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This episode is all about the emotional side of investing during market turmoil, especially the conversations (or arguments) happening at kitchen tables right now.   Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com   Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is an SEC Registered Investment Advisor. Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. The topics and information discussed during this podcast are not intended to provide tax or legal advice. Investments involve risk, and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Be sure to first consult with a qualified financial advisor and/or tax professional before implementing any strategy discussed on this podcast. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Insurance products and services are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed insurance agents.     Speaker 1: This episode is all about the emotional side of investing during market turmoil, especially the conversations that might be happening around kitchen tables all across America right now. Let's get into it this week here on Retirement Planning Redefined.   Welcome into the podcast, where we're going to talk about talking to your spouse or loved one about market crashes and fears. If you're sitting around the dinner table and stressing out about the stuff we've been seeing over the past few weeks, it's been a volatile March and April. It's maybe worthwhile to have a chat about how do you go about that, because obviously when it comes to dealing with money and talking about money, that's sometimes where families and relationships struggle. This week, the guys are going to help us break it down from things they say from their clients, maybe their own personal perspective and mine as well, as we have this conversation.   What's going on, John? How are you doing, buddy?   John: Doing good. Just found an electric fireplace.   Speaker 1: Oh, nice, nice.   John: For my remodel. I can't wait to have it installed.   Speaker 1: There you go. Yeah, we got one of those as well when we did ours. Nice, very good. Works well. My wife's always got that thing on. I'm like, "Really?"   John: Yeah.   Speaker 1: Even when it's warm. I'm like, "You're killing me." Well, hey, there you go. Couples and spouses already over the fireplace, we haven't even got to the money yet.   What about you, Nick? How are you doing, buddy?   Nick: Good, good. Staying busy.   Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, let's dive into this since you're about to have this situation start to prop up because you've got some nuptials coming soon. Again, congratulations on that.   I got a few questions I just want to run through. Feel free to drop in some real life scenarios that you've seen from your own life, or clients, or whatever you guys want to share when it comes to this. It's an important question, because I so many advisors like yourselves say, "Hey, when you're building a retirement plan and a strategy, make sure both people are involved so that you understand what you've got and what you're into." Even if it's not your thing, that way everybody just feels like they're on solid ground when it comes to knowing what's happening.   How do you deal with that? As a married couple or in a relationship, how do you deal with market downturns? Because when you start seeing your accounts go down, you start to freak out a little bit. Is it a good idea to talk about that, guys? Or do you think that should be saved for talking, Nick, like in front of you guys, where you're there as a mediator kind of thing?   Nick: I think the number one most important part is that people actually start to have the conversation.   Speaker 1: Just talk, right?   Nick: Yeah, just talk. There's a reason that, I would say from the standpoint of therapy, 50% of the stress probably comes from guidance and 50% just comes from getting it out kind of thing.   Speaker 1: Right.   Nick: The act of literally just talking and trying to get on the same page I think tends to be helpful. The reality is most couples with many things, the way that they approach a decision, the way that they feel about something that's happening tends to be different. It's pretty rare that they're both the same.   Speaker 1: Right.   Nick: John and I talking about that quite a bit with clients, where many of our clients, we'll work as a team. In a lot of ways, we feel like it benefits us because we have similarities and differences just like couples do. Often times, we can pick up on more information because of that.   I think having the conversation to get a baseline of how they're feeling about the direction of things. Then, really, I do think it is important to reach out to their advisor and get an idea, a better idea of what's going on. Because the other part about that is that the phase of life that they're in really has a significant impact on how much they could be impacted. We've got clients that are working and just saving, they're often times feeling less concern. Those that are approaching retirement or very early on in retirement, they're probably the ones that are the most freaked out. Those that have been retired for a little bit longer have gotten a better feeling of it and I would say are a little bit more stable when it comes to this sort of thing. Just really getting on the same page is important.   Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. John, to expand on that, what's each person's natural reaction to financial stress? The two top things that couples fight about is money and in the bedroom, and love. Do you fight, do you flight, freeze, freak out? When you start seeing your accounts drop, are you thinking, "Hey, my dream is fading away?" How do you react to that can go a long way into how you deal with that financial stress.   John: Everyone's personality is different. Everything you just listed there, Nick and I have seen it across the board.   Speaker 1: Oh, sure. Yeah.   John: I definitely say if someone's reaction is to fight over something, it's definitely a good time to do a check with your advisor to avoid those unnecessary fights about it. Everyone reacts differently. It's good to have conversations. Back to what we were saying, just having the plan reflect how is this actually affecting your situation. Once you see that, that might actually take some of the stress away to help you make better decisions.   Speaker 1: Well, yeah, because to that point, Nick, number three is that no matter what you do, whether you fight, flight, freeze, or freak out, is it because you don't know the longterm plan or you're not on the same page? Typically, the panic comes in when you don't realize what's going on, especially if one person is leading the financial charge and the other one is just along for the ride because it's not their thing or they don't care about paying that much attention to it. But then, in these times of turmoil, now they want to pay attention and now they're freaking out because they don't really understand the plan or they don't know it at all. That's the importance of both people working together.   Nick: For sure. I think over time, we realized that when people are uncertain or they don't understand something, that leads to anxiety. And the anxiety builds up and then blows, and that leads to the freak-out factor or fighting between each other, or things like that. We've got clients who have told me one spouse can tell when the other spouse is really freaking out. They're not the personality to say something, but they become ornery or short.   Speaker 1: Right.   Nick: It's like, "Okay, I knew it was time to reach out so that we can have a conversation about this."   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Nick: That absolutely is something that makes a lot of sense. Having that plan to be your guide and stay on path is super important.   One of the things that we tend to tell clients over time is, and this is really playing out, where the reality is there's a lot of people, for the last 10-plus years, that have been very heavily invested in the Magnificent Seven, or heavy in tech, and all that kind of thing. It's been a safe haven and out-performed almost everything and pulled the market. Now we've got a little bit of a cycling out of that and it seems like things are shifting a little bit more to diversification is important, that sort of thing.   One of the things that we'll tend to say to clients, at all times, you should have something in your strategy that you're very happy about having and something that maybe you're not so happy about having. When markets are going really good, you hate that maybe you've got six, 12 months in cash that's not getting a ton of return. But when markets are going bad, you're really, really happy that you have that six to 12 months in cash for different things. All those things go together to try to help stay on the same page and go back to your plan.   Speaker 1: Yeah. With headlines and internet stuff, and everything like that, it's really easy to get sucked into reactionary moments, John. How do you balance facts with feelings? That's one of the biggest things that we're dealing with. Money and feelings go hand-in-hand. How do you balance the facts in? If you're a couple at home, any thoughts or advice for folks? I know we talked a couple of weeks ago about not doom-scrolling and turning the TV off.   John: Yeah.   Speaker 1: Aside from that, what's some other ways to maybe balance the facts?   John: Yeah. I think it's ultimately looking at your situation, not just what a particular stock or index is doing that day. Like I said, last week, when someone was a little nervous and when we looked at their year-to-date return it was like, "Oh, that's not bad." It's like, "No, it's not bad. This doesn't affect you whatsoever, you can go ahead and travel." It's like, "All right, good to know that."   I think it's always going back to your personal situation, and how does it affect you, and how can you adapt. And in some situations, how can you take advantage of what's happening currently? Is there something you could do that would actually be beneficial to your overall over the next two or three years, or overall throughout your whole strategy?   Speaker 1: Good point. Yeah, definitely. You've got to get some facts in this situation because again, so many people just see the headlines, they run with it. They assume that's what's happening to them, and it may not be at all.   I guess the final piece here is, Nick, does that play back to have you talked with one another about your-   Nick: Sorry to cut you off.   Speaker 1: No, that's fine.   Nick: I'll give you one example of this. This was what the news will do to people. I have one client who's very risk averse and is concerned about the markets. It was good she checked in because she was getting pretty upset over what was happening. When we checked in it was, "Hey, everything you have is in fixed income." It was, "There's really not much risk." She was like, "Oh, it's just this news, I'm watching it, and it's all this stuff." It's like, "No, you're in really good shape. Nothing is affected." But again, it's just a matter of knowing the facts for her situation. Not everyone's like, obviously.   Speaker 1: Yeah.   Nick: She's extremely risk averse. It was good that she's in the right asset allocation based on her risk tolerance, because she wouldn't be able to handle what's happening right now.   Speaker 1: Yeah, that's hilarious. I'm glad that she got that sorted out too, so that she didn't have to stress. Nick, I was getting ready to ask you that. Is it time for you and your loved one, you and your spouse, to talk about your risk tolerance? Do you assume you're on the same page, are you on the same page? Or does your advisor even know what your risk tolerance is? Have you gone through and updated that stuff and had those pulse checks?   Nick: Yeah, it's really interesting because we'll have clients, for example, clients that are still working. Depending upon their personalities, I have a lot of clients that, if it's a couple, one person picks their own 401K investments, the other person picks their own 401K investments. Sometimes they might compare or look, and they'll pick their investments based upon ... These are, often times, people that, when they come in before they become clients, pick based upon what their own set of fact that they're using and all that sort of thing. When they shift to the phase of, okay, maybe retire, and now they're making more decisions together and trying to get on the same page.   Where we'll literally have situations where it's like, okay, say it's a couple, he's got his rollover into an IRA, she's got her rollover into an IRA, and then they have a joint account. The joint account's invested completely differently than either of the IRAs because they have to come to an agreement on it. It's interesting, the dynamics of how that works and how they slowly have to get on the same page often times. But having that conversation, those I would say that are more advanced at having those conversations earlier on, definitely end up in a better position.   Speaker 1: Yeah. At the end of the day, guys, it all comes down to conversations and chatting with one another, and being honest, about what you need to do. Especially with you and your loved one, if you're thinking that your retirement or your financial dreams are dissipating, well, A, are you on the same page with each other? And B, are you on the same page with your advisor and do they know that? It's important to sit down, have a conversation, have a chat. Reach out to your advisor, especially in these times.   I saw a line the other day, I don't know if I'll remember it exactly what it is. It was like, "Advisors, you're really earning your keep in times like these. This is when discipline and consistency beats brilliance." You're not trying to time the market and things of that nature, because there's always going to be these ups and downs. It's having a good, consistent plan to help you get to and through all kinds of different environments that are going to happen if you're retired 20, 25, 30, 35 years.   Get yourself a plan, get yourself a strategy. Reach out to John and Nick today at pfgprivatewealth.com, that's pfgprivatewealth.com, to get started on your situation or to tweak your situation and dive into that process with the guys. You can reach out to them at 813-286-7776. Or again, find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe to us on the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or whatever platform you like using. We'll see you next time here on Retirement Planning Redefined with John and Nick.

Patrick explores the concept of perfect contrition and explains what it truly means to love God more than fearing hell and how this profound act isn't about emotions but a willful commitment. Even without feeling it emotionally, genuine intent and contemplation can bridge that gap. Patrick also discusses the beautiful Prayer "Before a Crucifix" to strengthen reflections. (This Prayer can be found on the Relevant Radio App)   Bill - Where does the command to die on the cross come from? (00:32) Mary - Do you really have to love God more than you fear hell for perfect contrition? (10:51) Chris - When my wife came to the USA, she was upset that we didn't have voter ID. In Brazil, you do need voter ID. (22:49) Robert - What does it mean that heaven and earth will pass away (27:31) John - For skeptics of the Old Testament and the original Jewish Religion, what would be their strongman argument on why the Old Testament was communicated in that way.  (32:25) Elias - I have dual citizenship with Mexico and the US.  In Mexico, they have a federal ID, and it's required for voting. (40:10) Pam - If God was in the Garden of Eden and he intended Adam and Eve to be there together, then did he already know they were going to sin and Jesus would have to die on the cross? (42:16) Cindy - My daughter and I are discussing 'Sola Scriptura'. Do Catholics not believe in the Word of the Bible and only believe in tradition? (48:52)

Just a few more days until Christmas. But if you haven't gotten the house ready yet or the dinner planned? Who knows more about planning for a holiday celebration than Martha Stewart.? Perhaps the most fun interview I ever had with her was in the fall of 1993, not long before Christmas that year when we talked about her book Martha Stewart's Christmas. And we also talked about her business empire. Her TV show had just premiered a few weeks earlier. Here is that 1993 interview. Get Martha Stewart's Christmas by Martha StewartAs an Amazon Associate, Now I've Heard Everything earns from qualifying purchases.You may also enjoy my interviews with Ina Garten and Jill St. John For more vintage interviews with celebrities, leaders, and influencers, subscribe to Now I've Heard Everything on Spotify, Apple Podcasts. and now on YouTube Photo by Gage Skidmore

John Karren is the owner and co-founder of Elements Wilderness Program in Utah. John helps run two therapeutic wilderness programs: Elements is for boys thirteen to seventeen, and Traverse is all gender, young adults eighteen to twenty five. Today, John joins the show to discuss ‘non-traditional' therapies and how the outdoors can be such a great benefit to everyone.Key Takeaways01:03 – Shay Butts welcomes John Karren to the show to discuss wilderness therapy and other ‘non- traditional' therapy options10:08 – How Elements Wilderness Program works14:42 – Dealing with the negativity surrounding outdoor therapy18:51 – Striving for excellence23:40 – The role parents play in Elements Wilderness Program26:53 – Shay thanks John for sharing his story todayTweetable Quotes“I think the biggest thing for us is that if the client doesn't buy in, there will be no change. If we're punishing them or consequencing them, they're going to do it until the consequence has been lifted. So, really the focus for us is to get them to buy into themselves - to get them to understand what I'm feeling.” (10:29) (John)“For us - the clinical approach - we think of ourselves as a high-intense therapeutic intervention. And so, it's a deep dive into what's going on for me, for my family, for everything in my life, and then working through that in different ways.” (12:09) (John)“That's the hardest part for me, it just tears at me knowing the value of what can happen with [outdoor therapy], and the change that can occur, and the excitement, and then to hear people just bash it and speak negatively about it. It's hard.” (17:32) (John)“When people think about Wilderness, they think it's just sending their child off. And I tell parents all the time, ‘You're not sending your child away. You're going on the journey with them.'” (23:50) (John)Resources MentionedJFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com/JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen John's LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkarren/Elements Wilderness Website – https://www.elementswilderness.com/Shay Butts' LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/shay-butts-8963b217/**The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests are of their opinion and are not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

John Karren is the owner and co-founder of Elements Wilderness Program in Utah. John helps run two therapeutic wilderness programs: Elements is for boys thirteen to seventeen, and Traverse is all gender, young adults eighteen to twenty five. Today, John joins the show to discuss ‘non-traditional' therapies and how the outdoors can be such a great benefit to everyone.Key Takeaways01:03 – Shay Butts welcomes John Karren to the show to discuss wilderness therapy and other ‘non- traditional' therapy options10:08 – How Elements Wilderness Program works14:42 – Dealing with the negativity surrounding outdoor therapy18:51 – Striving for excellence23:40 – The role parents play in Elements Wilderness Program26:53 – Shay thanks John for sharing his story todayTweetable Quotes“I think the biggest thing for us is that if the client doesn't buy in, there will be no change. If we're punishing them or consequencing them, they're going to do it until the consequence has been lifted. So, really the focus for us is to get them to buy into themselves - to get them to understand what I'm feeling.” (10:29) (John)“For us - the clinical approach - we think of ourselves as a high-intense therapeutic intervention. And so, it's a deep dive into what's going on for me, for my family, for everything in my life, and then working through that in different ways.” (12:09) (John)“That's the hardest part for me, it just tears at me knowing the value of what can happen with [outdoor therapy], and the change that can occur, and the excitement, and then to hear people just bash it and speak negatively about it. It's hard.” (17:32) (John)“When people think about Wilderness, they think it's just sending their child off. And I tell parents all the time, ‘You're not sending your child away. You're going on the journey with them.'” (23:50) (John)Resources MentionedJFlowers Health Institute – https://jflowershealth.com/JFlowers Health Institute Contact – (713) 783-6655Subscribe on your favorite player: https://understanding-the-human-condition.captivate.fm/listen John's LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkarren/Elements Wilderness Website – https://www.elementswilderness.com/Shay Butts' LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/shay-butts-8963b217/**The views and opinions expressed by our guests are those of the individual and do not necessarily reflect those of J. Flowers Health Institute. Any content provided by our co-host(s) or guests are of their opinion and are not intended to reflect the philosophy and policies of J. Flowers Health Institute itself. Nor is it intended to malign any recovery method, religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual, or anyone or anything.

Subscribe To Our Exclusive Podcast Show: https://simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.supercast.com/ “John: For starters, as the topic suggests, there are bad and good debts for any financial situation.” Our Credits: These podcasts are productions of Little Red Hen Industries. OUR THIRD YEAR!! Learn about financial education & personal financial management in this episode with John Brandy on the Simple Success podcast, which comes out on Mondays! Learn more about Simple Success with John Brandy using our all-in-one access link here Visit the Simple Success with John Brandy website today! Guest Credits: My website: http://www.mywebsite.com/ My book: http://www.amazon.com/mybook/ My everything else: http://www.myeverythingelse.com The Big Kahuna Search Link: John Brandy Podcasts Simple Success Web: https://www.simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.com/ A Choice Voice Web: https://www.achoicevoice.com/ Reddit Sites For CONSTRUCTIVE COMMENTS And Of Course Fun!: https://www.reddit.com/r/simplesuccess/ https://www.reddit.com/r/achoicevoice/ iOS Simple Success: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-success-with-john-brandy/id1549566678 Droid Simple Success: https://podcasts.google.com/search/simple%20success%20with%20john%20brandy iOS A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-choice-voice-with-john-brandy/id1560026051 Droid A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.google.com/search/a%20choice%20voice%20with%20john%20brandy AI Voices & Other Stuff @ Online Tone Generator& @ Amazon AWS Polly & Google Finally, you can find us on Podmatch, Matchmaker.FM, Podbooker and Podcast Guests, where we consider guests & guesting on other pods. And really finally, our music and sound effects come from freesound.org. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/simplesuccess/message

In this episode, John chats to Luke Burrows who is dedicated to raising consciousness for all, a mission that has driven him to create and become the Founder of Raising Consciousness, a lifestyle brand and podcast that combines passions for personal growth, health, spirituality, sports, and leadership & business to inspire people to reach their goals and live their life to the fullest.  John and Luke talk about how he has made such great strides at such a young age, the skills and knowledge he shares with others to help them follow him on his experience, self-improvement and growth, consciousness in relationships and the service he offers through Raising Consciousness.   KEY TAKEAWAYS Luke hopes for a better tomorrow by raising the consciousness of all to create a more connected and spiritual future generation.   Raising Consciousness offers coaching, consulting and public speaking as well as the podcast. After issues with depression and anxiety and altering and redirecting his life, Luke knew that he could share his knowledge and experience to help others.  Reflection is a powerful tool that can be utilised by everyone to recognise difficulties within their own lives. Daily journaling can be a lifelong habit that will constantly improve and reveal positive changes that can be enacted.  Intention setting to pay attention, perhaps be kinder, more generous, or set boundaries are all part of self-improvement within relationships.  A slow reaction, a delay in response can lead to a more thoughtful interaction that, instead of being driven by emotions of the moment, can be inspired by a more thoughtful response, resulting in better relationships.  Raising Consciousness The Podcast contains in-depth conversations on such topics as health, environmental issues and personal growth. BEST MOMENTS ‘I always knew that I wanted to impact people and help people in a positive way to make progress and move things forward. It was really coming to the realisation of what that is for me  and that I can bring my strengths and skills into the world to serve and help people.' – Luke ‘It's fascinating that you were able to make such a big leap within yourself.' - John ‘For me, consciousness is in everything that we do. It's a part of becoming a better version of ourselves which is the ultimate goal.' – Luke  ‘I keep my circle very small. When I was starting my entrepreneurial journey that was a very challenging time because I was experiencing anxiety as well and I grew up with people who were very much more into the traditional youth stuff.' - Luke  ‘So maybe my family doesn't get what I do; ”go get a normal job”. Beforehand I would feel hurt by that, now I've come to the realisation that they're just operating from their level of consciousness and so I am just going to show gratitude and kindness towards them' – Luke ‘If you're able to be self-aware and be, ok, I can feel what I feel right now but if I can just take a breath, take some time to respond rather than react I think that's an amazing quality to be able to have.' – John GUEST RESOURCES Website: https://lukeburrows.com/ Podcast: https://anchor.fm/raisingconsciousnessshow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reallukeburrows Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/reallukeburrows Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/reallukeburrows VALUABLE RESOURCES links: www.johnkennycoaching.com The Bicycle Affect:  https://youtu.be/oO7XZGvdWno Video Course with 1-2-1 coaching - https://the-relationship-guy.teachable.com/purchase?product_id=3607138 Video Course –  https://the-relationship-guy.teachable.com/purchase?product_id=3607134 Link to my workshop -   https://www.johnkennycoaching.com/5- things-you-need-to-create-a-healthy-loving-relationship/ To get in touch - email –  john@johnkennycoaching.com  or book a complimentary call –  https://calendly.com/johnkennycoaching/30min If people want to order a copy of the book then they can just pay postage of £4.95 (RRP £8.99) - www.johnkennycoaching.com/podcast-book-offer Want to be able to address the relationship issues in your life? - Why not book in for a complimentary call and we can discuss how you can get the new started with some new types of relationships - https://calendly.com/johnkennycoaching/30min The Relationship Guy Podcast - https://omny.fm/shows/the-relationship-guy         ABOUT THE HOST I am John Kenny, Award Winning Relationship Coach.Coaching people to experience healthy loving relationships. Having spent a life choosing unhealthy relationships and self sabotaging my own success, I now coach people to live a life they choose. www.therelationshipguy.co.uk CONTACT METHOD Facebook –  https://www.facebook.com/johnkennycoaching 
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One Single Story: Day 361 Is there a correlation between the health of our spirit and our body? Are you encouraged when people you have influenced are living godly lives? Should we distinguish between good and bad servants? Pastors Stephen Mizell, Sheryl Daughety and Zack Unkenholz discuss. December 27th: 2 & 3 John For more on One Single Story, visit onesinglestory.com.

One Single Story: Day 360 How does the opening of 1 John compare to John's introduction in his gospel? How do we live in the light? Pastors Stephen Mizell, Jay Rivenbark and Alyssa Bream talk about some of the differences between light and darkness spiritually. How often should we confess our sins? December 26th: 1 John For more on One Single Story, visit onesinglestory.com.

This episode of the In The Club Podcast by Club Colors features your host, John Morris, Executive Director of Brand. There are 4 main keys that drive your brand and nurture your team culture. John discusses starting an online company brand store, implementing repeatable promotional programs, offering multi-level welcome kits, and choosing premium over volume. He provides tangible examples of how each key excites company employees and transforms them into brand champions.  HIGHLIGHTSThe 4 keys that drive your brand: An elite online brand storeRepeatable promotional branded apparel programsMulti-level welcome kitsGo premium over volume QUOTESUse premium apparel to incentivize stellar performance - John: "For those that meet or exceed standards of performance, you don't always have to give them a bonus check. Give them a credit to the company online store. Two things happen. Number one, they feel great because they're rewarded with something—and everybody likes an incentive—but what's the dual impact? The dual impact is they're going to go on your online store, purchase something with your logo on it, and become a walking billboard for your organization."Branded merch makes you extraordinary at the ordinary - John: "It's not going to save the world. It's not going to cure cancer. And, quite honestly, it's not going to increase your sales by 50%. It's not going to help your people close better. It's not going to drive your leads by 800% in a year. It's not happening. What it will do though, it will help you to become extraordinary at the ordinary as it relates to branding."Leaders must grow the company by creating brand champions - John: "If you're a CMO, executive director of HR, executive VP of HR, tip of spear executive, chief revenue officer, executive vice president of sales, whatever, you're trying to really take the company on the next level and build value in the organization. A great way to build value in your organization is to have the people really, really be advocates and evangelists, brand champions, for the organization." In the Club by Club Colors is sponsored by our proud partner:Maple Ridge Farms | mapleridge.com

What you'll learn in this episode: Why every art student should have business classes as part of their curriculum How the American mythology of the starving artist is more harmful than helpful Why it's important to expand a creative business beyond just making How polymer clay went from craft supply to respected artistic medium Tips for entering jewelry and art exhibitions  About John Rose and Corliss Rose 2Roses is a collaboration of t Corliss Rose and John Lemieux Rose. The studio, located in Southern California, is focused on producing one-of-a-kind and limited-edition adornment and objects d'art, and is well known for its use of a wide range of highly unorthodox materials. The studio output is eclectic by design and often blended with an irreverent sense of humor. 2Roses designs are sold in 42 countries worldwide and are exhibited in major art institutions in the US, Europe, and China. Photos Available on TheJewelryJourney.com Additional Resources: Website Etsy Transcript: For John and Corliss Rose, business and artistic expression don't have to be in conflict. Entering the art world through apprenticeships, they learned early on that with a little business sense, they didn't need to be starving artists. Now as the collaborators behind the design studio 2Roses (one of several creative businesses they share), John and Corliss produce one-of-a-kind art jewelry made of polymer clay, computer chips, and other odd material. They joined the Jewelry Journey Podcast to talk about their efforts to get business classes included in art school curriculum; why polymer clay jewelry has grown in popularity; and how they balance business with their artistic vision. Read the episode transcript here.    Sharon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Jewelry Journey Podcast. This is the second part of a two-part episode. Today, my guests are designers John and Corliss of the eclectic design firm 2Roses. Located in Southern California, they sell worldwide. 2Roses in an award-winning design recognized for their use of unusual materials. Welcome back.    When you look at these things, do you have visions right away? Does something jump out at you that says, “Oh, there's a pair of earrings,” or “There's a pendant. I can do something with this”?    John: Sometimes.    Corliss: Sometimes. With the way I personally work, I have a table full of all sorts of things. I'll take a certain amount of time and just look and pick and group and put this away. It's almost like a cat playing with a couple of little toys. You put it over here and you scoot it over there. Then we'll have dialogue about it, and we'll talk about things. Then it'll rest, and it'll come back. Sometimes the decision is immediate; sometimes it takes a little while. It's just the process. It's the same thing when John works. He's a little more direct than I am. I've learned from a couple of other peers that it's very helpful to have many, many things at the table at the time, because you can look at a variety of things and the mind just flows. It's like automatic writing. But John's very direct. He'll go through a process and then say, “Come here. Let's talk about this,” and we'll talk about something.   Sharon: What's the division of responsibility between the two of you? Does one person do the back-office stuff and the other person makes? Do both of you do the creative aspect? How does that work?   John: We're very collaborative. It's a very fluid process. I always refer it to as improvisational jewelry design. We don't set out with a plan to make a series of things, although themes and series have evolved organically through the process. We see these themes—moral themes, humor, political or social statements—just keep cropping up on their own to our particular point of view. But within the jewelry production design, it's really—   Corliss: It's fluid. Depending on the task that needs to be done, some things I will be better at soldering. There are some things that John does. He does a lot of—   John: Welding.   Corliss: Machinery and welding and things of that sort, engraving. That's where things maybe get a little compartmentalized. Not in the creative thinking process, but in the actual, physical production stages. “O.K., I'll take this stage. You do that better, so you do that and we'll talk about it.” That's what happens.   John: We don't want to get too far away from our business sides, like, “O.K., who's more efficient for the task?” But we do have certain divisions of tasks. On the back end, when it comes to the hard business stuff, Corliss tends to be the accountant. I'm the sales and marketing guy. She does all the web work. I do social media. I'll do photography and she'll do inventory. We do have certain tasks we fall into, but it tends to be more business operations than the creative work or production.   Sharon: Interesting. How many other businesses do you have? John, you have a multi-media empire it seems. What do you have here?   John: The main corporation is called Mindsparq. That's really an umbrella corporation. Underneath that, we have a variety of different business entities. There's the marketing company. There's 2Roses Jewelry. We have an education arm, a publishing arm, photography. I do a lot of restoration work.   Sharon: Restoration? I'm sorry, I didn't hear that.   John: Of jewelry antiquities.    Sharon: Oh, really. Interesting, O.K.    John: We're working with a lot of museums, auction houses, things like that, movie studios. That's turned into a whole thing unto itself. Then we do light manufacturing. There are a lot of different business entities. Some are intertwined with the jewelry; some are not.   Sharon: Corliss, you're doing the teaching on the educational videos or the educational aspect. How does that work?   Corliss: Yes, a lot more video now. I found that Zoom has opened up a whole wonderful world for expanding education, where I used to have to rely on being someplace in person, and the students had to rely on airfare, hotel rooms, that sort of thing. I have a very international following with online instruction in all different variants. It has proven to be not only lucrative, but very rewarding personally. John has been very instrumental in helping get the lighting and the connectivity set up and teaching me about different cameras and how to adjust them while I'm doing my instruction, that sort of thing. It's worked out very well.   John: I keep her on her marks.    Corliss: Oh, yes.   Sharon: It's so meticulous when you're trying to demonstrate something like jewelry making, metalsmithing, how to weld something, how to incorporate metal into this or that, because you're so close. It's like a cooking class in a sense. How do you show how to do it?   John: Yeah. Actually, the things we were doing with cooking demonstrations when Corliss was more involved in that helped us a lot when we started doing jewelry demonstrations and workshops. Basically, the videography and the whole setup is very, very similar.    Sharon: So, you were ready when Covid came around. When everybody was on lockdown, you were already up and running.   John: We were.   Corliss: Yeah.   John: Actually, what you're seeing behind us, we're in our broadcast studio now.   Corliss: With some of the equipment behind us.    John: Yeah, when Covid hit, we made the investment to set up a complete streaming broadcast studio because it was obvious that this was going to be the transitional network. It wasn't going to just be for the next six months.    Corliss: We've always been very pragmatic about trends and where everything is going. During the pandemic, we saw Zoom as something that was going to outlast the pandemic. It was going to cause a shift in education and a lot of other things, business meetings. So, we took the time to invest in learning the software and watching all the how-to videos and getting questions answered. We wanted to be able to hit the ground running with a certain amount of knowledge and have things work correctly, have that person's first impression be a good one, whether it was a student or I was doing a board meeting or whatever. We just saw that as the right thing to do.   Sharon: Do you see trends both with jewelry and with this? Zoom will continue, but do you see more polymer clay? Maybe it's me. It seems to have subsided. Maybe it was a big thing when it came out. I heard more about it, and now it's—not run of the mill; that's too much—but it's more widespread, so people aren't talking about it as much. What are your thoughts about that?   Corliss: You're talking about the polymer clay, correct?   Sharon: Yes.   Corliss: There have been advancements made within the community, but I actually see the most innovative work coming out of Eastern Europe. There's a design aesthetic there that is very traditional and very guild-oriented. There's a different appreciation of fine art over there, where in America this is a craft media; it's something to introduce young children to. There's nothing wrong with that at all, but it's just a different perspective on it.    John: I was just going to add that what you see in Europe is more professional artists.   Corliss: Yes.   John: Mature, professional studio practices incorporating very sophisticated raw material. Right now, the more innovative stuff is coming out of Europe. How that plays out, that's not to say there's nobody in America. I mean, obviously there are.   Corliss: There's more happening now. We're seeing more and more of our contemporaries getting into the large exhibitions, the large shows with very wonderful work. It's very satisfying to see that, but it's been a slow growth, mainly because this particular medium was introduced as something crafty and not something to really be explored as an art form. That came from within when polymer clay was first manufactured from a very small group of people who saw the potential of it. They set the foundation of pursuing polymer clay as an art form. It's taken a while to grow, but it is starting to get a little bit sweet now.   John: And that's not really different from other mediums. Look at it: it's just a medium. If you look at the introduction of acrylic paints into the painting world, it took 75 years for those to eclipse other things. Polymers are on that path.    Corliss: They were first invented, I think, in the 70s and 80s as a—   John: Well, they were invented of course.   Corliss: Yes, that is absolutely correct, but as an art supply. They were made in the 1980s. That's when they started being discovered.   John: Do you know how polymer clay was invented? Do you know the story?   Sharon: No.   John: It was invented by the Nazis.   Sharon: Was it? For what?    John: During World War II, for the leadup to World War II, it was an industrial material that was invented as a substitute for hard-to-find steel and things like that. It was used in manufacturing leading up to the war. It's an incredibly versatile and really durable product, and it's very plastic. It can be used for a lot of different things. So consequently, it was sitting on the shelf for many years, many decades, until around the 1980s when somebody somewhere discovered this stuff and said, “Hey, look at this. We can throw some color into it and do all sorts of crazy, artistic stuff with it.” That's where it took off.   Corliss: That was the start of Premo, and now you have countless brands of polymer clay that are being manufactured. Just about every country on earth has its own brand of polymer clay, including Russia and Japan. Polymer clay is very big in Japan.   Sharon: That's interesting.    John: Including us. We have it as well.    Sharon: You are early adopters, then. It sounds like very early adopters.   Corliss: Back in that particular time, the internet was just getting started. There wasn't a big outlet like there is today with social media for polymer clay enthusiasts or groups or fellow artists to get together. I learned everything online. There were one or two websites that acted as portals with links to different tutorials and other web pages with information about products, manufacturers' pages, that sort of thing. I learned polymer clay online.   Sharon: Wow, online.   John: There were no instructions.   Corliss: No, there was nothing.   Sharon: Wow! I give you a lot of credit, the stick-to-itiveness and determination to say, “I'm going to learn this.” Polymer clay, I took a class decades ago where they used some—is it baked?   Corliss: Yes, we prefer to call it cured.   Sharon: Cured, O.K.    Corliss: And some of the terminology that's been developed recently is to give a little more sophistication to the product so it isn't so crafty. So yes, it's cured. Most of it is cured around 275º Fahrenheit. There are brands that are cured a little bit higher and maybe slightly lower, but a lot of the brands are interchangeable, intermixable. You can have polymer clay look like a gemstone. You can have it look like old, weathered wood. It's very adaptable. It's a perfect mimic. It supplants the use of other materials in different jewelry compositions. It's a very interesting material to work with.    Sharon: It sounds like it.   Corliss: You can paint it. You can rough it up. You can use alcohol on it, just about anything.   Sharon: Recently you mentioned competition. You enter your work into competitions—I call them competitions. I don't know what you call them, where they give an award for best—   John: Yeah, exhibitions. That's something we do. It's part of the promotion of your work. It's about getting your name and your work out there in front of as large an audience as possible. It's one way to approach it. We've used that in a lot of cases, and these things are building blocks to how you build a sustainable practice. Being in an exhibition—for example, we've been in the Beijing Biennial for three years running. We've won numerous prizes for that, and we're representing the United States. We're one of six artists that have been chosen to represent the U.S. and one of the only clay artists outside the U.K. That'll pick up a lot of opportunities for us and allow us to make connections in China, particularly within the arts community in China. Just that one event has caromed off into, I don't how many years now it's been playing out, and it has continued to provide opportunities for us to do different things. So, yeah, they can be very, very useful, but you have to also recognize that the opportunities are there only if you recognize them and then take action.   Sharon: Would you recommend it to people in earlier stages of their careers, just for validation, to be able to say, “I won this”? Or would you say don't do it until you're ready? What's your advice?   John: I don't think we advocate one way or another. All I can speak to is this is what works for us. Results can vary. It depends on how you approach it. We had a discussion about this in one of the arts groups recently, and I was surprised that one of themes that emerged out of that was a lot of artists' discomfort with competition. If that's the case, then that's probably not going to be good advice for you. When you do exhibitions and competitions, you'd better have a thick skin because you need to be able to say, “It's not personal;  they didn't like my jewelry.”   Corliss: I think one area where we have been a bit instrumental is with younger people who want to enter that first competition for the first time. It's more of an instructional thing. The technology no longer does slides; you do images. It's little things like making sure your images all have pretty much the same backdrop, that they're easy for the jury to look at. Out of the 12 or 15 things that we made, we pick the five or three strongest that we feel would be looked at in front of the jury. When you fill out your questionnaire, if it's anything you have to hand write, please print legibly. It's surprising how careless people can be. Just things like that. Don't be disappointed if you don't get in. You go through the experience of having a binder three inches thick of, “Thank you very much, but no thank you,” before someone comes in saying, “Congratulations.” Then that new little binder starts growing and growing and growing. It's more of a basic instruction, hand-holding, a little bit of counseling and, “Here, go on your way. Just give it a try.”   John: For a long time, we confronted ourselves with that kind of thing. We have what we call the “wall of shame.” We post all our rejection letters and say, “O.K., we really suck. Look at this is a massive array of rejection letters.” But I think most professional artists that do exhibitions and things will tell you it's a numbers game. You just keep submitting and eventually you'll get into some, and you won't get into others; that's all there is to it.    Sharon: Yeah, I can see how thick skin comes in handy.   Corliss: I was just going to say I run to the bathroom and cry.    Sharon: No, but you have to have thick skin to do what you do in terms of putting your work out there. You see people looking at it. They walk to the next table. They walk to the next booth. I was talking to a jeweler about this the other day. It's challenging right there.   Corliss: I go back again to the early days of the apprenticeship. Speaking for myself, I had some hard masters. I remember one class—I will never forget this guy, Salvatore Solomon. He was a fabulous artist, a very good, well-respected artist, and I'm in class and he comes around. He didn't say a word, just took the piece I was working on, ripped it up. He said, “Start over.” Oh no, that didn't sit well with me, but that was his technique. He was very hard on his students, but he was teaching you a number of things. One, thick skin. Two, perseverance. The experience I came out of that with has benefitted me for the rest of my life. Now, I understand what he was trying to do.   Sharon: That would be hard thing to go through. John and Corliss, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. I give you a lot of credit for everything you've built, not just the jewelry, but everything around it. Thank you so much for taking the time.   John: Sharon, thank you very much for the opportunity and for taking the time to do this. It's been a real honor and a pleasure.   Corliss: Yes, it's been nice. Thank you so much.   Thank you again for listening. Please leave us a rating and review so we can help others start their own jewelry journey.

“Stop Being So Judgemental!”One of the most quoted verses in the Bible today is some iteration of the following:“Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye (Matthew 7:1-3)?”Usually when we hear it, though, we hear: “don't be so judgy!”, “only God can judge me”, “you're so judgemental!”, or “stop being so judgemental!” But is that what this passage means? Are we never allowed to pass judgment? Can we judge others? What's the truth of the matter? In looking at this topic, we are going to investigate four main questions: What is a judgment? Can we judge people? What can we judge? What are the spiritual dangers when we judge?What is a Judgment?First, what is a judgment? This might sound like an obvious question with an obvious answer, but let's take another look.The verb to judge is shared in English and French and comes from the Latin iudicere which means, generally, to proclaim, determine, or conclude. However, in a legal sense, from Roman usage, we get a few synonyms: accuse, reprimand, condemn, and damn. The word came from two root words: ius and dico. Ius means law or right and dico means I call or I point out. I love word etymology. Usually when I am trying to figure out what a word really means, I look at the history of it. Here is no different, and, in fact, we have already stumbled on an important fact. Even in the Latin context, there are two usages of the verb to judge - one means to proclaim or determine and the other means to reprimand and condemn. These are very different usages of the same word! So, we could say that there are two types of judgments, generally speaking. The first judgment belongs to any individual who has come to a conclusion and makes a proclamation. The second judgment pertains to one with authority handing over a ruling. Put another way: the first is an action (to judge) and the second is a job (acting as judge). Can We Judge People? Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the one and only eternal Judge. As we read in the Gospel of St. John:“For the Father judges no one, but has given all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son, just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life (Jn. 5:22-24).”Only He can discern the thoughts and feelings of the heart, mind, and soul. Judgment, in the eternal law sense, belongs only to God. To only Jesus is the judgment of damnation reserved. Upon death, all will appear before Him and He will make the eternal, lasting judgment of the state of one's soul, ultimately, to Heaven or Hell. So, can we judge other people? The answer is simple: absolutely not. This is what Jesus means when He says, “Judge not, that you will not be judged.” We are not omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipotent. We simply are not equipped to be the Judge. We do not know the state of someone's soul. What Can We Judge?If we cannot judge others. Rather, I should say - going back to our Roman dual-usage of the word - that we are not the Judge. What then can we judge? Jesus also says in the Gospel of St. John: “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment (Jn. 7:24).” It seems, then, that we can judge something! At the very least, Jesus is asking us to use *right* judgment.Counsel is one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit. It is also called “right judgment.” Counsel is the perfection of the cardinal virtue of prudence. Counsel allows us to judge promptly and rightly what should be done in especially difficult situations. Of course, this is a gift from God for our own personal use. What then is the right judgment of others? I think a prerequisite would have to begin with a firm grasp of the virtue of prudence.Prudence is the virtue that disposes of practical reason to discern our true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of achieving it, using the language of the Catechism. Put more succinctly, quoting Aristotle: “recta ratio agibilium” - “right reason applied to practice.” By practicing and growing in the virtue of prudence, we begin to determine with greater ease what is truly right or truly wrong. This is why the Catechism refers to prudence as the “charioteer of the virtues.”To paraphrase St. Thomas Aquinas, prudence allows us to do three things: 1) to discern the best means for action, 2) to judge soundly whether that means is fitting, and 3) to command the employment of the means. As we grow in this virtue, we will inevitably begin to notice when others employ less-than-virtuous means to attain a goal. We will make judgments. Even our legal code reflects this. We make and enforce laws because we are making a judgment, collectively, that certain actions are morally good or evil, right or wrong. Jesus presupposes this when He gives this charge to His disciples: “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector (Mt. 18:15-17).”Here the disciple is making a judgment that his brother has committed a sin. Then, he is charged with telling him this judgment. I am not sure how much clearer our Lord can be in the call to judge the actions of others, at least when someone has sinned against us personally. What are the Spiritual Dangers in Judging?We can judge the actions of others without judging them personally. But what are the spiritual dangers of judgment? First, we have to remember that we live in a fallen world and have an inclination to sin. We are not perfect, and, as our Lord says, we need to recognize the log in our eye before trying to remove the speck in our brother's eye. In other words, any judgment and correction needs to come from a place of righteousness and humility. We have to be cognisant of our biases, our passions, and our own short-comings. Once we have a real sense of self-knowledge, gained in prayer, we can, then and only then, look outward.Second, we must avoid rash judgment, detraction, and calumny. The Catechism summarizes this succinctly:“Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likely to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:– of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;– of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to persons who did not know them;– of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them (CCC 2477).”The Catechism then gives a lot more on this subject from paragraphs 2478 - 2487 .ConclusionJudging the state of someone's eternal soul is out of the question because you and I are not the Judge. There is only one Judge and His name is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Judging the actions of another, after sufficient discernment and prudence, is called for by the Lord and presumed by every human society with a legal code. I will try to conclude by summarizing this as succinctly as I can: Judge actions, not people. Thank you for reading/listening! This post is public so feel free to share it.Thanks for reading and/or listening to Will Wright Catholic! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit willwrightcatholic.substack.com

Ed asked questions about leaving the profession. Chad took a step. John jumped off the diving board. Leaving the Profession question 1 When we say that people are leaving or there is an AT shortage, are we actually talking about specifically in the traditional setting? (Not sure on % breakdown, but how many ATs are working in industrial and clinic setting now compared to 5 or 10 years ago) John: I think both are accurate. People are leaving the profession of Athletic Training and are leaving the traditional setting. Both situations are good for the profession. Leaving The Profession Question 2: For those who have moved on from a setting or profession, what were some of the red flags you noticed if any, or were there smaller subtler signs that were overseen that added up? John: Being close enough to the table to recognize budgets and spending, HR trends, and then not be given a proper salary increase or plan for the future were my major red flags. I, unfortunately, ignored all of the mini red flags of the community leading up to my decision allowing my value to drop or not be seen to be given a fair chance/raise.  Question 3 Are our governing organizations finding this trend of ATs leaving concerning, or is this what the BOC and CAATE want as we push to be more recognized and respected as healthcare professionals? John: From a MATS perspective, we are noticing it. We are also noticing the  Question 4 If our profession is in fact trying to distance ourselves from the traditional setting, how do we maintain the same, or improve the level of care we once provided to that population if we are trying to do that with less people? John: For me, and I think a lot of people, we want to see a well-laid-out plan complete with proactive answers to questions. Without that, it promotes anxiety and uncertainty even if a positive decision is being made. That being said, who knows? I know our skill set is unmatched but we keep changing directions and losing good athletic trainers in the shuffle.  John, how have you been treated since leaving the profession 6 months ago? I have had nothing but respect from peers and coworkers. Contact Us: Ed John Jeremy

This episode of the In The Club Podcast by Club Colors features John Lincoln, Founder and CEO of Ignite Visibility, an Inc 5000 company, and author of The Forecaster Method and Digital Influencer.John starts by sharing about his company's culture of innovation and how they cut through the noise with thought leadership and social selling. He talks about the changing trends in digital marketing and the dominance of short-form video across all platforms.He also discusses how they utilize social selling and how a customer-first mindset drives business. In his upcoming book, he empowers new digital marketers and entrepreneurs with the tools to navigate digital marketing and even its legalities so you can avoid them too. HIGHLIGHTSIgnite Visibility: The customer's success is your successThe changing digital advertising landscapeDigital marketing now: LinkedIn, YouTube, and TiktokJohn's upcoming book: Self-improvement in digital marketingSales and marketing are beginning to merge  QUOTESJohn: "Some of the main ways we attract clients is by writing books, by doing industry studies, by contributing thought leadership, just by being on the cutting edge and just loving what we do and going the extra mile for all of our clients."John: "We kind of developed this culture of we love to be experts, we love being digital savvy, so every week, people in the company are learning together and it's just a lot of fun to have that energy going. And we put a lot of money into testing and into research and development."John: "If you're posting consistently on your topic, engaging with other people, and you are doing things that are interesting, it will, for sure, lead to new business for you."John: "For the best YouTube channels, for the highest engagement, people, they don't leave, basically, we're seeing that these videos have an edit every 2 seconds." Connect with John by clicking the links below:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnelincoln/Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/John-Lincoln/e/B01B7BJV8M%3FWebsite: https://ignitevisibility.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/IgniteVisibility

In this episode, we cover: 00:00:00 - Introduction  00:03:15 - FinOps Foundation and Multicloud  00:07:00 - Costs  00:10:40 - John's History in Reliability Engineering  00:16:30 - The Actual Cost of an Outages, Security, Etc. 00:21:30 - What John Measures  00:28:00 - What John is Up To/Latinx in Tech Links: Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/ FinOps Foundation: https://www.finops.org Techqueria.org: https://techqueria.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmartinez/ TranscriptJohn: I would say a tip for better monitoring, uh, would be to, uh turn it on. [laugh]. [unintelligible 00:00:07] sounds, right?Jason: Welcome to the Break Things on Purpose podcast, a show about chaos engineering and operating reliable systems. In this episode we chat with John Martinez, Director of Cloud R&D at Palo Alto Networks. John's had a long career in tech, and we discuss his new focus on FinOps and how it has been influenced by his past work in security and chaos engineering.  Jason: So, John, welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where do you work? What do you do?John: Yeah. So, John Martinez. I am a director over at Palo Alto Networks. I have been in the cloud security space for the better of, I would say, seven, eight years or so. And currently, am in transition in my role at Palo Alto Networks.So, I'm heading headstrong into the FinOps world. So, turning back into the ops world to a certain degree and looking at what can we do, two things: better manage our cloud spend and gain a lot more optimization out of our usage in the cloud. So, very excited about new role.Jason: That's an interesting new role. I'd imagine that at Palo Alto Networks, you've got quite a bit of infrastructure and that's probably a massive bill.John: It can be. It can be. Yeah, [laugh] absolutely. We definitely have large amount of scale, in multi-cloud, too, so that's the added bonus to it all. FinOps is kind of a new thing for me, so I'm pretty happy to, as I dig back into the operations world, very happy to discover that the FinOps Foundation exists and it kind of—there's a lot of prescribed ways of both looking at FinOps, at optimization—specifically in the cloud, obviously—and as well as there's a whole framework that I can go adopt.So, it's not like I'm inventing the wheel, although having been in the cloud for a long time, and I haven't talked about that part of it but a lot of times, it feels like—in my early days anyway—felt like I was inventing new wheels all the time. As being an engineer, the part that I am very excited about is looking at the optimization opportunities of it. Of course, the goal, from a finance perspective, is to either reduce our spend where we can, but also to take a look at where we're investing in the cloud, and if it takes more of a shift as opposed to a straight-up just cut the bill kind of thing, it's really all about making sure that we're investing in the right places and optimizing in the right places when it comes down to it.Jason: I think one of the interesting perspectives of adopting multi-cloud is that idea of FinOps: let's save money. And the idea, if I wanted to run a serverless function, I could take a look at AWS Lambda, I could take a look at Azure Functions to say, “Which one's going to be cheaper for this particular use case,” and then go with that.John: I really liked how the FinOps Foundation has laid out the approach to the lifecycle of FinOps. So, they basically go from the crawl, walk, run approach which, in a lot of our world, is kind of like that. It's very much about setting yourself up for success. Don't expect to be cutting your bill by hundreds of thousands of dollars at the beginning. It's really all about discovering not just how much we're spending, but where we're spending it.I would categorize the pitting the cloud providers against each other to be more on the run side of things, and that eventually helps, especially in the enterprise space; it helps enterprises to approach the cloud providers with more of a data-driven negotiation, I would say [laugh] to your enterprise spend.Jason: I think that's an excellent point about the idea of that is very much a run. And I don't know any companies within my sphere and folks that I know in the engineering space that are doing that because of that price competition. I think everybody gets into the idea of multi-cloud because of this idea of reliability, and—John: Mm-hm.Jason: One of my clouds may fail. Like, what if Amazon goes down? I'd still need to survive that.John: That's the promise, right? At least that's the promise that I've been operating under for the 11 years or so that I've been in the cloud now. And obviously, in the old days, there wasn't a GCP or an Azure—I think they were in their infancy—there was AWS… and then there was AWS, right? And so I think eventually though you're right, you're absolutely right. Can I increase my availability and my reliability by adopting multiple clouds?As I talk to people, as I see how we're adopting the multiple clouds, I think realistically though what it comes down to is you adopted cloud, or teams adopt a cloud specifically for, I wouldn't say some of the foundational services, but mostly about those higher-level niche services that we like. For example, if you know large-scale data warehousing, a lot of people are adopting BigQuery and GCP because of that. If you like general purpose compute and you love the Lambdas, you're adopting AWS and so on, and so forth. And that's what I see more than anything is, I really like a cloud's particular higher level service and we go and we adopt it, we love it, and then we build our infrastructure around it. From a practical perspective, that's what I see.I'm still hopeful, though, that there is a future somewhere there where we can commoditize even the cloud providers, maybe [laugh]. And really go from Cloud A to Cloud B to Cloud C, and just adopt it based on pricing I get that's cheaper, or more performant, or whatever other dimensions that are important to me. But maybe, maybe. We'll remain hopeful. [laugh].Jason: Yeah, we're still very much in that spot where everybody, despite even the basics of if I want to a virtual machine, those are still so different between all the clouds. And I mean even last week, I was working on some Terraform and the idea of building it modularly, and in my head thinking, “Well, at some point, we might want to use one of the other clouds so let's build this module,” and thinking, “Realistically, that's probably not going to happen.”John: [laugh]. Right. I would say that there's the other hidden cost about this and it's the operational costs. I don't think we spend a whole lot of time talking about operational costs, necessarily, but what is it going to cost to retrain my DevOps team to move from AWS to GCP, as an example? What are the underlying hidden costs that are there?What traps am I going to fall into because of that? It seems cool; Terraform does a great job of getting that pain into the multiple clouds from an operations perspective. Kubernetes does a great job as well to take some of that visibility into the underlying—and I hate to use it this way but ‘hardware' [laugh] virtual hardware—that's like EC2 or Google Compute, for example. And they do great jobs, but at the end of the day we're still spending a lot of time figuring out what the foundational services are. So, what are those hidden costs?Anyway, long story short, as part of my journey into FinOps, I'm looking forward into not just uncovering the basics of FinOps, where is what are we spending? Where are we spending it? What are the optimization opportunities? But also take a look at some of the more hidden types of costs. I'm very interested in that aspect of the FinOps world as well. So, I'm excited.Jason: Those hidden costs are also interesting because I think, given your background in security—John: Mm-hm.Jason: —one of the challenges in multi-cloud is, if I'm an expert in AWS and suddenly we're multi-cloud and I have to support GCP, I don't necessarily know all of those correct settings and how to necessarily harden and build my systems. I know a model and a general framework, but I might be missing something. Talk to me a bit more about that as a security person.John: Yeah.Jason: What does that look like?John: Yeah, yeah. It's very nuanced, for sure. There are definitely some efforts within the industry to help alleviate some of that nuance and some of those hidden settings that I might not think about. For example, CIS Foundations as a community, the foundations of benchmarks that CIS produces can be pretty exhaustive—and there are benchmarks for the major clouds as well—those go a long way to try and describe at least, what are the main things I should look at from a security perspective? But obviously, there are new threats coming along every day.So, if I was advising security teams, security operations team specifically, it would be definitely to keep abreast into what are the latest and go take a look at what some of the exploit kits are looking for or doing and adopting some of those hidden checks into, for example, your security operations center, what you react to, what the incident responses are going to be to some of those emerging threats. For sure it is a challenge, and it's a challenge that the industry faces and one that we go every day. And an exploit that might be available for EC2 may be different on Google Compute or maybe different on Azure Compute.Jason: There's a nice similarity or parallel there to what we often talk about, especially in this podcast, is we talk about chaos engineering and reliability and that idea of let's look at how things fail and take what we know about one system or one service, and how can we apply that to others? From your experience doing a wide breadth of cloud engineering, tell me a bit more about your experience in the reliability space and keeping—all these great companies that you've worked for, keeping their systems up and running.John: I think I have one of the—fortunate to have one of the best experiences ever. So, I'll have to dig way back to 11 years ago, or so [laugh]. My first job in the cloud was at Netflix. I was at Netflix right around the time when we were moving applications out of the data center and into AWS. Again, fortunate; large-scale, at the cusp of everything that was happening in the cloud, back in those days.I had just helped finish—I was a systems engineer; that's where I transitioned from, systems engineering—and just a little bit of a plug there, tomorrow is Sysadmin Day, so I still am an old school sysadmin at heart so I still celebrate Sysadmin Day. [laugh]. But I was doing that transition from systems engineering into cloud engineering at Netflix, just helped move a database application out from the data center into AWS. We were also adopting in those days, very rapidly, a lot of the new services and features that AWS was rolling out. For example, we don't really think about it today anymore, but back then EBS-backed instances was the thing. [laugh].Go forth and every new EC2 instance we create is going to be EBS-backed. Okay, great. March, I believe it was March 2011, one of AWS's very first, and I believe major, EBS outages occurred. [laugh]. Yeah, lots of, lots of failure all over the place.And I believe from that a lot of what—at least in Gremlin—a lot of that Chaos Monkey and a lot of that chaos engineering really was born out of a lot of our experiences back then at Netflix, and the early days of the cloud. And have a lot of the scars still on me. But it was a very valuable lesson that I take now every day, having lived through it. I'm sure you guys at Gremlin see a lot of this with your customers and with yourselves, right, is that the best you can do is test those failure scenarios and hope that you are as resilient as possible. Could we have foreseen that there was going to be a major EBS outage in us-east-1? Probably.I think academically we thought about it, and we were definitely preaching the mantra of architect for failure, but it still bit us because it was a major cascading outage in one entire region in AWS. It started with one AZ and it kept rolling, and it kept rolling. And so I don't know necessarily in that particular scenario that we could have engineered—especially with the technology of the day—we could have engineered full-on failover to another region, but it definitely taught us and me personally a lot of lessons around how to architect for failure and resiliency in the cloud, for sure.Jason: I like that point of it's something that we knew theoretically could maybe happen, but it always seems like the odds of the major catastrophes are so small that we often overlook them and we just think, “Well, it's going to be so rare that it'll never happen, so we don't think about it.” As you've moved forward in your career, moving on from Netflix, how has that shaped how you approach reliability—this idea of we didn't think EBS could ever go down and lead to this—how do you think of catastrophic failures now, and how do you go about testing for them or architecting to withstand them?John: It's definitely stayed with me. Every ops job that I've had since, it's something that I definitely take into account in any of those roles that I have. As the opportunity came up to speak with you guys, wanted to think about reliability and chaos in terms of cloud spend, and how can I marry those two worlds together? Obviously, the security aspect of things, for sure, is there. It's expecting the unexpected and having the right types of security monitoring in place.And I think that's—kind of going back to an earlier comment that I made about these unexpected or hidden costs that are there lying dormant in our cloud adoption, just like I'm thinking about the cost of security incidents, the cost of failure, what does that look like? These are answers I don't have yet but the explorer in me is looking forward to uncovering a lot of what that's going to be. If we talk in a year from now, and I have some of that prescribed, and thought of, and discovered, and I think it'll be awesome to talk about it in a year's time and where we are. It's an area that I definitely take seriously I have applied not just to operational roles, but as I got into more customer-facing roles in the last 11 years, in between advising customers, both as a sales engineer, as head of customer success, and cloud security startup that I worked for, Evident.io, and then eventually moving here to Palo Alto Networks, it's like, how do I best advise and think about—when I talk to customers—about failure scenarios, reliability, chaos engineering? I owe it all to that time that I spent at Netflix and those experiences very early on, for sure.Jason: Coming back to those hidden costs is definitely an important thing. Especially I'm sure that as you interact with folks in the FinOps world, there's always that question of, “Why do I have so much redundancy? Why am I paying for an entire AZs worth of infrastructure that I'm never using?” There's always the comment, “Well, it's like a spare tire; you pay for an extra tire in case you have a flat.” But on some hand, there is this notion of how much are we actually spending versus what does an outage really cost me?John: Right. We thought about that question very early on at another company I worked at after Netflix and before the startup. I was fortunate again to work in another large-scale environment, at Adobe actually, working on the early days of their Creative Cloud implementation. Very different approach to doing the cloud than Netflix in many ways. One of the things that we definitely made a conscious effort to do, and we thought about it in terms of an insurance policy.So, for example, S3 replication—so replicating our data from one region to another—in those days, an expensive proposition but one that we looked at, and we intentionally went in with, “Well, no, this is our customer data. How much is that customer data worth to us?” And so we definitely made the conscious decision to invest. I don't call it ‘cost' at that point; I call that an investment. To invest in the reliability of that data, having that insurance policy there in case something happened.You know, catastrophic failure in one region, especially for a service as reliable and as resilient as S3 is very minuscule, I would say, and in practice, it has been, but we have to think about it in terms of investing. We definitely made the right types of choices, for sure. It's an insurance policy. It's there because we need it to be there because that's our most precious commodity, our customers' data.Jason: Excellent point about that being the most precious commodity. We often feel that our data isn't as valuable as we think it is and that the value for our companies is derived from all of the other things, and the products, and such. But when it comes down to it, it is that data. And it makes me think we're currently in this sort of world where ransomware has become the biggest headline, especially in the security space, and as I've talked with people about reliability, they often ask, “Well, what is Gremlin do security-wise?” And we're not a security product, but it does bring that up of, if your data systems were locked and you couldn't get at your customer information, that's pretty similar to having a catastrophic outage of losing that data store and not having a backup.John: I've thought about this, of course, in the last few weeks, obviously. A very, very public, very telling types of issues with ransomware and the underlying issues of supply chain attacks. What would we do [laugh] if something like that were to happen? Obviously, rhetorically, what would we do? And lots of companies are paying the ransom because they're being held at gunpoint, you know, “We have your data.”So yeah, I mean, a lot of it, in the situation, like the example I gave before, could not just the replication of, for example, my entire S3 bucket where my customer data is thwarted a situation like that? And then you think about, kind of like, okay, let's think about this further. If we do it in the same AWS account, as an example, if the attacker obtained my IAM credentials, then it really comes down to the same thing because, “Oh, look it, there's another bucket in that other region over there. I'm going to go and encrypt all of those objects, too. Why not, right?” [laugh].And so, it also begs the question or the design principles and decisions of, well, okay, maybe do I ship it to a different account where my security context is different, my identity context is different? And so there's a lot of areas to explore there. And it's very good question and one that we definitely do need to think about, in terms of catastrophic failure because that's the way to think about it, for sure.Jason: Yeah. So, many parallels between that security and reliability, and all comes together with that FinOps, and how much are you—how much do we pay for all of this?John: Between the reliability and the security world, there's a lot of parallels because your job is about thinking what are the worst-case scenarios? It's, what could possibly go wrong? And how bad could it be? And in many cases, how bad is it? [laugh].Especially as you uncover a lot of the bad things that do happen in the real world every day: how bad is it? How do I measure this? And so absolutely there's a lot of parallels, and I think it's a very interesting point you make. And so… yeah so, Jason, how can we marry the two worlds of chaos engineering and security together? I think that's another very exciting topic, for sure.Jason: That is, absolutely. You mentioned just briefly in that last statement, how do you measure it?John: Yep.Jason: That comes up to something that we were chatting about earlier is monitoring, and what do you measure, and ensuring that you're measuring the right things. From your experience building secure systems, talk to me about what are some of the things that you like to measure, that you like to get observability on, that maybe some folks are overlooking.John: I think the overlooking part is an interesting angle, but I think it's a little bit more basic than that even. I'll go to my time in the startup—so at Evident.io—mainly because I was in customer success and my job was to talk to our customers every day—I would say that a bunch of our customers—and they varied based on maturity level, but we were working with a lot of customers that were new in the cloud world, and I would say a lot of customers were still getting tripped up by a lot of the basic types of things. For example—what do I mean by that? Some of the basic settings that were incorrect were things just, like, EC2 security groups allowing port 22 in from the world, just the simple things like that. Or publicly accessible S3 buckets.So, I would say that a lot of our customers were still missing a lot of those steps. And I would say, in many of the cases, putting my security hat on, the first thing you go to is, well, there's an external hacker trying to do something bad in your AWS accounts, but really, the majority of the cases were all just mistakes; they were honest. I'm an engineer setting up a dev account and it's easier for me, instead of figuring out what my egress IP is for my company's VPN, it's easier for me just to set port 22 to allow all from the world. A few minutes later, there you go. [laugh]. Exploit taken, right? It's just the simple stuff; we really as an industry do still get tripped up by the simple things.I don't know if this tracks with the reliability world or the chaos engineering world, but I still see that way too much. And that just tells me that even if we are in the cloud—mature company or organization—there's still going to be scenarios where that engineer at two in the morning just decides that it's just easier to open up the firewall on EC2 than it is to do, quote-unquote, “The right thing.” Then we have an issue. So, I really do think that we can't let go of not just monitoring the basics, but also getting better as an industry to alert on the basics and when there are misconfigurations on the basics, and shortening that time to alert because that really is—especially in the security world—that really is very critical to make sure that window between when that configuration setting is made to when that same engineer who made the misconfiguration get alerted to the fact that it is a misconfiguration. So. I'll go to that: it's the basics. [laugh].Jason: I like that idea of moving the alert forward, though. Because I think a lot of times you think of alerts as something bad has happened and so we're waiting for the alert to happen when there's wrongful access to a system, right? Someone breaks in, or we're waiting for that alert to happen when a system goes down. And we're expecting that it's purely a response mechanism, whereas the idea of let's alert on misconfigurations, let's alert on things that could lead to these, or that will likely lead to these wrong outcomes. If we can alert on those, then we can head it off.John: It's all the way. And in the security world, we call it shifting left, shifting security all the way to the left, all the way to the developer. Lots of organizations are making a lot of the right moves in that direction for embedding security well into the development pipeline. So, for example, I'll name two players in the Infrastructure as Code as we call it in the security space. And I'll name the first one just because they're part of Palo Alto Networks now, so Bridgecrew; so very strong, open-source solution in that space, as well as over on the HashiCorp side where Sentinel is another example of a great developer-forward shift-left type of tool that can help thwart a lot of the simple security misconfigurations, right from your CI/CD pipelines, as opposed to the reaction time over here on the right, where you're chasing security misconfigurations.So, there's a lot of opportunity to shorten that alert window. And even, in fact, I've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years—I and my team have spent a lot of time in the last couple of years thinking about what can the bots do for us, as opposed to waiting for an alert to pop up on a Slack message that says, “Hey, engineer. You've got port 22 open to the world. You should maybe think about doing something.” The right thing to do there is for something—could be something as simple as an alert making it to a Lambda function and the Lambda function closing it up for you in the middle of the night when you're not paying attention to Slack, and the bot telling you, “Hey, engineer. By the way, I closed the port up. That's why it's broken this morning for you.” [laugh]. “I broke it intentionally so that we can avoid some security problems.”So, I think there's the full gamut where we can definitely do a lot more. And that's where I believe the new world, especially in the security world, the DevSecOps world, can definitely help embed some of that security mindset with the rest of the cloud and DevOps space. It's certainly a very important function that needs to proliferate throughout our organizations, for sure.Jason: And we're seeing a lot of that in the reliability world as well, as people shift left and developers are starting to become more responsible for the operations and the running of their services and applications, and including being on call. That does bring to mind that idea, though—back to alerting on configurations and really starting to get those alerts earlier, not just saying that, “Hey, devs, you're on call so now you share a pain,” but actually trying to alleviate that pain even further to the left. Well, we're coming up close to time here. So, typically at this point, one thing that I like to do is we like to ask folks if they have anything to plug. Oftentimes that's where people can find you on social media or other things. I know that you're connected with Ana through Latinx in Tech, I would love to share more about that, too. So.John: For sure, yeah. So, my job in terms of my leadership role is definitely to promote a lot of diversity, inclusion, and equity, obviously, within the workspace. Personally, I do also feel very strongly that I should be not just preaching it, but also practicing it. So, I discovered in the last year—in fact, it's going to be about a year since I joined Techqueria—so techqueria.org—and we definitely welcome anybody and everybody.We're very inclusive, all the way from if you're a member of the Latinx community and in technology, definitely join us, and if you're an ally, we definitely welcome you with open arms, as well, to join techqueria.org. It is a very active and very vibrant community on Slack that we have. And as part of that, I and a couple of people in Techqueria are running a couple of what we call cafesitos which is the Spanish word for coffees, coffee meetings.So, it's a social time, and I'm involved in helping lead both the cybersecurity cafecito—we call it Cafecito Cibernético, which happens every other Friday. And it's security-focused, it's security-minded, we go everywhere from being very social and just talking about what's going on with people personally—so we like to celebrate personal wins, especially for those that are joining the job market or just graduating from school, et cetera, and talk about their personal wins, as well as talk about the happenings, like for example, a very popular topic of late has been supply chain attacks and ransomware attacks, so definitely very, very timely there. As well as I'm also involved—being in the cloud security space, I'm bridging, sort of, two worlds between the DevOps world and the security world; more recently, we started up the DevOps Cafecito, which is more focused on the operations side. And that's where, you know, happy to have Ana there as part of that Cafecito and helping out there. Obviously, there, it's a lot of the operations-type topics that we talk about; lots of Kubernetes talk, lots of looking at how the SRE and the DevOps jobs look in different places.And I wouldn't say I'm surprised by it, but it's very nice to see that there is also a big difference with how different organizations think about reliability and operations. And it's varied all over the place and I love it, I love the diversity of it. So anyway, so that's Techqueria, so very happy to be involved with the organization. I also recently took on the role of being the chapter co-director for the San Francisco chapter, so very happy to be involved. As we come out of the pandemic, hopefully, pretty soon here [laugh] right—as we're coming out of the pandemic, I'll say—but looking forward to that in-person connectivity and socializing again in person, so that's Techqueria.So, big plug for Techqueria. As well, I would say for those that are looking at the FinOps world, definitely check out the FinOps Foundation. Very valuable in terms of the folks that are there, the team that leads it, and the resources, if you're looking at getting into FinOps, or at least gaining more control and looking at your spend, not so much like this, but with your eyes wide open. Definitely take a look at a lot of the work that they've done for the FinOps community, and the cloud community in general, on how to take a look at your cloud cost management.Jason: Awesome. Thanks for sharing those. If folks want to follow you on social media, is that something you do?John: Absolutely. Mostly active on LinkedIn at johnmartinez on LinkedIn, so definitely hit me up on LinkedIn.Jason: Well, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for sharing all of your experiences and insight.John: Likewise, Jason. Glad to be here.Jason: For links to all the information mentioned, visit our website at gremlin.com/podcast. If you liked this episode, subscribe to the Break Things on Purpose podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favorite podcast platform. Our theme song is called, “Battle of Pogs” by Komiku, and it's available on loyaltyfreakmusic.com.

John Vuong started his Toronto-based agency, Local SEO Search, in 2013 with the goal of helping small- to medium-sized businesses in North America, UK, and Australia improve digital presence in their local communities.   John had ten years in advertising and sales for print media directories with their online performance-based networks and then worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. Through this experience, he honed his understanding of how to dig out a business's gaps, opportunities and challenges, its potential customers, where those customers were located, what those customers wanted . . . and what businesses themselves were looking for in an agency. John explains that product characteristics, physical proximity, convenience, and/or services are only the beginning of the variables to consider in “positioning” a company. Whatever it is that a company's customers want needs to be prominent on its website. John says, “Make it easy for people to realize what you offer.” John believes “Google My Business” is “the biggest asset piece for the local space” – it is what sets local apart from traditional organic traffic. This link between Google search and maps is critical. Small business owners need to understand how people “shop, navigate, and search for information.” Websites at the local level need to be simple for Google to easily crawl and index user-relevant information.  Typical clients for this agency are professional service businesses (dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, and anything medical spa-ish), trades (e.g.; plumbers or roofers) and B2B businesses (e.g.; manufacturing, distribution, and e-com) – businesses that more competitive in nature, have higher revenue expectations, and have a higher lifetime customer value. John says the process of building a business takes time and work – that there are no shortcuts for things that are worthwhile. Local SEO Search has specialists that develop SEO strategy, build links, create content, and manage social media. The agency employs web developers and graphic designers. But even with that variety of services, the agency's focus is totally and simply on the attributes and signals Google uses to rank websites. John' strength is sales. Yellow Pages taught him a lot about business. He met business owners where the businesses had been in existence, not just for years, but for lifetimes. How? “They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it.” John sees the internet as the “new Yellow Pages.” When he started his agency, John had to learn how to deliver, how to hire and manage people, how to provide customer service. “There's so much more to running a business than just sales,” he admits. John values honesty and hard work and admits that he “went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked.” Today, he says, he's “just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people” who “have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means.” Those are the people he feels he can best help. John can be reached on his agency's website at: www.localseosearch.ca.  Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by John Vuong, owner of Local SEO Search based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Thanks a lot for having me, Rob. I'm excited to be on your show today. ROB: Super exciting to have you here. Why don't you start off and tell us about Local SEO Search? I think we might know what your superpower is, but why don't you tell us about it?  JOHN: Yeah, definitely. I started this agency 8 years ago, back in 2013. My sole purpose is really to help the small to medium size businesses service their local community and really help them for their digital presence, so make them appear more visibly on search, in particular Google. ROB: Interesting. We've talked to some different SEO firms, but a lot of times they're more on that “trying to rank for a keyword,” that B2B software client. How does that work differently with local? How do the tactics and mindsets differ when you're trying to be the pizza place somebody finds when they look locally? JOHN: There's a lot of different nuances. In my background – and maybe I'll take a step back before I even start with starting the agency. I actually worked 10 years prior in advertising/sales, and I dabbled in traditional advertising/sales and print media directories, some online affiliate performance-based networks, and then I resided and worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. For me, I really learned a lot about local businesses, understood what gaps, opportunities, and challenges they had, and what they wanted to look for or to in an agency, or someone that they wanted to build their trust and relationship with. When I started this company, it was all about understanding them, asking the right questions, and understanding what they really, really cared about in terms of staying connected and harvesting a good relationship long term. For me, that's all I needed to get into this agency world without knowing how to run an agency. Working at Yellow Pages is not your traditional digital agency. It was more traditional channel print media, telephone book. But I learned a lot from a big company, how to run a real company. In terms of local, the big thing for me was understanding who their customers were, understanding their challenges/problems, and ultimately the customers that were consuming their product or service. Fast forward to now Google and how local sets themselves apart from the traditional organic traffic, Google My Business is the biggest asset piece for the local space. How you understand and claim and verify and rank for a lot of terms to be on that prominent proximity or relevant map is so critical for a lot of these small business owners because that's how people shop, navigate, search for information. For you as a business owner, I feel you have to understand what your customers are looking for. The keyword gap analysis, great, but positioning so that you actually know exactly that pizza shop, what people are looking for, seeking out – is it the weekly specials? Is it the different toppings? The convenience factor, proximity, free pick-up, Uber, whatever? There's so many different variables. Understand that. Make it prominent on your website, and then make sure that Google recognizes that it's inside your schema markup, your sitemap. Make it easy for people to realize what you offer that's accessible and simple for your customers. ROB: Dig in a little bit just for a moment on schema markup. That's something I think some of the amateur SEOs like me out in the world might know less about. JOHN: Schema markup is just the way you sort your information on your website so that Google can index things. It's another way to add attributes within your website. The key about everything you do in terms of not just digital, but in your business, is to make it as efficient as possible for your customers. The more simplistic it is, easy it is – just like your sitemap on your website, making it so simple that Google can go in there and crawl it without trying to navigate five layers deep on the content piece that's relevant for the user. If you mark it up so it's simple, so that Google doesn't have a problem indexing your site, it allows you to then make it a clean transfer of information/content to the actual users and make it easy for Google to then crawl and index your site. ROB: Thank you for digging into that. It's an interesting through-line going back to your work with Yellow Pages. You've been helping businesses be found by people for longer than you've had a business. That's pretty fascinating. I wonder what a typical customer looks like for you. I might've pulled you down a path with that pizza restaurant example, but who are we talking about for your customers, usually? Are we talking about doctors or lawyers, home professionals, retail businesses? What's the meat and potatoes of who wants to be found locally and wants some help with that? JOHN: Our typical persona/avatar type of client is the professional service-based type of business, whether it be dentists, lawyers, physio/chiro, massage, anything medical spa-ish, as well as trades, which are the plumbers, roofers, etc. And of course, the B2B kind of businesses – manufacturing, distribution, e-com, etc. The reason for that is typically it's more competitive in nature, and in a local marketplace – I live in Toronto, Canada, and it's one of the larger metropolitan areas in all of Canada. There's more competition in dentists than there are barbershops. Therefore, if you are in business for a higher ticket service type sale of your client – and the lifetime value of a dentist is 7 years – so the value of acquiring a customer, you want the good type of avatar, a good ideal lead nurture of a client. Understanding that whole process, understanding who you want to cultivate, understanding how you want to portray your brand or yourself as a business cultivates the best lead source if you do SEO properly with the right company, yourself, or freelancer contractor. It doesn't matter. If you do it properly, you should have an inbound lead flow of quality clients begging for you, for your service. Those are typically my type of clients because of the price point, the value that they're looking for, and how difficult it is to get new customers in any other form of media channels, from social to paid ads to traditional, tradeshows, print media, radio, television. There are so many different media sources, but I feel SEO still cultivates the best lead source of your ideal type client. ROB: That makes sense. You started walking down a path I was interested to get into. Obviously, SEO is the name you hang on the front door of the business, but you mentioned other marketing channels. Have you engaged more deeply into paid and content and some other things? Or have you kept it pretty tight around SEO? JOHN: My agency focuses on SEO only, but there's pillars within SEO. We take care of the strategy; we have specialists. We also have link builders. We have content creators. We have web developers, graphic designers, social media management. But that is all attributes and signals of what Google is looking for to rank a website. Anything that is required to rank a website, that's what we touch. Anything outside that, which is usually paid – like if you're doing paid ads on social or Google Ads or behavioral networks, performance networks, email, that's different. We only focus on being a full-service SEO agency that's more of a boutique agency. ROB: You must've had clients, though, ask you to manage their paid budget. How have you looked at that temptation, potentially, and said no to it? JOHN: We have that daily, actually. A lot of clients know they need SEO, and I tell them there's a ton of agencies that offer full-service from paid ads to SEO to content, and they break it up, and that's fine, a la carte. I just want to be really good at one thing and do it right and be known for it. There's different strategies, different agencies out there. I just feel there's a big enough marketplace for being the best at one thing. If you're known for doing it really well, that's what people know you by, and that's enough business to be had. I could dabble into digital, like paid ads, and hire someone in-house and take it over, but I'm not a true believer in that. [laughs] I have to believe in it at a very high level to really be a big, strong proponent of selling it. ROB: Right. Super-duper interesting to keep that sort of focus. You mentioned your journey, you mentioned coming through that Yellow Pages background. It almost seems like there might've been a journey for you within that previous role before starting the company where you started to see something shift. What was your journey from “Hey, I'm working at Yellow Pages, I'm working with these businesses” to “I'm going to go start my own business”? Because it's a big difference between having someone who pays your bills and figuring out how to pay your own bills. JOHN: The journey definitely is something that I feel is a mindset journey for a lot of people. When I was at Yellow Pages, I was there for 5 years. I learned a ton about sales. I had the privilege to meet with thousands of business owners, and I was being mentored by them on what it takes to a business owner. And that's something that was invaluable at that time, for me to then pick their brain on what really mattered in not just business ownership, but in life. These people were so grateful to be ultra-curious about how they ran their business, what really made them happy, and what ultimately they wanted to do for their community, for their family, to have a good lifestyle. That's what resonated with me, along with, of course, selling ad space in a more dated format like the print directory, which allowed me to know that there was a gap in opportunity in the marketplace. People wanted to go with someone they trusted, or a company, but they didn't know how to do it and what was involved. So I wanted to be that transition piece. As you know, paid ads in the Yellow Pages was a diminishing return on investment. People were spending more than ever, getting fewer people transacting. The return on investment was lower, and people like myself were spending more time on Google to do search results. I knew there was an opportunity digitally. I didn't know anything about SEO at that time. I just knew there was a gap in the marketplace to add an idea, and I knew there were people willing to pay for someone or something to help them. That's all I really needed to get my foot in the door. But it was all timing as well. I did extremely well at Yellow Pages and ads, so I was doing well in sales. My wife gave me the go-ahead, because she had a stable job opportunity. For me, it was more, look, I can go get another job, maybe work at Google, work at another ad agency or whatever – or I can try something. Basically, she said, “Go for it.” The first couple years it was a struggle to learn how to run a business. [laughs] More so than the SEO thing at all. My strength was sales, so I was out there selling from Day 1. The first two months, I already had 10 clients. So, the sales aspect wasn't the challenge; it was more about now I had to figure out how to deliver and hire people and manage, customer service. I realized there's so much more to running a business than just sales. ROB: For sure, that is an interesting part of the journey. I wonder a little bit – I don't know if Yellow Pages ever tried this, but I know a lot of the TV and radio stations and the conglomerates around them that used to sell to local businesses tried to make this transition. They've been selling TV ads, radio ads, billboards to these local businesses for forever. A lot of them tried to make the jump into selling digital advertising and selling SEO, but it just doesn't seem like that transition worked for them. What is it that made it hard for those organizations to turn the corner where they already had the client relationship and build up that new line of business? JOHN: I think the biggest barrier for them was they were so comfortable with the margins they had. With a big company like Yellow Pages, they were so comfortable with a directory that they billed monthly for ads where they printed an ad, and the cost was less than one-quarter of a month. I knew the cost and the margin of retaining a customer and getting them to buy ads in their asset, which was the printed book. Now you go digital and the margins are a lot less; to get into that and then not know what expectations and profitability is, it's going to be bad on their shareholders because ultimately it's all about big business. For me, that's where this was a huge gap. I'm realizing, now that I've been doing this for 8 years, why do these business owners gravitate towards smaller boutique companies? Because the big guys will try to cut corners for cost – not deliver on the actual results. They're trying to do as little as possible and earn as much money as possible. ROB: And they're not used to doing the execution at all. You put something in a book and you're done versus managing a relationship, actually having to do execution, having to apologize. I'm sure something goes wrong sometimes in the Yellow Pages, but not the same way – I know of an ecommerce site that stood up their ecommerce site and WordPress had a setting that said “Don't Index Me.” That was kind of a problem for their SEO on a site migration. It doesn't usually happen that way in print. JOHN: Exactly. Again, digital is so multi-touchpoint and so many people need to be involved. With traditional media, like newspaper, flyer, tradeshow, radio, television, they already own their asset piece. It's a sunk cost. So, for them, it's all about ad spend and people. When you look at what is required for digital to perform, you invest a ton of money. For these companies that were so reluctant to spend and invest, and so comfortable with that profit margin, very difficult to get that mindset. Especially when they're older in terms of the older generation. They're okay with the status quo. They don't really forward-think like what we see today. As digital agencies, we have to look ahead. We have to stay ahead of the curve. ROB: You mentioned those first couple of years where you were learning a lot about running a business. You mentioned that you had some customers pretty early. Was there a point where it felt like you had turned a corner and you said, “Okay, we're not just trying this, we're doing this” and hit escape velocity where you'd built up a team now where you saw that ahead of you? JOHN: My goal to do this was either commit, do it properly, or not do it at all. For me, my intention was spend less time in the business eventually and learn as much as I can, early days. Because I did have a family but I didn't have children yet, I had time. I didn't have a lot of money because I bootstrapped everything. It was like, I've got to figure this out. I've got to make this happen. I've got to make this work. I didn't really have a digital background. No technical skills, no SEO skills. I had to learn it. I had to figure it out. My background was always just sales, but then I had to learn how to manage and operations and bookkeeping and all that other stuff that I needed to run a business. But that's the challenge of business ownership and entrepreneurship. You should always try to grow. You should always try to learn. And there are going to be tons of mistakes along the way. You have to acknowledge it, move ahead, and get better every single day, every hour. Challenge yourself. Figure out, what are the gaps? Where are the opportunities? Talk to people and get out there and learn. There's so much to it, and we only have a 30-minute podcast, so I don't even know where to start because there's so much I've learned over the last 8 years. ROB: It's such a big journey. I think you came into SEO at a pretty interesting time. SEO has an early baggage of being a gimmick business rather than a discipline business, or at least some people were very much in the gimmick business for a while. Were there any gimmicks or tactical short-term wins that you had to look at early on and either steer away from or get bit by once or twice to learn – I feel like what I would say is the best way to be found is to be worth finding, but it took us a while to get there in the SEO industry. JOHN: Yeah. There's so many hacks, fast ways. This is life in general, I feel. I was very fortunate working at Yellow Pages, where I met these business owners that were generationally in business – not just 5, 10, 20 years, but think about different lifetimes – 50, 100, 150 years. How did they survive without the internet? Internet's only been around for 15-20 years, right? Google has only really taken off in 10-15 years. It's transitioned and transformed the way we shop and our behaviors. Imagine these businesses. What did they do so well to keep them sustained? They took care of their customers. They relied on word-of-mouth, referral business. They understood how to run a really good business – service, pricing, competitors, unique selling proposition, understanding all their products and services. Inside out, they knew how to run it. If you take that foundation and you put it now digitally, people don't put that much effort in the foundation of a business online. They're looking for shortcuts. And in life, typically there's no shortcuts. Just like any profession – not just in business and entrepreneurship, but profession as in if you're a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor or a plumber, is there a shortcut to become one of them? Probably not. You probably have to go to school. You probably have to apprentice. You probably have to work as an associate. You've got to put your years in, training in, learning in. By the time you put in your 10, 15, 20 years, then maybe you have enough savings to start your own business. But now, with internet and with a lot of social media and videos and podcasts and everything, people find that it's easier for knowledge and information to be transferred. You can access information at your fingertips. There's so much information and intel at your disposal. However, there's not a lot of experience at your disposal. A lot of people think there's easier ways, faster ways to earn a living, and they get bitten by these videos or ways to do it. Just like a sports athlete, I'm all about mindset. I'm all about habits. If you look at one of the top basketball players – Michael Jordan, LeBron James – or Tiger Woods – how many years of training did they have to harvest? How many hours, how many years of dedication from help, practice, failures, to actually become that? People forget that in terms of business, and that's why in the first couple years of business ownership, a lot of people fail. They watch a video, they read a book, they listen to a podcast, and they purchase something on Wix or Squarespace or Shopify and build a site thinking, “Now I have a business.” But they don't have business experience and knowledge and insights on what real business ownership means. That's the gap that I'm saying. In terms of what I've seen over the years, I'm more a mature business now because I've learned from the type of clients I want to work with versus the type of clients that are not even real business owners yet because they're not profitable or they don't know how to run a business. I don't want to train someone how to run a business to be working with them, if that makes sense. People that are starting off or have an idea aren't my clients. ROB: Right. Those clients tend to go away. It's a great point about the athletes and about the experience. I think I heard you mention before “I didn't have kids yet,” which makes me suspect you may have them now?  JOHN: Yeah. ROB: So I think because you have experience, you don't have the time you used to have. Tiger Woods isn't as young as he used to be, and at one point he had to retool his entire swing to stay competitive, and there are still things he changes in his game now. Because he's not as young as he used to be, now he has to heal two broken legs, I think. That's what I think I saw, I don't know. But he's going to figure out and adapt, and experience is going to be the thing that gives him what maybe having raw energy and pure physical prowess gave him early on. We still have to work all those muscles. But it's a great point, a great analogy. JOHN: Yeah, ultimately it's mindset, right? What you feel will be what you want to do for a very long time. A lot of business owners are in it for the wrong reasons. They're chasing money or chasing fame and glory or trying to be the best, but they don't put in the work to become it. Business ownership is the same way. SEO is the same way. Digital ad agencies are the same way. I'm not selling a fake promise. I'm being authentic in terms of the journey. I want people to realize how long it takes, what's involved, and let them make an informed decision. The more you're up front with any transaction or interaction you have with your customers, the more likelihood they're going to stay with you for the long term. ROB: You're still doing it. You have more people, you have in some ways more opportunities, but also more problems. So, what is it at this point that makes it worth it to you? JOHN: I'm really just looking for good people to connect with. Good, honest, real businesses that not just need and acknowledge that they need help, but they're good people. The challenge with digital agencies – and again, I'm not your traditional agency coming from the ad world. I come from Yellow Pages, and that's all I built my business around. Long-term trust in clients that have a problem, fixing the problem and answering it. It's not rocket science, but it's very simple. People overcomplicate things with funnels and landing pages and different ways to try to cultivate new clients. I'm the type of guy that just went door-knocking at the beginning to get clients, and it worked. These things that really foundationally set these business owners apart when they first started still apply. People are always looking for shortcuts; there's no shortcuts. ROB: And it turns into – generically, not speaking specifically to the business – saying you're in the business of helping good people achieve what they want in their business in a way that you're skilled and enjoy. Isn't that what I think most people want from their work? JOHN: Not only will I give it all my best effort and my team will do what we possibly can for all clients, I'm trying to cultivate good, ideal customers that you want coming to you and positioning yourself as a thought leader. So, for me, I think a lot of business owners need to realize why they're in business, who they want to go after as their ideal type of client, and then focus heavily on that versus trying to take anything they can. Yes, maybe when they're first starting, you're doing that because it's like survival mode. But then you realize as you mature in your business what you really want to be known as. Who do you want to cultivate as an ideal customer? Just have fun. A lot of people forget about why they started the business in the first place. ROB: That's great advice, John. You've shared a lot of good lessons along your journey. Is there anything else you can think of – a key moment, a key decision you want a do-over on if you could? Obviously, we can only move forward, but if you could change something on the journey? JOHN: For me, I wouldn't, actually. Even though I made a ton of mistakes – I mean, I still make mistakes every day. I'm learning. I'm constantly eager and I'm hungry to want to be better. I don't have to be the best, and that's okay too. I'm always trying to get better. I know there's gaps in the agency. I know there's gaps in client expectations, and we can do more. I'm all about generating more value for my customers, taking care of my clients, taking care of my staff, and being a better human and living a better life of joy and happiness. If I'm enjoying that entire journey and process, that's what being a business owner should be about. ROB: That's fantastic, John. When people want to find you and Local SEO Search, where should they go to find you? JOHN: They can check out my website. It's www.localseosearch.ca. We're located in Toronto, Canada, but we service clients all across North America, UK, and Australia. For us, it's all about helping good people and informing them with decisions and letting them decide. I equip people with insight and knowledge, and they make their own decisions of who they want to work with and what they want to do. But just be informed. I think that's the biggest thing about SEO. Know what you want and go out there and be realistic, because there's experts or a lot of information out there; you just don't know who to trust and what that really means. ROB: When one goes to Google and types in “local SEO search,” I can affirm that you're proving your craft. You are the number one organic result for “local SEO search.” Not only that, there's like four or five ads above you, which means people really want that spot. It seems like there's some evidence here that you can do your job, John. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: It's pretty cool. And you're above people like BrightLocal and folks who would really like that slot. That's pretty impressive. JOHN: Yeah, Whitespark, BrightLocal. All of them have their own business. I feel just stay the course. It's a long game. Have fun, enjoy it. ROB: Sounds good, and we shall. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been great to hear your own journey and wisdom from it. JOHN: Thank you, Rob. ROB: Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Episodio 13: Introducción: Bienvenido a Amigos Learning Languages, este es un podcast hecho por amigos para amigos que aprenden lenguajes. Podrás escuchas a nativos hablando de su cultura, experiencias y consejos. In addition, you would be able to listen to people who are already on this path of learning and how they manage to get where they are. Enjoy this journey with us! Joffre: ¡Hola! Esta semana hablaremos acerca de un tema muy interesante: Amigos falsos, false friends and no, it isn't about people who say they are your friends but they aren't, it is about words that you believe that will translate in a similar way to Spanish and English but they don't. Son palabras que tienen una estructura similar en español y en inglés pero que su significado es completamente diferente en ingles y en español, por eso son falsos amigos, piensas que te van a ayudar pero en realidad te engañan, tienen un significado diferente. In this episode, we are going to talk about different false friends that would be useful for you if you're learning Spanish and English. Stay tune to this episode, let's get started! Hello my friend John! John: Hello! Joffre: It's a pleasure to talk with you again! John: It's great to talk with you! Joffre: ¿Tú tienes algún amigo falso? Do you have a false friend? John: Uhmm (laugh) Joffre: Because it could have like a literal meaning. John: Uhmm, I hope I don't have too many, so… Joffre: Okay. Yo también espero no tener ningún amigo falso, espero que no. John: Sí. Joffre: Exacto. Vamos a iniciar con la palabra eventually en inglés y eventualmente en español, ¿Saben ustedes la diferencia? Escuchemos la explicación de eventually con John, por favor. John: Sure! So, in English the word eventuallymeans after a period of time or one day something will occur. So, eventuallywe will all get our coronavirus shot. Eventually she will come back home. EventuallyI'm going to finish writing this paper. So, it's after a period of time. Joffre: Eventualmente es español significa por un momento, por un rato o por un periodo corto de tiempo. Eventualmenteestoy sin dinero; eventualmente voy a vivir con mis papás, significa por un tiempo voy a hacer algo; eventualmente voy a estar en clases o eventualmentevoy a estar fuera de casa, luego vas a regresar a tu vida normal, entonces no significa lo mismo que eventually en inglés, eventualmente en español tiene un significado diferente. En resumen, eventually se traduce al español como después de un tiempo o pasado un tiempo yo voy a hacer algo y eventualmentedel español se traduce al inglés como for a short period of time, por un periodo corto de tiempo o por un rato. So, could you give me an example with eventually in English? And I will translate it to Spanish in the correct way, in the right way. John: Sure. Eventually, I want to live near the beach. Joffre: Okay, la traducción en español sería: Después de un tiempo voy a vivir cerca de la playa o finalmente voy a vivir cerca de la playa. Es algo que estabas esperando y finalmente lo vas a hacer, ¿okay? Ahora voy a darte un ejemplo en español para que tu trates de traducir a inglés: eventualmente voy a pedir dinero a mis amigos. John: For a short period of time, just on this occasion I'm going to borrow money from my friends. Joffre: Exacto, exactly. It is like, es algo que no pasa siempre, es solo por el momento. *NO MORE SPACE HER* FREE COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT AT https://cutt.ly/1xH2iZ6

LUCY: You’re listening to a special edition of The Daily Sun-Up, a podcast from The Colorado Sun. This week we’re featuring special coverage to mark the one-year anniversary of the first known coronavirus case in Colorado. This is Fear, Loss, Change: A Pandemic Year. I’m Lucy Haggard.  JOHN: And I’m John Ingold. Today is Monday, March 1st, 2021. LUCY: More than four hundred thousand Coloradans have caught COVID-19 in the past year. Almost six thousand Coloradans have died with it. One in every thousand people alive on March 5, 2020 — the day Colorado identified its first case — did not live to see another year due to COVID-19. As of this podcast, more than 1.3 million Coloradans have received at least one vaccine shot, yet the death toll keeps climbing. JOHN: This has been a year-long mass casualty event. But it is, of course, not Colorado’s first mass tragedy. Look to the Aurora or Columbine shootings; wildfires or floods; the polio epidemic; the 1918 flu. But COVID is unique in that the devastation has largely remained invisible. Hospital wards and long-term care facilities have kept out visitors. Funeral homes are limiting the capacity of their services or holding them virtually. There have been no public vigils or displays of solidarity for those lives lost. It has been a tragedy that is difficult to see. JOHN: And while the majority of Americans know someone who was hospitalized or killed by the virus, experts say it has remained a divisive experience. When the pandemic began, experts assumed that people would become more unified against the coronavirus once they had more personal experience with it. But, by early this year, many had realized that wasn’t the case. Instead, people’s attitudes depended heavily on whether they identified with those falling ill. In other words, many people view the pandemic as a problem facing individuals, not one facing all of us together. JOHN: For those who have lost loved ones this past year, they experience more than just grief.  LUCY: Take the family of Anna Trujillo Pacheco. Anna died on November 13, 2020, five days after being rushed to Swedish Hospital due to low oxygen levels. Anna was the first of five generations of firstborn women. Here’s great-granddaughter Desiree Hooston, the fourth in that lineage. The evening before Anna died, family from around the globe gathered on a video call to say goodbye. Jeanette Esquibel, Anna’s first daughter said by that point, Anna was exhausted. By six a.m., she was gone.  Jeanette says she regrets not calling to check in on her mother. Anna had survived breast and kidney cancers as well as a debilitating car accident. As the family matriarch, she anchored together a vast network of relatives. If there wasn’t an ongoing public health emergency when she passed away, cousins and siblings would gather at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post off West Colfax Avenue. Granddaughter Ana Evans, who is named after Ana and the third generation of firstborn women, wrote her obituary, but she says it’s not enough. LUCY: With that pain comes anger at the way the pandemic has played out. Anger at people who refuse to wear masks, at how the virus has become politicized. Desiree, the great-granddaughter, wonders how her oldest daughter Rhaya, the fifth generation of firstborn women, will remember the one who defined her lineage. How will she share that memory with her younger brother and daughter, and with the child on the way, who never got to meet Anna? Of course, every loss happens differently. When Dominique Stephenson was taken off life support at Penrose Main Hospital on September 17, 2020, his wife Kathy Utley was masked up and right by his side.  Dominique had just arrived from Minneapolis to join Kathy in Colorado Springs, closer to Kathy’s daughter. The two had met in Madison, Wisconsin and ended up living together for six years before finally getting married, just over a year ago. They were excited for the next chapter of their life together.  But he fell ill days before he was slated to drive across the Great Plains, and while the first coronavirus test turned up negative, by the time he arrived in Colorado with the moving truck, he could barely walk. Even while Dominique was comatose in the hospital, somehow he kept up his endless generosity: Kathy received a pair of binoculars from an order he had placed days earlier. Since Dominique’s death, Kathy has moved in with her daughter. But moving on from the death of her soulmate is much more difficult. She’s finding that attitudes about the virus are different here than they were in the Midwest. And though she knows she’s not alone in her loss, it feels more lonely than it should. JOHN: You’ve been listening to Fear, Loss, Change: A Pandemic Year. To read the stories that go with today’s podcast, go to coloradosun.com forward slash coronavirus dash one dash year. LUCY: This episode of the Daily Sun-Up was made by John Ingold, and me, Lucy Haggard, with help from Pirate Audio. Our editor is Larry Ryckman. Special thanks to Jeanette Esquibel, Ana Evans, Desiree Hooston and Kathy Utley.  JOHN: If you like what we do at The Colorado Sun, consider contributing. Go to coloradosun.com forward slash membership.  LUCY: As always, thank you for listening. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This week we have a discussion on The Cure. During this podcast we discuss the music scene that The Cure's came from and the music scene in which they were hugely influential in creating. We run through their albums with a focus on their early 80's albums Seventeen Seconds, Faith & Pornography. We talk about how the band grew and their music became darker through these three pivotal albums. We also speak about their masterpiece Disintegration. Thorsten also talks about his favourite Cure song 'The Kiss' from the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me album, which was no surprise to John :-) For any comments please email us @ thisisourmusic@outlook.ie or connect with us on Instagram @ThisIsOurMusicPodcast

John Ciecko is a goal setter, so in AT Dads 2 we discuss the end goals and how we can work backward from that to make all 940 weekends count. Ryan, give us an intro to your family. 3 boys and a girl 10 and under What does the end of your career look like as related to your family? John - For a goal setter the end of my career has always been saved for… the end of my career. Now I’m focusing on financials more, planning and goal setting for 4 rather than just 1. Is there a career change, job change. I’m now more aggressive in my job responsibilities and worth at my current job.  Ryan - I am not a goal setter, I set priorities and work towards making those good.I want them to be functioning and contributing members of society.All my kids will be adults by thenWe want them to always feel welcome to come back and spend time in our house Let’s work backward from there to make a plan. 20 years Jeremy - approaching retirementAll Bio kids out of college; Possibly grandkids.I want to know my grandkids the way my mom and Sarah’s parents do.  I want to be an actively involved part of their life.  This doesn’t happen if I am absent from my kid’s life now. John: As Jenny says, in 20 years, I’ll be close to 100! - I’ll be approaching retirement or onto my “second” career in retirement. I will be focusing on Davids’s post-college and Cece's college years. These are very important years for them, where advice and communication are important to their adulthood. I’m building capital and “collecting coins” now so that my words then will have more of an impact on them when they need it.  10 years Jeremy - I will have 2 out of high school and at least one to go. Dating my Wife Intentional conversations and interactions with my kids. Ryan: I’ll have 4 teenagers… I want them to be safe Foster a relationship that allows them to tell you the bad stuff too. John: in 10 years David will be getting ready to try out for the basketball team at my high school...if that is what he chooses.I look forward to dealing with “father/son/patient/medical provider scenarios”I want them to fail so they can learn, but not fall. Next year Jeremy - adopting MJ, attending school events, taking them to school and events with me. It is not about the big events, but the daily interaction. “Dating my kids” - giving them individual time to invest in our relationship DATING MY WIFE  John: Focusing on my relationship with Jenny so that our relationship with our children is meaningful. We are intentional with our words and actions throughout our relationship.  How are we as AT Dads going to get there? John - Pulling on inspiration and examples from my ATDads/Men mentors like Jeremy, Tom Ford, Larry Cooper etc.  Call to action: “Dad can you look at this or are you too busy (with your phone)”...if you are hearing this look at why and respond appropriately. Make a plan for how you will hit your target. Watch AT Dads 2 on Facebook Contact Us Ryan John Jeremy

John: So I was wondering about disciplining kids in public. You have kids, right?Sarah: Yeah. I have two kids. I have a three-year old and a one-year old.John: Are they ever naughty when you're out in public?Sarah: Yes. They are naughty out in public. And I think that you shouldn't discipline your children in front of other people. So if I'm out in public and my three-year old starts to be naughty and she's crying because she wants a toy from the store or something, I will pick her up and I take her somewhere quiet until she's calm. Like I might take her to the family bathroom or a quiet hallway, so she can stop crying and stop making noise.John: I see. So you wouldn't just give her the toy she wants.Sarah: No. I don't think you should do that sort of thing to make your child be quiet, just give them something until they are quiet because then they'll be bad more in the future. If they know they can cry and scream, and mom and dad will give them what they want, they'll just be worse and worse.John: Oh, I see. They'll learn that it's okay. They can get what they want by crying.Sarah: Yeah.John: But don't you think you'll – won't you lose more time if you have to take your kids to some quiet place to calm down?Sarah: Yeah. You lose time but I think it's worth it because I think of the future and the time I'll save by making sure that my child is better behaved in the future. And the other thing too is I'm always trying to think about other people. So I don't want other people to have to listen to my child scream and cry. And I also don't want them to see me talking sternly to her because they'll maybe be annoyed or feel uncomfortable. And maybe my child will scream more because she can feel that. So I try to go somewhere quiet.John: Oh, I see.Sarah: Sometimes that's impossible though. Sometimes, if you're on the plane or on a train, you can't go anywhere or do anything. You have to stay in your seat.John: What if you're on an airplane, then do you give your child whatever they are crying for as soon as possible?Sarah: Yes, I do. I try to plan ahead and I think, okay, I need to have enough toys. I need to have lots of snacks, lots of fun things so that I prevent them from becoming naughty or crying or screaming. But sometimes, you can't help it. And if you're child or baby starts to be loud at that point, I will. I'll give them candy or food or toy, whatever they want.John: Oh, I get it. So I think you're saying, you think there might be a different reason why kids become naughty. Besides what they want…Sarah: Yeah.John: For example, they're hungry or bored.Sarah: Yeah. I think a lot of the times, children are naughty because maybe they're tired or they're hungry, or they want to play and stretch their legs but they can't because they're on the plane or they're in a stroller at the.John: So instead of waiting for bad behavior and then doing some discipline like yelling at your kids or grabbing their arms, maybe it's better to prevent bad behavior by making sure the kids sleep enough and don't get bored.Sarah: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. And, you know, my kids are young. Just three and one. So a one-year old can't really be naughty. They're just a baby. So if they need something, I give them food or what they need. But a three-year old, they can throw a tantrum. And so, they can be very naughty.John: A tantrum?Sarah: Yeah. When they scream and maybe they fall down on the floor, and they kick their legs. Sometimes they try to hit you. It's really bad. But I think all two-and-three-year-old children sometimes they do them.John: Oh, I've heard of that. It's called the.Sarah: Yes. But it also lasts into three.John: Well, it sounds like you're a good parent.Sarah: Oh, I try.

John: So I was wondering about disciplining kids in public. You have kids, right?Sarah: Yeah. I have two kids. I have a three-year old and a one-year old.John: Are they ever naughty when you're out in public?Sarah: Yes. They are naughty out in public. And I think that you shouldn't discipline your children in front of other people. So if I'm out in public and my three-year old starts to be naughty and she's crying because she wants a toy from the store or something, I will pick her up and I take her somewhere quiet until she's calm. Like I might take her to the family bathroom or a quiet hallway, so she can stop crying and stop making noise.John: I see. So you wouldn't just give her the toy she wants.Sarah: No. I don't think you should do that sort of thing to make your child be quiet, just give them something until they are quiet because then they'll be bad more in the future. If they know they can cry and scream, and mom and dad will give them what they want, they'll just be worse and worse.John: Oh, I see. They'll learn that it's okay. They can get what they want by crying.Sarah: Yeah.John: But don't you think you'll – won't you lose more time if you have to take your kids to some quiet place to calm down?Sarah: Yeah. You lose time but I think it's worth it because I think of the future and the time I'll save by making sure that my child is better behaved in the future. And the other thing too is I'm always trying to think about other people. So I don't want other people to have to listen to my child scream and cry. And I also don't want them to see me talking sternly to her because they'll maybe be annoyed or feel uncomfortable. And maybe my child will scream more because she can feel that. So I try to go somewhere quiet.John: Oh, I see.Sarah: Sometimes that's impossible though. Sometimes, if you're on the plane or on a train, you can't go anywhere or do anything. You have to stay in your seat.John: What if you're on an airplane, then do you give your child whatever they are crying for as soon as possible?Sarah: Yes, I do. I try to plan ahead and I think, okay, I need to have enough toys. I need to have lots of snacks, lots of fun things so that I prevent them from becoming naughty or crying or screaming. But sometimes, you can't help it. And if you're child or baby starts to be loud at that point, I will. I'll give them candy or food or toy, whatever they want.John: Oh, I get it. So I think you're saying, you think there might be a different reason why kids become naughty. Besides what they want…Sarah: Yeah.John: For example, they're hungry or bored.Sarah: Yeah. I think a lot of the times, children are naughty because maybe they're tired or they're hungry, or they want to play and stretch their legs but they can't because they're on the plane or they're in a stroller at the.John: So instead of waiting for bad behavior and then doing some discipline like yelling at your kids or grabbing their arms, maybe it's better to prevent bad behavior by making sure the kids sleep enough and don't get bored.Sarah: Yeah. That's what I'm saying. And, you know, my kids are young. Just three and one. So a one-year old can't really be naughty. They're just a baby. So if they need something, I give them food or what they need. But a three-year old, they can throw a tantrum. And so, they can be very naughty.John: A tantrum?Sarah: Yeah. When they scream and maybe they fall down on the floor, and they kick their legs. Sometimes they try to hit you. It's really bad. But I think all two-and-three-year-old children sometimes they do them.John: Oh, I've heard of that. It's called the.Sarah: Yes. But it also lasts into three.John: Well, it sounds like you're a good parent.Sarah: Oh, I try.

John Saunders, Founder of 5Four Digital, honed his SEO, SEM, and PPC digital marketing skills when he started his career working for an agency that provided dealership-level marketing services for automobile manufacturers. When John figured out that he wanted to use his skills for different kinds of projects and a more diverse clientele (SMBs, tech-startups), he started his own company. Today, 5Four focuses on brand identity (logo design and brand guidelines), and website design and development on Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress platforms. In this interview, John explains how to build automated linkages that will increase customer engagement and discusses 3 “shopping” platforms: WordPress, Shopify, and Webflow.  John says WordPress was a game-changer – it made CMS (content management systems) “accessible” for people with lower-level HTML and CSS skills. The platform is flexible enough that amazing sites can be built with either the supplied templates or with custom code. A disadvantage of WordPress is that it requires the use of an extensive array of plugins for website “attributes,” and these and other security measures need to be maintained. Wordpress with a WooCommerce plug-in works well for ecommerce, but John has found that Shopify allows the agency to more quickly scale stores for its clients. One Shopify app, Teelaunch, provides companies with low cost, high-quality print on demand products so customers can create an MVP (minimum viable product, Eric Ries: The Lean Startup,) and build their own brand for less than $1000. Another CMS option, Webflow, can produce outstanding websites. It has a slight learning curve but is easy to use and highly flexible. Although John currently sees Webflow as ”the future,” an organization's decision to use a particular CMS platform should be based on a number of considerations. Through the years, John has developed systems and standard operating procedures which allow him to delegate tasks to his staff or to automate processes, so the work gets done automatically. One tool he has found to be particularly helpful is Zapier, which provides a way to “web-hook” different websites, platforms, and apps. John uses Zapier to cross-integrate his company website contact form with Slack (to notify John that the form has been filled out), and then with Mailchimp to send a “thank you for your interest, here's another form.” Response to that drives another form for scheduling . . . and that information is sent to Colony. John says Zapier can be used to link Facebook to Gmail, Facebook Forms to Google Sheets, with up to 10 such linkages free. John recommends written website SOPs to facilitate task handoffs to clients if the client prefers to maintain the site. 5Four Digital was already running remotely when Covid-19 hit. John's SOPs and integrated technology continue to keep the agency operating smoothly. Many of his team use Asana to manage tasks. He notes that not everything he has done succeeded. However, the failures often provided the tools, resources, and experience he needed for subsequent projects . . . that did succeed. John recently started a company offering downloadable illustrations featuring people of color so sitebuilders have beautiful pictures that promote diversity. BlackIllustrations.com. He is also involved in digital education and sees a lot of that in the future replacing the traditional four-year degree.  John can be found on his personal website at JohnDSaunders.com and @JohnDSaunders on Facebook and Instagram. His agency's website is: https://www.5fourdigital.com/. Transcript Follows: ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Saunders, Founder at 5Four Digital based in Miami, Florida. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, Rob. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here, man. Thank you. ROB: It's excellent to have you here. Why don't you start us off with an introduction to 5Four Digital and where you specialize. JOHN: Absolutely. My name, of course, as you said, is John D. Saunders. I'm the founder of 5Four Digital. We focus and allocate our resources towards a couple key services. Those are brand identity, which is logo design and brand guidelines, as well as website design and development for Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Those are our main focus areas. ROB: That makes perfect sense. WordPress obviously has been around for a very long time, Shopify a decent amount of time. Webflow is a little newer. How has that development of competencies happened? Did you start in one of those areas? How have you decided where to keep your skills sharp? JOHN: Great question. I started in WordPress – man, it was at least 10 years ago. WordPress put CMS, or content management systems, on the map in regards to making it accessible for people that either have an entry level to HTML and CSS or high level. You create these amazing websites either using templates or doing custom code. I started doing that with WordPress, and man, it was an exciting time because I started out and I learned everything I could from YouTube videos and other things like that. This was in the infancy of WordPress, so it was before they even had all these templates and themes. I was able to build a site for my mom, who's a teacher, and we built this tutoring site. Kids were able to go on, fill out the contact form. I was able to take this idea I had in my head and make it something tangible. That's when I was hooked. As the agency grew, we really thought to allocate our resources toward a few key resources, and WordPress was that main one. As ecommerce started to build up and develop, I thought, WordPress is great. We have WooCommerce, plug-ins that integrate well. But I feel like Shopify was the perfect platform because we were able to scale out stores for clients at a quicker level than WordPress. So, we did that with Shopify. Then a couple years ago, we heard about Webflow, which is another content management system or almost like a live builder, and man, I built my first site in Webflow and I was like, this is definitely the future. It's easy to use. Of course it has a learning curve, but ultimately you can build essentially whatever you want in regards to your website, have your own custom CSS in there, and the designs and things we've been able to create with Webflow have been really, really dope. ROB: Right on. If somebody has a WordPress website, they'll probably stick with WordPress for the time being, although any given revision to a WordPress site can certainly be an entire rebuild. But if someone's starting today, how would you help them consider the decision of whether to go with WordPress or whether to go with Webflow? JOHN: That's a great question. If they're an existing business – let's say they've been using WordPress for 5 or 6 years and they just want to do a refresh or redesign their site. They already have historical data or historical SEO attributes to that website, so I probably wouldn't recommend completely changing over to Webflow unless the site was new and they didn't get a ton of traffic. If they're doing over 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 hits per month, we'd probably stay with WordPress and scale out that website in regards to building out a new design. If the business doesn't get a ton of traffic and they're not really worried about pulling all that traffic to the new site, I would absolutely recommend Webflow. One thing I like about Webflow is a lot is the transition in regards to using the platform is easier. You can build out sites how you want. You don't necessarily need a ton of plug-ins, which is one of the issues I have with WordPress; you need plug-ins for a lot of the attributes you need to add to a website. It also takes a lot of constant upkeep. Every month you have to make sure the plug-ins are up to date. You also have to make sure WordPress, the framework, is up to date, and you're open to malware and malicious attacks from people because the CMS is so popular. The good point about that is there's a ton of resources on WordPress and information out there. Thousands of plug-ins, thousands of resources, developers, designers. It's an open source platform that has a lot of people linked to it. With Webflow, it's a little bit newer, so it's smaller. But the level to entry isn't as steep as say WordPress, and it doesn't need that constant upkeep. You can build out your site, you can set up Zapier to set up web hooks between different websites and platforms, and you're pretty much good to go. ROB: Wow, it sounds like you're deep on the Zapier stuff. That's a whole other unlock there. JOHN: Oh man, it's like a cheat code, dude. [laughs] ROB: [laughs] Tell us about that a little bit for folks who aren't as familiar with Zapier and what sort of directions you can take that toolkit. JOHN: I'll give you a precursor. The first thing is I'm a big proponent of standard operating procedures or setting up systems within the business so I can delegate to either staff, team members, or create automation. That way no one has to do it and it just gets done automatically. I'm a big proponent of that. I work from home. I have five team members on our team, and I love to have the freedom to be able to focus on big picture. With that said, Zapier is a great way to connect different platforms easily through a platform seamlessly. I'll explain that. For example, when you visit our agency website and you fill out the contact form, that form automatically pushes to Slack. As soon as the form gets filled out, I get a notification that someone's filled it out on Slack with their information. That keeps me up to date. Secondly, we set up a Zapier so that it integrates with MailChimp. So as soon as someone fills out that form, they get an automatic email response saying, “Hey, thank you for your interest. Would you mind filling out this free form?” Once they fill out that form, then they get another automatic email push that says, “Hey, great, go ahead and book a time here,” and then we've connected Colony. All Zapier does is just connects different apps to each other. You can connect Facebook to Gmail, you can connect Facebook Forms to Google Sheets – the possibilities are endless. I think you can do up to 10 for free and then you can pay for different Zaps. ROB: Very nice. Thinking about WordPress versus Webflow, you get the site designed, you get it developed, you hand it over to the client – is either one of those more conducive to clients being able to manage things themselves? Or is it just the case that clients, even if you give them all the tools, aren't going to manage things themselves to make minor changes in the future? JOHN: It really depends on the client because they're both very user-friendly, especially on the client side, for the most part. It's easy to add blogs. It's easy to update pages once either you're using a third party platform like Oxygen or Divi or Elementor, the page builders. It's pretty easy to use once you get over that initial learning curve. Both WordPress and Webflow have a client-facing side so that they can make updates. So that part is pretty easy. What I like to tell people, especially agency owners, is it's a good idea to set up SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for your clients in regards to the handoff. If you're a web design agency, there's one of two things you can do. You can either manage and host that website for the client, and then they pay a fee every month, or you say, “Hey, here's a repository of my trainings on how to use the platform, how to jump in, how to add blogs. Your team can use this.” Because sometimes you'll build a project and give it to their staff. They might have a marketing team or a content marketing team that can create that content; they just need to know how to use the backend. So, you want to have that in your back pocket so that way when a client is like, “Yeah, we don't really want you to manage it. We just want you to build it out and then hand it off to us,” you already have that repository of operating procedures that you can give them. ROB: That all makes sense. John, if we rewind a few years, how did you come to start 5Four Digital? What's the origin story here? JOHN: For me, I was at an agency. I worked there for about 4 years. I moved up in the ranks and became marketing director. It was an automotive dealership agency, so we dealt primarily with a lot of the car manufacturers – Audi, Land Rover, Ford – at the dealership level. We would do the marketing at the dealership level. Being in that position taught me a lot because I was able to use SEO, SEM, PPC, all these different services under the digital marketing moniker. It helped me develop my skillset. Once I did that, I got to the point where I wanted to work on different types of projects. I got kind of burnt out from the automotive side. I wanted to work with maybe SMBs, tech startups, and that type of thing. That's when I left and I started my own company, 5Four Digital. I was focused on more so on the product as opposed to how it looked. I didn't need to have a fancy office or anything. Honestly, when I started, I didn't really have much money. I was on the ramen diet, and I was saving money because I had segued from a full-time position to doing this on my own. The biggest thing for me was to really focus and allocate my resources towards providing a great product to the client. I didn't have an office. I was working from home, and I started to build my team remotely. When other agency owners were like, “You need an office, you need this, you need that,” I was like, instead of paying $2,500, $3,000, $3,500 – because I am in South Florida – for an office, I can take those resources and I can pay a developer, I can pay a project manager to help scale this business without having to have that burden of a physical location. ROB: So, you were completely ready for the shutdowns this year. Did very much change for you as a business, either with how your team worked, or maybe with some of your clients when some of the COVID-19 shutdowns started to come through? JOHN: I do want to say that a lot of people are going through a lot currently. People are being furloughed, fired from their jobs. It's just a lot. The transition for us prior to COVID and to now hasn't really changed much because we were already running remotely. All the platforms and things that we were using were already conducive to that environment. A lot of our team and our staff work through Asana, our task management system, and that's what we work by. This is when something's due, and team members can work at night, in the day, they can take the day off and take their kids to the park. For me, ultimately you work when you're comfortable because I feel like that's when people work the best, and then we follow the structure of the due date within the task management system. ROB: That makes sense. When I look at your LinkedIn profile, some people are all-in on one thing and some people have a whole portfolio of interesting things they're involved in. What can you share about some of the other projects or businesses that you're involved in that keep your attention and you feel are worth pursuing? JOHN: For me it's about building an agency that not only works well for our clients, but for us internally also. I always recommend those that have the skillset to build an agency because (1) you can help build and develop clients, and then (2) you can build your own products or your own projects that siphon through your agency ecosystem. For us, when we have an idea and we want to build something internally, we're just taking that project or that idea and running it through our client cycle. For example, I have a business called BlackIllustrations.com, which we launched in April, which is a platform that allows folks to download illustrations for their websites, for their projects, featuring people of color. Because I didn't see the market have a lot of that, and as a website builder, there just wasn't a lot of diversity in the illustrations. Now, I've seen some beautiful illustrations, and we've leveraged a lot of them online, but I just didn't see that and I saw that opportunity. When that happened, I put together the process, I told the team, “Hey, this is what we're going to start building out,” and then it's essentially just walking them through that client lifecycle. It's almost like taking the ideas that we have and pushing them through this conveyor belt of the business and then being able to make another business that has its own separate income as an entity. BlackIllustrations.com launched in April; we've already had 40,000+ downloads, over about half a million visitors to the website. I'm really proud of that, and a lot of that comes down to creating those procedures and then running it through that cycle. ROB: That makes a ton of sense. With those different projects, you can imagine that some of them are going to thrive, some of them are going to perhaps not thrive. Some of them over time you might need to put to rest. I wonder maybe if even there's some projects that you have brought through the process, they lived a good life, and then you put them on pause. How do you think about the lifecycle and lifespan of these internal projects? JOHN: Essentially, for me it's really about learning as much as I can from the process. In one example, as an entrepreneur, you know we have a ton of failures. I'm not going to act like everything I touch turns to gold. I had one project in particular – it was a Kickstarter campaign. I was trying to raise funds for an app. This was 5 years ago, 6 years ago maybe. I went through the entire process of hiring a videographer, getting footage, walking through the process of creating this crowdfunding campaign, and it was a lot of fun doing it and experiencing it. Ultimately, we flopped because we didn't get to 100% of the goal. I think we got to around 60%. At first, I was like, man, I'm a failure. I didn't do the right thing. But, ultimately, I learned a lot through that process. I learned how to start a crowdfunding campaign, how to create engaging video that converts folks, and how to leverage an audience. So, I like to look at it as an experience as opposed to a failure, and I'm able to use those resources and those things that I came up with and allocate them later on in the next project. ROB: Each project is its own success, even if the project itself doesn't succeed. In that case, how fortunate to assess demand for an app. It's an inexpensive experiment to launch a crowdfunding campaign versus building the dang app and then hoping somebody likes it. JOHN: Exactly. ROB: Very good. John, you mentioned some lessons you learned there. When you look back over the history of 5Four Digital so far, what are some other lessons you've learned along the way and things you might consider doing differently if you were starting from zero? JOHN: I would look at delegating faster than I did prior. I think in the beginning, especially the first year, first couple years, I was trying to do everything and do it all myself. When I started the agency, we were doing SEO, SEM, Facebook ads, social media, web design, web development. It was a complete agency, full service. Which is great, especially if you have a good amount of employees, but it was just me. So I'm working with clients and one client is doing SEO, one client is doing PPC, one client is doing web design, and it's just a lot of work, especially changing your mind and doing the different things and turning off that creative and turning on the analytical side. It was just a lot. I started to get burnt out. One of the things I wish I did was niche down to a specific set of services. Not even niching down to a specific client set, but only offering a few core services. That would've helped me really streamline my process and be like, “This is the process we go through every time we take on a client” as opposed to doing all these different services myself, especially as a small agency or even a freelancer. It was just a lot. So, I wish that was one thing that I did: focus on a few core services. Secondly, I wish I would've started to make my operating procedures in the initial or in the beginning. Really start to think about, “These are the core services we have. These are the things we want to offer.” But I think it just took me time to get acclimated to providing a high-quality service to clients and then documenting that process. Then the third piece is hiring faster, hiring either a part-timer or an independent contractor in the beginning to help facilitate some of these things instead of trying to do it all myself and taking hours and hours in the wee morning trying to do it. ROB: How did you go about finding some of those fractional or independent contractors that you could trust to do the work in a way that's going to keep your clients happy? Did that involve the clients at all in the conversation of shifting who was doing the work? JOHN: Great question. For me, finding great people – and again, this is a process as well – comes down to not even necessarily their full skillset. A lot of times you'll try to find the perfect candidate in regards to their skills. I try to find a good quality designer, for example, but I also want them to be able to fit into our team dynamic. The fact that they're fun, engaging. The fact that they get their work done, but they're able to balance that and know that it's an open work environment where they'll be able to have fun and enjoy cultivating their creativity. So, for me, it's really finding someone that's a good fit for the team as opposed to just focusing on skillset. ROB: I hear a recurring passion for process. Is that something that has come naturally for you, but you didn't initially apply it to the business? Or has it been something you've discovered in some way as you've built the agency? JOHN: It's definitely something I've discovered while building the agency. There's a book by Michael E. Gerber called The E-Myth, another book by Tim Ferriss called The 4-Hour Workweek – those are two great reads – that talk about building a process so that you can delegate. For me, ultimately, in the agency right now I'm pretty much the project manager. I'm the one that talks to the client, that organizes the projects, that puts in my two cents and my recommendations and helps the team navigate through the buyer journey or the customer journey. I love being in that role because I'm able to pull out of the day to day and focus more so on big picture. I'm able to convey my ideas to the team, and we're able to implement together on what works best.  ROB: I can definitely understand that, and there's probably some future date where you're thinking about that second project manager role that takes that over. That's probably a whole new round of hire. John, you mentioned in your previous agency experience that you had done some work with auto dealers. For people who don't know, that can be a whole segment. A lot of agencies that do auto kind of only do auto. It sounds like you're not doing much of that anymore. One concern I have heard from people who are heavy into that space is some different constraints to the budgets of some of the different dealerships and what they want, and sometimes even the technology. What is your experience with that then, and was there any consideration of that when you decided not to focus on that as much with 5Four? JOHN: Can you repeat the last part of the question? It cut out for a sec. ROB: Oh, sure. How much of that distinction of the constraints of automotive clients drove your decision to focus less on that when you started 5Four? JOHN: Oh man, there's a lot of red tape you have to deal with. Just getting a webpage up or going through a brand discovery session, there's so many people that it has to go through that by the time you get the thing live, it's already dated. [laughs] It was really hard to move and grow the design and the marketing side of it because we had so many constraints in regards to the industry. But nowadays, especially working more so with startups or Series A companies, they have a lot more freedom to move around and upward. If there's new technology that comes out that we want to implement, you don't have to go through three C-level executives to get it done. You can just talk to a couple people, tell them, “Hey, this is how it works,” do a small test – if it works, great. Scale it up. It's a totally different dynamic. ROB: I've also heard a number of complaints about the technology that is even able to serve the auto dealer industry. Is that true, number one? And if so, why do you think it is? I've heard often there's a completely different marketing stack for that particular customer. JOHN: I will say in the last probably 2 to 3 years, there's been a lot of companies doing cutting-edge stuff in the automotive industry. Of course, outside of that you have Tesla, which is doing phenomenal things. But there are platforms, especially like for example Dealer.com, which is an automotive digital marketing company – they crush it, man. They do a lot of these different things – it's almost like Google, but in the automotive industry. They have all these different solutions and resources. So, I will say in the last few years there's been a dynamic shift.  Of course, you have startups coming out like Carvana that are doing a really great job of showcasing and making the process easier for the customer. I think the automotive industry has taken a while to understand it, but a lot of people don't necessarily want to go into the dealership. They don't want to go through that long process. They're trying to accommodate this fast shifting economy. ROB: I understand that. It's nice that there is some future that is not really, really dated marketing stacks for that industry. John, when you look ahead a little bit, what are you excited about that's coming up either for 5Four Digital in particular or for marketing more generally? JOHN: Man, I'm a tech guy, so I love being a part of this process and being in this industry. Some of the biggest things I see coming down the pipeline are one-click or headless ecommerce. A lot of folks have been talking about it. It's an ecommerce experience where you literally push one button and you're able to purchase, similar to what Amazon has and a lot of these sites that are coming out, but it actually works across the entire internet. That's something I've been hearing a lot of buzz about. In regards to the education side of digital, I'm really excited about it. As we move or shift into this new world dynamic, a lot of people are realizing that traditional college degrees might not necessarily be the best bet for us all. There are just so many options. I have my Bachelor's, but there's just so many different opportunities now. You have all of these educators, people like myself and yourself, who are great and skilled and adept that can create courses and teach other people our processes and the things we're doing. So, I'm really excited for the digital education frontier, I guess we could call it. But I think a lot of people are going to start segueing or moving towards that because it's super affordable. You can buy $500, $1,000, $50 bucks for these courses and learn these tangible skills that can pay you well into the six figures. So, I'm ultimately excited for that. ROB: Do you have some of your current projects or future projects in that online education space? JOHN: Yeah, we have a few resources. My biggest thing is providing value, value, value, value up front so that way you can position yourself as a thought leader, you can gain the trust of the people, they actually take your advice and leverage it and use it, and then creating more high-level, detailed courses for those people that are really trying to dive in heavily. We have a couple courses. We have a Web Design Studio Accelerator, which is for people that want to start their own web design accelerator, and then I have other job templates and SOP courses that people can leverage to learn and apply these skills. ROB: Solid. The SOP courses seem like something you can even also show to your team for training. JOHN: Oh yeah, that's what we do. We probably have 100+ videos for our team. We have one business – it's called IllustratorHub.com; the whole business runs on an SOP. I don't do anything with the business. It's automatically updated. Our team manages it, and it's just a great platform and a great example of creating these operating procedures in your business so that way you can thrive. ROB: Wow, that's excellent. Looping back to one thing you mentioned earlier – and I think I let it go a little bit too quickly; you mentioned beyond Webflow and WordPress – we dug into those differences there – but you also mentioned that you do work on the Shopify platform. If you look at their stock, they're not quite Zoom, but they're pretty close. This seems to have been a fairly banner year for that approachable “get an ecommerce store online” platform. What have you seen in terms of either how clients are investing differently in Shopify now or people who are putting stores online that hadn't quite gotten around to it yet? JOHN: I'm glad you brought up the Shopify stock, man, because it makes me feel like I'm Warren Buffett out here. [laughs] I bought 20 shares when it was like $60 bucks because I believed in the company and I saw what they were doing. With Shopify, I think, like you said, this year is their year. So many people are home. They want to start a business. They want something that's easy, that they can leverage, that they can create a high quality product. And that's what Shopify does. You look at some of the top stores, you have Kylie Jenner's Cosmetics, you have Allbirds, I think Warby Parker at one point was on Shopify. You have all these major brands running through this platform. It just goes to show you that it's made for commerce. People that are starting out like, “I want to sell some t-shirts” can open up a Shopify store, they can integrate it with Teelaunch, and then they can have these high-quality print on demand products with their own logo, their own brand on it. It's really low cost out of the gate. You can test and you can create this MVP, or minimum viable product, as Eric Ries would say, the writer of The Lean Startup, and ultimately you can really build your own brand for less than $1,000 bucks. ROB: Is Teelaunch a Shopify plug-in, or how does it work? JOHN: Yes, it's a Shopify app. They have hundreds of products – teacups, t-shirts. They even have air fresheners. It's ridiculous. [laughs] ROB: CafePress used to sort of let you do this, but you were listing stuff on their site. This is your own brand store. You can have your custom underpants, whatever you want. JOHN: Exactly. And they fulfill on your behalf, so if someone goes on your website and your shirt is $24.99, they go and buy that shirt – the app is integrated, so as soon as they make that purchase, it pushes to Teelaunch, they charge you the $12, $10 for the shirt and then the shipping, and then you take the rest for your profit. Then they ship it on your behalf to the customer, so you don't even have to touch the inventory. ROB: Very, very cool. John, when people want to find you and when they want to find 5Four Digital, where should they go to look you up? JOHN: They can find me at JohnDSaunders.co. That's where all of my resources and guides are. Also, I'm on Facebook and Instagram @JohnDSaunders, and that's pretty much where I'm at. ROB: Excellent. What's the “D” for in John D. Saunders? JOHN: David. ROB: Excellent. Perfect. JOHN: I have that because there's a famous ESPN newscaster who passed away a few years ago and his name is John Saunders. So, I had to put that “D” in there to add a little difference. ROB: Yep, I know that name. I remember that sportscaster. John D. Saunders of 5Four Digital, thank you for coming on the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast.  JOHN: Rob, thank you for having me, man. I'm happy to be here. ROB: Thank you much. Be well. Bye. JOHN: You too. ROB: Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

Welcome to Iteration, a weekly podcast about programming, development, and design.My name is JP, I am a software engineer at Opendoor. Today I am joined by JohnJohn IntroThis week on code reviews What makes good code review? Here's a link I found on reddit a while ago:http://cassandra.apache.org/doc/latest/development/how_to_review.htmlhttps://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/byxmk1/what_makes_for_a_good_code_review_session/Another tweet:https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/1198502828425150465Any good / bad experiences with CR?JP: It's not personalJohn: I've worked with team members who take feedback as a prescription for every timeRant about chefs, recipes and conceptsJohn: People not giving the PR in context. It's flagged WIP and then calling out a comment or a long method. Focus on the approach not the syntax at this point.John: I give code reviews for my clients team or other agencies.Can feel like a power struggle.I have to sometimes be open minded about solutions.If tests are passing and it's reasonably documented and maintainable, it gets merged.Example: Very javascript heavy interaction that could of just been MarkupWhat was your first CR like (receiving it and giving it)?JP: it took me a while to get comfortable leaving code review for people who I looked up to. +1John: It's hard getting feedback from the team who works under you, they can be shy about it. Can be frustrating. That's why at several points I've literally paid a tutor.How frequently do you do it?John: I get reviewed once a week. I give reviews multiple times a day.How is CR Conducted at John's agency vs at Opendoor?JP: Different kinds of PR's - WIP, Ready for Code Review, etcJP: CR EtiquetteJohn: It's pretty informal — working on stronger processes around this. We "Sometimes" do a WIP review. Lead Dev or I always do a final review before deployments.John: For more "final" reviews, I try to summarize my thoughts into an actual checklist into the main comment body.CR TipsJP: Take your time with itJP: Pull the code down and run it. Tinker around. This helps me see the bigger pictureJP: Know when to leave nit pick comments.JP: Think of the potential test cases before you read them.John: Giving Good feedbackConsider the McKinsey ApproachPermissionObservationI noticed that... Have you considered...Try to take ego out of itNever assumeCompliment Sandwich —Bring it all together: Wow, this was a lot of hard work. Great job overall. I noticed that you brought in JQuery as a dependency. Have you considered using Vanila JS instead? That way we keep our site fast and avoid possibly uneccisary dependencies. Here's an article that might help. Very impressed by your CSS skills in this. Keep rocking!JP: Get other engineers involved +1 Mob ReviewJohn: Ideally the person who submitted the PR takes the time to fix their own code. Sometimes you've just got to get code live.Async "Pair" — turn on screen recorder, walk through all your comments as you fix them. Do this when code is pressed for time.PicksJP: https://www.gitify.io/JP2: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/byxmk1/what_makes_for_a_good_code_review_session/John: Rocket Emoji's - https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/

John W Spring, How Trump Trade Averts War, Denuke Proxy States of Russia, South China Sea Nukes, Shared Missile Defense Tech, Need to Send eMail Letters to POTUS, John Must Have Secure Video Link with Trump ASAP, Sept before October Suprise, Solutions for Defense of EARTH, How to Avoid War, New SILK Road World Collaboration, NOT World Government, Dr Bill Deagle MD AAEM ACAM A4M, NutriMedical Report Show, www.NutriMedical.com, www.ClayandIRON.com, www.Deagle-Network.com, Dear Friends,If you are aware of the serious situation that I have been sharing with you about the Russian Air Force base on La Orchila Island in the Caribbean Sea and the other two-mile long runway at Punta Huete in Central America, you must also contact the President before an “October Surprise” my occur in 2019!So please, on the Internet, type-in “CONTACT THE WHITE HOUSE,” provide the requested answers and tell him why he must meet directly with me or by a secure line at a local federal facility with video. Unless you are willing to send him a message on my behalf, America could be lost very soon.Remember, I provided JFK with the analytical reports that were confirmed during the Cuban Missile Crisis. This current matter is just as serious.Thank you for caring.John For information regarding your data privacy, visit Acast.com/privacy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Vi gjorde det lidt besværligt for jerMen med jer er fremtiden i gode hænderSå Romkugle-folket har også en fremtid Du skal nu høre om, hvordan det går dem Og hvordan det går afledningsministeren?Og Huset på Romkugle-havn? Og lærer-Romkuglerne? Og romkugle-Birthe-Tom-Joan- og John?For ikke at tale om Pegefinger-Paladset? Og Nete og Joan?Vi ved det ikke endnu. Medmindre nogen fortæller os detOg det gør jeg nu

Panel: Divya Sasidharan Charles Max Wood Joe Eames Chris Fritz Erik Hanchett John Papa Special Guest: No Guest(s) In this episode, the panel talks amongst themselves on the topic: how does one contribute to opensource work? They discuss their various ways that they contribute, such as speaking at conferences, recording videos for YouTube, podcasting, among others. Check-out today’s episode to get some insight and inspiration of how YOU can contribute to YOUR community!  Show Topics: 1:31 – Erik: Contributing to opensource – and being a good resource for the community. Contributing and still making a living. If people want to make this more sustainable and doing work for the community. 2:26 – Chuck: What do you been by “contributing” – because people could think that “code contributions” would be it. 2:50 – Erik: Answering people’s questions in a chat, code contributions, or doing a podcast or doing a blog posts. I think there are a lot of ways to contribute. Really anything to make their lives and work easier. 3:33 – Panelist: Can we go around and ask the panel individually what THEY do? It could be as simple as mentoring someone at your work. I’m curious to see what the panelist members have done. Sometimes you can get paid for those contributions. 4:40 – Panelist: I am super scared to contribute source code. I really love organizing things: Meetups, conferences, etc. That’s my favorite sort of work. It is also terrifying, though, too. Educational content and organizing conferences are my favorite ways to contribute. 6:10 – Panelist: Why is that attractive for you? 6:22 – Panelist: That’s a good question. I’ve already started planning for the 2022 conference. It’s very physical – there are people that are present. Very direct interaction. My second favorite is sometimes I will teach at local boot camp, and the topic is about interviewing. There is interaction there, too. 8:32 – Panelist: Why do you think organizing conferences is useful? 8:46 – Panelist: Top way is that I will hear stories after the fact. “Oh I came to the conference, met this person, and now I have a new job that pays 30% more...thank you!” Stories like that are rewarding. It’s a ripple effect. A conference the main thing you are putting out there are videos (main product) going to YouTube. The people that are there, at the conference, are interacting people and they are making friends and making contacts. It inspires them to do better. John Papa just goes out there to talk into the hallway. You can talk to Chris Fritz in the hall. Make yourself available. You are the celebrities and people want to meet you. 12:20 – Panel talks about how desperate they are to talk to Chris. 12:36 – Panelist: Going to conferences and meeting other people. 13:08 – Panelist: Taking part of conferences in other ways. That’s something that you do Divya Sasidharan? 13:33 – Divya: It depends on your personality. You get to speak as a speaker, because you get visibility fast. I don’t think you don’t have to speak if you don’t want to speak. Anything within your community that is beneficial. Or the one-to-one interactions are great. Having a conversation with another person that cannot respond. It’s nice to give a speech because it’s a one-way conversation. I like the preparation part of it. The delivery is the nerves, afterwards is a high because it’s over with. I really like writing demos. For the demos I put in a lot of time into it. It gives me the space and time constraint to work on those demos. 16:10 – Do you like the preparation or the delivery? 16:20 – Preparation part that I do not like as much because it is nerve-wrecking, and then the anticipation to go up there on stage. 16:55 – Panelist: I am nervous until when it starts. Once I start talking – well that’s it! Can’t go back now. 17:26 – John: I have given a few talks at a conference. 17:39 – Panelist: Doing good and contributing. I knew John Papa when he was in Microsoft in 2000/2001. I read about it. Everyone knew about him. It would be so GREAT to meet John Papa, and now we are friends! We get to talk about personal stuff and I learn from him. 18:42 – Chris: I have had moments like that, too. Act like they are a normal person. 19:01 – Chuck: After I walk off the stage people want to talk to me afterwards. 19:24 – John: For my personal style, I learn about talking at conferences. I spend a lot of times building a demo. I don’t spend a lot of times with decks. I work on the code, the talk separately. I whip that up quickly, so I don’t This is the story I am going to tell – that’s what I tell myself before I do a talk at a conference. Afterwards, people come up to you years later – and they give you these awesome feedback comments. It’s a huge reward and very fulfilling. There was someone in this world you were able to impact. That’s why I like teaching. I watch the sessions on YouTube. I want to have deep conversations with people. You are missing out if you aren’t talking to people at the conference. 23:26 – Panelist: Yeah, I agree. I do a lot of YouTube videos. I write a blog for a few years on Node and such. Then I got into videos, and helping new developers. Videos on Vue.js. Like you, Joe, I try to combine the two. If I can help myself, and OTHERS, that is great. I promote my own courses, my own affiliate links. It’s really fun talking in front of a video camera. Talking through something complex and making it simple. 24:52 – Panelist: Creating videos vs. speaking at a conference. 25:02 – Panelist: My bucket list is to do my conferences. I want to start putting out proposals. Easiest thing for me is to make videos. I used to do 20 takes before I was happy, but now I do one take and that’s it. 256:00 – Sounds like lower effort. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do a YouTube video. 26:21 – Panelist: Even if you are a beginner, then you can probably help others, too. At first, you feel like you are talking to yourself. If anything else, you are learning and you are getting experience. The ruby ducky programming. Talking to something that cannot respond to you. 27:11 – Like when I write a... 27:29 – Check out duck punching, and Paul Irish. 28:00 – Digital Ocean 28:42 – The creativity of doing YouTube videos. Is that rewarding to be creative or the organization? What part do you like in the creation process? 29:23 – I think a blog you have text you can be funny you can make the text interesting. With videos it’s a whole new world of teaching. YouTubers teaching certain concepts.  There are other people that have awesome animations. If I wanted to talk about a topic and do something simple or talk outside – there are a ton of different ways 31:10 – Panelist: Some times I just want to go off and be creative; hats-off to you. 31:28 – Panelist: I have tried to do a course with time stamps and certain 32:00 – D: Do you have a process of how you want to create your videos – what is your process? 32:22 – Panelist: I have a list of topics that I want to talk about. Then when I record it then I have a cheat sheet and I just go. Other people do other things, though. Like sketches and story boarding. 33:16 – D: Fun, fun, function. He has poster boards that he holds up and stuff. 33:36 – Panelist: People who listen to this podcast might be interested in podcasting? 33:54 – Panelist: Anyone who runs a podcast, Chuck? 34:16 – Chuck: When I started podcasting – I initially had to edit and publish – but now I pay someone to do it. It is a lot more work than it is. All you have to do is record and have a decent microphone, and put it out there. 35:18 – Panelist: It’s a labor of love. You almost lost your house because at first it wasn’t profitable. 35:45 – Chuck: Yeah for the most part we have it figured it out. Even then, we have 12 shows on the network on DevChat TV. 3 more I want to start and I want to put those on YouTube. Some people want to be on a new show with me. We will see. 36:37 – Chuck: I have a lot of people who asked about Python. We all come together and talk about what we are doing and seeing. It’s the water cooler discussion that people can hear for themselves. The conversation that you wish you could have to talk to experts. 38:03 – Podcasts provide that if you cannot get that at a conference? 38:16 – Conference talks are a little bit more prepared. We can go deeper in a podcast interview, because we can bring them back. You can get as involved as you want. It’s also 38:53 – Chuck: Podcasting is good if there is good content and it’s regular. 39:09 – Panelist: What is GOOD content? 39:20 – Chuck: There are different things people want. Generally they want something like: Staying Current Staying on the Edge When you go into the content it’s the host(s). I identify the way this host says THIS a certain way or that person says something THAT Way. That is all community connection. We do give people an introduction to topics that they might not hear anywhere else. With a Podcast if something new comes up we can interview someone THIS week and publish next week. Always staying current. 41:36 – Chuck: A lot of things go into it and community connection and staying current. 41:52 – Panelist: How to get started in EACH of the things we talked about. How do we try to get paid for some of these things? So we can provide value to communities. Talking about money sometimes is taboo. 43:36 – Panelist: Those are full topics all in by themselves. 43:55 – Chuck: Sustainability – let’s talk about that. I think we can enter into that 44:15 – Panelist: How do you decide what’s for free and what you are charging? How do you decide? 44:55 – Joe: I think one thing to start off is the best way to operate – do it because you feel like it needs to be done. The money follows. The minute you start solving people’s problems, money will follow. It’s good to think about the money, but don’t be obsessed. React conference. The react team didn’t want to do the conference, but it’s got to happen. The money happened afterwards. The money follows. Look for opportunities. Think ahead and be the responsible one. 47:28 – Panelist: If you want to setup a Meetup then go to... 47:45 – Panelist: I bet if you went to a Meet up and said you want to help – they would love that. 47:59 – Panelist: Yes, do something that is valuable. But events you will have a budget. Is it important to have money afterwards or try to break even? 48:38 – Joe: I think having money after the conference is just fine. The #1 thing is that if you are passionate about the project then you will make decisions to get that project out there. I can’t spend 500+ hours on something that it won’t help me pay my mortgage. 51:29 – Panelist: It’s not greedy to want money. 51:46 – Panelist: It’s a very thankless job. Many people don’t know how much effort goes into a conference. It’s a pain. People like Joe will put in 90 hours a week to pull off a conference. It’s a very, very difficult job. 53:42 – Panelist: Question to Divya. 54:00 – Divya: I have only been speaking for about a year now. For me, I feel this need to speak at different events to get my name out there. You wan the visibility, access to community and other benefits. These things trump the speaker’s fee. As I get more experience then I will look for a speaker’s fee. This fee is a baseline to make sure that you are given value for your time and effort. Most conferences do pay for your hotel and transportation. 56:58 – Panelist: How much is worth it to me to go and speak? Even if at the lower level; but someone who is a luminary in the field (John Papa). But for me it’s worth it. I am willing to spend my own dime. 58:14 – Panelist: John? 58:37 – John: You learn the most when you listen. I am impressed on your perspectives. Yes, early on you’ve got to get your brand out there. It’s an honor to speak then I’m honored. Do I have time? Will my family be okay if I am gone 3-4 days? Is this something that will have an impact in some way? Will I make connections? Will I be able to help the community? There is nothing wrong with saying I need to be paid X for that speech. It’s all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. 1:01:30 – Panelist chimes in. I run conferences we cannot even cover their travel costs. Other conferences we can cover their travel costs; and everything in-between. There is nothing wrong with that. 1:02:11 – You have to be financially sound. Many of us do workshops, too. 1:02:59 – How do you get paid for podcasting? 1:03:11 – Chuck: I do get crap for having ads in the podcast. Nobody knows how much editing goes into one episode. It takes money for hosting, and finding guests, and it costs through Zoom. The amount of time it takes to produce these 12 shows is time-consuming. If you want to get something sponsored. Go approach companies and see. Once you get larger 5-10,000 listeners then that’s when you can pay your car payment. It’s a labor of love at first. The moral is that you WANT to do what you are doing. 1:06:11 – Advertisement. Links: The First Vue.js Sprint – Summary Conferences You Shouldn’t Miss The Expanse Handling Authentication in Vue Using Vuex Sponsors: Kendo UI Digital Ocean Code Badge Cache Fly Picks: Chris Vue Mastery Expanse TV Show Divya Disenchantment Handling Authentication in Vue Using VueX Joe Keystone Habits Charles The Traveler’s Gift The Shack Money! John Framework Summit Angular Mix

Panel: Divya Sasidharan Charles Max Wood Joe Eames Chris Fritz Erik Hanchett John Papa Special Guest: No Guest(s) In this episode, the panel talks amongst themselves on the topic: how does one contribute to opensource work? They discuss their various ways that they contribute, such as speaking at conferences, recording videos for YouTube, podcasting, among others. Check-out today’s episode to get some insight and inspiration of how YOU can contribute to YOUR community!  Show Topics: 1:31 – Erik: Contributing to opensource – and being a good resource for the community. Contributing and still making a living. If people want to make this more sustainable and doing work for the community. 2:26 – Chuck: What do you been by “contributing” – because people could think that “code contributions” would be it. 2:50 – Erik: Answering people’s questions in a chat, code contributions, or doing a podcast or doing a blog posts. I think there are a lot of ways to contribute. Really anything to make their lives and work easier. 3:33 – Panelist: Can we go around and ask the panel individually what THEY do? It could be as simple as mentoring someone at your work. I’m curious to see what the panelist members have done. Sometimes you can get paid for those contributions. 4:40 – Panelist: I am super scared to contribute source code. I really love organizing things: Meetups, conferences, etc. That’s my favorite sort of work. It is also terrifying, though, too. Educational content and organizing conferences are my favorite ways to contribute. 6:10 – Panelist: Why is that attractive for you? 6:22 – Panelist: That’s a good question. I’ve already started planning for the 2022 conference. It’s very physical – there are people that are present. Very direct interaction. My second favorite is sometimes I will teach at local boot camp, and the topic is about interviewing. There is interaction there, too. 8:32 – Panelist: Why do you think organizing conferences is useful? 8:46 – Panelist: Top way is that I will hear stories after the fact. “Oh I came to the conference, met this person, and now I have a new job that pays 30% more...thank you!” Stories like that are rewarding. It’s a ripple effect. A conference the main thing you are putting out there are videos (main product) going to YouTube. The people that are there, at the conference, are interacting people and they are making friends and making contacts. It inspires them to do better. John Papa just goes out there to talk into the hallway. You can talk to Chris Fritz in the hall. Make yourself available. You are the celebrities and people want to meet you. 12:20 – Panel talks about how desperate they are to talk to Chris. 12:36 – Panelist: Going to conferences and meeting other people. 13:08 – Panelist: Taking part of conferences in other ways. That’s something that you do Divya Sasidharan? 13:33 – Divya: It depends on your personality. You get to speak as a speaker, because you get visibility fast. I don’t think you don’t have to speak if you don’t want to speak. Anything within your community that is beneficial. Or the one-to-one interactions are great. Having a conversation with another person that cannot respond. It’s nice to give a speech because it’s a one-way conversation. I like the preparation part of it. The delivery is the nerves, afterwards is a high because it’s over with. I really like writing demos. For the demos I put in a lot of time into it. It gives me the space and time constraint to work on those demos. 16:10 – Do you like the preparation or the delivery? 16:20 – Preparation part that I do not like as much because it is nerve-wrecking, and then the anticipation to go up there on stage. 16:55 – Panelist: I am nervous until when it starts. Once I start talking – well that’s it! Can’t go back now. 17:26 – John: I have given a few talks at a conference. 17:39 – Panelist: Doing good and contributing. I knew John Papa when he was in Microsoft in 2000/2001. I read about it. Everyone knew about him. It would be so GREAT to meet John Papa, and now we are friends! We get to talk about personal stuff and I learn from him. 18:42 – Chris: I have had moments like that, too. Act like they are a normal person. 19:01 – Chuck: After I walk off the stage people want to talk to me afterwards. 19:24 – John: For my personal style, I learn about talking at conferences. I spend a lot of times building a demo. I don’t spend a lot of times with decks. I work on the code, the talk separately. I whip that up quickly, so I don’t This is the story I am going to tell – that’s what I tell myself before I do a talk at a conference. Afterwards, people come up to you years later – and they give you these awesome feedback comments. It’s a huge reward and very fulfilling. There was someone in this world you were able to impact. That’s why I like teaching. I watch the sessions on YouTube. I want to have deep conversations with people. You are missing out if you aren’t talking to people at the conference. 23:26 – Panelist: Yeah, I agree. I do a lot of YouTube videos. I write a blog for a few years on Node and such. Then I got into videos, and helping new developers. Videos on Vue.js. Like you, Joe, I try to combine the two. If I can help myself, and OTHERS, that is great. I promote my own courses, my own affiliate links. It’s really fun talking in front of a video camera. Talking through something complex and making it simple. 24:52 – Panelist: Creating videos vs. speaking at a conference. 25:02 – Panelist: My bucket list is to do my conferences. I want to start putting out proposals. Easiest thing for me is to make videos. I used to do 20 takes before I was happy, but now I do one take and that’s it. 256:00 – Sounds like lower effort. You don’t have to ask anyone for permission to do a YouTube video. 26:21 – Panelist: Even if you are a beginner, then you can probably help others, too. At first, you feel like you are talking to yourself. If anything else, you are learning and you are getting experience. The ruby ducky programming. Talking to something that cannot respond to you. 27:11 – Like when I write a... 27:29 – Check out duck punching, and Paul Irish. 28:00 – Digital Ocean 28:42 – The creativity of doing YouTube videos. Is that rewarding to be creative or the organization? What part do you like in the creation process? 29:23 – I think a blog you have text you can be funny you can make the text interesting. With videos it’s a whole new world of teaching. YouTubers teaching certain concepts.  There are other people that have awesome animations. If I wanted to talk about a topic and do something simple or talk outside – there are a ton of different ways 31:10 – Panelist: Some times I just want to go off and be creative; hats-off to you. 31:28 – Panelist: I have tried to do a course with time stamps and certain 32:00 – D: Do you have a process of how you want to create your videos – what is your process? 32:22 – Panelist: I have a list of topics that I want to talk about. Then when I record it then I have a cheat sheet and I just go. Other people do other things, though. Like sketches and story boarding. 33:16 – D: Fun, fun, function. He has poster boards that he holds up and stuff. 33:36 – Panelist: People who listen to this podcast might be interested in podcasting? 33:54 – Panelist: Anyone who runs a podcast, Chuck? 34:16 – Chuck: When I started podcasting – I initially had to edit and publish – but now I pay someone to do it. It is a lot more work than it is. All you have to do is record and have a decent microphone, and put it out there. 35:18 – Panelist: It’s a labor of love. You almost lost your house because at first it wasn’t profitable. 35:45 – Chuck: Yeah for the most part we have it figured it out. Even then, we have 12 shows on the network on DevChat TV. 3 more I want to start and I want to put those on YouTube. Some people want to be on a new show with me. We will see. 36:37 – Chuck: I have a lot of people who asked about Python. We all come together and talk about what we are doing and seeing. It’s the water cooler discussion that people can hear for themselves. The conversation that you wish you could have to talk to experts. 38:03 – Podcasts provide that if you cannot get that at a conference? 38:16 – Conference talks are a little bit more prepared. We can go deeper in a podcast interview, because we can bring them back. You can get as involved as you want. It’s also 38:53 – Chuck: Podcasting is good if there is good content and it’s regular. 39:09 – Panelist: What is GOOD content? 39:20 – Chuck: There are different things people want. Generally they want something like: Staying Current Staying on the Edge When you go into the content it’s the host(s). I identify the way this host says THIS a certain way or that person says something THAT Way. That is all community connection. We do give people an introduction to topics that they might not hear anywhere else. With a Podcast if something new comes up we can interview someone THIS week and publish next week. Always staying current. 41:36 – Chuck: A lot of things go into it and community connection and staying current. 41:52 – Panelist: How to get started in EACH of the things we talked about. How do we try to get paid for some of these things? So we can provide value to communities. Talking about money sometimes is taboo. 43:36 – Panelist: Those are full topics all in by themselves. 43:55 – Chuck: Sustainability – let’s talk about that. I think we can enter into that 44:15 – Panelist: How do you decide what’s for free and what you are charging? How do you decide? 44:55 – Joe: I think one thing to start off is the best way to operate – do it because you feel like it needs to be done. The money follows. The minute you start solving people’s problems, money will follow. It’s good to think about the money, but don’t be obsessed. React conference. The react team didn’t want to do the conference, but it’s got to happen. The money happened afterwards. The money follows. Look for opportunities. Think ahead and be the responsible one. 47:28 – Panelist: If you want to setup a Meetup then go to... 47:45 – Panelist: I bet if you went to a Meet up and said you want to help – they would love that. 47:59 – Panelist: Yes, do something that is valuable. But events you will have a budget. Is it important to have money afterwards or try to break even? 48:38 – Joe: I think having money after the conference is just fine. The #1 thing is that if you are passionate about the project then you will make decisions to get that project out there. I can’t spend 500+ hours on something that it won’t help me pay my mortgage. 51:29 – Panelist: It’s not greedy to want money. 51:46 – Panelist: It’s a very thankless job. Many people don’t know how much effort goes into a conference. It’s a pain. People like Joe will put in 90 hours a week to pull off a conference. It’s a very, very difficult job. 53:42 – Panelist: Question to Divya. 54:00 – Divya: I have only been speaking for about a year now. For me, I feel this need to speak at different events to get my name out there. You wan the visibility, access to community and other benefits. These things trump the speaker’s fee. As I get more experience then I will look for a speaker’s fee. This fee is a baseline to make sure that you are given value for your time and effort. Most conferences do pay for your hotel and transportation. 56:58 – Panelist: How much is worth it to me to go and speak? Even if at the lower level; but someone who is a luminary in the field (John Papa). But for me it’s worth it. I am willing to spend my own dime. 58:14 – Panelist: John? 58:37 – John: You learn the most when you listen. I am impressed on your perspectives. Yes, early on you’ve got to get your brand out there. It’s an honor to speak then I’m honored. Do I have time? Will my family be okay if I am gone 3-4 days? Is this something that will have an impact in some way? Will I make connections? Will I be able to help the community? There is nothing wrong with saying I need to be paid X for that speech. It’s all of the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. 1:01:30 – Panelist chimes in. I run conferences we cannot even cover their travel costs. Other conferences we can cover their travel costs; and everything in-between. There is nothing wrong with that. 1:02:11 – You have to be financially sound. Many of us do workshops, too. 1:02:59 – How do you get paid for podcasting? 1:03:11 – Chuck: I do get crap for having ads in the podcast. Nobody knows how much editing goes into one episode. It takes money for hosting, and finding guests, and it costs through Zoom. The amount of time it takes to produce these 12 shows is time-consuming. If you want to get something sponsored. Go approach companies and see. Once you get larger 5-10,000 listeners then that’s when you can pay your car payment. It’s a labor of love at first. The moral is that you WANT to do what you are doing. 1:06:11 – Advertisement. Links: The First Vue.js Sprint – Summary Conferences You Shouldn’t Miss The Expanse Handling Authentication in Vue Using Vuex Sponsors: Kendo UI Digital Ocean Code Badge Cache Fly Picks: Chris Vue Mastery Expanse TV Show Divya Disenchantment Handling Authentication in Vue Using VueX Joe Keystone Habits Charles The Traveler’s Gift The Shack Money! John Framework Summit Angular Mix

John For sittin’ in for Ida Mae – Listen up as Dr. David Law plays Kate Wolf music and talks story – surprise guest at the end, so listen all the way – enjoy!!

John For sittin’ in for Ida Mae – Listen up as Dr. David Law plays Kate Wolf music and talks story – surprise guest at the end, so listen all the way – enjoy!!

Great Escape Radio Episode #74: How Bad Do You Want it to Work Out? “If you want it to work bad enough, it will work.” – Theresa St. John For more information on getting started with travel writing, visit www.greatescapepublishing.com/start/travelwriting. Great Escape Radio host, Jody Maberry, brings travel writer and photographer, Theresa St. John back to the show. Since we last heard from Theresa she’s been a busy lady. (You can listen to her previous podcast here: http://www.greatescapepublishing.com/great-escape-radio-episode-51-its-about-emotions/.) “One of my goals for this year was to go on 12 media trips in 12 months. As of mid-July, I had already been on 10—I’m pretty sure I’m going to make my goal and then some,” says Theresa. All of Theresa’s traveling started with a decision. After a difficult divorce that saddled her with a significant financial burden, she decided to invest in herself. Theresa attended the Great Escape Publishing Photography Workshop and also the Ultimate Travel Workshop in 2013. The workshop fees took a lot of money out of her pocket at a time when she really couldn’t afford it. Theresa didn’t let her financial situation deter from following her dreams. She used it as motivation. “After attending the photography workshop, I decided to attend the travel writing workshop. I was going to be the best student possible—going to make an ‘A’ and not going to make any friends. I was there to earn my money back.” But as life would have it, she did make friends at the workshop. And those friends, along with the knowledge she obtained, have helped Theresa forge a new life. “I was so inspired by the success panel, the editors and the Great Escape Publishing staff,” says Theresa. In about 11 months, Theresa had made back every single penny she invested. “You just have to make up your mind and somehow find the means to get there,” she says of her journey. And, about those friends, she has traveled with many of them along with other friends. She’s quit her full-time job and she has discovered new places and new interests. Listen in as Theresa shares more with us about her journey so far and what her plans are for the future. Our upcoming Ultimate Travel Writer’s Workshop in Washington D.C. is now sold out but for more information on getting started with travel writing at home, go to www.greatescapepublishing.com/start/travelwriting.

Thank you for joining us for the We Like Drinking show episode 126. In this episode we’ll be discussing RateBeer and I’m bellying up to the Nano 108 bar with owner and head brewer Keith Altemose. So crack open your beer, uncork that wine, and let’s get drinking. Cheers my podcast drinking friends and welcome to happy hour 126! Panel Introductions A finalist in the 2013 Wine Blog Awards, a certified California Sustainable Winegrowing Ambassador, and the founder of the stay rad wine blog… Jeff “The King of All Wine Media” Solomon …. Jeff is drinking a Kalimotxo He’s a member of the American Homebrewers Association and the head brewer at Angry Goats Brewery, John "The Ruminator" Ruyak. John is drinking an Anchor vertical; Steam, Go West IPA, Liberty Ale My name is Jeff Eckles, I’m a certified specialist of wine and your host for these festivities…and tonight I’m drinking a whole lot of local craft beer. Our guest tonight is the owner and head brewer of Nano 108 brewery. A brewery designed like a traditional Ale House or Public House in Europe. They have 18 seasonal craft beers, 2 craft sodas, 7 different food trucks & are open every day of the week, and were recently awarded a bronze award for 'Best Local Brewery' in Colorado Springs. Please help us welcome Keith Altemose to the show. G, H, PCR Covfefe Booze News (1 story tonight) Where we discuss interesting, noteworthy, or idiotic stories. Solomon - Bar in Washington DC will give a free round of drinks every time Trump tweets about Comey during his testimony… http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/336710-dc-bar-to-offer-free-drinks-every-time-trump-tweets-during?rnd=1496846425 John - AB-Inbev is the Evil Empire https://www.porchdrinking.com/articles/2017/06/05/dogfish-head-requests-to-sever-ties-with-ratebeer-amid-anheuser-busch-acquisition/ Ask The Panel? Doley says - So you guys have me crazy on beer now. I may have the whole porter/stout/sours pretty much square. At least I've been through enough to know what I like. I'm trying to figure out IPAs. I've had many, and have dumped most after a few sips? Is that maybe an acquired taste? Any "starters" you can recommend?  Thanks much. What’s up? What do you have your eyes on or what do you have coming up. John - Brewing up some specials for two festivals. Keith - Father's Day special: Buy two 32 oz Crowler cans & get one 32 oz Crowler can free! Solomon - Patreons, get out the Vote for our June beer drinking episode. Visit wld/pledge to find the poll and get your vote in. Eckles - This Saturday June 10 for those in the Col Springs area, head on down to the Feast of St. Arnold festival from noon - 4:30. Several of our favorite Springs breweries will be on hand, including Nano 108. Gen ad tickets are $35 and you can find out more at http://feastofsaintarnold.com/ Also, a huge shoutout to former guest Alyson Hartwig who recently received a 2017 Glen Hay Falconer Foundation Siebel Brewing Scholarship. She’ll be embarking on the 12 week World Brewing Academy’s International Diploma course where she will study both in Chicago, Ill, and Munich, GR. You may remember Aly from episode 18 of our show when she was just starting her internship at Goose Island after brewing at Pikes Peak here in Monument CO. Currently she is brewing for Dry Dock up in Denver. Last call Time to clean house and lock the doors This is the time in the show where our beloved listeners go from merely listening to the show, to letting us hear your voices. How big an action star you become is totally up to you. What are some of the ways our listeners can climb the action taker ladder, guys? John - For our listeners that want to be like {action star} - Follow us on your favorite social media platform. Facebook or Instagram @ WeLikeDrinking, Twitter @WeLikeDrinking1, the number 1. Eckles- Hey, if you want to take your action star level up a notch like {action star} you can leave a review and rating on iTunes. Solomon- Finally, for those listeners that want to go full fledged {action star} you can become a Patreon. You can find out more by visiting http://welikedrinking.com/pledge And now it’s time for Wait, Who Subscribed You can also find the show notes for this episode with all the links to the stories or mentions we had at http://welikedrinking.com/podcast OK panel, let’s take one last trip around the table and get some final thoughts before we shut off the lights. John Solomon Keith Eckles Thanks again for joining us at the We Like Drinking Podcast….where you’ll never drink alone.

When God Interrupts: Zechariah and John For more information or visit us as www.connectioncc.org, or for sermon notes go to thisweek.connectioncc.org.

GEP Podcast #10 "The world is out there waiting for you…just go grab it." - Theresa St. John For more about how you can get started with travel writing today, visit: www.greatescapepublishing.com/travelwriting.   Great Escape Radio Podcast #10: Travel writing and photography can change your life Today on Great Escape Radio, Lori Allen introduces us to Theresa St. John…a true success story in both travel writing and photography. Like many people, Theresa made it to her 50s without really knowing her true talent. Her sisters had each found their niche, but she just couldn't quite figure out hers. Then she attended the 2013 Great Escape Publishing Ultimate Travel Writing Workshop in Boston, Massachusetts.   During the workshop, the instructors gave the attendees instructions on ways to find stories and sell them to editors. As part of the class, everyone was sent out into the city to look for a story. Theresa headed out into the Boston neighborhoods in search of a good story idea. She's a big fan of coffee, so she made a stop at a local coffee shop. By asking a few questions she uncovered a story. She made some notes, took a few photos, then wrote an article. Teresa pitched the article to an editor. The editor responded: "I like what you wrote and I want to publish it." That fueled Theresa to get started. Next, she attended a photography workshop to learn to take better photos. And the combination of travel writing and photography have changed Theresa's life. You can hear her full story on this episode of Great Escape Radio. Her tips for getting started with travel writing are… ***Take the Great Escape Publishing workshops to get the tools you need - it's easier than figuring everything out by yourself. ***Do a Google search for your hometown to find local publications where you can pitch your story ideas. ***Contact your local Chamber of Commerce and/or your local tourism board and offer to write about local attractions. ***Use the bylines you earn locally to pitch to publications outside your area. ***Write to places you're visiting and get passes for attractions then pitch those story ideas to publications. Theresa has also been successful in stock photography and currently has about 10,500 photos on stock photography sites. She has this to say about her new life as a travel writer and photographer… "It's all about quality of life. If all you do is go to work and go home day in and day out, there's no quality of life. Travel writing and photography has opened up the world to me. I truly feel like the world is my oyster." Theresa credits Great Escape Publishing with giving her a way to reconnect with her childhood hobbies of photography and writing and she really believes you can do it too. "Everyone has a story. Follow your heart and your dreams. If I can do this at 57, you can too. Put in the work and you can make it happen." For more about how you can get started with travel writing today, visit: www.greatescapepublishing.com/travelwriting.    

XH: Hello, welcome to RoundTable’s Word of the Week. This week we are talking about some commonly used workplace idioms, especially in the US, right?John: Yeah, most definitely in the US. It’s funny because when we are coming up with this list, at first I was like what exactly I’m looking for, and then I found a whole bunch, I said “oh, yeah, all right, these words and phrases are used all the day and time.” So we’re just going to go in a bit of random order, but keep up and you’re gotta learn a lot today. The first one is “green light”, basically it just means to approve a project.XH: green light就是允许为一件事情开绿灯。John: Right, “The director wants to green light your scented wallpaper idea.” The next one is one of my favorites, and you can use it outside the workplace. It’s called “brownie points”: to curry favor or get favor with someone, especially a boss. For example, “He earned brownie points by getting the boss’s coffee.” XH: Brownie是一种小甜点，但是brownie points的意思就是得到加分，印象分。John: Climb the ladder or climb the corporate ladder: to advance in one’s career through promotions. “Earning brownie points is one way to climb the ladder.” XH: Climb the ladder也经常用，指事业上进步、得到晋升的意思。John: “Team player” is pretty obvious: A committed employee who works well with other colleagues. “A team player often sees his proposals green lighted.” XH：Team player就是有团队精神的人。John: A “yes man”: an employee who always agrees with the boss. “He was a yes man, a team player and a chaser of brownie points.” XH：Yes man也很形象，指唯唯诺诺的人、应声虫。John: Then next one is “touch base”. Actually, my mother was a manager pretty much her entire career, and whenever I went to office with her, or she had to take a call at home, she would always use this phrase “touch base” or “touch base with someone”. It took me a long time to figure out. But basically, it’s just to confer about the progress of a project. So just to talk about the progress of what is currently being worked on. XH：Touch base就是碰个头，把事情进展知会给大家、互通情况。John: For example, “Let’s touch base tomorrow about the flea spray account.” Moving on to “crunch time”: When a project needs completed quickly. “It’s crunch time – we need to touch base as soon as possible.” XH：Crunch Time就是关键时刻。John: Right. And then “plug or plug a product”: To promote or market a product. “I was on TV this morning to plug our new flea spray.” And actually you know shen we have guests on Round Table, one of the reasons we have them on sometimes, is so they can plug something they are doing. XH：Plug有推广、销售的意思。John: Cash cow: The product that generates the most revenue for a company. “This scented wallpaper will be the company’s cash cow.” XH：会挤出钱来的奶牛，叫做Cash cow，中文就是摇钱树的意思。John: Then “On the ball”, “to stay on the ball” or “keep the ball rolling” is another one that is seen quite often outside the office, but is used especially in the office, meaning to ensure that a project is progressing efficiently and on time. So you have to “Keep the ball rolling on our green lighted projects.” XH：Keep the ball rolling就是要继续做某件事情，某个项目。John: Down to the wire: Said of something whose outcome or completion takes you to always the deadline. So you are working on a project and it will due on Monday at 9 o’clock. You are working at weekend. 8:55 on Monday you finish it. It called “come down to the wire”. XH: When something is down to the wire, that means 这件事情已经到了最后关头，最后期限了。John: “Glass ceiling” is used quite often when we talk about women and minorities, so the perceived struggle of women and minorities to achieve promotions. “She knew it would be hard to break through the glass ceiling and climb the corporate ladder.” XH: 玻璃屋顶，也就是隐形的升职障碍”。John: Pull the plug: To terminate a project or account. “He pulled the plug on the flea spray before we even got to plug it.” XH: Pull the plug是把插头拔掉，指终止业务或项目。John: Belt-tightening: To reduce expenses. “After we lost our cash cow, the HR department tightened its belt.”XH:就是“勒紧裤腰带”的意思。John: Work out the kinks: To revise, edit or otherwise improve a flawed product or service. “If you don’t work out the kinks, they’re going to pull the plug.” XH: Kinks有扭曲、打结的意思。Work out kinks指解决问题。John: Pull your weight: To share in the workload. “Since we’ve tightened our belts, everybody has to pull his weight.” XH: Pull your weight指尽力的意思。John: Axed: To be terminated; synonymous with being fired. “The yes man was axed when he came down with lockjaw.”XH: Axed被砍掉被开除的意思。John: Now, we are axed. That all the time we have for this week’s RoundTable’s Word of the Week.