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Could intentionally limiting your practice's growth be a good thing? In this eye-opening episode, I'm sitting down with Joshua Scott to discuss some unconventional but powerful advice for practice owners. Joshua reveals how focusing on controlled growth can actually protect cash reserves and stabilize operations. Drawing from his experience with Studio 8E8, he explains how capping client intake helps manage expenses more effectively and enhances profitability. We dive deep with Joshua into identifying early warning signs of unsustainable growth and effective strategies to manage them, offering you insights into managing your own business effectively.As we break down these concepts, Joshua sheds light on the typical cycle of increasing expenses tied to rapid growth, from hiring more staff to expanding facilities. We also cover the critical role of marketing investments in ensuring long-term stability and how priorities should shift once a business reaches the $1 million revenue mark. Rounding it all off, Joshua shares thoughts on self-awareness and continuous personal growth, emphasizing the importance of not becoming an obstacle in your own organization's path to success.What You'll Learn in This Episode:Why limiting growth can lead to greater profitability.How rapid expansion affects your cash reserves and expenses.Key strategies to recognize and manage symptoms of overgrowth.The importance of investing in marketing for business stability.How to adapt your role and focus as your business scales.Insights on building infrastructure and effective scaling.The significance of self-awareness and personal development in leadership.Ready to discover how smart growth can transform your practice? Listen to the episode now!‍‍Sponsors:Studio 8E8: Dentistry's story-driven marketing agency. Traditional marketing repels. Story-first dental marketing attracts.We bring your story to life in a way that captivates and connects: https://s8e8.com/affiliates/tdm?utm_source=tdm&utm_medium=affiliate&wc_clear=true‍You can reach out to Joshua Scott here:Website: https://s8e8.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuascott/‍Mentions and Links: ‍Terms:EBITDA - earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization‍Books:Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't‍If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041‍Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)‍Michael: hey, Josh will talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning? Joshua: Hey, Michael, this is for our business owners out there. And it's probably going to be a piece of advice. That's definitely unconventional, probably a little controversial, but I'll tell you, it's based in my personal research.It's based in my personal experience. I've done this. I know people that have done this, it's limiting your growth. In order to be profitable. Now, as a company and you're growing a business those two things sound at odds, right? You're like, no, I'm trying to grow because I want to be profitable and have a profitable business.But often what happens, especially in the dental profession, because practices can grow and they can grow quickly. And we begin to Keep up with that growth and chase that growth, which just sucks cash out of the organization. we have so many expenses and we're hiring new team members. Andwe've got 30 new patients a month, but we could probably see 45.So now you're looking at bringing on an associate. We're expanding, you're remodeling, you're renovating. All these things continue as we chase growth. And what that does is it just eats up the cash from the organization. the upside is you're growing a more valuable organization. So I get that we don't need to talk about, equity all that stuff.I understand that's one side of it, but in order to actually see profit, you know, when we talk about EBITDA being 10%, 20%, pushing 30 to 40 percent of dental practice, that's like super amazing. You oftentimes have to get to a place where you're limiting your growth in order to let the fixed expenses kind of cap and the profit begin to rise.Michael: Interesting. Okay. So then how does growth suck cash from the initial start? What are some of the early symptoms where you're like, okay, maybe we need to start slowing it down. And then what are some of the barriers or boundaries we can put to start slowing it down properly? Joshua: Yeah.No, it's such a great question. And a lot of times we get into the cycle before we even realize it, you know, like you've got to start up a lot of times it can be you and a clinical assistant, and then all of a sudden you start getting patients. You're like, okay, I'm gonna stop doing my own hygiene.I'm gonna hire a hygienist. that's a financial commitment, early on you're wondering if it's even the right time. Do I have the money to do that? And then more new patients come in. So you hire another assistant and then you hire front office.Then you hire another hygienist. And this whole cycle keeps going as new patients start coming in. The patient base is growing because now all of a sudden you're like, I only had three ops outfitted. Okay. Let me get the next two built out. Then you're like, okay, now we're full again. Now let me bust out through the side and add, another, three ops and rent that space.Then you're like, okay, now I need an associate. the more you grow, almost the more big ticket these expenses get, because now you're hiring an associate. Now you're expanding your space. Now you're moving locations. Now you're buying a building to do it. And so you just get all these expenses going.And I'll tell you from personal experience, what we did with Studio 88, this was about three years ago. And I was having lots of conversations around this with other business owners way ahead of me. And I said, how do you grow and be profitable? Cause we were growing, but man, it was almost like expenses and revenue were just in line with each other.We were never seeing that separation. But we were like having to hire people like, Oh my gosh, we got these more new clients. We got to hire all these other people. So I had these conversations with about three or four business owners. I said, how do you grow and be profitable? And all three of them were like, you can't.There's seasons where you're profitable, but usually it's because you're spending less money. And then there's seasons where you're growing and you're really spending, you're investing in the business and putting out capital. And those are very hard seasons to be profitable. So what we did about three years ago was, said, okay, we're going to cap our client growth at eight a month.I already have a team in place. We can handle eight a month. So let's go this entire year and let's just do eight. Okay. And see what happens. And all of a sudden when we controlled that fixed cost that kind of leveled out and then our profit began to rise. And then by the end of the year, I think we were hitting like 12 to 14 percent profit.And I was like, Oh my gosh, this was amazing. And then we added more team to go to 10 new clients a month. expenses kind of jumped up a little bit, but again, we became. And so there are seasons like of growing a business and then you may just be like, man, I just need to grow. Cause I'm trying to hit some like number and I just want to build a million or 20 million organization.Cool. But then there's some of us where it's like, we're growing, but we want to be profitable as well. How do we do that? And it could just be looking at your new patients and going, It's okay if we cap it at 25 a month, at 30 a month. And I maintain that team. And let's just have a year where we grow and you control those fixed costs.Don't renovate. Don't hire an associate. Don't bring on another hygienist. Just serve that patient base really well for that year and let that profit begin to expand. Michael: Interesting. Okay. So then real quick asking you, what made you come up with eight Joshua: Oh, like eight new clients a month.Michael: Yeah. Joshua: It had nothing to do with our name. It was just, I was like, yeah, no, it honestly was like, that was the capacity of the team. I went to our creative team, photographers, videographers, designers, developers, account managers.And I said, what do you guys feel comfortable with us taking? And we kind of reverse engineered it. We were like, I think if we did eight a month. We would feel great about the level service, the level creativity, and not overwhelming our team consistently. And so we said, great. And that's kind of how we capped it.organizations that go from zero to 1 million. it's a whole different dynamic. key is selling. when you're growing from a startup to a million in revenue, it's just sales. And we don't like to talk about that in the dental practice, but it literally is get as many new patients in as possible, create revenue, like just go, go, go.It'scall it like sell like hell, man. You just like it all to get the revenue in. But organizations, once they get above a million, they start to switch. now you've proven a market fit, you're doing a million dollars in your community. you're a solid practice.You've proven your practice fits in that community. You've got something. Now you've got to start focusing on scalable infrastructure. Now you've got to realize that growing like that begins to suck cash. But as you go from like 1 million to 10 million, the complexities increase a ton. you need cash not only to grow, but you got to bring on somebody for HR.You got to bring on somebody for as like a practice administrator, of a sudden youhave people on your team that are now making six figures. and it's just infrastructure. It has nothing to do with selling or creating revenue. These are just people that the structure needs.And so you realize a lot of times when practices get above a million and they're just grow, grow, grow, grow. All of a sudden they find themselves strapped for cash because they never created profit. And now they've got to invest in infrastructure and how the organization begins to scale towards the next complexity.Michael: So then what do you recommend when we pass that million, Mark, can we start looking into books or instructions or advice where it's like, Hey, help me to build infrastructure? Cause we don't I wouldn't know that. Once we hit this specific amount of employees and numbers and you know what I mean, kind of a thing. Joshua: Yeah. No, it's interesting, Mike, because work with larger groups and you can be acquiring practices. Okay. A million dollar one here, a 1. 5, 2 million one here. But all of a sudden you're like, Oh crap, I need a CFO. that's a high level want to call it an expense because I'm a P and L it shows up as an expense, but it's really an investment in your leadership team. But like, that's, a hefty, person, a COO. All of a sudden you're sitting on three practices doing 12 million in revenue.And you're like, I need somebody to run all this. You need a COO. These are high level people. And my point is if you've been buying practices nonstop, renovating them, hiring teams, putting in high paid doctors, all of a sudden you're in a situation where there's no cash. To bring on the COO, the CFO, the people you need.And so part of this is yeah, it's a race to get to a million, Get all the revenue and get all the new patients. But once you get past that point, start to figure out how to build a profitable organization because you're going to need it for the next step. And the thing I have found that I've seen proven I can't write a book on it yet.I don't have that body of like research, but I've seen it over and over again is if you can limit your growth. Then you'll start to see that profit increase. And so don't keep chasing that expense structure. Go, okay, we're going to be good for this year with this team. And we're going to serve 30 new patients a month.And that's just how it's going to go in the next year. We're going to expand or hire more team and we'll take on 45 a month, but begin to put that in place to create that profit. Michael: Do you think it gives you time to think time to plan look into the details of, Oh, we do need a COO or we do need an associate As well, Joshua: made such a good point because oftentimes growth it controls us. we get caught up in it and we're just running. it really takes discipline because That scarcity mindset really kicks in when you go, we're only gonna take 30 new patients a month that freaks people out because they're like, I'm turning away 15 or we're scheduling 90 days out or 120 days out.And I'm like, I know. you know what? They'll be there in the future. They will, you keep growing and make amazing organization. They'll be there. This is what's best for your organization right now. And even you create that head space to where you're not just chasing growth all the time.You're now turning your eyes as a CEO to what the organization needs. Michael: And then what if you're in a season where. You've already decided I'm only going to take in 30 new patients a month, but then something external happens, COVID, right? Or anything, right? I mean, something external happens where you're like, crap, I should have been selling this whole time. And now I'm like, you know what I mean? and maybe just for that season, how do you feel? What do you do? What should we? Look into it. Joshua: Yeah, this is why I love talking to you.I feel like you read my mind. You keep asking me like the next question and you and I didn't rehearse this, here's the thing when you're in that zero to a million, it really is about sales and it's about getting new patients in the door, create revenue, right? When you get past that million dollar mark, and now you're in that kind of million to 10 million range.It has to shift to marketing. And here's what I mean by that. We often look at marketing as solving our needs today. Josh, I need 45 new patients a month. So I need the market. I'm like, okay, that's a need for today. And Michael, to be honest, marketing doesn't often solve that. We're not going to change that in the next 30 days.You know, that we all know that marketing ispositioning you for the future. the reason why, like in the first phase of business, it's so important just to sell, cause you need revenue. You got to keep the lights on, keep people paid. The second phase is exactly what you just said. We don't know what the market's going to do.We don't know what the economy is going to do. We don't know what the community is going to do. So you'll face these kinds of ups and downs, these dips and challenges. But if you're investing in marketing, you're securing your future, you're creating momentum and attention, not for today, but for 90 days, for six months, for a year, And so you begin to shift that, put it in the marketing and build this brand that becomes resilient during times like that.So to answer your question, the best thing to do to solve a downturn is to have been investing in marketing six months ago to get you through that. Michael: have to have man, I guess a lot of more insight when it comes to Passing this 1 million mark, When it comes to your team, what you need, profit marketing.So what can help us with that? Cause we're not all. Immediately once a million passes, we know these things, right? We just continue to sell sometimes and that's it. So is there something specific kind of like a check Mark, a checklist or anything like that? Joshua: That's a good question, man.I think you're right. So much of this for me was trial and error. There's a lot of good books, scaling up as one of those books that I would say super impactful. It talks about these three phases of business and even gets into 10 million plus, and what we're trying to do at that level.first step is probably just realizing the grind of a lot of us know how to grind out a million dollar business and to be honest as we're sitting here in 2024, I don't know that that's as unique and as special as it used to be. It's absolutely an accomplishment, 100%. Most people will never accomplish that in their life, but I think we realize with some humility.A lot of people can just grind that out, but that skill set is not going to get you to the next level. And so people out there are going to be listening to this where it's like they've acquired practice two, they've acquired practice three, and they're trying to apply that same skill set, grind it out, sell, create revenue.And you have this like sneaking suspicion that it's not going to work. It's not going to get you where you need to go. And at this level, it becomes leadership. It becomes marketing and it becomes a scalable infrastructure. So turning your eyes from those things. Onto what's going to get you to the next step probably the first step is just self awareness Michael: Self awareness.So noticing these things, cause a lot of the times I feel like you bottleneck yourself and then you're like, no, I can do that. you know what I mean? And then you're,why would I pay this associate this much? If I can just double down and block out my schedule and do this and that it might work, but I don't know.Joshua: And dude, I'm so aware, Michael, probably one of the things I internally struggle with, not struggle with, but I'm very aware. Most founders of companies like agencies like ours. Only get to a certain level and they can't get to the next point. we're kind of at that point where like most founders kind of bail because they just don't have a skillset to go to that next level.I know that I am intentionally investing in myself. Cause I want to get there, man. I feel like I can, and I don't want to become the main limiting factor of this organization. I'm investing in myself. I'm aware of it. I'm trying to grow. Cause I'm like, we can do this. I can do this. Michael: Nice, man.Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate your time. And if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find Josh in the dental marketer society, Facebook group, or where can they reach out to you directly? Joshua: Guys, I'm at Instagram at Joshua Scott. I'm still in my account.So hit me up. Tell me you saw this, heard this episode. We'd love to hear from you, but also a website s eight e eight. com. Michael: Nice. And at the same time, studio 88. Does have an exclusive deal for you. So if you want to go in the show notes below, click the link, check it out, if you are a need or a marketing company or a website, especially a website, if you like my website, studio 88 did it.So go ahead and check it out. And Josh, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. And we'll hear from you soon. Joshua: Thanks man.‍

In the realm of mental health, the role of an anxiety therapist is often shrouded in mystery and misconceptions. To shed light on this crucial profession, Joshua Fletcher, also known as AnxietyJosh, shares insights from his latest book, "And How Does That Make You Feel?: Everything You (N)ever Wanted to Know About Therapy," in a candid conversation with Kimberley Quinlan on her podcast. Joshua's book aims to demystify the therapeutic process, offering readers an intimate look behind the therapy door. It's not just a guide for those struggling with anxiety but an engaging narrative that invites the general public into the world of therapy. The book's unique angle stems from a simple yet intriguing question: Have you ever wondered what your therapist is thinking? One of the book's key revelations is the humanity of therapists. Joshua emphasizes that therapists, like their clients, are complex individuals with their own vices, flaws, and inner dialogues. The book begins with a scene where Joshua, amidst a breakthrough session with a client, battles an array of internal voices—from the biological urge to use the restroom to the critical voice questioning his decision to drink an Americano right before the session. This honest portrayal extends to the array of voices that therapists and all humans contend with, including anxiety, criticism, and analytical thinking. Joshua's narrative skillfully normalizes the internal chatter that professionals experience, even as they maintain a composed exterior. The conversation also touches upon the diverse modalities of therapy, highlighting the importance of finding the right approach for each individual's needs. Joshua jests about "The Yunger Games," a fictional annual event where therapists from various modalities compete, underscoring the passionate debates within the therapeutic community regarding the most effective treatment methods. A significant portion of the book delves into the personal growth and challenges therapists face, including dealing with their triggers and the balance between professional detachment and personal empathy. Joshua shares an anecdote about experiencing a trigger related to grief during a session, illustrating how therapists navigate their emotional landscapes while maintaining focus on their clients' needs. The awkwardness of encountering clients outside the therapy room is another aspect Joshua candidly discusses. He humorously describes the internal turmoil therapists experience when meeting clients in public, highlighting the delicate balance of maintaining confidentiality and acknowledging the shared human experience. Joshua's book, and his conversation with Kimberley, paint a vivid picture of the life of an anxiety therapist. It's a role filled with challenges, personal growth, and the profound satisfaction of facilitating others' journeys toward mental wellness. By pulling back the curtain on the therapeutic process, Joshua hopes to demystify therapy, making it more accessible and less intimidating for those considering it. In essence, being an anxiety therapist is about embracing one's humanity, continuously learning, and engaging in the most human conversations without judgment. It's a profession that requires not only a deep understanding of mental health but also a willingness to confront one's vulnerabilities and grow alongside their clients. Through his book and the insights shared in this conversation, Joshua Fletcher invites us all to appreciate the intricate dance of therapy—a dance that, at its best, can be life-changing for both the therapist and the client. Transcript:  Kimberley: I'm very happy to have back on the show Joshua Fletcher, a dear friend of mine and quite a rock star. He has written a new book called And How Does That Make You Feel?: Everything You (N)ever Wanted to Know About Therapy. Welcome back, Josh. Joshua: It's good to be back. Thanks, Kim. When was the last time we spoke together on a podcast? I think you were on The Disordered podcast not so long ago. That was lovely. But I remember my guest appearance on Your Anxiety Toolkit was lovely. HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL?  Kimberley: I know. I'm so happy to actually spend some time chatting with you together. I'm very excited about your new book. It's all about therapy and anxiety and what it's really like to be an anxiety therapist and the process of therapy and all the things. How did this book come about? Joshua: I wanted to write a book about people who struggle with anxiety, but in the mainstream, because a lot of the literature out there is very self-help, and it's in a certain niche. One of my biggest passions is to write something engaging with a nice plot where people are reading about something or a storyline that they're interested in whilst inadvertently learning without realizing you're learning. That's my kind of entertainment—when I watch a show and I've learned a lot about something or when I've read a book and I've inadvertently learned loads of things because I'm taking in the plot.  With this book, I wanted to write a book about therapy. Now, that initially might not get people to pick it up, might not interest you, might not interest you about anxiety therapy, but I wanted to write something that anyone could pick up and enjoy and learn lots because I want to share our world that we work in with the general public. And so, the hook that I focused on here was, have you ever wanted to know what your therapist is thinking? And I thought, well, I'm going to tell people what I'm thinking, and I'm going to invite people behind the therapy door, and you're going to see what I do and what's going on in my head as I'm trying to work with people who struggle with mental health.  I wrote the pitch for it. People went bananas, and they loved it because it's not been done before. Not necessarily a good thing if it's not been done before. And here we are. I love it. I'm really proud of it. I want people to laugh, cry, be informed. If you go on a journey, learn more about therapy, learn more about anxiety. All in one book. THERAPISTS ARE HUMANS TOO Kimberley: Yeah. I think that one of the many cool things about it is, as a therapist, people seem to be always very curious or intrigued about therapists, about what it's like and what it's like to be in a room with someone who's really struggling, or when you're handling really difficult topics, and how to be just a normal human being and a therapist at the same time. Joshua: Yeah. What I want to write about is to remind people that therapists are humans. We have our vices and flaws. I'm not talking on behalf of you, Kim. I'm sure you're perfect.  Kimberley: No, no. No, no. Flawed as flawed could be. Joshua: Yeah, but to a level that it's like, even our brains have different voices in them all the time, different thought processes as part of our rationalization. And I want people to peer inside that and have a look. So, one of them is like the book opens with me and a client and it's going really well, and this person's talking, this character's talking about where they're up to, and celebrating on the brink of something great. And then there's the voice of biology that just pops into the room, into my head. And it's the biology of you need to go to the toilet. Why did it? And then the voice of critic comes in and says, “Why did you drink an Americano moments before this client?” Now you're sat here, and you can leave if you want, but it would be distasteful. And you're on this brink of this breakthrough.  And so, I've got this argument going on in my head, going, “You need the toilet.” “Yeah, but this person's on a breakthrough.” And then I got empathy, like, “Yeah, but they feel so vulnerable. They want to share this.” And then you've got analytical and all the chaotic conversations that are happening as a therapist as I'm sat there nodding and really wanting the best for my client. THE VOICES IN OUR HEAD Kimberley: Exactly. That's why I thought it was so brilliant. So, for those of you who haven't read it, I encourage you to, but Josh really outlines at the beginning of the book all of these different voices that therapists and all humans have. There's the anxiety's voice and there's biology, which you said, like, “I need to go to the restroom,” or there's the critic that's judging you, or there's the analytical piece, which is the clinical piece that's making sense of the client and what's going on and the relationship and all the things. And I really resonated with that because I think that we think as clinicians, as we get better and more seasoned, that we only show up with this professional voice we're on the whole time, but we're so not. We're so not on the whole time. This whole chatter is happening in the background. And I think you did a beautiful job of just normalizing that. Joshua: Thanks, Kim. It's a book that therapists will like, but do you know what? People will identify their own voices in this, particularly the anxiety. You and I talk about anxiety all day every day, always beginning with what if—that voice of worry that sits around a big table of thoughts and tries to shout the loudest and often gets our attention. And I tried to show that this happens to a lot of people as well. It's just the what-if is different. So, for some people, it's, “What if this intrusive thought is true?” For some people, it's, “What if I have a panic attack?” For some people, it's, “What if this catastrophe I've been ruminating on for so long happens?” For therapists, it's, “What if the worst thing that happens here, even in the therapy room?”  I'm an anxiety therapist that has been through anxiety, and I still get anxiety because I'm human. So, I celebrate these voices as well. Also, because I'm human, I can be critical almost always of myself in the book. So, I'm not just criticizing the people I'm working with. Absolutely not. But that voice comes in, and it's about balancing it and showing the work and what a lot of training to be a therapist is. It's about choosing the voice. And I didn't realize how much training to be a therapist actually helps me live day-to-day. Actually, I'm more rational when making more life decisions because I can choose to observe each voice, which was integral to me overcoming an anxiety disorder, as well as just facing life's challenges every day. WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE A THERAPIST?  Kimberley: Right. Because we're really today talking a lot about what it's ACTUALLY like to be a therapist—and I emphasize the word ‘actually'—what is it actually like to be a therapist, if we were to be really honest? Joshua: One thing I mentioned is that I talk about the therapeutic hour, which is how long, Kimberley? Kimberley: Fifty minutes. Joshua: Yeah. The therapy took out and I explained what we do in the 10 minutes that we have between clients on a busy day. And people imagine us doing meditation or grounding ourselves or reflecting or whatever. Sometimes I do do that. Sometimes I just scroll Reddit, look at memes, eat candy, and do nothing. And it's different each time. That's what I'm doing. I'm not some mystic sage in my office, sitting sinisterly under the lamplight waiting for you to come in. No, I'm usually faffing around, panicking, checking that I don't look like a scruff, putting a brush through my hair, trying to hide the stains of food I've got on my shirt because I overzealously consume my lunch.  And there's obviously some funny stories in there, but also there's dark stuff in there as well. When I trained to be a therapist, I went through grief, and I made some quite unethical decisions back when I was training. Not the ones I'm proud of, but it actually shows the serious side of mental health and that a lot of therapists become therapists because of their own journeys. And I know that that applies to a lot of therapists I know. Kimberley: For sure. I have to tell a story. A few months ago—I'm a member of lots of these therapist Facebook groups—one of the therapists asked a question and said, “Tell me a little bit what your hour looks like before you see a client. What's your routine or your procedure pre-clients?” And all these people were saying, “I journal and I meditate and all of these things.” Some people were like, “I water the plants and I get my laptop open.” And I just posted a meme of someone who's pushing all the crap off my table and screeching into the computer screen and being like sitting up straight. And all of these people responded like, “Thank God,” because all the therapists were beautifully saying, and I just came in here honestly, “Sometimes I literally sit down, open the laptop, and it is a mess. But I can in that moment be like, ‘Take a breath,' and be like, ‘Tell me how you're doing.'” Like you said, how does that end? We start the therapeutic hour. And I think that we have to normalize therapists being that kind of person. Joshua: Definitely. I think one of the barriers to people seeking therapy is that power dynamic, that age-old trope that someone stood leaning against a mahogany bookcase. You've probably got a mahogany bookcase. Your practice is really nice. I certainly have. I've got an Ikea KALLAX unit full of books I've never read.  Kimberley: Exactly. Your books aren't organized by color because mine are not. Joshua: No, no. There's just some filler books in there. Just like, why is Catcher in the Rye? Why is Catcher in the Rye? I don't know, I just put it on there. I just want to look clever. Anyway, it's like people are afraid of that power dynamic of some authority figure going in there about to judge them, mind-read them, shame them, or analyze them. And no, I think dispelling that myth by showing how human we are can challenge that power dynamic. It certainly did for me. I would much rather open up to someone who isn't showing the pretense that they have all of life together. Don't get me wrong, professionalism is essential, but someone who's professional and human, because going to therapy is some of the most human experiences you'll ever do. I don't want someone who isn't showing too scared to show that sign or certain elements of being human, but obviously professionally. And it's a fine balance to get. But when you do find a therapist like that, for me personally, one who's knowledgeable, compassionate, empathetic, has humility, I think beautiful things can happen. Kimberley: Yeah. I think you use the word that I exactly was thinking of, which is, it's such a balancing act to, as a therapist, honor your own humanity from a place of compassion. Like, yeah, we're not going to have it all together and it's not going to be perfect, and we won't say the right thing all the time. But at the same time, be thoughtful and have the skills and the supervision to balance it so that you are showing up really professional and from that clinical perspective.  DO THERAPISTS GET CONSULTATION?  Tell me a little bit about consultation as a clinician. I know for me, I require a lot of consultation for cases, not because I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm always going to be honest with the fact that maybe I'm seeing it from a perspective that I hadn't thought of yet. What are your thoughts on that kind of topic? Joshua: Therapy's got to work for both people as well, because the therapeutic connection, I believe, is one of the drivers that promotes therapeutic growth and change. It promotes trust. I will consult with clients and my supervisor and make sure it's right. I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but for people, particularly with anxiety disorders, I think they like to know and come to therapy. I think I've used self-disclosure on my public platforms tastefully in the sense that I know what it's like to have gone through an anxiety disorder, whether it's OCD or panic disorder or agoraphobia, and come out the other side.  But also, it's balancing that with, “Actually, I'm your therapist here. I will help you in a therapeutic setting and use my training.” You know I'm not someone who's got everything worked out, but you do know that someone who can relate that can step into your frame of reference, something I talk about a lot in the book frame of reference and empathy. If you feel like a therapist has done that and is in your frame of reference and it's like, “Ah, yeah, they get it or they're at least trying,” and we as therapists feel like there's a connection there too on a professional and therapeutic level, I think magic can happen. And I love therapy for that. Not all therapy is great and beautiful and wonderful. Some of it is messy, and some of it just doesn't work sometimes. And I do talk about that too, but it's about when you get that intricate dance and match between therapist and client, I think it's life-changing. WHAT TYPE OF PERSON DO YOU NEED TO BE TO BECOME AN ANXIETY THERAPIST? Kimberley: Yeah. What do you think about the type of person you would have to be to be an anxiety specialist, especially if you're doing exposure and response prevention? The reason I ask that is I have a private practice in California. I have eight clinicians that work for me. Almost every time I have a position that's open, and when I'm interviewing people to come on to my team, I would say 60% come in, and they're good to go. They're like, “I want to do this. I love the idea of exposure therapy.” But there is often 40% who say, “I'm not cut out for this work. This is not how I was trained. It's not how I think about things.” After I've explained to them what we do and the success rate and the science behind it, they clearly say, “This isn't for me.” What are your thoughts about what it takes or what kind of person it takes to be an anxiety specialist? Joshua: That's a great question. First of all, you've got to trust and believe in the modality that you're trained in. You and I use the principles a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure response prevention. I've got first-hand experience of that. You've got to trust the science and what we know about human biology, which is really important. It's about what you're trading in that modality. What I talk about -- again, see how I'm segueing it back to the book. Brilliant. I've done my media training, Kim. It's like, “Always go back to the book. Come on, Josh.” One of my favorite chapters in the book is explaining about modalities because a lot of people just think therapy is one big world where you see a therapist, they wave a magic wand, you feel better, and suddenly our parents love us again. No, that's not how it works.  Kimberley: It's not? DIFFERENT TYPES OF ANXIETY THERAPISTS Joshua: No, it's not. Mental health has different presentations, and a modality is a school of thought that approaches difficulties in mental health. So, the first modality I go to is person-centered, which is counseling skills, listening, empathy, unconditional positive regard.  The Carl Rogers way of thinking—I think I love that. Is that good for OCD, intrusive thoughts, exposure therapy, and phobias? Not really. It's nice to have a base of that because there's more chance of a therapist being understanding, stepping in your frame of reference, and supporting you through that modality. But I wouldn't say it's equipped for that.  Whereas in CBT, a lot of it is psychoeducation, which I love. And that's a different modality. Cognitive behavioral sciences, whether it's third wave, when you're looking at acceptance commitment, where are you looking at exposure response prevention. There's lots of song and dance about I-CBT at the moment and things like that. They're all different modalities and skills of thought.  Then you've got psychodynamic, which is the mahogany bookcase, lie on the sofa, let's play word association. Oh yeah, you want to sleep with your mom, Josh? No, I don't. That's nothing to do with why I keep having panic attacks in the supermarket. Stop judging me. But that's a different type of approach. Jungian approach can be quite insightful, but it's got to match what the presentation is for you.  I think CBT is my favorite, but it sucks for stuff like grief. When I was grieving, I did not want CBT. I did not want my grief formulated. I did not want to see that my behaviors were perpetuating discomfort. I was like, “Yeah, that's just part of my grieving process.” And in this chapter, I just talk about the different modalities. Therapists are very passionate about the modality of the school that they train in because you have to give part of yourself to it. You have to go through it yourself. And I'm very passionate about the modalities I'm trained in. And so, I play on this in the book. There's a chapter called The Younger Games or The Yunger Games, a play on words. And basically, it's once-a-year therapists from every modality, whether it's hypnotherapy, transactional analysis, CBT, person-centered, the trauma-informed. All of these, they all meet up in a field, and we all fight to the death. And the last remaining person is crowned the one true modality. Now last year, it was hypnotherapy. And what I also say is that a betting tip for next year is the trauma-informed. So, every year, I'll keep you updated on The Yunger Games. And basically, it's a narrative device to explain that.  Within the world of therapy, there are different types of therapists. You and I, we love CBT. We'll bang the drum for that. We feel that there's not enough ERP out there that certainly isn't, particularly with the evidence and the points towards it and mountains of evidence. But other therapists may not feel the same. So, when people come to work at CBT School and they realize that Dumbledore, aka Kim Quinlan, is like, “No, we do ERP here; we've got to get down and dirty and do the horrible work,” they're like, “That's not conducive to the softer step-back approach that I've trained in, in my modality.” Kimberley: Yeah. I'm always so happy that they just are honest with me. I remember as an intern at OCD Center in Los Angeles very clearly saying, “Are you okay talking about really very sexual, very, very graphic topics?” He listed off. Like, “Here is what you're going to need to be able to talk about very clearly with a very straight face. You can't have a wincing look on your face when you talk about intrusive, violent sexual thoughts. You're going to have to be up for the game.” And I think that was a big thing for me. But what I think is really cool about your book, and you see now I'm bringing it back to your book, is it doesn't mean the voice isn't in your head sometimes questioning you. As I was reading it, I'm like, there is an imposter in therapists all the time saying, like you said, the critic that's like, “You don't know what you're doing. You're a failure. You're a flake. You're a complete fraud. You haven't got it together. Maybe you haven't even worked on the thing yourself yet.” That's going to be there. Joshua: Yeah, and I still get that. I can't speak for you. But I think what makes a good therapist is a therapist who self-doubts. You don't want to go and see a therapist who thinks that they've got it all worked out. That's a red flag in itself. A good therapist is one that always wants to improve and uses that doubt and anxiety to make themselves a better therapist. Don't get me wrong, I'm pretty confident in my ability to be a therapist now, but there are challenges. In the book, the voices that come up, there's 13 of them. One of them is escapist, which is, “I just want to get the hell out of you,” or “Maybe I want to get rid of this client. I'm not equipped for it.” And then the other voices come in and they're like, “But maybe this is just you being critical,” or “The evidence suggests that actually you are trained for this,” and navigating that doubt, the anxiety that your therapist has. And I think it's a beautiful thing.  A lot of therapists are very harsh on themselves, but I think it's a gift to have that inner critic. Because if you stand there like one of these therapists, and these therapists do exist, unfortunately, I have completed all my training. I know everything inside out. My word is gospel. I worked out what the problem was with this person within 10 minutes. You don't want to talk to that person. What a close-minded moron. And there's a judgmental voice from a therapist. Kimberley: No, but I think that's informed. Joshua: So, it celebrates the vulnerability. You want a therapist who's not got everything worked out. Absolutely. I do anyway. Kimberley: Yeah, for sure. I'm wondering, how often have you had to work through your own shit in the room with a client? Meaning—I'll give you a personal example—the very first time I ever experienced derealization for myself was with a client, and I was sitting across from them. They were just talking, and all of a sudden, I had this shift, like everything wasn't real. Their head looked enormous and their body looked tiny. Like they were this tiny little bobbly head thing on the couch. And I knew what was happening. Thankfully, I knew what it was like. I knew what it was. Otherwise, I probably would have panicked, but I had to spend the rest of the session being as level and mindful as I could as I watched their head just bubble around in this disproportionate way. I got through it. I can say confidently I think I pulled it off really well, but it was hard. And I left the session being like, “What the heck just happened?” Has there been any experiences for you like that? Joshua: Yeah, all the time. I mean, first of all, I'd question if you did have derealization. I was your client with a giant head and a tiny body. I was like, “What's going on here?” There wasn't derealization. That's my body, Kim. Kimberley: No, that's just how I look, Kimberley.  Joshua: It's just how I look.  Kimberley: “Stop judging.” Joshua: But in general, no, it's true. And again, one of the voices in my book, And How Does That Make You Feel?, it's called trigger because therapists, they have to give a lot of themselves and they're living a life and have had stuff in their past. One of the voices is trigger. One of the things I get asked a lot is, I don't know about you, Kim, “If you've had anxiety, how can you work with it all day?” I'm like, “Because I'm all right with it. It's okay now.” Sometimes it creeps in, though, if I'm tired or have not slept well. There's stress in my personal life that you can't avoid. Maybe I've not eaten too well. Maybe it's just ongoing things. Sometimes trigger can happen, and it can be a stress-induced trigger or it could be a literal trigger from a traumatic event.  So, in the book, I explain when people bring grief and death, that sometimes makes me feel vulnerable because of my own experiences with grief and death. No spoilers, but the book throughout, one of the themes is why I became a therapist. Not only because of my passion for anxiety disorders and to be self-righteous around other therapists, train different modalities, but also because it's a very grief-informed decision to want to help people.  And there's several traumatic stories. One traumatic story around grief, that trigger, the voice of trigger will come up. So, a client could be talking about their life, like, “I've lost this person; I'm going to talk about it.” And of all these 13 voices around the table, what your therapist is thinking, trigger then shouts loudest. It goes, “Ah, trigger.” There's some pain that you've not felt for a while and I've got to navigate it. You navigated the derealization, the dissociation. You've got to navigate it somehow by pulling on the other voices. And not only do therapists do this, but people do this as well sometimes, whether you've got to be professional or you don't want to turn up to your friend's birthday and just listen to trigger and anxiety and start crying all over your friend's birthday cake. You might do. It's quite funny, but not funny.  Kimberley: I was going to say, what's wrong with that?  Joshua: Have you done it again? I thought you stopped that.  Kimberley: Yeah. You haven't done that?  Joshua: It's part of the interview at CBT School. You need to do really hard, tricky things. Go to your best friend's birthday and make it all about you.  Kimberley: Exactly. Joshua: But yeah, it's one of those. It crops up. The book's funny a lot, but it's good. It takes some really serious turns, and it shows you a lot of stuff can creep in and how I deal with it as a therapist. And I'm sure you related to it as well, Kim, because we do the same job, but you just do it in a sunnier climate. SEEING CLIENTS IN PUBLIC  Kimberley: Right. What I can say, and this will be the last thing that I point out, is you also address the awkwardness of being a therapist, seeing your clients in public and the awkwardness of that, or the, “Oh crap, I know this person from somewhere.” Again, no trigger. I don't want to give the fun parts of the book, but as a therapist, particularly as someone who does exposure therapy, I might go across the road and take a client to have coffee because they've got to do exposures. We very often do see people, our clients, our friends in our work. How much does that impact the work that you do? Joshua: If you ever bump into your therapist, just know that you have all the power there. Your therapist is squirming inside, “I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know. Do I completely blank this person?” But then I look like a dick. “Do I give a subtle nod? Oh, you're breaking confidentiality. They're out with loved ones.” It's up to you. You can put your therapist out of their misery by just saying, “Hey, Kim.” “Hey, Josh.” And then I will say hi back because that shows that you're okay with that.  There is a very extreme shocking version of this story, of this incident in the book where, when I'm at my lowest, I do bump into a previous client. On a night out, when I'm off my face on alcohol. Oh, if you want to find out more about that... Media training's really paid off. Get him on the hip.  Kimberley: I didn't want to give it all away, and you just did. Joshua: No, no, not giving any more away. A media training woman said, “Entice them, then leave it, because then they're more likely to read it.” So, I have listened to that media woman because my previous tactic of just begging and screaming into a camera doesn't work. It's like... Kimberley: But going back exactly—going back, we are squirming. I think that is true that there is a squirm factor there when you see clients, and it happens quite regularly for me. But I think I've come to overcome that by really disclosing ahead of time. Like if I see you outside, you're in the place of power, you decide what to do, and I'll just follow your suit. It's a squirm factor, though. Joshua: See, that's clever, good therapy stuff because you do it all part of the contracting and stuff. Actually, I told all my clients this is okay. But also, when you're a new therapist or sometimes you forget, you're like, “Oh no.” I used to run a music night in Manchester as part thing I did on the side. Enjoy it, love music, I was the host. One week I was on holiday, so a friend organized all the lineup of people to come down. Headline Act was a band name. Went along, and when I'm there, I'm having fun. I've got whiskey in my hand. I'm walking around telling irreverent, horrible jokes. No one in there would guess I was a therapist because I'm having fun and I'm entitled to a life outside the therapy room.  What I didn't know was that the Headline Act was a current client, and they'd just arrived dead late. They didn't know, and they walked on stage, and I looked. It's something that they've gone on publicly to talk about, so this is why I'm saying it now. I got permission to use it because they said it publicly on the radio and stuff like that. And we just looked at each other. It was like, “Oh my God.” And I stood there with this. I was like, “Oh my God.” And I've said all this bad language and cracking jokes, roasting people in the audience, my friends usually. And it's like, yeah, I was squirming.  So, at this point, I did just pretend I didn't know them because it was the best I could do. And they got me out of trouble. They were obviously confident in performance mode. And they got onto mic and was like, “Can you believe that guy is my therapist?” And I was like, “What?” I was like, “Wow.” And then he said some really lovely things. And it wasn't really awkward in therapy. If anything, it was quite something we laughed about in therapy afterwards, and it contributed to it. But yeah, the horror I felt. Oh, I felt sick, and oh. I don't want to think about it. FINAL CONCLUSIONS Kimberley: I want to be respectful of time. Of course, before you share this all about you and where people can get a hold of you and learn about your book, is there anything you want to say final point about what it's like to actually be an anxiety therapist? Joshua: It's the best job in the world for me. It's the best job in the world. All my friends and family go, “I don't care how you can do that.” I love it. I get to have the most human conversations with people without judgment. You mentioned before about intrusive thoughts. I've got the magic guitar in this room, and we make songs about horrible intrusive thoughts. There was one the other day about kicking babies down the stairs. You can't say that out loud. Yes, we do in here, to the three chords of the guitar I only know, particularly postpartum mothers.  Kimberley: You told me we couldn't sing today.  Joshua: No, I'm not singing. Kimberley: I wanted to sing today, and now you're telling me we can't sing. Joshua: I don't think it's going to be Christmas number one—a three-chord banger about harming loved ones or sexual intrusive thoughts—but you never know. Yeah, it's the most beautiful job. Kimberley: I am known to sing intrusive thoughts to happy birthday songs. Joshua: That's a good one. I have to close my window though in my office because I do get scared that people walk past and like, “Wow, that's a very disturbed man.” No, he's not. I'm confident in the powers of ERP and how it can help. Kimberley: You are. I love it. Josh, tell us where we can hear more about your book and learn more about you. Joshua: I'm Joshua Fletcher, also known as AnxietyJosh on social media and stuff. The book is called And How Does That Make You Feel?: Everything You (N)ever Wanted to Know About Therapy. It follows the stories of the four client case studies, obviously highly scrambled and anonymized, and gone through a rigorous ethical process there. So, don't be like, “He's talking about his clients.” No, that's not what the book's about. It's about appearing in behind the therapy room door. It's out in the US before the UK, which is here. I don't know if anyone's watching or whatever, but there it is. And it's also been commissioned to be a television show for major streaming services. We don't know which one yet, but it's exciting.  Go get yourself a copy. It should be in your bookstore. Get it at Barnes & Noble and all the other US ones. And I think you'll really enjoy it. So, it's a really lovely endorsement. Kim has also said it's really good, and Kim is harsh. So, if Kim says it's good, then it's going to be good. And I hope you really enjoy it and pass it on to a loved one who doesn't have anxiety, and you'll find that, “Oh, I actually learned quite a lot there whilst laughing and being captivated by the absolute bananas behind-the-scenes life of being a therapist.” Kimberley: Yeah, I love it. Josh, the way that you present it, if I was scared to go to therapy, I think it would make me less scared. I think it would make me feel like this is something I could do. Joshua: And that's the best compliment I can receive, because that's why I wrote the book. So, thank you so much. Kimberley: Yeah. So fun to have you. Thanks for being here. Joshua: Thanks, Kim.

Road to Episode 150 starts off with a special mid week Release. We keep the decks in San Diego and we welcome Oscar P's Open Bar Radio to the show. In this episode of Open Bar Radio, we welcome Homero Espionosa in the Mix. Tracklist: 1. Oscar P, Cris Herrera, djmiketbrown - Lets Get It (Cris Herrera & Miguel Rios Mix) 2. Homero Espinosa Ft. MrV- Set Me Free 3. Crackazat - Beacon Of Light (Maritime Dub) 4. Homero Espinosa - Mood Is Right 5. Kerri Chandler - I'm Searching (Vocal Mix) 6. David Harness - The Wiggles (Jackin' Mix) 7. Gary's Gang - Keep On Dancing (Louie Vega Remix) 8. T-Coy - Carino (Greg Wilson Re-Edit/Homero Retouch) 9. A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray (Grant Nelson Remix) 10.Emjay - Come n' Get It (Homero Espinosa Edit) 11. Atjazz & Fred Everything - Back Together (Lazy Days Original) 12. DJ Spen, Todd Terry - Stone Fox Chase (Manoo's Beats In The Bayou) 13. Taka Boom - Taka's Groove (Blakdoktor Remix) - 14. Unreleased - RASOUL REMIX - R2 15. Naked Music NYC, Joshua - It's Love (Mo Musique Vocal) 16. Joeski, E-Man, Accapella - Clap Yo Handz (Accapella) 17. Homero Espinosa, CubaseDan - FunkPlayer 2005 Mix 18. Mark Farina, Homero Espinosa - Come On, Baby

CEO at Achieve Today and Co-Founder of iCUE.tech, Joshua Christopherson, joins the show to share his over twenty years' experience in Education Technology. Today, Jeff and Joshua discuss Joshua's passion for cultivating a premier corporate culture. Joshua speaks to the value of one-on-one coaching, best practices for gamification and employee motivation and the importance of overcoming mental blocks and limited belief systems.Episode SponsorChampion Leadership Group – https://championleadership.com/ Small Fish, Big Pond – https://smallfishbigpond.com/ Use the promo code ‘SaaSFuel'Key Takeaways01:21 – Jeff introduces today's guest, Joshua Christopherson, who joins the show to discuss his background in Education Technology and the inspiration to launch iCUE Technology08:35 – The value of one-on-one coaching10:54 – Strategies for increasing engagement20:52 – Gamification and employee motivation25:18 – Overcoming conscious and unconscious blocks and limited beliefs29:41 – Be interested, not interesting32:11 – Joshua speculates on the future of employee engagement and education35:17 – What inspires Joshua to be his best self35:55 – Joshua lets listeners know where to learn more about iCUE and teases an exciting offerTweetable Quotes“We knew that the one way to make people successful was to hold them accountable, give them a coach - just like most successful people have - and train them through these challenges.” (06:47) (Joshua)“What we did was we essentially created an AI - we call it a virtual coach, iCUE - and what happens is an employee can come in the platform and they can spend maybe fifteen seconds going through this iCUE assessment telling them how they are feeling, some of the challenges they're struggling with in their career, or at school, or in their business.” (13:19) (Joshua)“Really at its simplest form, our software is an elegant way to deliver content and train.” (17:30) (Joshua)“One cool thing with the software - the virtual coach - they can go on the platform and say, ‘Hey, here's a couple of areas I'm struggling with at work.' Whether it's dealing with conflict, or troubles at home, or focus. And the virtual coach can suggest those things and help to solve those problems. We've seen employees having challenges resolved that their company didn't even know they were facing.” (20:17) (Joshua)“It doesn't matter where we are in life or what we've done. We have these things - sometimes consciously and, as you suggested, sometimes unconsciously - that are stuck in our minds that hold us back. Whatever it is, being able to overcome those challenges is what makes some of the greatest people the most successful.” (25:18) (Joshua)“How your mindset is outside of work plays a lot into your company's bottom line.” (32:45) (Joshua)Guest ResourcesJeff's LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffkmains/ Jeff's Book – https://www.amazon.com/Small-Fish-Big-Pond-Competitors/dp/1773710036 Learn More & Donate to Nova Ukraine Here –

As we read of the Israelites' conquest of the land of Canaan, we see how He alone was the Victorious One Who was giving the land and the kings into His people's hands. Moses warned them to not think they were the heroes of the story, because it was the Lord Who hardened the hearts of the Canaanites so that they would fight Israel and be defeated. --The awfulness of the bloody battles that are recorded here show us just how ugly sin is and how seriously God takes it. Indeed, the only reason none of us are struck down for our sins is because of our Lord's mercy. --The Israelites won these battles successfully because the God of Israel was fighting for them- for they themselves were weak, idolatrous, and sinful - just as we are. But Jesus Chirst is our Joshua- It is He Who crushes our giants and leads us in obedience to the Lord. The Book of Joshua is given to us so that we will realize that Jesus can conquer anything, and we are promised victory through Him-

JERICHO Today we are looking at the story of Joshua leading Israel in the defeat of the city of Jericho, where a miracle of God caused the walls of the city to fall down so that Israel could begin their actual entrance into the Promised Land after crossing the river Jordan. This city was the first of many that Israel was to occupy in their conquest and possession of the Promised Land.   We saw how God brought Israel through the Jordan into the Land of Promise through the miracle of holding back the waters of the flooding Jordan River. The miracle came about through the ark being carried into the water by the twelve priests. The ark represented the presence of God - and the twelve priests, one for each tribe represented ALL the people. This also represents ALL of us as humanity, entering into a new way of life through Jesus (our Joshua) It could have seemed at the time of the crossing of the Jordan that Israel had arrived at last and were now IN the Land, and in one sense they had arrived and were IN the Land, but in reality, possession of the Land had only just begun. The promise of possessing the Land was tied to the promise; Deuteronomy 6:11 I will give you large and beautiful cities which you did not build, houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, hewn-out wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant. All this was yet to come and besides, they were to grow into a mighty Nation in the Earth that represented a living God in the Heavens.  We now come to the first obstacle in their way to going in and possessing the Land – They had to conquer Jericho. They were told that Jericho had to be defeated and devoted to God as his holy place, and it was for Israel an enemy enclave occupied mostly by the Amorites.Jericho means ‘a place of favour’ and ‘the place of palms’, regarded as the oasis of all oases in Canaan. Jericho is the most ancient walled city in history, its walls having been destroyed and rebuilt over thousands of years. In Joshua’s time it had outer walls 2 metres thick and 5 metres high plus one tower, with higher inner fortification walls. Surrounding the outer wall was a ditch over 8 metres wide by 3 metres deep, cut through solid bedrock. The total area of the upper city and fortification system was about nine acres, and the city at the time housed only a few thousand people. However more people from the surrounding area would have fled to Jericho at the time, terrified by the sight of over two million Israelites with thousands of head of cattle creating an enormous cloud of dust that would have been visible from afar as they slowly advanced.   Everything that would happen from now on for Israel would belong to a new order of the plan and purpose of God. They were now called upon to take responsibility for their part in the accomplishment of God in his purposes. One small example was that now having crossed the Jordan the manna ceased falling from Heaven and they had to get their own food from the land. The battle of Jericho was a strategic disciplined operation for all the people of Israel.  THE BATTLEOF JERICHO Joshua 5:13 Joshua went and stood before Jericho. He looked up and saw a man standing in front of him, with his drawn sword in His hand. Joshua went to Him and said, “Are You for us or for our enemies?”He said, “Neither, for I am the commander of the army of the LORD. Now I have come.” Then Joshua fell with his face to the ground and worshipped. Then he said, “What does my Lord wish to say to His servant?” The commander of the army of the LORD said to Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.”  This special place was not just to remain an enemy fortress but a holy place of God and everything in Jericho had to be devoted to The Lord. The commander of the army of the Lord was obviously Jesus and not an angel, because he allowed Joshua to worship him (Whenever people worshiped angels in the Bible the angels told them not to worship them because they were not God but just an angel), and Joshua called him lord (the same root word as Adonai). Joshua 6:2 the Lord said to Joshua, "Jericho and its king and all its mighty warriors are already defeated, for I have given them to you! Your entire army is to walk around the city once a day for six days, followed by seven priests walking ahead of the Ark, each carrying a trumpet made from a ram's horn. On the seventh day you are to walk around the city seven times, with the priests blowing their trumpets. Then, when they give one long, loud blast, all the people are to give a mighty shout, and the walls of the city will fall down; then move in upon the city from every direction." When they first came to the Jordan after being in the wilderness for forty years they all crossed the river safely because the twelve priests were obedient in their responsibility to carry the presence of God, even into the turbulent Jordan. The rest of the people just had to follow at a distance, but in this new way of life they were partners with him in the execution of his plans and purpose as his children and as the heirs of his inheritance.This was a disciplined operation of both marshalled action and restraint from every one of them. Israel were not a battle-ready trained army and they didn’t have to be just yet, because God was giving them the victory in a miraculous way. This time instead of twelve priests carrying the ark, seven priests carried the presence of God. There were another seven priests in front of those priests blowing the trumpets. A company of armed men was to lead the priests and a rear guard of armed men was to march behind the priests, and as they were to keep silence for the whole period of that time – in contrast to the murmuring and complaining from the previous generation that wandered in the wilderness. And ALL the people were to give the victory shout at the end to bring down the walls. The number seven is significant in the Bible and is symbolic of the completion and fulness of meaning of the finality God’s purposes in the earth.(Seven days creation and rest – the complete work of both the creative work of God and of our communion with God). Seven priests carried the ark. (The completeness of the presence of God).Seven trumpets were blown. They walked once around the city each day and seven times around the city on the seventh day, and the seventh time on the seventh day the trumpets were to sound the victory blast then everyone gave the victory shout, and the walls.   THE STORY OF US TODAY.1Corinthians 10:11 Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were lessons for us, written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the age has come.These lessons for us, is the ‘us’ of all humanity. The Apostle Paul did not just write this to a church in Corinth but to all of humanity, to know the story of the redeeming work of God throughout history.   WHAT IS REDEMPTION? To redeem means to bring something that was lost into being found again, something that was out of order to be reordered, something that was malformed to be transformed, something that was broken to be restored. What had been broken between God and ‘us’?Communion with God and humanity had been broken in Adam, but God did not give up on the fulfillment of his original purpose for the whole human race, to be in communion with him and to be his friend and partner in his plan and purpose for his creation. God chose one Nation Israel to represent all of us as the example of his redemption for all mankind. So Israel had to go through trial after trial of faith and trust in God, and the trial of those lessons show that they could not fully trust God. Finally Israel gave birth to Jesus, who fully and completely trusted God on our behalf.  So what do the walls of Jericho represent spiritually, for us today?For us those walls represent the wall of resistance around our hearts which is our human struggle of independence. We need to allow the presence of God to surround us just like the presence of God was walked around the walls seven time seven and the walls came down. God desires to capture our hearts and is able to bring us into communion and partnership with himself by surrounding us with his presence. In those days the territory of the Promised Land was actual land but now the territory is the soil of our hearts. They were told that Jericho had to be defeated and devoted to God as his holy place. So just as Jericho behind the walls had to become holy so do our hearts. God also made a decree that the walls of Jericho were never to be rebuilt – and they weren’t! (Joshua 6:26). This work of God in capturing our hearts is a step by step process and it can be painful as there are lots of things in our personal garden that have to be uprooted or pulled down.  This becomes the unrelenting redeeming process of the mindfuness of God toward us in bringing order out of disorder. Our response of faith to God in his creative reordering of all things trusts in his working all things in our lives together for good. God’s first act of creation was one of bringing light into darkness, and that creative act has never ceased to operate.  Everything at any one moment in time is in need of that reordering process because nothing is yet completely transformed. We ourselves constantly create disorder within our lives because of our own limitations, and creation is always colliding within itself, changing from one form of arrangement and energy into another. But we have within ourselves in union with God the creative power to see our lives and everything in them being transformed according to God’s plan, from hope to hope, one moment and one day at a time. We can be co-workers with God in creating the future with God through what we do with him and through him in the present moment. This is the responsibility we are given. The world at this time is in its greatest need of change. You or I cannot change the world; we cannot even change another person, but we can let God change us. When we do that, that is when everything in our world is invited into the space of creative transformation that we have created. This is how the world could be changed. If there were enough people today ready and willing to accept and embrace that privilege and  responsibility we would witness the transformation of humanity, spirit, soul, and body. This is the hope that is always before us, that this transformation is happening moment by moment as we become consciously mindful of his presence and creative goodwill towards us at all times and in every situation. 

From War Zones to Ultra Podiums: How Running Makes Joshua Stevens Thrive In this episode, Coach Claire digs in to find out how Joshua went from that shocking diagnosis to running his first ultra at age 44, and eventually becoming the Badwater Ultra Cup Champion. We also learn how he approaches training and injury prevention, his plant-based nutrition, and how he could run for 24 hours on a treadmill. Joshua has incredible insight and is an inspiration, even if you don’t plan on running any farther than a local 5K. His experiences overcoming his injury, racing for 24 hours, and helping to pace and crew for friends are enlightening and huge confidence builders. Questions Joshua is asked: 4:42 How do you look at aging and running performance? 6:27 What percentage of your training goes to all the ‘extra’ things beyond actually running? 7:17 How can people learn to stop worrying and love the treadmill? 9:38 What was it like to go through your spinal injury, receive a diagnosis that you’d never run again, and then actually start running again from scratch? 11:41 What were the steps you took to start running all over again? 12:52 What is the experience of pacing, and being paced, like? 14:49 How do you talk to somebody you’re pacing through the Dark Times of a race? 15:55 What is it like to be running an ultra really hard in the middle of the night and being sleep deprived? 18:25 What other learnings from your military experience carry over into your running? 19:36 How did you develop your running form and what tips would you share with us? 21:18 Is it easier to have better form in the gym than on the road? 22:47 What do you normally eat before and during a run? 26:14 Do you have any mantras that help you get through races? 27:59 Can you develop a positive voice when you’re not racing? 30:11 What advice would you give yourself back when you started running? 31:27 What is the best gift running has given you? 33:03 How can people connect with you? 33:35 What’s on your horizon?   Quotes by Joshua: “It’s what you do with the other 20 hours. At least two-thirds to three-quarters of everything that I do is in support of the actual running.”   “If you have a negative mindset from the moment you step on the (treadmill) belt, it’s never going to be a good experience.”   “I’m just exceedingly stubborn. If you want me to do something, tell me not to do it, and I will make it my life’s mission; it will become my purpose to do it.”   “I didn’t know what I’d been missing until I got to pace and crew for some of my friends.”   “Where sleep is absolutely imperative is in the training and recovery cycles. I typically get between 8 and 10 hours of sleep a night. I try to be routine in that sometime between 9:00 and 10:00 is when I’m going down and getting up organically between 6:00 and 7:00.” Want more awesome interviews and advice? Subscribe to our iTunes channel Mentioned in this podcast:  Run To The Top Winners Circle Facebook Community RunnersConnect Facebook page Art Loeb Trail Run Rabbit 50 and 100 miler Spring Energy Products Wolf Pack - vegan-endurance-meal-for-athletes SPEEDNUT WITH CAFFEINE (Vegan) - Extreme Efforts Canaberry (Vegan)- Any Distance Fuel Kodiak100 Antelope Island 50-Miler Badwater 135 The Javelina Jundred   Follow Joshua on: Instagram Facebook We really hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of Run to the Top. The best way you can show your support of the show is to share this podcast with your family and friends and share it on your Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media channel you use. The more people who know about the podcast and download the episodes, the more I can reach out to and get top running influencers, to bring them on and share their advice, which hopefully makes the show even more enjoyable for you!    

Special Presentation on Agile Methodology Joshua: I am Joshua from Dorks Delivered. So, cool stuff I've done in the past are columns for an online entrepreneur magazine so that's something that's happened more recently. Published a book, a couple ago which I'm pretty excited about. Some of the different stuff and ways that we do business has been featured on news.com.au I've got a YouTube channel and a podcast as I already sort of pointed out there. Which you guys will all be podcast famous in a few weeks so, it's pretty exciting. Woo! In one way or another I've been a business owner for 19 years, with Dorks Delivered for 12 years. And I'm pretty keen on automating things. So my home, my lifestyle, and everything is automated wherever possible. Learn more about Agile Methodology at dorksdelivered.com.au A business owner needs to be able to automate everything. Not just when they're in their business and trying to get their processes and their staff all accounted and right, they need to make sure they're doing that in their home lifestyle as well, because if you're sitting at home and you're vacuuming, well you're not vacuuming if you're sitting are you? But if you're at home and you're vacuuming then you're wasting time a lot of the time. You need make sure that you're looking at every single process. That's the fish pond that I've automated, which goes through, uses the fertiliser coming from the, or the excrement from the fish is fertiliser across all the gardens, and does it all automatically. Looks at the amount of evaporation and goes nuts. Any questions? I can see a few confused faces. Speaker 5: It looks like a spa. Joshua: It does look like a spa! It's actually a dual tank fish, so you can have two different breeds of fish, sit out there in a little pond and have a look and they've got a little putt putt area up the top there. That I build around, so, just, fun stuff. You've got to automate your life. So with Dorks Delivered as I said, I'm an automation specialist through south-east Queensland. And what we do for business is remove poor time, time-poor, we bring time back to business owners by improving efficiencies and removing repetitious tasks. So I also help with sales and marketing to an extent through some of their social media aspects, but mostly all just as a holistic view, and point you in the right direction of how to get to the right person. So, what is agile development? As we sort of discussed, there's a waterfall methodology which is where you're producing something and then you're saying "okay now it's working, but it might have broken", and then you're going through a very, very, a process that's in series. There's a clear start and there's a clear end, but there's nothing in the, necessarily in the middle that isn't defined. It has a start, has an end and then the product is created. The problem with that is it's incredibly, tell me if I'm talking to quickly, because I say it and I just get excited. But the problem with it is, agile development, has a start, has an end, but costs a lot of money and doesn't make money most of the time throughout the process. And so the whole process of agile development costs a lot of money, needs a lot of capital and there's no money coming in from it. So, as I said, in a nutshell, it's creating the smallest most basic item that's scalable, that you can have sent off to your clients or sent out to market. So a good example would be Uber. Whoop I've gone too far. So Uber created their app on their phone so that you can rideshare and so on and so forth. Their intention is, and was, was and still is, to create autonomous vehicles but they needed to have acceleration, data and any other points of black spots and what-not... Of what's going around the area. So, Uber's intention is to create an autonomous vehicle, but they created an app that allowed for ridesharing, and used people, the meat in a seat, to achieve their objectives until they were able to have AI to a spot where they were able to then have it work. Because AI was going to be way too expensive, so they created a small product and then continued to develop the product, but had a known ending, but had a profitable product to start off with. So, any questions on how that all works? Any participation you get a prize. Speaker 4: Josh, it's just a, yes a question. So you said like, with agile development, there's like, you'd don't really get any sort of like, the potential return on investment until the end. So what you're saying now is with Uber, if you look at their agile development, you know, the intention was at the end was to have the AI intelligence that will make them, you know, self-automated. But what, so, they have got a return now, by implementing the first basic part of it. Joshua: So agile development gives you a return straight away. Or very, very close to straight away. Traditional models, or the waterfall model, means that you, they would have said, "we're going to make an autonomous vehicle" and they're going to say "okay, it's going to cost us billions of dollars but we have a clear defined outcome". Instead they've said "let's break this down into profitable steps, where we can then, use that". So although Uber appears as if they're in competition with DiDi and Ola and Lyft overseas, they're not really in competition with them and that's why Uber's balance sheets look like they're running at a loss. Joshua: Significantly. That's right. And then you look at others and you go "wow they're doing exactly the same thing, how are they running at such a loss?". So, and that's where their money is going, is- Speaker 4: But you generally find that people who are first, are the ones who end up losing all the money and then the others jump on it and like, like the DiDis and the Olas, et cetera, now they're using the same, but Uber paved it. Joshua: It depends, like McDonald's and Hungry Jack's could have the same argument. McDonald's and Hungry Jack's are pretty much exactly the same, but you've got McDonald's and it's definitely first, and it's still out there and I'd, it's definitely larger. It all depends. Uber's definitely got the name. No one says "I'm going to catch an Ola", they're going to go catch an Uber. They've changed the market. They've made it a level playing ground. From my house into Brisbane, it was a 20 dollar Uber, now it's a 46 dollar Uber, to get to the airport was 28 dollars and now it's something like 55 dollars. So all DiDi's done is they've just levelled the playing field. What Uber did is they said "let's crush", they did what Netflix did to Blockbuster, "let's crush the taxi drivers, once we've crushed taxi drivers, increase our profits". But you have the early adopters, and then you have the latecomers, and the early adopters and their... I'm not sure if I'm, that makes sense? The curve of where everyone sits in the adoption cycle. They would've known that someone was going to come along and copy the idea. But they would have had such a deep footing and grounding in what they've done, that it wouldn't have mattered, it doesn't matter a whole bunch because their end goal isn't to be competing with DiDi or Ola, it's just to be using their, the points of data. So for us, it looks like the same app, but what they're actually gaining, and the intelligence they're gaining from the app is far greater than what DiDi or Ola has does that make sense? For the questions, I'm going to give, you get a pair of fun, where is it? Green glasses! All right we can match. So has anyone heard of Beyond Meat? So Beyond Meat is this meat that has more protein than steak, more protein than most hamburgers, takes up 99 percent less landmass, has nearly all the health benefits of consuming meat, burns and cooks like meat, has haem in it the same as you have haemoglobin in meat, and to anyone that has not tried one of these, it tastes exactly like you've had meat. Has anyone tried any of these before? Grill'd, yeah they have them at Grill'd. They've only just recently come in there. And they're absolutely amazing. I tried when I went, you can't tell, if I gave that to a vegetarian, they would have sent it back to the kitchen they said "oh no this is terrible, this is meat". It, yeah, it flame grills a whole lot exactly the same. Anyway so, they created one product. Which is the Beyond Meat patty. And the Beyond Meat patty is absolutely revolutionary with the way that it works, and it means that it'll be a sustainable product that still gives you all the same benefits as meat into the future. Regardless of health and life choices and stuff, their intention was to have a huge range of products. But they obviously can't do that and be profitable if they're working on all these products at once. So they developed the easiest product that was able to sneak into the market as easy as possible. So, if you have a look at the predominant meat eaters, it'd definitely be America ever ever else, obviously India and Asia are significantly more vegetarian than they are anything else, even though they have a huge population. Jeff: So why does agile make a difference? Surely [crosstalk 00:11:24] the traditional project methodology, your goal was to produce the simplest product into the market as quickly as possible, why does agile make a difference? Joshua: It's about improving upon the original product, with a bigger end goal than just the initial project. Joshua: So the idea is testing the waters without getting your feet wet. You can use the agile methodology for anything, even marketing. So, as I said here, you can slowly develop your business without having huge cost outlay, is one of the big things. So from a marketing perspective, there are different ways that people use the agile methodology. So Dad and I, we've started a craft brewery. We've got ten different products that we've got on tap. We haven't got the licensing to sell it or anything like that, and the licensing to sell it and what not is quite expensive, when you don't know if it's going to work and people are actually going to enjoy the taste of your brew. So what we've done is we've created a survey, where when people fill out the survey, because we can give the beers away for free, when people fill out the survey and they try they beers and they go "yes this is fantastic", we pay a pre-order to buy a six pack for instance, when we have 6000 people on that list we then know that there's enough of a test there that we know that people would be interested in buying it, without having to then fork out the money for larger infrastructure and any of the licensing costs and so on and so forth. Speaker 4: So what will it cost you though, to give those 6000 beers for free? Joshua: Well the beers for free to start off with, the 6000 beers are quite cheap. Maybe 30 cents a beer or something like that. Speaker 4: Oh, okay. Joshua: Yeah, so it's very, very cheap. And in scale, cheaper than that. So that's why my wallet, it's better to be producing something that you can test the waters with. So if you need any help with the agile development process or anything in your business we can jump in and have a look at some of the projects that you're doing and make sure that you are doing them in the most efficient and effective way. So, what Steve Jobs did, is he has six different iPhones in front of his stand. On the six different iPhones one of them played videos, one of them received SMSs and calls, one of them played music and so on and so forth. So one of them had different apps that showed maps, and all these different things. Not a single iPhone could do all the things at once without crashing. Additionally, if you tried to, and you accidentally did it, it may start working and then crash mid presentation. So to save face, while he was showing everyone this revolutionary new technology, each different person with agile methodology was able to create the certain function working on each device, but not all of them together. He went up and said, "this is world-changing, this is revolutionary, everyone's going to have one of these in their pocket". And he's not half wrong. What he did there it was just fancy video editing, as he put the phone down and then picked it up, he already knew that it was going to be exactly the spot where it needed to be. Additionally to that, they had a tower that was put there by Verizon that, that was only paired to their phones that were on the stand, to make sure that they had absolutely lightning-fast speed, that had no congestion with everyone else that was in the audience. So, that is, that bit isn't really agile, that's just tricky. But having the different phones, knowing that you can do it somewhat, but you don't have the capital to continue producing a single device, and you don't know how well it's going to be received, this allowed for a world audience to see, pre-order the devices, continue to have the money to then build it out. Does that make sense? Does that kind of answer your question before on the, how it can be varied with the approach for agile development as opposed to just creating a full device from start to finish? Jeff: I'd be interested to know what your thoughts are on the difference between lean, agile and scrum, as delivering outcomes for small business owners like us. Joshua: With communication and branding you'd say that a lot of that would come to their marketing, and how well they're being shown on the web, making sure that everything's consistent. Yeah? Jeff: Oh, well I'm thinking about story-telling, so, if Steve Jobs you just gave is the best example of, any marketing story-telling, best businesses telling their stories. Joshua: That's correct. But if you went to a small business and you said "you need to make sure that your story resonates with your ideal client, and you need to make sure this you do that and this", and you said that the marketing budget is going to be $200,000 to make sure that we get your message our the appropriate people. Most business owners are going to be like "I can't afford that, I know that that's what I need to do, but I can't afford that". So let's test the water, use a long tail key word, sniper marketing, target a very test small audience, because you can't afford the $200,000 even thought you know that's going to work. You test a smaller audience, a subset niche of their target market, and then from that go "okay, that has worked, that is now bringing in an income", especially for startup business or something like, even if the income's not huge, it's bringing in then an income to then afford to then push the money towards the $200,000. So it's about, that would still be testing the waters, as opposed to knowing that you've got from start to finish the full solution. Speaker 4: Isn't that just the normal way that you would start a business? [crosstalk 00:29:17] don't startups just do that? Joshua: Do what, sorry? Speaker 4: Exactly what you're saying. You start with a smaller part of the market, make some money. Joshua: You should. That's exactly right. But even if you know that you need to have the larger portion of the market, or you're not necessarily a larger portion, but you need to market and brand in a certain way. Like I know that for instance, YouTube, cost the business a lot of money to produce a channel, it doesn't necessarily have a whole bunch of views, but the views that are does have, convert, and work towards our end goal in our business. So it's a functional platform, but most businesses when they start out they know, "if I have a YouTube channel I'll be able to get my message across more easily, be able to tell the story about what we do", but you won't necessarily be able to afford to be able to tell your story to the audience that needs to hear it. So, does that, am I explaining that right? I don't know, does that sound fair? So, sometimes you don't know how to go about finishing creating a product to service, and that's where we've sort of just said: "agile developmental design is your answer". That's what Steve Jobs did to make sure that they had a product, although they would have had the money and the market research that said "this product is going to work", they may not have wanted to spend the capital on something that might have flopped because there already was the Nokia phone that could do nearly everything, but it just didn't have the right story-telling and the right approach to it. So, security is another big objective towards agile development. If you don't have good security in your business, if you don't have good security practices, it will delay and push things out. One of the things that a lot of businesses, has everyone seen the HTTPS at the start of their website? So like, up until a couple of years ago, there was this thing, a vulnerability in it, that had been there for decades, for about a decade. Called heart bleed. Apple was aware of it. Apple had protected all their systems. Apple didn't let everyone else know about that. Apple was able to snoop and see any details that were deemed encrypted on everyone else's system. That's terrible. The OpenSSL protocol was able to be broken into. Certain people knew about it and other people didn't. The person that developed that was in their garage, just a home business that developed this and gave it away for free for everyone to use, and then everyone abused that, and that then opened up to mass hysteria when that came out of, the security problem came out about a year ago. So that's where you need to make sure you keep your eyes on the process and your security around all of the processes. Because if you don't, you, you'll have delays in the way that your product's going to be released.  

This celebrity ghostwriter says there are six things that every piece of content needs to have in order to be considered influential.  This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, celebrity ghostwriter Joshua Lisec shares his six pillars of influential content - a formula that any marketer can use to create better content, whether it be for a blog or a full-blown book.  In addition to being an accomplished author himself, Joshua has ghostwritten more than 40 books for celebrities, well-known entrepreneurs and other people who have compelling stories they want to tell, and he's used the six pillars in each of these cases to create books that have gone on to become best sellers and produce significant business for his clients.  Highlights from my conversation with Joshua include: Before Joshua agrees to work with business clients, he holds a manuscript strategy session in which he identifies what that client wants a book to accomplish for their business. Once he begins working with clients, Joshua starts by reviewing their existing body of work which can include anything from blogs they've written to YouTube videos, to case studies on their website. When setting expectations, Joshua tells his clients to expect to put in an hour a week for the first few months. Next he looks at the books that are in your category. What are your future readers saying about those books? What did they love? What did they not like? What did they buy hoping to learn but did not? By looking at what the market is saying, he can narrow down everything that you could write about to what you must write about. He suggests going to Amazon, GoodReads and Barnes & Noble and looking at the neutral (as opposed to very positive or negative) reviews of books to see what people are saying about them. When Joshua begins to write, he ensures that everything he creates follows the 6 pillars of influential content. The first pillar is credibility. This is your lived experience of how you made progress, how you got from where you were in the land of suck to success, how you're going to help people achieve that as well. Even if that success is merely progress. That's good enough. The second pillar is connection. This is where you're telling your readers what they actually want to read. You know this because you've gone and looked at neutral feedback of other books. So you know what your readers want, what they don't, you structure your book to give them what they want, but also make sure they're following a step-by-step path to get there. The third pillar is compelling. Write at the fifth-grade level. Simple English, easy to read. Anyone who's a PhD can understand it. Anyone who's a kid can understand it. The fourth pillar is counter industry. Name and shame the bad ideas. Not the companies, not the brands. The bad ideas, and explain why they did not work for your readers. You create a special intimate trust bond when you do that. The fifth pillar is a call to action. Make it stupid simple for people to get into your funnel. Make it better, faster, cheaper, easier than DIY-ing it, following the instruction inside of the book, literally copying by hand into their journal. And give them the templates, download one email, everything. Circulation is the sixth pillar. This is where you're applying your advice to literally as many people as possible, but you're still targeting your specific avatar, your target market by of having 80% of the examples or so be your target market with the other 20% being people who are just wildly not, but that's okay because you're still reaching that broad audience. You are also writing for your ideal reader. Resources from this episode: Check out Joshua's website Use the Book Ideas Generator to figure out what topic you should write about Take Joshua's Free Training Program Learn more about ghost publishing Visit Joshua's ghostwrite and prosper website Listen to the podcast to learn more about the six pillars of influential content and how you can apply them to your own marketing copy. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And this week my guest is Joshua Lisec, who is a celebrity ghostwriter. Joshua, tell me more about what that is. Joshua Lisec (Guest): Sure thing, Kathleen. Glad to be on with you today. As you said, I am indeed a celebrity ghostwriter. In fact, I am the only award-winning, celebrity recommended, number one international best-selling, certified professional ghostwriter on the planet. Joshua and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: Oh my God. There were so many adjectives in there. Joshua: Indeed, indeed. You could say writing books is a bit of an obsession of mine. I've ghosted over 40 of them in addition to my own books I've authored over the years. I have worked with everyone from your A-list celebrity types, your big day entrepreneurs, the breakout stars of tomorrow and the occasional great grandma wants to share with the kids what it was like to grow up during the war. Kathleen: Great. I am fascinated by this topic because I've always wanted to write a book, but I'm one of the many, many legions of people who talks a great game and then never puts pen to paper. And if somebody is listening they might be wondering, well, what does this have to do with inbound marketing? And what I thought was so interesting about it is that you have actually worked with people who are looking to write books with the ultimate objective of generating business, not just telling their life story. And you have some really interesting insights into what it takes to write a book that will accomplish that goal and then also how to promote it. So I'm excited to dig in. Joshua: As am I. When should you consider writing a book? Kathleen: Yeah, let's start with if you have somebody come to you who says, "I have a business and I think that writing a book could be a great way to generate leads or build my business or et cetera. Talk me through like is there a conversation you have with them to determine whether that in fact is the right way to accomplish that goal? Joshua: Absolutely. We have what's called a manuscript strategy session which we get into the details, what is it that you want your book to do for your business? Every entrepreneur, business owner, marketer that I work with who wants to write a book, they see an end result. So I want to mail copies of my book, autograph with the handwritten letter to my dream 100 prospects. I've got clients, they do that, they don't even promote the book. They just do that and they get their multimillion-dollar deals, when you add up all the consulting and the gigs that come from that. You have people who use their book as kind of a springboard to join an online program, very successful track record there. So when we get into is what do you see your book doing for your business that you cannot do without the book, because a book is like a key that opens any door of authority, influence and credibility that you desire. So we have to get clear on which one it is that you wanted to open. That's the very first thing. So we're talking about the end game, first part of the conversation. Then we get into what this book needs to do, what content it needs to share in order to make that happen. And there's a specific model that I use with every author. It's called the 6 Pillars Of Influential Content. It's a model to create well, influential content, whether that's a 300-page book or a 300-word blog post. It applies to all of them because any content, any message that you're getting out into the world needs to pull people in, persuade them to do it your way and then gently push them, propel them to take the next step and ascend inside of your business. It's a true inbound marketing project. So that's what we get into in this conversation. We'll get into the six pillars later on here in this conversation, you and I Kathleen, but we want to make sure that your message your book, idea, does in fact check all six box so to speak, that you have everything, and there's some authors that don't. So I'm very frank with people like, it doesn't make sense for you to write a book at this point if you don't have the track record yet. Although I will say that most people who wonder if they do have a track record or not, those are the ones who need to be writing the books. It's the one who were like, "I got this." Who usually have no idea what they're talking about. So that's something that I found and it's been interesting, is if you're questioning like, maybe I should, maybe I should, there's a good chance you have long ago checked all six boxes inside of your business and it does make sense to write a book to generate inbound leads. What does it take to write a book? Kathleen: Oh, I have so many questions. I guess first would be, I talked about how I've always wanted to write a book, but I've never done it. What kind of expectation setting do you do with people who come to you saying they think they want to do this, as far as like the amount of time and effort and an input that's required to produce a really good book? Joshua: Sure thing. Yeah, this is not one of those processes where it's like hey, I'm going to interview you, question and answer like a journalist, transcribe the answers, fix the typos, hey, it's a book. No, it's not. It's barely a booklet. It's a transcript that's probably not worth the bytes of data that make it up in the digital file. We do it different. Rather than say, "Oh, question asked, question answered." We want to start with the body of work you already have so everyone who comes to me, even if they're at the beginning of their career as an entrepreneur, maybe they had, 20, 30 years in corporate world, now to launch the consulting business and they want to book to propel them to credibility into that go-to expert status and then industry, you're starting with something. Maybe it's articles you've written, a newsletter you put out, maybe you've given speeches, you have presentation. I had one client who, he had over 250,000 words worth of YouTube videos when we transcribed all of them. So I felt like Michelangelo carving away everything that wasn't David from this block of marble so to speak. So everyone is starting with something. So we want to first see what do you already have that we could potentially repurpose for this book. Obviously kind of massage it into something different, make it be what it needs to be for this book, but there's something there. Are there success stories? Are there clients you work with that have done amazing things? Do you want to perhaps connect me with some of your clients and we can interview them and put together their success stories into this book? Even if you have very few, very few things you need to get this book going, I always tell my clients, "Expect to put in about an hour a week for the first two to three months. That's it." So people are like, "Wow, I can definitely do that." Kathleen: Less than I was expecting, I'll be honest. Joshua: Yeah, it's a lot more attractive to do that than to try to DIY it and you're getting up at 5:00 and staring at a blank Word document for two or three hours and then you're like, "Screw this, I'm onto something else." Kathleen: Yeah. Joshua: So the reason why we don't need that much time is because once we have our kind of body of work and repurpose this material. What we do next is we go and look at the books that are in your category. What are your future readers saying about those books? What did they love? What did they not like? What did they buy hoping to learn but did not? That's your opening. So by looking with the market is saying we narrow down everything that you could write about to what you must write about. That combined with the material you already have gives us a solid direction and structure for the book. So these few conversations over a couple of months, an hour a week fills in all those additional gaps. We have everything we need for a winning profitable lead generating book. Kathleen: So are you basically then going onto like amazon.com and reading reviews? Is that how you're doing that research? Joshua: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Goodreads, yes. One of my clients is in the reputation management industry. In fact, he's the CEO of the largest one in the eastern hemisphere and he's taught me something, working with him I've learned quite a bit about authentic reviews and what do buyers look for when they look at reviews, what is most important? How can you tell a fake review? So there's a lot of five-star reviews that are obviously fake. Even if it says verified, unfortunately. And there's a lot of one-star reviews that it's the competing author who's paid for these fake reviews on their competition. That's very common, unfortunately. So we look at the neutral reviews, which by and large tend to be honest authentic reviews, the two, three and four star reviews. That's where people have put some thought into what they want to say. Like, "I bought this book because I wanted to learn about topic A, B, C. And it was promised in the book description on Amazon. I saw in the book cover jacket. I saw them on a webinar promoting their book." I said, "Hey, it covers this topic I really want to learn about. It's critical for my business." You buy the book. There's one paragraph. So yes, it was mentioned, but you're going to say this in the real like, "Hey, I bought the book to learn A, B, C. I got one paragraph." And you'll see patterns across the different places where there are reviews, even on the Google Play or Apple iBooks for example, you'll start seeing patterns where people are saying the same sort of things over and over. The author said they would cover this, they did not. I felt like they over-promised and under-delivered. That's a gap in the market that you can fill because what you don't want to do is to write about something that no one cares about, that is irrelevant or has already been covered. We see that as well. People say, "Just stop talking about topic X, Y, Z. I've seen it enough." And you'll see that often, like, "This book is just rehashed advice from Russell Brunson or from Tony Robbins or for Carrie Green or whoever. We've seen this again. We're done. Let's try something different." So that also is kind of a warning sign for you to avoid that topic or to give a unique take on it that has been seen before. Kathleen: I love that advice to look for the neutral reviews because you're right, nobody's going to plant a bunch of neutral ones and there's also ... But even if the positive ones are genuine, there's not a lot to necessarily learn from that as much as there is from the neutral ones where there's something somebody thought was missing. So that's a great piece of advice. Is it fair to say, when I was listening to you talk earlier about how you start working with authors, is it fair to say that if you are someone who is a prolific content creator, like if you have a YouTube channel, if you're blogging a lot, that you are probably a really good candidate for this kind of thing, just because of because you do have so much out there already? Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. Because in that case you have this vast body of work that to you is overwhelming. You're at a strange paradox because there's so many things you can write about, but when you start you type chapter one, you don't know what to say. And like, "I could say this and this and this and that topic and that topic and all these other things." Well, the process that I've designed is one that helps you sort out the topics you shouldn't write about. They're fine to have on your YouTube channel, a course about it for example, maybe you have an e-book that you've done before, a series of webinars. But the process will help you identify the most profitable content that should be in this book in order to generate those leads, get the media appearances, the speaking invitations, converting people from being a reader into a high ticket client, maybe a member of your exclusive mastermind. So that a $15 sale becomes a $15,000 lifetime customer value relationship. The 6 pillars of influential content Kathleen: Interesting. So somebody decides they're going to move forward, you do the strategy session with them, you then go review, you look at the reviews of the other books in the space to see kind of what people are hoping for, what might have been missing, what makes a great book. And then you're ready to begin. Can you talk a little bit about the six pillars that you alluded to earlier? Joshua: Absolutely. As we get into that, I do want to mention that the manuscript size of the session is at no cost to authors because that's where we want to make sure that it actually makes sense for us to work together, is a book in the cards for you. So that, of course, is a complimentary experienced authors. With that said, let's get into those 6 Pillars Of Influential Content and how you get those in the book. So everyone listening right now, think about your book idea because that's where we're going to go. If you can check all six pillars, and I'll show you how, or if it's clear that it's not a right fit for you, that's okay. Maybe the time will come for you to write a book. Kathleen: I love this. This is my opportunity to see if that that kernel of a book that I've been harboring in my head is real. So let's do it. Joshua: Perfect. The first pillar of influential content is credibility. By this I do not mean, "Hey, I know what I'm talking about. I have the credentials and I have the experience, 20 years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Basically what's on your resume or CV. That's not what I mean, because what you'll be doing is competing against other authors, who, well they have all the credentials, they have the resume, the cover letter as well. Your credibility is your lived experience, your unique journey from the land of suck to where you are now, success, because what you are as the author is you are a Sherpa, a guide, the person who's taking folks on the journey from again, where they are, where you used to be, to where they want to be, to where you are now. So the best way to build the credibility pillar is to open the book sharing your story, how exactly you did that, how you became this unique expert. In short form content, this could be as quick as a simple sentence that's towards the beginning. And I in fact practice what I preach. At the outset of this call, I built my credibility pillar in this interview, this content, mentioning that I was the only such and such, award-winning celebrity recommended international best-selling certified ghostwriter in the world. No one can touch that. And in your case, you also have a combination of lived experience, yes, credentials, the track record, but the unique story to get to where you are today. So that's the story you want to tell in the first chapter, is build that credibility pillar and then towards the end of the chapter of make this great transition to say, "And now I'm going to help you. Here's how we're going to get there." Give a quick preview what you're going to cover in the book and then list in a glorious row of bullets, a column, you might say, "Here's all the ways your life is going to change." Think of these as action verbs. Second person, you're going to do this and this and this and this and this. The reason why we're doing all this, we're essentially selling the book. We're selling you, the author, in chapter one because people can get it for free on Amazon. I'm the guy who always download the book samples to see if I want to proceed further. So are your readers. You can even go and look at the read more or look inside on Amazon. So the purpose of chapter one, this opening chapter, introduction, whatever you call it, is to sell people on buying the book. Kathleen: So to clarify, you're saying that chapter one will be free? Joshua: Yes, that's just how it is inside of Amazon in our day and age. People will click it, they'll look at the table of contents and they'll look to start checking out chapter one to see if this thing's worthwhile. So that's where you need to sell people on your unique credibility that you're the person, not just how this is a great book. But like, "Wow, I want this person to take me on the journey that they themselves have successfully accomplished so I can get there and reap the rewards as well." Kathleen: Got it. Joshua: That's the best-seller. Kathleen: That's pillar number one, right? Joshua: That's right, credibility. Kathleen: Okay. Joshua: Second pillar is connection and we've already covered this a little bit where we have all the things you could write about, we're connecting marketplace demand with your knowledge base and we're making sure that the contents of this book, look at the table of contents match what people actually want. You are connecting your material to the demand of the marketplace. That's why it's so critical to look at the reviews. So you know what people want to read the next book, that they check out that's in the category that you are. Make sure that the entire structure of the book is including the things that people want to learn from you, but also it's in a linear order. Remember, you're taking people on this journey and all best-selling stories, whether it's fiction, novels, literature, movies television, they follow what's called the hero's journey. We co-op that for nonfiction. It's not a protagonist who's the hero. It's the reader who is the hero. And so what we have to do is connect their story to yours and bring them along with you. And structuring your books that there's a clear outcome, set clear sets of outcomes for them that they're going to learn these things going to have this type of confidence. They're going to be able to do a A, B, C things, get this result, this outcome. That's very, very attractive. That's the purpose of the second pillar, connection. Kathleen: Very cool. I want to go back for one second to the first one, credibility because something was like in my head as you were talking. You talked about credibility needing ... Like you're the expert explaining what your success has been. If somebody's listening, I feel like one of the questions that they might have is, "Well, I'm not this super successful person, I haven't gone on to do great things." Can you maybe put a little bit more definition around what success really means? How high is that bar? Joshua: Sure. Sure. So I think Tim Ferriss did a really good job of answering that question about 12 years ago with the four-hour work week, which is that if you are further along, then the next person, to that person, you're the expert. You're the expert on the progress that you have made. So it's not like it's totally perfect. Authors that I have, in many cases they've gone on a journey, they've achieved some sort of success, but bare minimum progress. And let's be real, if you haven't achieved progress for yourself or for your customers your clients, you don't even have a business. Like you're a wantreprenuer at this point. And I don't even think you would be the ideal listener for this podcast. So for everyone listening, it doesn't just have to be your personal story. It can be your journey of creating success stories. I have a lot of people who own different types of agencies, graphic agencies, digital marketing agencies. So for them, their credibility is their journey taking other people to the land of profitability and spending less time in their marketing campaign. So they can kind of borrow from that success and they might say like, "Hey, I can do the same for you." Kathleen: I love that Tim Ferriss thing that you mentioned because that really puts it in perspective and I think would take the pressure off of a lot of people who might otherwise disqualify themselves from this. I deal with this all the time in my job. I do marketing and I have a lot of experience, but I don't consider myself by any stretch to be a top marketing expert. But it's funny, I'll have a lot of people come to me and ask me for advice and it's because for whatever reason they feel like I have more experience than they do. I think when you frame it in that light, you can all of a sudden start to see yourself differently. I don't have to be an expert to everyone. I just have to be an expert to the particular audience that I'm writing to. Joshua: That's right. You've made more progress, and that progress is worth at least 20 bucks. Kathleen: Yes. Joshua: To learn about to how to achieve that as well. Kathleen: All right. Okay. So we talked about pillars number one and two. What's pillar number three? Joshua: Compelling. So this is where you don't want to write a textbook. I find that people who come from 8:00 to 5:00 world, the corporate world, they tend to knock over this pillar, demolish this pillar, unfortunately. The kind of simple hard-and-fast rule for building the compelling pillar is to write at the fifth grade level. Imagine that you were literally writing for children. The fifth grade reading level is the industry standard within publishing. Get too abstract, use too much jargon, then you're going to fly over people's heads, they're gonna have to reread it. If they can't visualize it, if it's not a sensory experience, if it is not a metaphor or an analogy to introduce something, then it's not going to be compelling, it's going to be cryptic, which is not one of the six pillars of influential content. The inverse of this. So always think about how can you make it simpler, what's the simplest way you can say this with as few words as possible. Cut all those prepositions out of your sentences. You don't need them. Throw away the adverbs. If you feel like you need the adverbs, it's more likely that your verb isn't strong or descriptive enough. I need to be able to picture exactly what you mean when you use a verb without the adverb thrown in there. Think of adverbs are like salt, too much of it and you just can't. It's a garnish, you might say. So compelling, write at the fifth grade level, use visual language, concrete, simple terms that anyone who doesn't have anything close to your experience, even someone outside of your industry can pick it up, can learn from you and can take action based on that. Kathleen: Joshua, this one pillar is like a masterclass in how to do marketing right, not just how to write great copy, because really this is the biggest mistake I see most marketers make. My audience is full of marketers and it's just unbelievable. They put their marketing hat on, they forget that they're human beings. They speak like marketers, not like humans. They use fancy words that don't mean anything to their audiences because they think it makes them look smarter. It's just uh, marketers, and I love myself and we're the worst. We love using jargon and it's funny because I just a week and a half ago started a new job and this is really resonating with me because I'm coming in to a cybersecurity company where it would be very easy to speak at a level that like even somebody with a PhD couldn't understand because cybersecurity is so complicated. One of the reasons they hired me was because I don't come from that background and they're like, "We need help translating this for the normal person." But it's not even just translating it for the normal person, like boiling it down even further, and I feel like this is such a universal challenge with marketing, with communications in general, is de-complicating the things we're saying. Any further advice on that? When you are working with people, how do you get people out of that habit of making it too complicated? Joshua: Sure. Well, of course, that's one of the things that I do for them, is I bring you- Kathleen: How do you do it? Joshua: I bring it down from the 12th to the fifth grade. Well, one of the things, there's all sorts of different tools that you can use to literally look at what's the reading level of this. It would be the Flesch-Kincaid score, that great average will tell you, "Hey, this is written in 11.8." Who is the end of a junior year of high school. Well, I need to bring it down to that fifth grade? A practical terms of people who want to DIY this, what's your industry? So in this case it would be the cybersecurity. So if you have position that's in the idea of marketing cybersecurity, maybe there's specific solutions or type of technology that it is that you want to be marketing. Here's what you do. You go on to Google, you type in what a technology is. You put that in, that's your first keyword. And then you type Wikipedia Simple English. That will pull up the version of Wikipedia, not the normal one that's kind of like the default for people in the English language, but there's an alternative Wikipedia in Simple English. It's literally one of the languages, German, French, for example, English, Simple English. And go look at how that article describes your product, your technology, its uses, its function. That's more so how you want to be writing in your copy. Kathleen: Okay, how did I not know that this was a thing? Who uses this? How did I not know about Simple English Wikipedia? Joshua: It's very popular in the ESL where the English is a second language community because that's how they kind of get their ... I guess they could say get their brains and the vocabulary around more, I guess you could take industry topics, not so your everyday kind of vernacular English, but rather on specific topics that maybe jargon doesn't easily translate into their native language, well, Wikipedia Simple English is perfect. So that's how you write copy especially in the technical fields. Is consulting the Simple English Wikipedia article on your product or on the technology. Kathleen: That is so fascinating. I feel like as a marketer I want to incorporate that into everything I do now because I mean, that's it. You go to write an email, you need to simplify it. You come up with your about us page in your website, you need to simplify it. It applies to everything we do as marketers. It's all about boiling it down. So I'm like going to bookmark Simple English Wikipedia going forward. So that is an awesome tip. I love it. All right, what's next? I can't wait to hear the next one. Joshua: The fourth pillar is counter industry. And this applies to all sorts of marketing, not just using a book to generate leads for your business or for your clients' businesses. The kind of industry pillar goes like this. I would say this to authors, in digital marketing as an example, there are over 50,000 books that people can buy, why should people buy yours? I usually get a deer in the headlights look at that point like, right. Kathleen: I don't know. Joshua: And now we need to get some clarity like okay, when people come to you, when your prospects come to you, what did they try before that didn't work? Where did they get that advice? Oh, they got it in a TED Talk? Oh, they got it from this famous person who's on the cover of Entrepreneur magazine? Everyone else is following their advice and it's not working anymore? Call that crap out. The counter industry pillar is all about not specifically pointing to hey, this person gets terrible advice, but name and shame the ideas, the strategies, the ways to go about getting results that you know aren't working. Maybe they're not working anymore. A lot of my digital marketing clients who come from that space are asked to call out what their clientele are still trying to do that just does not work anymore. Maybe worked 10 years ago, but times have changed. So this is where you can really set yourself apart, make your value proposition shine by consistently pointing out why you're doing it the way you're doing it? Why you're giving specific steps to accomplish this objective? Why are you teaching it this way? Why they want to follow your framework your model your approach to things rather than what they've done before? Even just spending a couple of sentences on why it doesn't work anymore the way that used to work. That's totally fine. Another common thing off authors will do especially in saturated markets where there's so much competition, spend a chapter on the myths about your industry, an entire chapter. I do this all the time with clients where okay, what are the terrible pieces of advice has that all of your clients are following? That's a chapter and that needs to be towards the beginning because then you're going to tell them how to do it properly. So this way you can go counter to what the industry titans have been saying and you can be the person who gives that aha moment and they realize, "So that's why famous person ABC's ideas aren't working for me. I thought it was my fault. I thought that was my problem. I thought something's wrong with me." And you just say, "No, either they don't work. They just don't work period or they stop working because of an industry shift for example or saturation in that space." So you can give people a glorious sigh of relief. There is an amazing quote that I always like to reference. It's called the One Sentence Persuasion Course. And it goes like this. As my marketer Blair warned, "People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions and help them throw rocks at their enemies." So persuasion in a sentence is that right there. The counter industry pillar takes on justifying the failures like, hey, you got sucky advice. That's why it didn't work. You allayed their fears. Oh, yes. There's good reason to fear doing it the same way that you've always been. We're doing it differently. We're doing it a way that works. You can rest easy. And you confirm their suspicions as well because you knew it couldn't be you that was screwed up, it was the process you're following that's broken. Throw rocks at their enemies, well, literally say, "Hey, these are stupid ideas. Let's break them down and explain why they don't work." Of the several little points of persuasion right there in that one sense, this fourth pillar just about takes on all of them and implements them for you. So this is an underused pillar. Make sure that you take advantage of it in your content. Kathleen: That's such a great quote that you pulled. I love that. And this whole topic kind of harkens back to that notion and marketing of having a common enemy, because that's what kind of gets people emotionally tied in with what you're advocating for, whether that's selling a product or a service or an idea. When you have a common enemy, people feel more of a sense of belonging, like it's us against them. And the common enemy doesn't have to be a person or a company, as you said, it could be an idea or an approach that's outdated. So I can see where that would work really well. All right, what's our next pillar? Joshua: The fifth pillar is the call to action. And this, like the third pillar compelling, simple as possible. What exactly do you want people to do next? With books, this is how you make the big money. Everyone listening now is heard of Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson. Jay Conrad Levinson, when asked about his first book Guerrilla Marketing, he said, "Guerrilla Marketing made me $10 million. The royalties only paid about 30,000, but the consulting, the coaching, the speaking, the products, the programs that I sold because I wrote this book account for the remaining $9.9 million." And of course, that's because he has a strong call to action to go get his free newsletter, to get updates, to learn more, to be part of his tribe, his world. So this is the way where you get from the $15 sale of the paperback the $15,000 mastermind. Make it an easy road to ascend right into your business to buy your other products and programs. And the way that you can do this inside of a book is to have free content upgrades. I'll give you an example from digital marketing. There's a client that I had, he, in his case, he told me later that his book was directly responsible for $1 million in revenue inside of this business over a 12-month period because he had a strong call to action. It went like this. So there's a chapter on how to write copy and design high converting landing pages for his specific industry, like the things that you need to be aware of in here in this industry that apply really to this industry, the specifics. He gives you the formulas, the templates, everything you need to go do it yourself. Then at the end of the chapter we say, "Hold on. You don't need to do it yourself. Go to this free page. Share your email with us so that we can send you this downloadable template." And saying ClickFunnels obviously because that's what they were using and you get your affiliate income for signing people up for ClickFunnels. He'd already written the copies, designed it. It was exactly what was explained inside of this chapter that we given you the how-to process. So you can DIY it or you could be smart and just go download the templates for free basically. And we have these sorts of free content upgrades for every topic from getting reviews, like here's a, go get this downloadable script, word-for-word script that you can copy and paste it so it's tech-based. You don't have to copy it from the book, type it into your computer. You just go download it. All sorts of free content upgrades that make it easier, faster and cheaper to implement what's taught in the book. So think about how you can give away as much how-to knowledge as possible. Literally your step-by-step processes. Don't worry about giving away the farm, as we say here in Ohio, give it all away because what you'll do is halfway through this book, you'll overwhelm people with so much to do to get the results that we like, "Is there a faster way to do this?" And then you come right along and say, "Yes, I have these content upgrades, these templates, these tools, these tactics, these techniques, download them all in one place." And it's the logical call to action. So people go from the book to being on your list and now they're in your funnel for your webinar, for your discovery call, for whatever your offer looks like to turn a once-off client into some serious high ticket income. Kathleen: Yeah, you pretty much answered the question I was going to ask, which is what's the right way to do that call to action, because I am sure that there are plenty of people who hear do a call to action and think, "Oh, I'll offer like a free consultation or a meeting with me to scope out a project or whatever." And that's very, very bottom of the funnel and I think probably a little bit more salesy than makes sense. So I like the idea of giving people tools that they can use to DIY things and in doing so bringing them into your orbit. You mentioned getting them signed up to receive your emails or to watch your webinars. I would imagine you could also probably, if you're really being a savvy digital marketer, you would have retargeting pixels on your website. So even if they don't fill out a form, as long as they visit your site and you have that Facebook pixel, what have you, you can then go and serve them up with retargeting ads on other platforms. Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. A strong call to action is a difference between losing money on a book and making a crap ton. Kathleen: Yeah, that's a technical term, right? Crap ton. Joshua: That's right. Simple English Wikipedia. Kathleen: Yes, that's writing for the fifth grader, right? All right, next pillar, we're on the last one now, right? Joshua: Yes, the sixth and final pillar is circulation. There is, and I know everyone in the audience has heard this before. If you're marketing to everyone, you're marketing to no one. That's like marketing 101. The inverse is true in publishing. To have a successful book right for anyone, for everyone. The reason why, 92% of book sales are according to Nielsen come from word-of-mouth marketing. It's the number one way that you're going to get people to buy the book. Think about every famous, take personal development. Think of all the personal development books, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Just take those two examples. Who wants to be more effective person? Who wants to win friends and influence people? Everyone. Of course, it just so happens that the authors were targeting the business professionals who could ... Let's take the 7 Habits for example. That person wanted to do more keynote speaking, wanted to be in front of more business people, who want to be more effective executives for example, they wanted to ... He basically had these consulting services lined up for a specific type of reader. So what you want to do is think about all the different types of people that your advice, that your strategies can apply to, can be useful for. So it has broad, it has circulation potential where your ideal client could give it to their spouse, their spouse could give it to their college-age kid. The college-age kid could read it and recommend it to the professor. Professor could recommend to the dean. Dean can recommend it to ... So on and so forth. This is how massive book sales come about, not through selling one copy the time, but through creating circulation inside of an individual reader's network with your book. So then you say, "Well, how do I actually get people to take my call to action? I'm writing for everyone. How does that work?" What you do is when you're giving your examples of how to follow your strategies step-by-step, because you're giving the how-to, the step-by-step, your examples will be your ideal clients. So you make them the stars. You highlight how you've helped your specific market or industry. Throw in a few other examples, think 80/20. 80% of the examples are your specific avatar or avatars, your ideal clients, and then there's some that are kind of completely unrelated, but you're still covering them. So that's how you get circulation while also still having a specific message that is useful to your target market. Kathleen: So helpful. I love this framework. Can you just quickly go back and summarize the six again so that we can remember and really kind of like cement it in our heads? Joshua: Absolutely, the 6 Pillars Of Influential Content. The first pillar, credibility. This is your lived experience of how you made progress, how you got from where you were in the land of suck to success, how you're going to help people achieve that as well. Even if that success is merely progress. That's good enough. Second pillar, connection. This is where you're telling your readers what they actually want to read, you know this because you've gone and looked at neutral feedback of other books. So you know what your readers want, what they don't, you structure your book to give them what they want, but also make sure they're following a step-by-step path to get there. Third pillar, compelling. Write at the fifth grade level. Simple English, easy to read. Anyone who's a PhD can understand it. Anyone who's a kid can understand it. Fourth pillar, counter industry. Name and shame the bad ideas. Not the companies, not the brands. The bad ideas, and explain why they did not work for your readers. You create a special intimate trust bond when you do that. Fifth pillar, call to action. Make it stupid simple for people to get into your funnel. Make it better, faster, cheaper, easier than DIY-ing it, following the instruction inside of the book, literally copying by hand into their journal. And give them the templates, download one email, everything. Circulation is the sixth pillar. This is where you're applying your advice to literally as many people as possible, but you're still targeting your specific avatar, your target market by of having 80% of the examples or so be your target market with the other 20% being people who are just wildly not, but that's okay because you're still reaching that broad audience. You are also writing for your ideal reader. Options for publishing your book Kathleen: Great advice. Thank you for summarizing that. I feel like there's not enough time in the world for me to ask all the questions I want to ask you, because this is so interesting. I wanted to talk about promoting your book and all this other stuff, but we're running out of time. So a couple of just short final questions here. I've done some other interviews with people who've talked about writing books and they've talked about how it's become so easy now to get your book printed. There's Kindle Direct Publishing. There's Amazon's Solutions where you can print even one book at a time. So it sounds like if I'm correct, there's really nothing that should stand in your way of creating this book because we no longer live in the days when you have to contract with a publishing house and spend $20,000 to get your run of books printed. Is that right? Joshua: It depends on what your objectives are. I have authors whose hearts are set on the traditional path, the agent, the publishing deal, the six-figure book deal for example. I have a track record of helping authors go down that path. I wrote a piece for the Nonfiction Authors Association about how to actually do that, what some of my clients' experience have been, the pros and cons of that. With self publishing a big concern people have is quality because there are so many shoddily thrown together books that are self-published. A lot of people are like, "Oh, you self-publish? I don't know man." That's what people will say. So what we've done inside of my business is we've developed a complimentary service to ghostwriting called ghost publishing. Ghost writing, someone else does all the work, you take all the credit. Ghost publishing, someone else launches a publishing business, your own imprint right alongside of your business. You don't have to do any of the work. We've combined the best of self-publishing, which is higher royalties, total control over the process, your timeline. We've blended that in with the best of traditional publishing, which is industry standard quality. The quality, the level of attention to detail that comes from New York City publishers, we apply that to this book process. Also distribution, the total number of countries, access to wholesale channels, the low margin, high volume sales through bookstores, libraries, book fairs. All that's available through this process. There's also special little things that go on the copyright page for example every traditionally published book has, no self published book does. It will set you apart. You get that as part of this process. So most of our authors actually choose the ghost publishing model because they get the quality of a big five, like Simon & Schuster, Random House quality book and the distribution of that process, but they get the creative control, the freedom that's afforded by, and also the speed that's afforded by self-publishing. Promoting your book Kathleen: Okay, that's good to know. And then you get your book published and you're like, then what? You have to get it into people's hands. Any quick like two minutes or under words of advice for the best way to promote your book? Joshua: Sure thing. There's a couple. One of which every New York Times, Wall Street Journal best-selling campaign you see nowadays follows this process I'm about to explain to you. It's a special limited time bonus. When your book comes out you want people to buy as many copies as soon as possible. One of the ways we do this, especially in the digital marketing space, is an expiring bonus that's available for like 48 hours after the publication date, 48 hours afterwards. So basically it goes like this. Buy the book within two days, you have two days to buy the book now that's out, and forward your purchase confirmation to this special email and we'll send you the audiobook edition for free. You'll also get access to one of our premium courses at no cost to you and you'll be signed up for a live question answered webinar exclusively with the author to talk about the book, ask any question you have seven days from today. You only get access to these bonuses if you buy within the next 48 hours. Come on. Let's do this. And usually there's like a price promotion in there, knock $5 off the price, 99 cents exclusively for the first few days for example. That's how you get lots of people to buy at once. Then when let's say on Amazon you rocket up in the best-seller and now you're number one because you're selling beaucoup copies, take screenshots of your book as a best-seller. Oh, look, you're number one. Oh look, you're in front of Gary Vee, Robert Kiyosaki, Anthony Robbins. Oh my goodness. Share that everywhere on all your social media channels. I had one author. She doubled her best goal for book sales because she started showing all those screenshots of her book selling more than copies than the celebrity writer next to her. So do not discount what a simple screenshot can do because success begets success. Follow that. Use the special limited time bonus offer and you will start your authorship journey off right. How to connect with Joshua Kathleen: Great. All right, we're close to the top of our hour so I don't want to end without asking you a couple of questions. First one is, if somebody is listening and they want to learn more or they have a question for you, what's the best way for them to reach out and connect? Joshua: Absolutely. A couple different ways. If you are an aspiring author and you want to have the key that opens any door of opportunity that you desire for your business or for your career, I work with several people who work in the corporate world and they want to use the book to earn that that promotion quite frankly. So what their objective is head on over to entrepreneurswordsmith.com. There's a few free tools that you can find there. One of which is a Book Ideas Generator. You're sitting there wondering, could I have a book in me? Does that make sense? But what is the title? I have no idea. What would I write about? I'm not sure. What you have to do is just type in your industry and your product or service and this thing will spit out in seconds winning book ideas for you personally, title and subtitle, to get those wheels turning and help put some structure to a winning book idea for you. That's The Entrepreneur's Wordsmith if you're the aspiring author. If you are a marketer maybe, a copywriter and you like this idea of the big money ghost writing world where you're working with celebrities and thought leaders and the influencers of tomorrow, I can teach you how to get into this world at ghostwriteandprosper.com. I have a free training there called the 7 Myths About Ghost Writing That Keep Most Freelance Writers Broke As F. Kathleen: That's a great name. I bet that resonates a lot with people. Joshua: It does. It does. I think the average or median income rather, the median income for freelance writer somewhere around 40,000. So yes. Yes. That should be one project, not your annual income my friends. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: Right. All right. So then the two questions I always ask all of my guests, which I definitely want to ask you, this is obviously a podcast about inbound marketing. Writing and publishing a book is one form of inbound marketing, if you're trying to do it for marketing or business purposes. Is there somebody out there, a company or an individual that you think is really killing it with inbound marketing right now? Joshua: Absolutely. Absolutely. Her name is Heather Prestanski. She is a sales and marketing consultant for high-ticket businesses. So basically, is your product or service more than a couple thousand bucks, she is the one to follow, Heather Prestanski. Kathleen: Great. I will definitely check her out. That's a new name and I always like when I get new names. And then the last question is, the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. How do you personally stay up to date with everything? Joshua: Well, one of the ways I do is set the trend myself. One thing I did not mention today is that I am the only, the first and only ghostwriter in the world who uses a software driven process to write in my author's authentic voice. Each of us has our own unique fingerprints. We all have our own unique way to communicate. We use the data science of stylometry to literally measure and understand your unique author voice and then we recreate that on the page. So that's where the future is going and we're already there. Kathleen: Awesome. Well Joshua, so much good stuff here. I really could talk to you forever. I feel like there was probably four podcasts that we smashed into one today. But thank you for sharing all that. I love the six pillars. I'm going to like write them and put them on my note next to my computer, because I think it really can apply to any kind of marketing copywriting, not just writing a book and it's a great framework for it. So thank you for coming on. You know what to do next... Kathleen: And if you are listening and you like what you heard or you learned something new, I know I learned a lot, please go to Apple podcasts and leave the podcast a five star review because that is how other people find us and we get new listeners and if you know if somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. That's it for this week. Thank you so much Joshua. Joshua: And thank you Kathleen. I enjoyed myself today. Kathleen: That was a lot of fun.  

Automation Is Life Live Episode Joshua: So good morning, everyone, and thanks for having me. So today we're going to be talking about automation and how your business can be more automated and what automation means to everyone. So I'm going to go and ask, I guess everyone, what do you think automation is? What would you say automation is? Learn more about automation at dorksdelivered.com.au Audience member: Do something once and not have to do it again. Joshua: Perfect. So removing repetition. That's a good answer. Is there anyone else that has any different understandings of what automation is? Audience member: Stuff happens without you having to do it. Joshua: That's very good. As long as it's being monitored for and you're told when it's not doing the things that it should be doing. So yeah, absolutely. Yep. That's another great example of automation. Any other answers? Audience member: Taking care of certain processes, setting them and allowing them to happen. Joshua: Yup. Yup. Absolutely. So automation is a very used buzzword at the moment around the place. And automation as I've written here, which was for Neil, but he's not here, oils just ain't oils and automations just ain't automations. I wrote that line just for him and he's not even here, jeez. Anyway. And the important thing is you need to automate as much in your business as you can, because if you don't, your competitors will. And automation is happening all the time and innovation and technology is happening all the time. And people think, "I'm scared of technology," but you go back only a few years ago, back 150 years. And refrigeration wasn't around. No one's scared of fridges now and no one's scared of microwaves now, no one's scared of a lot of things that we just take for granted. All these things are automating processes within our own home. We're able to have things washed in a dishwasher instead of slaving over a sink. So all these little things speed up your process and there's just a lot of automation happening at the moment to speed up all your processes. Automation shouldn't stop at work, though. Automation should happen at home. And so ultimately you have more time to spend with your family and your friends, because we've only got that once on this earth and that's our time. Everything else should be able to be automated. Does everyone agree? Good. Because otherwise the next 23 minutes is going to be really boring. So that's good. Everyone agrees. So as I said earlier, my name's Joshua and I'm from Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts. I've got my business cards here. Don't actually have them in the box, but if you want to pass them around, that'd be awesome. So Dorks Delivered does a lot of IT stuff, but a few years ago we found out that more and more businesses were getting us in to automate their processes, hence Business Efficiency Experts being born. So what we do is we try and automate and document... tell me if I talk too quickly as well. I naturally talk quite quickly, so, okay, cool. No worries. Pull me up on it. So yeah, so anyway, Business Efficiency Experts was born out of the need to have businesses automate their processes better. And that can be through removing repetition. That can be through better documentation processes and making sure you're doing a task once. Because you're doing it once and it can be repeated a hundred times or a thousand times, that's awesome if you're not doing it. Automation can be just documenting the processes down. So if you're... you said you had a problem with a staffing member leaving. You can make sure that the onboarding process is much faster. You then are able to have them onboard and have them profitable in a significantly faster time. It can be removing or creating accountabilities and removing any sort of repetition. So anything that is going to speed up your processes in business is giving it elements of automation. And this goes for home as well. So my home, I'd have to say out of... you've seen my home. Garry's been... lucky enough? I don't know. Audience member: Fortunate enough. Joshua: Fortunate. That sounds good. My home's very automated. When I go to bed I can call out to Alexa, which normally when I say that it starts talking, but it's not doing that here, which is good. But I can call out to Alexa and turn off all the lights, shut the gates, lock the door, turn the sauna off, turn the turn the pond waterfall off or whatever else is happening around the place and make sure everything's locked down. So very easy. You don't have to sort of be in the warm blanket reading a book and then have to have a fight over who's the one who gets out to turn the light off. So it removes arguments, automation removes arguments with your partner. So anyway, so in my spare time when I'm not doing stuff with Dorks Delivered and Business Efficiency Experts, I'm a columnist for My Entrepreneur Magazine. I've been featured on news.com.au, and soon to be published in every entrepreneur's guide, focus in on your marketing. As I said earlier, though, today I'm gonna be talking about automation and that's covered off heavily in our podcast, which is called Business Built Freedom. So I started automating things 19 years ago and I didn't even realise at that stage that that's what I was doing. I was going through a process where I was earning only $6 to make these number plate bracket things. And it was taking me an hour and a half to make them. I got this task, and as a 12-year-old, now you know how old I am, as a 12-year-old, I was making these number plate brackets, an hour and a half for $6 so I was earning $4 an hour. Not very good money but more than every other 12-year-old that was out there. In hindsight and looking back, it was child labour, but I'd chosen to do it. So I guess it's okay. Now, these number plate brackets, I used Lego, and I don't know if you know Technic Lego and robotic Lego and stuff like that. I saved up some money and built a cit that allowed for me to automate the process of creating these number plate brackets. And as a 13-year-old I was creating 10 of them in an hour. So as a 13-year-old, I was earning $60 an hour from home in mum and dad's garage. So that's more than what most 20-year-olds were earning and a lot of people were earning, as a 13-year-old. When I got to 14 and nine months, I registered my first ABN number. I then had it as a registered business, so it was legit. I then from there started to have my friends come over and work for me and work with me and had the rate increased to $10.60 per number per bracket. That meant that I was getting $106 per hour of work that was being done and then I was outsourcing that to other people to do it. Now, at that stage, I was just trying to make the process as quick as possible. I didn't really look at what I was doing as automation, but it was absolutely automation, and that's just where my love for automation has grown from there. So who here would say they're automating things in their business? Yup. Cool. Awesome. And who here thinks that they could be doing more with their business in the way of automation that they're not? Everyone should have their hand up. There's always ways to improve. I've automated a lot of things right now, but we're talking... How I'm talking at the moment. This will come up and be on my podcast. It'll be edited down and go into my podcast, it'll be transcribed, and from the transcription that'll end up on my blog. That will then be posted through Facebook, Instagram. Not Instagram, sorry. Facebook. No, it will be Instagram. Facebook, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. So that's in a doing all my marketing for me, it goes through a search engine optimizer that puts in all the heading tags and everything else, so then I've got content that's going up on the web, and I'm doing that all while talking to you guys. Because my time is valuable and all your time is valuable. How much would you say your time is worth per hour? I'm going to go around the room and I'm going to get Roger to grab your calculator out and you have to add all these up. Okay. Just quickly shoot. Audience member: Yeah, it varies depending on whether I'm selling a house or whether I'm doing a... Joshua: What would you like if you had to look at it, if you were sitting at home and you were told you needed to fix something or change a light bulb? Audience member: You know, when I've sold a house and I've sold it within a week, I've earned a lot for two hours' work. Joshua: But what would you say your time is worth? So if you were told that you're going to put a dollar figure on it, would you say your time is worth $5 an hour or $500 an hour? Audience member: Oh, it would just plummet. $80 an hour. Joshua: $80 an hour. Okay. Audience member: $250. Joshua: $250. Audience member: $450. Joshua: Okay. You adding this up real quick? Roger: Yeah, I'm adding up. Audience member: $250. $250. Joshua: $450. Audience member: $380. $550 at the moment. Joshua: Okay, cool. Audience member: $500. Joshua: $500? Yeah. Audience member: I have no idea. I'll go with $50. $110. $250. Roger: Let's just say, ballpark, we're up to about three grand or so. Joshua: Three grand or so. Okay. So roughly, and how many people do we have here? Five-ish, 20, 15? Okay, so we're talking about $150 an hour roughly, is what we have as a group accumulatively here. So every task that you do, whether it's at home mowing the lawn, or whether you're out and about shopping, you should be putting that number as whatever the number you've put in your head. So $5.50 is very competitive. That's going to be difficult. You need to have a dollar figure put on it, and not just for the time that you're spending, when you're earning money, but for the time that you're spending all the time. If you go and mow the lawn at home and it takes you two hours to mow the lawn, that's $10, $11 that you missed that on there. And with the different numbers we're looking at here, even as the average of $150 per a per hour, that's $300 to mow the lawn. If you can get someone else to mow the lawn for $50 and they're using better equipment, faster equipment, that's time that you can be spending on your business or with your family. That's more valuable time. So my dad's an engineer and one of the things that I saw him doing was fixing a DVD player, a $25 DVD player. It took him two hours to fix. Now, that is absolutely stupid, but he was learning and seeing how it all works. So if there's a learning experience then it's a different story. And that comes down to, again, automating what you're doing. If you enjoy learning, then do the task. But don't continue to do the task if there's better time that you should be spending your money, or time... better things that you should be spending a time and money on. Does that make sense? Cool. I know it sounds like I'm just saying the same sort of stuff in different ways, but that's cool. As long as we're all on the same page. So what would you say you'd like to be able to automate in your business? Everyone's sort of said that they had something that would like to automate or know that they're going to be doing something better. I'm going to go around the room and try and work out a way... or a business problem, maybe. Let's do it like a business problem. What's a business problem that you'd like to see removed? Roger, what would you- Roger: I like your automated postings and so forth. I've got some automated postings. I'd like to polish those up and improve them. [inaudible 00:10:57] exploited them to their full- Joshua: What ones are you using at the moment? Roger: What do I use? I use IFTTT. Joshua: Yep. That's really good. Roger: Yeah, that's what I use more than anything. And I use SocialPilot. Joshua: Cool. And how about you, Julian? Julian: Julian, yeah. Yeah, I'd like to be able to take a business card and just scan it and then have it send all the emails and introductions. Joshua: Do you have a business card? Julian: Yep. Joshua: Okay. So while I'm here... This is great. That's really, really good. Really good answer. So I'll send you an email while I'm doing this presentation. So I've just taken a photo, and I'll show you how to do that later. So yeah. Okay. And Sarah, would you like to automate? Sarah: Well, I just recently automated it. When I go do hair and makeup for weddings, I kind of don't really have time. So now I just pretty much put it in a drop box, somebody then takes it from there and they post it up for me and now it's done. I don't have to worry about that. As my business is very visual, people want to be seeing work all the time. That was a big thing. So that's been a good thing that I've just recently done, so yeah. Joshua: Cool. Audience member: So what we do do or what we want to do? Joshua: What would you like? What would you like to have automated? Or a business problem that you're trying to overcome? Audience member: I suppose for me it's making sure that my numbers are competitive with the rest of the market. So it would be really cool if I didn't have to go and check every time I needed to do a quote. Automating that sort of process of finding out what everybody else is charging, it would be great if I could do that with automation. Joshua: Is price a big deciding factor? Audience member: I think it is for people. Joshua: I know people look around a lot and you've got a lot of... like Vistaprint, very competitive. Not competitive probably in the quality of what you'd be doing versus what they're doing though. And so I strongly think everyone in business should not have price as a differentiator. You've got personalised service, localised service, fantastic face and you're able... Vistaprint have no face to their business. They just a cold business that are online and they're convenient and cheap, but that's not what- Audience member: It's finding the balance. Joshua: Absolutely. Yeah. And Willem? Willem: More of a social media presence. Joshua: Yep. Yep. Yep. So getting a better presence. Willem: I was able to farm that out to my wife. Joshua: Absolutely, causes less arguments. It comes up with blue screens of death when there's problems as opposed to arguments within the relationship. Audience member: Did you say you want to automate your wife? Joshua: Automate his wife! Do you have content at the moment that you could be putting up? Willem: Being part of a worldwide organisation, there's always something happening somewhere in the world. Joshua: Vetting your website with some of the videos and bits and pieces that go up and it looks good. So yeah. And Gary, how about yourself? Gary: I'd like to start a revolution to have Google shut down. I need young, smart fellows like you to be able to go and come into the industry and put decent competition against them and stop them from destroying small businesses. Joshua: Yeah. Well, I think between the big companies, Amazon, Facebook and Google, they're too big of a conglomerate. And Microsoft and Apple and everything else further from that. But the big three there that I already mentioned should be divided up and split up so that they're not owning the entities. I completely agree. I don't know what sort of militia we're going to have to put together to do to achieve this. Audience member: It looks like it might be happening in Europe. Joshua: Yeah? Yeah, I haven't haven't seen it, but... Yeah, it's a... Definitely. I agree with you. It's very difficult to do that the way... it's sort of like the devil. You have to just be with the devil. Now my rankings are going to go down for this social post. "What are you doing? You can't badmouth Google!" Audience member: That's the problem, everyone thinks like that. Joshua: Oh, you can. Audience member: If a lot of people started standing up to it... Joshua: It's just... So what sort of phone do you have? Audience member: Samsung. Joshua: Okay, so there's more than 200 touch points that Google gets from what you do every day through that phone. There's an experiment they did where they removed Google and Amazon from their life. They were unable to log into any of the other services such as Dropbox from the different ways and methods they using to proof it was a human or wasn't a human. They weren't able to use any Google maps. They weren't able to use anything else, so they started using Waze and then Waze was working but it cost a lot of money. A lot of the services that we use and take for granted are backed by Google, even if it's not the systems that we're using directly. And the problem is... Because they are selling our information off. That's how they're making money. Facebook makes $10 a month off of the data that we give to them. If we weren't marketed through anything on Facebook and the information wasn't sold, it would cost us $10 a month to use Facebook, and no one would use it because it wouldn't be worth it. So it's a balance. I think, yeah, the system should be changed, 100%. People should be very aware of how much data is actually being thrown around there about you. And Valerie? Valerie: I'm helping people to understand that once some data is taken, it should then be what a software industry is built on, plus it's growing more on bugging people's Bank statements through their systems. But it's not a huge buy-in to that. So I think in terms of my own business automating, I guess my process is automating that hasn't been done. Audience member: For me, it would be networks. Documents sending and receiving. Joshua: It's big thing that annoys me in your industry, how much paper goes everywhere. And also, has anyone heard statement, "Don't marry me on the first date"? Has anyone heard that? You have people that jump in and they go, "Oh, hi, yes, I'm Josh Litt and I'd love to do some work with you." And just really, really selling themselves without building the relationship. I've dealt with a broker in the past and they... It was like, I said, "Oh, can you help me out? I'm a small business owner, and that that makes things of question mark on complication." And they sent me an eight-page thing I had to fill out. I'm like, "Ah, I'm not going to go with you." Joshua: Well, have you seen some of the open banking stuff that's coming in in the start of July? Audience member: Open banking? Joshua: Open banking, so the bank statements and a lot of the information can be fed through APIs to different systems. Yeah. This bank statements, I think, dot com, or something like that, allows you to... that's really good for your industry. Audience member: Probably a structured onboarding process video and having it easily accessible. Can you sign it off as well? Joshua: Yep. Cool. Cool. Joshua: Bob? Bob: Probably the process of intakes, where the lawyers do a lot of writing. That can be digitised and then put back into our lead CRM system, development management system, so still when the client comes back, they don't have to redo it, it's actually from hand to digitised to CRM. Or it could be onboarding for a normal conversation as well. I've started a little bit, but I think it's culture change more than anything. I've looked at people with a Microsoft tablet. Carrie: We're in a relationship with business, so I think we've just got to be a little bit careful. We've automated our, what? We've got electronic work papers. The ITO is making us automate things because things come through electronically now, so we're trying not to have the whole paper thing, etc. But what everyone else said, I guess, we could do with some work on our CRM. Because it's rubbish in rubbish out with a lot of this. Joshua: Absolutely. Audience member: It's a little bit awkward in our business because a lot of those people who are just looking for insurance, they don't want to fill in forms. But in terms of having a social media presence, that's probably what I'm interested in. I would be firstly automating my data collection, so I'm still handwriting our analysis. It would be great to do it online so I'm not wasting paper. And the other thing that I want to automate ,gathering reviews. So when we've finished the process, we have a system where an email or an SMS, whatever, goes out with the link seeking reviews. Joshua: Cool. Cool. Awesome. I'm going to try and go around the room really quickly to give everyone a quick answer as to how to automate this stuff a bit better. Joshua: Okay. So your business, if you want to have your posts automated a bit better, you do know what RSS feeds are? Roger: Yeah, I know RSS feeds. Joshua: Being able to collaborate and join RSS feeds together. So what they do is that if you do updates on things on your website or updates anywhere, you can have it so that update is pulled and pushed to any other location that you want around the web on different times and different schedules and you can create different ways that it all works. And using RSS feeds in Sendible is what we use, and we found Sendible's fantastic. It integrates into most things. Roger: I haven't looked at Sendible. Joshua: Oh, it's fantastic. It's great. I've managed a couple of businesses through it. And yeah, it's by far the best one that I've seen out there. Not the cheapest but the best. Yeah. And you'd have to have some automation to be able to sell the websites for the price that you're selling them, because there is no money to be made in that otherwise. Yeah. So with your onboarding process, everyone sort of said something here and everyone's sort of... The answers they've got, it's not like there's a question mark for most of them. A lot of the things that you want to do are able to be done. It's just a time thing to be able to do them for most people, I'd imagine. Yeah? So for me, one of the biggest things that I did in my business was automating every single task that I did and documenting every task that I did and then finding something to do everything that I did so I could go traveling. And I went over to America for nearly three months last year and didn't have to touch a computer, didn't have to touch anything to do with the business, which was awesome. So that was my big a-ha, champagne moment in automation, being able to really step away from the business. Because a lot of the time we put ourselves into these businesses that we buy and we sometimes don't really buy into a business. We buy into a job. We've bought into our position in business. And that isn't a good position to be in because most of it's buying for more money or more freedom. And a lot of the time you end up with less of both. And the only real way out of that is by automating things. And automation isn't something you need to be choosing, do I do or don't I do it? It's, if you don't do it, you will be left behind. Because if you didn't have a microwave and you didn't have an oven now, it'd be very difficult to cook your food on a fire out in the backyard. And that's just- Audience member: No, we had three years without an oven. Joshua: You did? Three years without an oven? Did you have a dishwasher? Audience member: Yeah, my son. Joshua: See, see, you've got automation, that's automation. Audience member: Yeah, you'd want to sit and think. Joshua: So it's not monitored automation. So you need to always just be looking at ways to automate your business. We were contacted by a government agency in what we've been doing with some of the different things we've been putting around the web, and they've asked us to help businesses out, to automate their businesses. And they've actually reduced down the rate of what we charge out to $40 an hour to be able to help businesses, small businesses automate their processes. So if there's anything you ever see that needs to be automated at that sort of price, yeah, there's no reason why you shouldn't be getting someone in to at least look over your systems and see what needs to be automated. The great news is everyone already knows something that needs to be automated. Most of the time with fresh eyes and another perspective, you'll find that there's always more and more that can be automated. It's always great to get someone to come into your business and see how your process is working and how everything is going together. Because as theold quote goes, with the NASA spending millions of dollars to develop a pen that works in space and the Russians used a pencil. So it's a just a perspective thing. that didn't actually happen, but it's still a fun quote. So yeah, so that's, I guess, the main thing is make sure you're automating everything in business. Very few people here brought up automation, automating their marketing, only like a couple of people. And that is a big thing because you want to make sure your name is out there. If your business has no voice, your customers won't have any ears to hear it, so you need to be out there and be present in one way or another. Most businesses here are business-to-business businesses, I think, most of them. There's a few business-to-consumer businesses, but generally speaking, we all have a skill set that we can bring to the table to help each other's businesses out. Even if we're just going in, individually reviewing how things are working and how things could be better. With your systems to be able to see what your competitors are doing. you can do things such as what's called web scraping and you can have it so that all of your competitors and all their prices are automatically update in a spreadsheet or a dashboard that you could see each day or each month, however often you wanted to do that, and then you can use tools such as Proposify, which would allow for you to go in and see how you can go about change... sorry, you can use Proposify to be able to quote to your customers really quickly and easily in a templated way and know the prices that they could be seeing from any of the competitors around the place, and know the pain points and the reasons why you'd want to push away. I've worked with Sarah in the past and one of her concerns was there was other people out there that were cheaper in price. And I said, "Yeah, but they're not going to be anywhere near as good as what you're doing and how you're doing it." But we put a cheaper price up on the website and then just made conditions that it had to be a certain amount of people and it only included the same things that the other people included. A lot of the time, if people are looking to things such as Vistaprint, they're not going to necessarily go, "Is the stock as thick? Is it good glaze?" Or whatever the situation is, they're going to just go, "Oh, the cards are cheap. And then you can sort of just pivot that and you say, "Well, is that the image that you want to have from a business front? Do you want to have an image of a cheap business? Do you want to have these cheap cards"? Doesn't really sound very good. Your first impression's a crappy card, so that's where you can then sort of change the argument. But have the pricing on your website as competitive as Vistaprint so you're not backing people away. But you don't know if they are or not backing away from that without having some data to really sink into and work that out, which is what we love. We love building businesses up with lots and lots of data so that you're able to make informed, decisive decisions. You can work out if your staff force is efficient, if your systems are efficient and if things are as automated as they should be. Automation doesn't remove jobs. Automation brings health and life back into your business because the jobs that people are doing aren't repetitious. They are fun loving jobs. Automating your wife is a fantastic idea. Automated wife, happy life. Audience member: They have special shops for that. Joshua: And they can fit in your pocket. Sendible would be great to help automate all your social media marketing though. Sendible, the same thing I was talking to Roger about, which I can talk to you more about. It's a fantastic tool. It lets you see everything, all the comments and everything in one spot for all of your customers so you can just respond to everyone in one location. You can post everything out, you can make sure it only posts during certain hours. And set there so that it posts out videos and everything else. We've got our marketing down pat, so in one hour, one hour a week, I'm able to create two youtube videos, three podcasts, five blogs, and we've been doing that one hour a week for the last six months and we have over 160,000 written words that have all been SEO optimised and put onto our website. Which has increased our traffic for a B to B website, which we don't pay for any paid advertisement on our website. We get about 3,000, 4,000 unique visitors a month, so that's pretty good for a B to B business where we're not selling anything on the website whatsoever. There's no reason for them to come there except for see our services and see the blogs that we've been writing. So my time's up by a minute more than what I should have been talking, but plus extra and extra. But has everyone enjoyed this? It's been good? We've learned a bit? I could talk for hours and hours, but if you want to hear more, definitely if you've got my card, let me know. As I said, because the government rate is pretty, pretty amazing. We're pretty happy that I got into that. Audience member: The one big obstacle everyone's trying to overcome with all these message bots and things is automating the sincere personal touch. Joshua: You'd never automate that. I'm here. I can't automate what I'm doing right now because the feeling and the heart that I have for what I do in my business can't be seen through an automated message. So you can't automate the personal touch, but you can automate everything else around it. Audience member: They try. Joshua: Yeah. Audience member: You can't automate passion. Joshua: You can't automate passion. What you can do... Audience member: You could give them a microwave once started. My mother would think this is witchcraft. Joshua: It is. Audience member: Oh, it is, that's right. Joshua: Getting back to Google, it is. So you can't automate the passion and drive you have as a person, but you can remove that requirement. Say Google, the face of Google, the face of Amazon, the face... none of these big companies have a face. Apple had a face but then PC killed him. Do you get it? Yeah. It's a terrible joke. Anyway, you can't really automate that passion, but what you can do is create a lot of content around it so you can build a relationship beforehand, having dozens of videos and lots of social posts that sort of show that same approach. So I've got a comical approach to the way that I approached people, and showing that and having that means that you can build 80% of the relationship up and then the other 20% can be nurtured in person. I have seen some of the stuff they do around the reading, the psychology on how people talk. If people are talking in feeling words of people talking and doing or hearing words, you say, "How do you feel about that?" And it can analyse with their words and then reword whatever you've written to then post that back to them in a way that resonates more strongly with them. So you can do some things like that, but I still think we're all operating a small business. We need to be able to automate, but we need to also keep that personal touch. You don't want to remove that. It's one of the best things you've got in small business. That's what Vistaprint don't have!

Kids, Business, Marriage – how do you do all the things? Get a glimpse during the last of this 3 part series on how to raise an entrepreneurial family! On today’s super special episode, part three of three, Russell and his lovely wife, Collette are interviewed by Joshua and Ashley Latimer about being an entrepreneurial family. Here are the questions Russell and Collette answer in part three: What ways do you teach your kids about entrepreneurship and finances? What advice would you give a highly driven entrepreneurial family? How important is it to have a like minded community? So listen here to Russell and Collette as they answer these important questions. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Are you guys pumped for today? This is segment number 3 of 3 of my interview, of the interview with my wife, Collette. If you haven’t yet, make sure you go to Honorandfire.com, and opt into the Latimer’s and get their free family checklist system that they posted. It’s a free family checklist for entrepreneurial families. And it’s amazing. What they’re doing is so cool, and I’m so grateful for this interview and that they created a really safe spot for my wife to be able to share her thoughts and her feelings. And I hope you guys are loving her even 1/10th as much as I love her, because she is such an amazing person, and I’m so grateful to have her being able to share some of our experiences with you. Alright with that said, we’re going to jump in right now to segment number 3 of 3, and these are the last 3 questions they asked us. Question number 8: What ways do you teach your kids about entrepreneurship and finances? Question 9: What advice would you give a highly driven entrepreneurial family? And question 10: How important is it to have a like minded community? So those are the next questions. I hope you guys enjoyed the series. If you have enjoyed it, please, please, please go to, again take a screen shot on your phone or wherever you are, post it on Facebook, Instagram, social media wherever you post, and please tag me and tell me why you like this segment of this session. I’d love to hear some of the thoughts and the feelings about why you guys enjoyed this time with my wife. And maybe if you guys do, let us know, maybe we’ll do this more often, have her come on and share some more stuff. So excited. With that said, let’s queue up the theme song and we’ll jump into the exciting conclusion of my interview with the Latimer family and my beautiful wife, Collette. Ashley: How do you teach your children about entrepreneurship, and what ways will this give them an unfair advantage in life? Russell: I think … Collette: go ahead. Russell: One of the cool things that we did was a little, about two years ago we had Caleb Maddox and Emily come out, two young entrepreneurs, and spend the day with our kids, which was really cool.  They kind of talked to them about it, got them excited about it. And then Caleb and his dad, Caleb’s dad told us that what he did is he gave Caleb these success books and said, ‘I’ll pay you $20 for every book you read.” And I thought that was the coolest thing, so we started doing that with the kids. Some kids are more money motivated than others, but man, they’ve read tons of success books now on success. The Rich Dad Poor Dad for Teenagers, Success Dogs, Dallin’s read both of my books which is crazy. He’s like, ‘I don’t understand most of the things dad, but I read them.” Collette: Well and actually Aiden, he’s out, he’ll be 9 in august, but he’s been putting little mp3 player plugs in his ears and walking around and listening. So I think that’s cool. Russell: Yeah, so that’s been big. We brought them to one Funnel Hacking Live, but they were young and it was crazy and it was kind of hard. But this year, I think you know this, we’re doing a new event this summer specifically for kids so I can bring my kids to it. So it’s going to be really fun to kind of get them into that kind of thing. And then the other thing I really want to do, we haven’t discussed this, but I had a friend, her name is Rae Perry, used to run these home schooling programs, and she would do these events where she would have the home schooled parents and kids would come, they’d have speakers on each topic. So one of them would talk stock market, one of them would real estate, one would be internet marketing, one would be eBay, all these different things. And everyone would sell their courses, and then they’d have the kids each go and buy a course each event, and that’d become their curriculum to learn. I’m going to learn about stocks, and they’d go deep the next year on stocks, or on real estate, or whatever their thing was. So I kind of want to have our kids pick things like that in the summer, in fact, this is actually something, I forgot about this, we had this on our family night on Sunday. We’re trying to figure out, Summer is coming soon and we don’t want the kids all summer on their screens, right. So first we’re like, “We’re going to do a screen free summer, no screens all summer.” They were all just like, “Ahh.” Collette: So was I. Russell: Then Collette’s like, “Well what are we going to do with them all day? You’re going to be at work, this sounds horrible for everybody.” So okay, let’s rethink this. And then when we were in Puerto Rico hanging out with Brendon Burchard he said something really interesting. He said, because we were talking about social media and one guy there was like, “I don’t do social media, it’s a waste of time.” And Brendon’s like, “No, you don’t understand I’m not a consumer of social media, I’m not consuming it, I’m producing it. There’s a difference. As a producer I go and I produce something and I’m done, and it’s helping other people. But I’m not sitting there consuming other people’s things.” And that was the aha with our kids. Right now they’re consumers, they sit there and watch some stupid guy with blue hair play video games for 4 hours, watching somebody else produce, they’re consuming. And I was like, “I don’t want you guys being consumers. You don’t value, the world is not better if you’re a consumer, you need to be producers.” So we talked about, with them we talked about starting a YouTube channel and then each of them gets their own playlist. And we say, “Every morning wake up and…” Ellie’s our daughter who’s obsessed with the craft channel. “Wake up, go watch the craft channel, figure out what craft you want to make, then drive to the store, buy the stuff, come back, have you and your brothers film it, make the craft, then edit it. And you’re allowed to use as much screen time as you want, as you’re producing. You’ve produced a video that you published live, and now you’ve produced something.” So our whole thought is you can only use screen time during the summer to produce, not to consume. And then I thought it would be fun for them, there’s the email skill share, and all these different sites. I’m like pick out a skill that you want to learn, go learn it and then you can make videos of you teaching it back to people. So that’s kind of the goal, helping them be producers this summer instead of just consumers. Ashley: I love that. Joshua: That is gold. That is gold. Can I squeak in a mini follow up question to that though? Russell: Yeah. Like if we’ll execute on it. I don’t know. Joshua: I just want to make sure, respecting your time that we’re just moving along and everything, but this is so amazing. So what’s your philosophy just on finance with your kids and stuff? Okay because you’ve been broke and you’ve had lots of money, and you’re wealthy. Are your kids aware of it, is that something that you talk about? Is the business just your front stage, internet marketing stuff, or in the home are you talking about, “Here’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to go to a billion dollars. And we’ve got to restructure our org chart and our model.” Is any of that happening or is it just dad-Russell all the time. And there’s not a wrong answer, I just think people would be curious. And then when it comes to money, do you give them an allowance, do you teach them that they only get paid for value creation, do you buy them a car when they turn 16, do they have to buy it? How does that all work for you guys? Russell: The first part of the question, I have not been good at that, bringing them into what I’m doing more. A lot of times we’ll show them funnel hacker tv episodes and we’ll talk about a couple people we’re meeting, so they see a little bit of that. But we haven’t talked about the finances or the goals. That’s actually really interesting, I’m glad you brought that up just to think about. And on the other side, we don’t do allowances, they can work for money. We had them pull weeds for money, we had them read books for money. Collette: That’s allowance, well, I guess for money. Yeah. Russell: Allowance is like guaranteed, “Here’s money because you’re alive.” Collette: Oh. Joshua: Allowance, true allowance is like just pure socialism. You have a pulse, here’s some money.  {inaudible} Russell: It’s funny because some of our kids are super money motivated, and some aren’t. Dallin and Ellie both like money. Ellie will do something, or like, if she scores a goal in soccer we give her a dollar. So she’ll do stuff. And she’s a consumer. She spends it. She’ll make money and then she drives to the juice place and buys juice 5 seconds later. Collette: Drives her bike. She drives…she does not drive. Russell: Rides, yeah. Collette: She gets there. Joshua: Well, you know what we started doing? Our kids love to play games, Fortnite and all that, watch YouTube and stuff but they can only do it now by spending points. So what they do, when they take out the trash and do stuff, we have a little app that we built for my company called automate motivate, it’s actually for businesses, but we use it with our kids. Ashley: Or employees. Joshua: They get points since they’re doing stuff, but they can only play game time when they cash in their points for an hour block of game time. And it’s been a complete ridiculous success. Every day when they come home they’re just like, “What can I do, I wanna…” and then they do it, and they can earn 30 minutes of game time. It’s kind of game-ified that, but it’s not money directly. But there’s different things, they get game time, or they can go to the movies with mom or something. Ashley: It’s been interesting, some of our kids want to buy game time, and then the other one is like, “What can I buy on Amazon right now?” He wants, it burns a hole in his pocket, he would ride his bike to the store if a store was near us. We live in the middle of nowhere. Joshua: Well, that was great. Thank you for all of that, so much awesomeness. Question 9 is kind of for other people. What advice would you give a highly driven entrepreneurial family, and what advice would you give their spouse? So sometimes the man is the entrepreneur, sometimes the woman is, sometimes they both are, oftentimes one is not entrepreneurial, and one is a maniac, what advice would you say to that young couple that’s about to go down this crazy up and down, they don’t even know if they’re going to have to fire 80 employees in one day, 5 years from where they’re starting. Russell: {inaudible} Joshua: What would you say to them? Russell: I’d say on my side, I always think, I always tell people, you can only be as successful as your spouse will allow you to be. And I’m so, I look at everyone else I ever dated before, people I knew, if I didn’t marry Collette, there’s no way we could have got  here. It’s just not possible. And I think I’m so grateful for her, how much grace she’s given me during the times of like, the hard times, or the low times, or the times I didn’t produce, or times I didn’t show up right. It’s so easy to hold judgments and to hold grudges and to hold things like that, and she’s never been that way. There might be something we get in an argument about, but then it’s gone and she forgives, and it doesn’t keep lingering and lingering. I think a lot of times you see that in a relationship, it lingers and lingers to the point where it just breaks. And she’s never been that way. It’s just kind of like, I don’t know, she gives me, I guess grace is the word in my head, just forgiveness of like, I understand that you’re doing stuff, that doesn’t make sense. It’s not normal, but I still love you so it’s okay. Collette: Oh, it’s so hard because that question all the time, like at Funnel Hacking or when people do run into us like, ‘Give me some advice, tell me what to do.” I’ve had a couple of women just in tears, “how do I support my husband.” And it can go both ways. And it really made me think, because I’m like, “How did I allow Russell to live this dream? How did I allow him to move forward without me cracking?” But the truth is I did crack. You know, you go through all the things and I mean, we weren’t rich right out the gate. So we had a little family, worked hard for all that you had. You see and like, I want him to live his dream, I don’t want him to be miserable with this life, so it’s kind of, everybody is so different. Advice to me is hard because everybody is a different personality, but I would just say, communication. Because I just learned that I would tell my younger self that as well, communicate. And the other thing is do something for yourself. So the advice to a highly driven, for instance, he’s the dreamer. He’s always like, “What’s your dream?” and I’m like, ‘I really don’t know. Keep everybody alive, keep up the house, to be this mom.” But to do something for yourself, go out with your girlfriends and breathe, and communicate that with your husband, or your significant other. Take some time for yourself because otherwise you’ll crack. And I did crack a lot. I learned the hard way. But also, podcasting, all these great, amazing tools that we have today, I would tell people that are out in this world to listen to all the positive things to get through these moments. How to deal with a dreamer. I don’t know. Joshua: That was an amazing answer. Ashley: That was like a mic drop. Joshua: I’m pretty sure you know. That was perfect. Ashley: I think so too, that was amazing. Collette: There’s always tears, and there’s always a little something, that’s just human nature. But we’re not perfect. Joshua: Have you ever felt pressure to act like that’s not the case? I mean, things are weird at home, you’re a public figure, because you made yourself internet famous. But you know what I mean? Is there, what’s that like? Collette: What is that like? Why am I stumbling? Russell: I think sometimes you feel, I mean for sure you feel the pressure. It’s funny too because people are like, “how are you always happy?” because I’m happy when I’m clicking, “Hey! How’s it going guys!” and then it’s back down and you’re like back to the fight. You want to see what’s actually happening here, we’re really upset right now or whatever. But it’s interesting because I think a lot of times you feel like you have to keep that posture. Because the fascinating thing is the times that I don’t, the times I break posture and I’m more vulnerable with frustration or things like that, that’s when I feel like, that’s when people actually connect with me more. It’s funny, Natalie Hodson I was talking with her yesterday, she did an instagram or something like, “You guys think I’m a nice, cool, calm, collected mom, I just screamed at my kids for 30 minutes, I threatened to throw the TV over, I’m a horrible mom.” All these things, she’s like bawling her eyes out and everything. And she told me she had 351 DMs from that one thing, she said, “I’ve never had that before.” That’s what draws people in. And I think that, you know I feel like we tried you know, I don’t know, I think there’s always some of that, but I’ve tried to be more like, things are tough sometimes. I remember at the very first wrestling practice with the kids out in the garage, I did a whole podcast about like, ‘Man, that sucked.’ I want to record this now so someday I can have my kids remember the first practice, how horrible it was, how mean they were, how they just let, just try to share more of the pain part, because people actually resonate with that way more than the posture. Joshua: People crave authenticity. But now Russell’s going to choreograph fights so that he can make great content. Collette: Ha, ha. Joshua: I’m just kidding. Collette was going to say something, I’m sorry. Collette: Oh no, I 100% agree. I don’t feel like, well sometimes maybe, I’m like we get dressed up a certain way, that’s when people come up I’m like, ‘ugh. I don’t have makeup on.” But who cares, whatever. Seriously, we’re all people. Joshua: Totes. Collette: Yeah, yeah. Ashley: We never do that ever. Russell: Sure you don’t. Ashley: He did that last time. Joshua: I did that, we just talked to Alison Prince and her husband and I don’t know where it came from it just came out. Ashley: And he did it twice in that interview. He’s not allowed to do that. Don’t do that. Joshua: It just felt right. Collette: That’s hilarious, I love it. Russell: {inaudible} Ashley: It’s not right. It’s not. Okay, last question, how important is having a like minded community as an entrepreneurial family? Joshua: Like, we want to assemble all these people that care about crushing two comma clubs and doing huge things of business, not about money, it’s just who you are, it’s what you are, but equally and more so care about crushing it at home and just connecting with your spouse and being a super parent. How important for those people is it to be in community with other weirdos like that? Russell: I think it’s super important. Yesterday when we were preparing for the interview Collette asked Dallin, our oldest twin, 9 minutes oldest, about what he likes about this thing. And he’s like, “You know I don’t like being wealthy because I have friends at school that make fun of me for being the rich kid.” And for us, it’s like, “ugh” and it’s funny because the kid who said, I specifically know who it was, his dad told me, he’s like, “My kids ask me how come I don’t have my wrestling room at my house? Why can’t I get a job like Russell’s?” So it’s funny because both kids, the opposite direction. But I think it’s important because it’s like, we live differently right. Most people, they wake up in the morning, they go to 9 to 5, they come home, they watch tv, or they drink beer, you know, that’s the majority of the world. And we’re out here trying to change the world and have fun and do other things, and thinking about other people besides just ourselves, and we’re trying to create. And the more they’re around other people trying to do that, the more they’re not embarrassed of it. It’s like, it broke my heart hearing that yesterday because I’m like, if that’s how he feels because he’s embarrassed, we need to get them around more people who are creating. Because you know, when he hangs out with Caleb Maddox that night he’s writing a book because Caleb you know, the more you’re doing that, the more it inspires, the more they’re able to see kind of what’s possible. So I think that’s a big reason why we’re doing the kid event in the summer so they can plug into that. We’re having a couple kid speakers come as well, so they can see, I wan tthem to have their eyes opened to, “Oh my gosh, I can do this too, and this is cool.” And it’s not a bad thing, it’s a super positive thing. Collette: Yeah, I agree. It’s a big deal. I’m like, ugh. I really appreciated getting these questions beforehand because I really did, I was asking my kids the same thing, so it was interesting to get each of their perspectives. But anyway… Joshua: Well, thank you guys so much. We’re actually, part of what we’re working on is this thing that’s called the family war plan. It’s not a journal, we’re not going to call it a journal, because that’s not cool enough, we’re going to call it a war plan. But it’s for families and it has all this crazy stuff. Ashley: it’s an experience. Joshua: If we, I don’t know when they’ll be done or whatever, but if we get them done in time, I want to just give a bunch to Clickfunnels to give to the families that come to the thing with their kids. Collette: Gosh. Joshua: I don’t  know if they’ll be done or not. But it’s so epic and thank you, thank you. Triple thank you, thank you. Ashley: Thank you, and you were fabulous, absolutely fabulous. Russell: Really good, I’m super impressed. So proud of you. Collette: Awe, thank you. Russell: You’re a natural. Collette: I’m not a natural. Russell: We’re starting a podcast together. Joshua: You did a great job. Ashley: Yeah, you did a great job. Joshua: Enjoy, I’m assuming you’re having a day off since you’ve been doing crazy, ridiculous things. Collette: I’m making him go to zumba tonight. Russell: That’s our date night. We’re having some zumba. Collette: There may be some blackmail happening here in the future. Russell: I just found out yesterday that zumba is dancing. I did not know that. Joshua: You’ll just own it and do an instagram. Ashley: It’s like really hard dancing, you don’t stop, you keep going. Russell: I thought  it was like a cardio, like a workout. Collette: I’ve never done it either. Russell: Then Dave told me yesterday that it’s salsa dancing or something. Collette: It’s going to be amazing. That’s our date tonight. Joshua: Congrats too, on your wrestling thing. Russell: Thanks, so much fun. Joshua: {inaudible} thing to do that no one literally does, except for Russell. Collette: Mid life crisis friends. Bring him back to glory days. Joshua: you looked like you were in beast mode though, you were smashing people, dude. Russell: I only showed you guys the highlights, when I was smashing. The two I got smashed in you didn’t see anything from that. Joshua: Did you get wrecked by someone, or was it close. Russell: yeah, I lost 2 matches, I won 5 matches. So when all is said and done it was… Joshua: It’s amazing, and you just started training a few months ago for it, didn’t you? Russell: We had three practices before we went, because I hurt my neck. So it was, it was fun though. We had a great time. Next year, and there’s a kid tournament at the same time, so next year I’m going to bring all the kids and Collette, and we’re going to do a family party. Collette: Yay, a wrestling party. Russell: She thought she outgrew the wrestling. Collette: It’ll be fun. Ashley: Oh my gosh, you might be my new favorite person on the entire planet. I’m a big fan. Joshua: We’ll bring Collette honey too, from our honey bees. I don’t even know if you like honey. Collette: I love honey. Joshua: Okay, we’ll bring it. {Inaudible} the bee and put the honey right in the jar for you. [back and forth inaudible} Collette: Oh my gosh. Russell: I assume that’s how it works. I don’t know. Collette: I don’t know either. Joshua: Alright, thank you Russell. Ashley: Thank you. Russell: Thanks you guys, it was super fun. Collette: Thank you, thank you. All: Bye.

This is the second episode in an exciting series where you’ll get a chance to meet my wife Collette and her views on running an entrepreneurial family. On today’s super special episode, part two of three, Russell and his lovely wife, Collette are interviewed by Joshua and Ashley Latimer about what their family culture is like. Here are the questions Russell and Collette answer in part two: If you had to start over, what advice would you give your younger self? What does it mean to be a Brunson? How does your family stay motivated during tough times, and how do you reset? And What are some marriage and parenting systems that are working for you? So listen here to find out what it’s like to be a Brunson by taking a sneak peek into their family culture. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone this is Russell Brunson, welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. So I gotta know, how was the first episode with my wife? I’m nervous and excited to share her with you guys. She is such an amazing person who doesn’t get any of the limelight or the spotlight and this is kind of the first time she’s had a chance to be out there. So I hope you guys enjoyed the first episode. If you haven’t listened to it yet, go back and listen to episode number one, we cover three really fun questions. And again, if you’re liking these take a picture on your phone or wherever you’re listening to it, go to Facebook or Instagram or wherever you do social stuff and post it, and do #marketingsecrets, and tag me because I’d love to see your thoughts. And then comment in the comments of your post what you thought about episode number one, what you liked about it, what was meaningful for you, what helped? So let me know on that one, and then do the same thing with this episode. So episode two right now, we’re going to jump into, we’ve got 4 questions we’re going to go through right now. So I’ll tell you what the 4 questions are real quick, and then we’ll jump in. Question number four:  If you had to start over, what advice would you give your younger self? Which is really good. Question number five: What does it mean to be a Brunson? What’s your family culture like? Question number six: How does your family stay motivated during tough times and how do you reset? And question number seven: What are some marriage and parenting systems that are working for you? Oh man, I’m excited for you guys to listen to this next episode, again, we’re going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back I’ll play the next segment of the interview and again, if you’re liking this or you get any ideas or ahas, please take a screen shot on your phone, post it and tag me and let me know what you guys liked about this episode with my beautiful wife, Collette. Alright, let’s queue up the theme song, and we’ll be right back. Joshua: Alright question number four. Ashley: Okay, if you had to start all over again, what would you do different this time and what advice would you give your younger self? Russell: I know, do you want me to tell them mine? Collette: Yes. Russell: Alright, so at the 7 year mark when we were struggling with our marriage and everything, we tried traditional counseling but I think the biggest impact for both of us was going to Tony Robbins. I went to UPW first, walked on fire, came home and I was like, “Ahh!” and it’s funny, we were both in the same state when I left, but then Tony gets you up to here. So when I came home I was like, “Collette, you’re really depressed, you should go.” So she went and came home on fire and we’re like, “Ahh!” Everything was awesome. Then we went to Date with Destiny after, that year we did everything Tony had, I went to Tony for the whole year basically. But we went to a Date with Destiny and I remember Tony talked about the 6 human needs and all that kind of stuff and he talked about why we do what we do, what need are we trying to get met? And it was interesting because he helps you figure out what are your primary needs. For me, my primary need, the primary desire I have is love and connection. I’m looking for love and connection. And in my head though, I was like “I need to go get significance so my wife will love me and connect with me.” So I’m going and trying to take over the world, and make a million, and all this kind of stuff thinking that me being significant will make her love me more. So I went through this indirect pattern to try to get love and connection, that was the whole thing. And I remember we did a launch and made like a million dollars, and I came home and I was like, conquered like, “We did a million dollars.’ And she was like, “I just wish you’d come home.” Collette: Debbie Downer. Russell: I’m like, “I just conquered this thing.” And I had this realization at Date with Destiny, she loves me already, we already have connection, I don’t have to go prove anything. It’s like I’m going through this huge long path to get the thing that’s just right here. So that was my big thing. And I think, I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs we do it initially because we need that significance, we’re looking for that because we want love and connection with our spouse or our parents, whoever it is that we’re trying to impress. I think if I was to start over again, I would take things slower and just, I don’t’ know, there was a period in our life as I was building, where I was checked out and I was doing the thing, and that drove us apart. As opposed to like, not being so obsessed with the end goal and just slowing down and really, I don’t know. I think it’s the same thing, when we launched Clickufnnels, the same thing. Me and Todd had disconnected from everything to be able to get this thing off the ground. Where I think now it’s a lot better spot where now it’s fun because we’re traveling together, we’re doing a bunch of fun things, and she came to this mastermind in Puerto Rico, and it’s jus tmore things together, and I would have slowed down and done more of that from the very beginning. As opposed to thinking I had to go leave and get significance to come back, you know, slay the beast and come back and “here it is.” I would have been like, “Let’s go get this thing together.” Joshua: It’s funny because she already loved you when you were selling potato guns making $20 a day, right? Collette: Yes. Joshua: But we forget that. I feel like I’m in counseling right now. {Cross talk} Joshua: I think I’m doing that right now. Okay, this isn’t about me, this is about you. That’s good, anything else you want to add or do you want to go to question 5? Collette: No, I think that’s pretty good. I wish I could go back and be… Joshua: Let’s talk about what it means to be a Brunson, like from your kids perspective. For us, we’re obsessed with this stuff, we have our family logo on, we have these shirts we had made custom, “Do Hard Things” is one of the things we tell our kids, all kinds of stuff. And I know that Russell thinks that’s really cool because he’s like geeking out when we talked about it a couple of times, but tell us what’s unique about your family culture. Russell: First of all, I want to do all that cool stuff you guys are doing, they have so many cool things they’re doing. Anyway, I think a couple things that really, I think I watched Collette bring to the table that’s really fun, especially after Tony Robbins. We realized that every morning our poor kids wake up and they’re about to go to the evilest place on earth, we call it school, and they’re already tired. It’s like they wake up and it’s like, I remember waking up as a kid and hating waking up and hating going to school and you’re miserable until school’s over. And what Collette’s really good at, is getting the kids excited in the morning. She’ll turn musi con, and she’ll be goofy and dance with them.Doing stuff so that this wake in the morning is not this horrible thing, trying to get them to crack a smile. I remember there would be times when the kids were little, us picking up and dancing around the whole house with them and just trying ot get them to not be miserable you know, being in a good state so they can go and conquer school, or conquer the difficult things. It’s one of my favorite things I watch Collette do all the time. What are other cool things? We always tell them that Brunson’s, because all the kids don’t want to wrestle ever. So I’m always like Brunson’s wrestle. We do hard things. They, yeah, that’s a big one. Joshua: Do you use NLP on your kids to make them become wrestlers, Russell? Russell: what’s that? Joshua: Do you use NLP on your own kids to convince them to be wrestlers? Russell: I don’t think that stuff works on your wife or kids, it’s really weird. It works on everybody else. Collette: So stubborn. What’s wrong with us? Joshua: Yeah, when Ashley drops the kids off at school… Ashley: Oh gosh, don’t say this. Joshua: Just tell them all the stuff…. Russell: Yeah, let’s hear it. Ashley: Oh gosh, we pray, that’s one thing we do. But we make the prayer a little bit more… Joshua: fun. Ashley: a little more fun at the end. I say, “And then all my people said…” and they’ll be like, “Amen!” If they don’t end “amen” loud enough, Joshua: It doesn’t count. Ashley: It doesn’t count. We gotta pray again. And we just sit in line and wait. Joshua: And then you roll down your window and say, “I love you” way too loud and embarrass them. Ashley: yeah, and I do this other thing too that they like. I go, “Bring em out, bring em out. She’s 3 feet tall, and 39 pounds and she likes to party, Finley Sarah Latimer.” And I do that for all my kids. Collette: Oh my gosh. Russell: That’s so cool. I love it. Ashley: They don’t think it’s cool. Some of them do. Joshua: They think it’s cool until like 4th grade. Russell: In 4th grade they’re embarrassed. Joshua: It’s not that embarrassing yet, they just own it, like “yeah mom, you’re the best mom. Yeah.” Ashley: My sixth grader just puts his hood on and walks into school. Russell: He walks away. Collette: I’m curious because Russell takes the kids to school certain days, same thing, in the funnel hacker jeep with music pumping and then whatever else, lights flashing, I don’t even know. And breaking the rules, going up the wrong way, dropping off the kids. Anyway, I’m like, I asked the kids the other day, they love it. And they’re in middle, those are the middle schools, middle schoolers. Russell: Do you like Daddy’s jeep? “Yeah, it’s so cool.” Collette: Then I feel like the lame-o, I’m like, “Get in the mom-mobile. Let’s go.” Ashley: One time I tried to download that song, “Bring em out, bring em out.” And then I downloaded it, and I didn’t listen to it before I played it. And it’s like totally inappropriate. In my mind, I thought it was just the “Bring em out, bring em out.” Nope. Russell: There’s two versions. Radio version and non-radio. Ashley: It’s inappropriate, so you just have to do it yourself. Russell: One of the things that you’re talking about that I thought about that we did about a year ago, that’s really cool. After Charfin came and did an event, he talked about setting family goals, or he talked about this in your business. Like in your business having a hall of fame goal, and then what’s your superbowl goal, the yearly goal, and then you have your weekly’s, your monthly’s. So we did this, not quite a year ago, we said as a family, what’s our hall of fame goal? Someday, what do we want to be known for, what’s the hall of fame goal? So what we set for that goal, so in the Mormon church there’s temples, and the best thing to do is to get married inside the temple, that’s where you’re sealed for all time and eternity, it’s this really special thing. But to go to the temple you have to be worthy. So you have to be living the commandments, you have to be doing stuff like that. So our family hall of fame goal is that we all want to, when Norah is old enough to get married in the temple, Collette: Norah’s the baby. Russell: She’s the baby, we all want to be worthy enough that we can be in the temple with her. So that’s our, if that happens, then yay, we were successful as parents. Yay, our family. That’s kind of the thing. It might not happen, you know, who knows? So every night now, it’s fun, they all pray, “Please bless us to be worthy to be in the temple with Norah when she gets married.” That’s a thing that we all strive for. Ashley: How sweet. Russell: And then we set a super bowl goal, what’s the goal for the year now, that’s going to get us closer to the hall of fame. So the goal we set was to be able to read the whole Book of Mormon as a family, which we’d been trying to do that since they were born. Collette: We have. We finally did 13 years later. Russell: Yeah, so we set the goal, and then we said, “you know when they win the super bowl, they get to go somewhere crazy. They all go to Disneyland and dump Gatorade on their heads. What do you guys want when we succeed?” and we had this goal, so they all wanted to go on a cruise, a Disney cruise with their friends. So we set it, set the goal, set the date, and they were so cool. There were times that we’d be out on a date and they’re texting us, “We just read two chapters.’ Or we’re out of town and they’re reading. They actually set the goal and pushed it and it was so cool to see them achieve the goal and Collette had it set up so that Disney, when we were on the cruise they came out and gave us awards and cake and all sorts of crazy stuff to celebrate it. Collette: Of course, they treat you well at Disney. Ashley: I love that. Joshua: That’s awesome. Ashley: That’s really good. Okay, Joshua: question number six. Ashley: How does your family stay motivated or focused during tough times? And what does your family do to reset when things get out of sync. Collette: I say, reset, we kind of like, I’m going to start with the reset. I feel like, for instance, Russell was at his busiest Christmas break, all the things, but we ended up going to McCall, Idaho, which is a couple of hours out of town, in a little cabin, disconnected, and it just kind of reset. Everybody was playing board games, everybody was together, in this tiny little kitchen that I loved. I don’t know, in this big home people can just scatter and they’re gone. I feel like you can eat dinner, and they’re gone. So I feel like, Russell: Everyone’s stuck, it’s so cool. Collette: We’re in this cute little place, and we’re tight together doing the things. So for a reset, I just loved that. Going either on, even if you can’t go for a couple of days, just a walk or take a break outside, just to reset, break the pattern. Joshua: I just thought you guys built funnels as a family to reset. Russell: Funnel cakes. Ashley: I love that. Joshua: I don’t feel like you guys probably have, at least Russell, I hear he’s a motivated guy, so how do you stay motivated? You just kind of are that, right, and then you guys do Tony Robbins, and you’re doing the dance parties in the morning, that’s really valuable, resetting. Is there internet at that cabin? Collette: There was wifi I think, they had a smart tv. Russell: We didn’t have, we had our phones but that’s all we had. Collette: Russell didn’t even crack his computer open, which I’ve never seen that in a lot of years. So I feel like the reset was good for him. {Clapping} Collette: Yeah, it was big. Joshua: That is so hard. That is so hard. That is no joke. Okay, question number seven, this is a good one. And when I say “system” I’m going to ask you what the most important marriage system and parenting system is, you know throughout your journey. System is, people don’t say that phrase, we’re going to kind of bring that phrase out, but it’s just the way that you do something. It’s, every family is already fully systemized, the question is are those systems serving you well, are they serving your kids well? It’s not if you need this, because you already have them, the way you talk to yourself, the way that you take care of your body or don’t. So what do you think in terms of marriage systems, and parenting systems, what are a couple of really important ones that come to mind? Russell: I tell you as we were reading these questions ahead of time, that was like, huh, maybe we need to work on our systems. Collette: We’re doing better than we think we are. I feel like we’ve never had a really awesome system, other than positive vibes. Russell: I think a big thing for us too is that we go to church every Sunday, and then one thing that, one of the beliefs of our church is we have a thing every week called family night. And we’re not perfect at it, I wish we were perfect at it, but family nights we sit down and it’s cool because it starts with an opening prayer. And then, you know, usually there’s a spiritual thought, and we try to calendar out what’s happening this week, so we have some context of what’s happening, and then we should be better. We used to always make treats and stuff, we should probably get back to that. Collette: Yeah. Russell: We used to always, we had a family home evening board and they always like, “We need an opening song. I get to lead the music.” Do all this stuff when they were younger. Collette: The problem is they’re growing up, so we’re getting into the prickly teenager years. Russell: Teenagers are hard. Do you guys have teenagers already? Ashley: Yeah, he’s 12. Joshua: He’s 12 yeah, almost. Ashley: Oh, and it’s so hard. And this is a whole new avenue of life. Russell: Yeah, we’ve got two that are 13, and it’s like one’s in a15 year old body, and one’s like a 9 year old body. So it’s kind of like, the older ones, it’s so hard. And they beat each other up all the time. How do you referee that? Do you let them fight it out? Collette: We’re in the middle of craziness trying to figure it out. So suggestions please, anybody. Russell: If you have a guest who’s figured that part out, let us know, we’ll listen to that one and then we’ll come back for a recap. Joshua: Yeah, we’re going to find the answers. This whole project, we’re not trying to be gurus at all, we’re just, we want to do this, we want to be intentional with our family. So we’re just going to facilitate and crowd source for system ideas, and you know, deliver that to the tribe or whatever. Ashley: And literally I’ve been taking notes. I’m just like, “Oh my goodness.” As I’ve been learning from the entrepreneur part, and then also the parenting part. It’s mind blowing, amazing. Joshua: So with your kids, in regards to parenting or marriage systems, I know you guys do date night sometimes, but with Russell’s schedule it’s probably next to impossible to have total consistency, I’m assuming. But what about with your kids, is there any little things you do, annual things, is there….One thing, I’ll give you one thing that I do that’s really cool. We do Sawyer Sunday, Maverick Monday, Tucker Tuesday, Finley Friday and it’s not perfect at all, Ashley: June May Thursday. Joshua: I’ll sit down and play legos for 45 minutes and just be totally focused on that one kid at a time. That little thing is ridiculous, the impact it has on the kids. But that’s an example. Is there anything else you guys do as Brunson’s that’s… Russell: We gotta do that, that’s really…. Collette: I feel like individually we’re not awesome. I feel like we’re like, I mean, we go out and play and we play hard. So Russell’s outside playing with all the kids, but for individual, for instance, I haven’t done it in forever, but I pulled one of my kiddos out of lunch the other day and took him to lunch. He’s like, “Mom, I really needed that.” But of course, his love language is quality time. Russell: And when we get them all together they all fight. I think that’s a big thing we gotta start doing. Will you help us come up with cool names for our kids in the days of the week? Collette: Oh no, I’m going to come up with some later.

The #1 request I get from our listeners is they want to hear behind the scenes from my wife’s perspective on what it’s like running an entrepreneurial family. On today’s super special episode, part one of three, Russell and his lovely wife, Collette are interviewed by Joshua and Ashley Latimer about what it’s like to be an entrepreneurial family. Here are the questions Russell and Collette answer in part one: What is the best/hardest thing about being an entrepreneur? How is it possible to aggressively pursue business dreams but still have a happy home life? And finally, they talk about one of the hardest times in their life and how they got through it together. So listen here to finally hear Collette give her first interview on what it’s like to be married to Russell. ---Transcript--- Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I am so excited for the next three episodes for you guys. It’s going to be so cool. So the number one request I get by far, from all of you guys, from all of the people listening to the podcast, from all my funnel hackers, every Funnel Hacking Live, at everything, people ask is, “We want to hear from your wife. How in the world does she deal with you as an entrepreneur? How do entrepreneurial families work?” We get so many questions for Collette all the time. And I’m not going to lie, I’m very protective of my beautiful wife. This is not her world, she doesn’t step onstage and speak in front of thousands of people. She doesn’t feel comfortable there. The first couple of years of events, she didn’t even come to them. She stayed at home and supported us, and took care of the family. And it’s just something that I was always kind of nervous introducing her to. And at the very first Funnel Hacking live, I remember she came to it and she said she walked in and she saw the audience and she started bawling, and she’s like, “Oh my gosh, I had no idea that this is what was actually happening.” She’s like, ‘I was supporting you and doing these things, but I didn’t know the fruits of it.” And it’s fun and every year she comes to Funnel Hacking Live now, and she’s sitting on the front row and she’s like, “I don’t understand half the things you guys are saying, but I just love the energy and the people and the stories.” Anyway, she is my favorite person on this planet and I’m so grateful for her, she’s amazing. I always say you can only be as successful as your spouse will allow you to be. So without her there’s no way that I could have become who I’ve become, and there’s no way that I could have formed this team and built Clickfunnels and all the amazing things that the fruits of all this work we’ve been doing for the last decade and a half would not have been possible without my wife, Collette. So it’s funny because people always want to hear from her and I always just tell them no. But I am very impressed. Some of my friends, the Latimer’s, Josh Latimer joined my inner circle a little while ago, and he played things so well. He came to the very first Funnel Hacking Live, and the first thing he did, he ran up and found my wife Collette, and to kind of put this into perspective, most people when they see me at Funnel Hacking Live or at the airport, or anywhere, they run and push my wife aside, “Russell!” and they don’t even pay attention to her. And that’s how you tell if you failed the test, if you didn’t say hi to my wife and didn’t acknowledge her, you failed the wife. That’s basically it. If you ever want me to call you back or pay attention, how you treat my wife, is how much attention I’ll pay back to you. So it’s kind of funny because people always just brush her aside and just ask me the question. And it’s like, ah, you guys missed it, you missed the most important thing in the world to me, and you didn’t even acknowledge it. And Josh was the opposite way. He, first thing, he ran up to Collette and he’s like, ‘Hey, I’m here to thank you. I know the sacrifice that my wife’s gone through for my business to get here. And I know the sacrifice that you’re going through behind the scenes every single day. Just so grateful for you.” So because of that my wife knew who he was. And because when he asked to do this thing, he’d opened the door and planted the seeds. So reluctantly I finally said yes. He and his wife are working on a really cool project. In fact, it’s not all live yet, but if you go to honorandfire.com, so honorandfire.com, honor and fire, as of right now there’s a family checklist that’s in there, but they’re building a whole system for entrepreneurial families, and what they’re doing is super cool and it’s fun. And I want to share it with you guys. But this interview is part of one of their training courses they have for families. So they allowed me to be able to share it with you guys. So you guys have a chance to hear 10 questions with my wife and I talking about entrepreneurship and families and how it all works together. So this is the very first, we’re going to break this into three episodes. Episode number one, we’re going to cover three questions that they ask. The very first questions is what is the best/hardest thing about being an entrepreneur? Number two is how is it possible to aggressively pursue business dreams but still have a happy home life? And number three, talk about a hard time in your life. So we’re going to share those three questions on this episode, and then when you come back tomorrow, we’ll share with you guys episode number two. So after this is done, pause your phone and go to honorandfire.com, opt in and get the family systems checklist from the Latimer family, and this will help you to grow your family, to be able to have a successful business and a family at the same time. So I want to thank the Latimer family for allowing us to share this interview with you guys, and again, go to honorandfire.com to go opt in. And with that said, we’re going to queue up the theme song, and when we come back, we’re going to listen to the first of three segments of the interview with my beautiful wife, Collette. Joshua: Hey my friends, how the heck are you? I’m so excited that you’re here hanging out with us. You get to look behind the curtain in terms of business and family in a way that I’ve never seen done before. We’re going to ask Collette and Russell Brunson some questions about their family, their culture, their story, and just the raw truth about the good and the bad, and how it’s really hard to grow a business, it’s really hard to be married, it’s hard to be a parent, and you mix it all together and it’s this cocktail of potential destruction. But they’re still there, and it seems like they love each other, I’m pretty sure they love each other. So thank you Russell and Collette for being here. How are you? Russell: Doing amazing. Glad to be here. Collette: Yeah, super excited. Russell: Get my wife on camera for the first time, it’s exciting. Collette: It’s a big deal. Joshua: You’re going to owe Collette big time. We gotta think of something really epic to send her, because I know this is not in your comfort zone. Collette: I’m good. Joshua: It’s going to help so many people, it’s inspiring to them. So without further ado, the first question is an easy one I think. The first question, what is, from your perspective, the best thing and the hardest thing just about being an entrepreneurial family? Because this is a weird lifestyle. What’s the good and the bad from both of your perspectives? Russell: You want to start or you want me to start? Collette: No go ahead, you start it off. Russell: Alright, I’ll start. I think the best part, my belief, all the people we have a chance to serve. That’s why we do Funnel Hacking Live and these events. Now it’s like we’re internet celebrities. At the airport people come to us, a the weirdest spots people run to us and just the consistent theme is “Oh my gosh, you changed my life. You changed my life.” I think that’s the best part. It’s fun to see the kids, the kids will be like, ‘Dad, we got spotted again.” Which is…. We were at the waffle place the other day and some guy came up and was like, ‘Russell Brunson, you changed my life.” The kids are like, “My dad got spotted again.” I think that’s the best part, but he hardest part is like, it’s just hard. I don’t know. It’s hard because it’s like, like you said, there’s three big aspects. There’s the marriage, there’s the kids, and there’s the business, and all of them take a lot of time. We did the love language test with the kids on Sunday, and all except for one of our kids’ love language is quality time. Quality time to go around, we’ve got so many kids, you know. I think the hardest part is sometimes you get caught up in the business side and it’s like, I gotta remember this is what’s actually most important. How do I shift my focus back to them? How do we break away? I think sometimes in business when you’re having success, you get the positive feedback all the time. And then you go home and it’s like, ‘Oh my kids are struggling here.” And it’s harder and you don’t get the immediate positive feedback a lot of times, I think. And it’s just like, okay, but this is the most important part. We gotta go and do it. I think that’s the hardest part sometimes. Collette:  I think the best thing for me, I guess, it is seeing how lives are changed and things like that, it’s super empowering. I remember one of the first Funnel Hacking Lives I went to, I just had Norah, and I walked into the room and I’m like, ‘What’s happening? These people are here for you?” Being at home with all our kids sometimes, you know, he goes and does his thing, and I’m home. So my eyes were really opened at that first Funnel Hacking experience, and I had a moment. I was super hormonal anyway, but I just bawled. I did the epic cry for a minute because I’m like, wait a sec. So that’s really cool. So the best thing for me is to see him chase his dream, change people’s lives, but also for being at home, being able to be at home with my kids and, so that’s really cool. I think it’s opposite, the hardest thing for me sometimes is being spotted. Because I’m like, ugh, I’m not wearing makeup today, but whatever. It’s fine. We’re real people. So sometimes that’s hard for me. Or sometimes they’ll get super excited to see Russell and they’re like, “Russell Brunson!”and then they push me out of the way. Joshua: Big mistake fans. Collette: No, just kidding. I don’t care. Yeah, so sometimes….. Russell: It’s true though. If you guys want to be smart, this is why we’re on zoom meeting right now, Josh is a very smart man and the first person he ever said hi to was Collette, and now we’re here. So if it were the other way around, it doesn’t work that way. {crosstalk} Russell: Yeah, it was funny, we were on a plane the other day and someone ran up all excited to meet me. He was from Rexburg, which is where Collette grew up. Collette’s like, ‘I’m from Rexburg.’ and he’s like, “Oh.’ And just kept going, and it was just like, alright. I’m not going to remember your name now. Joshua: I couldn’t have done anything without her. That’s the reality, right. I mean, when you’re doing marketing and you’re the face and you’re being the charismatic leader and stuff, that’s one thing. But there’s times when you’re frustrated and you’re breaking down and you’re crying, it’s hard. And Clickfunnels wasn’t always a hundred million dollar thing, it was an idea and Todd’s coding. The dynamic is so hard when you’re launching something. And this is everything. So it was totally authentic, the whole saying thanks to Collette, because Clickfunnels did change our life. Joining inner circle changed our life, for lots of reasons, but I know that that doesn’t happen without her doing all kinds of stuff, holding you up, doing, just its huge. And I know that other married entrepreneurs know exactly what we’re talking about right now. Real quick, I forgot to ask in the beginning. How long have you guys been married? I think a lot of people probably know your story in general. But how long has it been, how many kids do you have? Tell us about that. Collette: So we’ve been married almost 17 years, it’ll be 17 in August. And we have 5 kids ranging 13 to 4. Joshua: Yeah, we’ve been married 17 years in July. That’s awesome. Ready for question number two? Ashley: How is it possible to aggressively pursue business dreams and still have a healthy home life? Russell: This is my question? Collette: {affirmative sound} Russell: You know it’s interesting, it’s kind of weird right now, we’ve had a lot of friends who have been in business recently who have made the split. And it’s like, ugh. I don’t know, every time it happens it’s heart wrenching for us. It’s like, oh, you did the hard things together and when you’re supposed to be celebrating that’s when they split, and it’s tough. You know there’s a quote that this guy David O. McKay said, “No success can compensate for failure in the home.” And that’s a thing that rings in my head all the time. When I’m at work and I’m stressing out at all sorts of stuff and then it’s like, the kids’ wrestling practice is happening, or we gotta do this, or whatever. In my head the easy thing is I’m too busy, I can’t do that. But then that quote comes in my head, “no success can compensate for failure in the home.” And a lot of times I just had to stop and be like, the day is done. I gotta be done. Even though there’s so many things happening, there’s so much stress and anxiety and a billion emails I gotta answer to and 500 voicemails. You know all these things, I just have to stop and come home. And I think that’s a big part of it. I think the other thing that’s been really good, we kind of learned this early in the marriage. I think sometimes, there are times when you have to pull an all-nighter, or you have to be gone for a weekend. And I think at the beginning of our marriage I was really bad at letting her know that, until it’s like 9:30 at night and she’s like, “Where are you?” and I’m like, ‘Oh I’m not coming  home tonight.” And then that’s when the friction would always happen. I think I got better at knowing, okay next week Todd’s coming to town, there’s probably going to be a night or two that’s going to be… When you were aware of it, then it was okay and we were able to kind of figure things out. So communication is a big thing. I don’t think we’re the best communicators, we’re still learning that part of our life. Collette: We’re horrible communicators. Russell: We’re still learning that, but I think as we’ve gotten better, that’s where it’s like I’m able to go really, really aggressive because I know that, like she knows that I’m gone this time and she can support it, and then visa versa, and it helps to even it all out. Collette: Yeah, I second that 100%. I think communication is huge, and we’re not the best at it. And it’s been a lot of, I mean sometimes, upset and sad and whatever, the emotions that come that are angry, not sad, angry. But I really feel blessed, like Russell said, there are a lot of people that do this journey and then you know, sometimes it’s so hard that the marriages do fail or the partnership fails. So I really feel blessed, because I really feel it’s also attitude, and I feel like we’ve portrayed a lot of positive energy to our family and to our kids, and then they kind of see that too. And I just think that’s really a neat thing. As aggressively as this entrepreneurship world is and as fast and furious Russell’s brain works and goes, it’s really cool for them to be like, “Oh my goodness.” But for me too, as a mom, seeing a couple of the kids, their brains kind of taking over and starting to aggressively  have these dreams, and I’m like, “How do I…?” you know. But it’s really cool. How do I keep that a healthy thing for them and discourage them and say, “Wait, wait, wait, let’s do these other things first.” Russell: It’s hard sometimes when Dallin has this million dollar idea. We’re like, “Did you do your homework yet?” and he’s like, “I don’t want to this. If I have to do homework, you have to.” {inaudible} it’s tough. Joshua: So awesome. I know you guys are believers too, and that’s a consistent theme with a lot of the high achievers that we’re going to be interviewing for this. That’s a anchor, I know that’s a huge part of your life as well, right. We love Jesus, we’re a Christian family and stuff. Question number three, I’m going to ask you about a time when it was really hard, which maybe that never happened for you. But you’re talking about love language, I think there should be a book about fight language too. Ashley’s fight language passive aggressive, so like, she just doesn’t talk. Ashley: I’m getting better. I’m getting better. Joshua: When she doesn’t talk I tell her to stop yelling at me, because I say that that’s the equivalent of yelling, it’s just a different methodology. Russell: You should totally write that book, that’d be the greatest. Joshua: So tell us about a time in your journey whenever, whatever comes to mind, that was really hard. Maybe there’s friction, maybe its financial uncertainty, God knows you went through a lot of that. How did you get through it? Collette: Um okay, let’s see. Russell: There’s been a lot of it. Collette and Russell: {crosstalk} sunshine and roses as much as people think. Collette: No, it’s really a hard journey. I want to say, I’m going to start with Ellie. When I was pregnant with Ellie, I feel like I was kind of struggling with my identity a little bit and things like that. Where was I going with this? I think back, our marriage was kind of struggling, was it our seven year itch? Okay, the seven year itch and I was really going through a funk, and he was going through a funk and we were trying to figure out things. You guys, therapy is amazing. Do it. Hard times through marriage and then business. So I would say, it’s good to have coaches, it’s good to have, like Tony Robbins changed my life. I went to that UPW that I came home on cloud number 10,000, and I feel like I came home a better wife and mom. And I feel like you need to redo that because I feel like all the sudden you go down that slippery slope again. So relationship wise, I feel like 2007ish, but then business wise, 2010 we took a pretty big hit. But communication, I didn’t really know so I was like, ‘Let’s go to Disneyland. Let’s go to Disneyland.” And he’s like, “We’re broke.” And I’m like, ‘What? I thought we were rich.” Russell: I was trying to protect her from this. {crosstalk} Ashley: I can totally relate. Totally relate. Sometimes I was like, ‘Oh I need to…” I told my mom I went to, sorry this is about you guys, but I went to the ATM and I was like, ‘Mom, I don’t know if I can get $40 out to go to a garage sale.” And she’s like, “Okay.” And I look at my bank account, and it’s like multiple figures, like thousands and thousands, and she’s like, ‘So are we good?” And I’m like, “Yes, I guess we’re good.’ {Crosstalk and laughter} Ashley: We could go buy a house maybe, I don’t know. What do you want to go buy? Collette: It’s so exciting, the entrepreneurial world. Russell: Yeah, I was thinking about for me, the hardest is, and I shared this story at Funnel Hacking Live and it’s funny because afterwards Collette came up and hit me. Remember, “Why didn’t you tell me about all of that?” Collette: I was mad. Russell: I was trying to protect you. Collette: We’re a partnership, and he held a lot of information from me. So at that particular, it was Dallas I believe, and I was bawling my eyes out, because I’m like, “You were going through that alone. That’s not okay.” Russell: Yeah, I was trying to keep it a secret from her, because I’m the man, I don’t want to… Collette: True. Russell: I was always, we always had enough money. Back then, basically we had a paycheck every single month that covered all our living expenses, and I was like, as long as that doesn’t shift, then her world doesn’t have to shift at all. I didn’t want to put any stress or pressure on her and the kids. So I knew that if it ever got worse, if I got lower than that, I’d bring it up and I was like, I can handle this. And I’d go every single day and just, we had, it was horrible, we had to lay off 70-80 people in one day. We lost all of our merchant accounts, it was just battle after battle. It was like a year of just, like the most stress and pressure ever. But I think one of the most impactful moments of that whole journey, I don’t remember where it was in the timeline, all I remember is that I was trying to take all this pressure and this burden myself. Because I felt like it was my fault, I’d messed up, and that was not just keeping it from her, but keeping it from God, keeping it from everything. I remember one morning I was in the room and I was just … Collette: It was a disaster. Russell: I was a disaster and I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t want to go into the office, but I had too and all these things. And I was just in tears and I remember, I don’t know if you remember this… Collette: I totally remember. Russell: I remember you grabbing me, and pulling me to my knees and you’re like, “We need to pray right now.” And I think you prayed for me and prayed for the business and prayed for everything. And it was just one of those moments where I was just like, I’m not alone. I have my wife, I have God, I have other things, and I need to rely, I can’t keep relying on myself. And that was really the turning point for me. So that was definitely the hardest part, and probably the coolest thing that came from that and helped me to be more open. Joshua: Thank you so much for sharing that. That is heavy stuff. That’s exactly what we’re looking at, because I know that that’s the case for everybody in their own way. That’s the reality. Because when we’re front and stage, you’ve got to be doing the thing. But there’s all this stuff happening behind the scenes that’s just incredible. Did you have something you wanted to add to that Collette? Collette: No, it was funny because I was thinking of that exact same story when I grabbed him and pulled him down like, ‘we need to pray.” Anyway, that was really cool that you shared that, felt that energy.

On this special Valentine's Day episode of ALPS In Brief, Mark sits down with Joshua Lenon, lawyer in residence and data protection officer for Clio, to hear firsthand how cloud products can make your law practice more secure and efficient. Fall in love with new features of law practice management and growth software that will keep your data safe and sound. Transcript: MARK:            Hello, this Mark Bassingthwaighte the risk manager with ALPS and welcome to another podcast, ALPS In Brief, the podcast that comes to you from the historic Florence Building in beautiful downtown Missoula, Montana. And I'm so pleased to have as our guest today Joshua Lenon, who is a lawyer in residence with Clio. And Joshua has done a podcast earlier with us in terms of one of our early initial podcasts, and I just wanted to invite Joshua back to discuss some developments in Clio. But Joshua, before we jump in can you just share a little bit about yourself for those that may not have heard the first podcast? JOSHUA:                   Sure. Thanks, Mark. It's really nice to be here. So, I'm Joshua Lennon, I'm Clio's lawyer in residence, and that means I am attorney admitted to New York, but I help Clio out of Vancouver, Canada with legal research into the intersection of technology in the practice of law. I also serve as Clio's data protection officer, helping us with compliance issues and research into the special privacy and confidentiality needs of legal technology and how we can really increase the security and protection of both law firms and their clients through the use of technology. I've been doing this for about six years now, I've been really lucky to be a part of the explosive growth of Clio and I quite frankly have one of the best jobs in law, I think. MARK:          I would agree. What has happened with Clio is really exciting. One of the reasons I wanted to visit with you is Clio has recently celebrated their 10th anniversary, as I understand it, and I've also heard that your 2018 Clio Cloud Conference, which occurred last fall in New Orleans was quite an event. And I thought we'd just start out by having you share sort of what's going on. What are the exciting things that ... What made 2018 a big year for Clio? JOSHUA:   So, there are a couple things that made 2018 a really big year for Clio. One of the words that leaps to mind is “growth.” We've grown both externally in terms of the number of law firms that we work with. We now currently work with 170,000 legal professionals in 90 countries around the world. We also have continued to grow our relationships with organizations like Bar Associations and law societies, whereas we're now offered as a member benefit by 66 different Bar Associations and law societies around the world. Excitingly, one of the oldest law societies in the world, the Law Society of England and Wales is now offering Clio as its exclusive cloud based member benefit, which is kind of cool. So, we get to go over to England and visit amazing historic locations that have influenced the common law around the world. So, that's been really cool. MARK: That is cool now. It just underscores you do have a very cool job. Please continue, what other exciting things are going on? JOSHUA:   We're growing like a weed internally at Clio as well. So, we actually just topped 350 employees, so that's 350 experts in their field, either building the backend of Clio or providing award-winning customer support to our customers. And one of the things that kind of leapt our head count forward is we acquired our integration partner Lexicata. What's interesting is because we're cloud-based, we actually integrate with a lot of different pieces of software out there, so not just things like the email that a law firm uses, but also highly specialized tools that target the legal industry. And we have approximately 160 integration partners right now, and one of our oldest and most popular is a company called Lexicata. They designed a client intake application that enables firms to really walk a potential client through the discovery phase, the consultation phase, and finally the retention phase of becoming a client with the law firm. And we realized that this was an area of legal technology that we could be performing better at, and so we took a look like any organization does. Do we go out and buy a piece of software that does that, or we build it ourselves? And we had such a great fit, both organically and technically with Lexicata that it just made sense to merge. And so it's our first acquisition ever as a company. We brought on 30 new employees in office in L.A. and a whole new software suite, which means that we now help law firms not only manage their practice but manage the onboarding of clients into their practice. And that's been an incredible accomplishment in 2018. MARK: Yeah, that's a really big deal and kudos to you guys. That's exciting news, that really is. One of the things that I took note of from the cloud conference ... I didn't attend but I have been on the site and just looking at all the different speakers and it looked like it was a fantastic conference. But I was very interested too in the Legal Trends Report. And you had given a presentation not too long ago, I believe, sort of talking a bit about the legal trends report, and I was interested in ... You talked a bit about lawyer missteps, and I think Lexicata plays into this. Can you kind of explore a little bit what you learned out of Legal Trends and how Clio is helping lawyers? JOSHUA:   Absolutely. Yep. So, in case your listeners aren't familiar with the Legal Trends Report, it is an annual report that we've put out for the past three years. We always release it around the Clio Cloud Conference, which tends to be in the autumn, and it focuses on two different types of data. So, the first is data contributed by our customers through the use Clio as software. And I use the word contributed because it's something that you can opt out of, but while we don't look at any confidential information, I want to be very clear about that, we can look at certain meta-data around the way lawyers use Clio. So, for example, lawyers need us to keep track of how long a bill has been open, and is it past due? While we can't see the clients or the amount, we can see that an anonymized aggregate state, so again, very, very at arm's length we can see that certain percentages of bills stay open for a certain percentage of time. And so, that's the type of data that we bring into the Legal Trends Report, but on top of that we also use really extensive outside research on a variety of different topics, both with lawyers, and in 2018 we started talking to clients and how they are interacting with lawyers. What was interesting is, in the client research that we did in 2018, we found that clients are really signaling that they want to work in particular ways with law firms, and when we asked the exact same question to lawyers we found there was mismatch. So, one example is scheduling appointments. It turns out that clients really want a very seamless, single touchpoint method for contacting a law firm and scheduling an appointment. They don't want to do a back and forth in email, they want to be able to pick up the phone or go to a website and just have an appointment made quickly and easily. And we found that lawyers were the opposite. They wanted back and forth, usually because they may not have access to their schedule, or that they may be interrupting other important billable activities. So, there's this mismatch or misstep as you said, between how the clients are expecting to interact with the lawyers and how lawyers are interacting with their clients. We went on in the report to identify eight different areas of mismatch between client expectation and lawyer service and how that can create frustration between the two parties, and may be an issue when it comes time for clients to refer new business to a law firm. MARK: Interesting. Interesting. Just as an aside, is this report available to the general public, or attorneys if they have any interest in taking a look? JOSHUA:   Absolutely. So, it's available for free. You can get to it by going to Clio.com/LTR. So, that's C-L-I-O.com/LTR, which is short for the Legal Trends Report. That'll actually take you to a website where you can download all three versions of the Legal Trends Report, that's 2016 through 2018, each with a little bit of unique research in each year. We've also provided some tools on that website based off of the research as well. So, for example, you can actually take a look at the billable rates per practice area, per state for both lawyers and non-lawyers and compare your own rates to them to see if you're charging maybe a premium for a high value product, or if maybe you're thinking about being a volume-based law firm, and are your rates then competitive with the law firms around you? MARK: It sounds like a lot of great information there. JOSHUA:   Mm-hmm (affirmative). MARK: Any news on new features being released? JOSHUA:   Absolutely. So, in addition to acquiring Lexicata, we've actually been rewriting it and we're launching it in January of 2019 as a completely new system that we're calling Clio Grow. And so it takes all the great features of client intake that Lexicata had already built, puts a little bit of Clio research and design on top of them and makes it more deeply integrative with the Clio Practice Management Solution. So, if you're looking to bring on a client intake tool, it's going to be a seamless experience between the two. In addition to that, within Clio's Practice Management we've actually added a ton of new features. One of the things that has been most well received is we've built in payment plans into Clio right now. In 2017 we added built-in credit card processing because our research found that if a law firm had the ability to accept credit cards, they actually get paid about 33 percent faster. MARK: Yeah, doesn't surprise me at all. JOSHUA:   Yeah, and so if we can help our customers have a better accounts receivable, we figured we should. So, we negotiated a very sweetheart exclusive deal with LawPay and LawPay is now built in to Clio and can help you accept credit card payments. If you turn on LawPay in Clio and it's provided at no additional charge, then you can also turn on payment plans and it allows you to take an invoice, structure a series of payments including how often it gets paid, and we'll just run that automatically in the background for you. It's been incredibly well received with people helping individuals in particular, so family law lawyers for example, or traffic and DUI/DWI lawyers are finding it to be a really helpful tool for bringing clients in, helping them afford legal services, and helping the law firm's bottom line. So, that's been an incredibly well received one. One that I think is really neat on top of that is a feature we're calling Clio Launcher, and it is a downloadable plugin that you put on your computer, and any time you see a document in Clio, if you click on it it will just open that document in whatever appropriate piece of software is on your computer. So, if you've got a Word document stored in Clio, for example, you click on it, it'll open in Word and then when you click Save, it will save it directly back up to Clio's servers. So, there's a really seamless now work flow between having Clio as both your billing engine and your document management engine behind your law firm, whereas before we found that people just needed a little bit more of a sync between the two, and they were choosing to integrate tools like Dropbox or Google Drive, which are still there, but now you can get the free unlimited storage that comes included with Clio and not change your workflow at all but have ready access to your documents. MARK: Yeah, yeah. That sounds awesome. JOSHUA:   Yeah, I like that one a lot. MARK: Am I correct that Clio is moving into the mobile space as well? JOSHUA:   Absolutely. So, we've had a mobile app for years, available on iPhone and Android as well as an iOS tablet app. And what's really interesting is there's been kind of change in mobile architecture. MARK: Okay, alright. JOSHUA:   And so this is probably highly technical for your audience but before when you were building apps, you would have to have really highly specialized language depending on the phone you were building it for. And a little while back, app developers realized this was kind of ridiculous. If I have to write the exact same thing in two different languages for an iPhone and an Android phone, that's a huge amount of overhead, and it actually diminishes the ability to improve an app, update it quickly, add new features, because we have to write the exact same thing twice but it different languages. So, there's been a shift and this is mostly led by some of the bigger tech companies out there towards developing single source languages that allow you to develop really quickly. So, Clio's onboard with this. We're converting our mobile apps to this single language which is called React, and we're actually using it to release a variety of different apps, so not just a Clio app now, we actually just put together a free timekeeping app that's available on the iTunes store. So if you are a solo lawyer and you don't really need a full practice management solution, maybe you're just starting out, maybe you're working part time but you still want to keep track of your time, we've got an app for you. And we build feedback cycles into our apps, so if you download it and it's not the right fit there will always be a feedback link, tell us what we can improve. And we're going to keep doing things like that, adding new apps and third party services using rapid development techniques, so that way we can find the best fit for law firms and lawyers out there. MARK: And what is on the horizon for 2019? Any exciting things that- JOSHUA:   Oh, so yes, absolutely. One of the things that I'm really excited about is ... We talked a little bit about the Clio Cloud Conference and it was another area of explosive growth for Clio in 2018, and so we had 1,500 lawyers from around the world come and meet with us in New Orleans. And we had, as you said, just absolutely phenomenal speakers. So, we try to pick the best speakers both inside legal as well outside legal, so that way we're learning what works for everybody. So, for example we actually had a great speaker come and talk about stress and how stress is not necessarily a bad thing. It's how you react to stress that needs to be your focus of your attention, right? Not the removal of it. You know? MARK: Right. Right. JOSHUA:   We had people from Stanford who came and talked about designing your life, and how we often times think of our professional life as separate from the rest of our life and really it's all just one big continuum. MARK: Yeah. JOSHUA:   So, how are you including the idea of your practice as a part of your life? And this is I think really important for lawyers because we consider ourselves professionals. It's an identity as well as a career, and if we're not thinking of that identity as both a part of our personal lives and our professional lives, we feel a lot of stress, for lack of a better word, between the two. So, if we approach it with a clear vision, while we may not be able to eliminate that stress we can definitely control how we react to it and our understanding of how other people are reacting to it as well. I found that to be very eye-opening. MARK: Yeah. JOSHUA:   So, 1,500 lawyers, phenomenal speakers, a really great party on top of that, but we ended up outgrowing the conference center that we were at, so there's no way we're going to fit next year, so we decided to move. And in 2019 we're going to be in San Diego, California. MARK: Oh, now there's a nice spot. JOSHUA:   Yeah. And we're expecting to add another 500 attendees. MARK: Oh my gosh. JOSHUA:   And we're already half sold out, which is amazing. MARK: That really is. Wow. Wow. JOSHUA:   Yeah. So, I'm sorry, I sound like I'm really hyping Clio a lot but it's just been a great year. MARK: It has. And you know, why I like to visit with you from time to time ... My role is Risk Manager, but I'm not, again, a traditional Risk Manager in the sense that I manage the risk of the ALPS corporation, I am hired to be a Risk Manager for all of our insureds, and for many attorneys you don't have to be an insured to work with me. Call and ask questions. And I, from a risk perspective for so many reasons just believe strongly in the value of a product like Clio, in terms of ... I could sit here and talk for probably 20 minutes on why I think moving to the cloud is a good idea and doing all of the things that you folks are doing in terms of the tools that you bring to the table for lawyers. I see that as essential. But let me ask in closing here, give you a chance to comment on one thing. What I'm starting to hear a little bit, there is, in light of some of these major breaches that we have seen and crypto jacking and ransomware attacks just being rampant with everybody, but you couple that in terms of the risks of cyber breaches of some sort with what has been a really bad tough year in terms of 2018 with Facebook. I would just like to have you share some thoughts on the value, how would you counter this, "I don't want to move to the cloud because look at Facebook. I don't want to move to the cloud because these guys are next on a major ransomware attack." Do you have some thoughts? JOSHUA:   Yeah, I do. I actually think there's never going to be a complete elimination of risk, and I think any technology vendor who tells you that they're 100 percent secure is pulling the wool over your eyes. MARK: That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. JOSHUA:   Yeah. MARK: Yeah. JOSHUA:   But I do believe that there are vendors out there who are transparent in their security protocols, who are committed to the specific needs of the legal industry and they're definitely very specific, but also are keeping in line with the security requirements of clients and I think this is a really important point that most lawyers don't think about. There's a lot of privacy and security law that is being imposed upon clients right now and those clients are in turn turning to their law firms and saying, "How are you living up to this standard with my files?" And so, you need a tech vendor who recognizes not only your ethical duty of confidentiality, but your client's regulatory duty of privacy, and combines technology in a transparent way to facilitate both. And even that won't eliminate the risk 100 percent. MARK: Oh, right. You're never going to. That's impossible. I hope our listeners understand that. Am I hearing, understanding correctly that what I think differentiates companies like Clio is that when you approach the build, the software and hardware build in terms of how ... Am I hearing that the design from the bottom up is really looking at what are the obligations lawyers have, what are the regulatory issues clients face, and where security is thought through from the beginning as opposed to, "Hey, let's build this cool thing and call it Alexa." I'm not picking on Amazon here, but ... JOSHUA:   It's been a bad day for them today, so yeah. MARK: Do you appreciate where I'm going? It sounds like, and I just want to confirm that I'm hearing this correctly, that design in terms of preserving confidences and security are very much part of the design process from the very beginning, as opposed to a last minute, "Oh we should think about that"? JOSHUA:   Yeah. Actually there's an industry approach that's called privacy by design and in some instances it's required, legally speaking. So the general data protection regulation out of Europe is really trying to push privacy by design on a whole host of different businesses, but yeah, it absolutely needs to be a part of any consideration when it comes to building technology that handles sensitive data, which I think we're beginning to discover is all technology handles sensitive data at this point. MARK: Yeah. JOSHUA:   So, how we do it at Clio is as per our terms of service, we actually take on some of the responsibility of that risk, where we commit ourselves to industry best practices and we are very transparent in whom we use as part of our backend. It's called sub-processors and privacy law under GDPR, so we're required to disclose those sub-processors. We're required to vet those sub-processors. We're required to see that they meet the same contractual obligations to us that we commit to you. And so, there's a shared risk that comes with using a good transparent vendor, but it is a risk and I don't think we can ignore that. I do think that dollar per dollar, cloud computing gives you the best security for your money right now when you pick a transparent reputable vendor and the economies of scale that could be affected with cloud computing outweigh anything a small law firm can put together on their own. And the one other counter point I would give to that is I think a lot of lawyers believe that because they're small that they're also obscure, and that nobody's targeting them. And what we've seen is unfortunately, things like Malware that people may not be targeting them specifically but they're still being caught in these giant dragnets of security risk. MARK: You bet. JOSHUA:   And so if you're trying to go it alone, what you're really doing is you're just setting yourself up to be caught in one of these dragnets. MARK: Yeah. I couldn't agree more. I hope our listeners ... That's one to note. Well, listen Joshua, I have taken more time than I think I should. I know you're a busy man here. I really appreciate your taking the time to visit with us, and to all of you listening I hope you found something of value here. My desire with this podcast really is just to try to have you hear firsthand the value of what cloud products can bring to the table in terms of enhancing your practice from a security side, to just creating all kinds of efficiencies. So, if you have been hesitant to look at these kinds of things up till now, I hope you will rethink it. You've got at least one Risk Manager here at ALPS saying hey, this is a really good idea. And from an insurance industry perspective I certainly think now's the time to make a move. So, Joshua, again thank you very much. I appreciate your time. To all of you listening out there, if you have another topic you'd like to hear discussed at some point in the future or a guest you'd like to have join us, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can reach me at mbass@alpsnet.com. Thanks for listening. Joshua, have a good one. JOSHUA:   You too, Mark. Thank you. MARK: You bet. _ JOSHUA LENON is an attorney admitted to the New York Bar.  He studied law at St. Louis University School of Law, obtaining a Juris Doctorate and a Certificate in International and Comparative Law. Joshua has since helped legal practitioners improve their services, working for Thomson Reuters' publishing departments in both the United States and Canada. Joshua currently serves as Lawyer-in-Residence for Clio, providing legal scholarship and research skills to the leading cloud-based practice management platform from Vancouver, Canada. He's been a guest lecturer for movements like legal hacking and legal technology at schools like MIT, Suffolk Law, and Vanderbilt, as well as before organizations like ReinventLaw and the ABA Law Practice Futures Initiative.

Episode 178: Putting Together A Tech Theatre Unit Drama Teacher Josh Hatt does not have a background in Tech Theatre. In fact he shied away from teaching it for years. But when it became part of his curriculum, he dove in with both feet. It was a great experience and now he'll never shy away from tech again! Listen in to learn how he developed his eight week unit exploring lights, sound, costume, make-up and staging. You too can teach tech! Show Notes Drama Teacher Academy Blank Scenes Example Mary Poppins as a Horror Movie The Shining as a comedy Episode Transcript Welcome to the Drama Teacher Podcast brought to you by Theatrefolk – the Drama teacher resource company. I'm Lindsay Price. Hello! I hope you're well. Thanks for listening! This is Episode 178 and you can find any links to this episode in the show notes which are at Theatrefolk.com/episode178. Today, we are talking tech and putting together a tech theatre unit. Hands up, how many of you fear tech? How many of you avoid including it in your program? Well, our podcast guest today was in the exact same boat as you. Now, he is a total tech convert. So, let's get to it! LINDSAY: All right, I am speaking with Josh Hatt. Hello, Josh! JOSHUA: Hello, Lindsay! LINDSAY: All right, tell everybody in the world where you are right now. JOSHUA: I am starting my second year at an international school in Shanghai, China. LINDSAY: I love the internet. Not always! We had a little difficulty connecting but we're here now and I think it's amazing. It's evening where I am and morning where you are. JOSHUA: Yes, it's Friday morning. It was funny because I was trying to coordinate what time we were doing this and, now, I'm back and I'm twelve hours ahead of you guys. So, we're like, “Okay, Thursday night at 8:00.” I'm like, “Wait, what does that actually mean for me? I don't remember.” LINDSAY: Twelve is pretty good, though. You know, it's when I get the most trouble when I'm even dealing with coordinating Mountain time and Pacific time. It's like, “Okay, you are this time, I am this time. We're all good.” So, this is your second year at this school. Just how is that going? What is it like to teach in an international school in China? JOSHUA: It's amazing. We work at an American school. And so, it's not much different, honestly, than any of the international schools as far as curriculum-wise. I've done the MYP curriculum before. This school, they do a lot of common core. It's incredible and, because it's a private school, we're really lucky. I luck out. I get to work in this beautiful two-story black box theatre and I get to take little sixth, seventh, and eighth graders through a little dramatic journey through there. It's magical. We kind of joke all the time. I was like, “I work at Disneyland! This is amazing!” LINDSAY: You know what, that's a pretty fun description of teaching theatre. I love that! JOSHUA: It's amazing. LINDSAY: I'm very excited, actually, about what we're going to talk about today because I know that this is something that teachers are asking us and pleading with us all the time – how do I do tech theatre? How do I teach tech theatre? The fact that you're doing it with middle school students, I think, is even more exciting and interesting in terms of getting some people some good information. Why are you doing tech theatre with your middle school students? JOSHUA: You know, I've never done much outside of plugging a sound system into a small performance because I've always had the experience of being a middle school teacher. You know, we get forgotten sometimes and it's like, “Great! We have a room, let's have a middle school drama program.” Of course, we're resilient and we persevere and we make it work and beautiful. I had the opportunity because they had just built this brand-new theatre space at the school. The high school got a brand-new black box theatre. And so,

Episode 132: Google Drive in the Drama Classroom Joshua Hatt was a frustrated drama teacher. He put together an extensive curriculum booklet for his students only to have them lose it time and time again. Joshua had a problem which he solved using Google Drive. Listen to him explain his process and how he went from technology hater to a full on convert. Show Notes Example of Electronic Process Journal (Google Doc) To use this file, Make a Copy and adapt to suit your needs! Episode Transcript Welcome to TFP – The Theatrefolk Podcast – the place to be for Drama teachers, Drama students, and theatre educators everywhere. I'm Lindsay Price, resident playwright for Theatrefolk. Hello! I hope you're well. Thanks for listening. Welcome, welcome, welcome! Episode 132! You can find any links for this episode in the show notes at theatrefolk.com/episode132. Today, I am talking to a Drama teacher who may be just like you. Maybe you're frustrated with your students' organizational abilities. How many times do you have to give them the same handout over and over? Are you frustrated because you're being told to incorporate 21st Century tools into your Drama classroom and you have no idea how to do it? Or maybe you're being told you need to further quantify what your students are learning in the Drama classroom and you have no idea how to do that? Our guest today, Joshua Hatt, was just such a frustrated teacher and he found his solution to all of these issues using Google Drive – Google Drive in the Drama Classroom. Let's hear how he did it. LINDSAY: All right, I am here today talking to Joshua Hat. Hello, Joshua! JOSHUA: Hi, Lindsay! LINDSAY: Please tell everybody where in the world you are. JOSHUA: I am currently in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates. LINDSAY: This is actually our second podcast guest who we've recorded who is in Dubai. One of our Theatrefolk playwrights, Allison Williams, is also currently there. So, Dubai is representing. JOSHUA: Excellent. LINDSAY: Okay. You are teaching currently in Dubai? JOSHUA: Yes, I am. I teach grades six, seven, and eight Drama. We use the MYP curriculum through the International Baccalaureate – that's an international curriculum. LINDSAY: First of all, how did you end up teaching Drama? Let's start there. JOSHUA: Teaching Drama? Actually, this is my fifth year teaching period. I went to school in Ontario, Canada, and studied theatre there and then went on to my Bachelor of Education degree at Trent in Peterborough and then decided that I think teaching Drama is exactly what I want to do and so I actually accepted my first post at an international school in China – Guangzhou – where I was hired to teach English and I ended up starting to help develop a Drama program there with a colleague of mine. And then, it just kind of jumped off from there – jumped to Germany and here I am in Dubai now. LINDSAY: Awesome. I have a question about that but we're going to back up just because I am also in Ontario. What was your high school experience like with Drama? Did you do Sears? Did it spark in high school? Where did it spark for you? JOSHUA: It absolutely sparked in high school but I'm actually from Nova Scotia. LINDSAY: Oh, okay! JOSHUA: Yeah, and I just decided that I would jump over to Ontario for fun – I figured, “Why not?” – to do my bachelor of arts there. And so, absolutely, I've had a passion for Drama and theatre ever since grade nine, really. I had an opportunity to jump into community theatre at a local playhouse in town and then we had a grade ten, eleven, and twelve Drama program there so it just really kind of cemented my passion for Drama. LINDSAY: Why do you think that was? JOSHUA: I had brilliant teachers. My grade ten Drama teacher – I truly believe – transformed my life. It was kind of the first time throughout my high school career, really, that I was in an environment where I didn't worry about taking ...

There are two things that many podcasters don't like to deal with, and one of those is the show notes. Philip Swindall is the Show Notes Guy and comes on today to share his podcasting journey and how he created a business around helping podcasters with their show notes. There are two main purposes for show notes: Increased SEO value Providing information/links for podcast listeners Each of these two purposes target different audiences, so you want to create show notes that makes it as easy as possible to accommodate each one. The podcast listener is primarily looking for the links and other goodies mentioned in the podcast episode - they're not necessarily looking to get all the details. Provide this information in an easy way by using headers in the content and providing a summary of the links and calls-to-action. The details on the show notes page, if done right, can help boost your search engine rankings, too. Phillip starts out by talking about his journey working with TV and radio many years ago. He became interested in early podcasting efforts, but never jumped in. In 2010/11, he started to touch the podcasting world a little. In 2014, he jumped into the podcasting world with both feet as he launched his business as the Show Notes Guy during Podcast Movement 2014. In the interview, Phillip shares the importance of having show notes and how to have better show notes. He shares how to get his guide on writing better show notes. I am downloading this myself so I can improve the show notes here! (The show notes for this episodes should be updated and improved soon!) Phillip also shares the editing cheat sheet he put together about how John Lee Dumas edits 8 podcast episodes in one and a half hours!   Here's a transcript of the episode: Joshua: "Alright welcome to the show Phillip. How are you doing?" Phillip: "I'm doing great Joshua it's good to be here." Joshua: "Yeah definitely glad to be able to have the opportunity to talk to you. I've been listening to you for several months now on your show the podcasters brought to you by the show notes guy." Phillip: 'Hey you got the phrase right." Joshua: "Like I said I've been listening." Phillip: "It's all in branding dude, you got to brand it." Joshua: "It is and so you do a very good job with that. And so everyone knows you as the show notes guy and they know you as the show with the podcasters. And I definitely love the show that you got there and you have a good mystery there with bringing interviews on and doing some solo stuff and answering questions; and definitely a very good resource. So for the person that's listening to this I would recommend going over there and checking out the podcasters by the show notes guys podcast. But what I want is to start out is just kind of start with your story because you haven't been podcasting for very long. Not even in the podcasting space for very long so can you go ahead and tell us your story about how you got into it and then kind of what you're doing with it." Philip: "Well Joshua I started working in radio and television in the 1980s. I was working in a lot of different areas of broadcasting doing some news, some print journalism even; doing a lot of different things. And then I got out of the broadcasting arena for a while. And that bug once it gets in you just don't ever get rid of it." Joshua: "Yeah!" Phillip: "And so when I was in Seminary in the late 90s blogging was just coming on. My first blog actually was on a movable type blog and then they started charging. So we had to start finding other platforms and I eventually landed on WordPress which now is just a beast. But back then it was a bit of a struggle. But even when blogging was just starting guys were thinking hey why can't we do this with audio? We can do it somewhat with video. YouTube wasn't around just yet but you know there wer...