Podcast appearances and mentions of john hey

Thank you for joining us for our 2nd Cabral HouseCall of the weekend! I'm looking forward to sharing with you some of our community's questions that have come in over the past few weeks…   Amanda: Hello! I have a 2 part question related to Omega-3 supplementation. 1. Do you see an elevation in LDL with the regular use of Fish Oil? If so, are you concerned about that elevation, or at what degree of elevation do you become concerned? 2. Do you use Cod Liver Oil for the Vit. A and D benefits? Thank you for your insight                               Mindy: Hi! I was wondering if you know the cause of why someone might get tightness and spasm on the right side of the throat. I've been having it freeze up and causes pain and tightness and I feel like I can't swallow or move. It only lasts for a few seconds and I just have to really think about relaxing everything. Thank you for all you do! You're someone I really respect and know we'll get truthful and non biased answers.                                                                                                             Al: Hello Dr.Cabral. I have lot of trust in your opinion and would like to ask about magnesium l-threonate. I've been reading about its benefits regarding cognitive function, Alzheimer's, as well as improving sleep quality. Is this form of magnesium better for above mentioned? Are you considering creating another product like that? My second question is about acne. My partner has deep acne, not inflamed, just tiny hard bumps on temples and forehead. She had elevated Candida, but no parasites and had gone through CBO, which resolved her gut issues, but didn't improve acne. She also has endometriosis, which she just started working on. Would you suggest coffee peeling? I've red that it works very well. Thank you.                                                                                                                                                                                         Gina: Hello I have suffered with gut issues for many many years. I did your cbo protocol and I felt amazing, but I've noticed some of my symptoms coming back. I was wondering if you and your team test for methane and hydrogen sibo, if so I was hoping you had a specific protocol to resolve the problem. Thank you for your time Gina                      Vanessa: Hello Dr. i recently did my hormone test and the tsh was 2.43, but since covid 2021 I had been having anxiety issues it's better but still I lost weight, and my skin is dry. Any suggestions or how do I get better pls , im 40 year old women                                                                                                                                                                                          John: Hey doc. Would like to know what's best for cyst on my knuckle and what usually causes it . Thanks keep up the good work     Thank you for tuning into this weekend's Cabral HouseCalls and be sure to check back tomorrow for our Mindset & Motivation Monday show to get your week started off right! - - - Show Notes and Resources: StephenCabral.com/3355 - - - Get a FREE Copy of Dr. Cabral's Book: The Rain Barrel Effect - - - Join the Community & Get Your Questions Answered: CabralSupportGroup.com - - - Dr. Cabral's Most Popular At-Home Lab Tests: > Complete Minerals & Metals Test (Test for mineral imbalances & heavy metal toxicity) - - - > Complete Candida, Metabolic & Vitamins Test (Test for 75 biomarkers including yeast & bacterial gut overgrowth, as well as vitamin levels) - - - > Complete Stress, Mood & Metabolism Test (Discover your complete thyroid, adrenal, hormone, vitamin D & insulin levels) - - - > Complete Food Sensitivity Test (Find out your hidden food sensitivities) - - - > Complete Omega-3 & Inflammation Test (Discover your levels of inflammation related to your omega-6 to omega-3 levels) - - - Get Your Question Answered On An Upcoming HouseCall: StephenCabral.com/askcabral - - - Would You Take 30 Seconds To Rate & Review The Cabral Concept? The best way to help me spread our mission of true natural health is to pass on the good word, and I read and appreciate every review!  

Are you and your spouse on the same page when it comes to what retirement is going to look like? If not, it's time to talk. Listen to this episode where we'll explore why it's so important for couples to have detailed conversations about their finances and retirement futures. We'll cover exactly what you need to discuss, and how to handle any disagreements.   Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com   Disclaimer: 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.     Mark: Are you and your spouse on the same page when it comes to what retirement is going to look like? If not, it's time to talk. So check into this episode where we explore why it's important for couples to have detailed conversations about not only their finance, but their retirement futures and their dreams, this week on Retirement Planning, Redefined.   What's going on? Welcome into the podcast. Thanks for hanging out with John, Nick, and myself as we talk investing, finance and retirement. And we're going to go to couples therapy this week here on the podcast a little bit, or maybe we'll make it more manly, I guess, and call it a team sport.   However you want to look at it, you want to be on the same page with your spouse, with your loved one when it comes to retirement. I wanted to talk a little bit about that this week, guys, to see how many people generally are on the same page by the time they sit down with professionals like yourselves, financial professionals, or if it's happening a lot in real time, right in front of you. So we'll get into it this week.   What's going on, John? How are you bud?   John: Hey, I'm doing good. How are you?   Mark: Doing pretty good, hanging in there. Looking forward to chatting about this a little bit.   Nick, I hope you're well.   Nick: All good.   Mark: All good as usual. Well, that's very good.   Nick: Good start to the season for the bills, so I'm happy.   Mark: All right, well there you go.   Nick: It's early. It's early, but...   Mark: My lions, my lions are all right for right now. We'll see. I don't have a lot of hope. 40 years doesn't bode well when you have one good season in 40 years, but we'll see.   Nick: I get it, [inaudible 00:01:33].   Mark: All right, so let's dive into this couple stuff here. Why is it important for couples to work together on their retirement plan? I mean, you come in, somebody sits down for the first time with you guys for a consultation, and they're just not even remotely on the same page. That's got to be a bit more problematic, yeah?   Nick: Yeah. Not being remotely on the same page is tricky. I would almost say we probably, at least for John and I, we probably don't run into it too much where they're completely on separate pages.   Mark: Well, that's good.   Nick: I would say that there tend to be different ways that they think about money and kind of communicate about money. To be honest, that's one of the reasons that I would say that John and I like working together as a team with clients is because oftentimes one of us will kind of pick up more on the vibe that one of the people in the relationship is on, and then vice versa the other way around.   And so I'd say it's pretty rare that people in a couple tend to think about finances the same way. Even though they might end up having similar goals on the backside, they kind of attack it a little bit differently. And really it's, I think we joke sometimes, I think at this point we're 80% therapist, 20% financial advisors.   Mark: Right.   Nick: And really it's just trying to get people closer to the same page, and realizing that a lot of the things that they're talking about are pretty similar and they're just going about different ways to attack that.   Mark: Well, John, to expand on that, when somebody sits down for the first time, do you guys, if they haven't really discussed some of those big issues, is it important that they maybe try to knock some of that out before they come in to see an advisor? Or does it not really matter as long as it's getting done?   John: Yeah, I don't think it really matters. I think sometimes they're not even really sure exactly what to be knocking out prior. So to delay meeting with someone just to try to figure out, "Hey, are we on the same page?", I don't think makes sense. I think what tends to happen in our meetings is we'll ask some questions that kind of get them thinking a little differently. Like, "Oh, I didn't think about that." And ultimately, I think what we do when we do our planning, they tend to have some things come out and then they tend to kind of understand where the other one's coming from and that kind of lines up.   Mark: Yeah. Well, I mean, I talk to advisors all across the country and I certainly hear stories often about people saying, one person will say something and the spouse will go, "Since when? I never heard of that."   Nick: It definitely happens sometimes for sure. I would say almost that tends to be more on the lifestyle side of things.   Mark: Okay, all right.   Nick: Versus almost purely financial.   Mark: Like "I want to go scuba diving in every major ocean or something." And the other one's like, "What?"   Nick: Yeah, when the husband pulls, "I want to drive across country in the RV" card, that's where I've seen a lot of the sideway looks where... My parents are a good example, it's like my dad doesn't like to drive to Publix, but then he said he wanted to drive-   Mark: Across the nation.   Nick: ... In an RV, because that's going to be more relaxing. And I remind him that a thousand miles is a lot worse than five. So there's things like that absolutely. How to spend that time, or even just the extra time together. I've almost seen it where it tends to be a little bit of a smoother process for couples when one person retires first, and maybe there's a year or two lag, where they kind of have a little bit of a staggering on spending an extra 50 hours a week together, which can be a little bit of a shock.   Mark: Sure, yeah, it's a totally different animal. Yeah.   Nick: Yeah, a totally different ballgame. So I would say from at least my experience with clients, it tends to be more in the lifestyle side of things. What I've seen most often with couples are it's rare that it's a 50/50 input on finances.   A lot of times I'll see it where one person might be a little bit more strategic on expenses, and then the other one might be a little bit more focused on the actual investments, things like that. But they end up being kind of having the same goal or outlook, but the lifestyle and how they're going to spend their time in retirement and how much they're willing to spend to do those sorts of things tends to be a little bit different.   Mark: All right, John, well let me throw this one your way. So my wife and I are not usually on the same page when it comes to certain different things in a relationship, like most couples. And when it comes to risk, we are completely different.   So how can couples navigate if they are in different places risk-wise? Because let's be honest, I mean the statistics are what they are. Typically, us fellas tend to want to take a little bit more risk, and a lot of times the ladies tend to want to play it a little safer. Not always, but that's kind of the average.   So how do you guys handle that and what's some advice there?   John: So we'll do risk tolerances for each client when that comes up. And we we'll find that someone, again, might be more aggressive than the other, so maybe their accounts are invested, maybe a moderate where someone else's, the spouse might be invested conservative. So that, having separate accounts makes that a little bit easier.   It becomes more difficult when it's the, a joint account. And what we'll do at that standpoint is we kind of go back to the plan. So a lot of the times it's what type of rate of return are we trying to achieve from the planning standpoint. We kind of have conversations, and we'll try to blend the two of them together.   I'd say for the most part, I don't want to speak for Nick, but he could jump in, have never really had this come up as an issue. It's kind of like, "Hey, this is how you want to do it. This is how this other person wants to do it." And for the most part, the spouses are okay with it as long as they're achieving their goals.   Mark: Interesting.   Nick: For the clients that tend to be, for the ones that have a little bit more of that risk appetite, we found through conversation that they have the risk appetite when things are good.   Mark: Sure. Everybody likes it when it's up, right?   Nick: Yeah, for sure. And not necessarily when things are bad. And so we're big fans of almost having, for lack of a better term, like a petty cash drawer or just kind of a smaller investment account that will carve out. So when there are clients that want to have that higher risk appetite, want to take opportunities to really kind of get some big upside.   Mark: So that's your speculative casino type money, right?   Nick: Yep.   Mark: If you will.   Nick: Yup, yup, exactly. And really too, because I would say the majority of our clients are pretty close to retirement or in retirement, they tend to, at least in our experience, be a little bit over that phase with any sort of larger amounts of money. Oftentimes they come to us and they're like, "All right, we had our fun and we're ready to be a little bit more in line on the risk side of things with the investment decisions that we're making." And oftentimes when we have that conversation of, "Hey, if you get an itch, let's have this off to the side and it'll help you make better decisions with the rest of the money." That tends to be kind of a winner for everybody.   John: No, I was going to say, yeah, that's kind of what we reference sometimes as a cave, this is kind of your play account where you want to buy some individual stocks and things like that, where the fluctuation won't really make a big impact overall on your plan. So as Nick mentioned, that kind of satisfies some of the very aggressive clients.   Mark: Okay. Well, so you mentioned the fact a second ago that a lot of your clients tend to be nearing or into retirement, and with a different demographic comes different feelings and mindsets about money.   So with that in mind, we tend to find that, which is really weird if you think about it this way, a lot of times you tend to find that in couples, going through the life, building of the life, raising the children, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, typically the wife tends to budget the money, handle the money, so on and so forth. She's doing all that stuff in the house. But when it comes to retirement, it tends to seem like us guys tend to take the lead there.   Is it okay for one person to handle all the financial matters? Or do you guys really prefer that both people have a good understanding, even if it's not your bag, do you still prefer them to have a general, I don't know, 10,000 foot view of what's going on?   Nick: Yes. I would say too, more and more that, again, from our experience, and maybe it's our clientele where you've got a lot of households that are both people work, both have retirement accounts, and although they may make some differences from the perspective of risk in their portfolios and stuff like that, it tends to be a collaborative effort. Again, I would say we have, anytime we do planning, we have clients fill out an expense worksheet. It's rare that they both fill it out. It's usually one of the two that are filling out the expense worksheet.   And so it does tend to get kind of broken up a little bit from who focuses on what. But it's definitely important that they're both on the same page and have a good grasp and an understanding. And I would say too is the easiest example of that, and the people that work with us kind of know this is there's one report that we go over with clients, it's like a cashflow. It's in detail, wall of numbers, lots of columns, can be kind of intense. And then there's an area called the decision center, which takes all those columns and it puts it into kind of a graph format and it's more interactive.   And I think that's kind of almost the best illustration of the different sides of the brain where one person in the couple sometimes likes the details and likes the column report and they like to, because they can go in on their client side of the portal and go through that and re-review it. And the other one is, "Hey, let's zoom out. Give me the broader picture. Are we good? Are we not good? Give me an idea of a couple of decisions that we need to make moving forward and let's go from there."   Mark: And there's no right or wrong to either one, it's just what is your personal appetite? But I think neither, like if both of you don't have a good understanding, John, that's a recipe for trouble later on too.   John: Yeah, no, I'd agree with that. It's important for both to at least have an idea of what's happening and working as a team, whether one takes a lead and one takes a backseat, we encourage everyone to have a general understanding. Because this past year has been interesting where I've had some clients have some health issues, pass away. And you got to make sure that both pistons are aware of what's happening because you don't want that situation where it's like, "Hey, I don't know where anything is. What do I do?" So [inaudible 00:11:43].   Mark: That's exactly the point, right? Yeah, that's the worst case scenario. And it often, it happens more times than people realize. So you both want to have a decent understanding, even if it's not your thing. And again, no gender roles there. It tends to be the case, but I mean, my wife is way smarter than I am, and she actually deals with, she's very analytical and deals with money and numbers all the time for work. And it's one of those things where when it comes to our retirement, she's like, "I don't want to deal with it. So you deal with it."   And it could just be as simple as, "I deal with numbers all the time, I don't want to deal with it yet another way." So no matter what it is, you find a way to make it work, but not having a decent understanding of what you have, and why you have it and who to turn to in the event of a catastrophe, is a recipe for disaster. So obviously if you're working with a financial professional and a team like the guys at PFG Private Wealth, then at least you also have that resource to turn to when something does happen like John just mentioned.   So one final question here, I'll let you both kind of jump in and chime in a little bit here. What final piece of advice would you give to couples who are maybe just beginning their retirement planning journey, when it comes to making sure that they both are feeling comfortable?   Nick: I think it depends on what phase they are in life, but in general, I think it's hard to screw it up long-term, if you're saving money. So even if you are very conservatively saving the money and you're not getting much return on your money, that kind of instills an ingrained habit of saving money and being used to living on the rest. That will lead you to better habits and better outcomes.   You can always take the next step in, whether it's working with an advisor, whether it's doing research by yourself and then making better and smarter decisions on how you invest that money that you saved. That tends to be kind of the easier part. But the behavior of saving that money first and then going from there, is the number one thing, I think that's important.   Mark: Okay. That's his advice there. What do you about you, John, what do you think?   John: Yeah, it's really similar. You can never go wrong saving. And it's really just kind of the words that just get started. Just get started saving, just get started planning, get started with any of it. Whether you have kids, you want to make sure that estate documents are in place, insurances are in place.   So depending on what phase, it's just a matter of getting started with the overall planning, and saving is definitely where you want to be the forefront. Because like Nick said, you can't go wrong. You're never going to be mad looking back saying, "Man, I saved way too much for retirement."   Mark: Right, exactly. Taking the forward steps and doing something to quote the rush song, right? If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. So don't make that choice to do nothing. Do something for yourself and your future self and get started today. Make sure that you are planning for retirement and having conversations with your loved ones so that you guys are on the same page.   And of course, as always, if you need some help, make sure that you get onto the calendar with qualified professionals like the team at PFG Private Wealth. You can find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com to get yourself some time on the calendar to sit down with John and Nick and get started today.   This has been Retirement Planning, Redefined. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on whatever major podcasting platform app you like to use. They're on all of them. So you can just type in Retirement Planning, Redefined in the search box, or just go to pfgprivatewealth.com.   We'll sign off for this week. For John and Nick, I'm your host Mark, and we'll catch you next time.

Patricia: Hi, John. 帕特里夏: 你好，约翰。John: Hey. 约翰：你好。Patricia: Today we're talking about artificial intelligence or AI. Maybe getting into a little bit of robotics. 帕特里夏：今天我们谈论人工智能或人工智能。也许会接触一点机器人技术。 John: I like it. Patricia: Just wanted to know your take on how you think this will change our society. The advancements that have been made so far in AI and robotics. 帕特里夏：只是想知道您认为这将如何改变我们的社会。迄今为止人工智能和机器人技术取得的进步。 John: Well, I mean, already we've seen there's a huge push towards whether it's AI in think tanks or things of that nature to people just exploring the idea of AI in terms of writing their own books, poetry, art. AI that is painting. I think the possibilities are endless. We will see development and exploration into ideas and areas we've never even thought of. Think about the idea of an AI painter or sculptor. They can probably pull the knowledge of all the painters and artists of the world and come together to form some entirely new form of expressionism or something of that nature. The idea of AI in medicine. It can look at exploring different ways of doing things, things that humans have never thought of and because of the sheer speed at which computers can process and, for lack of a better word think, the potential for growth in this area I think is endless. 约翰：嗯，我的意思是，我们已经看到，无论是智库中的人工智能还是类似性质的事物，人们都在通过写自己的书籍、诗歌和艺术来探索人工智能的想法。正在绘画的人工智能。我认为可能性是无限的。我们将看到我们从未想过的想法和领域的发展和探索。想想人工智能画家或雕塑家的想法。他们或许可以汲取世界上所有画家和艺术家的知识，并聚集在一起形成某种全新的表现主义形式或类似性质的东西。人工智能在医学中的想法。它可以着眼于探索不同的做事方式，人类从未想过的事情，并且由于计算机处理的速度非常快，而且由于缺乏更好的词“思考”，我认为这个领域的增长潜力是无穷无尽的 。 Patricia: Overall do you think these things will improve or worsen our society? 帕特里夏：总的来说，你认为这些事情会改善还是恶化我们的社会？ John: Well, like anything, I think it has a potential to do both. If we're not careful, it could lead to the corruption of minds, the abuse of these advancements to either oppress people or subjugate them. With the proper minds at the helm, this could serve to benefit humanity. If we have AI taking care of things like surgeries, exploration into dangerous areas, humans no longer need to endanger themselves to engage in exploration. These AIs can do the exploration for us, and we can benefit from what they find. That's not to say that humans can't still be exploring and expose themselves to all these amazing new things, it just means that we can take out some of that crazy level of danger and reduce that down so that humans can spend their time exploring other past times, other leisure activities to improve their minds, their bodies, their souls, however you want to put it. 约翰：嗯，就像任何事情一样，我认为它有潜力做到这两点。如果我们不小心，可能会导致思想腐败，滥用这些进步来压迫或征服人们。如果有正确的思想来掌舵，这可以造福人类。如果我们有人工智能来处理诸如手术、危险区域探索之类的事情，人类就不再需要冒着危险去进行探索。这些人工智能可以为我们进行探索，我们可以从他们的发现中受益。这并不是说人类不能继续探索并将自己暴露在所有这些令人惊奇的新事物中，这只是意味着我们可以消除一些疯狂的危险水平并将其降低，以便人类可以花时间探索其他事物 过去，其他休闲活动可以改善他们的思想，他们的身体，他们的灵魂，无论你怎么说。Patricia: Interesting, very interesting ideas. If you could have AI or a robot to help you with something in your everyday life, what do you think you would want help with? What would you use a robot for? 帕特里夏：有趣、非常有趣的想法。如果人工智能或机器人可以帮助您处理日常生活中的某些事情，您认为您会在哪些方面需要帮助？你会用机器人做什么？ John: What activities, tasks? Basically would be like a personal assistant. I would have somebody to help me organize my day, my activities. Help me stay on tasks, stay focused, take care of cleaning. I love cooking so I would probably still want to engage in some of that myself, but there may be days where I'm busy, so an AI whether it's in robot form or something like that, to take care of those tasks for me so that I can be more productive in the other areas of my life that need it would be fantastic. 约翰：什么活动、任务？基本上就像一个私人助理。我需要有人帮助我安排我的一天和我的活动。帮助我专注于任务、保持专注、做好清洁工作。我喜欢烹饪，所以我可能仍然想自己参与一些烹饪，但有时我可能会很忙，所以人工智能，无论是机器人形式还是类似的形式，都会为我处理这些任务，所以 如果我能在生活中其他需要的领域变得更有生产力，那就太棒了。 Patricia: Yeah, I agree. I would love to have someone who could do chores around the house for me, like cleaning. Yeah, thanks for your ideas, John. It was awesome to talk to you. 帕特里夏：是的，我同意。我希望有人可以帮我做家务，比如打扫卫生。是的，谢谢你的想法，约翰。和你说话真是太棒了。 John: Not a problem. I look forward to it, the next, sorry. I look forward to the next time we talk. 约翰：没问题。期待下一个，抱歉。我期待我们下次谈话。

John Wynkoop, Cloud Economist & Platypus Herder at The Duckbill Group, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss why he decided to make a career move and become an AWS billing consultant. Corey and John discuss how once you're deeply familiar with one cloud provider, those skills become transferable to other cloud providers as well. John also shares the trends he has seen post-pandemic in the world of cloud, including the increased adoption of a multi-cloud strategy and the need for costs control even for VC-funded start-ups. About JohnWith over 25 years in IT, John's done almost every job in the industry, from running cable and answering helpdesk calls to leading engineering teams and advising the C-suite. Before joining The Duckbill Group, he worked across multiple industries including private sector, higher education, and national defense. Most recently he helped IGNW, an industry leading systems integration partner, get acquired by industry powerhouse CDW. When he's not helping customers spend smarter on their cloud bill, you can find him enjoying time with his family in the beautiful Smoky Mountains near his home in Knoxville, TN.Links Referenced: The Duckbill Group: https://duckbillgroup.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlwynkoop/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. And the times, they are changing. My guest today is John Wynkoop. John, how are you?John: Hey, Corey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.Corey: So, big changes are afoot for you. You've taken a new job recently. What are you doing now?John: Well [laugh], so I'm happy to say I have joined The Duckbill Group as a cloud economist. So, came out of the big company world, and have dived back in—or dove back into the startup world.Corey: It's interesting because when we talk to those big companies, they always identify us as oh, you're a startup, which is hilarious on some level because our AWS account hangs out in AWS's startup group, but if you look at the spend being remarkably level from month to month to month to year to year to year, they almost certainly view us as they're a startup, but they suck at it. They completely failed. And so, many of the email stuff that you get from them presupposes that you're venture-backed, that you're trying to conquer the entire world. We don't do that here. We have this old-timey business model that our forebears would have understood of, we make more money than we spend every month and we continue that trend for a long time. So first, thanks for joining us, both on the show and at the company. We like having you around.John: Well, thanks. And yeah, I guess that's—maybe a startup isn't the right word to describe what we do here at The Duckbill Group, but as you said, it seems to fit into the industry classification. But that was one of the things I actually really liked about the—that was appealing about joining the team was, we do spend less than we make and we're not after hyper-growth and we're not trying to consume everything.Corey: So, it's interesting when you put a job description out into the world and you see who applies—and let's be clear, for those who are unaware, job descriptions are inherently aspirational shopping lists. If you look at a job description and you check every box on the thing and you've done all the things they want, the odds are terrific you're going to be bored out of your mind when you wind up showing up to do these… whatever that job is. You should be learning stuff and growing. At least that's always been my philosophy to it. One of the interesting things about you is that you checked an awful lot of boxes, but there is one that I think would cause people to raise an eyebrow, which is, you're relatively new to the fun world of AWS.John: Yeah. So, obviously I, you know, have been around the block a few times when it comes to cloud. I've used AWS, built some things in AWS, but I wouldn't have classified myself as an AWS guru by any stretch of the imagination. I spent the last probably three years working in Google Cloud, helping customers build and deploy solutions there, but I do at least understand the fundamentals of cloud, and more importantly—at least for our customers—cloud costs because at the end of the day, they're not all that different.Corey: I do want to call out that you have a certain humility to you which I find endearing. But you're not allowed to do that here; I will sing your praises for you. Before they deprecated it like they do almost everything else, you were one of the relatively few Google Cloud Certified Fellows, which was sort of like their Heroes program only, you know, they killed it in favor of something else like there's a Champion program or whatnot. You are very deep in the world of both Kubernetes and Google Cloud.John: Yeah. So, there was a few of us that were invited to come out and help Google pilot that program in, I believe it was 2019, and give feedback to help them build the Cloud Fellows Program. And thankfully, I was selected based on some of our early experience with Anthos, and specifically, it was around Certified Fellow in what they call hybrid multi-cloud, so it was experience around Anthos. Or at the time, they hadn't called it Anthos; they were calling it CSP or Cloud Services Platform because that's not an overloaded acronym. So yeah, definitely, was very humbled to be part of that early on.I think the program, as you said, grew to about 70 or so maybe 100 certified individuals before they transitioned—not killed—transitioned to that program into the Cloud Champions program. So, those folks are all still around, myself included. They've just now changed the moniker. But we all get to use the old title still as well, so that's kind of cool.Corey: I have to ask, what would possess you to go from being one of the best in the world at using Google Cloud over here to our corner of the AWS universe? Because the inverse, if I were to somehow get ejected from here—which would be a neat trick, but I'm sure it's theoretically possible—like, “What am I going to do now?” I would almost certainly wind up doing something in the AWS ecosystem, just due to inertia, if nothing else. You clearly didn't see things quite that way. Why make the switch?John: Well, a couple of different reasons. So, being at a Google partner presents a lot of challenges and one of the things that was supremely interesting about coming to Duckbill is that we're independent. So, we're not an AWS partner. We are an independent company that is beholden only to our customers. And there isn't anything like that in the Google ecosystem today.There's, you know, there's Google partners and then there's Google customers and then there's Google. So, that was part of the appeal. And the other thing was, I enjoy learning new things, and honestly, learning, you know, into the depths of AWS cost hell is interesting. There's a lot to learn there and there's a lot of things that we can extract and use to help customers spend less. So, that to me was super interesting.And then also, I want to help build an organization. So, you know, I think what we're doing here at The Duckbill Group is cool and I think that there's an opportunity to grow our services portfolio, and so I'm excited to work with the leadership team to see what else we can bring to market that's going to help our customers, you know, not just with cost optimization, not just with contract negotiation, but you know, through the lifecycle of their AWS… journey, I guess we'll call it.Corey: It's one of those things where I always have believed, on some level, that once you're deep in a particular cloud provider, if there's reason for it, you can rescale relatively quickly to a different provider. There are nuances—deep nuances—that differ from provider to provider, but the underlying concepts generally all work the same way. There's only so many ways you can have data go from point A to point B. There's only so many ways to spin up a bunch of VMs and whatnot. And you're proof-positive that theory was correct.You'd been here less than a week before I started learning nuances about AWS billing from you. I think it was something to do with the way that late fees are assessed when companies don't pay Amazon as quickly as Amazon desires. So, we're all learning new things constantly and no one stuffs this stuff all into their head. But that, if nothing else, definitely cemented that yeah, we've got the right person in the seat.John: Yeah, well, thanks. And certainly, the deeper you go on a specific cloud provider, things become fresh in your memory, you know, other cached so to speak. So, coming up to speed on AWS has been a little bit more documentation reading than it would have been, if I were, say, jumping right into a GCP engagement. But as he said, at the end of the day, there's a lot of similarities. Obviously understanding the nuances of, for example, account organization versus, you know, GCP's Project and Folders. Well, that's a substantial difference and so there's a lot of learning that has to happen.Thankfully, you know, all these companies, maybe with the exception of Oracle, have done a really good job of documenting all of the concepts in their publicly available documentation. And then obviously, having a team of experts here at The Duckbill Group to ask stupid questions of doesn't hurt. But definitely, it's not as hard to come up to speed as one may think, once you've got it understood in one provider.Corey: I took a look recently and was kind of surprised to discover that I've been doing this—as an independent consultant prior to the formation of The Duckbill Group—for seven years now. And it's weird, but I've gone through multiple industry cycles and changes as a part of this. And it feels like I haven't been doing it all that long, but I guess I have. One thing that's definitely changed is that it used to be that companies would basically pick one provider and almost everything would live there. At any reasonable point of scale, everyone is using multiple things.I see Google in effectively every client that we have. It used to be that going to Google Cloud Next was a great place to hang out with AWS customers. But these days, it's just as true to say that a great reason to go to re:Invent is to hang out with Google Cloud customers. Everyone uses everything, and that has become much more clear over the last few years. What have you seen change over the… I guess, since the start of the pandemic, just in terms of broad cycles?John: Yeah. So, I think there's a couple of different trends that we're seeing. Obviously, one is that as you said, especially as large enterprises make moves to the cloud, you see independent teams or divisions within a given organization leveraging… maybe not the right tool for the job because I think that there's a case to be made for swapping out a specific set of tools and having your team learn it, but we do see what I like to refer to as tool fetishism where you get a team that's super, super deep into BigQuery and they're not interested in moving to Redshift, or Snowflake, or a competitor. So, you see, those start to crop up within large organizations where the distributed—the purchasing power, rather—is distributed. So, that's one of the trends is the multi-cloud adoption.And I think the big trend that I like to emphasize around multi-cloud is, just because you can run it anywhere doesn't mean you should run it everywhere. So Kubernetes, as you know, right, as it took off 2019 timeframe, 2020, we started to see a lot of people using that as an excuse to try to run their production application in two, three public cloud providers and on-prem. And unless you're a SaaS customer—or SaaS company with customers in every cloud, there's very little reason to do that. But having that flexibility—that's the other one, is we've seen that AWS has gotten a little difficult to negotiate with, or maybe Google and Microsoft have gotten a little bit more aggressive. So obviously, having that flexibility and being able to move your workloads, that was another big trend.Corey: I'm seeing a change in things that I had taken as givens, back when I started. And that's part of the reason, incidentally, I write the Last Week in AWS newsletter because once you learn a thing, it is very easy not to keep current with that thing, and things that are not possible today will be possible tomorrow. How do you keep abreast of all of those changes? And the answer is to write a deeply sarcastic newsletter that gathers in everything from the world of AWS. But I don't recommend that for most people. One thing that I've seen in more prosaic terms that you have a bit of background in is that HPC on cloud was, five, six years ago, met with, “Oh, that's a good one; now pull the other one, it has bells on it,” into something that, these days, is extremely viable. How'd that happen?John: So, [sigh] I think that's just a—again, back to trends—I think that's just a trend that we're seeing from cloud providers and listening to their customers and continuing to improve the service. So, one of the reasons that HPC was—especially we'll call it capacity-level HPC or large HPC, right—you've always been able to run high throughput; the cloud is a high throughput machine, right? You can run a thousand disconnected VMs no problem, auto-scaling, anybody who runs a massive web front-end can attest to that. But what we saw with HPC—and we used to call those [grid 00:12:45] jobs, right, the small, decoupled computing jobs—but what we've seen is a huge increase in the quality of the underlying fabric—things like RDMA being made available, things like improved network locality, where you now have predictive latency between your nodes or between your VMs—and I think those, combined with the huge investment that companies like AWS have made in their file systems, the huge investment companies like Google have made in their data storage systems have made HPC viable, especially at a small-scale—for cloud-based HPC specifically—viable for organizations.And for a small engineering team, who's looking to run say, computer-aided engineering simulation or who's looking to prototype some new way of testing or doing some kind of simulation, it's a huge, huge improvement in speed because now they don't have to order a dozen or two dozen or five dozen nodes, have them shipped, rack them, stack them, cool them, power them, right? They can just spin up the resource in the cloud, test it out, try their simulation, try out the new—the software that they want, and then spin it all down if it doesn't work. So, that elasticity has also been huge. And again, I think the big—to kind of summarize, I think the big driver there is the improvement in this the service itself, right? We're seeing cloud providers taking that discipline a little bit more seriously.Corey: I still see that there are cases where the raw math doesn't necessarily add up for sustained, long-term use cases. But I also see increasingly that with HPC, that's usually not what the workload looks like. With, you know, the exception of we're going to spend the next 18 months training some new LLM thing, but even then the pricing is ridiculous. What is it their new P6 or whatever it is—P5—the instances that have those giant half-rack Nvidia cards that are $800,000 and so a year each if you were to just rent them straight out, and then people running fleets of these things, it's… wow that's more commas in that training job than I would have expected. But I can see just now the availability for driving some of that, but the economics of that once you can get them in your data center doesn't strike me as being particularly favoring the cloud.John: Yeah, there's a couple of different reasons. So, it's almost like an inverse curve, right? There's a crossover point or a breakeven point at which—you know, and you can make this argument with almost any level of infrastructure—if you can keep it sufficiently full, whether it's AI training, AI inference, or even traditional HPC if you can keep the machine or the group of machines sufficiently full, it's probably cheaper to buy it and put it in your facility. But if you don't have a facility or if you don't need to use it a hundred percent of the time, the dividends aren't always there, right? It's not always worth, you know, buying a $250,000 compute system, you know, like say, an Nvidia, as you—you know, like, a DGX, right, is a good example.The DGX H100, I think those are a couple $100,000. If you can't keep that thing full and you just need it for training jobs or for development and you have a small team of developers that are only going to use it six hours a day, it may make sense to spin that up in the cloud and pay for a fractional use, right? It's no different than what HPC has been doing for probably the past 50 years with national supercomputing centers, which is where my background came from before cloud, right? It's just a different model, right? One is public economies of, you know, insert your credit card and spend as much as you want and the other is grant-funded and supporting academic research, but the economy of scales is kind of the same on both fronts.Corey: I'm also seeing a trend that this is something that is sort of disturbing when you realize what I've been doing and how I've been going about things, that for the last couple of years, people actually started to care about the AWS bill. And I have to say, I felt like I was severely out of sync with a lot of the world the first few years because there's giant savings lurking in your AWS bill, and the company answer in many cases was, “We don't care. We'd rather focus our energies on shipping faster, building something new, expanding, capturing market.” And that is logical. But suddenly those chickens are coming home to roost in a big way. Our phone is ringing off the hook, as I'm sure you've noticed and your time here, and suddenly money means something again. What do you think drove it?John: So, I think there's a couple of driving factors. The first is obviously the broader economic conditions, you know, with the economic growth in the US, especially slowing down post-pandemic, we're seeing organizations looking for opportunities to spend less to be able to deliver—you know, recoup that money and deliver additional value. But beyond that, right—because, okay, but startups are probably still lighting giant piles of VC money on fire, and that's okay, but what's happening, I think, is that the first wave of CIOs that said cloud-first, cloud-only basically got their comeuppance. And, you know, these enterprises saw their explosive cloud bills and they saw that, oh, you know, we moved 5000 servers to AWS or GCP or Azure and we got the bill, and that's not sustainable. And so, we see a lot of cloud repatriation, cloud optimization, right, a lot of second-gen… cloud, I'll call them second-gen cloud-native CIOs coming into these large organizations where their predecessor made some bad financial decisions and either left or got asked to leave, and now they're trying to stop from lighting their giant piles of cash on fire, they're trying to stop spending 3X what they were spending on-prem.Corey: I think an easy mistake for folks to make is to get lost in the raw infrastructure cost. I'm not saying it's not important. Obviously not, but you could save a giant pile of money on your RDS instances by running your own database software on top of EC2, but I don't generally recommend folks do it because you also need engineering time to be focusing on getting those things up, care and feeding, et cetera. And what people lose sight of is the fact that the payroll expense is almost universally more than the cloud bill at every company I've ever talked to.So, there's a consistent series of, “Well, we're just trying to get to be the absolute lowest dollar figure total.” It's the wrong thing to emphasize on, otherwise, “Cool, turn everything off and your bill drops to zero.” Or, “Migrate to another cloud provider. AWS bill becomes zero. Our job is done.” It doesn't actually solve the problem at all. It's about what's right for the business, not about getting the absolute lowest possible score like it's some kind of code golf tournament.John: Right. So, I think that there's a couple of different ways to look at that. One is obviously looking at making your workloads more cloud-native. I know that's a stupid buzzword to some people, but—Corey: The problem I have with the term is that it means so many different things to different people.John: Right. But I think the gist of that is taking advantage of what the cloud is good at. And so, what we saw was that excess capacity on-prem was effectively free once you bought it, right? There were there was no accountability for burning through extra V CPUs or extra RAM. And then you had—Corey: Right. You spin something up in your data center and the question is, “Is the physical capacity there?” And very few companies had a reaping process until they were suddenly seeing capacity issues and suddenly everyone starts asking you a whole bunch of questions about it. But that was a natural forcing function that existed. Now, S3 has infinite storage, or it might as well. They can add capacity faster than you can fill it—I know this; I've tried—and the problem that you have then is that it's always just a couple more cents per gigabyte and it keeps on going forever. There's no, we need to make an investment decision because the SAN is at 80% capacity. Do you need all those 16 copies of the production data that you haven't touched since 2012? No, I probably don't.John: Yeah, there's definitely a forcing function when you're doing your own capacity planning. And the cloud, for the most part, as you've alluded to, for most organizations is infinite capacity. So, when they're looking at AWS or they're looking at any of the public cloud providers, it's a potentially infinite bill. Now, that scares a lot of organizations, and so because they didn't have the forcing function of, hey, we're out of CPUs, or we're out of hard disk space, or we're out of network ports, I think that because the cloud was a buzzword that a lot of shareholders and boards wanted to see in IT status reports and IT strategic plans, I think we grew a little bit further than we should have, from an enterprise perspective. And I think a lot of that's now being clawed back as organizations are maturing and looking to manage cost. Obviously, the huge growth of just the term FinOps from a search perspective over the last three years has cemented that, right? We're seeing a much more cost-conscious consumer—cloud consumer—than we saw three years ago.Corey: I think that the baseline level of understanding has also risen. It used to be that I would go into a client environment, prepared to deploy all kinds of radical stuff that these days look like context-aware architecture and things that would automatically turn down developer environments when developers were done for the day or whatnot. And I would discover that, oh, you haven't bought Reserved Instances in three years. Maybe start there with the easy thing. And now you don't see those, the big misconfigurations or the big oversights the way that you once did.People are getting better at this, which is a good thing. I'm certainly not having a problem with this. It means that we get to focus on things that are more architecturally nuanced, which I love. And I think that it forces us to continue innovating rather than just doing something that basically any random software stack could provide.John: Yeah, I think to your point, the easy wins are being exhausted or have been exhausted already, right? Very rarely do we walk into a customer and see that they haven't bought a, you know, Reserved Instance, or a Savings Plan. That's just not a thing. And the proliferation of software tools to help with those things, of course, in some cases, dubious proposition of, “We'll fix your cloud bill automatically for a small percentage of the savings,” that some of those software tools have, I think those have kind of run their course. And now you've got a smarter populace or smarter consumer and it does come into the more nuanced stuff, right.All right, do you really need to replicate data across AZs? Well, not if your workloads aren't stateful. Well, so some of the old things—and Kubernetes is a great example of this, right—the age old adage of, if I'm going to spin up an EKS cluster, I need to put it in three AZs, okay, why? That's going to cost you money [laugh], the cross-AZ traffic. And I know cross-AZ traffic is a simple one, but we still see that. We still see, “Well, I don't know why I put it across all three AZs.”And so, the service-to-service communication inside that cluster, the control plane traffic inside that cluster, is costing you money. Now, it might be minimal, but as you grow and as you scale your product or the services that you're providing internally, that may grow to a non-trivial sum of money.Corey: I think that there's a tipping point where an unbounded growth problem is always going to emerge as something that needs attention and needs to be focused on. But I should ask you this because you have a skill set that is, as you know, extremely in demand. You also have that rare gift that I wish wasn't as rare as it is where you can be thrown into the deep end knowing next to nothing about a particular technology stack, and in a remarkably short period of time, develop what can only be called subject matter expertise around it. I've seen you do this years past with Kubernetes, which is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around. You have a natural gift for it which meant that, from many respects, the world was your oyster. Why this? Why now?John: So, I think there's a couple of things that are unique at this thing, at this time point, right? So obviously, helping customers has always been something that's fun and exciting for me, right? Going to an organization and solving the same problem I've solved 20 different times, for example, spinning up a Kubernetes cluster, I guess I have a little bit of a little bit of squirrel syndrome, so to speak, and that gets—it gets boring. I'd rather just automate that or build some tooling and disseminate that to the customers and let them do that. So, the thing with cost management is, it's always a different problem.Yeah, we're solving fundamentally the same problem, which is, I'm spending too much, but it's always a different root cause, you know? In one customer, it could be data transfer fees. In another customer, it could be errant development growth where they're not controlling the spend on their development environments. In yet another customer, it could be excessive object storage growth. So, being able to hunt and look for those and play detective is really fun, and I think that's one of the things that drew me to this particular area.The other is just from a timing perspective, this is a problem a lot of organizations have, and I think it's underserved. I think that there are not enough companies—service providers, whatever—focusing on the hard problem of cost optimization. There's too many people who think it's a finance problem and not enough people who think it's an engineering problem. And so, I wanted to do work on a place where we think it's an engineering problem.Corey: It's been a very… long road. And I think that engineering problems and people problems are both fascinating to me, and the AWS bill is both. It's often misunderstood as a finance problem, and finance needs to be consulted absolutely, but they can't drive an optimization project, and they don't know what the context is behind an awful lot of decisions that get made. It really is breaking down bridges. But also, there's a lot of engineering in here, too. It scratches my itch in that direction, anyway.John: Yeah, it's one of the few business problems that I think touches multiple areas. As you said, it's obviously a people problem because we want to make sure that we are supporting and educating our staff. It's a process problem. Are we making costs visible to the organization? Are we making sure that there's proper chargeback and showback methodologies, et cetera? But it's also a technology problem. Did we build this thing to take advantage of the architecture or did we shoehorn it in a way that's going to cost us a small fortune? And I think it touches all three, which I think is unique.Corey: John, I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more about what you're up to in a given day, where's the best place for them to find you?John: Well, thanks, Corey, and thanks for having me. And, of course obviously, our website duckbillgroup.com is a great place to find out what we're working on, what we have coming. I also, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I know that's [laugh]—I'm not a huge Twitter guy, but I am pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can always drop me a follow on LinkedIn. And I'll try to post interesting and useful content there for our listeners.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the [show notes 00:28:37], which in my case, is of course extremely self-aggrandizing. But that's all right. We're here to do self-promotion. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me, John. I appreciate it. Now, get back to work.John: [laugh]. All right, thanks, Corey. Have a good one.Corey: John Wynkoop, cloud economist at The Duckbill Group. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice while also taking pains to note how you're using multiple podcast platforms these days because that just seems to be the way the world went.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

On this episode, we will continue our conversation on what expenses may change when you enter into retirement. Helpful Information: PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. 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. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Back here for another episode of the podcast with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth. On Retirement Planning Redefined, we're going to get back into our conversation from the prior episode about cashflow. We went through some categories, housing, work stuff, healthcare, taxes, so on and so forth, on how those expenses will change either to the plus or the minus, depending on our setup. Well, this is the time to talk about the setup. So as we are assessing our retirement expenses, we'll break these down into a couple of categories. So we're going to talk about those with the guys. John, welcome in buddy. How you doing this week? John: Hey, I'm doing all right. How are you? Mark: Hanging in there. Doing pretty well. How about you, Nick? Nick: Pretty good. Staying busy. Mark: Staying busy and enjoying. So we're taping this before the fourth, but we're dropping this after the fourth, so hopefully you guys had a good fourth? Nick, you probably went up and saw family, yeah? Nick: Heading up north to just, yeah, extended family and friends. That fourth week makes it an easier week to get away because everyone's doing stuff anyways. Mark: Yeah, yeah. It's always funny when we have the holidays and we're kind of taping the podcast ahead of time because then drop it because we're not around, so sometimes I get confused on my dates. So yeah, again, we're talking about this before the fourth about what we'll probably will be doing on the fourth. So John, are you on grill duty? Because I know I am. I'm stuck on it. John: No, no. My brother's forcing me to have a cookout at my house, so I told him if I'm providing the house, he's the one on grill duty. Mark: Okay, that'll work.   John: He's visiting from Boston, so he's excited because my other brother's down here and my sister, cousin, and actually the best man in his wedding is married to my sister, so he decided to come down.   Mark: So Marketing 101. So the second you said Boston, all I hear is these Sam Adams commercials right now, "Your cousin from Boston." Every freaking time I hear Boston, that's the first thing I think of. Or Sam Adams beer, I go right there. All through the hockey playoffs and NBA playoffs, I kept seeing those commercials so it's embedded in my brain. But hey, that's the point of marketing, right, is to be those little earworms, so you go out and buy whatever it is that you go out and buy. And speaking of that, that's my transition into the must haves versus the nice to haves. So if we're talking about those accounts, those different categories that we went through on the prior episode, guys, how do those things now play into for our cashflow? Again, cashflow is the conversation wraparound, it's the wrapper of this whole endeavor. We need to break this down. And do you guys do this with clients? Is it something you encourage them to do, because everybody's individual needs and wants are going to be a little bit differently, but do you break things up in the must-haves versus the nice to haves? Nick: I would say to a certain extent, we do. We kind of list basic expenses and discretionary expenses. Mark: So give us some musts. What's the musts? Nick: So obviously housing, healthcare, food and groceries, some form of transportation, whether it's one vehicle, two vehicles. Getting rid of debt. Those are all things that are obviously needs. [inaudible 00:03:02] Mark: Life essentials, right? Nick: Yeah, for sure, for sure. Depending upon the people, some things are discretionary. I would say most of the people that we work for can't afford to have some sort of traveling in retirement. Mark: Yeah, so is two trips a year or is it five trips a year? That's kinds how it starts to change? Nick: Yeah, exactly. Or even a big trip every X amount of years. So like a baseline travel budget of X, and then let's add one of the things that we commonly do is, let's say the travel budget is $6,000 a year from a baseline standpoint, and then every three years they want to do an additional trip of another 6,000, that's one trip. And so we can scatter that in throughout the plan and show them what it looks like and toggle that on and off. And with how we do planning, we can show them the impact of doing something like that and what it does to their plan. So for the higher tier, nice to have. For discretionary expenses, we will use our planning software and kind of show them, Hey, here's the impact on your plan if you want to do that. Because we always preface everything, it's telling people that it's your money, we're not telling you how to spend your money or what to do with your money, our job is to show you the impact of the decisions that you make. Mark: That makes sense, yeah. Nick: So let's arm you with that information so that you understand if you do these things, then let's make an adjustment accordingly. And for sometimes it helps them put into perspective where not everything is a yes or a no. And what I mean by that is, well, let's just say that there's two lifetime trips that they wanted to really do, and so they like to have a bigger travel budget, but really when you boil it down, it's like, okay, I want to make sure I go to these two places. So we make sure that we can accomplish those and make adjustments elsewhere. [inaudible 00:04:58] Mark: Yeah, because the must ... I'm sorry to cut you off, but I was thinking about this as you were saying it. The must-haves, like the housing, the health, food, you're not going to have any kind of discretionary wiggle room. Well, you don't want to. Now you could say, okay, we'll eat less food, or something like that, but that's not the goal in retirement, you don't want to go backwards. So the place typically we do make some adjustments in the cuts are in the nice to have categories. Nick: Yeah, and usually it's almost more of a toggle where even to a certain extent of, we've had conversations where, hey, if things are going really well in the markets and we're able to take advantage and take a little extra money out in years where things have gone well, that's kind of the impetus to do this sort of thing. Mark: Kind of pad the numbers a little bit.   Nick: Yeah. Mark: John, let me get you on here for, besides the expenses we covered, some of the things we went through, what are some contributing factors that will affect cashflow problems that you guys see in retirement? So all these different things, whether it's healthcare, housing, whether it's whatever, give me some bullet points here for folks to think about on things that can, not in a category per se, but like outside effectors, outside influencers, that can really cause us cashflow problems in retirement. John: The number one I'd say, concern for most people going through retirement is longevity. How long does my money need to last? Mark: And that's the great multiplier, right? Because if you live longer, it makes everything else go up. John: Correct. Yeah. So that's one thing we look at, and we do plans. We're planning for age 100, and we'll always get people like, well, I'm not living that long. But the thing is, that's always ... Mark: What if you do? John: Exactly. So it's like, Hey, listen, if you live to 100, guess what? Mark: You're covered. John: Your plan looks good. You could live to 90 and the plan looks good. So we always plan for, we again, overestimate the expenses, overestimate the life expectancy, Mark: And then you don't have to live with your cousin in Boston, right? John: Exactly. That's right. Mark: All right. What else besides longevity? John: Another big one we're seeing right now is inflation. Because with retirement, you're not getting a paycheck anymore, so your ability to earn is now gone. So your nest egg is providing that income for you and social security. And keeping up with inflation, especially the last few years has been a challenge for quite a few people. And mostly I would say for me, I've noticed my food bill has gone up drastically in the last couple of years, more than anything else is really. Because we talked about musts and nice to have, if trips go up, you could say, all right, I'm going to go on a little bit lesser trip, or not go as much, but you know, you got to eat and you got to have healthcare. So those things there are big ones to really consider going into retirement and to be aware of, is the plan [inaudible 00:07:42] Mark: Yeah, a friend of mine, for Memorial Day, we were talking about cookouts earlier, so we got July 4th, you're probably hearing this after July 4th, but how much did it cost you to buy this stuff? So a friend of mine posted a picture around Memorial Day that he bought three steaks, and he lived in the New York area, Nick, actually. And the tag on the thing was like 60 bucks for three steaks. It was like, holy moly. And I know different parts of the country are more expensive than others, but it was just where I'm at, it was like, wow. And they weren't like that impressive of a steak. So to your point, you got to eat. Nick: To be honest with you, I think there's a little bit of ... Mark: Price gouging. Nick: ... ridiculousness and price gouging going on right now from the perspective of a lot of different areas. I just got my six months notice on my car insurance, I've been complaining to everybody about it. One vehicle, no accidents [inaudible 00:08:34] John: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Nick, this isn't a therapy session, right? Mark: Well remembered, well remembered, John, from the prior episode. Very good. Nick: Yes. I drive probably 7,000 miles a year at the most and paying almost $2,500 a year for car insurance. But the crazy part is that, so okay, if it's always been high, that's one thing, but two years ago when I had switched companies, it was about 1,700. So again, we take ... Mark: Inflation. Nick: Do the math on that. I'm sorry, but 50% is not inflation, there's some 50% in two years and it's kind of wild. And then even just going, the area that we're in has been massive growth in this area, but even what the restaurants are charging, and it's just inflation impacts different areas differently. Mark: It's an excuse. I mean, just like anything, we've turned it into excuse, just like the supply chain problem issue. A friend of mine was trying to get his RV worked on and they were like, well, we're still having supply chain issues for a valve. And it's like, really, a valve on an RV, it's been three years. I don't know if supply chain issue really holds in that argument, but if companies are dragging their feet or employers, somebody's just taking long, that's just an excuse. And I think that's the same thing with the inflation. Is it real? Yes. But to your point, are some of these numbers really truly justified? But they can use that, well, inflation's bad. That's the excuse they use in order to hit you with a 50% increase. Nick: Yeah, and I'd say from a planning perspective, because people get concerned about that from a planning perspective, and saying, well, hey, we had much higher inflation last year than we did in our plan moving forward, and [inaudible 00:10:27] Mark: Are we going to be okay to survive it, yeah. Nick: Yeah, and the easiest way that we mitigate that from a planning perspective is we reprice current expenses. So in other words, repricing the current expenses allows us to take that into consideration, the increases that we've had, and then use more normal rates moving forward, which is how you more accurately display that from a planning side of things. Mark: Gotcha. All right, John, so you hit us with longevity and inflation as a couple of areas that can contribute to cashflow problems. Give me a couple more before we wrap up this week. John: Investment returns is another spot, depending on what type of plan you do or type of planning, if some people will really have their income depend on what their portfolio is returning for them. Mark: So we're talking about sequence of return risk, kind of thing? John: Yeah. So if you having a down year and there's not as much income coming in from your portfolio, well that could ultimately affect your cashflow. Or if it's a down year, and we go back to longevity of, Hey, how long is my portfolio going to last, just have a 20% dip in the market, you're going to be a little concerned about pulling out in that period of time, because once you pull out, you know, you realize those losses, and there's no more recovering [inaudible 00:11:41] Mark: Yeah, it's a double way, it's the market's down and you're pulling money out. So the truth that makes the longevity factor interesting. Okay. John: So one more thing on this. This is really important, and especially what we're seeing in the last couple of years where you have some type of plan where if you are dependent on that, you have almost like a different bucket to pull from in a time like this. So you really want to position yourself to be able to adapt to downturns in the market which could affect your income. Nick: One of the things, and I've been having this conversation quite a bit lately, is that previous to last year, for the dozen years leading up to that, rates in return on fixed or cash and cash equivalence was so low, you couldn't get any return on that money, that really people shifted predominantly, or at least in a large way, to take more risks, meaning more upside, so more heavily on the [inaudible 00:12:39] Mark: Well, because the market was going up too. We get addicted to that, so it's very easy to go, well, it does nothing but climb, it's done it for 12 years in a row, so let's keep going, right? Nick: Yeah. And a little bit of that's a circle where it's part of the reason it kept climbing, is because people were saying, well, and not just, but it's just a contributing factor where it's like, well, hey, I'm literally getting zero return here. So inflation's eating away at my money anyways, I might as well take a little bit more risk. And so earlier this year in the majority of our client portfolios, we took some money off the table because now we can get four to 5% in something that has no risk, and that lets us kind of at least take a deep breath, see what's going on, get some sort of return, where most of our plans, we use five to 6% in retirement anyways. Mark: Yeah, that's a good point. You just got to be careful, right? Because we don't know how long those rates will last either, so you don't want to lock yourself into anything too hefty either, without making sure it's the correct move for you. Especially, I'm thinking more like CDs for example. Nick: Yeah. We still target things that are short term, that sort of thing. But for a retiree, even from the perspective of, let's just use the million dollar number, there's a huge difference between five years ago, where if you wanted to do a one year CD and you could get 0.8%, that's $8,000 on a million bucks versus 5%, even just for a year, now it's 50,000 of income. I mean, one is you can't pay your bills, another one is going to be much more comfortable. So for a retiree, one of the sunny side or glass half full part of what we've been dealing with from an inflation perspective, is that at least there's a little bit more return on safer money as we try to re-plan and readjust. Mark: Yeah. No, that makes sense. So one more category here that I want to hit for just cashflow problems in retirement, John, you did longevity inflation and investment returns. I'm going to assume the fourth one's probably just the emergencies, the things that life throws at you in retirement years? John: Yeah, a hundred percent. Emergency funds, it's [inaudible 00:14:44] Mark: Got to have one. John: ... for that, because you just don't know what's going to happen. Mark: Murphy's Law's going to happen, right? John: Murphy's Law's been happening for the last three years. So basically a big one is healthcare expenses, which we touched on as a must have. So big health event could really dip into your emergency funds. Or again, especially here in Florida with the roofs, have talked to some clients and friends who basically were having homeowners insurance issues here, and then carriers are basically saying, Hey, for you to get renewed, you need a new roof. And all of a sudden it's like, what? I just go, my roof's fine. It's like, well, it's outdated, you know, you need a new one, or else [inaudible 00:15:24] Mark: And so they're not covering maybe the full cost or some of the cost, I guess, but they won't insure you. John: I had some friends actually get notices saying, your roof's too old. If you don't replace it, we're dropping coverage. Mark: Oh geez. Okay, yeah. John: So that's an emergency expense. Mark: Definitely. John: Roofs aren't necessarily cheap, so important to have an emergency fund because like you said, Murphy's Law, you have no idea what's going to come up and you want to be prepared for that. Mark: Yeah. No, that's a good point. Nick: The roof thing is pretty wild here too, because a lot of people have tile roofs down here. And depending upon the size of the house, a tile roof is going to cost you, what John? Between 50 and a hundred thousand dollars? John: Yeah, 50 to a hundred grand. Mark: Really? Holy moly. Nick: And so, yeah, and then if you're in a neighborhood that has association rules and all these other things, it can get a little squirrely. So just understanding even little basic things like that, where especially people that came maybe from up north where it's just shingle roofs and 10, 12 grand, 15 maybe, and then [inaudible 00:16:25] Mark: Yeah, I was going to say, my metal roof was like 20, and that was like eight years ago. Nick: Yeah. So there's just things like that where we always very much emphasize having an emergency fund. Mark: Yeah, definitely. All right, good stuff. Talking just cashflow issues, things to consider here on the podcast the last couple of weeks. So if you're worried about the cashflow or you're just worried about making sure your plan is accurate for the time of life you're in, especially if you're one of these folks that maybe got a plan, you're like, ah, I got a plan put together like a decade ago, or whatever. Well, it's not a set it and forget it, it shouldn't be a set it and forget it, anyway. Even insurance policies, sometimes it's very easy to get one and throw it in the drawer for 20 years and forget about it, but all those things can be looked at and reviewed and see if there's a better way to put a strategy together. So if you need a first opinion or second opinion, reach out to John and Nick and the team at PFG Private Wealth. Find them online at pfgprivatewealth.com. That's pfgprivatewealth.com. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, whatever the case might be. Whichever podcasting platform app you like, just type in retirement planning redefine in the search box. Or again, find it all online, pfgprivatewealth.com. For John, Nick, I'm your host, Mark. We'll catch you next time here on the podcast. This has been Retirement Planning Redefined.

This intro is written from ChatGPT with the following prompt: "Please write an introduction to a podcast called The Hold Up hosted by two men named John.  In this podcast they watch movies they haven't seen in many years to see if they still hold up.  This month they are watching Ex Machina from 2012 directed by Alex Garland." [Theme music fades in]Narrator: "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 'The Hold Up' podcast, where nostalgia meets critical evaluation. Join your hosts, John and John, as they journey back in time to rediscover the films that once captivated their imaginations. Will these beloved classics withstand the test of time? Or will they crumble under the weight of their own hype? Let's find out!"[Upbeat music fades in]Host 1 (John): "Hey there, movie lovers! I'm John, and alongside me is my fellow film fanatic, also named John. Together, we're your guides on this cinematic voyage."Host 2 (John): "That's right, John! Each month, we delve into the depths of our childhood memories and revisit iconic films that shaped our love for the silver screen. We're on a mission to see if these movies still hold up, or if our younger selves were just caught up in the hype."Host 1 (John): "Absolutely, John. And this month, we're diving headfirst into a sci-fi masterpiece that had everyone buzzing when it hit the screens back in 2012. We're talking about 'Ex Machina,' directed by the brilliant mind of Alex Garland."Host 2 (John): "Ah, 'Ex Machina'! A film that left us questioning the boundaries of artificial intelligence and human nature. I remember being blown away by the mind-bending plot and the stunning performances."Host 1 (John): "But here's the twist, folks! It's been years since we last watched 'Ex Machina.' So, we're strapping ourselves in for a fresh viewing, armed with the knowledge and experiences we've gained since then. Will it still mesmerize us like it did before? Or will it fall flat in the face of our newfound perspectives?"Host 2 (John): "We'll be examining every aspect, from the performances to the screenplay, the visual effects to the thought-provoking themes. And, of course, we'll be sharing our unfiltered thoughts and engaging in spirited discussions that will have you on the edge of your seat."Host 1 (John): "So, grab some popcorn, dim the lights, and join us on this adventure through time and film. Let's uncover the mysteries of 'Ex Machina' and decide if it still holds up. Welcome to 'The Hold Up'!"[Theme music swells, then fades out]Narrator: "Don't miss the next episode of 'The Hold Up' podcast, as John and John unravel the enigmatic world of 'Ex Machina.' Tune in, subscribe, and prepare for a trip down memory lane that just might change the way you see your favorite films. Remember, it's all about the nostalgia, and whether it can stand the test of time."[Upbeat music fades out]

John: Hey, is this thing on?? Jason: It is. So, I recently found out that our Recording Engineer and Editor, Paul, has a secret file of recordings that he calls From The Back Seat. John: Wait…what? So when we are just rambling on about car stuff, he's recording?Jason: Yep.John: Well, that can't be good.Jason: Turns out, it's not too bad. What you are about to hear are some of those recordings. Disclaimer: No car guys were hurt during the making of this episode. Put on your seatbelt. Here we go! It's here! The SEMA recap show! What's it like to go to SEMA? The guys are going to give you their take on what it's actually like to go to SEMA, some SEMA secrets and their favorite things at SEMA. Special thanks to everyone at Racing Junk for hosting the Get Out N Drive Podcast in the Racing Junk booth!Speed over to our friends at RacingJunk.comBe sure to follow Get Out and Drive Podcast on social media!GOND WebsiteIG: Get_Out_N_DriveTwitter  GetOutNDrivePodFB Get.Out.N.Drive.PodcastYouTube https://tinyurl.com/GONDYouTubeJoin our fb group to share pics of how you Get Out N DriveFollow Jason on IGIG @oldecarrguyFollow Jason on fbfb @oldecarrguySubscribe To the Olde Carr Guy YouTube ChannelFollow John on IGIG @customcarnerdFriend John on fbRecording Engineer, Paul MeyerSign Up and Learn more about National Get Out N Drive Day.Grab your Official Decals, Apparel and other cool shirts at GetDriveGear.com   Subscribe to the Str8SixFan YouTube Channel.Be sure to join the coolest place on YouTube on Thursday nights at 7pm CST, The CarrGuy & SixFan Show, powered by the Get Out N Drive Podcast.Music Credit:Licensor's Author Username:LoopsLabLicensee:Get Out N Drive PodcastItem Title:The RockabillyItem URL:https://audiojungle.net/item/the-rockabilly/25802696Item ID:25802696Purchase Date:2022-09-07 22:37:20 UTC#SEMA2022#SEMA#GetOutNDrive#RacingJunk#KenBlockSupport the show

John: Hey, is this thing on?? Jason: It is. So, I recently found out that our Recording Engineer and Editor, Paul, has a secret file of recordings that he calls From The Back Seat. John: Wait…what? So when we are just rambling on about car stuff, he's recording?Jason: Yep.John: Well, that can't be good.Jason: Turns out, it's not too bad. What you are about to hear are some of those recordings. Disclaimer: No car guys were hurt during the making of this episode. Put on your seatbelt. Here we go! Speed over to our friends at RacingJunk.comBe sure to follow Get Out and Drive Podcast on social media!GOND WebsiteIG: Get_Out_N_DriveTwitter  GetOutNDrivePodFB Get.Out.N.Drive.PodcastYouTube https://tinyurl.com/GONDYouTubeJoin our fb group to share pics of how you Get Out N DriveFollow Jason on IGIG @oldecarrguyFollow Jason on fbfb @oldecarrguySubscribe To the Olde Carr Guy YouTube ChannelFollow John on IGIG @customcarnerdFriend John on fbRecording Engineer, Paul MeyerSign Up and Learn more about National Get Out N Drive Day.Grab your Official Decals, Apparel and other cool shirts at GetDriveGear.com   Subscribe to the Str8SixFan YouTube Channel.Be sure to join the coolest place on YouTube on Thursday nights at 7pm CST, The CarrGuy & SixFan Show, powered by the Get Out N Drive Podcast.Music Credit:Licensor's Author Username:LoopsLabLicensee:Get Out N Drive PodcastItem Title:The RockabillyItem URL:https://audiojungle.net/item/the-rockabilly/25802696Item ID:25802696Purchase Date:2022-09-07 22:37:20 UTCSupport the show

John: Hey, is this thing on?? Jason: It is. So, I recently found out that our Recording Engineer and Editor, Paul, has a secret file of recordings that he calls From The Back Seat. John: Wait…what? So when we are just rambling on about car stuff, he's recording?Jason: Yep.John: Well, that can't be good.Jason: Turns out, it's not too bad. What you are about to hear are some of those recordings. Disclaimer: No car guys were hurt during the making of this episode. Put on your seatbelt. Here we go! Speed over to our friends at RacingJunk.comBe sure to follow Get Out and Drive Podcast on social media!GOND WebsiteIG: Get_Out_N_DriveTwitter  GetOutNDrivePodFB Get.Out.N.Drive.PodcastYouTube https://tinyurl.com/GONDYouTubeJoin our fb group to share pics of how you Get Out N DriveFollow Jason on IGIG @oldecarrguyFollow Jason on fbfb @oldecarrguySubscribe To the Olde Carr Guy YouTube ChannelFollow John on IGIG @customcarnerdFriend John on fbRecording Engineer, Paul MeyerSign Up and Learn more about National Get Out N Drive Day.Grab your Official Decals, Apparel and other cool shirts at GetDriveGear.com   Subscribe to the Str8SixFan YouTube Channel.Be sure to join the coolest place on YouTube on Thursday nights at 7pm CST, The CarrGuy & SixFan Show, powered by the Get Out N Drive Podcast.Music Credit:Licensor's Author Username:LoopsLabLicensee:Get Out N Drive PodcastItem Title:The RockabillyItem URL:https://audiojungle.net/item/the-rockabilly/25802696Item ID:25802696Purchase Date:2022-09-07 22:37:20 UTCSupport the show

ASIA FRUIT LOGISTICA and ASIAFRUIT CONGRESS are back: Chris White talks to David Axiotis and John Hey about the in-person return of Asia'a favourite fresh produce event to Bangkok from 2-4 November 2022. Fruitbox is essential listening for everyone in the fresh produce business. Every episode attracts a large global audience that tunes in to hear exclusive interviews and analysis about fresh fruits and vegetables. Fruitbox is produced by Fruitnet Media International. To tell your story on Fruitbox, email chris@fruitnet.com To sponsor Fruitbox, contact advertising@fruitnet.com

On this episode, we'll breakdown a recent CNBC article that analyzes a recent Morningstar study. The study found that most of us have at least one money bias, some of us more than one, and that those biases are very possibly costing us money in our checking, savings, investing and retirement accounts. Listen to see if you might be impacted by a specific money bias and for strategies to get it back under control. Helpful Information: CNBC Article: https://cnb.cx/3KKXSHf PFG Website: https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/ Contact: 813-286-7776 Email: info@pfgprivatewealth.com Disclaimer: PFG Private Wealth Management, LLC is a registered investment adviser. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice. 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. Investment involve risk and, unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed. Information expressed does not take into account your specific situation or objectives and is not intended as recommendations appropriate for any individual. Listeners are encouraged to seek advice from a qualified tax, legal, or investment adviser to determine whether any information presented may be suitable for their specific situation. Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Transcript of Today's Show: For a full transcript of today's show, visit the blog related to this episode at https://www.pfgprivatewealth.com/podcast/ ----more---- Mark: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. It's another addition of Retirement Planning - Redefined with John and Nick from PFG Private Wealth. We got to fun and interesting podcast this week to talk about, money biases and what those are, and are they costing you a little bit? If you have a money bias and you're going to be probably surprised to find out that you indeed do most people, I think do have biases about a lot of things. So, that's going to be on the podcast this go around. And of course, if you've got questions you need some help, always reach out to theguys@pfgprivatewealth.com. That's p-f-g, private wealth.com. John, what's going on, buddy? How you doing?   John: Hey, doing good. How are you?   Mark: Hanging in there. Doing pretty well. We were chatting a little bit off air and just talking about life, moaning and groaning a little bit, but overall you're doing okay? Hanging in there?   John: Yeah. Yeah. We, we just wrapped up a golf tournament that we hosted with Bern's Steakhouse. It's our second one.   Mark: Nice.   John: Yeah. Finalizing the numbers, but looking like a pretty decent donation to a couple of local Tampa charities here, which are Blue Star Families and then Jackson In Action, 83 Foundation, both a military base. So, so we're excited. It was a great event and we look forward to delivering the check soon.   Mark: That's fantastic. Awesome. Nick, how you doing my friend?   Nick: Doing pretty good. It's been a little bit of a crazy month, but have some vacation coming up, which will be nice, although I'm going to Key West and it'll be my first time going there, so...   Mark: Okay.   Nick: I'm looking forward to seeing what that's like.   Mark: Well, I don't know how you're getting there, but I filled up my truck yesterday and it cost me triple digits for the first time. It was over a hundred bucks.   Nick: Yeah. Luckily I'm flying. So...   Mark: All right.   Nick: We're good to go.   Mark: Well, the inflation numbers came in for February 7.9%. I don't know if you guys saw that at the time we're taping that they just came out this morning, so yay. Right? So people are definitely frustrated and we're kind of concerned. There's a lot going on, obviously the stuff in the world and the market's been reacting to that inflation is up. And so I thought it would be interesting to kind of have this chat. And we were talking about these money biases and how we feel about some of the different things. And I thought maybe it'd be a good idea to share some of this stuff with the listeners. So what we'll do is we'll also put a link to the article. This was a CNBC article guys, that was based off a Morningstar study. And I'll let you guys talk about Morningstar if you'd like to, just to explain that to the folks in a second.   Mark: But the study found that most of us have at least one money bias, some of us more than others, and that biases are very possibly costing us additional money in our checking, savings, or investing in retirement accounts. So, we'll see how this kind of impacts you and you'll kind of learn a little bit about this along the way. So a couple of key points before we dive in is that everybody has different attitudes about money. No real shock there, right? We know that, but that new behavioral financial study from Morningstar found that 98% of the respondents exhibited one or more. So when we say just about everybody has one, that's pretty true and that they are likely costing them some money. So we'll jump right in and get going here and with take away number one. Nick, what are the four main biases that they talked about and that you guys see?   Nick: Yeah, we really wanted to kind of focus on this with this chaotic as the beginning of the year has been. we think that people taking a little self inventory on, on how they might make some decisions would be beneficial. So right. The first bias is called a present bias or really kind of like present time. So really what this focus is on is kind of the tendency to go for immediate rewards over long term goals, or, the good old instant gratification. I would say that, what's interesting is, this can definitely be different for different age bands. So for people that, kind of like in that baby boomer era, they have their toes in this, for sure, whereas younger clients definitely. I would say it's a little bit more dominant just because of the things that they're used to and convenience and instant gratification.   Mark: Sure. The world we have. Yeah.   Nick: Yeah, for sure. And I think this is something that's real important because this become a stronger and stronger bias just with things that we're used to like news cycles and stuff like that. So, so that's, that's the first one.   Mark: Well, let, let me ask you a follow up on that real quick, Nick, before you move on. So with that present bias basically like it's that idea of, I feel like I need to do something now. Right? So like we'll use the market falling as an example. Right this minute we're down about 10% I think in the S&P or into a correction, I guess officially. So I must... I must need to do something now, so I can see the response, the immediate response. That way I feel like I've done something that's really what a present bias is.   Nick: Yep. Very much reactionary.   Mark: Okay.   Nick: Typically, and usually for most people, taking action at something like this, it's oftentimes too late. So that can really turn into this kind of yo-yo effect of, waiting where this is one of the things that lead people to buy high in sell low, which is kind of the opposite.   Mark: Which is the wrong. Yeah. Okay.   Nick: Yeah.   Mark: So that's the first one.   Nick: Yep. And then second one, is what's called base rate neglect. So really what happens is, this is kind of focused on how you judge the probability of something happening based upon new information, while you essentially ignore your original assumptions. So this is something where, for example, the whole concept of best laid plans. So this is where planning can really come into play, where might get a call from a client that, maybe it's a certain sector of the market. Hey, I want, I really want to jump into this certain sector of the market and they're not taking into consideration that maybe they already have exposure to that.   Nick: Or again, maybe it's a little bit too late and they're forgetting all of the effort and all the time that has been put into kind of creating the overall plan and then overreacting to good or bad news. And, this is definitely something like, for example, for myself, right. That I have to have, people remind me, I know that this is something that happens to me where it's like, because I do try to consume a lot of information and process, a lot of information and news where, dependent upon what's going on. This can kind of throw me a little bit for it.   Mark: I gotcha. So let, let me, John, let me of get you in here on this for a quick second. So for example, what I'm hearing then, so the NASDAQ for example, is technically into bear territory now, cause it's down 20 plus percent. So people calling up and saying, Hey, I need to get out of tech might be an example of this base rate neglect because they're seeing the current situation and they're reacting to the news versus does it make sense for their overall long term strategy?   John: Yeah. A hundred percent. It's the whole, kind of going into behavioral finance where it's, you're selling out when, when you shouldn't be, in reality, now's the time you know, if, as Nick mentioned, it's probably too late at this point.   Mark: Sure. Right.   John: It may be best just to stay of the course and stay in it, but a hundred percent that's kind of what we typically see.   Mark: Okay. All right. Go ahead Nick, what the third one for us?   Nick: Sure. So third one is overconfidence. This is an interesting one. Also, one that I know that I have a bias, where it's the whole concept of putting too much weight in your own abilities to make good financial decisions.   Mark: Sure. Yeah.   Nick: So, another way to think about this can be, is wanting to be right. And we tend to all want to be right. But then sometimes we will, double down or not take into consideration a concept of like a sunk cost where Hey, we're not always going to be right. And sometimes it's okay to make mistakes. You just want to learn from that. Oh definitely. And not double down, triple down, that sort of thing. So understanding that there's law of large numbers and there's efficiencies in different areas of the market and or planning. So being over confident, and again, this is something where if you look at the pie, you want to have your plan, your investment strategy, all that you want that pie to be, around 90% or so of the very strong part of your fundamental long term plan.   Nick: So sometimes having some of these biases on a small portion will help you really learn, usually people don't, they try to do it on a much larger portion. So that's a little bit of a takeaway too, is in moderation. Some of these things can be good because there are places where you can have a lot of upside that if you do it with the right amount of money and you take a little bit of risk with a smaller amount of money can help you kind of work through some of these biases without over overacting over correcting.   Mark: Oh, definitely. And if you think about the overconfidence bias here, Nick, I mean, we've basically been on a 12 year run, 12 plus year run with the market. So everybody's been feeling pretty confident. I mean, 1920 and 21 all finished up with double digit years.   Nick: Right.   Mark: So it's easy to feel confident when, when everything's going up, everybody's a genius, right?   Nick: Oh yeah.   Mark: So it's when it's going down that you start to get a little more concerned and maybe that overconfidence comes into play. And since we mentioned down, go ahead and go to the fourth one, which is the final one.   Nick: Sure. So the fourth one is going to be loss aversion. So a classic case of this is, because there's different types of risk as well. And one of the risks that we talk about sometimes are inflationary risks, which we're seeing now. So in other words, for people that might be way too heavy in cash over prolonged period of time, or they're afraid to take any sort of risk, they don't necessarily think about the trade off. So they, again, this is the concept of having a plan and having balanced, not only in your investments, but in your strategies and your overall planning is really important because as we see, sometimes people's thought processes, well, hey cash, if I'm in cash, it's okay. I just don't want to lose my money while, in times of massive inflation or just compared to other areas of the market, there can be significant downside to, the concept of what some people may think is no risk can actually have quite a bit.   Mark: Okay. So those are the four biases then. So you've got the present bias, the base rate neglect of the overconfidence bias and the loss aversion. So John here's the interesting part to me about this whole thing is take away number two, is that 98% of people are exhibiting at least one of these, what they found was the lower, the level of bias, the better your overall financial health. So if you only have one let's say of these four, then you're probably in better shape than someone that has two, which again, it kind of makes perfect sense, but there was some interesting statistics and information in this. So why don't you talk to me a little bit about that?   John: Yeah, yeah. That is pretty interesting. Basically the lower level of bias you have, the better financial health you end up having. And it's one of the ones here is like the present bias where basically research showed, if you have a low level of present bias, you were three times as likely to spend less than the money you that you make. So basically you're going to be saving more money. So again, it's kind of... You kind of look at this in life. You don't have that instant gratification. You're kind of looking at the long term of, Hey, I don't need this today. You know, if you go to the store and buy something, do I really need that now? No, I don't. I can hold off on it. You know, just making better financial decisions all around when you kind of break it down. Another one that was interesting with, with that, with the present bias was there's seven times more likely to plan for the future.   Mark: Yeah.   John: So, so I get... [crosstalk 00:11:36] go ahead.   Mark: I was trying to say, so what I'm hearing there is then, is if they don't re... If you don't react, if you don't give into the instant gratification bias, you typically were a better saver. Sounds like.   John: Better saver, better planner, just not reactionary to what's going on. So it's really the long term goal seems to be in mind with these type of people.   Mark: Seven times more likely. That's pretty good.   John: Yeah. It makes me think I need to... I need to be a little less into gratification for myself.   Mark: There you go.   John: You know, it's, I'm getting off topic here, but it's funny. I was talking to my wife the other day with, we got Disney plus for the kids.   Mark: Sure.   John: And it's like, oh, I want to watch this. And I started thinking, I'm like, man, I just remember just sitting there looking at the guide until, a TV show would finally pop on or a move I wanted to watch because you couldn't watch things right away. You back in the late eighties.   Mark: And in those places, it's great. Right. We enjoy that kind of stuff. But then what happens to this kind of this point is next thing you know, you've got 12 subscription services and you're not using them all. So yeah.   John: Yeah. So anyhow, starting off on a tangent.   Mark: No, you're fine.   John: But yeah, another one would be, overconfidence, lower level bias there. They found that people would have basically more savings. So again, back when Nick was staying with overconfidence in and I fall into this quite a bit, it's like, ah I have some time I can build that up or whatever. And I've seen this quite a bit with some retirees. So, if you're not over, you tend to save a little bit more and last one is the loss aversion of having lower 401k balance, the less bias you have towards that, the more apt you are to take a little more risk and save more into your 401k. And just as Nick mentioned here, not sit in cash and try to outpace inflation.   Mark: I gotcha. So yeah, if you, if you're a bit more overconfident, you feel like you can kind of well, I'll take some chances, right. Because I can get it back. So therefore I can build that savings back up or whatever the case is. So really interesting takeaways from that standpoint, when you think about it, because we all fall into one of these, whatever it might be. And so the lower level of money bias, typically the better financial health. Nick, so talk to me about some of the solutions Morningstar offered because they called it build a money life that fits your priorities, which makes a lot of sense for what you guys do as advisors to kind of find that right mold or fit for the individual.   Nick: Yeah. So it's pretty interesting in... We joke a decent amount of time with clients and among each other that, our business is probably 20 to 30% finance and 70 to 80% therapist. And really it's helping people with these sorts of things. So some of the things they talked about as far as what they call building a money life is kind of put some speed bumps or have a process in place for your decision making. So, one of the things that we try to get our clients to do as an example is that we have the... Because we are a planning focus firm and we use planning tools and software to help people model out different scenarios, we try to get them to start thinking through that realm because a lot... People have often like the quite, well, what about this?   Nick: Or what about that? Or should you know, one of the most common is, do I put extra money towards the mortgage or do I save some money? And the answer for everybody is different based upon what they've done up until that point. And so, for those that work with us, what we try to get them to do for those speed bumps is to say, number one, number two; number one, if there's something that you're concerned about, walk us through, what is the scenario that you're concerned about? So for example, if you're concerned about, the cost of fuel, cost of inflation, those sorts of things, in what way are you concerned about how that applies to you specifically? So not just the world and everybody on the news and all that kind of stuff, but how does it involve you specifically?   Nick: And so, okay. So, sometimes what people realize is that it's not going to impact their life in a dramatic way. It could have some sort of impact on, the economy and those sorts of things. But most of the times it's not going to have a massive impact on their life. And then we take it. So maybe, we figure that it could have some sort of impact. So then we can kind of go to the planning software and kind of model it and say, okay, well, if these things happen, let's take a look and see what it looks like. And okay, so now that you see what it looks like, here are some of the decisions that you can make to bring that sort of risk down and have a little bit of clarity. And then we can go ahead and try to implement those decisions.   Nick: So instead of just these open-ended concerns of things that are not in anybody's control, let's look at the things that we do have in control. And those decisions that we can make to impact and make it easier. And kind of referring back to what we talked about earlier, where that kind of high level of base rate, and then the overconfidence for lower savings and checking, sometimes what ends up happening is that, and we try to remind people of this is, having a solid base of savings, cash savings is your permission slip for a lot of different things. So when people look at and realize like, Hey, that this is... These are exactly the times that we emphasize having this cash handy because we can deal with these fluctuations in the market. We don't have to make irrational decisions because you've built this buffer and you've given yourself this permission slip to deal with these different sorts of circumstances.   Mark: That's a great point. Yeah.   Nick: Yeah. So that can be interesting. And then if, you're doing it on your own, maybe making some sort of process where, hey, you've got a couple of rules that you take into consideration where once you get to certain gains on an underlying investment, you're okay selling, or you sell with half and maybe you let the rest of it ride. Or you just kind of give yourself a buffer time. You know, sometimes people will joke that they have rules for emails, like when they're mad. So, give it an overnight, you're ready to fire off an email, maybe it's to a coworker it's to a family member, whatever.   Mark: Right. Yeah.   Nick: Or text message.   Mark: Wait till you cool down.   Nick: Yeah, wait to cool down. And, or maybe haven't had an adult beverage and give it a little bit of time because oftentimes, when we sit on it, we see that maybe even though we didn't think we were, maybe we were a little over confident in what our thought process was previously.   Mark: So yeah. I like that idea, John, what do you think? Like one of the things they had on there, and I think this is a good idea was the whole, wait three days to make an important decision. I'll use an exam... I mean, you've got the little ones there. That's great advice to try to, raise kids on as well. My dad used to do that with me. Hey man, if it's a good idea, on Monday, it's still going to be a good idea on Friday. Right. But if something changed or you don't feel like it's a good idea, then it's good that you waited before you took action. I've been thinking about buying a muscle car here recently. And of course, gas prices have got me second guessing that. So I went and looked at one last Friday and I still haven't made a decision because I wanted to take that time to make sure I was making that right choice. Right. Don't... That's that instant gratification, I guess, take a few days... [crosstalk 00:18:48]   John: [crosstalk 00:18:48] A hundred percent.   Nick: [crosstalk 00:18:49] Or you might be getting a really good price right now. I mean...   Mark: Well, that's true too, but.   Nick: So if you really want it...   Mark: What do you think, John?   John: I think it's always best to wait a couple of days to see if that's something you really want. I think, like you said there, it's going to be there, and the price could jump up in three days in this environment. But I think it's always best kind of way it a little bit before you make financial decisions. So you ultimately feel comfortable with decisions that you made. That it wasn't kind of an impulse buy or decision...   Mark: Right. [crosstalk 00:19:20].   John: That could affect the rest of your life.   Mark: So, well, the speed bump idea was really good, right? The Morningstar, they called it speed bumps to place your... Slow down your decision making as Nick alluded to. And if you think about the stock market, right, they've got those circuit breakers in place. We saw that with COVID right. When the circuit breakers would kick in to prevent any more trading because it was falling so fast. So if you want to kind of use that same analogy, have some speed bumps or some circuit breakers in place for your decision making process. So lots of different ways we can look at it.   John: Yeah, another one in the article I was reading through is really, and it goes back to what we're saying here, and what we always say is having a plan, a sense of direction and to tune out the news and really stop taking advice from your friends where it's basically, "hey, I did this", or "I'm buying this." And especially with, we don't advise on crypto, but you know, "I'm buying some crypto" and stuff like that. It's really, have your plan and stick to what your plan is for versus listening to what other people are doing. That was also in the article, which I thought was an interesting point.   Mark: Yeah. Very good points. Well, I tell you what, like I said, we're going to link this into the, to the show notes and information there. So if you'd like to check that out, you can. And as always, if you've got some questions, we'll wrap this up this week about a money bias, your own money bias, which one you may be affected by. You should be able to tell if you suffer from the present bias that give me now thing, that base rate and neglect where you just react to the news, the overconfidence of feeling like you've got it all figured out, you've mastered it all. Or maybe just the loss of version where that fear of losing money, just really kind of cripples you either way, it could be costing you money. So reach out to the guys, if you've got questions on how to control this.   Mark: And I think that's some of the value that an advisor brings to the table is they're not going to have those biases about your portfolio plan because it's not their money, right? So they're there to help guide you and be that sounding board and be that coach. So reach out to John and Nick, if you some questions at PFGprivatewealth.com, that's PFGprivatewealth.com. Before you take any action, you should always check with a qualified professional, like the guys, they are financial advisors at PFG Private Wealth. Don't forget to subscribe to us on Apple, Google, Spotify, or whatever platform you'd like to listen to. And if you'd like to learn more about some of those charities that they were... John was talking about earlier in the show, or maybe attend the next time they do one of those events, again, reach out to them at PFG Private Wealth. For John and Nick, I'm Mark, thanks for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time here on the podcast, Retirement Planning - Redefined.

“Imagine this picture. You're going to bet 40 bucks. And I find you a bet for that 40 bucks. And I really wow you. Doubting Thomas: And how you're going to do that? John: I'm going to tell you that after six weeks. You can take home 48 bucks. Doubting Thomas: Hoo boy! 8 bucks! Can I snore now? John: Hey, that's lunch money. Doubting Thomas: Yeah, for six weeks of work, no deal. John: Yeah, I thought you'd think that. So how about this instead? Same bet... Same time frame...” Learn all about financial education and personal financial management in this episode segment with John Brandy on the Simple Success podcast. 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! We also have websites, and you can subscribe to both podcasts. You can even send us a video, audio or text message, but of course, you'll have to head to the show notes, either on your phone or on the web, to actually get links and stuff. I mean, I COULD read the URLs where you can subscribe, support or leave one of those video or audio messages, but you really don't want me to do that. And those explicit and clickable links are in the show notes. Our Simple Success Website: https://www.simplesuccesswithjohnbrandy.com/ Our A Choice Voice Website: https://www.achoicevoice.com/ Podcast Subscription: iOS Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/simple-success-with-john-brandy/id1549566678 Droid Link for Simple Success: https://podcasts.google.com/search/simple%20success%20with%20john%20brandy iOS Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-choice-voice-with-john-brandy/id1560026051 Droid Link for A Choice Voice: https://podcasts.google.com/search/a%20choice%20voice%20with%20john%20brandy Support: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/support Voice Messages: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message https://anchor.fm/achoicevoice/message Finally, you can find us on Podmatch, where we consider guests as well as consider guesting on other people's pods. Podmatch Host Profile https://podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true Podmatch Guest Profile https://podmatch.com/guestdetailpreview/1611285111512x890580376127176400?return=true And really finally, the music for our pods comes from “Cute” by Bensound, and from “Piano Background” by Nick Simon Adams, both on freesound.org. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/simplesuccess/support

【句子】Phil, wait up. Let me ask you something, man to man. 【Modern Family S3E1】【发音】/fɪl/ /weɪt/ /ʌp/ /let/ /miː/ /ɑːsk/ /æsk/ /juː/ /ˈsʌm.θɪŋ/ /mæn/ /tʊ/ /mæn/【发音技巧】wait up连读+闪音；let me不完全爆破；【翻译】Phil，等一会儿。我问你点事儿，男人和男人之间的对话。【适用场合】wait up什么意思呢？其实挺简单。1. 在今天视频中，wait up就相当于wait；经常使用祈使语气；意思是：“停下！等等！”Stop or slow down so I can catch up with you.或者to wait for sb. or sth. to catch up停下等某个人/某物追赶上进度eg: Hey, wait up, guys! I'm coming too!嘿，等等啊，大家伙！我也要去！eg: Tell them not to wait up—I need to change this tire, so it'll be a while.告诉他们别等了！我得换个轮胎，所以还得一会儿呢！eg: John: Hey, Sally! Wait up! Sally: What's happening?John：嘿，Sally！等等呀！Sally：咋了？什么事儿？eg: Hey! Don't go so fast. Wait up for me.嘿别走这么快啊，等等我。这个时候其实就相当于wait for me2. wait up的第二层含义：因为等某个人，或者等待某件事情的发生而晚睡觉to delay going to bed until a certain time or until something happens or someone arriveseg: Are you going to wait up until midnight? 你打算一直不睡，等到半夜吗？eg: We waited up until we heard him come in the back door.我们一直等到听到他从后门进来，才去睡觉。eg: I'll be home late. Don't wait up for me. 我会晚点回家，别等我了。eg: We waited up for the coming of the new year.我们一直没睡，等待着新年的到来。【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】My parents always wait up until I get home, no matter how late it is.

【句子】Phil, wait up. Let me ask you something, man to man. 【Modern Family S3E1】【发音】/fɪl/ /weɪt/ /ʌp/ /let/ /miː/ /ɑːsk/ /æsk/ /juː/ /ˈsʌm.θɪŋ/ /mæn/ /tʊ/ /mæn/【发音技巧】wait up连读+闪音；let me不完全爆破；【翻译】Phil，等一会儿。我问你点事儿，男人和男人之间的对话。【适用场合】wait up什么意思呢？其实挺简单。1. 在今天视频中，wait up就相当于wait；经常使用祈使语气；意思是：“停下！等等！”Stop or slow down so I can catch up with you.或者to wait for sb. or sth. to catch up停下等某个人/某物追赶上进度eg: Hey, wait up, guys! I'm coming too!嘿，等等啊，大家伙！我也要去！eg: Tell them not to wait up—I need to change this tire, so it'll be a while.告诉他们别等了！我得换个轮胎，所以还得一会儿呢！eg: John: Hey, Sally! Wait up! Sally: What's happening?John：嘿，Sally！等等呀！Sally：咋了？什么事儿？eg: Hey! Don't go so fast. Wait up for me.嘿别走这么快啊，等等我。这个时候其实就相当于wait for me2. wait up的第二层含义：因为等某个人，或者等待某件事情的发生而晚睡觉to delay going to bed until a certain time or until something happens or someone arriveseg: Are you going to wait up until midnight? 你打算一直不睡，等到半夜吗？eg: We waited up until we heard him come in the back door.我们一直等到听到他从后门进来，才去睡觉。eg: I'll be home late. Don't wait up for me. 我会晚点回家，别等我了。eg: We waited up for the coming of the new year.我们一直没睡，等待着新年的到来。【尝试翻译以下句子，并留言在文章留言区】My parents always wait up until I get home, no matter how late it is.

John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer at Colder Ice Media, started in e-commerce in 2000 on eBay. He claims that people talked about business in Ebay chat rooms, making it  “the first social commerce platform” before there was such a term. At the time, John sold bandanas, and was pestered by constant customer questions for information on “how to fold a bandana.” So, he made a video and tracked ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars in sales – from that single video listing. Today's digital/social media was not the beginning of social commerce. John says, “No matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce” and that no matter the channel, there is always a person on the other end. If you appeal to human instinct, people will respond. Commerce, by its very nature, requires human interaction and “social” should be much more broadly defined. John explains that there are social channels that many people do not recognize as social, e.g., Amazon Comments. John wrote a book, Kickass Social Commerce, which offers universal stories of social commerce (as opposed to social media). In one story the book, he tells how Madam C.J. Walker, an African-American entrepreneur, developed a line of hair care products, marketed them to her friends, then sold them door to door, and finally had her friends set up “product presentation” parties for a cut of the sales, a sales strategy later used by such companies as Tupperware and Avon. Walker became the first self-made female millionaire in the US. John describes this as “early social marketing.” John presented “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today” at HubSpot's 2020 Inbound Conference, where he talked about the phases of social that make people buy and “the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact.” Two key concepts he covered were: Identify and define your avatar, your King Consumer . . . and profile in detail a minimum of three people who would purchase your product. Establish a need for reciprocity. DO SOMETHING for your King Consumer that creates an imbalance that makes them feel that the need to do something for you in return. In a candid and enlightening history lesson, John also discusses how race has impacted the growth and development of black entrepreneurship. Thank you, John. John can be reached through “Colder Ice” on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest – almost everywhere except on Tick-Tock. ROB: Welcome to the marketing agency leadership podcast, I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I'm joined today by John Lawson, Chief Executive Officer of Colder Ice Media, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, John. JOHN: Hey, thanks for having me, bro. ROB: Yeah. Good to have you here. If we were you know, if it weren't COVID, we might meet up in person. JOHN: Right? ROB: We have an Atlanta episode today. JOHN: Absolutely. ROB: Well, why don't you start off, John, by giving us a rundown of Colder Ice Media and what you all do exceptionally? JOHN: What I do exceptionally. I do e-commerce. Right. And I started my e-commerce business back in 2000 on eBay as a necessity. People were asking me the same question over and over, how to fold a bandana because I sold bandanas. It was annoying. So, I made a video on YouTube on how to fold a bandana. I would give everybody who asked that question that link. That bandana video went completely viral. Three hundred thousand people watched the video. Out of that, we were able to track ten thousand sales – not ten thousand dollars – but actual sales from that single video listing. That was like a cavalcade of understanding for me as people started asking me, “Hey, how do you do videos for selling stuff online?” I'm like, “Answer questions that people want.” That got me on stages. Finally I was like, “OK, if you need help with how to use social – the whole world of social – then that's what we did with Colder Ice Media. ROB: That's a very fun story. I can see why someone would put you on stage to talk about it. I think within that, at a tactical level, there's some cleverness, I think probably in your attribution –  because when you're talking about was not the easiest time to tie through who bought this thing. So how did you sort out that people were buying OR buying more of your product from that particular video? What was your tracking? JOHN: We would just look at the Google tag. Google tells you where traffic was coming from and we would see YouTube, YouTube, YouTube, and I'm like, “Dude, this is crazy.: And then, like you say, back in the day, the tools were not that deep, but they would show you the views. I would see these peaks and valleys in the number of views.  The week of Halloween, the peak would be 10X normal viewership. I had no idea that Halloween would be a great time to run specials selling bandanas. And I got that kind of information just by the volume of watchers during that Halloween week. So, it's if you take all of the parts, then you start seeing trends. You can't see a trend in a month. I know people think you can, but a real trend comes over years. When you see something happen three years, you can jump on and really take advantage of those little blips that other people are not able to see because they're just getting started. So, there's value in being there for a long haul, especially on social media. ROB: Wow. How many YouTube channels do you have in your orbit now? JOHN: Five. Yeah, I'm short. I will tell you one thing that I do – every time I get a new client, I create their own Google space – go out and create a Google account – because you need a Google account to create the YouTube. You're going to need that for writing or using their Google advertising. I will create that entire environment and isolate it for myself. What we do – we can show them the value of one-to-one versus, “Oh, by the way, here's some other tracking inside of your tracking.” I'm like, “No, we're tracking this. Put this in your cart so you can see exactly what our efforts are bringing to your business.” ROB: That makes perfect sense. You got this start in understanding on the video side, but you have this, I think, a broader intentionality around social commerce in general. How has that unfolded – your understanding from that first moment of “a video driving sales” to the broader portfolio of social platforms and tactics? JOHN: That's great . . . I like that question. What happened with me is I got really fascinated with Twitter in the beginning. I'm talking about . . . there were like one hundred thousand people on Twitter when I joined. What was fascinating for me is that I had created this business and I left the office space and I didn't have a whole lot of conversations anymore. So, I started using Twitter to just conversate with people while I was sitting at home in my home office. All of a sudden, it just started naturally moving into, “Hey, what do you do?” “Here's what I do.” “Oh, Ok.” Then I start talking about what I did. The e-commerce thing just started bringing other people in that were in the same field. That made me say, “Why or what is it about being or putting your expertise out that makes people suddenly feel like you are their expert?” You hear about this – everybody today will say, if you want to be an influencer, the first thing you do is start going to places and giving your expertise, There was no playbook when I was doing this. But I would watch this happen and it would happen organically. So, you start wondering. Social is very organic. I know people think it is some technology, but it's really not. I've traveled all over the world and no matter where you go, whether first world country or third world country, there is a central location that is a marketplace where people do commerce. In that commerce marketplace, there's always at least one coffee shop where you have social. Social and commerce go together. I tell people. Facebook was not the first social platform neither was MySpace. Actually, eBay was the first platform. Why? Back in the day, we would sit in these chat rooms while we were waiting for eBay auctions to end. A lot of people were talking about business in those chat rooms. They were a social commerce platform way before there was a term. They were doing social because social has been here since chat boards and chat rooms. AOL was Facebook, 1990. Social has been here forever. And if you grasp what I'd like to call the flywheel of contacting, engaging, getting people to take action, and then measuring that action to create better contact  . . . it goes around and around in that flywheel. And that's kind of what I talked about when we were doing the Inbound thing. It was about the phases of social that make people buy. ROB: Let's get right into that. We were talking beforehand. We were probably hoping to meet up at the Inbound conference and record this live and in person or in Atlanta. But we're not meeting up for things like that right now. But Inbound still happened. HubSpot's big Inbound conference, tens of thousands of people, maybe more – online. And your session there was “Twenty-one Kickass Social Commerce Tactics to Sell More Today.” And so I'd love you to dig in and get us into some of the meat and potatoes, maybe some particular things that you saw resonate back out into your audience on Social because you probably were paying attention to that. JOHN: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'm all about and I tell people and Ok, I get it these do feel very, "Oh I've heard that before." And that's probably the problem is that if you've heard identify your avatar, I call him the King consumer. If you can identify and get in the mind of your King Consumer, then everything that you do after that speaks to that King Consumer. Create at least one. But I say really, at minimum three people that actually purchase your product. They can be real people or they can be fake people. Let's say you don't have your product in market yet, or you think you know who's going to buy that product when you create this King consumer, what you have to do is start thinking about everything that that consumer is into. I want you to go deep into your thought patterns about, not just what they're what they want, but what do they need, what situation are they in? How do they know how many kids do they have? What job do they have?  What are they what do they listen to? What do they say? What are some of the terminology they use? And the more you find that out, the better your business is going to be. I know when I created our business and I was selling those bandanas, I bought those because I was into hip hop and everybody in my neighborhood was wearing the bandanas. I could sell that to people in my sphere. But once I started putting it out there and getting the feedback from others, I was like, whoa, wait a minute; these aren't hip hoppers that are just buying these. These are the bikers. Oh, wow, that's cool. Like I said, people do in the Halloween. Oh, Ok. Cool. And once I started asking my people, hey, how are you using that? How did you like that? You got to definitely go out there and ask. You have to ask. What you're going to learn from your ask are things you're never going to be able to come up with in your own mind. Things that you think when you think that your product and you are your customer – you're not. You're absolutely not. So back to the original question. Identifying that King consumer is one of the things you have to do. The next thing I talk about was reciprocity. If you do something for others, there becomes an imbalance in them that makes them feel like they have to do something for you. That was the whole thing about me teaching people – and I didn't tell you that is the main question actually was – how to fold a bandana like Tupac. Right. And it's so ridiculous. But remember, this is early 2000s, so or late 2000. So, the deal was in my mind, I'm like; everybody knows how to do that. But here's the deal. The people between the East Coast in the West Coast – those flyovers would watch videos and they wanted the same look and they didn't know. Once I taught them how to fold that bandana, then when they were making their choice on who to buy one from, they automatically thought about, “Hey, those guys taught me how to do it.” And just by the nature of who we are, we wanted to make the balance inside of ourselves with reciprocity. So, I'll buy it from them. They might be a dollar more, but I'll go ahead and do it. So, you really want to think about that. That's human nature. We want to get in balance. We always do. If I ask all my friends to help me move, I know, when one of them asks me to help them move, I can't say no. That's reciprocity. Right? ROB: And it's even more helpful in it's not just that they want to know this information. It's that the Internet to an extent and social have made it possible to ask questions that you're too embarrassed to ask your friends. So, you're bailing people out of feeling silly that they don't know how to fold that bandana. JOHN: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Or, they don't even know who to ask. ROB: Yeah. And that continues on out to – I think you look at the some of the beauty influencers and all these makeup tips. There are people who want to know how to do something with their makeup and they are embarrassed that they cannot. Yeah. YouTube bails us out of that. YouTube bailed me out of not knowing how to fix my toilet . . . anything. JOHN: And think of who are the biggest beauty influencers out there – a lot of them are males. That's crazy, right? But you think these guys wanted to put on makeup and a lot of their audience maybe never did. So, who are you going to ask? Your sister? There's a whole lot I got to do before I ask my sister how to put on makeup, There's a whole lot of steps I got to go through. ROB: Yeah, you're probably not going to get a straight up answer right away on that. JOHN: There's going to be some other conversation where exactly we need to have a deeper conversation. ROB: Amazing. I like how the story it started out. When did you realize that you were going to be into this world of social and commerce and Colder Ice Media for the longer run? Was that evident right away? Or was there something after the instigating moment that really cemented the business for you? JOHN: It was probably around 2012 2013. These guys were writing a column about eBay sellers and they asked me if I could do an interview as one of people who are eBay success stories. I agreed.  We get on the phone and were doing this interview and she's like, ”You're one of ten people we're going to feature blah, blah, blah.” But we stayed on the phone for 80 to 90 minutes. And I was like, “Just for a feature piece, this is kind of weird.” We were just having good conversation. At the end of that call . . . she and her husband are a team and write together . . . . . . at the end of the call, they said, “John, man, that was really good stuff. I think we're going to make a multipart feature just on your business.”  I was like, “Really? That's pretty cool.”  And then he's like, “Hey, and if you ever think about writing a book, I'd help you because we've written twenty-two books and we'd love to help you.”  I was like, “Really?” I had never thought about writing a book before because I never thought I had much to say . . . or how much you need to say. But once we put the treatment together, it became my social commerce book. First. It was about social commerce, not just social media. But the key thing was, I don't care how many people like me – I want you to buy from me. There are a lot of people out here who have social influence but couldn't get people to piss on them if they were on fire – they don't really have the ability to move people. There's a difference between having likes and having people that will buy from you. And that's the big difference to me in social media. For me, it was all about the commerce portion. ROB: And what's the name of the book folks want to go . . . JOHN: Kickass Social Commerce. ROB: Excellent. Excellent. Any additional publishings of it or is it still pretty fresh? JOHN: You know what? Here's the thing. When I wrote the book, I wrote it forever. Yeah, right. I did. I literally did because the concepts, again, of social and purchasing go together. So, I grabbed all of these universal stories. And one of my major stories, he first story I talk about is a woman called Madam C.J. Walker. Have you heard of her? ROB: I am not familiar with her. JOHN: Great. Fantastic. So, I could tell this story if you don't mind. ROB: Go. JOHN: All right. So, here's the deal. Madam C.J. Walker was an African-American, a black woman. OK, I like that better. Right? She was a black woman and she created a scalp ointment because her hair was falling out from straightening it. She created an ointment that would keep her hair healthy. And other women saw her hair from going to where she had maybe patches, bald spots, and not healthy hair to these long, luxurious locks. People asked, “What are you using?” She had created this thing in her kitchen and she ended up going from her sink and to the bathtub to create larger volumes of it to sell to her friends. Well, the business starts growing and she starts going door to door to do sales. So that's the first part, right? You go from friends telling friends to going door to door. Her door to door sales grew so much that she realized that she was limited by the number of doors she could go to in a day, and that was hampering the growth of her base simply because there's only so many doors you can knock on. So, she came up with this great idea. She said, look, I'll get one of my clients that already buys for me to have a party and I'll go to the party and display my products at the party. Sound familiar? ROB: Mmm-hmm. JOHN: She was the one that created the model that today Mary Kay and Avon use. She created that and that was, again, social. You're expanding your network by using small influencers to bring their friends in and allowing you to do that demonstration. Of course, you would give them a cut for the party. Ultimately, she built a house bigger than the White House . . . and this was in 1918. This is she is the first self-made female millionaire in America. She was ranked number six of the top 10 entrepreneurs in Entrepreneur magazine for all time, one of the greatest success stories. But I tell this story because, as I was listening and reading and researching, I realized how social media can grow for commerce because. literally, she had her own, quote “Facebook” by doing what she did with these people. So, it's universal. I wrote from that understanding . . . from that standpoint. ROB: Yeah. You can imagine a version of a book on social commerce that would get nitty-gritty – focus very much on the popular channels, marketing channels of the day, would talk about specific ad-spending tactics – and it would have a very short shelf life. But I get the sense from talking to you that you define social channels – and you did this a little bit with eBay – you define that remarkably differently from many people. So, when we think about social channels today, what are some other channels you think may not be intuitively understood as social, but yet are extremely so? JOHN: Hmm, that's a good question. ROB: Because we could talk about Tick-Tock, but we don't and we can, but we don't have to. I don't think you could write a book with a long shelf life if that was your frame of mind. JOHN: Right. Because the channels always change their rules. Yeah. But if your understanding is, no matter what their handle is, there is a person on the other end and there are certain things that we . . . we as humans are just a higher level of animals and there's certain habits that we have that we're always going to use. No matter what channel you use to get there, if you nail that human instinct, they're going to respond to it. Here's what I give you that you wouldn't think of: Amazon comments. Amazon comment, that is a social channel. There are some people that do nothing but read and post or try things and post and then they read other stuff from people. And then they respond in those posts. They do this all day long. Why are they doing that? Because that's their social world. ROB: Hmm. Have you seen some people using Slack communities in a business context, maybe? JOHN: Yes, absolutely. Because what they're doing now is they're getting people away – moreso Reddit. I mean, Reddit, its killer. Reddit is really killer. But a Slack community is a great way to get people that are interested in a specific topic away from the distraction that is social media, especially in an election year. ROB: Hmm, right. Plenty of that. JOHN: There's so much of that. And people's moods are being changed sometimes by the constant back and forth in these major social channels like Facebook or Twitter. It gets distracting. So, you get your people out from there into a nice global world that doesn't have all the noise in it. ROB: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's almost in some cases, there's too much – If you were in a room, there are some rooms where there's too much shouting to be helpful. You can't help people who are in the middle of a fight. JOHN: Right. Exactly. It's like it's really hard to get my attention when there's a train wreck right in front of us. ROB: What does that pivot point look like? What's it look like? What's an example – help us kind of think through it and catalyze our thinking – of someone who's commenting on reviews on Amazon and they're selling something and it's driving – I understand it conceptually, but it's a bit abstract. Is there a concrete example you've seen where they comment on this thing because they were selling this other thing? JOHN: Well, what ends up happening is, if you comment a lot, Amazon flags you as a commenter. Once you get that known as a trusted source, once you get that flagging, then other people that are trying to get reviews by people that have that tag or that flag will start reaching out to send you products. ROB: Got it. JOHN: Right. So, here's the deal. Once you recognize that people are gravitating to you, starting to ask you for your opinion, you've probably got something going on there. I've got a client right now that built a business – and this is so weird – around selling old music media. So, it's flipping CDs. Who buys a CD today? Why don't I get that? I didn't get that. I get it now. He's done six figures just teaching people how to look for CDs at garage sales and thrift stores. That's just amazing to me. You wouldn't think there was a community around that before this. I just never knew. So, there are a lot of niches – there are people that do nothing but needlepoint – there's a niche for darn near everything and it doesn't take a lot of people for you to reach out and find an audience that will either purchase from you or take your recommendations and purchase other things so you can become that influencer for that thing. ROB: Right. It's like the kind of the Kevin Kelly conversation, around a thousand true fans and there are lots of thousands of fans that are looking to be with him.  JOHN: Who did you say? ROB: Kevin Kelly, I think. JOHN: Who's Kevin Kelly? Wait a minute, is not the original? ROB: It might be. Where have you heard it most? JOHN: I'm just going to check this out because. Ok, says Kevin Kelly. Interesting. I'm thinking. Anyway, go ahead. Go ahead. I want to talk about it, Ok? KK.org got it. Technically. ROB: Yep. JOHN: Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Because it's funny you say that. When it first came out, I was so into that. The reason why I was into it, just to go a little bit backwards. is because I'm a huge Prince fan. When Prince left the label, he left a multi-million-dollar deal with Warner Brothers. He was like, “You know what? You can have my entire song category. I just want to be free.” And I was like, “What the hell?” Right after that, he put out his own album. This was the early 90s, He used like a chat room, basically a chat board, to sell a hundred thousand records. Now, this is a man that sold 10 million records for just his Purple Rain album and now he's selling a hundred thousand. And he said, “You know what? I made more off that hundred thousand records than I ever made off of Purple Rain. And when that thousand true fans came out, I was like, ‘Wow'.” That is the basis from where I teach. If you can get a thousand true fans, you're in. ROB: That's amazing, I didn't know that story about Prince, but even in the music world, it brings me forward even to someone like Run the Jewels. Their first album, they put it on their website for free. And they kept on doing their albums for free. And now their albums are basically for free, even if on Spotify. But they were able to cut through a lot of noise and find their fans a lot faster, but still make a living and in a way that is far beyond just selling music. JOHN: Right. Most musicians don't make their money off selling music anyway. That's why they have to tour. Yeah. They have to tour to pay for everything because, I mean, the music business is an amazing thing. I don't want to go into how they really do their business, but let's put it like this: If you sell a million records, you're probably not a millionaire. ROB: Yeah, man. Well, John, this is this is quite a knowledge drop here. I hope that when we're back to meeting in person, people will get a chance to get out and see you and meet you and hear you. When people want to find you and when they want to find Colder Ice Media, where should they go to track you down? JOHN: Just put in Colder Ice. That's all you got to do. Put it in your browser and I will show up I'm Colder Ice on every platform. I am one of those branding crazy people that did that a long time ago. And I'm Colder Ice on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest. I don't care where you go. Pretty much I own Colder Ice except for Tick-Tock. Somebody stopped me on Tick-Tock. ROB: Oh man, that's tough. Well maybe you can make a phone call at some point and get it unlocked for Colder Ice. The handle you reserve when you were early on Twitter, did you get another good Twitter handle early. JOHN: Man, you are just pulling out all the good stories. But my name is so common. John Lawson. When I first looked it up, there were like eight million John Lawsons. I had the story in my head. I remember this story that back in segregation – a lot of people don't understand this, but African-Americans are some very original entrepreneurs, not because we had the entrepreneurial spirit – but you had to be an entrepreneur if you wanted to feed your family. You couldn't I couldn't walk into the regular grocery store and buy groceries back then. You had to have a black-only grocery store. There was a black-only cab company. There was a black-only bus company, black-only hotels. All of that. Run by black people because “white people wasn't sharing.” But literally, those storefronts that were serving the black community, the day that integration became the norm, they would see their customers walk right past their storefronts to go shop downtown. They came up with the saying, “Well, I guess the white man's ice is colder.” And I always remember that: colder ice. That's the story. ROB: Wow, I didn't know that either and you're gracious in your history lessons. There's a lot of strong feelings tied up in that. I know. We're all trying to figure out different ways to actually be sorry and be better. JOHN: No, we're all getting better, man. That it's all good effects on your ear. That's the great story of America. ROB: Well, John, thank you for coming on again. I can't wait to get out and hear you share something in real life, but I appreciate you joining virtually as well. And I think our audience is better for it as well. JOHN: This was a great interview. I really had fun. ROB: Thank you. Thank you for listening. The marketing agency leadership podcast is presented by Converged. 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.

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.

John Hey knows the Asian fresh produce market almost like the back of his hand. As editorial director for Fruitnet in Asia, he's seen some major changes to the way the market – or that collection of extremely varied markets – works, particularly in the past six months as a result of the Covid-19 crisis. “The pandemic has really been a catalyst for change in shopping behaviour,” he tells Chris White during the latest episode of Fruitnet's conversation series Fruitbox. “Wet markets have been heavily impacted by Covid restrictions, like social distancing and shorter operating hours, and some consumers have stayed away due to hygiene and food safety fears.” Modern retail formats like supermarkets have certainly benefited from that shift, but Hey believes the most significant growth is elsewhere. “The headline trend we've seen is online and digital channels growing their share of fresh produce sales,” he notes. “Pre-pandemic, China was already blazing a trail in the digitalisation of food retail with the integration of online and offline, but Covid has really accelerated the trend there.” Plus there have been other interesting developments in other parts of the supply chain, including producers and importers developing their own innovative and ingenious ways of reaching consumers. “That's a trend I think that we will likely see grow.” During this specially extended episode of Fruitbox, Hey takes us through a whistlestop tour of Asian markets, summing up the various trends, challenges and opportunities that exist for fresh fruit and vegetable suppliers and buyers. Hosted by Chris White in London, Fruitbox now attracts a big audience across the global fruit and vegetable business that tunes every week to hear exclusive interviews and expert analysis. Produced by Fruitnet Media International, the show is essential listening for everyone in the fresh produce industry. To find out how you can tell your story on Fruitbox, email chris@fruitnet.com. To learn about sponsorship and advertising opportunities, email advertising@fruitnet.com. Read the latest fresh produce industry news at www.fruitnet.com

John Hey, Chief Strategist from VC3, discusses how technology and IT leadership are playing a critical role during the COVID-19 pandemic and how it relates to overcoming challenges with communication, culture and operations. Hey shares some of the things that VC3 is doing, as well as helpful advice and best practices for other businesses, organizations and municipalities. VC3 has been on the leading edge of Information Technology since 1994, providing client-oriented solutions to both commercial and public sector clients. We implement IT projects and services that can provide above-average returns on investment, significantly enhance productivity, and lower technology ownership costs.Helpful advice:Communication - "Communication is in the DNA of the person it's not all about tools.  IT is an enabler IT is not the destination it's a tour guide on the journey and so where that Zoom or Teams or Slack or whatever you use, those are just tools to enable what should be inert in you already ."Video  - "In lieu of the circumstances that we all live in I think video is paramount it's so important to have that interaction be able to see your face body language. You lose at least 50% of the efficacy of the communication."Culture - "We've actually seen a spike in productivity almost to the detriment of being online from 6:00 in the morning until 6:00 at night and maybe take 20 minutes for lunch or  lunch gets booked over. The pendulum swings to work-life balance.  Work-life balance was easier to mitigate that under the norm we grew up with.  Now you've got to find some discipline in term as a leader and you have to culturize that your organization  better decide, hey I want you to go take a walk at lunch or I want you to log off at 5:30. . You got to turn off the faucet somehow. "Ready for Better IT?Learn more:   https://www.vc3.com

Dr. John Hey, founding Elder of Grace Bible Church in Greenwood, Mississippi, shares some thoughts on the 50th anniversary of the church's founding.

Chris White is joined down the line from Melbourne by Fruitnet's editorial director for Asia, John Hey, and its China editor Yuxin Yang, to explore recent trends and future developments in India and China, the world's two most populous fresh produce markets.

John: Hey there friends and fellow farmers. Welcome to another episode of The Growing Farms podcast. I am your host, John Suscovich, and today's episode is going to be an "Ask APPPA" show, the American Pasture and Poultry Producers Association.   At one of the annual APPPA conferences I brought my camera, I brought my microphone, I brought my friend Mike, and we recorded interviews with about two dozen people.  I asked those two dozen people the same four questions. And the wonderful thing about this community is that our heart, the core mission of what we're trying to do, is build healthy soil and we do that by raising animals on pasture.    Now we are all there for the same reason, to learn and grow together, we are all bringing our own level of commitment, our own piece to the puzzle to those annual conferences and that is great.    Today's episode is going to be with Ginger Shields of Pastured Life Farm located in North Central Florida and the first question that I asked Ginger was:    “What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you were starting out? Your advice for the new guy.”   Ginger: My name is Ginger Shields, and I am from Pastured Life Farm located in North Central Florida.    I wish that I knew - when we began farming -- That it was okay to say no, that it was okay to say "We don't need to produce chickens year round".    We didn't need to have beef available 100% of the time. We didn't need to have pork available 100% of the time. It wasn't a sustainable model for a small farm to have everything for everyone all the time. We carried a tremendous amount of burden. Like "We have to produce more, we have to produce more", so we don't have to tell people no and we scaled up faster than what we were ready for.    So I really wish that I had known or could go back to my former self and say "It’s okay. You can tell people no. You can explain why we have seasons, why nature has seasons and why we replicate that in our farm model".   John: I really love that piece of advice. Something that I have heralded here on Farm Marketing Solutions is the desire, the need, the strategy of pushing consistency in your market. Having chicken available all the time so that when people want chickens you're the go-to person to provide it for them. I thought that was a core fundamental thing to have as part of your farm strategy. You know, especially if you want to get into wholesale accounts.   What Ginger highlighted here is that building the model around not only what the customer wants but what you want to do as a farmer is really important for the long-term viability and sustainability of you and your farm. If you're consistent with what you offer, when you offer it, and your messaging is clear, consistent, and concise it will be easy for people to do business with you. That is just a fantastic piece of advice.    If you don't like farming, you are not going to stick with it and that's hard. You know? It's like... why stick with something that you don't like to do? Which brings me into my next question. I asked Ginger:    What is the most enjoyable part about being a farmer.   Ginger: For us, for my husband and I - I am speaking for both of us - I believe that the most enjoyable aspect of farming is that we get to work with people that we like. We get to work with our family, we get to work with our kids, and we get to be together.    I am not sending my husband off for his 9-5 job, packing his lunch and he's coming home miserable after spending an hour and a half in traffic, and we're not apart for sixteen hours a day. We're working together. We both want to work on our farm, better our farm, and work with our kids and teach them the values and the morals and things that they can't learn anywhere else but on our farm.    John: That was a great answer, Ginger. I really appreciate the feedback; and for me, that also -- You know, I'm just going to say "ditto".    The fact is that I’m usually working pretty long hours. But I’m always close by so if my family needs me or wants to come find me they know where I am. I get to work with friends, business partners who are my friends, and I love the staff here at the farm or the brewery -- We just have the most amazing people and that makes the day to day very enjoyable.    At times it is a grind. Not every day is a holiday, but the fact that I am a member of APPPA and I have all of those people to turn to, I have a wonderful business here in Western Connecticut; and that  my family is around all the time, I can structure my schedule around people instead of work...    It's a lot of work hours but I can structure my schedule to be around for dinners, to be around for school send-offs... If there is something that needs to get done in the family, my family always comes first; and the fact that I get to work and live around all these amazing people is why I did this in the first place.   Being self-sufficient is kind of a farce. You know? Being out in isolation by yourself is depressing and very difficult because you're not going to be able to do everything by yourself. So to surround yourself with wonderful people - I have that community, I have that connection, and I have that strength.    For when I am feeling weak, there is someone there to help prop me up, and when someone else in my community is not feeling 100% I am there to prop them up. There’s been a really good balance through the years. So for me, that has been valuable as well and I appreciate Ginger - your response to that question.    Now my next question - because this is Farm Marketing Solutions and that's what the channel and the podcast is all about - I wanted to know, Ginger:    What is one of your greatest marketing/farm marketing successes and how did you get there, and then what is one of your biggest struggles - and then what do you do about that?    Ginger: For our farm our biggest marketing success has been the ability to put ourselves out there. To become comfortable and confident in what we're doing; thanks to organizations like the American Pasture and Poultry Producers Association we have become confident in our practices, confident that we're bettering our environment, we're bettering the soil, and that the chicken that we're producing is far superior to anything that's available in the grocery stores.   Having those tools in our pocket to be able to approach customers, approach people at meetings like at Weston A. Price Chapter meetings, or at a CrossFit gym where we might pop in during a session and talk about our product. We find strength in having those tools, education, and information available for us to share. Also, confidence in our product that we didn't have when we were first starting out.  Our biggest marketing struggle has been definitely making the time. Marketing - it's another job! You're a farmer, you're a family, you're a mom, you're a dad... but you're also a marketer and a salesman. You have to make yourself make the time to market your farm. You have to schedule that time into your already busy, crazy life. That's our biggest marketing struggle and our biggest marketing failure. It's our area that we plan to improve on the most for the next few years; is to just work on our marketing.    Our markets are changing. Our customers are changing. Our demographics are changing. We have people much younger than us that are having food awakenings - we need to be able to reach them and it's a challenge to keep up with it.   John: Now that is a great response because a lot of people get into farming because they're introverted. Being out in the field by yourself, you spend a lot of time alone. A lot of farmers like to grow, fix, nurture, animal husbandry or however you verbalize or verb that, but not all of us are outgoing.    It's amazing that you might hear me say that I -- I have recorded 650 or pushing 700 videos now, and I still get uncomfortable when someone else is just watching me record. I am comfortably down here in my basement, talking to a camera alone with my dog asleep on the floor. That is where my comfort zone is, and it has been a journey for me to be comfortable enough to walk into a room and be like "Hey everybody, how are you doing? My name is John Suscovich".    That is something that I have worked on over time and being comfortable putting yourself out there, sharing that information... You are passionate about agriculture. Otherwise you are not -- Why are you listening to this podcast or watching this video on YouTube? Because you want to do this. There is a reason why you are committed.    You're following Farm Marketing Solutions because you're starting to make a business out of farming or you are looking at a lifestyle change. There is something in you that motivates you. It drives you to get back to the land, to live a healthier lifestyle, to produce food that is nutritious and supports your community, and that is amazing.    That passion, that heart, that fire that you feel right here... share that with people! Don't be afraid. And with me, you know... there's a lot of fish in the sea. I give farm tours every weekend. Sometimes my jokes land and sometimes they don't. I have learned to read a room and see how that conversation is going.    Putting yourself out there... you do it and you're going to fail sometimes. Then you're going to do it, and you're going to succeed sometimes. You're going to be like "That farmer's market rocked!" or "That conversation that I had with that person really went well!" and when it goes well or if it goes poorly, learn from those circumstances. If it went really well, why did it go well? Because you connected around a certain topic or idea. Is that something that you can reach other people with? If it didn't go well, was it because you misstepped or misspoke or maybe it wasn't the right person?    Think about sales as dating. You're not going to date everybody. Not everybody is going to be a perfect match. You're going to have good customers and you're going to have bad customers. You're going to have easy customers and you're going to have hard customers. You shouldn't spend all your time trying to convert people. You should serve the people who want what you already have to offer. It's a little bit easier to sell that way. And you're going to find those people by sharing your passion, sharing your ideals, sharing your story, sharing your name on your website. Please.    It becomes easier over time, but I'll tell you - it can be a struggle. So just have the confidence in yourself to put your heart out there. Get hurt a little bit. Come back from it. Chickens are going to die. Cows are going to die. Crops are going to go bad. Sales are going to be lost. But also... Chickens are going to grow. Cows are going to grow. The grass is going to grow. The sun always shines at some point and it does get a little easier with time.    Now, because I recorded these at an APPPA conference - The American Pasture and Poultry Producers Association, APPPA.org, I wanted to know:    What are the benefits of joining APPPA? What are the benefits of going to the conference? What do people get out of being a part of this organization?    For me, I am a paying member. I have an annual subscription that I renew. I get the newsletters. I am part of the forum. It's amazing! I just learn so much all the time -- And for when I can't answer other peoples' questions, I post questions on the forum and get answers back from people all over the country. It's really amazing.    So I asked Ginger: What is the best part about being an APPPA member and what is the best part about being at the conference?   Ginger: The biggest benefit to being an APPPA member is access. You have instant - almost - access to professionals producing twice as much, three times as much, or maybe even a hundred times as many chickens as you are.  They have been doing it longer, they have experienced the same failures that you have and if you can learn from another farmer's failures and prevent that failure yourself it's going to be so much easier for you in the long run if you can learn from another person's failure.    I can't remember who said this quote:    Anyone can learn from another person's success, but a truly intelligent person can learn from other's peoples' failures.    We all have a sharp learning curve as farmers and so if we are able to maybe lessen that curve, maybe lessen the blow a little bit, and maybe prevent some of those catastrophic things that naturally happen as farmers because we don't control the weather, we don't control the environment, and we don't control so many factors.   Who would choose a job where you have so little control over anything? It's like, "Why did I go into this job where there's a hundred outside variables that I have zero control over and still expect to have a good outcome?" What a terrible idea! But we all do it, right?    And that's where the APPPA conference becomes an invaluable tool; you get to see these farmers that you've been interacting with, maybe on the list serve or via email, and you get to be in the same room together. You get to commiserate a little bit together.    You get to shake each other's hands, understand each other's struggles, and nowhere else can you get a bunch of pastured poultry producers who are already kind of out here on the fringe in the same room and just be together - and that's really cool.   Nobody needs to have someone - another person - on the pulpit, selling you something, telling you what you should or shouldn't do. We need to be together. We're better together.    John: Ginger, that's a good plug, and I will add that Ginger is on the board of APPPA and has been a big inspiration for me. She is kind, caring, and tough as nails. She is everything you would want in one person, and just a great representation of what I feel the future of agriculture is.    She has been doing it for a while with her husband Dave and all of her children. She is now a good friend of mine. We text back and forth; and just the fact that she put herself out there and recorded the video for me - this was really great - and I want to thank you Ginger and Dave.  Dave's interview will be coming up in the future.   If you want to learn more about APPPA and how to become a member, you can go to APPPA.org.    I have over 100 episodes in the archives. You can find those on Google Podcasts, on iTunes, on Stitcher and on Spotify and probably a bunch of smaller stuff. If you can't find it on your platform, write in and we will submit the feed to that so that you can get it as well.   This is a new type of podcast that I am doing. I am going to publish these APPPA interviews as well as some farm updates through the year, now that I have this medium back again. I have fixed all the technical problems which feels really good.    Feel free to leave me an honest review on any of those pod-catching platforms. It helps the podcast get discovered.    Thanks for taking the time to listen and/or watch, because we're releasing this in both video and audio format on YouTube and all of the pod catching things. And until next time, I will see you on the field. 

Panel discussion on the Republic of Sudan. Joint event with The Sudanese Programme, held in St Antony's College on May 3rd 2019. Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi (Research Fellow, St Antony's College, Trustee of the Sudanese Programme), Dr Sara Abdelgalil (Paediatric Consultant, President of Sudan Doctors' Union UK), Dr Richard Barltrop (Consultant and researcher on the two Sudans, Trustee of the Sudanese Programme) About the speakers: Dr Ahmed Al-Shahi is a Research Fellow and, since 2002 co-Founder of The Sudanese Programme. He is a social anthropologist whose research interests are economic and social development, sectarian politics, social differentiations, popular culture and oral tradition. He has undertaken extensive anthropological research in northern Sudan. Selected Publications: Among his publications are: Wisdom from the Nile (with F.C.T. Moore), The Oxford Library of African Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978; La Republique du Soudan, Berger- Levrault, Paris, 1979; Islam in the Modern World (co-editor with D. MacEoin), Croom Helm, 1983; Themes from Northern Sudan, Ithaca Press, 1986; The Arab House (co-editor with A. D. C. Hyland), University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1986; The Diversity of the Muslim Community: Anthropological Essays in Memory of Peter Lienhardt (editor), Ithaca Press, 1987; Disorientations: A society in Flux. Kuwait in the 1950s by Peter Lienhardt (editor), Ithaca Press, 1991; A Special Issue:Al-Tayyib Salih, Seventy Candles, Edebiyart: The Journal of Middle Eastern Literature, (co-editor with Ami Elad-Bouskila) 1991; Shaikhdoms of Eastern Arabia by Peter Lienhardt (editor), Palgrave/St. Antony's College Series, 2001; Middle East and North African Immigrants in Europe (co-editor with Richard Lawless), Routledge, 2005; Sudan: A Long Transition into Two States (editors: Ahmed Al-Shahi and Bona Malwal), published (in collaboration with the Sudanese Programme, St Antony’s College) by M.O. Beshir Centre for Sudanese Studies, Omdurman Ahlia University, Omdurman, Sudan, 2013; and Hikma min Al-Nil (Wisdom from the Nile) (editor with F.C.T.Moore), Abdel Karim Mirghani Centre, Omdurman, Sudan, 2017. His most recent publication are: Women Writers of the Two Sudans (2019, co-edited with Laurent Mignon) and Wisdom from the Desert (2019) in collaboration with FCT Moore. Sara Ibrahim Abdelgalil is a consultant paediatrician who is interested in international child health and development. She graduated from university of Khartoum in 1998 with Kitchener’ and Albagdadi’s prizes - best academic performance. While in Sudan she worked alongside other colleagues to establish an organisation that supports children with disadvantaged backgrounds e.g. orphans and street children. Sara moved to the United Kingdom to achieve her dreams in better training and medical practice. She campaigned for women and children rights as well as for human rights violations in particular in relation to health services. She obtained her masters and diploma degrees at Liverpool school of tropical medicine in tropical child health with an award and distinction - John Hey prize. Sara completed her paediatric training in the U.K. and has the fellowship of the royal college of Paediatrics and child health. Working among Sudanese diaspora in different societies and groups she promoted the activation and return of legitimate professionals unions back home. This campaign included Sudanese university graduates. Her role in the Sudan Doctors’ Union U.K. extended from establishing links with other Sudanese professionals in U.K. to working in epidemic campaigns in Sudan. As the president of SDU U.K. she is leading her organisation to support democratic change in Sudan and contribute to rebuilding of new Sudan. SDU U.K. raised concerns in regards to human rights violations against peaceful protestors in Sudan. Richard Barltrop is a consultant specialising in work on conflict, development and peace in the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Since 2001 he has worked for the United Nations Development Programme in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Yemen. He has worked for the UN peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, and for the UK Stabilisation Unit in Iraq and on Syria peace talks. He has also worked as a consultant on conflict resolution and peacebuilding for the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, International Alert, and the EU. Richard has a DPhil in International Relations, an MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies, and a BA in Classics from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Darfur and the International Community: The Challenges of Conflict Resolution in Sudan (IB Tauris, 2011), and was a visiting fellow at Durham University in 2015.

Joining us today is John Sterling. John's been in a number of markets and was previously with Keller Williams and most recently was in San Francisco California and is currently in Colorado. John's background is fairly extensive in real estate. John is known for his work in Europe and London as well as working with multiple team leaders and market centers and helping them attract agents. John talks at length about his challenges in real estate and really not really getting EXP at first. John I'll give you his insight in terms of why he ultimately moved from Keller Williams to EXP and he hasn't regretted it and never looked back. Learn More about eXp Realty - Click here to watch a quick 7 Minute Intro Video. Remember our disclaimer: The materials and content discussed within this podcast are the opinions of Kevin Cottrell and/or the guests interviewed.  This information is intended as general information only for listeners of the podcast. Listeners should conduct their own due diligence and research before making any business decisions. This podcast is produced completely independently of eXp Realty and is not endorsed, funded or otherwise supported by eXp Realty directly or indirectly. Why EXP is growing fast Why Successful independent brokerages partnering with EXP Keep your Brand, grow your income with EXP Big benefits of being at EXP Earning publicly held stock. EXP listed on Nasdaq EXP innovating and game changing technology made simple   Stay tuned for Part 2   Transcription Kevin: Welcome back to another episode of the EXP explained podcast. I'm joined today by special guest John Sterling. John's been in a number of markets. He was previously with Keller Williams and most recently was in San Francisco California and is currently in Colorado. John's background is fairly extensive in real estate. He and I met years and years ago when I was a team leader at Keller Williams and he was doing some leadership expansion and attraction of agents. Certainly if you're listening to this and you're from Keller Williams you're more than likely will know John from his work in Europe and London as well as working with multiple team leaders and market centers and helping them attract agents. John talks at length in my interview about his challenges in real estate and really not really getting EXP at first. So if you're a little bit skeptical and you want to hear from somebody who was right there where you were dug into it didn't pay attention to the rumors and misinformation in the market and did quite a bit of due diligence over about 15 months. John I'll give you his insight in terms of why he ultimately moved from Keller Williams to EXP and he hasn't regretted it and never looked back. Stay tuned for my interview with John Sterling. Kevin: Welcome to the show John. John: Hey thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Kevin: I'm looking forward to it. We are reunited again and I'm sure we'll get into a lot of that on the conversation today but before we do for people listen to the podcast that maybe you aren't familiar with your background and history and real estate and all that you've done. What did you take a couple minutes and just give a little bit of your highlights in terms of some of the stuff you've done. Because I've known you a long time and I know you've accomplished a lot. John: Oh well thank you. Yeah I'll keep it short and sweet. So I started my real estate career in Chicago back in 2002 it was with a traditional firm then they had a great training program. So I got up and running very quickly. There were some changes there so I went off and started my own brokerage after about two years and then eventually merged that with Keller Williams back in 2004. My time at Keller Williams was mostly spent opening up new offices and markets where we didn't have them. And most of that work was before the financial crash and after the crash I was the guy who would go fix these struggling offices. So it involved a lot of moving. So I got to go all over the US and then even opened up our London office. So I was in the UK for two years. Packed my flat on Brexit vote day and came back to the U.S. and had been engaged in real estate and just sales in San Francisco and Denver ever since. Kevin: Fantastic. And you're very modest. I mean I first ran into you I probably was about two thousand five or six when I was in St. Lewis with Keller Williams And you were part of the group that was essentially acquiring market centers and expanding and you guys were rocking and rolling and obviously lots changed for everybody after the market shifted. I was excited and it was a long very detailed due diligence process before you moved over to EXP you and I had conversations over I don't know probably 15 months or so. And I think for people listening because the whole genesis for this podcast is to allow people you know it doesn't have to just be a Keller Williams but people that run their real estate business like a business and are seeing all of these agents like you were changing brokerages and coming over to EXP. I remember like you like everybody else had healthy skepticism. You wanted to understand it you were from the outside you were part of a gigantic franchise system and there was a lot of misinformation and noise out there in the marketplace. What is it that you learned that really caused you to start to shift your mindset and say I need to dig into this further. John: That's a good question. As you mentioned you know it was a long process for me it wasn't an overnight type of thing and I'd been paying attention to EXP for a long time. In fact I remember when Glenn the CEO was with Keller Williams back in the late 2000s and he left the start yet. And it was you know I just thought it was an interesting move and I was doing some unique things in the business but didn't really give it much thought. I was happy. Keller Williams still think they're an amazing organization. So I don't have any you know any issues with Keller Williams. It seemed like a better opportunity and fit for the future that I want to create and kind of where the business is headed so the things that got my attention over the past few months and ultimately led me to making the move is that you know I had ignored EXP for a long time as you mentioned a lot of people do this. And the people I've talked to who are in the process of joining you know people who are my friends who never would have given it a second glance if it wasn't me calling. You know it was or someone else. The gist of it was there is a lot like you said misinformation or half truth is I'd like to explain it which is understandable. You know it's like EXP has come out of nowhere. I have never seen growth like this in the real estate business and I was with Katie when I early days when it was growing like crazy. But even they didn't see growth. This is great. So there's just a lot of fear from the incumbents that they're going to get squashed because if he keeps up this pace then they're going to have some serious problems. Kevin: So it is interesting I want to touch on one point because that is something that you know you hear the comments of well they can't keep up growth at this pace or I can't believe they're growing that fast or there's no way they could be growing that fast. And I'm going to touch on something in the franchise system you know there's very well Gene Frederic knows it well I know well we'll come out of the same franchise system when somebody goes to expand a franchise system, this is for listeners to understand and why EXP can sand grow so much quicker. I'm going to contrast the two let's say that John and I are in the franchise system and we decide we're going to open up an office in Palo Alto California and we get a conversation going with a great great huge player hugely influential big producer and the producer says hey John and Kevin I'm ready to join. I want to do something with you. How do we get started in Palo Alto. And that starts the clock in the process right. And they have to go through the approval process and there's a whole bunch of steps involved in the point that I'm making here is from that conversation assuming you get some sort of a green light go I'm willing to do it. There are steps like getting an investor getting it approved getting the franchise awarded in the net net on it is on average it's 14 to 18 months before mega agent key influencer walks in the door of an office or can announce that they're part of that Palo Alto location hypothetically. Now when John and Kevin have a conversation with that same agent in Palo Alto. And assuming they're excited about the EXP and they due to due diligence. We're having them change brokerages in as fast as 10 days. I mean you listen to Brent Gove's interview. He made the decision in 10 days or less with one hundred and fifty million dollar team. It's unheard of. In the franchise systems. Now the follow on to that is when like we had in San Diego we had Daniel beer Carl Wessel and Mary Maloney and all of the others joined in it like a really short 10 day period EXP because they're influential has tons and tons of agents joined after it. So for somebody and I want to get your perspective on this from the outside we you're seeing these mega numbers of agents right. You know a thousand plus fifteen hundred plus agents a month and you are. In the franchise mindset or a bricks and mortar mindset where you're used to being in a physical location. Many many people. And this is why I think that they talk about this. Not being sustainable. Look at it and go. There's no way they're going that fast. We never did. We can't. How can they. And I think that that's the driver is John and I can go out and have hundreds if not thousands of conversations as well as every other agent that EXP. And if somebody says go. It's like when you say go it wasn't very long before you were alive and over at EXP. You actually were waiting for some things. To occur in your business world. But from the process where you're like OK good. I'm ready to go. It was fairly quick. It wasn't like the franchise world. John: Yes. All of that's true. Interestingly enough probably the most fascinating part to me is the large number of independent brokerages so they're not affiliated with any franchise or big regional company. You know he could be one person or a few dozen agents. You know it's typically the size of these things of those types of organizations that are going to need EXP. That was eye opener for me too because it's a fairly common thing in our business for people to get a little experience and then decide they'd like to be their own boss. They want to be their own broker so they leave the company that they started with they got some training or whatever else they're no longer working under someone else's brand they start their own. So it happens all the time. So the fascinating part is how many people have gone through that process achieve their independence so they have their own business with their own branding and their boss their names above the door. I can tell everyone in our neighborhood that they own the company and they're still coming to EXP. So they are profitable businesses that are doing well. They're helping businesses that are growing. Everybody's happy. And even with all that they're still choosing to partner with EXP. So they just see that there is more value with EXP you know from a small item I'd have to pay every year through their split the system was just good for agents at any level. But it's the big winners are the ones who were showing up with teams which are essentially you know they could be standalone brokerages but these big agent teams are like you mentioned they're moving very fast. Then you have the small brokerages who are looking for some more leverage because if you're a brokerage that has 20 or 30 agents you're probably still selling right. It's probably not making enough from the agents splits in order to support yourself. You're probably still selling yourself. So that's just a lot of work. Like you have to manage all these people and you have to do your own business well with the EXP you get to leverage a lot of the stuff that's already built in for very low costs. You can send your agents the training or bird virtual campus any time you are reading online. You can then go hire more people because you don't have to babysit them all day like there's no 30 or 40 training events we have every week. I don't think you can just sit down in front of the computer and say OK here are the training you need to go to go to these and come to me with questions. It's much more leverage and just a much better way to scale. So that was an interesting thing that I discovered just as I paid attention to all the people who kept showing up. Kevin: So absolutely and one of the things just to echo what you're saying and this is happening all the time in fact there's one by the time this goes live that's in the Dallas Fort Worth metro. They have ninety five agents. They're an independent and you know the model is almost this hybrid model which we're seeing pop up more and more where the broker/rainmaker is a weather pick your flavor. Right. Zillow preferred or premier whatever the program is and they feed their agents. And so the lead gen side they've got wired right they might be spending one hundred thousand dollars a month in this case. And what was interesting is she was so excited about EXP. Her biggest concern is I don't know if this is going to translate throughout my key people right? My leaders within my office and then the agents downstream. And what was interesting is Gene and the leaders were in town meeting with this Rainmaker and the key people and he called me yesterday afternoon and his conversation is "I only stayed half a day because they all get it. I met with a handful of people". I talked to him again this morning and he said we're done all ninety five or come and they're just basically working on the onboarding process with ninety five agents making sure everybody's applications and the revenue share piece is set up correctly. That is the wave of the future. I mean I've talked with people within the company they're talking to 25 agents smaller brokers and the driver for that. And if you think about the NRA numbers 55% of the agents aren't independents right. It's the biggest piece. We spent a lot of time talking about franchise systems. They're more in franchise system likes to tout that they're number one but you had the agents that are at independence. It's way bigger than they are. And so when you look at the opportunity this is the next big wave that's occurring. And you talk to these broker owners I'm talking to some in the United States in the southeast U.S. And the number one thing they say is they love being producers. They love mentoring and training agents. They love the Legion and helping people in the case of this this gal in the Dallas Fort Worth area. She'll be on the podcast shortly but what she's going to tell you is I don't like being a broker. I'd rather be brokered by EXP get out of compliance get all the systems and all of the things in place and just go do what we do well the brokerage stuff is not sexy. The brokerage stuff is not fun. The compliance stuff nobody enjoys. Previous to EXP it's been the necessity right. You didn't have somebody that said hey keep your brand keep your look and feel. Go do what you do well and then we'll take over all the other stuff. John: So it really is the best of all worlds. And I think that's really I mean just spending years and years.... I mean all again all over the US and even in Europe. One of the hardest things to overcome when you're having conversations with people about joining your company is it's really just ego. They like that their name is above the door. They like to tell everyone in their world that they own the company and the fact that that's happening at EXP is very telling. We've overcome that objection. You know people are like oh it's like well I could still on my company. It's just kind of you know using some of the EXP stuff too which is great. I mean this is it's a huge advantage for us just because it's you know the more or people show up the more examples we have to point to and say See we told you everything worked just fine except you're you're growing faster and you have fewer headaches. Kevin: Yeah. You know and part of what you did John is you talk to over the course of when you talked about turning around market centers and moving around there was a long period of time where I consider you a non team leader Team Leader. In other words you were having conversations with hundreds if not thousands of agents but virtually on the phone at conferences. So you've got a pretty good basically a take on mindset of agents. You personally were responsible for many many agents that went into Keller Williams When you look at this. John: You wanna know my number? Kevin: Yeah What is your number? I was going to ask you next. John: I had my office lady look it up before I left Keller Williams. I directly recruited sponsors like brought to the company just me but named me as the reason they were with Keller Williams one hundred and sixty two before I left. And there were many many more of those that like top of a hundred sixty two that I recruited on behalf of other people because that was my job right. So it was really just a hundred sixty two that I found on my own. And then as you know it's like hundreds or like you said I don't know how we'd be able to tabulate that but we'll just say north of a thousand. Kevin: You've got a great take on this you know so enjoining EXP and you know coming from a franchise system. If I'm an agent. Whether I'm a rainmaker on individual age a mega agent and I'm an expansion agent that's thinking about this. What are the two or three things that you think that. You learned about it that if you were on the phone with these people going forward you would say you really have a couple of options you could go to a franchise system or you go to EXP. And here are the big benefits of being at the EXP. John: Yep that's a good question. So if I had to put it in bullet form first the money has to work right. You know it's a Financial decision this is a business like we're in business to make money. So we do other things too. There could be a bigger purpose for our you know working in real estate but like the math has to work. So the. That was a good thing for me because you look at EXP everybody is on an 80 20 split the 20 percent caps at sixteen thousand dollars a year no matter where you are compared to my San Francisco office with Keller Williams where I was paying fifty thousand dollars she here is a cap. I mean that alone by you know in two hundred eighty dollars a month in an office these you know it's just a huge expense to be there now. Sounds like you don't have to do to any deals the same let's go to cap but still like I can have that same environments like comparable stuff or even better tools and only pay sixteen thousand here. So that seemed like a much better deal to me. So that was part of that. There's you know a small transaction fee after the after the sixteen thousand but it's nothing substantial nothing to worry about. In addition to that there are certain ways you can earn a publicly traded stock. So it's not privately held. There's not a king of EXP it's all up it's on the Nasdaq. It's a publicly traded company. So for longtime I guess it's a good side note just as far as this goes that EXP was traded on the OTC exchange. So it's just another stock exchange out there. But the trick with that is that it's there's not as much liquidity because it's not like you know we'll call Big Boy exchanges. So really it's like you got to be a publicly traded company you want to be on one of the big exchanges in the US. That's the New York Stock Exchange with the Nasdaq. I go to the two that are reputable and that's where you want to be. So earlier this year another sort of catalyst to me opening up the conversation to joining. Was when EXP was Listed as what they call it. You get up listed to the Nasdaq. So they went off the OTC. Exchange and onto the Nasdaq. You don't get to do that just by choice. I mean you have to be performing well and behaving well and. Know. The analysts and everybody else has to be compliance people the FCC everybody has to. Agree that everything is legit. So I like that. I like that there is some third [arty accountability to everything that we do. Versus you know it's like we have it we have a board of directors into the people on the board of directors are agents that real estate people so they're not just the financial types and the bean counters that you would find them on a traditional board of directors. So when the board of directors of stock analysts and all those people get involved. You know there's some accountability. Versus when you have a company controlled by essentially one person. There's not. Any real accountability I have no piece of ownership and that's I'm contrasting with where I came from. And it's more of a dictatorial sort of environments. So. You know being able to earn stock being able to purchase stock at a discount. I mean. The portion of my commission checks can go toward purchasing. This publicly traded stock and I get it at a 20 percent discount. So basically every deal that I do I'm getting a 20 percent gift from the EXP. It's like I mean you know it's like if you invest in stocks like 8 to 10% consider pretty great. So if I'm getting an instant 20% regardless of how the stock performs feels like likely going to continue to grow then that's good news for me. So those were the big financial components. Oh and then I almost forgot the getting into technology which I'll come back to in a second but the Web sites that we get I mean these are some of the best lead generation sites you can get for your business. We work with Konversion. You don't know them check them out. I think last time I looked to their retail prices were a thousand dollars to set up and then 500 a month just for the system and then you have to pay ads and everything on top of that. But at EXP that's all included in the 50 dollar month technology fee. So it's a 500 a month I'm paying 50 a month. So you don't like anything else about the EXP or you don't care about revenue share and you'll care about the training you care about the virtual world. If you don't want to do your own business whatever you could make an argument that it's just the Web site by itself basically pay for your affiliate vision with the EXP if you want to do any of the rest like you're going to stumble across other great thing that you expected. I'd like that by itself is a good enough argument to make the move so. So that was the money piece as far as the technology goes so we'll continue that thread just for a little background there. I've been involved with tech startups as both an adviser like a formal advisor and an investor for years. In fact I looked it up the first one that I did was back in 2007 was a property portal that was competing with like Zillow to really realtor dot com didn't make it as far as those guys did just it was funding and leadership and whatever else. But you learn a lot through that process. A lot of people understand kind of the dynamics. So I'm very comfortable vetting technology and more importantly not just the technology it's the teams working on the technology real estate in general as an industry as a late adopter for most technology things even today. So for example there's a zip code valuation thing that's clogging my Facebook timeline right now with people asking their clients you send me your zip code I'll give you a valuation. Well that technology has been around for about 10 years now for many years. I was a customer of the company that developed first just as a real time market valuation estimates are now 10 years later everyone's acting like it's some revolutionary thing. You know.. Give me break... it you know if it's fancy tech that's going to disrupt the industry and that's the fancy tech then there's not much concern for me that like that's what I'm competing with. So going back to the teams that worked with technologies I mean the technology itself is great. It's like there's the wonderful stuff I get to use. Everything works fine. I have to worry about it like of course the EXP is going to continue to expand those offerings of course are going to develop their own proprietary stuff. So right now we're just growing so fast that you know the priority it seems to be like we need to be sure our basic system scale. So the people that are joining to get deals done right. Like we'll worry about dressing it up later. But really the team behind the technology is the most important piece for me not just in real estate but like everywhere because technologies involving at such a rapid pace that we're going to have to pivot we're going to have to make changes we're going to have to make decisions that are going to alter the sort of trajectory of the technology that's being used and developed. And it's like I have the full faith in the team the technology team at EXP to get that done. Again it's like we're not a real estate company pretending to be a tech company right. It's like technology's been built in from the very beginning. Right. So it's like yes real estate sales is our focus but it's not a sort of copycat thing after the fact. Thinking hey we need to get on this tech train. I'd like to know I've been tech focused from the beginning. That's where the team's focus has been and so with the company's focus has been that's been our game from the very beginning. You know I trust the team to be able to make the right decisions and keep us ahead of the curve and those sorts of things. Kevin: A lot of people know this because I've mentioned it before. You know I was one of the first sites up on real geeks when Jeff Manson rolled that stuff out and S. Lewis from my team. So you know you and I are fairly tech savvy and we do this and that was a huge draw for me as well. I also find the whole post your social media and give me your zip code I'll give you a report. This just shows that the average agent who's wowed by that doesn't realize that as a member of the National Association of Realtors they have an RPR account and that functionality is built in there too. So everybody has this not just the EXP agents everybody has it. So it's fun for some of us to understand technology to kind of smile at that but you know a lot of agents are not as tech savvy and certainly when they look at the suite if you look at the you know the platform for conversion you look at the enterprise application all of the back office stuff the workplace platform and the collaborative tools. You don't have to be super tech savvy to plug into EXP. And then again that's another misnomer that you know this is for you know super tech savvy agents. We have plenty of agents come through the onboarding process hit the ground running and they're like very commonly saying Wow I had no idea I could use all these tools and you know raise my hand get answers that super easy if you could use an iPhone you can use everything we have. So it's not that big of a deal. Sorry. Or Android. For those people out there.. You know I'm not overly concerned with today's hottest apps on stuff. Right? It's like it's just not really that much of a concern for me. My clients choose me because of our relationship not because of my fancy shiny tools like shiny things are going to change my relationship. It's like Sure it might make it easier for me to keep up with all my clients. Like give me some leverage but it's really about me and the value I provide to my clients. It's like that's you know that's not going to go away. So that was the answer to the technology.

Hey, what's up guys? Hey, I am having a great day. You know what's funny? I love Mondays. I love them so much. Monday is my favorite day of the week, and Monday morning specifically. I go popping out of bed and I'm like "Yeah, we get to do this again! What?" I get pumped about it. I'm excited about it. Well, hey, I kind of have to hurry here a little bit. We, in about an hour here, we're actually going to find out the gender of our new little kid and I'm excited. It's going to be a lot of fun. Few things have taught me as much as being a father, so this'll be a good experience. Hey, I wanted to drop in a question here. I love hearing you guys' questions. I do get them and I kind of vet through them to see which ones are most applicable for everybody. I got a question here from John Bender and great question. If you guys don't know what I'm talking about it you go to secretmlmhacksradio.com and you have to opt in, but on the next page what it does is it, there's a green button down on the bottom right and if you click that button what it'll do is you actually can record a question to me. Typically, they're about 30 second questions, and just start with "Hey, Steve" and if it's a question that's applicable for everybody, you can go ahead and drop it in there. I put them inside the actual episodes themselves and I think you guys have heard me do that before. I have another one here and I thought I'd play it right now. Speaker 2: Hey, Steve, this is John Bender checking in here, getting ready to head into the gym, but had a question for you. You know I've been doing networking for 23 years and been pretty successful. We've done about $350 million in sales with our different systems. I've studied all these gurus for years, focusing in the digital space. Why is it that you seem to be like one of the few good guys on there? You don't curse, you're not off color. You don't do sexist jokes. You're just a good guy. You're funny, you're bright, you're intelligent. You're extremely informative. I know you're incredibly giving. What gives, man? I don't get it. Why do all these other people, from some of my greatest icons out there to the modern marketers of the day, they're so crude and rude and yet you're such an incredibly great mentor, not just for what you know but who you are and apparently whose you are. So, I want to thank you for that and doing this for so many years it's great to see the great work you're doing. Keep it up. Hope to be a part of your team. Steve Larson: Hey, how's it going, John? Hey, first off, thank you so much for that question and extremely nice complements. I was not expecting that. Hey, I actually, the reason why I actually wanted to put this in the episode for everybody though, is there's a specific reason why I do what I do and how I do it. I've had the opportunity, the chance, in my career to work with some very big names. Okay. John Bender, yourself, you're the man. Obviously, for everyone else who's listening, I do know who John is. I actually was shocked and surprised when I saw him drop this question in. Just very, very nice of you, but certainly consider him to be one of my mentors as well. We have, I've had the chance of working with some very big names, very big people. When I was working at ClickFunnels, I'm saying. I'm solo now, as you guys all know, I've been solo for, I'm staring my fourth week solo and it's been awesome, and it's because of MLM that I'm able to do that, which is a lot of fun and great. But we did a ton of projects with some huge names, guys. I mean I built for Marcus Lemonis on the TV show The Prophet, on CNBC, did five funnels for him. We did some awesome projects with Tony Robbins for his book funnel, Money Mass Of The Game. We did some projects for Robert Kiyosaki. The Tony Robbins one that was right before I got there, but that was the kind of stuff that we would do all the time. It was fun, guys. I mean it was super fun. What was interesting was to watch the mentality of these massive giants. What was interesting is, there seems to be this disconnect. You're thinking, "Steve, what does that have to do with MLM?" It has everything to do with MLM. Okay. Just follow me on this a little bit. What I noticed is rubbing shoulders with some of these massive guys. I'm talking A, tier one people. Everyone knows them. Everyone knows who they are. They're sought after. They have massive distribution. You know what I mean? The power of what they say sways markets and people's opinions like crazy. They're huge people. And they know that. I learned that like 90% of the time these guys are like some of the most amazing authentic caring loving people. They're genuinely good people, just good people. Okay. What was fascinating though, and I'm going to be very careful as I say this, and this is for the lesson and it might not be nice to some people when they hear it, but there are some people that, they're not on that tier one level, and they know it. But they think that to be a professional they must go around toting around their successes in front of the faces of all these other people, and kind of be mean about it. As soon as they, there's a ... Guys there's a ... I'm very religious, okay so I'm just going to say that. There's a verse that says that the moment someone gets any amount of power or authority, they tend to abuse it. That's basically what the lesson is. Any amount of power, or any amount of authority, then tend to abuse it and basically drink their own Kool-Aid, okay. That's not what that says, but that's basically it. It was a huge topic that I had with Russell many times. Many times one-on-one with him, and he would say "Steven, if you want recognition don't seek it." Then he would also say things like "Don't drink your own Kool-Aid." It's not that I was, okay, it's just that we would watch these other people, and we would have conversations and stuff like that about, and we're like man ... and it's not to say like "ah I'm better than you, 'cause I'm not drinking my Kool-Aid." You know it's not a status thing, it's nothing like that, but I truly believe that, guys, everyone of us whose listening to this podcast right now we all have the ... It is innate and it is inside of us to be great. To be great. It's inside of every individual. It's not reserved for just a few people. Every person can be great. What does great mean? First of all, you compare yourself to you, no one else. Okay. One of the easiest ways to get down in your life is to start comparing yourself to other people or to an ideal. If you look around and you start saying to yourself, like "oh man, like for me," ... You guys know a lot of my story. When we had literally no money, like literally no money, and it was extremely stressful. It was terrible. It was an awful experience to go through that whole thing. But, when we had no money, if I compare myself to where I am, compared to where we were. Oh man! That's awesome. Like that's so cool. I have nothing to be ashamed about. There's nothing to be embarrassed about. Like look what I was able to get done. I'm comparing me to me. That is the easiest place for you to have success and fulfillment emotionally in this game of MLM. The easiest way for you to get down and have destructive energy all over you, is to compare yourself number one to a person or number two to an ideal. The problem with comparing yourself to an ideal, like pop culture. The problem is they change all the time. It's an ideal. It's undefinable. You don't know when you reached it. There's no actual, you don't know when you hit the spot, because it moved the moment you started going towards it. That's the problem with ideals, so don't compare yourself or put your self-worth or value by comparing yourself to ideals. Again, pop culture does that all the time. I'm not throwing mud, I'm not throwing rocks, I'm not saying like ... I'm not downplaying Hollywood. I'm not downplaying movies. Nothing like that. I'm saying when you pit your self-worth against things that are ideals or another person, you will never really feel successful or happy or satisfied with what you're doing. Ever. You can't. But when you compare yourself to something that's solid, something that there's concrete evidence of, something that, and you compare yourself to where you've gone. You measure that progress, that my friend is how you actually get the feeling and emotion of "Oh man, I actually, I can do this" or "Look what I've done, like this is so cool." Not in a boasting way, you're not being proud, but it's okay and it's important to feel a sense of pride and accomplishment over what you've been getting done. So, John, you said what gives? I compare myself to me. I looked at myself in the mirror about three years ago, and I remember this, and I looked myself in the mirror and I said "I am Steve freakin' Larson, and I'm going to be the best funnel builder in the world." That's what I did. I looked myself in the mirror and I got serious about it. I started making sacrifices in order to get there. I did not go hang out with friends. I did not go, and I studied my face off. Literally, just one right after the other, every single day. For years. Only slept anywhere from three to five hours a night, typically. Sometimes I'd indulge and go to six. I did that for years. To study and to learn and to practice and to build side businesses and side agencies and build sales funnels for other people and other companies and for myself. Finally got good enough that people started knowing who I was. Then finally got good enough that Russell Brunson found out who I was and got hired to ClickFunnels as the lead funnel builder. Then I really started accelerating. I don't remember who said it but it's the quote that basically says like hey when you're standing up in the clouds realize you're standing on the shoulders of giants. You know what I mean? I totally botched that quote, but basically I don't get anywhere on my own. I'm very cognizant of that. I do believe that God has been very much involved with it and will continue to be and I've very thankful for that. There's nothing that I can do or say, really, that is of my own. You know what I mean? It's the nature of ideas that ... Guys, in a business you're starting to have ideas. Especially in this podcast, I'm sure I've given you ideas. Guess what? I got the ideas, though, from other people and other things and they got taken. This piece got taken from that base. This piece got taken from this origin. This piece, and then when I combined them here, look how cool they got?! Then I'm sharing them and you're taking them and you're saying "Here's where I am Steve" and "I'm tossing my things on them." So there's nothing in my mind that is really of our own, both physically or idea based. Everything has come from something else and in my mind I do believe that's God. It's ludicrous for me to think that it came from my own hand. Look what I crafted 100%. Now, I have agency. I can move forward. I can take action. I can do everything I can to work super hard and get things done and nothing's going to get done, nothing's going to work unless I do, but it's still ultimately at the end it's not really my own thing. That's my belief. I don't really talk ... I'm learning I'm talking about God publicly on my podcast more. It's something I'm getting more comfortable with. I've never really done that on this episode I don't think, or on this show, but anyway. That's why. That's why. I was speaking at two different events this past week. I think I told you guys about that, but it's two different events back to back. I started getting a lot of praise, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with understanding that you're good, and I know I'm good. I'm unapologetic about the fact that I know I'm good. But I also know where that all came from. Okay? I'm pointing up like you can see me. That's part of it. Part of my background with this, guys, is that, a lot of you know, it's two things. I just wanted to drop two stories on you here real quick. There's two things here that are really, really important for me to always remember in my background. Number one, I was probably the most shy kid that you could ever find. When I was in high school, I got voted the nicest kid in high school. There were 600 people in my graduating class. 600. I got voted the nicest kid. I literally got the nicest kid award. It shocked me. I was a little rage machine on the inside. I was like "nicest kid award?" It was like pent up internal energy. I was like, it surprised me like crazy. Nicest kid award. What on earth? It wasn't, internally it was not because I was nicest. It was because I was shy. But I was full of rage and I was like this little tiny terror, which is so true. I had to overcome a lot of stuff and it wasn't, you know, I was the one that created activation energy to show God that I was actually able to go do these things. But, ultimately the change did not come because of me. That's where my mentality is with that. The second thing is that when I look back and I start thinking about ... Guys I was an idiot in school. I just was. I was not good at school stuff. I was not book smart. I was what you would call street smart. I barely graduated high school. I actually did so bad my first semester of college, that I got kicked out. Which is true. I had to reapply after learning how to learn. Then I went back and that's when I started getting straight A's. Almost complete straight A's. I ended school with a 3.85 GPA, which was awesome. I mean it was awesome. Really, really cool. But I think I got a .17 GPA in my first semester. No joke. Which is awful, super bad. So for me there's just been such a stark contrast in life from where I was as a kid and as a teenager and even into my early 20's, compared to where I am now. The internal transformation has gone through the roof. It's frankly one of the reasons I'm so passionate about business. I have had more personal development through the pursuit of entrepreneurship, than any personal development course could every give me. Just like Robert Kiyosaki says, and I know I've brought that up before on this podcast before too, is like look the moment you start an entrepreneurial journey, you'll move forward. You'll get excited. But character flaws are going to explode in your face. They're going to make you ... There's going to be egg on your face all the time. The character flaws are going to explode, and you're going to go "Aw man! I wish I could have done that or this or I should have talked to that client" but man, I had personal habits and addictions that made me stay up late. You know what I mean? Whatever it is. I couldn't get up on time. I'm not eating right. Whatever those things are for you, they're personal character flaws that we all know about ourselves that are actually the thing that are holding us back a lot of times in business. It's not so much always that "Hey, I don't know what to do next." I don't know what to do in my business next. You know what? 90% of the time I've found out that people know exactly what they should be doing next in their business, but what holds them back is a character flaw. A fear. They're scared of speaking. They're scared of ... whatever it is. It has more to do with that. It's been my opinion, and it's been my very amazing transformational experience, to know and notice that if I take those things and I say this is what I want to work on. You actually can overcome those things and you can move forward in a very powerful way. That is what, in my mind, makes you successful. I don't publish stuff to look perfect. A lot of people do that. I don't wear a certain tie on my podcast cover for a reason. I take the starch out of my shirts. I'm trying to be just a real dude and show you, hey look I have fears. I have passions, desires. I have hobbies. You know what I mean? I'm just trying to be a real guy. I'm not trying to go around ... And what's funny is I've noticed that when I publish and I speak and I go out and I'm more that, I get more followers than if I try to put a suit and tie on and posture myself. If you're going through for somebody who wants to see the shirt and tie, great. That's fine. I'm not saying I'm against that at all. What I am saying though is there's this thing to being authentic and real that a ton of people that I think are afraid to show. I think that they look around and they think oh my gosh to be professional means I must look ... I hate the phrase dress for success, or wear ... you can see it's a lot about clothes, stuff like that. I don't know if that's a ... Maybe that's a complex I have. I don't know. It's just I've been around so many massively wildly successful people, especially in the last little bit in my career, to notice and see that the ones that are really satisfied where they are. The ones that are not drinking their own Kool-Aid. They're not afraid of being real. They're not afraid of ... if there's somebody's whose clearly not on the level they are, the ones that are really awesome are the ones that won't care about that and they'll just still tell them the same answer. They'll tell the same answer to somebody who paid $100,000 for the answer as somebody who they can tell is just starting out and just needs to know what the answer is. You know what I mean? They're able to, everything isn't black and white to them. They're real authentic individuals. They have no problem being open and honest. Anyway. So I saw that and I've been really trying to just be ... I mean it's the reason guys, I'll tell you, I was running up the stairs chasing my little girls. We were running around, playing hide and seek. I tripped up the stairs. I freaking broke my toe. Like come on. Most people, anyway, like ... Just whatever's going on in your life, and a lot of you guys know, especially those of you guys who actually came and saw Secret MLM Hacks, which I hope that you guys all do. The actual program itself. I hope you join the program, 'cause what I do, module number one actually talks about how to become an individual that others want to follow in the first place, since in MLM they join you not the MLM. How do you actually do that? That's literally what module one is about. It goes through and it talks, it shows like this is how you be someone that other people want to follow. This is how you ... and you will speak to certain people and they will not like you. That's fine. You will speak to other people and this other following over here, they'll like you. But if you're speaking so generically that you have this group over here that love you and that no one has any opinion about you. No one's going to follow you. They need to have an opinion about you. Which means you need to get opinionated. I have no problem sharing my opinions. But also understanding that I shouldn't be full of myself either. Anyway I feel like I've said the same things a billion times over and over and over again, but there's something to trying to be ... I don't know, just authentic about where you are that people can sense it. It's a big enough deal. I feel like its something that people should all practice and try. Anyway, this was a 20 minute episode. I was not planning on doing that. As far as what gives, it's that I'm just trying to be just a real guy and be a loud version of myself. There's always someone who's going to be better, faster, stronger, better looking, there's always the er, right, than me. Er, er, er, er. Whatever it is, better, faster, stronger, you know what I mean? There's always someone who's going to be, so that's not what I compete on. What I compete on are my differences not my strengths. Okay. In business, like the actual product, I compete on my strengths, but for my personal character, as far as my attractive character, the way I publish, I compete on differences. I don't compete on strengths. That's one of the major reasons why I stand out. You think through that with your MLM. Think through where you are. What are your differences and how can you compete on differences rather than strengths, for your own character. But then for your product, compete on strengths. Rather than focusing on weaknesses, it's kind of two different ... Anyway, I realized that a while ago and it's been cool to be able to do that. I really feel like that's where I started turning up more frequently in places, 'cause people wanting to follow me. We just screamed past 12,000 downloads, and I got a cool surprise for you guys coming up here in the future. But anyway, you guys are all awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for the question, John. Have mad respect for you. I will talk to you guys all later. Hey, thanks for listening. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback for me. Do you have a question you want answered live on the show? Go to secretMLMhacksradio.com to submit your question and download your free MLM Masters pack.

Productivity Secrets (Incl. Full Transcript) of Kate Erickson That Led To $433K in Feb 2015 Revenue! Kate Erickson already worked with the John Lee Dumas in growing entrepreneur on fire into one of the most successful podcasts. Kate's story begins in corporate America where she worked in human resources having decided fairly, early in her career that the corporate ladder wasn't for her. She chose to blaze her trail as an entrepreneur since she has joined Entrepreneur On Fire she pioneered the Entrepreneur On Fire Blog, and I've also done some guest blogging on behalf of Entrepreneur On Fire. She has also bee heavily involved in Podcaster Paradise of which am a proud member which probably is the best resource online when it comes to learning how to podcast. She is also the brains behind the explosive growth of Entrepreneur On Fire, and she is continuously working with her partner John Lee Dumas to develop and refine the growth strategy she has been instrumental in growing the business well beyond the six-figure monthly income and made $433,000 in February 2015 which is pretty awesome. Share This Episode: Click To Tweet Links Mentioned: Click here to download podcast shownotes A few highlights from the interview: Kate's story -  a transition from corporate employee to successful entrepreneur Kate's morning routine and how it helps her productivity Kate's strategy to overcome 'imposter syndrome' as an entrepreneur How Kate uses themed days to increase focus Kate's take on Kate's Take Kate's advice to aspiring entrepreneurs Full Transcript of Interview Below ASH: You've been instrumental in growing the business well beyond a six-figure monthly income and made $433,000 in February 2015, which is pretty awesome. KATE: That's definitely very awesome. Thanks for all your kind words, Ash. I really appreciate it. You're also the brains behind the explosive growth of EOFire, and you're constantly working with your partner, John Lee Dumas, to develop and refine the growth strategy. JOHN: Hey, this is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur On Fire. You're listening to my friend Ash Roy. ASH: Welcome to the Productive Insights Podcast for entrepreneurs and professionals, where we discuss how to leverage your business. Head over to productiveinsights.com for over a hundred free tips, articles, videos, and podcasts that help you increase your productivity and maximize your profits to fund the perfect lifestyle. In today's podcast we speak to Kate Erickson, who has worked with John Lee Dumas in growing Entrepreneur On Fire into one of the most successful podcasts. Kate, your story begins in corporate America where you worked in human resources. Having decided fairly early in your career that the corporate ladder wasn't for you, you chose to blaze your own trail as an entrepreneur. Since you've joined Entrepreneur On Fire you pioneered the Entrepreneur On Fire blog and I've also done some guest blogging on behalf of EOFire. You've also been heavily involved in Podcasters' Paradise, of which I'm a proud member, which probably is the best resource online when it comes to learning podcasting. You're also the brains behind the explosive growth of EOFire and you're constantly working with your partner, John Lee Dumas, to develop and refine the growth strategy. You've been instrumental in growing the business well beyond a six-figure monthly income and made $433,000 dollars in February 2015, which is pretty awesome. KATE: It's definitely very [00:02:00] awesome. Thanks for all your kind words, Ash. I really appreciate it. ASH: You're most welcome. These achievements make for a very spectacular resume, particularly for somebody who's such a young entrepreneur. Could you spend a minute telling us about your entrepreneurial journey, Kate? KATE: Sure. Like you said, I kind of started off in corporate America. I thought that's where my career would lie.