our Spanish audition winner -- Pilar: Milena Benefiel. Anne: Yay! Hey Milena. Milena: Hi. Anne: And then our best English and Spanish audition, Ramesh Mahtani. Yay! So first of all, congratulations, everybody, on your wins. Joe: Thank you. Milena: Thank you, gracias. Ramesh: Gracias. Anne: It's very exciting. For those BOSSes that are just joining us and have not joined us before now, Pilar and I ran a bilingual audition challenge contest, which featured a Toyota commercial in both English and Spanish. And this was about, I'm gonna say, three to four weeks ago, and we had a number of submissions. I think it was over what, Pilar, like 130 or something like that? Pilar: Yeah. Anne: Or close to 130. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: And so first of all, everybody did a wonderful job, but we are so, so incredibly excited to have the winners with us today to talk about being bilingual in the industry today and what it takes. So let's start with our English winner, Mr. Joe Lewis. Yay, Joe. Joe, tell us a little bit about yourself and then I wanna play your winning audition. Joe: Okay. Well thank you for having me here. First of all, it's great to be with you all. I am a bilingual voiceover and voice actor, born in the US, Spanish father, American mother. And basically I've been back and forth in the States to Spain and from Spain to the States at different points of my life. And it's been a trip or several trips. You learn to adapt where you are and you do as the Romans do. And you learn a lot of stuff because you have to leverage two cultures, two languages. It's a thing. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, let's play your winning audition. And I wanna tell you a little bit about the specs. Our specs indicated that the voice should be confident, knowledgeable, optimistic, never take themselves too seriously, but at the same time, never come off as sarcastic either, warm human down to earth, playful spontaneous, conversational, relatable, and above all else, nothing that is typical commercial sounding, movie trailer, or announcery at all. So. Milena: All the things, all the things. Anne: All the things. Pilar: In other words, the kitchen sink. Anne: All the things. Totally. And I want to give a big shout out to the queen bee herself, Liz Atherton, and CastVoices for her sponsoring this contest and offering our winners a year pro membership to CastVoices. You guys, castvoices.com, go and get yourself an account. Liz is amazing and always has the voice talents' backs. I'll tell you what, she's amazing. So thank you Liz for that. So let's go ahead and play the warm, human, down to earth, playful, not typical commercial sounding, movie trailer or announcery English winning submission by Joe. Here we go. Joe: Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Anne: I love it. Joe: Thank you. Anne: I think that that really took every single spec into consideration. Joe, did you have any particular strategy when you were doing this audition or what is it that you do to prepare for an audition? Because we had so many submissions, but yours just kind of really stood out from the get-go. Joe: Well, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate it. As far as strategy, if it's automotive, I take it extra seriously because it's a big genre. So no matter what it is, even if it's a dealership, you know, it could turn into a long-term gig. So you take it seriously. It's always a challenge, uh, to see if it's a soft sell or if it's a harder sell, more promotional. At the same time, as you say, there's lot to consider in the styles or the trends that we work with today, uh, which are very different from 10, 15, 20 years ago. And that's as far as in general or as far as English. As far as Spanish, obviously my origin is of Castilian Spanish, uh, from Spain. So knowing that this would be for the American market, I tried to modulate that and go to a more neutral read and, and taking the specs into consideration as much as I could and have fun, have fun with it. Anne: Yeah. I think that's so important that you have fun with it. Pilar, comments about why we love Joe so much. Pilar: Listening to it again, I think what, what I really liked about it, this is probably not the right word. It wasn't folksy, but I really felt like I was listening to you, and I was listening to a real person rather than somebody reading it. Anne: Yeah, I agree. Pilar: Like, and just the small pauses, the little giggle -- there were some amazing entries, but what I found so interesting about yours was that you had this attitude from the beginning. You weren't serious, and then you went to the punchline. You had this sort of upbeat throughout the entire read. That's what really stood out for me. Anne: Yeah. Really, really warm smile, I think overall. Joe: Thank you so much. Anne: I just felt like. Pilar: Yeah, yeah. Anne: I felt like we were just longtime friends, which we are, but listening to, I felt like we were, and it really, really stood out from the beginning. So congratulations, Joe, again -- Joe: Thank you so much. Anne: -- on that. Joe: I appreciate it. Anne: So onto our winner in the Spanish division, Milena. Milena: Hi. Anne: Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you're located and your VO journey so far. Milena: All right. Well Saludos, hola, hi. Milena Benefiel. I am currently located in Orlando, well, near Orlando, Florida. I am the first generation born here in the US. Both of my parents came over from Cartagena, Colombia, woohoo and they insisted that I learned Spanish as a child, and I never understood why. Why would I ever need this other language? And look at me now, right? My background was actually in television. I worked part-time as a TV host for a Telemundo affiliate in Spanish and did a lot of commercial acting while also being an ER nurse and ICU nurse. I came from entrepreneurial parents who had multiple careers, multiple jobs, 'cause they had to, right, coming from another country. So I don't know how to not have too much on my plate. So this was kind of my side hustle. And after COVID I, I took it from part-time to full-time. I, I was kind of burnt out in the hospital, and yeah, I had the ability to go from sounding very middle America English, as you can hear in my, in my accent to speaking [Spanish] speaking in Spanish that's very neutral. It kind of like people are like, are you Colombian or Cuban or from where? So I've been very fortunate in that that I've been able to provide both sides for my clients. So it's been a really fun journey. Ramesh: Super. Anne: Yeah. Let's have a listen to the winning entry. Here we go. Milena: Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Yay! Ramesh: Super. Anne: Congratulations again, such a wonderful, warm sound. That's what I really got. And I love how, when we said have fun with this or somebody that doesn't take themselves too seriously, I really felt that in the places where you could -- it opened up to have fun, the more conversational like, "oops, I think my burrito's done." I love the way that you guys brought life to that and brought fun to that that wasn't even as expected. Pilar, your thoughts, Pilar: You had me from the beginning Milena. This was to me displayed so much warmth and reassurance. I felt like when I listen to it, you're taking me by the hand, and you're reassuring me as a consumer that it's gonna be okay. And it's like, oh yeah, I'll do whatever she says. Milena: Wow. PIlar: So that's what I got from this read. It was really, yeah, it was, it was really good read. You just, you got me. Milena: Oh my goodness. Thank you so much. I am so grateful for that feedback. That's kind of my MO when it comes to anything that I do in VO. I just, I, I wanna be warm and caring and reassuring. That's kind of my, my thing. So that you heard that feels so good because it makes me feel like, wow, okay. I'm, I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. So thank you so much. Anne: I wanna kind of tag on to what Pilar said. Like for me, I do not speak Spanish, but I could hear the story. If I listen, I could hear your story in there. And when we talk about trusting Toyota, I felt that, and I really felt that you took the words beyond just what was on the page, and really you were in the scene. And like I said, for me to not even speak Spanish but to listen and to be able to hear your storytelling, I thought that that was, that was just really wonderful. So yeah. Milena: Wow. Thank you so much. Such a huge compliment from two women that I admire very much. So this is a very surreal moment for me. So thank you so much. Anne: well deserved. Well deserved. Milena: Thank you. Anne: Okay. So onto our English Spanish combination winner. Ramesh Mahtani yay. Congratulations. Ramesh, tell us a little bit -- Ramesh: Well, thank you very much. Anne: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey. Ramesh: Yeah, well, I suppose like most of us over here, very, very varied background. I mean, I was born in Karachi, Pakistan to Indian parents who perhaps were a bit disgruntled with the way things were going out over there, and they decided to move to the Canary Islands. Why, I have no idea, but that takes me back to when I was about four. So I came over here to the islands, speaking a combination of Sindi, of Hindi, of Urdu. Of course I had to learn Spanish rather quickly. And my parents always wanted me to speak English because they knew that English is the lingua franca, and you wouldn't get anywhere in the world without it. So I grew up in an American school over here in the canaries, and I was shipped off to a horrible concentration camp sort of boarding school in England, which was a nightmare. Um, I would spend four long miserable years there, which is I suppose, where I picked up the sort of vestige of an English accent. And then I went to America to do my university degree, which was a lot of fun. And I saw what the real world was like. And I didn't, I suppose, switch on to the American accent because wherever I spoke to were like, oh my God, your accent's so cool. Where are you from? Well, I'm originally from -- Oh my God. Keep on speaking. We just love your accent. So, um, no, I didn't pick up an American accent, I suppose. I just veered towards what, what I call international or neutral. So that's my story. And in voice, I I've always played around with my voice. I love switching accents between -- I speak to my parents with a bit of an -- well, my mom. My father passed away -- with an Indian accent. So it changes depending who I talk to, if it is very strong Indian community, well, it becomes Indian, otherwise it's what I speak now. And then of course, in Spanish and English and French and all these sort of, you know, weird voices going on in my head, it was but natural that I followed a voice over career. So that's what brings me here today, basically. Anne: Wow. Well now you did something interesting with your auditions. You did two takes for both English and Spanish. And so one of the things that stood out to Pilar and I were the fact that you did two different takes for each. And so let's go ahead and play now. Um, I'm gonna click on this one. I'm not sure if this is the English or the Spanish. So hang on one second because the name is, is long. So it's kind of running off my little table here. Ramesh: Sure. Anne: It could be either one. Let's put it that way. There we go. Ramesh: Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Beep. Beep. That is the sound of me signaling that this is a car commercial while being considerate of the fact that you may be on the road. It's exactly this kind of consideration that lets you know, you can trust Toyota and our all new 2022 Highlander SUV to get you where you need to be faster and more reliably. Beep beep beep beep beep. Oops. Sorry. I think my burrito's done. Anne: I love it. I wanna just make some comments before we played your Spanish entry. I thought, first of all, you had two completely different takes, and now I understand where the accent came from because you were living in the UK. So I get that now. I was not aware of that, but I really loved it because it really wasn't something that felt to me like it was obviously forced or something that wasn't natural to you. And the fact that you did completely different reads shows just some tremendous acting ability, which I think is any good casting director that can hear that knows immediately that they would be able to direct you to do anything really. And so that was, I thought was really strong about your English entry. And I also liked you had a different reaction and a different emotion about the burrito, which stood out to me, even though it was like a nuanced change. You're like, oh I think my burrito's done. Or Ooh, I think my burrito's done. It really lent a lot to the different reads and the different aspects and the showcasing of your acting abilities. Pilar. Pilar: Yeah. I felt like you were talking to two different people in the two different reads and that was really significant. And it's funny because I didn't realize it, but they were two different accents, and I was like, they sounds so different, and it's, it's like, oh yeah, duh, because he's so versatile. But that also colored the read because one was a little bit more business-like. The other one was a little bit sort of more off the cuff, more warm. And so it was really interesting to see them together, but they are very different reads, so yeah, that's great. Ramesh: Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I suppose one of the underlying elements is that I try and make sure that I'm not trying to sell in this case, sell the car, but just say, tell the story, uh, as something that we will often talk about in voiceover direction. As soon as it sounds sort of salesy, you know, you're going the wrong direction. So spice it up, you know, conjure up some magic, just make it sound as if as Pilar said, you know, you're just basically off the cuff having a conversation with someone, without sell, buy this car sort of thing, you know, which we definitely do not want to go there. Anne: And you know, I don't know if you guys noticed, but in the middle of that script, the sentences were a little bit long. You know how we always get a script and if it's a really lovely, wonderfully written script, we're like, oh yes, it's so easy to voice. We gave you something specifically that may not have been so easy to voice in navigating a long sentence. So. Ramesh: Ah, you did it purposely. Anne: Yeah. All of you handled that so well, so kudos on that. I mean, I'm used to doing that because you do a lot of long format narration and coaching my students, there's always unwieldy sentences. And to make it sound truly conversational and you know, as if you're talking to one person or talking to us, you gotta know your rhythm, you gotta kind of know, you gotta put yourself in the scene and understand where those pauses, where the commas are, even if they don't exist. Ramesh: Yeah. I realize, I thought, my gosh, who's written this, because it is, there was a part where it got really wordy and thought, you know, you have to navigate that. Pilar: Those were the traps and none of you fell into it. Anne: Yes. You know, we are teachers . Exactly. Yes. Always a teacher, just saying so, so congratulations. All right. So let's play, uh, the Spanish entry, which again, you did two reads, which were different. So here we go. Ramesh: Soy Ramesh Mahtani. Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Bip bip. Ese es el sonido que uso para señalar que este es un comercial de autos mientras que usted podría estar conduciendo en la carretera. Este tipo de servicio es lo que le permite saber que puede confiar en Toyota y en nuestra nueva SUV Highlander 2022 para que se transporte de un lugar a otro de la manera más rápida y confiable. Bip bip bip bip bip. Vaya, lo siento, creo que mi burrito está listo. Anne: Yay. Ramesh: I suppose I'll just caveat, uh, the accent there. I mean like Joe, I live in Spain and sometimes if my client's in mainland Spain, I would do a Castilian accent, but I put on a sort of neutral and general Latin American accent for those, which is similar to the Canarian accent. Anne: Yeah. I was gonna just ask you about that. And one thing that I wanted to point out, which I thought was super strategic, because you did the two takes, you immediately went into your second take to call the attention of like -- Pilar and I listened like, oh my gosh, I think it took us a weekend, right, at least, uh, one after the other one after the other. Pilar: Several times too. Anne: Exactly. And the fact that even though, I didn't know, you were having two takes immediately going into that second take was like brilliant because I didn't stop listening. You know, I was just getting ready. Okay. He's finished -- oh no, here he comes with the next one, which I thought was really strategic. And I think if I know you, Ramesh, that was on purpose Ramesh: Would it have been the alternative to have said, take one? Pilar: No. Most people leave a space. Anne: A lot of space. Yeah. Pilar: You don't let the listener down for a second. There's no lag time. Ramesh: Right. Pilar: And that is brilliant. I mean, I'm using that in my auditions now as well. Ramesh: Okay. I've I've always done it that way. Anne: That's smart. Ramesh: I, I seldom send off an audition unless I do two. Pilar: It's wonderful. Ramesh: I usually always do two takes. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: And I just do them back to back. So as you said, so they don't have a chance to hit the next button. Yeah. Milena: I typically call it out in my slate if I'm going, do two takes, which -- Anne: And that's good too. Milena: -- for most auditions I would do two. Yeah. But I like this. You give them no choice. Give 'em no choice. Anne: Right, right. Just go right into it. I love it. And you went right into that second character too, which I thought was great for that. Now did you have a strategy English versus Spanish? I know you just mentioned that you did more of a neutral Spanish. What was your strategy for those two different reads? Ramesh: For the two Spanish reads? Anne: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Ramesh: Um, just, just variation really. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: I mean, I just, I would loathe for them to sound similar so the director would've said, ah, you know, this guy's obviously reading the same thing twice in the same way. I, I just do not wanna fall in that trap. So whatever I could do to spice it up or color it to just make them sound different and believable, relatable and conversational, keeping away from the salesy. Anne: Sure. So then let me ask you what's happening in your brain? What's happening? What's the process? Are you putting yourself in a different scene maybe? Ramesh: I've got a different audience and I'm somebody else. Anne: Okay. Ramesh: So either I'm a young sort of rich, youthful sort of business dude, or I'm an older person just wanting to sort of have a nice car. So I, my whole persona changes, maybe it helps being a Gemini. I could switch from one, from one personality to the other, but yeah, definitely. I've gotta change the audience and change the speaker. Both of them. Anne: Oh good. That's a really good tip. I like that. I've always changed the scene, but not necessarily who I was, because I always wanna be conversational and, and tell this story and, and not be salesy as well, but I never thought about changing, let's say I'm a younger Anne, which that would be nice. I like that. Milena: Your voice can be as young as you wanna be. Anne: That's it. There you go. Yeah. I like that. Ramesh: I guess ever since I was a young kid and, and having been moved around so many different places, I perhaps, and this is for something very personal and intimate, and I, and now that it comes up in context, I don't mind sharing it, but I've, I've often struggled to have a proper identity as an -- sometimes I don't even know who I am because I've had to switch and I do often switch, you know, when I speak, as I said, I speak to my mom, I speak to in an Indian sort of way. I speak to the local Canarian dudes out in the street and become totalmente canario; it's a totally different accent. So I'm always switching, switching, switching, switching in the end, to think, you know, oh my gosh, existential crisis, you know, who am I? Anne: That's a, that's really an interesting point. Yeah. Joe: You're a chameleon, Ramesh. Ramesh: I'm a bit of a chameleon. Anne: Absolutely. Ramesh: I'm not Spanish and I'm not English, you know? So it's really weird. Anne: That's very interesting. I always equate that, and again, I'll get maybe a little into it, but I grew up with three brothers. And so being the only girl in the family, I didn't have to share necessarily, but I also didn't have like a sister to kind of like play dolls with or whatever I was gonna be doing. Milena: Same. Anne: So I got really good at my imagination. Ramesh: Yeah. Anne: And playing with my dolls and teaching and talking to them and really putting myself in different scenes with them. And I think that carries through the adulthood. Right, Milena, you mentioned the same thing? Milena: Oh yeah, absolutely. I didn't have a sister growing up. And I also just think like with my parents having the multiple jobs, they were both performers. My whole life has been a performance, and I kind of do the same in my two takes. I go into my lower register in that warm, buttery, soft, like my first take will be -- or exactly what the specs ask for, I'll give you in the first take, and then the next one, I'll kick it up to a little bit of a higher pitch, make myself a little bit younger and I'll be a little wackier, like a little more fun, a little more conversational, and just get a little more crazy with it. Just to add some adlibs and some different things too, just for range. Anne: I think that's great. Do you have more than two personas? I always have two in my pocket, but do you spend time developing, let's say, a third read or a third persona that can give you a different read? I think that's good for the artist in us. Joe: I mean, I, what captivated me about this piece was the invitation to do effects. You don't usually see that in copy, so I thought that was like, ooh, this is gonna be fun. Anne: Yeah. Joe: And then I tried to add layers, do several takes and sort of warm up and then listen to them and see if I can be sprinkling, uh, or adding something. But I do agree that when you kick into another language, it's another dimension of tools and, and tricks that you have. I wasn't privileged to have brothers or sisters. So being lucky enough to grow up with a, a parent of either side, you know, you, you kind of take it for granted when you're a kid, and then you, you grow up and you're like, wow, this is pretty powerful to switch on and off, switch the languages, you know, with all the cultural and the contextual things that come along with each particular one. Totally there with Ramesh on the strange dichotomy that happens and not really knowing who you are or when it's the, uh, what secret service did you say you worked for again? Pilar: No, comment. Milena: I love how he's silent. He's like -- Joe: He's a pro. Milena: If I tell you I'll have to kill you. Ramesh: Well, sorry. Did I, did I talk about a secret service? Joe: I was asking you what secret service you work for, my friend. Anne: I love it. Milena: Crickets, crickets. Anne: Crickets. Secret service. Pilar: Speaking of which, that was one of the things that really struck me about Ramesh's Spanish read is that I heard someone speaking in Spanish with the Spanish language rhythms rather than a translation. And that to me was so important because that not being your first language, and I think that that's really important because like Milena, I mean, I was born in this country, but my parents spoke to me for the first five years of my life in Spanish, but it's technically not the language that, you know, I speak English all the time. So there's something, there's always that strange sort of divide. Like who are you? Are you this? Are you that? And what I really liked about your read was that it was like, I was listening to a Spanish person speaking, not a translation. And that's so important. Everyone is always so concerned with the accent. That really kind of falls by the wayside. Because if you believe in what you're saying, and it has to do with acting, if you're really acting it, how well you speak or how much of an accent you have doesn't really matter. It all falls by the wayside. So that's what to me, what made a very successful bilingual audition. And that's why we picked you, one of the reasons why we picked you as the bilingual audition winner. Ramesh: Oh, thank you. I'm privileged. Thank you very much. Anne: And again, I'll just kind of tack onto what Pilar was saying is both of the Spanish versions of your audition, I could hear the story that you were telling. And again, I listened very carefully, especially in the unwieldy sentences, because that's what I do every day with my students. I'm working on these crazy, long format narration scripts that aren't always written well. And so I would really be listening carefully throughout all the entries for that navigation. And I still felt the story. I felt the rhythm, and I felt the words that needed to come be a little more present in my ear that were important, like the brand name, the fact that you trust Toyota on all of your reads. Believe it or not, listening to all of the entries, that was kind of a key I was listening for, to trust Toyota. And I wanna feel that trust as opposed to trust Toyota. And I really wanted to feel that little nuance of emotion or trust. And I think every single one of you in every one of your English and Spanish gave me that trust feeling and that warm feeling and that kind of having fun with it, especially at the end, and the beeps too. I mean, I like the fact that we gave this script out because of the beep beep and what people did with the beep beep was really telltale, especially in the beginning, if you did something that maybe wasn't a traditional beep beep or you had fun with it, or you just kind of smiled at yourself. I think Joe, you're, right off the bat, you're kind of chuckling a little bit and it just was so warm and I fell in love with that from the beginning and all of your interpretations of the beeping at the front end of that and the back end of that, I loved it. You know, you had fun with it like we asked in the specs. Joe: Well, I was just gonna say Road Runner, you know, I mean, it was irresistible to me. It was irresistible. Ramesh: Absolutely, absolutely. Milena: Yes, that's exactly what I pictured in my head too. Ramesh: Yeah. Milena: That's funny. Ramesh: I think after doing this for, I mean, you know, you're speaking to people who are super professionals. I have great respect for Joe and Milena and Pilar and yourself, Anne, of course. I mean, when you listen to somebody who's just started off and doesn't have much training, that's when you realize, oh my gosh, this is a poorly done audition. But after a while it just becomes intuitive, I think, plus the script lend itself, the beeps, the mic proximity that you can, the burrito whole thing. I mean, what does the burrito have to do with the car sale, for God's sake? So you can do so much with that. You know, you can just, as you said, have fun and the more imagination you have, and the more years of experience you have tucked under your belt, you can do crazy things within parameters, of course. I often don't overthink it because that's usually when it doesn't usually work. It's usually my first and my third take, which are good. Uh, the first one, because I'm just off the bat, I'm fresh and I'm just being really spontaneous. The second seems to be similar to the first ,and the third, usually I've had a bit more time to imagine nuances, and those come out quite magically. So, but yeah, the script was nice. It lent itself to, to having fun and being creative. Milena: I completely agree with that, the instincts, I know Anne, you had asked earlier, you know, what was your method? How did you attack this script? How did we look at the script? And I actually will do a read prior to even reading the specs, just to get my natural inclination of like, okay, I'm looking at the script without overthinking it. Let me just do a read. And then of course looking at the specs, and then kind of picking apart, you know, I listened back to my read and picking apart, what words do we wanna highlight? Like you said, trust, right? The brand, faster and safely, getting there fast and safely. Those are important things, right? Joe: Exactly. Milena: So then I go through with it, but I completely agree with Ramesh, it typically is my first read. And then maybe my third or my fourth. The second one always sounds like the first one, or it's like, so off the wall that it's like, why did I go totally left field on that one? But yeah. I completely agree with you, when you just go with those once you've been doing it for a while, when you try to be someone you're not, it's not authentic. Ramesh: Exactly. Milena: And you can hear it in your read. Joe: Yeah. By family tradition, my parents came from the academic and the publishing world. So script analysis, I put at the top of the list, you know, the top three, because the burrito for example was what invited me not to do it in Castilian. And that was my choice. I thought it was great that you did two takes of each, Ramesh. I, I shied away from the Castilian because I just wanted to have a burrito and, and that's Mexican, and I just -- and it's international by now., yes, but it's traditionally and originally Mexican. And I wanted, I wanted to go there. If you told any person in Spain, you know, burrito just stand alone, they might not get it. If it's contextual, they'll be, oh yeah, yeah, Taco Bell, you know, whatever, but, or Mexican restaurant, but that's, that's the reason I, I shied away from Castilian and I, I made an attempt at my best neutral Spanish. Milena: I had no choice. I don't do Castilian You don't wanna hear me trying to do Castilian accent. Anne: So that brings an interesting question, which I had asked of Pilar early on in our series, about when specs come in for Spanish, is there a strategy? Are specs clear? Do you sometimes have to say, well, is there a particular dialect that you're looking for? What do you guys do? Joe: First and foremost is the market. What market is it hitting? Because if it's a state, it's gonna be 99.9% neutral Spanish. It's very exceptional to do Castilian. I've spent many years living in Spain, and sometimes they call me to do Spanish and Catalan. And for many years they wanted an American accent, even though I don't really have one when I speak normally. So I, I had to kind of impose, impose an accent like this or something like that. You know, you know what I'm saying? Milena: I love it. Being in the US, I think it's kind of less of a question for me. I know Ramesh and Joe are overseas. For me here in the US, typically my specs are always gonna say either neutral Spanish or Latam Spanish, Latin American Spanish. That's 99%. I think I have gotten a couple auditions that have asked for Catalan or Castilian Spanish. And it's very rare, but I am pretty upfront with them that I'm like, you're not gonna be happy with my read, if you want me to try to pull one of those off. But yeah, I think for me over here in the States, it's almost always, it's gonna be neutral or, or Latin American Spanish, which is what I do. And I can put a little bit more of that Paisa, you know, Colombian accent on it, if they're asking specifically for Latin American, but yeah. Ramesh: I've had a very strange situation with many of my castings in Spanish. I've booked jobs. And then they come to me and say, you're not Spanish, are you? I said, they say, you sound very Spanish, but by your name, we had doubts. And a few times they're, they're brave enough to say that. Anne: Yeah. Ramesh: They're like, your name sounds Indian or Pakistani. I'm like, well, it is. What you want do about it? Milena: What you want? Ramesh: You bookedme. You, you booked me, you liked my audition, but are you just curious? You just wanna start a conversation over here? And, and I struggle with that. And the same thing with my English, like, oh, this guy's Indian. He probably, he doesn't have a proper English accent. I'm like, well, so I stopped trying to be very British at one point, and I said, well, I'm international English. I mean, what can I say? Yes, I'm Indian. I can't, I could change my name. And at one point I tried to go as Robert Martin, but I thought it just sucks. Joe: No, you should be Pepe Mahtani. Ramesh: Pepe Mahtani de las islas canarias... so, yeah. So that's another sort of strange one, but like Joe's, But I mean, I also do a lot of times they, they ask you to do a span with the English accent. So you have to do what they, what the client wants and you hope they're happy. Joe: You have to. You have to. Ramesh: You have to. Pilar: You have to. Ramesh: Yes. Milena: Oh my goodness. Ramesh: Without a doubt. Milena: Ramesh, that did strike me. Remember, our first conversation. That's what I said. I said, I'm completely blown away. As soon as I saw your name, I was like, well, he's not Spanish or American. [indistinct] Ramesh: No, I totally understandable, yeah. It's like, where are you from? [speaking Spanish] Milena: Cómo puede ser, pero no entiendo. [banter in Spanish] Joe: For me, it's the same, Joe Lewis. Right? You know, talking in Spanish, like, come on. This is -- Pilar: You could be José Luís. Joe: Ridiculous, ain't it? Milena: José Luís. Joe: José Luís, exacto. Ramesh: Whenever I speak to Joe, whenever I, the first thing I tell him, when we get on the phone is like, hello, Mr. Joe Lew-is. . Joe: I try to do my best Southeast Asian for Ramesh because I love him so much. Ramesh: Listen, all my white friends who try and do an Indian accent are just terrible at it. You guys suck big eggs because you cannot do an Indian accent. Even Mr. Peter Sellers, who I have great respect for in the movie "The Party," he also did not pull out a decent Indian accent. I'm sorry. It's crap. Joe: A thousand apologies. But I do -- I do this with, with love. I do this with love. I promise you. Ramesh: Joke around. Anne: Oh my goodness. Ramesh: You can joke around because we are good friends, but your Indian accent, I'm sorry, is not very convincing. Joe: Totally. Totally agreed. Anne: Oh my goodness. Well, you guys -- Milena: Friends don't let friends go around with terrible accents. Anne: There you go. There you go. Joe: Precisely. Anne: So I wanna ask each of you, what would be your best tip? Like how do you market yourself as -- like people that are coming in to the industry now, if they're bilingual, what best tips can you give us to market yourself as a bilingual voice talent? Joe: I've spent many years trying to equate both. I have them at the same level, both languages. It was a thing of responsibility. That's a big R word, responsibility. And this was instilled through my parents directly and indirectly. So I was very lucky with that. It all went astray when, uh, a number of years ago, I started to get requests from clients to do accents that are not my natural accents. Oh, I wait, are you sure? I'm like, yes, no, please. And then you do it and they love it. And like, Hmm, well, maybe there's something here. Maybe, maybe it's a thing. So you can never sleep in your laurels. You can never get too comfortable. You can never get too overconfident because it's like music. I come from music. It's ultimately unattainable. You're not gonna finish it. Just keep on pumping. That's what you can do. That's my best advice. Keep on pumping. Ramesh: 100%. Milena: I guess before this interview, we talked about this a little bit. I actually shied away from doing Spanish when I first started, despite me literally being on Telemundo, right? like having my own segment in Spanish. I always was a little bit insecure about my Spanish, and I would get requests to do things both English and Spanish, and producers kept telling me like, you've got something here. You've gotta do -- when you can offer both sides, it's more efficient. It's mutually beneficial for you and the client. You've really gotta push this. And I did. So I try to -- and I'm trying to get better at it -- I try to, when I'm posting things, say to social media, or, you know, whenever I'm doing things, I'm trying to do more showing the spots that I do in English and in Spanish so that people can see both sides, especially right now. There's this huge shift in the last few years here, that is this huge push for diversity, huge push for bilingualism, especially with Spanish in the US. And I don't know if you guys are seeing things over there too, or internationally, 'cause of course I just know here in the US, but there's this really big push. So I've been very, very fortunate in that everyone that I connect with, as soon as I mention that I'm bilingual, they then mention that to somebody else. So my biggest tip would be let people know. Don't do what I did for the first, you know, five years and shy away from that. Practice it. And if you don't feel as confident in that second language, which I didn't, start reading books out loud, watching movies, speaking -- I told my parents do not speak to me in English. We're speaking in Spanish, and I would read technical things so that it would be more difficult, you know, words that I didn't use in conversation, and just let people know, but plaster it everywhere and make sure everyone knows. Anytime I send an audition on say Voice 123, 'cause I do use that as a pay to play in addition to my agents and other things, anytime, even if it's an English audition only, I always, always, always write, hey, and if you ever think about hitting the Hispanic market, I also speak neutral Spanish. Please go to my website and here's my stuff. Even if it's only an English spot, I always let people know. And you know what? 50% of the time, they come back to me and say, you know what? We posted a separate for the Spanish. We'll just go with you for both of them. So whatever language that is that you're in, use it. And even if you don't think they'll ever use you in -- let people know, 'cause they're not gonna know unless you tell them, right? So that is my biggest piece of advice is just brag on yourself, man. Let 'em know. Joe: And if I may quote Jaco Pastorias, the great late bass player, it ain't bragging if you can back it up. Milena: Heyo. Ramesh: Absolutely. Anne: Ramesh, your thoughts? Ramesh: Yeah. Well, I think in my case, I was speaking to Joe about this actually a few, a few days back, it, it's very market specific. I mean I live in Spain and I don't really market myself to Spanish clients in Spanish, I suppose because I know there's, there's a whole plethora of Spanish voice artists here. Why would they necessarily go to me? So they come to me for English and as Milena said, once they come to me for English, then I'd bring out the Spanish. I'm like, here you go. I can do it in Spanish for you. Oh great. That saves us so much trouble and hassle finding somebody who can do it in Spanish. And likewise with international clients that I book in English, you know, I tell them I, I can do the Spanish, but I think you, as Milena said, you have to let it be known that you can do both and do whatever you're good at. If you're good at corporate, well, sell yourself at corporate and be even better at corporate, and then perhaps branch out to something that you may want to aspire to. If you wanted to do some animation in Spanish, you've never done that before, get coaching, but focus on your strengths and build your strengths and be really confident that my strong piece is this. And I can promote that openly and confidently, because confidence is, is 90% of the game. If they see that you say I can do Spanish for you as well. And you know, you don't have a belief in yourself, it's gonna seep through. I mean, I do French voicing, but I tell the clients, I'm not a native French speaker. I've got a very good accent, but it's not native. And I try and pull it off because I have confidence that I can do it. Joe: I totally agree. We don't read minds. And I, I was in a corporate multinational advertising agency for a while, and bilingualism in the States is a really important thing. I mean, I don't know what you think, Ramesh, if you agree with me, but for certain reasons, I think there's more of a bilingual ambient in the States than there is in Spain. 'Cause Spain is too busy with politics and they're busy with co-official languages. They're not dialects, they're official languages like Catalan, Gallego, or Galician and, and Basque. And the, the thing is that, uh, because of the way English is taught in Spain and, and because of dubbing, this is the reason why English is not a second nature, uh, language in Spain. So you always have to have client education in mind in the good sense to try to explain to them because they may not read your mind. They may not understand to what level you are in the other language. It's not easy. I mean, it's, we live in a world that is very multiplied because of social media. And you know, I see this from the musician standpoint, again, you know, the advent of pop star. You do a 3000 line casting. You, you get in, you're on TV, it's instant stardom. I mean, there's a lot of ways to get known really quickly and dramatically in this world. And a lot of people are strutting their stuff. So it's a complicated thing to market yourself effectively. It's not just marketing, and here I would like Anne to take over on the marketing thing because you're a master at this, but it's a really important question, what you ask. How do you market yourself in English and Spanish effectively and be taken seriously? You know? Anne: Well, I mean spoken by the guy who has the bilingualvoiceover guy.com, right? I mean me@thebilingualvoice -- so that I'll tell you, right in your URL, you're advertising, and you've got multiple URLs. And I know that, you know, all of you on your websites are focusing or you have the fact that you are bilingual. And I think that's number one, I mean, in this online world and Pilar, I know does an exorbitant amount of not just bilingual voiceover, but also dubbing. So Pilar, any specific, additional tips that we haven't talked about that maybe you could offer as advice to, let's say, bilingual voiceover talent that are coming into the industry now? Pilar: Um, well a lot has been said about it. When I first started in the industry, in voiceover, I was encouraged not to do a bilingual voiceover demo for example by a very, very well known coach here that Anne and I both know who shall remain nameless who said, absolutely. You never mesh the two together. Milena: I've been told that too. Pilar: You have Spanish on one side and English on the other. So I did, not with them. And so then I, I was like, okay. So I went with somebody else. I did it, Spanish, English, fine. And then I thought, no, I'm gonna go ahead and do a bilingual voiceover demo. And I did, and that is one that's booked me so many jobs. The other one is really good. The other two that I did, the Spanish and English and it, my agents prefer me separating them. So that's fine. But the Spanglish one is what has booked me so many jobs. And so for somebody starting out, I think it's just important to keep at it, just to keep putting yourself out there. And also you never know what the client's gonna ask. I just, I find it so hysterical that I get booked for something. We'll do it in English. We'll do it in Spanish. And then they'll say, well, can you just give us a little accent? I'm like, you're kidding, right? And I don't have an accent in either. I mean, in Spanish, I always think I do, but I don't. I know I don't, it's just, it's so minuscule, but they're like, can you just make it a little bit more for us? And then in English, can you just give us a little bit more, a little thicker? I'm like, okay, fine. If that's what the client wants, that's what the client gets. So I think that the key is to be elastic and to say, yes, I can do this. I can do this. Never say no. A lot of times I've come up against artists who sit there, and they say, oh, well, I passed on that because I can't do it. And I was like, well, why can't you do it? Well, I didn't, I didn't think I could. Well, if you don't think you can, then you're not gonna be able to. Right. Exactly. So always be available and let the person who is casting see if you're right for it or not. And you know, keep putting yourself out there, no matter what. Milena: I wanted to ask, 'cause this is the question that I have and I think maybe some that are coming in would appreciate an answer to this -- in the US, the majority of my buyers are speaking English, right, whether they want Spanish or not. Now I do work with buyers that speak Spanish, but the majority of them are in English. So I've struggled with the decision to make my website, do a Spanish website, all Spanish website, or just an all English website. So I've chosen to do an all English website that says I'm bilingual and I'm gonna have an about me page that's just in Spanish, just my about me page. And I just wanted to get your feedback on that, 'cause I think that's a question that a lot of people have coming in as well. Like do I need to have these two separate entities like I have for my demos? Or like I said, for me, the majority of my buyers speak English regardless whether their client is or they -- their primary language may be Spanish, but my buyers are usually in English. Pilar: So this might sound a little radical. Milena: I like it. Anne: Already. Pilar: I'm not thinking about who my buyers are. I'm thinking about me. And if I go, and I did this, 'cause I had two separate websites 'cause I actually followed what this person said to me at first, and I had an English website and I had a Spanish website. And all that does is dilute you. That does nothing for your SEO, does nothing for the persona. And if you're talking about branding, for me, this did not work. It might work for other people, but I just park everything in one place and I have different categories. That's just me. Milena: Perfect. I like it. Pilar: And that has worked better. I think it's worked better in consolidating everything because at one time I had like three different websites. It was just crazy. And it just diluted -- Milena: It's a lot to manage. Yeah. Pilar: Exactly. Joe: I mean, Milena, you could put a tab -- you could have your website in English and then put a little tab of in Spanish and then they can click, and then they'll, they'll go to that same site, and you'll have it all translated into Spanish. What I'm not an expert is an SEO and how it behaves looking at a, at a site in one language and if it can complement SEO ratings on the same site. So just because I could, I have the Bilingual Voiceover Guy, but I have both Voces Bilingue, and right now I'm redirecting them. But the idea is to have Voces Bilingue in Spanish and then have it linked to the English one. Anne: And then Joe, you have a page on your, the Bilingual Voiceover Guy, English that also is translated in Spanish, correct? Joe: Yes, because I hadn't had this thing that I just talked about yet. That, that, that was a sort of a patch in the meantime. And funny enough, that page is what's ranking. Anne: I was just gonna say that, if you have that page, if it's all in Spanish, because if somebody doesn't speak English, and they're typing a search term in Spanish, that would match your page, your landing page. And it still comes to your central, you know, I call it the central website, but you've just got another page. Yeah, a separate tab, a landing page. And I think that's a really good strategy that you'll be able to capture the best of both SEO worlds. Yeah. Pilar: Yeah. The tab is essential. Joe: Yeah. The tab, mm-hmm. Anyway, I mean, my thing is work in progress too, but the way I choose to think is that there's 2 billion English speakers, and there's 600,000 Spanish speakers. So that's a market of 2.6 billion. Anne: Yeah. Joe: For each one of us. And sky's the limit. Pilar: Absolutely. Anne: Ramesh, how do you work your website? Do you have a special page dedicated? Ramesh: I just have it in English actually. I think that's, that's definitely something I need to work on to see how I can, but I've -- to be absolutely honest, I'm quite happy with the level of work that I've got right now. So -- Milena: If it ain't broke. Ramesh: -- smooth sailing, I don't wanna sound arrogant, but I'm comfortable. So I, I could perhaps do all these lovely suggestions that you guys have come up with, but perhaps another time. Anne: Well, I don't have another language page, but I have literally four other genre specific pages like website, because I specialize in corporate narration or I specialize in e-learning. So I have the e-learningvoice.com. I have medical-narration.com, phone voice. And so even though I may not get a ton of activity on those sites, the words on those sites get indexed, and it contributes to my SEO. And each of those sites also maps back to my core site, which I think is my core brand of AnneGanguzza.com in addition to my VO BOSS and VO Peeps brands. So I handle probably 11 sites. Pilar: That's next level marketing. Go to AnneGanguzza.com for next level marketing, that's, that's that's our next, our next job. Anne: But yeah, it just helps to be found and it kind of just works on its own. And every once in a while I do have, as a matter of fact, I'm looking to refresh those pages just to make sure they keep generating people, pointing at my website. And again, it's a wonderful position to be in. If you have a, a good amount of work, I think that's amazing. Then things are working for you. And so that's why your advice and everything we're talking about today is so valuable for people that are coming into this industry. So we thank you, guys, so much for joining us. Milena: Thank you for this contest -- Joe: Thank you for having us. Milena: -- and this swag. Hello! Ramesh: Thank you for having us. Anne: I know. So yeah, I do wanna mention the swag. So not only did you guys get, uh, thank you again to Liz Atherton, but also you guys got BOSS swag, which Pilar and Milena are wearing right now. Ramesh: Yeah. Mine's on the way. It'll be here in about next -- Anne: Which it is on the way. As a matter of fact, I will tell you because you're on that little island there, Ramesh, it might take a little longer to get you. Milena: It's gonna come by carrier pigeon. Ramesh: Keep on looking at the skies to make sure the drones are dropping in. Anne: I can't wait to see pictures of you in that t-shirt. Ramesh: Oh, I will. Anne: And Joe with your mug. That's awesome. So. Ramesh: I love it. Super. Anne: You guys, amazing job. Thank you so much. It's been, this has been so wonderful, and we thank you for sharing your wisdom with us, and yeah, I wanna do this like now every six months. Milena: Down for it. Anne: Think we should -- Joe: -- amazing. Anne: You know, right? Ramesh: It would be pleasure. Anne: So what's been going on in six months in the bilingual world? So yeah. Awesome. Well guys, I'm gonna give a great big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You guys can connect and network like we have on ipDTL. Find out more at ipdtl.com. And also I will say that this was recorded today with Riverside. So I'm extremely happy to have given this a try, and thanks for the wonderful video and audio tracks that we're going to get. And one more sponsor, 100 Voices Who Care. If you want to use your voice to make an immediate difference and give back to the communities that give to you, find out more at 100voiceswhocare.org. Thanks, guys, so much for joining us again. It's been amazing and we'll see you next week. Ramesh: Thank you very much. Joe: It was lovely. Milena: Thank you. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Joe Ferris is thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps Support, Maintenance, and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling applications. They have an on-call team and do more complex cloud build-outs with the goal being to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. Follow Joe on Twitter (https://twitter.com/joeferris) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-ferris-81421a167/). thoughtbot's Mission Control team (https://thoughtbot.com/mission-control) Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/) Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Joe Ferris, thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Joe, welcome back to the show. JOE: Thanks, Chad. It's been a while. CHAD: It has been a while. I think you were the first-ever guest, if I'm not mistaken. JOE: I believe that's right. We talked about null, I think. [laughter] CHAD: Yeah. And it would have been with Ben back when I was just a listener and maybe producer. So welcome back to the show. It's been a long time, and a lot has changed at thoughtbot over the years. I've been talking to each of the managing directors of the new teams, and I wanted to be sure to have you on. Why don't we take a little bit of a step back and talk about Mission Control? When we say DevOps and maintenance, what do we mean? And what does Mission Control do? JOE: Sure. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps support, and maintenance, and SRE. It came out of our experiments with DevOps a while ago now, almost two years coming up. Historically, thoughtbot has shied away from getting too much into DevOps. I think a lot of us had some unpleasant experiences earlier in our career around sysadmin tasks and expectations there. Not a lot of people have wanted to be on call historically. So we've heavily leveraged services like Heroku that take a lot of that burden away from you and avoided doing things like direct to AWS deployments or getting too involved with CI/CD pipelines that were particularly complex. But we've had clients over the years that have requested more interesting or more difficult deployments. And finally, we had one a couple of years ago, where we said, "All alright, let's just handle this instead of saying no or trying to outsource it." We thought it made sense for them. And after going through it, we came to the conclusion that it was actually pretty good that the ecosystem had evolved a lot and that it was a service worth offering. That began our journey into DevOps, so to speak. So we did some smart DevOps work for a variety of clients over the next year or so before we decided to form an official team doing this new kind of work, which is how we ended up with Mission control. The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, the goal of Mission Control is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling their applications. And we have an on-call team. We will do more complex cloud build-outs. And our goal is to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. CHAD: You used the acronym SRE earlier in that little spiel. I'm not sure that everyone knows what that is. [laughs] So it stands for Site Reliability Engineer, right? JOE: That's right. And that's been newer for us. So DevOps is supposed to be the fusion of development and operations. But the operations world is really big. So similar to how everybody has problems getting people to be full-stack enough given the complexity of front end and back end, we have similar problems in design. We also have that problem in DevOps where both development and operations are huge, rich ecosystems. And so, having developers that are fully experienced at both is hard. So the path of least resistance, when you say are doing DevOps, is definitely just to do operations. And it's been a struggle for us to actually break down those silos and have teams work more on the operation side on their own. So one of the things that caught our eye with SRE was some of the built-in mechanisms for engaging with the team. The one-sentence pitch for SRE is that it is operations if you approach it like a software problem. It has these concepts of SLOs, Service Level Objectives, and error budgets, which is the amount of time you spent violating your SLO. And part of the process is getting buy-in from the entire team, from the stakeholders down to the developers and the operations team. And so, it provides a natural interaction point between the operations folks and the rest of the team because nobody wants to break the error budget. Once the error budget is exhausted, everybody has to stop building new features and focus on stability until the error budget is cut up again. So rather than having this unpleasant give or take where we're more coming from the operations side, and we're always pushing for more stability, and everybody else is coming from the product side, and they're always pushing for more features, SRE gives you this useful metric to have that conversation around where we're not always just pushing for more. We're trying to hit a specific goal that we've agreed on. And when we hit the goal, we know that we can keep full throttle moving out new features. CHAD: Now, is the SRE a developer who is also working on resolving errors before the budget is hit? JOE: Yeah, a Site Reliability Engineer is a developer. But that's actually not too different from other forms of DevOps. DevOps is supposed to be developers in general. When I say we built an operations team, even if you look at the work that we're doing, a lot of it is development work. We build scripts, and automations, and so on. We don't manually set up EC2 instances, and not everything is toil, even outside of SRE. But the idea in SRE is that somebody will be more integrated with the development team and make changes to not just the operational stack but also the development stack in service of reliability. I've heard it said that SRE is a particular implementation of DevOps. That makes sense to me. CHAD: Let's start back in the beginning because you made reference to the fact that historically, a lot of what we deploy was deployed to Heroku. And we did that because, for a lot of the applications that we're building, it made sense. It minimized the operational overhead of deployments. There is a point in some systems that you cross a line. Where do we see that line typically being where you need to start looking at something else? JOE: I think there can be a few different instigating factors. One of the fastest ways for somebody to want to move to AWS is if they have significant security concerns, particularly for healthcare applications. The security model is more straightforward in AWS to have better isolation. There are options on Heroku, but it requires going to a different Heroku platform using Shield. And you just don't get the same power you get in terms of network isolation models you get on AWS with your own VPC. So if you're already at the point where you want to start out with a VPC out of the gate and do that kind of isolation, my opinion is you may as well own it and go to AWS. So that's one reason. Another is if you start hitting scaling issues, Heroku is easier for the developers because it's simple and it's very streamlined. But doing complex deployments is difficult, which eliminates some of the options available to somebody doing something like SRE. So to give one example, one mechanism people can use to make it safer to deploy without potentially introducing bugs or performance degradations is a canary release where when you release, you put the new version out as the canary build. And you route maybe 5% of traffic to that, and you actually collect metrics on performance and error rates on the canary traffic versus the regular traffic. And then you have some period where you're in experiment mode, which varies depending on the level of stability you're looking to achieve. Once you're confident that the canary release didn't introduce a regression, then it gets promoted to the stable build, and you do that every time you deploy. I have no idea how you would do that on Heroku. CHAD: I think you'd have to do it at the application level. You'd have to do it with a feature flag system. And it would only be possible to do some of the things that you would be able to do if you're able to do the whole system. JOE: Right. And I guess you could do weighted random numbers to try and decide whether to canary or not. But one of the benefits of doing it outside the application is there's no way to make a mistake. So, for example, if you introduced a bug in your canary mechanism in the application or you forget to put it behind a feature flag, then you've now deployed to production, and you have an error. Whereas if it's managed by the CI/CD pipeline, you're just deploying a new version of the application. In Heroku land, that would mean you deploy the new slug as a canary build. In most other areas, it means you're deploying a container image. That's one example of why if you get to the point that you have a lot of traffic in production and you need to manage that traffic while continuing to release features, it can be helpful to work on a platform like AWS where you have a lot more deployment options. Another one is that SRE is heavily built on observability and metrics, which can be difficult to collect on Heroku. Some of that is just a matter of lineage. Like, the SRE community was built up around tools like Prometheus that are scrape-based. That means you need to have a special metrics endpoint exposed on all of your containers. In Heroku, there isn't a way to access any of your dynos directly except through the web router, and you can't control which one you get. So using Prometheus on Heroku is not really practical, which means you need to re-implement what everybody else has built for SRE using a different observability tool. And observability out of the box on Heroku it's easy to get set up, but it's more limited. So doing something like complex SLOs and setting up error budget dashboards and alerting is going to be a significant task. Versus on a platform like Kubernetes where it doesn't sound like it'll be easier, but it is because there are open-source tools that you can just deploy. CHAD: You mentioned Kubernetes. It's probably worth calling out that that's pretty much what we are using across the board, right? JOE: For our AWS and other cloud deployments, we have standardized largely on Kubernetes. We started out using simpler containerization platforms like ECS on AWS. But what we found is that the developer tooling is generally not particularly good because there's not enough community momentum behind any of those. And the open-source is limited versus something like Kubernetes there's a massive open-source community. There is a ton of different tooling that people build that's available for developers and for DevOps. And for these things like SRE, you can use almost entirely open-source software to build out all of the interesting parts of that and deploy that. So what we've been building is basically an SRE Platform as a Service where we collect these open-source components. We deploy them to a managed Kubernetes cluster. And then, applications can immediately start exposing metrics to Prometheus and defining SLOs. CHAD: So much in the same way where we talked about some of the boundaries where it starts to make sense to not be on Heroku, what are some of the boundaries that teams hit where it makes sense to start thinking about SRE or even just having someone on the team that's focused on that kind of work? JOE: I think as soon as people start hitting their first scaling challenges. So for an MVP where you're validating a product where you don't actually have production traffic yet, I don't think it makes sense. And I also think I would avoid deploying to something like Kubernetes if you can help it for an MVP. But for anybody who has scaling concerns, SRE is a very useful mindset. And the sooner you start adopting it, the sooner you'll start to build an application that's made to scale. It can be very difficult to put out those fires while something is not on a platform where you have many options, and nobody has been thinking about observability. It means that you need to be guessing at how to put out the fire as well as simultaneously introducing metrics and potentially planning a cloud migration. So I think as soon as you start feeling nervous about deploying to production or as soon as you notice that you're spending a lot of time working on performance, it makes sense to bring in SRE. I also think anybody that needs to provide an SLA should for sure implement SRE. It can be used to measure whether or not you're on track to hit an SLA because you basically set SLOs that are stricter than your SLA, and you make sure that you meet it. CHAD: Is there a way that existing teams can layer on some of the SRE activities without having full-time SRE people? JOE: I think you can have a team member who does development that also acts as the SRE. If you have a small team, I could see the commitment to it being daunting. I think that could be one good reason to bring in outside specialists if you're not at the point where you can afford to have a full-time SRE in-house. Working with a team that can provide an SRE on-demand like Mission Control could be valuable. CHAD: I didn't realize that that was going to be a perfect segue into part of the value proposition of Mission Control [laughter] when I asked the question. But I guess that's a really good point. That is part of what we're helping people do is monthly contracts that provide this to them, even if their team can't do it 100% of the time. JOE: Right, except for pretty large teams. I don't think it makes sense for them to hire a full-time SRE. It's much easier to work with a team like ours that has the experience and has more than one person. Even if you do hire a full-time SRE, you will only have one. So if they go on vacation, or if they get sick, or if it's in the middle of the night, then do you still have an SRE? I think that's one of the benefits of working with a team. CHAD: And that's been interesting with Mission Control because we introduced Mission Control and made it a formal thing at the same time as going entirely remote. And it's interesting how doing that freed us up in terms of being able to commit to building a different kind of team. It doesn't necessarily need to be on call after hours if we're going to have an entirely remote team. We can have people on that team that span different time zones. And so, from a thoughtbot perspective, it's interesting how those things went hand in hand for us. JOE: Yes, it's been immensely helpful for Mission Control, in particular, to be fully remote. There are a lot of options that wouldn't have been available to us if we were a U.S.-centric team. It's been really interesting. I've built out development teams before that were focused on a location. And it's been really interesting to build out this team with a focus on availability and distribution. For example, one thing that has helped us is having somebody in South America because they don't celebrate U.S. holidays. So even discounting time zones, which are a challenge when you're trying to provide around-the-clock availability, just having that kind of diversity in holiday schedules really helps. So we've been able to build it totally differently than we would have if we were trying to put a bunch of people in an office. And I think it's made it possible for us to have much better coverage with a much smaller team. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So Mission Control I introduced it as maintenance and DevOps. So we're also helping people with different kinds of things beyond operations, right? JOE: Yeah, particularly with SRE, there's a focus on stability and scaling. And we're also helping people with CI/CD. One of the focuses for us this quarter has been helping people develop CI/CD pipelines that provide safer deploys and providing guidance and a system for developers to implement things like feature flags and beta flags. Because one of the challenges of making performance improvements is that you don't actually know if you've solved the problem until it's deployed, and deploying something that changes performance is inherently risky. And so, in addition to helping people actually make the performance improvements, we have to demonstrate the process for deploying and testing those improvements. CHAD: I've worked on fairly big systems in the past. But there have been a couple of different instances over the last maybe year where we've approached the problem in a different way than we have in the past, which has been really interesting to me from a development standpoint. It's the idea of…if you remember, for the food delivery application, we had that conversation about the different ways to build APIs rather than versioning APIs explicitly. And that has been a different approach than the way I would have done things in the past. And it's been a really powerful approach. So, can we talk a little bit more about that approach? JOE: Sure. CHAD: Well, specifically, so we have mobile applications that use a back-end API, and not everyone updates their mobile application at the same time instantly. You have bugs basically in the wild that you are fixing or that you're changing in your API, or if you're just introducing API changes. And so the idea of instead of explicitly versioning API on the server-side and having clients write to a specific API, instead building much more flexible APIs, in particular, having the client tell you what version of the API that they're expecting but through consolidated API endpoints so that the server is much more in control of the behavior than the client being in control of the behavior. JOE: Yeah, I think the two big changes that were helpful on that project were using GraphQL for some of the APIs, which provides more flexibility generally than a typical REST API and the minimum version requirement. So the application sends the version of the application. And the API will tell the client they have to upgrade if it's a version that isn't compatible with the newer APIs. So when we do have to break backwards compatibility, we force an app upgrade. CHAD: But in general, you're taking the approach not to break backward compatibility. And you're meeting the client where it's at whenever possible and maintaining backward compatibility in the APIs. JOE: That's something that we have been teaching developers about generally is backwards and forwards compatibility. We do that with deployments as well. For some of the larger deployments we have where there might be dozens of containers running for a service, it certainly doesn't make sense to stop them all and start new ones because the app would be down for a long time. And it would take too long to catch up to the backlog of requests. But even a typical blue-green deployment is problematic. So if we have 30 containers running and we spin up 30 new containers, and they all need 15 database connections, then during the deploy, you potentially overload your database or exhaust your connection limit. Plus, you will need to allocate the compute resources for double the normal workload. So what we've been doing instead is rolling deploys almost everywhere where we spin up a few new containers using the new version and wait until they're fully online, spin down a few old ones, and then repeat that process until everything is up to date. But to do a rolling deploy like that requires backwards compatibility with the services it uses, in particular, at the database. And so, writing Rails migrations that are backwards compatible for one version has been a challenge. CHAD: And there's not really good tooling in Rails to do multiple stages of things. So if you really want to do that, you have to manage that in your source control basically and say, "Here's a new migration. We're going to merge in and deploy after this one," and that's not so great. JOE: Right. The other way to do that in the CI/CD pipeline would be to release commits one at a time and wait for them to be rolled out. But depending on how you structure your commit log, that could be pretty tedious. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. I've seen as I've worked on this other project we're really striving to do continuous deployment. It's a high traffic, very complex deployment with lots of individual configured tenants. Separating out the concept of a deploy from a release has been very valuable for the application and for the clients. It changes the way that you need to think about how development progresses. I never before really worked in a system where you're literally sometimes duplicating and preserving old code, putting new code in place, having them both deployed, and then being able to switch between them as part of the release, and then cleaning up the old code later. At the scale that this is at, at the complexity that this is at, it makes sense for that application. It obviously doesn't make sense for everybody to be working that way. JOE: Right. Breaking up applications to be a little smaller, having components that could be experimented with individually would make some of that easier. The experimentation there separating the release from the deploy some of that is necessary because it's monolithic in so many ways. Like, it's a very big Rails application with one database with ACID compliance, which is a very powerful model. And it provides simplicity in some ways. But then it requires you to take on the complexity of making sure that you release things correctly. I do think that it would be difficult in this particular situation but for applications that reach that level of traffic and where you need to manage the risk of deploying, having smaller components, having some services broken would make that easier because you could do, for example, a canary deploy with one release rather than duplicating the code and having the old and new version. CHAD: Right. The services create boundaries with contracts about behavior and reduces things that are tightly coupled together, and their behavior is tightly coupled together. So, for example, on this application, we do have that one service that is completely managed independently from the main monolith and has its own deploy schedule. And we can, for the most part, change them independently without needing to go through all of that process that we go through to manage change. I think you're absolutely right. JOE: Another experiment we've been trying for another client is it's another Rails monolith. There are different audiences for it. So this is the food delivery application again. And there are customers who are placing orders. There are drivers who are delivering orders. There are restaurants that are fulfilling orders. And then there are admins who are managing everything in the back end. And there's some overlap in the data they use. But the actual requests, and controllers, and pieces of the Rails application they use are almost entirely isolated. So one challenge we had was being able to provide different reliability contracts for those different audiences and also scaling them and configuring them differently. So, for example, if you've done tuning for a Rails application before, you've probably tweaked things like how many threads will I have for each of my Puma workers? How many Puma workers will I have per container? How many database connections do I need in the pool? And what we were able to do for this application using Kubernetes and Isto was running the same application, the same container, so like one monolithic Rails container but running it more than once in different configurations and routing traffic to different pools of containers based on the audience. And so, for example, if the customer is making requests, those all go to the customer pool of containers, which are scaled independently and have their own configuration tweaks for the kinds of requests that customers tend to make, which are generally small, high throughput requests with lots of little rights. And then, compared to the admin panel, they typically view dashboards and big lists of records. And so, the requests tend to be larger, but the number of users is much smaller. There are way more customers than there are admins. And so, for those, we have fewer connections. We have more memory allocated for the kind of bloat that results in those types of requests. And we also have a different performance objective for admins. It's more acceptable for those pages to respond a little bit slower. And admins understand it's their job. They have to use the software. So they'll reload the page if they have to versus a customer where if they're having trouble placing an order, they might just buy somewhere else. So that's been a pretty powerful mechanism we were able to leverage CHAD: Is that switching on URL-like endpoints? JOE: Yeah, it's based on the path. But the mechanisms available to us are actually pretty powerful. At that point, we have access to the full request. So we could really route based on anything we wanted right down to the user. CHAD: I guess that's a really good example. You don't have access to that routing on Heroku. JOE: No, I think any Platform as a Service where they manage the routing if they don't provide that feature, you don't get that feature. CHAD: This is the first we're talking about this. That is a really interesting example of how to scale a monolith solves some of the problems that services often get you without having to break everything up right off the bat in order to do that. JOE: Yeah. I also think it provides kind of an inside-out approach to doing that. One of the problems with breaking out services is you have to plan what the services are going to be to a certain degree. And so, I think the best way to do it is to extract services from a monolith the same way you extract classes to break them up. And this audience-based approach is almost like a dry run. You can see if the boundaries you're drawing make sense in terms of traffic. And if those make sense, it probably makes sense to break up the front end at those boundaries eventually into different applications. And then figure out what services you need to extract to provide the common infrastructure for those front-end services. The same way test-driven development makes it much easier to find the correct tests to write, I think this approach of audience boundary discovery is an interesting approach to finding service boundaries versus trying to guess at what the services are, which very frequently leads people to wrapping services around database tables which doesn't help at all. CHAD: Yeah, that's the wrong thing to be looking at when you're looking at how to do services. JOE: Right. It's almost like deciding what your database tables would be upfront before you've seen the UI for the application. CHAD: Cool. So heading into 2022, we're looking ahead at the upcoming year. And so what's on the docket for Mission Control? JOE: We didn't start experimenting fully with SRE until the third quarter of this year. And so far, we've loved it. So I think we'll make a pretty heavy investment into our SRE offering. The goal is for us to have an open-source set of Terraform modules that effectively deploy a platform ready to go for SRE. What we want to do is maintain and curate that platform and then deploy it and maintain it for our clients. I think another big thing we'll be doing is (This might be incredibly boring.) but restructuring the way our agreements work a little bit. One of the things we wanted to test out when we built Mission Control was how much we could have built into a monthly recurring contract versus billing for time and materials like we usually do. So we tried putting a lot into that contract and really pushing the boundaries of what would be reasonable. And there was definitely a lot of pain there for us and a lot of difficult conversations with clients. So I think for 2022, we will be shifting a lot of our work back towards time and materials. So I guess that's a lesson out there for anybody else that's providing [laughs] support contracts is to make sure that the responsibilities contained in the linear amount scale linearly. CHAD: I think when we originally conceived of Mission Control, we also saw it handling a lot more things that it turns out just were not doing as part of Mission Control like regular Rails upgrades. JOE: Yeah, a lot of the things that we included in contracts originally were not particularly important to clients or at least were not outside of what they were capable of doing already. So it wasn't that much of a value-add. There are a lot of people out there that will upgrade your Rails version. And having somebody who just does it in the background but isn't aware of some of the impacts that might have in the application turned out to be not much of a value prop. Whereas stability turns out to be a big pain point for a lot of people, people don't know how to do it. And then our maintenance offering, I think what ended up providing the most value is not the keeping the code fresh parts, but it was more for the teams that don't have a large continuous development team having access to somebody who can fix quick bugs and things like that without needing to first negotiate a contract with a provider. I think that provides a lot of value. Those are pretty separate and different offerings. But those are the pieces that we found have really been valuable to clients. CHAD: Well, great. If people want to find out more about Mission Control or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? JOE: Well, we have a website thoughtbot.com/mission-control with a dash between mission and control. There are a few ways to reach out there. You can also find us on Twitter. We are @thoughtbot, and I am @joeferris. CHAD: Cool. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Special Guest: Joe Ferris.

Words from Penny Prana Luna: I HAVE BEEN ON A MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR MY ENTIRE LIFE. I HAVE BEEN A TRAVELING, PERFORMING ARTIST, MASSAGE THERAPIST, YOGA TEACHER, MEDITATOR, BREATHWORK TEACHER AND ETERNAL STUDENT OF LIFE. MYGOALASATEACHER,NOMATTERWHATIAMTEACHING,ISTOSPARK AWARENESS, TO INSPIRE SELF LOVE AND EASE IN ALL THAT WE DO WHICH THEN EMANATES INTO AND INSPIRES THE WORLD AROUND US. I BELIEVE THE BREATH IS THE KEY TO AWAKENING ,THE ENGINE THAT PROPELS OUR JOURNEY. ALIGNMENT OF BODY, MIND AND SPIRIT INTO A COHERENT PATERRN IS THE FOUNDATION FOR OUR STRENGTH. A WELL TUNED VEHICLE MAKES OUR JOURNEY DOWN THE ROAD A SMOOTH RIDE. MY NICKNAME HAS BEEN “PENNY PLAYS FOREVER” FOR MANY YEARS. PLAYFULNESS KEEPS YOU YOUNG AT HEART. LAUGHTER AND A SENSE OF COMMUNITY ARE ALWAYS BROUGHT INTO MY CLASSES. I'M AN IMPROVISOR SO THERE IS ALWAYS AN ELEMENT OF SURPRISE IN MY CLASS. I LIKE TO BRING IN OTHER MODALITIES SUCH AS KUNDALINI, SELF MASSAGE, TAPPING, CHAKRA ACTIVATION, TAI CHI, GYPSY DANCE, CHANTING, AND LAUGHTER. I NOW NAME MYSELF “PENNY PRANA LUNA” AS MY PASSION IS TEACHING BREATHWORK ALA DR JOE DISPENZA AS WELL AS TRADITIONAL YOGIC BREATHWORK. I HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING DR. JOE FOR 2 YEARS AND HAVE ATTENDED 2 ADVANCED RETREATS. I ALSO AM AN ACTIVE MEMBER OF COHEAL INTERNATIONAL AND PARTICIPATE IN REMOTE HEALINGS ONLINE . DR JOE'S WORK HAS BEEN ROCKET FUEL FOR RAISING MY FREQUENCY OUT OF THE MATERIAL PAST TO THE ETHEREAL NOW OF ALL POTENTIAL IN THE QUANTUM FIELD AND I EMBRACE HIS TEACHINGS WITHIN MY OWN. I HAVE NOW MERGED WITH MY FUTURE SELF “COSMIC DANCER, WATER HEALER”. SOME OF MY TEACHERS IN ORDER ON MY JOURNEY SWAMI SATCHIDANANDA (HATHA YOGA) ANNA HALPERIN ( S.F. DANCER'S DAILY RITUALS TRAINING PROGRAM) DAVID LIFE AND SHARON GANNON (JIVAMUKTI YOGA) SHIVA RAE( YOGA FLOW) SAULDAVIDRAYE (THAIYOGAMASSAGE) GURMUKH (KUNDALINI) JAYE MARTIN AND RITA KNORR (ANUSARA YOGA) NATASHA GRBSCH (CHINESE ACUPUNCTURIST AND YOGA MENTOR) THE TEACHERS AT YOGA VILLAGE AMRIT INSTITUTE (YOGA NIDRA) DR JOE DISPENZA (QUANTUM SCIENCE AND BECOMING SUPERNATURAL) EVERY PERSON I MEET IS A PIECE OF THE COSMIC PUZZLE, I THANK YOU ! I BOW TO ALL WHO HAVE WALKED THEIR PATH OF TRUTH, LEAVING FOOTSTEPS FOR US TO WALK OURS. I HONOR ALL INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ALL LIFE FORMS. AS A PERFORMER SINGER PERCUSSIONIST/DRUMMER ACTRESS DANCER (SALSA, AFRICAN, SAMBA, GYPSY AND GET DOWN AND SHAKE YOUR BOODY) CLOWN/ PANTOMIMIST CHILDREN'S THEATRE SOUND EFFECTS FOR COMEDY PANTOMIME ACTS HEALING MODALITIES MASSAGE REIKI REFLEXOLOGY YOGA NIDRA/ IREST YOGA CHI GONG MEDITATION BREATHWORK TONING AND CHANTING LAUGHTER (he,he,ha,a,a,a,a) I HAVE HELD SILENT RETREATS, GODDESS GATHERINGS AND CREATED A HEALING SANCTUARY FOR THOSE READY TO SHIFT AT MY REMOTE BEACH HOME ON THE SEA OF CORTEZ, BAJA MEXICO. I HAVE HELD HEALING CIRCLES WITH SAMANTHA GRAY (THE ANGELIC VOICE SOUND HEALER AND ENERGY CHANNELERPSYCHIC) IN MY FLORIDA HOME. I NOW TEACH AT THE SUNSHIP TRANSFORMATIONAL CENTER IN PALM HARBOR. “ A MOVING MEDITATION” AND “FEELINGYOUR INNER FREQUENCY” I ALSO ATTEND AND CONTRIBUTE TO THE 11:11 AM SUNDAY MEDITATION IN PHILLIPPE PARK ( OPEN TO THE PUBLIC). THANK YOU KATRIEL FOR “ENERGY SPEAKS”! IT WAS A DELIGHTFUL AND FUN EXPERIENCE.

How To Find A Business Coach Or Mentor with Jordan Montgomery. My discussion with Jordan involved learning about the various types of performance coaches, the styles, how can someone benefit from a coach and why you would need/want one. I enjoyed this honest conversation with Jordan, his ideas and how well he spoke and conveyed his ideas and message. There's a good chance a performance coach could really improve so many things in your life, that it's worth looking into for sure. Thanks for listening! Joe #thejoecostelloshow #montgomerycompanies #performancecoach Jordan Montgomery Owner - Montgomery Companies Website: https://www.montgomerycompanies.com/ Instagram: @jordanmmontgomery Facebook: @montgomerycompanies LinkedIn: @jordanmmontgomery Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Jordan: Hey, Joe, thanks for having me, man. I've been following your work, and I want to say congratulations on all that you've built and continue to build. And it's an honor to have this conversation with you. Thanks. Joe: Hey, Jordan, welcome to the podcast. Man, I'm glad you're here. I'm excited to talk with you. Jordan: Well, Joe: Thanks Jordan: I appreciate Joe: For coming. Jordan: That question and I'll try to be succinct with my answer, but I grew up in southeast Iowa and a little town called Colonia in Kelowna is the smallest Joe: Thank you, man, I appreciate Jordan: One of the smallest Joe: It. 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Jordan: So Joe: So Jordan: I live in Iowa Joe: The stage Jordan: City, Joe: Is Jordan: Iowa, Joe: Yours. Jordan: Actually just outside of Iowa City and a little small town called Tiffin with my wife Ashley and our three daughters. My wife today runs the business. I run my mouth. We have a full scale coaching and consulting firm, Montgomery Companies. We have several coaching partners, and today we serve several thousand coaching clients. Those clients range from professional athletes to entrepreneurs and salespeople. We do work with some executive leaders at some larger firms. And I just have a blast getting to do what I do. And I meet some really interesting people. We get to help people think more deeply about who they are and where they're headed. And ultimately you get to help people live into who they were created to be. And it's a tremendous blessing. So I had a career in the financial services business, allowed me to pivot into this world pretty open about my professional journey. But at the end of the day, I graduated college 2010 and University of Iowa spent the last 11 years really building a skill set that's allowed us to build a business around coaching, consulting and leading people. So that's kind of the short version of my story. Obviously, there's a lot of twists and turns and gods provide a lot of grace. Jordan: Certainly I've been thankful to be around a lot of the right people. But if you're asking me the short version on how I got to where I'm at today, that's the the short version on Jordan Montgomery. Yeah, I think my dad, at the end of the day, my dad was a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I wanted to model that. I wanted to be a family man with a business, not a business man with a family. And I think as a driven type, a young man living in America, I kind of fight that every day. I mean, at the other day, like my wife and my kids are my top priority. But if I say they're my top priority, then that needs to show up in my calendar and that needs to be reflected in how I spend my time. And I want to be respected the most by people who know me the best. And that means that I'm a father first. I'm a husband first. I'm leading my family well. And if I lead inside the walls of my home, then I think I can lead in other areas of my life Joe: Cool. Jordan: As well. But Joe: So Jordan: I just didn't want to be Joe: First Jordan: The guy Joe: Of Jordan: That Joe: All, I love the part Jordan: Built Joe: Where you Jordan: Something Joe: Said Jordan: Professionally Joe: That because your father Jordan: But Joe: Was Jordan: Then Joe: Able Jordan: Sacrificed Joe: To make it, Jordan: Or Joe: You Jordan: Compromised Joe: Gravitated Jordan: In really other Joe: Towards Jordan: Important Joe: That Jordan: Areas Joe: Feeling Jordan: Of life. 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Not a lot of people have said that in the past on the show when they when they said, oh, I became an entrepreneur because and it was all of these other reasons. But to actually associate it with your father sitting on the sidelines, watching you play sports and concert or whatever it might be, that was really cool. Jordan: Well, and I'll say this to Joe, because there are some entrepreneurs listening that maybe don't have that flexibility, like maybe you're truly in a situation where you've got a team or your businesses in an industry that requires you to work certain hours or whatever. So that's not a shame or guilt. Anyone who's working really hard to provide, because at the end of the day, entrepreneurs are called to work longer hours is just part of the deal. So if you're in that grind right now, here's what I'd encourage you with, is somebody that's going to change and the reason that you're doing what you're doing right now, the reason that you're working as hard as you're working right now is to have the flexibility and the autonomy. And, you know, I also wasn't there for my dad's early years. Like, I missed you know, I was born when my dad was eight to 10 years into being an entrepreneur. So he earned that flexibility. So let's just not forget that that flexibility is earned. And that looks different for every entrepreneur based on the industry Joe: Yeah, that Jordan: That Joe: Was Jordan: You're Joe: Really Jordan: In Joe: Cool, and I Jordan: And Joe: Came Jordan: This Joe: From Jordan: Stage Joe: An entrepreneurial Jordan: Of Joe: Family as well. Jordan: The business Joe: The Jordan: That Joe: Unfortunate Jordan: You're in. Joe: Thing for Jordan: So Joe: Me is that Jordan: I think Joe: My Jordan: That's Joe: Father Jordan: Important to Joe: Could Jordan: Underscore. Joe: Not attend most of my stuff. So when you said it, it kind of hit home and I hold nothing. He's passed on at this point. But I never held a grudge because he just he worked his butt off and and just to provide and create something great. So it never struck me the other way. It wasn't Jordan: Yeah. Joe: Like I was resentful over it. But I just love the way you framed that whole thing. That was really cool. Jordan: Well, yeah, you know, I just I fell in love with sports at a really early age. I just love competition. I loved competing. I love watching other people compete. I love the atmosphere. I love the energy that goes into a sports competition. I'm still the guy, Joe. Like, I will watch one shining moment at the end of the final four for those who are familiar with that show. I cry every year when I watch that one shining, but that little three minute clip. And I think part of the reason I get emotional about that as you watch young people get emotional over competition. And I just loved the rush of competition. I loved watching people give their all to a very specific activity, blood, sweat and tears. And Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jordan: So Joe: I totally Jordan: I just fell Joe: Agree Jordan: In love with sports Joe: And Jordan: At a young Joe: I'm Jordan: Age. Joe: Still Jordan: I played Joe: Working Jordan: Sports Joe: Like Jordan: All the way Joe: Crazy, Jordan: Through high school. Joe: But Jordan: I did Joe: It's Jordan: Not compete Joe: Just Jordan: In college. Joe: Because Jordan: And Joe: I Jordan: It's something Joe: Don't Jordan: That's Joe: Say no Jordan: Kind Joe: And Jordan: Of Joe: I Jordan: Interesting Joe: Just keep Jordan: About Joe: Adding Jordan: My story Joe: More and more Jordan: And background. Joe: To my plate. 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But you get paid and your best to show you get paid really, really, really well to be prepared Joe: Hmm. Jordan: In small little windows of time. And so I developed the sort of fascination or obsession with helping athletes prepare and be at their best when that small window of opportunity presents itself and, you know, your clutch, your clutch when you can show up and do normal things. In an abnormal times, so like Derek Jeter, Kobe Bryant, you know, they're considered clutch because at the end of the day, they could show up normal. They could just be who they were because they had practiced so much in the most important windows of time. And it's a really interesting metaphor that we can apply to all of life. Yeah. Yeah, well, it's it's a pursuit of excellence, right, and you know, I'm reading a book right now by Tim Grover, The Unforgiving Race to Greatness, and it's called Winning. And, Joe: Yeah, it's Jordan: You know, there's Joe: And Jordan: So much of what Tim Joe: Again, Jordan: Grover preaches Joe: People Jordan: That I Joe: That Jordan: Really love. Joe: Maybe Jordan: I'm Joe: Just Jordan: Not Joe: Watch sports casually Jordan: Maybe not aligned Joe: Don't Jordan: With one Joe: Understand Jordan: Hundred percent of it, Joe: The Jordan: But Joe: Grueling Jordan: Winning has a price, Joe: Effort Jordan: You know, in Joe: In the lifelong Jordan: Pursuing your Joe: Commitment Jordan: Calling has a price Joe: To potentially Jordan: Regardless Joe: Never, Jordan: Of what you do, Joe: Ever Jordan: You know, sports or otherwise. Joe: Getting Jordan: If you're an Joe: That Jordan: Athlete, Joe: Chance Jordan: Great. But Joe: In Jordan: If Joe: The sports Jordan: You're an entrepreneur, Joe: World and Jordan: There's going to Joe: Used Jordan: Be a cost Joe: To have some really good friends Jordan: Associated Joe: On the Buffalo Jordan: With Joe: Bills Jordan: Your calling. Joe: Football team because Jordan: And Joe: I went to college Jordan: I Joe: Out Jordan: Think Joe: There Jordan: Sports is the epitome Joe: And Jordan: Of that. Joe: I was Jordan: But certainly Joe: A musician. Jordan: Entrepreneurship Joe: I was Jordan: Is Joe: In a band. Jordan: Is Joe: They Jordan: Right Joe: Loved Jordan: There Joe: Our band and they used Jordan: With being Joe: To come Jordan: With being Joe: And Jordan: An athlete Joe: Hang Jordan: In Joe: Out. Jordan: Terms Joe: We've got Jordan: Of Joe: The dinner with Jordan: Making Joe: Them and Jordan: Sacrifice. Joe: You would hear the stories. And it's just to live on the edge of not knowing if you're playing or you're sitting each day and who's who's looking for your spot and the work so hard and give up so much from a really young age all the way through. It's unbelievable. You know, and I watch certain friends here in Arizona, believe it or not, Arizona has got a very big hockey base. You know, like fans love hockey. And there's a lot of kids that come here, play hockey, play on the farm team of the coyotes or and we've had friends that had their kids just go through all in hockey. Moms and dads have the worst it's the worst schedule I've ever seen. And to go all the way to the very end and be on the farm team and never get called up. And I can't even imagine that it's just grueling. Jordan: Yeah, well, you know, there's there's a lot that goes into speaking, right, speaking as an art form, and in today's world, attention is currency. So something we think about a lot and the keynote speaking world is you've got Joe: Mm Jordan: To Joe: Hmm. Jordan: Keep people's attention. And if you can't, you're out, you're done. You'll never be the really high demand keynote speaker if you don't know how to keep somebody's attention. So there's multiple ways that we do that. One of the ways that we keep people's attention is through story. It's a story sell facts, tell. When you get really good Joe: Yeah, Jordan: At telling stories, Joe: Yeah, I Jordan: You keep Joe: Agree. Jordan: People's attention. Joe: Ok, Jordan: In Joe: So Jordan: Fact, Joe: Enough about sports. Jordan: If I Joe: I Jordan: Were to Joe: Watched Jordan: Tell you about Joe: The video Jordan: My business, Joe: Of Jordan: If Joe: You Jordan: I were Joe: Working Jordan: To say, well, Joe: With Jordan: You know, Joe, Joe: The Hawkeyes Jordan: These are the five Joe: And Jordan: Things that I do my Joe: I Jordan: Business, or Joe: Was watching as Jordan: If Joe: The Jordan: I said, hey, Joe: Camera Jordan: Joe, Joe: Went around the room, I Jordan: Let Joe: Was Jordan: Me tell Joe: Watching Jordan: You a story. Joe: To see how intently Jordan: The minute I said, I'll Joe: The Jordan: Tell Joe: Players Jordan: You a story, Joe: Were listening Jordan: I would actually Joe: To you. Jordan: Activate Joe: And Jordan: Your brain Joe: Like I was Jordan: At 12 Joe: Watching Jordan: Times Joe: Their eyes Jordan: The Joe: And Jordan: Capacity. Joe: Their expressions Jordan: So Joe: And they Jordan: There's Joe: Were Jordan: A Joe: All Jordan: Lot of neuroscience Joe: Incredibly Jordan: That supports Joe: Focused. Jordan: The fact that Joe: And Jordan: I've got Joe's Joe: I can Jordan: Attention Joe: Only imagine the coach going, hey, Jordan: At 12 Joe: Today we're Jordan: Times Joe: Having Jordan Jordan: The rate. Joe: Mcqueary come in today. He's Jordan: If Joe: Going Jordan: I Joe: To talk Jordan: Decide Joe: To Jordan: To Joe: Us Jordan: Allow Joe: About Jordan: My words Joe: The Jordan: To Joe: Six Jordan: Paint a picture, Joe: Inches Jordan: Draw Joe: Between Jordan: You Joe: Our Jordan: Into Joe: Ears. Jordan: A story Joe: I want you guys Jordan: That Joe: To pay Jordan: Actually Joe: Attention. Jordan: Activates Joe: I want you to Jordan: Your Joe: Be open to Jordan: Senses. Joe: What he says Jordan: So Joe: And whatever. 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Jordan: Think eye Joe: When I Jordan: Contact Joe: Watched Jordan: And tonality Joe: Even Jordan: Is Joe: The speaking Jordan: Is another Joe: Engagements Jordan: Big one, right? There's Joe: At Jordan: A difference Joe: The corporations Jordan: Between communicating Joe: That you've Jordan: And Joe: Done, Jordan: Connecting. People Joe: You Jordan: Want to feel Joe: Have a really Jordan: Like you're Joe: Good flow. Jordan: Speaking to them Joe: You don't Jordan: Like, Joe: Use Jordan: Wow, Joe: All Jordan: This guy's Joe: Of the Jordan: Speaking directly Joe: Weird words Jordan: To me. Joe: That people use Jordan: And Joe: All the time. Jordan: It sounds Joe: Tell Jordan: So Joe: Me Jordan: Simple, Joe: How you do Jordan: But what's Joe: It. Jordan: Common sense is not always kind of practice. If you watch your average keynote speaker, their eyes will kind of drift all throughout the room to look down, look sideways. I think at the speaker, you want to keep constant eye contact. And then the other thing I think about is being really you centered in the message being you centered. So I'm going to use two people's names. I'm going to pick people out in the crowd. I'm going to touch people, maybe even on the shoulder or the arm as I'm speaking. And I'm going to move through the crowd. And so much of communication is nonverbal, right? 90 percent is nonverbal. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And it's also not what you say. It's what people hear and it's what they remember. Maya Angelou famously said it's not what you say that people remember. It's how you make them feel. And so I try to stay really in tune with how I make people feel. A lot of that is my energy, my body language. It's you focus communication, it's telling stories, and it's the difference between connecting and communicating. So if you're listening and you're thinking about your communication style or maybe you want to develop your craft as a keynote speaker, those are a few things that you could consider. Jordan: And I'll say this to Joe. I'm a long way away from where I want to be. I got a long way to go. So those are things that I think about repetitiously. And I get obsessed with the practice of my craft. And I'm evaluating and observing high level keynote speakers. You know, how do they move? What do they say? What do they not say? You know, their pace, their tonality, the way that they tell stories, their presence. Yeah, those are all things that I'm paying attention to. So I appreciate your kind words. I think communication as an art form is no different than playing an instrument or doing a dance. And for anybody that's in sales, for any entrepreneur, if you're not taking that seriously as you develop and grow your business, that's something to really consider and think about. Because whether you're speaking to an audience of one hundred or a thousand or an audience of five or ten, you're in the human connection business before you're in the construction business or before you're in the marketing business or financial planning business or real estate business. We've got to remember that the human connection is at the center of everything that we do. Well, thank you. It's kind of you to say. I did and I went to school for interdepartmental studies, which is a fancy way to cover recreational management, so I literally wanted to go to school, have a great social experience, and then start a business and the fitness world. Jordan: That was kind of my dream. And so I took some entrepreneurial courses, got a degree in recreation management, fell into finance and in two things were true. I didn't want to have a boss, so I went to work for myself and I wanted to create my own schedule that that was it. I want to call my shots, create my own schedule. But I didn't have any money and I didn't have any experience. And so I fell into financial services because it allowed me to be in business for myself, but not by myself. So I had a great support system. It was kind of like a franchise model, had a lot of success in that world at an early stage, had a big event in my life in twenty fifteen that really have me thinking about my future in a deeper way. And then I decided to pivot into sort of the consulting and coaching world making financial planning, kind of our kind of our core client. And so in a very early stage in a coaching business, financial advisers were some of our first clients by way of my background in the financial planning world. Joe: Yeah, and you do it incredibly well, my friend. So thank you. So let's just backtrack really quickly so that I can get the progression from college into starting this company. So did you go to school for finance? Jordan: I think it's so true Joe: Ok. Jordan: In life and in business, definitely in entrepreneurship, where we're leading people, that more is caught than taught. Joe: Ok. Jordan: And so nobody really taught me how to coach. But I watched other people coach and I watched other people in my industry that do what I'm doing now, do it at a really high level. And again, I paid attention to quality of life. I paid attention to the relationships. I paid attention to the way that they manage their decisions and manage their time. And I thought, you know, I want to do that. I think I can do that. And I actually did it in tandem with my own financial planning. And so I started sort of coaching on the side and I had really been coaching all the while I was in financial planning and some aspect working with clients. But I also started getting asked to speak and do workshops. And so I sort of fell in love with that work, Joe. But the reality is I had a couple of mentors. I had some key people in my life that had done that work in a really high level. One of those people is a guy by the name of Ben Newman. Another guy is John Wright Senior. And they both had Joe: How did Jordan: Big Joe: Coaching Jordan: Coaching Joe: Catch your Jordan: Practices Joe: Eye, or Jordan: Working with Joe: Was it because Jordan: Professional Joe: You were Jordan: Athletes Joe: Just taking Jordan: And Fortune Joe: From Jordan: 500 Joe: Your Jordan: Executive Joe: Love of Jordan: Leaders. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: Being a coach? Right. Jordan: I just Joe: I Jordan: Admired Joe: Mean, just Jordan: The work. Joe: Taking Jordan: I thought, Joe: That, Jordan: You know, Joe: But Jordan: I think Joe: Now Jordan: I Joe: Saying, Jordan: Can Joe: Ok, Jordan: Do that. Joe: Wait, Jordan: I got a lot to learn, Joe: I want Jordan: But Joe: To do a little Jordan: I'll Joe: Bit Jordan: Learn Joe: Of that Jordan: As I Joe: With Jordan: Go. Joe: Sports Jordan: And Joe: People. I want to do that with Jordan: Just Joe: Entrepreneurs. Jordan: Like you or any Joe: I want Jordan: Other Joe: To do Jordan: Entrepreneur, Joe: It with Jordan: You Joe: With Jordan: Kind Joe: Business Jordan: Of dive headfirst Joe: People. Jordan: And just Joe: I mean, Jordan: Hope Joe: What Jordan: It works Joe: Made Jordan: Out. Joe: You Jordan: So Joe: Wake up one day and Jordan: Our Joe: Say, Jordan: Business Joe: Yeah, Jordan: Grew Joe: I Jordan: Rapidly, Joe: Want to do coaching and Jordan: By Joe: I Jordan: God's Joe: Want to Jordan: Grace, Joe: Do it Jordan: Into Joe: In Jordan: The help Joe: This Jordan: Of a lot Joe: Form? Jordan: Of good people. And I woke up one day and I thought, you know what? I could leave my financial planning business based on what we built in the coaching business. And then we started to add more partners and multiply our efforts through other people. And that's when it really starts to get financed, when you can impact the world or you can impact the world around you through the people that work with you. So virtually everybody on our team right now, with the exception of maybe two to three people there in the coaching business, so their coaching partners, so they're leading, they're doing coaching and consulting work, either individual coaching group, coaching, keynote speaking, they're all contracted out. So some of them have five clients, some of them have 30 clients. We have a couple that have just a couple of clients and they're all sort of specialized. So we have some former professional athletes. We have some people that came from the ministry world. So they're actually pastors or they have been pastors. And then we have some people in the world of sales. We have some real estate agents and financial advisers. Some of them are very technical. Somebody might say a more motivational, but all of them are for hire as coaching partners. It's my job to lead them and make sure that they're getting what they need from a content standpoint and also just keeping them connected to to a vision and and keeping them connected to our company. But we're having a ton of fun. I mean, it's it's awesome to be on a team. It's fun to be a part of something that's bigger than just me. And, you know, each one of them is unique in terms of what they bring to the table. Joe: So that's a great segue because you do have a fairly Jordan: You Joe: Sizable Jordan: Know, what's Joe: Team. Jordan: Most important Joe: So Jordan: To us, Joe, Joe: What Jordan: Is that Joe: Do those Jordan: We all Joe: Team Jordan: Have Joe: Members Jordan: Similar Joe: Do Jordan: Values, Joe: For you? Jordan: So I want to give people the freedom and flexibility to be autonomous and how they work with clients. And so I've never told somebody, hey, here's the five step plan. Here's exactly what you have to do. Now, I'll make some general suggestions about the way that we lead people and care for people. But at the end of the day, most of the people that are on our coaching platform have been wildly successful in other arenas. And so they've been leading. They've been coaching. They've been training and developing people. So I think we're aligned in terms of our values. But beyond that, I want them to really operate in their true giftedness. And for some of them, that giftedness is in listening. You know, for some of them, it's in the world of neuroscience. You know, they just really understand how the brain works for others. They're just big on accountability, the kind like the bulldog that's in your face. It's really intense and motivational. So we want people to be who they are. We want them to have strong values, which for us means their faith filled and family oriented. And if they're faith filled, family oriented, others focus. They're usually a good fit for our coaching Joe: Did Jordan: Practice. Joe: They follow Jordan: And then, of course, Joe: A Jordan: There Joe: Certain Jordan: Are some other criteria Joe: Structure Jordan: That we want to Joe: That Jordan: Vet Joe: You Jordan: Out. Joe: Have Jordan: But Joe: Set up Jordan: That's Joe: So Jordan: A that's Joe: That Jordan: A good question. Joe: When someone hires one of those people, they know that if they're getting the quality of the Montgomery companies coach and there's a certain structure formula, something like that? The. Jordan: Yeah. Yeah, I would say that's that's very true of of our team, I think we're well positioned to help just about anybody in any industry with any problem. You know, there's a few that we would say, hey, we're not not licensed to do that. We're not going to dive into that space. But for the most part, if it is in the world of performance sales and driving results, there's somebody on our team that can handle the issue of the opportunity. Yes, so there's really two components to coaching for us and our business model, one is group coaching and one individual coaching, and those are obviously very separate. If I'm working with an individual client and we're talking about the phases of coaching or how I work with a client, first is discovery. So the answers you get are only as good as the questions that you ask. And people don't care how Joe: Cool. Jordan: Much you know Joe: Well, Jordan: Until Joe: I Jordan: They Joe: Just Jordan: Know that you care. Joe: It's important Jordan: And Joe: Because Jordan: To Joe: I Jordan: Us, Joe: When Jordan: It's Joe: I Jordan: A Joe: Went Jordan: Relationship. Joe: And looked at the website, I was like, Jordan: And Joe: This Jordan: So Joe: Is this Jordan: I Joe: Is Jordan: Always Joe: Cool. Jordan: Tell Joe: You Jordan: People, Joe: Have a Jordan: Hey, Joe: Really Jordan: I'm Joe: Cool team Jordan: A coach, Joe: Around Jordan: Which means Joe: You. And Jordan: I'm Joe: I Jordan: Going Joe: Wanted Jordan: To hold Joe: To Jordan: You Joe: Find Jordan: Accountable. Joe: Out if there Jordan: I'm Joe: Was Jordan: Going Joe: A variety Jordan: To share ideas Joe: In Jordan: Where to talk about Joe: What Jordan: Concepts Joe: They Jordan: And strategy, Joe: Coach on Jordan: Just Joe: Which Jordan: Like Joe: You Jordan: Any Joe: Answered Jordan: Coach Joe: That question. They Jordan: Would. Joe: Do. You have people that Jordan: The Joe: Specialize Jordan: Difference Joe: In Jordan: In Joe: All Jordan: Our Joe: Sorts Jordan: Approach, Joe: Of things. Jordan: I Joe: So Jordan: Think, is Joe: It's Jordan: That Joe: Great Jordan: I'm also Joe: That Jordan: A Joe: If Jordan: Strategic Joe: Someone Jordan: Partner. Joe: Loves working with you for all Jordan: And so Joe: The reasons Jordan: If I sign Joe: That Jordan: Up Joe: They Jordan: To work Joe: Love Jordan: With a client, Joe: To work with you, they Jordan: What Joe: Can Jordan: That means Joe: Get Jordan: Is Joe: Basically whatever Jordan: I'm going Joe: They Jordan: To advocate, Joe: Need under one roof, Jordan: I'm going Joe: Which Jordan: To support, Joe: Is cool. It's Jordan: I'm Joe: Not Jordan: Going Joe: Like Jordan: To connect Joe: You do. It's not one Jordan: And Joe: Dimensional Jordan: I'm going to highlight Joe: In any Jordan: And spotlight Joe: Any way, Jordan: Who Joe: Shape Jordan: You Joe: Or form. Jordan: Are and what you do. That means that my network is your network. It means if you want to speak engaged, we're going to help you with that. If you need marketing help or we're going to help you with that. If I need to get you connected to another leader, I'm going to help you with that. If we need help, you track down a client or prospect, I'm going to help you with that. So it's our approach is a little bit different that way. It's it's heavily based around relationship. The relationship has to start with Joe: All right, Jordan: Discovery. Joe: Cool. So let's talk about Jordan: One of my Joe: The Jordan: Other Joe: Coaching Jordan: Beliefs, Joe, is Joe: Part Jordan: That if Joe: Of it, Jordan: I'm working Joe: And Jordan: With a client, Joe: If Jordan: It's always Joe: You can go through Jordan: 100 percent Joe: And tell Jordan: Of the time, Joe: Me the Jordan: Their time, not Joe: Different Jordan: Mine. Joe: Types Jordan: Which Joe: Of Jordan: Means Joe: Services Jordan: I've got to Joe: That Jordan: Deal Joe: You Jordan: With Joe: Have Jordan: The issues, Joe: For the coaching Jordan: The Joe: Piece Jordan: Opportunities Joe: Of. Jordan: And the challenges that are most present for them right away before I try to drive my agenda. So if I show up to the call and I say, hey, Joe, here's three things I want to talk about today. Here's the here's the new approach to closing a sale or here's the new approach to the discovery process or whatever. And I find out that your dog just died or that you just lost the key employee or that your house just burned down. But I'm using really dramatic examples. But anyway, the point, is there something else on your mind? I'm missing it. I'm not know I've failed to connect with you, and candidly, I failed to lead you. So the first question I asked to all of our coaching clients and a coaching meeting, and they would tell you, this is not to say, hey, Joe, how do we create space to discuss and talk about the things that are most pressing, interesting and relevant for you today? I want to start there and then we'll recap and we'll talk about some of the stuff that we've talked about the past. I'm always, you know, forcing accountability. So we're we're bringing things to the forefront. Did you do X, Y and Z to do that or Yapp with that? But we addressed the issues that are most present. And then I'm always trying to share ideas and concepts that I feel like are relevant to them based on the seasonal life there in industry they're in or what they've said that they needed help with. Conversations tend to be fairly organic because, again, it's it's a relationship. And, you know, people open up to us about all kinds of stuff, their marriage, their finances, their friendships, their their problems that go way beyond their professional life. Jordan: So I appreciate the question. I don't know if I if I answered it exactly. But to give you a window into our world and how we work with people, that that's sort of our our process and style. You know, right now we work with such a wide range of people, Joe, so I'm not as concerned about like industry or niche. Here's what I what I'm really concerned with this character traits. So they've got to be values oriented, right? They got to care. They're going to be a decent person. In other words, if they just want to go make all the money in the world, they don't want to leave their family. I'm probably not a good fit. I'm going to challenge them on their values and lead in their family and growing in their faith. And that's part of who I am. But that's not for everybody. But so we're probably not a good fit if that's not part of who they are. And then the second thing that I would tell you is they got to be open minded. They have to be willing to learn. They have to be somebody that enjoys new information and new ways of thinking. A new perspective, fresh perspective. Right. Doesn't mean that I'm always right or my perspective is the right perspective. It just means that they're willing to listen right there. They're willing to hear and then they're willing to be challenged. So they want somebody to ask them the tough questions and share the truth and mix even said it best. You said average players want to be left alone. Good players want to be coached, great players want the truth. I want people that want the truth. I want people that really want to be challenged. Joe: Great. Jordan: They've Joe: So Jordan: Got Joe: Before Jordan: An open Joe: We Jordan: Mind Joe: Move to Jordan: And they have strong Joe: A Jordan: Values. Joe: Group coaching piece Jordan: And Joe: Of it, Jordan: If they've Joe: Because Jordan: Got those Joe: We just Jordan: Three Joe: Talked Jordan: Things, Joe: About the one on Jordan: They're Joe: One. Jordan: Usually a good fit for Joe: What's Jordan: Our coaching Joe: Your sweet Jordan: Practice. Joe: Spot? Who who are the people that you feel you work best with or can can help the best. Jordan: So the group coaches typically kind of a one hour session, we try to kind of meet people where they're at. So I work with organizations, as do our partners, to figure out, hey, what really do you need? What's the right time frame? What's the right size? I'd love to tell you that we've got, like, this specific program. It's cookie cutter. It's not. But that's by design. We really want to be a partner and meet people where they're at. So sometimes it's a small as is five people. I've got one group right now, 60, which I think is a little too big. What's important to us is that that's it's intimate or as intimate as it can be where people really feel like, you know, them. And and so we call on people. I try to get to know everybody by name and remember little facts about who they are and what's important to them. It's highly interactive. So I'm calling on people throughout the session. Usually I'm delivering 30 minutes of content or 30 minutes of discussion. We challenge challenge on the spot. I have other people challenge each other. I always say this in our group coaching program that where you sit determines what you see and you see something different than everybody else's and different is valuable. And so what that means is your voice matters because whether you're the most experienced person on the call are the least experienced person on the call, you see something that nobody else in the organization sees. And so we need your voice. We need your perspective, because you've got a different perspective than everybody else. So, Johnny, that sits at the front desk, that's the director of First Impressions, has some really valuable Joe: Awesome, Jordan: Perspective Joe: I Jordan: Because Joe: Love Jordan: Johnny Joe: That. OK, cool. Jordan: Sees Joe: So Jordan: Something Joe: The group Jordan: That Sarah, Joe: Coaching, Jordan: The CEO, Joe: What does that entail? Jordan: Doesn't see. And so we really just try to foster conversation, encourage people and empower people to share and speak up and then deliver content that's inclusive and relevant to the group. Yes, so much of our business is virtual, it just kind of always has been and most a lot of our clients aren't local. So they're you know, they're kind of spread out. We have people all over the US. I'm pretty used to Zoom calls and phone calls, and I speak a lot. Right. So keynote speaking is live often, but we still do virtual keynotes as well. So it's a good mixture, I would say, in so many ways covid changed our business. I was always willing to do things virtually, but I think a lot of companies weren't until they realized like, hey, we can do it this way. And so for me, as a person with a young family, it allowed me to stay at home and I didn't have to. I wasn't on a plane twice a week sleeping in a hotel. So so covid in some ways I'd be careful how I say this, because it was a really difficult time for a lot of people for our business. It actually affected my day to day rhythm or quality of life and I think a positive way and allowed me to be more present with my family. So it's a good mix of both. But I would say the pandemic certainly forced it to be more virtual. Joe: The coaching business, covid or not covid, were you doing live coaching up until that point and now a lot of Jordan: Yeah, Joe: It has shifted Jordan: I would say Joe: Onto Jordan: A good Joe: Like Zoom Jordan: Portion Joe: Calls and things Jordan: Of Joe: Like Jordan: Our Joe: That, Jordan: Clients Joe: Or Jordan: Are either Joe: How your Jordan: In Joe: Business Jordan: Sales or entrepreneurs, Joe: Today and what's Jordan: You know, Joe: The Jordan: So Joe: Mixture Jordan: There Joe: Of live Jordan: In fact, Joe: Versus Jordan: I would say it's Joe: Online? Jordan: Probably 80 percent of our business, either business owners or they're in sales and then there's maybe 20 percent that are in the world of executive leadership or sports. So that's kind of a mix of our business. When I say executive leadership, they're a leader in some sort of a corporate setting, but it's starting to change more every day. Like we work. I work right now with a group of physicians. We've got a gal that owns a very successful cosmetology clinic. So her whole thing is cosmetology Joe: Yep. Jordan: And she's been wildly successful and real estate agents and financial advisors and and college athletes and pro athletes. And so it's a it's a it's a wide range of people. Joe: Perfect out of the clients that you have, what is the percentage of general corporations, then entrepreneurs and then sports related? OK. Awesome. OK, we're closing in on the amount of time that I have you for, which is unfortunate because I love talking with you and I love your approach. 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First of all, have 20 years of experience, a team of 20 people there doing tens of millions of dollars revenue, that they're very successful. And so they hire us. They hire me to come in and do coaching work with them. And every one of them has sort of a different set of needs. But one of the things that we always talk about, at least on some level, is our communication style. Right, because they're in sales and they're communicating all day, every day for a living. So I challenge this financial advisor. Usually within the first few meetings, I'll say, hey, I want you to send me your approach language, which is really their what they say to engage a client and conversation. So it's a first time meeting and this is the first five minutes of sort of the introductory meeting. And I can I can feel their energy when I when I challenge them and I say, I want you to send me that communication. Their energy is like at a negative to. Right, they're thinking you're going to bill me X for coaching, I've been doing this for 20 years, like what I don't need is help on the basics of what I say. And, you know, I can just feel that just not really excited about that. Jordan: But I challenge him. I say I think this is a really important part of our work together. It helps me understand who you are and how you're showing up for people. So send that over when you get some time. So they send it over and it's not going to have all the answers. But I'm willing to listen to it repeatedly. Our team listens to it repeatedly. And then we give them an analysis. We give them feedback. The energy level, when we give them feedback, goes from a negative two to a 10. Every single time. Because they do not know what they do not know. And I just had a guy the other day, I said, OK, so when the first two minutes of your communication, you said the word thirty seven times. Did you know that? You know, hey, the way that you show up, did you know that you use me focused conversation? Over and over, you are literally saying I my, me repeatedly. And you were doing it for 20 years and nobody has ever told you that you're doing it, and that's a shame because you would connect with people and a deeper and more meaningful way because you would be able to drive better results. You would have more purposeful conversation if you could just make that one small tweak. Jordan: You know, we could end the conversation at the cozy relationship right there, and the time that we had spent together would have been massively impactful. Again, not because I have all the answers, but because I'm willing to listen, give real feedback and press in on blind spots that we all have. And the last thing I'll say is people need to be encouraged. You know, people will go farther than they think they can when someone else thinks they can, period. And I don't care for the most successful person, the least successful person, the most experienced, the least experienced. I'm working with a guy the other day, Fortune 500, executive leader, big time leader of people. They had a record breaking year at the firm. Unbelievable year. This guy is in charge of literally hundreds of direct reports. And I asked him in a conversation, I just said, hey, how many people told you over this past fiscal year? So you just wrapped up the year. How many people told you? Good job. And he says, well, like, what do you mean? I said, you know what I mean? Like e-mails, texts, phone calls. Like how many people reached out to you said, hey, good job, great you. And he said, Zira. Zero people had picked up the phone and sent a text instead of an email, so the point is this job that I've worked with, this guy named John. Jordan: So the point is this, John, that you need to be encouraged. You need somebody to point out what you're doing. Well. You need somebody to touch your heart and remind you of who God made you to be and all of the natural God given giftedness that's inside of you. And I just want to share with you it's an honor to be able to do that for you and with you. But let me let me help you see what I see. Let's look back at the last 12 months. Here's what you've achieved. In that moment, I think I think when you step into somebody's life in that way, you're a lid lifter and you do it authentically and you help them see more and you help them see before. Man, I think you're in a position of strength relationally. And I think that person at that moment realizes that that relationship means more than they ever realized. So there's a lot that we can say about coaching. But I think, Joe, when you touch somebody's heart, when you appreciate people for who they are, when you point out their God given gift A. and when you deliver the truth and love and you point out the blindspots, you can be a world class coach and it has nothing to do with what you know, it's all about. Jordan: You show up and serve people. Well, that's just my answer. I don't know if it's the right answer by anybody else's standard, but in my world, it's the way that I try to live each and every day with the people that we serve. I love it. Yeah, so here's what I'd say, we do a lot of work through social media, so Instagram is probably where I'm most active. I'm Jordan and Montgomery on Instagram, so I would love it. If you want to get in touch to send a direct message, I'll communicate back with you. I would love to connect Montgomery Companies dot com is on our website. I'm also active on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and if anybody reaches out, I will gladly respond. If you got a question, if you're wrestling with an issue, an opportunity I'd love to talk to it with and be of service to anybody listening. And Joe, I want to say thank you for having me on your show. It's an honor. It's always an honor to share your great with the questions that, yes, it's very clear that you showed up prepared and you also had great energy. And so I just want to say thank you for your time and attention. Thanks for who you are and for what you're putting out into the world. It's making a difference. I. Right back at you, brother.

  Tim O'Brien along with his wife Becki, have created a unique vitamin, supplement and nutrition store that is more about helping people than it is about margins and commissions. As Tim says" Souls before sales!"   It was a pleasure sitting down with Tim to learn more about The Healthy Place and what products and services they have to offer.   After Tim educated me, I'm definitely going to lean on him and his team in the future, to help me make better and more educated decisions when it comes to my health.   I hope you enjoy this episode and you walk away with at least one snippet that either helps you in your entrepreneurial journey or with you health in general.   For 30% off, please use our affiliate link as it helps us to generate a little income to produce this podcast...thx so much!   https://findyourhealthyplace.com/?rfsn=5901087.08b0f6   Thanks for listening!   Joe   Tim O'Brien Founder - The Healthy Place Website: https://findyourhealthyplace.com/ Website: https://livelyvitaminco.com/ Website: https://wildtheory.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/applewellness/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thehealthyplaceTHP YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYQVVKB58mGd_YgxAL0LMGA/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/apple-wellness-the-healthy-place/about/ Email: tim@findyourhealthyplace.com Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Tim: My guest today is Tim O'Brien, the founder of The Healthy Place, an e-commerce store for healthy products. They also have for brick and mortar locations, one in Madison, Wisconsin, one in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, one in Middleton, Wisconsin, and one in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. Tim's passion is health and wellness, and he has spent the last decade sharing his passion with the world on a personal side. He is married to Becky and together they have three children. In this conversation with Tim, I expressed how much health and wellness is important to myself and how convoluted the marketplace is and very difficult to trust who you buy from and which products you buy. I was excited to have Tim on the show so that I could learn more about the difference in what the healthy place offers over buying products at other places like GNC, Walgreens, the vitamin shop and obviously Amazon.com. So sit back and listen to the education that we get from Tim on how to buy better and healthier products in the health and wellness space. Joe: Hey, Tim, welcome to the show. Tim: Hey, hey, how you doing, buddy? Joe: I'm doing great, man, happy, what is it? Wednesday, I lost track, I just got Tim: Yeah, Joe: Back into Tim: It's Joe: Town. Tim: Hump hump day of the week, man, and Joe: Beautiful. Tim: I'm doing this to say thank you for giving me a chance to be on your show. Man, this is cool. Joe: Yeah, no, that's my pleasure, as as I mentioned before, we actually started this that I have, you know, I know that literally health is everything. Like you can have everything in the world that you ever, ever wanted. And without your health, it's just, you know, it's it's unfortunate because I know people go through things that had nothing to do with them not being healthy. They just got delivered a bad hand, Tim: Yahav. Joe: You know, so that's a different story. But those of us Tim: Jerome. Joe: That can make sure we stay healthy, there are things that we can do. But before we get into all of that, and as a lot of my listeners for the podcast and the viewers of a YouTube channel, now, I'd like to get the back story because a lot of the people who listen to the show are my hope is that these entrepreneurial spirits that are trying to figure out what they want to do are there in the midst of doing it. And they they need ideas from people that are being successful doing it. So I would like to go back as far as you're willing to go back to allow myself and the viewers to understand how you got into what you're doing today. What Tim: I love Joe: For? Tim: To share that. Yeah. Joe: Yeah, like what triggered the fact that you're now in this world of, you know, Tim: Supplements, Joe: The health world Tim: Natural Joe: And. Tim: Alternatives, Joe: Yeah, Tim: Yeah. Joe: Yeah, yeah. So I'd love to hear that and then we'll get in, Tim: I'd love to. It's Joe: Ok. Tim: A cool story, I kind of like telling it because it's just cool to see how things can work together to sort of bring you to the place that you're at. And it's sort of confirmation in some different ways. So I love to share it, man. I'd be happy to do so when my when I was like five or six years old, my mom fought through thyroid cancer. And I remember her like going through the chemo radiation and losing the hair, like seeing her at the hospital. I have four siblings, so just a lot of fear in the home, worried about mom. And then I remember this time where she came home and she was sort of like excited and sort of like filled with a little bit of hope because she had gone into this health food store in a little town called Muskego, Wisconsin, just this tiny little town that had a health food store. And she talked to this guy named John for like an hour and a half. And John shared with her all these natural alternatives that had some good science and some good reason to believe that it could help her in her process recovery, treatment of the thyroid cancer. And so she would like go in there like once a week, whether it was a refill for some supplements or whether it was some more education, because there was a lot of literature that this guy handed out as well, like books that he gave her. Tim: And I would go with her. And through this whole process, she she was benefited quite a bit from these natural alternatives that helped her and her recovery process. So I remember hearing about that as a little guy. And through that process, she got a job as a manager at this health food store. And she was there all the time, 40, 50 hours a week kind of thing. And us kids were home schooled. So we would go with mom often sitting in this back room of this health food store, doing our math problems, doing our schoolwork. And I watched over the years these testimonies produced of people coming in with chronic pain, depression, sleep issues, other folks that battled cancer, that my mom held their hand through the process, educating them. And so that was like my whole upbringing. And it really got into my DNA that there is natural alternatives out there that work and the general population just doesn't know about them, because the way our medical system set up pharmaceutical medications, you know, we have some of the best doctors in the world. And, you know, you go to them, you get a prescription, you don't Joe: Mm Tim: Necessarily Joe: Hmm. Tim: Get a natural alternative recommendation. So I got a bit passionate about that in my late teen years. So I got a job at a GNC franchise and worked for the owner who invited me to move out to Madison, Wisconsin, to manage some of his GNC stores after a little while. So I was like, man, OK, my boss thinks I'm good at this. I really enjoy helping people, encouraging people. I just happen to like like people in general. So it was it was sort of a fit. Like I got this passion for this natural alternative thing. I feel like I'm helping people. I'm impacting the world. I want to make a difference. And I was managing these GNC franchises in Madison, Wisconsin. Well, there was a corporate takeover, dude, in twenty seven where everybody lost their jobs, like corporate took over these six franchises that my boss owned. And it was like, OMG, like, what am I going to do now? And so I determined, you know, hey, I want to do something. And that's natural alternative space. I have always been sort of passionate about business in general. I had like three paper routes when I was 11 and I hired my sisters for a quarter a day. I was making bank Joe: Right. Tim: And I was so I tried a network marketing business for a little while that was suppliments and that was brutal. Multi-level marketing can be really hard. And I was like, OK, I don't want to go that route. Maybe I should open my own health food store. And at that time I had just met dating, married Becky, my wife. So we're prayerfully like thinking through this. Should we do this, put the house on the line, open up our own health food store and risk everything. And we decided to take the plunge. So our first brick and mortar store, 2010, was in a town called Fitchburg, Wisconsin, which is right outside of Madison, Wisconsin. And then twenty fifteen, it was store number two in the Madison area and then twenty nineteen with stores three and four. So that was going well. We then moved towards ecommerce where like, hey, if we're making an impact and a difference here locally, which is really exciting, we really enjoy it together. We work as a team like let's let's hit the nation. That sounds fun. And so we started to see a little bit of success there, especially ones covid hit of last year because our in-store traffic took a hit. So our pivot as a company, like a lot of smart companies, was, let's focus on e-commerce. And so that really helped us talk about a blessing in disguise, really helped Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Us figure out the e-commerce space a little bit. So really exciting. In December, January of this last year, we got our little warehouse. So now we have a warehouse in Madison and we're shipping packages out all over the United States. And that's the story. And the mission is about impacting, empowering and educating as many people as we can to just like, learn, grow and create a lifelong foundation of health and wellness. It's like a fanning a flame. You know, somebody already just has a little spark. You know, they're putting the cigarette out outside my store, throwing the McDonald's bag in the trash and like, I need something for my chronic pain all the way up to the health enthusiasts. And no matter what, to me, it's so encouraging to just fan the flame of someone's health and wellness. Because you said it earlier, life is a gift and people need to remember that. Joe: Yeah, and so have you always, based on the background of sitting in that store with your mother and seeing what the proper nutrition and supplements and things like that did for her? Did you always pretty much lead a healthy lifestyle? Tim: Funny is Joe: Don't Tim: No. Joe: Tell me you're a fast food junkie. Tim: No, I wasn't. Yeah, I was, and I always felt very bad if I was going through that fast food line, but my diet really didn't really take a huge impact until I married Becky. So for whatever reason, I would I knew a lot about supplements, really passionate about natural alternatives. But I was I was not the guy who is eating ultra clean, raw, organic, clean. I was like, OK, I'm going to eat a basic diet cleaner than most know what kind of excuses that. And then I'd lean on supplements for nutrition. And so when I met Vecchi, this is two thousand eight, she's like, wow, this doesn't even make sense. Like you can't go eat at pizza, frozen pizza, you know, and then go take your supplements. And so she really convicted me. And it's been a pretty cool team because that's always been her passion is very clean eating. And she didn't understand or know about the supplement natural alternative thing. And my passion has always been for my mom's story of natural alternatives and supplements can change a life. And so then getting married and working together as a team to educate Madison and our social media platforms and on YouTube, it's like there has to be a marriage between nutritional deficiencies, making sure we don't have them eating well, eating clean exercise. So we should work together. And I've improved since meeting, Becky. Joe: Wow, so are you actually telling me that she was already before you guys even met, she was interested in this sort of thing or she was she was Tim: Yeah. Joe: A healthy, clean eating person. Tim: Yes, she was Joe: Wow. Tim: A health enthusiast, yeah, I mean, just health, and that's part of what drew me to her is like, man, this girl's got discipline, like extreme self-control. For me, that's been an area of struggle, just like in general, like discipline waking up early. I'm the guy that would, before I met Becky, like stay up till one and then sleep till nine till I had to quit, get to work. And, you know, he's like, man, we got some work to do. But, yeah, she sure inspired me and a few of those areas. Joe: Ok, so without prying too deeply then, because now you're really piqued, my interest is the fact that you guys are lying so well. How did you meet? Tim: Yeah, so we there was like a young adults meeting through it, through church called Metro Believers Church in Madison, Wisconsin, you know, I'm a Christian, she's a Christian, and in my early twenties, it was like, hey, I really enjoyed finding people like minded. And I think in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm searching for a life, you know? So I would go to a couple of these different churches, young adult ministry meetings, whatever, 20 something groups. And we just started hanging out. So it was like a group of like six or seven of us. And I was about six months in. I pulled her aside one day after church and said, I still laugh at what I said. I said, Hey, Becky, I've taken a shining to you and I'd like to continue on to marriage. And she's like, oh my gosh. Like, OK, I'm kind of like you, too. It was weird way to ask, but OK. Joe: It's also that's Tim: Yeah, Joe: Old school, Tim: I don't do it right. Oh, yeah. Joe: But also Tim: Oh. Joe: All right, cool, well, that's that's great. So how did you change or why did you change the name from Apple Wellness to the healthy place? Tim: Yeah, really good question, you know, Apple Wellness was a good name, you know, in the sense of like Apple a day keeps the doctor away and we just had too many people thinking we are the Mac Apple store. So I literally get calls, at least weekly, Joe: Wow, Tim: And Joe: That's so subtle. Tim: At least I know, and then I'd see my employee across the way and he'd be talking to somebody and he'd be like, well, try turning the phone off and then turn it back on, you know? Joe: Oh, my Tim: So Joe: God. Tim: Especially after he got the e commerce thing going, I started, Becky, as the graphic designer and kind of branding expert within our company for a long time. She's like the Apple word's taken. That's just gone. And I should have consulted with her a little bit more before we chose the name. Joe: Uh huh. Tim: And so she's always kind of wanted it changed. But then I found out that Apple, the company, has an Apple wellness program Joe: Oh, Tim: For employees Joe: Of. Tim: Like it's trademarked. I mean, so I figured it was just a matter of time before I end up getting some sort of litigation letter from Joe: Yeah, Tim: Apple. Joe: Yeah, well, OK, that's interesting. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So you stole one of my questions, but it was perfect because it was actually in line with what you were talking about. But I want to go back to it because Tim: Sure. Joe: It's important, again, for like the entrepreneurs that are listening to this and what we just went through with covid, you talked about shifting. They're not shifting, but literally adding to what you've already established. Right. So you were Tim: You. Joe: You were a retail store, people walking in foot traffic. That's what you counted on to make a living. Right. So when covid hit, obviously, everyone stayed home. So there goes all the foot traffic. So did you already have the e commerce portion of this set up before this happened when you said it was a blessing in disguise? Were you already ready to go the moment like that? Tim: Really Joe: The Tim: Good. Joe: You know, Tim: Yes, Joe: The doors. Tim: Yes and no, I Joe: Ok. Tim: Mean, it's like we had the website, we had the ability to set up ship products out. We had maybe three hundred out of the four thousand products that we have in our stores on the site. So we were ready in certain ways and then not ready for a lot of things. And we had no idea on the digital side of marketing, Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO optimization, email marketing. We hadn't done text messaging. We hadn't done very much of that, very basic and each one of those areas. So it was all of a sudden like pedal to the metal once March hit, where it was like, OK, we have some of these basic fundamentals. And I always tell a business owner like you, if you don't already, you have to have a website like I mean, covid showed us all that pretty quick, like Joe: Yeah. Tim: Have to have a website and you can get free ones are very inexpensive. Wick's dotcom. I'll tell business owners, like even if you're not a photographer, don't don't try to be don't don't get some real basic a white posterboard. Put the product right over it. Just take a picture by a window. Don't don't try to get real clever with it because Vecchi tells me that it can end up looking really bad if Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: You're trying to do so. Basic things like get a website, get a social media, you know, ask your grandkid if you don't know how to set one up sort of thing. So we had all the basics, but then for us it was like, OK. Let's get live chat on our website, because we are one of our difference makers, is consultations Joe: Huh? Tim: With we change lives because we ask questions and we figure out the best products and forms and brands for their specific issues, problems. So let's get a live chat on our website so we can have those conversations. Let's get free shipping. Let's make it really easy. Even if we lose money on maybe one out of five orders, let's just like make it easy, reduce friction in any way that we can. Let's get on Google ads and Facebook ads. So we hired a digital agency for that and it's pretty cool. A year later, we had 30 percent overnight of our foot traffic was just gone once we were able to stay open, thankfully. But that 30 percent in one year's time, we were able to build that on our e-commerce platforms. We were able to replace what was lost. So I'm still head spinning, so thankful for my team able to bring that together because it's quite the operation and it takes a lot of work. Joe: Yeah, did you did you keep the stores open themselves or did you? Tim: We did Joe: You did OK. Tim: Not. Joe: Ok, Tim: We Joe: And Tim: Were Joe: Was it. Tim: Scrambling in the beginning of if we could be classified as essential or not, and my belief is that the immune system is something that can really be strengthened. I'm more passionate about terrain versus the germs so we can strengthen our terrain, strengthen our immune systems, both defense and offense. I mean, there's incredible science behind simple nutrients like sand, mucus from elderberry. The University of Sydney showing the prevention which with elderberry prevention of viruses entering the cell. I mean, it's some pretty cool science. So at the beginning of the covid thing, it was like, OK, I'm not going to tell anybody I can cure or prevent Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Whatever, but I'm sure as heck going to yell it from the rooftop that you can strengthen your immune system and a strong immune system. Strong health is the best defense against any disease, virus, sickness anywhere. So I got pretty passionate about that a year ago. Joe: Cool. Yeah, that's great. So I'm normally pretty good at not bouncing around, but in this case, I want to go back to when you decided to do this. You know, obviously when when someone gets released from a corporate environment and they're like, oh, my gosh, I don't have control over my own destiny because these people Tim: The. Joe: Just literally rip the rug out from underneath me, which is another thing that a lot of entrepreneurs know because this is how they got to where they are there that happen to them. Like I'm not letting someone else dictate how my life is going to turn out. Right. So Tim: Yeah. Joe: But what's really crazy is I don't know if it if in Wisconsin or the places where you have these stores, obviously we know that you already brought it up at GNC is a big brand around the country. There's also where we are. There's the vitamin store. Right. Are the stuff that one of those Tim: Yeah, Joe: Is a vitamin Tim: Yeah, Joe: Shopper. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So there's a lot of these places. So it's almost like you saying you and Becky going, oh, yeah, we're going to create the next pizza delivery like pizza Tim: Now, Joe: Delivery Tim: There's already Joe: Franchise. Tim: 10 right around Joe: Yeah, Tim: The corner, Joe: Right. Tim: So let's see number 11, yeah. Joe: Right. It's we're going to be the next Pizza Hut or Papa John's or whatever. It's just like that that industry Tim: Yes, Joe: That's it takes a lot Tim: It's Joe: Of guts. Tim: So competitive. Joe: Yeah. So when you thought about it, as all entrepreneurs, do, we always come up with these ideas and then we sometimes will kill our own ideas without our spouse or partner or someone will say they'll be the sensible one and say Tim: Right, Joe: That's Tim: Right, Joe: Never Tim: Yeah. Joe: Right. But then you have all these outside influences of of friends and things. And, you know, at any moment, if you would have said, hey, we're thinking of opening up a vitamin supplement, healthy sort of Tim: John. Joe: That people would look at you. But what about all of these major brands? So tell me about how you got over the hump to make to pull the trigger. Tim: Yeah, do that's such a good question and, you know, to identify and I had some friends who opened a coffee shop, you know, and a year later, you know, the coffee shops not doing so well is unfortunate with covid timing and everything. And it's like the supplement thing where you, like, hear this and you're like, oh, I don't know, you know, I wish him well, but I don't know if that's going to work because it's just like there's a hundred of them, you know. Joe: Right. Tim: So I think for me what happened was I worked for GNC for, I don't know, five years. And you start to see good stuff. You start to see bad stuff, you start to see their model. They were purchased by China a while back. So, OK, it's all sourced from China. Forms of nutrients are in their synthetic forms or not so absorbable forms. And you start to learn like, OK, a better product would help this person more than this form of curcumin that's not absorbing into their system from China or wherever, you know, so you start to see where you could make a difference and you sort of start to see your difference makers. So in the supplement world, there's two veins of supplement stores. There's the type of stores that are all about muscle gain and weight loss, you know, weight loss, thermogenic high caffeine, ephedra, and then trim and tracks Hydroxycut. And a lot of that isn't super healthy for Joe: Hmm. Tim: People to be taking steroids or pro hormones, you know, not super healthy. So that's like one vein of supplement stores. And then there's another vein of supplement stores that just they sourced from China. They use synthetic nutrients. It's a little bit more about margin and profit than it is about quality and making a difference. And so that is something I realized pretty early on. And there's not too many supplement health food stores that have a lot of knowledge where you walk in. And there's not just like a high schooler selling the huge jug of protein because it gets a two dollar commission on it, you know. Joe: Yes, I do know. Tim: Yeah, yeah. And there's just not a lot of those out there. So then all of a sudden starting to dream about, you know, originating from my mom's story where somebody really helped her out, where I can really make a difference, because if I open my own stores or store at the time, I can bring in some of the best brands in the world. And pretty quick, in any industry, you find out, good, better, best. And I want to be in that best category. And all of a sudden you're working with some of the best brands in the world and you have the knowledge to be a to guide somebody with Crohn's disease. Let's just Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Talk over asthma on natural alternatives that really work. And if you impact them, if you help them, if you change their life a little bit for the better, now they're going to keep coming back forever. And they tell everybody they know because there's such a vacuum, such a desperate need in this day and age for knowledgeable resources in the natural alternative space. We have a ton of medical, we have a ton of pharmaceutical drugs. We just don't have information coming to the general public on natural alternatives that work. And I get to be that resource in Madison, Wisconsin. So I think that's why we have done well in our brick and mortar stores. And I think that's probably why our attention is higher for our e-commerce is because of that customer service, that knowledgeable resource, that going the extra mile to impact their lives. And I'll give you an example. A lady might hit our live chat from California and say, hey, I'm looking for a V12. Can you give me a recommendation? And then we might ask the question like, absolutely. Here's a couple of options. Do you mind if I ask while you're while you're taking V12? Oh, my doctor said because I have really low energy, I have nerve pain and my mental clarity and focus, I get like foggy brain all the time. So then all of a sudden we say, awesome, OK, I'm actually going to encourage the method in form of V12 because it absorbs much better than this sign form that I first sent you, because I really want you to feel the difference. And since you're feeling fatigued, a little brain fog, I'd love for you to consider this adrenal boost product that has adapted genic herbs in there, like Atul Gawande wrote Rodeo Mocca because ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. So then you recommend that product. They get it. And this lady two months later goes, Oh my gosh, my energy is a little better, my focus is better, my stress is reduced, which I didn't even bring up. But that adrenal product helps with stress, too, I guess. Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Then all of a sudden they're leaving a review like, wow, that wellness consultant, Ryan, he's one of our our wellness consultants. He really helped me out. And so it's a very different sort of dynamic than a typical GNC store, health food store, vitamin shop type experience. They're Joe: Huh? Tim: All great stores. I mean, I love Natural. Anywhere you can get them. So that was like our difference maker and that's why I thought I could make a go out of it. Joe: Ok, cool. I have so much to ask you now, because you keep opening up like Kansas. So. So before again, I, I want this stuff to be helpful for the entrepreneur. And then then we're going to help the consumers that listen to this. So how when you decided on doing this and said, OK, and let's pull the trigger, how did you figure out the place where you're going to open up store number one, that you do all that extensive, Tim: Oh, Joe: You know, Tim: Good question, yes. Joe: Traffic, you know, what's going to pop up around us? What Tim: You know, Joe: Is, you Tim: Find Joe: Know? Tim: Find a good broker, a real estate broker that can find you spaces. So I had a guy named Kent in Madison, Wisconsin, and he you don't have to pay these guys. You know, it's the landlord that pays them. Joe: Right. Tim: And so as a young entrepreneur about to, like, risk everything you had, that was really important for me to know. Like, I I still am shocked by that. Like, you can just call one of these guys, try to find a reputable one, find somebody that trusts that can make a good referral. And they do all this scouting for you. They send you all the reports and you don't pay a penny. You know, I am a bottom line at the end or something, but you don't pay a penny for this. They get paid from the landlord. So he was bringing me idea after idea after idea. And he had been in the industry for a long time. So he knew the city really, really well. And he was able to guide me through, hey, this has a really strong anchor. The anchor in Fitchburg was Joe: Yeah, Tim: Target. Joe: Yeah. Tim: It was a super, super target. So I was like, oh, learning about anchors are important, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Really important. So I tell you, if you're listening, like, look for some strong anchors, because that's really going to help you for traffic. Joe: And just for the listeners and the people that don't like it, like when they talk about like a small strip mall or a plaza or something like that or even in a in a mall small, an anchor is an anchor store. That is when they go in, there's a really good chance they're not going away like they are a big thing like Target or Wal-Mart Tim: Exactly. Joe: Or Nordstrom or whatever. So I just wanted to clear that up because I didn't know at one point. But I know when you're looking at retail space like that, you want to be surrounded by an anchor store that has been around forever and is not going away. Tim: Yes, and just to further drive that point home, we have for brick and mortar stores and the one that's doing like the worst is the one that doesn't have a strong anchor by it. So just get one with a strong anchor and then look at price points and definitely negotiate. So we had that broker that was able to help us out. He was able to negotiate tenant improvement. Our big deal when you're opening a store, because you you could use money towards the build out and you can ask landlords for that. So if, again, if you have a good broker and you tell them your story, what you're trying to build out, a lot of times you can get a number of things paid for by the landlord because they're about to ask you to sign a five year lease. Joe: Mm hmm. OK. So at this point, the four locations that you have, you are in a lease situation Tim: Yes, all for you Joe: At Tim: And I've Joe: Any Tim: Looked into purchasing. Joe: Ok, so there is yeah, that's my question. It's like when do you pull the trigger on saying, OK, I want to actually start to own some of these buildings are these spaces. And that's a huge job. That's that's really put your Tim: Yeah, Joe: Neck out. Right. Tim: So in all four, I looked at them and each one has a different story, the first one I looked into though, at the Fitchburg location, the buildings were not for sale. So I was like, all this is so cool. So I looked into it and it was seven million dollars for these two buildings because it's in a strong anchor, high traffic area. So it is difficult to buy the spot by the strong anchor Joe: Maha. Tim: Because it really it would have been risking I couldn't I couldn't do it. But then the idea next idea is like, well, maybe I should move locations now that my name is established, if I can buy a strip mall down the way or something like that. So that Joe: Te. Tim: Idea is in the back of my head. But then you move away from the strong anchors. That's Joe: Right. Tim: Been called me back. Joe: Right, cool. See, that was perfect because that was like all of the things that you have to consider and Tim: Right. Joe: It's yeah, that's a tough decision, man. That's a lot of money. Tim: It is, Joe: Yeah. Tim: Dude, I Joe: Yeah. Tim: Know and I have a buddy who owns a dentistry office and he Joe: We. Tim: Was able to purchase his location and it's awesome. He's about to pay it off after ten years. And I'm super excited. So Joe: Yeah. Tim: It is depends on the situation. Joe: Yeah, OK, so now let's get into what I consider in the world that you're in and I'm a huge fan of natural like I is, it's a there's a difference between naturopathic or is. Right. Is that pronounced correctly? Is that they say it Tim: Yeah, Joe: Now Tim: Naturopathic Joe: Or Tim: Medicine Joe: Or homoeopathic. Tim: Homoeopathy yupp homoeopathy Joe: Right. OK. Tim: And integrative medicine is kind of like medical and naturopathy together. Joe: Yep, yep, so Joel and my life partner went through a battle of breast cancer where she had some lymph nodes and luckily, you know, Tim: Giese. Joe: Through through chemo and radiation, she came out on the other side and everything's great. But Tim: Good. Joe: The big thing that she also had was she had a naturopathic doctor Tim: Hmm. Joe: That went that came from the cancer world. So the advantages is that he understood the treatment that was happening with the normal medicine and he knew what to give her to not take away from what she was doing with the chemo and radiation, but at the same time helped to keep her system built up and not offset any of that. So there was a perfect marriage between the two. And Tim: That's. Joe: I swear to this day, I feel like that was the reason that she was Tim: Wow. Joe: Fairly, fairly normal through the process, like we were doing 90 X and she was in the middle Tim: That's Joe: Of chemo Tim: All Joe: And radiation. Tim: Right. Joe: Yeah, it was ridiculous. So Tim: Dude, that's Joe: So Tim: Awesome. Joe: I'm a big fan of the naturopathic side of things and natural remedies and all of that. So Tim: Not the. Joe: So that's why this was a cool episode for me, because it's hard to talk with somebody that is in this niche that you're in without it being the big stores. And so my first question, because I got so many of them Tim: I Joe: First question and the first Tim: Love Joe: Question Tim: It. Joe: Is how do you become with all of the misinformation that's out Tim: The. Joe: In the world? Right. And this is what confuses all of us as consumers. You go to Amazon and you say, I need a B vitamin of Tim: Right Joe: Some B supplement. Tim: Now. Joe: And the habit is you you click on the five star rating, things that you want. You think that's going to be the best because people are taking their time to read it, which Tim: Yeah. Joe: I think there's enough Tim: What Joe: Conversation Tim: Did he. Joe: In the world that says that's not necessarily true. Tim: Right. Joe: And then you literally are just like throwing darts at a dartboard with Tim: I Joe: A blindfold Tim: Know that, Joe: On. So. Tim: I know. Joe: So how do you get through all the misinformation that you feel so confident enough that when you when you suggest something to a client that you haven't been taken advantage of by the misinformation, like Tim: Yeah, Joe: How do you get through Tim: Because. Joe: All of that stuff? Tim: A great question and even the reviews, if a company markets really well and they're incredible at marketing, they can get a billion, five star reviews and they can be like synthetic sourced from China, not NSF certification. So over the years, you start to be able to read between the lines and you start to be able to say, hey, this is B.S. over here. This is marketing. Only not met with quality. And like any industry, you start to learn the good, better and best. So there's a few things. So first and foremost, I think everybody needs somebody on their team. Like your wife has that naturopathic doctor now as a resource that she can probably shoot an email to or make an appointment with and ask these questions. I think everybody needs somebody on their team because most people have a medical doctor and beyond that and they might have a pharmacist. Right. And they're good to have on your team, but we need somebody with. Expertise, knowledge, history in the supplement space, because even a naturopathic doctor, they know way more than I do about the human body, about maybe. Yeah, just just how to treat maybe disease. Tim: Right. When you're in the supplement space, there is you get to deal with hundreds and hundreds of brands. And over the decades, which I think 18 years now, you start to find out what brands are good and trustworthy and which ones aren't because the FDA doesn't regulate all the supplements. So you can say whatever you want on the label about me, your romantic drink here, but you can say whatever you want and. FDA isn't going to necessarily nail you if you're lying, if your label is making false label claims and this happens, there was a clinic in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where not real clinical, but where they took products from a number of stores, GNC, Walgreens, Wal-Mart and Target. They took supplements from those four stores and then they had them tested at Chavannes and it was Chavannes Labs. And all four of them had discrepancies with what the label said and what was actually in the capsule. And one product was an Asia product, which is good for the immune system. And it had zero percent echinacea in there and a little bit of garlic like Joe: Oh, Tim: What Joe: My Tim: The H Joe: Gosh. Tim: Now? Yeah. So that exactly what you said. It's shooting in the dark. Is it marketing that's producing these reviews? Is it quality? Is it going to help me? Is it a waste of my money? Am I being sold. Right. So there's all those questions and the privilege that I'm so thankful for is just being submersed in the supplement world long enough. You learn a couple of things. So sourcing is vital. Where is it coming from? There is vitamin C that you can get our China, that there's some concerns there with chemicals, heavy metals, arsenic, or you can get vitamin C from Scallan, which happens to have a really rich ascorbic acid form of vitamin C clean, great place to source it from. So where a product is sourced from is really important. Number two is does the brand have NSF certification? So NZDF C, GMP grade facilities that they work with, which they're paying money to NSF to a third party test and ensure that they're having all of these practices that are healthy for supplements, they're sourcing their cleanliness. Has it been tested? Is it clean? Those questions? And NSF doesn't care about the company. They care about the reputation. So there sure as heck going to just that's a good certification is trusted in the supplement world to ensure that what's on the label is actually in the product. Tim: So sourcing No. One, NSF, GMP certification, number two and number three, which all of these take some sort of expertise or having somebody on your your team. You know, that's why I say to have somebody on your team first. But number three is the forms of nutrients. So E 12, which I gave the example earlier, Psion Kabalan and B 12 is synthetic. So your body has to convert it and you lose a lot of the content in that conversion versus a methyl form B 12, which is the natural form that your body absorbs really, really well. So four items, number one and two, saucing and NSF, you can have a very clean form of sign Kabalan and B 12 source, very clean. You could have NSF facility ensuring that you have that 50 micrograms of cyanide Kabalan B 12 in the B complex. But then it would take some expertise to know, like, OK, that's fine, that's good. But we would prefer a methyl form would be 12 because it absorbs so much better Joe: Mr.. Tim: And every single nutrient. This blows my mind because every single nutrient has good, better, best. You know, whether you're talking about vitamin C, ascorbic acid, sodium ascorbic calcium ascorbic B 12, which I'm talking about the six paroxetine hydrochloride versus toxified phosphate turmeric. You can get the the turmeric that colors your Indian curry orange and you can take that capsule and it's good for you. It just doesn't do very much for inflammation unless you extract the curcumin out and then even that doesn't have a good absorption rate. So blending it with the turmeric, essential oils and the sunflower lecithin launch the absorption where it's literally absorbing two hundred to five hundred times better than the turmeric Indian spice that you started with. And that's the form of ninety five. That's the form that Baylor University of Texas is using to literally treat cancer and chronic pain with incredible results. I mean, the cancer story is very cool. Inflammation is the root of the root system of cancer. Joe: Mm, huh. Tim: So that's an example where it's like oh man form so saucing, NZDF, GMP, great facility forms of nutrients. Those are the big three that you want to look at to know quality. Right. So that's what I always tell somebody, find somebody that you can trust. So for you guys, it might be your your doctor that your wife worked with for in Madison, Wisconsin. A lot of people trust the healthy place to help guide them, know we don't do commission so that we can just recommend what's best so Joe: Right. Tim: People can use that live chat feature on our website to just ask those questions. But find a health food store maybe that is trustworthy in your home town, that you do meet a job like my mom met John Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: Or find a store like mine that you can connect with and you can go to when health strikes, health problems strike because everybody has some conditions, some problem, something, even if it's something as simple as fatigue, you know. Ninety two percent of fatigue is related to your adrenal glands. You can strengthen your adrenal glands and you can have more vibrant energy every day. And people just don't know that. So they keep reaching for the coffee or the soda or the caffeine pills, what have you. So get somebody on your team that you can trust. Joe: So go. So you said at one point in this conversation that do you have over 4000 Tim: Products, yeah. Joe: Excuse now, right? OK, so let's just take that as an example. It's a full time job for someone like you to be the Tim: Yes. Joe: Gatekeeper Tim: Yeah. Joe: Of your of the healthy place. You have to be the gatekeeper to say, yes, this comes into our door and gets put on ourselves or in our e-commerce store or Tim: The. Joe: No, this doesn't meet the criteria. So to me, it feels like it's continuing education and literally a full time job for whoever that person. Let's just say it's you at the moment that Tim: Yeah. Joe: Is the person that says yay or nay on these products. So it's just mind boggling what is out there and what you have to do to sort of educate yourself to to say, yes, this makes the cut, not only doesn't make the cut, but it's in a product. It's not a product and not a C product, you Tim: Yeah, Joe: Know what I mean? Tim: You're Joe: So. Tim: Absolutely right. And it's like reading a book, though, you don't want to minimize what I do, it's like it's not hard for you to read English, you know, after you've learned it. But if you're learning a new language, it looks like totally confusing. Overwhelming can take me forever to learn this language. And it might take some years to learn it. Once you have that language mastered, it's just like reading a book, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: You just check the boxes, right. OK, where is the source from NSF? GMP, what's the forms of these nutrients? Because you start to learn and then you have experts that you follow. A lot of people smarter than me that I follow. Dr. X, Dr. While, Dr. Whitaker, Dr. Northrup. And you start Terry Lambrew and you start to follow these gurus in the southern industry that have been there for 40 years, that know so much more than you. And you're reading their literature, listening to their podcasts. They're the symposiums around the planet that are going on for this breakthrough, that breakthrough. You get the subscriptions right to the. So I just tell everyone, get plugged in at least where you're getting encouraged on a regular basis to own your health, build your terrane strength in your health and all the ways that you can inspire yourself on a regular basis and then get somebody on your team that you can trust to help guide you in the space, because it is a new language, right? Joe: It's nuts, it's just it's so frustrating. Did a three month vegan plan Tim: Nice. Joe: Because Tim: Yeah. Joe: I'm not vegan, but I loved it like it was good for me. But I Tim: Yeah. Joe: Actually I actually, in the process, lost a lot of muscle mass because I was also going always going to the gym. But all of a sudden I started to shrink both, Tim: Right, Joe: You Tim: Like, Joe: Know. Tim: No. Joe: So, yes, I'm like, I'm doing all this hard work. And it's just I needed to get on a B 12 vitamin of something. And it's funny because I don't even know what I'm taking, but it's something that I got from Amazon and Tim: Your Joe: I Tim: I can do it. I've been assigned to general Joe: I'm sure. Tim: Check that Joe: So Tim: After Joe: I'm going Tim: The program. Joe: To look when yeah. When we're done, I'm going to look and then I'm going to and then I'm going to say I need a direct line to Tim in Tim: There Joe: The Tim: We Joe: Chat Tim: Go. Joe: Room. Tim: Yeah. Joe: So have you ever thought of franchises? Tim: I have, I Joe: And Tim: Have. Joe: And I'm Tim: You Joe: Just interested you don't have to you don't have to Tim: Know, Joe: Say to. Tim: I'm so I am very interested and I have been kicking that ball around in my head for a long time because we are we specialize in education, right. So you got to find ways to duplicate yourself in a franchise. And so we created a three month curriculum that our wellness consultants have to go through. They have to pass quizzes and tests and they have to get certifications from this company, this company and MKB certification, all the enzyme certifications to understand the industry, know what questions to ask customers and how to make recommendations. So that's one of the hardest things that we've done that would make it more easy to duplicate the knowledge side of our company and our brand. And as I've talked to people who have created franchises, the the legal side to it is one hurdle and then enforcing them to actually maintain your model as representing the healthy place. What we have created is the two big unknowns for me as far as difficulty. So then the choice came, should we just keep adding brick and mortars in our own territory? Right, right. In the Madison area and then put all of our energy and focus into our brands that we've created and our website because there's infinite you can do in the business world and you kind Joe: Mm Tim: Of Joe: Hmm. Tim: Have to choose. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So we decided to park the franchise idea for now and really go after lively vitamin CO. This is one of the brands that have been borne out of our brick and mortar stores. So now we're selling that to other health food stores around the country. And the number two is build find your healthy place dotcom, because just like Amazon is a freakin mammoth, there's so much opportunity to impact and power and educate everything that I'm passionate about on that website. So currently with four kids, we are chilling on the franchise idea. But I think it's brilliant because there's not there's not the option out there, which is why it keeps coming back to me Joe: Yeah, Tim: Like Joe: Yeah. Tim: There's not that many health food stores out there that really care. Soulsby for sales. You know, as one of my Joe: Mm Tim: Saying Joe: Hmm. Tim: That, Joe: I Tim: I really Joe: Love that, by the way, I love that. Tim: Thank you. Thank you. There is a time I was praying and it was like not I it going to make my friggin mortgage. When I first opened the store, I was praying to God for sales and I was like, God to declare bankruptcy here is brutal. And it was like an arrow is like, do you care about their soul as much as you care about the sales? Joe: Yeah. Tim: And it was kind of striking. So, yeah, there's not that many stores out there that really care about the human that have knowledge to help guide them and a model that works to help people, you know. So it's still an idea that keeps coming back to me. So Joe: Right. Tim: We'll see. Joe: Yeah, well, good luck if it happens, I'm sure it'll be great. Tim: Thank you. You see one popping up next door, you'll know where to get your V12. Joe: There you go. So you hit upon this a moment ago with the whole franchising thing of how to actually create this template and create a strict thing where where the people that are talking to your customers are very educated and they're giving the right information and asking the right questions. So how have you done that with the people that are at your current stores and how have you done that with the people that are on the other end of the chat? When somebody files in to ask these questions, Tim: Yeah, so. Joe: How do you get something like when is somebody OK? You're ready to take a call, you're ready to be on the chat, you're ready to to advise a customer in the store, like, what's that process? Tim: Yeah, Joe: And you don't Tim: So. Joe: Have to go too deep. I just Tim: No, Joe: I Tim: No, Joe: But Tim: That. Joe: I'm sure somebody is going to say, like, hey, Tim, super educated on this. So every time I talk, like I just said, you know what I call him on the chat, I want him, you Tim: Right. Joe: Know. So Tim: Right. Joe: How to how do you duplicate Tim so that everyone that's coming in on the chat or walking in the store says this is just a clone of Tim like he may. He's already run them through the ringer, you know? Tim: Yeah, that's so the three month curriculum that we created is our pride and joy. I'm so thankful for that. It was brutal to create. So I created one hundred videos, having a five minute conversation where I'm explaining different parts of the world and explaining brands and what to look for and how to explain it. And then we'll go through they'll have to pass quizzes and tests based on each module. So there's nine different modules to this curriculum. They have to go through trainings with specific companies. They have to do a number of roleplaying activities with our managers where they pretend to be the customer Joe: Mm Tim: And Joe: Hmm. Tim: Coming in, hey, I'm looking for some CBDs. What do you got? And so they get tested there and they have to get these certifications from each of these brands, so they have to pass it. So there's one guy who got to the end and he is like, OK, dude, we got to rewind because you're not retaining this stuff. So either you did the last minute cramming for this quiz the night before. And like I didn't I did that in high school. Joe: Ok. Tim: And then you don't retain it, right. Joe: Yeah. Tim: So do you really care about this or not? So he had to start over. He had to go through it again. So it's a team. We have a leadership team of five. And so we have these nine modules, the quizzes, the tests. They have to pass them. They have to do the role playing. And then the leadership team of five will say, OK, this person's ready or they're really not ready. And there's still a couple of parts of our team where we're like, OK, where they can be a wellness consultant in the store, but we don't think they're ready to be on live chat. So then we'll wait maybe six months until they have a little bit more experience, because where our team learns the most is from the customers coming in asking the questions and they don't know the answers of how to treat colitis Joe: Mm Tim: With Joe: Hmm. Tim: Whatever. So then they have to go find out to get back to that customer and then they learn something. So right now, I'm proud to say our live chat feature on our website, if you go to find your other place, dotcom lower, right. You get that little live chat bubble, the seven different consultants that you might run into over there are, I wouldn't say clones of Tim because I think they're smarter than me, but they are really well equipped and able to match, kind of hit the mark of where they need to be. And they all know and are passionate enough about helping people to not. One of the first things that I'll tell them is, dude, never bullshit. Joe: Yeah, yeah. Tim: That's a real thing. And I came from a I won't say anything negative where it's just more about getting the sale, about getting that commission. And and that's part of why we don't do commissions. So it's a fun process for intense. Joe: Well, that's great, man. Yeah, so I want to respect your time. We're down to the wire. I want to make sure I didn't miss anything that you want to talk about. So you have four stores in Wisconsin. Tim: Madison, Joe: Correct. Tim: Wisconsin, the. Joe: Ok, and you have the website Tim: Find your healthy place, Dotcom. Joe: Buying your healthy place, Dotcom. Anything else that I missed that is important that we talk about? Tim: You know, dude, I mean, as I was thinking about this program and your followers, like what your mission is, you're trying to encourage entrepreneurs, trying to encourage people to be thankful for life. You don't Joe: Mm Tim: Take Joe: Hmm. Tim: To treat life like the gift it is, you Joe: Yep. Tim: Know? So I did want to offer your followers a coupon code. If they don't have you know, if you have a health food store in your own home town, that's great sport. Those guys, if you have somebody on your team, that's awesome. That's my main passion. And if you need a resource that you can trust, if you go to find your healthy place dotcom and you get something type in coupon code, Castelo, and that'll give 30 percent off the full price on anything on our whole website, we have thousands of products. So anything from V12 to something more intense. And regardless if you buy something or not, use that live chat feature to ask questions. You know, I've had people call my cell phone bill. Hey, Jim, you know, I'm in Wholefoods right now and I'm looking at three different multivitamins. Like which one do you think I should get? You know, and I get to tell them and it's fun and you can share the love. And so use that live chat feature as a resource, because more than ever, dude, we need natural alternatives. We need some education we at least need to know about, like Joel and your Joe: Yeah, Tim: Life partner. Dude, Joe: Yeah. Tim: What if she didn't have that naturopathic doctor that gave her some natural supplements through one of the most intensive crisis's that she ever faced in her life? Like, you know, in your gut that that helped her in a dramatic way because you watched her do P ninety three, the cancer experience. Joe: Yeah. Tim: I mean, that's a miracle, dude. And it took somebody reaching out and it took a resource being willing to respond to create that miracle, you know. And so that's what I want for people. Joe: Yeah, it's I can't stress it enough that Tim: Right. Joe: What I saw before my very eyes every single Tim: Right. Joe: Day and it would and then I see people that are going through cancer of some type and they're only being treated, Tim: As Joe: You know, Tim: A medical doctor, yeah. Joe: And they're their body is just being crushed. Tim: Yes. Joe: And there's and there's nothing, no nothing helping to offset the chemicals and all of the harshness Tim: Know. Joe: Of that treatment. And so. Tim: Right, and let me say, you know, you saw it with somebody you loved very much, I saw it with my mom when I was five or six. And since then, I'm getting goosebumps. I have seen it for thousands of people through the last 11 years that the healthy place has been a company, thousands of people, not always cancer, but but we're talking depression, chronic pain, Crohn's disease, asthma, like people suffering like megacorp. There's so much suffering going on Joe: Mm hmm. Tim: In the world and there is natural alternatives that people literally don't know about. They have nobody in their world telling them. So they just listen to whatever mainstream media or their medical doctor Joe: Yeah. Tim: Or their pharmacist. And there's a lot of good people with good intent in those areas. It's just there's not the voice of natural alternatives. So we need to know about this stuff. We've got to get the word out. Joe: Yeah, it's great, man, I love what you're doing, and this Tim: Think. Joe: Was exciting for me and and I think I actually have your personal email, so I'm just going Tim: That's Joe: To I'm Tim: Awesome. Joe: Going to go I'm going to go ten. I need Tim: You Joe: More Tim: Should. Joe: Energy, Tim. I think I think I have inflammation. And I'm going Tim: Yeah, Joe: To be like. Tim: I know you should, and if anyone's listening to and they because sometimes, you know, they just have a trust factor or whatever, Tim at Find Your Healthy Place Dotcom. I am happy to take emails. This what I get to do all day, dude, and it's just fun. It's so rewarding. You just get to point people in the right direction and help them out. So I love it. Joe: I wish you all the luck in the world, this is a Tim: Thank you. Joe: This is a great thing that you're doing. It's nice to have somebody who is, like you said, it's it's Soulsby before sales. It's a great it's a great way to do it. And I think Tim: Thank Joe: You'll be Tim: You. Joe: Rewarded continually be rewarded for doing Tim: Thank Joe: It that Tim: You. Joe: Way. I'll put everything in the show notes. Thank you for the coupon for the listeners Tim: Now. Joe: And I'll make sure I have all the correct links. So find your healthy place. Dotcom is the website. The company's name is the Healthy Place for locations in Madison, Wisconsin. You eventually might franchise someday, Tim: Yes, Joe: But Tim: And people on Facebook, you know, Joe: Yeah. Tim: The healthy people on Facebook, my wife's a genius as far as really caring for our community there. So you'll find a lot of good content and Instagram as well. So thank you, dear. This Joe: Yeah, Tim: Is. Joe: Tim, thanks so much, man, I really appreciate your time today and thanks for all the insight and I really do wish you the best of luck. Tim: Any time, brother, and wish the same to you. Joe: Thank you, Matt. Tim: I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I want to thank you for listening to my podcast. I know you have many options to listen to various podcasts, and I'm honored that you chose to listen to mine. I would love it if you were to rate my podcast Five Stars and write a nice review. It really helps to bring up the rankings of the podcast. Other listeners, once again, thank you so much for listening to the Joe Costello show. I appreciate you very much.  

Sean Swarner Interesting Facts - Learn how Sean not only beat cancer twice but went on to summit Mt. Everest and the remaining 6 summits and the north and south poles. He now brings hope to all who have cancer and those who have survived cancer with his organization CancerClimber.org. I loved, loved, loved this conversation with Sean and my hope is next July 2022, I will join him to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro and add the names of my own loved ones, who have had to deal with cancer and either survived or lost their battle with this awful disease. Thanks so much for listening! Joe Sean Swarner Speaker | Author | Performance Coach Adventurer | World Record Holder Author of: Keep Climbing: How I Beat Cancer and Reached the Top of the World Website: https://www.seanswarner.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanswarner/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sean.swarner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanswarner/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/seanswarner Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Ok, today, my guest is Shawn Swarner. Sean is an incredible human being, you're not going to believe the things that he has done already in his life. And I am so excited for this interview. As I was talking to Sean offline, I was explaining how the whole thought of summiting Everest is just in itself amazing. And then the way that it's been accomplished by Shaun and the adversity that he had to deal with growing up and just to to be this person that he is. So this is exciting, not just at a sports level or at a level of just doing all these amazing feats, but just just the human drive that this person has. So, Shawn, welcome to the show. Man, I am so excited to have.   Sean: I appreciate it. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to do the.   Joe: So I like to start and people that listen to my podcast hear me say this one hundred times that I like to start from the beginning. And I know you probably told the story a million times already, but I like to set a foundation of pollution is where you came from, how you grew up, the main health factors that happen early on, how you got over that and then become who you are today. So if you don't mind, if you could at least give us as much of the back on the floor is yours so as much of the back story that you want to give? I welcome it all.   Sean: I appreciate that and I'm going through my mind, and one of the things that got me through was a sense of humor, which we'll get to, but I'm assuming you probably don't want to go back. Forty six years with my mom and dad got together, then nine months later.   Joe: Yeah, that's got no so that we could start right there. That's what.   Sean: So I came into the world crying and screaming and kicking. And   Joe: There we go,   Sean: I remember it like it was yesterday.   Joe: Right.   Sean: No, I. Well, I guess my I was born and raised in Ohio, just a normal Midwest kid. I remember back in the day before toilet paper was hard to find. We would TPE the coach's house and across country in the house. And then he installed a motion sensor lights. So we had to be a little bit more careful. And I just I learned to. Do things I wasn't supposed to, but I never got caught because I learned how to not get caught. So I was a kind of a studious growing up. But everything was it was completely normal until I was in eighth grade. And I was actually I was going up for a layup and basketball things and I came down and something snapped my neck and it sounded like like, say, for Thanksgiving, you grab the chicken bone and you're pulling on the leg like the ripping the tendons in the ligaments and everything. That's that's kind of what my knee sounded like when I was hobbling over to the stage that to sit down my whole body the next day swallowed up so much. My my mom and dad couldn't even recognize their own son. So they stuck in the local hospital. Willard, Ohio, population was five thousand, I think is maybe five thousand three now. So it's not much just change. Maybe eight stoplights or something like that, but they stuck in the hospital, they started treating me for pneumonia and it's very it's very difficult to cure cancer by sucking on a nebulizer. So I wasn't getting any better. But at 13, I was thinking, well, you know, I'm going to soak up all this attention. I got the cheerleaders coming in. I got my friends coming out of balloons all over my room.   Joe: The.   Sean: It was fantastic. But I didn't know what was going on in my body, which was advanced stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma. And I remember my parents didn't tell me that I had cancer. They told me that I had Hodgkin's. And I can only imagine what they were going through when the doctor told them that I had three months to live. The doctors approach to my my parents said your first born son now has an expiration date. And no one wants to hear that, and I've heard that one of the greatest pains, pains that you can have is outliving your your son or your daughter. So I didn't want that to ever happen to my mom and dad. And I remember very vividly where I was on the bottom of the on my hands and knees in the shower three or four months into treatment. And because of the treatment, I was bald from head to toe. I was on my hands and knees sobbing, just absolutely weeping, pulling chunks of hair out of the drain so the water could go down. And I was also thinking because I was getting ready for school that day, and that's when my hair came up all in that one time in the shower. And I was thinking about what my friends may have been doing at the same time, getting ready for school the same time I was.   Sean: And they were probably worried about the latest hairstyles being popular. If things that in my mind, looking back at it now, were trivial, it meant nothing because there were nights I went to bed not knowing if I was going to wake up the next morning. I mean, can you imagine what it feels like being terrified to close your eyes and fall asleep because you don't know if you're going to wake up. And that's that's what I had to deal with as the 13 year old. So I grew up with a completely different perspective. And thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, family support, prayer just in a will to move forward. I guess if I walked out of the hospital, a hairless, happy, bloated young man and I, I went back into being a quote unquote normal teenager, I guess if there is anything that's that you can say normal for a teenager. But the remission was short lived because I was going in for a checkup for the first cancer when they found a second cancer completely unrelated to the first one. And in fact, on the apparently I'm the only person to ever had Hodgkin's and ask start. And the chances of surviving both of those illnesses is roughly the same as winning the lottery four times in a row with the same numbers.   Joe: Radical Krutch.   Sean: So I think I'm a living, breathing, walking miracle, without a doubt, and. I remember going in for a check for that first cancer in one day, they found a tumor on an X-ray. They did a needle biopsy. They removed a lymph node, put in a hip and catheter. They cracked open my ribs, took out the tumor, are put in danger and started chemotherapy less and less than one day. And they diagnosed me with a type of cancer called ASCAN sarcoma. And that's basically they gave me 14 days to live.   Joe: And this is at age 60.   Sean: 16, so 13, the first cancer, 60   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Percent cancer, cancer, my my whole teenage years were just they were taken from me, from the cancer.   Joe: He's trying to just picture this in my brain of what happens during those years of like those prom, there's sports and it sound like you were active before 13 when you were first diagnosed. So you are definitely you look like someone that would be athletic. So you're missing all of that.   Sean: It's a green, it just makes me look like I'm.   Joe: No,   Sean: I   Joe: But.   Sean: Was I was I was incredibly athletic, and I, I think I because I was a swimmer, I started competitive swimming at maybe five or six years old. And I think I still have some records from the 11, 12 age group.   Joe: Still hold it.   Sean: Still   Joe: Wow, that is so cool.   Sean: Undefeated in the summer league, went to Nationals numerous times. I loved it, but I also think that's one of the reasons why I'm still alive, is because I looked at things differently from a competitive angle, and I pushed myself not to be the best, but I always pushed myself to be my best. And that's what I did, was going through the treatments, I I knew that when I was going through the cancer that I was going to have bad days. And I also knew I was going to have good days. So if today was a bad day, then I just I focused on tomorrow or the next day when I was going to have a good day. And I when I had those good days, I was I was truly living and learning how to be in the present moment.   Joe: Yeah, that's definitely one of the gifts that would come out of what you went through, which people struggle their whole life to eliminate the noise around them and to be present. Right. Because you literally only have this moment right now. So many people worry about what's on the schedule for tomorrow or the future or all of that. And some people even and I'm totally guilty dwell on the past. So I should have done that different. Where would I be today if I had gone left instead of right? So it's it's really hard to bring that in to be present and figure out how to do that. And I would assume that's a that's at least a good outcome of what you went through, is that it forced you to live every day the most that you could, knowing that this just this who knows what tomorrow will bring, if anything. Right.   Sean: Absolutely. I mean, one of the things that I do every morning before I even get out of bed, the instant I open my eyes in the morning, I don't I don't I never hit the snooze, because if you constantly hit the snooze over and over and over again, you're telling yourself subconsciously, I'm excited about the day. The day can wait. But if you turn it off and I actually have a smartwatch and just vibrate so it doesn't wake up my wife. So I turn I turn the alarm off and I lay there and I tell myself the past is done. There's nothing I can do about it. Tomorrow may never come, so no matter what happens today, today is the best day ever. And I have a choice, we all have a choice to make that day turn out however we want it to, and it starts with that morning intention.   Joe: Also, I don't want to get too far because I had so many questions. This is exciting. Like I said, I'm not going to let you go. So 16. So you're you were diagnosed and you're going through all of these treatments. When do you become and for lack of a better term, quote, normal where they say, OK, we've we've clobbered this thing, you're you're in remission and your hair is growing back. You're starting to feel like average every day. 16 year old, our seventh year, however long it took for you to become being normal.   Sean: That's a great question, and I was I was thinking, while you're talking and I honestly want to say that the answer is never.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Because no one's ever had these cancers before. No one no one knows what's going to happen to me.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: I go in once a year for a checkup and they obviously for the past 20, 30 years now, it's come back clean. So I literally see every time I go into to get my blood work done at my annual checkup, I see it as I have another year left. And I try to accomplish as much as I can in that year, so I don't think because of the way I'm looking at it, I don't think I'll ever have a normal life.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: This is my new normal. And I've just adapted to I think because of everything I've been through, I'm comfortable with being uncomfortable. So when when things are going well for me, I'm like, oh, something's going to happen.   Joe: Yeah, so that was I was going to ask you that I just turned fifty nine and I don't envy having that fact for lack of a better term, that cloud hanging over my head, knowing that I went through something, I beat it.   Sean: The.   Joe: But there's always the chance that it'll rear its ugly head. And so people that have to live with that   Sean: And.   Joe: Sort of pressure on them, that has to take its toll. I would I would assume it has to take its toll depending on how you deal with it. Right. And with everything. When you wake up, you have the choice of saying this is going to be a great day. It's going to be a bad day. And for some reason and you can help me with this and hopefully the listeners will really heed your advice on this is why do we always choose the negative part? Like everyone, people just love to complain about how their job sucks so they don't have enough money or whatever the case might be. And if they and I listen, I've gone through my whole life having sort of this always this negative thing, like, why didn't I ever reach this goal or that goal or this accomplishment? And I'm hard on myself about it. And I also know I didn't do the work to potentially get to some of those goals. So I'm starting at this ripe old age admitting to myself, OK, you just didn't put in the time. But now I'm only in the past few months I've really shifted my frame of mind to say I literally have everything that I need know. I love my life. I I love the person that I live with. Joellen, my life partner I love. I have everything that I need. And why would I just complain all the time of all the things that I don't have? And our mutual friend David Meltzer says you literally have to get out of your own way and let the universe deliver to you the abundance that's there. And we actually get in the way of making that happen. So why don't people choose the negative? That's what I want to know.   Sean: Absolutely, and I honestly, I was thinking of a couple of things, one. We do have we have we do have a choice, and when people start to get anxious, when people start to worry about things, it's because of of two words. What if. What if this happens, what if that happens? What if this happens? What if I get cancer again? But you learn to to realize that for me, it was a it was a house of letters. It was a six letter word that that I was allowed to have power over me. So. And recently, it's funny you mention that recently you were thinking of this, that with because I'm doing the same thing recently, I'm realizing that this word cancer. Had so much control and power over me because I allowed that to happen. And then I realized, why am I freaking out over a word? I mean, don't get me wrong, I completely respect cancer and it can be deadly and it oftentimes is. But it's the word that's making me freak out when I go in for my annual checkups. It used to be smelling sailin that would make me think of all these traumatic things that happened in my past. But it doesn't mean it's going to happen again. So when I realize I'm asking myself, what if. I'm projecting into the future and I'm giving my brain permission to go crazy, to come up with any any cockamamie imaginary thing that I can come up with. So when I when I think of my my treatments or what I think of my annual checkup and I constantly, constantly ask myself, what if I realized, well, what if I get cancer, but what if I don't?   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Perfect example.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: So I realized that the word itself means nothing. It's what I'm actually placing on that word and how I react to it. So when people hear cancer, they're like, oh, wow. But if this is what I did, I spared myself in the mirror and I said cancer about 50 times over and over and over again. And slowly it lost its power over me. And around thirty five or forty times I looked at myself laughing, what the hell this is? This is crazy. But it's lessened its power over and over and over. You just can't cancel. The more you hear about it, the more you get rid of it, you know, the less power it has over you.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And then why people are focused on on the negative so much. I think it's because unconsciously, people are allowing their brains to be programmed by outside sources. If you look at it, most people probably I would say 80 to 90 percent of the world, the first thing they do when they wake up, they grab their phone, they check their emails, they go on social media, whatever it might be. Either they do it before they go to the bathroom or while they're going to the bathroom. It's one of the. And what happens is if you're not paying attention to what you're consuming, because there's that old saying of you are what you eat, but in all honesty, it is you are what you consume.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: So if people are constantly consuming this, this this false information from the media and with the media, let me turn on the news. You don't have to watch it for more than 30 seconds to realize it's going to be depressing   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: Because it's the same stuff all over and over and over again. You have to wait through, what, 60 different stories to see one positive story that takes a point zero five percent of the hour long program. So what people are doing is they're allowing their brains to be programmed by outsiders, outside sources. That outside source is just constantly bombarding their brain with negativity. However you can you have a choice to, like, wake up in the morning and have a positive affirmation, today is the best day ever. I write down my, my, my daily affirmation and I write down three things that I'm going to do and three things I'm going to try to do or and then at the end of the day, as opposed to turning on the news, I get my journal and write down five things I'm grateful for. So I'm essentially bookending my day on a positive note as opposed to, I would say, most of the world they book in their day on the negative note.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: So if you're constantly being bombarded in allowing negative thoughts into your brain, how do you think it's even possible to be positive?   Joe: Yeah, it's I don't know if you hit it on the head and it's just it's it's letting all of that stuff come in from the outside. You have a different perspective for what you went through. And and I think people just take for granted that they're alive and healthy and have a roof over their head and all of the simple things that we just don't we don't think about. And it's important to take a step back and look at that. And instead you take what if and you say, what if all of this stuff went away?   Sean: Now.   Joe: Where would I be right? Or what if all of this stuff tripled and double that? I had even more abundance because of this, this and this. But it seems like what you wish for, what you think about when people concentrate on the negative things, more of that stuff, it's just   Sean: Mike.   Joe: It's just naturally happens. And I was doing it for so long. And now that I've shifted, it's just completely changed. And it's I don't know if it's because it's so hard to understand that you can do that with your own brain and your own inner power to shift your mindset. And people, though, that's all that fufu stuff. And it's not. It's and I think that's why it's so hard to explain. It's so hard to get people to just give it a try. Just 30 days. Just think towards the most positive thing you can think of. And every day just try to eliminate as much negativity in your life will change. And   Sean: Right.   Joe: It's just really hard for people to understand, I think.   Sean: And I think that I mean, there are some there are a large percent of the population who think they're still positive when they're actually being negative to the brain and they don't even realize it. So a perfect example. You're walking down the street and you're telling yourself, don't trip, don't trip. You're going to fall on your face, but if you turn it around it from a different perspective and you tell yourself, stand tall, stand tall, walk strong. When entrepreneurs when people go into the stock market, whatever it might be, I guarantee you they don't think, oh, I don't want to lose money. No, that's state. That's that. People are thinking, I'm being positive. No, they want to make money to focus on what they want. And that's exactly what happened when I was in the hospital. The story of that 13 year old who was 60 pounds overweight in the bottom of the shower floor. Like I mentioned before, I didn't I didn't focus on not dying. I focused on living. I mean, can you imagine how it would have turned out if I kept telling myself, oh, don't die, don't die, don't die or climbing Everest. Hey, don't fall, don't fall, don't fall, don't don't stop. And same thing for runners and people doing anything athletic. I guarantee you people who are so don't stop, don't stop as opposed to make it to that spot. And then when you make it there, make it to the next spot. Same thing in life. People are saying never quit, don't quit your brain, just quit   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: As opposed to make it to that milestone, make it to the next milestone, make it to the next day. Make it to the next day. Keep pushing forward.   Joe: Yeah, that's a great point, and that's what I think really people should take away from this section of what we're talking about is that even when they talk about visualization, right, it's like you're you your body, your brain does not know whether or not you've accomplished something or not. Right. So why not tell it the best story you can write? Why not say that? I, I, I'm like, visualize you're on top of Everest. Like just visualize it until it happens. Right. It's just so you have to tell your own, your own body the best story possible. And I think that's this portion of what we're talking about should be a lesson to say your your body, your brain and your body is listening. So make sure you tell the right story. So can you take us back to your 16? You're going through all this. What's the next phase in your life?   Sean: A wild and crazy college life   Joe: Ok, where was that?   Sean: That was in Westminster College, and I think looking back at it, because my my teen years and my high school years were taken from me, have   Joe: You're going   Sean: You   Joe: To make up for   Sean: Have you ever seen a movie Animal   Joe: The   Sean: House?   Joe: Absolute.   Sean: There you go. And I was Bellucci. I had a wonderful time   Joe: Nice.   Sean: And I wouldn't change a thing. And I started off molecular bio thinking I was going to cure cancer by splicing genes. And I took organic chemistry and immunology. And it's it's pretty difficult to pass those classes when you don't open a book and study. So. So I actually switched to psychology because I was taking a an introductory psych course while I was going through the immunology class. And I really found it fascinating. And I started thinking, oh, well, maybe there's something here where I can help cancer patients and cancer survivors move on with their lives because it's not an individual disease. It affects everybody in the family thinking, OK, well, I have this great insight. Took the GRE, went to Jacksonville, Florida, to go to work on my master's and my doctorate. And then some things happen. I was working for different jobs, trying to go through my doctorate, which is just ridiculous. I mean, just to focus on education. Wow. So at some point I decided that I hadn't dealt with my own issues. Because of what I went through, I never even considered what cancer did to me and how I wanted to quit on the other end, because in college I just I left it behind. I didn't even bring it up. I mean, there I dated some girls and I was thinking, OK, well, how do I bring up that? I'm a survivor. It's not like, you know, dinner conversation. Oh, you know, how how how's your wife and how is your dinner? Oh, I had cancer. You know, he just   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Can't do that.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: So I was so worried about I didn't know what to do. I just I just I forgot about it. So then in grad school is thousands of miles away from Ohio. And it was the first time I actually stopped and looked myself in the mirror and ask myself those deep questions, you know, who are you? What do you want from life? What's your purpose? So I just did some deep, deep understanding of who I was, and then I realized, OK, I had been given a tremendous gift of the mind body connection, and I wanted to help and give back to cancer patients in the cancer world. And that's what I did, more research and more research and kept getting bigger and bigger and thinking higher and higher and like, OK, well, how about we use the biggest platform of the highest platform in the world to scream? Hope the guy. Great. Let's let's go climb Everest. Moved to Colorado just because, like the highest point in Florida is the top of the for the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami.   Joe: And   Sean: So I moved to Colorado, Rocky Mountains   Joe: I love.   Sean: Because I know I don't know too many mountaineers who live in Florida.   Joe: No, no, but it's also.   Sean: So I moved to Colorado and I trained in and literally nine months later flew over to Kathmandu, Nepal, and headed up Everest as the first cancer survivor to some of the highest mountain in the world.   Joe: So what year was this and how old were you?   Sean: Well, that was that was 2002, I actually submitted May 16th at nine thirty two in the morning. So night again almost 20 years ago, 19 years ago. I was twenty seven at the time. That's right.   Joe: And   Sean: Twenty   Joe: You   Sean: Seven.   Joe: Did this with nine months of training.   Sean: Nine months of training and when I first. Well, when I first moved to Colorado, I didn't even have any support. My brother came with me. We lived out the back of my Honda Civic and we camped in Estes Park for two months before we even got a sponsorship.   Joe: Oh, my gosh.   Sean: So we were I remember one morning we woke up, we were going to go climb, I think it's one of the Twin Peaks in Estes Park and we got about two feet of snow in August. And I was thinking to myself, because we're living in the car, that camping, it's like, the hell am I doing here?   Joe: Josh.   Sean: What did I get myself into? My my office was the library and a pay phone bank. So I was calling corporations like Ghatak and Karvelas in the Northeast saying, hey, I'm a two time cancer survivor with one lung and I'm going to go climb Mount Everest in 10 months and I need your help. Ninety nine doors closed in my face.   Joe: Really, that's   Sean: At.   Joe: So surprising that your story is so unique that that one that triggered people to say yes more often.   Sean: But they didn't think it was even possible.   Joe: I guess,   Sean: They thought   Joe: Wow.   Sean: It was physiologically impossible to do that with half your lung capacity, so they like, like I said, nine out of 10 people. I mean, hey, you know, this is my story. Click And I thought it was a joke. So   Joe: What?   Sean: I. I actually have both lungs, but there's so much scar tissue from the radiation treatment, there's really no oxygen transfer. Yeah. So   Joe: So   Sean: It's   Joe: There wasn't removed, it was just   Sean: Like.   Joe: It's just collapsed or   Sean: Now.   Joe: If that's the right term, but   Sean: That's   Joe: The scar tissue,   Sean: A perfect term,   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok, and this that was from the age 16 to one. A lot of the chemo and radiation was done. That's when it happened.   Sean: Exactly.   Joe: Did you have it? Did you also have chemo and radiation at 13?   Sean: I had chemo the first time and chemo radiation the second time.   Joe: Ok, and so it just affected the one long in the sense that it just created just the scar tissue over   Sean: Correct,   Joe: It where it wasn't. So   Sean: Correct.   Joe: It doesn't really work at all.   Sean: Not not really. In fact, in January, I had a little scare, they think it's a long term side effect from the radiation where I had some spots in my back removed and now I have another another starless by about six inches long where they had to go remove that. But if that's all I have to do, the first cancer, the second cancer is 16, 17, and the now 46 year old. Cut it out. I'm good.   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok, so we are. You said what was the date again,   Sean: May 16th.   Joe: May 16th of two thousand and two,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: And you were twenty seven years old, OK? And so you trained nine months before you decided you said, I'm going to go do this. So you you set aside nine months to get ready for this.   Sean: Correct.   Joe: Ok, so does the training. Is the training the stuff that I saw in some of the videos where you're you're pulling a sheet behind you and and whatever, your pull tire's up a hill and like, how did you figure out how to train for such as that?   Sean: So that was actually when I when I went to the North Pole a couple of years ago, but for training going up to up Everest, there's lungs Long's peak, which is 18 miles round trip, and it's it's fourteen thousand two hundred and fifty six feet. And I eventually worked my way up to climbing that peak once a week with 100 pounds of rocks in my backpack. So I would train myself and I'll go up onto that peak and into the Rocky Mountain National Park in a bad day, thinking that a bad day on Long's peak was probably better than a good day on Everest. And what I do a training for, for anything like the North Pole, the Hawaii Ironman, I did that. I train harder than I think the event actually event is going to be for two reasons. I get my body in shape, my mind in shape, but also I'm thankful I don't have to train more and I'm more excited about the actual event.   Joe: Right. That's crazy. So what is a normal when you're when you're training for something like that? What what would be a normal day in Sean's life? What time do you get up? What kind of stuff do you like? I can't even fathom something like this. I just   Sean: Well.   Joe: Got done skiing and snowboarding in Utah. I got home last night. I went with the old my oldest friend. We went from elementary and junior high and high school. And   Sean: Now.   Joe: Our families were friends and his father was my dentist. And so he said, I'm going to snowboard spring skiing. I haven't been skiing in twenty five plus years.   Sean: Now.   Joe: Like, come on, let's go. And I was a good skier a long time ago and yeah, I just can't imagine what it would take. My legs were shot. So what does it take. What's Seans the day in the life of of what you do.   Sean: Well, I'm going to challenge you again, then, what are you doing July twenty, Fourth to August seven?   Joe: I saw that and I was like, God, I want to do that. So   Sean: So.   Joe: Explain. So since you're talking about. Explain what that is before we talk about your daily routine. So   Sean: Well,   Joe: Explain.   Sean: Yeah, that would lead into it, because I everybody every year I take a group of Kilimanjaro as   Joe: That's.   Sean: A fundraiser for cancer charity, and what we do is we actually we pay for a survivors trip. And then it's the responsibility of that survivor to raise funds for next year's survivor, kind   Joe: Oh,   Sean: Of   Joe: Wow.   Sean: Paying it forward. Anyone can go. We just fund the survivors trip. And this year we actually have enough funds to send to survivors. So I'm hoping with those two survivors, there isn't. They raise enough funds to take three and twenty twenty two and then maybe five and twenty, twenty three and so forth up to. I'd love to take 15 people, 15 survivors for free every year at   Joe: Wow, that's   Sean: All   Joe: Incredible.   Sean: Costs. But for Kilimanjaro, let's say I would, I would wake up and about four miles from here we have a set of stairs that are pretty steep and there are two hundred and I live at I want to say sixty, sixty four, sixty five hundred feet. So I'm already an altitude which helps a lot.   Joe: Is   Sean: I   Joe: It?   Sean: Wake up in the morning before sunrise and eventually I will do that. That set of stairs 10 to 15 times with about 70 or 80 pounds of rocks in my backpack. So you're talking what, two thousand, maybe, maybe three, four thousand steps up and down in how many stairs are there? The Empire State Building. I think there's one thousand something so   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Less than I did.   Joe: Right. Wow.   Sean: Then come back, wake my wife up, will do some yoga, eat breakfast, come here to do some work on my laptop, and then I'll probably either do it depending on the day, either rowing, lifting or running, and then on the weekends go out and do a 14 or something like that and a 14 year, a fourteen thousand foot peak. But I also have a sponsorship through a company called Hypoxic Go   Joe: Check.   Sean: Where there's this machine. I call it Arcudi to like R-2 because it's tiny and it actually filters out oxygen to simulate altitude. So I'll I'll do the yoga, I'll do the rowing machine or and I'm doing this because it's a mask of   Joe: For those of you who are listening, he's putting his hand over his face.   Sean: Just randomly. That's that's what I do. And I work out, I,   Joe: That's right.   Sean: I, I'll do those workouts at home on a mask that's connected to this machine and I'll end up doing these workouts at nineteen thousand feet. So what I'm doing is I'm pretty acclimatizing my body because I have to make up for the lack of my right lung because when you get into altitude there's less oxygen, you know, it's spread out, spread out further. And when you get to like if we left, if we went from here to the top of Everest, we'd be dead in five minutes just because of the lack of oxygen. So I treat it and I try to pre acclimatize myself. And when we go to Kilimanjaro, I tell people my training schedule and like, I could never do that. Well, remember, you're training for yourself. I'm training for me and ten other people.   Joe: Right.   Sean: So   Joe: Right.   Sean: This if you're interested, this would be my 21st summit of Kilimanjaro.   Joe: That's incredible in regards to what you eat, are you like a very strict like is everything that you do? Very strict and regimented.   Sean: Not not everything, I mean, I give myself some leniency sugar during the week, I don't do on the weekends   Joe: Ok.   Sean: On Easter. Yeah, I have those little malt balls, you know, the Easter Mother's Day. But for the most part, I mean, no sugar. See, what did I have just for lunch? My wife made a salad. We had some chick like a chicken, homemade chicken salad. We're very conscious of what we eat. We stay away from the sugars. No. And that means no white pasta, no white bread. I love I've always loved broccoli. I just eat healthy.   Joe: Right.   Sean: Every once in a while I'll have a burger or steak, but, you know, maybe once a month.   Joe: Beer, a glass of wine, no.   Sean: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I   Joe: Ok,   Sean: Like I actually I brew beer at home too.   Joe: Ok, OK,   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: It's great because when I travel you know, I make the beer, I come back two weeks later I'm like, oh beer.   Joe: There you go. OK, cool.   Sean: Oh.   Joe: So were you afraid going Tavaris like, I can't I can't even imagine I'm telling you to sit here and talk with you about this. I I've watched like we've talked about before, we actually started recording, watched the shows, the different movies or documentaries about it and the getting frostbite and people getting pneumonia and their sister, their body shutting down. And they're having to have the tip of like my nose is red right now from being sunburned and windburn from Snover. And I'm like, I don't I can't even fathom all the things that must go through your brain. And then watching where you cross over on that, I don't even know what it's called. You think I know after   Sean: Remasters   Joe: Watching.   Sean: Have.   Joe: Yeah. The with the ones with the ladders. Right. I don't know how many of those you have to cross and I just I don't know. And then the spots where I don't even know if this is something people point out on the way up or on the way down. But that's where we had to leave so and so like at the all those things go into your brain and you don't want to be the weak link in the chain. Something happens to you and then all of a sudden other people have to descend, like, I don't even know how that works. So, I mean, arriving at base camp must have been just like incredible and scary as hell. I've been like, oh, my gosh, there's no turning back here. It is base camp. And I'm and I said, I'm going to do this.   Sean: I think for me, I obviously was focused on the summit, I wanted to get to the top like everybody else who goes over there, but I think I was more focused on enjoying the whole process because literally when I got to base camp, every step outside of base camp was my personal record for altitude. I had never been any higher than base camp. But so every step was higher than I'd ever been, so   Joe: What   Sean: I   Joe: Is   Sean: Am.   Joe: What is base camp at?   Sean: Seventeen thousand six hundred feet.   Joe: Ok, and you and you're saying this machine you use change you at nineteen thousand.   Sean: But I didn't I didn't have that machine before   Joe: Oh,   Sean: I.   Joe: Wow.   Sean: So the highest I have ever been was just around just below fourteen thousand five hundred feet, which is the highest mountain here in Colorado.   Joe: That's correct.   Sean: Albert.   Joe: Wow.   Sean: And when I got to the summit of Everest, I mean, it was double the whatever, the highest point I'd ever been. But I knew that I was so focused on, you know, you asked me about being afraid, there were times that those little. Negative seeds got planted in my brain, but I didn't want them. I didn't let them grow and I was very mindful and very aware of when those thoughts came in my brain, because looking back at the same analogy of that young boy on the shower floor, I focused on living as opposed to not dying. And when I when I was crossing the ladders on on the glass across the crevasses, I wasn't focused on, hey, don't fall in the crevasse. I was focused on making it to the next side. And when we passed the dead bodies, I stepped over a number of dead bodies. I just I tried to not ask myself the question, I did this when I got back down. Why did he die? Why would nine? And what's the difference, like, why would I why would I be worthy and he wouldn't be. But it's it's like anything in life where you just don't know sometimes. Why did I get cancer? I don't know. It's a whole question. Why me? Why me? Well, the fact of the matter is, it was me. So deal with it. Why not me?   Joe: Yeah, I've had this conversation with other people on the podcast who have gone through some adversity. I you know, I feel like that adversity has been given, fortunately or unfortunately, however you want to look at it, because the outcomes of things that you've learned through what you've gone through have created this person, this mental strength, and someone who is very happy day to day or other people, just no matter, they could be having the most amazing life and they still complain. But I feel like, you know, the adversity has been given to people with strength, and I'm not sure if that's true. It's something I made up of my own brain because I think I'm such a wimp that I cut my finger. I start like I don't know how I would deal with what you've gone through, what other people around me have gone through. So that's what's my own little story, I tell myself. So you just didn't choose me because he knew I couldn't handle it, so.   Sean: But but you never know what you can handle until you're put in that situation.   Joe: Right.   Sean: And people always say say things like that all the time, I don't. My God, I have no idea what I would do if I was ever in your situation. You don't know.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And you'd be amazed at how much you can actually handle when you are in that situation.   Joe: Yeah, that's incredible. OK, so you're at base camp and how many are you in? I don't know how you travel if there's 12 or 15 or whatever the number is. How many are there with you going up?   Sean: So, as you probably know, a normal Everest expedition could I mean, it could be 20, 30 people.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: A number of sardars Sherpas, you name it, and clients. I had my brother at base camp, a cook at base camp, two Sherpas and me, and that was it. We were I say I was we were on a shoestring budget, but we didn't even have shoelaces. So we.   Joe: Did   Sean: It   Joe: You end   Sean: Was.   Joe: Up ever getting sponsorship before you left?   Sean: I did in   Joe: Ok,   Sean: One of   Joe: Good.   Sean: Them was Ghatak, one was Capello's, and   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Believe it or not, I didn't even have a summit suit a week before I was supposed to go up for the top. And just my crazy luck. And I know it's not like it was by the big guy upstairs, but the north face came in with my my summit suit and it actually said Shantz Warner Everest base camp on the box. And it got to.   Joe: Wow, that's crazy.   Sean: It's like two or three days before I was supposed to go up in the sun at my summit suit came in.   Joe: That is nuts. Wow. All right, so when you start out, how long does it. How long should it take you or how long is like the most that you can spend up that high? Like, is there a period of time that you have the summit? And I know it's due to weather, too, right. You have to sometimes   Sean: At.   Joe: Just go. We can't make the attempt today. The weather is just not good enough. So what did it end up taking you from base camp to summoning Everest?   Sean: So a lot of people don't understand that when you get there, you don't go from base camp and go up to Camp One, spend a couple of days there, go up to camp to spend a couple of days there, three, four. Same thing from the south side. We actually there are four camps and then with base camp there.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: So we arrived at base camp April 8th and I summited May 16. So almost a month and a half. The whole time we're going from base camp up higher, establishing different camps and then coming back down so that that does two things, we go up with a full back, a pack drop off stuff and then go back with an empty backpack, go back up with a full pack your stuff and go back down. So, like I said, does two things. It actually transports the gear and material that we need to each camp, food, gear, whatever. But it also is getting our body adjusted to the altitude.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: So then we would go up and down, up and down, up and down after we established three and then four when when you get to camp for your before you get to Camp four, you pay attention to the weather. And there's a weather window because everybody has seen that that quintessential picture of Everest with the snow plume   Joe: Yep,   Sean: Blowing off the top.   Joe: Yep.   Sean: That's because that's because the sun is puncturing the jetstream, the just   Joe: Uh.   Sean: Tunnels, the summit, two   Joe: Huh?   Sean: Hundred three hundred miles an hour. So it's impossible to climb on that. So what happens is pre monsoon season, there's a high pressure system that pushes the jet stream north. And that's when people sneak up on top of Everest and come back down. So you see on I guess you don't look on a map, but meteorologists know and they give you a weather window like it's usually mid-May. For us, it was supposed to be May 15th where the weather window was good. But for whatever reason, that may on May 14th, we were supposed to move to May 15th and go up for the summit. I was at camp three and I was suffering a mild form of cerebral edema, which is altitude induced swelling of the brain. And I couldn't move. So every single other expedition who was on the same schedules, us went from Camp three, moved to Camp four and went to the summit that night. The next morning, the winds were howling. They came down the aisle retreat, and they lost their opportunity to climb. I slept on an oxygen that day. The next morning we went up to camp for summited on May 16th, a day later, and there was just a slight breeze in the top. We spent about 30 minutes up there to forty five minutes, which is unheard of.   Joe: Who's medically trained to tell you what's wrong with you or do you just have to know, like there's no one is like in your own little group, it's you just have to know what's right or wrong with you and how to fix it.   Sean: In my group, yeah, I mean, in other expeditions are expedition doctors, you know, everybody there were we made friends with some people from Brown University who were doing a study up there. And it was it's actually really funny. They're doing a study on how the altitude affects the brain. And they gave me this book and I became a volunteer to help with the study. And I was at Camp three when I was acclimatizing and not going up for the summit, but just sleeping at Camp three is going to come back down the mountain like a little Rolodex thing. It's like the size of an index card and you flip it back and on the front of it, you're supposed to pick out which object was was different, which which one didn't belong. And it was like a small triangle, a large triangle, a medium sized triangle and a Pentagon or something like that. Right.   Joe: So.   Sean: And so and each each are different. So big, medium, small square in a circle you pick out the circle. But it was funny. So I get up to camp three and I'm radioing down to them. All right. You guys ready to go? Yeah, we're good. So I flip it over and I'm thinking I'm going to have some fun with this.   Joe: All right.   Sean: So I go page one, the Penguin Page to the House, page three, the dog. And keep in mind, they're all geometric shapes. So   Joe: All   Sean: I think.   Joe: Right, to the naming of animals, as they say, oh, for.   Sean: It's like I take my thumb off the microphone and there's a long silence.   Joe: It's not.   Sean: And all of a sudden, Sean, are you feeling OK?   Joe: Right.   Sean: Like, yeah, why, what's going on? There are no animals.   Joe: That is so funny. Oh, my gosh, they were probably like, oh, we got to get a helicopter up there.   Sean: They were thinking, we need to get emergency up there and get him down off the mountain.   Joe: That is so funny. Oh, my gosh. So is it true that it gets backed up up there when people are trying to summit during a certain season?   Sean: It is now when I was there, it wasn't as bad   Joe: Check.   Sean: And also. A few years ago, there was a big earthquake and there used to be a section called the Hillary Step,   Joe: Yep, I   Sean: And   Joe: Remember hearing.   Sean: So it used to be a chunk of rock that used to hang out. And literally, if you took six inches off to your left side, you would plummet a mile and a half straight down. And there was that section where only one person could go up or one person could go down at a time, and that's where the bottleneck usually was. So with the earthquake, what I've heard is that there's no longer a Hillary step. It's more like a Hillary slope now because that giant rock has been dislodged. But from the obviously you saw a picture from a couple of years ago that just that long queue of people, apparently it's getting a little out of control.   Joe: And that's crazy. Would you ever do it again? Do you ever care about doing it again?   Sean: Well, as is my family or my wife going to hear this this time, I don't know if it calms down and it becomes less popular, I honestly would I would like to attempt it again without oxygen to see if it's possible to climb Everest with one lung and no no supplemental oxygen.   Joe: Who was the guy that did it with no, nothing.   Sean: Reinhold Messner, he's climbed, yeah, and then there's also a guy named Viscose who climbed the 8000 meter peaks. So it's been it's been done numerous times, but the first person who did it was Mesner. I believe.   Joe: No oxygen, it just all right. Yeah, I don't want to get you in trouble with your wife, so we'll just, well, not talk about it anymore, OK? I'm telling you, I can sit here and talk to you forever, and I want to respect your time. I don't want to run too far over. So besides everything you've done every day, the tallest peak on every continent at this point, is that true?   Sean: Correct. Still the seven summits,   Joe: Yeah,   Sean: Yep.   Joe: Ok, and then along with that, you have this series of books that you're doing. Can you explain what that's about, what people find when they give each one of those books?   Sean: Oh, sure, yeah, it's actually it's in the infant stages right now, but it's called the Seven Summits to Success. And I just signed an agreement with a publishing company. We're producing we're publishing the first one which is conquering your Everest, where it helps people bring them kind of into my life and understand how I've done what I've done, not just what I've done, what I've done, not what I've done I've done, not what I've done, but how I've done what I've done.   Joe: Yeah.   Sean: And it's also it's very similar to what I just I put together called the Summit Challenge, which is an online series of individual modules, seven different modules walking people through. Utilizing their own personal core values to accomplish things like self actualization, and at the end they essentially find their purpose and it came from the concept and the idea where after a keynote presentation, so many people would come up and say, that's a great story, but a handful would say, that's a great story. And then followed up with a question, but how did you do it? And then looking at Kilimanjaro again, the average success rate on the mountain is roughly forty eight percent, meaning fifty two people out of 100 don't even make it to the top. And like I said, this this July with my twenty first summit with groups and our groups are at 98 percent success rate, double that of the average. So I was thinking, OK, well what's what's the difference? And the difference is I've been subconsciously imparting what I've learned going through the cancer because my first goal was to crawl eight feet from a hospital bed to the bathroom, and then I ended up climbing twenty nine thousand feet to the top of the world. So all those little things, those little insights that I've learned, I've been imparting on people in my groups. So we do something every day that's different to help people get up there. In the main, the main understanding that they get is understanding what their personal core values are. Because once you hold fast to your personal core values and you have an understanding of a deeper purpose, nothing is going to get in your way.   Joe: So in that kind of brings us back to when you left college and you decided that you're you're camping with your brother and then you decide you're going to do this thing to Everest. Right. Was that the beginning of this this portion of Shawn's life where you're going to do these things? But now there's an underlying what's the word I'm looking for this an underlying mission, which is you're you're doing this, I guess, because you like to challenge yourself. Obviously, you just want to you're so happy with the fact that you have been given this chats with   Sean: Right.   Joe: With what happened to you. You're going to make the most of it. So here I am, Sean Zwirner. I am so grateful that I went through two different types of cancer that easily either one of them could have killed me. One of them ruined one of my lungs. I'm still living. Not only that, but I'm going to make the most of every day. So you go to Everest, you do this, you accomplish that, and then you say, OK, that that's that's it. You went for the biggest thing on your first run. You would start out small. You just like, screw it, I'm going to Everest. And then after that, all these other things would be cakewalks, and I'm sure they're not. But then you did all seven summits. And now, though, is it the underlying mission is that you are you are the voice of cancer survivors and and what you do and I don't want to put any words in your mouth, so stop me at any moment. But is it like you're doing this to to to provide hope for them to say, listen, I not only did it twice, but I am living at the highest level of accomplishment and and I don't know what there's so many words I can think of that you just you want them to all think the same way, just keep pushing forward, get the most out of life. And I'm here to support you. And look at me. I've done it. I'm not just spewing words from a stage. I've literally gone out and done this. So I want you to be on this journey with me, both mentally, physically, if you can. Does that make sense or that I just destroy it?   Sean: No, absolutely, I I wouldn't I wouldn't personally profess that I am the voice of survivors if others want to think that that that's great. But I wouldn't I wouldn't declare myself that. But I have found a deeper purpose. And it did start with Everest, because when I made it to the summit, I had a flag that had names that people touched by cancer on it.   Joe: Yeah, I saw that, yep.   Sean: And that was always folded up in my chest pocket, close to my heart as a constant reminder of my goals in my inspiration, and I planted a flag on the top of Everest. I planted a flag on the seven summits, the highest on every continent. And I also planted a flag at the South Pole and most recently at the North Pole. And I think it initially started. With the concept of I don't want to say infiltrating the cancer community, but getting there and showing them exactly what you said, you know, being up on stage and saying, hey, I'm not just talking the talk, I'm walking it as well. I know what it's like being in your situation. I know what it's like to have no hope. But I also know what it's like on the other side. And I also know what it's like to scream from the rooftops that there's there's a tremendous life after after cancer and it can be a beautiful life. So a lot of people who and like I said, it started off with cancer, but now it's it's reached out to anybody who's going through anything traumatic, which is with the state of the world, is it's everybody now. So with with any uncertainty, you can use that, especially with my cancer. It wasn't the end. It was the beginning. So what the world is going through right now, it's not necessarily the end. It's not uncertainty. How we come out of this on the other side is entirely up to us. And it's our choice. And we can use all the trials and tribulations and turn that into triumph of success if we want. It is all based on our own perspectives.   Joe: So you come off of Everest and then there's your life now become this person who is going to continue to push themselves for because you obviously want to live this amazing life and you don't you just do love the adventure. You love the thrill of the accomplishment. I'm sure all of that stuff that any of us would love, like I went skiing for three days of twenty five years. I'm glad I'm still alive. Sit and talk   Sean: They.   Joe: Because trust me, I wasn't the guy you were talking about walking down the sidewalk and say, don't trip down. I was like, you're fifty nine. You break a bone now you're screwed, you're breakable. And I'm going over. These moguls go, oh my gosh, why am I here? How did you survive? How does someone like that survive financially? How do you survive financially that you now did that? Does that start to bring in sponsorships and endorsements and book deals and speaking deals, or is it just the snowball that happens? And how do you decide that this is the path your life is going to take?   Sean: You would think so, and I've been approached by numerous corporations where the conversation went, something like me telling them, well, I really can't use your product up in the mountains and doing what I do. They say, OK, we'll just take the money we're going to give you by which you really use but endorse our product. So if I went if I went down that path, absolutely, I would be living the high life.   Joe: Right.   Sean: But because I'm a moral and ethical person, I think.   Joe: So.   Sean: It's not nearly what you probably think it is, I don't have people banging down my door for a movie. I don't have people banging down my door for a book. And I think it's because most of the media that we see on television is is paid for media. And every time I reach out to a production company or a marketing company or a PR company, they're usually the first question is what? What's your budget? OK, well, how about the story? How about helping people? Because like I said, every morning I write an affirmation down, in fact, or was it just yesterday was I will give more than I receive. I will create more than I consume. And I think most people who don't understand that think that you're living in a state of lack. And maybe I am. But I'm also incredibly grateful for everything we have. And do I want my story out there? Absolutely. But I don't need to make millions and millions of dollars on it. And what I what I want to do is take those millions and millions of dollars and take cancer survivors up Kilimanjaro every year. I'd love to do that three or four times a year. So I'm always looking for people who can who can jump in here and help me out and share my story with others to give back to help people and help them believe in themselves and help them find their purpose, their their inner drive, their inner.   Joe: Is this is going to sound so stupid, so forgive me, so when you do this, this trek up Kilimanjaro, you do it in July, right?   Sean: Yeah, yeah,   Joe: It.   Sean: People should arrive at Kilimanjaro International Airport July 20 for.   Joe: Ok, is it cold up there?   Sean: It depends. That's a it's not a stupid question,   Joe: Really,   Sean: But   Joe: I   Sean: That's   Joe: Thought   Sean: Like   Joe: You were going to   Sean: Asking.   Joe: Be like, yeah, it's it's it's however many thousand   Sean: Oh.   Joe: Feet. What do you think, Joe?   Sean: But that would be like me asking you, hey, what's it like in snowboarding? What's it going to be like in snowboarding? July? Twenty Fourth. Twenty twenty three. I mean, you have a rough estimate.   Joe: I.   Sean: So in going up Kilimanjaro, it's one of the most beautiful mountains I've been on because you go through so many different climactic zones getting up that you start off in an African rainforest where it can be a torrential downpour. It's always green, but it could be a torrential downpour or it can be sunny and the sun kind of filters through the canopy and you'll see these little streams of light coming to the camp, which is beautiful. And then the next day, it's it could be sunny or rainy, but it goes through so many different zones. You just have to be prepared for each one summit night. However, yes, it's tremendously cold. It can be zero degrees or maybe even minus 10. But with the right gear, you're going to be fine. I mean, there's there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad year.   Joe: Well, here's a good question, and if someone was to go on this is how do they get that gear that they have to buy all that stuff?   Sean: You can you can purchase it or you can rent it over there. I've used the same group of people for the past 18 months, and if you're if you're never going to use a zero degree sleeping bag again in your life, just rent it for 30 bucks. You don't spend three hundred four hundred dollars to buy one. Or if you do buy one and you're never going to use again, give it to my friends, the Sherpas of who use it all the time.   Joe: Right, so basically somebody's going on this could, when they arrive there, get everything they need to make it happen.   Sean: Well, except for your boots and your underwear, you probably don't want to rent me underwear.   Joe: The point well taken. OK, go. So I want to ask you about the Big Hill challenge.   Sean: So great, the big Hill challenge is actually an abridged version of the summit challenge, so some challenges this really in-depth twenty one week program where you take micro challenges and utilize something that you learn and just incorporate into your daily life. The Big Hill challenge is going to be a three week challenge where I take a group of one hundred people at a time and work them through three weeks of little micro challenges to help them along.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: And they're both based on understanding and utilizing your personal core values.   Joe: Perfect. And these can be found on your website.   Sean: Yeah, you can go to the summit challenge dotcom event eventually, you can go to the Big Hill challenge dotcom,   Joe: Ok,   Sean: But every   Joe: Ok,   Sean: One or dotcom.   Joe: Ok, great, because I'll put all of this in the show, notes and everything else, I wrote this question down because I wanted to make it clear that besides your website, Shawn   Sean: Like.   Joe: Swane or Dotcom, you have the cancer Climategate.   Sean: Correct.   Joe: Can you explain can you explain that site to me and what the goal of that site is?   Sean: So cancer climber, cancer climate Doug is actually the organization my brother and I founded that funds trips for cancer survivors to kill javu.   Joe: Ok.   Sean: And actually, if we raise, my goal is to raise about two million dollars to have a mobile camp for kids with cancer.   Joe: Wow. That's   Sean: Because   Joe: Incredible.   Sean: You there are camps all over the country, all over the world, but oftentimes you can't get the survive or you can't get the patient to the camp because of the compromised immune system. So I thought, well, what if there's a semi truck that brings the camp to the kids?   Joe: Hmm, that's interesting. That's a really cool. And the reason I ask about coming on being cold is because Joel in my my better half of 20 some years survived breast cancer. It was lymph node sort of stuff. So taken out and be like God. But she hates the cold like she I would be so cold to do something like this with her. She just literally I mean, I don't know if she would go the last section to the summit because her cold do not mix. She's so happy here in Arizona and she never complains about the heat. So   Sean: My.   Joe: That's the only reason I ask that. So.   Sean: My wife was born and raised in Puerto Rico,   Joe: Ok.   Sean: Forty forty years of her life, and she went with me.   Joe: She.   Sean: She did. She hated the last night, but she's so happy she didn't.   Joe: So it's really just the one night that's the   Sean: Yeah.   Joe: Coldest. So it's one night out. How long does it take to get from where you started out in the rainforest to the.   Sean: So the whole trip itself is a seven day trip up and down the mountain summit on the morning of the 6th, we leave the evening of the 6th, and then after we come off the mountain, we actually go we fly into the Serengeti and do a four day safari to the Serengeti.   Joe: And when you're staying on the way up to the summit, or is it just like caps right   Sean: But   Joe: There? Oh, so that's it. There it is.   Sean: The.   Joe: That's right. So the people that are listening to this on the podcast, you'll have to look at the YouTube video later. But he's showing me the actual   Sean: The.   Joe: Tents and. And is everybody carrying their own tent?   Sean: No, I actually, because I've been there so many times, we pay two porters per person to haul your gear up and all you have to worry about is your day pack some water, snacks, showers, your camera, sunscreen, hat, stuff like that. I don't want anybody carrying anything more than, say, twenty five thirty pounds up the mountain, but the sort of porters will actually give them the leave. After we leave camp, they'll pass us on the way.

We are taught how to defend ourselves from a very young age. But few of us are taught the pragmatic power of love. We build a series of walls we can put up whenever someone makes us uncomfortable. What if those very walls create a drag-on life that slows down our dreams? What if love is an easy-to-use tool that turns all that friction into forward momentum?"Love can't really exist without empowerment. You can be fond of. You can be scared of losing, but to actually love in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming, the only way you can deeply welcome, is to feel deeply empowered to not be worried of the result."We are taught how to defend ourselves from a very young age, but few of us are taught the pragmatic power of love. We build a series of walls we can put up whenever someone makes us uncomfortable. What if those very walls create a drag on life that slows down our dreams? What if love is an easy-to-use tool that turns all that friction into forward momentum?Today's topic is Love Over Defense. Joe, we've all heard, "All you need is love. Love will tear us apart. Love is the answer." We get hit with these phrases all the time, but it's hard to tell what anybody really means by love. What do you mean by love?Joe: That's a good question. That's a big one. Before I say what I mean by love, let me say what is often considered when people are thinking about the definition of love. One of the things that I see is, that people think about it, they dissect it the way the Greeks did, which was there's the love of friendship, like the love you'd have with a friend, the love you'd have that's romantic, the love that you would have with God, the love that would be very much dissected by who you were loving and how they had different visceral experiences in the body.For me, I think about love slightly differently. I think about love as in, there's a love that feels a lot like peace and there's a love that feels a lot like enjoyment and there's a love that feels a lot like care and there's a love that feels a lot like a deep welcoming. When I'm speaking about love, I would say that it's closest to a deep welcoming. They're all components of love. It's not like one of these is a better love than the other or one of these is a separate love than the other, but that deep welcoming seems to be the biggest leverage point. It's what seems to activate everything else the most.Brett: What makes that the deepest leverage point?Joe: I'm not sure if I have a great answer for that outside of experience. It's a dance, for sure, meaning that, when I really put myself out there and deeply care for myself or care for others, then that absolutely helps me have a deeper welcoming of all life, all people, all parts of myself. What I notice is the focus on that deep welcoming towards self, towards others, towards life, that seems to have a very big influence on my sense of peace, my sense of enjoyment and my sense of care.It just seems like it has the biggest turbo booster. In my life, what I've noticed is different ones at different times have bigger turbo-boosting potential, so to speak, but that deep welcoming seems to be the center of gravity for all of it.Brett: It sounds like what you're saying is that the deep welcoming is letting information, letting the world be seen by you and be felt by you and letting it impact you.Joe: As it is, yes. Exactly. It's allowing myself to be touched.Brett: What would be the next most important leverage point?Joe: For me, I think it's care. It's self-care and care of others. If you look at different religious traditions, you'll see that they fall into these different categories. They're focused on these categories, more or less. The Buddhist piece has a big emphasis. Daoist enjoyment has a deep emphasis and the Christianity care has a deep emphasis.For me, the care one seems to have a big impact. There's something about being generous and being giving that also dissolves the self in such a way that it creates a lot of peace and a deep welcoming. It's another really influential one.The dilemma with the care one is that all of these ways of loving, they have a dark shadow on the other side. The peace side of things, for instance, can become disassociation. The enjoyment side of things can be hedonism. The care can be codependency. A deep welcoming can become an apathy of sorts and it can become a giving up of responsibility. All of them have a way to have a shadow take over them.Brett: It sounds like, that the deep welcoming and the dark shadow, that the apathy, a lot of that seems to relate to surrender and the way that people talk about surrender. How does this relate to surrender for you? Many traditions have surrender as an important part of the journey to love.Joe: Yes, that's exactly right. Surrender, it's a path to love and it's also the result of love. Or the other way to say that is, surrender is a path to a deep welcoming, but it's also the result of a deep welcoming. So many traditions have surrender being the first step. The first step is to surrender to Jesus, or in Buddhist monasteries, for instance, in China in particular, the first Buddha that you see is this happy, fat Buddha who's plenty and that gets you into the temple.Once you're into the temple, then it's surrender. Then once you've surrendered and it's surrender to the teacher, to Buddha, or to the teachings, or to the Dharma and then beyond that is compassion, is a deep care of self and others. They have different Buddhas or different archetypes in the different stages of the temple, depending on how far in you are allowed to be. It is a great description of how that journey works, generally.In the Western world, however, surrender has some connotations and some issues that I don't know whether it's just people thought of surrendering differently then as they do now. The dilemma, generally, with surrender is that it's been used to subjugate people. It's been used to have people follow without their full authenticity involved. I stray away from the word for that reason.The real key is, what are you surrendering to? If you surrender to Jesus, you're not just surrendering to Jesus, you're surrendering to the concept of Jesus in your head, or what you think the scripture says. Surrender is so incredibly powerful and it's very, very much a deep welcoming, when you're surrendering to that very quiet call inside of you, to that impulse, to that thing that is always there and always knows the right direction.Brett: That we always have a voice in our head that shoots it down, perhaps surrendering to that. What do we lose by not emphasizing surrender, given that it's been so useful in so many traditions, but also there's this problematic aspect and particularly, in the way that it's conceptualized in the west? What do we lose by you not emphasizing it in your conception of love here?Joe: What we lose in not emphasizing it, is another way to lose our identity. In general, all of these methods, the deep care, the surrender, the silence of meditation, all of them are just ways to get past the illusion of self. It is to evaporate the identity, to see yourself beyond the small me that you think you are, to see yourself outside of your everyday cares and worries. It is to not be able to identify with the voice in your head anymore. That's generally what all these paths are pointing to.There's other less known traditions, too. There's a way of losing your identity in a group that's healthy, unlike most of the ways people will lose identities in groups. The Quakers had some great work on that as well. There's lots of ways to do it, but these are the big ones and love itself is that same thing. It's an expression. That's why, in some of the writings, you'll see people talk about love as your inherent state, because love, as you walk down that path of love, the identity evaporates as well and you see that your identity is love. You are love and love is what you are, just as you are nothing and nothing is what you are. It is when the sense of self dissolves into the whole, if you will, then love is the result, not emptiness is the result.Brett: It seems like a lot of people are onto this love being so healing, but there are just so many ways that you can get caught in an eddy or a backwater or in a shadow. What are some of the main misconceptions about love that we hold?Joe: Everybody's a little bit different here and people's misconceptions of love are based on their childhood. If the thing that you looked for to be your role model of love beat you, then love is painful. If the role model that you looked to was critical, then love is critical. If love meant being nice, then love is nice, or if love meant not holding boundaries, then love is not holding boundaries. Whatever you experienced love to be when you were young, those are usually exactly the misconceptions you hold about love.Societally, however, there's some pretty big normal ones. There's nice. Nice is a big one. If I'm nice to you, then I'm loving you, which is horribly inaccurate. That being compassionate is often a very sharp sword. Being compassionate is often saying a hard truth in a loving way with an open heart.I remember when I was a kid, I lied all the time. I was compulsively lying. I was a freshman in high school and it was to make people like me. This guy, his name, I remember it was Alex Bellini, this was like a week before the end of school and he said, "Hey, Joe, we all know that you're lying all the time and we would all like you so much more if you didn't." It was the most profound act of love that I had experienced to that date. I'm sure it was scary as shit for him to say and nobody else had said it. Nobody else had given me that information and my lying just stopped. Nothing else needed to happen. My lying just stopped at that point or reduced by 97% or something like that.That's an act of love, but that sure as fuck wasn't nice. I think a lot of times people mistake being nice-- because they think that if they love somebody, there's not going to be conflict or something like that. That's just not how love works.The other thing that's often the case is a lot of people are scared to be in love, because they have a conception that love doesn't hold boundaries, as if Gandhi didn't hold boundaries, as if Mother Teresa didn't hold boundaries. Love is holding boundaries. Great mothers-- the thing that we think as loving as mothers, they hold boundaries all the time. That's another one I think that people really have a problem seeing, that love is holding boundaries.I think that the other one that's most commonly not seen, is that love can't really exist without empowerment. You can't really love if you're not empowered. You can be fond of, you can be scared of losing, you can really, really, really want, you can desire, but to actually love in a way that is beyond you, that is a deep welcoming. The only way you can deeply welcome all the good and the bad and the dangerous and the unknown and the mystery is to feel deeply empowered, to not be worried of the results. Brett: What are some other examples of how this has shown up in your life, or just shows up in people's lives day to day?Joe: Wow so many-- you see lovers, husbands, wives say that they deeply love each other, but they're constantly trying to change each other or they're scared of losing one another. That's not love. That's a habit. I don't think it's really possible to love somebody fully and want them to change. Then you're loving them if they show up a certain way, or loving yourself that way is another example of it. Being in a job and being scared to get fired is another example of what isn't love. There's a famous coach who used to say, “Lead with love.” and if you're scared of getting fired, you can't lead with love. Then you're leading from fear. There's a lot of things like that.The thing I think that people don't really understand is, people say, “Love is the answer”, or “Love will find a way”, all those things about love, but nobody really talks about the mechanism of what makes love so powerful. What makes it, that if I love a part of myself, or if I love a part of you, I have more power over that part of you than if I don't. What makes that happen is the question that I think a lot of people don't fully understand. The best way to look at it is internally, which is, if I love an aspect of myself that, so far, I haven't been able to love, it gets to move, it gets to express and it gets to evolve.If I'm saying that that part is bad, I'm containing it, I'm holding it, so it can't move and so it can't evolve. That's how the mechanism works. It's like, if I love you unconditionally, then you don't have to be constantly managing yourself and then evolution can double-time it. That's how it works, is that, that loving of ourselves and others or a situation is one of the best change agents for it. The only difference is it's not changing in the way that you want it to. It might change in the way that you want it to, but it's going to change in a way that's best for it and you, but that doesn't always correspond with what you want.The mechanism of love is that you allow for something to be able to move and therefore, it can evolve instead of holding it in place. It's just like if you have a kid and you want them to evolve, don't stick them in a room with no lights on. You let them play and explore and learn and grow.Brett: So, this allowing something to move, allowing things to move feels a lot like undefendedness, which brings us to the second half of this topic of Love Over Defense. What do you mean by defense and how does that relate to this?Joe: On the mind side, defense is any way that you've decided that there's separation. "They don't understand. I'm better than them. This course moves too slow for me." Any way that you're creating separation between you and other people, that they come from an inferior race. They are better than me. They come from a better race. All of it, all of that is separation and that's the mental place.Somatically, it's literally like a wall, typically, in front of you, typically, somewhere from the perineum up into the top of your head and it's stronger for different people in different places, but it's literally, you can just feel like the “crr--” shutting down. And on a gut-level it's a subtle fear. That's what defense is.Brett: Clearly, there are times in life when you need to defend yourself and we've talked a lot about how boundaries are a part of love and that can feel like defense.Joe: Yes. The thing is, we mistake that defending ourselves can't be welcoming. That's the way that I would say it. Just because I have to draw a boundary or I want to draw a boundary, doesn't mean that I can't love you. Just because I am in a fight with you, if I'm literally going to say, "Okay, I can't allow this person to throw trash all over my front lawn," so I'm in a fight with you, it doesn't mean that I can't welcome you. I think that this is best in any religious book I've ever seen is, I think it's the Bhagadavida and-- Oh, I'm so bad with names.Brett: Bhagavad Gita.Joe: Yes. It starts off with a man who's about to get into a war with his brothers, with people that he loves and he prays to, I think it's Krishna, who has the conversation with him, which is what most of the book is about. He says, "Hey, you got to fight." He doesn't say, "No, don't fight." He says, "You got to fight.” It doesn't mean you have to give up loving to fight. Life is tension, generally, call it a fight, call it tension. Life is tension. If I took all the tension out of your cell, it would die. If I took all the tension out of your body, you would die. Tension and life require one another, or at least life requires tension. If you give it up, then you're dead. The only thing left then is how you hold it. How do you hold the fight? That's what this book really talks about really well. It's like, "Okay, this is the fight, but how do you hold the fight?" That's the same thing here. Like, just because you've engaged in the war doesn't mean that you have to stop loving people. That's the confusion that I think most people feel, is, that if I am going to be in tension with you, then I have to give up my love for you, which is not at all true. Brett: Right. I can think of any circumstance where I feel like I have a conflict with somebody, it's so easy to drop their humanness. To make them an other, to make them wrong, to make them an obstacle and that never helps the conflict.Joe: Right. You can still love them and still overcome the obstacles, so to speak. They don't have to become the obstacle.Brett: How do we start cultivating that love, that allows us to experience the fight in a different way?Joe: This is why I think I call it a deep welcoming more than any other reason is, because there's a visceral experience of that. It's like, if you close your eyes right now and you deeply welcome yourself here and love yourself just as you are right now, that's it, that's all there is to it.We can make it more complex and I'm sure we will in this podcast, but that's all there is to it. How do you deeply welcome yourself in this moment and in the next moment and the moment after that? It's a very somatic experience to be loved.Brett: Yes. I just did that and the first thing was I noticed tension in my body and then it just immediately relaxed.Joe: Right. It's literally like you have a feeling of love for something. Maybe it's for your dog, or maybe it's for your child, or maybe it's for your mother, maybe it's for a friend. How do you give yourself that same feeling that you have, that you give to them? How do you feel the same thing you feel for them for yourself?That's the best way to cultivate love, because our capacity to love all the bits of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love everybody on the planet. The more that you learn to love all the parts of yourself, the more you're capable of loving everybody on the planet.Brett: What else can we do?Joe: Well, one thing for sure is if you can't love yourself, then love your resistance. It doesn't really matter in the moment what it is you're capable of loving. There's no time when we're incapable of love for anything. If you find yourself, like, "I just can't love myself right now," then love the fact that you can't love yourself.Also, the other thing you can do is, again, we've talked about this a little bit, but don't mistake love for caretaking. Loving yourself, loving somebody else isn't caretaking them. It's not saying yes, even if you want to say no, it's not going against your truth. It's not trying to make them happier. It's just having a deep welcoming for who they are.Brett: What if you identify ways that you're caretaking and you're afraid to stop doing them and then you realize, that you're not loving and then you get hard on yourself about that?Joe: Oh, you've got lots of choices there. You can love the fact that you're a caretaker. You can love the part that is so scared that it thinks that it needs to be a caretaker. You can love the part of yourself that thinks, that getting angry at yourself will actually change anything. You can love the part of yourself that is really wanting what's best for them and yourself and doesn't know how to get there. All sorts of parts to yourself to love in that circumstance.Brett: Anything else that we can do to cultivate this love?Joe: Yes, drawing boundaries is really good. That's a great way to really cultivate love in yourself and in others.Brett: Describe a boundary that you might set with yourself.Joe: Oh, that's a good one. First, the thing is people think about boundaries as a form of separation and I just said like, mentally, defense is separation. I think it's important to talk about that paradox first, which is when you draw a boundary, you're doing something that's good both for you and for the other person and that's really the opposite of separation. It's the same, actually, with being compassionate. There is nothing that you can do that's truly compassionate for you that's also not compassionate for those around you in that circumstance. It's the same with a boundary and that's the important part of a boundary. The important parts of boundaries are, that, when you draw the boundary, it increases your love for the person, no matter what they're going to say to the boundary.I know that I'm drawing a great boundary when I'm doing that. When it opens up my heart to the person that I'm drawing the boundary with. If I'm drawing a boundary to myself, I use that same thing. It's like, what's the thing that actually opens my heart to myself when I'm setting a boundary?Brett: What's an example of a boundary you might set with yourself? Joe: Let's say a boundary that I might set with myself is, if I am noticing myself getting angry, I am going to separate myself from other people, so that I don't get angry at them. That would be a boundary that I would set with myself.Brett: Elaborate a little bit more on how that helps you love yourself.Joe: If I'm angry at people, then I have shame, then I have blame, then I have a whole big mess, usually, that I have to clean up. None of that stuff is really loving and it's also making my anger wrong and making parts of myself wrong. In that boundary, I stop making myself wrong. The trick is when I'm literally thinking about drawing it, it doesn't feel like an oppression. It feels like a gift.Brett: That makes sense. The part of us that we are drawing a boundary against might otherwise feel defensive against us making it wrong.Joe: I would say with, drawing a boundary with, not against.Brett: With. Right.Joe: That's the subtle thing about boundaries that people think. The subtle thing about boundaries is that it's against, because we value this idea of freedom so greatly in ourselves. That's the other part of drawing a boundary that's so important. The other part of drawing a boundary that is so important is, that you're not asking them to be any different. You're saying, "I'm going to be different."If I'm drawing a boundary with-- this is different with children, obviously, but if I'm drawing a boundary with a friend and that person, to use the same example, has a tendency to get angry, I would say, "My boundary with you is when you get angry, I'm going to walk away and happy to re-engage with you whenever you're not yelling at me. Or if you're yelling at me, then I'm going to walk away and I'm happy to re-engage with you." I'm not asking them to stop yelling at me. I'm not asking for them to stop drinking. I'm not asking for them to stop. I'm saying what I'm going to do in these circumstances.Brett: Like creating a background of safety in connection, regardless of how they act so that they don't have to be a certain way.Joe: That's exactly right. It's the fully empowered move. It's taking full responsibility for yourself. If you start trying to love yourself to change yourself, it won't work, because trying to change yourself isn't loving yourself. What happens for a lot of people is they start to feel the power of love and they start to feel how loving unconditionally starts transforming the world, they start wanting more of it and so then they start loving to transform the world and then it stops working. Because if you're trying to love to transform the world, you're not loving anymore. It's a really important thing to see that the love, if it gets tainted, it just stops working.Brett: As we were cultivating this love and the defenses that creep in taint that love, at the same time as we're working to cultivate love, how do we work on lowering our defenses as well?Joe: Yes. There's a feeling when we lower our defenses, what we're actually doing is allowing a whole bunch of emotions we don't want to feel to be felt. Those emotions purify us. They start to dismantle that sense of self and it literally feels sometimes like it's burning away or that it's melting or something to that effect and so, there's an intensity to that.Every time we lower our defense, there's this little thing inside of us, is like, "Oh, we're going to be fucking destroyed. We're going to be destroyed. Don't do that. If I lower my defense, I'll be destroyed. Don't do that." There's an intensity with doing it.Brett: Well, there's a truth to that too, like a part of ourselves does get destroyed.Joe: Exactly. There's a great saying by Pema Chödrön, I'm going to paraphrase, it says, "Open yourself up for annihilation, because that way, you can find out what part of yourself can't be annihilated." That's what you're doing. You're just allowing that purification to happen and you know it, because there's an intensity to it of, oftentimes, a fear as well and to feel into that, to step into that deeply is the move to make around the defenses.Surrender is another really good move in these moments, it's, you're not surrendering to the circumstances. You're surrendering to not defending yourself. What do I mean by that? I had a great experience with this. There was a man and I was on the Board of Directors with this person and he was bad for the company. He also had this tendency to whatever I said, he would do the exact opposite thing. What I did was I told him, "Hey, I'm going to try to remove you from the board, I will stop trying to remove you from the board at any time that we can actually work together well and that you're in your thought processes aren't just against mine.We love contrarian thinking in boards typically any board I've been a part of, but this was just contrary for the sake of contrarian, it wasn't contrary because it was independent thinking.Anyway, so every time, for like six weeks or six months, I would call him up and I would say, "This is what I'm going to do and this is what I suggest you do." He would do the exact opposite of that the entire time. By doing exactly the opposite of what he said is how he got himself removed from the board. If at any time he would have said, "Oh, I see." And called me up and talked to me and said, "Oh, wow, you're really giving me the advice." I was constantly able to give him the advice that was actually the best for him. I was constantly able to say, "This is what I think is best for you and for it to be accurate." It is also the fact that he couldn't do it that led to his removal from the board, which was best for the company if he couldn't learn to work with people and be collaborative.Brett: That's fascinating. I'm curious, how you differentiate in that story love over defense versus knowing what's best for him and versus controlling him through suggestions.Joe: The main difference is what you're feeling internally. I am welcoming him as he is and at the same time, I am making the call, that says this company is better without you. That's my call to make, just like it's his call to make and he was making the call that the company would be better without me, or that whatever, China should win the war, or Korea should win the war. Those are calls that people are going to make. That's the war. You have to call what you think is best, but that doesn't mean I ever had to close my heart to him.The way that I could act to not close my heart to him is to constantly tell him, "This is actually what I think is the best thing to do," and to tell him, "I'm going to keep on telling you to do this stuff and as long as you keep on-- I gave him the whole map. I told him the key, I gave him everything to get out of it and he chose not to do that. It was literally me at the time, it was the first time that I was like, "Oh, I am in a war, how do I maintain an open heart?" The way I could do it was to give him every opportunity I could possibly think of. That's the only difference.I think the thing is from the outside it might not look different at all. From the inside, it's a far more effective way to fight a war. You hear this from people who are fighters all the time, try to get your opponent angry, because if they get angry, they'll be less effective. What happens if the person you're fighting has a big open heart for you and they're still determined to win?Brett: How angry did this board member get?Joe: He got pretty angry and there's definitely multiple occasions where he called up yelling. Then, for me, that was the practice. He would call up yelling and I would just keep on opening my heart and keep on feeling the discomfort and keep on feeling my emotions and lots of heartache for me. There was a lot of heartbreak in it and that was my purification was that heartbreak.Brett: Tell me more about that heartbreak.Joe: I have this saying, that every time my heart breaks, it increases my capacity to love. Heartbreak is like the feeling of it breaking open to expand or the feeling of expansion of the heart. That's the feeling. It's interesting. I've obviously never given birth, but when my wife talks about birth, she goes, "I don't know why they call them contractions when they're really expansions," but there's a feeling that it's a contraction as well as an expansion. In heartbreak, that's the visceral feeling of it, for me, anyway. There's this feeling of heartbreak that just totally increases my capacity to love.Another great example of this was, I don't know if I've shared the story, but there was a time when I was just totally bothered by all inane conversation. Just two people talking about going 65 miles an hour on the way to Santa Barbara, whatever it was, would just drive me nuts. There's this day where I recognized that I shut down when this was happening and so I was like, "I'm not going to shut down, I'm going to sit there. I'm going to feel whatever there is underneath this."I would hang out with people, having inane conversations and I would just weep. I would just cry. Probably at times, I had some idea of why I was crying. I think at the crux of it, I was crying because I had just shut this entire part of life off. It's like I'd cut off a part of myself and as I opened it up, there was just this pain of like, "Oh, wow, I've lost this for so long."Brett: What was it that you had lost?Joe: The ability to connect in this fashion, that I had judged this way of connecting. One more way of connecting with people that I had separated myself from, because of my own self-definition. I just weeped. It was very awkward. Sitting there crying, they'd be like--Brett: You did this with them in their presence?Joe: In their presence, yes. It was awkward at times and they'd be like, "What's wrong." I'm like, "Yes, it's nothing. Don't worry about it." I'd just keep on and then they keep on. They're used to having those levels of conversations, so asking me about this twice wasn't really going to happen.Then all of a sudden, I was just completely able to enjoy the more superficial way of connecting and even found out that there's some of that super "superficial" way of connecting that's not superficial at all. That connecting over flowers or connecting over food, there's a very sensual, non-heady level of connection, that is quite sweet and has a depth that deep conversations don't have.Brett: Something juicy in that story for me is, that you started weeping in front of people and then they asked you what was going on with you, inviting depth and then you were like, "Oh, it's nothing."Joe: Yes. That's exactly it, because I wanted to feel the heartbreak. I didn't want to disturb the thing that was breaking my heart. Once you realize that heartbreak increases your capacity to love, then it's like, "Man, I want it. I want that heartbreak," because I know that at the backside of it, there's so much more love available to me.Yes, if I could shut it down, I'd shut it down, because I'd want to just keep on feeling the pain of a superficial conversation, so that I could feel that heartbreak. It was the same with this guy. It's like, just to feel the heartbreak of the fact that here's two people who want something great to happen in the world, who want this company to be successful and this is the only outcome that I know how to create. I didn't have the capacity to really get them on board or bring them along or whatever. I don't know if I could have ever, but that heartbreak and that incapacity to feel into that totally increased my capacity to love.Brett: How is it that experiencing that heartbreak can be experienced as not discouraging, but as empowering?Joe: I think you have to live through it a couple times. I don't know if there's another way to do it, but to just live through it a couple of times. I think that once you live through heartbreak and you realize how much it increases the love in your life, then it's just like going into a hot sauna. If you go into the hot sauna the first time, you're like, "What the f-- are you guys doing? I'm out of here. My skin's burning, what the hell?" I'm talking about like a real sauna, not an American sauna. There's nothing logical about doing it, but then you do it a couple of times and you're like, "Oh man, I can't wait to get back to the sauna." The same goes to the cold plunge, the exact same thing. The payoff is so great that you're like, "Let's do it."Brett: It really seems that this love thing seems to be the crux of all of this teaching.Joe: Yes, absolutely it is. The first real week was VIEW, which is vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder. That's really unconditional love. If you put all those three things together, that's another great pointer to unconditional love. You feel vulnerable, because you're open and welcoming. You're impartial, because you're welcoming as is, not telling them how to be. Empathy means you're open and feeling them. You're allowing yourself to be touched and wonder is this basic nod that the universe knows more than you do, that it's still a mystery and will always be a mystery. That really prevents you from wanting to try to change stuff, change things. We start off with VIEW and we end with love and they're very much the same thing. They're the whole thing. Everything we've done in this course has been to move us towards a greater state of love for ourselves and others. I think the thing about it is that it can't be done out of order. A lot of people will move straight to love, they'll say, "Okay, I'm just going to love everything all the time." I think that's great. Don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't seem to work as well to love everything as an escape, or to love everything as a bypass, or to love everything so that you don't have to feel it. To love everything means that you're really happy to feel everything, that you're happy to express everything, that you're happy to be wrong about everything, that you're happy to be empowered and you're happy to feel helpless. It's a deep welcoming of life and a lot of times people will use love as a way to cut off a certain portion of it.Brett: The question I was about to ask, but you've just explained it, was what makes it that you didn't call this work the art of unconditional love?Joe: Oh, I don't want to answer that question. [laughs] There's a part of me that says you answer as a business guy, but also as a coach. You meet people where they are. You meet people with the problems they think they have and most people aren't walking around going, "I just don't know how to love enough."The biggest problem I have is that my heart isn't broken enough. I don't get enough heartbreak. Most people aren't walking around saying that, so you meet them where they are. Luckily, the unconditional love piece and especially with the emotional fluidity, the empowerment and seeing yourself as inherently good, which is the crux of the fulcrum that the love uses to create its leverage. Brett: It reminds me of where I first met you, which was a consciousness hacking talk entitled, "How to Make Better Business Decisions". I was, "That's what I need to do."Joe: Exactly. Check it out, though. Have you been making better business decisions?Brett: Absolutely.Joe: Yes, see. That's the cool thing, you can actually deliver on the promise, but you can deliver on it so effectively, only because you're speaking to the deeper truth. I think the other reason, just to say it, is that semantically everybody thinks about love very differently. If you say you've got 20 different viewpoints immediately, it just makes it harder to really go through the process.Brett: I think one of the main resistances to doing some kind of group work around unconditional love is, that it'll trip people's cult triggers. Maybe another question is, what is the difference between doing this kind of work in a group and finding unconditional love together and a cult?Joe: Well, this is the surrender piece. This is why I don't use surrender. That little thing about surrender that's in there, it's basically I'm going to ask you to give up responsibility for yourself. Whereas everything that we do is very much pointing directly at, “Take responsibility for yourself. The wisdom is inside you.” If you look at how I interact with students, I'm mostly asking questions and I'm also saying, “Tell me what your instinct says, tell me what's moving you”, because I trust that more than I trust me. I might know the terrain. I might know the map. I might know the six most likely places that you want to end up, but only you know where you are at this moment and know what the next move is and that's the big difference.That's why I don't emphasize surrender because as soon as you emphasize surrender, people think, "Surrender to what?" If I do say something like, "Hey, surrender to the ineffable part of yourself," then all of a sudden, there's a definition, "What is that? How do I do that?" and then that definition becomes what you surrender to instead of the thing itself.Brett: I think a lot of that, what you're speaking to comes from when people get into a teacher role, they end up subtly asking for people to surrender to them, because it sounds like that comes from a lack of trust in people's internal work. What is it that makes you feel so trusting, when you are working with somebody on one of our Q&A calls, somebody who's miles and miles away and could have just freak out and close the laptop and then go do something insane? What makes you feel so much trust for their internal compass, that you feel safe doing this work with them, without the sense of control that would lead to them surrendering to you?Joe: That's a great question. I've never been asked that question before. It's funny what happens in my system when you ask it, is just like this deep sense of humility. The intellectual answer I want to give you is, because that thing in them is the same thing that guided me. I just wasn't lucky enough or I wasn't ripe enough to be able to be given someone to guide me in this way. I had to trust my own, so I just trusted in that way.I think that's part of it, but there's another part of it too, which is, it's experience. It's just so many times, I'm like this, "I can see where the path leads," and I can watch the person just instinctually make the next right move over and over and over again. Not just that person, almost everybody, that I--. Whenever I question it, I'm like, "Oh, that's going to be like a backpedal." It turns out it's the perfect backpedal for them.I don't mean that in a hippy way of everything's perfect, just the way it's supposed to be. I mean just like roses know how to grow. They just know how to do it. Grass just knows what to do. Birds just know what to do. They just know it. I don't have to trust them. I don't have to trust the trees and people. There is a center of gravity just asking. All they have to really do is, just get out of the way. All my questions are literally just questions to help them see themselves. There's no question I'm asking that's underlying point isn't just to have them see themselves.Brett: Wow. Thanks, Joe. This has been another amazing episode.Joe: Yes, what a pleasure. I'm sad that they're done. I'm glad that they're done because I could use a little more free time, but I'm sad that they're done, because I'm not going to get to play with you for a couple.  Brett: I'm excited to see what kind of playing happens again in the future.Joe: Yes, it will for sure. What a pleasure, Brett. Thank you.Brett: Thank you.Joe: All right. Bye. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment podcast.  If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach us, join our newsletter, learn more about VIEW, or to take a course, visit: artofaccomplishment.comResources: Pema Chödrön: https://pemachodronfoundation.org/

A conversation with the principal of Jotham S. Stein P.C. about his recent book called "Even CEOs Get Fired". This is an easy read for any entrepreneur, C-Suite executive or investor on the tips and tricks in today's high stakes business world. It's probably safe to say that most people who want to make sure they are protected in their work environment whether you're the CEO or you work for a company, should definitely read this book! Enjoy this very educational conversation with Jotham Stein. Thank you for listening! Enjoy, Joe Jotham S. Stein Principal - Law Offices of Jotham Stein P.C. Website: https://jotham.com Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jothamstein/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jotham.stein LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jotham-s-stein-7b92474/ Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: Jotham Stein, welcome so much, I'm glad you join me on the podcast. I'm looking forward to this. I don't do a lot of things that dig deep into legal conversation. So this is going to be very educational for me and I know for my audience as well. So thank you so much for joining me.   Jotham: Thanks for having me on your show, Joe.   Joe: Yeah, absolutely, so we're going to definitely talk about your new book, which is ""Even CEOs Get Fired"", which is very interesting because I've been a CEO my whole life. So it's kind of scary to think about that I would get fired from my own company first, get a little back story about you from the interviews that I heard. I know that you and I are both New Yorkers. So I grew up a couple hours north of New York City. And you grew up on Long Island. If I if I remember correctly.   Jotham: That's true. I'm proud graduate of high school, Syosset, Long Island, New York City, Nassau County, sort of almost all the way to something closer to north and south shore, but pretty much in the middle.   Joe: And do you still get back there or you're not there, right? Do you live in California now?   Jotham: Yes, I live in Half Moon Bay, California, three blocks from the beach, so when I was growing up in high school, I used to love to go to the beach. That's where you go, you know, all the time in Jones Beach Those   Joe: Yes.   Jotham: Beaches, even Robert Moses State Park on Fire Island, you go there, too. Now, I live three blocks from the Pacific Ocean and   Joe: That's   Jotham: Happened back.   Joe: That's awesome. I saw a kiss at Jones Beach. Of all Kiss and Aerosmith all in one night.   Jotham: In one night, wow,   Joe: One.   Jotham: I think you have the theater there, like in the bay. Oh,   Joe: Yeah,   Jotham: That's cool.   Joe: And I where I went to college, I went to New York State University and pretty much the entire university was Long Island resident. So I have a bunch of friends that live out a lot. So it's near and dear to my heart. Can you give me a little back story about you, like how you decided to get into law? You know, just I like my audience to know who you are, and we just don't launch into, like, who you are. Now, it's interesting to know the person and then we get into what's going on today.   Jotham: So after high school, I went to college at Princeton in New Jersey, and I was actually interested in public policy. So one of the things people are interested in public policy do is they go to law school. So I wound up I never really been to California only one time in my life. So I was fortunate enough. I applied to California schools, got into Stanford and and went to law school at Stanford, which is right in Silicon Valley, as it turns out. So I got out of Stanford and I went to work for the big Silicon Valley law firm for two years. You know, the firm that probably I think started Apple are famous in this area. Not that I have anything to do with Apple, but but I went to work for that law firm for a couple of years and then left and traveled the world. I hitchhiked around quite a bit. I've been in quite a few countries and that I eventually hung out my own shingle in Silicon Valley and people knew that I was. I started out in litigation, meaning when people are individuals or companies to each other. But after a while, a lot of the local lawyers figured out that that I could probably write a contract to protect people as best you can from getting into lawsuits.   Jotham: So that's how it started. And eventually, I'm an entrepreneur myself, so I like meeting a lot of entrepreneurs and executives of people. So I'm a lawyer that has a lot of people as clients, real people that have different issues. And so I like meeting them at all that show. When you start doing a good job with one entrepreneur, they refer you to other entrepreneurs. Lawyers refer you to other entrepreneurs. I ran an advertisement I talk about in my book, "Even CEOs Get Fired", which is sort of named after an advertisement ran 20 odd years ago and no longer existent magazine called Red Herring, which in those days was the hot Silicon Valley magazine. And it was titled "Even CEOs Get Fired". And you would not believe who called me off this advertisement because people have all sorts of problems at employment at every level. My book is for everybody from the entry level individual to the mid-level manager to the CEO. And all those people called me off that Ed. And and one thing led to another. And here I am. Now, I, I know a lot about protecting executives, entrepreneurs, mid-level employees, starting out employees, somebody with a new business and so forth. So that's that's the background.   Joe: Perfect. And so I notice that you have not one, but three officers   Jotham: I   Joe: Said true.   Jotham: Do. That is true.   Joe: How?   Jotham: How do you get to ask me how I wind up having three offices? So.   Joe: Well, because it's like I know even when you were with David Meltzer on that interview, it's like, why? What was the first thing that came to your mind when you said, hey, I'm going to break out on my own, get out of the safety net of working at a firm? Right. You don't have to think about much of anything but what you're responsible to do. But then you break out you open up not only one office, but you have three offices. So I was looking going, OK, man, he really went for.   Jotham: So that's the story of those offices, of course, that my longtime office has always been in Silicon Valley, in Palo Alto, although these days with covid you can work anywhere, we could work anywhere anyway when you represent as entrepreneurs do not care where you are in the world, as long as you're giving them excellent advice. And many of them won't even come to visit me in my Palo Alto office because time is money. They'd rather be doing whatever they're good at with the mobile games, whether it's by a pharmacy, but it's a Wi-Fi, whether it's security, whatever they're great at, they don't want to come visit their lawyer maybe once. So I could really work anywhere. But I had an office and I now have an office in Chicago land outside the Chicago suburbs, in part because I live there. And I can say that living near Lake Michigan in that area and those lakes out there is not the same as living by the ocean. We grow up along Long Island by the ocean, and it has to smell like salt. So I now moved back to California and I have an office in New York on Long Island as well. And that's actually because you're supposed to have an office in New York if your practice law in New York, and I'm licensed in New York, in Illinois and in California, Colorado and the District of Columbia. So that's   Joe: Perfect.   Jotham: How got.   Joe: All right, well, good. Can I can I break down what your firm and what you do, like what's the specialty before we get into talking more about the book?   Jotham: Look, the thing is, it's going to really help you, you know, the CEO, but it's also a breezy read. This is easy to read in the story. In the book, about 40 percent of the book is there. Fifty nine stories there that are fictional. They're the repetitive stories of genres of stories that happen, but they're not any specific story that made them up actually to Peet's Coffee in Half Moon Bay here. I wrote the I wrote all of those there. And so you might find out, hey, that happened to me or or it happened to somebody. I know. But it's because it's a kind of repetitive story that happened. So it'll be a really easy read for you. You can read it on a plane, you can read it on a train, you can read it at your house, you can read it on the beach or wherever, or you can read it, you know, looking for very straightforward advice about how to negotiate a contract and how to protect yourself.   Joe: I think it gets confusing with people who don't understand the law and don't understand when they might need an attorney and when they don't. What would you say if you had to put down the bullet points of what your firm does? What do you specialize in? So if somebody said, hey, they hear this and then they eventually see this YouTube video, they say that's one of those is exactly what I need. And they reach out to your firm. So it'd be nice if we knew exactly what you could help a CEO with or someone who is working for a company at a high level, at sea level position, any of that.   Jotham: So the first thing I have to do is be technical here and say that in California, you can't say you specialize in something, you have to say focus on it. That's some ethical obligation. So I don't want to mess it up for anybody who's from California listening to this. So what we focus on, I guess, is I've got I've got to turn that question around on you just to say that sorry about that,   Joe: No,   Jotham: Because,   Joe: That's perfect.   Jotham: You know, every every state has their own bloody rules. And so I pay attention to them 100 percent. And so I want to make sure it's focused. So what we do is what if you want one word is we help individual, whether they're the whoever they are, to protect themselves in the employment and personal relationships. So it could be a relationship with your boss, could be a relationship with your company, could be a relationship with your investors. That's typically what we do. So and we represent actually in their individual world, we even represent investors, professional investors like private equity partners, a private equity companies. Those are the venture capital or venture capitalists. We represent venture capitalists typically in their own deals. So when they're protecting themselves, when they're doing deals with other venture capitalists, for example, so with a CEO, for example, we would give us their contracts and they say, well, we should should we sign this? And I said, well, are you protected? Are you protected in your severance? Do you have a profession, what we call a professional prenuptial agreement, which is nothing more than a severance agreement negotiated on day one. So for the executive, that may be, you know, severance and equity protection may be protection for COBRA payments down the road for an individual like an engineer just starting out if they have any leverage at all. And honestly, many don't. But if they do a one line sentence, if you fire me without cause you've asked me six months of stock and and you pay me three months of pay, for example. And so that's what we do. Those kinds of contracts can be not just employment like you're thinking about, but they could be equity contracts.   Jotham: So how not to for an entrepreneur, how not to get screwed by your own investors for yourself. It's your own company. Let's say let's just say you taken capital invested. You have an investor, right? So they invest in your company. Suddenly they have 20 percent of the company, suddenly have 30 percent of your company. How do you, Joe, as a CEO, protect yourself vis a vis those investors? Now, like I said, sometimes those investors, the professional investors come to us because they want to be protected against their own investors when they do a deal. So with their own investors. So what they are doing is becoming limited. They're becoming general partners or having some sort of arrangement. So we review contracts and give straightforward advice about how to protect yourself and honestly what the risks are if you don't, because people and businesses take risks all the time. You as a CEO have to be taking risks in your business. So you need to be fully informed about that. And so that's what we do on the individual level. We do represent companies as well. And we are some of our CEO clients have have us, for example, representing their company because they thought we did a good job for them individually. So we do a lot of that also on the separation side, too, and I've described the employment side, protecting, protecting the CEO, like your question was on the front end. But the back end is we helped negotiate separation agreements all the time so that somebody has sort of a smooth landing and can then professional reincarnate themselves.   Joe: So I used to share office space with a what are called a placement agency. They were finding jobs for people   Jotham: Brian.   Joe: And some of these jobs would be at a high level and   Jotham: Right.   Joe: Really look fairly large salaries if the negotiation of that employment is is carried through the placement agency with the people at the company that are hiring and all of that stuff gets done. How can someone fit in, someone like you or your firm in the middle of that negotiation and make sure before anything gets signed and they get employed that they've been taking care of?   Jotham: So   Joe: That's   Jotham: If   Joe: Kind of tricky, right? It's it's.   Jotham: It's very tricky because the employment agency is working for the company and the employment agency typically gets paid only when the person is place, so the employment agency has a very that's not always true. Some employment agencies get paid straight salary or commission or something. That's not per person. They're just given a job or a project. But often they only they only succeed if they place the person. All right. So if you're talking on a lower level of employee going into the company, they often don't want to take the risk of going to get a lawyer because I could create a real problem, frankly, in getting their job. If you're talking about a senior executive being placed by an agency that is there, the really best placement agencies that really care about their clients that they're placing, even though they represent the company, will say go get a lawyer, but almost all of them do not even at the highest level. So it's incumbent on the on the on the executive, whoever they are, or entrepreneur. But in this case, employment agency is going to be executive to go and to say get get their lawyer. So once they get a lawyer involved, then the employment agency sort of out on the outside and some liaison between the executive and the company and using us often as shadow counsel. So we don't even appear until the end to work on the contract. But, you know, if you're going into if you're a senior senior level person, you want to know what your downside risks are, what your recommendations are from from somebody who's seen it hundreds and hundreds of times, maybe a thousand times before. So.   Joe: For someone who's listening to this, that is at that level that hasn't thought about that, step back for a moment. Take what you've been offered. Find someone like your law firm and say, I need you to review this contract to make sure it's in my best interests so that once I sign, I'm being taken care of all in there. And I have some sort of exit strategy that makes sense. That's fair on the way out.   Jotham: Absolutely, 100 percent, I couldn't have said it better myself,   Joe: Well,   Jotham: So,   Joe: I'm learning already.   Jotham: Yeah, it's great you're learning and it's just to maximize the return, the person   Joe: Right.   Jotham: That's listening to the podcast. So they want to maximize their return. Why in the world would they sign a contract without being fully informed? And the only way to be fully informed is to come to someone like myself who's done it hundreds of times. I can tell you we've had the most shrewd executives, some that have been so successful in their lives, and they come to us after they get screwed and they say, well, what happened? And I say, well, if you talk with me before you sign the contract, either you wouldn't have negotiated this and you would have protected yourself or you would have said, you know, Jotham, thank you very much for that great advice. I'm going to take the risk. I hope I don't call you to tell me to tell me meaning, Jotham,   Joe: All   Jotham: The person   Joe: Right, I told,   Jotham: That you told me so.   Joe: Right, exactly. Let's take me, for example, as a CEO of a company and like I had mentioned, I have I have had three or four companies up till now. Do you if what I ever come to you and say, I need help protecting my personal assets, I need some way for you to look at my business and look at my personal assets to make sure that as as an LLC, which I am an LLC with an escort on the tax side in my protecting myself, is that another thing that you would help someone do or that's just different? That's a different.   Jotham: That's actually a complicated question, so I certainly read the operating agreement because many, many people start it depends on how you're asking the question of it's called context dependent. If you're asking me how can I set up a corporate formation that I'll best protect myself with trusts and estates, I'm not the person to do trust estates. Right. We send that out to lawyers we know all the time. That's a special area if you want to set up. Like I said, I trust the estate and lawyers in the legal world. They call that trust the state's law. If you come to me and say, how best can I protect myself in the corporate world by setting up an LLC, we certainly could set up an LLC have done that. We also work with other firms or give advice all the time to our entrepreneurial clients. I mean, I'm like a secretary or just just have been secretaries of companies before for our clients. But we might work with with another law firm if, for example, they had doing a sophisticated security transaction by selling stock or something. But so we could we give advice on that. And at some point we'll stop and say, no, you need somebody else.   Jotham: If you're if you're talking about how you Joe, who has an LLC, can protect yourself vis a vis other investors or vis a vis partners, you might have strategic strategic partners or even vendors or contractors. Yes, we do that all the time. Then you would come to me. So basically we have client exactly like you're describing somebody who just starts a business. There's a bit of serial entrepreneur and they get most of their advice from us and we say, no, we're not giving you advice. For example, tax law. I never give advice on tax write. I know the lawyers who give the advice, but and I recommend our clients that to that. But I have I have clients who want me to give them advice on tax law. And I'm like, absolutely not. Let me let me let me tell you where to go. And, you know, most most people who are in business and and are will say, OK, well, my lawyer's telling me he's not the right person. We find them the right person. That's just an example. So your question sort of involved a number of possibilities. And   Joe: Sure.   Jotham: Without knowing the facts, I can't really answer 100 percent, but.   Joe: Yeah, and I'm just trying to drive to the fact that if I was listening, like I listen to a podcast of the chat and things will pop out during an episode where I'll say, oh, that is something I've been thinking about or something I to get an answer for. So I'm trying to make sure that everyone knows who's listening to this and eventually will watch it, know the things that you can do for them in case something pops up. I'm trying to ask the questions that if I was listening to this, I wonder if he can do this for me. It's that kind of thing. I'm just trying to make sure that if there's something you can do, I want people to know you can do it for them.   Jotham: Oh, yeah, I mean, you want to start a business, we knew that you want to get investment, we protect you, you want to do employment, work on any level, we could help you protect yourself. You got a strange sort of possibility for your next job, for your next business deal. You come to us, we give you straightforward advice, and that's really the key. And we give great business advice as well as great legal advice. And you'll see if when you read the book, "Even CEOs Get Fired" half of our work. Is that so? In other words, since we've seen so many different possibilities, people in the gym don't not going to see that the hair on my head on your YouTube channel. But but I've seen all these all so many different possibilities that go right in that go wrong. And sometimes they go right. The person's thirty third business, they say, oh, business one, that business do they reincarnate and they and they maximize their returns and they make it on the third go. But we have lots of people sitting there doing that on the bikes or in the gym and maybe on the rowing machine.   Jotham: A row or so do rowing machines, you know, just because it's they've succeeded twice before and they're going to their third job doesn't mean that they don't have tremendous pitfalls in their deal, whether it's their equity deal or whether it's their employment deal, whatever the deal is, whether it's a deal to to have your perks, for example, cars, for example, to drive around, it doesn't mean that because you've been OK the first two times, there isn't some gigantic problem that might rear its ugly head the third time around. So if you're going in as an entrepreneur to a company or starting a company or as your executive or anybody with leverage in employment, it's always a question. Do you spend money on a lawyer? But if you want to protect yourself or want to see what your downside risks are, want to be fully informed. I want to have either the opportunity to maximise your personal returns, whatever they are, or know that you're taking risks in that attempt to maximize them. You would come to me or my law firm or or a lawyer who does similar type work wherever that person lives.   Joe: Great. OK, so to lighten things up a little bit,   Jotham: Ok, it's.   Joe: So I thought about this when I heard you talk about there's fifty nine fictional stories there, actually there are real circumstances, but you've you've obviously protected the people by not naming names and naming companies or whatever. Right. So is that what you mean by those fifty nine. These are actual things that occurred, but you just created them to not name companies or names or anything specific.   Jotham: More like they're not they're not individual to any individual story, I've had it just happen so many times over and over again. And so it's like, OK, I get something that happens. An entrepreneur walks in and I'm like, OK, this is like 16 other times it's happened. It's new to the entrepreneur, but to me it's happened a lot of times before. So that's what I mean by it's fictional, but it's based on my experience. So I literally wrote them at a Peet's Coffee. Right. And so, I mean, let me take one, for example.   Joe: I was going to ask I said I was going to put you on the spot, say I love story, so I need you to tell us why.   Jotham: Ok, so there's one in my book, I actually spoke just briefly about it with David Meltzer. It's one I like. OK, here's a perfect example. There's a very successful woman as a number two at the company. Essentially, she is also a biathlete. So I like athletics. I never did biathlon, but it's people who do cross-country skiing and shoot at targets. Right. OK, she's very successful. She has a doctor. She is a doctor. But like some doctors that you never think about, they go into business. Right? All these biopharma companies, a lot of these are ends. They never actually practiced. But I got clients who I have clients who are MDs at practice and those that never practice. They get their degree and they go right into business. So this this character goes into business. And her CEO, she's doing really well after four years of this company and her CEO gets changed out the prior CEOs to lead. This happens all the time. New CEO comes in and this character is as good, as honest as the day is long. And the new CEO wants a yes person.   Jotham: So, you know, yes man, a yes woman. And she is not a woman at all. And so he decides he's going to push her out. OK, this happens all the time. So he makes her life miserable. But being a biathlete who's well trained, she's she's able to stays there and continues to work like we see so many of our executives and entrepreneurs, they think because they work harder and they do a better job, that the board and the CEO are going to somehow like them more. And that's not the way it works. If somebody who wants a yes person wants to get rid of you so or in a different world, very similar corollary genre. A new CEO comes in, wants to bring in their old team. They're going to fire people below them. And the literature is actually you should do it within 60 or 90 days. So it doesn't matter how good those people are. Anyway, she's a straight shooter. That's what I say in the story, right? She's a straight shooter at two hundred yard   Joe: Right.   Jotham: Shooting a rifle and she's a straight shooter. The CEO and the CEO finally can't take it anymore. And he fires her. He gets the board to approve the board votes. Five, nothing to fire after nine months. Maybe it's maybe I don't even my story. Right. Maybe it's ten months. Maybe it's seven months. But it's something like that.   Joe: Ok.   Jotham: This happens all the time. I've never had a biathlete as a client. I've always admired biathletes when I watch them on TV. I did spend time in Lake Placid while I was doing Lugt, a different sport   Joe: Oh, nice.   Jotham: So I could talk about that anyway. So what's the story? So this thing's all made up, but what happens after she's now out? She gets a severance agreement, she leaves, she's at the firing range, practicing at two hundred yards and she gets a text. Who's getting a text from she's getting a text from the investor of that company who sat on the board who voted to fire her was five nothing, remember? OK, the investor says, as so often happens in Silicon Valley entrepreneurial world, the investor says essentially this is all by text now. So I'm paraphrasing my own writing. So now north of our paraphrasing what I wrote and the investor says, well, why don't you look at two of my other portfolio companies? And she text back the character, text back to the investor and says, well, I don't understand. I got a great severance agreement. You fired me. Vote was five nothing. Why are you contacting me? And he says, well, it didn't work out so well at the other company, but one of my portfolio companies here might be a better fit. OK, that's a story that's happened multiple times in Silicon Valley, multiple times in the entrepreneurial world. I have no, that's what I mean. I created them. That's a genre of a story. So I could have a client come in today after our podcast, they could tell me a similar story and I'd say, don't burn the bridges with those people sitting on the board that you all those board members almost always invest in startup, not always, but almost always back the CEO until the day they fire the CEO. But you've just been fired. You're the EVP or the SVP or the VP, whoever you are, that board member sitting there who's a shrewd investor, the only thing they care about really is all of their other portfolio companies they're taking care of. Right. And so they may call you to offer you a job. So you don't know that. So what in this story comes in in a part of the book, which I guess I should show again,   Joe: Absolutely.   Jotham: "Even CEOs Get Fired". There's a chapter on professional reincarnation. So and this happens all the time to somebody just like this character gets fired. And so they reincarnate themselves in the next job. That's a very, very, very common circumstance. I often have clients. It's a terrible separation. They're having like this particular executive I described in my story, nine months of being beaten. I mean, it's a miserable place to work. But a lot of these a lot of these people soldier on. They've always been they think that they work harder. It's going to get better and often it doesn't. And but I often tell people six months later, you're going to call me and tell me it's the best thing that ever happened to you got fired.   Joe: All   Jotham: And   Joe: Right.   Jotham: Many of them, if they have protection, you know, they. They call me six months later, they say, hey, it's the best thing that ever happened to me, I got fired to have a better job. I have a better life at home. Whatever it is, I'm doing sports more often. I'm getting paid more. I get better equity, whatever.   Joe: Right, so there was two takeaways from that story for me. One was that potentially that smart woman had you look at their contract. And so when they did finally get removed from the CEO position, they walked away with a nice severance package. It didn't have to fight to get anything. And the second thing that you mentioned was that they left in good terms, at least with the board, which showed that they could then potentially get more opportunities down the road by not having this giant blow off at the end of it.   Jotham: So the I should say with what you just said, the second one is absolutely true and there's a part in my story where I talk about burning bridges and you should and I say, listen, sometimes it's the best thing personally, mentally to burn the bridge, to strike back. OK,   Joe: Right.   Jotham: I got that. But I what I talk about in the book and what I try to tell all my clients and the people on the podcast that are listening to everything in business coldly and calculatingly, if you're going to lose your crap in somebody and you're going to start yelling at them because they fire you and you're never going to talk to them again, that's fine. And but what I say is do it coldly and calculatingly, at least understand what you're doing. So in this in this case, and what I often talk about in the book is the character did not burn their bridges. It's true. They left the first part of your what you took away was that they had come to us for a employment agreement. Actually, in this case, two things. One is they got a great separation agreement even with the person who didn't like them and forced them out. They got a good separation agreement. So they negotiated that on the back end. And the other thing I should say is, as I say in the book, I am not into stories. It's modeled after the advice I would give. But I'm not in the story because the story is totally fictional. But it's as important to get a good separation agreement and be professional on the back end as it is to get an employment agreement on the front end.   Joe: So this has been bothering me, like, why did you stop? Fifty nine and I go to sixth. Why did you go past fifty five to fifty nine?   Jotham: The truthful answer is I didn't count them up until the end, so I didn't know how many I wrote,   Joe: Ok.   Jotham: But there is there is a story there's two stories in my acknowledgments, one with a colleague who's worked with my law firm a long time. I thank her for reading many versions of the book. And I tell a story there. And once for the four people I dedicated the book to, I tell the last story in the book and that actually involves for four Long Island guy going to the beach, Jones Beach. And so it could be 60 one by.   Joe: Perfect. OK, I just it was something that I wanted to ask,   Jotham: The.   Joe: So just so with the way the world has changed it actually let me let me back up in the dotcom era. Right. But like when everything was all about equity, how   Jotham: Right.   Joe: Much has that changed now? Because I remember when that was going on, like, I literally this is going to be funny. You're going to. But when I was working for a software company before I opened my first company and I was working in New York, we were actually teaching corporations how to use a Web browser. I was literally at the beginning of the Internet. So I remember just companies starting and going come in and work with us. The pay is going to be low to nothing, but we're going to give you equity in the company. And it was just all over the place. Every company was giving shares away. Right. That's the that was that whole era of the dotcom portion of the world. How has that changed now?   Jotham: It's exactly back to the way it was   Joe: Really?   Jotham: And absolutely there are hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people running around in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Remember, I've license a license to practice multiple states. So we have clients all over the country. They want equity. It's all about an equity play. Now, having said that, there are many, many companies who don't really give equity to anybody but their senior officers. And there's many places in our country, in America, where you only get a salary. And there are many, many kinds of many salespeople who care about equity, but mostly what they want is commissions. And, for example, an uncapped commission plan would be there, their their golden golden goose. They don't want to have equity. But if you're talking about the old dotcom days, because I was there then, too. And now if there are many people whose deals is all about an equity play, they get less pay than they could on the market for whatever they're doing. They take the risks and and often, especially for those starting out, coming out of college, they may go to two or three startups which will fail. And then the fourth or fifth one is the one that gives them, you know, a tremendous upside so they can go buy their next their house or whether the house, multiple houses, whatever it is. So it's really the same as it was when you were doing that in the dotcom era.   Joe: Was was there a lull at one point after the dotcom where everyone felt so burned about equity and all of that, that for a while it wasn't even on the table or.   Jotham: I think there was a guy there was like it never went away for everybody, but yes, there was definitely a period of time when I remember the stock market was in, that was way down and there weren't so many IPOs and people wanted that was all about salary even before the start ups or upside bonus upsides. If you did a good job after a year, even though you got a lower salary. And so it did it did desire for equity and equity plays slackened? I would absolutely say that there was like a trough like this, but now it's back to the way it was in my view. And it's that way not just for the entry level person coming out of college, wants to get some equity in the company and not just for the mid-level individual who's moving from one company to another, but also all the way up to the CEOs who want more equity and and give up salary or bonuses. Now, at the largest companies that you hear about the fortune, one hundred companies, those executives are getting equity and very high. So and bonuses and what's called long term incentive plans. So it depends on where you're what you're talking about, what company context you're talking about, what region of the country. But in terms of the startups of the world, the smaller companies in the world, the equity play for everybody from from the person who takes out the garbage all the way to the CEO, it's it's it's the way it was.   Joe: That's incredible, and you would see a lot of that where you are in Palo Alto, where you're know Silicon Valley right here.   Jotham: All the time,   Joe: All   Jotham: And when   Joe: The   Jotham: You   Joe: Time.   Jotham: Think all the time and when you talk about that, if you're getting stock in a company and it means a lot to you, you better figure out or you should figure out how to protect yourself with that stock. So, for example, many times companies give out shares over four years, let's say, or five years, they vest over time. And in the first year they have what's called a cliff. So you got no stock, you don't get any stock, you know, right. To stock until the end of a year. What happens if you're fired at 11 months and 30 days just before the year the contract says you get nothing. So do you want to protect yourself against that possibility? Because that happens a lot. Right.   Joe: That's crazy. Wow. All right, so I grew up in a large Italian family that owned a restaurant business   Jotham: Ok.   Joe: And I literally I partnerships for me make me cringe. Just just the word makes me cringe.   Jotham: Right.   Joe: And and I saw my own internal family fight and I saw my my father, who has since passed by his brother, is still living. But I saw that literally just separate and not talk to each other for years and the rest of the family hating each other. So that's just the lead in to the question of partnerships. Is there a part in the book? Again, the book is "Even CEOs Get Fired". Is there a part in that book that talks about partnerships and talks about what to look for, red flags, things that that seem to always go wrong in partnerships, any of that sort of advice?   Jotham: So there is a little bit, but it does not heavily focused on partnerships because but but the teachings in the book on how to protect yourself, maximize your returns, put everything in a clear contract. That's very clear. There's two sort of parts of the Italian family having the restaurant business and then a fight among family members. OK, and and that is discussed in the book in a different way, which is, you know, make sure, you know, you're going into business with. But part of the problem is I can't protect you from a fight among man family members who are fighting for many other reasons and historical reasons. Right. I mean, they just weren't family members in the business. They had had a family history. Right. They grew up together. They had uncles and aunts and grandparents. And so that's that's a personal sort of a personal concern. Those people that's that that a lawyer can help you with, although we turn out being a psychologist all the time. So we might have been able to help. For example, somebody comes to us and this happens all the time to partners in fighting and we say, well, why are you fighting? You know, maybe it's better you break up. And before you have a fight about this, do you really want to sue each other? Because you wouldn't believe some of the lawsuits that are fought between family members of former friends. It's terrible.   Joe: Well, yeah, and I was going to say this was a push out, my father got pushed out, so this was a thing where he worked there all the help build this business his entire life. And in the end, this could happen and he got pushed out.   Jotham: So the worst part of those kinds of push ups that happens, and I'll tell you another one of my stories that repeats itself all the time, the worst problem of those stories that I hear about you're telling me about is the personal the personal suffering. Right, with getting getting kicked out of your own family business, getting stabbed in the back by your own brother or uncle. That worst part of that isn't the financial loss, although that can be terrible. The worst part is the personal loss and the personal relationships that are lost and the suffering that happens on a personal level, that sometimes people need psychologists for that to help them there rather than a lawyer. The second part of that is the financial potential loss that we could have helped to protect himself. Because if you have a contract and we've had some of these where nobody can fire the other person, contractually, you can't fire them. So they have to do a deal. Or in a typical family situation, somebody passes, you have a buy sell agreement. But imagine having a contract that we've had these with really sophisticated investors. So imagine like your manager, whoever pushed out your dad, not having the legal right to do that contract says the business is 50 50. And one or even the contract could say uncle gets 70 percent of the business. I get 30 percent of the business. But you can't fire me and you've got to keep paying me or well, if you fire me, at least you got to you've got to continue to pay me my exact same salary with a cola cost of living increase. You know, there are ways to help to make sure that it's negotiated out as opposed to a coup. Now, the story. You want to hear this story from the book.   Joe: A   Jotham: That's   Joe: Totally.   Jotham: All right there. The repetitive story that happens a lot. And again, the worst is just like your dad. The worst is the personal cost is the person who gets the entrepreneur who gets stabbed in the back and is forced out of their own business. The palace coup, the leader or not necessarily always the leader, but the person who following along, enjoying in that palace coup is a person who stood up at their wedding. And the wrongdoer is the person who stood up in the wedding. And so when the client comes to me with the story and it's happened many times, multiple times over the years, and the worst thing you feel both terrible about is the client here is now telling this story. They made a lifetime of decisions to have the wrongdoer stand up at their wedding and they believe that that person was their loyal friend. And the destruction of that friendship and and the and the new clients recognition that they got it wrong on a personal level, that's even worse than the the financial costs and the financial cost can be great. Being stabbed in the back by the person who stood up at your wedding stories only happened when money becomes involved. And the startup world, that's usually when equity suddenly becomes it goes from a penny a share and suddenly it's worth fifty dollars a share, twenty dollars a share. And by the way, unfortunately, I have to report that the wrongdoer can be a bridesmaid just as much as it can be a groomsman.   Joe: Wow. OK, so here's the question I have based on the circumstance we just talked about with my father having that business and it goes for any any business. If you start to think something's going bad, is it too late then to try to figure out a way to protect yourself?   Jotham: Maybe, but the first thing you should do if you get if you get concerned that something is going wrong is not wait around, it's go find a lawyer who knows what to do and might be able to help you. So this is something I do talk about in the book. If you get a lawyer while the things are going wrong and he or she acts as your shadow counsel, they can often help you, first of all, react in an appropriate way, in a way that protects yourself, maximize your protection while things are going downhill. But for example, in the email wars that might happen where somebody else is trying to paper file and and, you know, something's wrong, but you don't know what they're doing, you can paper that file to protect yourself. And so that's really important since actually what you just described. I've had that on my website. My my professional website, which is not the book's website, is "Even CEOs Get Fired" dotcom. So   Joe: Perfect.   Jotham: If you want to learn   Joe: I was   Jotham: More   Joe: Hoping   Jotham: About   Joe: You   Jotham: It.   Joe: Would say that.   Jotham: Yeah. Even see, it's one word, "Even CEOs Get Fired" dotcom.   Joe: Our.   Jotham: But even before that, I had a professional website being a Silicon Valley very early on and it talked about exactly what you just described as something you feel something's going wrong in business, in your job, in a relationship with an investor, whatever it is, call an experienced lawyer, not necessarily the your friend, the lawyer, not necessarily the person who did your your will or your trust, somebody who does entrepreneurial and executive law. And they've seen it before. And they can give you really good advice and you can really keep yourself from being really financially harmed if you do that.   Joe: And when something like that happens, like my my brain initially went to, OK, if I felt something was going wrong and I was in a partnership or some sort of partnership, but any circumstance where there are other people involved, because I'm lucky in my case, it's just. I don't have to deal with anything. But if I was in that circumstance, do you have to get the other party to sign? Like, if I came to you and said, listen, something's going wrong, I need to start protecting myself. We need to write up some documents. Are they not official until the other party has seen them or sign the.   Jotham: Now, you've asked me a complex question,   Joe: Good. Now, here we go.   Jotham: You could have an oral contract, right? Many   Joe: Ok.   Jotham: People have law contracts. You could have an oral contract evidence by a course of business doing business. So I really have to know more. That's something the first thing we ever do when somebody comes with a sort of a fact pattern, you just ask me is we want a full chronology of events. So if you come to a lawyer who's seen a lot of it before, they'll be able to figure out where you might have protection because you have an oral contract, for example, as one example, because the other side has it doesn't have anything in writing, even though they're trying to force you out. But I don't want to go back, if I can, to your father getting pushed out,   Joe: Mm   Jotham: If that's   Joe: Hmm.   Jotham: All right. Like,   Joe: Yeah.   Jotham: I don't know what happened. I never heard about it. So you just told me. Tell me now. But it's likely that your father groused a lot and was worried about it with his own family and didn't do what I just described, which is go find a lawyer who's shrewd and maybe unable, able to help him protect himself from the Paluska that that happened. And so it happens even in a small family business, you know, and now it's I'm going to a lawyer. You go to a lawyer and and you and you tell them the fact pattern. If they're good, they'll give you advice. And some of the advice might be, don't tell me I'm have a lawyer. Right. Just go along. You know when to disclose. You have a lawyer is it's a business decision and you want to maximize your return when you do that. So now that I went back to your father, I might have forgot what you just asked me. So   Joe: No,   Jotham: I have a question.   Joe: No, that's OK, I just I didn't you you alluded to the fact that it could be an oral contract. I didn't even know there was such a thing. I thought that in the eyes of the law, everything had to be written and signed. So I don't know what you mean by an oral agreement.   Jotham: So so OK, because you have listeners, I assume, across the country, I have to say, I'm not giving specific legal advice just so they understand   Joe: Yep.   Jotham: In every jurisdiction is different. And if you happen to live in Alaska or Louisiana, particularly Louisiana, it's really different. So, you know, if you're in North Dakota listening to this or you're in Illinois or wherever you're listening, you have to go see somebody in your own. And wherever you are, your own fancy word is jurisdiction, state, whatever. But in most places, they're an oral contract is equally as enforceable as a written contract. If two people come to a meeting of the minds literally about a contract and there's consideration and it's oral, depending on what the form of the contract is, you can have an enforceable contract. Now, they're in every state. There are certain contracts that can't be formed orally. A classic example in many places is you can't have a contract for land that's oral, but in most other places in all contract is enforceable. Is a written contract actually now a written contract is easier to sort of prove in some ways because you have it in writing. And if you ever have to go to a judge or a jury, you put that thing up on the screen and it says, look, you signed it and there it is.   Joe: Right.   Jotham: But it's equally enforceable, dependent, you know, there are always limitations on oral contracts that every state might be a little different, but absolutely. And so then there are other fancy things in the law, oral contract evidence by writing. So, you know, if you can prove it, you have an oral contract and you sent an email and that's your writing. So that might be a little different. An oral contract evidenced by a course of dealing. We always did this for the last 10 years. So that shows that we had an oral contract to always do this in the future. That's a possibility, too. So now I recommend in the in my book, even the CEOs get fired. You sign clear written agreements because that reduces your chances of getting into a fight. Right. If it's in writing and it's clear, even if the other side's a wrongdoer, you know, it's clear they're realize they're going to try to work around the clear language and and or what happens off to the business. If you have a really clear contract and they don't want you, they buy you out. The classic example being a separation agreement, they fire you, but they give you a good, good exit package.   Joe: So I had no idea so that it's a huge light bulb went off that I thought if it wasn't written and it wasn't signed, if both parties didn't sign it. Both attorneys didn't review it. It doesn't if it's not done in writing and signed, it doesn't exist. So this is.   Jotham: If you've had a meeting of the minds so so typically the kind of contract you're talking about in writing where it goes back and forth, back and forth to the lawyers and everybody, there is no meeting of the minds until the contract is signed. But, you know, now you're going to think about this. Well, have I ever had an oral contract with somebody else who might have something against me? So but yeah, sure, it could happen. So perfect. I'll give you an example. In your business, you're a CEO of your own companies. Imagine you. I don't know you. You met a successful person and you said, hey, I'll give you twenty five percent of my business if if you tell me how to increase my market share, using that as an example by by one hundred and fifty percent in the next two months. And that person then connects you that connect you with, I don't know, the great guru of market share. And suddenly in a month you've you've increased your market share by one and a half times. You might owe them 20 percent of your business as an example,   Joe: Yeah.   Jotham: Keep you from going out, making those promises.   Joe: Plower.   Jotham: So think of it this way. If you make an oral promise, you promise somebody something and they're giving you something back. I'm not talking about, you know, a family member or something, although it could be a family member. Lots of crazy disputes that way. But you promise somebody something in business and it's something to do with your business. And you say, for example, I'll give you twenty percent of my business if you do X, Y and Z. And the other person says, I agree, if I do it in the next two months, you might have an oral contract depending on what state you're in and depending on what it is you promised. Again, if you promise to to sell your property, not likely in most states, but   Joe: Right.   Jotham: If you're selling your securities 20 percent of your LLC, you might.   Joe: It's crazy, I literally it's an eye opener for me. I had no idea. So I'm glad we talked about OK, real quick, because I know I have to let you go. I wanted to ask how covid has has either as it happened with all the things that were going on and what you expect to happen once we reopen up, because, you know, there are these circumstances where people are furloughed. But what does that even mean? Like some of these people are furloughed. They're not getting paid. They have no insurance. It's just like, yeah, we might bring you back. I don't know. Legally, it doesn't seem to mean anything. What happens with people that are taking home equipment from the companies to use it to work from home? The the security of that data, it's no longer within the premises of the company, through their secured network. I mean, all of these crazy things that are going to going to open up as time goes on is is are you starting to see some of those effects or work on those types of cases or any of that sort of stuff?   Jotham: Sure, I mean, your question, we could spend another hour   Joe: I know, I know.   Jotham: Because it involved so many different things, right? I.P individuals coming back from furlough and so forth. So just as a general matter, covid obviously a lot of people working at home. And so there all those things that you just talked about are we get calls about both from the individual side and from the company side as well, because the IP sitting at home or on somebody's computer and not in the location because they're working at home, all of these things are really critical and they've happened since covid shutdown. And now what I think about coming back is some of those businesses wanting everybody back and people don't want to come back yet. So that's a big problem. On the other hand, some of the business want to keep people at home. They're like, OK, it worked really well, let's keep it at home. They don't need to be in an office lower overhead. And actually, sometimes they realize there's more efficiency at work because there aren't anybody to talk to when you're at the house. So it goes both ways. And then there are issues about how to come back from covid and what to do. So we've literally had calls and given advice on many of the things that you just discussed. And they're completely different, right? They're just issues that came up that nobody ever thought about before. I mean, they always thought about what they thought about them, but it didn't happen. Didn't happen. Like a whole country got stuck at home. And now there are all these issues. So happy to talk to you, Morna, in another podcast and we're coming to the end about it. But   Joe: Yeah.   Jotham: You just raise like so many issues. And one question.   Joe: Yeah, I know it's a it's and I was just and for the listeners, it means intellectual property says I want to make sure they understand what we're talking about, what we're talking about that. But, yeah, I'm sure it could be an hour long. Just talking about it real quick for any new laws created because of covid-19 and all of that. Have you dealt with new laws?   Jotham: Oh, yeah, there's a huge number, I mean, for example, the stimulus package that happened because of new laws, right? So there are other other laws associated with that. There's been a whole bunch. The legislatures, you know, have done done various things, but there's been three stimulus packages. That's just a one example.   Joe: Yeah, yeah, OK, perfect. Can you do me a favor and show the book again, "Even CEOs Get Fired".   Jotham: Even   Joe: It's a.   Jotham: Ceos get fired, you can get it on Amazon, so if you if you type in, "Even CEOs Get Fired", separate words like you're targeting in the words of a book, then you can get, you know, come up on Amazon right away. If you type in my name in the book, you know, do a Google search, it'll come up. The website is "Even CEOs Get Fired" dotcom. But it's one word. You have to type it all together. There's no spaces. So, yeah, like I said, I it's a really breezy read, so I recommend it to you whether you're at the beach, whether you're whether you're in the gym, like doing a bike and you want to, you know, wanted something to read while you're or something. And one of the other things at the gym or   Joe: Hmm.   Jotham: Whether you're on holiday, it will not bother you at all. Like those 59 stories. If you add the two at the end 60, what I think you really enjoy the read.   Joe: Perfect, Jotham, I really appreciate you coming on. It was a pleasure to meet you. It was a pleasure to talk about this is a subject that I have very little knowledge of. And every time I get to meet someone like you and talk about something this in depth, it makes me feel like a better CEO, even though I probably should know more about this than I do. But I appreciate it very much. I wish you all the success with the book. I really look forward to reading it.   Jotham: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on your show, Joe.   Joe: You're welcome. Thank you.

A discussion with international speaker, author, comedic entertainer, partner of Bliss Champions and co-author of "Unlocking Your Purpose" found on Purpose Code.com. Patrick has become one of my all-time favorite people because he lives in a state of bliss. He has found his purpose and he's filled with unlimited peace, joy and love. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. This one is definitely a highlight for me and hits home as I continue my own journey to find my ultimate bliss. Enjoy! Joe Patrick Combs: Connection with Patrick: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.combs "Unlocking You Purpose": purposecode.com Bliss Champions: blisschampions.com Patrick's website: patrickcombs.com/ Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.libsyn.com Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to: https://joecostelloglobal.lybsyn.com Follow Joe: https://linktr.ee/joecostello Transcript Joe: All right. Hey, Patrick Combs, welcome to the podcast. So glad to have you here. Man, I've been waiting for this, as you know, for quite a long time, a few few months now. I think. So I'm   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Really excited   Patrick: Thanks,   Joe: To do   Patrick: Joe.   Joe: This. Yeah.   Patrick: As as I have been too excited to be here with you.   Joe: Well, thank you, I appreciate it and I do appreciate your time. I know you're busy, guy. So so what I like to do is, you know, I was very intrigued by us meeting, even though it was all, you know, via the Web. But, you know, I had this opportunity to see you talk to the group that I was in and, you know, learn a little bit more about you. But what's amazing, and you already know this about yourself is your storytelling and all of that. But before we get into all that, I want to kind of give the audience the back story of who you are and where you know your progression, where you came from. And then we're going to talk about all the cool things that are happening today, because I know you have, like me, a lot of irons in the fire, but you have some really unique things. You're working on things that actually, you know, that resonate deeply with me. And that's the connection I have with you. And so I'd like for you to kind of explain, you know, who where you came from, who you are. And then we'll get into the nitty gritty of everything.   Patrick: Ok, that's nice, Joe. Well, I am, I am I was raised by a single mother. In Bend, Oregon, which a lot of people are familiar with these days, because I guess been super big and super nice, but when I was in Bend, it was super nice, but not super big was sixteen thousand people. And I was my mother, a licensed practical nurse, raised my brother and I on a very small salary in high school. We were living in a trailer house, which was no problem. But, you know, let me just sort of sketch and nobody from our family had ever gone to college. But my mom was a pioneer. She was the one from our family tree that was reaching for Moore, and her primary way of doing that was to encourage my brother and I with phrases like Do what you love. Learn to work with your mind. Don't worry about your mistakes, look it up for yourself in the encyclopedias. That's what I bought those damn things for. And so I was the first person from my family to go to college and. In college, it's first at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and then at San Francisco State, I began to really realize that my purpose had something to do with uplifting and performing.   Patrick: And today, I know I'm fifty four and I know my purpose very clearly, it is through performance and story to uplift. And so but but, you know, you're in your 20s, you're trying to figure out what to do with your life. I felt all the calls, all the tugs in the direction of my purpose. And I could not be more grateful that just by by God's grace, I feel so I don't feel very responsible. The older I get, the less responsible I feel for my choices. I just feel grateful for them. But the greatest choice I ever made in my life and I think the first greatest choice I ever made in my life was that I was going to be an inspirational speaker. Come hell or high water is starting at twenty six years old and an author. And so without any connections, without, quote, the appropriate background or credentials or accomplishments, I did that. I became a paid professional, inspirational speaker, and it's twenty five years later and I've spoken all over the place, but there's been a million people that have that have been in front of me and my audience is listening to me waxen. And then along the way, I expect, you know, I took that purpose and and I expanded into other joyful callings, this the the second that I'm the second sort of biggest imprint that I'm known for, I think, is that I created a comedic.   Patrick: Solo comedy show for and I performed it all around the world in theaters. So if you look in broad strokes at me, if you go Patrick Combs, who is this guy and you read my bio and stuff, you you read Hall of Fame, inspirational speaker. You read comedic performer with the smash hit show and an author of five or six time author. So that's what I look like on paper. And behind the scenes, you know, I have just I have I just live doing what I love. That's been the great game of my life to live doing what I love. To place my joy. Even above my my above money, because somehow I knew early on that if I placed money above Joy, I would not end up joyful and probably not even end up healthy. So so today I have a third company and it's called Bliss Champions, and I and my business partner and I help people really lock into that great truth, unlock their purpose and maximize their joy.   Joe: So I have so many questions. OK, first question this is going to speak to well, no, actually, I want to go back to the early part of this, which is you were lucky enough to have a mother that instilled what she did in you with, you know, that positive reinforcement. I think if when I listen to other people talk who had struggles creating the life that they would ultimately wanted, it seems that we trace a lot of that. Back to how you were brought up and what was said to you by your parents. That's the ultimate it seems to be the ultimate catalyst of what you end up becoming. And the people that had an incredible reinforcement and, you know, go ahead, make mistakes, whatever. Follow your dream, follow what you love. All of that stuff. They end up becoming these incredible people and the ones that didn't have that struggle through ridding that from their brains and flushing all of that garbage out and then having to kind of rebuild themselves at a at a, you know, somewhere in the middle, at an older age. And then eventually the hope is that that that   Patrick: Yes,   Joe: Leaves them so   Patrick: Yes and no,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: Right? So for me, one hundred percent, yes. My mother my mother gave me the foundation. The schemata and the foundation, both the both the sort of the loving, the loving, positive self reinforcement of positive self-esteem. Combined with really great directives, I mean, she was my first Joseph Campbell, right? He   Joe: Hmm   Patrick: Said, follow your   Joe: Hmm,   Patrick: Bliss. And   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: She said, do what you love. But when you when you counter correctly and you don't want to add something to it, when you say, well, and then what if you got negative messages from your parents? Well, you know, that's Howard Stern and that's Bono and that's Oprah. So what I know is the difference between, though, is that because I'm really fascinated with how Howard, this conversation Howard Stern and Bono had once both sharing that. So it seems like if you if you got no love speaking for men specifically, you got no love from your if you're trying to somehow live up to a father that beat you down, seems like tremendous successes often created. But then you have to reckon with why you created it, what foundation it was created upon emotional, psychological foundation. It was created on some point. I think there's a reckoning for all of us in our childhood, you know, to say, hey, no one gets out of their childhood unscathed by the by the inadvertent or accidental mistakes of their parenting or perceived mistakes. No one gets out of that. You know, I came out of my childhood heavily damaged by my mother's suicidal nature. You know, so. I just wanted to sort of add that footnote, Joe.   Joe: Yeah, no, I and I and I look at this sometimes through my own lens, that my mother struggled, you know, her family struggled financially. Her father was an alcoholic, left them her mother had to, you know, take care of them all. And so when she when she was raising us, it was always a very cautious sort of raising. It's like, you know, do something that that makes a living. You know, you get health insurance like a very sort of secure, protective sort of thing. And I think that in my own brain caused me to not necessarily do all that I thought I could do, because I just always felt this this limitation of, you know, you shouldn't do that, you know? And I was pursuing a music career. So I you know, that's very, very hard career path like acting and other things like that. Right. And so so when I when I think about this and we have this conversation, my father was very much would push me to say, go, do you know, do that. But it would be more quiet like my mother took care of us. Right. He was working. So she got the say. And it was like, you can't you just can't go do something like that. You have to take the safer route.   Patrick: Now,   Joe: Right.   Patrick: That's   Joe: So.   Patrick: That's impactful, right,   Joe: Right.   Patrick: That that's your first introduction to the rule book for how to proceed   Joe: Yep.   Patrick: In your life, and you were given the one that said proceed with caution.   Joe: Correct.   Patrick: Boy, that I mean, yeah, I was given the opposite rule book.   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: I really was I was given a very different rulebook, and it that matters, doesn't it?   Joe: Yeah, totally,   Patrick: It matters   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Until it doesn't matter, as Secretary says, about suffering. Suffering matters and is helpful until it doesn't matter and it's no longer helpful,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Right? So as soon as we wake up to oh shit, that's the rule book I had. Now we're free to grab a different one off the   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: Shelf.   Joe: Yeah, and it's just whatever that triggers that, you know, and whether that's, you know, reading different things and being around people that, you know, like yourself, that create this this aura of like, no, this there's another way. You know, it's just it's this is one life. Go do it.   Patrick: Right.   Joe: You know, one's around anymore to tell you what to do, especially people that are older. Right. Is just   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Go.   Patrick: And there's no safety in playing it safe.   Joe: Right.   Patrick: It would be the rulebook, no safety in playing   Joe: That's   Patrick: It safe. That's   Joe: Hey,   Patrick: The greatest   Joe: That's   Patrick: Risk of all.   Joe: That could be the next title of your next book.   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: All right, before we get to all that other stuff, so then the next thing that you talked about was the speaking part of it. And I know there's so many people out there and and, you know, they'll definitely be people in my audience that listen to this and and eventually watch the YouTube version of this that look there. They would love to do that sort of thing. And and it's hard to get someone that has had such great success at it like you to where I have you one on one at this moment, say, well, how did you do that? What was the first step? And then what was the part that finally went to something much bigger? And then where you are now, where, you know, the audiences are huge, you're speaking fees. You know, they could be I don't know   Patrick: They're   Joe: What they   Patrick: Big,   Joe: Are, but they're big,   Patrick: They're   Joe: So.   Patrick: Big,   Joe: Right. So   Patrick: Joyfully big.   Joe: Good. So what was the first how did you get into it?   Patrick: So let's I'm going to go fast and I'm going to speak to two different directions, because I heard you very specifically. First, I'm going to go fast on how I got into it. But   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Second, I'm going to couple that, if you don't mind, with what I would do today if I was starving,   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: Because there are different worlds.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: But what they both have in common is the psychology that's necessary. OK, so let me address the psychology last year, OK? What I did is it twenty six years old, I naively said naively and powerfully, impotently said I want to be a speaker, so I want to be paid at it. So how do I get a paid speaking engagement? And it didn't take much looking to say I have to tell people I'm a paid speaker. So I made I bought a mailing list of every college in the United States, half of half of all colleges in the United States of America, those that were part of an association looking for all kinds of talent. And and then I made an ugly ass flyer and I licked and stamped one thousand two hundred and fifty envelopes and I put them all in the mailbox. And and then I and then I waited for the incoming interest, interested prospects, and I cold called and and failed 40 incoming prospective cold calls, a failed 40 out of 40 of them. And then the universe's magic that is always present will always show up, kicked in. And another lead came in and I followed it up. And after four months of failed, failed calls, I got a yes from black out Black Hawk. Technical college in Wausau, Wisconsin, for one thousand two hundred dollars, total airfare included,   Joe: Wow.   Patrick: And I was off and running.   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: You know, so you can hear both, but you can hear them, you know, the challenge of it and the mechanics of how simple. I somehow intuited. The path to be and I see people overcomplicate marketing all the time, especially in today's world where marketing super sophisticated and you know your call, it looks like you have to be you have a billion followers and all this stuff and none of it's it's rarely ever true.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: So anyhow, if but but I was launching myself as a speaker in 1992 when if you wanted to have a voice in the world and you wanted to be paid for it, there was, you know, a keynote speaking. Was it? You know, I was looking up to the Tom Peters of the world   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Who are being paid 50000 dollars in and they were like, oh, Jesus, Tom Peters has a job where he gets up in front of people. They pay him to give his opinion and his advice. Jesus, I wanted that so badly. I wanted that so freaking bad. So I went after very directly who would pay me to speak to them and give them advice? Who could I command their attention of and be 100 percent confident? I can tell you something that's beneficial.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: In Wisconsin, as I said, oh, I know what to say to college students because I was there just three years ago and they're not getting the truth about what it takes to to to grab that job you're passionate about and go for it. So and therein lies the the deep psychology of what it takes. It's it's answering a tug on your sleeve from your soul that says you have something to say, you want this and you've and you've got something to say. But the hardest choice. The first three steps are the hardest one is to recognize you got a tug on your sleeve. Your soul is saying, that would be incredible and something is there for us. I believe in that more than I believe in anything in the world. Something in Steven Jobs said it's something inside you intuitively knows what you already want to be. Something inside me intuitively knew I wanted to be on stages, inspiring people, uplifting people to answer that call is difficult. It's hard as hell, only the most courageous. No, only those who find them. Their moment of courage will do it. So you don't there's no such thing as being courageous, there's just being courageous in the right moments. So once you answer that, then the second giant hurdle you got to get over, even in today's world, is what's my message? Because the number one thing, the Powers's speaking career is confidence.   Patrick: That you deserve to be on that stage. And it's hard it's hard to find if you don't know where to look. And so that confidence has to be built on who can I confidently be certain I could make a difference with because of what I know and I've experienced and I've overcome. Twenty six years old, I could not have built a successful speaking career speaking to corporate audiences. Why? I had fantasies about it because Tom Peters was the guy I was looking up to, but I could not find. A firm grant firm ground to stand on, say, I can walk into a corporate audience and tell them what's up. At twenty six now, I haven't worked at a corporation. So so the deepest the second deepest question, the answer for yourself is who come on, just tell me who in front of you. Who do I put in front of you that you go, Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, I can do this. And when you nail that boy, you're like nuclear powered. Now all you've got to do is say, great, how do I tell them I'm available for hire? How do I tell the right people I'm available for hire? But so far in today's world, though, so here's the nuance in today's world, though, Joe, I wouldn't start a keynote speaking career in today's world if I was if I was saying I want to be a speaker,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Because now social media exists because a messenger, I'm a messenger and a messenger. And that just means you got the messages you want to share. So so the messenger and me saw. Oh, well, in 1992, that was stages. If you were the keynote speaker in 2000 and 2001, it's every day on social media.   Joe: Right.   Patrick: And that's where so anybody that, quote, wanted to be a speaker said, no, no, you don't want to be a speaker, you want to be a messenger, constantly sharing your messages and often getting invited to stages in stages. Now look like Zoom's. They look like webinars. They look like 20 minute Ted Ted talks.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: They look like anywhere where you are the authority getting to share your message.   Joe: So let me ask you this, I don't mean to interrupt, but I want to know why, when you first did that speaking when you started on this path, what made you think only three years out of college that you had something to then go back and teach the college kids? What light bulb went off and said, I can go back and explain to them that I'm doing what I love?   Patrick: None of none of my peers, I looked around and none of my peers, all of them that were smarter than me, all of them had better grades than me, even my peers that went to better schools than me, UC Berkeley and Stanford, they all seemed to lack a fundamental understanding that I was benefiting from, which is you should do what you love. Isn't that wild?   Joe: Yeah, it's it's I mean, you're lucky   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: It's.   Patrick: They they they all seem to have bought into the giant myth or lie or distortion that says you should do what's hot. You should do what you can get. You should do what pays you good money,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: All of which to   Joe: Mm   Patrick: Me   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: Look like I'm in a casino. Astonishing bullshit. Like, I think one of the greatest blessings God ever gave me was a radar that said, that's inferior bullshit.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: That's not what a great, meaningful life of purpose is built on, it's not built on what's hot on what makes money, you know, on what other people will think is cool. It's built on what your soul thirst to do.   Joe: Yeah, it's it's powerful, it's just, you know, and I just had this conversation with our our friend Chris hey, where I feel like there's I don't I don't know how to even say this, but it feels like we're fixing ourselves later in life. And I wish what you did on that first stage for that, those college kids, we could even go a little earlier in life and and, you know, talk to kids that are I don't know what the age, what the mentality is and what the age group and what they can absorb at a certain age. I don't know that scientific research that's been done, but it would be nice, you know, how sometimes a young kid will see something they'll see   Patrick: It's   Joe: On Michael   Patrick: Happening.   Joe: Jordan?   Patrick: It's   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: Happening,   Joe: I   Patrick: You   Joe: Just   Patrick: Know.   Joe: Wish we could move it. I feel like we're all trying to fix it now   Patrick: Right,   Joe: In   Patrick: But.   Joe: Midlife where I wish we could move it earlier.   Patrick: What you know, I mean, the role models for today's kids that that are young, that are below 10, they're tremendous   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Because I have a 12 year old son. And if you've never seen Mr. Beast in, my son loves   Joe: Oh,   Patrick: Mr.   Joe: Yeah, I   Patrick: Beast   Joe: Have   Patrick: And I love Mr. Beast. That's an that's a messenger. That's   Joe: A.   Patrick: An inspirational messenger. Who is role modeling. Hey, you can not only do what's wildly joyful and fun, but you can give your that guy understands giving it a level   Joe: Yeah,   Patrick: That I dream of learning that   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: I dream of embodying. So, you know, every jet I view this next generation as Savea as more enlightened and it's so awesome to see.   Joe: Yeah, I.   Patrick: But Mr. Resum role modeling for my son, you know, I thought I think I'm a role model for my son, that you can do what you love and have an abundant life. And Mr. Beest is better role model. You know, Mr. B gets it earlier and at a level that's in almost incomprehensible,   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: You know.   Joe: Yeah, well, OK, so you've talked about the speaking part of it, and then how about a little bit about the one man show, because that was a really interesting story to me about   Patrick: Ask me   Joe: How   Patrick: A question,   Joe: That came about.   Patrick: Would you benefit me with a question?   Joe: Well, I want to know, like what I remember the story, how you saw it on TV and a trigger, you were like, I want to do that. Like when you said, I want to create this show. And just that one night in that hotel room that triggered it all for you, just like that, you're still on stage, but it's a step in a completely different direction.   Patrick: Yeah, thank you, Joe. OK, so then let me think about. Making the super relevant for anybody listening. OK, so what's really remarkable to me is that we can be successful. So maybe someone's listening to say, I love my life. I like my life. I'm Ahmad, I'm successful, and you're just clapping along and you're saying, oh, yeah, I got this. I couldn't be happier for you, but I want to I want to tell you a true story from my life about when I felt that way, but I wasn't. But I wasn't. But there was something much bigger that was tugging at my sleeve that was very hard to acknowledge. So I was this quote, by my standards, very successful speaker all over the country, whatever. And then but. There was this secret unrealized ambition, Joe, and you haven't you haven't heard this sort thing, and the secret unrealized ambition was to be a story teller in the theater, just the only guy on stage, enthralling and entertaining an audience and making them laugh with just a personal story from my life. This and this was a dream that came to me that was inspired. It's not a dream. It's this was a. A soul calling. That I felt when I was about, oh, twenty two or twenty three years old, because it even before I became a speaker, my girlfriend took me to a theater, not a movie theater. And we watched Spalding Gray, a legendary theater performer, just tell us a story for an hour and a half from behind his desk. And I walked out of that theater, Joe, and I turned to my girlfriend in her old 1964 Rambler. And I said, thank you for bringing to me that that was amazing. And she said, Oh, yeah, he's so great, isn't he? I said, I looked her in the eyes. I said. Now, that was unbelievable,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: I said what I would give to do that. Because I thought I just seen the best thing a human being could ever do with their life and, you know, and this woman who loved me very much and meant nothing harmful by it responded. Yeah, but you'd have to be funny. Bakersfield was super funny, and what she didn't know is, is that was like shooting an arrow accidentally right through the chink in my armor because I heard it and said, oh, yeah, what was I thinking? I just sat in there with a master. And I'm not funny and I'm not even good storyteller, so I'm just sitting here in this 1964 Rambler having myself a pipe dream. I can't do that what he just did, he made it look effortless because he's a master and so I built a speaking career, which I very, very, very much love, but I still had this secret, unrealized ambition in it. 30, what you were referring to is at 33 years old. Well, another theatre performer had come on the scene, a named John Leguizamo. And John Leguizamo was in my book was Spalding Gray Times 10. And no disrespect to Spalding Gray, the creator of the medium. But but where Spalding Gray sat behind a desk, John Leguizamo tore up use the entire stage became 18 different characters, male, female, young or old, and was 10 times funnier in my book. So he came on.   Patrick: I was there in a hotel room and he has his HBO special came on. And I've never felt worse about my. In some way about my sort of career self and, well, this really I got this horrible, horrible ache pain in my solar plexus, and it was the pain of fear, of paralysis, of envy, of self-loathing. Because what? Because it was this swirling ball of hell in my stomach that said, I love what this man is doing and I want it so bad for myself, but it's impossible for me to get to because it's it's. I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough to ever do what I dream of doing. And and that was that was the that was my fear of not doing it. You know, built up for 10 years is, as we like to say in my business, Bliss Champions. Your purpose left on, attended to becomes a purpose, curse becomes a curse. And so on that hotel room bed, I felt the curse and the pain. And fortunately, I grabbed for a pad of paper and I wrote at the top, what are you so afraid of? And I started freeriding. And I wrote all these fears, you'd expect them looking bad, looking stupid, being awful, wasting my time, you know, wasting money, taking away from my really good speaking career. And then in the end, I wrote something that really surprised me. I'm afraid I won't be as great as John Leguizamo or Spalding Gray.   Patrick: And when I wrote that sentence. It like took the lid off of something super dark and evil in me, because when I saw that sentence in the light of day, I never realized that was one of my fears. It looked absurd. I laughed out loud at the absurdity of I have never told and I've never even attempted what they've done and yet. And yet the reason why I'm not going for it is because I not I might I'm comparing myself to the greatest human beings on planet Earth at this craft. And it just struck me as ridiculous, and then a voice came into my mind, a thought that I never had before, couldn't you just do it for fun? And the weight of the world was lifted off that secret, unrealized ambition, me, who's so success minded, had never thought of just doing it for the sake of fun, the pleasure of I should try that. Who cares if I fail? And that was my ginormous breakthrough on my greatest bliss ever. And so I so I started doing it for fun shortly after that. And to make a long story short, for 15 years, I toured with my one person solo show. I and this is a metric I care about, but is not why I did the show. I did the show for the love of doing the show, for   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: The love of learning to do the show, for the love of hearing audiences laugh. But in the end, what blows my mind is a hundred thousand people bought tickets to see my show. Hundred thousand people sat in my audience for 15 years. I had a red carpet tour of the theater world and today it's being made into a Hollywood movie.   Joe: It's amazing.   Patrick: Right.   Joe: And it's incredible.   Patrick: So.   Joe: So what you said or you said, why not just do it for fun if someone's in the same spot that you are in that hotel room, when you were watching him perform on that HBO special, would you say that that's a good starting point for some people who just can't seem to to to do that thing that they so want to do as it just. Is that a good trigger? I don't know if that's the right thing,   Patrick: It   Joe: But   Patrick: Is.   Joe: Is that OK?   Patrick: In Bliss Champions, we've learned we've got a real extraordinary map for for these for these kind of we call them bliss journeys, going into speaking was a blitz journey for me. A journey to follow my bliss. Going into the theater was a journey to follow my bliss. Writing a book was a journey to follow my bliss. So we've got a really detailed map. And what's surprising is the biggest pitfall we know of on the map is the desire to monetize what's possible to use to Zoom to early. So   Joe: Interesting.   Patrick: You think of your bliss, right, and then immediately society is trained us to think, but how will you make money at that?   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: And that kills more bliss journeys. The two biggest killers of all blessed journeys is not getting started and trying to monetize to even think about monetizing too soon. So they're the antidote to monetizing too soon is forget about monetizing. Do it for fun. Do it for fun. The benefit is Joy.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: The benefit is fun fund, the benefit is aliveness, then the benefit is ball in motion, and momentum has to be included in anybody's realistic formula of great success. Momentum is one of the major ingredients of great success. So as long as you're sitting around not doing something, trying to figure out how you how you can guarantee success on it, you got no momentum. You got nothing.   Joe: Yeah, yeah, that's   Patrick: So, yeah, just do it for fun.   Joe: I love it,   Patrick: That's my mantra now, Joe, is   Joe: I love it.   Patrick: Is I don't wake up my career and figure out how to do things for money, I wake up and I figure out how to do things for joy and the money. I mean, you know, I care about money. I make good money. But the money is and is a secondary thought. It is the longest money has that rightful positioning in my life, it's secondary,   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Like once I once I figured out what's joyful to me and I've got emotion in it, we can figure out how to monetize it. No problem. You know what we teach English champions. If you can't monetize your your most blissful activity, don't blame it on your bliss. Blame it on your on your business skills. And you don't have to blame it on your business skills, you just have to know it's not my bliss that I can't monetize. I don't have to change my bliss or forgo my bliss. I have to learn to monetize.   Joe: Yeah, it's you hit it on the head and it's a it's amazing how many people have such great talents, great ideas, great aspirations, and it's just that putting that one foot in front of the next one. And the one thing I think you hit it right on the head is just how I can make a living at that. How can I do that? And it's it's it would be so cool if people just did it for the fun of it and then the joy and what they bring to other people, all of that other stuff the universe delivers because it just realizes that's what you were meant to do. Right. It's just.   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: Well, so you mentioned Bliss Champions, you know, throughout this conversation. And I think this is the appropriate time now to sort of clue in because, again, we're we're limited on time and I have a million things. So let's talk about this champions. So I would like to know I ran across it just because once we got off that call where you were teaching us how to tell the story, you know, tell our story and a very creative way, I then was doing all my own research and I said, who is this guy? Man, I love the way he talks. And I can tell that there's just something about him in his soul that's on fire. And I want to know more about it. And then it took me to Blessed Champion. So I'd like for you to explain to the audience what this champion is, what it does, what you know, how, and then we'll put in the show links all of the other stuff to get in touch with you. But I you know, to explain what it what its purpose is would be awesome.   Patrick: Ok, well, I'll give you I'll give you us a scoop, Joe Torre, I don't know when you're going to publish this. I actually should ask you, when are you going to publish this? Probably.   Joe: I can do it whenever.   Patrick: Ok, well, you   Joe: I do   Patrick: Know.   Joe: What a week, normally I can postpone this, I can I can   Patrick: Ok, well, look, in   Joe: Do   Patrick: About   Joe: It tomorrow.   Patrick: In about one in about one week, two weeks tops, we're going to announce our brand new book   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: And I'm so excited about it. It is the conversation we're having. So I'm going to tell you the first person I'm going to tell, it's called "Purpose Code", How to "Unlock Your Purpose", maximize your joy, astound yourself and if someone says, oh, jeez, I am interested in this free report we made about it, which is the 10 reasons why people don't unlock their purpose and go to purposecode.com. So no one knows that website exists yet. So.   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: So but they're going to find out first through going to purposecode.com.   Joe: I love   Patrick: So   Joe: It.   Patrick: Bliss Champions. Bliss Champions, so the surprising thing, Joe, is in, you tell me how much you've seen as I can't believe how much I've seen, it's shocking to me is how many successful business owners there are. Who are lacking joy. These are people I'm telling you, like Mega Millions dream home, not one dream car in the driveway, as many as they desire looked up to by all their peers and all their employees. Happy that they built the business, happy they overcame all this stuff and made it to the top, but their deepest secret. Is something's missing. And so my business partner was one of those guys, you know, he cashed out for 50 million bucks. And still, something was missing. So his story is quite remarkable. He's not here, so we won't tell it, but but. As you saw, so he both knew it through personal experience and sitting in on groups like on the IS. Know, as the entrepreneurs organization, you got to be a successful entrepreneur to qualify to get in. Well, one of the first things that my business partner saw up close and personal through that organizations, wow, so many people here have secret unrealized ambitions that they're not going for because somehow they're successful business.   Patrick: Has it been a little bit of a bind? And somehow along the way, while they were flexing their entrepreneurial muscles. They their their muscles for joy and bliss atrophied or were never developed, and so we both inherently understood how much impact if you can shift a person at the top of an organization to be joyful, they will spread. They will spread that message through the entire organization. Leaders that lead from Joy and that follow their bliss want everybody to follow their bliss and maximize their joy. That is the you can't be living joyfully and blissfully, truly without wanting to spread joy and bliss. It's impossible. Love, it's impossible for love to not desire to spread love. So. So. Bliss Champions is our remedy, it's we're four years into into seeking out and accepting individuals who who are successful but know something is missing. They don't know how to figure out what what is missing in what would be in their lexicon, a smart move, because they're used to everything being, quote, smart, right. What would be a good, smart, legitimate move that would bring them more joy? And we're experts at that. We help them unlock their purpose, because once you know exactly what your purpose is and you can put it in words, you have a true north and you not now you don't make missteps.   Patrick: And then but once you unlock your purpose, then then the great opportunity is to feel great, you know what your purpose is, what bliss journey should you take up? And there's a lot of choices. So you have to have good decision making structure. So we call ourselves Bliss Sherpa's because we've been up and down the on our own bliss journeys through our whole lives. That's that's been the blessing of our lives. We know the territory. We know the mistakes. We know the pitfalls. We know where where people quit and why they quit. So we Sherpa people up on blissful journeys and all of our secrets to doing that, that we've you know, I've been on I've been Sherpa and I've been a Sherpa for people following their passion and living their dreams and following their bliss for twenty five years. And Eric has been doing it for an equal amount of time as a CEO of large organizations. So this is why I'm so thrilled that we wrote a book together on it and the book's called "Purpose Code". And all of our secrets are in that book.   Joe: That's great, it is was there some momentous occasion that how are you and Eric connected?   Patrick: Yeah, Eric cashed out for millions of dollars, and he and the day after he cashed out and he went to lay in by his pool, just view overlooking his wine estate. He was rushed to the hospital and almost died from   Joe: Uh.   Patrick: Poor health while he was laying in that hospital bed contemplating his mortality. He realized I didn't finish the job of my purpose. And he knew that Eric's always known I've known Eric twenty five years, Eric has always known his purpose is to help other people, is to help is to inspire himself to live joyfully and to take that inspiration and spread it to other people. This is the thing about purpose. Here's a lesson and purpose. Your purpose is, first and foremost, what selfishly brings you joy. And you can't support your purpose if you're looking for if you're looking outside of yourself for where to save the world, you will you'll you won't see it when you say, look, it's just selfish. Something inside me always, you know, is always finds joy when I'm in this direction, when I'm doing this kind of activity, I'm my best self. Once you identify where your best self, what you'll see is then that when you give yourself that gift, you automatically give it to others and desire to give it to others. And that's where your purpose becomes a service to the world. So so, Eric, figure it out, man, you know, I I've always been living my purpose, but I slipped off track. While I was going on flexing his entrepreneurial muscles and going on this incredible monetary tear.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: And so he got out of the hospital, began working on his health and called me up and said, let's start list champions. There's a there's a he said there's you know, the one thing you and I have always been united on is wanting to help people follow their bliss.   Joe: Now, that's really crazy. That's.   Patrick: And the reason why I said yes is because I had hidden from my bliss for 10 years in in fear, right, my secret ambition seemed   Joe: Yeah.   Patrick: Impossible. And so I knew the cost of doing that. I knew the falsehood of doing that. And I and I knew that I knew the tremendous pressures that await anybody on the other side of finally finding the wherewithal to   Joe: But.   Patrick: Do it. And so, as I said, once you've experienced that kind of joy and bliss and truth, you want to share it with others. You want to say, like, I'll show you where your greatest life is and society just doesn't it just doesn't have enough messages. You know, it's societies has too many messages about smart, about practical, about money, about status. And all that stuff comes with following your bliss. But it can't be it can't be the deciding factors or you won't know where your bliss is calling you to.   Joe: Yeah, it's like we have it backwards, it's like the cart before the horse, right. And if we can just flip it, it's everything just sort of opens up and through Bliss Champions, you help people to work through this. And then ultimately the goal would be is is it a week long?   Patrick: It's a six it's a six month program.   Joe: Six month program, so.   Patrick: Yes, it's a month program, people apply to get in.   Joe: A.   Patrick: We we we work with seven people at a time, cohorts of super small seven. So it's super individual. And and then it culminates after six months of coaching and masterminding, it culminates in our super, super specialty. We take you to Bliss Island, which is in Hawaii where we own the property and we run an extraordinary five day retreat to try to really launch our our participants and into their bliss.   Joe: Yeah, it's incredible. I   Patrick: It's   Joe: Love   Patrick: Fun,   Joe: It.   Patrick: It's   Joe: You   Patrick: Super   Joe: Know you   Patrick: Fun.   Joe: Know that I love it. I just   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: One of these days I'm going to be a blessed champion and I'll have to figure that out. But sooner than later,   Patrick: Now, we've   Joe: I'm   Patrick: Launched   Joe: Not.   Patrick: We launched Authors', we've launched we've taken people that that thought this isn't a this isn't worth a book. And now they're published on the best publishers on Earth and they've got a multi thing deal with one guy has only he said his bliss was motorcycle's writing Harlesden. He thought, what can I do with that, that you can't monetize that? And and now he has one of the only dealership licenses in the country to rent Harley's and take people on Harley tours, Harley Bike Tours.   Joe: Mm   Patrick: He   Joe: Hmm.   Patrick: Has his own Harley bike tour dealership. We've taken CEOs who had giant companies but weren't happy and now they're super joyful, super happy. Their marriages are better. And they're and in addition to running their company, they're joyfully doing this thing they always dreamed of doing. They're they're more amplified, express self. So our stories sound like that, you know.   Joe: Yeah, that's great. So how can someone find out about this champions and how do they go about doing what they need to to become a part of that program?   Patrick: Well, let's I'm going to answer that really quickly and then let's go to a different territory, if   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: You don't mind, OK, because I don't want someone listening to this. I'm looking at the clock here and I think that we have about 12 minutes. And I   Joe: I   Patrick: Like   Joe: Just   Patrick: To maximum   Joe: Want to I think   Patrick: My.   Joe: It's amazing. I wanted to   Patrick: Thanks.   Joe: Give it its time because I   Patrick: Well,   Joe: Think   Patrick: Everybody   Joe: It's, you know.   Patrick: Everybody should start "Purpose Code", because the biggest value that they can get right away is truly to read this report that I wrote. And it's called "The Ten Things That Stop People From Unlocking Their Purpose". You got to know, how come I don't know my purpose? What am I missing here? So go to purposecode.com and just grab that free report.   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: And then and then it'll it'll lead you to learning about Bliss Champions. It's an application process. I would love people to apply. It's free to apply, you know, and then we individually interview you get to know you and and we have all kinds of ways to serve. And   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: You can get the book in your hands.   Joe: Ok,   Patrick: But   Joe: Cool.   Patrick: But let's let's let's see how many more how much more insider. Something super helpful we can pack into the last ten minutes here.   Joe: Perfect. So I have something that I totally wanted to ask you that if you can put it in an understandable layman's terms where it doesn't come across as being overly spiritual and fufu. But you talk about being present in so many people these days are talking about that. But I love watching your talks. When you you know, you're out doors taking a walk and you have your phone and you talk about it. But how do you put it in and like everyday   Patrick: Layman's   Joe: Terms   Patrick: Terms,   Joe: For it? Yeah,   Patrick: Yeah,   Joe: Because, you   Patrick: Yeah.   Joe: Know, everybody looks at and go, wait a second, you want me to sit in silence for ten minutes, meditate, or you want me   Patrick: I   Joe: To   Patrick: Don't write.   Joe: All of those things to pull yourself back in, to be centered, to have, you know, hold space for yourself, all these things. And it's just so hard these days. We're getting bombarded from all sides. So because of you and how you can communicate these things, I want to know from you what being president means and how someone could practice it on a daily basis   Patrick: Ok.   Joe: Where it's not this.   Patrick: You're   Joe: This.   Patrick: Making me. You're making me super happy because now you're bringing up my next favorite subject.   Joe: Perfect.   Patrick: So   Joe: Awesome.   Patrick: So I. I am both deeply spiritual about this, but but there's no need to talk about it in that way because I didn't approach it that way. I just approached it from man, I need I need a different way to do my life. And I found that different way to do my life. And it was the most revolutionary, impactful, beneficial thing I've ever learned or done in my life. And so you'll see me spend the majority of the rest of my life has boiled down to two two things. Two things on one hand, follow your bliss. And we've been talking about why, why, because it's your bliss, it will bring you bliss and, you know, as we say in Bliss Champions sometimes. Is there something better than BLIS because BLIS means perfect happiness? So what are you looking for if you're not looking for perfect happiness? So but in follow your bliss, there's a doing this to it, right? It's it's OK. We don't similar, but there is another path to bliss. And so I have a right hand and a left hand strategy to life in my right hand because I love having a career. I love to have something to do every day. I love making, you know, while having a career. I follow my bliss and in my left hand, I, I. Nowhere Bliss's without doing anything, I know how to find BLIS every single day of my life, no matter.   Patrick: What happens, no matter the circumstances, no matter the hardships, no matter the challenges, I know where bliss is, even in storms. So my career could not be going well, but in my left hand, I still know where Joy is every single day and how to get there in a concrete fashion. So that to me, my this left hand strategy I'm talking about that you brought up that I call a presence practice. That's where it sits in my life. So. Let's see, it's a good window into this. I'm taking a little quiet space for it to find me. Why would someone want to practice presence? Because what I didn't know I was well into my 40s, Joe, and I had never once wielded the word ego. And and up until the point when I got a new definition and it became very meaningful to me, Igoe to me meant don't be egotistical. It meant, oh, or you have a healthy ego. It takes a healthy ego. That's all I thought of ego when I was in. And then, to be honest with you, I hit a rock bottom in my life sometime in my 40s, my ego, the my shadow self, my bad behavior, the worst of me. The worst of me put me in a position where I were where I was at my rock bottom, and I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way.   Patrick: And I reached for there had been a book sitting on my cell for a long time that I had no interest in. It was called.    "The Power of Now", Eckard Tolle. And I grabbed this book and it re educated me and it re informed me and it completely transformed my life. The book didn't transform my life as much as my adherence to what the book said for the next seven years on a daily basis transformed my life. It did it very quickly, but I was so in love with what I was discovering that that I just kept being a diligent student of what Eckhart Tolle calls presence. OK, so in a very short amount of time, here's what I would love somebody to experiment with on this call that is non-spiritual. The only thing that is ever causing you a bad feeling. Is your thoughts? Now, so I had to wrap my mind around that first experiment with that, because I used to believe, no, I'm having a bad feeling because this shitty thing happened. And I was positive that was true. Until I wasn't until I began to say, wait a minute, is there a buffer in me that's causing the pain, not the situation, this is easily answered, but you should but everybody should try it on. That's life changing, because what if situations and bad circumstances are not causing you bad feelings? What if it's what you think about those bad circumstances, how often you think about those bad circumstances that are causing you a bad feeling? OK, for instance.   Patrick: I want to talk about the pandemic and then I'll talk about the pandemic, for instance, the day that it's announced that we're going to be in quarantine for however long, an indeterminate amount and 20, 20 people in the world had multiple possibilities for a thought about it. Somebody sitting in their home could have taken that news and began thinking all kinds of really bad thoughts that, hey, are well justified. I'm not here to argue with the with the with whether that thought is justified. But somebody could have been sitting there thinking, this is awful. I might lose my job. I like going outside now. I can't going outside. What are the implications of not going outside? What if I'm in my house forever? What if I get covid-19? What if my friends get covered and I die? What if they never leave? The governor is terrible. The president is terrible. The vaccine is terrible. Was it made in the lab? Those thoughts are causing in a bad and negative emotions in the body. And what if and some people thought those every hour of every day. Not not by choice, but by by habituated pattern of their mind, getting to think without ever being safety, without ever any but any other force saying hold on.   Joe: Mm hmm.   Patrick: Do we want to think like this 24/7? Is it serving us? OK, but equally to lots of people did that. So lots of people had horrible emotions. And I'm not saying don't do that, I'm just saying be aware that's why you had horrible emotions. What didn't happen is the pandemic is the the announcement the pandemic did not reach into anybody's body invisibly and say you now feel bad. Outside circumstances cannot reach in your body and and flip switches and say you feel bad. They cannot be the cause. If only a fox can be the cause, equally so and wildly true, unbeknownst to me just six years ago, but now perfectly known to me and the most exciting thing I've ever learned is some people heard the news of the pandemic. And fought and fought like this. Oh. We're going to go into quarantine. Now with to wash the dishes. And didn't have further thoughts about it until there was more news or until those thoughts were necessary. And didn't feel negative emotions, or if they did feel the negative emotions, only felt them for as long as that emotion lasted, while it wasn't being sustained by unchecked, unreasonable, insane, incessant thinking. So a president's practice is simply, well, on one hand, a presence practices the deep recognition that circum negative circumstance circumstances don't cause you upset your thoughts about them do and your ego. Ego should be defined as when when you're not thinking your thoughts, they're thinking you. And you don't even know it. So I learned to not be the crazy guy, the insane guy who is washing dishes, who is physically washing dishes, but who mentally in my mind for 15, 20, 30 minutes is having an imaginary argument that I'm winning with somebody else.   Patrick: I learned to not be that guy, I learned that I that I was concerned that we're all constantly that guy. And that you don't have to be that you can wash dishes while you wash dishes. And that if you do so, here's what I promise you, because I know from experience, if you learn to quiet, to say presence means I'm not going to be in the future, I'm not going to be in hallucinatory future scenarios. I'm not going to let my mind run off to hallucinatory past scenarios. I'm not going to hallucinate about the future. I'm not going to hallucinate about the past because those can only be hallucinations or call them imaginations. You cannot make the future real. You cannot make the past real. The only real is ever. But you can find through your five senses. So presidents practice means live in the real more often. Want to think about something, think about what you're doing. Be what you're doing. Washing dishes, wash the dishes. If you're working on your book, work on your book, if you're talking to another person, talk to another person. If you're watching the birds in your yard, watch the birds in your yard. So here's the let me give this for me, the big wild finish, first of all, if that's all I ever knew and I figured out how to do that six years ago without any other further teachings, I would be right where I am today.   Patrick: I and these are not light sentences to me, these are the greatest revelations of my life piece. A profound sense of constant peace, a profound sense of joy for no reason and a loving feeling. You know, that filled what I used to have this black hole of, gee, I wish I could get more love. And now I have a fountain of love that just comes from inside me for no reason, peace, love and joy for no reason are what automatically and guaranteed come from being present doesn't require meditation. It requires noticing that your thoughts are running rampantly out of your control and you can distance yourself from them. And then once you distance yourself from them, you can I I like to call them the roommate, you can notice your thoughts are not you? They are a crazy roommate that's always stirring up shit in your head and never stops talking. And you are not that roommate. And you can move that roommate to the garage in the day you move. And it doesn't happen in a day the more you put that roommate in the garage. One hundred percent, peace, joy, love, for no reason other than you moved your roommate to the garage and. Miracles will begin manifesting in your life. For some reason, the entire universe is more capable then of coming to support your happiness.   Joe: It's incredible. I just I can sit and talk with you all day, and we've already gone over our man. I could just I literally could sit here and then do this. So before we leave this one subject, I think it's important. Is there is there any sort of when you talk about the practice, is there any little tidbit of how someone can do that in the simplest way? Because I think everyone gets bogged down with all of the things that are just, you know, for example, we talk about meditation. Is this hard? I mean, I used to get up every day that I made it a promise that I wouldn't do anything until I just put my headphones on, put the app on on my iPhone, turn. Everything else also wouldn't be interrupted and just did it. And I felt like that was my most productive. Let's say it was a year that I did it straight. I haven't done it in so long. I feel like I got to get back to it. I can do it like I don't mind meditating. But first there are people that will never do that. So what is of super   Patrick: I'm   Joe: Super   Patrick: One of those   Joe: Simple.   Patrick: People that doesn't matter to me.   Joe: Ok,   Patrick: I was one of those people that will never meditate,   Joe: Ok.   Patrick: And I'm really happy to say that that both are fantastic choices, whichever you feel called to clearly. And they both lead to the same way. But if someone if if in some crazy really hypothetical, I can tell when I'm saying something stupid, I'm saying something stupid. But in some crazy, stupid hypothetical situation, it's a pattern. You have to choose one for the world meditation or presence practice. I would say we got to go with presence practice. It's easier. OK, so, yes, I have two things that are really simple and super practical and bless you for asking Joe the number one thing and and wildly enough this what I'm about to say is the prescription and the advice of seemingly every great. Teacher, you know, on the planet, that's that is spiritual and it's it's to be conscious of of one single breath. So at any point in time you go, Oh, I want to do it. I want to try this president's practice. You would simply take a one breath and be aware of that of your breathing for one breath. And your awareness, you can shift around, you just say, look, my job is to be aware that I'm having this breath so that for you that might mean, oh, I'm going to focus on the feeling of the air. Coming into my body and exhaling from my body. Or you might say, I'm going to become aware of the feeling of my body expanding and contracting, or you might you're awareness might say I'm going to be aware of the sound of my breath. Doesn't matter one conscious breath because it is impossible to be conscious of your breathing and think a thought at the same time. But conscious breath is both a great it's a great present to practice because it will be difficult for most people at the beginning of their journey to complete one conscious breath without becoming aware. Fuck, I   Joe: No,   Patrick: Started   Joe: That's right.   Patrick: Thinking. I started thinking during I, my mind got off the leash and started thinking something halfway into that breath. And so that's the great teacher one because that's OK. That's a president's practice of presidents. Practice isn't isn't stopping all thoughts. It's becoming aware. Are of the thoughts of the roommate. It's becoming you're you're you're winning when you go to the roommate came in and started talking shit while I was trying to take a breath. So that's called a wake, that's a state of a weakness that in as long as you're awake to your thoughts, peace, love, joy and miracles will begin pouring into your life. Mark my words. So but as you will practice that, too, you can take a conscious breath without thinking on most given days. Wonderful. OK, the second practice, right, is that built my life on this. Is. Step number one, notice when you're feeling anything that's bad. The only thing this doesn't apply to is physical pain. OK, so I want disabled people to eliminate physical pain. It can be applied to physical plant pain, but let's just say that's an advanced course. OK, but the step number one, the most important step is to notice, oh, I'm feeling upset in any way. And there should only be one word. It would be helpful if if people change and said there's only one word now we're going to throw out all these different various words hate, depression, loneliness, sadness, grief, worry, overwhelm, stress, anxiety, who cares? Fear.   Patrick: They all deserve really one word. Suffering. They're all a form of suffering, so notice the next time that you're suffering a negative emotion. Boom. Now there's a great opportunity for step number two, OK? And usually when you notice this, what's fascinating is you'll have been feeling it for a long time. That's how long it takes for awareness to come in and say, well, I'm feeling something bad here, but I did this very for at least a year and I got to choose my life. So first, I know I have a bad feeling. Step number two is built on the awareness we already learned. Every bad feeling began with a thought that was against something happening. Every bad feeling is caused by a thought that always follows the same structure. This shouldn't be happening to me. This shouldn't be happening. OK, so when you have a bad feeling, like you're like a person trying to defuse a bomb before it really blows up, and so you trace the wires knowing at the other end of the wire there will be a fire. You had a thought at the other end of those wires that was something about you thought it shouldn't be happening. Let me give you some examples. He or she should have spoken to me like that. I should have gotten that job. I shouldn't have gotten that. There should be more money in my bank account. There should be a different president there. There. That guy shouldn't be president.   Patrick: That shouldn't have happened through my television screen. I shouldn't be in this condition. I shouldn't have that ailment. I shouldn't have this pressure. I shouldn't have been raised that way. I shouldn't. So all you're doing is tracing those wires to what did I think shouldn't be? As it is. That was the source of your pain. Now, once you have that, the third step is to take that shouldn't it shouldn't have. And. See if you can find any part of yourself and you always can. It's harder at first that says. I can allow that it. That it is that way and you're why your justification, why can you allow that it is that way can always be. Sanity because. It is. That way. And as soon as you accomplish any ability to allow that, what you are against, to just allow that, it is it's even if it's temporary allowance, it's not saying I'm OK with that person being president forever. It's not an allowance of forever. It's I'm OK. I can allow that. That person is president. Currently, because they are. So you just looking for this momentary allowance of what all spiritual teachers say of what is to be against and I love it when they point out to be against what is is insanity. Because. I'm against that this can exist really, because it exists. Could you allow that it exists? I can allow that exist, why? Because it does exist, right?   Joe: So, so far   Patrick: Right   Joe: Of.   Patrick: Now, it's not a total acceptance of and I and I can I'm and I'm allowing that these cans will exist for forever. It's not saying that. Can you allow that exist right now? At first, you'll hear your ego go, no, I hate that can. But can you allow that it exists right now is anything. Yeah, why does it exist right now? And   Joe: The.   Patrick: And all all the it shouldn't exist or they shouldn't exist. It shouldn't exist. You can do that for 12 years. Twenty four, seven years can will still exist.   Joe: It's just.   Patrick: So if you can allow that, it exists. You have accomplished. A presence practice, because presence will what will happen next will always happen, you will feel better and you'll notice how I feel. I'm returning to peace. And once you accomplish returning to peace, you'll notice or I just feel in general more love, and then after a while you'll notice, someday you'll take a measure of your life, you'll say, is my lecture. If I say my life's joyful all the time everywhere. Why? Because you moved your roommate, your ego to the ground.   Joe: Oh, it's awesome.   Patrick: Now, there's a fourth final step to that, and I think of it as advanced, but so sometimes it's hard and sometimes it's easy, but it's super fun. The fourth step, the third step was, can you allow that? Something is what it is. And the fourth possibility is can you embrace. That it is what it is. Is there anything in you that could embrace that could say not only can I allow the can is there, but I can embrace that the can is there and you can see why that's a harder step because something you were previously just totally against, could you embrace it? Now, it's a that's a different sort of class, it's not complicated, but it takes more words, my journey towards learning to embrace things I was previously against. But I'll tell you, like some of the greatest revelations of your life come when you learn to embrace everything. Everything's.   Joe: It's really powerful, man

At this point, it’s old hat to say that 2020 was a pretty wild year — countless industry experts have waxed poetic about the long-term implications of the acceleration of ecommerce we’ve seen this year.  But Joe Manning hasn’t just been talking about adapting in the face of change, he’s working to make it happen.Joe is the Chief Business Officer at Shipt, an on-demand delivery service that connects customers with thousands of grocery items and retail shops like Target, Best Buy, CVS, and national and local grocery stores -- and they do it all through a single mobile app. This year Joe has been on the front lines of scaling Shipt while still delivering not only physical products, but exceptional experiences to Shipt customers, employees, and partners. Earlier this year, Shipt doubled the size of its shopper network to meet the growing demand for grocery delivery. And now, as the holiday season is in full swing, the company has added 100,000 more shoppers to its network. Not every company will have to scale quite that quickly or extensively, but ecommerce companies that will thrive moving forward will be the ones that are ready to jump into new markets, pivot quickly, and reach beyond their comfort zone.On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Joe explains what it takes to do just that, including how to maintain a culture of happy workers and customers as your company grows and changes. Plus, he looks at what is ahead this holiday season and why last-mile delivery is an area ripe for innovation.  Main Takeaways:Super Market Sweep – When entering new markets, researching the dynamics of where you are expanding is a critical step. No two markets are the same, and each new market will require investments in different areas. Taking the time to get to know who your customers might be and what their needs are will provide you with a better idea of where you should invest your resources.Happy Employee, Happy Customer – Even if you are employing mostly gig workers, helping to build a good culture and work environment should still be at the core of your business strategy. When workers feel supported and connected, they in turn will deliver better customer experiences, which impacts the bottom line.Choose Your Own Adventure – The future of ecommerce is all about providing choice, personalization, and bringing the best of the in-store experience online. Companies that learn how to capitalize on the unique needs of every customer through gathering data, implementing technology and deploying resources — whether it’s last-mile delivery, seamless returns, or personalized shopping suggestions —  will lead the industry.Tech Talk – There will be more tech brought into the ecommerce experience, especially as it relates to grocery shopping. From barcode scanning, to robot shoppers, to maps to help customers navigate the aisles in-store, there is a lot coming down the pike.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, and welcome back to the number one ecommerce podcast. This is your host, Stephanie Postles, co-founder at Mission.org. Today on the show, we have Joe Manning, the Chief Business Officer at Shipt. Joe, welcome to the show.Joe:Well, thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.Stephanie:I'm excited to have you too. How many podcasts have you done so far? You seem like a good veteran.Joe:This is my first.Stephanie:Ooh, really? Oh, this will be fun then. I love having people on for the first time.Joe:Cool.Stephanie:So before we dive into Shipt, I was hoping you could kind of touch on your background at Starbucks because I saw that you worked there, I think, for over 10 years. And I want to hear what you did there, your role and some of your learnings that you got from there.Joe:Absolutely. So, I had the opportunity to work for 10 years at Starbucks. Starbucks was an amazing company. And one of the things that I really loved about what Starbucks did, and does, and how that applies to Shipt, Starbucks is very focused on the human connection between the barista and the customer. And they're great at leveraging technology. But as an enabler for a human connection. And I think at Shipt, we're trying to do very much ... We are doing very much the same thing. We are all about creating great connections between shoppers and customers, and we're a people-first organization. And we recognize the technology is a great enabler for that. But it is about the human connection.Joe:And so when I was at Starbucks, I worked in a couple of different spots. One area was the licensed stores business, which is the store inside a store. So, if you go into a Target or an airport, that business model I worked with those retailers to really build out those businesses. And then in addition to that, I spent a few years on the CPG business, which is the coffee and the aisle at the grocery stores. And that retailers and I led the business development area for that for a few years as well. And as I said, it was a great experience and the commitment to partnerships and the human connection was really impactful. And really, I think, gave me great insights to bring to Shipt as we started to build out the Shipt business.Stephanie:That's great. So what's one of your favorite memories or stories when you were working at Starbucks and trying to get Starbucks within the stores, or getting it on those supermarket shelves? What do you have a fond memory of or a funny story from your days there?Joe:Well, I'd say, I think one of the pieces that we really focused a lot on the Starbucks cafe experiences is very unique. They take a lot of pride in that customer experience. And so it was exciting when we would bring the stories to the retailers about how to operate at Starbucks or what the brand should be within the cafe. And we started to hear where retailers were then using the same terminology that Starbucks had been using. So, it was really fun when we started to hear them repeat back to us the words and the phrases that we had used, which really signal to us that it was going to be a great partnership, that they really understood what we were trying to accomplish. And that they were embracing that for their own business purposes, which was great.Joe:So coffee is at the core of everything Starbucks does. And I had an opportunity to go to a coffee farm in Costa Rica. And I got to plant a coffee tree and connect with all the farmers, or a lot of the different farms in Costa Rica where we sourced or Starbucks sourced coffee. And it was just really inspirational. I mean, it was fun to do for sure, but hearing the stories from the farmers about how their lives have changed because of their opportunities to partner with Starbucks was really inspirational and really made us feel good that we were making a difference around the world, not just creating great coffee or creating great experiences in the cafes.Stephanie:That sounds like a really good life-changing trip. Very cool. So what had you go over to Shipt? What led you to Shipt?Joe:So in about end of 2015, 2016, everything in Northern California was focused on the gig economy. Airbnb was growing, Uber was growing, and grocery delivery was starting to grow. And I don't know, about 20 years before then, there had been a grocery delivery company called Webvan that had had some success, but then it did not last. And I had been working with grocers, and it really felt like the time was right for grocery delivery to really kind of flourish. And I started looking around at different gig economy delivery companies, and I came across Shipt and Shipt was a small company. It was headquartered out of Birmingham, Alabama still is. And the founder was talking about how the quality of the shoppers and the personal experiences between the shoppers and the customers where was the competitive advantage that Shipt was going to capitalize on.Joe:And I really thought that that really resonated with me. I do really believe people have a personal connection to the food that they consume, the foods that they have in their homes, and creating that model. And it was different than what a lot of other companies are talking about. A lot of other companies were talking about the technology, and how technology was so important, and it was changing the landscape. And again, technology is important, but I really love the way Shipt talked about the personal connection, and the quality of the shoppers, and how that was the area where Shipt was going to invest, and it was going to win.Joe:And then when I met with the founder and I met with the company, the culture was just phenomenal, and it still is today. Everybody is passionate about the mission for Shipt and really focused on doing right, making a difference in the communities, passionate about building the business, but they recognize that it's really about helping people. And if we do that, then the business results will follow.Stephanie:I love the fact that you guys are so focused on giving a good quality shopper that I can feel a connection with. Because so often, when I order from certain companies, I'll get things like an avocado that's so soft. I'm like, "Who would get this? I would never pick an avocado this soft. Or I would never pick tomatoes with fuzz on them. You obviously do not care about my groceries." So, I feel a very close connection to having someone who ... A shopper that is looking out for my best interest, and actually picking things that I want, and not just being like, "Ah, there's five avocados, throw them in a bag, or they're fine."Joe:Well, that's exactly right. And that's what we hear from customers too. It's again, produce is tough to pick. And we put a lot of effort into supporting our shoppers so that they can get the right produce. And even the product is set up so that when we ordered bananas, we order a couple of green and then three yellow because we know we're not going to consume them fast enough. And our shoppers are graded, selecting that for us, and we get what we want. And it really is impactful because getting products that you don't want or that aren't going to work for you defeats the whole value proposition and the convenience of grocery delivery.Stephanie:So tell me a bit about how Shipt has changed over this past year because it seems like ... I mean, especially with grocery delivery, people really just had to rip up their plans, and start over, and be like, "This is the new world. Now I need to figure out how I'm going to do shipping." And everything seems so hard when it comes to grocery delivery instead of like Amazon, where they're all on routes, and they can deliver 60 things in a day versus a grocery delivery just feels so one-to-one. So tell me, what kind of shakeups have you guys seen at Shipt, and what are you doing to tackle them?Joe:This year has been unreal and, obviously, unexpected. And one of the first things that we did is we ramped up our shopper network. We doubled the size of our shopper network early when COVID had spiked, and we knew demand was growing, and we knew people were just desirous of getting products delivered. And so, we wanted to be able to support as many customers as possible. So we invested a lot to ramp up the shopper network. And even as we've gotten into holiday now, we're going to add another hundred ... We are adding another 150,000 shoppers this holiday season. And so, building up the shopper network was first and foremost and what we need to do to support the demand. But then, in addition to that, we worked really closely with a lot of grocers and a lot of retailers to help them succeed in this space.Joe:And to your point, it's a complicated model. And as you said, it's a one-to-one model. So there isn't the ability to drive around, for numerous routes all day long, you really have to put the care and effort into each individual order. And the order sizes are 25 to 30 items in the basket. And so we've worked a lot with retailers, not only to enable them on the Shipt marketplace to reach more customers. But we invested a lot in our last-mile delivery business, which we call Shipt Driven, which has really helped a lot of groceries. And a lot of retailers extend their curbside program to last-mile delivery. And that's really been impactful certainly through COVID. And we're seeing it even more so now during the holiday when again, there's a little bit more of a COVID spike. But then, just during the holidays, every retailer is trying to put together the pieces to support their customers and enable them to get the products they want in a way that works for the customer.Stephanie:Are you also helping advise some of these retail partners around coming up with the economics to make it work? Because it seems like a big Safeway has a very different model and how to get scale and efficiencies than a local grocery might have. Are you working with them to be like, here's what I see works? Here's how to make the model work for you guys.Joe:Absolutely. And you're right. I mean, we work with a lot of awesome regional grocers. And to your point, they don't have the scale of some of the national grocers. And so, in putting our programs together, we work closely with them to make sure that not only is it a good experience for the customer, but that it's economically beneficial and profitable business for the retailer. And we'll do that in a couple of ways. We'll certainly work with them on the technology and the integration to manage that so that it's as cost-effective where they get the best return on investment that they can. But in addition, we'll create marketing programs together. We'll do merchandising programs together to add items to the basket. And then, we'll collaborate on operations efficiencies so that we can pull out costs from the system so that it can be a profitable endeavor for them.Stephanie:So earlier, you were mentioning how you scaled up your shopper network. I think you said 100,000 shoppers, right?Joe:150,000 in holiday. And it was as a 100,000 earlier in the year. So 250,000, over the last six months or so.Stephanie:I mean, that's a crazy number, especially if you're trying to keep quality high. So how did you all go about hiring those shoppers? I mean, even finding that many people and making sure that they're going to be the quality shoppers that you want. How did you go about scaling like that?Joe:Part of what we did was implemented some enhancements to our recruiting process so that we were able to move through applicants much more quickly and thoughtfully, but while still ensuring we're getting the great quality candidates.Joe:We also invested a lot, as you would imagine in sourcing applicants, but we also worked with a lot of retailers back in the spring. There were a lot of retailers who were shutting down stores. And so, both our partners, as well as other retailers. We partnered with them to enable their employees who were looking for work to get fast-tracked through the Shipt application process so that if they wanted to pick up some Shipt shopping opportunities, they could, and they were great partners with whom we worked. And we got a lot of great applicants through that.Joe:And then another piece that we did ... Doing the first shop can be intimidating for folks if they've never done it before. And so, we have a lot of resources available for shoppers to access. And we continue to build on those, especially around how to enable the first shop. Because once you do a shop or two, you get into a rhythm, and you feel good about it. But it takes a little encouragement sometimes to do that first shop. So we put in resources to really make it as easy as possible for our shoppers to get out there and do the first shop.Stephanie:That does seem kind of scary doing that first one. So, I mean, how do you think about onboarding people? Did you have to set up all-new systems for all these new people? Did you have to change a bunch of things to scale that?Joe:Fortunately, we had the systems in place and in part because Shipt has been expanding rapidly since 2016. And even in, I think it was 2018; we were launching three to four markets a week for a good portion of the year. So, we had really good systems in place for recruiting shoppers building the network. And so, it was really more of just kind of amplifying that so that we could go even quicker during this period of time as opposed to having to build out new systems.Stephanie:Got it. So when you are going into these new markets, and you're launching quickly, what are some of the biggest issues that you encounter when you're going into the new markets?Joe:So new markets they're exciting, but they can be challenging. And one of the great things is the market dynamics differ. Launching in a New York City is different than Savannah, Georgia, for instance. And so, one of the pieces that we do is, when we go into markets, we'll spend time there to really understand the market dynamics so that we're thoughtful about our investments. Not only in how to recruit the shoppers to succeed in that market, but how to tailor our messaging so that it resonates with potential customers and that we're knowledgeable about the markets. And we've built out a market operations team that works and serves in all the different markets in which we operate so that we have the local knowledge that we can tap into.Joe:But one of the things that is super exciting as we launched markets is, we will do a market launch gathering a couple of days before. And then the night before, we launched the market, and the intent there is to get together with shoppers, to engage with them. So, we understand how they're feeling about launching this market and supporting us. We'll partner with the retailers in those markets with whom we'll be working. And it's really a great opportunity. It's a celebration of sorts. There's a great opportunity to connect with the shoppers and really help them better understand what Shipt is all about. Help them understand the retailers with whom we're working, and to get them excited about launching the market. And then back to the Shipt culture, part of what happens is there's just a whole group of folks who are working through the night to make sure the launch goes off properly. They're in the market for the next couple of days, picking up orders if we need to, troubleshooting if anything happens.Joe:And again, it's a celebration, it's a lot of work, but it's really exciting. And listening and engaging with the shoppers is really fun because you really get to understand who they are as people. And again, how enabling these jobs is really kind of making a difference in the communities in which we operate.Stephanie:It seems like a really good way to also build a community among those shoppers where they could potentially get to know each other, talk about best practices. I mean, do you cultivate the community of shoppers so they can kind of have their own little network? Can you talk to me-Joe:Absolutely. You're exactly right. We support the shoppers, and through various Facebook lounges, there are shopper communities. But you're right. The shoppers build such an amazing community amongst themselves. And it's great because they share best practices. They share tips. They're great resources for new shoppers who again maybe are a little bit hesitant or uncertain about how to operate. And then they celebrate with each other. And there's been instances in which there'd be a surprise party at a particular store because a shopper is just on their 5,000 shops or something like that. And we see the pictures of it and you see the shoppers. They're just so excited for each other, and they really do support each other.Joe:And they recognize that the stronger the community they build, the better the customer experiences are going to be, which is going to drive more volume, which is going to be supportive for everybody. And it's really exciting to watch. And we do think it's something unique that we've helped create as what we've seen with other gig economy companies. They don't put the same effort into supporting their shoppers or their gig economy workers. And we do think it's a unique advantage that we have.Stephanie:And I think that's a really good lesson for gig economy type of employers because I think a lot of people who do that work aren't really celebrated. And you don't see the person being really proud to be working on that because I think the company is not cultivating a community where people can be excited to actually showcase the brand and say, "This is what I do." I mean, I think about shoppers right now. You wouldn't know looking around Whole Foods or something, who maybe is a shopper, who's not, they're not wearing a shirt. They're not walking around proud for the majority of shoppers or even delivery drivers or anything like that. And I think that the moment that you start incorporating people to be proud of their job like that, and wanting to celebrate the other people in that network and community, you're only going to scale quicker and also build a good experience for everyone.Joe:Totally agree. Totally agree. And that's I think too often, some of the technology companies look at the gig economy worker as a cost. And we look at it the other way. We celebrate them, they're a phenomenal brand representation, and they represent our brand, and they represent the retailers with whom we work. And so, the more they feel good about what they're doing, the more we can help support them to do a great job. Often, it'll show up in the customer experience, and that's so hugely important. And so, we are excited about that, and we do provide Shipt Swag, let's call it because-Stephanie:It actually sounds better.Joe:For sure, the shoppers wanted it. And it's great. And again, I mean, it's brand building, but it's really more ... It speaks to how excited they are about what they're doing. And then the stories we hear from the shoppers, they feel like they're making a difference in people's lives. And that's invaluable to growing and driving the business. And so, we're excited about that.Stephanie:I think people view ... I mean, at least out in Silicon Valley ... And you probably know this Joe, since you lived out here. But swag being a thing of like, "Oh, you get so much of it." Employees don't even want that anymore. Don't spend money; it's a waste. They just throw it away or whatever. But I think they aren't thinking about the rest of the country who actually still celebrates a great t-shirt or hoodie and how important that is to them. And that's still a good technique to keep your employees engaged and excited to get something great.Joe:Absolutely. Absolutely.Stephanie:So let's talk a bit about customer acquisition. I saw a few articles where you were giving Shipt, I think, memberships to the elderly for free, which I was like, "Wow, that is genius." Because these are people who maybe wouldn't have engaged with grocery delivery ever before, but it's a good way to not only help them right now but also have a long time customer, even when COVID and everything's done. So how do you think about growing your customer base, getting on their radar, people who maybe would never find you organically?Joe:And so, one of the things that came out through COVID, there were a lot of people who tried grocery delivery for the first time. And we saw a large increase in the senior population as well. And it makes sense there may be a little less or a little reluctant to go out to the stores. And so, from that, we began talking to different agencies across the country who support the senior population. As well as talking to some healthcare entities and talking about how do we work together to build awareness about grocery delivery, make it easy for folks to get grocery delivery, support them economically? And so, that's been an area that we are continuing to invest in because we're seeing good results. And again, we know it makes a difference in the community, and the feedback we've gotten from the agencies and the senior population has been phenomenal.Joe:In addition to that, I mean, again, desire for grocery delivery has skyrocketed this year. Previously, Shipt was a membership only option you had to buy and an annual membership. During this year, we expanded to offer a pay per order option. And then you can also one order, or you can buy passes and get multiple orders. But we did that because, again, we knew people wanted to try the service. They weren't certain that it was for them, and either they wanted to try it because they were in a need state for it or because it was just new to them. But by enabling the PPO option, we have greatly expanded the number of customers that we're reaching. And it's really been, again, it gets back to supporting customers in a way, where they are today. And sell by providing the individual orders or the passes we've greatly increased the number of customers that are accessing the Shipt service.Stephanie:So how did you think about retention when it comes to ... I mean, I think that's great to be able to allow someone to pay for order. I know that would be something I would do. Is like try it at once and if it works well, maybe do the subscription, or maybe just keep paying for order. But how did you think about retaining someone who might just try it out and then forget how do you keep that customer around for the longterm?Joe:Absolutely. And with our members, the usage and the retention is phenomenal, and it makes sense. They've committed to the membership with the PPO customers. We are very focused on connecting with them and engaging with them so that we're giving them multiple opportunities to use this service several times. What we've found is using the service several times, it starts to become part of your shopping pattern. And so, part of what we do is we continue to connect, to communicate with those customers to make it worthwhile for them to try it a second or a third time if they haven't.Joe:And what we've seen, we've been very pleased. What we've seen is the transition from PPO to either multiple passes or Shipt Everyday, which is our annual membership, has been very good. And what we do find is as they use the service a couple of times, the quality of the service they're very pleased with. And so that gets them to kind of continue. But to your point, we're absolutely focused on how do we continue to connect and communicate with them so that they aren't one-time customers, but they become a much bigger part of connecting with us.Stephanie:So this past year, I'm sure you guys have noticed customers coming to you from many different channels. Like new channels are popping up to tax, not very big. I mean, where have you seen your new customers coming from, and how are you also trying to differentiate yourself from all the other competitors right now? Because I'm thinking, if I'm a customer, and I'm scrambling, like, "I need eggs." I'm just going to go on there and be like, "Okay, either I can just go on Amazon, because I already have a Prime account or let me just try, Instacart or whatever. How do you make sure to separate yourself, and really show your value, and also get on new and different channels, and finding customers in new ways where maybe other brands aren't doing that?Joe:We think the quality of the experience that we provide continues to be our competitive differentiation, and the quality of our shoppers is far and away superior to others in the market. We've always been very good at digital marketing, and we continue to invest there. We've also done quite a fair number of social media campaigns that have created different avenues and exposed us to different customer demographics that have been really beneficial. And then we've also leaned in more to traditional marketing as, particularly for the grocery space; we find that to be an effective channel. And so, in working with our grocers and exploring traditional media, we've seen some very good results with that. And so, it's really quite a credit cross-section of investments across various channels. But we're seeing good success across all the different channels in which we invest.Stephanie:Cool. I could see there being some fun campaigns with just an image of a dirty little brown banana and being like, "Did you just get this delivered to you? Come on over to Shipt. It'll never happen."Joe:Absolutely. And one of the campaigns we did, we talked about again the quality of our shoppers. And there were fun little snippets of how the shoppers will go above and beyond to get you the right product. And I think there was a version of it was tongue in cheek. But a shopper going into a lake to make sure you're getting fresh fish or diving into the freezer at the grocery store to get you the right product. And really trying to capitalize on the quality of the shopper is really beneficial because you want to get the products that you want, and not have somebody who's just focused on trying to get in and out of the store as quickly as possible, and throwing whatever in the bag to deliver it to you.Stephanie:So, with the holidays coming, you hear a lot right now with ecommerce about there's going to be a ton more demand for shipping. Things are going to get held up. How are you guys approaching the holiday season right now since you don't only do grocery, you do other things as well?Joe:That's right. And so, as we said earlier, ramped up the shopper network so that we can continue to support the increased demand. One of the areas where we've invested a lot in 2020 is in our last-mile delivery, so, Shipt Driven. And that's a program where a customer will actually place an order of the retailer's property or ecommerce program, and our shopper will arrive at the store and pick up the order and drive it to the customer's home. So it's basically extending BOPUS to last-mile delivery. And that business has skyrocketed this year. And we've got a great lineup of retailers that go beyond just the grocery side. So, we work with Bed Bath & Beyond, and Best Buy, and CVS, and Office Depot.Joe:And one of the things we're doing closely, we work closely with those retailers. We are managing, or we're partnering on forecasting so that we understand not only holistically what kind of volume we're thinking there's going to be, but even down to the store level because we'll make sure that we're hiring the right shop. Not just the right number of shoppers, but the right shoppers in the right locations. And then in addition, we are really focused between both the driven business and the marketplace on communicating that you can get products delivered the same day.Joe:And I think particularly in the next couple of weeks as other services are going to take longer to get products, we're going to communicate to customers that whatever product you're looking for, you can get it that day and at the last minute. Gifting ideas and through the holiday, ensuring that people are getting the products before the holiday arrives is a big opportunity that we're going to focus on from a Shipt marketplace standpoint. But also in partnership with our retailers on the last mile piece, because we can enable same-day delivery for those retailers as well.Stephanie:That seems like a really good opportunity there. And so many people are trying to figure out that last-mile delivery. What are some of the hiccups you encountered when setting that up? Because that once again seems like a very hard problem to solve, starting to work with all different kinds of retailers and solving that problem for them.Joe:So, fortunately, we've got such a great network of shoppers that on our side for the logistics that's the foundation is in place. I think what we find with retailers is they're standing that up, and how we work with them. Fulfillment costs can be daunting. And particularly on the last mile piece, the retailer needs to be prepared to collect those orders and ship those orders so that we can then drive at the last mile. So, we work with them to try to help them think through how to forecast and then how to plan for that fulfillment piece because that is an area that we have experience in. But in this model, they're going to be managing that. So that's one piece.Joe:And then, working with them on the operations and the handoff, it's not difficult, but we do put effort in there. Their store associates need to know who Shipt is, and why we're showing up at the store, and collaborating on how we connect with the customer to ensure that we're communicating effectively with the customer. Both on when is the order ready, when we're picking it up, when it will be dropped off, and if for some reason there are returns or other items that we need to communicate, setting up that structure so that we're all communicating effectively. So, that is a great customer experience.Stephanie:So you mentioned forecasting a couple of times. And you share those plans with the retailers to also help them plan for inventory, and like you said, fulfillment and everything. Is that a pretty standard process, or does every retailer in market ... Is everyone having a different kind of forecast or a training procedure to work through to be prepared this year?Joe:Yeah. So, we do collaborate with retailers, and we'll let them know what kind of volume we're expecting, and they'll share with us as well so that we can do what we can to manage inventory positions. Every retailer has their own process for that, but we have a dedicated team. We call it the Partner Success Team. They're phenomenal, and they work closely. Every retailer gets a dedicated team that supports them. And again, I think it's an area where we've invested more than a lot of other companies because these retail partnerships are so hugely important that we want to make sure they're getting the support that they need.Joe:And the feedback we've gotten from the retailers is that far and away, our commitment to details or thoroughness, and our communication exceeds what they see with other partners that they have. But on the forecasting, we'll work closely with them. We'll communicate the numbers that we're seeing. They'll share what they're seeing, and we'll review it, certainly right now on a weekly basis because if there's going to be spikes in demand, we want to be prepared for that so that we can create great customer experiences.Stephanie:That'll be interesting to see what happens this holiday season. So, where do you see the future of app-based delivery headed? What are you all planning for?Joe:So, everything we see through the pandemic, grocery delivery is certainly going to continue to be a huge part of the grocery industry. And I was thinking about there's in 2016, a lot of people in the grocery space didn't think customers would ever really embrace ecommerce that they needed to be in the store. They needed to see the produce they needed to choose it for themselves. And since 2016, so many things have changed. And so, grocery commerce is still going to be a huge portion of the business. I think projections are 2025. There'll be no more than 20% of the business. So we don't think I don't see anything changing there.Joe:The other ... But in addition, and we do work with retailers outside of the grocery space. What I think the pandemic has created is, retailers are building out a broad ecosystem of ecommerce solutions for the customers. They're recognizing that customers are going to want to interact with them and their products in different ways. And they want to let the customer choose how they want to get the products. And whether that's a third-party marketplace like Shipt, or if they want to do pickup, or having the retailers enable last-mile delivery through their own ecommerce programs. That, to us, feels like the winning strategy. That's what we're seeing, the retailers who are creating multiple options in allowing the customer to choose. Those are the ones that appear to be gaining a share and taking more of the business in the market. And that's where we see the future going.Stephanie:I've heard that quite a few times where the market is headed to where the consumers now know that there's options and they should have all the options and it needs to be the best option that they get to choose. And that wasn't something that even a year or two ago was something that may be a lot of consumers expected. So, I think that's a fun place where it's headed, though.Joe:Yeah, I agree. And I think that's it. I think awareness has grown so much so; customers are way more aware right now. And like everything else, they want to choose. It's the same if you go into a store, into a category. There's lots of options because consumers want to have the right to choose what they want. And again, I think the pandemic has kind of accelerated that mindset a little bit. Particularly as awareness has grown so much.Stephanie:So what kind of tech advancements are you all most excited about, or what tech enablements are helping your business the most right now?Joe:I think, again, I'll talk a little bit about grocery. But it's consumers want the ecommerce experience that's convenient and fast, and they want it to replicate their experiences in the store in the good ways. And so, some of the pieces that we're excited about substitutions, is a big portion of the shopping experience. It's about 76% of orders will have an item that's not available in the store. And so, substitution is an option there for the customer. So, we're enabling proactive substitutions to make that as seamless as possible. And we know it resonates because again, the customer wants to get the products and they want ... If you think if you're in the aisle, I can make a choice there because I'm looking across it. So how do we bring that to life through the ecommerce experience?Joe:And so we've enabled some features there, and we'll continue to build on that savings and loyalty programs continue to be a big portion. We look to integrate in with retailers' loyalty programs as much as possible. We know the consumers like that. And they want to get rewarded for making the purchase, whether it's inside the store or through Shipt. And so we're bringing that to life. And the other piece is continuing to find ways to enable exploration through ecommerce, it's still the early stage, but if you think about all the different touchpoints inside a store in which a retailer can speak to a customer, how do we bring that to life through ecommerce.Joe:And then the extension of that is personalization, especially in the food space, everybody's eating habits are very different. And so, how do we continue to capitalize on personalization so that the way my interaction in the app is different than yours based on my preferences? And how do we gather those preferences? But then also, continue to enable that, so that I'm getting access or information about the products that are most relevant to me. So, I think from a customer experience those are some of the areas that we're really excited about.Stephanie:Cool. It seems like imagery too, is, such an important piece of it. I know when I've ordered food before, if they ... I mean, why I go to the grocery store is so I can maybe look around and be like, "Oh, I didn't know I wanted that goat cheese and red wine type of thing. But it's so beautiful looking, and it's very enticing. I'm going to get it." And I think that's something where if it was in an app and it showed it right next to something, I would right away probably add to cart. But sometimes, it feels like that's still lacking of having the right imagery and being able to showcase it in a way that really makes me want it just like I would in the store.Joe:Totally. That's right. I mean, and image coverage is not where it needs to be. And again, part of it is for a lot of the industry they weren't really built for ecommerce. And so, they're moving quickly to enable elements like that, but you're right. I mean, that's such a huge opportunity. And then, even I think with the patterns that may be the pandemic have created there's a lot more eating at home. So how do you continue to find variety and give consumers various options that fit in with what they want, but they may not be thinking about on their own? And I think that will continue to be a bigger opportunity. And I think that'll last post-pandemic as well.Stephanie:Do you know what I want? I want a surprise me button. I want my shopper to know me so well where I'm just like, "Here's $3, surprise me with something." Because that's why you go to the grocery store. Sometimes, you feel like, "Oh, I'm pleasantly surprised by what I just spent on like ..." Can my shopper do that for me?Joe:Totally, absolutely. And so, you should try it out. We have a special request portion of our product when ... So you can ... If for some reason you're not finding a product that you need, or if you have a special request, you can put that in. And so, you absolutely should. And I think the shoppers would love that. They totally enjoy that. And I mean, we've got two dogs, and there's a handful of shoppers that we see regularly, and the dogs love when the shopper pulls up because they know that food is coming, which they're excited about. But also, the shoppers have multiple times picked up a little treat that they've seen for the dogs. Because they just think it's fun. And so, you absolutely should test that out.Stephanie:That's fun. And what about things like personal barcode shopping and things like that, or ways to make the shoppers more efficient? But then you have to partner with retailers to enable that. Are there any technologies in that area that you guys are exploring right now?Joe:Yes. And so, creating the efficiencies is a big focus area for us and will continue to be. And so, a couple of the areas, you had hit on like the product catalog, and imagery, and attributes for the products, that's an area. But for driving the efficiencies, we work really closely with the retailers and out of stock information. We have real-time data because we have shoppers that are in the store and they're looking for particular products. And so, we share that with the retailers to help them incorporate that in with their logistics information to try to reduce out-of-stocks. And we've seen some really good results with retailers where our data was helpful as an additional data point to solve some out-of-stocks. And so that's a big area that we focus on.Joe:Getting good IO location data is really helpful for helping the shopper navigate through the store. And so, we'll work with retailers on that. And then, I think your barcode scanning, we call it scan and go technology. We've enabled that with a couple of retailers, we're going to continue to build on that. And that is just so helpful for moving through the store more quickly, reducing checkout time, and reducing some of the labor costs in the store because the more that we can simplify the checkout process, that's labor savings with the retailers. And then, we're at the early stage of looking at other kinds of automated opportunities. And how do we take advantage of some of the investments that the retailers are to generate efficiencies?Stephanie:I see. And they should [inaudible] Bigger ones like Walmart were experimenting with having robots going down the aisles to map the store and take inventory. But having just so many issues depending on things were all jumbled behind the one that was near the aisle or how high the aisles were. And it seems like a big problem to solve, but something that could really help a lot of ... Especially larger retailers like the Costcos of the world, who just have so much stuff to inventory all the time and are constantly running out of things.Joe:Absolutely. And that's I think the bigger stores. But even the traditional grocery store could have 45,000, 50,000 skews. So it's such a big opportunity. I think there's going to be a lot of investments and especially as ecommerce has grown. Again, in many ways, the grocery industry is still early in the ecommerce space. And so, I do think there's going to be a lot of good technologies developed that will really help generate efficiencies, which will ultimately be a great win for the consumer because the efficiencies will drive down costs.Stephanie:Yep. I agree. All right. Let's move over to the lightning round, brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This is where I'm going to ask you a question, and you have a minute or less to answer. Joe, are you ready?Joe:Yeah, I'm ready.Stephanie:All right. I feel like you're on a roll. So I'm going to start with the trickier question first. What one thing will have the biggest impact on ecommerce in the next year?Joe:Well, the pandemic is certainly going to continue to have an impact on ecommerce. But I think ultimately, it will be how quickly retailers can continue to build out a broad ecosystem. And I think that's what customers are looking for. And I think those who move quickly to enable that will be most successful.Stephanie:What is one of your favorite business or management books that you refer back to from time to time?Joe:Well, it's funny. I just had this conversation with somebody with one of my peers and we were talking about strategy, and Art of War is something that I have on my bookshelf, and I do refer to it on an ongoing basis. I just think it's ... I mean, it's a classic, but I find it to be really beneficial.Stephanie:I love that one. What do you not understand today that you wish you did?Joe:Oh gosh. There's not a limit there. I think the piece that I want to continue to more broadly understand is the customer buying patterns across retailers and how that will continue to change. Everybody's got their collection of retailers that they shop for. And I just had this conversation recently because we were driving down the road, and there was a little strip mall that we've never really gone in. Those stores, I'm sure, are great. It's all part of our pattern. So the psychology behind creating the patterns and the behaviors, and then what would it require to disrupt that.Stephanie:That's a good answer. I like that. If you were to have a podcast, what would the podcast be about, and who would your first guest be?Joe:So I-Stephanie:I think you've thought about this-Joe:I have. I think podcasts are awesome, and I'm so envious. So, an area that I've found to be more interesting of late, I kind of stumbled across this street art. And so, Denver has got a really good community of street artists. And so I think it's super cool. And if ... I mean, my goal and I would love to meet Banksy, who's a street artist out in the UK. And that's if I could have him on my podcast. That's how I would do my one episode, and I'd be done.Stephanie:Like mic drop, I'm good.Joe:Exactly.Stephanie:That'd be a good one. All right. And then the last one, what is the favorite app on your phone?Joe:So, my favorite app, I don't know if I should say, well, DraftKings is recently become legal in Colorado. I have two boys. And so, we like pro football. And so, every Sunday, we choose a game and put 10 bucks on it. And so that is ... It's probably not the best family forward kind of thing, but we're having fun with it.Stephanie:Sounds pretty family forward to me, so, you can do what you want, Joe.Joe:So let me know if you have any recommendations because we haven't been winning the last couple of weeks.Stephanie:Oh, man. You don't want recommendations from me. Trust me. I'll let you guys do your thing there. I'll trust you. All right, Joe. Well, this interview has been great. Where can people find out more about you and Shipt?Joe:So Shipt.com and download the Shipt app. And then I am on LinkedIn, and Joe Manning chipped up on LinkedIn.Stephanie:Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on.Joe:Thank you. I really appreciate it. 

How does empathy affect our decision making? We often think we are making decisions based on intellect but in reality we make many, if not all, decisions based on trying to feel or trying not to feel certain emotions. If you look forward to all of your emotions what will that do to your decision making? "When you have empathy with someone, they are more likely to be open because they feel that you are with them, and you can't do anything to show it to them. You are just empathetic, and it just occurs."Welcome to the Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and ease.My name is Brett Kistler.  I am an adventurer, entrepreneur and a self exploration enthusiast.  I am here with my co-host, Joe Hudson. Joe is a business coach who has  spent decades working with some of the world´s top executives and teams developing a unique model of human patterns that underpin how we operate with ourselves, each other and the world. A good entry point into this model is a mindset called VIEW, vulnerability, impartiality, empathy and wonder.  Through understanding and cultivation we learn to easefully drop into the VIEW state of mind, deepening self awareness and increasing our connection with the world around us. To learn more about this podcast or courses, visit artofaccomplishment.comBrett: When we imagine a professional environment, we often see a world where emotions are held inside and remain unseen by others, filtered out as distractions. We might focus on the business stuff, that is the logistics and agreements that seem more relevant than the feelings behind them. Even in our personal lives, intense reactions from others can feel like a distraction from the connection that we want. What if learning to be acutely aware of others' internal experiences, can give us more useful information than the words they speak? How can our personal and professional relationships change as we learn to notice and address the hurt behind an angry attack or the fear behind a hasty agreement? This is the practice of empathy, the E in VIEW. Joe, how do you define empathy?Joe: It's so hard. Empathy is so much of a feeling, more than it is an intellectual understanding, but I would say it's being with somebody's experience without losing yourself in it. That's what I would say empathy is. It's not watching somebody's experience and it's not wanting to change somebody's experience. It's being with them in the experience without losing yourself in it.Brett: Give me an example.Joe: Oftentimes when I'm working with clients, for instance, they'll be all agitated around something, and I'll just ask a simple question like, "Is this yours?" Recently there's some COVID anxiety that one of my clients is feeling and I was like, "Is this yours?" They just immediately dropped. They're like, "No, it's not mine." That's one way. That's why, kind of when you're in it. The other way to define kind of what it isn't so to speak is, you see this all the time with babies crying. Baby starts crying and some people get instantly annoyed and some people can be with that crying, and that's really a deep expression of their capacity to have empathy in that moment. There's actually something biologically that happens too after a baby cries for an extended period of time. For a man, their testosterone increases. In those first couple of minutes of crying, our capacity to empathize with that child or be agitated by that child is really kind of that linchpin.Brett: Okay. You said earlier this question, is it yours? What do you mean by that?Joe: Yes. Oftentimes, highly empathetic people go beyond empathy, the way I would define empathy. They would go beyond it and then they're not being able to tell what's their emotional state and what's another person's emotional state. This really happens to people who were children of alcoholics or children of abuse, people who had to survive by knowing the emotional state of somebody when they walk into the room. They can very much get lost in the other person's emotions and think that they're theirs.We have these things called mirror neurons in our brain, and they basically allow us to feel the state of other people on some level. Sometimes when we're feeling somebody else, we forget that we're feeling them, that it's not us that's feeling that way. In a weird way, we start feeling that way, so then it's really even more confusing because then you're like, I'm feeling it. If you ask yourself the question, is this mine, and then that can clarify a lot.Brett: Yes. That makes a lot of sense. The idea of mirror neurons is a little bit interesting. The way I see it is, that basically our entire system, all of our consciousness is mirroring our reality in some way, mirroring and correlating perfectly with it and then losing ourselves or are we correlating with it and being with it and experiencing it and learning from it?Joe: Yes. Mirror neurons in neurology is such a mystery still. What is it that allows-- Is it some form of mirror neuron that allows a whole bunch of birds to know how to turn at the exact same moment? There's something particularly around mammals, where most mammals communicate without any words, and so they're really relying on their ability to sense the experience of the other animals.Brett: Yes, social nervous system. Tell me how practicing empathy will benefit us. What does this do for us?Joe: Well, one of the great benefits is, that if anything that you have a hard time empathizing with, means that you have a hard time with that emotional state for yourself. That's fantastic because our decision making process is really based on emotions. If I take the emotional center of your brain away, you cease to make decisions, it would take you half an hour to decide what color pen-- We're really making decisions based on trying to feel or trying not to feel certain emotions, whether we like it or not, whether we think we're being logical or not. If that emotional center of your brain gets taken away, you still have all the intellect, you still have all the rationale, but you still can't make the decisions.It really helps us clarify our decision making, it really allows us to help us be with our own emotional-- and to discover where we're having a hard time being with our own emotions. If you think about your life in this way, if you think about how much of your life has been decided by, "I don't want to feel like a failure," or "I want to feel like a success," or "I don't want to feel unhappy," how many decisions have you made based on that criteria and to be able to be with all of your emotions, what will that do? If you look forward to all of your emotions, what will that do to your decision making and how does it change your emotional state? If I have sadness and I don't want to feel it, it feels very different, than if I have sadness and I want to feel it. Those are a lot of the things that'll benefit us on an inward perspective. Externally, obviously, people like it when other people are with them. If you think about your friends and the people you feel closest to in the world, you can find that they're more able to be with you than people who you don't particularly like. If you look at your friends and you say, what is it about your friends that you want to have changed, oftentimes, it fits into the category of their inability to be with you or see you for who you are. There's that whole thing, too, where it's just, we want to be empathized with, most of us want to be empathized with. It just creates a deeper connection, more loving, more capacity to love.Brett: Yes, it seems like the first half of what you described as feeling into our emotions to find out where our thoughts and rationale are coming from, and then in others being able to see behind that, too. If somebody is presenting you with a solution or an idea, whether it's a business context or in a relationship, to be able to see behind that, what the feeling is that that's coming from can allow you to address a deeper root cause or need.Joe: Yes, at least it gives you the capacity to do it. Sometimes people get upset if you do that. [chuckles] It's like, "Wow, it really doesn't seem like you're angry, it seems like you are hurt." "No, I'm not." You know that kind of-- but generally, it goes pretty well and people want to deal with the underlying thing. So many logical arguments are really not at all about the logic. It's not really about the tactics or the facts. I mean just look at most public discourse. It's not really about the facts. It's about the emotional state of people and their fear, and what they need and what they want and what they are angry about. Yes, to be able to connect with people on that level and to not tell them that they need to be different, but to actually be with them, it's a huge capacity. It really allows you to have a much deeper authentic relationship or communication with people.Brett: I think the public discourse is a great example, because a lot of people get so triggered around other people believing different facts than them. I think that that's really just coming from a lack of feeling seen, a lot of that.Joe: Yes, or feeling that they are out of control in their world, or they are helpless or that there's forces beyond them that are controlling them or so many emotions are happening there.Brett: Earlier you said this a couple of times, "To be with somebody in their experience without losing yourself." How do you prevent that?Joe: The easiest way to do it, I mean it's just a really simple way. Just put some attention in your own body while you're with somebody. If you happen to be that type that has that deep empathy and you lose yourself in the person, the traditional way people do it is, they become defensive, just whole level of defense, and they are like "No." That works, but it doesn't allow you to be empathetic. It just prevents you from getting lost in them. To be empathetic in a successful way is to maintain a certain amount of your awareness in your own body. Like right now when you're listening to me, you could also be paying attention to the bottom of your feet or you could also be paying attention to how the sound of this podcast feels in your inner ear. Then that allows you to be with yourself while listening to me and being with me and my experience. It's about as easy as that, just putting some attention in your own body.The other more intellectual way is to just be aware of when it's happening. I think that's the biggest challenge for most people is that they just don't know when it's happening. A great sign that it's happening is, if you buy into the story of whatever anybody is saying. Let's say you have a friend and they are like,"Oh, my boyfriend, and dah, dah, dah, dah, and the world and my boss and dah, dah." If you're like, "Yes, you've been victimized and we need to do something about it." Pretty much you're in them now or just the opposite. "These people are bad and dah, dah, dah," yes, then you are in them if you buy into the story.If you are with them emotionally, but you know that the story that they are telling is true within their context, but not true within everybody's context, then you're pretty much not lost in them.Brett: Yes, this sounds very non-intellectual and a lot of people are going to want to try to understand this more. What would you say to folks who want to understand or analyze emotions or just have that tendency or just want to analyze this process?Joe: [laughs] Yes, you are screwed is what I would say. [laughs] I mean we can tell you a good story. We're doing it right now. We are telling you good stories about it, but it's not going to really help. Empathy is a felt sense. It's like, say, you close your eyes and you know where your left foot is. That's called proprioception. It's knowing where your body is in space. How do you describe that logically? You can describe what it is logically potentially, but you can't really describe how to do it logically. Similar with going to the bathroom. How do you know when you are done going to the bathroom? Where is the logic? Are you measuring something? Are you timing it? There's just a felt sense, "Oh, that's done." It's the same thing. Empathy is a felt sense and felt sense can't really be described by the intellect with any kind of accuracy. It's like looking at color. How do you describe seeing green? It requires a label that is arbitrary. Logic isn't really going to do any good here for that, and it's why it's so easy to dismiss things like empathy and energy or whatever words people are using. There's a felt sense to it, and I think you find this in a lot of things, prayer, or meditation. It's really easy to dismiss those things even if you hear the logic behind them, until you feel them. Then once you have a felt sense of what prayer can do, whether you believe in a God or not, or what the felt sense of believing in a God is like, and what the felt sense of not believing in a God is like.All those things, they are a very felt sense. You can argue it night and day, but it's why nobody changes their mind on this stuff until they have a change of felt sense. If you want a logical conversation about empathy, go and feel people. Go and be empathetic and stay in yourself while you do it. That's a far better way, just experiment.Brett: That is true across all of these VIEW podcasts. These are all pointers, intellectual pointers to something that you ultimately need to feel into and experience.Joe: It's why oftentimes in these conversations they could be logically contradictory. It's because we're just creating frameworks that make it easier to feel into or realize something. It's not about telling it like a truth. [chuckles] It's not like there's one way, or there's something that's right here. There's just, “How do you want to be?'', is the question and that question isn't answered with logic.Brett: Just feeling our way beneath any fear response we have, which brings me to another question. We have been talking about losing yourself in the other person, not being empathy as you are defining it. Losing yourself in another person sounds a lot like the flight-fear response that we've discussed before, like fleeing from your experience into theirs to try to fix it. Then you'll dive into a story about why they have that experience. Then you'll create some idea of who's the abuser of the tyranny or the victim. I imagine there's something equivalent that we do in the fight-- in the freeze responses as well. How do these other forms of fear impact our ability to be present with others in their emotions?Joe: Yes, if you think about it from an evolutionary sense, we have fear. If you are really scared, it's really not time to empathize. That part of your brain goes offline and your fear response comes online. If you are in flight, like you said, you're looking at the world around you, the environment, and the actors in that environment, and you're trying to figure out how to manage those. If you are in fight, then immediately that emotion that you're starting to feel in your system is going to make you angry and you are going to try to stop it, like the angry person on a plane when the kid starts crying, and the freeze response is the disassociation. It's like a checking out. You can just watch the eyes kind of haze over. It makes sense when we are in fear, it's really hard to have any empathy at all.Brett: How do you prevent this fear response, or let it pass through you? What do you do with this, when you know a deep bodily patterning to fear in a particular business context or a relationship context?Joe: Yes, you feel it. That's the trick to all of this stuff. It's like, how do you feel the emotion? When I say feel it, I don't mean be taken away by it. You know there's just some saying that I heard the other day, it was beautiful. I think it's from some supreme court judge. I don't know, but it said, "I wouldn't give you a fig for the simplicity on this side of complexity, but I'll give you my whole world for the simplicity on the other side of complexity." What it's speaking to, is that before we start our learning process, things are pretty simple, then we start learning processes that get really complex and somewhere along the line, it gets very simple again. With emotions, it's very simple for a two-year-old, "I feel angry, and so I'm going to yell at you or punch you." Then there's the complexity of actually learning what those emotions are, what's happening, identifying them in your body, feeling them, expressing them in a way that doesn't hurt people, letting them move without resistance, finding out that they're very similar to one another, finding out that you can love all of them. Getting to the other side is, "Wow, you just have emotions again," and they're just fluid, except for, you're not run by them. You're not controlled by them. You're not hurting other people with them.The only way to do that is to actually learn how to feel the fear. If you have a fear response, feel it and invite it in. Don't put it at anybody. Most fear is not wanting to feel something, which is pretty cool when you think about it, like "I'm scared that I'm going to get fired," but if I told you, "Hey, if you get fired, you're going to feel awesome," would you be scared of [chuckles] being fired anymore? It's really us not wanting to have emotions that we're at the core very scared of. When I say feel the fear, I mean welcome it. I really mean like invite it in, breathe it in.Brett: What's a good way to tell in the moment, if we're working on empathy and how do we tell if what we're feeling in the moment is true empathy and not one of these coping mechanisms or distortions? Another one that comes up is sympathy. There's a lot about how sympathy and empathy are different and often confused.Joe: It's a wonderful question. The main thing is, are you putting yourself outside-- It's not quite outside, I guess it's above the other person. The differences in, when you're putting yourself above the other person, like subtle ways. Like you want to fix them, but for you to fix them, you have to be less broken, or you want to help them not feel it, which is assuming that you're not feeling it is the better solution.Brett: That means buying into another story and being that story like, "Oh, yes, fuck that guy."Joe: Exactly. It's just you're with them. When you're with somebody the way that we all want to be with, it's like we're supporting. We are with, but we are not saving. There's this great phrase that, I think it was from an Aboriginal community or a native community in South America, and says, "Hey, if you're here to help me, no, thank you, but if you're here to work together on our mutual freedom, let's get to work." That's really the essence of it.Brett: Another thing that happens a lot is that being empathic is often associated with being manipulable or easily taken for an emotional ride. How could it be that deepening our empathy in the ways that we've been talking about makes us less likely to fall into a fear response and abandon our needs or our boundaries?Joe: You get that fear a lot from people, they're like, "Oh, if I empathize, then I'm going to fall for them." I think that what they're thinking about that person who's fully into the other person's reality and they've lost themselves in it. If you do that, you're more likely to be taken advantage of. If that's what the person wants to do on the other side or is capable of doing, but in all cases, we don't want to feel something, if we're allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of, "I'm going to sell you this magic pill and it's going to make you skinny in two days." If you buy that, it's because you don't want to feel something anymore or you definitely want to feel something.There's something that you want to feel or scared of feeling to allow yourself to be taken advantage of. To have empathy, it really requires you to be willing to feel whatever is arising for yourself and that other person. It actually prevents you from getting taken advantage of, because you're welcoming of everything and you're not trying to get rid of it. It doesn't matter whether you're non-empathetic or like, "I'm not going to feel that person." That means you don't want to feel shit. It means that you can be taken advantage of pretty easily. Just look at the most non-empathetic people on our planet. They are the most likely to be manipulated by politicians or authorities or advertising.Then the other side of that is someone who's totally like in that other person's world. Then they're going to sacrifice themselves for it, but if you're actually like, "Oh, I can feel you, I can be with you, and whatever you throw at me, I can feel I can be with." What makes you need to do anything that is contrary to your truth?Brett: It seems another example of that is in a business relationship where somebody is coming at you with a bunch of emotion and making you responsible for something that you're not responsible for. If you're with them in that emotion, but you're like buying into their full story, then you're going to think that they're entirely right. You're going to lose your boundaries and be taken for a ride.Joe: Absolutely. If somebody thinks that you're bad and you get locked into their emotion, then you start thinking you're bad, that's exactly a great place where you're going to be taken advantage of by somebody who doesn't think they're taking advantage of you. It's by somebody who feels like they're a victim in that moment typically.Brett: Back to what you were saying about the people who are the least empathic are the ones that are most likely to be taken for a ride. Many of us simply don't seem to feel emotions in others as much as we'd like. When we start doing this kind of work is when we start to notice this. When I started to work with you, I experienced certain emotions and others when we were doing exercises. I was watching them as an ant colony. I could see and recognize the patterns, but I wasn't in it with them. Like, "Oh, I didn't have an alcoholic father. That's not my problem." I can see what that does in you, and now I can see your problem. I think I can try to analyze how to fix you. How can we tell the difference between observing someone's experience in a non-empathic way and genuinely being with them?Joe: The body is the telltale sign here. I think I remember that when we were working together and you're doing that, and I believe I came up and shook you a couple of times. Then you could feel a different way. There's a rigidity that happens in the body when you are trying not to feel, no matter how you're trying not to feel, whether it's by creating distance or disassociation, which is somewhat of what you were doing, being the watcher or wanting it to stop, any one of them. It just creates rigidity in the system. This often happens in the belly, shoulders, jaw is locked oftentimes when I do a workshop, like this one. I'll walk around and I'll hit people's jaws, so that like tap their jaws to remind them they're holding all this tight, or their belly is really tight.That's the main way, is to keep your body loose and you'll have to feel it. Our feelings are a muscular thing. Our feelings live in our muscles. If you're the person who was told you can't get angry and you are not angry, all the time now, and anytime anger comes up, you either give it to yourself or suppress it really badly, your muscles have to contract in such a way and become distorted in such a way. It's why there's a whole science behind just watching how somebody walks into a room, you can tell a tremendous amount of their upbringing.Once you know what you're looking for and you've experienced it yourself, the way a person's face is, you can tell what emotions they want to feel, or they don't want to feel. By the way they hunch their shoulders, by the way they tuck their butt, by the way that they hold their lips, how they purse them when certain things come up. It is why we have body language and it's why we have micro-expressions.Brett: Something I've noticed over doing this work is, that I've started to detect when somebody is disconnecting from me in a conversation. I can roll back a little bit and recognize that I had actually disconnected from them, then they're responding to that. It's as though the feeling for them is the difference between being with a good friend who's there with them and their experience, and being with a shrink who's psychoanalyzing them. I think that happens a lot for people who want to be there to help others. A lot of it comes from wanting to deal with their own pain, their own history. I think this happens a lot in therapeutic communities where people take the therapeutic role, but they're really analyzing and they're not being empathic.Joe: It happens definitely in some places there. It happens just with a lot of people who find themselves like the savior or helper of their group of friends. You'll see a lot of that happen. The truth is what-- Sometimes what that is, is they're trying to manage their life by managing other people's emotional states. [chuckles] If you feel happy, I'll be happy. If you're not angry, I'll be happy. If you're in a good mood, I'm in a good mood, and A, it doesn't work and B, you can't change people's emotional states and C it's just far more enjoyable to be with them in the emotional state.Brett: Which comes back to that self empathy thing we're talking about, like, as I've experienced my ability to actually have empathy with others has directly grown from my ability to actually feel that equivalent feeling in myself.Joe: That's right, that's exactly how it works, is our capacity to love the parts of ourselves is directly correlated to our capacity to love the parts of other people and other people in general.Brett: Sometimes being empathic with somebody and holding a highly charged emotion can leave us with a sort of static residue in our system. It can linger or put us on tilt. It takes time for integration, or just leaves us feeling that thing for days. For some people, this is really strong, the empaths. The self-identified empaths will just avoid certain situations, because they are like, “I just can't handle that energy.” How can we navigate this and be deepening our empathy without closing ourselves off or avoiding situations, especially if we are frequently going from one high energy interaction to another in business or something else?Joe: Yeah, I had to learn that really the hard way. For me, when I started coaching people and you know the depth in which the coaching can happen. I would go from that to a conversation with negotiating lawyers over points on a contract, and then back into a coaching session. I had to go into these big, highly charged things, one right after the other, and similarly when I do the seven day really deep retreats, it is like one emotional baseball bat after another in the best possible way. Brett: With real baseball bats sometimes. Joe: Right, but obviously not hurting anyway. It is something I really had to learn. The main thing is avoid it, and the way you avoid it isn't by not feeling the emotion. It is by being in your body. It's just putting some of your attention in your body while you are with other people and their emotions so you're not losing yourself. That's a huge thing. If you do that, as you get better at that, that takes care of about 70% or 80% of the problem. Then the other stuff, it is really about grounding. It's about staying grounded, realizing what's yours and not yours. Your body and your breath is the best way to do this. Releasing whatever emotion residue you have, letting the tears flow, shaking it off, grounding yourself in the different ways people can ground themselves. There are some tai chi moves that can do that, yoga moves that ground you. Brett: Just asking, “Is this mine?”, that was a really good one from earlier. Joe: Yeah, is this mine? There are some things to calm the nervous system down, different breaths. There are all sorts of things you can look into. If you go into any kind of system that says how I ground, no matter what kind of system from functional medicine to this, you can find those things and they work really well. My personal favorites are deep breath, walking barefoot, sitting in silence, meditation. Those things, I feel very grounded in those things. Massage will help me feel grounded probably quicker than anything else. Brett: If you are going straight from a sprint planning meeting where everybody got in an argument, started yelling at each other, and you are carrying that energy straight into a performance review. You really want not to take that out on the person you are reviewing. You have got like five minutes between them. Joe: First, I wouldn't buy into the story you have to. I would say I am not prepared for this meeting right now emotionally, and I would rather give you the actual emotional attention you deserve. Let's postpone it. That's one thing, obviously. For instance, if there's a big fight in the sprint meeting, I would probably enjoy it, because I could be with the anger and energy, and I would say look at all these people who really give a shit. They really care. They really want it done right, or they wouldn't be fighting. Brett: Way better than a bunch of apathetic checked out people. Joe: Exactly, and because I would be enjoying the tension, it would also change the dynamic in the room, the anger, because so much of the fighting that happens is based on a level of resistance, because unresisted fighting feels very much like clarity and decisiveness and a deep care. Again, staying in your own physical sensation is a huge part to prevent it, but I mean literally just shake your body for two or three minutes between the meetings can work. Taking deep breaths can work. Getting in touch with what's aware of your emotional state instead of your emotional state can work. Yawning 10, 20 times in a row can work. Having a quick cry. Crying doesn't take very long. It can be a minute or two. All of those things can work. Brett: Can you tell me a couple of stories about how empathy transformed a situation for you in a business context, something like this or different?Joe: I remember a time when I was fundraising. I can't remember, somewhere in like the $10 million range of fundraising. I just noticed that I was with the person who I was talking to and I noticed that they were getting distant. I just said, “Wow, I notice you are getting distant. I notice something turned you off. What happened?” That is what allowed for a far deeper conversation about what they were looking for, what about my attitude had scared them. We could address it directly. I got to learn that I was objectifying the person probably a little bit more than I would want to. They could learn that they were in a past deal, not in the current deal in front of us. That's a good example of one. Same thing, raising money, I have been able to empathize with the people on the other side of the table to realize they have objectified me or they see me as an employee rather than a partner. I don't want that. I think investors who see their investees as employees, they are dangerous. You can sense it by the way that they keep a distance from you or how they hold themselves emotionally with you instead of the way somebody who holds you as a partner. That has prevented me from having some really bad investors that way. Another example is selling. Oftentimes you see in a sales process a customer goes into resistance, and the salesperson tries to convince them, which puts them into more resistance instead of saying be like, “I notice something is not working for you. What's going on? If this isn't working for you, I don't want you to do it. If it's not working for you, there's a potential there's a misunderstanding so I would like to clarify it. But I don't want you doing something you don't want to do, because then I just have an unhappy customer, and that's not good for business.” You can't really do that unless you can feel the person. Brett: What are some other examples, like working with peers, for example, or within a team?Joe: For instance, I hear something from managers all the time. They are like, “We all had alignment, and then nobody did it. We all agreed. We all sat in the meeting. We all agreed and nobody did it.” I always say, “In that meeting did you feel like they were excited?” “No.” I am like, “Okay, what stopped you from saying I don't feel the excitement in the room. What's preventing the excitement?” You can't do that with anything beside empathy. If you are addressing the emotional reality instead of just the intellectual reality, because people, like I said, make decisions based on emotions. That's why people can all agree to something in a meeting, but if they are emotionally resistant, they are not going to go and do it. You can feel into that resistance, feel into where the excitement is, feel into what's being held, where the rigidity is in the room and clarify it. That makes things far more--  It's the same with product development. Kind of a famous thing where people spend a lot of money on a focus group, and then the focus group goes, “This is great!” Then the product fails, or vice versa has happened too. It is because they are asking them about emotional decisions through the intellect. Sometimes it works, but it's not a perfect translator. It's really feeling your customer. It's really feeling, what makes it important for them to buy it. Henry Ford said, if I gave my customers what they wanted, I would have given them a faster horse, but you put a person behind the car, and you see them drive it and what happens to their face, and you see the way people look at them and what happens in their faces. It's pretty clear who is going to buy what. Brett: I've always thought that one was interesting, the faster horse thing, because it's not really what they wanted. If you asked them what they wanted, if you asked them the solution that would have solved their problem, they might have bought a faster horse, but really what they wanted was better transportation. Joe: Exactly. That's the exact point. The intellect is limited in its capacity to see what the emotions want. Transportation was horse and feet at that time, so that was the limitation of the intellectual part of it. But if you looked at the emotional experience, then you know there are other solutions. Brett: I think this happens in product research all of the time. The research will be conducted in some way where it is like, what do you like better, the red plastic or the blue plastic, and you will get an answer. You will have a meeting where there's a graph that shows how much of the market wants this versus the other thing, but you missed the deeper question and the deeper emotional connection to the product. Joe: That's exactly right. It's why there's a felt sense to great design. You see something designed with beauty and you feel it. You go, “That's beautiful!”, not just beautiful as in looking, but the design is elegant, and there's a felt sense to that. It makes it appealing to us. There's no way you are going to use the intellect to describe that, unless you have been trained in design for years. Brett: How will we see our lives and our work change as we deepen our ability to feel our emotions and empathize with others? Some of these good examples are good examples, but what are some other things that would happen in our lives?Joe: Decisions become more clear, because we are more likely to feel emotions and be happy to feel emotions. We start caring for people instead of care taking them, meaning we are not trying to make them feel better. We are just being in support of them and therefore we get that in return as well. You get more people who are happy to be with you. You also see the people around yourself, and you become more and more empowered. As you stop fearing all of these emotional states, then you just stand in your truth more and more and more. There's just a deeper level of empowerment that happens, for you and for the people around you. One of these things, I was working with a CEO of one of the companies, and he tended towards care taking. Obviously, because he is care taking, there are a lot of people that fall into that victim thing in this company, and there was this victim mentality in the company because he felt responsible for them. As that changed for him, as he could be with people instead of taking care of people, all of a sudden the decisions that could empower them could start to be seen. Instead of coming in and saying, “Here's how we are going to fix the world.”, he would say, “How do you want to fix the world? Clearly, you are unhappy. How are you going to fix it?” He would empower people to fix their own problems, and it changed everything for his company. Brett: You can just use my name when you are talking about me. Joe: That wasn't you. You were not the person in my mind when I was saying that. Brett: I know, but I just felt it as like yeap, that's exactly been my journey. What else happens? A lot of times when we do these kinds of practices, there are shifts in our lives that are short-term uncomfortable or destabilizing. Is there anything like that that would happen with practicing deeper empathy?Joe: As the emotions start to get felt and the resistance isn't worked through, it can be a bit turbulent. It's not the emotions that are uncomfortable. It's the resistance to them. There can be a little bit of turbulence. There can be moments of tears where you would prefer there weren't tears. They don't happen very often. They are pretty rare. People are like I am going to be crying all over the place. It is like I cried at this one place, and actually somebody came up to me and said something sweet. Yeah, it can be a little bit turbulent. There's also this idea that if I allow my emotions, then they are going to take over me and control me. It's the projection you have been controlling your emotions, so you think they are going to control you. It doesn't happen like that. I have seen anybody at all of the thousands of people I've seen go through this process, I've never seen any of them who are like, “I am controlled by emotions now.” Brett: Damn you, Joe. Joe: Exactly. It has never happened. I would say that. The biggest thing is what we have really harped on, on this talk-- If you empathize with losing yourself, that can be really damaging. Learning how to be in your own body while you are empathetic is so critical. I just even recommend for the rest of the week, put some of your attention into your physical body during every conversation. See what that does to your world. It will rock your world, if you do that for every conversation for a week. It will just rock your world.I just say it's important to take it slow. I would say if the emotional tube is kinked, just be gentle with the unkinking. Take it slow. Brett: There's the wisdom in taking it slow, and there's also another side of that, that I can see. A lot of times these emotions are stacked on each other. You get beneath one of them, and you let yourself feel it. You might get yourself to feel the anger, but then if you don't feel the hurt underneath the anger, then a completely different thing starts controlling you. You get the disruptive thing going on in your life, and you are entering another pattern. There's like being gentle with yourself and taking it slow, and then there's being curious about how far down it goes and what's beneath this one I am not feeling. Joe: I would definitely agree with that. To think there's an end is no good. It's not going to be servicing your journey at all, so seeing it as endless, being curious about it, being vulnerable with yourself about your emotional state, being impartial with how you feel. You can use all of those tools, and use it for this empathy. It might upheave and you might find yourself bawling, crying and shaking. All of that can happen while being gentle with yourself. Brett: What are some ways empathy can go wrong? What does it look like if we are trying to be empathic, we aren't quite there so it is shallow or it is false? How could it be used directly as a weapon if somebody starts using these practices and they are like, “I could actually use this to manipulate people? What happens then? How does that look?”Joe: Creepy, you can see it. The difference between a good interviewer and a bad interviewer is one is using real empathy and one is faking it, and you can tell. It makes your skin crawl on some level. It might work for some people, but it is only going to work on a small percentage of them where empathy creates connection consistently. You can use empathy as a tool. They do all these skills that are based on that, mimic their body language, nod yes when people speak, and blah, blah, blah. Brett: Mirror the last three words of the thing they said. Joe: Use their name in the front of sentences, and blah, blah, blah. You can do all of that stuff, but if you are not in empathy, it comes off as false, fake, and gross. We have all been with that person, but if-- you could do all of that stuff with deep empathy and then it's actually quite appealing. It is really the empathy that is appealing.I think the reason those tools work when they do work, sometimes is, because they actually hack the mind into empathy. Brett: They are disarming, and if the intent is to disarm, then it can get you closer to it, to disarm yourself that is, not to disarm the other person as a trick. So what are a couple of summary bullet points on how all of what we have discussed would apply to a VIEW conversation and practice with the rest of this course?Joe: One of the things is you can ask questions. You can ask how, what questions that are based on nonverbal cues, on empathy. “Wow, it feels like you distanced yourself right there. What happened?”You can say, “It looks like you don't agree with that. What's going on? What's happening with you right now? How did that feel?” You can ask questions like that, and people generally stay up on the intellectual and won't ask questions on the moetional. Brett: And in a curious way. “I saw you disconnect there. I saw you disconnect there. I know it. Tell me.”Joe: Empathy as an attack. That's right. Also, basically, you'll notice that, when you have empathy with someone, they are more likely to be open, because they feel that you are with them. You can't do anything to show it to them. You are just empathetic and it just occurs. Like I said earlier, there's this creepy thing where people know you are managing them, and when they do, they back off. You don't have as much data. You don't get as much truth. You don't get to see the problem as it is. You don't get their ideas for solutions. With empathy, you get all that stuff. You get more data, and more ideas for solutions. Brett: Or the solutions you get from them are actually their solutions to get you to stop managing them. Joe: Exactly. Also, if you are in empathy, you can catch yourself being partial. If you are using empathy and you see somebody have an issue with you, you can be like, “I was being partial. I will catch my own partiality from being empathetic to their response to me.” Brett: Like the way I was describing earlier, when I catch somebody rolling back, you are like, “Wait a minute, I see what I did there.” Joe: Exactly. Brett: As you close, I would love for you to tell us about an impactful experience you have had, that caused the deepest increase in your empathy for others in the shortest amount of time. Joe: I want to give you two. The first one was, I was having this experience where I realized where I really just did not want to be with people who were having meaningless conversations. It was so annoying. “I was driving 65 miles an hour.” “Really, 65?” “Yeah, 65 miles an hour down to Santa Barbara.” Uh, it was so frustrating for me. I was like “What is it that I don't want to feel? What is it that's happening for them, for me that I don't want to feel?” I just opened myself up to it. It was awkward. I would be weeping in these conversations that were seemingly benign. After two or three weeks of that, maybe a month of that, the personal recognition that came through it was so critical to my sense of self, that I had to be valuable. The idea that I might be spending time where I wasn't valuable, it was so hard on my system I didn't want to feel that kind of sense of worthlessness.  That was an internal thing. Then to have the freedom to be worthless. “Oh yeah, I am happy to be worthless, and I am happy to be of value.” Having that freedom was tremendous. Then my capacity to immediately be with people who were having that level of conversation happened, and what I realized is, even in that level of conversation, there are different forms of connection going on. There are different ways people are connecting that aren't verbal, that aren't about the immediate intellectual thing that's up front. This one wasn't as quick, but it was bigger for me, which was getting in touch with Hand in Hand Parenting, which is really one of the main tools I learned empathy from. One of the tools in that is, it is called Parenting by Connection, and it allows parents to be deeply connected with kids, kids to feel deeply connected. The thought process is when kids feel connected, they naturally want to behave in a way that´s enriching for themselves and the family. All of the tribulations that we feel from children is just them being out of connection, and so how do you get them back into connection?One of the tools, they have five very simple tools. One of the tools is, stay listening. It's like allowing the kids to have temper tantrums, and being with them in that temper tantrum and even encouraging it to move through and making sure it doesn't get stuck. I was not good with a lot of my emotions when I started doing Hand in Hand parenting. I got good with them really quick. All of a sudden, I have a tremendous amount of emotional freedom I didn't have before. All of a sudden, my decision making got so clear, because I couldn't be with my child's temper tantrum until I could be with my own. I couldn't be with my child's anger until I could be with my own or their tears until I could be with my own. That process of empathizing and being with my children gave me so much more freedom. Brett: How did these two stories impact your ability to have value for people? Joe: I don't care. I mean if I were to look at it, seemingly I am more able to be more valuable to them, because I can be with them in a deeper way now, and I am not judging them or myself. That seems like that's probably more valuable. The bigger answer is it doesn't matter to me anymore. Brett: I love that paradox, the driving wound of your first story to just not caring anymore, actually having that impact. Joe: It was a great conversation. Thanks so much, Brett. Brett: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to The Art of Accomplishment.  If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe & rate us in your podcast app. We would love your feedback, so feel free to send us questions and comments. To reach out to us, join our newsletter, or check out our courses at artofaccomplishment.com.Links/notes: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." ― Henry Ford“For the simplicity on this side of complexity, I wouldn't give you a fig. But for the simplicity on the other side of complexity, for that I would give you anything I have.” ― Oliver Wendell Holmeshttps://www.handinhandparenting.org/ - a nonprofit that provides parents with the tools and support they need to listen and connect with their children. 

There are a lot of twists and turns in Joe Demin’s journey to founding Yellow Leaf Hammocks. It opens with a childhood refugee turned successful real estate developer, then twists into a story of entrepreneurship and an appearance on Shark Tank, and then turns again when a request for $400,000 became a $1 million investment. Through it all, though, Joe was guided by a singular idea to build a business that could actually have a measurable, sustainable positive impact on people.  On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Joe guides us through his quest to make Yellow Leaf a success. Tucked within this incredible story are some critical bits of knowledge about running a successful eCommerce shop, including the challenges of selling on Amazon and the ways to optimize your Amazon strategy, plus some of the pitfalls to watch out for if you decide to pursue a path into retail.  3 Takeaways: There are challenges to selling on Amazon, and it all comes down to whether you choose the seller-central or vendor-central route. If you choose seller-central, you have more control, but have to provide the inventory and warehouse the product on your own. With vendor-central, Amazon purchases directly from you, but then they resell on the Amazon site and the algorithm sets the price, so you have to constantly monitor that aspect to make sure you are not cannibalizing your own business  Today, there are many companies that have a social good aspect to what they do. However, very few take the steps toward setting up an actual sustainable enterprise that truly benefits the people you are trying to help. By providing jobs and then programs that teach financial literacy and other skills, you create an impact that lasts longer  There are certain pitfalls that small businesses encounter when pursuing the retail path. Whether that is claiming shelf space, creating market-ready packaging or understanding inventory needs and retail term agreements, there are headaches involved, so you need to be prepared to deal with them or find a different strategy 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, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie Postles from mission.org. And today we have Joe Demin on the show, the founder and chief relaxation officer of Yellow Leaf Hammocks. Joe, how's it going? Joe: Going really well Stephanie: So, your title, I don't think I've ever had anyone on the show with a title of chief relaxation officer. I was very excited when I saw that. Joe: Yeah, we're laid back, so we can't take our titles too seriously. Stephanie: Yeah, completely agree. Joe: It's a fun job. Stephanie: So, when I was looking over a little bit about you, you have a very interesting background and I was hoping you could start from the beginning actually, which I don't ask from a lot of my guests. But I mean, I want you to go way back, like age five. Joe: Yeah, wow. Stephanie: Tell me a little bit about your journey to where you're at now. Joe: Yeah. I mean, I appreciate the question and definitely I think a lot of what I'm doing now is sprouted from my background. So, I came to the U.S when I was five as a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union and had, I guess, natural hustle built in just from my experience growing up in a kind of a rougher part of Boston and just worked my way up through into college. And was, I would say, on a track to do something entrepreneurial. Joe: And early on in college, I fell in love with real estate development for various reasons. We can probably have a whole separate podcast on that, but ended up getting a really amazing job, like a dream job and where I got to lead a lot of high profile development projects. And through that experience, that was my first foray into fusing positive impact with making money in business. Joe: And this is around the time where green building was just starting to become a more of a mainstream topic. And as one of the younger people at the firm, I spearheaded efforts to reposition the firm as a leader in green building and sustainable development. And part of that philosophy that I had early on was this realization that we can actually increase profitability by building things that were better, more sustainable, that had a better health impact, creating healthier communities and so forth. Joe: It was definitely driven by wanting to do good but also realizing that you can do good and have a profitable enterprise. And as 2006 came around, the recession started and real estate was really the first. I graduated in 2006 and so I lasted a couple of years through the recession and ended up taking a job, more of an institutional finance position, but focusing on affordable housing. And a similar philosophy there where if you roll up your sleeves, you can actually take on a part of the sector that wasn't necessarily as sexy, but also had real impact on people, and again, keeping on profitability. Joe: And around this whole time of being in real estate, I was starting to get exposed to other entrepreneurs more in the consumer product space who were some of the early pioneers in sustainable agriculture and fashion, those types of areas and they were doing it in ways that were really impactful. Joe: And so, I caught that bug and had no idea what I was going to do next, but real estate was not the place to be at the time. And I was basically planning to go to business school. And right before going and applying for business school, I saved up all my vacation days and ended up going to visit a good friend in Thailand who was living abroad with four of my other close friends from growing up. Joe: And it was on that trip where the idea for Yellow Leaf came to be, but it all transpired on that trip, but driven by this experience that I had and exposure that I had to other social entrepreneurs. Stephanie: Okay, cool. So what happened in Thailand where you were like, "Uh-huh, I need to start Yellow Leaf." What did that look like? How did you find the hammock? What was the story behind that? Joe: So, I was originally on a remote island and reading a local guide book trying to figure out what to do with my day. We're sitting on the beach one morning and in this book, there was a story, it was a basically said, there's a little shop on the other end of the island in the old part of the island. Joe: And in the shop, there's a map that they give out for free that's a locals' only knowledge type of thing where it'll tell you the secret waterfall and the secret beach. And I was like, "Okay, I got to go check this out." So, I hopped on my motorbike, zipped through to the other end of the island and ended up getting to the shop and it was closed. So I was pretty exhausted by the time I got there. I sat down, someone came and opened the shop and I asked for the map. Joe: And then I also noticed that there was just a plethora of hammocks that were beautiful. And I immediately jumped in. I had loved hammocks before this never thinking that I would be in the hammock business. But I jumped in and was immediately struck by how soft the yarn was, the intricate weave. And I started asking questions about this hammock thinking that I would buy some and bring them home. Joe: And I was told the story of the Mlabri tribe and an aid worker who was working with this tribe and how literally through hammock weaving they had gone from being on the brink of extinction as a culture and they were trapped in indentured servitude. And through hammock weaving, they were able to provide enough income in their community where they were able to self-sustain themselves and build a path out of poverty or were on track to do that. Joe: The impact that they were creating for themselves that was driven by themselves and not an outside aid organization was really interesting to me. I had been familiar with the Toms Shoes model, the handout approach to creating impact. And so, this struck me as something really different. And I learned that these hammocks were not sold really anywhere else outside of a few places in Thailand. Joe: And so, a week later, that story of this community and what they were doing and the hammocks really stuck with me and I contacted the shop and I asked if I can go visit. And they connected me with the village. And long story short, I convinced the cab driver to drive me 600 miles to the village. Stephanie: Gosh. Joe: And I went there and I got to meet the women making the hammocks and spent a whole day in the community. And I learned that people would hike as far away as the Laotian border to this village because they heard how much money they could earn, how well they could be treated. And they were being turned away because there just weren't enough sales. Joe: And immediately I was like, "Well, this is a great product." Naively I was like, "Oh, I can sell some hammocks. We can provide work in this community. And I came home with a backpack stuffed full of hammocks and all this energy and excitement, threw them down on the bed when I got home and with my now wife was who was my girlfriend at the time we were living together. And told her about my experience and it all just snowballed from there. And I basically decided not to go to business school and start doing this on the side and diving into it and slowly getting to where we are today. Stephanie: Okay, cool. Yeah, that's such an amazing story. Where are you guys today? How many hammocks are you selling? Joe: Oh, God. Well, we have over 200 trained weavers. We started with about eight women when we first decided to do this full time. So, we've grown quite a bit in terms of annual units. I mean, tens of thousands that we've sold. And we're actually growing a ton right now. But yeah, it's definitely a very sustainable business. We're past the ideation stage and more into growth right now, so. Stephanie: For sure. Yeah. And I love that idea of giving jobs and actually, like you said, developing a market, a bigger market and providing an opportunity instead of just giving things to someone. Because I do think that's a much more sustainable path and one that I'm always very interested in. How has it changed though from when just a few women making these hammocks? What does it look like now with all these weavers? Are you ingrained in the training process? How do you keep up product quality? It seems like there's so many questions when you're working with a village in Thailand. Joe: Oh my God. Yeah. I don't even know where to start. There's a lot that we've learned and I think we've built a really, hopefully, a model that others can replicate for the artisan sector. But basically, when we started, we were, well, one of the first things we did was update the designs and we learned early on that... Joe: I guess to just step back even a little bit. When I first came back from Thailand, my co-founder Rachel's idea was that we needed to test the market and see if other people thought these hammocks were as great as I thought and that I wasn't just crazy. And that proved to be a really valuable process that we went through where we started selling hammocks at local markets and different fairs around New England, where we were at the time. And we didn't share the impact story. We just tried to sell the product and we led with product first. Joe: And through that experience, we gained a lot of feedback around design and being really design-focused. And so, one of the first things we did as we were starting to really grow was update a lot of the aesthetic to be more on trend with color and pattern and things like that. Upgraded materials so they were really built for the outdoor use and using performance materials. Joe: And so, as we were introducing these things, our weavers were really receptive to that. And we really engaged them in the process. But some of the things we've done as we've continued to grow and looking at how do we create more impact? Layering in like we built a financial literacy program, we have this amazing partnership with kiva.org where we're able to provide zero interest flexible loans to our weavers. Joe: And thinking about how do we provide additional support or bring in partners that can provide additional support in the communities to make it truly sustainable because the first step is giving somebody an opportunity to earn a great living wage and helping people evolve to the middle class. But then it's taking that next step. And so, we've done some work around that and really focusing on quality control from the beginning as well has been super important for us. Stephanie: That's amazing. So, how do you manage inventory levels? I saw you were on Shark Tank, which I'd love to hear the story behind that, but it also made me be like, "Oh my gosh, when you're on Shark Tank, I'm sure you got a million orders." How did these weavers keep up? So maybe first, if I can hear a bit about the Shark Tank story and what that is like, and then move on to how you manage inventory from that surplus of sales I'm sure you have. Joe: Yeah. Yeah, Shark Tank was quite the experience for us. I think we have an ideal product to showcase on Shark Tank, especially during today's times where people are spending more time at home. But for us going on Shark Tank was really, it's catapulted us truly. First off, we've had our first infusion of capital. I guess I can give away what happened. Joe: We received a million dollar investment from one of the guest sharks, Daniel Lubetzky, who's the founder of KIND Snacks. So, he's a very mission-driven investor who has a similar track record as us in terms of rolling up his sleeves and taking 10 years to build what he's built. And so, he's been through the trenches, but our experience in Shark Tank was, I mean, since Shark Tank, we've definitely seen a huge uptick in sales and we've been able to put some systems in place to really shift our business towards more of a direct-to-consumer model. Joe: And it's only been a month and a half since we were on the show. So, we're still living through a lot of the chaos that comes after you're on the show. Stephanie: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So what kind of unexpected chaos came? Because I'm sure you're like, "Oh, we're for sure going to get more sales," but what things happened or what surprising things happened after you were on the show or maybe during the show? Joe: Well, we honestly had no idea what to expect. We talked to some other entrepreneurs that have been on the show and have learned that it's different for everyone. It depends on what's going on in the world at the time that your episode airs. I talked to one person who was on the show during a massive snow storm and people were at home watching and he had a product that really fit the times. And so he did really well. Joe: And I talked to other people who were like, "Oh, it was okay." So, we just had no idea. And then going into this also, we're going through such a crazy time where we just didn't know if people are, how bad people are impacted economically. And so, we didn't know how to prepare inventory-wise, we didn't want to overinvest in inventory. That's been something we've really tried to hone in on and not hold inventory too long, have some of those kind of basic business principles baked in. Joe: But we've seen sales have far exceeded our expectations and it's broke a lot of the systems that we've had and created a lot of inefficiency now as we're trying to catch up. And going back to your question around the supply chain, on the one hand it's been a challenge, but we've also been able to catch up pretty quickly. And I think having a vertically integrated supply chain like we do and really great relationships with our weavers is what's allowed us to not lose out on, we're not leaving too many sales on the table and trying to take advantage of everything that's going on, keeping our foot on the gas. Joe: But it's been just the uptick in order volume within a short amount of time and sustained order volume has been something that's new to us. And so, it's been a fun challenge to work on. Stephanie: Yeah, that's amazing. Congratulations. Getting a million dollars from Shark Tank is awesome. And you went in only asking for 400,000, right? Joe: 400,000, yeah. Stephanie: That's crazy. Joe: Yeah, they have a great clip at the end where Kevin O'Leary goes, "It's never happened before in Shark Tank where someone comes in for 400,000 and comes out with a million." And honestly, we had no intention of raising a million dollars on Shark Tank. I think, yeah, we're still like, "Did that just happen?" Stephanie: Did it hit your bank account pretty instantly or was there a whole process behind it? Joe: There was definitely a whole process. You go through due diligence after, it's more of a handshake agreement on the show. And so, we ended up closing and then went to work afterwards just preparing to be on the show, making sure that everything was in place for us to have a successful airing. Joe: And this was before COVID existed, so we did not anticipate what the world would look like when the episode actually aired. But it's great to see some money in our account for the first time and actually be able to think a little more strategically, so- Stephanie: That's always a good feeling. Joe: ... definitely a different business today than, yeah. Yeah. Stephanie: So, what was the first thing that you invested in after that cash hit? Did you have a plan for it or what did that look like? Joe: So, we knew we needed to build our marketing engine. Prior to getting investment, we were very bootstrapped, we would reinvest all our profit and we were always getting pulled in a lot of different directions. And for once we can actually focus in on updating our website and really making sure we're telling our story and being a little more deliberate in the communications through our website. And so that was several months of a project and also focusing more on product development. We've got this new product called the hammock throne, which is a new category of its own. Stephanie: I need the throne because I consider myself a queen, so I like that. Joe: So, putting money towards that and making sure that we're positioned for this next phase of growth with product development and a really good Ecommerce experience was the first two things. And we're continuing to reinvest into those areas right now. Stephanie: Very cool. Do you ever test with the messaging on your website? And if so, what kind of testing do you do and what do you see works best to tell the story? Joe: Yeah, we've done some light testing. And the one thing we've tested the most, I would say, is how we message the product and the impact. And it's always odd to us if we ever lead with impact and the artisan story, it doesn't resonate as well as telling the product story. And so, we continue to test and we continue to iterate how we're communicating that because obviously impact is super important to us. It's baked into our business model, it's why we started, but the product is what makes it sustainable. Joe: And so, we're trying to really weave that into the storytelling more, but that's one thing we've, every time we test it, product story always wins. But we're starting to really get that striking a chord with more about how we tell the impact and how the impact story really contributes to making the product superior and what the benefit is to our customers. Stephanie: Yeah, that makes sense. I did go on your about page and I was watching more of the story of the weavers and I couldn't stop watching. It was like one of those addicting memes or videos where you're watching someone knit something and I'm like, "Oh, I can't look away." That's a really good video. Joe: Thank you. Yeah, and that's how we're now figuring out how to really tell that impact story of showing how it's made, showing the people that are making it. Every hammock is also signed on the label by the woman who made it. Stephanie: Oh, cool. Joe: And so, we really want to connect customers to, there are real people that are so enthusiastic about every single sale that we get. It's awesome. And we want to connect our customers with our weavers. And so, that video is something that it took us a while to get. Again, just not having raised money up until recently, everything came naturally and organically and over time, but those are things that we've tested out and seen how once we're able to show how it's made, that's one of our advantages. A lot of products are just made in I guess more of a boring way. I'm not sure, but just not in the same environment. And so, there's this beautiful craftsmanship that we want to showcase. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, I probably would not watch how my office chair was made, but yeah, that I could not look away from. Joe: I did just get back from an office chair factory as we were figuring out the hammock [inaudible] that's was... I do think... Stephanie: What were you doing there? Joe: We were sourcing components for the hammock [inaudible] because we're getting into furniture. And I think that just showing how things are made should be done more. I think it creates more transparency and connects people to where things are coming from, which is important for sustainability and just awareness around that's important stuff. I would challenge that and say, even the way office chairs are made, at least maybe I'm just a geek around manufacturing and production, but I think there's some, I don't know, I saw some cool things that I thought other people would be interested in. Stephanie: Well, if you take a good video, I will be open to watching it and- Joe: Absolutely. Stephanie: ... seeing if it's as enticing as watching someone weave a hammock together. Joe: Yeah. Stephanie: So, when it comes to new products, you just mentioned that you guys are looking into getting into new products. But one thing I saw on your site was that you could actually build a custom hammock and it made me just think about, how did you decide that you would allow consumers to build a custom hammock and how does that get to the weavers? Because it seems like it would be easier just to have like, "Here's our three products, and this is what the weavers know how to do, and this is all you can order." What was that thought process like allowing a customer to create their own? Joe: Yeah. We had a lot of debate around whether or not we wanted to pursue that because it does add extra work for us. We figured out what would be the premium cost. I think it's a $50 premium to make a custom hammock. The process has evolved over time and we're getting more towards a tech-oriented solution in this next iteration. But there's a design guide that we share out with customers. Joe: Right now it's pretty manual. You order the custom hammock, we then email you a design guide, a PDF that you fill out. So you can't actually see the hammock, but we have a lot of examples in that design guide and you can see the different colors. And it's worked really well, but what inspired us to do that was more around just realizing we have the ability. Joe: We have a very design-oriented customer, or at least one segment of our customers are very, in that interior design world. We also were previously, we did a lot of collaborations with companies like Anthropologie — we made all the hammocks for Tommy Bahama and other brands and realizing that they wanted something unique to them and limited edition collections and things like that and that we have the ability to do that. We realized maybe individual customers also have that preference and to make something that really fits their space as they're designing that area in their home or backyard. Joe: And so, we tested it out and we got a pretty good response and realized it was something we can do. And it's allowed us to differentiate as well, but also just another way to add value to people. And I think there's this broader trend around customization and less mass market products and things that really represent your personality and your style and things like that. So, we really lean towards that and wanted to empower our customers to be able to do that. Stephanie: Yeah. That's awesome. So, are you guys in retail or are you only doing direct-to-consumer? Joe: When we first started the business, we basically were trying to get any sale we can get. There's that bootstrap approach, just hit profitability as quickly as possible. We weren't really deliberate about where our sales were coming from, didn't have the resources for one strategy or the other. And as we grew and started reinvesting and we became a little more strategic and we focused on, our business was at, a year ago, it was probably 50/50 between retail partnerships and Ecommerce. Joe: And we've obviously started shifting heavily towards direct-to-consumer with stores being shut down, but other reasons as well, I think we were going in that direction anyway of being more direct-to-consumer. And the other thing that we're focusing on, thinking about more longterm is, I don't think we're going to not sell into retail. We're just going to be more strategic around who we work with and making sure that our story is really told well, the product showcased well, it's definitely a hard product to merchandise. And it's an easier story to tell on the internet with video like you mentioned and being able to really focus more on storytelling, which is a big part of our brand. Stephanie: Yeah. That makes sense. What kind of issues did you run into when you were going into retail, outside of COVID and everything, but what problems did you encounter? Joe: Well, taking up space on store shelves, packaging, we didn't really have retail ready packaging. And so, going through a couple of iterations of different displays, things like that, it took so much time to develop. Also, payment terms aren't flexible with most retailers, things like that. We pay our weavers immediately upon completion of the hammocks and some in advance. Joe: And so, just the whole retail business model wasn't really friendly for our art model. And we constantly were up against having to negotiate for better terms, having to figure out how to display the product in a store. And it's always just been so much easier to do it online. Stephanie: Yep. So, earlier you mentioned that when you started getting more orders, a bunch of things broke. What kind of things started breaking first and how did you go about fixing them? Or are there any best practices where you're like, "Well, when you have this happen, we saw this work, then this didn't?" Joe: So, I would say on the supply chain side, a lot of the efficiency that we had created just broke in the sense of... So, when we first were working with eight women, we were able to really go to someone's house and collect hammocks. And it was very manual and individual. As we grew to 200 weavers, we created a little bit more of a schedule around when we would drop off yarn, created a central location and standardized some of the things around collecting hammocks and payments. Joe: And after the Shark Tank appearance, our sales, we far exceeded what we expected to sell. And so, we ended up going on back order and still working through a lot of that right now as we speak and ended up having to go door to door again, completely lost all the efficiencies that we had, just trying to get the hammocks to the customers as quickly as possible. Joe: We started drop shipping directly from the communities where they're made in Thailand direct to customers homes. And so, a lot of the efficiencies just broke down and those things are compounded as you continue to stand back order. And so, that's one thing. The other is that when we relaunched our website in the beginning right before we went on Shark Tank, we had all these plans to continue innovating testing and a lot of those plans just fell by the wayside because we were putting out so many fires around being on back order, trying to get more yarn. Joe: There are so many challenges right now with global logistics. So, getting hit from a lot of angles. Stephanie: Yep. Do you see the industry evolving around logistics in the future? Because it seems like so many brands were maybe dependent on one location or these couple of factories or something. And if they're down for the count, you're in a pinch, how do you see things evolving in that part of the business going forward? Joe: Yeah, that's a really interesting thought to try to predict what will happen. But I definitely think a lot of brands are reliant on just one manufacturer and there's reasons to maybe figure out other backup solutions. I think we'll definitely start seeing that it's definitely wise to not just be fully dependent on one supplier. But it's going to be really tricky because in the U.S we're just not set up to manufacture a lot of things that people buy here. And so, it's not like it's going to be a sudden shift to bring manufacturing back. Joe: And globalization, personally, I feel like has had a positive impact on prices of products for people and accessibility to different things, but we're retracting a little bit, so I don't know. I'm definitely closely watching it and thinking about how do we look at different yarn suppliers and raw materials and maybe have more options just in case. Joe: But I think we're also inclined to not create a problem and just stick with the status quo. I think a lot of businesses are that way, so it's a little bit of a balance of putting some resources towards planning for worst case and also keeping your foot on the gas and keeping up with what's actually working now, but things will certainly be changing in the coming year. Stephanie: Yeah. Completely agree. So, with everything going on and all the chaos that you just mentioned, have you been able to focus on your content and marketing strategy? And if so, what does that look like for you all? Joe: Yeah, we've been definitely trying to scale up our content strategy. It's a little too early for us to report anything significant, but one of our, an area that I think we've done it really well in is having a lot of user-generated content. And if you look at our website, most of the photos on there are actually taken by our customers and this might have been a benefit of being bootstrapped and that we didn't have the resources to do a lot of these full-on photo shoots that bigger brands have been able to do. Joe: And that's allowed us to have real people in our products and to be able to show that to our customers, creating that relate-ability. And we're definitely wanting to continue that, and we're hiring now, trying to build out the content arm of Yellow Leaf more and focusing more around what a hammock represents in your life and relaxation and really shifting our mission a little bit more towards making relaxation a daily ritual in your life. And so, focusing our content strategy more towards that. Joe: And so, being a little bit more deliberate around our photography too and really showing the product in different places and how to use it. It's a little bit of a technical product in terms of how do you set it up? Where do you place it? And so, going forward, we're really focusing on being able to create content that showcases and answers a lot of those questions. Stephanie: Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely a good move. I also saw on the reviews, people were able to select where they place their hammock, and I thought that was so important because then you can be like, "Oh, she's like me and she put it in her backyard," or they put it in their kid's room. And it just helped you visualize, "Okay, it must not be that hard if a bunch of people are able to do it." Joe: Yeah, exactly. And that's where the user-generated photos that we have come into play. We also included a 12 page hammocking 101 guide book with every purchase. Stephanie: That's good. Joe: So, it has a lot of resources on how to hang it, where to hang it. Everybody sets it up a little bit differently. And so, as we look ahead, developing products that allow you to really be able to hang a hammock anywhere, there's more of our focus going forward. I think we've done really well with perfecting the woven hammock and now making sure that we can increase the amount of hammocks we can sell and the way people can use hammocks and making it a more integral part of our culture in the U.S. And so, that's the biggest focus for us in this next phase with solving that how to hang problem. Stephanie: So, when it comes to, you were mentioning UGC earlier, how do you encourage your customers to post those images? Joe: Well, I think for us, we're fortunate in that it's the type of product that people like to brag about. So, we definitely see a lot of people who are excited to use it. And so they're like, "Hey, take a photo of me," and they share it. And we try to really monitor social channels. I wouldn't say we have a massive audience compared to others yet. It's growing right now, but we try to really connect with people individually and have them share those photos with us directly so we can reuse them and just engaging with people one-on-one has helped. Joe: And then, more people see others sharing and they share. And so, it just builds on itself. Obviously, we send out the post-purchase review requests and anytime we communicate with customers we're always like, "Oh, we'd love to see your photos." And it makes our day to see that. And I think they're excited to share. And so, we try to keep that momentum going post-purchase. Stephanie: That's great. So, for a product that's pretty durable, probably going to last many years, what's your idea around increasing the lifetime value of a customer? How do you bring them back? How are you trying to get them to buy more than one product? What does that strategy look like? Joe: Yeah. With hammocks, it's obviously you would think a onetime purchase, and we were really surprised with our findings once we started really looking at the numbers behind our sales. And for us, it's about just under 20% repurchase rate within first year of purchase. And so, we were just shocked that for a hammock that we were seeing that. Joe: And what we learned was that this was such a great gift for people. And we started communicating that more once we discovered that so many people were gifting hammocks to a new, if someone, a friend buys a new home, get them a hammock. That's a great wedding gift. It's unique, it's different. And so, we've started really showcasing a lot of that gift giving more. And so, that's helped with the repeat sale. Joe: But that aside, we're also looking at how do we add more products? How do we build out, there's that space in your backyard that compliments the hammock? So, you buy a hammock, but there's other things. What else are you buying to create that space? And thinking about building more of a robust home and backyard brand centered around the idea of creating that relaxation space. And so, what can we do to add more value there? That's the product philosophy is more around hammock-inspired products, I guess. Stephanie: So, earlier you were talking about creating different messaging around relaxation or gift giving and things like that. What kind of marketing channels are you seeing success with? Joe: I would say right now, definitely the basics of being on Facebook and Instagram, especially for a very visual product like ours is great. We see a lot of success there and we've really tried to focus in on those. In the earlier days when we were starting to really focus more on digital marketing, we cast a little bit of a wider net. We found Google to be really expensive, really competitive and narrowed it down to, let's really figure out Facebook and Instagram before we start branching out elsewhere. Joe: And so, that's what our key focus right now. And we're also seeing with a lot of bigger brands moving off of Facebook right now with things happening politically, we're seeing prices come down a little bit. So, it's a smaller brand, it's honestly benefiting us. And so, we're trying to take advantage of that to be totally transparent. Stephanie: Oh, yeah. We've had a lot of brands, smaller brands say that as well, so you're not the only one. Joe: Okay. Yeah, and it's great. I mean, I think things are always shifting. The more people jump on a particular marketing channel, the cost increase, so you have to be really nimble. And for us, this is also new. We're also focusing more on Amazon these days. And so, I would say that's another really, it's been a great sales channel for us too. Stephanie: What was that process or what does it look like selling on Amazon versus B2C? What kind of things do you encounter while selling through their platform? Joe: Definitely very different. You lose a lot of control. Amazon's broken up between seller central and vendor central. And seller central you warehouse the product on your own either in your warehouse or put it in Amazon's warehouse so that you can offer prime shipping if you do that. But you have more control on that end. And on vendor central, they purchase direct from you and on the inventory and therefore their algorithm prices your product. Joe: And so, if you have a minimum asking price map pricing like we do, we never really discount our products. And so, you're constantly having to monitor and make sure that the product is represented the way you want it, which is really challenging. But at the same time, so many people are shopping on Amazon. Joe: And I think when we were first starting to shift more towards direct to consumer, we had a little bit of pride around thinking, "Oh, we're just going to be on our own website and some select retail channels." And really again, I don't think that's wise, I think you want to be where your customers are, particularly for your category. And for hammocks, we had an opportunity to really stand out on Amazon because it's such a commoditized category. Joe: And so, we definitely, yeah, we made this decision and it's worked out well for us, but there's definitely challenges around being in control of how your product is showcased and there's less customization and so forth, but a lot of people [crosstalk 00:43:39]. Stephanie: How do you stand out on Amazon? Joe: You can pay a little bit of money to be able to create your page. I think it's called A+ pages. And really you're still working with their templated sections, but really focusing in on like, what are the core things you want to showcase? And you have to stick within those walls. But trying to make that section mirror our website as much as possible and just having good customer service on Amazon as well is important. Joe: You do lose a lot of that control when you're selling on Amazon, especially if you have such a, you're trying to build a brand and not just another kind of a trinket type product. But again, if people are especially already aware of your brand, like for us, we saw after Shark Tank, people would go to our website, but also people would check Amazon just because Amazon has such a strong reputation for quick delivery, easy returns. And so, why compete against Amazon when you could be on there and increase your sales to reach more customers? Stephanie: Yup. That makes sense. So, how do you build, I mean, we've had a lot of our, we do a survey for some of our listeners and many people ask about selling on Amazon. So, what kind of optimizations do you do to your page, or are you experimenting with where you're like, "This is working really well or make sure you pay attention to this part." What kind of things are you looking at when it comes to creating a different page that gets found and it's enticing and still tells your product story and the background and all that? Joe: I would say we're still learning a lot, but one thing that's worked for us was to move all of our products under a single page so you can click through the different views all in one page. And for a while, we thought that would be a bad thing to do because if you're searching for a particular product and you only see one design, you might not click on it. We found that to not be true. Joe: Once you click on, you actually land on the product page, you can click through the different designs. And so, keeping people all on one page. And I guess you can apply this to your website as well. And Amazon obviously tests these things and we started just following whatever their best practices are. And it also allows you to have all the reviews for all of the products on all in that one page versus broken out across 30 plus views. Joe: So yeah, I mean, generally we're just trying to follow their best practices and take their advice on how to set your page up and just stick to the basics and good photography obviously is a given too, so that's been important. Stephanie: Yeah. A previous guest also mentioned that, let the algorithm do its job, or like you said, let Amazon tell you best practices, because he was just saying that a lot of people will try and just do something different because they think they know more and instead it's like stick with what works and what the brand is telling you what works and see how that goes first. So, yeah. Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Stephanie: That's good. So, earlier you were mentioning your website, is there any new tools or technologies that you're playing around with right now that you're seeing help conversions or maybe before you were seeing cart abandonment and now you're not, or you were dropping off traffic from the homepage and now you're not anymore? Anything that you've had success with on your website? Joe: For us having the live chat functionality is really great. And rather than having something that pops up and is in your face right away, just having a subtle message in a corner that you can click on and you can ask questions and if we're on, you can chat with somebody right away. Oftentimes it's been turned off lately just because we still have a pretty small team. Joe: But you can, instead of going to a contact us page, having that there, we learned that for our customers, that was really important. A lot of people have questions before purchasing. And so, making that readily available without a way that's super intrusive to their site browse-ability. And then having a popup with really good messaging around. What's the value to you to sign up to our newsletter and not just trying to throw another discount in your face, because again, for us we're not able to really discount heavily. Joe: And so, those two things have been probably the greatest for us. But we're continuing to develop our site more and add a little more functionality and features. And so, but yeah, we're just, again, sticking to what works and following... We oftentimes look at maybe what other brands are doing and get inspiration from them. Joe: If you're small like us, what we've learned is that there's no point in reinventing the wheel. And bigger companies like Amazon and other Ecommerce companies that have huge markets that are testing things constantly, you can really learn a lot by looking at what they're doing. And so, yeah, we're testing on our own, but also taking cue from others. Stephanie: Well, that's a good question then. What kind of other brands are you looking at? What Ecommerce companies do you keep an eye on? Joe: Definitely some of the big marketplaces like Amazon and Wayfair, very different from our website and they're more of a marketplace but just what their experience is like for customers is great. Actually, another company that we look at our category specifically, The Inside, who I think was on your podcast. They do an amazing job. We were looking at a lot of furniture and direct-to-consumer brands who are also selling products that require a lot of thought before purchase and how they're communicating some of the questions that people have when they're shopping for their home like Parachute Home, Floyd, or another furniture company. Joe: And also I would say some of the early pioneers and direct-to-consumer brands like Warby Parker, Away travel, who's done a really great job. And so, yeah, looking at the companies that have been able to raise a ton of money, grow super fast, build those departments out, what are they doing and how can we tailor some of those best practices towards our own business has helped. Stephanie: Cool. Yeah, I love that. So, before I move into a quick lightning round, is there anything that I missed that you were like, "Man, I really wish we had talked about this?" Joe: I mean, no, I think we covered so much. Stephanie: We did. All encompassing. Well, cool. Then we can move right into lightning round brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. So, this is where I ask you a question and you have one minute or less to answer. Are you ready to go? Joe: Ooh, great. Let's do it. Stephanie: All right. What's up next on your reading list? Joe: Ooh. I am really looking forward to reading something that is non-fiction. Honestly, I've had my head down for so long that I have not had a chance to actually kick back in one of our own hammocks. And maybe I have to do a little staycation. So, I'm looking for a book that can take me away from all the work stress and everything else. I can't say I have one right now. But I would encourage people to... I'm sure a lot of your listeners are always looking for ways to improve, innovate like I am. And I think I've always found value in trying to step away from that. And so, I would say I don't have a book on my list, but I would recommend A Gentleman in Moscow, which totally takes you to a whole different world. Stephanie: I like it. Joe: And that requires all sorts of great creativity when you do that. Stephanie: Yep, completely agree. What is your number one recommended spot when you go to Thailand that you would tell other people, "You have to go here?" Joe: I would say if you're going to Southern Thailand and doing more of the beach thing, take the extra step to go further from, a lot of people go to Phuket, which is great, but get on a boat, travel a couple hours further. And there's hundreds of islands to choose from. Honestly, pick any one of those. I would say Ko Lanta is great. It has a little bit of everything, but just, yeah. Go a little bit further, a little bit further away from the people and allow yourself to have that experience of truly being remote. Stephanie: Yeah. That's awesome. What is the favorite piece of tech that makes you more efficient? Joe: I would say, I mean, I love my MacBook Pro. Stephanie: Same. Joe: Yeah, thing is great, I take it everywhere. But everyone's got a computer these days. I would say, I don't know. Lately it's been just my computer because I've been staring at it for so long lately. Stephanie: Makes sense. Yeah. As is all of us. If you were to have a podcast, what would it be about and who would your first guest be? Joe: It would be around relaxation and how to live a more values-oriented life. And my first guest would probably be, I would say, Wim Hof, maybe. Stephanie: Ooh, that's a good one. Joe: Yeah. Stephanie: I was just watching a series about Iceland. It reminded me of him doing his cold plunges and yeah, he's great. Joe: Yeah. He's figured some things up. Stephanie: All right. Well, this was a great lightning round. Where can people find out more about you and Yellow Leaf Hammocks? Joe: So, our website would be the first place we recommend yellowleafhammocks.com and also our Instagram which is Yellow Leaf Hammocks. So yeah, looking forward to, yeah, seeing where things take us after this, but thank you so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure to share our story and hopefully add value to others. Stephanie: Yep. Yeah, it was awesome. Thanks so much for coming on Joe, and we will have to bring you back after all the Shark Tank craziness dies down and see how you're doing in six months to a year. So, that'd be fun. Joe: Yeah, that would be amazing, Stephanie. Stephanie: All right. Thanks Joe, have a great day. Joe: You too, bye.

I sat down with world-renowned vegan chef and author Jason Wyrick who has co-authored a NY Times Bestseller "21 Day Weight Loss Kickstart" as well as the book "Powerfoods for the Brain" with Dr. Neal Barnard, MD. Other books he has written are "Vegan Tacos" and "Vegan Mexico". He was the food editor for "Living the Farm Sanctuary Life" with Gene Baur and Gene Stone. He's a coauthor of "Clean Protein" with Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich. Jason has published the world's first vegan food magazine, The Vegan Culinary Experience which is now defunct and has been featured in the NY Times, the LA Times, VegNews, and Vegetarian Times. He has traveled the world teaching cooking classes and is the first vegan instructor to teach in the prestigious Le Cordon Bleu program. We talk about being vegan, health benefits, dairy, cheese, his home delivery service of amazing vegan food called The Vegan Taste and his restaurant Casa Terra. Jason gives us such a great insight of his progression of eating like most of the population to becoming a vegetarian and finally a full out vegan. It was such an honor for me, to have such a celebrated chef and author on my show. Because I've eaten his food, this conversation had so much more of a meaning due to my various attempts of being vegan myself. I hope you enjoy this conversation and the knowledge Jason shares with us all from his heart. Jason Wyrick: Vegan Food Delivery Service: The Vegan Taste Vegan Restaurant: Casa Terra Co-authored a NY Times Bestseller: "21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart" and "Powerfoods for the Brain" with Dr. Neal Barnard, MD. Other books he has written are "Vegan Tacos" and "Vegan Mexico"He was the food editor for "Living the Farm Sanctuary Life" with Gene Baur and Gene Stone. He's a coauthor of "Clean Protein" with Kathy Freston and Bruce Friedrich. Connect with Jason: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/thevegantaste/videos Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jason.wyrick.5 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casaterrarestaurant Twitter: https://twitter.com/VeganChefJason https://youtu.be/6jzSCBvX7PA ********** Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass ********** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review:I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world. Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Jason Wyrick: Joe: All right, welcome, Chef Jason Wyrick, this has been a long time coming for me. I have looked forward to interviewing you the moment I tasted the food that was delivered to my house. So here we are and I'm so excited to have you on the podcast and I really appreciate the time and you actually saying yes to me, so thank you so much and welcome! Jason: Well, you're welcome, I appreciate you having me on here. Joe: Yeah man this is a, the way this came about for me was I got a flyer in the mail and it was one of those things like come to this free, healthy dinner to hear some, I don't know, some sort of talk about healthy eating and nutrition. And it happened to be from a nutritionist, a company in town, like an office in town. And I went and then I, I got pulled into it, you know. The food we had was great, but it wasn't necessarily vegan, it was just healthy. But then when I got into the program, which was not cheap by the way, but I felt I was worth it. They started to say, you know, do all this blood work and then we found out my, I knew my cholesterol is always a little high. So their program is doing vegan for 30 days on their menu. And then from there, you, you know, you the hope is you stay with it or you alter it a little bit or whatever, so that's how I got into this. And the problem for me was I literally was so busy I did not have the time to prep my food. It was taking me like half days on Saturdays, half days on Sundays. And I was like, my weekend is shot and I've prepped all this food and, and I, you know, any small amount of time I had was gone. So then I really went on the hunt for trying to find healthy vegan food that I could just literally eat and not do anything with. I had already done, I think I did Sun Basket a while back. You know, all the food prep things that you know Jason: Right. Joe: of and we talk about. So that's how you and I got connected. I, I don't even know how I ended up finding you. I say it was just purely, I was so desperate doing a Google search and I found you and I was like, SOLD! You mean I can just heat it and eat it, right? That's that's your thing, it's just heart and eat. So here we are. So I want to start from wherever you want to start. I know that this was a health thing for you in combination of other things. But knowing the stories that I've read and interviews I've seen of you, that this came about more for a health reason initially for you. And then it just blew up from there and and it became your passion, which is really cool to me, because this is what I preach on this show and on my videos, is that I want people to live or fulfilled lives doing what they love. And it's cool that you went into that direction knowing some of your past, which you can talk about om how this all started for you. So take Jason: I'm Joe: It away! Jason: Sure it was a kind of a winding journey, I think I mean, it, it seems kind of straightforward when you look at it. I was unhealthy, I went vegan, I got my health back. Hurray! But that's, that's really not how it started, I mean. It's starts when I'm a little kid because, I think I didn't eat great, but I didn't eat bad for the kind of regular American diet. Which meant, you know, my mom cooked some of the meals and occasionally ordered out and I played sports all the time, I was always active. So I was a super healthy rail thin kid. And then as I got older, towards the end of high school and in college, I kept eating the same way I had been eating the last few years and last few years had changed because my mom went to work, she got busier and so our food choices changed to, "What, which one of these seven different chicken dishes do you want tonight that I know how to make? or would you like Taco Bell or Burger King or Pizza Hut or something like that?" So when I stopped playing sports all the time and was super active, the calorie and taken and honestly, like the terrible food I was eating, started to catch up with me. And so I, I probably put on 30 pounds from when I was 16 to probably 19 and just kept going up about 10 pounds a year from there. Jason: So I was already getting overweight. And then right at the end to college, I started learning how to cook. So I went to, I went to this really great Egyptian restaurant in Fort Worth where I went to college, had the ah this amazing meal with the first amazing meal I'd ever had. And I was like, "I want to learn how to eat like this!" And I'm broke because I'm in college. So I started to learn how to cook for myself. And then right after that, it was like two months after that, I went vegetarian and that was solely for ethical reasons. No real idea of the health impact or anything like that, that it has. I didn't care at the time, I was just going to keep eating food that was super tasty and not worry about the health part. So, of course, even going vegetarian, a couple gaining weight. In fact, I was kind of a stupid vegetarian, I'll just be blunt about it. I took the meat I was eating and I replaced it with blocks of cheese. So instead of these instead of like these super fatty steak fajitas loaded with sour cream and cheese that I was eating before. Now I was eating cheese lover's pizza from Pizza Hut and the additional topping was extra cheese. Exactly! [laughter] Joe: [laughter] Jason: And that was that was my dinner. I was with someone at the time, she had her own pizza. It was it was terrible. And so I became incredibly overweight. I weighed about 330 pounds and I got type two diabetes by the time I was in my mid 20s. And I was, I was faced with having to take insulin for the rest of my life and in basically starting to deteriorate even more. Like I was already deteriorating, my eyesight sucked, sleeping 10 to 12 hours a day. Everything you can think of with Type two diabetes was going wrong with me. So I was facing having to take medication and deteriorate for the rest of my life, which was probably not going to be that long at this point or changed my diet. And so it's, it's funny because I was, I've been vegetarian for five years and I had, I had heard of vegans, but I didn't really know what they were. And I even made fun of it a little bit.[laughter] Joe: Right. Right. Jason: This was back in the late 90s. And then all of a sudden it's 2001 and I'm faced with having to make this choice, do I do I give up this food that I love, which is cheese, and live a better life or just keep going with the cheese and and it's funny because even though it it sounds like a no brainer, like eat cheese and die or give up cheese and regain your health. I mean, it sounds like an obvious choice, but there is so much there's so much pain involved in a lifestyle change, that the stress of that was really bad in itself and, and going vegan in 2001 when really no one else around me was, was vegan. It meant I had to learn how to cook, I had to learn how to fend for myself, I had to completely change all these foods that I knew how to make and eat when I was growing up. And so it was super stressful at first. And so I relaxed a little bit and decided I was going to give myself a cheat day. So I was going to be a cheating vegan once a week. So every Wednesday night I'd go out and I get all you can eat enchiladas at my favorite Mexican restaurant and they bring them out in pairs they'll bring you two enchiladas at a time. And the first time I went in there, the waiter was like, "OK, yeah, whatever, it cool! He brings out enchiladas, except I eat 14 of them. Joe: Oh, my gosh. Jason: And then they come back the next week and all of a sudden the waiter's like, "Hmmmmm" because I need another 14 enchiladas. So by the third week, the waiters like "I hate you but I have to serve you anyway." Joe: You're like the, you're like that all you can eat buffet, crab, Jason: Right. [laughter] Joe: Leg guy. [laughter] Jason: It's it's probably familial in some way because I know my, my little brother would go to a Mongolian stir fry places and he take the bowl and see how much he could pack in the bowl because it was one pass through. And so he'd, he'd have the regular bowl and it only come up like three inches and then there was like the six inch pile of stuff on top Joe: Oh, Jason: Of the. [laughter] Joe: My gosh. It's. Jason: So there must be something familial about that, that buffet all you can eat thing. I, so I, but anyway, the point is, I, I did that for a few months and even then I managed to start losing weight and my symptoms went away. So I'd be vegan for the entire week, except for this one, one rather egregious cheat meal but it was still just one meal. And then it went to once every other week when I would go to this place. And then once a month. And then I remember the last time I purposely had went to this place in order cheese that I order in the enchiladas and I, it was a weird experience because I looked at them and I realized they didn't taste good to me anymore. They didn't have that, that feeling you get when you cheese that Homer Simpson like, "dooonnuuttt" like when you eat dairy, so I didn't have that anymore. They didn't taste good and I realized I was ordering them out of habit and not because I actually wanted them. So I didn't even eat the enchiladas, I pushed them away, paid the waiter, who probably sighed relief Joe: Right. Jason: that I was getting had their there and that was the last time I ever stepped foot in that place. And at that point, I was a full on vegan, which took me about eight months. And it also coincided with me completely getting rid of diabetes. Jason: And Joe: Incredible! Jason: After the first year, I dropped about 60 pounds and then when I added in some real exercise, I dropped another 60, so I dropped about 120 pounds over two years. Joe: That's incredible. And I think Jason: Yeah. Joe: What people need to understand about you, you're a big guy. Like I know Jason: Yeah. Joe: from the interviews and stuff, 6' 3", right? Yeah, I mean, that's you know, and and I think at one point you said you, you went to school and lived in San Antonio...Fort Worth, sorry. So you're like in steak town. Jason: Yeah, I mean, Joe: Right. Jason: The nickname of Fort Worth is Cowtown. Joe: Yeah, ok, so there you go! Yeah, so that must, the be, that must be hard. It's just the stigmatism with, you know, vegan and yoga and all of those kind Jason: Ok. Joe: Of things. Right. It's tough. Jason: It depends. OK, it was weird because Texas is really interesting. I mean, I grew up here in Arizona but my dad is Texan. And so I was already pretty familiar with Texas before I actually moved there for school and stayed there afterwards. And Texas has this reputation of being big and boisterous and rednecky and it is. But it also has has this huge liberal side and has this huge health side, has this huge vegan side to it. I mean, I remember when I was in college, I went to the Texas Vegetarian Chili Cookoff. And this was in the mid 90s and it was like this huge gathering of people from all over Texas doing this Chili Cookoff. Like Texas had one of the biggest vegetarian societies in the 90s, at least when I was there participating in that stuff. And so Texas is just this really cool mix of all these different things, religion and Atheism and big hair money and rebel activists and steak eaters and vegans and no one is quiet about it. Maybe that's the one thing about Texans is, you know, everybody kind of gets by in the big city but they're, they're friendly but boisterous about that stuff, which makes it really cool. Anyway, that's my tangent on Texas. Joe: No, but that's great, because it's exactly you, you saying that is exactly how it educates people to know that it's not just big hats and boisterous voices and steak and whatever, it's, I had no idea that you would think that long ago people were vegan in the state of Texas. Jason: I mean, I think, I think Fort Worth had one of the first vegan restaurants in the country, which was Spiral Diner that opened up in 2001. Joe: Yes, I don't think anybody would ever know that. So that's, that's cool. So the tangent was great. OK, so you are, this is what year now that you go full vegan? Jason: So that was the, I started the beginning in 2001 and then I was full vegan by the end of 2001. Joe: Got it. Jason: And I think, I think I might be more like a lot of other people with this, like I've, you know, I've written books with a lot of the vegan doctors and usually their message is that's all or nothing proposition. You go from zero to 60. And from a physiological standpoint, you're going to regain your health really fast that way. But if you're miserable doing it, chances are you're going to quit out. And so I think for a lot of people transitioning, as long as they have it in their mind that it is a transition, it makes it easier for people. So that's that's what I did. It took me it took me about eight months to fully transition over. And I tried to zero to 60 approach for Joe: Right. Jason: three weeks, and it, I was miserable. Joe: Yeah, and for me, the 30 day thing I did not find hard, the part I found hard about it was the meal prep and that's literally what was difficult for me. And I even heard you in some other interviews, the good thing that we have going for us these days is that it's, it's much more accepted in the world. And when you go out to a restaurant, there are options that would have never been there 10 years ago. Jason: Yeah, there are plenty of options, Joe: Right. Jason: Which has made it an interesting landscape for vegan businesses. Because I think in the past, vegan's gravitated towards vegan businesses because that was their only choice. And now at least in the Phoenix area, vegan businesses are just one amongst a bunch of other vegan options. Joe: Right, but I think the key and the reason I was so excited to have you on is what helped me get through the, the, the next 30 days that they asked me to do because they could see that my cholesterol was dropping. So Jason: Great! Joe: They were like, will you, "Are you willing to buy into doing it another 30 days? And towards the middle or end of the first, as I think when I came across your website and then it was easier for me to say yes, because I literally just could not afford the time to prep. Jason: Right. Right. Joe: But but besides that, the biggest thing for me was the taste. And I don't know, like this could be a trademark or something that I'm saying, but I didn't know vegan food could taste so good, and you can still Jason: No it's true, Joe: if you want. If it's not taken by somebody, it's all yours. But, yeah, that's what it was for me, man. When I first dug into it and the way I worked with you was that I wanted it spicy, which you were all down for. I think even when I, I got from my doctor what I needed to do, he said, OK, well, if you're gonna get this food from The Vegan Taste, just make sure, ask them if it's low and oil, right?. And it so... Joe: It everything was a yes. Like all, you know, that was when I wrote to you, Yes, you know, it's either low or minimal oil or no oil. And I can get it the way I like it, so you made it spicy, which is the way you said you liked it in email. Jason: Right. Joe: So it was like the perfect marriage. I was like sold! Jason: Yeah, I think that's, that's the key to getting people to make a change. It's about honestly, I think it's like about the in the environment that you put people in. So I know Dan Buettner, who wrote the Blue Zones by it. And one of the things that he told me that really impacted the way I thought about food and getting food to people and the way we treat people, is that the the biggest determinant for someone making choices that let them live a long time was not their willpower, was not a doctor's prescription or anything like that, it was the environment in which they lived. And so if the choices were easy to make, to go out and exercise, statistically speaking, more people would go out and exercise...that way. And so to me, food is part of the environment that you're in. And so the easier I can make it on someone to make a better choice for themselves, the bigger chance they are they're going to have to actually make that choice. And so for me, that's putting ready to eat meals in front of someone that's going to make them happy. Joe: Yeah. Jason: The less you have to worry about it, the easier it is for you to be healthy. Joe: Yeah, it's it was so nice to find the website. It was that, I could hear that sound when the heavens open, I was like "Thank you!". It's the only thing that's gonna keep me on track. Now, you know, before, before we get too deep into this, I'm not full vegan. Since doing nutrition program, I've cut out a lot of, like I would use, I would snack before dinner. I'd be so hungry I'd come home at four o'clock, whatever, and I'd pull out the the block of cheddar cheese and some Triscuits and, you know, just take the edge off. I, I stopped doing that a lot more than I use, you know, it's, it's cut way back to almost minimal, you know, to none. I don't drink, I used to drink half and half of my coffee and now all I use is either oat milk or almond milk. So I've completely switched over to that type of stuff. So while we're on the subject of, of, you know, how this has helped you, why do you think dairy is so bad? Is it just that it's like, was it not meant to be eaten or drank? Is it just like we've created this product that should not have existed? Jason: I think so. I mean, dairy's primary uses to grow a baby. And so you're you're consuming something that's meant to grow another being and as, as adults, we're not, I don't think we're supposed to be consuming foods that are continue endlessly making us grow to that scale. Like I have a five year old daughter, I watch how much she eats and sometimes as much as I do, because she, she's always out there running around and she's, like I look at her in a week later, she's taller and I'm like, oh, my God! And so calorically dense foods are good for her, I mean, that's why human mothers breastfeed and you know, all this other stuff. But then when you stop growing and you keep eating those foods, you're consuming growth hormone and all this other stuff that I don't think we're meant to be consuming. And then, you know, there are a couple other issues that go with it, which it turns out casein, which is the protein in milk seems to be carcinogenic, even, even in that milks appropriate species after their weaning, it seems it seems like the incidence of cancer goes up in that species if they continue to consume milk even from their own species after they're supposed to stop drinking it. And then, I mean, look at us where we're drinking stuff that's meant to grow a baby cow into this big monster cow compared to humans I mean a cow is pretty heavy. Jason: So, you know, there's, there's that it's, it's loaded with fat and it's all if you have cheese, it's all condensed down into this calorically dense product with all these other, all these other ingredients into it that are probably not meant for us to just get fuel. And it's all like if you take milk, milk is this big volume, take cheese and it comes down to  this little thing, all that condensed down. It's like a black hole of food. And then you're you're eating that, so, of course, no wonder you're you're getting fat, you're having arteriosclerosis as you age and all these other problems. So that's why I think the health problem is with dairy. From, from an evolutionary standpoint, it's was a good thing because you could have this nutrient dense food even in times of famine. That's, that was one of the benefits of cheese because cheese was basically shelf stable in a long period of human history when we didn't really have very many shelf stable foods, the same way that after a fashion beer, a shelf stable, just one of the reasons that beer was traded there and there are all these ways to preserve foods during times of famine and we just don't live in that anymore. Joe: Right. So on the dairy part of this, what I guess people have a hard time thinking of how they would substitute a cheese for these recipes, and I know that in you know, you have this enchilada recipe and you, there's I mean, you have a ton of different recipes. What are just some off the top of your head, some substitutes that you do use for cheese? Like, how would someone make a pizza? What would they put on it as their cheese? Jason: You know, it depends. There are a lot of nondairy commercial cheeses out there. I think from a health standpoint, they're good insofar as you're not getting casein and all these hormones that go with it, but I can't pretend that they are health food. Joe: Right. Jason: I mean, it's base, it's like cheese is solidified fat when it's dairy and the non vegan cheeses are still a solidified fat. They just have all the other junk that goes with them. So, you know, if you if you limit that look, if you're going to have a pizza and you have it once a week and you put some vegan cheese that's made out of almonds or cashews or something like that on it, you're going to be OK. If you do that every single day, you're not going to be so OK anymore. You can still be a junk food vegan. In fact, it's easier now to be a junk food vegan than it is to be a healthy vegan, because you can run over to Carl's Jr. and get a Beyond burger, that's, you know, still loaded up with all this fat and it's still a burger where as when I went vegan almost 20 years ago, if I was craving a burger, I had to make it myself. Joe: All right. Yeah, I mean, the creativity Jason: So that's. Joe: That, that you have to come up with for these recipes must be daunting. Jason: I sometimes, but only because when I do a lot of recipes, Joe: Right. Jason: I mean most, most chefs at a restaurant might do 30 recipes throughout the year. If they're really pushing themselves. I think with the delivery service, we're doing 300. Joe: WOW! Jason: Every, every year, at each year, it's different too. Joe: Ok. So you're rotating 300 recipes a year from The Vegan Taste. Jason: And we're just making about as we cook every week. Joe: It's amazing! Jason: Yeah, it's, it's, it's daunting, but it's cool. Joe: Yeah, it's. Jason: Yeah, I mean, and like back to the cheese thing, sometimes it's replacing that, that fatty mouthful, mouthfeel that cheese gives you so you can even use something like an avocado or you can use, what are my favorites is this thing called pipián verde, which is just this ah pepitas and tomatillo puree. It's it's a classic Mexican dip and I'll just use that on enchiladas or we'll make our own cheese at the restaurant, sometimes we'll make it just out of almonds and some other ingredients and we'll make our own queso fresco like that and we make our own mozzarellas and stuff. That's a little laborious, I think, for the for the home cook, it's just getting that, that creamy texture which you can get from nuts and seeds. Joe: Right. Yeah. Because even on the recipes at Casa Terra, your restaurant, I saw that there was I think you have is it brick oven pizzas or just... Jason: Yeah, Joe: Or Jason: We have worked fire Joe: Wood Jason: With Joe: Fire. Jason: Fire pizzas Joe: Right. Sorry. Wood fire. Yeah. And so and I did see one of the recipes are one of the descriptions of the you know, the pizza said mozzarella. So I was like, OK, how does he doing that? Jason: Right. It's just a, when you get to that type of cheese, that's it's a little time consuming and it's a mix of art and chemistry. Joe: Yup. It's just it's incredible. So I know we just kind of skipped over it a little bit but we talked about your daughter and, and I and I know we talked about, we didn't quite say that she's vegan, but I know that she is from based on my research about you. And I know it's tough with kids these days with all of the gluten allergies and, and everything that's going on that or used to be a lot tougher. Now, its parents are more aware there are more options and I would think that it's almost the same thing with your daughter as it is with a child that has a gluten allergy. When they go to a house for a birthday party and let's just go back to using pizza as a example, because that's how I grew up, right? That your parents would buy a bunch of pizzas, and... What does she do in that case? Or how how do you let the parents know that she's vegan and that, you know, that isn't something she would (A.) like to eat or (B.) she shouldn't eat or (C.) it might make her sick of she eats because she's not used to eating cheese. Jason: We just we tell them and ask them not to make a big deal out of it. And then we make sure our daughter has food that totally owns everybody else's. Joe: Perfect. Jason: I Joe: That's awesome! Jason: When she was in school before COVID hit, the teachers were asking if we could bring stuff for them. Joe: That is so funny. I can imagine, no I, listen, I know what it smells and tastes like. Every kid we sit there with, their pizza from Dominos going, WWO!, what are you eating? I'll trade you, I'll trade you two slices for that, that's perfect. Well good, she's totally vegan incorrect? That's amazing. So you, what is the Vcology project? Is that how you say it? Vcology Project? Jason: Vcology. Joe: Vcology. So. Jason: It's pretty much the umbrella for all the stuff that I do. Joe: That's what I thought, I just wanted to make sure. And I, because I know that you spoke about The Vegan Taste, which is the home delivery food service, Casa Terra, which is the restaurant out in Glendale, Arizona. And then I heard you speak about other things potentially coming down down the road, so I assumed that that was the umbrella where all of these things would fall under. Jason: Yeah, I mean, we're working on commercializing our cheeses on a large scale. We've already had one big vegan restaurant chain express some interest in it, which was really cool, it came out of the blue. But that was, that was a nice surprise. And Joe: Yeah. Jason: And we just want to roll out really high quality vegan cheeses onto the, onto the food service market and then retail, if we can. Joe: That's great. Jason: But if I can. I mean, if I can get, like some of the best restaurants in Phoenix using high quality of vegan cheeses, all of a sudden it opens up really great menu options for vegans around the entire town. Joe: Right. And I Jason: And Joe: Was Jason: I Joe: Thinking Jason: Think Joe: Good Jason: Go ahead. Joe: While I was sitting Jason: I think. Joe: On the dairy part of it, and I didn't even know that this underlying thing about the cheese had a broader scope or what was happening. I just I kind of chose the one thing that I know, like you, you know, it's like, how do you have ravioli? How do you have a pizza? How do you, if you you're so used to having half and half in your coffee, how do you make the move away from dairy? And I think that's, I think that's harder almost than the meat part of this or that Jason: It's way Joe: Or the Jason: Harder. Joe: Protein part of it. Right. Jason: I didn't know why until Dr. Barnard told me a few years ago that the casein in cheese is called the casomorphin and that basically means that acts like morphine. It acts like an opiate in your system. And I was like, "That makes sense!!", because one day I just gave up meat and it was like, whatever but when I gave up cheese, I had withdrawal symptoms. I was jonesing, I mean, like the hands were shaking and I had headaches and I was irritable and everything else that I had heard from people that were trying to give up cigarettes or drugs or something like that, I was going through and I'm like, "What the hell is going on?" That was, that was one way where I knew, like, I've really gotta get off this stuff, because Joe: All right. Jason: If I'm having that reaction, this is probably pretty bad for me. But it was a few years later when he told me why. And so Joe: That's Jason: Anyway, Joe: It. Jason: I think that's why cheese is so hard. Joe: That's incredible. How did the two of you get connected for that book? Your book? I wrote it down. I'm going to have it in the show Jason: Sure. Joe: Notes. Jason: The "21-day Weight Loss kickstart". So he was coming through town to do a talk and they wanted someone to do a cooking demo and I was the only one in Phoenix, doing this kind of stuff, so I just volunteered to do it. They were gonna pay me and I was like, don't worry about it, I'll just I'll just do it. And so we became friends through that and then I started teaching the cancer project classes here in Phoenix for a few years, which later became their Food for Life program. And, and during that, I just developed tons of recipes every single week. Because I think back then they were kind of in the same boat that a lot of healthy, healthy doctors are in, we're like, they're like, you have to change your diet. Here's how you do it. But they're not really experts at the here's how you do part. Joe: Right. Jason: And so, you know, their recipes were easy to do, but they weren't necessarily great. They were just like, "Ahhh". And so during that class, I just continuously develop stuff that was usually easy to make, but also really spectacular. And then because of that, we just wrote the book together. Joe: And that's really cool. It's just amazing how things, you know, you can make these connections and they just turn into something amazing like that, so, yeah. I'm trying not to skip around, there's so many things I have to ask you, I have so many notes, it's like this is, like I said, I, I was doing the meals for when I was doing the 30 day thing, basically for lunch and dinner. And then I started to do them just for lunch because my partner, Jo Ellen, we were like we were eating separate times, separate things at dinner, it felt like it wasn't this Jason: Right. Joe: Community. Jason: You loose the social part. Joe: Yeah, and so it's this balance for me. But so I thought at least at a bare minimum, and I think this is one thing that we talk about stepping stones and doing this in stages, is that it's worth at least trying to say to yourself, OK, "I'm going to eat vegan for lunch", just take a meal of the Jason: Right. Joe: day and say, this is what I'm going to do. And literally, breakfast is super easy because for me, it's, it's like a vegan smoothie, right? There's nothing and so I don't have to worry about that. It's not sausage, an egg and bacon and all this other stuff. So then you handle the vegan lunch part and you're already better than probably seventy five percent of the world in regards to how healthy you're eating. Jason: That's Joe: And Jason: What Joe: Then. Jason: I think. Joe: Right and then you just. So and that's kind of the approach I took. I don't know yet, just being honest with you, if I can completely eliminate that occasional steak or burger or Jason: Right. Joe: And I'm sure I can at some point, like for me, like you, I, I refuse to go on medication. So I'm 58 years old and I'm like, I'm not going on cholesterol medication. I don't take anything for high blood pressure. I'm not going to do any of that stuff. So if it's a, if it's food, it's going to make the difference, then that's the difference that I'll make. Go into the gym five days a week is already easy for me. But if I have to do that and get rid of the burgers and the steaks and whatever, and that's the mood that I would make. Jason: And if you could make that, did you make it fun and pleasurable, then why not? Joe: Right. That's Jason: If Joe: It. Jason: It's this chore, you know, like most people are gonna be like, ahhh screw it. I don't want to do it, Joe: Now, Jason: But. Joe: For me, it's it's talking my girlfriend into seeing if we can do it together, so that'll be the that'll be the piece we'll see. Yeah. So tell me a little bit about, oh, I also heard an interview where you said that your daughter growing up with two chefs. So is your wife also working with you at either at The Vegan Taste or Casa Terra? Jason: She she was Joe: Ok. Jason: Doing The Vegan Taste for a while. Joe: Ok. Jason: I mean, for, for years, she was with me in the kitchen. And sometimes when I was off doing other stuff, she was running at it for months at a time. Joe: Got it. Jason: But I now we're in a situation where it's hard for us to split our time like that. And so she takes care of the household and raises our daughter while I take care of the business. We tried where we were splitting it both ways and it was like, I think it's hard to multitask. Right? It's hard to be great at a bunch of different stuff at the same time. And so we just finally decided, well, I'll have to go off and kind of slug it out and be the champion for the business, while she's the champion for keeping the rest of the family sane. Joe: Which is the admirable thing for sure. So The Vegan Taste, let's talk about that really quickly. So The Vegan Taste as home delivery, vegan meals that come in these great packages that are, like you said, are the goal is to heat and eat. And Jason: Right. Joe: They I don't know. I'll let you just talk about it because I don't want to, I know I had a certain schedule and the whole thing with the coolers, but I'd like you to describe it so that the audience will know what it's all about and then they can make their decision from there. Jason: Yeah, it's it's super easy. So the menu changes every single week. It's a fixed menu. You put your order in by Friday night. My crew comes into the kitchen on the weekends, makes everything. We plate it up over the weekend. Pack it up for delivery on Monday and then my team of drivers go out every Monday and they deliver all the meals at once for your entire week, that Monday. They leave it in a cooler loaded up with ice packs so even in the middle of July, the meals will stay chilled until you can pick them up and then you put them in your fridge. I know, some of our clients will reheat them on the stovetop. They'll take the ingredients out and reheat them on the stove, top it honestly, talking to people, most of them stuff it in the microwave and they have a lunch in two minutes. Joe: Yup and those containers are microwaveable. Jason: Yes, Joe: Is that correct? Jason: Yes. Joe: Yes. I know I've done both. I've depending on what the food was, sometimes I would heat it on the stove and sometimes I would heat it in the microwave. And I think that's all, also another thing in my brain about microwaves, they know make me a little nervous thinking that maybe something's there that eventually Jason: Right. Joe: someone's going to admit to, so if I if I have enough time, I'll go to the stove. If I don't, I just use the Jason: I Joe: Microwave. Jason: Am exactly the same way. I mean, I don't even have time to cook for myself very much anymore, so so I use our delivery service for me and most of the time I just slide the contents out of the container and right to a pan. Joe: So in regards to the meals that are available, is it, are they just lunches and dinners? Are they breakfast, lunch and dinners or... Jason: It's basically lunches and dinners right now, but will add in a breakfast option and the juicing option and some desserts pretty soon. Joe: And and like me, at one point, I was getting doubles of things so that I could have something for lunch and then something completely different for dinner. So I assume you have clients across the board that are only lunch, only dinner or a combination of enough meals for, is that how many, how many Jason: Yeah, Joe: can they get? Is it Jason: So, Joe: The. Jason: Yeah, basically we do six different dishes every week and you can get a single portion of each one or you can get a double portion of each one. And the people that want to have our meals for lunch and dinner, get the double portion. Joe: Right and that's what I was doing for a time, that's, that's right. And then in my case, I said that I wanted it spicy but so you actually keep tabs of certain things that people request on a small, I assume a small level because you can't be doing personalized, you know, things across the board for everybody. Jason: Yeah, we have spice is one of the standard options we have for people. And then we have a gluten free option, soy free option, although we use pretty limited soy already anyway. And then no oil option in the meals, again, are are pretty much pretty low oil already. So we just talked to people like, do you really, really want no oil? Or is that that's that you're trying to minimize your your oil? Are you trying to minimize your soy? Are you trying to minimize gluten? Because we don't we don't use those types of ingredients heavily in the meal service. And then if there's something that we can, leave off as a garnish for someone like if someone's like, "I hate right onions." I'll tell them, you know, if it's mixed into the dish, we can't change it but if it's a garnish, we can make a note to leave it off for you. Joe: Right. Jason: I mean, most people are good about it, but then sometimes I get someone that sends me a list of like 10 different things, I can't, sorry, I can't do that. Joe: Thank God I do that I don't want to sit here and look at you in the camera and go, oh, I was one of those people. And Jason: No, not Joe: I Jason: At Joe: Think Jason: All. Joe: The only thing that I said, I everything was great for me. The only thing I request that I think was less tofu in some of my stuff only because I'm I, it's just me getting used to it, it's it, and, and it's not, I would, I wouldn't even say it's a texture thing for me because I eat oysters, right? That's about as weird of a texture as you can Jason: That's sure. Joe: get. So I don't know why I definitely have had tofu from your food service, that was amazing. And it's almost like it's firm and some of it sometimes is even like crispy, like it's it's hasn't where I've had it other times where it just, just, it's just weird. Jason: Yeah, I mean. Joe: I don't know if there's good or bad tofu, maybe there's just the quality of it, I don't know. Jason: It's the way, it's the way it's prepared. And I think it's also what you're used to growing up with. I mean, if you're used to growing up with, say, diced up firm tofu in a miso soup, you're not going to bat an eye at it. But if you're not used to that, the texture might be weird for you. And I think, when dealing with American culture where we're not used to that stuff, too many people just take tofu and throw it in a soup or a stew and they're like, "Okay, that's good enough." But it's not I mean, it's like to me that's like throwing in a raw hunk of meat and is something and being like whatever. So, Joe: Yeah, Jason: You know, it's just it's Joe: Ok. Jason: All in the preparation. Joe: Ok, good to know because I started to get to like it. And thanks to you once again, because I was definitely I grew up with, in an Italian restaurant family and my father was a chef and so all of this stuff is new to me. Jason: Right! Joe: I was eating pizza and pasta and bread and, and you name it. So I wanted to ask you about Cassa Terra. I noticed that on the website, like a lot of places, especially during this time we're living in right now with COVID-19, that the kitchen is closed for the summer, right? That's what it says on the website. Jason: Yeah, Joe: Is that true? OK. Jason: A lot of the high end restaurants, it seems, around town actually close up for the summer. Unless there are these big corporate things that can afford to take the loss that restaurants just suffer with the summer here. Joe: Is Casa Terra where you do actually all the food prep and making them? So that that kitchen is still being used for the food delivery service? Jason: Yeah, it's our Joe: It's. Jason: R&D kitchen and our delivery service kitchen. We do catering and stuff out of there, too. Joe: When does the restaurant open or when do you expect it to open back up in the fall or ? Jason: I'm not sure yet Joe: Ok. Jason: Because honest answer is for a, for the type of food that we do, our location is not that great. And so if we can find a location that's more central or on the east side, that makes more sense for us right now than trying to just reopen in Glendale. And Phoenix is a weird city, so, we have these really accessible freeways and it's actually pretty easy to get around here but I don't know if our food culture is is there yet, because if someone else to drive more than 20 minutes here for food, it's painful. And the chances are they won't do it. Joe: You know. Jason: Or if they do it, they'll come once a year. And Joe: Yeah. Jason: So it's, it's difficult that way we're compared to like Los Angeles and New York or Chicago, people will spend an hour getting to, getting to a place to have dinner. And if it's a good meal, that's just part of the it's part of the experience. That might not be a great part of the experience, but it's something you're willing to do. So. Joe: Yeah, absolutely, Jason: So Joe: Yeah. It's Jason: We Joe: Funny. Jason: Have to be, yeah, we have to be in a more central location. Joe: Yeah, because I know we're in, and I live in Arcadia and the boundary for me is pretty much like the 51. If it's on the other side of the 51, I have a hard time going that far west but I understand that. You, one of the things that I did read was that about the Le Cordon Bleu the school and it was something about you being, was it the first graduate of vegan Jason: First Joe: Or Jason: Instructor. Joe: First instructor of vegan? Jason: Remember when it was theater, 2007 or 2008 that I was teaching at the Scottsdale Culinary Institute Joe: Yeah. Jason: And right when I, right when I started teaching there, they became part of the Le Cordon Bleu program. And so I, because I became the first official vegan instructor in that program. Joe: That's really cool! Jason: There was there was cool. Joe: Yeah. There's so many things, the other thing was I remember either hearing or reading that philosophy was your major? And I think what, what struck me about it, when I when I read it and then who you are and, and I even, there was an interview about making the argument of why to go vegan, like how when someone find something like this and this is why this has been like I've wanted to talk about, even though I haven't gone full vegan, I think that the health benefits are so important and just the, the eliminating of dairy alone. I mean, I've told people when they said, oh, yeah, you know, it sucks getting old. I'm like, well, I'm 58, I agree with you, but I don't, I'm, I don't wake up feeling achy. And, and, and I never did a lot of dairy, but even cutting out what I've already done, I think the inflammation piece of this is what other, you know, is another part that people are missing. Jason: I'd, Joe: And so, Jason: Yeah, it's. Joe: You know, so getting back to the philosophy part about how you're able to convey this in a not like beating someone over the head with a club, you've got to do this, it's, it's the only way. Your approach to it is your first of all, your demeanor of how your, you know, your a 6' 3" guy who you would never think if I met you in the street, would say you're vegan. And then the way you intelligently talk about the food and then the bonus of all of it is how it tastes. And so there's just so many amazing things about this, it's why I was so excited to finally do this. Jason: Well, cool! Thank you. Joe: So the Jason: It's. Joe: Go ahead with the phil..., with the philosophy part of this, I think it's helped a lot. Jason: That that's actually what got me to go vegetarian, but also it it taught me a few things about the way people make decisions because I socially and just because of the way I was raised, I didn't want to go vegetarian because it meant changing my lifestyle. And intellectually, I've been kind of bandying it about for a couple months before I pulled the trigger on it. And I didn't do it, it was just something I had thought about it. And then I had an epiphany because I was watching, I was playing with my cat. And I, intellectually, I knew my cat is this other being with its own thoughts and her own emotions. But then there was something where I was just playing with her and I had that emotional epiphany and that's where it went off and I was like, I understood that my cat was this separate creature that was valuable and she had her own rich emotional life and because she was sitting there problem solving and she was getting excited about bringing this little bottle cap back to me and playing fetch with me. It wasn't like this, this robotic, emotionless, thinking-less, piece of matter that, that's how Descartes used to view animals and that's how he justified doing all these horrible experiments he did on them because he, you know, even though they would, they would scream and all this other stuff, he passed it off as they didn't have a soul and they weren't really conscious and all this other BS. And so you can intellectually know that, but then you have the understanding there is that connection. And within a second I was like, wait a minute, it's not ok for me to just, like, take a hammer and smash my cat apart right now, that's really jacked up, that's something serial killers do. Why? Why can't I do that to my cat but why am I paying someone to do it to a cow? And I was like, "I have to stop!" So I stopped, went vegetarian and then spent a month arguing against vegetarianism to see if any of the arguments hold up. And none of the arguments were self-consistent. And so I was like, I'm going to stay vegetarian. And that was the the rational part of that. But what I learned was I had to have that emotional epiphany to fully make that leap in my decision making. And then when I went vegan, it was even more so because I was doing it for health reasons. But then I found out about factory farming. So it's ironic because being vegetarian for a few years, I had no idea about factory farming and then all of a sudden I'm looking at it for health reasons and learning about factory farming and I know that it's what happens in a factory farming is horrible and I don't want to partake in it. But yet I'm going out and having all you can eat enchiladas once a week. Because I emotionally had that tie to the enchiladas and, and so I think for most people, decision making is ah, pain pleasure balance. And it's, it's a very immediate and very immediate decision. And it's funny because people that can make that decision for the long term, we call them wise, because in the short term, going out and jogging or lifting weights sucks for most people. But the wise people go out and do that because, you know, it's going to pay off in the long term. And so I think going through that myself, even though I was trying to be rational about it and I knew what the right decision was and not being able to make it because I had this emotional thing is what got me into food in the first place. Because I knew if I could if I could take the pain part of that calculus away for people and just give them an environment where they could make a good decision for themselves and for the planet and for the animals, then, then I had to do it. Joe: Yeah, it's, it's really cool. I mean, I learned so much more about you just doing the research that I wanted to do up front and, and I think it's important how the philosophy part of your, what your brain has done through, you know, getting that degree in school and then then I heard about the soul sucking marketing job that, you Jason: Oh, Joe: Know. Jason: It was horrible. Joe: Right. Yeah. And it's and this is it all plays, this is why this Jason: It's. Joe: is such a cool interview for me. And I don't want to keep you any longer because I know that, you know, you work really hard and but I, I would love to do more at some point, Jason: Yeah, that'll be Joe: You Jason: Fun. Joe: Know, it's just cool that you, you are doing your passion. It really means a lot to you. You're you know, you eat, sleep and breathe what you preach, but you preach it in a way that it's not preaching. The food tastes amazing! It was just a godsend for me to find it. We find out tonight as you're setting up here and give it a talk, you play the drums. It's like, what, what more of a kinship could we possibly have? And all I do is try to preach on my podcast and on my, you know, social media and all that is just people following their dream. And it's really cool to see you do this. It's, it's, it's great. And and I'm glad you're healthy. Glad you made the choice when you did. You're here Jason: Yeah. Joe: To help keep us all healthy and feed us. Jason: Well it's funny, so it's funny you brought that up, because I feel like I'm in another transition point in what I'm doing because, ah you know, I had this amazing journey where I lost all this weight, I cured my diabetes, became a chef and went and helped out other people. And in the last couple years my, my health started to decline and I was like, what's going on because I'm eating right. But there's, there's all this other stuff. So, I mean, you know, in the last couple of years, I almost got divorced. I was working 100 hours a week. I was doing all this other, other stuff. I was, you know, we went to set up to open up this restaurant, we had some guys steal about 50K from us and steal, ah... He probably cost us about 200 grand in the long term, which was almost all my family's money and almost all of my best friend's money that she had. And then we opened up this, opened up this restaurant, which you were in the restaurant business, so, you know, like it is a lot of work. And on top of that, we're doing these other businesses. Jason: And so there are all these other stressors and I realize it actually happened right wing COVID hit. Because we were thinking about like, we were really looking forward to the summer when we could shut the restaurant down for a while and get a breather. And then COVID hit and all of a sudden, oddly, my life got better. Because I was spending time with my family and I was killing myself anymore and my health started to improve. That was it, I had this very narrow focus in my life, which I was really good at but it also carried all the stress that I think, I think you have when you get a little bit older in your career and you're kind of at the, you're operating at a higher level, it's also a more stressful level. And there's a lot more at stake about point. And so when COVID hit, I had more time for my family. And then I started going on bike rides again and hiking and I started spending time playing the drums, I hadn't touched my drum set in three years. Joe: WOW! Jason: And I started playing again, which was actually cool. I have this thing where I get my, stop something for a while when I pick it up and better at it. So now I can actually play some of the Rush songs that I couldn't get through Joe: Nice. Jason: For three years. Like, where did this come from? Joe: It's awesome! Jason: You know, so that was cool. And so, so I realized, like, I'd been talking about environment with food choices. But I've been ignoring everything else that goes into being a healthy person and taking care of your mental state, taking care of your family, making sure you have time to not be insane with all this other other stuff and so I think my crew is shifting into a point where I'm going to start talking about more about holistic health and creating good environments for your, for your well-being as an adult. It's, I'm sure it's true for for kid or whatever part you're in but since I'm in my 40s and kind of went through the midlife crisis part, that's how I solved it, was figuring out that I had to create a good environment to make good choices throughout my whole life and not just with the food, because I'd just been concentrated on the food, which is one key. Joe: You. Yeah, it's amazing how many people I know, it's it's hurt a lot of people. But I personally, it's been the best three months and so long because I was running so hard. And like I said, I've gotten to do things that I want to do. I it's just it's been a good thing. And I'm glad to hear that everything is turning back around for you, too, as well. I worried about you when it happened, to be honest, because, you know, I, I know it devastated the event world for me, I mean everything just stopped. And so I was worried just purely whether or not you know how how well you would do during that time. And it's funny, speaking of, you know, COVID-19. Was there any concerns about, you know, your clients with Joe: The food delivery and any, any things that you had to do differently in order to to be, you know, follow the CDC guidelines or anything like that? Jason: We just did extra sanitation, but we were already doing that stuff anyway. Joe: Right. Jason: We were just more hardcore about it than normal. But that was it. Because I think with the food delivery, it's contactless, so our drivers just show up and Joe: Drop the Jason: They're Joe: Cooler. Jason: At their doorstep Joe: Yeah. Jason: In and head out. Joe: Yeah. Jason: So, so in a way, it didn't really affect the delivery service at all. Joe: Got Jason: It was Joe: It. Jason: horrible for the restaurant, but that ended up being a boom for us personally. Joe: Yep, yep. Well, awesome! Man. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that you're here. Like I said, I was disappointed when I had a sort of postpone it last time, I just took on too much. It was one of those deals where I thought I could I forget how much time postproduction takes after I get off this thing to get it, Jason: Yeah. Joe: You know, ready for prime time. But I am super, super grateful that you said yes and you came on, I love your food and you're an amazing human being. The more I've done the research and get to know you now. And it sounds like your daughter is definitely waiting for you to put her to bed. So I'm glad, I could go on, I swear to God for another hour, there's so many questions about food and just things that you've done, but we'll do it another time for sure. Jason: Yeah, that'll be fun. I'd love to come back. Joe: I again, I can't thank you enough. It's an honor to have you on here. And I'd love to have you back again. Just for the audience sake and things like that, where's the best place to get in touch with you? And I'll put I'll do in the show notes, I'll list every, you know, your social media things but like in regards to, let's say, The Vegan Taste, what's the best way for people to reach out? Jason: Just go right to thevegantaste.com Joe: Okay, perfect. Jason: I mean, we have all the social media platforms, but it seems like, you know, Facebook changes what they want to show to people every few months and Instagram is the same way. You know, all these other ones. So just just go straight to thevegantaste.com Joe: Perfect. I'll put in all the other links, I'll take care of all of that. Again, thank you so much, I appreciate it, it's so, I look forward to actually meeting you live in person. Maybe we can sit around and jam one night. Jason: That would be awesome! Joe: I would love it. So. Jason: Cool. Joe: All right. Thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Jason: Hey, thank you. Have a good night. Joe: You too!

Richard Maxwell has created and runs one of the most unique and inspiring creative musical arts and sciences program in the nation. For me, it reminds me of the entry level sound recording program I went through in college, only Richard's students get into the creative process early because of what he had the guts to create. This program happens in an area of the school campus where they have their own section of rooms that is their facility. It's made up of a larger classroom if you will that doubles as a performance room plus they have 15 Pro Tools stations and Pro Tools running in their A and B recording studios. They learn how to be expressive without fear of judgement, they write songs, they mutually assist and critique each others work in a helpful, loving way and it's magical to see what happens on a daily basis. Richard is a loving, caring person who, by his own efforts and fortitude, has created a platform where he can give the students, his very best in regards to guidance, ideas and processes.If you love music, talking about music, the process of making music, what music looks like in today's world, interested in how music could be handled in schools or always wondered how a single person can make a huge change in our education system, these episodes split into Part 1 and Part 2, are for you! Enjoy, share and spread the musical love. Richard Maxwell's Links: Richard's Website: https://sites.google.com/view/richardmaxwell CMAS Program: https://sites.google.com/view/arcadiacmas YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/RichardMaxwellMusic/videos Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/richard.maxwell.3538 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rchrdmxwll/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/rchrdmxwll LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-maxwell-235ab513/ https://youtu.be/KPMuQNW9GL4 ********** Podcast Music By: Andy Galore, Album: "Out and About", Song: "Chicken & Scotch" 2014 Andy's Links: http://andygalore.com/ https://www.facebook.com/andygalorebass/ ********** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Subscribe, Rate & Review: I would love if you could subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest rating & review. This will encourage other people to listen and allow us to grow as a community. The bigger we get as a community, the bigger the impact we can have on the world.For show notes and past guests, please visit: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Sign up for Joe's email newsletter at: https://joecostelloglobal.com/#signup For transcripts of episodes, go to https://joecostelloglobal.com/#thejoecostelloshow Follow Joe: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jcostelloglobal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jcostelloglobal/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jcostelloglobal/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUZsrJsf8-1dS6ddAa9Sr1Q?view_as=subscriber Transcript Part 1 – Richard Maxwell Interview: Joe: Hey, Richard, great to have you, man. I'm glad you could come on the show. And as you know, I'm a huge fan and when I reached out, I figured, you know, while we're all in this COVID-19 thing, you aren't quite as busy as you usually are. So I'm glad Richard: Different Joe: I was able to Richard: And Joe: Get you in here. Richard: Different, busy? No, I'm I'm I am as I'm I'm as big of a fan of yours as you are always so kind to me as well. So Joe: I Richard: I think Joe: Appreciate Richard: A Joe: It. Richard: Mutual admiration society. But that's Joe: Awesome. Richard: A Joe: Yeah. Richard: That's a good thing. I'm flattered to be here. Joe: So I know just from my own personal experience with you that you are a multi instrumentalist because I know that you and I have a kinship with drums for sure. Richard: Yes, we do. Joe: But that's pretty much where my talent starts and stops. And then you go on to songwriting and playing guitar. And I'm sure you play the keys. Richard: Yeah, but. Joe: So. Richard: Yeah. But to be fair, your skill you have in, like your little finger in drums eclipses my entire rhythmic independence and abilities beyond belief. Joe: Now that you talk about being too kind, that's too kind. Right. Richard: Well, no. I mean, you are a masterful musician in your own right. Absolutely. Joe: Well, Richard: I am Joe: Thank you. Richard: A jack of all trades, master of none in some ways. But I think that I mean, for what it's worth, the multi instrumentalist thing is partially due to the control freak nature of my personality, I think. I've had time to analyze this over the years and some of that I'd like you know, I'd like to be able to sort of be like, yes, I love playing all these instruments and I do. But some of it is because somewhere along the line, it was hard to find people that I felt like I could say, hey, let's do it this way, you know, and some of that was because I was probably not probably I was really difficult to work with. I think myself. So I started just kind of trying to figure out ways to do it on my own. On the other hand, you do learn a lot when you explore other instruments. So there's a lot of instruments that I will pick up and play badly just for the sort of joy of seeing what it does. What's that? But I like that. I think I think I think musically, there's something about process for me. You know, I'm I'm at an age where, you know, there's a lot of "what ifs" in my life and in my career musically. So now, you know, it's interesting because, like, I think you're, you're in, you're at a point in your thirties where you like all of those things are sort of like, oh, man, if only I had. If only I had. And then, weirdly enough, you get to a point where you're like, wait a minute, I actually now this actually means like artistic freedom. Which has been fascinating for me, and I know we also want to talk about, you know, the program at the school and stuff, but it sort of relates to it like, like you start to realize, like sometimes that's actually more valuable. Like there's a ya know, there obviously we all want to be Springsteen or Taylor Swift or whoever is that, you know, that that A-list group. Of course. I mean, who wouldn't want Joe: Yeah. Richard: That lifestyle and and those opportunities and I think that anybody who says they don't, is probably not being entirely honest. On the other hand, you know, I remember, I've been biking through this COVID stuff as much as I can so I, I have one ear with a couple different podcasts that I listen to and when John Prine died, when and if you know who he was or Joe: Yeah, Richard: Not, is Joe: Absolutely. Richard: Really a brilliant songwriter. So there was this one podcast that was talking about him that had said something that just stuck with me. I was never a huge John Prine fan. I mean, I respected the guy, but they were saying how he looked at his career and at one point, the fact that he never had, like, that top 10 smash hit was a detriment. But then the music critic who, who's pretty, pretty brilliant guy, he goes, yeah, but on the other hand, when you talk to people about his entire catalog, everybody's like, yeah, but everything's brilliant and not having that hit, like, he wasn't identified by a particular sound or of particular time and he could always kind of do what he artistically wanted. I've become more fascinated by, by that than, than anything else. And I talk a lot about that with my students, you know, in their process to like, you know, that thing that you love is wonderful. But what's like, what's the step before and maybe what's the step after? And are you and frankly, are you allowed to even take it? You know, we get very critical of artists and what we see on TV and on, you know, any video and YouTube now and everything else, but sometimes I wonder, you know, man, it's that the pressure to sustain that, whatever that thing is for them. I don't know. I know it sounds weird to maybe people would say, oh, he's just copping out for whatever. I don't know if I'd want it at this point in my life. Joe: Yes Richard: You don't. I mean. Joe: That's funny because I've had the same conversation with myself. I totally in my heart and in my soul and to be truthful to myself, that's all I ever wanted. And then it took me until I don't think it was that long ago that I actually was able to look myself in the mirror and go, you just didn't put in the work. You didn't put in that extra thing to allow yourself to rise above to be noticed. It just, it didn't and I know that, you know, I just I just never went that last whatever it was Richard: Sure. Joe: To get Richard: But then, Joe: It done. Richard: On the other hand, you know that what's the cliche about, you know, one. One door opens and another and one closes and another opens. I mean, you just you know, I've come to realize that. That that. Things happen for a reason like, like, you know, along the lines of what you're talking about. So, like, I never took the risk to, like, go out to, I've been to L.A. enough times that I kind of have a love hate relationship with that city in some respect, I think, like everybody does. And places that nature in terms of the industry. But I never when I was in my early 20s, you know, I didn't do the stereotype I wanted to but the thing of it is, is that I know now, looking back, if I'm like you're saying, being truly honest with yourself, I'm truly honest with myself, I know for a fact that if I had gone out and done that, then, it wouldn't, I would have, I would have destroyed myself, probably like I wasn't going to hit it, like it wasn't going to happen then. It Joe: That's Richard: Just Joe: Interesting. Richard: It just wasn't I wasn't ready. Joe: The. Richard: I wasn't you know, I am a very slow process learner. It takes me a long time. I guess I'm not OK with it, you know? I mean, I'm sitting in this, you know, not to sound funny, but on the other hand, I'm this is everyday for me where I am right now. Like, Joe: Right. Richard: This is you know, I was I was in a position we were able to get a house built. And it's not like it's that fancy. And I'm not going to show you. I could show you what I'm looking at out my window. But like, if you saw like, there's just gear and stuff everywhere, it's a mess in the studio. But the fact that I'm able to sit in a studio every day, I have opportunities where I can make music on my own terms. You know, I'm thinking about everybody I grew up with and stuff like that, that's, that's not so bad. You know, I mean, I'm not like like taking a, like, sort of second place on that either, I mean, you know, I have I have friends, I have students who tour, former students who tour all over the world now. And I'm so proud of them. And it but it's brutal, I mean, it's just I mean, not even I'm not even talking about, like, the COVID stuff. I mean, just that lifestyle in general and trying to maintain that, I mean, it, it I did I did some of that, you know, like one hundred years ago. But, you know, it's I guess, I guess maybe I feel lucky we live in a time where I can feel fulfilled in some ways. Joe: Yeah, yeah, and it's so funny because I just the last guests that I had on it, we actually talked for two and a half hours and I won't do that to you. And it was I'm going to actually blame it on him because he's such a great storyteller. But I had Nate Morton on who is the drummer for The Voice, and him and I have become good friends over the past few years. And, you know, we went through his early childhood then, you know, going to engineering school, of all things, and quitting it because it was he knew it wasn't in his heart. Going to Berklee and then the connection that I'm making here was you talking about L.A., is he said that I knew I had to go where the gigs were of of the caliber that I wanted. I know I could have stayed in Boston, but I wanted to play on a hit TV show or I wanted to tour with the best of the best. And so he said, I just knew that that's the only move that I had with the two things that he he points out the two biggest things, decisions he's ever made in his life, even to this day was, number one, going to Berklee and number two, going to L.A. And without those combination of those two things, you wouldn't be where he is today. Richard: Sure, sure, Which Joe: So, Richard: Totally makes sense. Joe: Yeah. Richard: Which makes sense and for everybody, you know, and you've got to find your place in it. I don't know. Who knows? I mean, we're not that old. You never know. It's, I mean, to me, mean and the industry is different now. And there's, you know. I mean, because I work obviously I work with a lot of teenagers and a lot of 20 somethings and they're all and they're wonderful. But it is interesting how, like, you really can almost you can almost like feel the sort of like flash in the pan kind of vibe of whatever they're, they're currently into. Joe: Yeah. Richard: Which I don't see that as a criticism. I just mean, you know. Sometimes you, you know, I wonder, like, yhere are certain artists or certain bands and, you know, they used to get like, you know, the joke was like the oldies circuit kind of thing. But at the same time, you look at what those musicians are doing and there's something about the fact that they're that they're playing like, like I feel like that state, even with all the technology and I am a technology guy, let's not kid ourselves. Joe: Right. Richard: At the end of the day, it can't be about the technology. And I feel like there's something, you know, like. And I know they have all kinds of ups and downs with personnel and issues of personality. But like journey of all the, you know, sort of like stereotypical cliche kind of bands in a way. But it is interesting to me that decades on, when you see them play they're play like they're actually are playing Joe: All right. Richard: Late. And I think that's the right partially think that that's a big part of the reason I think that people go and see the Rolling Stones play. Because they're playing like like it's not tracks, it's not you don't you know, you don't go into their show going, well, they're going to produce it this way or produce it that way. And I don't think that has so much to do with age. I think that has to do with approach. I've become a big fan of all crazy things. I tell my students I always find this funny. I found myself a few years ago and I couldn't figure out what it was. At first I would I would be in here like in the studio and just kind of like I'd be doing like paperwork or like just whatever, like just I wasn't working on something, but I'd want happened in the background and I would find myself streaming from YouTube, live bluegrass. And I could not for the life of me, I don't like, I'm not like a country guy, I don't, what in the world is happening? You know, that's like my having, like, some sort of, like, long, weird dystopian out of body midlife musical crisis... Richard: I mean, like because I mean, I was, you know, my first musical love was classical and in prog rock. And then I got into rock and anything else. So like bluegrass is is just. We're, we're, we're moving on in a chain that was so bizarre and then I finally figured it out and it was because it was pure, like it's a bunch of guys and girls sitting with acoustic instruments, basically, and they have to play them. The instrument has to respond. You don't get the benefit of, you know, all the other stuff if you don't do it, it doesn't happen. And I have that has become incredibly compelling for me. And now so I've been spending years and I don't know if you want to get into this part of it or not. But I've been spending years trying to figure out a way to marry the two. How can you like my big thing right now is. How do you take like I love loopers, for example? The textures you can create. I really dislike the lack of in the moment control you have, though, with a looper, because once you do a loop, you're basically stuck with it. Joe: Right. Richard: You know, you can stop it. You can start it and sign. But in real time, I want to sit down like, like when you sit down behind a kit, you know, I want the high hat to respond as I'm playing it, not in some prefabricated way that I can no longer alter in any way. So I've been working on trying to figure out a way to play with all of the layers, but have them respond to me like I was sitting down behind the kit and doing it organically or at a piano or on a guitar or just, you know, a kazoo. I don't care what the instrument is but the idea that it responds immediately to me, that's a more interesting use of all of this. So anyway. Joe: What are you doing? Yeah. Not to go too far because we know, but it's interesting now, what are you doing to do that? Richard: So a lot of it has to do with um, figuring out ways to like, look what makes up the layer that you need. Do you know what I mean? So like like a loop for me, when I was like, you know, you there's there's people that are brilliant data. I mean, and that's the other thing, too. You know, you're you know, Ed Sheeran is a brilliant songwriter. He is gifted on so many levels and he's kind of perfected the looping thing. You know, Tash Sultana, I don't know who she is or not. Joe: I don't Richard: You should definitely look her up. She Joe: Work. Richard: Is. Oh, my gosh. She is about the most organic looper I've ever seen in my life to the point where you can tell that something glitched or made a mistake. And it's like she does it, it doesn't stop. She's so in the moment about the music she's making and it's it's just frickin' brilliant. It's unbelievable. But the point is, is that, you know, you start to look at all these textures and you start to see some commonalities. And then funny enough, I, I started looking at, well, what do I really need? Like like when when I when a singer songwriter starts a loop performance, a lot of times, you know, they start with like a drumbeat kind of thing, right? And, you know, they've got their acoustic guitar and they're doing all kinds of stuff. And there's not I mean, it's cool. But then it's like, well, what is that really about? You know? And so I had gotten really heavy into Mumford and Sons, of all things. And I'm watching Marcus Mumford, especially when it's just the four guys. Sorry, four guys [shows fingers]. And, you know, and the and he's doing you know, he's just got that kick drum and he's got that weird little pedal mechanism for the tambourine. But it's essentially he's doing all that momentum off of a kick drum. And because it's so well played organically, you can hear the rest of the drumkit, but you don't actually need it. I know for a fact that you in studio work because, you know, I've talked about this. You have a less is more kind of approach. You know, you don't have to you know, don't get me wrong, we're all fans of Neil Peart. I mean, Joe: Yes. Richard: You know, God rest his soul. The man was a genius on so many levels, but we're not gonna be able to pull that off. Like, I mean, he he could he could fill the space and you didn't go "Well, that was gratuitous." Joe: Yeah. Richard: You know, that's a I mean, you know, he's like he's not the only drummer. I think that could really get away with that consistently. Simon Phillips may be another one. But that's just and that's just just my opinion. But my point being, what I've basically been doing is I'm looking at the layers of what can you actually do and then essentially it's a variation on voice splitting. So if I take a tone and I branch it out and I noodle with it and essentially process it in a certain way, you don't necessarily know what it is that I'm playing from. But then it goes even further, and I promise we won't stay too long on this. But just because this is where my brain goes, Joe: That's right. Richard: Still, I had developed this hole and there's some video and stuff you can I mean, I'll send you some links and stuff of early, like prototypes of what I was doing and it's fun. But it's are real, first, I was a real pain to get a song prepped. Like the irony of the amount of time it would take me to get a song prep so that it could feel natural and organic was just like killing me. Like it, it became so creatively so, so I went back, I've gone back and I've read redressed it. And the crazy thing is, is so I started looking at instead of for the drum kit, I started looking at the relationship between the kick drum and the bass drum. And part of that was because at one point years ago, I had developed this really cool way to simulate what sounded like drums off of an acoustic guitar without having to play it as a loop like it was coming essentially off the strings, believe it or not. And it sounded really cool. And then I would do like some coffeehouse gigs or some, you know, whatever, some small shows and things, theater kind of gigs and stuff. And I realized that people like if they knew what I was doing, they'd be all over it. But just as a listener, it was like, oh yeah, he's got backing tracks. An I'm like, no wait, you've missed the whole point. And then I realize. And then. And then you like and I know, you know, you perform all the time. You can't really blame your audience if they if they don't get what you're doing, that's on you. You know, there's only so far you can go. Oh yeah. They didn't understand like Joe: Right. Richard: I mean, it's just, you Joe: Right. Richard: Know, you can't play that game successfully. I don't think anybody can. So I've gone back now and I've started to look at what really is required for momentum. And can I treat like for some reason, hearing a bass line off of a guitar? We'll make that jump. I'm still trying to figure out how far do I go with the actual percussion sounds and things, but that's also to me, part of it is I'm a big process guy. I come back to that all the time. This, to me is fascinating. I've been playing with this concept since before my oldest son was born. And I'm really, really freakin old. It's been a long time, Joe: No, Richard: But Joe: I Richard: I. Joe: Really friggin old. Richard: Fair enough... Joe: I Richard: Off. Joe: Don't. Richard: Fair enough, now you're not. And it's just a number anyway, Joe: Right. Richard: Even if you were. And even if I was. No. But seriously, you know, to me, it's the process. I think that. That's the fascinating part. I am reminded Mick Jagger has been asked how many times what you know, "How do you write a hit song?" And I love his response in certain in one interview. He's like, "I don't know and as soon as I figure it out, I'm probably done." Joe: Yeah, Richard: Like, I don't want to know Joe: Yeah, it's interesting. Richard: Why it looked like it. It kind of ruins the magic of it. Joe: Right. Richard: I think there's great merit in, you know, I think art in all of its forms. And for me, it's music is its own, kind of like its own living, breathing entity. And you communicate with it. And, you know, if you if it's if you're working with it collaboratively, it's there's some way, you know, these amazing things will happen. And if you piss it off, it's like it takes its toys and goes home and then you're stuck. And I don't know what to do anymore. I mean, that's but that's that's literally my my thing. Which maybe I don't like I said, I can talk for like I went two and a half hours. I can so beat that Joe. I have. Oh my gosh. I love Joe: So Richard: The sound of my own voice. Joe: That Richard: I'm not going do that. I won't do that to you. Joe: No. Richard: But I know what it's like about the program. Joe: Well, no but, but because we talked about a couple of things here, I'm just going to put. Just add my own two cents based on, you know, the whole looping thing for me. I also love and I'm enamored when I watch it done. The problem that I have when it's in a live situation and I deal with it with the people that, you know, my other persona is being the owner of Onstage Entertainment, right? So booking a lot of entertainment in here in both Arizona and Colorado. I, I have to ask some of them that, OK, I don't mind you looping, but you have to get into the song within the first, like, minute to loop the layer, you know, the layers. And there's I don't know, I don't loop I mean, I don't do it. So I don't, I can't tell them what to do and I can't feel their pain. But if you're going to do it, you got to be quick at it and you got to figure out how to get into the song quickly because people whose interest it just. Richard: Well, you're not wrong. I mean, that's the other thing. I mean, you know, mostly, you know, you do the looping thing and it's like the first time, the first song. That's really a two and a half minute song that takes you 12 minutes to perform. And the audience is like, okay, that was cool. Three songs in and I can tell you this from experience. Some of this is because I don't have the gift that certain people do for looping, which is probably why I gave up on looping in some respects, and now but now I mean, like again a door closes. This is so much more creatively interesting for me. But, you know, three or four songs in the audience is always like we've seen this trick before. We know. We know they. They don't know what's gonna happen specifically, but they kind of know where it's headed. And I think some of that's the lack of interaction in all honesty, I think that's why you see some people like, you know, time. But the looping thing I've I. The one thing that fascinates me about Ed Sheeran is genius level songwriter, brilliant performer. Albums sound nothing like the live show albums are basically a band. Then he goes out by himself, which is very fascinating to me, you know, but on the other hand, I kind of respect it because that kind of I absolutely respect it because to me that's using looping in an effective way, using technology in an effective way. But I'm with you. I, I can imagine, you know, that battle. You're right, people don't, but especially, you know, bars and clubs and stuff. There's Joe: Yeah. Richard: Only so they that you can go and. And again, I think one of the things I know I deal with this a lot with my students is, you know, there is a line that you have you have to accept the fact that if you're going to go off on those musical tangents, that may be incredibly invigorating for you personally, you have to be willing to accept the fact that, you know, you may not get all the gigs you want. You know, or you may not get the type of gig that you think you deserve because people are going to you know, if that's you know, if that's not what the listener wants, that's not what the listener wants. And then, then and then that needs to, but that has to be OK, too. I mean, I think, you know, I firmly believe it's kind of like there's two music industries in a way. There's the industry that we see on TV that, you know, is, you know, is is the big influencers and stuff. And the award shows and everything else. And God love him for it. I like I said, I would love to have their problems, but then there's all this other stuff, but isn't going to make it beyond, you know, it's going to play the smaller clubs and it's going to be in in more intimate settings. Richard: But that's OK, you know what I mean? Like, that's OK. And at least now that's when you and I were growing up. You know, we were we were still of the generation where if it did come on the radio, you didn't hear it. You know, or you had to really I mean, I can remember you would spend hours at a record store. Because you couldn't return it. You know, I mean, you really chose carefully, you know, those, those you know that 10 bucks or 20 bucks or whatever it happened to be, you know, before we really got into the whole Napster opens up streaming for us. You know, world. You know, it's a totally different thing in it's interesting talking to my students about that, because some of them... It's that they are still very careful and they'll tell me they're like, my time is valuable to me. And they'll stay, but, but there's still even with them, there's still a sense of acceptable risk. You know, for, whatever, 10 bucks a month or whatever you spend for whatever streaming platform. I mean, that's like, ya know, that's insane to me. Joe: Yeah, Richard: I mean, Joe: Yeah. Richard: That you can get pretty much every recording that exists for 10 bucks a month. Which Joe: Yeah, Richard: Then also Joe: It's. Richard: Begs the begs the question, is it worth being worried about signing the big record deal anyway? Because you're not gonna make any money for it anyway. Maybe just go make what your heart wants you to make artistically. You know, 50 percent of not much. OK, now you are getting that much in the first place. But. Joe: Yeah, yeah, and it's, it's for them, you know, for all of us these days with the streaming part of it, it's like drinking water through a firehose when it comes to the amount of content you can actually take in. Where you? Yeah, and you and I are talking. It's like, yeah. Go to the right. You know, you you mowed for lawns. You have ten bucks to go buy the one album that you've been waiting to get Richard: Exactly. Joe: In. Richard: Exactly, exactly. But Joe: Yeah. Richard: It made it so much more, you know, I cannot remember buying an album and not sitting down and listening to it, track for track, multiple times all the way through. Joe: Reading all the liner notes, Richard: Exactly. Joe: Knowing Richard: Exact. Joe: Everybody who played on it every yeah, Richard: Yep, yep, Joe: Yeah. Richard: Or like I can remember. I can't remember what album it was, but I can remember buying an album, taking it home to listen to and then we like I remember my parents were like, we have we have something to go to in like 20 minutes or something. And I can remember sitting there thinking, ok do I put on listen, like the first two tracks or do I wait till I get homesick and listen to the whole thing? And I waited. You know, because there was something about that experience. And even now I find myself, you know, fast forward and, you know, I mean, it just did it. It's I find myself with some of those bad habits a little bit that I wish I didn't, necessarily...but it is what it is. Joe: Yes. Well, and two other things you touched upon that I know you. You brought it up and it's something that I deal with. But I took a position a long time ago and I started Onstage, that I actually don't hire anyone that runs tracks. And I did it purely for the fact that I didn't want any musicians being put out of work on basically my watch for lack of a better term. Richard: Oh, that's awesome. Joe: So that's just the position I took. And I don't have anything, you know, like there's a like I had a corporate gig. So when I say that, it's really like the local type stuff. So I'm not going to, I'm not going to put a single guy in a resort and put a bass player and drummer out of work because he walks in with bass and drums on tracks and back and backup vocals. And, you know, these other people are sitting home and not working. But the caveat with that is if I there's a corporate band that I hired out of Montreal, Canada, who had amazing tracks that they had built from scratch for themselves. Now, the difference between them is that every single track that they had, there was literally an instrument onstage playing it. So all it was for was for the thickness of the sound. Richard: Sure, sure. Right. Joe: There was literally not one sound on those tracks that did not exist as a human being on the stage. Richard: Right. See, and I think that you're hitting on something to me that's really important, which is intent. Like, I think that gets lost in all of this because we're so we're so caught up in the spectacle. Or the site. You know, I was just at a wedding not too long ago for for one of my nephews and it was interesting because the band, the band was they were good. This is back in Ohio where I grew up, but it was lots of tracks. And it was interesting the way, you know, I'm sitting there picking the thing apart because that's where my head goes. But the rest of my family's just enjoying the sound. You know, almost to the point where, like I've seen deejay's lately, do a thing, oh, sorry, my son's come in and Joe: Hmm Richard: Interrupt Joe: Hmm, hmm, Richard: Here Joe: Hmm, Richard: For a second. Joe: That's Richard: We have Joe: Totally Richard: To Joe: Fine. Richard: Apologize. My apologies, Joe. Joe: No, Richard: That's Joe: It's all Richard: My Joe: Good. Richard: Ex, Gray. He's gone and he's gone in for your drumming job. Joe: All right, perfect. Richard: His no, but I think I'm, you know, like deejay's lately, you see them like they'll travel with a drummer. And I actually think that's a really good thing. You know, it's, it's, it is a little bit in the other direction, because I actually I respect that decision you've made and I actually I did not realize that that's awesome. And I think, I think the world of professional musicians would be better off if more of the owners of these companies, such as yourself, took a stance like you do. But on the other hand, you come from this as a player. So you have a you know, I think some of this is, you know, that battle. You know what that's, you understand on a different level. And nothing against promoters, managers and anybody else out there but a lot of them don't. Is my as a you know, they're well-meaning, but they don't you know, they don't get it. You know. Joe: Yeah, we've talked about this a lot. You know that the success of what happened with my booking agency is the fact that I take the position and I also have the business acumen part of it. So I'm kind of a hybrid in a way where I can understand what I have to deliver to the end client and how professional all of that has to be and at the same time, I have to put my self in the position of the performers or performer, either one. And that, you know, when it's really hot outside, they need shade and if it's too hot, it's just impossible to perform outside in Arizona. And yet, because we live in Arizona and it's the desert, you know what? It gets freaking cold in the wintertime. So, and the fact that other than a singer who then has to worry about catching some sort of cold or bronchitis or something, that all the musicians use their fingers and as soon as your fingers freeze up, the performance goes downhill and everyone's upset and it just doesn't make for a good... So in our contracts, it's very in-depth about, you know, needing shade and needing heaters in the winter and then if it's too hot or too cold, that has to be moved inside. And we, had ad nauseum, I could talk about all Richard: No, Joe: This, Richard: Of course. Joe: You know, circumstances, but that's the approach that I took. Richard: But it's interesting, too, because like as you're as you're describing all of us, I keep coming to the word legacy like like like your own sort of personal legacy and all of this like, you know, and I've known you now for years. So I kind of I feel like I, I. I can say this maybe with a little bit of insight, if you like. I know you to be like you need to be able to sleep at night like you don't like it. But that's important. Like, look, I know that, you know, some of that's just because you couldn't send somebody on a gig that you yourself wouldn't feel comfortable taking, which I think is important, because, again, I think, you know, again, I deal with a lot of younger musicians, you know, a lot of teenagers, lot of 20 somethings with, you know, with the the college stuff folks that I work with, too. And, you know, you do have to kind of be aware, you know, the pay to play thing that goes on a lot. I see a lot of younger musicians that get really excited over gonna get this gig at blah blah, blah, blah plays. That's awesome! Can you buy a ticket? Because we have to sell 200 of them Joe: Yeah, Richard: To get Joe: Yeah. Richard: The opening spot. I'm thinking to myself, I know I get it. I mean, I you know, I understand there are costs and everybody needs to be able to make a living and provide for themselves and their families. And I really do understand that. But it's, there's something off putting about like, like to me, I feel like art's disposable enough, like it's treated almost like a fast food meal sometimes that, that going into that world, I don't know. I just, I just feel like, you know, one of the things I'm always telling kids is, you know. To me and this is this has always been my approach, and if I ever decide that I want to get myself out of this studio environment here where I noodle around, which I might, you know, in my midlife extended crisis of who knows what the heck's going on right now. I actually had plans and then the COVID thing kind of hit. But that's a separate conversation, I suppose. But no, but to think about, you know. We look at gigs, I think, especially younger musicians, they look at gigs in this context of, I have to get the gig for the exposure and the, quote, "fame." But I also equally need the money from the gig, and I think that that's in some ways, the problem. Everybody's got to eat, everybody needs to. I get, I understand that. But I do think that when you can eliminate either one or the other from the equation, you actually give yourself more opportunities. Joe: Yeah, it's. Richard: You know, like if you can, you know, and now I realize I'm in a very unique situation. I could take a gig or not just for the joy of the gig. And then one of the reasons why I started to think about I should really start playing out again just for my own sense of self and to noodle around with this not looping looper thing, to be perfectly honest with you in front of people, was because I realized I don't really care if I make any money doing a gig. Of course, I would love to get some cash, you know, some money in my pocket for for for performing. But at the same time, it's like you priority, you know what what matters? And I think that that's part of it, you know, especially now, you know, because there isn't you know, it's really tough. As you know, being a gigging musician is really brutal and obviously right now it's basically impossible, Joe: All right. Richard: You know, with with the situation we're in. But I do think. Like, it's funny, like I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of my, my students about the fact that I know and just a lot of people in general. There are some you know, this is horrible right now. I mean, it just it is devastating the live music industry, which is like, what, eight billion dollars annually or something at a minimum is just devastated right now. And all of the ripple effect of it is, is just it's gutting. But I do think there is also some good possibly to come out of this. The number of people I talk to, younger people that are so excited at the notion of when I can go see another show, like the appreciation for it. You know, like when you're younger and like you can go to any show you want, anytime you want, basically because you've got all your income is basically disposable and, you know, whatever else or even if it's not but you can you can seriously prioritize it. You know, you not to worry about house and car and bubble on food. And I know some kids do, I'm, I'm speaking generalities, but just in general. Joe: Yeah. Richard: When that's been removed now. It is so interesting, the number of conversations I've had with kids that are like, WOW!, I'm just so appreciative of when I'll be able to do that again. Or, or the realization that that because we would we talk about it all the time and might within my classes, like, OK, you go to that show. I don't care what show it is. That person onstage, even if it's a soloist, isn't the only person involved in you seeing that show. They just aren't. There's no circumstance where it's just them. And you start to really now understand how it all changes, you know? You know, or not changes but how, I mean, it's gone right now, you know, and they're talking about 2021 before major tours happen again, major festivals and things like that. I want to get all the pressing and down on stuff. But but Joe: Oh, Richard: I think. But I mean, it's like you don't already know this. I'm sure you. Joe: I have. I have tickets to see the Doobie Brothers and the Eagles. Yeah. And and that the Eagles, I think, was supposed to happen in April. That's been delayed, I think, until October or December and you know, there's a good chance they're all going to be moved until 2021 to just Richard: Yeah, Joe: Me. Richard: It. Joe: No one's gonna want to go to a concert and sit, you know, six feet apart from the person they went with and sit, you know, have every other row with someone, it's just it would be weird Richard: Well, and Joe: Because. Richard: Not to even some more paranoid, but like I've been reading about different things about like I guess they did a study recently about that choir that had that rehearsal before anybody realized it was a pandemic. But then like 40 out of the 60 people that were in the choir wound up getting tested. They're testing positive. Joe: Oh, wow. Richard: And they you know, I mean, it's a horrible tragedy, I think like two or three of them passed away from it and the whole circumstance was awful and they were going off of all the information they had, which at the time was nothing. And I mean, the whole thing is a terrible tragedy. But out of that, they recreated the circumstances. They obviously didn't infect people again, but they started to look at how singing and things of that nature, what it does to the transmission of a disease, you know, of a virus of this nature and then you think about people that like an event where they're shouting or screaming or singing along and all this other stuff. And you just think to yourself, you know, how is this going to look? Joe: Yeah. Richard: You know what we know? I don't know. It's it's, a it's an interesting. If it wasn't so devastating to the to people that I personally know and just to the industry that I'm aware of and the ripple effects of all of that, it would be just fascinating. But instead, it's just I mean, it's just. Joe: Yes. Richard: It is really. It just makes me really sad and I'm really grateful, like I feel weird sitting in a studio talking to you right now because I feel like almost like I'm, I'm unintentionally flexing and I don't mean to be. It's just, you know. I never thought my life musically would be in a place where I could feel musically secure more than most musicians out there in the world. That is such a bizarre moment of clarity for me. I almost feel obligated to be making more music right now. Not because anybody needs to hear it or that it'll be any good, but almost because I feel like if I don't, I'm being incredibly selfish, that I have the option to do it and I'm not Joe: Right. Richard: Taking advantage of it. Joe: A. Richard: I feel like, you know. You can believe this, but I feel like I would just do like such an ass, like if Joe: Now I get it. Richard: I feel like, I feel like I believe in karma. And I just, I just feel like I have I have an obligation, especially I'm about to head into summer, which changes up my teaching obligations and my, you know, Joe: Yes. Richard: Obligations of that nature. And running the studios are going to be very different for the foreseeable future, at least. Joe: Yes. Richard: Wrote Joe: And it's then Richard: permanent excuse Joe: It's like, no, yeah. No. And I get it. And it's in a lot of our talent is struggling. You know, that that I personally know and had, had helped to get a fair amount of work that they, you know, at times where they don't have work and they're struggling just to put food on the table and pay their car payment, keep a roof over their head. They now are sort of forced into possibly going into debt to buy a webcam and a microphone and and learn, you know, some sort of software if need be, or if they just end up going live on Zoom or Facebook or any of the streaming platforms. But, you know, they're putting in there they're Venmo and PayPal handles as a virtual tip jar just to try to make any sort of money. Richard: Yeah, anything is Joe: And Richard: Anything. Joe: Yeah, Richard: Mm Joe: And Richard: Hmm. Joe: It's it's really tough. So, yeah, I keep brainstorming on ways to try to figure out a way to help. And I haven't come up with it yet. I but I'm working on it. It's not like I'm sitting here, I'm not you know, I'm lucky enough that I had a business where because at one point I was the seven day week musician, you know, I was playing, you remember, and Richard: I do. Joe: That's all I Richard: I Joe: Did Richard: Do. Yeah. Joe: Before. Richard: Yeah. You were impossible to get a hold of because it would always be like a message back, like dude I'll call you later, I'm on, I'm like, you know, 17 gigs today. Joe: Yeah, right. Yeah. But so I get it. Again, we go back to. I've I've lived it and I understand where it's all coming from. Now I just have to figure a way to help and so that's a struggle for me. But that's that's a whole like you said, it's a whole different conversation. And the one last piece that you touched upon that I don't want to forget is that in the conversation I had with Nate Morton, the drummer from The Voice, there's a connector in L.A. that you may or may not have heard of that that I knew when I wanted to, you know, possibly get a tour. A guy named Barry Squire and Barry is basically the music matchmaker out there. So if Cher is looking for a band, Barry will put out the notice that Cher is about to go on tour and they need this, this and this. Same thing with Pink or any of those, Barry was the guy to basically piece these bands together in L.A. for these big tours. Richard: Interesting, Joe: And Richard: I did. Joe: And so now the listing and Barry puts these listings up now on, on Facebook and it's obviously become a lot easier as part of the discussion I had with Nate, where it used to be, hey, you go to this executive's office and you pick up a C.D. or tape, you learn these three songs on it, you come to this studio/soundstage on the Saturday at 1:00, you play the songs and we'll let you know kind of thing. Now, Barry posts these things on Facebook and its he post the requirements. And, you know, everyone has to be pretty much for the most part, 25 or younger, you know, there's there's no none of these things that are going to take all these old dudes like us out on tour. Richard: Right. Joe: Her Richard: Right Joe: Or me Richard: Now, of course. Joe: Anyhow. Richard: No, no, no, no, no, I'm right there with you. I'm Joe: But Richard: With you. Joe: But the instead of it being the old style that you and I are used to, which is, you know, bass, drums, maybe two guitars, keys and a couple of back, backup singers or maybe a horn section. Now it's guitar, drums and a multi instrumentalist that knows Ableton. So it's, it's that and Barry and Nate were talking, they went to lunch a few weeks ago. They'll always be a drummer because the visual part of it, of of that makes it look like it's a band. So that that one seat, you know, thankfully, has not been necessary, eliminated as much as the others. But it's just so weird and Nate and I were talking was like, I mean, I know I, I don't know Ableton anywhere near that I could say I could do it to go get a gig and neither does Nate. But that's the state of things right now. And then, and then Nate's talking and he's like, and if the band becomes, you know, popular and there's more money in the budget, they don't turn around and then start adding bass and guitar and keys that they add more production, they add dancers, they are they whatever. It's just it's so weird to me. Richard: Well, yes, the idea of a show, it's different, you know. That's why, that's why it still comes back to me of this idea of playing. And I think that, I don't know, Like like, do you still sit down to play just for the joy of playing? Joe: I, I do here and there, but nowhere near as much as I should. Richard: Well, nobody ever does that as much as they should. Joe: Yeah. And it's like we Richard: But. Joe: Played a gig last Wednesday and we played out in the parking lot at an assisted living complex for Richard: Oh, Joe: The Richard: Cool. Joe: For the residents because these elderly people had not been out of this place for the last two months or whatever. Richard: Oh, Joe: They're Richard: My Joe: Just Richard: Gosh. Joe: Going stir crazy. Richard: Sure, Joe: So Richard: Sure. Joe: There was four different jazz combos and we were setup out in the parking lot where the people could come out on their balconies and Richard: Oh, Joe: We played to Richard: How Joe: Them. Richard: Cool. Joe: Yeah, it was fun and it was cool. And at the end, like all the guys in the band are like, God, I so misplaying, like I just the hell with practicing, I just want to play because there's that interaction on stage and anticipating where that that other player is going to next and just being able to interact and lock in with somebody. And because I left the gig going I really got to practice. And everybody's like, no, we're just gotta play, we just it's more fun just playing. So, Richard: Yeah, yeah, Joe: Yeah. Richard: And that's I think that I think there's something about that visceral live element. You know, Joe: Yeah. Richard: We it's funny when, when when, when the COVID shut down happened, it sort of sent obviously a lot of chaos into the whole educational system, especially into arts education, which regardless of titles and everything else, I am basically running an arts program. You know, call it what you want, but it's an arts program. And it's been it was interesting what wound up happening very much and that's why I truly thought I'm going to get all these kids that are just going to send me you know, here's this recording I worked on at home, here's this work and I've got a lot of those. I mean, that's. And it's great. But the lot of them, first of all, a lot of them, you know, you started to really see the demographic of the students and who had what available to them. Joe: Yeah, Richard: Lots of posturing and Joe: Yeah. Richard: In high school certainly about that and that's fine. But I don't begrudge because any we've distributed gear as much as possible in that. But it was, you know, was interesting how a lot of them really enjoyed the live streams we did more than anything else. So we wound up doing our big annual end of year concert anyway. But we did it online on Zoom. It was clunky we were subjected to all kinds of elements related to streaming and what mics they had and Wi-Fi connectivity and everything else and yet in the moment, the fact that it wasn't taped, that we, you know, like Joe: Yeah. Richard: I had some kids that played some sessions, that we just kind of watch the sessions on the screen, which was still cool and it was really awesome. I had one group that actually did go in and they pre-recorded their parts and filmed themselves while they did it and then we spliced it together into kind of like a live video and and whatnot. But most of it was a kid with their guitar, at the piano or whatever it happened to be singing. You know, in some cases it was just through their phone and imperfect, absolutely! But, it it had that kind of because you knew it was right then. And there wasn't a well, we're going to go back and fix it in post kind of option. It was interesting that, that, you know, you still got a little bit of that same charge. I mean, it was different because obviously you don't get the you know, you don't hear the applause in the same Joe: Yeah, Richard: Way that you're hopefully Joe: Yeah. Richard: Getting you know, there wasn't really production in terms of lights and stuff that we normally would do. But, you know, because I asked a lot of them, you know, should we be prerecording this and some of them are like, yeah, that would be better for me. But that was because of nervousness that they always have had inherently. You know, these are kids that don't like to get up on stage, even though they're wonderfully talented. They just may be, you know, at that age, they're, they're they get freaked out by it or whatever. But the vast majority wanted it live and in the moment, warts and all. And I found that to be very fascinating. Joe: Yeah, Richard: And Joe: That's cool. Richard: We wound up, you know. We did a tie. I think we did. I think we did like seven or eight live broadcast. We're still doing them. We've done a bunch of podcasts, but it's been interesting watching the students. Their response, and maybe it's not an entirely, like I'd like, I don't think that I can, I always look at my own students and I go, I probably shouldn't be lumping you in with every other teenager is like a generality because they tend to be a little bit of a unique and and if we're being honest, I probably do have a bit of an influence on their approach Joe: Right. Richard: In that regard. Joe: Yeah. Richard: Hopefully a good way. But I do think it's interesting, like what you're saying, that there's something about a live response, even if it's remote, even if it's from streaming, it still beats the just watching video. Joe: Yeah, Richard: There's something. And organic and visceral about it. Joe: Yep. Richard: Which is Joe: All Richard: Important. Joe: Right, well, you know, since we are now, you know, sort of talking about the graduation piece, I wanted to...so I always refer to it as CMAS and I think that's probably what most of you do. But it's Creative Musical Arts and Science program, correct? OK,  So this is happening at Arcadia High School here in, are we, this is considered Phoenix. You're right down the street from me, right? So it's Phoenix. Richard: Yes, well, I'm yeah. Joe: The border is. I don't know. Richard: Yeah, it's Scottsdale Unified School District, but it's technically in greater Phoenix we're like I want to say, what's 48 Street and Indian School and what is it? 56th is the line into Scottsdale. Joe: Ok. Richard: I don't actually know. I mean, I've been at that school for, gosh, 20 plus years, if you can believe that...long time. Joe: Yeah. Richard: I don't know. I was long before my time how they managed to carve out that section of, you know why it's Scottsdale and not in Phoenix Union, I don't know. Joe: All right. OK. So you just mentioned 20 some years ago, so when did you get to this school? Richard: Ok, so let me see. How do I explain this? 1990 or something so I'm at the U Of A Joe: Ok. Richard: I have finished my second master's degree in orchestral conducting, which I still miss, I, you know, if only for not having enough time in the day. Basically, I start working in Tucson at one of the high schools and a middle school, I've got an orchestra program that I love. I am always still for years and years and when I did it, I grew up in the Midwest. So as an undergrad and as a grad student and at different times and in different places, I was always gigging as a very mediocre drummer. I like to say I was, I was sort of the, the, would you want to call it? I brought the game down for everybody else, But um..but, you know, and so I done some touring, nothing, nothing fancy. So but I had done a lot of it, I loved the studio experience and also their stuff. But there was no at the time at least available to me, you only were really able to do that kind of independently and on your own. And there was very much this sense of, you know, we were we were talking before about two different music industries well, there were sort of like two different musical experiences. You had the experience you could have as a student. I mean, you know, you know, it was one thing and there were in it, it was great. I mean, don't get me wrong, I have such fond memories of growing up. And I still every now and then I am lucky enough, I guess. I've talked to my old high school band director a few times, he's long since retired. He drives trains now, of all things Joe: Wow. Richard: Which he just loves. Old, old military, retired guy, sweetheart of a guy, brilliant musician, far more, I didn't realize his musical chops. This is another problem I have like I hadn't like it takes me a while to realize something in the moment. Oh my gosh. The level of lost opportunity on my count two, like not tap into more of his experience as he came out of a military band experience but he had this incredibly open view of what music was for, even if he had a particular love of a certain style and what not. But I'm I've Joe: Wait, Richard: Got this. Joe: Before before you leave, that point is just amazing that you just said that because I look at you and go, God, if I only had a band teacher in high school like you. My teacher, and God rest his soul, I think I'm sure he's gone by now but I was just there doing it, collecting the paycheck, Richard: Sure, Joe: Going through the Richard: Sure. Joe: Motions. Just it was just the worst. And. Richard: And it can't. Yeah, I mean, I. I don't know, I can't speak to that. I mean, the educator in me says, you know, at a certain point you can it's very easy to get disenchanted if you get wrapped up in it and you never know. I mean, you know, the further back you go. People that I get asked all the time, you know, did you have something like CMAS when you were in high school or whatever? And I can't tell if they're sometimes I wonder if they're being sarcastic, if they've completely misjudged my age, if, you know, I don't even know where it's coming from. But, but the truth of the matter is, is that it's not a matter of if I did or not, it wasn't even an option. It just literally wasn't a possibility. I can't, I can't fault Pete Metzker was his name, is his name or Jeff Bieler or Bob Wagner. I literally remember all of these people...West Frickey. They were brilliant! They didn't, if they, if you would come to them and said, we have this idea and you described what I built with the CMAS Program, what I designed, honestly, I think they would have been like, OK, that's really cool! We can't, like we, if we could figure out how to do that in the architecture or the in, the in, the the infrastructure, if you will, of music education at the time, I really think they probably would have been like, OK, sure! Let's do it! I don't think it was an option. I mean, I really think that, you know, there's a prospective element. I'm not that old but it does remind me a little bit of what I have conversations with students about classical music, for example. And I always tell them the same thing. Richard: You know, you can't, you can't fault Beethoven or Mozart and say you don't like their music because there's no electric guitar. Because there wasn't even electricity at the time. You can't you know, you're missing the whole point. You don't think, like that can't be your thing. In the same way when I have students who are very, very much of a more and this is fine too, but we'll say a more traditional mindset. I'm like, you can't look at a kid who wants to do like turntables and say that's not a legitimate musical instrument. You do it, for the same exact reason because you've got to deal with intent, you just you just have to. And that's the thing that like I said, I look back on those that band director and those teachers, all of them throughout all of my school years, as it were. And Dave Vroman, I mean, I could list all these professors throughout, you know, college that some of which I'm still friends with, which is really wonderful too, you know. Sorry, I, I have to I have to namedrop Molly Slaughter, I don't have anyone to know who she is but just for me, I got to say it karma again, and there's lots of others. Greg Sanders, Steve Heineman I'm gonna shut up now, okay...Ed Kaiser God, we would be here for a long time, but, but all of them would tell you...but, but the thing of his you is the best musicians are about intention. You know, Springsteen walks up onstage with the E Street Band and it's unbelievable and then the band takes a break for a minute and he sits down with just as acoustic guitar and it's unbelievable. Joe: Yeah. Richard: And it's I mean, look, the guy's a genius. And I mean, that's you know, you don't need me to say that. But I think the reason it works in both settings is because of his musical intentions. Joe: Yeah. Richard: It comes out different, of course, it comes out differently when you have more people and you can interact. And again, we go back to that visceral thing, but it's about intent. And I think that's what I've carried with me from all of those people. Joe: Right. Richard: I go on in any case, so I go, I go to Bradley University and become their first music educator, excuse music composition and theory graduate ever out of that university. I don't, I don't know if that's like I have two distinctions being a Bradley, one is I'm the first person ever to receive that degree from that institution, which I'm very proud of and two, I was probably the most arrogant pain in the butt student that's ever been through there in the history of that university's music school. And it was a brilliant place, it was wonderful. They had an old Moog synthesizer, that had been installed by Robert Moog himself. Joe: Oh. Richard: But it unfortunately didn't work. If I could go back now...know, you, you know, you always say if you know, if I knew then what I know now. But they allowed you know, they bought some equipment. We had, you know, an old Mac computer and we were able to do some sequencing and learn some bit. And I just kind of got bit by the bug of it. I just found it so compelling and so interesting. Didn't know what I was doing, had a couple of microphones, couldn't even tell you what they were. Probably a 58, like a beat up condenser, by whom...You know, I want to say there was a, I don't know, I want to say it was like an old Rode or an AKG or something, but it was I mean, we you know, we didn't know what we were doing. But freedom to explore the process. I mean, again, in hindsight, I see all of us greatest gift possible. Graduate, don't know what I'm going to do. So the Youngstown's, I don't know if I'm gone too far back Joe: No, Richard: Or Joe: No, Richard: Not in the story. Joe: No, no, no. Richard: So I'm going to I go to university, so Youngstown State University. Partially out of desperation, partially out of you know, I didn't, I was wandering in sort of like the the desert of my own immaturity and unawareness, you know? I just, I just I had this thought in my head that I was gonna be the next Leonard Bernstein. Not realizing that basically even the next Leonard Bernstein wasn't going to be the next Leonard Bernstein because that world doesn't exist. And it wasn't like people were telling me that but it doesn't, I mean, it just doesn't exist. And and I didn't, I wasn't that guy. I mean, that's, you know, kind of like what you were talking about before, which I disagree with your assessment of your skill set but we can have that conversation off of air sometime. But no, but, but in all seriousness, I mean, you know but I wasn't that guy. I mean, that's just that's a reality, I wasn't that guy. But while I'm in Youngstown, Stephen Gage, who's another one of these sort of like ah ha moment people. I'd done a lit..I'd done some conducting. I even put together for my senior recital at Bradley, I put together my own sort of like mini orchestra of friends just for the heck of it. And I seem to remember Vroman, Dave Vroman, who was head of the music department, and that can be one of the main conductors there, I seem to remember him saying, you know, we could have like. Richard: To help you out with this, like you didn't have to, like, do it covertly here. He's a guy I really did not appreciate nearly as much as I should have at the time, brilliant man, just brilliant, wonderful guy. But anyway, he, um, so but so Steve Gage basically goes, you know, I need a, I, I've got an opportunity for graduate student. And he was the band conductor is like, but you'll also work a little bit with the orchestras as well. And you'll get to do you know, you'll get to conduct and I'll teach you how to and he was my first real conducting teacher that I took seriously. I had taken cond

In the world of e-commerce acquisitions, it is always beneficial to explore a transaction from both the seller and the buyer side. In today's Beard King follow-up episode we bring you part two, the buyer. Raj Patel is a law school dropout who has been an entrepreneur for several years. He started to build Amazon businesses while studying full time. Being and entrepreneur and making more money as a student than he would have if he had followed his original career path led Raj to abandon law for e-commerce. Raj looked at over 35 businesses before pulling the trigger on Beard King, his first sizable acquisition. He is here to give insight into his search criteria, the buying process, and some of the ideas he has to grow his newly acquired business. If you missed Part 1, you can listen to it here. Episode Highlights: Raj's background and how he found success in e-commerce. Why he began moving towards acquiring rather than bootstrapping. The new Amazon third party platform and any impact Raj fears for his businesses. The number of businesses he looked and how the search process played out. Whether any of the other deals explored in-depth came to offers. Why direct calls and face to face time between buyers and sellers is important. Aspects of the Beard King business that attracted Raj despite trends and competition. Raj's retrospective view on what was done right and what lessons he can share from the acquisition. How he boosted his bottom line quickly. What he's now doing to boost the topline. The foreign markets Beard King is focusing on and how Raj chose them. The sources of Raj's experience, how he learns, and how he weeds out useless information. How he interacts with other entrepreneurs on a regular basis to avoid loneliness. How many hours Rajputs into the new business each week. Transcription: Mark: Hey, recently Joe I know that you had Nick from the Beard King on the podcast to talk about selling the Beard King. And today we have part two. You have Raj on who bought the Beard King. Joe: Yeah it's a great follow up. The first one we get to see it from the seller's perspective and then we get to see it from the buyer's perspective. And Raj is pretty impressive. He is a young guy. He's in his mid-20s, a law school dropout that became an entrepreneur. He was going to law school and building Amazon businesses along the way and realized that there was just no way he was going to make as much money in law school with the demands of law school and life in general afterwards as he is as an entrepreneur. And this is the first sizable one that he's purchased and he goes through the process of the hunt for finding the right business, some of the criteria he was looking for, and some of the changes he's going to make to the Beard King to help grow it over the next 12 to 24 months. Mark: Yeah you told me before that he had been looking for quite a while for a business and he looked at was it like 30 or 40 different businesses before he pulled the trigger on this one? Joe: Yeah, exactly. He'd made a couple of offers on other ones that we had listed, it just wasn't in the right place at the right time in order to make it happen. So this one I think is going to work out great. AAs the audience knows that listened to the first one there's a lot of IP around this one with utility patents, design patents, and it's a big reason why Raj jumped on this very quickly. Mark: Very good. Let's get right to it. Joe: Let's go. Joe: Hey folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and the Quiet Light Podcast. Today I have Raj Patel on the line with me. He bought the Beard King. We had Nick on the podcast last week talking about his exit as a seller and today we've got the buyer. Raj, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Raj: Thanks for having me, Joe. How are you? Joe: I'm good man. But where's the beard? I mean we chatted last week there was a little bit of stubble I was expecting a big bushy beard today; what's going on? Raj: Unfortunately I am not the Beard King. I can't grow a great beard but I do know business though. That's my thing. Joe: You do know business that's for sure and at a young age; we're going to get into that a little bit as well. Why don't you tell everybody listening who you are, what you're all about, what your background is? Raj: Yeah pretty much my name is Raj Patel and I've been doing about e-commerce; it's my 5th year in I would say. And I primarily do Amazon FBA but we do some; I do own a couple of sites as well that we do direct to website sales as well like Shopify and those platforms. But yeah primarily we're doing; about 80% percent of my revenue is coming through Amazon FBA right now and riding this wave of how well e-commerce is really doing and this market is just exploding right now. Joe: And if I recall from our conversations you're 25 years old and were on the path to becoming attorney and said I can't do that, I'm not going to make enough money. I want to be independent, I want to be an entrepreneur and live this life. Is that right? Raj: Right. That's pretty much true. Yeah. Well, I just turned 26. But it was one of those things where I was making more money while I was in school than I would probably make with a job after I graduate. So I was kind of one of those things that didn't quite make any sense for me to continue that path and I was enjoying what I was doing I got to travel. I'm still traveling all the time and I'm kind of reaping the perks and just growing businesses. Joe: How many have you purchased; was Beard King the first actual purchase or were the other 2 or 3 that you might own are purchases as well or did you develop those from scratch? Raj: So I developed 2 from scratch and those are the ones I started with about 4 or 5 years ago when I was experimenting and I still have those 2 today. And I purchased another and then Beard King would be my second purchase. Joe: I got you. Raj: I moved away really now from starting my own businesses because I've accumulated the capital so I'm moving more towards acquisitions and finding the right fit and brand and adding my spin to it and sort of the knowledge that gained in the last 5 years in defying that 3 businesses. Joe: That's interesting you know we've had Walker on a podcast, he wrote Buy Than Build and then Amanda Rob another advisor here at Quiet Light took another approach which is bootstrap, build, and then sell. You've bootstrapped and built too but you're now because you have the capital buying. Do you find it's easier to get ahead when you're buying something because there's revenue that's already being produced or is there; what's the sort of logic between buying now versus taking the time to build? Raj: Right and to me, it's kind of a timeline thing. I've always been sort of aggressive in terms of expanding and it's to a point where if I start my own Amazon business, I'm looking at a year or 2 out before I can really see the return on my money in terms of the marketing, getting trademarks, getting brand registry, doing a whole bunch of things; graphics, creative, getting all that stuff together as well as building the supply chain in China or wherever you're supplying from and it's really a time thing. I know the work that I put into my first 2 businesses and the timeline it took me to get to where it's at now which was it took quite a bit of time and a lot of work while I was obviously doing other things. And now that I have the capital I'm able to skip those 1 to 2 years of just hard work; not hard work but that sort of figuring things out period and get right into the top where I'm already getting a cash flow positive business that I can just keep adding to it really. Joe: Yeah. And if you hadn't started those other businesses you wouldn't have been able to buy the Beard Kind. You wouldn't have gotten capital. So there's no perfect process or method for everyone. You've got to take your own path. It sounds like you took one that definitely worked for you and now you're evolving into a buyer instead of a builder. Raj: And I would say for anybody who's looking to get into it you know it always helps to know kind of what you're doing too. If you have a little experience that's going to help but that learning curve won't be as drastic. So kind of what I know and now that I'm able to pick these businesses I kind of have these 5 years under my belt I can figure out what I generally want and how I can improve the businesses that are out there. So I feel confident purchasing. Joe: So let me grill you with a bunch of questions as a buyer given that you've just gone through the process and on this one in particular. It's mostly an Amazon business at this point it started off non-Amazon, right? Shark Tank, Shopify, things of that nature and now it's mostly an Amazon. As a buyer, as an entrepreneur, how much do you fear the Amazon third party platform and things changing there and having an impact to your business? Raj: Yeah I think that's a pretty big concern for everybody because they're thinking oh well I only have one source of revenue but the truth is if you expand to a whole bunch of different markets on Amazon you're having kind of multiple streams of income. It's not just you had to stick to the US and that's it. People always forget that there is a lot of people in the world and expanding; it's not like you're putting all your eggs in one basket. And the way e-commerce is kind of going is Amazon is kind of just out there killing everybody right now. So it seems like though you have to follow this path and if you continue trending upwards Amazon looks like it's the way to go right now. Joe: So you're comfortable with the risk on Amazon and you don't think it's going away. Raj: I don't think so, no. I still think it's relatively new and the idea that a couple of years ago you can never build a business like this out of nowhere. First, it was always you take it to retail, you build the supply chain and you're talking 2 to 3 years of just negotiation and relationships and now you can build an entire platform, a business in like a matter of 2 to 3 months which is crazy to think. Joe: Yeah. Raj: Things change over time and you kind of have to go with the flow and that's what; this is where it's at. Most of these businesses; Amazon's made it so it's automated for you and you can run these businesses and pretty much just continue to grow it. And whether it be on Amazon's platform or somebody else's or it changes over time you just have to be willing to change with that too. Joe: And when you were on the hunt for a business to buy were you specifically looking for something that was Amazon based or were you looking for anything that was e-commerce physical products and you didn't care what they were selling. Raj: No I did like the Amazon platform just because they allowed me to; I do a lot of other things during the day as well and the one thing about the FBA platform is you can really optimize everything that I don't have to put in 30, 40 hours a week. I can kind of put it on autopilot and set it. But the other main thing was ad spend is getting kind of crazy in terms of running Facebook ads and Google ads and all that stuff. It's kind of getting really expensive and I've been noticing the last 1 or 2 years with the drop-shipping model that really pushed up the cost for acquisitions for these and getting clicks. So I was kind of trying to stay away from that because that was something I couldn't really control. I couldn't really control how much I'm going to spend on ads with Facebook and all that but I could kind of control my supply chain and have a relatively good idea of what my margins would be on Amazon. Joe: I got you. Okay, just out of curiosity how many businesses in total did you look at in the process of finding this one? Talk to us about that process because some people say they've been looking for a long time but they never actually looked at a full package or they've made 9 offers they must be doing something wrong. What was your process? How long you have you been looking and what was your process? Raj: I would say I was looking for a solid 4 to 5 months I would say and I was looking pretty aggressively. Every day I would look at at least any; I was subscribed to every single email list out there whether it be Quiet Light or whatever other brokerage; everything and I contact; I don't just subscribe to a contact list. I've talked to all the brokers and I would look through all the memorandums and all the offering material. I look through from top to bottom because to me I was always learning something in those. It didn't seem like it was a waste of time for me to read an offering material. You kind of learn how people worked their businesses and you can really gain a lot of knowledge just from reading those as well. So it was never like I didn't; I just skimmed them, I read all them and you could see on my; I don't know within half an hour I'd probably have signed up or whatever new businesses out there and getting their offering memorandum. So I would say 4 to 5 months of just aggressively looking for the right fit. Joe: And in that 4 to 5 month period how many; rough estimate how many listings did you look at in detail where you've looked at the full package? Raj: I would say probably more than 40. Joe: Wow. Raj: I'd say 35 to 40. And some of those weren't exactly Amazon FBA because not that many FBA businesses are available as you would think in the market that fast. I mean when I was looking I wouldn't see more than I don't know and in a month maybe 3 or 4 new businesses would pop up that was something different or something that fit my criteria really. Joe: Okay, and of the 35 to 40 that you've looked at how many offers did you make? Raj: 3 to 4 offers I would say I have made on businesses. Joe: Did you two go under LOI on any other businesses and have it fall apart in due diligence or did your offers not get accepted until the Beard King? Raj: Yeah I did actually do one LOI; no actually what happened was I missed it by a day. Another buyer came in and signed the LOI before I signed it and I literally missed it by one day. I flew in in the morning but my offer was late willingly. Joe: Well how do you; in that regard you said that when you look at these packages you have conversations, with all the brokers that you'd have conversations, it sounds like you're building a relationship with them, do you find that building that relationship with a broker advisor that is representing that client helps if you're making a lower offer or justify some sort of offer or did you that no matter what if you made a lowball offer whatever that lowball is that it was received with displeasure and animosity from the broker and the seller? Raj: Right. I would always try to talk to the broker because when you send a lowball offer by email it doesn't seem genuine. I mean lowball offers aren't too genuine anyway. But when I talked to a broker I can sort of tell them this is what I'm thinking this is what the business needs this is what's missing kind of justify why I'm shooting them that offer and it's the starting point for me. It's to get the conversation going. If I see that there's some room to work here it kind of gets me more excited to say okay maybe we can get to the number I have in mind. That's not the number I want but I can meet you somewhere in between just to know that you're able to work. Some sellers will be stuck on a price or as we've seen many times too I know we talked about business before that just shot through the roof and they're asking this they went over asking so I kind of can gauge where the audience is slash what the seller is really thinking. Joe: Yeah, so I think you've gone through the process with me twice because I think you made an offer from one of my listings that had 10 offers if I recall. And I don't recall specifically on that one or not did we do; with the interview with the seller did we do the video call? Raj: We did a video. Joe: We did a video call. Did we do that with Nick or was it just audio? Raj: Just audio with Nick as well. Joe: Okay. So we're doing video now. One of the things that we've done and moved to as often as possible when it's feasible is on that first buyer call; buyer-seller call we will pop on the video as long as everybody's comfortable with it. I felt that it makes a tremendous difference in terms of connecting. You're in one part of the world, the seller's in the other part of the world and you can bridge that gap. And I've been in situations that I'm sure you've heard this or seen it before where being likable kind of makes a bit of a difference in business especially when you're in other parts of the world. Raj: I think one thing I've really noticed is a lot of people with their business that they're selling this is kind of their baby, right? This is something that they've been working on for years and to see somebody that maybe is just looking straight at the bottom line and just wants to buy it and just do whatever they want, seller's don't like that. And they might take a lower offer from somebody who seems genuine in their intentions to grow the business and they have a passion for that business. And definitely, that face to face helps with that. That's for sure. Joe: Yeah. So this particular business it had plenty of interested parties. You kind of stepped up and got the ball rolling with Nick and went under a letter of intent. It's got what? Two utility patents, two design patents, multiple copyrights. I haven't seen a whole lot of businesses like that in my 7 years of advising with Quiet Light. The drawback or the downfall of this particular business I think was the trends. I think you've got a heck of a value given all of the IP protection that it has, the way that the revenue took off right before closing you almost ran out of inventory because things took off because of the Amazon patent protection program. In your searches were you specifically looking for something with this kind of IP or were you just looking for something with great trends that you thought you could handle and take over? Raj: Yeah. So I was looking for something that had some kind of; something that was proprietary about it and IP is always great because another way to collect and another source of revenue is to enforce the IP and it kind of takes away these competitors. And the one thing I was seeing with business was there were a lot of competitors at the time if you recall and the IP had just gone through. So it's one of these things where I kind of was excited to get in there and start taking off these competitors. And as you saw right before a whole bunch of the competitors got knocked off the platform and the sales they shot through the roof. So that got me even more excited to say well this is just the beginning, right? Joe: Yeah. If I recall we had a conversation and it was there's a possibility he might run out of revenue; out of inventory. Raj: Actually he did run out of inventory. Joe: Prior to closing? Raj: Prior to closing we went about 2 to 3 days; nothing is in it there but 2 to 3 days. Joe: But we waited to close. The goal was to no matter what we were going to close after inventory is in stock. Raj: Exactly, yeah. Joe: Talk to me about your review now that you've had the business for 3 or 4 months. Looking back you've looked at 40 different businesses, a lot of different brands, what was done right with this business and what lesson can you share that maybe was done wrong in terms of this particular business? And I don't want you to throw Nick under the bus. I think he did an amazing job with the brand. Raj: Yeah, 100%. I think that Nick has done an amazing job to start off with the marketing side. Joe: Yeah. Raj: What Nick has built-in terms of marketing and he has a real keen eye for how to put that vision out there and represent the product in a way that it's appealing to everyone. Also, he invented the idea too which is something that we don't really think of too much, right? Joe: We all come up with great ideas. He actually followed through and got it done. Raj: Right. Yeah, he came up with the idea and then he made such a great marketing plan and if you look at how well the website is made, how well the quality of the product is, everything is impeccable that he's done. I think that was really his strength just how well he executed on the marketing side of things. Joe: And what do you think the weaknesses of the business were in the months ahead of you taking it over or the 12 months ahead of you taking over? Raj: Yeah so what I kind of look the weakness is we're really just cleaning up the logistics of the business. I saw that there was a lot of money kind of left on the table in terms of the cost of goods was way too much when I was looking at the business and that's when I was already in talks with my own suppliers and everything figuring out like hey we can drastically reduce the price and t explode the bottom line really and get this business; make it extremely profitable from what it is. That was kind of the icing on the cake because I was able to; as you know with this business when we look at the numbers it was kind of like you had to kind of dig deep to figure out where everything exactly was. And by doing that and like you said reading the offering material I was able to figure out like if I clean up the logistics I will easily make this business extremely more profitable than it was. Joe: So you worked with a manufacturer to modify; did you modify the product or just found a manufacturer cheaper, less expensive, same quality? Raj: Manufacturer cheaper, same quality, I haven't even; I'm considering modifying it a little bit but the price point I have without changing anything I just knocked up 80% of the value which is crazy. I mean everything that happened off the product… Joe: Percent of the cost of goods sold? Raj: Cost of goods sold off of the product. Joe: Can you put that into dollars? Raj: Sure. Right now I'm paying; how much the cost of goods is right now? Joe: Don't talk about how much you're paying, how much did; well I guess people will figure out the math here and we have to…if you tell me edit after this I'll edit and if you're all hearing me say the word edit then we chose not to. What I'm trying to figure out is a lot of people think about how to drive more revenue and you've got a unique approach which is how do we actually maximize the bottom line? I know now that I'm an entrepreneur buyer that the value of this business is a multiple of the trailing 12 months; the discretionary earnings. So did you save $2 a unit times 100 units a month that you're selling or what kind of immediate boost do you see to the bottom line inaudible[00:20:25.5] negotiations? Raj: I've saved say $6 a unit. Joe: Holy cow. Raj: Yeah. Joe: Holy cow. That's tremendous. Raj: And it wasn't just the cost of goods it was also the method of shipping; that was a big deal. Joe: That's right. You've got the capital to do freight versus doing just in time airship inaudible[00:20:44.2] right? Raj: I had the cash flow to lock up for a month or 2; that's okay with me but when I can take that much off the bottom line that's definitely winning. Joe: That's amazing. What are you doing to boost the top line? You just said most people focus on the top line instead of the bottom you're doing the smart thing but now tell me what you're doing for the top line? Raj: Sales fix everything at the end of the day; sales fix everything. You know the logistics thing the reason I started with that first was that was a quick fix. That's something that you could do instantly. Improving the top line, now that might require a little bit of money, a little bit of tweaking, some marketing, and what we've done with that is really expanding and being aggressive with opening up in all different marketplaces; Canada, Australia, UK, Germany. I just kind of hit the ground running with those in the works of launching in all those different countries. Joe: Really? Raj: That's what we're working on now and sending inventory over there figuring out the VAT stuff and all that stuff I've done before is just kind of even as we talk some country is only going to see maybe 5 to 10% increase in sales but it's still 5 to 10%. It still adds to the bottom line and still, you're leaving money still on the table and you don't want to do that and so that's what we've been focusing on right now. Joe: And how did you choose those countries just out of curiosity? What kind of research did you do or is it just countries that you're comfortable with and you've done it before? Raj: I've done it before and as well as I did a little research on the European ones because as you know it's a little expensive to open up the VAT and all that stuff if you're not choosing but working with other sellers and the experience I know kind of what countries do really well. If you have a North America Amazon plan you can easily open up in Mexico and Canada within like an hour. It's not anything. The listings get sent over and it's not a lengthy process. I just had to send the inventory. Joe: Did you have to translate the Mexico ads and everything? Raj: Oh yeah, you have to translate it. They have the translator on there and then you had to run through each of the listings as well because even when they get sent over the listings get converted they don't end up being right anyway so you kind of have to inaudible[00:22:52.8] anyway. Joe: I got you. Okay, maybe we can do an update in a year to talk about how those international markets went and what kind of additional revenue it was driving. Let's talk about how you've learned to do what you've accomplished here. Are you tuning into podcasts, did you go through any training programs, what is the source of your experience; who do you listen to, what do you read that kind of thing? Raj: I'm kind of a simple guy in the sense that I really listen to what Amazon puts out there too. They haven't tons of seller university information which is great but when I started watching YouTube videos here and there kind of helps. I never paid for a course or anything like that because I kind of learn by trial and error. I don't think you need a course per se but you're going to make a lot more mistakes if you don't have a clear path to follow. There's a lot of information. I would say it's not really too useful for people or kind of misleading out there too. So it's kind of hard to find. But using Amazon's material and just going to trial and error. I'd say your first product is not going to always work. And I think people are under the impression that if they buy a course and they do this that this is a home run; it's not like that. It's trial and error really. Joe: Okay, so you're doing your own research; watching, reading Amazon stuff and what they put out versus paying for courses and programs and going to events and things of that nature. I just had a call this morning with somebody that is like Nick he's 12 months after selling his own business and one of the big reasons he sold was he felt isolated. It was growing and there was risk but he felt isolated and alone. And he did the same thing. He didn't have a Mastermind group or anything like that. How do you overcome that? Do you have friends and colleagues that are also Amazon sellers that you talk with? How does that work in your life? Raj: I'm in contact with a ton of people that we talk almost every day about what we're doing and say oh you know international sellers and see how they're getting what they're doing on Amazon. So they are mass; I'm not part of a thousand, 2,000 group mastermind group but I am part of groups where big power sellers kind of talk to each other and figure out what's going, what's working, these new changes Amazon's made. So we do talk about that every other day. Joe: Okay, and how many hours a week are you putting in on Amazon altogether or Beard King all together? Raj: Beard King? Joe: Sure. Raj: Beard King by itself I would say I'm putting in about 15 hours right now. Joe: A week? Raj: Yeah. Joe: And you're making more money than most people make when they do graduate from law school. I think you've chosen the right path here. Raj: Yeah I think I'm onto something for a while now so I'm happy with the outcome and grateful for everything. Joe: Well look, you did the work, you took the risk, you were in school and focused on building your own businesses as well. You studied up. You took the risk. You worked hard. The harder you worked the luckier you got. And here you are today buying a business with something very rare; a great IP and whole lot of protection with a lot of growth potential ahead of it. It's growing in the bottom line which is fantastic the way that you're renegotiated cost of goods sold and shipping. I'm excited to hear what it does over the next 6 to 12 months for the expansion to the other countries and some other focus. Raj: Q4 is coming up and we're super excited it's about; we're already up all across the board in revenues and it's just about to take off now so it's in the interesting lap in the next couple of months. Joe: That's great. Let's get every man in America growing a beard and using the Beard King products. Raj: That's the dream. Joe: You've got to do it too though you've got to grow that beard. Raj: Yeah I'm going to try. It's a patchy beard but I'll work on it. Joe: For anybody that does get over to the Quiet Light YouTube channel. I think it's Quiet Light Academy now. You've got to take a look at Nick's beard versus Raj's beard and my beard. You and I Raj are pretty pathetic. We don't have much to go on at all. Raj: Nick got a crazy beard though. Joe: Absolutely. Well, listen it's been great. I appreciate you sharing your story. What you've accomplished is pretty damn impressive and I'm excited to hear what happens over the next 12 months. How can people learn about what you're doing or reach out to you? Raj: Well you can find me on YouTube at Raj Patel and I'm going to be pretty much talking about everything from selling on Amazon to how to launch your product as well as just telling stories of what I've done over the last year that's worked for me and putting some information out there that people can use in whatever they're trying to accomplish by selling online and to learn sort of what I've done and help them out pretty much. So you can check me out at Raj Patel on YouTube. Joe: Alright and everybody watching we'll be expecting you to grow a beard as well or at least have a fake one on now and then Raj Patel at YouTube.com. Raj: Yeah, inaudible[00:27:43.3] progress made. Joe: Alright, perfect. All right man thanks for your time today. I appreciate it. Raj: No problem, thank you, Joe. Links and Resources: TheBeardking Youtube

Learn about LinkedIn strategy, #mojovation and more with Joe Apfelbaum, our guest for today. Journey with us as we explore some failures and lessons learned as well as the best way to grow anything online - with a sound strategy and a PLAN. Show Highlights 1:54 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=114) - [Ari] Can you tell us a little about yourself? 2:06 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=126) - [Joe] I love to mojovate entrepreneurs! I love helping entrepreneurs go from frustration to mojovation. 2:36 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=156) - [Ari] How did you come up with this whole concept of #mojovation? 4:50 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=290) - [Ari] How do you define success, you personally? 6:14 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=374) - [Joe] So for me it's a lot about awareness. Step number one is awareness. Step number two is having the right plan, the right strategy. Step number three is having accountability, the discipline, the persistence, the ability to just keep going. 7:07 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=427) - [Joe] And now I coach other entrepreneurs through The Breakthrough Maze podcast, and just in general I take them through my three step process. 8:05 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=485) - [Joe] Every single day I prepare for my day with determination. Like today I woke up at 4am and did my rituals. 9:22 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=562) - [Joe] I love helping entrepreneurs go from frustration to mojovation, that's what I love doing. I love helping entrepreneurs go from frustration to mojovation, that's my number one passion. What are some other things I like doing? 11:07 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=667) - [Joe] Your beliefs are what drive whether you take action, and action produces results. 12:54 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=774) - [Joe] I come up with my little raps that I do....[hear Joe's LinkedIn rap]. 15:53 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=953) - [Joe] For example, if I ask you what you do (Joe proceeds to give an example of LinkedIn strategy, using Ari as an example; includes Joe calling Ari out for not being very active on LinkedIn, back in December 2018). 19:56 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1196) - [Ari] What are some of your biggest lessons you've learned from failed or abandoned projects? 21:30 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1290) - [Joe] And there is a difference between failure and defeat. 24:20 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1460) - [Joe] So you need to cultivate a feeling of gratitude for every feeling, and then you got to figure out, what does this mean? Why am I feeling this? What do I need to change? 28:36 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1716) - [Ari] What's a recent success that you've had? 30:00 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1800) - [Joe] I want to help 1000 hungry entrepreneurs....if you want to help 1,000,000 people you have to help 1000 first. 32:25 (https://www.waytogreatness.com/003?t=1945) - [Ari] What's one action listeners can take away from this show and implement immediately? About Joe Apfelbaum Joe Apfelbaum is the CEO of Ajax Union, a B2B digital marketing agency based in Brooklyn, NY. Joe is a business strategist, marketing expert and certified Google trainer. Joe is the Author of his new book High Energy Secrets, How he lost 95 pounds and has more energy than ever. When he is not Mojovating entrepreneurs at events and on social media he chills in Brooklyn with his Wife and 5 kids. Joe's Social Media Profiles LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeapfelbaum) Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/joeapfelbaum) Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/joeapfelbaum) Twitter (https://twitter.com/joeapfelbaum) Originally recorded 12/24/2018 Special Guest: Joe Apfelbaum.

Joe Fontenot: All right. We are recording. Okay. Jamie Dew. Jamie Dew: Yep. Joe: You are the president of the seminary. Jamie: Newly elected. Joe: New Orleans Seminary. Jamie: Two months ago. Joe: That's right. We're glad you're here. Jamie: Thank you. Joe: Glad to have you on the podcast. Jamie: Glad to be here. Joe: I wanted to ask you some questions, namely around why you're here. Jamie: Okay. Joe: You, born and raised in North Carolina. Jamie: Right. Joe: You were with Southeastern for a long time. Jamie: 19 years. Joe: 19, wow. I didn't know it was 19 years. Jamie: Yep, yep. Joe: Yeah. Jamie: As a student, then Ph.D. student, teacher, administrator. Yep. Joe: Right. So well into that world, both Southeastern seminary but also just North Carolina. And then you came to New Orleans. In a lot of ways, Louisiana is a typical Southern state. In a lot of ways. Broad blanket there. But New Orleans, culturally, yeah, it's kind of like this island. Jamie: Yeah. Joe: Culturally. And so what are some of the things that have surprised you since you've been here? Jamie: Oh, okay. Yeah. That's a great question. You're right, I was very surprised at how different the city of New Orleans is from the actual state. Jamie: And you know, it's funny. Throughout the search process, the search committee occasionally in some of those meetings, they would reference that or they'd say something about it. I didn't think too much about it. I was like oh, they keep saying New Orleans is not the South. But I didn't believe them. Joe: Everybody says their stuff's special. Jamie: Yeah. That's right. So that's kind of the normal thing. And then you get here and you realize oh wait, they were serious about that. This is just not the South, in so many different ways. I mean it doesn't have ... it's a very culturally diverse city. It's a very European city. And that becomes obvious pretty quickly when you ride around. Especially when you eat the food, because it's fantastic. Jamie: And everybody says oh, the food's amazing. And I thought yeah, okay, everybody says they got great barbecue and stuff like that. But my word. The food here's delicious. And so you do. You see the difference of this city than really anything else you're going to see in the South. And so people had said that kind of thing, I didn't really believe them. But getting here, I totally see that now. Jamie: Because you've got racial diversity, you've got cultural diversity, you've got economic diversity, you've got religious diversity here. It really is a melting pot of everything. The good, the bad, the hard, the easy. There's fun things. There's challenging things. And I think it comes together to really create a very unique sort of concoction of culture that I really have never experienced in any other city. Jamie: That really did surprise me, I'd have to say. And then I'd say ... I mention one other thing that surprised me. This is a very happy city. And that I totally didn't see coming. Not that I thought I was going to get down here and people were going to be sad or mad or anything. But I think it's easy for people, especially maybe the Southern Baptist Convention, they still tend to view the city with this post-Katrina lens. What they saw, very vividly- Joe: Blight. Jamie: In a sea of that brokenness ... yeah, was difficulty and strife and sorrow and struggle and all these things. And indeed, all that was real. All of that really did happen. But the city in so many different places has bounced back. And more importantly, it's pretty obvious that however difficult all that was, it didn't break the spirit of this city. Tara and I, we came down, it was for my last interview, some of my interviews were on different parts of the country. And some of my interviews were in different parts of this state. Jamie: And then the last interview was here in the city of New Orleans. We came down about a day and a half before the actual interview. This last interview was set up to meet my ... for them to meet my wife. But it was also set up to give us an opportunity to see the city. And they wanted us to have some time well before the actual interview for she and I just to walk around the city and be in the city. And see it and eat the food and check the culture and everything. Jamie: So the first morning, we got in late one night, first morning we got up it was breakfast time. We drove into the French Quarter, we went to the famous Café du Monde and we're sitting there eating our beignets and our café au laits. It's about 8:30 in the morning. Jamie: And they were sitting outside under this awning, watching the French Quarter. And this guy walks up with a trombone and he just starts playing the blues. And next thing you know a saxophone and then the next thing you know a trumpet, and then somebody with a bass drum and then somebody with a snare drum. Jamie: And the next thing you know, you've got this full band. Just sitting there playing. And they're having a fantastic time. Which was really cool. You certainly don't get that in Wake Forest, North Carolina, where we're from. Jamie: And but what really struck is as this sort of random impromptu band struck up a concert for the people there, of course they were collecting money and stuff like that. That was fine. I actually gave them some money. Joe: They make good money, by the way. Jamie: They do. And rightly so. It's genuinely entertaining and joyful. But as they started to play, there were all these street workers that were responsible for cleaning the streets and stuff like that and city maintenance people, and they're walking down the street with their little broom and their sweeper. Jamie: And they're sweeping up the cigarette butts that are on the street. And they're just dancing to the band and that impromptu struck up a concert there for us. And Tara and I, we looked at each other and we just thought wow. You never get anything like that in North Carolina. This is genuinely cool. Jamie: And that was a typifying example of a city that we found to be a very happy, joyful city. That's really neat. Joe: That's a great example. Because New Orleans is a city that's kind of like Las Vegas in a sense. People, they think of Las Vegas and they think of the strip. There's not much else you think about. But Las Vegas is a big place. It's got a lot of good things going for it that are very much nothing to do with the strip. And I think a lot of people, they think about New Orleans, they think about seedy Bourbon Street. Which was about two blocks from where you were. Parallel anyway. Joe: And so then they also think about parades and then seedy parades. And the interesting thing is, my in-laws came down recently and we went to a parade in Metairie. Which is a suburb area and it's a very family-oriented thing and they're like yeah, we had a lot of fun and all this kind of stuff. And it's like yeah. There's only 10% of them you need to stay away from. 90% of them are actually normal. Jamie: That's actually another surprise. Coming from a non-New Orleans background, you come into the city, Mardi Gras has the reputation I think throughout a lot of the South, and maybe our whole culture, of being the very very naughty thing that people do. Joe: Exactly. Jamie: You only do that if you're a certain kind of person. So your point, everybody here does Mardi Gras. And there's all sorts of family friendly ones. And so that's been a neat surprise as well. Joe: Yeah. Well, that's interesting. What have been some of the biggest adjustments? I know you haven't been here for a long time. But I feel like it's also very still fresh. Jamie: Yeah. Joe: You know? And so what have been some of the biggest adjustments you've had to make? Jamie: Well, some of them are I'd say professional and then some of them are cultural. So professionally I've never been a president. Joe: I want to come back to that in a minute. Okay, yeah, yeah. Jamie: I've never been a president and you learn that in some ways it's actually your call now and you have more authority to do what you feel like God's put in your heart to do. But you still have to lead in many of the same ways. Jamie: So for example, at my previous job I had to ... if I wanted to pull off initiative X in my role as the dean of the college at Southeastern, I had to win the support of other vice presidents and things like that, to help get them to pull the rope with me on those tasks. Jamie: Here I may not have to necessarily get anybody's approval in that way, but it would still ... it would be profoundly foolish of me to just lead with an iron fist and demand. You still have to win the support. Because even though maybe I have that authority vested in me, it still is going to function vastly better and create an environment with the ethos that I would want this place to have, if we're getting people to buy into it. Jamie: And so that's new. There's always adjustments on that type of thing. Then I would say culturally two things. One has to do with the weather and one has to do with traffic. Jamie: The weather here, everybody told us, and this kind of goes back to the surprise. Everybody's like dude, it's so stinking hot there. And I believed them and I was prepared, I was really really prepared to walk outside and melt. I actually have to say, in some ways I feel like North Carolina in the summertime is hotter. But it does not have the humidity. So for example you'd walk outside there in the heat and the scorching summers and the sun felt like it was genuinely cooking you in that moment and your body just starts pouring sweat as a result. Jamie: Here you don't necessarily feel like that. But you feel like you walk outside and the air gives you a hug. Yeah. Joe: That's the best euphemism for our humidity I've ever heard. Jamie: It seeps into your clothing and it wraps itself around you. And you're damp all the time. Joe: So come to New Orleans. Jamie: Yeah. I'm a blue jeans kind of guy, I'm wearing blue jeans right now. And blue jeans are like wearing a wool blanket, as it turns out, down here in New Orleans. And so you don't want to do that, as often as you can. Traffic is ... oh. Gosh, I'm 42 years old, I've had my driver's license since I was 16. I've got a lot of driving experience. I feel like a brand new kid in the car again. Joe: Yeah. Jamie: Just the traffic. The traffic patterns are different. This whole median, or what is it, neutral ground? Joe: The neutral ground. Jamie: Space and turning left across those where you'll have actually not one but two stoplights. And sometimes you can run those stoplights, evidently, and sometimes you can't. And your light may have just turned green, but you really don't want to just take off. You need to look and actually make sure nobody's blazing through there. Jamie: So I feel like I'm having to learn to drive again and I'm certainly questioning my blue jeans wardrobe that I tend to wear. And learning the ropes of what it means to be president. Joe: You know, this is funny because New Orleans, sometimes people say it is America's third world city. And yeah, you're like eh, yeah, I could see that. That's right. It's got all the laws but it doesn't really have the behavior. And I think probably the best spin for that is this is the greatest place to come and learn to do missions. Because you step outside of a normal culture, in many ways. You're so close to it. Joe: You drive 70 miles and you're in Baton Rouge, which is pretty normal in a lot of ways, city in the South. But it's the capital of our state. But in a lot of ways you're here, and it is just a very different cultural experience. Jamie: That's right. And I think that ... look, I'm genuinely grateful for all six of our seminaries. We're doing fantastic work. Joe: Absolutely. Jamie: It's a joy to have six that are strong. And I think that the theological diversity between the seminaries, and then also the diversity in specializations and niches that we each have, is ... I think that's genuinely valuable to the body of Christ and to the Southern Baptist Convention. Jamie: We need, with some 15 million Southern Baptists, we genuinely need six seminaries that have distinctions and differences. And I lament and grieve over the fact that often we fight over those things and we pit ourselves against these. Jamie: I'm not saying necessarily seminaries do that. But those types of trends happen in our midst and I think it's a blessing to us that we really are so distinct. One thing that I think New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Leavell College can do exceptionally well in theological education for Southern Baptists is we can give students a very unique cultural experience while they're doing theological education. Jamie: If you're going to go, for example, to be a missionary in say Europe or Afghanistan or anything else, now granted I'm not saying our culture here is like Afghanistan. It's not. But the skillset and the tool set you've got to have to do ministry here, if you can learn that tool set here, you can then employ that in any context. Jamie: And so I think that New Orleans gives a student the opportunity to ... a laboratory if you will, to constantly work on and thing through contextualization. Which is vital to the proclamation of the gospel. And I think that we have a real advantage there. Joe: I definitely agree. I think NAMB agrees too. Because New Orleans is really not a big place. Yet it's still one of their send cities. Jamie: That's right, that's right. Joe: We have NAMB representatives here and they talk about some of the things, and it really is true. Jamie: Yeah. And another thing within that. What I've said to students recently, look, the city in the context you have the laboratory itself, is remarkable for ministry preparation. But then also the faculty that we have here is really unique and distinct. The faculty here, you can say virtually every faculty member we have is knee deep involved in vocational ministry in local church context in this setting. And this is a setting where there's difficulty and challenge and you have to do contextualization. Jamie: And if you can do ministry here, you can do it anywhere. And this faculty is doing that ministry here. And so therefore they have, I think, firsthand experience in a very unique way that I just don't know a lot of seminaries have that opportunity. And so where better, and who better from, to learn how to do ministry than right here at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Leavell College. Joe: Let me ask you a question. Jamie: Okay. Joe: You mentioned something earlier and I wanted to go back to this, because I thought it was an interesting point. A lot of times when God is calling us to something, it's not always something that we recognize or we've done before or we can even compare to something else. Right? So a lot of times part of what's going on inside of us is we are deciphering God's calling. Is he really calling me to this or do I just want this? You know, how does that look. Joe: You have talked before about how God called you here. You've never been a president before, there's not really a lot of presidents of seminaries and this kind of thing, so the pool gets really small. You talk to people and kind of get a flavor of this. How did you know, really, that God was calling you here? Jamie: I could talk for hours about this. I got overwhelmed and bombarded from every angle and vantage point that a human being could possibly be spoken to, in terms of confirmation. Jamie: To start off with, I was not ... there were so many things about this that got my attention. And it got my attention in a way that, as it happened, I couldn't doubt that this was something that the Lord was doing. Jamie: So for example, I personally did not want to be a president of a seminary. I wondered from time to time when people asked me if I ever had aspirations to be a president, maybe something like a college or university at some point one day. Because I was a dean of college, I loved college life. It's funny that I ever even thought that, though, because looking back on it I actually don't know anything about universities. Jamie: So I don't know why, in my mind, I thought that would've been it. I know quite a bit about seminaries, though. But my passion was college and so I thought that. I saw ... oh, let's just be frank about it. The Southern Baptist Convention can be volatile a lot of times. There are often storms that are raging. And here I am taking the helm of a ship and sailing it into a storm. Jamie: That did not sound appealing to me at all. And in fact it still doesn't sound appealing to me. And so this has forced me to my knees and my prayer life has never been as vibrant as it has been in the last eight months. But I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to pursue it. I had friends encourage me to quote on quote put my name in for it. I refused to do it. They pressed me on it, I kept on saying no, absolutely not, I have no desire to do it. Jamie: And it had nothing to do with New Orleans itself that I didn't want to be here. It's just I didn't want to be a seminary president. And I wanted to stay right there in Wake Forest where I was. That's where my family is. Joe: It's your home. Jamie: That's right. It's 40 years. It's like home-home. I didn't move there and it become home. I mean that's where I grew up. And so I had no interest in doing it. And Bob Stewart on faculty here is the guy that was approaching me, saying, "Come on, man. Come on." And I was just like, "Bob, I'm not doing it. I can't do it." Jamie: And he says, "Man, don't you feel like maybe you need to open your hands and see if that's what the Lord would do?" And I said, "Look, Bob. If God did something and made it clear to me that I'm supposed to do this, obviously I'd have to pray about this. But that's the only way I could do it." Jamie: And he said, "Well, what would that look like? For you to think that this is God, not you." And I said, "Hmm. I don't know. Me putting my name in it and trying to get it." Look, if I had half of a spiritual life and I had gone that route, and it goes somewhere, I would have to wonder is this God or is this me. Did I do this or did he do this? And I said to him, "Listen. If I cannot pursue this, if God wants me to do this, he knows exactly where to find me. If the search committee knew who I was for some reason." Which they didn't at that time. Jamie: And they thought that I was somebody that has to be pursued, then I would obviously have to pray through it. And so that was in November of 2018. Just a couple ... oh gosh, almost about 10 months ago now. Jamie: And he said, "Okay." And we got up from the table and we left and November ended and I didn't hear anything. And December ended, I didn't hear anything. And January came, and by that point I'd heard it was something like January 8th was the deadline if you wanted to put your name in for consideration, if you wanted to do that. Put your name in and they might consider you or something. Jamie: January 8th came and went, I didn't put my name in. I went on with my life. I completely forgot about New Orleans, aside from the fact that I was praying for the next president every time I would think about it. Jamie: And on I think it was January 18th, 10 days after the date for submitting your stuff closed, I was preparing to go to England to defend the dissertation for that second degree I did. And I got an email from Frank Cox, the chair of the search committee. Jamie: And he introduced himself and he said someone gave us your name as someone to consider. Joe: Was it Bob? Jamie: It was Bob. Yeah. Joe: For our listeners, Bob's going to be on the podcast later in this season. Jamie: He's a faculty member here. He was my sub reader on my dissertation 10 years ago. And we've gotten to be friends since then. Jamie: Anyway. Frank emails me and I thought ... well, by that point they obviously had seen my resume and everything. And so sure enough, the committee had seen me and thought that I was someone they needed to talk to. I called Danny Aiken, who is my president that I served under there and a mentor to me, and I talked to Ryan Hutchinson. And I talked to Chuck Lawless and I talked to my pastor. Jamie: And I talked to my dad. And all of them really pressed me and said ... my dad of course did not want me to go. But he even said, and this got my attention, he even said, "Jamie, you have to fill out that questionnaire." And I thought doggone it. And Chuck Lawless aid, "Jamie, you'll be being disobedient if you don't do it." So I said, "Okay. Well, I guess I'll fill out the questionnaire." And surely I'll fill it out and I'll ... they'll move on, I won't be the guy. Jamie: Rewind a bit. In 2008, New Orleans actually, I don't want to say came after me, but came to me to talk to me about joining the faculty in 2008. And a long story short, it was not the moment in our life that we could move down. From a family perspective, it was not what it wanted to be. And I don't think she'd mind me telling you this. My wife was not crazy about moving down here, mostly because of moving away from family. Joe: Almost nobody who comes from any of that area is crazy about coming. I've never met anybody who is. My wife's same thing. She comes from Tennessee, which is a little bit further, east Tennessee. Jamie: And for her it was mostly family. Her family's there and everything. And so she did not want to do it. And looking back, I have no doubt in God's providence things turned out the way it was supposed to be. But let's just say since then I always have a fear that maybe my wife would not be open-handed with this. And when that ... I came home that afternoon and told her what had happened, and even she was like we have to see if this is what the Lord would have us do. Jamie: And I'm like why is everybody saying this to me? And at first I was like me? I mean I'm not a president. I had not been the guy that was an SBC mover and shaker. That's not who I am. I just didn't have those connections and nobody knew who I was. Jamie: In fact, I asked Frank Cox once. I said, "When this process started, did any of you even know who I was?" And he said, "Nope. We didn't." So anyway. I can keep telling the story, but bottom line is throughout the process I did fill out the questionnaire, I answered things in stone cold, honest, straight up fashion as I possibly could. I just knew that I would probably be off-putting to the committee and offensive. Jamie: And I got a phone call a couple weeks later that I was in the top four and they wanted to talk to me. And I went into my first interview in Denver, is where we were. I went into that meeting looking for a way to get out, because I just assumed that they were looking for something that I'm not. Jamie: And I had no interest in being anything other than what I felt like God made me to be and do. And I needed in that meeting to be stone cold honest with them about what I am and what I'm not. And I went in the meeting and the meeting took a drastic turn into candor and frankness immediately. And I was able to share here's who I am and here's who I'm not. And I'm not going to be the guy that's coming in here trying to strut New Orleans and suggest that we're better than everybody else. Jamie: I just have no interest in doing those types of things. But I want very badly, wherever I sit, whether I stay as a dean of the college, end up as the president of New Orleans, or go somewhere else, no matter what job I perform all I want to do with my life is train up a generation of servants. People that will serve the broken and be faithful to Christ. Jamie: And I began to talk about that. And I could tell something was happening in the room. But I didn't know if I was offending people or lighting a fire. I didn't know. By the end of the meeting I had a pretty clear sense that something just happened. And I don't know. I knew there were still four people in it at that moment. I was checking myself constantly to not be arrogant and think that it was mine, because I didn't necessarily think it was mine. Jamie: But in the back of my mind, at the same time- Joe: Something has shifted. Jamie: Something had shifted. And that was March 20th, 2019. And I got on the plane the next morning early early, like a 5:30 flight to fly back to Wake Forest. And I sobbed and I wept the entire flight home because in the back of my mind I kind of had this sense that I was going to be forced to let go of my beloved college at Southeastern. Jamie: I mean my heart and my soul was in that college. And it was impossible for me to imagine doing anything different. But there was this clear sense that the Lord was going to take that from me. And that's how I felt about it. This was mine, I loved it. And no, it's not yours, it's mine. And I'm going to give you something else and you're going to love it just as much. Jamie: And I didn't ... I had a hard time believing that, on that flight back. And I sobbed and sobbed and I came home that day and I said to Tara, my wife, I said, "I just am afraid that I'm going to end up in a job God calls me to, granted, that I'll never love as much as this one. And a people that I'll never be able to love as much as I have them." Jamie: And I don't know how else to explain it other than from that moment, March 21st, that morning when I sobbed all the way home, till the next month and a half as I continued through the interview process, the grieving of letting go of Southeastern lessened more and more every day. I still grieved, but less. Jamie: And simultaneously, as I ceased grieving as much in degrees by every day, vision and desire began to take root in my heart for New Orleans. I don't know how else to say it other than God began to put this people in my heart and in my mind. And I could not sleep at night. Jamie: My second interview, I showed up and Frank Cox picked me up that morning about 7:30 in the morning. He said, "How'd you sleep?" And I said, "Frank, I haven't slept in a month and a half." Because, I kid you not, every single night all I could dream about was New Orleans. Programs, degrees, people, graduates, recruits, fundraising, the whole gamut of it all. The Lord was just bombarding my heart and soul. Jamie: And now I sit here and as much as I loved the college at Southeastern and my students, it's impossible for me to imagine being back there now. And it's impossible for me to imagine not being right here right now. Joe: Had you ever been through anything like that before? Jamie: Not like that. This calling was very distinct. But I would say ... so I've been a Christian for 24 years. Not the oldest in Christ by any stretch, but certainly got some street cred. And when you walk with Christ, the nice thing about getting older in Jesus is that your life, you get more reps with him, day after day after day. And you've had more chances. It's not that you get smarter or better yourself. But over time you just had the opportunity to see him be faithful, again and again and again and again. Jamie: And it becomes, I think, easier in some ways, to believe that he just might do something here. And I had never had, in that 24 years, these are not everyday occurrences, right? These moments when God just grabs your heart and turns your head and your mind to something. Joe: For sure. Jamie: But I can point to four or five moments in those 24 years where I can say definitively God called me to it. I don't use that language of calling lightly. And I don't think we should. But I remember the night that I came to faith in Christ, June 16th, 1995. I knew that night, after coming out of the drugs and the alcohol and the womanizing and all that stuff and the brokenness and the arrests, I knew that he had just changed everything for me. Jamie: And I was so grateful and so overwhelmed and so overcome by the love of Christ that I knew not only that night that I was home in Christ, but I also knew that I would spend the rest of my life serving him. Whatever that meant. I didn't understand callings, I didn't know what that meant. I didn't know that you could make a career out of being a preacher. I didn't know any of those things. Jamie: So I didn't know what that meant or looked like, but I knew I would spend the rest of my life serving Christ. And the Lord, for about eight months, just confirmed and confirmed and confirmed. Because I wanted to go in the military. I wanted to fly jets, that's what I wanted to do. I have vertigo, I could never fly jets. I'd pass out up there when I was doing turns. Joe: We have air shows here so you can go watch. Jamie: I know that God, knew that God, was calling me. I knew again years later when I went to go be the pastor of Stony Hill Baptist Church in 2004, in Wake Forest, North Carolina. Right at the beginning of my Ph.D. program there. Jamie: Very clear. I had a sense, the morning I handed in my resume. A friend of mine asked me, it was my eye doctor, my buddy Jay. He asked me for my resume and a tape. I dropped it off at his office, drove out to the church, and I drove up in the gravel parking lot of that church. Jamie: And I knew they had other people they were going to look at and interview. I knew that. And they were good candidates. It's not that I thought I was better. But I knew God had called me to the pastor of that church, and I pastored there for eight and a half years. I knew the day that I was asked to be the dean of the college at Southeastern that God was calling me to do that. And I know now, with everything in me, that God has called me to be here to do this. Jamie: And it does not make sense to me, in a lot of ways, because I'm probably very atypical as a president in lots and lots of ways. But I like to build stuff. I love to renovate stuff. Whether that's something physical like a house, we renovated our house in Wake Forest. Or it's a degree program or it's a college or a seminary. Jamie: I love taking something with good bones and developing it and flourishing it and renovating it and renewing and restoring. And I look at this place and I think holy moly, this place has got good bones. We could do so much cool stuff here. Joe: One thing, our office monitors all of the social media chatter and all of this kind of stuff. And we just on and on. And so we see all the comments everywhere. Joe: And as a reflection of what you just said, I think people are really excited that you're here. And I know you don't like a lot of me focused language, which we are liking this everything. But we haven't heard a single negative comment. Joe: We haven't had to hide anything or be like oh, that's in appropriate. You know? Jamie: Yeah. Joe: It hasn't been that at all. It's been a very fluid, happy transition. And it's been surprising, just because you just don't see that. I'm very thankful. Jamie: I'm very thankful for that. To be honest with you, that was one of the reasons I didn't want to be a president. I had no desire to lift my hand up and say me, I'll do it, put a target on my back. That sounds awful, to be honest with you. I'm not a perfect man, though. I'm grateful that it's been so well received. Maybe it's because I have the good fortune of being a normal human being prior to being an academic, or even being a pastor to be honest. Jamie: But I've made ... I know what I've done. I know what my mistakes have been. And I shouldn't be here. There's the bottom line, I shouldn't be here. I've done horrible things. Yet Christ has redeemed and restored. And so I would simply say I know I'm going to make my mistakes. I know I have made my mistakes. And some of this probably a bit of a honeymoon. Maybe there's an encouragement that I seem to be a rather normal guy. And I do feel like I'm a rather normal guy. Joe: You wore shorts the other day. I saw you. Jamie: I did, wore shorts. That's right. I ride down the road and my kids make funny sounds out of the car. But I make my mistakes, I know that I will. Jamie: And there'll be times I have to ask for forgiveness, or I have to correct something. But man, I tell you, I feel the magnitude of this responsibility. And this process and now this presidency has forced me to my knees in ways that really, gosh, it's been since I was a young, young, young man in Christ. Jamie: And that has been sweet. Joe: I think that's really a great testament to the picture, the bigger picture, of what's going on anyway. Like you described, you weren't looking for this. But God said this is what I want now and the transition just happened to, from our perspective, work really well. And so I feel like that all is the same story being told from different angles. Joe: I have another question for you. When we do things in life, whenever we go over and beyond, we're often driven by passion or a burden. When somebody, probably somebody famous, said I can tell you what you value, let me see your calendar and your bank account, that kind of thing, because that's where you're going to spend your time and your money is what you care about. Joe: So the question I have is you for that. What are the things that are burdening you specifically for NOBTS right now? What is your passion project, so to speak? Where is your effort pointed right now for NOBTS? Jamie: Yeah, great question. I would ... really two fronts is where my mind is constantly turning at this point. One has to do with big picture, 30,000 foot vision type of stuff that has to do with the ethos of the school. And then there's another set of questions that I'm always churning on that are very, very practical and strategic. Let me start with the ethos types of things. Jamie: I am struck. I'm like everybody else, to varying degrees. There was once a point in my life where it mattered to me very, very, very much that I be somebody intellectually and academically. You know? And so the press to publish and the press to do the degrees and all these things, there were lots of reasons I did that second Ph.D. But one of them was man, I just really wasn't satisfied yet academically. I wanted to keep driving. Jamie: And through way more things than I can talk about right here of how the Lord worked to break my heart of those things, maybe that's another podcast for another day. Joe: We could do that. Jamie: The Lord just broke me and humbled me and reminded me of who I am and who I come from. And I don't care about that anymore. I really don't care if I ever get to publish another book, to be honest with you. Jamie: I will and I'm scheduled to and I'm working on something. Joe: So if the publisher's listening… Jamie: Publishers, I'll get it to you, I promise. But I don't care. And I think it's become acutely aware for me that despite the fact that we're in a moment right now where people know my name, and even talk about me and maybe watch little videos about me or read articles about me or whatever else, here's the deal. Jamie: This world will forget my name. That's the bottom line. The day I die, the people that come to my funeral are going to sit there and cry for a minute. And then they're going to go eat some fried chicken and move on with their life. And there'll come a point where even my own descendants, probably two or three or, not two. But maybe three or four generations down, my own great great great grandchildren won't know who I am. That's family. Jamie: That's my reality. That's your reality. That's everybody's reality. So we should all remember that the fame for which we are laboring and striving for, the worship of our own name, that idol that we so often bow down to, is, as Ecclesiastes says, vanity of all vanities. I will be forgotten. And this school will one day be forgotten. And we should remember that. Now, the work that we do will not. The work that we do will last forever. Jamie: With that in mind, here's what I want this school to be about. I want us to be a people that first and foremost above everything else are servants. If I can be honest, I love being a Southern Baptist. There's no other denomination I would want to be a part of. There really isn't. There's so many good, wonderful things about us. But in our worst version of ourselves, we can peacock. We can strut and we can puff ourselves up, we can look, show off how big we are and how special we are. And it's all vain. We'll all be forgotten one day. Jamie: I want to train up a generation of people, I want to be a leader that, above everything else, just serve. And be willing, like Christ, to take the towel and the basin. Look, Paul says this. And we nerd out in Philippians 2 about the kenosis passage. Jesus emptying himself, he is God. It's one of these great Christological statements that Jesus is equal with God. Jamie: Yeah, I get it. That theological point is there. But that is not the point of that passage. The point of that passage is what Paul is saying about Jesus he says as an illustration to the point. You, let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, that though he was God he humbled himself and became a servant. Jamie: In other words, you're supposed to do that. I'm supposed to do that. This is what his followers are supposed to do. I want to be a part of training up a generation that they care vastly more about advancing Christ and his kingdom and serving the broken and the lost in the name of Christ than they do about getting their own church or having their own Twitter account with lots and lots of followers, or fill in the blank of whatever it is. Jamie: That's first and foremost. Then I'd say two other things on the ethos front. Gospel proclamation. This is something New Orleans has been known for and has done well in its history. And doggone it, I don't want that to drop off. I want that to continue on and march on. We have to proclaim to those that are dying. Because they're perishing and they don't have life, even now as we speak. Not to mention what's to come. So gospel proclamation is vital and key. Jamie: And I see in that, man, in church planting and church revitalization and missions and evangelism and all of those things have to be essential to what we do. Jamie: And last of all, if we're going to do that, this is the part that strikes me, the Lord ... I've always know this. We always know this, right? But you know, the Bible tells us in the book of Psalms that unless the Lord builds a house those who build labor in vain. And Jesus says abide in me and I in you and you can bear much fruit, but apart from me you do nothing. Man, we are called to things vastly bigger than ourselves. And the Lord has burned that into my mind these last eight months throughout this process. Jamie: And certainly for me I can sit here and tell you the job in front of me, the job that the Lord just put in my hands, is so much bigger than me. If I'm going to do any of the things that God's called me to do, he always calls us to stuff bigger than ourselves, if we're going to do all the things that God's called us to do, man, we are going to have to walk on our knees every single day with Christ. Jamie: And he's going to have to show up. If he doesn't show up, then we're in a lot of trouble. As scary as that sounds, I think that that's the right place to be. So I want that, therefore. I want this to be a place where we walk with God more than we ever have. And that might sound oh of course this seminary president's going to say that. But those who've been to seminary will understand what I'm about to say, and maybe those who haven't maybe this will surprise you. Jamie: Seminaries can often be the place where people's spiritual walks dry up. They don't mean to and it's surprising. But it's because we get here and all of a sudden Christianity goes from being a very personal, spiritual thing to now a very intellectual, professional thing. Jamie: Yeah. We're doing it professionally now. And when that happens, we're ... that is a perfect recipe for disaster. And it's also a recipe to make us completely powerless to do the work that God's called us to do. Man, I hope that we can cultivate an environment here where our students have purity before God. Where our students have a prayer life that is vibrant and passionate and they're walking with him. Jamie: So those are ethos things I want to do. And then I would just say this very quickly. Structurally then some strategic things that I want us to be about. Leavell College we're going to expand and develop a lot. Enrollment strategy, and by enrollment we don't just mean recruiting and admissions. We mean things like advising students, helping them with financial aid. Doing all the things that actually help students through their enrollment process, from matriculation at the beginning to graduation at the very end. Jamie: Helping them to succeed. Because what we don't want is a generation of students coming, starting, and then fizzling out. We don't fulfill our mission when we do that. The students don't and we don't. We want students to get here and actually complete their programs and finish their programs. We want to increase the number that actually complete. Jamie: Then marketing and communications. I think that our story, this podcast, has been a great example of the kind of thing I think we have to do more of. In the sense that people have a mindset about what New Orleans is all about. Joe: Very much. Jamie: And I think you ... God's like you and I, we have to sit down and tell that story very differently because this is a cool place to be. And then last of all, denominational relationships. I want to ... I need to meet, my team needs to reengage, the denomination itself. Because if we're really going to be servants for Christ we've got to be... So anyway. Those are the things. All that right there. This is where my mind is 24/7 as I think about our wonderful institution.

When it comes to buying and selling a business, one of the first questions we typically get is how long it takes to complete the deal. These businesses are complex and looking beyond the multiple to see the potential value and return opportunities for return is key. Today's guest experienced a longer deal closing than expected but he is being rewarded for his patience. Some mistakes take longer to clean up than others but this is the story of how much the seller wanted to sell to this particular buyer despite the snags in the process. A born entrepreneur right out of high school, Karl spent over 10 years building a handyman business on his own. Right around the time he heard about Amazon and a local kid making a million dollars on the platform, Karl started to dabble and found his way in. After a few false starts, Karl became experienced in the Amazon marketplace. Today he walks us through his business buying process and his plans for doubling discretionary earnings in a very short time. Episode Highlights: The background on the business Karl purchased and how he knew it was the right fit for him. What happened with the SBA loan process and how that affected the deal. How Karl maintained the rapport with the buyer throughout the process. Why a price increase occurred during the process. The importance of keeping on top of the lender throughout. Karl's plan for doubling his margins and how he's implementing it. The importance of an in-face meeting with your Chinese manufacturer and how often to have one. Karl's advice to anyone planning a purchase. Transcription: Mark: Alright guys welcome to another episode of the Quiet Light Podcast. Real quick before I talk to Joe; if anybody out there hasn't left a rating on the Quiet Light Podcast, do me a favor go to iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to us, leave a rating, we certainly appreciate it. Makes us feel good. Makes us feel like we're doing a decent job at this whole podcasting thing. So thanks in advance to everybody that has done that. Okay, so Joe, when we're talking to a potential seller or even talking to a potential buyer one of the topics that come up often, is how long does it take to complete the deal, right? And we have people wondering am I going to get this done in three months and what have you. The fact is these businesses are complex. On the upfront summaries what we see usually is pretty plain and simple. You see revenue, you see earnings, you see a multiple, and you kind of think well this should be nice and capsid and quick. And sometimes it is. But other times you have to look a little bit deeper. And you and I have talked about this before, right? For buyers to make sure you're looking beyond the multiple and the multiple is one point of data. And for sellers and buyers alike to also have patience with the process and understand that you're selling a complex asset. I know you had Carl on the podcast who is a recent buyer of one of our properties. And it was one of those situations where the deal took longer than expected and the numbers weren't as necessarily straightforward as maybe you would think when you just look at this. But the net result for him as a buyer and for a client were phenomenal by being patient and looking a little bit deeper. Joe: Yes, no question. This particular deal took I want to say from letter of intent to closing seven and a half months which is probably the longest I've ever had. There's really specific reasons for it. And Carl is partly to blame for it because he made a mistake on his application to the SBA lender. So we had to do the process essentially twice. The seller Kevin hung in there with Carl because Carl was a nice guy. It made a difference. And at one point when the deal fell apart, we had to go back. Well, my advice was to go back out to market for an awful lot more money because the business has grown a lot; probably worth $400,000 more. Carl and Kevin got along so well that Kevin said no I don't want to do that to Carl. Let's just bump the price thousand $160,000; crazy. Most buyers would walk away. They'd be like no. Yesterday it was this price today you want $160,000 more. Carl didn't do that and he's being rewarded greatly for it right away instant equity, in my opinion, a quarter of a million dollars in the business. And then some things that he's doing on his end immediately once that first container load comes in doubling the discretionary earnings because of a focus on reducing COGS. It's just fantastic what he's doing. And it's a great lesson for buyers and sellers to be patient, to be focused on helping each other, and not looking just at that multiple. Mark: You know I love this sort of story because I get it right from a buying standpoint you're looking at a lot of deal flow you need to evaluate businesses quickly. So the temptation is often to look at just the high-level metrics and to eliminate something based on that. But so many of these businesses and if I could just say you know maybe even a plug for Quiet Light you know when we bring a business to the market we usually believe in that company pretty strongly as being a good value play for buyers. And so taking the time to kind of dissect it and to understand more than the top-level metrics and what's going on underneath and look for those opportunities for that immediate win and again looking beyond that multiple. So this is a really good story of somebody doing just that and seeing a really quick reward on that. I want to listen to this. I want to hear all the dynamics. This is one of those more complex deals and I think a really good example of what happens when the deal isn't straightforward but still works out in the end. Joe: Yeah. Hey, one other thing. I had a really strange interruption everybody in the audience I want you to get 10, 15 minutes in. Chris, our producer asked me about a particular person. I'm trying to find out who this is. If you could just get that far listen in and shoot me a note. I want to try to track that person down. Thanks, Ben. I appreciate it. Let's go to the podcast. Joe: Hey folks Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage. Today I've got Carl Sally on the podcast. Carl recently bought a business from me and it was a long, long process. I think we; I'm going to throw a quick data to Carl, we originally went under LOI in October of 2018 and didn't close until June of ‘19 and we want to share the story of why with the buyers and sellers and talk about what happened during that period, how the business grew out, how we fell out of LOI, got back under LOI and eventually closed to the point where both you and the seller are thrilled and some of the things that you're going to do with the business going forward. Before we go over all of that why don't you give a little bit of background on yourself so the folks listening know who you are Carl? Carl: Sure yeah so right out of high school I basically started out a little handyman company; very artificial, just a smelting yard and painting walls for a long time, offered a few contractors to work for free until I got enough knowledge to do plumbing and electrical and basically do the house from the ground up. I did that for 10 years. So in my late 20's that's when I learned about Amazon and I always had podcasts and things trickling in my ears, self-help books and what have you while I was tiling bathrooms or roofing on a house. And I heard the 4-hour workweek and kind of the same time I heard about The 4 Hour Work Week I heard about this kid, he was making a million dollars a year on Amazon. And so I said man if she can do it there's gotta be a way I can figure this thing out. And I did some free work for him at his warehouse. And he taught me a lot and just basically pointed me in the direction of YouTube. I learned everything I could. I had a few failures in my first project; my first product on Amazon. I think me and my partner lost maybe 10 grand on our first product and that was all credit card money. And then the very next product that we launched we did it the right way and we're able to actually start a business on that foundation and eventually grew that to five, six million dollars in gross sales. Joe: That's amazing. Now let's just come back to this kid that was making a million bucks on Amazon. You didn't hear it online. It was somebody local in the area that you live in? Carl: Yeah, it was just some random kid from the community. Joe: And you tracked him down and said look man I'm here for free I just want to learn? Carl: I was great at electrical work and I knew he needed some electrical workers for his house so I just thought he could do a little trade with me. Joe: Fantastic. Carl: He was thrilled. It was nothing to him. Joe: That's beautiful. That's the way to do it. I remember hearing a story a long time ago doing the same; self-help books and everything like that where somebody was trying to develop a project, a real estate development but he didn't have enough money. So he brought in people with all of the expertise and gave him a piece of the pie and all that sort of stuff. Where there's a will there's a way. I mean that's exactly what you've shown here. And now you've bought a business that's quite sizable and you're running a business that's even much larger. So cool, good for you. That's a great story. Let's give a little background. Again just a review. We just closed the transaction. Today we're recording on June 26. I think we closed on the 12th of June but we went under LOI a long time ago. You and I've been talking for I guess it would be eight or nine months now. This is the first time we're on video folks as well. You might want to jump over to the YouTube channel and see what's going on there. The first time we've seen each other. We'd like to do a lot more video in the initial buyer-seller conference calls now. But this is our first shot together. So that's great. Carl: Yeah. Joe: But it's been a long time. We initially; a little bit of background on this particular listing folks; it's a listing that I had listed for sale I think it was in late ‘17. And the growth rate on it had slowed. The owner of the business had some competition and he reduced prices. And his sales went up, his total volume of orders went up I guess I should say. His revenue did as well but the margin shrunk because he cut costs. So growth had slowed to 1 or 2% and it concerned buyers. So for owners out there, sellers think about that aspect of it. It concerned buyers. Growth has slowed. He slashed prices. He had some great growth opportunities in the package but just hadn't implemented them out of fear. He didn't want to make a whole lot of changes before listing the business for sale which generally is right. But in this case, the combination of that slowed growth because of cutting prices to fend off competition turned buyers away. And we didn't sell the business. We had it listed for three or four months. And Kevin decided look I'm going to go ahead and implement these growth opportunities and come back at this in the future. And he did. He came back. He implemented those growth opportunities. He fixed what was broken and came back and the growth was phenomenal. Nine months later, 10 months later we saw a 25% year over year improvement in total revenues and discretionary earnings. We listed the business for sale. And probably within a couple of weeks, I think Carl you got the winning bid. We put that under offer at full price. You knew what you could do with the business which is fascinating because this one is it's in the home sector, right? You can do installation yourself and things of that nature. I didn't know there was a connection before with your background, how you grew up in that first 10-year high school. That's awesome. So it makes more sense now. But why don't we talk about it? This is we went under LOI and it was going to be an SBA loan and it fell apart. We were almost there and then we lost it because we didn't get a commitment letter. Can you talk a little bit about your process in terms of first maybe why you liked this one and then what the SBA loan process was like for you and then we'll get into how it fell apart? Carl: Yeah sure. So the business itself I really liked because well one the numbers were right, it had a very; like you said a strong year over year growth which I found attractive. All the products; it had a small amount of products for the amount of revenue so that that ratio of low amount of SKUs to high revenue was very attractive to me. So it's less management and I could handle it myself. Also, the review ratings were really high. It had a great historical keyword ranking for most of the SKUs and all of those things kind of checked all the boxes for me. And then next I wanted to talk seller because a lot of it has to do with the seller as well. I knew this would be a long process with an SBA loan and I wanted to work with somebody who was honest. So as soon as I got on the phone with them I realized this guy's a straight shooter. And I've dealt over the last 15 years with a lot of shady characters and I just don't like doing business with those kind of people anymore. So it checked every box at that point and I said okay I should definitely; I don't want to screw around. I want to give him a good offer. I felt that it was a good price for the amount of growth that it had left to do. So I made that full offer. And then we started to kind of get into my first SBA loan experience. Joe: I definitely want to talk about that. Let me talk about price. We're not going to give away the price here folks but we went with an aggressive multiple on the low side. I'd say we were at about 2.8 times even with that growth. But it's because we have listed it prior and it didn't sell. So we were able to list it for more than we did the prior time but at a multiple, that was relatively conservative at 2.8 times. And it's important to note that because of what we're going to get to at the end. So okay, back to the SBA process. Carl: Sure. So we started the process and of course, I think I approached two different lenders and they had said each one of them had said oh yeah we'll get this done for you in 30 to 60 days. And I'm like oh man that is faster than I thought. That's great. Let's do it. Joe: Yeah. Carl: So we got it going. And I think about three or four months into the process that's when we realized that I had actually screwed something up in the paperwork. There was a personal financial statement for those who haven't done SBA loans yet, you have to declare everything that you have as an asset on this paper. And so in good faith, I didn't want to commit a federal fraud. So I declared everything that I thought was an asset including two properties that I have been receiving rental on for the last three years not thinking anything out. And then they went to go do a title search on them and realized that my name's not on the deed. It's not on the loan. And to me, those have always been performing assets. But in reality, since I didn't technically own them and I just had kind of handshake agreements; paper agreements on the side with the other partners in those properties, they didn't check out. And it's almost like I was in danger of performing fraud even though I came from a place of honesty. I put assets there that I technically don't really own. So anyway the bank at that point couldn't lend to me. I was untouchable. And we had just wasted four months of time. And of course, the seller was furious. I was furious. And the lender was furious. Everybody is just mad because I screwed up. I still wanted the business. The business was growing hand over fist every month. And I realized there was no way at this point even if the seller decides to keep me on that I'm going to be able to pay the same price for it. So I reapproached Joe and the seller just to see if we can still make a deal happen. There was literally just this one little thing in the paperwork that I screwed up so I knew I had this other stack of 100 documents that I could just drop in the next lender and hopefully accelerate that process. And I think probably Joe knows better. You know better. But I think that the seller saw that I had been moving extremely quickly the entire time even though when the lender had been dragging their heels. It was probably par for the course. I see now. And so he knew that I would perform very quickly for the next lender and that there was no way that he was going to get another SBA buyer that would move faster than me. And we had also established a pretty good rapport over the over those four months. He's kind of like I am in that he likes to move fast. So I think we just kind of hit it off and he still was able to sell it to me even though we did raise the price which I thought was an extremely fair raise. I thought he really took care of me on that which I'm grateful for. We were able to make the deal. Joe: Yeah let me pipe in there because I have to; people are like what you raised the pricing? You kept going and you bought the business? First I want to touch on a couple of things there. When an SBA lender says yeah we can do this in 30, 45 days; definitely get that done. And you think yeah that's great, that's fast. You have to talk about from what starting point. Lenders have a different definition of closing, of starting; they're really talking about from the commitment letter; 30 to 40 days. And they're right. Sure. But we always want to talk that one language and that's from a letter of intent, right? We signed the Letter of Intent I think with the initial one was October 14. It's going to take anywhere from 60 to 90 days to close that deal. And by closing, we mean what? We clearly define that as money changing hands, asset changing hands, you taking control of the business, Kevin the seller getting funds; all of that is closing. So when anyone is ever talking to an SBA lender talk from the point of the Letter of Intent. Understand that there's going to be a time when you got to put that whole package together, submit it to them, it's going to go to underwriting, then you're going to get a commitment letter. That in itself can take 45 days. And then you're another 30 to 45 days to closing. So that's where we get that 90 days from the SBA side. It can happen quickly. We've got; I think Chuck did one in 45, 42 days something like that. But if it's a sizable deal and more towards the end of the year guess what they want to do it faster because they're trying to hit certain numbers. Yes, they could do it faster all the time right Carl? Carl: Of course. Joe: The other thing I just want to touch on. I'm on a podcast right now with a guy named Carl and I tried to talk my seller out of selling the business to Carl. It is pretty laughable, right? Carl: I don't blame you. Joe: Because when the deal fell through the first time I'm like look, Kevin, your business has exploded. It's worth a lot more now. We need to really jack the price. If we go back out based upon what's happening year to date and this is now, this was March 2019 at this point something. I gave a high number; a much bigger number, that the business is worth probably $350,000 more than we were under LOI with you. And you know what? He's like you know what Joe I really like Carl. We get along really well. I like him. All the paperwork is done. If we can just get it submitted the right way with another lender we could still fast track it. And you know what let's see if we can find a fair price that's going to work for Carl and me. So we did. We went back to you and we did jack the price. You ended up paying, and I'm not telling the list price, but you ended up paying about $160,000 more for the business. Carl: Right. Joe: Oddly enough the multiple still went down. Carl: Yeah, that's how good it was doing. Joe: Yeah. That's how good it was doing. You went from a 2.8 multiple to a 2.55 multiple. Yet you were paying $160,000 more. Now I'm talking about multiples here a little bit. Folks, one of the lessons I want you to get from this, Carl is looking at this business with an eye of what he can do with it, what he can accomplish, and how he can grow it. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes. Not the multiple. The multiple wasn't his main focus. It was wow it's doing this in discretionary earnings based upon things within the business I can correct, fix, shift and even with the same revenue, I'm going to jack up the discretionary earnings and have some instant equity. Speaking of instant equity we talked about it, I think that you have probably a quarter of a million dollars in instant equity in the business because I think it's worth at least that much more right now than what you paid for it based upon the growth. Okay, so there's my little two cents I wanted to go ahead…hold on a sec, my producer is poking his head in. What's up, Chris? This is odd. Okay, he gave me a piece of paper. He's asking me Carl have you ever heard of a guy named Andy Youderian? Carl: I did not. Joe: Okay Chris, no idea. Okay. Hey anybody in the audience listening, if you guys have any idea who Andy Youderian; sounds like somebody from Star Wars, have any idea who the guy is, reach out to me find him, let him know that our producer is looking for him. Alright, I'm sorry for that tangent guys. Back on track. Okay so we went out to another lender and it worked. Just touch on that in terms of how long that process was because you had to resubmit an entire package again. Carl: Right. I mean they want; as soon as they said they wanted to work with me I dropped a document stack on them about 50 pages long; no 50 documents, some of those documents were 20 pages long. Joe: Wow. Carl: I mean it was just a huge stack of paper and in my mind, I'm thinking now we can get this bank down in three weeks. But of course they; when you get legal involved I realize that that's the real linchpin is the lawyers. It just takes so so long to review and get stuff back to you. They would expect to document for me in a week. I hand it to them in 24 hours. They needed it by close of business. They'd have it in five minutes. So I never ever ever want to be the person who's holding the ball. I think with SBA loans you got to just keep the ball in the lender's court over and over and over again. And sometimes it would be even though I'd get it to them so quickly I would be waiting for seven days for a response. Joe: Yeah. Carl: And this just; that time compounds. Joe: You got to keep pushing. Carl: And I would push and I was always squeaky; always squeaky with the lender. Joe: Squeaky but nice folks. You can't put them off. Carl: Squeaky but nice. Yeah, you don't want to put them off because I still do want to do repeat business with these people. So it's a fine line you walk. But I think in the end we really did close that super-fast. It wasn't like maybe even within that two months that they normally promise. Joe: I think it was. It helped; we fast-tracked the package to underwriting which sometimes again takes 30 to 45 days. But because you had it we were able to get there fairly quickly. The other lender, by the way, helped out with that. He gave a lot of the package right over and helped out as well. Alright, so we did close it. Let's jump to the fun stuff so people can learn about what you're doing with this business. We closed June 12th; yeah 11th or 12th, then you and I had a conversation. And you basically told me that you're going to double the discretionary earnings. Can you talk about that a little bit and how you're doing it and what other folks should look at when they're looking at businesses instead of just looking at the top-line number in terms of the meat and bones of the business itself, what you looked at and how you're approaching it so that you know you can increase the bottom line number and the total margins? Carl: Sure. Well, oddly enough I didn't even realize this until maybe three days before closing. But I was really excited to close finally and I put the deal in front of my partner for my existing business who does most of the logistics for us. And he said hey this product is really similar to some of the stuff we sell, why don't we run it past our existing supplier and just get a price out of them before shopping it around to other people in China. And so we did and I think the main item that the seller of the business I was purchasing was paying for; I think he was paying 16.50 for an item that this new manufacturer was willing to make for us equal quality for $8.05. Joe: Wow. Carl: And so I said holy crap this can't be real. So we just got the samples in yesterday and it's pretty similar. I mean probably with another dollar tweak to $9.05 it'll probably be damn near the same product. And at that point—. Joe: How many units is that selling? Carl: I think that's about like 20 a day, 600 a month; 6 to 900 a month. But what that did to the EBIDTA bottom line is I think it increases it by between 80 and 90%. That's incredible. Carl: Yeah. Joe: We get a quarter million equity going in by— Carl: It was a huge windfall. I mean completely unexpected honestly. Joe: When it comes to relationships with your Chinese manufacturers, I understand your business partner from your other business spends a lot of time on that aspect of it. Do you find that it's important to get over there and meet with them face to face and spend a little time with them? Carl: Oh absolutely; 100% yeah. To be able to press the flesh with the Chinese manufacturer is night and day difference. I mean that big of a difference; completely night and day. You're just a number overseas even if you have big order amounts. They like the green but they also like the in face meeting a lot. It's part of their culture. They call it Guanxi over there where it's business relationships; a special word for a business relationship that you develop. And the more Guanxi you can develop with your manufacturer, the more seriously they'll take you even if you have smaller order sizes, even if you're ordering less frequently, they give you the benefit of the doubt many times if you screw something up they'll pick up the slack for you. And some manufacturers will negotiate on their terms as well which is something that for most people who buy from China they know that they're very inflexible on that. But if you meet them enough and bring gifts and you offer respect and just have a good time; just go out, have some cigars and some drinks with them, the more often you do that the more a friend you are they really blur the line between friend and business over there. And the more that you can step into that gray area the more freely the favors flow and the more freely they'll give you really good terms which is even better than in my opinion getting a better price. Terms is everything because your cash flow is helped out so so hugely. So I think it's hugely underrated I think everybody should see their manufacturer. Joe: For those that haven't traveled to China before, how complicated is it? Is it safe? Should you plan on spending three days there or five days, a couple of weeks and see multiple manufacturers? What would you recommend to people that haven't done it before? Carl: Personally, I think at least a week is good. And I think starting their relationship with your manufacturer. Don't just go in blind. Have at least a few months of history with your manufacturer where they see that you do pay and you're a real buyer, you're not just a maybe then they'll already respect you enough to want to extend…roll out the red carpet for you. And just saying that you're going to be there for seven days. They will take care of you. They're extremely honored to have an American guest come to their homeland and care enough to see the things that they like and care enough to see their manufacturing facility that they've spent so much time developing. So yeah they'll take you on tours. They'll pay for your hotels. I mean I've never had it where at least it wasn't at least offered to pay for most of my expenses. They bought my family gifts. I mean I didn't; these were things I was uncomfortable receiving. But I felt like I needed to receive them in order to develop that relationship and not become one-sided. Joe: I've heard that time and time again. I think one of the key things for buyers to take away from that is that if they've never been it's safe to go and people are honored to have you there. Carl: Oh yeah. I felt very safe. Joe: Business relations; Guanxi you call it, is that right? Carl: Yeah, that's what they call it. Right. Joe: So buyers that are looking at businesses one of the ways that if the seller of the business has never gotten on a plane, spend some time with the manufacturers in China. There's probably a good growth opportunity in terms of bottom-line maybe terms and do that. How often do you feel it's necessary to go over? Carl: Maybe once a year if that, if not once every couple of years even. The first meeting is the best. If you can spend a good week there. It makes a huge difference. Joe: You say [inaudible 00:28:42.4] every day or are they taking you beyond the manufacturing facility and recommending other things that you can see in China as a tour? Carl: So we had two manufacturers. Actually the first time we went to we sort of split our time three days with this one three days with that one. And we saw them every day while we were there. We didn't know anything about anything. And we totally explained to them look if you have a business to take care of we can take care of ourselves we'll walk around town and just entertain ourselves with the new sights. But they were pretty adamant about wanting to be with us every day. So that's just how it shook out. Joe: Terrific, that's fantastic. Okay, so a little bit of a tangent there folks but a great recommendation in terms of being a buyer and how to improve the bottom line numbers. Carl: Sure. Joe: Alright, so you're going to improve the discretionary earnings on this business that you already have a quarter-million dollars in terms of equity when you bought it by another 80 to 90%. How long is it going to take that to happen in terms of buying the product and getting it in? Carl: Probably two months. So in two months, we'll start to see those savings in two months. We already have about three or four months of inventory on hand so it's plenty of pad to get the new inventory up and running. But that's probably what's going to happen. And then it'll take another year to log that. A year afterward to log that in as actual recorded earnings. Joe: Right. You're thinking in terms of a resale of the business, total discretionary earnings on the trailing twelve. Carl: Days to log in the equity; right. Joe: The equity itself. Yeah, we have in the past when the cost of goods sold has been dramatically reduced then ordered hit FBA and sales occurred. We have been able to do an add back. And for folks that haven't already heard the podcast on the sale, I did with Mike Jackness on Colorit, Google Quiet Light Podcast Mike Jackness ColorIt or even eComcrew. Mike did a series and honestly, he's a fantastic podcaster if you haven't heard it. I think it's episode 247, 257. Just Google Quiet Light ColorIt eComcrew podcast and learn. Because you actually learn from somebody that's sold a business. And some of the trials and tribulations we went through when you've got four brands in one seller account under one LLC and you're only actually selling one of them. So sellers out there doing that please listen and learn because it's a major challenge. But we got through it. What other things Carl would you recommend to people that are buying a business when they're looking at things like you have and approaching it? You've done something I think really really impressive here; hanging in here for seven and a half months to get the deal closed. Building and maintaining a good relationship with the guy selling the business so he trusted you. We talk about the four pillars here at Quiet Light, well that's the fifth one right there. It's being a good guy, being likable, building good relationships with either your buyer or your seller. What other things do you think are critical when you're buying a business? As people are looking all the time they're looking at lots of things before they find the right fit. What would you recommend they do? Carl: The first thing that comes to mind is anything sold at 5 million we're really looking at SBA funds. I think what I said earlier about just being forefront on pushing the ball into the lender's court; that is so important. If you're lagging on documents then it can damage the entire transaction and the relationship with the buyer. They see that you're lagging. So I mean that is underrated. I've always been a punctual person but I never realized how much that really plays in the business on different levels. I think one of the things that helped me was having built an Amazon business before so I really was comfortable with all of the key metrics and some of the red flags on the account didn't bother me at all because I knew that those specific things were common given the circumstances. So I think it really helps to either have that background or start small. I would never have jumped into this with both feet at this dollar amount with no prior experience. I think I would have rather pick something maybe 10 times less or maybe five times smaller and just gone in with an attitude of this is my intuition and I'm going to learn here. The mistakes I'm going to make, at least I'll probably break even. It's going to be cheaper than college and more lucrative. I think going into a smaller deal is still a good idea even if you can't put up big numbers to show off to your friends. It's not what it's about, right? Get that experience under your belt and then you can make really good decisions down the road. So buying small is good, starting out from scratch I think is a great experience as well. It takes time but you're better off putting in time than losing tons of money I think. Joe: What about finding a mentor? You clearly did that. That's one of the things you mentioned. The kid in the neighborhood that was doing a million on Amazon. Carl: Yeah. To be fair he really just pointed me in the direction of YouTube. That was his biggest recommendation. And I mean you can learn a ton just by listening to people. A lot of my mentors don't know me. I get them in books. I get them in podcasts like this one. I get them in blogs. So there's a lot of free information out there I never took a course and I feel like I've done pretty well. Joe: Well, obviously you've done pretty well. I got to tell you just the YouTube thing I've got a 17-year-old and anything he needs to learn it's on YouTube. Carl: Yeah. Joe: I'm 63 so anybody my age, learn from Carl and those younger; anything you want it's on— Carl: It's crazy. It's information at your fingertips. Joe: At your fingertips and it's free; that's right. Alright, then this is great. We're just about out of time. I appreciate the last nine or 10 months. And I'm looking forward to working with you in the future on some other transaction as well. Carl: Oh definitely. That is not the end. Joe: Alright, thanks for all your time. I appreciate it, your patience and congrats on such a great business that you've got here. Carl: Thank you, Joe. I appreciate it. Links and Resources: Mike Jackness Episode

In part two of the incredible exit of Mike Jackness's Colorit, we are hearing his first-hand perspective on what the process is like from the side of the seller. Mike honestly and openly goes through the process, from the letter of intent through due diligence, all the way to the handoff and transition. He reveals the humbling moments, the surprises, and things he would do differently. This episode is for anyone thinking about being on the seller or the buyer side of the acquisition process. Ending your involvement in a business can happen more easily and smoothly if you are in a good position and absolutely prepared no matter what. The takeaway to all business owners is put your business in that position from inception in case of an eventual sale. Episode Highlights: Mike's background and how he found himself in the coloríng business. How the due diligence process went and how in many ways it was harder work than running the actual business. The things that came up during the process that were surprising and how to approach number discrepancies in due diligence. The value of using a professional firm for due diligence. Why early preparation is critical. The creation and review of the asset purchase agreement and how it went for Mike. The small things he relayed to the buyer in order to make the transition smoother. Why in-person meetings are very important during the hand-off. The importance of doing everything you can to facilitate while still creating limits to your involvement in the process. What's next for Mike. Transcription:   Mark: Mike Nuñez. Yes, Mike if you're listening to this podcast congratulations for sending in the right answer to the movie quote. And which one was it; that was the Boiler Room, right? Joe: I think so. You expect me to remember. I don't know. We need Chris Moore our content director on here. Come on Chris. Mark: Hey Chris, we need your show notes for before we actually record these. But I do know that Mike you sent in a correct answer. Thank you for doing that. I don't know the prizes although the next time I see you I'll buy you a drink for sending that in and getting the right answer. Joe: For people that don't know, why don't we tell who Mike Nuñez is? Mark: Yeah, Mike Nuñez is an old friend of Quiet Light Brokerage. He is also a buyer with Quiet Light Brokerage and what are we getting out Joe what am I missing? Joe: Doesn't he run AffiliateManager.com? Mark: He does run AffiliateManager.com. Joe: He's huge in the affiliate space so if there's anybody out there with products that are looking for a great affiliate company to connect with look up Mike Nuñez on Linked In and connect with him. He's one of the nicest guys in the country and you'll love working with him and his company. Mark: You know what this movie quote is going to become, right? All of the show vendors, all of the other vendors out there that want us to make a pitch on the podcast are going to start sending in the right answers to us here on out. So those of you listening whatever the movie quote was send us an email and let us know what that's from. We'll give you a shout out on the podcast. But now let's talk a little bit about today's podcast episode. I'm excited about this. I love the actual stories of selling some of his business. Joe, you've been working with Mike Jackness is on ColorIt.com getting his business sold and today we're continuing the story. We already have one podcast on this where we talked about getting the offer, preparing the business for sale, going through all that, and now we're looking at the other side of it. And that is preparing for the close and doing that due diligence and some of that stuff that gets pretty difficult towards the end of a sale. Joe: Yeah the 1st podcast was right up until the letter of intent and now we're talking honestly and openly about the process that we had to go through; that Mike really had to go through with his team from the moment you're under a letter of intent all the way through the due diligence, that financial trusted exam if you will, negotiating the asset purchase agreement, meeting the buyers face to face, working with transitioning your virtual assistants over to them, closing, and training and transition after. We go through all of it. Nothing is left out. Mike is honest and humbled and surprised in some cases. I don't mean to plug people but Centurica did the due diligence and Mike—we'll let people listen to it but Mike made a promise to Bryan at Centurica and he said something about this process and his accounting and how it's going to work out and Bryan said yeah okay we'll see and Mike was a little humbled and surprised in the process. Mark: Well, that's great. Mike is a good guy. We plugged him before. He's been on the podcast now a few times. Let's get over to this because I think anyone that is thinking about selling or even if you're a buyer and you're going through this process, it's so useful to get that perspective of what it's like to go through this process as a seller. Because boy it can be frustrating sometimes, it can be stressful and just getting to the psyche of what's going on there I think is invaluable. Joe: And not to go on too long but one of the most important things you're going to hear is what Mark and I say all the time but you're not going to hear it from us, you're going to hear it from Mike. He's built, he's bought, he sold, and he's gone through this process most recently as a seller. And there are some things if he could turn back time that he would absolutely do and he would have made more money. But he was at a certain emotional state and life state where he wanted to sell and we made that happen. And we achieved his financial goals but if he could turn back time that would have changed things a little bit. So we're hoping that the lesson that you'll get out of this is planning; planning your exit eventually. If you may wake up one day and decide okay today's the day I need to reach out to Joe or Mark or anybody at Quiet Light and begin that process what will you plan well in advance for that? That's part of the mistake that we talked about with Mike. So that's it, let's go to the podcast. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley with Quiet Light Brokerage and we have another great episode of the Quiet Light Podcast here with our good friend Michael Jackness. How are you today Mike? Mike: I'm doing good man. Joe: It's good to have you back. I know that we've been chatting a lot lately because we just closed a transaction together. Mike: We did. It's good to be on the other end of it now. Joe: It is and it's been a process. We're recording this folks on April 18th and we started in mid-December. And we ended up closing the transaction on April 5th. So giving you a little bit of a recap; this is Part 2 of the process of selling Mike's business Color It. Mike those that are just tuning in and didn't hear it the 1st time why don't you give a 60 second background on yourself so they know who you are. Mike: Yeah. So I always joke that this background story gets longer and longer as I get older but the short version is that I have a background in IT. I'm an entrepreneur by heart and was doing affiliate marketing. I quit my day job in 2004 and I've been out on my own doing various things since then. I got into e-commerce in 2012 when we bought Travelo.com and sold that—had an exit to that in 2015 in January. Four e-commerce brands one of which we just sold through you. And we've been blogging and podcasting about that journey since 2015 at EcomCrew. Joe: And you're being a little humble there because you really travel all over the world and speak now. Not just with EcomCrew but also on your email marketing campaigns that you do with Klaviyo. So I'm going to boost you up a little bit. Mike: Thank you. Joe: You're famous man, I'm humbled just having you on the podcast and to call you my friend I think. Mike: Inaudible[00:07:06.7] has this show notes that say famous on Amazon I had one that says famous in my own head. Joe: I'm famous in my house but the least famous according to my family. There you go. Alright, so just a quick recap; again we launched Color It for sale in mid-December against my better judgment but you're influential and you pushed me and we did it anyway. But we try normally to have three to five conference calls in the 1st 30 to 45 days and at least one acceptable offer. We had three or four. We can't remember. We talked about this the other day and I didn't bother looking it up. But we had enough so that we got two offers. We ended up under LOI on Feb 5th, intentionally chose not to close for 60 days so you could move three of the brands out of the seller account into other seller accounts and that was a fun process, right? Mike: Oh yeah. Lovely. Joe: And then we ended up closing on April 5th, roughly 60 days later after going under the LOI. So we talked about the process, getting to LOI in the previous recording. Let's talk about what happened afterwards and talk about due diligence. How was your experience in due diligence; how painful was it, how good was it, how easy, all that good stuff? Mike: It was a lot less enjoyable than receiving the wire. Joe: Is this a yes or a no that you really worked harder getting the business sold than you did actually operating the business? Mike: I'd say absolutely. It was a lot of work. It was stressful just because—I kind of strive for perfection and I wanted everything to be exactly what we had communicated in the preliminary process. But Centurica is really good and they found stuff that I didn't even know about my own business which was really frustrating for me. It was a little bit unnerving. I was worried about how that would be perceived if it would—how it would affect the deal. What I realized I guess eventually was that every one of these deals I think that goes through due diligence stuff comes off and we were kind of within that normal boundaries of acceptable tolerances I guess or whatever they would call it and I probably was making [inaudible 00:09:12.1] but for me at the moment that it was happening I was pretty upset. Joe: Yeah so we had two or three things that came up where the P&L wasn't exactly right; the discretionary earnings wasn't exactly right for the trailing 12 months. And it's funny I had a call this morning, I'm working on launching a listing tomorrow and the owner of that business said well what happens in due diligence if that happens? And he was worried that the whole deal would just fall apart and you start from scratch. That's not normally the case. Normally you just use logic and math and say okay if you're off by $1,000 and your multiple is a 3 time you take $3,000 off the contract price of the business. That's really important when you build that trust that you've built over the last two or three months with the buyers of your business Mike. But in your case we didn't make any adjustment at all even though your numbers were not exactly the same as in discretionary earnings, right? Mike: Yeah and I think a few things kind of happened and number one as we were going to do diligence and working towards closing our January numbers came out and our February numbers came out and eventually we kind of knew what March was looking like and we were up significantly year over year. So I mean it was getting to be to a point where in some respects I was kind of hoping the deal will fall apart just like be realistic for money. Joe: Yeah. Mike: Obviously, that wasn't what I wanted to happen because I didn't want it to go through [inaudible 00:10:37.3] but that certainly probably helps. And I think a little of the trust kind of was established like you said that they knew that there was nothing the fairest going on there or at least they hope that that's what they were thinking. I'm sure that's what they were thinking obviously. And I also think that just based on talking to Bryan over at Centurica like after the whole thing was done it was basically like when a report comes out it's always going to be—there's always something that's kind of found and I just—it's kind of like a home inspection. When you go buy a home there's going to be a home inspection and there's always going to be stuff that that guy finds. Some of the stuff you can try and negotiate for to lower the price of the home but a lot of it you just accept. It's just like there are things that you're going to just go okay well I didn't know that when I signed the agreement to buy this house and put it in Escrow but I want to buy the house nonetheless and here I am and I'm going to just go ahead and still do it. So I think all of those things combined and I just I mean legitimately was willing to walk away. I wasn't willing to sell it for less. Because I feel like the number that we picked in my mind was the least I was willing to sell the business for. I was willing—we had talked about willing to—because we had already started separating our companies and making things better that if we waited another year we would have gotten more money for it. But at the same time, I also had set my mind to sell it. So I mean there was a bunch of things going on there but luckily all kind of worked out in the end. Joe: Yeah, you were emotionally ready to sell. There's no question about it. I talked to you three times about waiting; separate them all out, wait another year or so, and you definitely were ready. Mike: It wasn't about the money. I mean it was just a lifestyle adjustment and realizing we had too much going on and leaving some money on the table for this transaction to almost certainly put us in a better situation moving forward. So all and I think we're going to do much better by selling one of these businesses. Joe: Yeah, and you're going to be able to narrow your focus with the sale. So with regards to Centurica; for those that are considering using them or are fearful that you're under LOI and your buyer is hiring Centurica. I've never had a deal go sideways with Centurica. What they do is they find out like Mike said what the issues are with the business and really what it is, it's a little scary but for the buyer of the business it's really things that can be fixed and it's a path towards future growth and making the business stronger. So I like it when somebody else steps in on a buyer's behalf and really digs into those numbers. It helps the process and instills confidence in everybody that it is a good investment and that nothing's going to come back to you Mike in this situation after the sale if you closed and the buyer found something after the fact. It's better that they find it during due diligence like we did here. Mike: I think the only reason you really need to be fearful is if you are hiding something and you know it. And these guys will find it. I promise you—I mean they're incredible. And if I ever go buy a business I will absolutely hire them. They are incredible. I almost want to hire them just to tell them to come do an audit on our existing businesses to make sure we'd get things fixed before we go sell it—another piece of it a year or two from now. They're really good. Joe: It's not a crazy idea preparing in advance for the sale of a business 12 to 18 months out. You know now that that is critical. We've talked about it recently. You got a good value for Color It but I think realistically if the brands had all been separated out and you had clean tax returns, a staff that was delegated just towards Color It, it's possible you would have gotten a higher multiple. And with your January, February growth numbers and December was just killer, there's no doubt that the buyer of your business is really excited and didn't even think about making an adjustment because some of the numbers were off by a little bit. Because the numbers were so high for January and February he knew that he was getting a great business. And he told me personally that he thought that this one is probably the best of the three Amazon FBA businesses that he's bought for me in the last eight months. So we got through due diligence, it was a little painful, a little tough. Centurica helped. We had some trust built early on so we didn't make any adjustments and mostly because of that trust and because of you keeping your foot on the gas in terms of the numbers and the growth of the business. The worst thing you can do folks is once you're under LOI have a bad month or two during due diligence. It scares the buyer. They're making a lifetime investment putting their life savings on the line and they want to see positive numbers, not negative numbers. So we got through it and the next phase sort of when we got most of the way through it was to end up drafting, editing, and signing a 30 to 45 page asset purchase agreement. And that can be kind of scary and overwhelming in itself but the situation was pretty smooth, don't you think Mike? Mike: Yeah. I mean it was incredible. I expected it to go one way. This is actually funny, I expected due diligence to go one way and it kind of went a different way because I was building to Centurica when I had did the kickoff call that this will be the most accurate—I forgot exactly how I said but I really hear myself on that [inaudible 00:15:57.3] accurate company that have ever gone through diligence with you, you're not going to find anything off here by a penny. He was like yeah we'll see about that. That went one way and then the legal actions in my career and the ones where the other party drops the agreements are usually just an awful experience of their lawyer is dropping the agreement on behalf of their clients and all the things that they would want in a perfect world for their client with complete disregard to what the other party would want to see in that agreement knowing exactly what they want. They already know what the 3rd party is going to want but they don't care about that. They hope that of a hundred things that are in there you only asked to change 50 or something and the other 50 stays in the other party's best interest. So what I got was an agreement and—so I'm not a lawyer and I've been through these a million times and I don't really get emotional about this. I just send it immediately off to my attorney I was like let me know and I was expecting pages of stuff that were going to be really difficult to go back and forth on. And I really hate this part of the negotiation process because you've already signed a deal and now you're negotiating over a bunch of other points that you weren't expecting to have to fight over and there was none of that. Like she just like make sure you fill in the blank for this number and they haven't created this LLC that they're talking about in the agreement and make sure that that's done so it's actually a legal entity before you sign. I mean there was little pebbly stuff like that, there was a couple of small things that had some substance but it made me so happy not to have to go through a tough process. It kept our legal fees down only spending 2,500 bucks reviewing and editing the APA which I was expecting 10 or 20k just from previous experience of having to go back and forth. And it was such a great experience. I actually emailed the buyer afterwards and I was like dude I just want to let you know that I really appreciate this because somebody along the way from your team said do not send an agreement off to Jackness and Terran that's just lopsided. Like, make this a middle of the road agreement from day one. Like that was clearly someone communicated that because otherwise, I think it would have been the other way. Joe: Yeah. This is the 4th transaction I've done with Matt and his attorneys; the 1st one years ago and the last three within the last eight months. And every one of those contracts had been fair and balanced and turned around very quickly. And we actually have an attorney referral list now where we just want people to have good attorneys because we've had situations where people have awful attorneys. So we started gathering a list and we put this firm Jones and [inaudible 00:18:35.7]. if anybody is working on an asset purchase agreement and doing it directly with another buyer or seller and you want a referral to an attorney, shoot me an email at joe@quietlightbrokerage and I'll be happy to send it off to you; I'm happy to do that. So that's good, we got through that APA and we actually signed it. It's interesting because we signed it on the 14th of March and normally when we sign it money goes into Escrow and then we're right off to closing. But in this case, we waited almost another three weeks. So it could have been even longer. Mike: It did [inaudible 00:19:16.7] Escrow. You might not recall but there was like a $25,000 deposit. Joe: Yeah because of the request—actually it was necessary because you moving things out of the seller account. It was a nonrefundable $25,000 earnest money that was put in Escrow after signing the asset purchase agreement. I think it was nonrefundable. But that went to the attorney Escrow agreement and then the balance was sent in just prior to closing. It all worked out very well. We ended up closing on March 5th. But prior to that, we had to have some calls and some meetings and doing some planning but there were times when you were a little nervous because there wasn't a whole lot of planning and a whole lot of conversations going on. Mike: Yeah, and it was from my point of view like I wasn't worried about me because like I knew the money was going to be there. But I'm the kind of guy as you know that I'm looking out for the other guy. They just spent a lot of money, I want to make sure it's a good experience for them. And I was just like guys you're buying this business in a couple of days and we haven't talked about changing passwords and billing and things are going to just start breaking if you aren't paying attention to them and the team needs kind of a handoff to know exactly where to look for things etcetera. So it was a little bit weird to me that it didn't seem to be—like they were the kind of guys like everything was like T's crossed I's dotted, really highly motivated and passionate about everything that they're doing but that didn't seem to be as big of a concern. And I think we were talking a little bit—I think it was a combination of they just purchased another business like right before that. Joe: Yeah. Mike: I was also coming to visit them for two days like a couple of days after closing to be with them two, four days in person which I think probably they were just mostly waiting for that to happen. And I think the last part is that they just basically trusted me by that point that I was a good guy and wasn't going to rake them over the coals. But there were definitely some moments where I just like I—if I wanted to like really screw these guys [inaudible 00:21:09.4] kind of I was like thinking that and more just from the perspective of I think they probably should just be more careful because not everyone is a good person and I've seen scribbly stuff happen. Joe: And remember you didn't read every line of the purchase agreement. I'm sure whatever the potential screwing was or could have been was covered there. Mike: There's probably, I did not read the agreement. My lawyer read it but yeah I'm sure there was some legal stuff on there that had I screwed them—I mean again that wasn't even like—I was [inaudible 00:21:39.9] that I was just more—I'm worried for them. Joe: Yeah. Mike: The biggest was that if a wire did come in and we still had that lump in the Amazon accounts and—who knows someone could just like catch a fly out of the country and really see it later and it was a little bit scary for me on their behalf. I just worry about stuff like that. Joe: Yeah. Well, I think that the last minute stuff was due to they had just closed one so they were busy with that and they also knew what was coming. And they are so busy they have so little capacity for anything about what's in front of them that they were like we'll get to that when it's necessary and it's necessary just after closing; after the money is wired. The other thing you mention was that you went to meet with them in person. You happened to be going on a road trip and going to be in their neighborhood just after closing. So that worked out perfectly. Mike: Yeah. Joe: I always recommend to people, to buyers in particular regardless of the size of the transaction that if you can; if there's any possible way, you get in a car, you get on a plane and you go visit your seller during due diligence. Once you're under a letter of intent get in front of them; have lunch with them, have dinner, get a tour. You don't want to let the staff know that the business is forsold, the large part until the APA is signed. But you could go in as a consultant or at the very least meet them so that you can gain that level of trust because it makes a huge difference. The worst situation I've ever had—I actually had a guy from San Diego where you're from. Early on when I 1st started back in 2012, he bought a business from me that was $35,000 and there was about $40,000 worth of inventory. He flew from San Diego in January to Minnesota and he didn't have a winter coat and I was trying to talk to him because I grew up in Min and I'm like you really—you don't know what 10 degrees is and with the wind chill factor of 20 below but it worked out. And he said to me later, he said look if I hadn't met them in person and learned everything I learned in due diligence I would have walked away because due diligence was tough when you've got a business that's $35,000 and there's $40,000 worth of inventory. But he met them in person and that made a difference. He still owns it today. I saw him at the Prosper Show a few years ago. So definitely in person meetings are really, really important. So let's talk now about those two days; in most transactions, there's a transition period, a training period that is part of the purchase price. The standard asset purchase agreement says up to 40 hours over the 1st 90 days after closing. I don't think you're going to use 40 hours or they're going to use 40 hours from you but you put in a couple of very long days right after closing, right? Mike: Yeah. I mean I don't know that it was required and I committed to be there whatever but I'm again that type of guy and I want to see them have success with this business; bottom line. And part of it is just treating others like I like to be treated. And I have been in transactions before when I bought Ice Wraps on the wire hit the guy ghosted me. It was like I literally never heard from him again. Joe: That's why we do hold backs people. Mike: Yeah but I mean it was a $50,000 purchase. It was actually the exact same situation as going—I went to Michigan, it was also in January. I also didn't have a winter coat. And I was also [inaudible 00:25:13.8] I thought you're talking about me for a second. But the employees did help me with the transition. The owner just was gone. And there were a couple of things that I could have used his help on that would have just taken him 30 seconds to answer. So again I just would never want to be that guy. And there is a lot—I mean a lot of things are going on in our business that I probably needed to hand off you realize it is all complicated; they are but it seems so easy to you because you learned them one day at a time. And when you're trying to take five years of something that you learned one day at a time that for me they're like sending orders into Amazon or you have something come from our 3PL or coming from China go to a 3PL and go to Amazon or deal with the customer service issue or do Facebook Ads, I mean all the different pieces of the business it all just seems so 2nd nature to me. It's no different than breathing. But when you try to start explaining to somebody you realize like just how much there is. And so I actually made a list of like 40 items as I just started thinking of them over and above what they were asking for or things that I thought that I needed to explain to them. And I just I wanted to feel like when I left there that I felt good about myself that they had everything from me to make sure that they were going to be successful. Now what they do with things from here on out isn't really—I look at that and that's not my problem. I mean I've done everything I can it's up to them now if they want to end to the ground there's nothing I can really do about that. I'd rather that they'll make a billion dollars with it. I'd be much happier with that result but I want to tell they felt good about me. Like I gave them every tool possible to be successful and I'm still there for them. They still have been in contact with me but they've been really good about it and respectful. And I've been spending 10 to 15 minutes a day maybe since I left there helping them which I think is completely reasonable. And I see the light at the end of the tunnel in that within two to three weeks I'll probably never hear from them again other than to say hi and maybe have a drink some day because they're really awesome guys. I really like them and I'd love to hang out with them just on a personal level next time we're in the same city. But they're obviously not going to take advantage. That's when I would get upset is like if the other parties are taking advantage and like asking you to continue to do stuff and spend eight hours a day helping them and just taking advantage. And they're not doing that and again I just want to make sure that I do the best that I could and I can feel good about myself with the hand off. And that's kind of how things transpired. Joe: Yeah. And that's why as far as the taking advantage that's why it's called transition and training. It's not operating the business. Mike: Yeah. Joe: So we've always got a certain period up to and over, the reality is that even after three months they may send you a note, a Skype message, a text, an email with a quick question that you're going to respond to. It happens. There's just no way that you can pack everything that's in your head inside of a two day training period. Because they're going to come up against something that may not happen for four months and it's new to them and it wasn't covered in training. It's just the nature of all of the pieces and parts. But at the same time, it's not overly complicated. These businesses are fairly easy to transfer and the training is fairly easy. It's just running on its own now and it's the key thing that I always tell people is especially people that are leaving the corporate world and are used to working 60 hours a week and they take over a business like yours that might take 15 hours a week on a high side that just put in 30 but 15 working in 15 observing and training and don't fix anything that's not broken. I see that happen too often. People come from the corporate world and they're just fixers; they want to fix things even if it's not broken so they do break it. So that's the big piece that I try to have them not do which is really important. Okay, so we're doing a video here. Most people listen to audio but you've got the EcomCrew shirt on so I want to talk about that a little bit. I want to know; we've closed, the money is in the bank, you've dropped one of four brands so you've got a little bit more free time. Not a lot, I know you're crazy busy but what's next for Mike Jackness? Mike: Well immediately following as just I have the EcomCrew shirt on is because we're doing an EcomCrew webinar right after this. That's what's immediately next but I think you're talking bigger picture. I'm trying to get—I have some life goals, I do a podcast every year about yearly goals and a couple of big themes are less is more. I think that would be just trying to do too much. We've been successful in spite of ourselves, in spite of running at full scene. I'm concerned about burning out because I've been there before and I can kind of feel that coming to [inaudible 00:30:01.6]. So before running off the rails and feeling like I'm completely burned out, I wanted to make some changes. And one of those things was selling one of those businesses to make sure that the burnout thing doesn't happen. And overall like the thing that I really enjoy doing is the teaching and education part with EcomCrew. It's just been awesome. I talk about how I feel like I have enough in life. I mean it's always nice to make more money. I'm not going to be one of those guys that's like I'm not going to take any money when I have enough to make money but there's different ways to make money. And one of the things that have been really cool is just to help others while doing that. It might be a situation where I might make 10,000 instead of $20,000 but somebody else might make $100,000 so it's like a net win for the role and it's still good for me and it's still in an environment where I get way more enjoyment out of it and it's a lot better than coming to the office every day and just kind of grinding which is not really for me. That was the reason why I left my day job in 2004. So those are kind of some big picture things that we're working on. I also want to get into an e-commerce business I have just a personal interest in. I think that that's really important after just being in e-commerce and business stuff over a long period of time. The things that you are personally interested and passionate about are just way easier. And Color It was an amazing business, amazing brand for a whole bunch of reasons that we don't time to get into here but it's just not something that I'm personally into. And the same thing with Ice Wraps and Tech Miner and Water Baby, those are just things that they make money. I'm an entrepreneur at heart, I think a really good business person at heart like I am very strappy. I will figure out a way to make money doing just about anything but it's not just about that. It's doing something that I actually have an interest in and enjoy which I think will be a lot better. So those are some big picture things for me. Joe: But I think a lot of that estranged and left comes with age and experience; hustled in the past and you did what you had to do and you got ahead and you're giving back. For those that have not listened to EcomCrew, the podcast, I highly advise it. We talk about it often here on the podcast for people that have just purchased businesses or even those that have them and are trying to expand their channels either to Amazon or email marketing or anything like that. You got to tune in and listen to Mike and Dave on EcomCrew. They've got a great series, Under the Hood, we're going to try to do something like that on valuations here at Quiet Light someday but Mike is one of those guys that has been there, done it, and now he's helping. He's not teaching because he had nothing else to do. He's teaching because he's been very, very successful in sharing his experience with others. So I appreciate that. Mike, any last thoughts, any last words in terms of what you'd say to people that are thinking about selling in the future and how to prepare? Mike: Specifically, on thinking about selling and how to prepare, the 1st thing I would say is that everything comes to an end at some point. So even if you're like I'm never going to sell my business that's complete B.S. because everything comes to an end. And what I've learned in life, entrepreneurial life is a lot of times it sneaks up on you. You think you're in a good spotting and you're happy with what you're doing but there's a lot of things that happen in business that are irritating and wear on you. And eventually one day you might just throw your hands up and you'll be like I've had enough of this. And if you're in a better spot to sell and you're prepared to sell all along the way that can happen a lot easier and smoother than if you haven't prepared. And you'll also get way more money for your business if you have prepared. So it's something that you should be thinking about at all times. It will probably make you a better business person and make your existing business better anyway because if you're always thinking about it from the perception of I might need to sell this business any time it will force you to have better procedures in place. It will force you to be looking at your accounting every month and scrutinizing all your expenses. Making sure that your net profit is always as high as possible. There's a lot of [inaudible 00:34:09.9] benefits having that thought process. And even if you “never do sell” it will probably put you in a better position no matter what. So if there are things that I wish I'd—if I could go—if you try and go back and change things and I was thinking a lot about this; our plan was to sell the whole thing as like a big conglomerate originally. But things changed and so I wasn't—I had been marching towards to sell everything as a conglomerate goal, everything was together and I thought one day e when I was done with e-commerce I would just be done with e-commerce. But that's not how it worked out. What ended up happening was we got too big for what I was comfortable with in terms of risk to reward and I want to take some money off the table and I still immensely love e-commerce and I want to be involved in e-commerce. So I could have better prepared ourselves for that by having multiple LLC's for each brand that maybe one LLC owned each one of those and it still would have been that conglomerate thing and structured in a better way. You can't foresee the future all the time but you can definitely plan—put yourself in a better position when the unexpected comes. Joe: I don't know if I could have said it any better than that so we're just going to wrap this up, Mike. Mike: [inaudible 00:35:20.4] Joe: It's about a complete pleasure working with you. I'm glad to have been your broker in helping you achieve these goals and maybe another year or two we'll do it with the next one. Mike: I'm looking forward to it. Joe: Alright, thanks, Mike.   Links and Resources: ColorIt.com MIke's Podcast Email Mike Centurica

Gary Myers: Hi, my name is Gary Myers. Joe Fontenot: I'm Joe Fontenot. This is the Answering The Call podcast. This is the podcast where we talk to people who are answering God's call. Today's guest is Kyle Beshears. Kyle talks about a new word, new word to me at least. Kyle was here at the Defend Conference, and the word he taught me was apatheism. Gary: Apatheism? Joe: Apatheism. Gary: That's a new one on me as well. Joe: It is, it's not fruit, it's something else, which he's going to tell us about now. Gary: Let's hear from Kyle. Joe: Okay, so Kyle you've said something that doesn't get said often and it's called apatheism. In some ways we can guess what it's about, but I think your explanation is much more helpful. What is apatheism? Kyle Beshears: Yeah, the word's a bit intuitive. You can parse two words out of there, apathy and theism, a clever way of trying to describe a feeling of indifference towards questions related to God's existence is how I would initially define apatheism. There's a ... I don't know how to describe it, the-ism we think has to do with the way we think, right? Kyle Beshears: It's a belief, it's cognitive, but I think apatheism affects our heart as well, and how we feel, our emotions. Apatheism is not just finding questions related to God's existence intellectually or being apathetic to them intellectually, it's also an affective reaction to questions about God. I might define apatheism as when a person believes questions about God are unimportant and they feel that way as well. It's both a belief and a feeling. Joe: Okay, so let's work that out. Like a role-play, right? Your apatheist, I am me, and I say, "Kyle, I would like to talk to you about God." What do you say? How do you act? Kyle: Well me personally I would be polite, but to have the conversation ... Joe: A kind apatheist. Kyle: Yeah, yeah, you seem like a nice guy Joe, but in reality I really don't want to have this conversation. I find it as uninteresting as arguing over whether or not Pepsi is to be preferred to Coca-Cola, right? It's just not an interesting conversation to me. Joe: It's sort of irrelevant. Kyle: Irrelevant, yeah, I don't find that God affects my life, my relationships, my future, and I don't think ... Maybe he affects you in a personal way, but that's that's you, that's idiosyncrasy, that's unique to each person. To me, I don't care. Joe: Do you think it's a generational thing? Kyle: Thinking through it, I think it's probably more prevalent in younger generations, so millennial's and younger. I've just been reclassified as zenial, so I guess we're in between generation Y and the millennial's. Joe: Okay. Kyle: I think probably you're starting to see it in Y, in zenial's, millennial's, and whoever comes next. I don't think it would be fair to assign apatheism to just younger generations. I think you see wherever there is a decrease in religious attendance and church services, wherever you see an increase in religious un-affiliation, I think you'll find apatheism there. Kyle: Apatheism may even be ... You might be able to find apatheism more geographically that generationally, right? Pockets in the Northeast in the United States, Western Europe, Canada, I think you'll find that apatheism is more prevalent with those people than in say southeastern United States or majority world contexts like South America and Africa where church is growing, you'll find a complete opposite. Joe: Where do you think apatheism comes from or what causes it? Is there an easy answer for that? Kyle: No, I don't think there's an easy answer for that. I think you can trace the beginnings of apatheism maybe as far back as pre-Socratic thinkers. You have this movement in ancient Greece where some philosophers are starting to move away from polytheism and they're moving towards this ... It's not monotheism, but it's God is everything and God is fate, right? Kyle: The problems you're having with your crops or your relationships or your wealth are not because of fickle gods, it's because of fate, so why should you care about the gods? You see an apathy towards the comings and goings of the gods, but it's not replaced with the apatheism we experience. Their apathy was a virtue like you come to just recognize that you can't control fate. Kyle: The moment you truly understand that, you'll find bliss, you'll find happiness. I think the kind of apatheism we experience today starts to rise in the Enlightenment period where people are rejecting Christian theism in exchange for agnosticism, which is we can't know if God exists. Deism, which means a God exists, but he or it doesn't really have any direct impact on our daily lives. Joe: Set it and forget it thing. Kyle: That's right, yeah, the popular phrase is the absentee landlord. Atheism, no, I'm unconvinced that God exists, right? There's this a line from one of those Enlightenment era atheists named Denise Diderot. I'm going to pull it up real quick. Sorry, you'll have to edit this part. Joe: No, it's okay, we don't edit, this will all be in there. Kyle: Oh, okay, great. Joe: They're listening to us right now. Kyle: Good, good, so Denise Diderot, famous Enlightenment atheist thinker, and he distills apatheism in his time in this one sentence. He says, "It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all," right? If you don't know much about hemlock, you should not put that on your tacos. Joe: That's the stuff that kills you. Kyle: It will kill you, yeah. Joe: Painfully. Kyle: Hemlock and parsley look similar, right? Diderot is saying it's more important that you discern between what can go on a salad and what will kill you than warrior fret about whether or not God exists. Joe: I feel like that betrays this huge idea already that God doesn't exist. If he exists, it's more of the idea of God exists. The same emotional attachment we might have like a small kid has to a blanket, do you know what I mean? This makes me feel good, I almost feel like in once sense what he's saying is forget about the blanket, it's just a toy thing. Joe: There's real issues, something could kill you and not kill you. The irony there is that what happens when you die? It really does matter if there is a God or not. Kyle: It is deeply ironic with this question, what happens when you do mistake the hemlock for parsley and you end up dying? Joe: Right. Kyle: Well, now the question of God's existence becomes of the ultimate importance. Joe: Right. Kyle: Yeah. Joe: Yeah. How do you put apatheism on the scale with atheism? I think a lot of people know atheism, whether it's the new atheists which are angry and want to pick the fight, or whether it's just the person who says look, "I'll be honest with you, I've thought through this, I don't think God exists. I'll talk to you about it, but it's not something I talk about a lot." Joe: Then you've got this new class or this newer category, newer to me, apatheism, which is just like this is completely irrelevant. Where do you put those on a line as far as the easiest people to talk to? Kyle: Yeah, intuitively you would think apatheism has a lot to do with atheism. If you don't think God's existence is important, well then you must not believe in him. That could very well be the case for a lot of people, but actually I think there is something that an atheist and a theist has more in common than does an apatheist, and that is interest in questions relating to God's existence. Kyle: If you were to ask a Christian theist, "Do you believe God exists?" They would say, "Yes, of course I do." Then you would be able to have a conversation, "Well, what is that God like? What are the implications of that belief?" If you were to ask an atheist, "Do you believe God exists?" They would say, "Well no, I don't," and then you'd be able have a conversation. "Well, what does God's nonexistence mean," right? Kyle: Now if you were to go to apatheist and ask them, "Do you believe God exists?" They're going to shrug their shoulders and say, "I don't care." That indifference drains any conversational power out of the whole dialogue, right? They won't have the conversation with you, because they don't care to have the conversation. In one sense atheists and theists should both share a deep concern about apatheism, because both the atheists and the theists find questions relating to God's existence important, because they understand the ramifications of answering the positive, theism, or negative, atheism. Joe: That's really interesting, I never thought about that before. An atheist should be concerned about the ramifications of an apatheist. Kyle: Absolutely. Joe: Clearly a theist of the Christian should be concerned, because we want everyone to be restored to God and love God and have a happy life. The atheist should be too, tell me why. Kyle: Yeah, I mean a simple scenario, who's going to buy Richard Dawkins books, right? Let's say Richard Dawkins publishes a new book, which is a very compelling, intellectual argument against the existence of God. The people that are going to buy those books are people interested in the question of God's existence. The atheist, the theist, and even the agnostic are sitting in a room having a conversation about God, because they're all interested in whether or not he exists, and what God is like if he does, and what it means if he doesn't, or even what it means if we can't know. Kyle: The apatheist is on the opposite side of the room looking over at those three having the conversation thinking they're wasting their time, it's completely useless. Yeah, I think that should be deeply concerning to atheists and agnostics as well as theists. That maybe rounds us back to the question that you asked earlier, which of those do I find most difficult to engage with the gospel, the atheist or the apatheist? Kyle: Unequivocally, I think it's the apatheist, because at least when you're approaching atheism, you have a mutually common interest in whether or not God exists. Joe: Yes, okay, so I have a very specific question about this. I'm going to come back to that in just a second. Before I get to there, what are we talking about? Are there a lot of people that are apatheistic? How do you count, find, survey apatheistic people? Would they even care? Then how do they compare to atheists or agnostics? What's the ratio? What's the population? What are we talking about? Kyle: Yeah, this is a frustrating thing looking into apatheism. It's impossible to tell how many apatheists there are in any given culture. The reason is because if you go to polling data, so things like American Religious Value surveys or Pew Forum or Gallup that ask questions about religious identification, those pollsters do not double-click into the reasons for why people don't believe. Kyle: Very quickly we might say, "Well I know where all the apatheists are, they're in the nones, the N-O-N-E-S," right? The religiously unaffiliated, those people who when asked if they have a religious affiliation, they say, "No, none." Apatheism is not restricted to the nones, and there may be nones that are not apatheistic, right? You may just not have a religious affiliation, but it doesn't mean you don't find the question of God's existence important. Kyle: Further, to complicate matters, you can find apatheism in people who identify as a religious tradition. You can say, "I'm Jewish, I'm Christian," but they don't really care what that means. Joe: For sure, I mean, there's so many, not so many, but I already at the top of my head think of so many secular Jews who are popular in the media or whatever. I feel like in a lot of ways they don't really care. They're Jewish by culture and heritage, but not religion in the spiritual sense. Kyle: Here we're in New Orleans, I'm in Mobile in Alabama. We're in the South, the primary religious affiliation is going to be some kind of Protestantism or Catholicism, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that they care about what that means, it just means that, that's the household they grew up in, that's the tribe to which they belong. Kyle: Apatheism permeates both religious affiliation and non-religious affiliation, so it makes it very tricky to try to gauge. Joe: Where does apatheism as a proper noun end, and where does all the category, whatever you would call this, and maybe this is apatheism, all the category of say the people that come and sit in the pew, but don't do anything, do you know what I mean? They don't tithe, they're not active, they're coming for some reason, maybe it's social, maybe it's guilt, maybe it's who knows? Joe: We all know this exact group of people and they're usually a large group of people, is that apatheism? If not, is apatheism something different or more extreme maybe? Kyle: Yeah, so I think what we're walking around now is the difference between apatheism and what's called practical atheism or pragmatic atheism. Practical atheism is as old as the Bible itself. We hear Scripture lament that the fool says in his heart, there is no God. Now that doesn't mean that they were actually atheist. The fool doesn't say, "There is no God." The fool says in his heart, so there's a dissonance between what this fool believes and how this fool acts, right? Kyle: This is the height of foolishness that you believe that there is a God or you acknowledge there's a God and you recognize that the implications of God's existence affects your ethical moral behavior, but you act as if he doesn't exist. I think for a lot of our experience in the church, what we're seeing is practical atheism. Kyle: It's a profession and even maybe a vague belief of God's existence, but a refusal to recognize and act upon the implications of that belief. How that's different from apatheism, is that the apatheist doesn't care about God's existence or nonexistence, he or she could care less. The practical atheism's apathy is sympathetic, it's not real. Kyle: An apatheists apathy towards God's existence is real. To me, from my experience and my readings, this is very new. This is a very new thing in the life of the church, not one that it's had to approach perhaps ever. Joe: Yeah, you had mentioned earlier that you and Tala Anderson have written or presented a paper on this. Kyle: Yeah, that's correct, so Tala Anderson is a professor of philosophy over at Oklahoma Baptist University. He and I and a couple of other folks presented papers on apatheism at the American Academy of Religion in Denver this past November. The goal of that presentation with those papers is to define apatheism from an evangelical, Christian perspective, and then to propose ways in which we might approach it as gospel believing evangelistic, Christians who are first concerned that you don't care about God's existence. Kyle: Second, that we would like to see you come to know the Lord Jesus the way we do. Yeah, we felt it was one of these conversations that the church ought to start having, right? Especially as the United States continues to secularize in an unique way from the rest of the West. A little slower than Canada and Western Europe and a little more diverse, right? Kyle: We're seeing an increase in interest in neopaganism and the occult, which is completely unexpected. Joe: Interesting, yeah, where did that come from? Kyle: Apathy, right? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: We are secularizing in a different way, but yeah, as a challenge to the gospel, we thought it would be a wise thing to begin, at least bringing it to the public mind. Joe: Yeah, getting the word out there. Kyle: Most people experience apatheism, they know it, but they don't know it. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: Right? The second you say even the word apatheism, people go, "Oh yeah." Joe: Right. Kyle: I know exactly what you're talking about. Then it makes that thing that was intangible, tangible. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: If it's tangible, well now we can talk about it, because we can identify it, we can see it, and we can prayerfully think through how we ought to approach it. Joe: This brings me to the question, one of the questions I wanted to ask specifically was how do you start a conversation with an apatheist? An atheist, right? That's easy, there's so many entry points. It might be intimidating, but it's clear there are a lot of ways in. An apatheist says, "I don't really want to talk about this." How do we talk about something someone doesn't want to talk about? Kyle: Yeah, this is the tricky part, right? The word that's probably floating around in people's minds with a conversation like this is well that's apologetics, right? I know what I need to do, I need to go bone up on apologetic methods, arguments for God's existence. If they don't find God important, well maybe if I argue that he exists, they'll find that he's important. Kyle: Unfortunately, that presupposes something that's not there, that they're interested in having that conversation, right? Joe: Right. Kyle: I certainly don't fault people, because as creatures created in the image and likeness of God designed to have a relationship with our creator, we are by default we have interest in God's existence, right? Thinking that everybody thinks the way or feels the way we do about God is intuitive, right? Certainly, that's the model we received from Scripture thinking about the context and the time in which it was written. Kyle: Everybody thought God or gods existence is in the little g, like multiple gods, is important. We've built our apologetic models off of that, and rightly so as a biblical foundation. For example, the most famous apologetic model that's cited from the New Testament is Paul's Areopagus sermon in Acts. When he goes into Athens and he's preaching the gospel and people find it interesting, so they invite him to the Areopagus or Mars Hill in the King James. Kyle: They want him to present this new philosophy they're so unfamiliar with. As he's walking there, he passes a pantheon, so he sees a bunch of statues of gods. He notices that there's one statue to the unknown God. They are so superstitious, that they wanted to make sure they didn't offend the one god that they might not have remembered in their little collection there. Kyle: This one God is really interesting, because there's something special about him, right? He seems to proceed the other gods, there's something more powerful, more mysterious about him. Paul notices that they're very religious and he leverages that religious interest. He starts, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious." Kyle: He presupposes that they both share a minimally common interest in theism, even though they are polytheists and he is a Christian. At least they both think that God's existence is important. From that story we've built our apologetic methods, have we not? I mean, I find it very rare to read a book on apologetics without that model coming up. Kyle: That's so important, because it's so good, but what if we live in an Athens without a statue to the unknown God? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: What if we live in a society now where there may have been a statue to an unknown God, but it's come under disrepair for being neglected, vines are growing on it, soot, it's been chiseled away, right? People don't care about the Pantheon anymore, how could Paul have started, "Men of Athens, I see that in every way you're very religious." They would say, "What do you mean? No we're not, we don't care about what you have to say." Joe: It's like in the one hand you've got we're in a car and they're in a car. We have gas in our car and we're going north. They have gas in their car going south, and we're trying to get them to turn their wheel and come north, the right way. This new scenario that you're talking about here is like we're in a car and we're going north and they don't have any gas. Kyle: Right. Joe: It's like a totally, foundationally different issue. Kyle: That's correct, yeah, so that's why I argue that it's far more challenging to present the gospel to an apatheist than it is an atheist or an agnostic, because you are robbed of that minimally common belief. Not only are you robbed of that minimally common belief, but the question, do you believe in God, is zapped of its power because of indifference and apathy to it. Kyle: That question is meaningless to an apatheist, in fact, they may even feel negative towards it, because they're so tired of being asked it, right? Joe: Right, so you're starting at a deficit almost? Kyle: Exactly. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: You have to take a step backwards in just recognizing that we don't share that minimally common interest is crucial to approaching apatheism, yeah. Joe: Excuse me, what should I do if I've ... I have this friend and he's apatheist, I'm just going to say, and I have a few friends that I already know fit. Say they're not friends, say we don't have a relationship already, is that the key? Is it having a relationship? Even then, maybe they don't care to talk about this. I'm the kind of person, jumping into me for a minute, I'm the kind of person that I will get confused like sports. Joe: I'm like which one is the football and the basketball? I'm at that level, right? Extremely ignorant when it comes to sports, just a real idiot, and so somebody wants to come and talk to me at sports, I'm just like I will smile and be nice and can't wait for you to stop talking about this, right? How would a person come to me and talk about sports in a way that's interesting? Joe: How do I go to a person and talk about something spiritual when they just simply don't care? Kyle: Yeah, so in that scenario what I would say is you are interested in sports, you just don't know it yet. Joe: Oh, good one, I love this, please tell me more. Kyle: How do I get you to recognize that you actually are interested in sports? Well, I would begin by finding what are you interested in period, right? When I say that the classical methods that we've developed from apologetics, we've presupposed something that perhaps we don't have any more. What I'm not saying is well we'll just nuke apologetics altogether, right? Kyle: We're just going to start over again, that's absolutely foolish throwing the baby out and the bathwater, right? Joe: You've got nothing. Kyle: No, there are people in the history of Christianity thinking theologically, philosophically and approaching their cultures, that I think anticipated this type of thing. I think we look to, in their technical terms, individuals that have explored presuppositional or existential approaches to apologetics. Things like the moral argument can be very helpful here. Kyle: What we do is we start from the bottom up, rather than the top down, right? The to down approach is you believe in God, I believe in God, but you believe in God in a way that does not align with reality, so let me explain to you how. Let me argue that, let's go through your objections, and then boom, we get to the gospel. Joe: Which even works for an atheist, because you would say, "You believe in the value of this concept God, you just believe that it's false." Kyle: That's correct, yeah. Joe: Right. Kyle: Then you deal with objections and then get to a gospel presentation. With the apatheists though, I think you have to flip the script a bit, you have to start with the bottom up. We start with the individual, and I've found that most people are interested in themselves. Joe: Yeah, sure. Kyle: Via fallen nature that we are our favorite thing to think about. When I'm having conversations with apatheists, the place I start with is not God. He is the goal of course, but the place I start with is them. I ask them, "What do you find interesting? What drives you? What are your fears? What are your hopes? What are your desires? What do you think is virtuous? What do you think is unvirtuous? What do you think is good character? What do you think is a character flaw?" Kyle: Naturally most of those conversations go towards political things. What I try to do is I try to steer the conversation towards issues of morality. Then employ what Francis Schaeffer identified as pressure points and worldviews. Things that are held inconsistently or ideologically, and really push on them and ask, "Why? Why is that?" Kyle: Very quickly, for example, using the moral argument for why murder is wrong. You would ask a person like, "Why do you think murder is wrong?" The person would say, "Well, it's not good to kill somebody, because you're taking away that person from their family." "Well I agree with that, but what if a person, another person believes that taking away that person from their family is good, is a good thing, and they have one reason or another? Well who's to say that you shouldn't murder that person?" Kyle: Well the conversation then goes to there's governments let's say, right? You shouldn't murder, murder is illegal, so I guess that's why I think murder is wrong. Well what if there is a government that decides murdering is good, right? Joe: We've had that before. Kyle: We've had those before in history, right? Then what do we do, right? You argue this until you're in this theoretical land of a one universal government that determines whether or not murder is wrong. Then well you can imagine that universal government decides at one point no, genocide is good, so now what do we do? Well I don't know, what do we do? Kyle: That's a pressure point in their worldview, they can't explain why they believe murder is objectively wrong. Joe: Yeah, I think this is interesting, because a lot of the stuff we learned in apologetics, we've essentially shuffled the deck on. We're still using all those cards, we're using all those approaches. We're using all those ideas and concepts. We're using the reductio ad absurdum, the logic, like take this to its logical end and where does this take us based on what you said you, etc. Joe: We're doing it in a way, like you said, which I think is so critical, we're doing it in a way that starts with something they care about. Kyle: Right, that's exactly right, yeah, and notice the entire time I was having, we were having this very speedy, truncated vision of that conversation, I didn't bring up God once. Joe: Right. Kyle: I didn't need too, that wasn't the point in the conversation at the beginning stage. Then the question becomes well, why can you say murder is objectively wrong? I don't know. That moment, the, I don't know is called doubt, right? Doubt, when used sometimes, is quite advantageous. You've caused them now to think critically about their worldview. Kyle: Soren Kierkegaard has a great line about doubt, using it in this kind of a way. He says, "That doubt is a higher form than any objective thinking, because it presupposes the latter, but it has something more, a third, which is interest." Joe: Yes, because doubt is not simply, I don't know, like agnosticism in the little a, agnosticism. It's not just simply a vacuum, it's an out of balance vacuum. I feel uncomfortable, because something needs to be back in line. Kyle: That's right, so this is Kierkegaard's point. Doubt's a good thing in these kinds of situations, because if you're apathetic about your faith, if you're apathetic about a position, no amount of questioning or propositions is going to zap you out of that apathy until you're interested. Obviously you can't be apathetic toward something and interested toward something simultaneously, it's impossible, it defies both terms. Kyle: How do you get somebody from apathy to interest? Kierkegaard says, get them to doubt something about the thing that they're apathetic about, or that is related to the thing they're apathetic about. Then you have interest, and interest is important, because it zaps the apathy of its power, right? That one thing that they were completely disinterested in and indifferent towards just a moment ago, now becomes something that they have to seek out. Joe: Yes, doubt becomes like the fulcrum gets them back into the interest area. Kyle: That's right, that's right. Joe: That's very interesting. Kyle: At this point, in these moments of doubt, they start to think objectively. Now for the first time maybe in a long time they're interested. This is when you make a gospel presentation. This is when we can re-approach apologetics in the way that perhaps we're more familiar with, right? We've not assumed the presupposition that these men of Athens are very religious in every way. Kyle: We've gotten them interested and then now we can move forward. Joe: Really, unless a person is clinically depressed or something like this, unless a person is really just disconnected and not motivated to live, they are interested in something, in things. They have ambitions, they have motivations, and I feel like what you're saying is we just need to do the work of finding those. They are not being upfront in that kind of way in the way that an atheist is. Joe: An atheist says, "I'm very upfront about what I disbelieve." Somebody who is apathetic in this way says, "I'm not really gonna tell you in that way," right? Kyle: That's right. Joe: This conversation is boring to me, but it's not boring. It's just the framework of it's boring, and what you're saying is you come in with this back door, you find the doubt, find what they're interested in, expose the doubt, and then the new interest emerges, the relevance to the real conversation. Kyle: That's right, if you've struck a vein that truly causes them to doubt, interest inevitably comes. Nobody's ever doubted something and then not felt some kind of interest towards why they doubted that thing, right? It's a very, very powerful tool to use, it just needs to be used wisely and appropriately. Joe: Sure. Kyle: Perhaps even in moderation, you don't want to just throw somebody into an existential tail spin. Joe: Yeah, this is for your own good. Kyle: That's right. Yeah, I think it's a challenge, right? Joe: Yeah. Kyle: It's a challenge. Joe: It's a challenge, but it's also a way forward. I think you come across someone who is in apatheist, someone who's really just apathetic about spiritual things, you're like well I don't know what to do. I think a lot of people feel that, and having this approach first step I think is very helpful, it's very helpful for me. Kyle: Well that's good, that's good, yeah. Yeah, I would say I've had this kind of conversation quite a few times now, and one of the things that I've had told to me is that just seems like a lot. I can't even remember this conversation that we had, how am I supposed to draw up this framework the second I identify an apatheist? One, I think these types of things come with experience and practice. Kyle: Evangelism, of course, is a gifting that the Holy Spirit gives us, and it's one in which he guides us, and one that we become better with through experience. The challenge I would say is well don't worry about being able to draw on this and other things that you've thought about before, go do it in and see if the spirit is not good and willing and able to guide you through these things. Kyle: Then second, in these moments we're called to be stewards. If we're stewards of the message that we're given and we rely in faith that even in our stumblings we're trying to analyze somebody's worldview, find pressure points, push on them, get them to doubt, get them to interest, that first of all this is precious to the father. This is an act of worship and it's pleasing to him. Kyle: Second, he's good to use it, so you may not zap them out of their apathy the first time, the third time, the fifth time, the 10th time. That's okay, like you may be chapters one through three in a story that's 50 chapters long. Joe: Yeah. Kyle: Yeah, it's a challenging thing, but I still think that not only are we called to through the great commission to engage all peoples, which include the apatheists, even if they're more challenging than others, it's something that the spirit indwells you to do, right? He's there with you in these moments. Joe: I think the encouraging thing to me is having the right tools, knowing what to do, at least in some sense is a good thing, but ultimately, it's not my job to save anybody. Kyle: That's right. Joe: Right? It's just my job to say why I care. Kyle: Yeah, that's right. Joe: To me that's encouraging. This has been really great Kyle, I want to ask you one last question, how are you answering God's call? What does that mean and look like and so forth in your life? Kyle: Yeah, I mean personal day-to-day, the way I'm answering God's call is through finding the ways in which he's sanctifying me, and digging in and pushing into those. It may sound very basic, but I think it's very true. This comes through repentance and through prayer and through reading Scripture and acting on the things that God has told me to do and not just filing them away in a journal. Kyle: Very recently, just being candid, the Lord has pressed on, or just pushed on my heart in prayer that he would like to see me be more aware of what repentance means and to be bolder. Answering God's call for me in this season of life is being keenly aware of what is repentance, how often do we do it? Should I be doing it more often? What does it mean to be bold, to be bold for the gospel? Kyle: It means being a good husband, it means being a good teacher. It means being a good preacher when I'm given those opportunities. I think for me, the short answer of how I'm answering God's call is he's given me talents like from the parable, talents to steward and to multiply. Every day I ask how can I multiply the talents that you have given me? Kyle: Not just to receive an answer, but to act on that answer as well. Joe: It's a great question, how can I multiply the talents that you've given me. This has been quite a joy as always. Thanks for coming to the podcast Kyle. Kyle: Yeah, Joe, thank you for having me, it was a pleasure.

Here at Quiet Light we often like to hire people who are just a bit smarter than us. Amanda Raab is one of those people. She has been helping our clients through her own expert entrepreneurial experience since 2012. Having started the famous Pure Pearls online retail company at just 25 years old, Amanda has gone on to buy and sell multiple businesses. She's with us today talking about the benefits of building a business without working herself to death. Amanda shares tips on how she's acquired multiple businesses, outsourced their growth, and sold them successfully. The buy versus build topic truly never gets old and every time we talk to a guest about it there is something new to be learned. Amanda makes a good case for both. Episode Highlights: Amanda takes us back to how she got started in the online world. Her pearl company story and the press surrounding her success. What it took for Amanda to realize she could hire people to run her businesses. The absentee owner business model that she's been able to replicate several times over. Reasons to hire someone who is good at every component of your business. What Amanda looks for when she's hiring and what building a solid team requires. How much she manages her creatives and monitors their input. Where Amanda lands on the buy vs build spectrum and why. The first areas Amanda outsources when starting a business? The last thing she would outsource. Amanda's number one piece of advice for buyers looking to invest in an internet business. Transcription: Joe: So one of the things that you and I have talked about over the last few years is that we keep hiring people that are smarter than us, maybe smarter than both of us combined which may not be saying much. Mark: Yeah you set the bar pretty high there Joe. Joe: For you anyway but Amanda is talking about a number of different things in this podcast coming up. Amanda and I started at the same time back in 2012 and I'm really looking forward to listening to it because honestly, I don't know that much about her history. But every time a new broker connects with her, talks with her, they get kind of blown away with her experience. Walker, as we all know, wrote a bestselling book and we like to make fun of him and prod him on and we're proud of him for it as well called Buy than Build and in this episode, Amanda's doing the opposite. She's talking about the benefits of building a business, outsourcing some of the things that people don't like to do themselves, and then actually selling them off. Kind of the opposite of what Walker talked about. Mark: I mean you're right she's kind of a more private person and I think I was working with her for three or four years before I realized that she was … or I even learned that she was featured in Time Magazine when she was in her young twenty's for some of the entrepreneurial work that she was doing. And she actually had a documentary filmed on her about sourcing pearls from China of all things. Joe: Oh. Mark: Yeah I know right? Joe: I didn't even know that. Mark: Yeah to think we've been working with her for seven years and you didn't know that there was a full documentary on this person that we've been working with. And also that she was invited and actually spoke at a conference. Did you know this Joe? She actually spoke at a conference in the past. Joe: She did? Mark: I know right. Joe: I have absolutely no idea. We're underutilizing her talents. There's no question about it. Mark: That's what I'm saying. And she is actually crazy smart, one of the most talented entrepreneurs that I know and have known. So in this conversation we ended up just talking a lot about her background because I wanted to find out just in this conversation what wisdom would come out and what revelation would come out of this and getting in a couple of things right away, finding out how did she start multiple businesses, grow them but not work herself to death because she's always building a new house or a new rental property. She's always got some other project with a business on the side. And then she's been working with us for as long as she has. So her time management skills are great. So we talked about this idea of how do you outsource your business people. And I know we've covered this before on past podcasts but I don't know if this topic really gets old because people are doing this in different ways and every time I talk to somebody about this I learn something new about how they're doing it. And so I asked her what is the first thing that you outsource when you start a business? And I'm not going to share the answer now because it actually surprised me a little bit as to what the first thing was and what the last thing was that she does. And then we talked about this idea of is it better to actually build a business or is it better to acquire a business and when should you look at both options? And I thought it was a pretty good conversation, a very honest conversation as well that hey there's room to actually start a business in this entrepreneurial world of ours where people might think we only want to talk about buying a business. She made a pretty good case for when it makes sense to actually start something from scratch. So a fun conversation honestly and really just lots of interesting tidbits of information throughout the entire podcast. Joe: Well I think it goes to the depth and breadth of the quality of people that you've hired at Quiet Light over the years so I'm looking forward to listening to it. Let's go on and so people can stop hearing us chatter. Mark: Well I'm going to say one more thing. Joe, did you know that she decided to start an affiliate business and within four months became the number one super affiliate for that product? Joe: You know I had no idea because the only one who I thought was ever a super affiliate was Jason because he wrote the Bathrobe Millionaire. Mark: He's our other author. Joe: He's our other author, our super affiliate. Wow, no I didn't know that. She's never said a word. I wasn't— Mark: Exactly, I love it. So anyway let's get to know Amanda a little bit and hear some of her past and some of the things that she has to say about online business. Joe: Let's go to it. Mark: All right Amanda thank you so much for finally agreeing to come in the podcast. I've been trying to get you on the podcast for a while but I know you've been building houses, building rental properties, doing business … starting businesses, and of course helping Quiet Light Brokerage clients as well. Amanda: Yes, I've been busy that's for sure. Mark: That's for sure. Amanda: So now I have some down time and I decided to take on the challenge of doing one of these podcasts. Mark: Yeah well, of course, doing the podcast is always a little bit interesting but I think again we're just going to have a conversation here about your background and everything else. So I tell … I don't want to embarrass you right off the bat here but when I talk about the Quiet Light Brokerage team to people I often say well Joe is a client, Jason is the one that kind of forced his way in the door of Quiet Light and I tried to scare him away by giving him all these awful leads and the next thing I know Jason is breaking every record in the book. Joe came on and has been doing the same. But when I talk about you I said … I always say one of the smartest buyers I've ever worked with. And that's how you and I initially met; you were looking at one of my transactions … a deal I had. Do you remember that deal? Amanda: Yes I do. Mark: Yeah. Okay so … and a real lot of competition for that deal but of all the buyers you're able to kind of hone in on some of the key metrics right away. [inaudible 00:06:06.8] was super impressed. I deal with a lot of buyers so super, super impressive. So let's do this. Let's go back a little bit to how you got started in the online world because you actually started with a website called PurePearls.com. You were featured in Time magazine at a super young age. And then you filmed a pearl documentary in China as well right? Amanda: Yes it's kind of crazy to think about it because that part of my life was much of a whirlwind. But I was actually in grad school when I started my pearl company and thought it would make a great hobby. Something as a creative outlet outside of the day to day just what I was doing already in grad school. And so it kind of just snowballed and I just loved it. I was super passionate about learning the business not just the pearl business but just e-commerce, internet marketing, what it would take to get in front of customers. And that opened up so many other opportunities from public relations to search engine optimization. At the time those were big channels for marketing and it just kind of went from there. At the time I was focused on the pearl company I realized there's much broader market and I started getting interested in other opportunities as well. I was invited to a conference in DC to do a speaking engagement for Yanik Silver's Mastermind Group. And as much as I do not like public speaking I decided to face my fears and do it. And I met so many awesome people there. And I just kind of basically looked at what everybody was doing and thought wow there's just so many things that we can be doing with this internet space. And that was kind of a long time ago so I'm thinking that was probably around 15 years ago. So at that point, I just started another company and built that company, sold the pearl company because it was exploding at the time and I just … I couldn't manage it all. So I kind of started small with my new company in the printing industry. So its check printing and I started five new websites. So I just kept building, building, building and developed relationship with manufacturers and started printing basically our own custom products. I scaled that up and realized that I could develop a team to make sure that was a lifestyle company and I didn't have to be in the business. And that's kind of where I got the idea of starting my self-company. Businesses that I did have to work in that I could work on building teams to run them and basically allowing me to do a lot of different things. And so I didn't have to focus on just one niche. Mark: I've just run being been in the business. I've met a guy over the weekend. I was at a conference in Los Angeles … not it the Internet marketing world it was just kind of a more generic business conference. And he used to be a professional fighter and then we were talking about his business career. He said well I have 13 companies so I founded 12 and acquired one. I'm like oh my goodness and he said well I don't really do that much I've put teams in place. And we've talked about this on the podcast as well. We had Shakil Prasla on twice talking about this and how he hires CEO's and puts people in place. And this seems to be kind of this recurring theme with a lot of what we're doing here talking about that. At what point did you learn to put people in place with your companies? What did it take for you to be like you know what I'm going to hire people? Was it … well did you have kind of like a moment where it kind of struck you or was it more organic over time that you realized this is a good way to go? Amanda: I'd say both; a combination. With my pearl company, I realized I needed to put systems in place because I wanted to do a lot of different things. And so I went to an event and I heard somebody speaking about outsourcing things that you don't like to do. And I was like wow that's really smart because when you run a business there are going to be things you don't like to do. There are those dreaded tasks that you put off and put off and put off right? But you need to do them to run a functional business. And so at that point, I started outsourcing things for the pearl company. When I first started obviously I was wearing all the hats in the company but then I started hiring a customer service person. I was lucky enough to have somebody to handle all of the manufacturing and the shipping for me, the packaging so I don't have to actually even touch the product. And from there I hired a marketing team, content writing and things like that. So basically all I did was make sure that the marketing was on point, develop new ideas for marketing channels, and keeping the books in line. And then when I brought on my new company Check Printing, a financial printing company, I kind of used the same system and developed it for that business and it worked really well. I started that from the very beginning and so it was very much an absentee owner business outside of me looking at new marketing channels and keeping the books and whatnot. And so I was able to replicate that with each of my other businesses as well. I think it comes out of a necessity because when you want to do a lot of things you realize you have to create these systems right? But also I don't think you can be really good at everything and I'm not. And so you hire people that are really good at each individual component. So somebody who's customer service is likely not to be the greatest at book keeping, right? And somebody who's great at Search Engine Optimization may not be that great at Facebook Marketing. So I think it's really important to hire somebody that is really in tune with each different component of the business. It just makes more sense. Mark: Okay so we're going completely off script here because we're going to talk about the buying versus building and kind of building off of Walker's episode that we filmed. You know Walker who is a … we always have to say now best-selling author Walker Diebel because he's done such a great job with his book Buy than Build. People are like … we're at CapCon this past weekend and we gave away his book and when people realize he was there like oh the author is here, oh that's super cool and like he's kind of a big deal. So we'll get to this I do want to talk about building versus buying and making sort of the argument of why would you want to build a business someday. But I want to go back something you're talking about here, hiring out different pieces. Okay, it sounds so easy to do to say hire a marketer and hire somebody who's really good at what they're doing. Okay, great. Look I've hired people before, I've fired people before, these are all … it's usually in the agency sort of roles. When you're looking for somebody to hire specifically for marketing let's delve into that, how do you A. qualify them or what do you look for? Are you looking for an agency? Are you looking for an individual that works for you directly? Or does it really matter to you? And then also how do you … you said keep the marketing message on point? How? What are you doing to keep that marketing message on point and to check that? Amanda: That's a great question. I was actually reading something last night that said there's no such thing as a getting rich quick scheme. They often take a lot of work to get there. Even though it sounds simple it's actually really difficult. And it kind of goes with the same thing that success is like an iceberg, you only see the top part but there's a huge component at the bottom to making that work. And so there's a lot of trial and error with that to find the right person. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of hiring and letting go and finding somebody else because you learn what you don't want, you learn what you actually need. And sometimes that can be an agency if they have all those components built in. So if they have everybody you're looking for and they're doing exactly what they say they're going to do and holding themselves accountable then great since that makes sense. And to me, that's ideal because there's less hand-holding and less training involved. A lot of times though, it does involve finding one contractor to do something very specific. And it does require constant monitoring to make sure that they're staying on task and basically meeting those milestones that you've put in place for them. So I think that building that team does come with trial and error. It does come with some unfortunate firing of team members because they're not performing. But at the end of the day finding those quality team members are what kind of drive your business. So it's really important to stay on top of it. Mark: Yeah and I think it's important as well when talking about letting people go. Like this is the unfortunate part of being an entrepreneur, sometimes you have to let people go. But I do think it's important to look at the options available to you as well. Maybe like you said somebody is really better suited for customer service and you can really apply that. I often think about like sports teams and what do they do right? Sports teams are often handicapped by who they actually have on their teams and so a lot of times they play to the strengths of the team members that they currently have. And so this is something that for those of you that are currently like me that kind of cringe at the idea of letting people go this is something that you can do; it's invest in the people that you do have to find out where they do thrive. That doesn't mean that you should just need and see hold on to somebody. Everybody is an adult and should understand that obviously, it has to be a good fit. But you can definitely invest in people as well. How involved do you get with that marketing message when you are taking a look? Let's say that you hire somebody to do some Facebook Marketing for you and they're going to set up the creatives and everything else. How closely are you monitoring their ad work and how much are you kind of saying okay I'm going to let you run and possibly fall and this is your gig … I guess my question is how do you avoid micromanaging versus letting them run wild with a completely wrong message? Amanda: Well that's a good question because I think that first of all I am a natural manager and anybody in my family will tell you that … so especially when it has to do with your marketing dollars and getting a return on investment. However, there are things that I just don't know how to do really well and … for example Facebook Marketing or an email, like Amazon PPC or something of that nature. And a lot of times you will be told that they need a ramp up period so they can kind of test campaign. See what's working and then dial in on a more targeted marketing after they do broader match term. And so they do require a period of time to really get those conversions up or an Amazon to take the a-cost down and so with that I really only check in every three months to see if they are meeting our goal. And if they're not then you have to decide okay am I going to give them another three months period or do I need to move on? And so … I mean it really depends on what it is, what channel. Obviously, with SEO, there is a really long period of time that you kind of have to wait to see if its working and that can be really hard for people who are not patient enough. Because with Google with all of the algorithms that have come through in the last couple of years it can take a lot longer than it did previously before that in the old school days to get results. So it just really depends whether it'd be Instagram, Facebook, where I think you can see a lot quicker results versus Amazon or Google PPC and SEO. It's just a completely different ballgame. Mark: Are you an old enough internet marketer … and I don't want to call you old but are you old school enough to remember the Google Dance? Amanda: Yes. Am I showing my age now? Absolutely. Mark: I'm so glad that we got that recorded that I'm here calling you old publicly to everybody. No, I just … you know I often … I love talking to entrepreneurs. I have been doing this for a while because we remember the Google Dance. Every 30 days or 45 days and then the forms will light up like all right the Google Dance is happening and you'd want to see where you … everything is shook out and did you gain, did you lose? How— Amanda: Worse than the stock market. I tell you … unbelievable, yes. I don't miss that. There's a lot more opportunities for diversification now it seems so— Mark: Yeah. I think Google has done a good job of … because if you got edged out by like a spammy site or somebody that was just been [inaudible 00:19:19.4] the search results you're done. Amanda: Right. Mark: You had to wait 30 days minimum to be able to correct it and it was just torture but exciting at the same time. All right let's get to the topic that we were going to talk about. I want to talk a little bit about building versus buying. And I know I brought this up with Chuck at CapCon and he's like why would you guys talk about this? You're going to shoot yourself in the foot because we obviously make our money when people buy businesses from us. But there's an argument to be made as well especially for creatives for building something. So let's start right there and just ask you've done both, you've bought businesses and you've built businesses. Amanda: Mm-hmm. Mark: Where do you fall kind of on that spectrum and why? Amanda: Well I'm more on the builder side. I'm just a natural builder, a natural creator. I love the challenge of it. I love actually creating something from nothing. That is very much who I am. And you can't buy something without having somebody to build it right? So there is the other side of that coin and so somebody has to build a business, hopefully, a great business for a buyer to want to invest in. And so I love talking about building businesses because that's really where I'm passionate. I'm also very analytical as you know with data and statistics and marketing. And so I just … I think that when you're looking at buying a business versus building I think there's great opportunity for both right? If you're … if you have a portfolio of businesses for example like Shakil does and obviously he's willing to buy businesses because he doesn't want to invest the time to just necessarily or take the time to grow because they have a team ready to jump into something and run with it. Whereas I like to take some time to build it and see kind of where it's going to go and then run with it that way more organically. And that's kind of where my passion lies. And I like to kind of have that control of what I'm … the product how it's being made, packaged, the overall message around it. And that goes with pretty much everything whether I'm building a home or a business kind of my thoughts on it. Mark: Yeah and I met him. You've built multiple properties physical like … since you've been with Quiet Light one rental property, two homes at least that I know of. Amanda: Yes, three. Mark: Three? Wow. Amanda: Uh-huh. Mark: Holy cow. And I know you're really involved in the design process as well. When we met down in Austin you've had floor samples and everything like that in the car because you were going through all this. You do like to get in to that. Do you think it makes more sense? Let's just talk purely investment strategy here from just an investment standpoint. So I'm looking to place money into something and really kind of grow from a financial standpoint, do you think that there's a benefit in buying versus building in that scenario? Amanda: Today it is harder. It's more competitive to build. There's no doubt about it. It's much harder than when I started out. When I built my pearl company it was in 2003. We launched in 2004. Obviously, that was a total different time, kind of similar with my check manufacturing company. And then with Amazon, I still think that there's easy room for building obviously and even with Facebook Marketing you can see some pretty quick growth there. But there is something to be said for businesses that have really paved the way and are established and the foundation is there. And so I think it just depends on how you want to invest and so if you want to invest in something that's established and that has a history, a foundation that's already been done, they've already built a team for you and you're just walking right into it. That makes for a very sound and smart decision versus taking a risk and just seeing where it takes you in building a business. Because I mean I've experienced this, I've built a lot of businesses that haven't been successful either because I either burnt out or the marketing just didn't pan out. But I've learned from those and so I think one of my greatest successes is built off of just learning from the failure and then building off of that platform. So I think there's something to be said for both. From an investment standpoint though I'd say if you're looking to invest in something investing in a business that's established makes more sense. So I guess it's just different. I am a creator and a builder but at the same time, I do like to invest in sound vehicles so I've done both. Mark: I've asked this question to a few people before. If you were to guess how many domains you own right now how many would it be? Amanda: Oh gosh I don't know. And I'd hate to look because I'm sure I'm spending a lot of money just wasting away. Mark: Yeah. Amanda: Yes I actually purchased domains for my daughters as well because I don't know where this internet space is going and so I just want them to have the opportunity when the time is right. So yes I have a lot of wasted domain right now. Mark: Yeah I've logged in to my domain account and it's kind of like going down memory lane of bad business ideas or maybe— Amanda: Yes isn't it? Mark: They're not always bad but some of them are bad. Some of them are like oh my gosh what was … was my diet bad when I did that … decided to because this is— Amanda: The someday businesses; yes, what I might do someday. Mark: Exactly, there's a couple in there like you know what I actually still want to do that. It's just a matter of A. it doesn't pay anybody if I do it and B. the prime. Amanda: Right. Mark: But I think before that you were actually getting on to a point that I thought was really interesting and I found this with buyers. You've been with Quiet Light now seven years I think? Amanda: Yes, seven going on I think eight; crazy. Mark: I know right? So you've dealt with a lot of buyers over the years as well and I find that buyers tend to be … tinkers a lot right? The people that love to buy and do really well they're great at taking something existing, tinkering, modifying it, improving it. But a lot of buyers … and this is speaking generally; this is the rule for everybody. The creative process of starting up something from scratch and having to create and have that runway isn't really of interest to them. You know those are things that kind of bore them. And I know in Walker's book he talks about this. He starts out saying that he had start-up companies and they … it failed, including companies that received quite a bit of funding. And that process, that ramp up period was really painful. But once he started buying he really enjoyed that part of it. That was super exciting to him. So I think some of it does come to just personality. Amanda: Yes. Mark: What do you get excited about? You are a creator. You're a creative person. You love design. You love creating systems and you are data driven and data oriented. So that makes sense that you are going to really go towards that starting side to help exercise some of those creative muscles. So what are some of the first areas that when you're starting a business you like to outsource? Amanda: Obviously, the website design that would be the first step and it really depends on what the business is. But the first step would be product manufacturing, a website design, and how to start your first layer of marketing. And I would outsource all of that. And basically, I would just be managing that process to make it look and feel like I want it to so the business imparts the message that I want to integrate into the business. But that part is the hardest part I think of running a business. It does require a lot of thought, creativity, and management. At the same time for me, that's really what drives me when I'm creating something. That push and that challenge is what I look forward to everyday or stay up super late at night thinking about. And so I think it really is important to start outsourcing from the beginning. Because I'm obviously not a manufacturer, not a web designer, and I don't do the day to day marketing per se. I hire all of that out. Mark: Yeah and I've heard it a lot. Start at the beginning don't try and run a bootstrap with and then think that it's going to be easy. It's going to be easy just to hand that off because it's really hard as an entrepreneur to do that. What's the last thing that you would outsource? Amanda: Probably bookkeeping, to be honest, because … yeah, it pains me to say because I want everybody to have clean books right? But the last thing for me is bookkeeping because I know how to get a bank account and a credit card. That's easy; those are things that most people can do if we're generic. But running your books, you actually need to have a history of at least a couple of months and so it's pretty easy to integrate that into Quick Books or whatnot from your bank statement. So typically that's the last thing I would hire out because it seems to me that it doesn't take them very long to catch up. Mark: That's interesting. So I'm actually reversed on that. I like to outsource books first because I just don't enjoy it at all. Amanda: Right. Mark: And like you said outsource the stuff that you don't enjoy and keep things that you do so cool. Well, this has been interesting, it's been useful, it's not everything that we planned to talk about but I actually liked what we talked about and that there was something interesting. So I'm going to end with this, you've been advising buyers and sellers for a long time now and most of the people that listen to the podcast are looking to buy, there are some people selling. If you were to give one piece of advice for people buying an online business whether it'd be through Quiet Light Brokerage or through any other place; you find it online or another brokerage firm, what would be just kind of the one thing that you would advise people on? Amanda: I think the best thing that you can do is take some time to research just overall broad marketplace. Don't just look at a few packages. Really allow yourself several months at least to get a good feel of what's a good fit for you. There are so many different models of businesses, SaaS businesses, Amazon, to e-commerce and so forth and so one may seem more attractive to you. It may not necessarily need to be a certain niche but it may just be a certain type of model that is attractive. And I just want to add to that that the other thing that I recommend is don't basically pigeonhole yourself into a certain niche because you might find a business that doesn't have an attractive product but everything else could be right; the lifestyle component, the workload, the margin, the net profitability. And so I think that's really important to keep an open mind. Mark: Awesome. Well, hey, thanks, Amanda for coming on the podcast. I really do appreciate you coming on and I'm sure everybody else will as well. Everybody knows where to reach you, amanda@quietlightbrokerage. If you have questions about buying, about starting, about … you know or just have really general questions about this I will stand by the fact that your entrepreneurial background speaks for itself. And I think the success that you've had repeatedly speaks for itself. So we appreciate you sharing some of the wisdom you've gained over the years of doing this entrepreneurial thing that we do and everything else. Amanda: Yeah. Mark: So hopefully we can have you on again sometime in the future but we'll wait a year or so before we do. Amanda: Yes please do. Mark: All right. Amanda: Well thank you, Mark. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Links and Resources: Contact Amanda About Amanda  

Brad Wayland may be the only QLB broker that was asked to join our team. Others amy dispute that, but they were not interviewed today, so they don't have a voice! Brad has been with Quiet Light Brokerage for less than a year now, and has already established himself as an honest, hardworking and driven entrepreneur and broker. Prior to joining Quiet Light, Brad spent his time focused on SEO for a custom t-shirt firm (Blue Cotton) where he is a partner. From there Brad built a portfolio of content & affiliate sites and eventually sold them to a private equity firm in 2015. In all, Brad completed 30 transactions between 2010 and 2016. Mostly as a buyer, with four sold. Brad learned quickly how to find the right opportunities and work out a deal that made sense for both the seller and himself. And he gained a reputation as the person to sell to, where sellers reached out to him to sell their business. Episode Highlights: [3:22] Who is Brad Wayland? [8:10] Why is the custom t-shirt business the most difficult ecommerce niche? [8:40] Buying and building a portfolio of content sites. [11:15] Wall street style negotiations, or nice guy everyone is happy? [11:45] Name dropping. Yep, Brad met Warren Buffett. [13:50] How to implement economies of scale. [14:45] Outsourcing and keeping things simple, streamlined and with little effort. [16:10] How Brad set up the corporate structure(s). [17:00] How to work with investors and set up a win/win. [19:40] Why having investors can turn pretty uncomfortable, quickly. [20:30] Brad's recommendation on deal structure for investors. [23:10] What interest rate do you pay investors? [23:30] How the multiple of SDE changes with larger net numbers. [27:15] Brad's view of PE monies and what's happening in the industry [28:40] Google “freshness” is critical to long term content portfolio success. [29:50] Content multiples are strong, the nich is hot and buyers are in abundance. [30:30] QLB closes a content site for just under $9,000,000 [32:30] Bryan @ QLB has a supplement business under LOI for $18,000,000. [33:55] The worst conversations we have as brokers are… [35:35] Near death accident: Wayland Falls – the newly named mountain in North Carolina. Transcription: Joe: So Mark the more we bring on brokers here at Quiet Light the less I feel like I've achieved anything in my life. I think you and I are just a couple of slackers compared to the people that have joined the company. Mark: You know I feel the exact same way. We were at the capitalism.com just a few weeks ago and I was standing next to Walker, you know the last picture he sent me was of him in the lineup with Bill Nye the Science Guy right next to him. And he's casually mentioning over a dinner about the different documentaries he's been a part of and all that right? But it goes for every single person on the team. Amanda, when we were talking to her there and I was just consistently feeling like boy I need to get my butt in gear. Joe: Yeah I don't try to have in-depth conversations with Amanda about business because I just feel stupid. Mark: Right, I mean she just starts going off and you're like oh okay I … everything I thought I knew yeah it could pale as in comparison. Brad though is one of those guys and I remember the first time we did a companywide call; we do this once in a while with Quiet Light Brokerage because we're all over the world. All over the country but all over the world and so I don't know maybe once a quarter we have a companywide Zoom conference call where we can see everybody and there was Brad on top … in his office overlooking his factory floor. And I think everyone was just kind of like oh this guy has actually done and accomplished some real things. Joe: Yeah Jason was calling from his kitchen. Amanda was calling from a car. Chuck was from home. I was from home. You, of course, have to get out of your house because you have got a basketball team and a half in your house … well, maybe not that much I exaggerated. I love to exaggerate about the number of kids you have by the way. Mark: Hey it changed since the last time by the way. We've had like four more kids. It's attractive to … you know and it's hard to- Joe: Completely different podcast right there. Mark: But Brad was somewhere in the world. We have no idea. I think he was in Cuba or Costa Rica or something. Joe: Oh right he's always somewhere else, some other exotic location. But yeah Brad is an impressive guy. A very low key but man he's sharp. He talks about his history, talks about what he did at the Blue Cotton T-shirt company. It takes 22 hands to make one t-shirt. It gets touched 22 two times but he stepped in, focused on SEO, and that company blew up after a couple years of him being there. But that's not really what the podcast is about. It's about him and his experience but I'd really focused in on his content portfolio. At one point while running … or while being a partner at blue cotton he built a small little multimillion dollar content portfolio on the side and eventually sold it. And he outsourced everything. He had a reasonably low workload and he used initially other people's money. You have to listen to find out whose money he used. It's kind of interesting and fun but he did very well. And he talks about that approach and I think it's something that any listener can get something out of it in terms of whether they're building their own portfolio of physical products companies, drop ship companies, SaaS companies, or content companies. And of course get to know Brad along the way as well which is kind of the purpose of the podcast. But I think there's so much more to it than just getting to know Brad Wayland. Mark: Yeah I think one of the things I love about this company is it seems like everybody that we bring on just seems to up the ante as far as their qualifications. I mean two or three years from now we're going to have Elon Musk asking us for a job. Joe: Okay, got to be very sad for all the investors of Tesla, sorry folks. Mark: I don't know maybe they'll kick him up and who knows. All right enough of me talking, enough of you talking, let's listen to Brad. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe at Quiet Light Brokerage and today we have one of our very own on the podcast with us. Now don't get bored he actually has a life time of entrepreneurial experience. He's bought and sold many businesses. He's kind of a big deal. I think he bought and sold more than I have for sure; probably more than most of us. His name is Brad, most of you folks listening know who he is. Brad Wayland welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Brad: Hey Joe thanks for having me on. Joe: How are you doing? Brad: I'm doing well. Joe: Are you ready to tell all of these people everything about you? Brad: I'm ready to tell them but I would contest your point that I'm kind of a big deal. In fact, I was on another podcast with Chris Guthrie that you had on the Quiet Light Podcast a couple of months ago and several years ago. He did an intro and he said most of you probably don't know Brad Wayland. He's what I call a silent baller. Am I right? All right well- Joe: He subscribes to HBO there. Brad: Yeah I would call myself pretty well unknown. But I have had a lot of experience and I hope that I can share some things today that will help our listeners. Joe: Well you are humble. There is that and you're part of the Quiet Light team because of that vast amount of experience that you do have. And you're one of the few … actually, maybe the only one where Mark actually said “hey maybe you should do this” versus the rest of us which reached out to Mark and said “hey can we do this?” that's right isn't it, Mark asked you to join the team? Brad: Well there's different versions of that story but I specifically remember that I asked Mark. I knew Chuck from the buying and selling world so I kind of made a joke at Mark about [inaudible 00:06:41.6] Chuck on I guess if things don't go well on the buying and selling world you might end up doing some brokering. And he was like I think you might be interested in doing some brokering with Quiet Light and that's where the conversation kind of started. And then over about a six month period he kind of showed me the Quiet Light way and I started getting more and more interested. And I really enjoyed my time at Quiet Light so far, it's good for people. And really every day when we get on the phone calls with buyers and sellers I'm just blown away by how impressed they are with the team we have at Quiet Light. Just the knowledge is there, its entrepreneurs. I tell everybody every day, its entrepreneur led. These are people that have bought, sold, built, operated in through hard times so I really do enjoy it. And I think brokers sometimes have like a little bit of a stigma attached to them. And I think that we are kind of definitely leading the way in kind of changing that. Because I find that people really look at Quiet Light as a breath of fresh air. Joe: Yeah I would have to agree. I was just at Brand Builder Summit down at Austin and really for the first time in a long time, I mean I started in 2012 the broker stigma had an icky feel to it. You and I have been self-employed for years … decades probably and people are starting to reach out to brokers for the experience and expertise that we do have. So it's good but let's talk about your experience and expertise. Who the heck are you? Tell us about your entrepreneurial history and when you started? Kind of how many things you bought so on and so forth. Brad: I started having some interest in the internet world around 2003 and I had graduated from college with a finance degree and was working as an accountant for a publicly traded company. And I really hated the work and actually thought you know what I'm going to get fired from this job before I can find another job because I felt like I was doing such a poor job. I just wasn't really built for the check in to your cubicle at 8 AM and checks out at 5 PM. I needed something a little more challenging for me and maybe a little less structured. And so I was thinking I would go into financial planning because I had a degree in it and had an offer. And a couple of friends of mine said “Hey would you like to come on and work on some business development for us in our t-shirt company?” And they had just crossed a million in sales and they have launched a website and it's called Blue Cotton. And so I came on and quickly I became enamored with search engine optimization and spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. And honestly I fumbled it around like four years and even to the point where I think they thought does this guy have any idea what he's doing at all? But around 2005, I started realizing what we needed to do and that was rebuild the site. It had not been built where it could really ever rank the way that certain things were structured and basically the site was just a giant image. So we rebuilt it. It took two years to rebuild it and when we launched it we were on the front page of Gizmodo within 24 hours from just people finding it. And back then there was- Joe: Gizmodo, what the heck is Gizmodo? Brad: It's a popular tech blog. I'm sure you probably heard of it. Joe: Clearly I haven't, so thank you. Brad: Well it crashed the site. And so that first day we launched it [inaudible 00:10:02.2] spent two years working on this project, it's never going to do anything. And that morning we got a phone call from the developers, our phones are ringing off the hook and they said something's going on. There's tons of traffic on the site. Back then you didn't even have Google analytics. We were paying for index tools back then. And so they … Gizmodo crashed the site, we had something like five million people trying to get to the site and it couldn't happen. Joe: Wow. Brad: You know it was just some crazy situation and there was no social media. So a lot of the traffic back then went through these popular blogs. That's how people … they have their RSS readers on their desktop and they would go through and read their articles and stuff. So they did that and then we had built a design studio where people would create their t-shirts in Flash. And a month later Adobe awarded us the site of the day which didn't crash site but it gave us a page rank 9 of 10 link from Adobe's website. Joe: Wow. Brad: Adobe was the most … at the time Adobe was the most went to website in the world. And the combination of Gizmodo … well because of Acrobat and I mean think of all the click here is that you have for Flash, for PDF reader, for all those things. It had tons of links coming in. And so the combination of those two things propelled us and we went on a crazy tier of growth. It grew up 50% a year for nine years on average. Joe: Woah, we'll let the listeners do the math on that unless you're going to tell us. 50% percent a year for nine years and you wouldn't want to know. Brad: Well we went … we grew from … I mean we were small. We were like a million dollars in sales but that ride took us from like, it probably took us to about seven million. I still own my equity in that company. I didn't start that way. We kind of after the web kind of took over the two owners came to me and said hey 85% of our revenue is coming through this thing you've helped us work on so we need to come up with an arrangement here. So we ended up doing that in 2008 and today Blue Cotton is still a thriving business. It's got … we're, I would call us a medium sized business now. We'll be considered a low eight figure business in terms of revenue. We've got 125 employees, 110,000 square feet of production capabilities which one I'm using all of that now. We use about 55,000 [inaudible 00:12:27.3]. So I did that and just to kind of quickly summarize that when you're in the custom t-shirt world you are making money in the most difficult way possible. A custom t-shirt has to be touched by about 20 people before it goes out the door. And if you order one for your family reunion then it's got Joe Valley's Family Reunion 2018, it's time sensitive. You've got a specific idea and you don't want to be the guy that ordered them and your family says “Man, Joe these are awful. You did a terrible job designing them.” So there's a lot of anxiety in the purchase and so I became pretty interested in content. And around 2010 a friend of mine who was … is a pretty big name in the vector space, like image vectors, he was looking at a blog for sale and it was on Flippa. And he … it was it was a $50,000 purchase price and he said you know what it's only worth 25 grand to me in high five. Man, that thing has content and ads like that's the most amazing business model I've ever seen. You don't have to do anything. Joe: Especially compared to 22 hands per t-shirt. Brad: Right. So I ended up buying that site for $50,000. And that started a new trajectory for me. From 2010 I started getting heavily involved into content and affiliate and just bought and sold a lot of stuff from 2010 and 2015. 2015 I divested a lot of it up to private equity but the- Joe: Can you ballpark how many you bought and sold in that time period? Brad: Yeah so I did 30 transactions between 2010 and 2016 and most of it was buying. I had basically four sales everything else was purchase. I kind of quickly … the space was the web design space so the blog that I bought … economy was kind of in the tank in 2010 and so the blog that I bought I quickly made my money back on it. It's a $50,000 purchase and I made the money back in like 10 months. And I thought this is like too good to be true. So I started kind of keeping my eyes open for opportunities and found another one that was for sale and overpaid for it compared to what I had done. So I paid 72,000 for the second one and it was starting on that same trajectory but after those first two, economy was really not doing well and I started having people reach out to me. And so I had a guy reach out and say hey I hear you're the guy that buys web design sites, you've bought this one and this one would you want to buy mine while I was tapped down on cash. I had spent all my kind of extra money that I had to kind of do something like that with and so I told him you know what I'll give you about 80% of what you made in the last year but that's the best I can do and I can do it today. Joe: And they said? Brad: And he said I'll take it. Joe: So let's talk about that on … just for a moment because you've got experience, I mean you bought 30 businesses, 30 transactions over the last several years. Was your process New York Wall Street walls to the wall top negotiating or was it nice guy that really likes you and you built a relationship and you made it work both in the end? Brad: I'm probably me there. I'm a quick decision maker. When I was in … when I graduated from college I had the opportunity to meet Warren Buffet at a finance event that went on in my hometown here at Bowling Green. And Warren Buffet said that he plays bridge, and he drinks diet Coke, and he takes 13 phone calls a day, and he doesn't have a computer in his office and one of the questions was how do you evaluate companies? He had bought Fruit Of The Loom which is why he was in town and they said how do you evaluate it? And he said honestly I don't spend a lot of time on it. I go with my gut. I look at the few things that I think I have but I usually make a decision within a matter of hours about whether or not I want to buy something, the price, everything which is not the way M&A is done. Joe: Wow. Brad: I know. He's a great capitalist in terms of what he does and that's not me. So I'm not trying to embarrass Warren Buffet but there is one element that is like me and that is I don't waste time. I like to put deals together. I'm not very patient. And that kind of benefited me in the buying and selling world. So I did things very unconventional. Like my transactions, I would never use escrow. I would try to do it as fast as possible, meet them in person, come up with an arrangement of I'm going to wire half here and then you're going to transfer this. Or I'm going to wire it all you're going to transfer these things at the same time. I just did a lot of things that weren't kind of the norms because I'm just not very patient. I kind of wanted to get my hands on it that second. I didn't want to wait 60 days for things to pan out. Joe: So no long drawn out contract negotiations on asset purchase agreements or SBA deals anything like that? Brad: No. Joe: Pretty simple. Brad: And I would say that I focused less on making sure I got this exact price that I wanted at that exact multiple that I wanted. And I focused more on trying to find things that I knew I could immediately do something with. When I got into the design space I don't know anything about design. In Blue Cotton, we have nine designers that work there. I don't know anything about it. I don't know anything about web design really. I know I can tell you some names of like what post would be like but I know nothing. If you put me inside one of those Adobe programs I'm totally lost, I know nothing about it. But what I did learn pretty quickly is that there are some economies of scale to having things that are alike each other. And so when I had one blog and an advertiser would come through it was like what would happen if I had five of these blogs? Or what I could do is I could leverage the advertiser for five times the amount and have the same amount of contact. And so I did a lot of that and I did it on the affiliate side. You know I couldn't negotiate better affiliate deals for my company because I would say well here's all the traffic I have in total and they would look at me and be like oh well if you've got that much then we want to do this size e-mail send or we want to do this size add by and so I started to feel that … and a lot of the … so about 15 of my 26 purchases were in the design space. Joe: And did you have writers that were consistently focused on the design space, outsource VA's, or did you do it all yourself? Brad: Yeah so in the design space there's a lot of writers available. You go to some of the popular sites like Smashing Mag or some of these other big names. You'll see a new name every day. And so I again I kind of always try to structure things in a way where I didn't have to spend a whole lot of time on them. So you know one of the things that I did is I found writers that were okay at being paid once a month because I didn't want to be jumping into PayPal 15 times a month to pay writers. So I found writers that could go across several sites that wanted to do like a substantial amount of work. And so I'd have four or five of them and then at the end of the month, I would just one time pay everybody for all their posts. I found people that knew what I wanted instead of me having to review every single post I found people and I was like okay you did these three posts for me this is exactly what I want, go down that road. Some of them would send me like here's what I'm thinking about doing this month, some of them were just like I know what he wants and they would just do it. And I just always try to streamline things to a … the most hands off as possible. I did not want to hire people to support the network. I didn't want to … I wanted to keep it very like the opposite of the teacher business. I wanted it to be something that I could do a lot with a little time. Joe: Did you put all 30 of the properties or 26 when you sold four off, did you put them all in one LOC did you have them separate? How did that work out? Brad: Well I had to … we hadn't gotten into how I built the portfolio so I will tell you that I quickly ran out of my own cash and had to start looking for help. So I did end up having three different LOCs total and that was because of the way I had to go find capital for the deals. Joe: Okay. Brad: And then I kind of got tired of that and so I basically rolled all of those partners up and blown and got them out and took everything over 100%. And you know the thing is when you're … there's guys that it was their pockets that are out there raising money and I had a conversation with one of our … someone who's buying a property from us yesterday about it. When you're trying to raise money from people instead of going out and asking for everything you think they could possibly muster up one of the best ways to convince people that you give them good returns on their money is to do something good with some … with a small amount of money, something that you know is not a big deal to them. And I didn't really do that on purpose. It's just that my deal started out kind of small. I started around this $50,000 range and by the time I was done I wasn't interested in $50,000 transactions. I didn't do anything that was all that large but I did a couple of three hundreds. I did two $500,000 transactions. And the thing about those transactions is I put that money together in a few days and it wasn't coming out of my bank account. So I had people that believed in what I was doing and I could literally pick up a fund and say hey I've got this opportunity and they would say I'm in. Joe: For those that are listening that have portfolio folks that might do that but for those folks that are investing that haven't ever done it before are they getting equity or are they getting return on investment and how quickly do you start paying them back? Brad: Yes. So the way that I was kind of pitched it I didn't have anybody that I was connected to that was like used to investing in tech … so I'm talking about people that have some extra income or extra savings but they're not people that were like highly technical. So, my parents, you know the first people I went to were my parents and I said “Hey would you guys want to invest a little bit of your money into an idea?” And they said, “Sure, what's the terms?” Well, my terms were terrible for me in my opinion. I said well if you'll put up the money I'll give you 50%. That's where I started. Joe: Oh. Brad: And I talked to someone yesterday he said that that was absolutely ridiculous. They are like you gave them 50%? I was like well I didn't have … I wasn't going to be able to buy it [inaudible 00:22:40.7]. Joe: They could praise you so that … you know they ultimately lost money on the flunk transaction called Brad Wayland. Brad: Still that's true. There are some things in our past, there's some car situations and things like that but it definitely cost them some money and a hard day. But I started with them and … but I became concerned also about … oh wait a second, they're willing to put a lot into this after we started going. They're willing to put more into this and I started thinking I don't really want to be responsible for my own livelihood and know that I could potentially tank theirs. Joe: Right. Brad: So I started to get kind of concerned about that. And they didn't have unlimited funds anyway. But around that time I started looking to partner with other folks and I partnered with some people that I didn't know as well as my parents. So people that had told me like hey I want to get in and my relative over here is willing to invest in me. So I did that kind of deal and I became pretty uncomfortable with those pretty quick. And the reason why is because when you're working with your parents or if you're working with a close friend you kind of know we're not going to end up in a courtroom somewhere. Joe: Right. Brad: You know that that's not going to happen. You know now you could ruin your relationship or you could have that little mark on your relationship where you're like well remember that time when I lost like $400,000 of your money? Sorry about that. You know like that's not a good situation. But I started getting uncomfortable with having partners at all in the space when I took on partners I didn't know. Joe: So how did you determine … you know once you've got beyond that experimental stage and your relatives and friends of relatives and giving them too much, what would you recommend to somebody that's listening that wants to build a portfolio of sites? Is getting money from people are not used to investing? What would you say? Look if I were to do it all over again with what I know I'd probably offer them X, Y, Z, and pay them how often? Can you summarize what you know? Brad: Yeah. So if I could do it all over again I probably would do it the same way. I understand that giving up 50% sounds like … I don't know if that sounds like a lot or not. One guy I talked to yesterday said yeah it sounds like a lot. It probably was a lot. They weren't doing anything. And I was … you asked a minute ago were they getting paid? If I took a check they got a check. And I was looking for cash flow because I wanted to build up and be able to go buy more and do things. So I wanted to realize real gains and kind of do something with them. So I would give a lot early but I would structure the agreements to where you control the situation. And that is one thing I did. I just … when you have all the knowledge and the other side doesn't really have an opinion, they're like hey I don't know really know what you're doing with the money over there. I just know that you're operating these websites out here and you're making us money. When you have that kind of arrangement those people are more willing to say well you tell us what the investment is going to look like? And so from my perspective I kind of went down the road of just saying look I want to … I still want to pay you your money but I don't want to have partners any more for various reasons. Like I want to structure this in such a way that makes sure that you get your return but also make sure that I benefit from it in the way that I think I should long term. And so I'd like to roll out … basically, I bought them out. I just came up with a structure and said this is how I would value the properties and I can [inaudible 00:25:59.2] the properties to pay this off. And so I rolled everything out into basically a Seller Finance note and I was able to get it done in 20, 30 days. As opposed to an SBA loan or trying to go out and raise … when you do a situation like that where people are giving you their cash and you're dealing with multiple investors, if you are able to call the shots then when you're ready for that change you can do it very quickly and efficiently. Joe: How many different investors did you have at that time where you had to get them out? Brad: So I only had really three people that had invested at that time but at the same time I was looking to buy more. So when I rolled it out into a loan I actually brought on three new investors but I brought them on as just debt. Joe: Got you, okay then you paid them a higher than normal interest rate. Brad: I did. So it depends on who it was but my interest rates were 6 to 9% on the deals that I did. Joe: Okay. Brad: So it just depends on who it was. And I never really nickeled and dimed people over the interest rate, I try to find people that I thought would be able, that would trust that I would do the right thing with the money and [inaudible 00:27:07.6] plus trying to get the exact interest rate. Joe: Let's talk about for those listening thinking about rolling up different properties into a portfolio. Let's talk about multiples and returns on investment. You know we talk all the time about a business that's doing 100,000 that's five years old with one employee is worth a certain multiple but an equal business with one employee and work load that same age that's doing a million in discretionary earnings not only is it worth 10 times more in terms of numbers but it's also that multiple goes up right? So instead of two and a half to three and a half times in terms of value, the multiple because of the size and breadth of the business that multiple might jump to four or five times. Did you find the same thing to be true when you rolled up essentially 30 small content sites, 30 small blogs into one portfolio and sold off to a private equity firm where they pay a much larger multiple? Brad: Yeah okay. So … just so you know the private equity firm that I sold it out to I sold it at four and a half multiple. So just to kind of … that was a high multiple, I was very pleased with the transaction. Joe: Okay. Brad: So in my sale, I definitely saw an increased multiple. Okay, so from my perspective I did transactions that were … I did a lot of them in the 50,000 range and then as I got further down the road I did a lot of 125, 300, a couple of 500s. And here's what I found from my perspective, the properties in the … at least in the web design blog space that we're selling for more were higher quality properties. So where we deal with every day like we're talking to someone who's selling on Amazon, we could find someone who's selling on Amazon that's doing $50,000 a year in discretionary earnings, it's got … doing everything but they're in a small category. Whereas you could find someone who's doing a million dollars in discretionary earnings that's doing everything perfect as well but they're in a broader category. So we would see that where it's like hey they're both doing great they're … you know but they just happen to make less. In the design blog space, it wasn't so much like that. It was like if you're doing great then you are bigger and you are earning more. And so they did command higher multiples. I don't know off the top of my head I know one of my 500,000 transactions was a two and a half multiple and … but I know that one of my $300,000 transactions was a three point maybe one or two. Joe: And you talked about when you purchased it. Brad: When I purchased; yeah. So [inaudible 00:29:46.2] a lot of that. Joe: When you sold it was all lumped together and one multiple was applied. They didn't look at the individual blogs and sites and say we'll give you this for that and this for the other one, it was all- Brad: Right and the and the private equity plays … I mean I'm sure that you've talked to people just like I have, the private equity world is … we're seeing some changes I think in the industry right now with private equity. I think there's kind of two things going on. One is private equity is scooping up a lot of sides, stripping out all of the cost out of them, and literally just let them die and because the return on the money is good even then. That's one thing that I've seen private equity doing and that's what happened with mine. It killed them off. I mean there's no way. Joe: It killed them off. Brad: Yeah but having said that, that company that bought it is thriving. So I think through the acquisition they learned some things about what they wanted to do and what they were good at. So I don't know that they would look at it as a failure because I think that if they were able to use the information to then go and build a much bigger company that's doing some pretty big things. On the other hand, I had mentioned the other way that private equity is going like we just had a transaction that closed this week that I … where you've got an operational group that is under private equity. So we see the private equity guys a lot of times, they're like hey we want five million on EBITDA. Well, we don't have a lot of sites that come our way that have got these big seller discretionary numbers. So what I think is happening in the industry right now is there are these operational groups that are saying hey we'll go deal with 10 or 15 of these things, we'll still get you your … whatever you're looking for, several million dollars in sellers discretionary earnings but we'll operate all these things underneath you and kind of keep them running. And I do think that they'll like hold on to the content and just let it die. I think that Google especially is fighting against that right now specifically. I think their Freshness algorithm has kind of taken over and kind of prevented people from being able to do that effectively. And so I don't think that strategy is advised or a good idea and I think it will go away completely. Joe: You mean in the algorithm updates or having those sites die off a lot faster if you're not doing anything? Brad: They do. They just … they track what you're doing and I've even done some experiments. So I analyzed it on a small content portfolio and I have a marketing firm that runs those forming. They basically do all the content and everything. And we have experimented and seen Google Freshness is a very real algorithm that if you fall asleep on a blog or something that has any kind of time sensitivity at all then you will pay the price and it doesn't take very long. Joe: Got you. So for anybody listening that thinks that Quiet Light is only a physical products e-commerce brokerage firm, Brad is obviously showing us that the experience that we have is pretty vast. Jason's been in the affiliate space. We've all done SaaS, affiliate, content, advertising, physical products, but Brad obviously I think probably the bulk of transactions that you've closed so far with Quiet Light as an advisor you had been in the physical product space. But you've got a tremendous amount of experience in content as well correct? Brad: Yeah but to me, the content is hard to come by. I don't know if you feel that way or not but I don't get them a lot. I did a transaction last month for a guy that I actually had bought three websites from in my buying days. And it was a really interesting dynamic because I was able to … when the buyer has been on the phone and saying can I trust this guy? I was able to say you know what I did three deals with him myself and I can tell you it went exactly like this [inaudible 00:33:21.0]. So that was kind of a neat thing. But you know he came to me and said hey I want to sell a content site and he was monetizing it through digital downloads, and not a big transaction, a couple of hundred thousand dollar transaction. And you know he said what should I expect? And I said you know what the content is pretty hot, we don't get tons and tons of content people trying to sell these days. People want to hold onto it because it's very low workload and it's very high earnings for what people are doing and they seem to be getting very good multiples for it. So we priced it out at a 3.25 multiple and we got about 96% or something of the asked within 72 hours, I think you sent me an e-mail and said both your listings this week are going to be under a lot. By the weekend you are right one was 48 hours, one was 72 hours that transaction was closed in three weeks start to finish. Joe: Yeah content is easier to do due diligence on as well. I just had a content site closed. What is … we're recording on I think Wednesday right? Brad: Yeah. Joe: So 10 days ago. Less than 10 days ago I had one sell and it's interesting I'll give you the details of it. Daily updates, hundreds of thousands of visitors to it and Google was rewarding it like crazy because of the vast amount of new content on a daily basis. And the revenue took off like a rocket. It was just under a nine million dollar transaction and a very very high multiple. Higher than yours but it was explosive growth. It was very big. A lot of … their discretionary earnings is obviously very high. So the bigger the discretionary earnings, perk of the growth that you've got there the higher the multiple as well. So content sites if you're out there listening and you've got a portfolio of them or you're an individual person running one and you think that you're hearing things that are not worth all that much, truth of the matter is that we saw lots. And there's lots of good buyers for them. Brad: And I think that's your point, you asked the question earlier. Are we seeing the multiples go up the same way? And I think across the board you just have a supply and demand issue when you get into larger sites. There's just not a lot of them available and we're seeing that our buyers are ready to go on larger transactions. You just don't get as many large transactions to come by. And the example that you gave, I'm pretty sure you had competing offers on that deal. Joe: I did. I had three offers and they kept … they update each other and grew it up. Bryan- Brad: Three offers on a nine million dollar property, that's something. Joe: Yeah. Bryan's got the physical products business; its nutritional supplements. It was listed at 15 million and is under contract at higher than that because there were multiple offers on it. So don't be afraid. I hear people tell me look I think I should sell before it gets too big because there's not going to be as many buyers out there. That's not what I'm finding. It's not the case. Would you agree that there's a ton of money out there for the right business? If it's a good quality business it's going to last. Brad: Well it will sound very counterproductive to what we're trying to do at Quiet Light but every week I talk to people on the phone and I just basically tell them if you've got the willingness to keep working on your business you should not sell. I mean you just shouldn't because you should grow it as big as you can. Because it's not easy to build a business that does what your business is doing. Whatever it is, anyone that we're talking to is having some level of success because they're talking about selling and they know they've got cash flow and things like that. And I just always tell them if you're done let's go. If you're ready to be done or you've got other plans or you want to travel or you want to do this or that or you want to … you've got a new venture that you're thinking about sure let's list it. Let's get it done. But if you've got the willingness to keep going then we're here when you're ready but honestly keep going. Go as far as you can take it. Joe: And Mark calls that reckless honesty because it's not necessarily in our best interest but it's what we all do. He did it for me when I sold back in 2010. The difference I'll tell you now for those that are thinking they're emotionally tired and done really you've got to sort of tap yourself in the chest and say do I have the heart? Brad: Yeah. Joe: Because the worst conversations I've had are when I say look, you want X value, your business realistically is only worth Y. If you hang on another 12 months and you reinvest your energies, you set some goals, you get that traffic back up, and you get that revenue going again at a higher level you'll get Y but it's going to take 12 months. The worst conversations I have are when they come back to me in 12 months and say you know I didn't do any of it. The revenue has gone down 20%, can I still get the X you talked about? And the answer is no because they didn't have the heart. Those were the worst conversations. Brad: Right. Joe: So always, I tell people tap in my chest if you've got a heart do it. But like you say, if you're emotionally done; if you're ready we're ready. I think some people … I've been doing this six years as you know and occasionally we tell people look it's in your best interest to hold off. Sometimes they'll interpret that as we don't want to list their business. That's not the case at all. Brad: Yeah not. Joe: When they're ready, we will do it. We'll get that buyer. And just from the few examples that we've talked about, there are buyers and situations where we get it under contract very very quickly. Listen Brad we are running short on time you shared a lot of information here that I think will give people good insight into you into building a portfolio of either content businesses or any businesses the way that they can sort of piece it together the way you did and then exiting which is fantastic. I do want to talk about one thing briefly though. Personal in nature if you don't mind, can we? I won't go too far I promise but say yes. Brad: Yes. Joe: Okay. So I understand you went hiking in North Carolina recently and they're renaming a mountain after you. Brad: Yeah. Joe: Do you … what happened there? Brad: Well my wife and I have five boys from range two to 11. So we're pretty busy living life. And for our 16th anniversary, we decided to go to Asheville North Carolina, leave the kids at home. My parents came to town to take care of them and we went to Catawba Falls … which you can Google it. There has been many fatal accidents there. In fact, there's been a fatal accident there since I left. Pisgah National Forest has many accidents from what I've come to learn. But we were hiking up a trail at Catawba Falls and then we entered a closed section of the trail. I didn't know it was a ropes kind of situation so we're climbing up ropes and going up a rocky kind of cliff. Joe: Let me just clarify for the attorneys out there that's thinking they can help you. You entered a closed section of the trail; closed. Brad: I didn't know. Here's the thing, I've got some lawyer friends that have reached out to me about it and here's the other thing the Pisgah National Forest is owned by the US government. So if you decide that you want to sue them just know that the US government does not take lawsuits kindly. And they take zero liability. So I had friends reach out to me and say you need to pursue this and then I was like I was in the Pisgah National Forest and they're like no, that's not going to work. You're going to lose that. But basically, it depends on the state. North Carolina does not have very friendly laws for stuff like that anyway. It's one of the least friendly states for that. But I hiked up, I saw a beautiful waterfall … actually and filmed in the movie The Hunger Games and that's why we wanted to go up and see it. So we went up there, saw the waterfall, we needed to kind of get a move on it because we had hiked a lot longer than we had expected so we're moving very quickly on the way down. Joe: You and your wife and kids or just you and your wife? Brad: No just me and my wife. The kids were at home. I vacated the ropes for a minute, I don't … I saw a path; it seemed like a reasonable thing to do. It was only going to be like 10 ft. and honestly I don't remember anything after that. I fell 40 ft. down a very rocky slope and I don't remember anything until the paramedics and the firemen were there. They tried to life like me up they couldn't do it. And I broke my arm, dislocated my shoulder, collapsed my lung, I had deep bruises and things like that. I did not have a concussion surprisingly. Joe: You got to thank God. Brad: Three and a half hours to get … yeah, I did. It took them to three and a half hours to get me out in to the hospital. Joe: Wow. Brad: And anyway thank God it was just a lucky situation, very scary for my wife. She was talking to me for a long time without me really knowing what was going on. For 45 minutes she thought she's lost his mind. Joe: Well the first thing I think we all did a Quiet Light was you know thankfully you're okay and we were doing little prayers for you and all that stuff. And then we start like man that guy is just not so bright going on the closed trails. For everybody listening, if anybody is foolish enough to do what Brad did, we bought him the inflatable … what do they call it, the inflatable? Brad: They're like these big bubbles that you get inside with your family. Joe: We bought Brad a bunch of those and I started a petition here in North Carolina to change Catawba Falls to Wayland Falls but nobody listened. Nobody listened at all. Brad: Unfortunately. Joe: I've been there and next time I go again I'm not going on the closed trails I don't think but. Brad: You may not know where the closed trails are. I didn't know it was closed. Joe: Okay. I've been there because I know that it was like oh look that's where the Hunger Games was filmed. Brad: Yeah. Joe: I'm going to bring a sign and I'm going to drop it in there. I'm going to take a sledge hammer and put it in the ground call and Catawba Falls and take a picture for you. Brad: Yeah. Joe: See if anybody takes it out. It could be there for- Brad: It was a crazy accident and I'm thankful for all the support I got. From Quiet Light, from friends of family, it was a … I recovered very quickly. I've got a pretty gnarly scar right here that is still … I'm hoping it's going to turn the color of my skin is it looks like I got really depressed or something. Joe: He's holding up his wrist ladies and gentlemen and it looks like he decided to take his own. Brad: Tried … that's what it looks like. Joe: Is there a pin in there now? Brad: Yeah there's a play and about a dozen screws in that arm but I've got full mobility back. I'm free of therapy. I can't do pushups yet but I'm getting closer. Joe: And you did it all while we started at Quiet Light and you had listings and not a single client really knew what was going on and they … I mean it's because you worked anyway which is amazing so that's awesome. Well again Catawba Falls, I'm going to try to get it changed to Wayland Falls but let's see if that happens or not. Brad: Good luck with that. Joe: Brad, thank you. I learned a lot. Brad: Thank you. Joe: I learned a lot about you and I appreciate your time. Hopefully, everybody here has did as well and we'll keep doing what we did here at Quiet Light. Thanks, man. Brad: Okay thanks a lot for having me on. Links: Brad's LinkedIn Profile brad@quietlightbrokerage.com About Brad Wayland on QLB

I've seen Ezra Firestone speak at events, online, and in his “how to” courses. But until I got to chat with him one on one for 30 minutes about work/life balance, did I realize he's the next Tony Robbins (OK, of the ecommerce world, and without the banana hands.) No kidding, Ezra is inspiring and full of passion. And he does what he does (rock 30 million a year in revenues without breaking a sweat) while giving back to others, focusing on family, and taking care of his health. If you're are a corporate exec wanting to live the ecommerce lifestyle, Ezra's approach is spot on. If you are an ecommerce owner and want to be the “navigator” of your business instead of the jack of all trades, listen and try to really hear what Ezra is saying. It will make a difference in your business, your bank account and your family life. Episode Highlights: Highlights from Ezra's unique upbringing and how he grew up with e-commerce. We follow the journey of his professional life from poker to yoga to where he is today, earning thirty million per year in revenue. Ways the apprenticeship model can be beneficial to young entrepreneurs. Ezra reveals the pivotal moment where he understood the freedom he could achieve from acquiring a skill and mastering it. How Ezra found his “mastery” in e-commerce after trying several things. Every type of e-commerce business requires the same kind of marketing. All the marketing that goes with the product: before, during and after is what smart marketers need to focus on. The easiest business to run at scale is the physical product in e-commerce. The importance of going premium in e-commerce. There are buyers for every level of the market. Why Ezra chose not to sell on the subscription model. Using consistent ongoing marketing content in customer communication can generate revenue by sending the customers back to the website over and over. Ezra describes how he made the transition from driver to navigator. The importance of setting boundaries. Work will fill the time that you give it but it is necessary to scale in order to create balance. Balance as an entrepreneurial leader allows you to give the autonomy to those around you to step into roles that they can be motivated to succeed at. Ezra runs his business based on the practice of permaculture. Serve the world unselfishly and profit, that is his philosophy. Transcription: Mark: I saw an ad on Facebook the other day Joe and it made me think of our guest today. The ad was for anyone … any guy who has just a regular hairdo like I do and it was a man bun attachment. You could actually buy a man bun attachment to put on the top of your head if you wanted to have a man bun. Joe: Don't say his name now, don't say his name. Mark: I want a minute here and think who in the industry … in the world of marketing is known for his man bun? Joe: You know when we had Syed Balkhi on the podcast I actually went out and bought myself a Florida gator hat to wear during part of the podcast. I seriously thought about going on Amazon and ordering a man bun and putting it on for this podcast. That's what I wanted to do. But you know what I don't know the guest well enough. I've seen him at events and we were a host, we're not a sponsor on his last event. Today we're on this podcast is the first time I really got to sit down and talk with him for 30 minutes or so. I guess we can say is name now is Ezra Firestone. If you don't know his name where the hell have you been? Because essentially he is … in my view he's the Tony Robbins of the e-commerce world without the banana hands if you've ever seen Shallow Hal. He's very impressive. When he starts talking you just sit back and listen and you go “What? Really, wow that's incredible. That's incredible.” He's so full of energy and so passionate about what he does that you would think that he works all the time. And that's kind of the takeaway from this podcast for me. There are lots of great insights to how to run a more effective e-commerce business in different channels and philosophies that someone like Ezra applies. And look he's doing 30 million dollars a year in revenue growing month over month and does incredible things. He does not get out of bed … well, I shouldn't say bed; he does not start his day until 10 o'clock in the morning. And that doesn't mean he works until 10 o'clock at night. He works maybe till 5 o'clock unless he's out doing events; like he's going to be at Blue Ribbon Mastermind next week which is just incredible … doing 30 million a year in revenue and not working 40 hours a week; a really impressive guy. Mark: Absolutely you know I have a confession to make. You know these courses, these e-courses online that are super expensive, I usually look at these and I'm like yeah who in the world would ever pay for this? So my confession is this, I've actually bought one before and it was one of Ezra's. It was on Facebook Marketing which is a little bit off from what you're talking about. But I can honestly say it was worth every single penny. I think those who have actually gone to Ezra's events and listened to his advice bought one of his courses and have followed him. He's big. He's known because he's a real deal. Starting work at 10 AM is an awesome testament to the idea of this work life balance and making sure that we're working so that we can live our lives. We're not living so that we can work our lives. That's awesome. I want to hear this because right now I'm working so much and Joe I know you are too. So hopefully you did pull away a few things from this as well. Joe: I did. I did and people don't want to hear you and I anymore so let's just go to Ezra. Mark: Let's go. Joe: Hey folks it's Joe Valley from the Quiet Light Podcast and today I have Ezra Firestone on the line with me. Hey Ezra how are you doing? Ezra: Happy to be here man. Thank you so much for having me on the show. I love doing stuff like this. Joe: So so glad to have you here. You and I have … we've been to a couple of events together, I've been to your Smart Marketer and Blue Ribbon Mastermind but we've never had a half hour to talk to each other so I'm loving the fact that I got your crew to schedule this. So thank you first and foremost, I know you're a busy guy. As I mentioned earlier we don't do a fancy introduction so for those that don't know who you are if you could tell us a little bit about yourself and your background that'd be fantastic. Ezra: Sure. Thanks. I am currently sitting in a presidential cabinet room, so that's my current location in the world. Joe: For those listening and not watching, get online and look. Ezra: Yeah get up take a look. This is actually an off … my wife and I bought 76 acres of land about 20 minutes from here that we're intending to sort of develop and build a home on and have kids on and stuff. We're renting this home and the person who lived here before was like some kind of a lawyer or something. And this room … it's all cabinets and for me for some reason that is confronting. Like I don't know why but I walk into this [inaudible 00:05:02.0] in my office and I love … I love it. I love that I have a space where I can work but all the cabinetry it kind of freaks me out because it's very not … much not my vibe. So I'm like putting in plants, I've got like a skateboard over here. You know I'm kind of trying to make it feel a little less intense. Anyways a little bit about me business wise is I never went to college. I went straight from high school to New York City to play poker for a living which I did really well as a teenager and into my early 20's. I was really fun but eventually, I sort of came across the concept of not trading time for money and began looking at building systems to generate revenue and resource for me without my direct time input all the time and sort of fell into e-commerce. Because you know e-commerce was really coming up in society at that time. We're talking 2004, 2005, 2006. It was my first years in e-commerce and I've been fortunate enough to grow up in this industry. And this was a time before events and before podcast and before this industry was … everyone, when you said you were an Internet marketer they thought you were into porn or gambling. Joe: That's right. Ezra: It was not looked at as a good thing. And so long story short is I've been doing e-commerce full time for about 13 years. I have grown and sold several companies. I currently have four different brands that generate about 25 million a year in revenue and 70 employees on my team around the country. And I'm just a guy. I'm just some random guy who loves this stuff. I really really love it and I think timing wise I came into it at the right time and fell in love with it at the right time and have been putting my full energy and attention in the direction of online businesses and e-commerce in particular physical products. Although I do have other business models e-commerce is my most successful model over the last decade. Joe: That's impressive. First and foremost the fact that you didn't go to college and you went right to life and you're a professional poker player. I don't tell my kids this, as I mentioned before I've got two boys, 14 … oh almost 15 and 17, some of the most successful people I know didn't go to college. One of the guys I worked with up in Portland Maine, Rob Graham if you're listening, absolutely one of the most successful people I know and he just … he got it. He worked hard, he was smart, he used common sense and intelligence which you have to have a combination of so kudos to you. Ezra: Thanks, man. By the way, you can't give me too much credit for that decision. There were no colleges that would take me with my problem. I just didn't fit the mold. I sort of always had this idea, you know I haven't … I had an alternative lifestyle. I grew up in an intentional community in the Bay Area of California with flower children hippie parents and so I kind of had some alternative views on life from my upbringing. And one of them was that the school system really felt like a system that was farming me into a model … into a workforce that I didn't want to join. You know sitting at a desk for eight hours a day and then you'll be trained to go sit in the cubicle eight hours a day. And I believe that in life you get what you want from people who have it. That's how … you find someone like you Joe and you learn about how to sell businesses from someone who is doing that. And I have always sort of believed in that apprenticeship model. And you know I looked around at college, I mean I attempted to get in, nobody would take me but there was like nothing there for me you know. The teachers didn't have anything that I wanted. I couldn't really see a future for myself there and I was a very good hustler. I always had little businesses and I was the guy at school … I almost had, I would have to go on to those stories but I always had something going on to make money because we weren't rich. We grew up without much means and I always had this goal of generating resource so that I could use it for causes that I found noble like taking care of my family and taking care of my community and participating in the world in ways that you can only do when you have access to resources. So I always kind of had my attention on that and yeah I fell in to entrepreneurship sort of because of that. Joe: So if people are reading in between the lines and the threads and lines here, we've got somebody that … you used the word hustle, you know I think the harder you work the luckier you get. You take from people who have it, in other words, you associate from … or with people that they can help you and you're in turn helping them it's never a one sided- Ezra: Totally. Joe: -you would think. And the noble cause is giving back. I have to ask though when you give the visual of 76 acres that you and your wife have bought, you're going to build a home and when … I just what state are we talking about? I keep hearing New York and Hawaii but I think you're up in New York. Ezra: Yeah so I live in upstate New York now, about two hours north of the city and I grew up in Hawaii and California. Moved to New York at 18 to play poker and just fell in love with the East Coast. I met my wife when I was 20 and this is kind of where our life is and where our community is and our friends are and just sort of I'm a big fan. I love it, it's a really really good place and yeah we got our problems, we got ticks and we've got the winter and like there are things you know. But it's like anywhere you go there's going to be stuff. Joe: Well you can have your events in the southern regions of the country so that you can get out of New York when it's 10 degrees and 18 inches of snow out there. Talk to me about that transition that you had from okay online poker or playing poker up in New York is not cutting it and you wanted to step into the e-commerce world, did you … was there a day, a moment, a person that you met that made a difference and you said okay this is the path I think I'm going to try it? Ezra: Totally. I think that entrepreneurs, in general, are chasing some form of freedom; financial freedom, location freedom, freedom of where they can spend their time and they're running away from pain in general. And then you kind of reach different levels of entrepreneurship that I'll talk about in a minute as I've gone through all the phases of like I started … my wife didn't like the idea of me being out all night sleeping all day under fluorescent lights with a bunch of degenerates just eating Butterfingers and just being like a New York City underground poker scene guy. I mean that is not an attractive package so she wasn't to excited about that so I took what I call a square job where it was one of my first ever jobs where I actually worked for someone else running this yoga studio in Manhattan. And this was at a time when Bikram Yoga was still in its heyday. It just kind of like we're talking 2007, I was running this studio. It was the biggest Bikram Yoga studio in Manhattan. I was the manager, the youngest manager. I was 21. I ran the whole thing and this was before everyone found out that Bikram was a creep and a rapist and the whole kind of Bikram thing fell apart. It was sort of as yoga was going main stream in society and that was a really fun gig being in service that … you know in the world service running a studio. But man I would be there 60 hours a week and I didn't like not having the … not being able to have choice in where my time was spent. And so that was the initial sort of pain point that pushed me towards man the poker gig was better than this because I had more flexibility of where I've got to put my attention. And I think that in life what you put your attention on grows and what you ignore gets smaller. You put your attention on your health it gets better, if you ignore your health it gets worse. If you put your attention on your relationship it gets better. If you ignore it, it gets worse like … just where you're directing your attention is everything. And I think that really as a human being the skillset you want to develop is the skillset of mastery which is simply the willingness to put your attention in one area consistently over time. Pick up the instrument for 30 minutes a day after a month you're better at it. It's a willingness to place attention and direct it consistently over time and I think that … so I kind of was playing poker for a living and I met a guy. Now, this guy was a really fascinating guy and he was a coach and a coach of coaches before coaching was mainstream. So now you know about relationship coaches, health coaches, life coaches, business coaches, coaching has really penetrated society as a mainstream concept. Back in '04, '05, '06 it really was not that big and this guy was an early life coach. He'd started the International Coaching Federation one of these things he started that was a life coaching sort of governing body. And the thing about coaching is there is no real governing body, any schmoe off the street can call themselves a coach and start charging. And that is both good and bad, right? You end up with access and to opportunity for people but also some people are you know schmucks and not so good at it or they're selling you stuff … you know they're not qualified. Anyways long story short this guy … we're talking '05, he was selling business opportunity information products, e-books, digitally delivered courses, DVD sets, and these were how to become a life coach, how to start a life coaching business, how to make your own money and have a practice as a life coach. And the way that he generated visibility for this offer was with the search engine optimization which was the traffic source of the day for internet businesses. You would rank on Google and you would buy query based traffic from Google Ad Words when someone typed in a search query like how to make money he would show up. And so I taught him how to play poker and he taught me search engine optimization. And that was like my first foray into … you know this guy worked from his laptop, he was making a bunch of money and I was like men his life and his production cycle is a much more effective production cycle than mine. If we're looking at like we both have the goal of generating wealth, the way he is doing it is far more appealing than the way I'm doing it sitting behind a desk selling people water and coconut water and being yelled at about how we don't have any towels. It was like your hustle is smarter man you got to teach me this. So I taught him how to play poker he taught me search engine optimization. I ended up taking over his business and running this life coaching information product business, learning about things like landing page optimization and conversion rate optimization, sales webinars, and product launches, and upsells, and just like traditional direct response internet marketing as it relates to the sale of information. And this was really where I cut my teeth as a marketer and I love that business. It was a lot of fun. And ultimately once I had developed the skill set of the ability to generate visibility for an offer which was not that hard back then, it was buying Ad Words and doing article marketing, link building, and SEO, I thought to myself man selling information is wonderful but it's got a couple of downsides which is you're reliant on a single influencer. You are only as … you only have as much value as the next month's cash, it's not … you can't sell the thing. It's not an asset, it's a cash flow business by its very nature because it's built around, in general, a particular persona and you can't ever sell that. And there's a number of reasons why I wanted a different model and I tried a whole bunch of them. You know I had a seven figure services agency. I currently run a multi seven figure software as a service business. I did coaching and consulting. I did development for people. I've done all kinds of models and e-commerce appeals to me as the number one model and has been my most successful model and the model that I've enjoyed most for a number of reasons and I'll go through those now. I don't even know if this is the answer to your question. I'm kind of rambling. Can I tell you about why I like e-commerce? Joe: Keep going, please I love this. Ezra: So if you look at the three main areas that result in a business's success … now I will determine a business at scale as a business that's doing between half a million and a million dollars a year and has at least three employees and consistent processes. I'm going to label that as “scale”, so being someone who has run probably 10 different business models, you know affiliate marketing … I've done everything in the last 15 years or so. At scale, e-commerce is my favorite for a number of reasons. When you look at what I believe to be the three things that you've got to have in place to scale a business there's … the first one is product. You need supply chain; you need the ability to produce this product at scale in a way that is not going to take over your life. So if you look at e-commerce, I literally sell tubs of goo. Okay this is not a tub of goo this is a stick of goo but basically, it's a plastic stick there's some goo in it. I mean and you can see here on the visual this is very very good goo, it's handmade goo. Joe: It's like fantastic all natural goo. Ezra: Yeah, it's really really good but it's like I got a tub and I got some goo and I got some labels right? At scale I buy more tubs, I mix more goo and I have more labels. Now let's look at product and supply chain at scale for software as a service which are also sold at scale. Software as a service I need front end engineers, back end engineers, QA's, I need to actually be creating new code and updating the product and integrations all the time. Like the product is morphing every single week; it's not the same product. It changes every week and then whatever I change breaks and then once I develop the product I have to document what I did for the people who are actually using it. And then I have to train and now we move into the second pillar; support. So you have a product you want to ask me something about that product? Joe: I want to point out that the products that you have in your hand also they get used up and reordered and auto shipped so it's a key differentiator between selling a water bottle [inaudible 00:18:06.6]- Ezra: Hey smart marketer all right. Joe: -versus a tub of goo. Ezra: [inaudible 00:18:12.7] is I mean obviously subscription based revenue things that are consumed is really really phenomenonal. If you look at information marketing the beauty of the product side of selling information is you create it once and then you don't have any more cost of goods. Every time I need to buy another one of these it cost me six bucks. When I create an informational course, I create it once and I can continue to sell it but the product goes bad after about six months to a year because it's outdated information. It's not self-help. I mean I sell very specific here's how you run Facebook ads that might need to be updated every six months. So it's very hard to keep that product up to date. Services, I struggled with the product side of setting boundaries. I had a multi seven figure consulting agency doing advertising for e-commerce businesses back in '09 and my problem was always around where does the service end? People would ask me for more. I would then do it like I just didn't have a … I wasn't good at boundaries and so I found that product very hard to fulfill on and as much as I had a very hard time. And this is maybe not other people's issues, I had boundary issues and it's therefore I failed as a services agency and I did well but like the model was not super profitable because I could not figure how to set boundaries. So as far as the product goes e-commerce has been the easiest one to scale without my direct involvement. And I'm looking for the ability to generate wealth and resource and have the most pleasurable model possible. And when you look at the most pleasurable models to run for me it's e-commerce. Let's talk about the support side because as your business scales you have to engage with and support your customers. And with software as a service, those support people need to be very high level. They need to understand the software, the highest level and be able to talk to customers about it. It's way more intense than support for e-commerce where it's like what's in the product, can I get a refund? You know I mean like the support is not anywhere near as high level for e-commerce. So if you look at I have a 1.5 million dollar a year in annual recurring revenue software as a service business that I launched about 24 months ago it will be about 2 million this year and 20 something but the point is that business at 2 million dollars a year has double the amount of employees that BOOM! does at 20 million dollars a year. Double the amount of employees at only 2 million a year because I need people for the product; i.e. front end, back end, engineers, QA people, project managers, I need more support people for the number of customers than I do for BOOM!. So support is something that you have to figure out and support on the agency's side if you're running an agency is very difficult because you got to get on the phone. You got to talk to people; you got to show them results, you're the punching bag when things don't go well. It's very difficult to be … do services well and on the support side it can be really tough. So support for e-commerce is easiest for me in my experience of every model that I've been involved in. And then the one thing that e-commerce requires is marketing. Every other model requires marketing as well, that's sort of the third pillar right? Product, supply chain, support, and marketing; I mean really this is like what we are doing at the end of the day. I mean there's other stuff but like everything kind of is an offshoot of one of those. So the marketing side which is storytelling, sales funnels, content, copywriting, social media, all this kind of stuff is what I excel at; that's my real specialty. It's one of the reasons why every model that I've engaged in I've done some kind of well at because I understand how to comment on a collective experience. And so this is my frame for it. I feel like every business that I have is serving a particular group of people who are having a collective experience and my goal as a marketer is to comment on that experience in a way that resonates with that particular group of people who's having that experience and then push them in the direction of my products ultimately. And so the example you know this product line is sold to women over 50 who are all having the experience of aging and everyone telling them that that is wrong. That's the group of people and that's the collective experience they're having and then I comment on that with my marketing. And so that for me is the same with every business. Every business requires the same kind of marketing; creating videos, amplifying them via advertising, creating sales funnels and technology stacks that push people through a 60 to 90 day sales cycle with retargeting, and then once they buy having content marketing and engagement to keep their attention and then up sells and cross sells after they've consumed with constant content post purchase all of that stuff. And so since that is what I excel at is the marketing side and then I'm looking for okay you know and some people struggle with that but that just happens to be my particular skillset. The model that I am most in love with and I think is the easiest to run at scale is physical product e-commerce because the supply chain is easy and the support is easy and marketing is the same level of difficulty as any other business at scale. Joe: That's a good point. You know I never thought of it. I was at a Mastermind a year and a half ago, someone got up on stage, talked about importing from China and she went into such detail about how important it is to determine the thickness of the corrugated box when you're importing from China. For when it's on that container ship, when it gets to UPS, when it gets to the fulfillment center and all of it … I got to tell you I practically fell asleep and said to myself I never ever want to own any physical products e-commerce business again. Ezra: Don't import from China. I don't. Joe: Don't import from China. I didn't. I had nutritional supplements and it's all US based. So I think it's the ideal business model if you're an e-commerce is something with a consumable product recurring revenue that is manufactured here in the United States. Ezra: I would agree and I would also argue that if you look at e-commerce you might as well go premium because there's buyers for every level of the market. Let's say you have supplements that cost $10 a bottle versus supplements that cost $90 a bottle. I'm always going to sell the $90 a bottle. The reason is it's about the same level of difficulty to generate the sale. And if you go premium you have much more margin that you can then reinvest back in to better product, better score, and better marketing. And so I fall more and more … and you look at the companies that are scaling, Purple Mattress like a lot of these companies have discovered all birds shoes for example by $90 … $5 a pair, it cost them like 10 bucks, they got $80 of margin to spend on growing the brand. So I really believe in premium, consumable … and it doesn't have to necessarily be consumable but line expansion, so if you are selling water bottles also have water bottle coolers and you know what I mean like [crosstalk 00:24:25.2] expand the line but- Joe: And an expansion of that line that is something that can be shipped on a continuity basis. Ezra: Yeah, ideally for sure. I mean listen I don't sell subscription. There's no subscription in my brand though 40% of my revenue comes from repeat customers. Joe: So why the choice not to sell subscription? Ezra: Well, you don't necessarily need to actually have someone on a credit card ding every month to have a high level of repeat business. All you have to have is really good marketing. And my particular demographic is afraid of subscription. And as much as they've experienced a whole bunch of people not letting them off subscription when they get on subscription … so I get all questions every day like is this subscription? Can I cancel my subscription? People don't want to feel obligated, they want to come back and buy when they want to buy. And my view point is that you can have … and my experience is that you can have a recurring business model without actually having people on subscription programs like I do with this product if your products are worth it. Joe: And the product in your hand and this is from experience, not everyone's going to go through that product in the same amount of time. And so that 30 day renewing charge to the credit card is going to be too quick for some, just right for others and too long for others. So you're an expert at reaching out to them and giving them what they need is hey it's time to reorder at click, reorder … that's your … instead of auto shipment you're reaching out to them with I would assume an automated email campaign or through a messenger or something like that. Ezra: Well, we do consistent ongoing content. So we're always sending out videos and articles and so we could generate a lot of revenue just from sending people back to our website. Joe: You mean you're helping customers? Ezra: Yeah, we're adding value to their lives by commenting on the conversations that they're already having. Joe: So to the newbies out there listen to that, adding value to their lives by helping them with the information that they have and making their lives better. That's ideal marketing right there. Ezra: And every six weeks we run a sale event. And I would say about 70% of our revenue from repeats comes from those sale events every six weeks with those sale events and 30% comes from just the random content emails. Those sale events work a lot better when the audience is engaged in ongoing content. So then when we do ask them to buy something, they've been hearing from us, they've been engaged with our content, they've seen our videos on Facebook and their feeds that are just interesting fun videos that are about beauty and help and stuff like that. And then they see this oh they're having a sale, I like these people, I know these people, I engage with their content every now and again. So the ongoing content strategy actually acts as a supporter of our ongoing sales. And when you do the sales every six weeks without the ongoing content they don't work anywhere near as well. Joe: You know it's almost like you just said how do I help more people not how do I sell more product. Ezra: I want to do both but yes. Joe: By doing the first you're doing the second. So it's more of a mature, seasoned approach to growing a brand where you're helping more people and generating more revenue. That's the end result and I'm saying this in a way that sometimes I see businesses from all shapes and sizes, we're doing four to five valuations a week and there's a team of eight of us here at Quiet Light and so we see a lot of different variations of businesses. And the toughest ones to sell are those that are just trying to make a quick buck. They've built a little … slapped their brand on it and they're to get it out there and they're going to get eaten up alive by guys like you in time. They can make a little dent but it's not going to last. What you're doing is something that I think is going to last and eventually will build a much bigger value and someday have a lifetime … if you ever choose to a lifetime event sale where you can say okay I'm done. I don't really ever need to work again but it sounds like you're full of passion, you'd probably be working for a long time. Ezra: Yeah, I feel like if you like what you're doing and you're enjoying it and you have a nice balance … because the problem that most entrepreneurs experience at some point and I can recognize this from across the room at an event and everyone goes through it at some point in the entrepreneurial journey or at least my experience has been like everyone I've talked to and I've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs that have gotten to this place at some point which is burn out. Joe: Yeah. Ezra: They're overwhelmed, overstimulated, they've taken on too much responsibility, and they feel at the mercy shackled to their production cycle … shackled to their business operation. And you know my big transformation in the last two years has been going from driver to navigator. So you know I spent my career driving on the road, taking turns, doing everything and as I've scaled I've seen that really like my most valuable skillset is that of the person who navigates the ship. If you're on the road making the turn you can't see the mountains in the distance. And so at some point you have to make the transition or at least part time the transition to a person who is setting strategy, who is reviewing what's going on, who's going out and meeting new people and bringing in deal flow, who's actually like holding the container and the vision for the operation. And then reviewing what the team is doing and delegating responsibility and giving autonomy and freedom to the people around you to step up in the roles like lead copywriter or lead advertiser or lead project manager or you know all the stuff that you might be doing yourself. And I think that when you are able to do that it affords you the ability to relax a little bit and kind of have a little bit more space for your business. The other thing I will say that people don't do enough of is set real clear boundaries around their work life. Because as an entrepreneur, particularly as an internet entrepreneur your business is with you at all times. I've got my cellphone on my hand but if you … you know it's like your wallet, just always with you and so you don't end up with separation between your life and your business. And when you look at the people who are burned out you find that oh they've been ignoring their bodies and their health. Oh, they've been ignoring their relationships and their intimacy and their connection and their social life and their hobbies. Oh, they've been ignoring like the home front. Like it's … the burnout stems from lack of balance between production cycle and other cycles. And work will fill the time that you give it, it really will. It will fill whatever time that you give it. So I don't actually put my attention on work until about 10 AM and I stop around 5:30 or 6, that's my time frame. I wake up, I move my body, I meditate, I hang out my wife, we have breakfast, we do our little morning thing. It's super fun. A couple of hours in the morning where I'm just partying and having fun and then I start out my work day and I'll work for a couple hours and then I'll have lunch. I'll put in a couple more hours and then I'll stop and that'll be it. And I'll enjoy my evening and my … I do that four solid days a week, sometimes five, and sometimes I don't work at all Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, sometimes I do and it's like you might think oh like my business is to crazy I can't actually do that. I promise you if you do not start working until 10 and you stop at 6 everything that important to get done you will get done. And that's so much working time that is your whole life man, 10 to 6, four days a week it's like you are asking too much of yourself if you're trying to put more of that in your production cycle. And then look I understand that sometimes you've got to run 14 hours a day for four weeks in a row because you're doing a product launch. It's like okay … cool but that … it's a marathon, not a sprint. [inaudible 00:31:25.8] explain this thing you're going to fail. And I can tell you that as someone who has gone through the stages of entrepreneurship from working off the couch with a full time job moonlighting the business to now running an eight figure set of brands with 70 members and a lifestyle that I really really enjoy. I've been there and you really … if you don't set the boundaries and don't set the container it will not exist and the work will permeate your entire existence and you will have no separation from it and you have no relaxation and no space. And a lot of times your best ideas come when you're not working. When you have space and you're enjoying yourself. It's like it is necessary to scale to set constraints around your work life. And people are unwilling to do this because they feel it will be a detriment to their success. But actually in my experience and the experience of everyone who has done this that I know it works the opposite. Joe: And a lot of folks that come from the corporate world when they're putting in 50, 60 hours a week traveling all over the world and they just want to get out of the rat race and they want to be an entrepreneur. And they buy an online e-commerce business and they feel like they need to put in 40, 50, 60 hours a week. And I said look the guy that you're buying it from has been working 15 hours a week, you've got some learning to do so just maybe cap it at 25. But don't work to the point where you're trying to fix things that are not broken, just learn. Go to events, go to Smart Marketer and things like that. You just don't have to work that much and you've worked so hard that it's time to take care of your own health and wellness as well. Ezra: And I think that totally and like hey go for it put in a full eight hour day or 10 hours a day multi work weeks as you're getting in to the game but like at least have the goal of setting some boundaries and containers around your work life because you will be a happier person. And like what is the point of all of this? Is the point just wealth creation because mine certainly is not. I would love to generate as much resource and I'm using resource as a lingo word to describe generating wealth so that I can then direct that resource towards causes that I find noble. Take care of my community where I grew up, take care of my family, provide a lifestyle for my wife that she's really excited about and our family, do other things that are … that have meaning to me like saving lands and all kinds of stuff. So not a lot of people have figured out how to generate resource, everyone is failing at this. Everyone thinks that success is the goal and they're running in the direction of success and most people are failing at it and most people are miserable. And it's like the goal … fun is a much less popular but more fulfilling goal than success. So if you can figure out how to have fun and enjoy yourself which means setting fucking boundaries around your work life and having hobbies and having a social life and taking care of your body you will have more success. You're guaranteed to be a winner if you're chasing a good time and fun. You're not guaranteed to have fun if you chase success. So it's like what the hell is the point? What are you doing person? I want to grab you by the shoulders and smack you around and say listen, stop it. Focus on enjoying your life. And yes but obviously focus on the production cycle and the success. Joe: We're not talking about being poor and happy we're talking about a combination of both [inaudible 00:34:37.5] which are successful businesses with recurring revenue models and a very happy and healthy home life. I think it's amazing that you really generally don't start work until 10 unless you're out at an event to a sponsorship or something like that and then you're walking away. Do you actually put that device down and walk away; that phone that's in your hand? Ezra: Oh yeah. There's no phones in the bedroom dude. Turn off the computers, get off the digital medium. I mean you're shackled to it, man. You're on it all day every day, give yourself a freaking break and all of a sudden you feel better and life is better. And you hop on in the morning and you respond to the emails and the slacks and then you start creating. I kind of use my morning time for my creation, strategy, content you know I create a lot in the mornings and then like throughout the rest of the day I'll be … I'm at a place in my business now where I have a lot of reviewing and talking to people about what's going on. And my job is a lot of like sort of directing, hey okay yeah this is good let's move it over here. I'm doing a lot of like kind of holding and sort of directing things and if you don't have the visual of my hands [inaudible 00:35:39.8] but … and that I find is so easy to do in the later parts of the day. And in the early parts of the day, I do my creation. Joe: Creation as in … you like, what does that mean you're? Ezra: Well creation as in like for me- Joe: Like creating content? What is it? Ezra: Yeah. Well for me it's like thinking about marketing campaigns, looking at strategy, thinking about what we should be doing, thinking … anything that involves thinking of new stuff or doing new stuff or like you know I do a lot of … for my SaaS business and my information marketing business I do a lot of content creation and blog videos and webinars and sales videos and writing scripts. And I do a lot of creating things and also creating strategies. And I find that that is easiest for me in the early parts of the day and then in the later parts of the day reviewing stuff that other people did, talking to them about it, directing things just a little bit. I know it doesn't require as much focus. I mean it's still focused but it's not like I don't have to be fully locked in I could kind of be doing other stuff and you know. Joe: I got you. Hey, you mentioned the word meditation I want to jump right in to that if you don't mind. Just are you up and meditating every day? Did you read a number of books? You've been doing it for a lifetime; I would imagine based upon the way you grew up. Ezra: Yeah I mean you know this hippie commune that I grew up on was not what you think of. It wasn't like crunchy granola, everyone meditated and you know we didn't have animals. It's very different than what you think. It wasn't one of these places where you had to subscribe to some ideology to be a part of it. A lot of these intentional communities in order to get in them you have to be a … you have to hold a certain set of viewpoints. I describe the difference between an intentional community and a cult in these ways because a lot of people are like oh you grew up in a cult like the group of … any time you get a group of people living somewhere with different viewpoints people call it a cult right? So let's just let me give you my description for this, from my perspective a cult is something that is easy to join and hard to leave. An intentional community is something that is very hard to join and very easy to leave. It's like hard to get in to the party and then if you want to go at any time you could get out of here. That's sort of the difference between those two models. And particularly in the place I grew up it wasn't like built around a hey you must believe these things to live here. It was like a bunch of hippies who sort of wanted to step away from traditional mainstream society and focus on how to live pleasurably in a group and do cool things like run charities. And yeah I mean there was definitely some alternative viewpoints and they definitely teach courses on things like communication and relationships and all kinds of stuff. It's a really really cool place but meditation was not like a part of my life as a kid. I was just like … I went to normal, I went to high school normal school. I was a normal kid. I just went home to a different place than most people and I didn't go home to the suburbs. So you know I kind of came across meditation through my wife. She was a yoga teacher when I met her. And she was all into this sort of Eastern philosophies and stuff. And we go through phases where we will be meditating 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night and then we won't do it for a couple months. We kind of like … I think that people think that they're failing if they don't stick to their routines. And it's like routines are meant to be broken. Part of the fun of having a routine is breaking it and coming back to it. It's like the goal is not to just do the same thing all the time. You notice if you work out and you do the same work out over and over your body gets used to it. So we go through phases where we'll do it a lot and we won't do it that much. I do find that when we are doing it I feel better. I feel clear and I like it. And you know when we restart we'll start with just like 10 minutes in the morning, and then maybe like 15 minutes, and then we're like 20 minutes, and I actually found this really cool meditation seats on Amazon. They're like a tiny little plank with a cushion on it and two short little legs and you kneel on them. And man they've been awesome because they keep you upright. But yeah I like meditation; I'm a fan of it. And I think that really it's less about the specific formula that you subscribe to and more about the intention to take time for yourself and take care of yourself. Have a bath in the evening, pay attention to what you're putting into your body, move your body. It's like … it's more about the intention of wellness rather than the particular formula that you are subscribing to for wellness has been my experience with it. Joe: Yeah. Ezra: Because … different strokes for different folks man. Different shit works for different people. Joe: Absolutely. We're running a little short on time but I can talk to you for another hour and a half but I want to talk quickly about the helping that you do in terms of the Smart Marketer. Because the people out there listening they've heard you mention a few different things. I first met you at the Smart Marketer conference in Austin last year, I was just at Blue Ribbon with you in Denver which is your Mastermind group and then I think you're going to Capitalism next week in Austin as well? Ezra: Brand Builders, are you coming? Joe: Brand Builders, yes we'll be there as well. Ezra: Hey, maybe we could actually talk to each other in person. Joe: I know, how about that? That'd be awesome wouldn't it? But you know with Smart Marketer Mark actually bought your Facebook program but you know I'm constantly talking to people about what they're doing within their e-commerce businesses and where to go what resources to look at. Can you just talk briefly in terms of what you do and what programs you have in there and what resources are available for those people that are listening that are e-commerce folks that want to grow their businesses but at the same time do it in a shorter day like yours is. Ezra: For sure let me introduce to you the concept of permaculture. Are you familiar with that concept? Permaculture, it's a farming term. Joe: No. Ezra: What it means generally … what kind of the high level meaning is to reuse all of your resources to their greatest benefit; so capture the rain water, water the garden, take the chicken shit use it for your compost. Reuse of resources. So I spend all of my time with my focus on innovation in the direction of e-commerce and I do a really good job at it. And then with Smart Marketer I document whatever is working and I share that with my community of business owners through my free blog and through educational courses where I have how we run Facebook ads or how we do conversion optimization on our website or how we run project management for our brand or how we run social media for our brand or whatever. I have all these different courses but what they are is they're a direct documentation of what's worked for me and my brands. I then take the money that I make from Smart Marketer and I reinvest back into the e-commerce businesses. And in my e-commerce businesses I'm also developing software. I'm developing things to make them function better. So anything that works really well I open source that and share it with my community of business owners in the form of software as a service. Any money that software as a service brand makes I dump back in to e-commerce. So all of these things sort of work together. The e-commerce is the heart that pumps the blood to the information which then takes revenue and puts it back into e-commerce which then lets me do developments which then I use for my software as a service brands so kind of all works together and Smart Marketer, in particular, is do and then document. And I only have two products, I have digitally delivered courses … digitally delivered educational courses in the forms of videos, PDF's, and handwritten notes on what they are that teach you the things that I have found to be most effective. Paid amplification, how to run Google traffic and Facebook traffic to your website, project management, how to run your e-commerce business with systems and processes at scale and hire people, social media, how to have ongoing content and engagement for people who bought from you in the past. I have all these different courses and they're on my website but I have digitally delivered educational courses and I have a Mastermind. A Mastermind is only for million dollars sellers basically. If you're doing 500 grand minimum most people are doing five million, 10 million, etcetera … then this group is for the high achievers; the people who have really made it. It's a more intimate intense program where it's like very high level 100 people all really kicking butt. So I have that Mastermind and I have the digitally delivered courses. And that's all Smart Marketer is. It's just my personal journey being documented and open sourced for business owners and thankfully for me, I think again timing was a big issue … a big thing here. I was the first you know. I was the kind of first e-commerce influencer and as much as I started a blog about my e-commerce journey before people were doing it really really and it got real popular early on. And I've kind of continued to put energy towards it because I love doing it and I feel really fortunate that people care about what I have to say. It was like really awesome that people want to hear this stuff because for me it's like you have to be a total nerd to be interested in this. It's like kind of dry content, it's not like … it's not dry but it's like if you're not into internet businesses you're not going to be interested in this blog. I mean yeah I talk about relationships and lifestyle and stuff like that too and that's fun but I think that like the real sort of core to base of subscribers are internet business owners and e-commerce business owners, and so that's that model. Joe: That's fantastic. I'm always impressed when you speak. I'm always impressed with your energy, your enthusiasm, and the fact you'd really really trying to help people more than anything else. And it comes back to you. It's not like you're doing it for free and whatnot. Then you're not trying to earn a living for you and your family and whatnot. Obviously, you are but you do it in a manner that is beneficial to others that comes back to you which I commend you for. Ezra: Serve the world unselfishly and profit; that's my motto in business. Joe: And you came on here not even knowing fully what we were going to talk about. It wasn't a pitched Smart Marketer or any of your services. Really it was to talk about work life balance which you laid out very very well. I loved your journey. I love your approach. I love your philosophy. And I'm really hoping that people go back and listen to this again and actually read the article that will be produced from it as well so that can really hone in on what you do and focus on it to, maybe get out to see you at some of these events that you put on and get to Smart Marketer and get better at what they do. Ezra: Thanks man, and I would totally share this. Let me know when it comes out I'll put it out. Joe: Absolutely. Thank you for that. We'll put it down and I'll put all the details on how to reach you and how to reach your courses and whatnot down on the show notes. And I will reach you when we get it wrapped up and ready for the world. Listen to it and watch it and thanks for your time, Ezra. I appreciate it. Ezra: Thanks man, talk to you later. Links: Smartmarketer.com Free Facebook Video Ad Training Full Course Selection Blue Ribbon Mastermind Ezra on Twitter Ezra on LinkedIn

Ryan Daniel Moran was a preacher-in-training turned entrepreneur. He moved to Austin with little to nothing to his him name, and launched Amazon businesses that he eventually sold for over 8 figures. Ryan did us all a solid – really – by documenting and sharing his journey. The Freedom Fast Lane Podcast helps entrepreneurs at every stage of their business, from startup to exit. In this interview, Ryan shares his top three “mistakes”, or as discussed, things he wishes he did differently as he looks back. He openly shares his story and journey, in the hopes that other entrepreneurs do things to maximize the value of their business (and life). Through Ryan's conference, Capitalism.com, he helps bring like minded entrepreneurs and experts in the ecommerce space together to build brands and businesses that last. While he may be a preacher-school-dropout, Ryan still has a way of delivering the goods when it comes to advocating doing the right thing…so good things follow. Episode Highlights: [1:25] Who is Ryan Daniel Moran? [4:38] Is it better to buy or build? [6:43] Ryan thinks we're in a “seller's market” [8:05] What are Ryan's “mistakes” and what would he do differently. [11:30] Does it matter if you like your buyer? Does likability matter? [13:52] The likable buyer story…who won out over an all cash buyer. [15:12] Mistake # 1 – playing the short term. [17:25] Mistake #2 – telling people what to do and diminishing their talent. [18:51] Ryan shares his staffing team numbers. Inhouse and remote. [20:06] Mistake #3 – Ryan wishes he spent more money on advertising, customer acquisition, and brand building. [22:51] Why is a 100% Amazon business worth less than a Shopify store? [24:00] What channels would Ryan expand to – beyond Amazon.com [25:30] The first “nut you have to crack” [27:02] Ryan disagrees with Joe! [30:40] Brands last, product businesses don't. [31:06] Should you be thinking about a possible exit at all times? [33:05] What gives Ryan the “goosies”. Ok…he didn't say goosies, that was JLo. [33:58] Know what you will do with your money before you sell! [36:10] Should you plan your next brand before you sell, or stay focused? [39:29] How do you get more Ryan Daniel Moran Transcription: Mark: So if I could go back in time I would do a number of things different than I did in my entrepreneurial past especially before I sold my first company. And I have told you the story before that when I sold my first company I sold it for $165,000 only to find out that a year later the same person who bought the company got an offer for 350,000 without changing anything about the business at all. So … and there's a lot of regrets I have by not going back in time obviously I think anybody would like to have that ability. Joe: I'm glad it's that instead of saying you're bringing me on as a business partner. Mark: Well, you're here so I can't … I might not say that to your face. Only when you're on vacation and I have somebody else filling in as guest host. Joe: Well, Jason doesn't listen to the podcast, let's talk about him. Mark: Right. Exactly. Joe: Conversation … no regrets there. Yes and Daniel Ryan Moran was our guest and he talked about some of the regrets or as we called the mistakes because that's how he learns in life as many of us do by making mistakes and in trying not to make them over again. Fascinating … fascinating yes they're our podcast today Mark. I don't know if you recall … if you were there for his presentation at Smart Record over the last summer in Austin but he got up on stage and he spoke for 60 minutes with no script, no PowerPoint presentation and everybody was captivated. And the information that he has in it … volume of entrepreneurs that he works with and the velocities, and the approach, and everything about the way he does business and the way he literally … I mean not literally, preaches business. Okay, he's a … he was going to be a preacher so I want to say preacher school dropout. He chose to be an entrepreneur instead but the way that he talks about things is spot on with the way that we see the most successful entrepreneurs run their businesses. They focus on a number of different things and they implement those and maybe someday if they choose to exit they're in a great position to do so. Ryan talks about all of that including his own two exits that combined totaled over eight figures. Mark: Daniel Ryan Moran, same Moran that comes from Freedom Fast Lane right? Joe: Freedom Fast Lane Podcast where he talks about his story. You know five years ago he had a car and he drove to Austin, Texas and he decided he was going to launch an Amazon business and record his journey. And his journey is not over yet. It's on a new adventure, a different larger adventure but his journey kind of came to a new chapter after selling the last Amazon business that he had. But he talks about it all the way through on the Freedom Fast Lane Podcast. He got tired of seeing people do things the wrong way and learned ways to cheat at conferences and started to do his own conferences through capitalism.com and bringing good like-minded people together that build strong foundation long term value businesses and he talked about all of that today. Mark: Fantastic I can't wait to hear it. Let's go to it. Joe: Hey, folks, it's Joe Valley from Quiet Light Brokerage and today I've got somebody that a lot of you might know already. His name is Ryan Daniel Moran. Ryan, welcome to the show. Ryan: Joe thanks about having me in, let's make some magic. Joe: Listen I was having a barbecue last night we had some friends over and this is an absolute true story and one of them is an entrepreneur wannabe. She's in the corporate world and she bought some Amazon products and she tried something and it didn't work but she's going to go at it again someday and she's grilling me … she always asked me how things are with Quiet Light Brokerage and she starts asking about the podcast. I said yeah we're doing all right and hey have you ever talked to Ryan Daniel Moran just like that and here you are today we're talking to you. You're kind of a little celebrity I should say … little, you're kind of a celebrity; a rock star maybe for this … look it was a 50 year old woman. She's rather attractive and she knows who you are. Ryan: Well you know it's like my ideal market is attractive 50 year old women. We all know that that's the market I'm after right now. So tell her to give me a … maybe call me maybe. Joe: She loves listening and the fact that you're first and foremost helping people that's what she loves about it. She says someday she's going to get back to it but she loves listening and she's going to take that leap at some point in the future so good for you. And listen as I said prior to the intro we don't do fancy intros. So if you would … I know it's hard to talk about yourself but give folks a little bit of background about yourself; who you are, where you came from, and what you're all about. Ryan: Yeah. I invest in and I start physical products brands. And the way that I got to that point was actually as a pastoral student back in 2006. I built my first website and started my first business in between high school and college on my shared dial-up computer in my living room and hand coded websites using raw HTML in a software program called Dreamweaver. If you are old enough to remember Dreamweaver and you know it well. So what's funny is we hear a lot of people who are talking about building and … or selling businesses thinking about the good old or either like all the opportunity is gone now or the good old days have these … man, I was hand coding websites in Dreamweaver on a dial up computer. Do you realize how much more opportunity we have now being able to build websites on platforms and sell products on Amazon? So the opportunities are way way bigger now but I was just trying to find a way to supplement my … what I expected to be $30,000 a year salary as a pastor. Now fast forward a few years I did not finish the pastoral route for reasons that would be probably best left on a second podcast that you have Joe that's going to be called quiet skepticism. Joe: Yeah, some kind of … something where we're helping people, we're guiding them off that path right. Ryan: Exactly; quiet go to the light we'll call it. And I did not finish that route and I became a full time entrepreneur. So I was in really involved in the internet marketing space for many years until I really decided or realized I hated that crowd. I didn't like hanging out with those people. So I was like what a conference where those people hung out and I took the skill set that I had from Search Engine Optimization from Pay-Per-Click Marketing from Email Copyrighting and I applied it to physical products brands. And I've had a couple of different exits in the physical products world and now I'm an investor in physical products businesses because it's what I know. It's who I can help the most. And I think it's one of the biggest upside is in the market right now whether you are selling or building a business or buying a business, I think there's a tremendous amount of white space with the transition from big brands into more what I call micro brands mostly Internet based that's where I see the biggest opportunities right now. So that's a … I've had a couple of exits and the total over billed were eight figures in cash exchange. I still own a minority stake in a few of those businesses and have a portfolio business but my primary focus is investing in physical products brands and I have a media company for entrepreneurs at capitalism.com. Joe: Okay, so when it comes to investing people look at buy versus build. In fact, we had a podcast recently with our newest broker Walker Diebel who wrote about a book called Buy Versus Build and there's a really long subtitle and it was a … it quickly rocketed to the top 10 podcasts that we have. And you're talking about investing, do you think it's better to buy versus build at this point in your career or would you recommend somebody that's just starting out to scrape some dollars together and bootstrap something and start? Ryan: Yeah, it's better for me to invest but it wasn't better for me five years ago. In 2013 when I took my first sale on Amazon.com for a physical product I know business investing in physical product brands. I know businesses buying physical products brands now … back then I was buying a lot of websites. And you know what I was buying Joe? I was buying search engine friendly websites with email lists … social media followings weren't this big back then, but with audiences, followings targeting each market that sold affiliate products; because that was what I knew. Joe: That's what you knew. Ryan: I would have been a lot of people who are like looking for the system and that you are the system. You are the machine. And your machine is unique to you. So applying your machine to different opportunities is where value is created. So for me, I'm … at this point, I have more upside as an investor because I already have all the retail connections. I have the connections to sell businesses. I'm connected to other investors. That's my own skill set but the entrepreneur who I invest in is way better suited to start that company than I am and that's what capitalism is. Where I get the value that I bring in combination of the value that you bring and when we bring them together it's greater than the sum of our arts. And so for me yeah I'm … I have more value as an investor but to say like it's better I think would be a mistake. Joe: You know I think you're absolutely right. It depends upon the individual's situation without a doubt. I bought and I've sold and I've invested as well and I can say each were successful in their own way and each were very very difficult in their own ways as well. You'll learn along the way from the mistakes mostly. Ryan: If I could Joe I will add though, I mean globally I think we're in a seller's market. I think we're looking at buying versus selling if I give it a binary choice I do think we're in a seller's market right now. Joe: I have to agree with you 100%. When we have a good quality listing come … I had a conversation with someone this morning who wants to buy. And he's a referral from somebody who already bought and this guy is doing great so I want to do what he's doing. And the response is look when a great listing comes along you need to be prepared. So the more listings you look at the more you're going to know the right shit when it comes along. And you need to be able to act fast because you and a dozen other people are doing the same thing and they're going to make an offer on that business. So I agree it's a seller's market but at the same time, the multiple still don't get pushed too high. It's still the buyer to decide that. You and I as sellers, as brokers can pick whatever number we think the value of the business is but we don't make the final decision at the end it's usually the buyer. The seller's got a lot to say about it because they can say yes or no. But it's still the buyer makes the decision in terms of the value for the most part. But you just recently said you've exited a couple of different times in the last few years. What did you learn in that process if you look at the exit? Or maybe do you want to talk about the fact … the mistakes you made maybe building and what you can do to help the entrepreneurs that are listening or perhaps the exit and maybe a little bit of both. Ryan: Yeah well, there's one thing in particular that I think was on the stake if you will and it was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. By the way, this is C money right here or by a … my … he is the one who wants to make great on the Internet. Joe: For those listening and not watching somebody just walked into the background. Ryan: Yeah, so the mistake that I made was thinking that the buyer had all of the control. And if I could redo this Joe, the truth is if you built something, if you built a business you're the one with the asset. You're the one with the goods that money is chasing you, people want to buy you and so often the seller comes into market and is like the thing that I'm after is the check and I'm hoping that I get the check and that immediately puts you in the frame in which you're the after. You're the one who is not in the power position. So we share them with an offer and the seller is like thank you please oh please Mr. Money Pants I would like your money. And now they're in a position to beat you up over earnings, over … in the negotiations. So what I wish I had done was recognize the fact that I'm the one with the goods. I'm the one with the asset that people want. I'm the one courting the offers. People are making offers to me. There they want one I got not the other way around. So if you're in that position and you're willing to say no and you combine that with the turn ship that says here's what I'm looking for, that to me puts the seller in the frame of mind repair and the negotiating position. I didn't do that. I discovered that after the fact and I really could only have learned that by going through the process. I learned … I personally learned by making mistakes and paying for them later. Joe: We all do. Ryan: Yeah but that's a mistake that I wish somebody had told me before I went to market. Joe: Or is it … the buyer that you're referring to is it a strategic buyer or did you have your business officially listed and people came to you? Ryan: Yeah, we had it listed and we were acquired by an equity group. I still own a minority stake in that company and I'm in great terms with the equity group. I'm really happy with the buyer. I have become friends and obviously business partners at this point. But had I gone to the market with terms that I wanted I probably would have ended up in a more favorable financial position when it came to closing. Joe: Well, the next time you have a transaction you'll know that and you'll be able to make adjustments. Ryan: Right. Joe: Really I think like you said the check isn't the end all, it's more about … I think almost in many ways what your next adventure is going to be. I know that a lot of folks that I work with and myself included when I exited I was just … I sold too late. I was emotionally tired and I think that's the absolute wrong time to sell. You should sell … you should plan to sell, just don't wake up and decide to sell. But when you're emotionally tired you're not doing everything that you can to maximize the profits of the business and that's going to drive down the value. And you're going to get beat up at the end if you're so committed to that check that you can't negotiate a little bit more for something else and be willing to walk away from that buyer if they're if they're not a good buyer. And correct me if I'm wrong but just tell me how you think here, I always find that it makes an enormous difference if you like the person that's buying your business or the one … if you're buying a business from. It's not just about the check. It's not just about the money. It's the people you're doing business with. And I think that as a seller you can get more value if you're respected and professional and likable and the same as a buyer, if you're a buyer and you're professional and likable and complement the owner on the business that they built that you're going to get a better transaction out of it versus all the hard core raw street negotiations. What are your thoughts on that? Ryan: I don't know if you are right or wrong because I intentionally don't do business with people that I don't like. [crosstalk 00:15:45.7] Joe: So, therefore, anybody that wants to buy a business from you if you don't like them then you've got to do that to work with somebody you like. A classic- Ryan: I don't think everybody has that mentality though. I think I would even go as far as to say the majority of people are buying and selling based on numbers or like the deal and very few entrepreneurs get to find every purchase as a person. And so I think most people are approaching it by numbers and logically rather than is there a connection here. I personally … just like for the protection of my own lifestyle am willing to say no to anything that I personally don't like. And what that does is it always puts me in a strong negotiating position because if I don't like somebody I have no problem walking away. And the person who has … the person who is most willing to walk usually has the upper hand in the negotiation. Joe: I agree 100%. I find that from a buyer's perspective one of the questions I get a lot from buyers if I'm up on a panel or speaking or something like this is how do I negotiate up against an all cash buyer, somebody that's got more money than me? And the tried and true answer is really is be likeable. It's … you don't necessarily have to have more cash to get the deal done and I … the classic example is I sold a business last fall. It was about two and a $2.5M and the guy had two full price offers within the first 10 days. One was from an all cash buyer who was a little rough around the edges and was hard to work with. The other was from a really likable guy who was buying with an SBA loan and actually required 10% seller financing in that. The entrepreneur, the seller of this business had the choice; you could go for the all cash or you can go for the guy that he liked. He actually chose the full price SBA buyer and chose to carry a 10% seller note versus working with somebody that he didn't like. So in that situation, I think it makes a difference in terms of … buyers that are listening be likable. If you're working with a broker you absolutely have to be likeable because they're … as you said it's more of a seller's market. And there's a lot of buyers out there. There are buyers that are competing for that same business and when they're likeable they're going to build rapport and when you build rapport you sometimes learn about things before they hit the market as well. Ryan, talk to me about some of the mistakes you've made in your own business. Maybe two or three of the biggest mistakes that comes up at the top of your head. Looking back and learning damn I screwed that up if I ever do that again I'm going to it a different way. Ryan: Well, every time I've made a mistake it was because I was playing the short term. So when I have made short term decisions I usually make bad decisions. I like to say that the longer term that I can make decisions the wiser I am and the better decisions that I make. I said before that people forget that behind every purchase is a person … that goes for customers too and all relationships are long term relationships. Or the best relationships are long term relationships. So if you are aware that behind every transaction is a person and you play it like it's a long term relationship you end up building the better company. Sometimes in spite of a short term decision, meaning … for example as we're recording this there's a … in the Amazon there's a thing we're calling review gate where Amazon is coming in and hit them onto your businesses and removing their reviews. And it's been a bloodbath. It's been absolute bloodbath. And the people who are soaring through it are people who have been doing of the right things the right way for the longest. And the people who are being hurt the most are the people who are the most profitable over the last couple years because they played the tactic game. And like there's absolutely room for tactics inside of every business but those who have been building really solid brands and building audiences and building followings they're going to soar right through this and capture a whole heck of a lot of market share. So the mistakes that I made were always in saying what's the Band-Aid solution here rather than building for the long term. So we take a rule now in the business that we're building, we say okay here's the situation that we're in rather than talk about how we're going to fix it let's say what do we wish we had started doing 90 days ago and that would have made today a lot easier to get through? That's the decision that we need to make today which is a really hard conversation to have when you're in reaction mode. But we force ourselves to ask that question because it usually addresses whatever the root cause is that we need to fix rather than going for a Band-Aid solution. So that being mistake number one, mistake number two would be as a leader telling people what to do. There's a great book called Multipliers that really morphed my brain in terms of how I can affect [inaudible 00:20:52.9] people. And what I realize after reading that book was that I have been diminishing the talents on my teams by telling people what I wanted them to do rather than casting a vision and inviting people to build their piece of that. Now that seems kind of a nuance and maybe overly simplistic but I couldn't emphasize enough the accountability that this book brought me on how much I was diminishing the people that I was working with, And the difference in energy and growth that happened once I started correcting those issues. So as an entrepreneur, we often have like our baby that we're bringing in to our team and we're telling people how to build the baby when reality if we're working with smart people they'll probably own that area of expertise better than we can even if we can't see it. And the big distinction of that book highlights is someone who diminishes their team is usually the smartest person in the room but a real leader makes the rest of the team like they're the smartest person in the room. And that was a huge shift in my overall happiness and with the growth of my companies and it's something that I wished that I had done before I was building companies to sell them. Joe: What kind of staffing do you have just out of curiosity? Ryan: Well, the company that I just exited was a team of four. The portfolio of companies … of brands that I have is a team of five. And my media company capitalism.com is a team of six. Joe: And are all of those people in-house or do you do some … or the VA's are they working remotely or they come to the office every day? Ryan: I'm only counting in-house people so that does not count freelancers. But no not everybody … we have … there's, we are a distributed team. So like I'm recording this in my office right now, one of my team members is just right here my side. But people will come in and out. Some people … like we have a team member in Canada, we have a team member in Germany, but they're all full time dedicated to [inaudible 00:22:47.0]. Joe: Good. I asked that because you know most people that are listening would probably be considered lifestyle entrepreneurs and they have to outsource staff and VA's and people working remotely. So it's good to know that even though they're not coming into your office every day this is really important [inaudible 00:23:02.3] get their short term vision don't have that long term vision so that you don't have major major stomach aches with algorithm updates we'll review gates in that situation and then over managing of the staff you know let them be their experts; anything else that comes to mind? Ryan: As far as big mistakes that I've made … I mean we talked about the mistake in selling and as far as building the business I'll say I wished that I had spent more money on cold advertising. Like always like there's never been a business that was like ah you know I think I spent too much on advertising. I've only ever said I wish I'd spent more on advertising. Joe: Yeah, where would you have spent it because these are primarily Amazon based businesses correct? Ryan: The businesses that I personally built, yes. Joe: Right. So where would you spend that money? Ryan: So we just identified the problem because you said they were mostly Amazon based businesses so had I done things even better I would have doubled down on non-Amazon advertising. Because what … if you're an Amazon business which is like nails on a chalkboard to me because it means you're dependent on somebody else. Joe: Right. Ryan: It means that you're dependent on this channel and you've got to go double down on building a business has a different leg to the stool and that when you combine those things together magic can happen. If you've got an email list of 100,000 people that you've built from cold advertising or from buying tripwires and now you're combining that with the power of something like Amazon.com that's really really powerful. Most physical products sellers never make that [inaudible 00:24:32.6] or they get so myopic into one channel that they never spend the money and the time to go develop the advertising for another channel. I wish I had been comfortable losing my rear end on other advertising channels until I figured out those systems. It's interesting Joe, it's true that every channel you will lose for a while and then you figure out the systems and then you start to grow through it and you get profitable. The strange thing is that most people once they've figured it out and get profitable they're unwilling to go do that hard work in another area. So the way that Amazon worked in 2013, '14, and '15 was if you spend until you grab long enough you could outrank everybody else and go win but I never … I lost that hustle when it came down to Facebook Ads or influencers and people start looking for the immediate ROI. In what business is there immediate ROI? When you're building a long term brand that has sales potential … like buyers are buying the systems; they're buying profitable systems because you've already gone through that hard work of developing the systems that are profitable. But it requires you to go build them so I wish I had spent more on advertising, been more willing to lay it on the line, rolled more back into reinvestment. So I'll call that mistake number three. Joe: So for buyers and sellers that are listening, entrepreneurs that are listening it's that one legged stool, two legged stool, three legged stool. If you're 100% Amazon business it's riskier than if you also have a revenue channel from Google Ad Words and driving traffic to your Shopify store and you might be doing wholesale or B2B things of that nature but right away as I've said before if you've got a business that's just at within $100,000 in discretionary earnings that's 100% Amazon same business $100,000 in discretionary earnings but you've got 60% Amazon, 25% Shopify, I guess that would be 15% percent [inaudible 00:26:36.4] my math here, another percent of B2B that business on the other side is going to be worth 15 to 20% more. So you might be breaking even or losing a little bit of money on that land grab trying to grab more customers but if you can turn that into even the same discretionary earnings that business automatically is going to be worth 15 to 20% more because the buyers will pay more for a risk averse business that'll be around for the longer term so very very good advice. What channel would you go to first? Because there are so many options these days and building a channel off of Amazon is hard as you know. You've got to learn a whole new expertise. Where would you go first and what do most of your successful folks do? Ryan: Yeah and I'm actually going to cue on very creatively sidestepped this question because the obvious is Amazon. But where I would suggest is actually people double down on where the audience is. To me, this is the nut has to be cracked if their building a sellable company. And what that means to me it is for some people their audience hangs out following influencers. For other people that is they follow blogs or they have a blog where the audiences are already hanging out. Or some people they've got a Facebook where there's an audience. Now what most businesses, especially like a million dollar businesses, are doing is they're going channel first and trying to extract as much of it as possible. Like I'm going to go to Amazon try to rank and pull as much out of this pie as possible. Only a few people can win that game but if you switch it and you say where are my people who is the ideal buyer and where are they then the channel where you collect the order can always change. And that makes Shopify, Amazon, B2B a whole lot easier. The first nut that you have to crack isn't where the buyers hang out apart from the sales transaction and then you bring those buyers to the transaction. So the transaction to me … Amazon, easy no question. Put your product on Amazon the credit card is already there, people are already looking for it. No question, easy, done. The nut that needs to be cracked is what happens one step before that. And if there is … like if you don't have the influence, the list, the following, the traffic, the pay-per-click strategy that some way to go get those people and bring them into your ecosystem I think you are struggling from the get go and that's the primary question that I ask the entrepreneur. Joe: Yeah and I think depending upon as you say the product and what they're offering some of those different channels will make more sense. You know I had a conversation with someone this morning that has several brands and one brand has incredible numbers with email marketing and that same expertise applied to that different brand doesn't do as well. Ryan: Right. Joe: They're driving people to their Shopify store though Amazon keeps growing and out phasing everything else. So I understand identify where your customers hang out and then you've got to go find those customers. To own that list though you need to send them to your own store, not to Amazon. So are you sort of balancing between sending them to Amazon because it's all there or? Ryan: No, I just disagree. So I think that the loyalty to the brand is the customer experience. And you give the customer the ability to give you money wherever they are most comfortable making the purchase. I heard Brian Lee say where it's … Brian Lee is the founder of the Honest Company, the billion dollar brand with Jessica Alba, and I heard him say once that he considers it a win when the product is in the customer's home. That's when you've wo, not collecting it online e-commerce site, not getting into retail. It's when the product is in the customer's home. However, they get it and you want to release as little friction as possible getting the product into the customer's home. You will own the customer experience when you have their data. You have the ability to communicate a message in front of them. So if you've got the email list and you send them over to Amazon, Amazon rewards that and your conversion rate is probably going to be higher sending them to Amazon that sending them to your Shopify store. So there's a balance [inaudible 00:31:12.7] I know that I can get a higher immediate customer value sending them to my own web site because I can put them through upsells and cross sells to get their immediate data versus sending them to Amazon where I am going to have to work to get their data. I don't have any upsell experience. They might see a negative review. And so the entrepreneur is going to have to play the game of where the numbers make the most sense over the long term. But I think that the actual customer experience happens in when you communicate with them. And that's in the email message, that's in the outside of just a transaction, not just where their credit card is being added but words being communicated. Joe: Okay, I get and I'm just going to repeat it for those that are … well not smarter than me; let's put it that way. So it's capturing the customer information up front, building that relationship with them, and then simply send them to the place that they can buy the product and experience the brand with the least amount of friction and get it in their home. Ryan: Nailed it. Joe: Okay. Ryan: That's my opinion. Joe: And it all goes back I would say and it's kind of almost unspoken that the brand has to be pretty amazing so focus on that first. Build a great product, a great brand so they have a great experience and then do all that other stuff as well. Ryan: Yeah and let me address that because that often brings up the question how do I identify a brand? Like what exactly is the brand. And the brand is the way that trust is communicated to a very specific customer. Most Amazon sellers have no idea over their customers they know what their product is. If you know what you sell and not who you sell to you do not have a brand. Or you might have a brand but it's really lousy whereas if you know who the person is, it makes the product really really easy. I was just meeting with one of my team members today; we were expressing the frustration over one of our brands in our portfolio. Because when we acquired it, it sold a lot of product but it had no target market. And so we've had to do a lot of work to convert that brand into an actual brand where people are not just buying a product but they're buying something and it says about them sells. Those businesses last, product businesses don't because they're commodities. You forget about commodities and the minute that there's a better price or better customer experience their loyalty changes. But when you've got the brand people are very stingy with their trust. I want to give it to you, you have them for as long as you keep their trust. Joe: Very important message right there. Ryan, any thoughts in terms of whether someone should be building this business and always think about the future and possible exits; do you try to instill in them that they should know the value of their business in the event they wake up some day and want to move on or do you just focus on building that brand and when you're ready the time will come? Ryan: You know the real … the temptation for me is to say that no, you shouldn't be necessarily thinking about selling but I know that I'm in a different spot than everyone who's listening. So I would say if you are building this to make money, be building it to sell from day one. Because the very act of being in it for the money means that you will burn out, you will wake up and want to do something else. It's going to happen. So if that … and like let's just be real about it, if you're in it because of the payday, build it to sell because that's what you're in it for and the payday is the cherry at the end of the rainbow here. If you were in it because you've got a product you want to bring to the world then still develop the systems and processes that will keep you in the position to be in your zone of genius. And that will make you more sellable one day but I don't think it's necessary for you to know what it's worth or be making decisions based on that. So these are different goals. Now I build companies that I'm excited about and I am building them in the same way that we make something valuable because I want to be in a position where I'm just in my zone of genius. But it's a different mindset than if I'm building something because it's going to be profitable. Does that make sense Joe? Joe: Absolutely; excellent …excellent. Hey listen I know we're running out of time here I just want to say that last summer I was at the stock market conference and you got up and you spoke as did another dozen or so very very successful entrepreneurs. Each and every one of them had a PowerPoint presentation. You got up there with nothing. And you talked for an hour and the audience was captivated as was I. You have a gift thank you for sharing it. I appreciate it. Ryan: I just got goose bumps. Thank you so much, mate. I really appreciate it. Joe: How do more people get to experience that and listen to you and hear what you do share? Ryan: You know I'd love to answer that question, can I offer one more piece of advice before we go? Joe: You can offer a dozen more pieces of advice. Ryan: Wow, awesome. I'll leave it to one but if you are in this to please have a plan of what you're going to do with the money when you get it. Entrepreneurs are magicians. We remake things up here on thin air. We create value out of thin air. We create a bigger pie. We make money show up. And we also make things disappear. Joe: Isn't that true? Ryan: And if you do not have a plan of what you're going to do with the money it will slip through your fingers. I know you think you're the exception. I know you think all I have to do is invest this at 8% and I'm [inaudible 00:37:11.5]. I know you think that's how it's going to be. You will ball the money. I … right now I just heard you think “no I won't”, yes you will. So if you don't have a net for catching the money and allocating the money for your lifestyle you will be back in the grind very very quickly. I promise you, I know you don't believe me. I'm here to tell you that's the case. Have a plan for what to do with the money once you get the money. It's actually my favorite conversation to have. At some point, I'll probably have more chops [inaudible 00:37:45.3] about investing once you have a big windfall. But for now, it's like have a plan like a plan is better than no plan. And that plan would probably be best done after you sat on the money for about six months and you've gotten used to that money being in the bank account. Your second question or actually your only question was- Joe: Can I interrupt that? Ryan: Please. Joe: I definitely want to get to that but in terms of having the plan to exit, I'm always telling people look have your next adventure planned. Because entrepreneurs like you say they blow through the money, it goes through their hands like saying. I'm often saying maybe get that other opportunity started and launched long as it's not competing to get the ball rolling. So that you got some working capital maybe you're going to put it in … some of it you're not as bootstrapped although you'll be more successful probably if you are. Do you think maybe they should 100% focus on what they're doing on that brand before they sell it up until the day they sell or maybe when it gets big enough and good enough and they've done enough right they can take some of their attention and start Brand B while they're selling off Brand A? Ryan: Wow, Joe. The reason I'm saying wow is because my experience is pretty unique and that was I took about a week off and then I immediately went back to workaholism and it was the worst. It was a horrible experience. Now full disclose like at the same time I was going through separation and I'm going through a lot life changes. I threw myself into work right after the sale. I celebrated by reading books on my patio for like eight days and I was immediately back to workaholism. And I like … I roasted my body, I mean I so needed a break and I did not give myself that break. I don't know if every entrepreneur was as burnt out as I was. I was more burnt out than I [inaudible 00:39:40.5]. Joe: Most ideal [inaudible 00:39:42.8] they come to me tired, exhausted, ready to move on. Ryan: Joe, it's been over a year. I wouldn't even say I'm back now. You know I'm probably operating at 75% of capacity because I never really recovered. So should you go right back into it? I don't know. I think it depends on the level you're at and your own wiring. I make really good decisions when I'm relaxed and creative. I make terrible short term decisions when I'm stressed. And when I'm in that workaholic mode I'm a terrible entrepreneur. I wish I had just blissed out for like three months; I didn't. Joe: I don't know what the folks that listen to you every week would do if you would disappear for three months though. Ryan: Well here's the thing though Joe. I kind of did. Like my podcast sucked for like three months, three to six months and I was trying … like I'm sitting in front of mic trying to come up with things to say and I was uncreative as heck. So I sort of did disappear it was just a different way. And now I'm getting back to it and it's a completely different experience. But I actually think I did my listeners a disservice by not taking a break. And if have been just really upfront and be like guys I just got an eight figure check I am going to the beach and I will call you when I'm ready. My audience would've popped but instead, I was like operating from this place of like I'm so … oh my goodness I'm so tired and I turned off a lot of people. I know it's not the answer that you expected it's not the answer I expected to give you. Joe: No, I like it. Ryan: But I think it's true. Joe: I think sleep and rest and meditation or whatever it is to focus on is absolutely necessary. So back to that original question and you know finding out what they do with the money after they sell. How do they get more of Ryan Daniel Moran? How do they experience what that audience down at Smart Market and myself experienced where you just talked and everybody listened and took notes and all that? Ryan: Well, thanks so much, man, my media company is capitalism.com. My podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. And I say things into a microphone and we hold events at capitalism.com that are specifically for entrepreneurs. And we're actually … we just rebooted the Freedom Fast Lane podcast. I feel as though- Joe: With fresh energy. Ryan: What's that? Joe: With fresh energy right? Ryan: Well yeah, I think you'd probably feel it from me. Five years ago I started this journey as a boy and I was … I just put everything I owned into my car, drove to Austin, Texas, started some new companies, I documented the whole experience from startup to sale. And then I kind of grew up while documenting the journey. And now there's a new journey and it's a much bigger one and so we just rebooted kind of the entire audience, the whole experience in the podcast. And my podcast is called Freedom Fast Lane. My company is capitalism.com. Joe: Okay. Well, I'll make sure those are in the show notes. I'd love to see you be more successful on this new adventure, this bigger journey. Ryan: Thank you. Joe: Let's stay in touch. I think I may see you at the capitalism conference at the end of August; let's see. At the very least we'll be to as many as we can be over the next few years. Ryan: Good to see you man, thank you so much for having me. Joe: Thanks for your time, I appreciate it. Links: Capitalism.com FreedomFastlane.com

In the latest Blood Red podcast, regular host and Liverpool reporter Ian Doyle is finally reunited with full-time Liverpool correspondent - both home and away - James Pearce, along with ECHO duo Joe Rimmer and Paul Gorst to discuss the last few days of all things Anfield. On the agenda is the decision to allow Ragnar Klavan to depart, future plans for Joe Gomez, what's going to happen to Liverpool's unwanted, the injury to Manchester City's Kevin De Bruyne, the possible return of the 39th game and a look towards next Monday's game at Crystal Palace.There's also yet another inappropriate Selhurst Park-related observation from the nasty man Joe For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Kubernetes Joe Beda @jbeda | Heptio | eightypercent.net Show Notes: 00:51 - What is Kubernetes? Why does it exist? 07:32 - Kubernetes Cluster; Cluster Autoscaling 11:43 - Application Abstraction 14:44 - Services That Implement Kubernetes 16:08 - Starting Heptio 17:58 - Kubernetes vs Services Like Cloud Foundry and OpenShift 22:39 - Getting Started with Kubernetes 27:37 - Working on the Original Internet Explorer Team Resources: Google Compute Engine Google Container Engine Minikube Kubernetes: Up and Running: Dive into the Future of Infrastructure by Kelsey Hightower, Brendan Burns, and Joe Beda Joe Beda: Kubecon Berlin Keynote: Scaling Kubernetes: How do we grow the Kubernetes user base by 10x? Wordpress with Helm Sock Shop: A Microservices Demo Application Kelsey Hightower Keynote: Kubernetes Federation Joe Beda: Kubernetes 101 AWS Quick Start for Kubernetes by Heptio Open Source Bridge: Enter the coupon code PODCAST to get $50 off a ticket! The conference will be held June 20-23, 2017 at The Eliot Center in downtown Portland, Oregon. Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode 70. With me is Elrick Ryan. ELRICK: Hey, what's going on? CHARLES: We're going to get started with our guest here who many of you may have heard of before. You probably heard of the technology that he created or was a key part of creating, a self-described medium deal. [Laughter] JOE: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. CHARLES: Joe, here at The Frontside most of what we do is UI-related, completely frontend but obviously, the frontend is built on backend technology and we need to be running things that serve our clients. Kubernetes is something that I think I started hearing about, I don't know maybe a year ago. All of a sudden, it just started popping up in my Twitter feed and I was like, "Hmm, that's a weird word," and then people started talking more and more about it and move from something that was behind me into something that was to the side and now it's edging into our peripheral vision more and more as I think more and more people adopt it, to build things on top of it. I'm really excited to have you here on the show to just talk about it. I guess we should start by saying what is the reason for its existence? What are the unique set of problems that you were encountering or noticed that everybody was encountering that caused you to want to create this? JOE: That's a really good set up, I think just for way of context, I spent about 10 years at Google. I learned how to do software on the server at Google. Before that, I was at Microsoft working on Internet Explorer and Windows Presentation Foundation, which maybe some of your listeners had to actually go ahead and use that. I learned how to write software for the server at Google so my experience in terms of what it takes to build and deploy software was really warped by that. It really doesn't much what pretty much anybody else in the industry does or at least did. As my career progressed, I ended up starting this project called Google Compute Engine which is Google's virtual machine as a service, analogous to say, EC2. Then as that became more and more of a priority for the company. There was this idea that we wanted internal Google developers to have a shared experience with external users. Internally, Google didn't do anything with virtual machines hardly. Everything was with containers and Google had built up some really sophisticated systems to be able to manage containers across very large clusters of computers. For Google developers, the interface to the world of production and how you actually launched off and monitor and maintain it was through this toolset, Borg and all these fellow travelers that come along with it inside of Google. Nobody really actually managed machines using traditional configuration management tools like Puppet or Chef or anything like that. It's a completely different experience. We built a compute engine, GCE and then I had a new boss because of executive shuffle and he spun up a VM and he'd been at Google for a while. His reaction to the thing was like, "Now, what?" I was like I'm sitting there at the root prompt go and like, "I don't know what to do now." It turns out that inside of Google that was actually a common thing. It just felt incredibly primitive to actually have a raw VM that you could have SSH into because there's so much to be done above that to get to something that you're comfortable with building a production grade service on top of. The choice as Google got more and more serious about cloud was to either have everybody inside of Google start using raw VMs and live the life that everybody outside of Google's living or try and bring the experience around Borg and this idea of very dynamic, container-centric, scheduled-cluster thinking bring that outside of Google. Borg was entangled enough with the rest of Google systems that sort of porting that directly and externalizing that directly wasn't super practical. Me and couple of other folks, Brendan Burns and Craig McLuckie pitched this crazy idea of starting a new open source project that borrowed from a lot of the ideas from Borg but really melded it with a lot of the needs for folks outside of Google because again, Google is a bit of a special case in so many ways. The core problem that we're solving here is how do you move the idea of deploying software from being something that's based on these physical concepts like virtual machines, where the amount of problems that you have to solve, to actually get that thing up and running is actually pretty great. How do we move that such that you have a higher, more logical set of abstractions that you're dealing with? Instead of worrying about what kernel you're running on, instead of worrying about individual nodes and what happens if a node goes down, you can instead just say, "Make sure this thing is running," and the system will just do its best to make sure that things are running and then you can also do interesting things like make sure 10 of these things are running, which is at Google scale that ends up being important. CHARLES: When you say like a thing, you're talking about like a database server or API server or --? JOE: Yeah, any process that you could want to be running. Exactly. The abstraction that you think about when you're deploying stuff into the cloud moves from a virtual machine to a process. When I say process, I mean like a process plus all the things that it needs so that ends up being a container or a Docker image or something along those lines. Now the way that Google does it internally slightly different than how it's done with Docker but you can squint at these things and you can see a lot of parallels there. When Docker first came out, it was really good. I think at Docker and containers people look for three things out of it. The first one is that they want a packaged artifact, something that I can create, run on my laptop, run in a data center and it's mostly the same thing running in both places and that's an incredibly useful thing, like on your Mac you have a .app and it's really a directory but the finder treats it as you can just drag it around and the thing runs. Containers are that for the server. They just have this thing that you can just say, run this thing on the server and you're pretty sure that it's going to run. That's a huge step forward and I think that's what most folks really see in the value with respect to Docker. Other things that folks look at with containerized technology is a level of efficiency of being able to pack a lot of stuff onto a little bit of hardware. That was the main driver for Google. Google has so many computers that if you improve utilization by 1%, that ends up being real money. Then the last thing is, I think a lot of folks look at this as a security boundary and I think there's some real nuance conversations to have around that. The goal is to take that logical infrastructure and make it such that, instead of talking about raw VMs, you're actually talking about containers and processes and how these things relate to each other. Yet, you still have the flexibility of a tool box that you get with an infrastructure level system versus if you look at something like Heroku or App Engine or these other platform as a service. Those things are relatively fixed function in terms of their architectures that you can build. I think the container cluster stuff that you see with things like Kubernetes is a nice middle ground between raw VMs and a very, very opinionated platform as a service type of thing. It ends up being a building block for building their more specialized experiences. There's a lot to digest there so I apologize. CHARLES: Yeah, there's a lot to digest there but we can jump right into digesting it. You were talking about the different abstractions where you have your hardware, your virtual machine and the containers that are running on top of that virtual machine and then you mentioned, I think I'm all the way up there but then you said Kubernetes cluster. What is the anatomy of a Kubernetes cluster and what does that entail? And what can you do with it? JOE: When folks talk about Kubernetes, I think there's two different audiences and it's important to talk about the experience from each audience. There's the audience from the point of view of what it takes to actually run a cluster -- this is a cluster operator audience -- then there's the audience in terms of what it takes to use a cluster. Assuming that somebody else is running a cluster for me, what does it look like for me to go ahead and use this thing? This is really different from a lot of different dev app tools which really makes these things together. We've tried to create a clean split here. I'm going to skip past what it means to launch and run a Kubernetes cluster because it turns out that over time, this is going to be something that you can just have somebody else do for you. It's like running your own MySQL database versus using RDS in Amazon. At some point, you're going to be like, "You know what, that's a pain in the butt. I want to make that somebody else's problem." When it comes to using the cluster, pretty much what it comes down to is that you can tell a cluster. There's an API to a cluster and that API is sort of a spiritual cousin to something like the EC2 API. You can talk to this API -- it's a RESTful API -- and you can say, "Make sure that you have 10 of these container images running," and then Kubernetes will make sure that ten of those things are running. If a node goes down, it'll start another one up and it will maintain that. That's the first piece of the puzzle. That creates a very dynamic environment where you can actually program these things coming and going, scaling up and down. The next piece of the puzzle that really, really starts to be necessary then is that if you have things moving around, you need a way to find them. There is built in ideas of defining what a service is and then doing service discovery. Service discovery is a fancy name for naming. It's like I have a name for something, I want to look that up to an IP address so that I can talk to it. Traditionally we use DNS. DNS is problematic in the super dynamic environments so a lot of folks, as they build backend systems within the data center, they really start moving past DNS to something that's a lot more dynamic and purpose-built for that. But you can think about it in your mind as a fancy super-fast DNS. CHARLES: The customer is itself something that's abstract so I can change it state and configure it and say, "I want 10 instances of Postgres running," or, "I want between five and 15 and it will handle all of that for you." How do you then make it smart so that you can react to load, for example like all of the sudden, this thing is handling more load so I need to say... What's the word I'm looking for, I need to handle -- JOE: Autoscale? CHARLES: Yeah, autoscale. Are there primitives for that? JOE: Exactly. Kubernetes itself was meant to be a tool box that you can build on top of. There are some common community-built primitives for doing it's called -- excuse the nomenclature here because there's a lot of it in Kubernetes and I can define it -- Horizontal Pod Autoscaling. It's this idea that you can have a set of pods and you want to tune the number of replicas to that pod based on load. That's something that's built in. But now maybe you're cluster, you don't have enough nodes in your cluster as you go up and down so there's this idea of cluster autoscaling where I want to add more capacity that I'm actually launching these things into. Fundamentally, Kubernetes is built on top of virtual machines so at the base, there's a bunch of virtual or physical machines hardware that's running and then it's the idea of how do I schedule stuff into that and then I can pack things into that cluster. There's this idea of scaling the cluster but then also scaling workloads running on top of the cluster. If you find that some of these algorithms or methods for how you want to scale things when you want to launch things, how you want to hook them up, if those things don't work for you, the Kubernetes system itself is programmable so you can build your own algorithms for how you want to launch and control things. It's really built from the get go to be an extensible system. CHARLES: One question that's keeps coming up is as I hear you describing these things is the Kubernetes cluster then, it's not application-oriented so you could have multiple applications running on a single cluster? JOE: Very much so. CHARLES: How do you then layer on your application abstraction on top of this cluster abstraction? JOE: An application is made up of a bunch of running bits, whether it'd be a database. I think as we move towards microservices, it's not just going to be one set of code. It can be a bunch of sets of codes that are working together or bunch of servers that are working together. There are these ideas are like I want to run 10 of these things, I want to run five of these things, I want to run three of these things and then I want them to be able to find each other and then I want to take this thing and I want to expose it out to the internet through a load balancer on Amazon, for example. Kubernetes can help to set up all those pieces. It turns out that Kubernetes doesn't have an idea of an application. There is no actually object inside a Kubernetes called application. There is this idea of running services and exposing services and if you bring a bunch of services together, that ends up being an application. But in a modern world, you actually have services that can play double duty across applications. One of the things that I think is exciting about Kubernetes is that it can grow with you as you move from a single application to something that really becomes a service mesh, as your application, your company grows. Imagine that you have some sort of app and then you have your customer service portal for your internal employees. You can have those both being frontend applications, both running on a Kubernetes cluster, talking to a common backend with a hidden API that you don't expose to customers but it's something that's exposed to both of those frontends and then that API may talk to a database. Then as you understand your problems, you can actually spawn off different microservices that can be managed separately by different teams. Kubernetes becomes a platform where you can actually start with something relatively simple and then grow with that and have it stretch from single application to multiple service microservice-base application to a larger cluster that can actually stretch across multiple teams and there's a bunch of facilities for folks not stepping on each other's toes as they do this stuff. Just to be clear, this is what Kubernetes is as it's based. I think one of the powerful things that you can do is that there's a whole host to folks that are building more platform as a service like abstractions on top of Kubernetes. I'm not going to say it's a trivial thing but it's a relatively straightforward thing to build a Heroku-like experience on top of Kubernetes. But the great thing is that if you find that that Heroku experience, if some of the opinions that were made as part of that don't work for you, you can actually drop down to a level that's more useful than going all the way down to raw VM because right now, if you're running on Heroku and something doesn't work for you, it's like, "Here's a raw VM. Good luck with that." There's a huge cliff as you actually want to start coloring outside the lines for, as I mix my metaphors here for these platform services. ELRICK: What services that are out there that you can use that would implement Kubernetes? JOE: That's a great question. There are a whole host there. One of the folks in the community has pulled together a spreadsheet of all the different ways to install and run Kubernetes and I think there were something like 60 entries on it. It's an open source system. It's credibly adaptable in terms of running in all sorts of different mechanisms for places and there are really active startups that are helping folks to run that stuff. In terms of the easiest turnkey things, I would probably start with Google Container Engine, which is honestly one click. It fits within a Free Tier. It can get you up and running so that you can actually play with Kubernetes super easy. There's this thing from the folks at CoreOS called minikube that lets you run it on your laptop as a development environment. That's a great way to kick the tires. If you're on Amazon, my company Heptio has a quick start that we did with some of the Amazon community folks. It's a cloud formation template that launches a Kubernetes stack that you can get up and running and really understand what's happening. I think as users, understand what value it brings at the user level then they'll figure out whether they want to invest in terms of figuring out what the best place to run and the best way to run it for them is. I think my advice to folks would be find some way to start getting familiar with it and then decide if you have to go deep in terms of how to be a cluster operator and how to run the thing. ELRICK: Yup. That was going to be my next question. You just brought up your company, Heptio. What was the reason for starting that startup? JOE: Heptio was founded by Craig McLuckie, one of the other Kubernetes founders and me. We started about six months or seven months ago now. The goal here is to bring Kubernetes to enterprises and how do we bridge the gap of bringing some of this technology forward company thinking to think about companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook. They have a certain way of thinking about building a deployment software. How do we bring those ideas into more mainstream enterprise? How do we bridge that gap and we're really using doing Kubernetes as the tool to do that? We're doing a bunch of things to make that happen. The first being that we're offering training, support and services so right now, if companies want to get started today, they can engage with us and we can help them understand what makes sense there. Over time, we want to make that be more self-service, easier to do so that you actually don't have to hire someone like us to get started and to be successful there. We want to invest in the community in terms of making Kubernetes easier to approach, easier to run and then more applicable to a more diverse set of audiences. This conversation that we're having here, I'm hoping that at some point, we won't have to have this because Kubernetes will be easy enough and self-describing enough that folks won't feel like they have to dig deep to get started. Then the last thing that we're going to be doing is offering commercial services and software that really helps teach Kubernetes into the fabric of how large companies work. I think there's a set of tools that you need as you move from being a startup or a small team to actually dealing within the structure of a large enterprise and that's really where we're going to be looking to create and sell product. ELRICK: Gotcha. CHARLES: How does Kubernetes then compare in contrast to other technologies that we hear when we talk about integrating with the enterprise and having enterprise clients managing their own infrastructure things like Cloud Foundry, for example. From someone who's kind of ignorant of both, how do you discriminate between the two? JOE: Cloud Foundry is a more of a traditional platform as a service. There's a lot to like there and there are some places where the Kubernetes community and the Cloud Foundry community are starting to cooperate. There is a common way for provisioning and creating external services so you can say, "I want MySQL database." We're trying to make that idea of, "Give me MySQL database. I don't care who and where it's running." We're trying to make those mechanisms common across Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes so there is some effort going in there. But Cloud Foundry is more of a traditional platform as a service. It's opinionated in terms of the right way to create, launch, roll out, hooks services together. Whereas, Kubernetes is more of a building block type of thing. Kubernetes is, at least raw Kubernetes in some ways a more of a lower levels building block technology than something like Cloud Foundry. The most applicable competitor in this world to Cloud Foundry, I would say would be OpenShift from Red Hat. Open Shift is a set of extensions built on top of it. Right now, it's a little bit of a modified version of Kubernetes but over time that teams working to make it be a set of pure extensions on top of Kubernetes that adds a platform as a service layer on top of the container cluster layer. The experience for Open Shift will be comparable to the experience for Cloud Foundry. There's other folks like Microsoft just bought the small company called Deis. They offer a thing called Workflow which gives you a little bit of the flavor of a platform as a service also. There's multiple flavors of platforms built on top of Kubernetes that would be more apples to apples comparable to something like Cloud Foundry. Now the interesting thing with thing Deis' Workflow or Open Shift or some of the other platforms built on top of Kubernetes is that, again if you find yourself where that platform doesn't work for you for some reason, you don't have to throw out everything. You can actually start picking and choosing what primitives you want to drop down to in the Kubernetes world without having to go down to raw VMs. Whereas, Cloud Foundry really doesn't have a widely supported, sort of more raw interface to run in containers and services. It's kind of subtle. CHARLES: Yeah, it's kind of subtle. This is an analogy that just popped into my head while I was listening to you and I don't know if this is way off base. But when you were describing having... What was the word you used? You said a container clast --? It was a container clustered... JOE: Container orchestrator, container cluster. These are all -- CHARLES: Right and then kind of hearkening back to the beginning of our conversation where you were talking about being able to specify, "I want 10 of these processes," or an elastic amount of these processes that reminded me of Erlang VM and how kind of baked into that thing is the concept of these lightweight processes and be able to manage communication between these lightweight processes and also supervise these processes and have layers of supervisors supervising other supervisors to be able to declare a configuration for a set of processes to always be running. Then also propagate failure of those processes and escalate and stuff like that. Would you say that there is an analogy there? I know there are completely separate beast but is there a co-evolution there? JOE: I've never used Erlang in Anger so it's hard for me to speak super knowledgeably about it. For what I understand, I think there is a lot in common there. I think Erlang was originally built by Nokia for telecoms switches, I believe which you have these strong availability guarantees so any time when you're aiming for high availability, you need to decouple things with outside control loops and ways to actually coordinate across pieces of hardware and software so that when things fail, you can isolate that and have a blast radius for a failure and then have higher level mechanisms that can help recover. That's very much what happens with something like Kubernetes and container orchestrator. I think there's a ton of parallels there. CHARLES: I'm just trying to grasp at analogies of things that might be -- ELRICK: I think they call that the OTP, Open Telecom Platform or something like that in Erlang. CHARLES: Yeah, but it just got a lot of these things -- ELRICK: Very similar. CHARLES: Yeah, it seems very similar. ELRICK: Interestingly enough, for someone that's starting from the bottom, an initiated person to Kubernetes containers, Docker images, Docker, where would they start to ramp up themselves? I know you mentioned that you are writing a book --? JOE: Yes. ELRICK: -- 'Kubernetes: Up and Running'. Would that be a good place to start when it comes out or is there like another place they should start before they get there. What is your thoughts on that? JOE: Definitely, check out the book. This is a book that I'm writing with Kelsey Hightower who's one of the developer evangelists for Google. He is the most dynamic speaker I've ever seen so if you ever have a chance to see him live, it's pretty great. But Kelsey started this and he's a busy guy so he brought in Brendan Burns, one of the other Kubernetes co-founders and me to help finish that book off and that should be coming out soon. It's Kubernetes: Up and Running. Definitely check that out. There's a bunch of good tutorials out there also that start introducing you to a lot of the concepts in Kubernetes. I'm not going to go through all of those concepts right now. There's probably like half a dozen different concepts and terminology, things that you have to learn to really get going with it and I think that's a problem right now. There's a lot to import before you can get started. I gave a talk at the Kubernetes Conference in Berlin, a month or two ago and it was essentially like, yeah we got our work cut out for us to actually make the stuff applicable to wider audience. But if you want to see the power, I think one of the things that you can do is there's the system built on top of Kubernetes called Helm, H-E-L-M, like a ship's helm because we love our nautical analogies here. Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes and just like you can login to say, in Ubuntu machine and do apps get install MySQL and you have a database up and running. With Helm you can say, create and install 'WordPress install' on my Kubernetes cluster and it'll just make that happen. It takes this idea of package management of describing applications up to the next level. When you're doing regular sysadmin stuff, you can actually go through and do the system to [Inaudible] files or to [Inaudible] files and copy stuff out and use Puppet and Chef to orchestrate all of that stuff. Or you can take the stuff that sort of package maintainers for the operating system have done and actually just go ahead and say, "Get that installed." We want to be able to offer a similar experience at the cluster level. I think that's a great way to start seeing the power. After you understand all these concepts here is how easy you can make it to bring up and run these distributed systems that are real applications. The Weaveworks folks, there are company that do container networking and introspection stuff based out of London. They have this example application called Sock Shop. It's like the pet shop example but distributed and built to show off how you can build an application on top of Kubernetes that pulls a lot of moving pieces together. Then there's some other applications out there like that that give you a little bit of an idea of what things look like as you start using this stuff to its fullest extent. I would say start with something that feels concrete where you can start poking around and seeing how things work before you commit. I know some people are sort of depth first learners and some are breadth first learners. If you're depth first, go and read the book, go to Kubernetes documentation site. If you're breadth first, just start with an application and go from there. ELRICK: Okay. CHARLES: I think I definitely fall into that breadth first. I want to build something with it first before trying to manage my own cluster. ELRICK: Yeah. True. I think I watched your talk and I did watch one of Kelsey's talks: container management. There was stuff about replicators and schedulers and I was like, "The ocean just getting deeper and deeper," as I listened to his talk. JOE: Actually, I think this is one of the cultural gaps to bridge between frontend and backend thinking. I think a lot of backend folks end up being these depths first types of folks, where when they want to use a technology, they want to read all the source code before they first apply it. I'm sure everybody has met those type of developers. Then I think there's folks that are breadth first where they really just want to understand enough to be effective, they want to get something up and running, they want to like if they hit a problem, then they'll go ahead and fix that problem but other than that, they're very goal-oriented towards, I want to get this thing running. Kubernetes right now is kind of built by systems engineers for systems engineers and it shows so we have our work cut out for us, I think to bridge that gap. It's going to be an ongoing thing. ELRICK: Yeah, I'm like a depth first but I have to keep myself in check because I have to get work done as a developer. [Laughter] JOE: That sounds about right, yeah. Yeah, so you're held accountable for writing code. CHARLES: Yeah. That's where real learning happens when you're depth first but you've got deadlines. ELRICK: Yes. CHARLES: I think that's a very effective combination. Before we go, I wanted to switch topic away from Kubernetes for just a little bit because you mentioned something when we were emailing that, I guess in a different lifetime you were actually on the original IE team or at the very beginning of the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft? JOE: Yes, that's where I started my career. Back in '97, I've done a couple of internships at Microsoft and then went to join full time, moved up here to Seattle and I had a choice between joining the NT kernel team or the Internet Explorer team. This was after IE3 before IE4. I don't know if this whole internet thing is going to pan out but it looks like that gives you a lot of interesting stuff. You got to understand the internet, it wasn't an assumed thing back then, right? ELRICK: Yeah, that's true. JOE: I don't know, this internet thing. CHARLES: I know. I was there and I know that like old school IE sometimes gets a bad rap. It does get a bad rap for being a little bit of an albatross but if you were there for the early days of IE, it really was the thing that blew it wide open like people do not give credit. It was extraordinarily ahead of its time. That was [Inaudible] team that coin DHTML back to when it was called DHTML. I remember, actually using it for the first time, I think about '97 is about what I was writing raw HTML for everything. CSS wasn't even a thing hardly. When I realized, all these static things when we render them, they're etched in stone. The idea that every one of these properties which I already knew is now dynamic and completely reflected, just moment to moment. It was just eye-opening. It was mind blowing and it was kind of the beginning of the next 20 years. I want to just talk a little bit about that, about where those ideas came from and what was the impetus for that? JOE: Oh, man. There's so much history here. First of all, thank you for calling out. I think we did a lot of really interesting groundbreaking work then. I think the sin was not in IE6 as it was but in [inaudible]. I think the fact that -- CHARLES: IE6 was actually an amazing browser. Absolutely an amazing browser. JOE: And then the world moved past it, right? It didn't catch up. That was the problem. For its time when it was released, I was proud of that release. But four years on, things get a little bit long in the tooth. I think IE3 was based on rendering engine that was very static, very similar to Netscape at the time. The thing to keep in mind is that Netscape at that time, it would download a webpage, parse it and display it. There was no idea of a DOM at Netscape at that point so it would throw away a lot of the information and actually only store stuff that was very specific to the display context. Literally, when you resize the window for Netscape back then, it would actually reparse the original HTML to regenerate things. It wasn't even able to actually resize the window without going through and reparsing. What we did with IE4 -- and I joined sort of close to the tail on IE4 so I can't claim too much credit here -- is bringing some of the ideas from something like Visual Basic and merge those into the idea of the browser where you actually have this programming model which became the DOM of where your controls are, how they fit together, being able to live modify these things. This was all part and parcel of how people built Windows applications. It turns out that IE4 was the combination of the old IE3 rendering engine, sort of stealing stuff from there but then this project that was built as a bunch of Active X controls for Office called [inaudible]. As you smash that stuff together and turn it into a browser rendering engine, that browser rendering engine ended up being called Trident. That's the thing that got a nautical theme. I don't think it's connected and that's the thing that that I joined and started working on at the time. This whole idea that you have actually have this DOM, that you can modify a programmable representation of DHTML and have it be live updated on screen, that was only with IE4. I don't think anybody had done it at that point. The competing scheme from Netscape was this thing called layers where it was essentially multiple HTML documents where you could replace one of the HTML documents and they would be rendered on top of each other. It was awful and it lost to the mist of time. CHARLES: I remember marketing material about layers and hearing how layers was just going to be this wonderful thing but I don't ever remember actually, did they ever even ship it? JOE: I don't know if they did or not. The thing that you got to understand is that anybody who spent any significant amount of time at Microsoft, you just really internalize the idea of a platform like no place else. Microsoft lives and breathes platforms. I think sometimes it does them a disservice. I've been out of Microsoft for like 13 years now so maybe some of my knowledge is a little outdated here but I still have friends over there. But Microsoft is like the poor schmuck that goes to Vegas and pulls the slot machine and wins the jackpot on the first pull. I'm not saying that there wasn't a lot of hard work that went behind Windows but like they hit the goldmine with that from a platform point of view and then they essentially did it again with Office. You have these two incredibly powerful platforms that ended up being an enormous growth engine for the company over time so that fundamentally changed the world view of Microsoft where they really viewed everything as a platform. I think there were some forward thinking people at Netscape and other companies but I think, Microsoft early on really understood what it meant to be a platform and we saw back then what the web could be. One of the original IE team members, I'm going to give a shout out to him, Chris Wilson who's now on the Chrome team, I think. I don't know where he is these days. Chris was on the original IE team. He's still heavily involved in web standards. None of this stuff is a surprise to us. I look at some of the original so after we finished IE6, a lot of the IE team rolled off to doing Avalon which became Windows Presentation Foundation, which was really looking to sort of reinvent Windows UI, importing a bunch of the ideas from web and modern programming there. That's where we came up with XAML and eventually begat Silverlight for good or ill. But some of our original demos for Avalon, if you go back in time and look at that, that was probably... I don't know, 2000 or something like that. They're exactly the type of stuff that people are building with the web platform today. Back then, they'll flex with the thing. We're reinventing this stuff over and over again. I like where it's going. I think we're in a good spot right now but we see things like the Shadow DOM come up and I look at that and I'm like, "We had HTC controls which did a lot of Shadow DOM stuff like stuff in IE early on." These things get reinvented and refined over time and I think it's great but it's fascinating to be in the industry long enough that you can see these patterns repeat. CHARLES: It is actually interesting. I remember doing UI in C++ and in Java. We did a lot of Java and it was a long time. I felt like I was wandering in the wilderness of the web where I was like, "Oh, man. I just wish we had these capabilities of things that we could do in swing, 10 or 15 years ago," but the happy ending is that I really actually do feel we are in a place now, finally where you have options for it really is truly competitive as a developer experience to the way it was, these many years ago and it's also a testament just how compelling the deployment model of the web is, that people were willing to forgo all of that so they could distribute their applications really easily. JOE: Never underestimate the power of view source. CHARLES: Yeah. [Laughter] ELRICK: I think that's why this sort of conversations are very powerful, like going back in time and looking at the development up until now because like they say that people that don't know their history, they're doomed to repeat it. I think this is a beautiful conversation. JOE: Yeah. Because I've done that developer focused frontend type of stuff. I've done the backend stuff. One of the things that I noticed is that you see patterns repeat over and over again. Let's be honest, it probably more like a week, I was going to say a weekend and learn the React the other day and the way that it encapsulate state up and down, model view, it's like these things are like there's different twists on them that you see in different places but you see the same patterns repeat again and again. I look at the way that we do scheduling in Kubernetes. Scheduling is this idea that you have a bunch of workloads that have a certain amount of CPU and RAM that they require like you want to play this Tetris game of being able to fit these things in, you look at scheduling like that and there are echoes for how layout happens in a browser. There is a deeper game coming on here and as you go through your career and if you're like me and you always are interested in trying new things, you never leave it all behind. You always see things that influence your thinking moving forward. CHARLES: Absolutely. I kind of did the opposite. I started out on the backend and then moved over into the frontend but there's never been any concept that I was familiar with working on server side code that did not come to my aid at some point working on the frontend. I can appreciate that fully. ELRICK: Yup. I can agree with the same thing. I jump all around the board, learning things that I have no use currently but somehow, they come back to help me. CHARLES: That will come back to help you. You thread them together at some point. ELRICK: Yup. CHARLES: As they said in one of my favorite video games in high school, Mortal Kombat there is no knowledge that is not power. JOE: I was all Street Fighter. CHARLES: Really? [Laughter] JOE: I cut class in high school and went to play Street Fighter at the mall. CHARLES: There is no knowledge that isn't power except for... I'm not sure that the knowledge of all these little mashy key buttons combinations, really, I don't think there's much power in that. JOE: Well, the Konami code still shows up all the time, right? [Laughter] CHARLES: I'm surprised how that's been passed down from generation to generation. JOE: You still see it show up in places that you wouldn't expect. One of the sad things that early on in IE, we had all these Internet Explorer Easter eggs where if you type this right combination into the address bar, do this thing and you clicked and turn around three times and face west, you actually got this cool DHTML thing and those things are largely disappearing. People don't make Easter eggs like they used to. I think there's probably legal reasons for making sure that every feature is as spec. But I kind of missed those old Easter eggs that we used to find. CHARLES: Yeah, me too. I guess everybody save their Easter eggs for April 1st but -- JOE: For the release notes, [inaudible]. CHARLES: All right. Well, thank you so much for coming by JOE. I know I'm personally excited. I'm going to go find one of those Kubernetes as a services that you mentioned and try and do a little breadth first learning but whether you're depth first or breadth first, I say go to it and thank you so much for coming on the show. JOE: Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's been great. CHARLES: Before we go, there is actually one other special item that I wanted to mention. This is the Open Source Bridge which is a conference being held in Portland, Oregon on the 20th to 23rd of June this year. The tracks are activism, culture hacks, practice and theory and podcast listeners may be offered a discount code for $50 off of the ticket by entering in the code 'podcast' on the Event Brite page, which we will link to in the show notes. Thank you, Elrick. Thank you, Joe. Thank you everybody and we will see you next week.