Podcast appearances and mentions of kelly what

The Dr. John Delony Show is a caller-driven show that offers real people a chance to be heard as they struggle with relationship issues and mental health challenges. John will give you practical advice on how to connect with people, how to take the next right step when you feel frozen, and how to cut through the depression and anxiety that can feel so overwhelming. You are not alone in this battle. You are worth being well—and it starts by focusing on what you can control. Let us know what's going on by leaving a voicemail at 844.693.3291 or visiting johndelony.com/show. We want to talk to YOU!   Show Notes for this Episode Question from Kelly: What is ruminating? My wife had a baby a couple of weeks ago and I find my anger increasing with my lack of sleep. My mom is an alcoholic and recently relapsed. How can I help her? In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts - Gabor Maté Unbroken Brain - Maia Szalavitz  When I make a mistake, my husband holds it over me even after I apologize. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents - Lindsay C. Gibson Lyrics of the Day: "Into The Mystic" - Van Morrison   As heard on this episode:  BetterHelp Redefining Anxiety John's Free Guided Meditation Ramsey+   tags: parenting, marriage, kids, family, substance abuse, special needs, addiction, suicide/self-harm, disagreement/conflict, anger/resentment/bitterness   These platforms contain content, including information provided by guests, that is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The content is not intended to replace or substitute for any professional medical, counseling, therapeutic, financial, legal, or other advice. The Lampo Group, LLC d/b/a Ramsey Solutions as well as its affiliates and subsidiaries (including their respective employees, agents and representatives) make no representations or warranties concerning the content and expressly disclaim any and all liability concerning the content including any treatment or action taken by any person following the information offered or provided within or through this show. If you have specific concerns or a situation in which you require professional advice, you should consult with an appropriately trained and qualified professional expert and specialist. If you are having a health or mental health emergency, please call 9-1-1 immediately.

On this episode of our podcast, we speak with Kellianne Fedio, an Amazon consultant. She discusses selling her previous business for seven figures and the creation of her new podcast. Her journey is long and interesting, with a lot of twists and turns. Here, she shares her entire story and offers great advice to those who want to follow in her footsteps. Tune in to hear Kellianne's great insights. Topics: When she stumbled on Ecommerce, she realized it was a good fit. How Amazon has changed since she started. Why outside funding sources are necessary. The importance of Mastermind groups. Living through rocky periods. Explaining rebates. Kellianne's consulting methods.   Resources: Kellianne on LinkedIn Kellianne on Facebook Digital Shelf Strategy Quiet Light Podcast@quietlightbrokerage.com   Transcription: Mark: Joe, we know that first-hand experiences of people that have gone through the process of building a business, preparing it for sale, going through that exit, that tends to be some of the greatest stories and stories where we can get a lot of lessons back to us that we can apply and learn how to optimize our own businesses for a better exit. I know you had Kellianne on recently and she shared her story of building her business and going through that exit and now her current pivot where she's starting up a podcast on this very topic. Joe: Yeah, Kellianne is good friends with another good friend of ours, Paul Miller, who owns Cozy Phones and Kellianne had a seven-figure exit. Technically, I guess it would be early this year that she closed on the transaction; early 2020. And she's learned a lot through that process and now she's sharing that experience and the knowledge and the networking and the story of building a business on Amazon; all the resources and connections that you need to make in order to build it well and build it right with an eventual exit in mind. So she shares her entire story and gives real tips and advice from her own direct experience during the interview. Joe: Hey, folks, Joe Valley here from Quiet Light Brokerage and the Quiet Light Podcast, Today I've got Kellianne Fedio and I had to say that out loud several times to make sure I pronounced it right. Kelly is a former attorney, Amazon seller, seven-figure exit that she's had recently. And she's going to be moving into helping people build their Amazon businesses for a stronger exit down the road. Kelly, welcome to the Quiet Light Podcast. Kelly: Thank you so much for having me, Joe. I'm such a big fan of everything you guys are doing over at Quiet Light and have done for the past several years so it's a real honor to be here. Joe: I appreciate that. I did more of an intro just now than I normally do, but I didn't read from the script. But why don't you go ahead and tell us who you are and your story and where you came from and what you've done here? Kelly: Sure. So I started out as an attorney in a former life, and after having kids, getting married, I became very unhappy in that profession. That was just a lot of long hours, not enough pay at least for what I was doing, and I really wanted to be there for my kids. So I became a stay at home mom for a while and loved every minute of it. And then when my kids started elementary school, I was like, okay, what's my next chapter here? And I never would have guessed it would have been entrepreneurship. I was very traditional type-A personality in high school. I'm going to get all A's. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to law school. I'm going to be an attorney. And that was like my plan for the rest of my life. And so fast forward to several years later, after having practiced law for 10 years and now having kids and a husband and a wonderful family life, I was like what am I passionate about? What can I put out there into the world that not only is going to hopefully bring in income to our family but also that I could be excited about doing? And so I just knew it had to have something to do with online; being online and creating value online. And so, like a lot of other entrepreneurs getting involved in the online space, I tried a lot of different things, made tons of mistakes, had tons of failures, learned a lot, loved every minute of that experience, but sooner or later stumbled upon e-commerce and pretty quickly realized this is something that I really could see myself doing for the foreseeable future. And so around that time, Amazing Selling Machine had become pretty prominent in terms of the Amazon education space. So I was in ASM3 and of course… Joe: I got to ask, what number were you? The early ones were the good years. They're coming back around. They're doing good stuff again. I talked to them last week. Kelly: They are. They're always innovating, always doing new stuff so, I mean I always bring that out when I'm on podcasts or other interviews, because if it wasn't for that course my life would be a lot different. So I met an amazing group of entrepreneurs with the affiliate group that I joined. It was Ryan Moran and his tribe. I met a lot of amazing people. I'm still friends with them to this day, and really just dug in and had some pretty early success early on. So it was really, really exciting and I knew that this was what I was going to be focusing on, probably forever. Joe: How did you choose your first product? Kelly: I chose something that I thought I could build a brand around. So I'm very passionate about talking to other Amazon sellers about when they're thinking about how to start their business. You know, people always ask, well, how do you pick a product? First and foremost, you have to build a brand these days. When I started, you could throw up kind of anything and just with a little luck and… Joe: How many years ago was it that you started? Kelly: 2014. Joe: Okay. Kelly: Yeah, so it was a while ago. Things have drastically changed, right, in the Amazon space? Joe: A little bit, yeah. Kelly: Yeah, a little bit. And so even back then; and I had no branding experience or consumer product experience, but I knew that this first product, I could build a brand around it and actually wasn't a product that had a huge demand at the time, but it was a product that I knew that I would love and that I knew that other active women would love. So that's really what I built the brand around and just continued to develop products; not all winners, lots of failures… Joe: Additional products all within that brand, yes? Kelly: Exactly, that would serve a core audience and solve a problem or need. Joe: How many products did you launch initially, was it just one? Kelly: It was just one. Joe: And it was a success out of the gate? Kelly: Not right out of the gate. So I launched it in August but by that Q4, I had reached seven figures on top-line revenue so it was really, really exciting. Joe: Cool, very exciting. Kelly: Just with one product, one variation. Joe: And probably not working as many hours as you did as an attorney. Kelly: No, I mean, I definitely was working a lot because I was still in learning mode. I mean, the thing about Amazon and e-commerce is you're not only learning the platform itself, but you're learning how to source overseas, perhaps, and manufacturing and product design and advertising and marketing. So there's a lot of different skill sets you have to learn. So I definitely was really, really passionate about learning as much as I could. Joe: When you learn all of those things, do you think it's things you need to learn and then do yourself or do you think that there are certain experts that you can outsource certain things to like photography or listing creation or whatever it might be; importing from China, dealing with different things? Are there certain aspects to an Amazon business you feel that should be outsourced and things that you should do in-house as the entrepreneur that started the business? Kelly: Oh, absolutely. In the beginning, I think you should do everything with the exception of maybe photography. Super specific skill sets, like graphic design or photography certainly, you can outsource that early on. But everything else I would say you have to learn first and foremost yourself before you can effectively outsource it. And there are I mean, so many great service providers now that have obviously spawned in this Amazon industry not only software services but also other types of services, whether it's Amazon brand management or writing listings, things like that. So now it's all out there, but you should really learn the components and the strategy behind it first before outsourcing. Joe: How much money did you start with Kellianne? Kelly: I started with about $5,000. Joe: Okay, and did you have to borrow more to keep up with inventory? Because that's the story that I consistently hear. I started out with X and then when you dig deeper the business didn't fund the growth. Did yours fund the growth or did you have to go and borrow more? Kelly: In the beginning, it did. But yes, even if you reinvest all of your profits, there's no way you can grow initially without getting capital from outside sources. So about a year into it, I was able to get Amazon Lending so that was great. But before that, it was a lot of credit cards. And then early on, I actually was able to get a line of credit after the first year. But until then, it was really credit cards. And I wouldn't recommend people doing that but sometimes it's just a necessary evil to get where you need to go. Joe: Yeah, I was playing golf with a mentor years ago before I grab my head and one of the things he said to me was get a line of credit set up now; before you need it, get that line of credit set up because you never know when you're going to need it. And I see so many people that are struggling to keep up with purchasing more and more inventory for growth or developers if it's a SaaS business because they don't have the ability to stroke a check when it's necessary. They go hunting for that line of credit when they need it as opposed to getting it set up beforehand so I think it's great to get it set up beforehand. So you hit six figures you said by the end of Q4 your first year… Kelly: Seven figures, I was very lucky. Yeah. Joe: And did a million in revenue in 2004. Kelly: Mm-hmm. Joe: Don't you like how I could do the seven-figure translation to a million? That was really; okay, all right. Anyway was it all with one SKU or did you add additional SKUs as well? Kelly: By that next quarter of 2015 then I started adding more SKUs, but it was really just on one product. And so that talk about funding the inventory for that, I got to say it was just a lot of luck. I was able to forge a really strong relationship with my supplier very early on in China without ever having met him. And he gave me terms once he saw that this thing; and that normally doesn't happen that early on in the relationship. Joe: No. Yeah, I know. Kelly: He was able to give me terms. So that's another way that I was able to fund that growth so quickly that that first year. Joe: Yeah, if you can get to China, folks, we did a podcast with Athena Severi from China Magic and before that with Dan from Titan Network all about negotiating terms with your Chinese manufacturers, and it does exactly what Kellianne did, which was it gives you more cash flow for buying more inventory. And if you can get terms, it's a lot better than an Amazon Loan because the interest rate is very different. It's nonexistent in most cases. During that initial journey Kellianne if we summarize things so far, you took ASM3, you invested $5,000, you did a million dollars in revenue. Sounds easy, but I'm sure it wasn't, right? Kelly: It was and I know it sounds easy and like I said, there was a lot of luck in there too. I'm not going to like take credit that it was just all my superpower genius. But I did have tremendous tenacity because between the time that I launched the product in August, it was like pushing a boulder uphill; August, September, October, November. It wasn't really till November that it really took off. And I had the foresight and maybe just stupidity to order a bunch of inventory in anticipation of Q4 and early on recognize that I could market this product as a gift in addition to just the primary keywords that were related to the product. So that was something that I did very early on and that allowed me to scale too because I was able to secure top positioning for keywords such as gifts for women, top Christmas gifts for women, things like that, very early on. So all of that came from me putting in the hard work of learning and masterminding, I can't underestimate the power of masterminding as well. I found a small group of; there were all guys, actually, I was the only girl. They are all amazed… Joe: So you were in charge essentially, right? Kelly: Yeah, sort of but we just were kindred spirits and we became very close and we would meet once a week and we were all building Amazon businesses, others went on to build SaaS businesses and all other types of businesses. They're all super successful entrepreneurs and that really made a huge difference in making me feel like I could really do this because I had other people in my corner so that was all. Joe: There's nothing more valuable than that and it didn't cost you anything. It sounds like there are groups that can get together just to help share information or you can join more formal groups like eCommerceFuel or EcomCrew Premium things of that nature. Kelly: Exactly. Joe: I think it's incredible. So let's talk money; ASM3, launched million dollars in revenue within the first year, you must be rolling in cash flow, yes? Kelly: No, absolutely not. Joe: I knew the answer to that. Kelly: I wish. Joe: How much did you; other than distributions just to make you feel good to pay taxes that were going to be due, did you put yourself on payroll or take any money out of the business for you and your family? Kelly: No, not the first couple of years I did not. And I was again, lucky that I had a husband who had a full-time career and that's the money that we relied on to support our family. So starting this business, that wasn't the mindset that we were going to do this to support our family. This was hopefully something that we could build into something bigger and perhaps fuel some bigger investing goals and things like that. Joe: So you would not recommend someone listening quit their job and they've got $10,000 and they're going to do $5,000 to start the Amazon business and live off the rest until revenues start rolling; bad idea, right, because they're going to run out of money very fast? Kelly: Absolutely, I would never recommend somebody quit their day job. You really need to start any business, in my opinion, as a side hustle. I mean, even my husband and I to this day, like right now, I'm really getting into real estate investing and he's getting into day trading and we're going to wait until we become masters of that and really start making significant sums of money before he would ever consider quitting his job. Joe: Yeah, good advice. All right, so 2016 rolls around how do things go? Did you have any rocky periods where you thought this isn't for me or did revenue just continue to climb? Kelly: Oh, no. There was a lot of rocky periods. So back then there was no brand registry, there was no; just counterfeiters galore and the initial product that I had launched all of a sudden came on everybody's radar. I can't remember if by then there were tools such as Jungle Scout or things like that to look at what sales revenue these products were doing. But it definitely; people caught on and started copying my exact listings, the exact product. I mean, certainly, I didn't have any proprietary rights. The product was a private label product, but definitely, competition grew and revenue; I was able to maintain revenue because I diversified my keyword traffic and wasn't going with what everybody else is going for. Slowly but surely the market grew. But my market share also grew with it and then declined at some point because so many competitors came in. Joe: Did your margins tighten; did you have to drop the price too? Kelly: Yes, I did. I remember actually, so Q4 of my first year of selling, I think I sold that particular product at a price point of I think as high as $35. And now if you were to look at this product on Amazon it ranges between $10 and maybe $17 tops. Joe: Wow. Kelly: Yeah, and that happens. I mean you don't get to; that product was still a winning product by the time I sold my business but I knew that this couldn't sustain me forever. I needed to obviously continue rolling out products, right? Joe: And that's how you combatted it; you continued to roll out new SKUs? Kelly: Yes, absolutely. Joe: How did you determine what to do next in terms of SKU expansion? Kelly: I did make a lot of mistakes there. I launched a lot of products that failed. Joe: How many? Just out of curiosity. Kelly: How many failures? Joe: Yeah, after the initial launch out of the next 10, how many were successes, and how many were failures? Kelly: I would say I was probably at a 50:50 rate. Joe: That's good. Kelly: I would have liked it to be higher. And I think nowadays, with all of the tools that are available and with the mindset that you have to cut losers quickly; that was my biggest downfall, is it was so hard for me to give up on a product that I spent not only time but a lot of money on developing and then to just let it go. That was really hard for me. I was emotionally tied and that's one area that if I had cut those losers quicker, I would have freed up my cash flow and been able to expand and scale a lot quicker and more efficiently. Joe: Let's go into that a little bit further. Let's define a loser in terms of products. Is it one that is negative profit-wise or is it at 5% profit where the others are at 43% profit? How do you determine what a loser is and then what action do you take with it? Kelly: Well, it also depends on the time period. So when you're launching a product; everybody has their own time frame, but I kind of give it a three-month cycle of pushing it out, launching, ranking it, advertising, heavy on advertising so you're usually in the red. At least I was okay with being in the red at that point, but then it should start to pick up after that if it's going to be a winning product. If you've done everything right with your launch, and ranking strategy, it should just start to kind of take off on its own, really. Joe: A three month period is that what you're okay? Kelly: Yeah, about three months. Joe: Okay. Kelly: At least for me back then. I would say now it's probably a longer time window. I would say probably about six months. But there becomes this like intuitive sense of you're still continuously pushing a boulder uphill with your nose rather than it's starting to gain some traction and go downhill. And so you've got to know when is that point to cut it off and it definitely took me a lot of failed products and a lot of wasted money and time to finally realize. Even up until when I sold my business; I mean, the buyer who bought my business, there were quite a few SKUs that he was just like I don't want to continue with these because these are just not making enough profit. They were profitable but not making enough profit. So everybody has their own standards. Joe: So yeah, there's SKU balance that offsets risk. If you've got one SKU doing 60% or 70% of your revenue, some buyers will perceive it as more risk other buyers will perceive it as less work, and they like that. Kelly: Yeah. Joe: How do you; I mean, if you're at a six month period now in your assessment of really it takes that long to push that boulder uphill until it's profitable and then you determine whether or not you get to keep that SKU that you've worked so hard on or if it's not profitable enough and you move on. How often are you launching SKUs? It sounds like you're probably needing to launch them every couple of months just to keep up and stay ahead of the game. Is that the case or is that something you recommend? Kelly: Yeah, it definitely depends on your product mix and what your revenue goals are and what capital you have to work with and your cash flow; all those things. But ideally, if you could be launching a new product I would say at least every quarter but there are sellers out there that are launching products every week or every two weeks. It just depends. I did not have nor did I want to have some big, huge behemoth of a business where I had a million employees and I was doing all the product design in the beginning; myself, along with my manufacturers, maybe hiring some outside design people to create changes to existing products to make them better. That was always kind of my MO. And really, you have to have a certain amount of capital that is allocated to new product development and know where that line is because then you don't want to let your other product suffer either and that's what's bringing cash in and keeping the lights on, right? So there's a fine balance there and I really do think that comes down to cash flow management; knowing your cash flow. Joe: And that's something so many people fail at. I probably looked at 8,000 profit and loss statements over the last eight, almost nine years now, and I'll be honest with you, probably 70% of them are inaccurate; wrong cash accounting, not using Quick Books or Xero, but the audience knows that. I know that's my thorn in my side. Let's talk about favorite tools. I mean, you obviously have figured out the Amazon game. You must have used some tools along the way. Have there been any that have stood out that you kind of you think must have? I mean, you mentioned Jungle Scout a few minutes ago. What tools do you use in your Amazon business or recommend as you work with new Amazon owners now to help them fine-tune their business and get it ready to sell? Kelly: Well, I wouldn't say I would at this point in time recommend a specific tool because there's a lot of competitors in the Amazon SaaS space, right? But you want a good tool for first and foremost, keyword research and keyword tracking. So, for example, Helium10 is a great one for that. But there are many others out there that are very good. So I'm not going to say that Helium10 is the best. They are one of the best and I like that tool a lot. And then you're going to want to have a tool for launching and ranking. These days that's all about rebates and so I recommend Six Leaf. My good friend Joe Junfola created Six Leaf and he's got a very new and exciting rebate option in there now and I'm helping my friend Paul Miller with his business in using that. Joe: Really? He's my friend, too. Kelly: What's that? Yes, your friend too; our good friend. Joe: Our friend. Kelly: Yeah, and so if you don't have outside traffic that you can send to your listings and have like a system for that, you definitely are going to need to do some I would say giveaways but these days that means rebates. And so there are other platforms that can do that but that's the one I recommend for that. And then Helium10 basically has all the other components that I would recommend, such as product research and keyword tracking. There are so many different tools out there and they've all kind of evolved over time and they all kind of overlap and what was most frustrating to me by the time that I sold my company is I had so many different tools. And even though they did a lot of the same functions, one did one better than the other and so I felt like I just had a lot of bloat in there and a lot of things that I could cut out. And so I wish somebody would just like focus on one thing and just do it right. Joe: Yeah, because if you wasted a thousand dollars a month, that's going to cost you an awful lot in the sale of your business. Kelly: Yeah. Joe: Can we talk about rebates for just a second? I want you to educate me and educate the audience because a rebate to me; from a novice standpoint and I don't sell on Amazon, I did once upon a time but it'd be a conflict for me now as I see it. Plus, I don't ever want to import from China. Kelly: I don't blame you. Joe: Yeah, I don't want to; I was at Helium10 back when it was a man he had Illuminati Mastermind and I was at the event. It was in Cancún and somebody was up on stage and she was literally talking about importing from China, talking literally about the thickness of the corrugated box that your products have to be in. And I swear to God I felt sick three times and I thought never will I import from China. Rebates, you're giving something away. They're getting a discount back or they're doing a review and they're getting a discount. Explain how it worked because it sounds like it's definitely against terms of services depending upon how it's used. Kelly: Now, I don't think it's against terms of services. I mean there's a lot of rebate services out there now. Joe: What is a rebate? Kelly: A rebate is the purchaser gets to purchase the products and then they get reimbursed the full amount usually to be most effective or it could be some percentage of that amount. So traditional retailers have been doing rebates for years. I mean, it's a very common thing in marketing. Joe: So there's no hey, we'll give you 100% refund for review it's just buy it and we're giving you your money back and that improves the algorithm rankings; organic rankings. Kelly: It's a keyword ranking strategy. I would not use it as a review strategy; absolutely not. Joe: Yeah, okay the review strategy definitely gets against terms of services. Okay, thank you. I needed to hear that. Kelly: I mean, I wouldn't say it's necessarily against terms of service if you're asking for a review after the fact. But it just can be on that blurred line that you could potentially; and I haven't heard of anybody getting taken down for this but if you were to rebate a customer and then after the fact ask for a review then Amazon could potentially look at that as gaming the system. So you just want to be really careful and I would just recommend that sellers don't ask reviews for customers that they've given rebates to. Joe: What about is it cheaper or should it be a dual strategy of sending traffic from outside; buying traffic on Facebook that would drive directly using a keyword directly to the Amazon page, is that going to have a similar effect as rebates, cost less, cost more, or would you recommend a dual strategy of both of those or have you not sent traffic from outside sources like Facebook? Kelly: Well, that's a great question, Joe, but the rebate is just kind of like the end result of what the customer is getting but the traffic and the quality of the traffic is the most important thing. So a lot of these rebate services that are out there, they're just for using the same audience that they've built on Facebook over and over again. And Amazon now is so sophisticated they can tell that all that traffic is coming from the same source that's just this incestuous pool. So you really want to be careful of the services that you use. And ultimately, the best way is always to build your own list, to have your own audience whether that's a mini chat list or an email list or if you're a master of Facebook Marketing and you know how to target and you know what kind of audiences are really going to go and actually buy your product and if you have enough profit margin built into your product to do Facebook advertising. That's a whole another thing in and of itself. But for ranking purposes, you need to send high-quality traffic and a lot of these ranking or rebate services you just have to be careful of where they're getting their traffic from. Joe: Okay, so far we've established you as an Amazon expert; one that's been there, done that. I had to ask a couple of questions; dumb questions, if you will, to get us to where we are right now. Let's talk about digital shelf strategy, your business, where you're going to actually help Amazon sellers. If somebody out there in the audience is thinking that they want to exit their business someday in the future, or if they're just struggling and they're barely able to keep up with inventory demands, not taking any money out of the business and they're pulling their hair out, how are you going to be able to help them? Kelly: Great question. I started digital self-strategy when I was still a seller because I've over the years, I love Amazon. I live, breathe, eat, sleep, Amazon. I still do. And I would get questions from people anywhere from one-off questions to people wanting me to help them with their businesses. And so I have been very, very generous I feel like with my time wanting to help people. But sometimes if it needs to be a little bit more work or more time spent with somebody then I set up this agency just so I could have a way to work with sellers ongoing. And so between that and then another new business that I started with, Paul Miller, Amazing Exits, the consulting piece of that is really helping sellers with being able to look at their businesses holistically and help them figure out what are the strengths and weaknesses of that business. So kind of like a SWAT analysis and being able to help them with the things that are going to really move the needle and increasing the value of their business, whether or not they ever want to sell it because if you increase the value of your business, you're going to be spending out more cash flow. It's going to make you healthier in the long run. And then it'll certainly make it a lot more attractive to a potential buyer someday if you've got all your financials in order and you've got a really healthy profit margin and ROI and all the other things that go into having a valuable and sellable business. So it's a one-stop-shop, really, in terms of being able to look at a business, identify what are its strengths and weaknesses. For the weaknesses, we want to connect them with the resources that are going to help them fix those weaknesses and then ultimately be kind of their white-glove concierge along the way to a successful exit. Joe: And the Amazing Exits Podcast, that's where you're going to talk to people that have actually sold their businesses and have those resources, those experts on as well. Kelly: Yes, that's going to be both. I mean, we are looking for as many sellers as we can who have exited so we definitely want to have those as guests on. But we're also featuring top experts such as yourself to talk about exit planning. We're really trying to make exit planning sexy. This is what I say all the time and to really… Joe: Good luck. Kelly: Well, we're very passionate about it. And I think that if we couch it in terms of making your business more valuable now, like do you want more money now in your bank account and your pocket to feel your life, to feel your investments? Well, that's what it takes to build a successful business. And you might not ever want to sell it, but you should be building a sellable asset and realize why you're doing this. Joe: You're preaching to the choir. Making exit sexy again or sexy to begin with is; I had David Wood on the podcast and one of his visions was for people that are planning to eventually sell their business to imagine themselves on the beach doing whatever they want because they've got enough money in the bank to live off of and that's the sexy part of it. Or if you're building a better business, it's kicking off more cash flow. You are struggling less. You're able to do the things that you want because you've got the money and that part is sexy as well. Accounting makes most people's eyes bleed. It's the foundation of understanding cash flow and running your business successfully to get a strong exit. As you know, Kelly, anyone listening that owns any kind of online business at this time odds are that their business is their most valuable asset. Also, if it's an e-commerce business that's growing odds are that more than 50% of the money they'll ever make from that business will come the day that they sell it. All of that combined should kick start them into wanting to do more exit planning or coaching or training or things; whatever you want to call it, just getting in shape. As you want to work out and get your body in shape you should exercise your exit strategy muscles so that you're in better shape for your eventual exit because you will have a better path to it, a better exit as well, and be better off afterwards so that you can all go on to your next adventures, whether it be start another online business or do what Kelly is doing which is consulting and helping other people or where she was just a few years ago. Kelly: I couldn't agree more. That's so well said. And I would just add to that then, I truly believe, Joe, that one of the fastest ways to build wealth is to build a business and in this case an Amazon business and sell it. And that's the word that I want to get out to people, is that this is, like you said, your most valuable asset, most likely. And I didn't retire after I sold my business. I made a nice chunk of change and now I'm able to invest that into cash-producing assets but I will never stop being an entrepreneur. But I have so much freedom; clarity now that I didn't have when I was on that hamster wheel of running the business. So I want to just be able to express that to other sellers that there is another option to get off the hamster wheel and you can sell and do this again if you want so you'll have a lot more freedom and peace of mind. Joe: And cash in the bank throughout though. Kelly: Yes. Joe: Great. Kelly, thanks so much for joining the Quiet Light Podcast. I appreciate it. We'll put URLs up in the show notes for people who want to reach out. Kelly is there any other way that they can or should find you? Kelly: Yes, absolutely. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active over there. @KellianneFedio on Facebook and then they can also go toAmazingExits.com and sign up for our email list for when we get ready to launch the podcast later in August most likely. Joe: All right, she rolled her eyes a little bit here folks for those not watching. She's got a hopeful goal of August. I think it's going to be great whenever you launch it. If it takes an extra few weeks is not a big deal. Kelly, thanks for being in the Quiet Light Podcast. I appreciate it. Kelly: Thank you so much, Joe.

There may be something dangerous in the woods with them This episode is not explicit. Written by David S. Dear; performed by Raj Jawa and Stephanie Bergeron http://ninthworldjournal.com  http://rajjawa.com   http://stephaniebergeron.com   TRANSCRIPT A strange sound is heard GUS What was that? KELLY I don't know... what do you think it was? GUS It sounded like... an orthopedic surgeon. KELLY What would an orthopedic surgeon be doing out here? GUS I don't know, but I'm really scared. KELLY Me too. (beat) Are orthopedic surgeons vegetarians? GUS I don't think so, Kelly. KELLY Hold, me, Gus. SFX Credits: Large Warehouse/Factory Ambience https://freesound.org/people/fimrod/sounds/278987/ Black Throated Diver Calling https://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/Black-Throated-Diver Box Falling Down Stairs https://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/drop-box-stairs Drop Several Silverware Utensils on Hard Surface https://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/drop-silverware-hard Hammering on Metal Pipe https://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/Hammering-Metal-Pipe Volvo Car Horn Honks Short and Long https://freesfx.co.uk/sfx/Volvo-Car City Park Ambience WIth Distant Traffic https://www.freesfx.co.uk/sfx/City-Park-Ambience Music Credits: Paradise by Music For Makers (Paid Commercial License) https://musicformakers.com/songs/paradise/ Among the Clouds by Music For Makers (Paid Commercial License) https://musicformakers.com/songs/among-the-clouds/ Vacation Days by Music For Makers (Paid Commercial License) https://musicformakers.com/songs/vacation-days/ Lullaby Sting by Twin Musicom http://www.twinmusicom.org/song/147/lullaby-stab

Buckle up because life is a great ride. Today’s featured author is American Sign Language Interpreter, half-marathon runner, chocolate lover, and mom of 4, Kelly Brakenhoff. Kelly and I talk about how she got into writing both mystery novels and children’s books, where she finds the inspiration to write her books and more!!! *For An Entire Special Edition transcript of this episode, scroll below. Key Things You’ll Learn: Why she writes mystery novels and why they’re her favorite book genre. Why she started her own publishing company. What inspired her children’s book series. The most important thing you must get right about when you publish a children’s book.   Kelly’s Site: http://kellybrakenhoff.com/ Kelly’s Books: https://www.amazon.com/Kelly-Brakenhoff/e/B07PN7K7T7%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share   The opening track is titled "Good Morning World" by MagicMusic Productions. Listen and download the full track by clicking on the following link. https://magicmusicx.bandcamp.com/track/good-morning-world Resources Mentioned: NaNoWriMo: https://www.nanowrimo.org/   Related Episodes: 33 - "Inspiration, Sci-Fi, & Video Games" with Beth Martin (@bethmart07): http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/33-inspiration-sc-fi-video-games-with-beth-martin-bethmart07   92 - "Roya Sands and the Bridge Between Worlds" with Saryon Michael White: http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/92-roya-sands-and-the-bridge-between-worlds-with-saryon-michael-white 120.5 (Local Author Bonus Special) [LABS] - "The Children of Time" with Victory Parsons (@ReadLiftRepeat): http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/1205-local-author-bonus-special-labs-the-children-of-time-with-victory-parsons-readliftrepeat   150 - "Princess Monroe and Her Happily Ever After" with Jody Vallee Smith: http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/150-princess-monroe-and-her-happily-ever-after-with-jody-vallee-smith   241 – “Highwayman” with MJ Preston (@MJPreston1): http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/241-highwayman-with-mj-preston-mjpreston1   243 – “Fantasy Writing & The Power of Audiobooks For Indie Authors” with Riley Tune (@rileytuneauthor): http://goingnorth.libsyn.com/243-fantasy-writing-the-power-of-audiobooks-for-indie-authors-with-riley-tune-rileytuneauthor   Episode Transcript (Courtesy of Kelly)  :) : Dom Brightmon: You are now tuning in to the going North podcast. With your host, bestselling author, professional speaker, and member of the John Maxwell team, Dominique “Dom” Brightman, and every Monday and Thursday we're going to hear the voice of a different author, sharing their gifts, stories, and expertise to help your charge forward in life. Now, let's get on with the show. And today on the Going North podcast, we're bringing some fabulous humans from across the globe. Today is no different. Today is no different because we got another fabulous author from the Creative Edge Crew, baby. That's right. These are some creative folks who have an edge and not Adam Copeland because this fabulous author right here is not only a fabulous mom, but she's also an American Sign Language Interpreter, which is actually a first for this podcast. You we’ve never had an ASL professional well on his podcast, and her motivation for learning ASL actually began back in high school when she wanted to converse with her Deaf friends and she also, and published her first novel a murder mystery, which is Death by Dissertation, which was published back in April, 2019 as well as Dead Week. In addition to that, a children's picture books series featuring Duke, the Deaf Dog as well. This is a lady of many talents in addition to all that fabulous stuff. She also serves on the Board of Editors for the Registry of Interpreters for the Deaf publication, VIEWS. Let's give it up for the fabulous KB, not KB Toys herself. Ms. Kelly Brakenhoff, how are you today, ma'am? Kelly Brakenhoff: Hi, I'm great. How are you doing? Dom Brightmon: Doing fabulous, doing fabulous, indeed. We got the fabulous Kind Kelly on the show. I'm talking about. Kelly Brakenhoff: You remind me when I was younger, and people would try to make fun of my name. You know, they do the rhyming thing. The worst thing they could come up with was smelly Kelly with a belly full of jelly. I was really hurt though. Dom Brightmon: Or did you even have a belly, at least a huge one? Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, no. I suppose is that if that was the worst they could come up with, that was okay. Dom Brightmon: Oh yeah, we can always call you a tree. Well that that could be worse. Why did I do that to myself? Never mind, that's bad, but don't worry. It's about the sensational Kelly. Would you mind filling in some cavities or filling an introduction and tell us a bit about who is the one and only Kelly B. herself. Kelly Brakenhoff: I was looking over your website and everything. You really have had a lot of inspirational people on before me, and all of the things that you've gotten to do. I was trying to think of what I could contribute to that body of work there. I was intimidated thinking that I'm just a mom and I wrote some books. But I guess one thing that's interesting is that it took me a really long time to write the books. I am quite a bit older, and I've had this career as an American Sign Language interpreter for a very long time. And like you said, I have four kids. I took a lot of time raising and teaching them how to use the washing machine and the dishwasher while they were growing up, until they could fend for themselves and move out. Once they got older, I got serious. I'd always wanted to be a writer my whole life, and once they started getting old enough, I really buckled down and decided that I wanted to do this badly enough. I was going to do whatever it took. I think it was 2014 when I did my first NaNoWriMo. Dom, have you experienced a NaNoWriMo yourself before? Dom Brightmon: Oh yeah, I wrote maybe five words. Kelly Brakenhoff: See, I'm the person where I love that challenge. I'm competitive, like our family. We have these, you know, game nights. Everybody in our family is really competitive. If you set a competition before me, that's the best way to get me to do something. When I read about National Novel Writing Month, I thought, okay, I can write every day for 30 days and I can come up with 50,000 words. I think I can do this. One year I decided to go for it. Well, I ended up with 50,000 words, and then it took me another four years to edit and revise them to make it into my first book, Death by Dissertation. Dom Brightmon: Well, hey, that's frigging awesome. Well, I mean, that's a feat within itself to be able to actually write enough words during that month before it ends, or as it ends, and then it's actually published. It actually takes guts because some folks in the past on this show, they've done NaNoWriMo they've had plenty of books, but they never actually published them for the public to read. That takes guts on your follow through, and it looks like we found a new nickname for you, Competitive Kelly. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah, that's right. I mean, definitely it's a great accomplishment to complete NaNoWriMo. Some people do it for their own personal satisfaction, to challenge themselves, but I wanted more. I've always wanted to be an author and I never really saw the path to do that in my life with time and everything. But once I broke it down into the small chunks of like, okay, well I can write 50,000 words and then I can start working on getting them revised. It took me a couple years to get through that whole process and I submitted it around to a bunch of agents and publishing houses. I had a lot of people who asked me to send in my whole manuscript. And I did that for over a year and worked really hard at that. And then, I never could get anybody that was interested in offering me a contract. And I went through this time where I had to decide, do I start something else or do I keep working on this one? And I really believed in this story because of the main character, her name is Cassandra Sato and she moves from Hawai’i to Nebraska for her dream job. Who does that, right? But she always wanted to be a college administrator. She works in a small college in Hawai’i, and she wants to become a president of a university someday. She gets offered the job at this college in Nebraska, but after a couple months they find a student dead on the campus. She has to go and help figure out what happened to the student. Some of the characters in the book are Deaf and use American Sign Language. In the process of writing the book, I realized that one of the things that I wanted to do with this was make people aware of what it's like. You know, with my day job, I work with Deaf people all the time, and I know lots of really cool Deaf people that have really cool jobs and do great things. But your average person doesn't run into very many deaf people. And you might not know very much sign language except for the alphabet and a couple of curse words, and that's it. I thought it'd be really cool to have characters in the book that are Deaf and use sign language. The more I've gotten into it, and the more I've written in the series and everything, I've realized that’s my thing. I wanted to make the world more aware of what it's like to be Deaf or to know sign language. A lot of the feedback that I've gotten from reviewers and readers have said that they really appreciated learning about Deaf Culture. The first book is a lot about what it's like to be a college student who's Deaf. If you imagine that you're in your class and the professor is talking, but you're getting all the information through the interpreter and what that's like and how hard and challenging that is. You know, a lot of people don't think about things like that. And the readers have really enjoyed getting a taste of what it's like through the books. That cemented in my head why I'm doing this. Dom Brightmon: Ah, yes, indeed. Yes, indeed. And I'm guessing your day to day work with Deaf folks, is that really the main inspiration beyond the novel, the mystery novel. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah, definitely. In my day job, most of what I do is on call. Well, not now, but usually what I'm doing is on college campuses. I actually attend the classes with Deaf students and interpret what the teacher and the other students say in class, and then interpret what the student says to the rest of the class so that everybody knows what each other's saying. I've been doing this for over 20 years, and I've done 17 different college majors all the way from freshmen English to PhD candidates. A really, really wide variety of things. I've seen really good professors. I've seen really bad professors. I've had interesting classes and some classes that are make me squeamish or things like that.  It's been a really interesting thing. I noticed college campuses have academic politics. I've worked with faculty members too and sat in on staff meetings and everything. You know, some of that stuff, like how they always say like life is stranger than fiction. I always thought this is a great place to have murder. You’ve got mayhem. You’ve got politics, you got all kinds of good stuff here. Some of the quotes in the book, I didn't even make it up. It was things I’ve overheard. Dom Brightmon: Not just killing walls but killing humans. Kelly Brakenhoff: There's quite a few series that are based in college campuses. I'm not the only one who thinks that it’s a ripe setting. Dom Brightmon: Oh yeah. Cause definitely a lot of folks in the spring, some professors fighting for tenure, right? Of course, administration, the politics and hell, that's everywhere. Shoot, whenever there's more than one person, there's going to be something happening. Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, there's something about college campuses. You know how it's almost like a little town within a town. There's all kinds of plot opportunities there. Dom Brightmon: That's right. It's like a little town. It's like an exhibit Pimp My Ride. It's like, yeah, yeah, man. We put a town inside of your town. It's really called Murder Town. It’s a mystery novel where somebody got killed. Yup.. Kelly Brakenhoff: Sorry. I have this visual of a car with a town inside the back. Whatever. Totally taking me off on a tangent now. I'm sorry. I'll come back. Dom Brightmon: Oh no, we're going to go down a rabbit hole, bunny ears and all . . . about that time we had the mushrooms. Let me start. I’m just messing with you don’t’ worry. But it's all good though. It's all good. Out of all of the types and genres out there of novels and fiction, why mystery? Kelly Brakenhoff: Oh, that's easy. I love mysteries. That's been my favorite genre since I was little. You know, Nancy drew, except I thought Hardy boys were more interesting cause they got to do more cool stuff. They get to dig and camp and all this stuff. And, and as I grew up, I read more mysteries. I love to read thrillers too, but I don't know. Those are the things that I love to read myself so that's what I write. Dom Brightmon: Sweet. Yes, indeed. It's kinda funny. It's like whatever we expose ourselves to the most is what we eventually become. It's like you expose yourself to mystery books and then you love them so much that you eventually get to join a business of immortality and write a few of your own. Kelly Brakenhoff: Definitely. One of the good things that's kept me going here in my extended, self-quarantine, our cable TV company added all the Hallmark Channels to our package. We didn't get them, but now we have the Hallmark Mysteries and Movies channel. I've watched this whole channel, all of these different mystery movies and shows. It's been really nice for me to sit down at night. I feel like I can call it research and then it doesn't seem like I'm wasting time, but it's been really fun. Maybe someday I'll try to sell them my mysteries. Dom Brightmon: Heck yeah. Probably got two books cooking right now as we speak. Kelly Brakenhoff: That'd be great. Dom Brightmon: Yes, indeed. Tony, the tiger approved too. That's right. The sponsors didn't pay me, and they are not going to be feeling great. That was Roy. Tony the tiger. I'm about to show him who the real Tiger King is. Let me see. Kelly Brakenhoff: Do you watch that Tiger King show? Dom Brightmon: I've seen photos. I had no idea what the heck it was until maybe yesterday. I'm like, what? In the blue Hill? Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah, I kept seeing people talk about it, but I didn't know what they were talking about. Then I saw someone listed all of the things in it, and then I was like, okay. I think I'm okay with not knowing about it. I’m good with that. I think I don't really need to know everything. Dom Brightmon: One of the few times or ignorance truly is bliss. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah. There are a few times, and this might be one.. Dom Brightmon: Yeah. But the beautiful thing is that you are versatile and yeah, agile in the literary sense. Cause you also have a children's book as well. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yes, that's right. I do. The children's book I've written is for preschool to second grade age. The kind where your parents still have to read to you or your grandparents or babysitter or somebody has to read you the book out loud and, it's called, Never Mind. it's about Duke, the Deaf Dog. Again, using my professional experience. I’ve been around a lot of really cool deaf people for a long time, and it's changed how I look at the world. I think I was telling you before how it took me a really long time to get my first couple of mysteries published. But at a certain point, I had to decide if I wanted to get an agent or a publisher or if I wanted to do it myself. And I did a lot of research for about a year before I decided I'm a control freak, I'm going to do it myself. And I hired an editor and a cover designer and went down that path and worked really hard to learn about the publishing industry. And as I was doing that, I had to file with our secretary of state. Set up my own publishing company that I could publish my own books. I filled out the paperwork and sent in the money. And then about two weeks later happened to be on Christmas Eve. I woke up in the morning and I had this revelation where it dawned on me that, well, if I'm going to start my own publishing company and I'm really going to do this, then I can do whatever I want. Like I'm the queen, I can publish whatever books I want. Then my mind started racing from there. It was like flipping a switch. Maybe some deaf people that I know maybe want to write a book and I could publish their book. Or if something inspires me, I could publish that. The next day I had another idea. There's not that many children's books out there that have deaf characters in them. I started doing research on it. The more research I did, I realized that, especially for this age group, there's seriously three or four books. That's all that have deaf characters that aren't those baby signs books. That’s popular where people have babies and teach them “milk” and “more.” But there's few books that actually have Deaf characters where a Deaf child could open up the book and see that character is like me. Cause now I'm going to have my own company. I put all these things together. And one of the really cool things about the book is that there's photos inside the book of one of my friends who's an American Sign Language instructor at the university. The book has photos of her signing the 10 vocabulary words in the book. As the kids are reading the story, they can also learn some signs. And I thought, well, a lot of the parents of kids that are deaf, you know, a lot of those parents can hear, and they don't know any signs. This way it would be a good thing for them to start learning sign language at the same time that their kids are learning. Then it took off from there. Dom Brightmon: Like a big old rocket ship, indeed. Competitive and creative. Kelly Brakenhoff: You know how you make one decision and it opens the doors to stuff that you never would have thought about before. Dom Brightmon: Oh heck yeah. Pandora's box on a good way. Kelly Brakenhoff: Right, exactly. Once I crossed that threshold and said, this is what I want to do. It was amazing. All of the people that I was able to contact and all the things that fell into place. The book was published the end of December. Seeing the response of people and how they are excited about it. Parents are excited about it. We have videos online. In the book you also get access to videos on my website where Amy teaches you how to do the signs and then she even reads the whole story in sign language on my website. Kids can practice how to do it and learn some signs. Each thing that we do leads to the next step, you know. If you had told me a year and a half ago that this was going to happen, I don't think I would have even believed it, but one step at a time . . . Dom Brightmon: One step at a time, and then the jump happens. Yes, indeed. Yes indeed. And definitely got to give you kudos to that cause definitely write this out. ‘Cause outside of the baby signs books, there's really nothing out there for Deaf children at all. Even deaf people, period. To be honest. Kelly Brakenhoff: A few movies here and there. There's a few. And you know, they're good. There's not very many. Like I think about my four kids. I don't know if you've heard of them Little Critter books by Mercer Mayer. Did you like those when you were a kid? My kids loved those and they each had a little lesson and the illustrations were cute and everything. And I said why don't deaf kids have something like that that they can see themselves in? The cool thing that's at the end of the book, the last section is all the people who worked on the book with me are Deaf. Except for my sister, ‘cause my sister's the illustrator and she's not deaf. But the other people who helped me with the book are all Deaf. And I thought it was really cool that I have their stories at the end. What they do for a living and how they got to be where they are. Deaf children need to see what they can become when they grow up. And I wanted them to see some of the people that I know who are really successful. I wanted deaf kids to be able to see a glimpse of the things they can become. Dom Brightmon: Well, opening up a whole new world for him. That's what I'm talking about. Kelly Brakenhoff: A lot to ask from 34 pages, but we're trying, Dom Brightmon: Oh, don't worry. I'm sure those pages are being multiplied as we speak. Kelly Brakenhoff: My sister is working on the second book. She's drawing it right now. You're going to like this. The name of the second book is called Farts Make Noise. Dom Brightmon: Yeah. But they catch them on Facebook. I'm like, God, this is going to be given the keys. They were killed. Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, we do have three boys, we had a lot of research at our house. Dom Brightmon: Research by force, I'm assuming. Kelly Brakenhoff: Whether I wanted it or not. Dom Brightmon: Yeah, exactly. There was no choice. Kelly Brakenhoff: There's certain things you learn when you're a parent. Definitely. Dom Brightmon: Beautiful. So for those who are out there, who may be trying to write a children's book, what was the best advice you can give those who want to go the children's book route? Kelly Brakenhoff: Ooh. You really have to do research. Children's books are very different than adult books. I had to join a whole bunch of other groups for children and I feel like I'm scratching the surface. I still have a lot to learn. I'm really lucky. My sister did the illustrating. I know a lot of times when you say, yeah, my sister's doing the illustrating, people think, okay, great. But my sister is actually really good. She's not using crayons and making some sketches. She's a professional artist. That was a big relief for me that I could ask her, and she would come through for me. Whereas if you're a person writing a book and you don't have any art skills, especially for picture books that’s hard. The illustrator makes the book. I mean, my story while I like it, and it's great. But the pictures make the book. If you look online and you see the pictures of Duke and the other dogs, they're adorable. They make it much better. And even writing older books like chapter books and young adult books. People think that they're like little adults, but they're not. You have to come at it from a completely different perspective. Dom Brightmon: Right. You're definitely right about the illustration as being everything, the illustrator making the kids book itself. Because if the pictures are bad or they don't match the words then you're in trouble. ‘Cause I remember one time I was reading a kids book and there were these aliens in the book. I forgot what they originally were supposed to be, but I'm like, wait a second, why are they green space aliens? I thought they were supposed to be little insect people. I said, what's going on? Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah, yeah. Well, and there’s many kinds of art. You know, some of them are anime and some of them are old fashioned. Even my sister, you know, I said, Hey, I want to do this book and I want it to be dogs and you know, what do you think? And she's like looking at me like, you're such an idiot. She didn’t say that out loud, but I'm sure in her head she was like, you have no idea what you're talking about. She was like, well . . . what kind of drawings? Like I said, I'm lucky I could put myself in her hands because she did a great job. But honestly, the pictures are what make the book good. Dom Brightmon: Yes, indeed. Definitely fabulous right there. And that's the power of trusting a good specialist that knows the difference. That's something I forgot for a split second, but you're right. Because there are different styles of drawings in the illustrations. It's like, you know. If you go the anime style route, you're going to be in trouble trying to reach certain audiences with your work. Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, it symbolizes something else, right. Or if you do more of a fantasy type of thing or a science fiction look. People can tell at glance at the pictures, what the meaning is behind it. And even young kids, that's how they get started. If you're watching TV shows, the difference between cartoons and their styles. There's so much thought that goes behind all of those pictures. I took that for granted before I started working with the illustrator. I didn't realize how much thought they put into every single drawing, every single step. Dom Brightmon: Yes indeed. It's true. And I agree with the cartoons and the anime on the TV and everything like that. Seeing how much behind the scenes work is required to put something like that together. You want to respect those that do that more often cause it's like, Oh, I didn't know how much work was required for that. Kelly Brakenhoff: Oh sure. Think about even the Pixar shorts. Those take a whole team of people a year to work on, what, a 15-minute video. We don't respect how much time and skill it takes. Dom Brightmon: Oh yeah. Because folks see the finished product, they don't see the work that was involved. Kelly Brakenhoff: I mean, I guess that's how it is with anything, right. You know, when you're see something done very well, it looks effortless, but we all know it's not. Dom Brightmon: Folks finished the book faster than you as a writer and then they want to know when's your next one? I read that in one day. Yeah, we're gonna find a time chamber for you. Shoot. I'll be right back.  What's on the horizon for Kelly? What's next. Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, I thought I’d be through my third book in the Cassandra Sato series. I'm working on it right now. I thought with all this time at home, I should be writing thousands of word every day. But the news makes me anxious.  The first week or so it was really hard to get going, but the last couple of weeks I've been moving along pretty good. I'm almost done with the next book. Like I said, my sister's working on the next Duke, the Deaf Dog book. Those should both be coming out later this summer. Dom Brightmon: Wow, two more books out? That's what I'm talking about. Kelly Brakenhoff: Well, when we get past all these really difficult times, it'd be great if I had something to show for it. At least a clean house or some organized shelves and maybe a book. That would be nice. Dom Brightmon: Oh yeah, definitely. I'm in the same boat with you. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah. trying to stay away from people and keep other people healthy and not be the person who causes anybody else, any anxiety or stress. Trying to do my, my part in this little corner of the world. Dom Brightmon: Some call it the cozy corner. Kelly Brakenhoff: Right, me and my dogs. They're really confused. They don't understand why I'm home all day. They keep looking at me like, are you ever leaving? Like what are you still doing? Dom Brightmon: It's like, we're going to mess up the furniture. Why are you still here? Come on. Darn it. It's like the human's been here for a long time. What's going on? This is something going on. We don't know about. There was this thing with beer, I don't know, maybe it was a chocolate chip cookie. No, that was probably the beer. Kelly Brakenhoff: Probably one of the first days I was home. I was making a sandwich for lunch and I put the ingredients on the counter, and I made the mistake of walking out of the room. One of our dogs is a German Wirehair Pointer. He's about nose level with the counter. When I came back, my, my bread was gone and I was like, dude. What kind of coworker are you? Dom Brightmon: Who's the real breadwinner now? Kelly Brakenhoff: Clearly hiring in this place is bad.. Dom Brightmon: Yes, indeed. Not too bad. The HR office is closed on this one. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah. Nobody wants to hear your complaint. Dom Brightmon: Woo. But there's one thing we definitely want to hear and that is the advice you would give to your 25-year-old self. If you were 25 and it occurred in the year of 2020. Kelly Brakenhoff: Wow. 25-year-old self. Buckle your seatbelt and enjoy the ride, because it's going to be a lot of fun. There's a lot of ups and downs, but it's going to be a lot of fun. I had my first son, my first child when I was 25. It got better and better after that. Dom Brightmon: It's still hard to believe. Listening to your voice that you’re old enough. Kelly Brakenhoff: Yeah. I know I have a young sounding voice. When I lived in a different state from my parents and I was probably about 25. Some telemarketer called the house and he said, Hi, can I talk to your mom? And I said, my mom lives in Nebraska, and I hung up. I know I have a young sounding voice, but my mother does not live with me anymore. Dom Brightmon: Yes, indeed. Age could be an advantage too. It's like, yep. Had a child at 25 you get to stay at 25 metaphorically, Kelly Brakenhoff: That's right. I wish my face and my gray hairs and my wrinkles would stay 25 but you know, Hey. Dom Brightmon: You can say gray or some call it silver magic. Kelly Brakenhoff: I know. All the young girls are dying their hair gray and I’m trying to cover mine up. Dom Brightmon: That's the thing. I'm still confused about it. I'm like, why is your hair gray? I thought, y'all don't want to rush that process. Nobody wants to rush that process. Kelly Brakenhoff: You know what's funny though? I think it’s stunning if you have the right skin tone and the right style. Some of those girls are really pretty with it. But yeah, people my age are saying no way. Dom Brightmon: Exactly. It's like, stop rubbing it in. No, I'm the original on the natural hair. Well for those who want to keep in magical contact with a competitive, kind, and creative Kelly, what's the best way for folks to reach out to you? Kelly Brakenhoff: I would love if people would check out my website, which is my name, kellybrakenhoff.com or you can see me on Facebook @KellyBrakenhoffauthor. I'm really trying to post funny things on Facebook. Try talking to people and not be too salesy. Especially at this moment, like I said earlier, I'm an extrovert. I'm dying here. I need people to talk to me. Follow me on Facebook and talk to me ‘cause I'm stuck in my house all day long. I'm not built for that. Dom Brightmon: Yeah. I guess the dogs can only woof so much. Kelly Brakenhoff: That's right. They're very cuddly, but you know, I do like to talk to people also. Dom Brightmon: That's right. Fabulous having you on today folks, and also our Facebook page. Give us some likes, some magical hearts. Check out our Amazon page and check out some of the magical books. Those who love mystery, or who wants something with the kids. Any parting words for the folks still listening, Kelly? Kelly Brakenhoff: I'm really hope everybody can, stay healthy and stay safe. Hug your family and your loved ones and take care of each other. Dom Brightmon: How's it going? You're super special, you awesome human. Since you made it to the end of episode, it looks like you really enjoyed yourself. Since you enjoyed this episode, be sure to share with at least three people in your network and tell them what you really liked about this episode. And even shoot myself or the guests an email and let them know what you like most about this interview that way they can stay inspired to keep pushing out great work.

Dr Kelly Brogan is a Manhattan based holistic woman's health psychiatrist, author of The New York Times bestselling book ‘A Mind Of Your Own’ and co-editor of the landmark textbook ‘Integrative Therapies For Depression’.She completed her psychiatric training and fellowship at NYU Medical Centre after graduating from Cornell University Medical College and has a B. Sc from MIT in Systems Neuroscience.She is board certified in Psychiatry, Psychosomatic Medicine and Integrative Holistic Medicine, and is specialised in a root cause resolution approach to psychiatric syndromes and symptoms.She's a medical director for Fearless Parent and a founding member of Health Freedom Action. She's a certified KRI Kundalini yoga teacher and also a mother of two.Join us as I ask Dr Kelly:* What is the definition of depression?* What role do antidepressants really play?* What can the contraceptive pill do to someone’s mental state?Dr Brogan will also share with us:* The importance of your gut microbiome.* Ways to send our body signals of safety and reclaim your health.* The link between the side effects of psychotropic drugs and violence.Dr Kelly is dedicated to mental wellbeing, and her expertise shines through in this podcast, when she says things like:“When I put down my prescription pad and I started to employ lifestyle medicine in my practice I had a full recovery of unmedicated patients.”“Our diet is communicating to our entire nervous system through the responsivity and integrity of our gut microbiome.”“We are not meant to be the superhuman race that outpaces the rest of the planet through the great gifts of science and technology!”To find out more about Kelly Brogan visit http://KellyBroganMD.com - and check out her book “A Mind Of Your Own” - you won't be disappointed!I’d love to know your thoughts and experiences - join the conversation on my Facebook page.For more episodes of Recipes For Life, find us on iTunes at https://apple.co/2NpsIba, Spotify at https://spoti.fi/2NpSiN0, Whooskhaa at https://www.whooshkaa.com/shows/recipes-for-life-with-pete-evans, click the link on https://peteevans.com, or just look up "Recipes For Life" in your favourite podcast app.I'd love to spread the knowledge in these podcasts far and wide. If you liked this episode, I'd love it if you could share it with your friends, and perhaps even leave a review on iTunes.This podcast is proudly presented by The Institute For Integrative Nutrition, or IIN for short.I've completed this amazing health training course through IIN, and I would thoroughly recommend it for anyone wanting to start a career in the health coaching and wellness space.This course is conducted over a year long period and it's constructed in a way that if you're a full time worker or a busy parent or wherever you are in your life you'll still be able to complete all the required curriculum and modules.Please see the link included in this post on my Facebook or Instagram page or on iTunes, to access the free sample class and first module of the program, to get a great taste of the format and structure as well as utilise my special discount that I can offer you if you decide to sign up.Just go to https://geti.in/2K2QcAw, email admissions@integrativenutrition.com or call +1 (212) 730-5433 outside the US, (844) 780-3300 within the US.Make sure you tell the admission team that you're part of the Pete Evans tuition savings to claim your very substantial discount. More info is at https://www.integrativenutrition.comTheme music by Mandharu -

Hey Rebels!  In this episode Caroline and Kelly talk 5 Ways To Rock Your Summer!!  Who doesn’t love a rockin summer?!  Summer is the best time to tackle things in the shop that get forgotten and sales are usually slower.  So sit back, enjoy a cocktail on the porch (or inside if you hate the heat) and get ready to rock your shop for the summer!  What you do now will affect you in 3-5 months for the Holiday Season! 5 Ways To Rock Your Shop: Free Course-CBR Rock Your Summer Challenge Download the 6 FREE PDF’s Listen to the Rock Your Summer Playlist Plan Get a calendar out, plan releases, upcoming promos, courses and your holiday schedule. Work on Projects That Do Not Normally Get Worked On Update your shop listings Clean up the office Update photos Get finances up to date Pick a Project New Idea to Help Grow Business Organization Social Media Take Some Time Off-Switch Your Schedule Step away from the computer Change your hours for working during the day   Quote Love from Caroline & Kelly You are not doing yourself any favors if you are working on vacation -Caroline Sometimes not having anything on your schedule is exciting -Caroline Spend your summer getting things in place & you will totally thank us later -Kelly What you do now, will affect your shop months from now -Kelly   Follow us on instagram (@creativebizrebellion) and use hashtag #creativebizrebellion for a shop shout out!!! Enroll in our FREE course:  The CBR Rock Your Shop Summer Challenge! If you have a second please jump over to iTunes and leave us a review! Click on the link and then click on “view in iTunes” to leave us a review.  We give you all the virtual fist bumps.  Thank you! JOIN THE REBELLION! Signup for our newsletter and get our fave list of Instagram hashtags FREE! YOU CAN FIND KELLY ONLINE AT: www.helloworldpaperco.com www.kellyparkersmith.com www.helloworldstamps.etsy.com YOU CAN FIND CAROLINE ONLINE AT: www.carolinecreates.com www.carolinecreates.etsy.com SHOW YOUR REBEL SPIRIT WITH SOME AWESOME GEAR FROM THE CREATIVE BIZ REBELLION SHOP: www.creativebizrebellion.com/shop *This post does contain some affiliate links*

Kari and Kelly have talked a lot about fixers, and their value on the road – and in this episode, they interview William, their first fixer. William is the king of the grift, and he talks about how you can find money anywhere...even in the trees. Speaking of trees, William is the one who introduced the ladies to the term “chicken of the trees,” which is what some Puerto Rican locals are trying to rebrand iguana meat as. William talks about how he found the people who sell iguana meat, and how he’s discovered the potential business opportunity in catching and selling live iguanas. Iguanas aren’t the only thing William was after in Puerto Rico, though. He also was able to free dive for conch and octopus (octopuses?), and teach the ladies a thing or two about making money on the road. What’s it like to be a fixer for Kari and Kelly? What’s the best grift William’s ever run? Lots of ground is covered here, and you won’t want to miss it. To follow along in real time, see video/pics of the process, get Workationing tips and travel hacks, check out www.workationing.com. Follow us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/workationingAnd Twitter: www.twitter.com/workationing

  Kelly: Hello, this is Kelly Coughlin, CEO of BankBosun. Today we're going to launch a series of podcasts on community banks and the role they have played in our history and the future. Community banks are critical to a community's social and economic ecosystem. I use the term ecosystem carefully and intentionally to describe a system of inter-connected elements formed by the interaction of a community with their environment, and in terms of a social and economic community, in my mind community banks are critical members of that ecosystem. That brings me to this podcast series, in which we're going to focus on community banks. In this series we're talking to a number of executives who are leaders in community banking, and I'm asking them to make community banks more fun and interesting. I think I used the term “humanize” community banks. The community bank has been around a long time. From the Revolutionary War in Massachusetts to the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas; expansions and contractions, recessions and depressions, community banks have seen it all. With that in mind, I have one of those leaders, Sammie Dixon, CEO of Prime Meridian Bank in Tallahassee, Florida. He's not been around since the Revolutionary War, I don't think, but he has seen a lot. Sammie, are you on the line there? Sammie: I am. Kelly: Have you been around since the Revolutionary War, Sammie? Sammie: No, I barely made the '60s. Kelly: Barely made the '60s, excellent.  Sammie, I wanted to talk to you because when I look at your bio and some of the community involvement…I looked at all the involvement that you guys have…and I counted nearly 50 organizations, whether it be the Treehouse of Florida, Toys for Tots, Young Actors Theatre, Good News Outreach, Holy Comforter School, Lee's Place, Opening Nights. I'm not sure what Opening Nights is but..., you've got Florida Tax Watch. You've got over 50 organizations that you guys support one way or another. Talk to me about that. Sammie: Well, Kelly, there was a famous banker here in town by the name of Godfrey Smith, that always stated that a healthy community makes a healthy bank. And if you take care of the community, then the bank will be taken care of, if you're providing good service and charging good, honest rates, paying people good rates, and just making sure that the well-being of each individual client and the community as a whole is taken care of. Kelly: Kind of jumping forward here, what happens in a community when a community bank ends up getting acquired by a national bank or a large regional bank? Does that go away do you think? Sammie: It does to some extent. You've got someone outside of the individual community that really doesn't understand what's important, making decisions or providing budgets to the local leadership of that regional or money center bank. And they cannot react as quickly to the needs of the community. Whereas your community banks are able to really provide a nimble outlook. And by that I mean that if there's something happening that needs to be taken care of. The decision can be made within 5 minutes and let's get the problem squared away, from supporting one of the individual not-for-profits that are providing services to our community to the hospitals, the school system. It's having that ability to make a decision on the ground floor. Kelly: That's a segue into maybe the bigger picture here. That dynamic doesn't just relate to non-profit involvement, but it gets at the for-profit activities that a bank is involved in. When you're not part of that community, you can't respond as quickly, whether it be granting a commercial loan or that sort of thing. Talk about that a little bit. How is that impacted? Sammie: Every business is nothing more than a story with substance behind it. Having people and having the executive leadership having the opportunity to not only listen and hear the story, but live it. You get to see what they do each and every day and you're able to make decisions and make judgments in extending credit; what type of depository services they need; and there's nothing about a story that fits in a box. Every one of them is different. Every individual character, if you want to say, within the story is different. Having that ability to take the time, sit down, understand what the story is and where it's going, gives us an opportunity to make very quick and rational decisions that helps each individual business that then helps the community. Kelly: You mentioned story. What's your story? What's Prime Meridian's story? Sammie: Well, Prime Meridian Bank is a newer bank, one of the last in the state of Florida to get chartered. We opened our doors February 4th, 2008. We initially capitalized with about $12.9 million dollars. We have now since grown in excess of $275 million, over the last 8 years. We decided to start the bank, myself and Chris Jensen, and we thought we could provide service to our clientele, and decisions that would help them move more prudently and faster. Kelly: You saw a need specifically in the Tallahassee market? Sammie: We did. We thought that we could provide service and compete with everybody in town. We didn't have a group of people come together and say, "Let's start a bank." We put our story together and put our model together, and went to individual business leaders within town, here in Tallahassee and said, "We're going to start a bank we'd like you to be a part of," and that was the genesis of Prime Meridian Bank. Kelly: Was there a lot of consolidation and acquisitions that had gone on prior to that, and so that kind of created this market opportunity for you guys? Sammie: No. You had several community banks here in town already, most of your southeastern regional banks and your money center bank. We just thought there was an opportunity for us to come in and provide a little different level of service that would make us a profitable entity and serve Tallahassee very well. Kelly: Let's talk about the name Prime Meridian. You do know that you're not on the Prime Meridian? You do know that you're 84 degrees west, right? Sammie: I do, but the Prime Meridian for all metes and bounds in the state of Florida is here in Tallahassee. Kelly: Oh, got it. Sammie: If you look at the Prime Meridian, what is it? It's a starting point of the metes and bounds here for the state of Florida, and starting point of time, or the starting point of a new financial institution. The Meridian line is an unwavering line going over the Earth. We're unwavering in our outlook and care of our shareholder's money, but more importantly, our clients. Kelly: The Brits claimed Greenwich was the Prime Meridian. They don't own that, so you'd redefine Tallahassee to be the Prime Meridian. Sammie: At least for a new financial institution. Kelly: Very good. Continue with the evolution of the bank and the challenges you've faced in the past, as you went from de novo Bank? You didn't acquire another bank, right? Sammie: Right. Several things that we're proud of through the evolution of our company. Number one, which goes back to the quality of our team. When we started our bank, the average startup cost was about $800,000. The day that we opened the doors and took the write-off to capital for the expenses, we wrote off $395,000. That goes to the knowledge and expertise of our team of not having to hire a lot of consultants, and understanding each and every thing that we did. Going on to 2012, four years after we opened, we looked around with the team that we had, and realized that we could do our own data items processing. Instead of having a service bureau that was processing our checks, we decided we would do it ourselves. That added an immediate $8,500 a month to the bottom line. Kelly: Wow. Sammie: That same year, we also became cumulatively profitable. That was pretty exciting for us. And then in December 11th of 2013, we became an effective SEC registered company and then started listing our stock in 2015 on the OTCQX. So those are some of the things that we have done and we're very, very proud of. Dealing with the SEC, we went through a full review, when we filed our S1, our initial going public document. Our comment letter back from the SEC was simply 2 1/2 pages, which goes to say just how good our team is, and how detailed we are in each and every thing that we do. Kelly: Yeah. I know access to capital has been good once you go public, but it's quite a task to a) go public, and b) maintain that. The requirements are immense as you know. Was it worth it, do you think? Sammie: Absolutely. We went public for 3 reasons. Number one is we could raise our capital the way that we wanted to. We didn't have to worry about an accredited offering or anything of that nature. Number two is we're looking to grow the company and grow outside of the Tallahassee MSA, and if we do that we want to have a currency that we can use. In order to have your stock act as a currency, you've got to have a market for it, and the only way to do that was to be an SEC registered trading company. Then number three, when we decided to do it, our bank is still very clean. We do not have many non-performings or any crazy things on the books. It would never be easier to go through and do it. And we look at it like these days, with capital, you can't say, "Okay, we're going to go buy someone or do something. Now let's go get approval and say, 'Okay, if you give us approval we'll get the capital.'" You've got to have capital already on hand. There's no more just in time capital. And the same way we look at it is there's no just in time human capital. Kelly: Let's talk about human capital for a minute. How challenging is it for you to compete for new talent and retain existing talent with the compensation structure that community banks have to deal with? Sammie: Well, Kelly, that's been one of our strong points. When we started the bank in 2008, we were the new kids on the block. Nobody knew us. All we had was a story. It was nothing but air. So going out and getting the top absolute talent was difficult. People had their banks, things were going well. So we decided that we would start building our own bankers. And being here in Tallahassee and having Florida State and FAMU and TCC here, gave us the opportunity to go get a lot of talented younger folks to bring in, that had the capacity, train them, educate them. And one thing that we've done is we've been very transparent with our team. Up until we went public, we went through our financials with our entire team once a month. Now that we're a publicly traded company, we do it once a quarter. But giving them the exposure, I cannot give them experience, but giving them the exposure to what we're doing, why we're doing it, and how we're doing it, is as important as finding experienced people. And our entire culture is surrounded by a one-word question and that's “why”. Any teller, relationship manager, operations person, whoever, can ask me or anybody in the bank why are we doing something. And that causes two things. Number one, the hardest thing to get people to do is think. If they're asking you questions, then they're thinking. And if you answer their questions: Why did we go public? Why did we raise capital? Why are we looking to acquire banks? What does that mean to the bottom line? Now, all of the sudden you've created an inclusive ecosystem, as you say, that people can buy-in. The biggest thing people want is to be a part of something, and what we've afforded a lot of folks to do is come in and be a part of building something from the foundation up. And constantly giving them that transparency of what we're doing and why we're doing it, is very, very inclusive. And we listen. I can't tell a teller how to make a teller line more efficient. So if I can't listen to what they're doing like I ask them to listen to me and do what I say. If we don't have a partnership there, we're not going to get any better. That's the number one. Number two, if someone asks me a question. Why are we doing this? and I can't answer it, then I might need to rethink what I'm doing. Does that make sense? Kelly: It certainly does. Have you used non-qualified benefit plans as part of that overall compensation structure? This is not a pitch for that. I was just curious if you'd ever talked about that. Sammie: Yes. We're in the process of looking at our entire compensation structure now, and figuring out how to better enhance it to a) retain, b) attract, and c) incentivize. Kelly: So say another side of say the balance sheet, since we're talking about that, municipal bonds. Anything that you've seen change here since the 2008 Dodd-Frank and all this other stuff of municipal bond rating agencies? Have you guys had to modify any of your practices on that? Sammie: We're using a third party right now to monitor our municipal portfolio. So in the old days of just buying bonds and putting them on the books, we actually have a quarterly review of all of our municipalities. Kelly: So you've had to upgrade that since the regulatory changes? Sammie: We have. And I don't think it's all that bad from the standpoint that you look at a lot of municipalities out there that are having weakness due to the down-turn, and the one thing that we have made the decision from day one, is we take risk, and there's risk in everything you do, but we take the real risk in our loan portfolio. We do not want any risk in our investment portfolio. We're looking at it as simply a hedge against interest rates, and also as just a liquidity source. Kelly: Well then you better load up with bank-owned life insurance. You've got about 50% of your financial assets in muni’s and I like the lower balance sheet risk that BOLI offers. That’s another discuss with you and Glenn. What's the future look like for community banking in general, threats that you see, opportunities? For example, 80% of millennials haven't even walked into a bank before. Sammie: Let's stop right there for a second and talk about the millennials for a minute. Number one, I talked about how we hire and what we do. The average age of our bank is 38. The average age of our management team is 41. As far as dealing with millennials and all, one thing most people have forgotten is most millennials have yet to start a company. A lot of them, due to the recession, still live with their parents. So therefore, they really haven't needed to walk into a bank. Now a lot of the millennials that we have found, and we talk with, and we do this a lot. They want to be a part of something. And they're much more community driven and doing something for the greater good. Once you are able to show them from a teammate standpoint what we're doing, they buy in. Once they actually need something other than just a regular checking account, i.e. buy their first house; buy a business or trying to finance the start of a business, they need to sit down and talk with someone who understands the market. And we have found, we've been very successful with millennials. Now we're not out there with everything online, rocket mortgage and things of that nature. We're finding a lot of success dealing with the millennials. What that comes back to is we generally don't get them until they need something. And every individual, every household is nothing different than a story too. Where's your income coming from? Is it going to be sustainable? Can you afford whatever asset you're trying to purchase? That has been very, very beneficial to us. As far as whether or not banks are going to be here, I've talked with bankers that go back to the '60s that said the community bank's not going to be around much longer. Well, as long as you have people, there's a certain segment of the population that wants to talk with people, when it comes to their financial situation. Coming up from a small town in south Georgia, and growing up the 3 most important people in the town was your doctor, your preacher, and your banker; your health care, your faith care, and your financial care. And you generally didn't do that via an email. I truly believe that there will always be a place for the community bank. Now with the regulations and thought process out there, there's going to be fewer and fewer community banks due to the fact that what we're required to do. We're operating in most cases from an asset-liability standpoint, overall balance sheet management standpoint, like a larger bank. However, we don't have the economies of scale to do it. So we have to be more innovative and more nimble. And that goes right down to talking with your regulators on a consistent basis to understanding what the rules are. If you're going to form a hospital, or if you're going to start a power company, there's regulations you have to abide by. As a community banker, you had better understand the rules and abide by them or find something else to do. That's just the approach that we've taken. And it creates a lot less heartache and stress, when you come at it from that standpoint, versus saying, "The regulators are going to kill me." Regardless what they're going to do, they're going to do it. So you better find out or figure a way to cope with it. Kelly: Great. What's the biggest threat, other than let's say cyber-security risk, which probably keeps you up at night…other than that, what's the biggest risk or fear that you have, say for the next 10 years? Sammie: As we expand, finding the human capital, finding the talent, the teammates. Kelly: Really? Sammie: The human capital. Kelly: So in Tallahassee or in some of your outlying branches? You have access to plenty of talent there, right? Sammie: There is a good supply, and it's just finding the right people that believe in what we believe in. Our culture is the most important aspect of what we do each and every day, and I go back to the question “why”. If you're questioning why we're doing something, some people look at that as somewhat of a negative. We look at it as a positive, because if you cannot explain what's going on, and you cannot understand it, then the “how” really doesn't matter. Kelly: What's the biggest opportunity that you see? What gets you up every morning after you've had a sleepless night worrying about cyber-security risks? What gets you going? Sammie: The opportunity to grow, to build our franchise here within Tallahassee; the opportunities outside of Tallahassee. Within our investor presentation, we show that we don't want to go any further north than Macon, south of Ocala, east of the Atlantic and west of the eastern border of the state of Mississippi. That is south Alabama, south Georgia, and north Florida. The opportunities to be there are endless. And that is something to get excited about and get out of bed every day, and figuring out a new challenge to go build upon. Kelly: That's great. All right. In closing, I always like to ask either your favorite quote and/or the stupidest thing you've done in your business career. Sammie: I will give you my favorite quote, and it's on our boardroom wall, and it is by a retired General, Eric Shinseki, who has been re-retired. The quote is, "If you do not like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less." Shinseki is the most recent former head of the VA. He's pretty irrelevant right now. Kelly: I would say so. Alright. Very good. Anything else you want to add Sammie, or should we sign it off? Sammie: You tell me. Thank you. Kelly: I think we're good. Thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure talking to you. I wish you well, Sammie. Stay safe! And that’s it for my interview with Sammie Dixon from Prime Meridian Bank in Tallahassee, Florida. Thank you.

Kelly Coughlin interviews Wes Sierk, President and Co-Founder of Risk Management Advisors. Wes is the author of the book Taken Captive: The Secret to Capturing Your Piece of America’s Multi-Billion Dollar Insurance Industry. Wes is a recognized expert in using captive insurance strategies to manage and fund certain types of risk. Kelly Coughlin believes that such a strategy could be used to manage and fund cyber security risk. This is the first in a series of three podcasts covering captive insurance and cyber security risk management.   Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: Hello this is Kelly Coughlin with the BankBosun. This is the podcast that’s the first in a series of three podcasts that are going to be related to using captive insurance strategy to manage and ensure cyber security risk and loss. I’ve talked to many bankers over my 25-year career and I have observed in the past five years cyber security going from a concern of IT guys and techno geeks to top of mind attention and concern of CEOs, CFOs and boards of directors. In fact, I was at a conference in Kansas a while back, and a number of the sessions were on cyber security risk. I was thinking, “Well, should we go to that? Should we not go to that?” We talked to C-level execs. These sessions were all standing room only, completely filled with C-level execs. It occurred to me that in this environment, we have potentially overpricing of all services related to the risk management of this risk including prevention, detection, hardware, software, consulting. I thought the subject of these 3 podcasts would be the transference of this risk. I think one of the areas that I detect as potentially being mis-priced is the cost of insurance, partly because the risk of loss is all over the map. We thought, “Let’s explore cyber security risk through a captive insurance enterprise.” To help kick this series off, I am interviewing Wes Sierk, President and Cofounder of Risk Management Advisors. I came across Wes through a book that he wrote, exciting title called, Taken Captive. That sounds good so far. Here’s where it goes downhill: “The secret to capturing your piece of America’s multi-billion dollar insurance industry.” I’m interviewing Wes remotely. He’s in Long Beach, California. Wes, you heard my introduction, and the reason you would be on this call, but let’s start with a couple of minutes on your background, how it would connect to bank cyber security risk management. Wes: Well first of all thank you for having me on the show. I started out in the insurance business in 1993 in a division of Northwestern Mutual, which was a life insurance company called CCI, Compensation Consulting Inc. Mostly what we did there is qualified and non-qualified planning, retirement plans and deferred comp, things like that. I came across captive insurance companies in 2000. My first thought was, it was a perfect alternative to deferred comp. That’s how I got into it. My background is … I’m a researcher, so I started digging into why life insurance was all the same. It was you go to a life insurance company and you get a 45-year-old male, and you say, “How much is a million dollars of coverage?” The insurance company prints out that ledger. If you had ten agents going to the market, they would all come back with the same quote. PNC is completely different. You actually have one broker who goes to the market for you and it’s much more of a negotiation, which leads into the pricing issues that you alluded to earlier in your call. My partner Jared and myself went on to form Risk Management Advisors in 2004 and all we’ve been doing since is just the design, implementation and management of captive insurance companies. On a personal side, married for about 24 years, two kids, I coach baseball, and Risk Management Advisors has a Nascar team. Kelly: Give us a definition in two sentences of captive insurance. Wes: It’s an insurance company that a business sets up to insure their own risk. It’s pretty simple. Kelly: It could be a bank? Wes: Yes. Instead of them buying their general liability, their cyber, their property, all of their coverage from AIG, Zurich, Liberties of the world, they actually form their own licensed regulated insurance company and they pay those premiums to their own company. They deduct those premiums, just like they would by paying any other company. Kelly: All right. In terms of primary motivations, my research shows that one, you’ve got access to cheap insurance rates because you’re paying them directly to your own carriers so to speak, right? You’ve got first dollar loss coverage, you can accelerate loss deductions, which appears to be a fancy term for you can over-fund the risk premium and build up tax deductible reserve. Are those the three core motivations to do this, or are there others? What’s the primary motivation to do this? Wes: I think you hit the nail on the head. One thing it does give you, if you’re an insurance company, is it gives you access to the reinsurance marketplace. Kelly: How much would a bank be saving? Are you talking 5% or are we talking 40%? Wes: Well it depends on the kind of policies they’re writing and the amount of risk that they’re willing to take. One thing is, the reason why reinsurance is less expensive is because the insurance industry, insurance companies, have thousands of employees. I read somewhere that the insurance industry has three times as many employees as the US Post Office. They do a lot of the processing of paperwork and claims and things like that, so they have higher overhead. A re-insurer can get away with having 5% of the employees of an insurance company, because they only attach at a certain level whether that’s 50, 100, 250, a million, whatever. They’re not getting involved in the day-to-day operations of the insurance company and the day-to-day pay out of claims. That’s left to the insurance company level. We see, for regular insurances, I would say you could see a 30% savings over your traditional insurance. Kelly: In the banking business we have what are called banker’s banks, and they provide banking services to banks. They don’t do anything directly with the public. So would a reinsurance company be an insurance company’s insurance company where they provide services only to another insurance company, so you cut out all of the sales process I suppose, the distribution expenses? Aren’t those the core things that are cut out plus the servicing part because they’re not dealing with million to 20 million dollar cases, they’re dealing with whatever the number is, 50 million or above, the larger ones? Wes: You’re exactly right. Your analogy is very good. Where bankers have banker’s banks, this would be like an insurance company’s insurance company. Kelly: If one were going to set up a captive, that entity would have to also sign up, unless they were going to absorb all of the risk themselves, which is unlikely. If they want to transfer or share some of that risk, they have to set up relationships with reinsurance companies, correct? Wes: Correct, unless they want to take that risk themselves, which we don’t usually recommend the first couple of years. Kelly: I suppose companies like you, this is not an infomercial for your group, but is that part of what you do, is you have these relationships and there’s probably some vetting process that you would go through to bring on a new captive client, I suppose, and introduce them and negotiate terms, etc with the reinsurance company. Is that one of the roles that your company provides? Wes: Yes it is. Clients come to us because they want us to set up and manage their insurance company for them; deal with the departments insurance; do all of the regulatory filings and in most cases, not all cases but most cases; they’ll have us go and negotiate the reinsurance contracts for them. The good thing about reinsurance, reinsurance is always sold net of commissions, unlike an insurance policy where you pay an insurance agent, we’re just negotiating on behalf of the insurance company as a manager of the insurance company. Kelly: That’s where the big savings comes from. Wes: Yeah, there’s a lot of savings in that. I’m not going to begrudge brokers because brokers bring a tremendous amount of value to clients. Kelly: There are a couple of ways to set these things up from what I can tell. You could set them up as a single parent captive or a group pooled collective type where you have a group of banks. You have a single bank, Bank A that decides, “We’re going to set this up.” It’s only one bank in there. Then you have a pooled or group approach where you have Banks A and B setting up the collective. They either do it alone or with others, like kind business I suppose, right? Is that a fair assessment? Wes: Yeah, they either do it by themselves or they do it with other people. Then within the other people, there is many different ways they can do it. Kelly: You know the context and setting that this call is about. It’s specific community banks, cyber security risk, captive insurance. If you had to Google this, those three terms would be in there. One other risk if you do it as a group or collective, let’s just say there are two banks in the collective – you have Bank A and B that are, let’s say they’re putting in an equal amount. Let’s say Bank A has great internal controls and risk management processes, Bank B has terrible ones. Bank B incurs all the loss and Bank A has insured it all. There part of the reason was to put in a bunch of excess premium perhaps, build up this reserve. Then you have Bank B eating up all the reserves. Is there a way that a bank can set up a hybrid of this where they could share say, the operating expenses, maybe consulting expenses, a number of things related to the entity? It could be another class of stock, something where the actual risk is only absorbed by the individual bank and ultimately a reinsurance carrier downstream. Wes: There could be, but I wanted to go back to one point you made, which was Bank A has great internal controls and Bank B doesn’t. The issue with cyber security is many banks have good security or great security, but it’s also the luck of the draw. The person with bad security could be fine and the one with great internal controls could have that one in a million chance where somebody comes in and breaches their security or takes millions of dollars out of their company. Within the group captive there’s also cell companies. You can have a cell captive. A cell captive is one where it basically looks at and smells like one large insurance company but each individual bank has its own cell, so they kind of wall off the assets and liabilities on a bank by bank or cell by cell limit. That could go a long way to protecting the bank. Then you go get one reinsurance treaty for all of the banks, and then you carve it off. You go get 100 million dollars of coverage and you carve it off at 5 million dollars per bank for twenty banks. The insurance companies like that because they know that if they’re writing 100 million dollars in coverage and they basically divided it at 5 million between twenty banks, they know their chance of loss is actually smaller. The frequency may be higher but the severity probably wouldn’t, and that’s where they get into the pricing. They’d much rather spread it 5 million over twenty banks, than one bank have a 20 or 25 million dollar claim. Kelly: I accept your point that Bank A may have great controls and Bank B not, but Bank A could be hacked, right? I understand that’s a valid point, but I think in this environment what is going to happen is certainly you have the Top 10 banks, they’re the high-value targets of cyber criminals. They have the budget to always attempt to put up the adequate defenses to that. I fear what is going to happen is the less target-rich environments like community banks will, as the Top 10 banks for instance, get better at defense, then the smaller community banks are going to be the target and they don’t have the resources to fund that. It’s an expensive undertaking. where you’ve got hardware expenses, software, consulting, insurance, all of this stuff, and staff of course. My thinking was that you set up this captive and you develop best practices. I’m going back to my PWC days in consulting, where in consulting business you’re always looking for best practices, but you develop best practices and you share the costs. You buy them properly, buy them at the right price, right terms, etc, and then you share the cost over twenty entities and not one community bank. The reality is these banks can’t afford to set up the high-level controls that a Top 10 bank can do it. Wes: You’re exactly right. It’s the philosophy of build your ark before the flood comes. By creating their own insurance company and warehousing dollars today, because of the way the policies are written, they basically expire every 15 months. If they are the targets of cyber criminals three years from now, they would have already stockpiled a ton of money, so they can weather a claim if they have it and maybe not have to hit their reinsurance. To your point, we both know what’s happening in the cyber marketplace as far as the premium dollars in the traditional market. The reason why … it’s because insurance companies are doing the exact same thing. They’re charging exorbitant fees today because they don’t know how big this is going to be. It reminds me of the old asbestos claims. Remember when asbestos started being a problem? All of the insurance companies started raising their rates dramatically. Then what happened was, a couple of smart insurance guys said, “You’re charging $700,000 for a million dollar general liability policy for asbestos, but if the people actually get hurt, it’s going to be a worker’s comp claim.” It’s not going to be a general liability claim, but the insurance company hadn’t thought that far ahead. They just wanted to get as many dollars in their coffers as they could in case they got hit. For cyber, you went to that conference … you’re exactly right. Five years ago it would have been just the IT people and you’d have fifteen people in the room. Now it’s actually the C-level. It’s CEO, CLO, CFO that are doing this. Kelly: The board members are the ones that are saying, “Get to the conference. I want you there.” They’re telling their CEOs to get there. Wes: It’s huge. It’s such a huge problem. I was just reading an FBI report on cyber crime. Their prediction is all businesses in the next five years will be spending at least 10% of their gross income on cyber for protections and hardware and software, and everything. You can’t even fathom that today, but it’s coming. Now we have passwords on top of passwords to get into password programs. They listed off that the FBI did a study and they went into the Apple iTunes store where people get the applications and they have all these password programs. 10 of the top 20 were programs that were sold that said, “Number one password protector.” They were sold and designed by organized crime, downloading these programs for their iPhone and their Androids, putting all their passwords in, all their banking information, and all that stuff was being directly fed to Russian organized crime. They don’t have to steal cartons of cigarettes anymore when they can make 20 to 30 million dollars in one financial transaction. Kelly: Absolutely. Wes: It’s staggering. I can see why these board members and CFOs and everyone else would be concerned about it. It’s a big issue. One of our clients was just hit with it. Kelly: Let’s say we set up Newco captive insurance for community banks. You set up as part of this synthesis of best practices and captive insurance for cyber security. I’m going to throw in another term, “best practices.” I don’t necessarily think they’re into gouging. They just can’t efficiently price it because the risk parameters or the level of risk that they’re taking on an entity basis per entity, per insured, is all over the map. When you take in a company to join the captive … would you call them a shareholder? Wes: Yes. Kelly: Okay. When you take a shareholder, they have to adopt the best practices standards that the new captive insurance carrier says. Does that make sense, that would be part of the admission process? Wes: I would say you definitely want to do that. Some insurance companies, it’s really a risk assessment for cyber preparedness. There are some insurance companies that have done a great job at this. In fact, one of them, these people developed this cyber preparedness company for Ace and Chub insurance company, as freelancers. They said, “Well we want this to make sure.” For them they realized that, “Hey, there’s a real market for this.” They basically bought company back for nothing. This was a few years ago. They’re like, “Well this isn’t going to be as big as we thought it was.” That’s all they do is analyze cyber preparedness. They give you a full report. We just had them come into ours because we have a lot of data in our stuff. We have a lot of HIPPA stuff because we run insurance companies for medical, for example. They gave us a whole big report of change this, change this, change this, and some stuff you’d never even think about. You’re like, “Whoa.” The cost to do it … I thought it was going to be very expensive but it was nothing on the scale of things. Kelly: You just hope that they’re not owned by the Russian mob, right? Wes: Yeah, exactly. Three of my clients had used them and the one that just got hit for cyber, their system was set up in such a way where they were instantly notified that this was happening. This was a server in Toronto. Instantly they had to switch the whole thing offline. They flew two of their internal programmers from here in California up to Toronto. They were back online in under 24 hours without an ounce of data. I’m like, “You know what? I’ve got to have your people come in and do this.” This is a company that does 100 million dollars in sales. I think everyone should be requiring this. Kelly: I think there’s some really cool things you could do when you have many entities splitting the cost of this. I’m certainly set up best policies, procedures, all that kind of stuff. You could buy licenses. You get quantity discount, volume discounts there. There’s a lot of benefit to having a larger group in there. Even just the project team, these banks don’t have the resources to have a really good project team to do a good vendor search, for instance. That’s a costly undertaking in and of itself is, “Well what email provider should we do?” They just don’t have the resources free to do that. You threw out the 10% number. My goal would be to let’s set it up so the goal we could make that a 5% of revenue number, not 10. Wes: Or 1%. What I was saying was, that was what the FBI’s projection of what people would be spending on their cyber stuff was. In my business, I can’t even fathom that. We spend all this money a year on hardware and software, and our business is X. If I were to extrapolate that out to say, “Well how much would we do if we did 10%?” There’s like, “There’s no way.” We could buy server hubs. We could buy everything. I guarantee you if you picked ten of your banks who listen to this, one of them is doing something great that the other nine aren’t, and so having a depository … You say, “Hey this was a great idea that this bank is doing and then you could take it over to the other one.” Kelly: Yeah, but what happens, Wes, is that everybody is going to these conferences. They get the heck scared out of them, they come back and they talk to their IT guy and say, “You know I just went to a conference. We’ve got to start controlling this risk.” Then they look at it and realize that, “Oh this is going to cost $100,000? Oh I guess we can’t afford that.” There’s plenty of ideas out there. There are some great ideas and there is some not great ideas, but there’s loads of ideas. Taking the idea and having the resources to actually implement is the big challenge. I believe that the captive program is a way to pull those things together buy cost-efficiently, do vendor searches efficiently. It all comes together there through that thing. Yeah, there are some tax benefits by throwing in higher premiums, that kind of thing. That’s great but I don’t think this is primarily a tax-driven … It just so happens that taxes will be favorable … favorable tax treatment. I really think it’s the cost-effective way to manage risk and to get best practices adopted in community banks throughout the country that otherwise just can’t quite afford it in their budget. Wes: I was going to say, and you’re using double duty dollars. Right now if they buy cyber insurance from AIG, they’re not getting internal controls, they’re not getting all of this due diligence, they’re not having somebody come in. They pay them and then if there is a claim … They still on top of their premiums have to go out and do the best practices and do all of the stuff to make sure they’re secured vs. paying premiums to their own company. Let’s say the insurance company takes 10% of all the premiums that it takes in from all the companies and then uses that to go in and install the best practices and stuff, so you’re actually using money that you would have just given to somebody else to now improve your overall business operation. We’ve had people do that with worker’s comp where, hey they can’t afford a safety guy and their worker’s comp rates have gone up, so they create their own worker’s comp company and now they use the money they were giving to Liberty and AIG and all these other companies to hire their own full-time safety person. That’s actually now just an expense of the insurance company vs them having to take money out of the bottom line of their company. Kelly: One other thought that’s a great image that I have of you is set up this captive, you have fifty banks involved and you also fund a cyber security SWAT team comprised of Navy Seals and Rangers that are deployed in the event of some ransom war type deal, right? Then they get engaged, they’re ready to go, and then they go out and take them down. Wes: Yeah, that’s a great idea. Kelly: Otherwise it’s a call to the FBI and okay, they do great work, granted, but man it’d be nice to have our own team. That could be Phase 2 down the road. Anyway, let’s wrap it up. I really appreciate your time. Let me ask you this. Do you have a favorite quote? Wes: Yeah, well I do but it’s a Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged they talked about Rearden Metal and it was going to be too expensive to rebuild these bridges for the trains using Rearden Metal because of the engineering. The quote was, “When men got structural steel, they didn’t use it to build steel copies of wooden bridges.” Kelly: Good one. Wes: I look at captives and things like that as you can use it as a powerful tool to do something in a completely different way. You don’t have to just use it for the same way you were always doing stuff. I would say that would be the first one that popped into my mind. Kelly: What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done in your business career? Give people a laugh. Give people a chuckle here. Wes: Oh, I have an album on my bookshelf. You know Bill Withers, “Lean on Me”? Kelly: Lean on Me and “Use Me”. Wes: I got an appointment. His wife called and wanted me to come talk about overall financial planning and stuff. I went to see him and I’m like, “I love your music. I love the movie and everything.” They’re just sitting there like uh-huh, uh-huh. The meeting didn’t go well and I left there. I had it confused with Stand by Me instead of Lean on Me. My dad found this Bill Withers album and he said, “Keep this on your bookshelf and any time you don’t know the answer, you won’t make a complete fool of yourself.” Kelly: Oh that’s a great one! That’s very good, I love that one. All right, Wes. I appreciate your time. How can people contact you? Wes: Yeah, my website is Risk Management Advisors. It’s riskMGMTadvisors.com and my email is WSIERK@riskMGMTadvisors.com. I create a website that’s not branded by us, but it’s captiveinsurance101.com and it just has general info on captives. You were kind enough to mention my book. The book is called Taken Captive and it’s just takencaptive.com We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin.

Kelly Coughlin talks to Kevin Chiappetta, CFA, Financial Institution Management Associates Corporation about bank portfolio stress testing tools that are being utilized to help banks get prepared for the new FASB rule and CECL   Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: Kevin, I came across FIMAC I think, at a conference in Wichita, where I met your CEO, Greg Donner. I think Greg made a presentation there that I thought was really interesting. Let’s just start out with a little bit of just brief background, Kevin, of who you are. Then we can do a deeper dive into what FIMAC does, and what you see going on in the market today. Kevin: I appreciate the opportunity. Living in the Milwaukee area, my wife and I are the parents of two recently grown children. We’ve got one out of college, living overseas. We’ve got one who’s in college not too far from you, up in the St. Paul area. Kelly: You came over from your executive director from a company called Balance Sheet Solutions. Kevin: That’s correct. Kelly: You guys are in the space of helping banks manage their balance sheet … Both their assets and liabilities. Correct? Kevin: That is correct. We actually are two different approaches on that. We consider ourselves a technology company. We do provide the tools to do that. There are a number of them in the market place available at different price points. Different models which accomplish the tasks with slightly different variations, but we also are the consulting side of it. We use those tools to help the financial institution understand the risk that’s inherit in that, and use that risk information to make different decisions. We also want to be able to lend the expertise that we’ve been able to accumulate over the years. Both from bank CFO positions and other consulting firms to help them understand that information. Help them build that information better. Having the technology is fantastic. It’s helpful, but understanding how to use that technology is really where we’re kind of moving forward with our firm, helping those institutions understand what all goes into using technology to make better decisions. Kelly: The first point of entry is technology. Give them some tools. They start to use it, and they think that it probably triggers more questions than answers, so they need help implementing it. You’ve got a consulting area that helps the bank from that point. Kevin: Precisely. Kelly: What are some of the different business models out there to help the bank with their ALM? Kevin: The most basic approach that we’ve seen is the technology side. Here’s our model. Here’s what it cost to run it. We can help you move data in and out. Here are the results. We provide that series of results in a report, and you’re off on your own. There is some benefit to that. Obviously, it tends to be more of a low-cost entry. For those who are well-versed in that type of thing, it might be advantageous. We can see all the way up to the full consulting as we’ve described it before. We know that there are a number of competitors in the market space that provide that as well. We see some of this provided by firms who offer other product lines. Perhaps a broker dealer could offer something like that under a different feed-based arrangement, so we see a number of different ways to pay for that service. Whether you’re paying through a soft-dollar transaction type of thing that doesn’t show up on the income statement, or more on the straight feed base. There are probably three or four different ways, I think, that we see financial institutions using this information. Where is it coming from? Who’s running it? When we start to compare the models themselves, we get into what type of random number generator is being used to create rate paths and some of the more geeky stuff that comes along with the rate models. We can start to split hairs as to one model comparison to the next. I think the business side of it really breaks down into a model-only on the left-hand side, and on the right-hand side, the full-in consulting. Either you are or you’re not a full service on the consulting side. You’re just merely providing the service that brings the data in and pushes the reports out. Kelly: You certainly have plenty of brokers that are trying to jam municipals and securities into the asset side. Right? That’s one component that is somewhat of a unique approach that you guys have. Kevin: Without a doubt. We’ve run across some of those models. I don’t want to be overly disparaging. It really cuts back to something. We want to make sure as an organization that we separate duties. We do that in a lot of different areas. Those who are responsible for money coming in versus money coming out. To the big duties, we try to make sure that we split the risk-taking and risk-measuring. When you start to combine those two duties you open up the opportunity for one to kind of crowd out the other. When you have advice that’s given on an overall risk-management standpoint for somebody who’s being compensated for selling you risk, it doesn’t take long to see that the opportunity to create more risk than you wanted to was there. I’m sure there are very good people doing that modeling, but when it comes down to it at the end of the day. Whether I eat or not is dependent on you buying risk and adding it to your balance sheet. The opportunity to create an environment that looks like you can absorb more risk is clearly there. Personally, I just don’t think that you’ve done enough effort to separate those two duties to make sure that conflict of interest is removed if you’re getting the information on your risk-management and acting on that from the same place. It creates too much room to create errors either willfully or otherwise. Kelly: In other words, if you’re going to accept the business model where brokers drive the decisions, then you better have done your preparation and homework beforehand so that you know exactly what you need. Don’t let them decide which assets sit inside the bank’s portfolio at the inherit conflict. Is that a fair statement? Kevin: Yeah. I think that’s a spot-on statement. Clearly, to create these risk reports it requires a certain amount of judgement to go into some of the assumptions. I don’t want to get overly technical but if you look at the liability side, it requires a certain amount of assumption. You need to understand the impact of that assumption has on the result. If my main motivation is to sell risk asset, I can make an organization look more or less risky depending on what is necessary. The opportunities exist for that to happen. Any time the opportunity for that conflict of interest opens itself up, it has risk managers and organizations who are responsible for managing that risk. I think it’s imperative that we try to close off those opportunities. Whether or not you believe they’re there. The opportunity for it to be there and anybody with a suspecting eye is going to be drawn right to that, taking that opportunity for that risk-management problem off the table. It just goes a long way in proper governing. Kelly: All right. Another approach, that I’ve seen in the marketing out there, might be to outsource it completely to another investment management firm where they will take on the entire function. They’ll take care of finding and executing the trade. Presumably, not with their own broker, I would imagine, but in theory they could. They could be a broker dealer, they could be an investment adviser, and run the trade. Do you see much of that going on? Kevin: Yeah. We do see some of that. Some of my background comes from that particular business model, whether with or without the dealer side. It’s not too dissimilar from the role I described earlier on our consulting side, where we spend a great deal of time getting to know the organization and working along with them. In essence, being an outsourced CFO, or finance division if you will, we create that role and play that role within the organization. Along the lines with that business line, however, it’s imperative that you don’t simply take it off their table and say, “Go focus on lending,” or “File your table reports and everything will be fine.” It’s imperative that you become part of the organization, provide the information, the education, and help them understand what’s going on with that decision-making process. It might seem easy, say, in February now to come up with the reports from the year end, then tell them where they are and what they can do, but along about April, May when they need to answer for an exam a process , “ Where did those numbers come from? How did you make that decision process?” I can’t think of something that would go worse in that exam process than not being able to answer a question because you just don’t know what’s going on behind the numbers that created that decision. However, we approach that. If you don’t include management in the decision-making process, I think later on there’s going to be some difficult conversations you’re going to be having. Kelly: Why don’t we talk about what’s going on with this new FASB ruling, the current expected credit loss that is coming out here? I believe it’s going to come out this year. Correct? What are you guys doing? What should banks be doing? What are your thoughts around that issue? It seems to be a fairly big one. Kevin: It clearly is. It’s kind of been hovering out there for a while now. This sort of looming storm coming our way. As we look and see the discussion of the proposal, I think the proposal become more finite this year, so we get a lot better feel for how it comes out. It’s a slight shifting from the current allowance calculation where our allowances sort of reflect previous history on loan credit performance. It gets more into a projection. From our standpoint it really works very well with the mathematics that we’ve been doing in the forecasting for interest rate risk. It may be an eyebrow-curler but I think there some really definite, clear parallel there. We’re expected to put a present value on the projected losses for a particular loan, loan portfolio, or loan type. However we want to look at that. That really kind of goes along with the same type of mathematics we run now for expected cash flow. From our standpoint, this is more of a pivoting of how we’re going to create that projection of loan losses from a look-back historically to a forward-looking calculation. The technology that we have isn’t going to require us to make any major changes in the mathematics of it. We’re just applying it a slightly different focus. To be projecting a current value of a future cash flow, that’s kind of what our whole business is about. While it is somewhat scary, because we still don’t know exactly what it is, and it’s going to change to focus of what we’re doing. We feel very strongly that we have the tools, and the expertise in place to help management get their arms around this forecasting process. Then, sort of tweak the way put the input into a loan-stressing calculation or a forward-looking calculation. It’s so similar to what we’re doing now that we’re trying to take a sort-of … Let’s relax, focus on it, and apply that same thought process into the loan loss process. We think we’re going to be able to come up with a solution that’s going to be fairly well understood, fairly well put into place, and maybe less stress than we we’re thinking at the beginning, simply, because of the unknown. Kelly: You guys aren’t currently doing that now for loan portfolios. You’re doing it for assets. You’re doing it for investments. Correct? Kevin: Yeah. Absolutely. We’re applying that same concept to losses. What is the value of that loss? Is it the currently value of those future losses? The same discounting process that we’re going to go through. We’re just using that into a different piece of the balance sheet than we’ve had in the past. We’ll do a study so we can build an assumption built on some sort of a historic look-back as to how the depositors behave. We’ll help them understand the pre-payment speed. All the different assumptions that have to go into that technology in order to understand the behavior of the cash flows under different rate environment. We help them with that point. I mentioned earlier that I think one of the biggest assists we’ve had right now is just bringing people up to speed into what it is we’re doing. The board can handle those responsibilities that have been squarely put into their lap, but they just don’t have the day-to-day expertise to deal with making sure that they can deal with what’s going on. When they see what comes out of that technology, they get a better feel for what went into it and what it’s telling them once they see the results. Kelly: Okay. You guys are well-positioned, I’m thinking or at least from what I’m hearing, for this CECL ruling. Correct? Kevin: Yeah. We’re very confident that we have the tools in place now to tackle CECL. There’s still a lot of detail that needs to be brought out and put into place, but we understand the mathematics of it very well. That’s the business we’ve been in for decades. Just merely applying that concept here isn’t overly frightening. Again, there are detail that need to be brought out. There are certain things that we need to make sure we’re comfortable with so that we’re applying it properly to comply with the CECL guidelines. Without a doubt, we’re very confident that we have the knowledge, expertise, and the tools in place to tackle this once we get around what all the specifics are. Consciously optimistic is the right way, I think, to put that. Kelly: Okay. That’s great. Do you have any take-aways that you’d like to go away with? Kevin: Sure. Let’s start with CECL because that’s what we we’re most recently discussing, and again, it’s going to bare a repeating. We have the knowledge and the expertise in place already as banks, and institutions. We’ve been working with these concepts. We’re now applying it to a different area of the balance sheet and the balance sheet reporting. I think it’s important to know what the guidelines are, but by the same respect we want to make sure that we don’t get overly concerned with the concept of moving from a backward-looking to a forward-looking projection of losses. It’s merely applying the concepts we know into a different area. The biggest concern that we have on CECL is more making sure we understand the guidelines behind the assumption building process and get that done. We want to make sure that we don’t step into a panic state because it’s something new. From an interest rate standpoint, one of the things that we’re trying very, very hard is to get people to conceptualize as they get into the balance sheet management process. Not merely the interest rate reporting process. What do we mean by that? As I’ve mentioned before, we have the technology side of our business. We do a great job of getting the information, and reporting that information. What we do with that information becomes the big next step. From the consulting side, what we’re trying to get organizations to understand is more the movement up the scale towards this modern portfolio theory. We want to look at the balance sheet as an entire entity rather than component, as most things are done now. For instance, organizations that run an investment portfolio with a certain set of guidelines, because we don’t want risk here. We take risk elsewhere. That isn’t necessarily beneficial to the overall organization, or to the balance sheet. We want to look at how a decision is made in a loan portfolio. It has an impact on the balance sheet. We want to understand that. A decision made in the investment portfolio has an impact on the balance sheet, and we want to understand what that is. Understanding how things interact with each other when we’re going through the risk management process is one of our biggest challenges. Trying to evolve organizations out of the component style management into a more holistic balance sheet style management. In order to do that, you really need how the balance sheets react to each other. In order to do that, you need to be able to break down interest rate risk reports that we’ve provided. In order to get to position, we have to take three steps backwards. We need to make sure the policies are written correctly, that the management understands what we’re doing, that the process of doing testing, stress testing, movement rates, and seeing how different decision’s reactions appear on the balance sheet. All of those things become critical in order to look at the balance sheet management as opposed to component management. When we start using this information to make management decisions as to merely reporting what our risk profile is, that is a huge step forward in getting everybody aligned. We’ve got Board alignment through line management alignment. Everybody understands what we’re trying to accomplish. Everybody understands how things impact, and we know that before those decisions are made. We just feel that’s a much better approach. One that if we embrace the holistic approach, the decision making process becomes more a matter at looking at the menu and picking which we want to have as opposed to hoping that things work out our way. Kelly: Great. Very helpful. Do you have a favorite quote? Kevin: There’s one from a business standpoint that I was told a long, long time ago. I try to remind people of the same thing. When you find yourself in a hole, the best exit strategy is to stop digging. You see how people try to manage their way out of that hole. It sounds kind of basic. Maybe a little too folksy, but it makes a whole lot of sense. Whatever put you in that spot, you need to stop doing it first. That’s our first strategy. Stop doing what put you in that world of hurt, and start trying to come up with ways to get out of it. Kelly: That’s great. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin.

Kelly Coughlin interviews Donald Moore about generating more revenues from trust and wealth management clients and managing risk in that business line. Moore is a former OCC examiner.   Donald Moore Jr., CEO of Bearmoor, LLC has over 20 years of experience in the asset management and fiduciary industry. He has served in senior fiduciary positions with various US Treasury agencies, as well as a leading financial services consulting firm. He began his career as a Trust Examiner with Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He has examined over 50 trust divisions, including the lead position at two of the nation’s largest trust institutions. He has assisted in the development of national policy and guidelines at both the Comptroller’s Office and the Office of Thrift Supervision. Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: I’ve got Don Moore CEO of Bearmoor LLC. Don, how are you doing? Don: I’m doing well, thank you Kelly, I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you today. Kelly: Don, you’re in Boulder? Don: I’m not quite in the Republic of Boulder, I’m a little bit closer to the Breckenridge area up in the hills of Colorado. Kelly: You’re happy because the Broncos just won the Super Bowl, I take it. Don: I’m slightly indifferent to the Broncos winning, although they had their ginormous parade yesterday down in Denver. Everyone’s excited that Peyton got his Super Bowl, but again, I think it was the defense that won it for him. Yeah, we’re happy here in the state. No one’s going off the edge yet. Kelly: Let’s get right into it. Tell me what Bearmoor does. What’s your value proposition? Don: Basically, it’s the optimization of risk-adjusted revenue from an organization’s existing fiduciary activities portfolio. It’s basically their personal trusts, their investment management accounts, their retirement accounts, foundation endowments and custody. All those off-balance-sheet activities within the fiduciary world. Again, the optimization of their risk-adjusted revenue from their existing portfolio. Kelly: First of all, it’s banks that are in the wealth management business. They have trusts, they have wealth management capabilities, correct? Don: Correct, a lot of organizations that are clients, their definition of wealth management differs, but it does include trusts, insurance, and private banking. Kelly: You help those kind of banks do what? Don: Optimize top-line revenue. What we mean by that is, I like to use a quote from Bono, the lead singer for U2, he was up at his concert and doing one of his social announcements where he was clapping his hands and he said, “Do you know, every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies?” And someone screamed out, “Stop clapping your hands.” We don’t focus in on expense because for the past 10 years in the industry, the industry’s been focused on nothing but expenses. The expenses have outpaced revenue growth 6 out of the last 10 years. Their focus on expenses I don’t think, has been all that fantastic. We like to say, “Well you’re already focused on expense reduction, we want to help you grow top-line revenues.” Our value proposition leads to an increase to revenue top-line. Kelly: Before we get into how you do that, let’s talk about some personal background. Don: All right, I’ll start out with education. I went to school, got a degree in finance and accounting, after I graduated from that I went to work for the United States Treasury Department as an examiner with the Office of the Comptroller. The currency, the OCC, I found an opportunity to begin examining in the fiduciary world and I became a fiduciary examiner. Through that, I went to Washington, DC. For those of you in the fiduciary world that have an understanding of Regulation 9, when I was in Washington, DC I helped draft and write that regulation that now national banks follow. For most states, it’s been adopted verbatim on that. I left there, and went over to another Treasury Department, the Office of Trust Supervision, which has now been rolled into the OCC and wrote their fiduciary training program and some of their examination procedures over there in a fellowship capacity of 18 months before leaving and going to the consulting world, and focused on consulting in the fiduciary world, and that brings us to where we are right now. I am married to my wife Toni, we live out here in Colorado, we have four children. Hobbies; I would say right now we’re doing lots of skiing, got some good snow out here in Colorado, so that’s one of my hobbies. Do a lot of running, outdoor activities is me. That’s who I am, I’m 52 years old and I feel it every day. Kelly: Don and I have known each other for probably 15 years, and we made a good connection when we found out you grew up in Minnesota, correct? St. Louis Park? Don: Yeah, sure, you betcha. Kelly: Let’s talk about the business. How do you help these banks make money? How do you help a wealth management bank make some money? I want to come up with let’s say five take-aways on how our listeners can make money through what company like yours offer. Don: Let’s start out with, the opportunities for increasing top-line revenue within your fiduciary activities exist. They are out there. I like to use the phrase, “You’re standing on a whale, fishing for minnows,” because there’s already opportunities to increase your top-line revenue within our organization. What we mean by that is we go through and do an analysis account by account basis and identify opportunities in three phases: one, gap analysis which is, “Hey, where are you missing it?” From the standpoint of what you think you’re getting. You may have some system errors, system inaccuracies that can help you identify opportunities, that’s one phase. Second one is competitive analysis. Where is it that you would like to beat your competition, and where is it that you actually are? We ask you what your business’s strategic plans are, we go out and do mystery shopping and competitive shopping for the organization to make sure that they understand where they are and where their competition is, and where they can go with their current level of pricing. The third analysis is a regulatory analysis. What’s changed in regulation that allows you to either understand the regulation and generate additional revenue, or do we have some risk there? Again, gap analysis, competitive analysis, regulatory analysis to help you identify those opportunities, because they do exist. I would say that’s the first area. Kelly: You exposed that just recently, gap analysis. You’re looking at pricing, and how competitive they might be in pricing in addition to more of a qualitative, these are the type of services they would offer? Don: Along the lines of both, Kelly, with regards to the types of services we want to break it down so we understand the types of services they offer. Then the pricing that they have on each of those services. When we talk about pricing, we all know that there are committees, and then there are boards, and we’re talking about the board-approved pricing for these services. Kelly: This is for wealth management services. These are the basis points. This is how much we charge for a $5,000,000 fiduciary trust account, correct? Don: Correct. Absolutely. Those are established by, I would say, the business line which then goes to the committee and the boards approve. These are the pricing and it would include not just basis points, but it would include minimum account fees, it would include fees for ancillary services such as real estate administration, closely held business administration. Maybe there’s a tax prep fee or a tax information letter fee. Maybe there’s a stand-alone fee for extraordinary type services. All the fees charged for the services provided within wealth management on the fee schedule. We then go through and see what accounts are actually on that schedule, and what accounts are not, what accounts have customization, what accounts have discounts. It doesn’t make sense for the level of service being provided. What’s critical with that, from a Bearmoor perspective, is what I would say would be the second take-away, which would be a risk understanding of your accounts. If you haven’t done a risk assessment on an account by account basis, it would be highly recommended that you do so. This would allow you to identify the level of risk for each account and type of account using system information. This isn’t something that’s subjective, it’s based upon system criteria that you’ve established and put risk weightings on it. Let’s say you have an account that is an irrevocable trust account with two co-trustees, five beneficiaries, some unique assets in there, and maybe it’s over $2,500,000. You would assign various risk criteria to each one of those factors. Maybe that has a higher risk than a revocable trust. Kelly: You’re not talking about portfolio risk, you’re talking about risk of an unhappy client (other than portfolio volatility). Don: Correct. What we’re seeing is a fair amount of, I hate to go back to the regulatory side, but a fair amount of regulators are saying, “Hey, we can risk rate loan accounts on the banking side, why can’t we individually risk rate these off-balance-sheet trust accounts from an administration standpoint, from a level of risk?” and then get some understanding about what may be some levels of capital might be for this entire portfolio. It’s not investment portfolio risk management, for lack of a better term it’s complexity rating the account. Kelly: Give us three things that you like to look at, that might go into the calculus of that. Don: I would say type of account. Kelly: The fiduciary, non-fiduciary. Don: Correct, you would have the fiduciary accounts would be those revvocable and irrevocable trusts, investment management accounts, foundation endowments, IRAs. Then the non-fiduciary lower risk would be a custody account, where you don’t have any investment management responsibilities. Another item would be the type of assets in there, so maybe less risk would be a mutual fund portfolio, that’s made up of a bunch of mutual funds to meet the account’s objective. A higher risk would be, “Hey, it’s a stand-alone investment in a large piece of commercial real estate.” High risk on that. The third thing would be type and/or number of beneficiaries. The larger the beneficiary pool, the more risk you may have because you have different competing objectives. Some of those might be income beneficiaries, others might be remainder beneficiaries, or growth beneficiaries. Kelly: The high-risk account would be one in which there’s a fiduciary relationship to your holding assets that are perhaps individual securities and not mutual funds and the third? Don: Number of beneficiaries. Kelly: Number of beneficiaries. Is that because the more people you have in the equation, the more likely it is you’re going to have somebody complaining about it? Don: More likely there’s going to be a complaint there, but more likely that there’s going to be conflicts of interest. What I mean by that conflicts of interest is those beneficiaries may all have different needs and you as the fiduciary that’s managing that account, have to take all those into consideration and make sure you treat them equitably and fairly based upon the information you have. Kelly: Tell us how you help the bank make more money. Don: From that account by account analysis on the gap analysis and identifying opportunities within their portfolio. Not just from a best practices from what we’ve seen over the past 15 years of doing this, but also what’s taking place within their lines of business and their strategy. Overlaying that on that analysis and saying, “Hey, here is the opportunity, and here’s how that opportunity impacts each account.” Kelly: This is for your part one you look at the market, you look at competitors, and you say, “Oh, your competition’s charging 200 basis points, you’re only charging 150. You could charge 180,” for example. Don: Correct. If you still want to be the low-cost provider and the lowest-cost provider is charging that 200, and you’re at 150, you could go all the way up to that 200 and charge 190, 180. Right. Kelly: Right. Don: Do that complete analysis. Or your minimum fee is stated to be this, we’ve done in a cost analysis of your portfolio and you’re not even covering your costs with your minimum fee. You’ve got to adjust your minimum fee. Kelly: Don’t you think most banks know their competitor? Let’s say pricing, and their level of service, because they either get clients poached frequently, or infrequently, and if they find out why, then it’s well, his is cheaper, or better service, whatever it was. Don’t you think they know that? Don: That’s what we thought. That’s what we were counting on, but when we started doing the mystery shopping, because we asked our clients who are their competitors, who do they want us to mystery shop. Then we also provide them all the other information that we have. That, other than the actual opportunities, was one of the most highly prized pieces of information that we provided to our clients was, “Oh, look at all this competitor information.” My business partner and I looked at each other and said, “Wow, we didn’t realize how valuable this was. We thought you guys knew it, we’re showing it to you to let you know that we know it.” You would think they would know it, but a lot of times that isn’t the case based upon the information that we were able to gather and the reaction that we get from those. I think they have an understanding of it, but once they actually see the documentation and support for that that we’re able to gather, that brings it full circle. Kelly: I’m intrigued by, and I always have been intrigued by you being a former regulator with all due respect to your former profession, the dark side I suppose, or actually I think when you go into industry, they say you’ve gone to the dark side, I believe. However you look at it, how a former regulator can help on the revenue side is always been amusing to me. I know you do have a pretty good reputation out there, so kudos. You’ve been doing it quite a while, I believe. Don: Yeah, I appreciate those comments. Perhaps my capitalistic views weren’t always the right forum to be a regulator, so maybe I’ve always had to get back to this side. Maybe I was on the dark side and came back to the light. Kelly: Any more takeaways? Don: I would say re-acceptance, and what I mean by re-acceptance is, based upon the information that you have today on your existing accounts, the level of administration, the level of responsibility, the potential problems associated with the risk audit compliance items, the regulatory issues, and the revenue that you’re making on it, would you re-accept the accounts in your portfolio today? If the answer to that is no or maybe, you need to actually go through and do this risk assessment and the revenue opportunity assessment to make sure be able to answer that question yes or these are accounts we no longer need to be a part of. Kelly: It isn’t just no longer be part of, it may be no I wouldn’t accept it under these terms. These terms being pricing, but would you accept it at 50 basis points? No. Would you accept at 150? Yes. Isn’t that as much of a relevant question as acceptance or non-acceptance, it’s how should we price this thing? Don: Proper pricing is critical. We have top 10 risk piece that we do and one of the top 10 risks is appropriate pricing, so you’re absolutely right. “Hey, I wouldn’t re-accept it because of the assets.” That’s one thing. I wouldn’t re-accept this because of the price and the assets. Could we price it accordingly where you would accept it? Absolutely. That’s part of the analysis we do. Kelly: Why don’t you post on our website the top 10 risk pieces in a blog post? Don: Absolutely, I can do that. Kelly: That’d be nice to accompany this. That’s it for now, give us your favorite quote. Don: It’s Milton Friedman the great economist. “The question is, do corporate executives, provided that they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities, other than to make as much money for their shareholders as possible?” My answer to that is, no they do not. Basically, everyone should stay focused on generating revenue for the shareholders for where they have their fiduciary duty. Kelly: What’s the stupidest thing you’ve said or done in your business career? Don: This is classic me, and this took a long time to live down. This was years ago. I basically said, I used another quote when I was giving a presentation because someone asked a question with regards to revenue enhancement and I said in front of this entire group, “Life’s tough, but it’s tougher if you’re stupid.” Yep. Kelly: Good one. Don: I was much younger. Kelly: Don, I enjoyed talking to you, thanks so much for your time. We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin.

Kelly talks to Dan Hill, CEO, Sensory Logic, about how the latest face recognition techniques and technology can tell you many things about people before you agree to do business with them or hire them.   Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: Dan, I want to do introduce you and talk to you briefly about what you’re doing with your role as CEO of Sensory Logic, and generally get some of your background and talk about the science of what you guys are doing with this technology. My summary of it is something like you’re using technology to objectively measure 12 human emotions. They range from joy to sadness, and anxiety with the purpose of evaluating personality traits, measuring personality traits, to determine how neurotic or how normal people are for the purpose of identifying matches with whatever the goal might be to using that. Is that a reasonable estimate or summary of what you guys are doing? Dan: We are trying to capture and quantify emotional response and that can apply to consumer’s reactions to the advertising, website, and other touch points of thanks for instance, but if you move over to the more personal side in terms of financial advisors or trying to reduce risks when looking at hedge fund managers, yes, then you start getting into the personality dimensions. Obviously for hedge funds you want to make sure that they are prudent investors and not someone given to overly large risks. There’s both a general consumer application we are talking about here, and one that’s more personnel driven. Kelly: That sounds interesting, using technology to evaluate those things that are clearly has been in the realm of subjective interviews and personal objective evaluation is fascinating. Let’s go over a little bit of your background, Dan. Currently you’re CEO of Sensory Logic, and a little bit about what you are, who you are, and then who Sensory Logic is. Dan: I started the company in 1998, and I got lucky. Someone I knew at IBM sent over to me an article about the breakthroughs in brain science and how much people are emotional decision makers. You may know the conservative estimation is that at least 95% of peoples’ mental activity is subconscious. A lot of what happens to us and for us is below the water line so to speak, and it’s important to access that and the emotional part of the brain sends ten times as much information to the rational part of the brain and vice versa. As to the ratio of emotional to rational in terms of the interactions it is a ten to one ratio. Kelly: Presumably we have a rational mind that’s informing our subconscious mind, correct? Dan: Sure, the mind is very interactive so there is an interplay back and forth, but I think the real thrust of the breakthroughs in brain science in the last 25 years aided by technology and from MRI brain scans for one thing, is that we really have to change our viewpoint. We probably have run for 300 years with Dick Hart’s assumption that we are rational beings. The famous comment, I think therefore I am. Ambrose Bierce, a contemporary of Mark Twain said, “I think therefore I am.” That’s probably a lot closer to the truth. In the financial industry you want to go to the numbers and facial coding gives us a chance to bring numbers to something that otherwise might have seemed rather soft and squishy which is emotions. In reality there’s really two currencies in the business world. Dollars and emotions, and we’re after the second one on behalf of the first one. Kelly: Not to be outdone with your quoting of philosophers, I will reference Aristotle who also used the concept of having, of creating habits that are natural to the human that just make it part of the unconscious, subconscious mind so that your naturally inclined to do, he felt like, the virtuous, the right thing. That took kind of integrating the conscious mind, the rational mind, with the subconscious mind. Is that consistent? Dan: I think the metaphor that Aristotle used actually was that human beings is as if they are in a chariot, and it’s driven by two horses and one’s the rational horse and one’s the emotional horse. He was already acknowledging, obviously, the importance of emotions. I think what the neuro biology advances have suggested is that maybe the darker horse, the emotional horse, may be the stronger of the two, most likely is. Kelly: Dan thank you, you crushed me on your quoting of Aristotle. Thanks, I appreciate that. Dan: That wasn’t my goal, but whatever helps illuminate things for people. Kelly: And I went to a Jesuit school! So let’s talk about your education. You have a PhD. Tell us about your education. Dan: I do have a PhD in English literature, not psychology as some people might assume, but I’m an inquisitive learning sort of guy and really what happened is once I got this article brought forward from the IBM person, I really started on a second education. I don’t have a formal degree, but I have spent a great deal of time reading and talking to experts in neuro biology and psychology over the last 20 years to understand really one of the drivers of human nature and just to give you some feeling for the groundings here. If you go back to Latin motivation and emotion have the same root word, move, to make something happen. That’s how essential emotions are to human behavior, and the person who first realized the importance of emotions was Charles Darwin. In his work on evolution he essentially said to himself, “Okay, emotions must give us an adaptive advantage, otherwise they would have gone away. How can I best capture emotions?” That turns out to be the face, so what we do is use facial coding to be able to bring science to bear on emotions. Kelly: Dan, where do you live? Tell me a little bit about your personal, family life. Do you have any hobbies? Dan: When I have the time, sure. I like to play tennis. I’m an avid movie goer. I enjoy traveling so I’ve been to about 80 countries including a year ago or so was in Botswana on a non-hunting safari. It’s whatever can broaden the horizons. There’s readings, there’s films, there’s tennis, there’s travel, obviously time with my wife, so there isn’t anything remarkable there, it’s just try to be a busy and engaged guy. Kelly: Let’s get down to some business stuff. Tell me in fifteen words or less, roughly, what the value proposition of Sensory Logic is. Dan: Actions speak louder than words, and there are things people can’t or won’t say, and if you can get to emotions you can get below the surface and get to the real thing. Kelly: In terms of the banking ecosystem which is the ecosystem we are navigating through, what is the applicability or this, not necessarily your company, but this technology if you will, that value proposition, how would it benefit, how is it connected? Is it connected now, or is it an area that you guys want to be connected to. Where’s the applicability? Generally speaking. Dan: There’s really two realms. Let’s start with the one we’ve historically been in, because I’ve run my company for 17 years, and we’ve done work for nearly half the world’s top 100 consumer facing companies, so things outside of the industrial realm and so forth. That’s plenty of things in the financial services industry. It’s a long list of banks and institutions, also in the insurance industry, as well that we’ve done work. From that point of view, obviously if you have these touch points with consumers you want to connect effectively. I think the place you have to start is that of course, trust is the emotion of business. Trust is not an emotion you can capture through facial coding, but you can capture its opposite which is contempt. Contempt means I don’t trust you, I don’t respect you. If you’ve ever read Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller “Blink”, facial coding was the only tool described in the book for some 30 pages. At the University of Washington in Seattle they have a love lab where couples come in who are in distressed marriages, they use facial coding to figure out whether they can save the marriage. Contempt is the most reliable indicator that the marriage will fail, so if it’s not good for a married couple you can imagine it’s not good for a company and its clients. We use this in advertising testing and websites to understand how people are responding. There’s several varieties of information that is important. The first one is actually do you engage them. Do they emotionally respond? You don’t want to waste your advertising dollar, you don’t want to just be talking to yourself, you need to make that emotional connection. That’s one of the first things we go after. Kelly: Put yourself in the place of a community bank CEO and they’re in the business of making business loans, by example. How does that CEO or that credit officer, how could that credit officer utilize this technology? Not your company, but the technology. How do you envision that this technology could be employed by a credit officer at a community bank in any city in the USA. Dan: There’s actually a template here. I mentioned Charles Darwin earlier, but there’s a man named Paul Ekman, E-K-M-A-N, who’s been honored by the Smithsonian who has been cited by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people on the planet. Paul worked as a colleague at the School of Medicine in San Francisco. Over the course of about 15 years he created what is called the Facial Action Coding System. He figured out from 43 muscles in the face what are the muscle movements, the action units, the activity that reveals seven core emotions which you alluded to earlier. They run from joy, the high end of happiness, through things like fear and contempt. These muscle movements correspond to the emotions, this is relative public knowledge, also in a book of mine, and that information for a loan officer if they were to do their due diligence, and take some homework assignments, and actually study this a little bit, would give them a feel for the person across the table. There is no lie muscle in the face, it’s not that simple, but there are patterns you can look for. Obviously if the person is unusually anxious, if they show contempt, if there’s an unusual rhythm to how they’re emoting, if the emotions seem inappropriate to the conversation. There’s probably a half dozen little ways in which you can get a feel for whether the person is solid and honest, and therefore a loan risk worth taking, or ones that are passed on. Kelly: These quantifiable and emotional metrics, I’m just going to quickly list them. Joy, and they’re more or less in a continuum here, starting with joy going down to anxiety. Joy, pleasure, satisfaction, acceptance, curiosity, alert, skepticism, dislike, contempt, frustration, sadness, anxiety. So you guys can measure these twelve emotional reactions that appear on a person’s face, convert those into a profile. The profile has to equal 100%, so it comes up with a profile. Again, back to the CEO that’s going to potentially do a loan to this business customer. It comes up with that profile and then what? Dan: In our case we were trained directly by Dr. Ekman, so you are right. You get to a pool of 100%, so you distribute which emotions are occurring based on those muscle activities, and as to the output. Once you know the emotional profile of somebody, I would suggest, for instance, they index very high on anger, or what we call frustration, that should be of concern, because frustration obviously is an emotion about I want to hit you. I want to break through barriers to progress, I want to control my destiny. That all sounds good except the hit part, so someone who is violent or combustible, if they index high in frustration, is there a greater chance that someone is at risk? Definitely for you as a banker. If they are really high on anxiety, why are they so anxious? What is going on here? How solid is the scheme in which the bank is taking a chance. I think particularly when you look at the negative emotions you’ve got to be careful, because we have more negative core emotions as human beings than positive ones, not because we’re negative or Dr. Ekman is negative, but rather it’s a survival technique. People hear bad news more loudly because it helps defend themselves. You want to look at negative emotions like the two I just mentioned, also contempt. Frankly it often corresponds to a lack of honesty or a lack of connection back to you as a banker. If I had to highlight three, those are the one I would probably go to. Although I will say that someone who is overly happy, it’s a nice emotion in terms of it’s embracive, it’s accepting, but a really happy person can be sloppy with the details, so strangely enough, there, too, a banker might face a bit of a risk factor. Kelly: You also have the external environment, for instance, that can influence a person’s behavior on that given day. Could be they just got in a fight with their wife that morning, or their favorite football team lost so they’re having a proverbial bad day. Especially if you have this human subjectively scoring this stuff. I’m intrigued by that, so you have some kind of de facto shrinks up there kind of ticking off, watching the video saying, “Oh look at that he frowned, we’re going to check off he dislikes this,” or “Look at her eyes. She looks a little sad, we’re going to mark her down a little bit for sadness.” It scares me a little bit that police interrogation might be using this. Dan: Quite often that cat’s already out of the bag. Dr. Ekman has done training of the CIA and the FBI. We worked a bit with a company trying to automate facial coding for the TSA, so yes, this is a huge interest, obviously, to anyone involved with national security or policing matters. Whether it’s used properly, whether inaccurately, whether it’s done within the boundaries of the law. That’s really outside of our purview, that’s not how we’re trying to use facial coding, but there’s no doubt that obviously every angle of life people are looking for advantages and security, and because if you’ve never been lied to in your life, congratulations. Facial coding gets you past the lip service to behavior, to actions, as to how people respond based on what they reveal in their face. It’s going to be of interest to a lot of parties. Kelly: From this data that these scores are measuring they are taking that data, and then scoring it. I’ve seen some stuff that talks about the big five model, ranging from extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness, to neuroticism. Tell me about that. Dan: I have ten US patents, most of them related to facial coding, and one of them does involve personnel. I have been at work for a few years now looking to see if we can come up with an emotional formula and algorithm so to speak, that can match these big five personality traits. I wouldn’t say we have anything definitive at this point, but I am making the effort because the one thing that bothers me about all manner of these self-reported psychology personality profiles is that it is self-reported. Self-report is a big problem. People tell lies. Dr. Ekman has estimated the average person tells three lies per ten minutes of conversation, but the biggest lies in life are the ones we tell ourselves. I’m reasonable, but everyone else in this meeting is crazy, etc., etc. Self-reporting is rather dubious, and so yes, we are looking for a way around that to say that by picking up these muscle activities, which by the way, all have numbers to them, and I realize you might feel it’s subjective, but we’ve done coder reliability. We have been trained by Dr. Ekman, so we know which muscle movements correspond to which emotions. Studies would indicate that human coders well-trained and versed in doing this will be over 90% accurate. Kelly: What would the goal be for this credit officer, he probably does this subconsciously anyway, but he certainly is making some judgements alright, how normal, how neurotic is this guy. Am I able to pry this data out of him and he’s in charge of sales? What’s the likelihood that this company is going to be successful if I have to pry this stuff out of him.” Same with openness, right. Agreeableness. I don’t know how you would determine conscientiousness. Does he show up to the meeting on time, and doesn’t care, I mean that’s kind of a real fuzzy one, that conscientiousness. Dan: Actually that’s one of the traits where we have some of the inklings of an algorithm or a correspondence. You’re not going to want someone who is overly happy and blissful. I already mentioned that if you really index high in joy you tend to be a bit more of free thinker, which is great, but you can also be sloppy with the details, so that doesn’t square very well with conscientious. Being hot-headed and having really intense anger doesn’t work, but actually the face shows eight different versions of anger, from slight annoyance to outrage. The lower grade versions of frustration can actually be helpful from a conscientiousness point of view, because one of the definitions or understandings of frustration is I want to be in control of my life and I want to make progress. If that is done in a way that is not overly combustible then you have the makings of someone who might indeed, if it’s leavened by some other emotions, be conscientious. Kelly: Give me the three to five takeaways that a bank CEO should take from this. Dan: One is they’re going to be making some outreach to people so let’s start on the marketing side. Presumably they’re going to have a website. It’s easy for someone inside the organization to think that their website is really clear, and I can tell you from doing usability tests for all sorts of companies on websites, that it’s often about as clear as mud. So I would say the first takeaway is they should think if their website a lot more like it’s the drive through lane of a fast food joint. That may seem demeaning to them, but these people know how at quick service restaurants to get it across to people and quickly and let them keep moving. If they look at their website from that perspective, and it doesn’t resonate, and it’s not quickly understandable, they’ve got a problem. The joke that has to be explained to you in life is never as funny as the joke you just get, so think in terms of hut, hut, hike. If the connection isn’t about that readily done, you’ve got a problem. The second thing I would suggest is probably a lot of banks will at least, if nothing else, have some print ads or some mailers at times. We’ve discovered that if you put your company logo in the lower right hand corner which is where ad agencies love to put it, that is typically about the second to last place anybody will look at on a piece of paper. That’s bad news because we’ve found that people read quickly, they barely read at all. The banker, the CEOs, the bank may think that people are going to study my marketing material closely, read it word-by-word, not the case. Likelihood is they’re going to spend three to fifteen seconds on it. If you advertise for yourself and it’s unbranded in effect because they don’t get to the logo, then you’ve got a problem. I’d say that’s the second one. Third one is you’re in the people business. If they come into the bank or the bank branches, we respond to nothing more strongly than other people. We can tell the difference, human beings. There is a difference between a true smile and a social smile. Social smile is clearly less authentic than the true smile. It is hard for employees to be able to manage a true smile repeatedly during the day, especially on demand, but knowing that that emotional connection with the customer is important. I sit on airplanes often for my business, and I facially code the people who are serving us in the isles, and look for those little moments where they give away weariness, or something else that’s a little off putting sometimes. Dan: That’s three for you. I think we’ve already touched on the loan officer, so I’ve got you up to four. I guess the fifth one would be, frankly, who you hire, and taking a little more care. Not just look at their credentials, but look at their personality which is what Southwest Airlines does. Kelly: What does Southwest airlines do, briefly? Dan: They actually have their people look for a sense of humor. They ask them to tell little stories about themselves, or incidents, or I think even, if I’m not mistaken, at times literally play comedian for a bit, and try to tell a joke. They don’t want to hire somebody who’s just ultra serious and has no levity to them because if you have no levity you can’t be flexible, and if you can’t be flexible you can’t adjust to your customer’s needs. Kelly: To that end, I’m going to ask you what’s the stupidest think you’ve ever said or done in your business career? Dan: That would be numerous no doubt. I would say one is, someone asked me once if I was quote/unquote a “rebel” and that’s the way they phrased it. I simply said, “I suppose so.” That’s not the answer I should have given. The truth is I’m a reformer. I’m not interested in rebelling against something, I am interested in improving something. Whether it’s market research or in the financial sector, making sure your advertising dollar is not wasted, and that your customer service is better, I go back to my earlier quote. “There’s two currencies: dollars and emotions, and you need both of them and they interact with another.” I’m not a rebel, I’m a reformer and someone who is eager to make sure that people aren’t inefficient, don’t waste their money, make the best progress, the best connection they possibly can. If you step closer to the customer you can step ahead of the competition. Kelly: And since you’re an English lit PhD, I’m going to see if you can identify it. If you can’t, I will think very lowly of you. Dan: Wonderful, wonderful. Kelly: “Arise and go now. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” Dan: That would be Yates. Kelly: Very good. He’s my favorite writer. Dan: Yates is a tremendous poet. I was in Dublin a couple of years ago, there was special exhibit on Yates’ poetry, and I fell in love with all over again. Kelly: Good for you. Now I’m uber impressed. Do you have a favorite quote? Dan: I have so many favorite quotes. It’s probably one of them is from Groucho Marx, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” Kelly: Very good. Dan, I appreciate your time. CEO of Sensory Logic. How can people get hold of you? Dan: We’ve got a website, of course. Sensory Logic.com should be able to do the trick We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin.

Kelly talks to Chris Carlson, CEO, Narrative Pros, about what business leaders can learn from a stage and theater actor about presentations to small and large audiences.   Kelly Coughlin is CEO of BankBosun, a management consulting firm helping bank C-Level Officers navigate risk and discover reward. He is the host of the syndicated audio podcast, BankBosun.com. Kelly brings over 25 years of experience with companies like PWC, Lloyds Bank, and Merrill Lynch. On the podcast Kelly interviews key executives in the banking ecosystem to provide bank C-Suite officers, risk management, technology, and investment ideas and solutions to help them navigate risks and discover rewards. And now your host, Kelly Coughlin. Kelly: I’ve got my friend Chris Carlson CEO of NarrativePros on the line, Chris are you there? Chris: I’m here. Kelly: Great, Chris and I have known each other for many, many years. Chris is an actor at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis He’s also a lawyer and an entrepreneur, and I’m a big fun of his. Listeners are saying, why does he have a starving actor, lawyer on here? Before we get to your connection in to the banking ecosystem. A little bit of personal background. Chris: Minnesota residence, most of my life, three kids, I’m 46. I’ve been, as I said earlier acting professionally for 22 years. I’ve been an attorney for about as long. Kelly: Well let’s get into why I have you on BankBosun and your connection to the banking echo system. If you recall, I asked you to give a talk at a conference my company was hosting for banks and investment managers. I think we had like six or seven speakers there over a two day period, probably eight or nine I suppose. You got the highest rankings of anybody in terms of popularity. Tell me why you think that happened and what your value proposition, if you will, to the banking industry is. What was it that resonated with these bankers in that message? Chris: Absolutely, and I to think to answer as many of those question as efficiently as I can, it has to do with the value of genuine connections between individuals, whether that’s one on one or one to many, or many to one. The expertise that I have amassed over the years, is to how to efficiently create that. How to make that efficient, how to maximize the feedback that you get from any communication. Kelly: What does that really mean? Chris: Let me give you an example, bankers are smart guys. They tend to live in their heads when it comes to ideas. They believe if they have a great piece of advice, that that’s the end of their value. That I tell you to invest in stock A, because that will help you. But the real world has as much to do about that conversation and whether or not you say invest in stock A, in a way that is meaningful, whether it makes sense to them. Whether you’re rude, whether you’re cold or indifferent. The value of advice when it’s person to person, which is at the center of any banking relationship, depends on the connection between two people. It’s not whether or not I like you necessarily, but it’s I have to trust you. I have to respect you. I have to understand you absolutely. It has as much to do about that as anything. Kelly: How I perceive you or how a customer perceives a banker. Not necessarily how he really is. Chris: Well actually I would say that the goal is to have them perceive you as you really are, and we are many different people to many different audiences. You yourself are a father, a friend, a boxer. You will behave differently in the ring than with a client. What you need to do is harness what will be of the most value, and make the strongest connection with the audience that you’re in front of. That has to come from somewhere that’s true. One of the things that people often mistake is that acting is fake, and it actually has all to do with truth. If you see a good actor, you get them, you buy them, you connect with them. If you see a bad actor, you absolutely reject them. You don’t get it. It’s not real. Kelly: I think what you’re saying is that you learned this in your acting career. And as a lawyer, you practice this. But you learned this through your acting training to be real. Two scenarios, one is making a one on one presentation, and another is giving a talk to 20 people. What does your advice do in those two scenarios? Chris: My advice hopefully will encourage people to understand that their impact on their audience, whether it’s one person or 20 people, has more to do with how they say their message, and how they’re able to let people connect with them as real individuals. How they’re able to be themselves in a very genuine and authentic way, and then share the advice that they have. Far too often people, I call them left brain professionals. People who think a lot will sit in front of their computer and work on their outline in their PowerPoint and then get up and give it, without really spending much time on whether or not they’re giving it in a way that incorporates who they are. I think you, Kelly, are a good example of an effective delivery. That’s you, when I hear you talking, that’s the same Kelly that I hear when I’m having a conversation with in the coffee shop. People are drawn to that. For a banker to have an interaction with somebody, the more genuine they can be, the more that they can focus on that individual as a human being, and also share with them, themselves as a human being. That will make the advice that they give, that much more meaningful and valuable. In many ways it’s the same thing when they stand up in front of 20 people. It‘s genuine and real and to a degree vulnerable. That has a lot to do with fear that is natural, standing in front of a group of people or a high pressure sale. Anyway that you can wrestle that fear, and you kind of say look, “This is me, and this is what I have to say and I think it would be great if you used it, or bought, but if you don’t I understand.” That’s incredibly attractive for people to be around that kind of energy versus, “Look you really got to buy this and it’s really important to me. I don’t know what I’m going to do if you don’t, if you don’t buy this, if you don’t listen to me.” Even though it is important what the person thinks about you, or whether or not they take your advice or buy it. Showing that, gets in the way of who you are and their comfort quite honestly. Kelly: Give me a couple of takeaways that relate to preparing for a presentation and then three or four related to the actual presentation itself, beginning, middle and end that kind of thing. We’ve got some real solid takeaways, I can put some guiding principles here. Chris: Let’s start with the content, that’s where everyone’s comfort is, and most people will spend 100% of their preparation time working on their PowerPoint slides, and you definitely have to work on some kind of presentation, outline and some visuals do help. Number one, when it comes to the visuals, speaker support, PowerPoint, I would work as hard as you can to get rid of all the words quite honestly and just focus on graphs and charts, and pictures or visual creatures. There is a huge disconnect when somebody puts up a bunch of words on a slide, and reads them, or makes the audience read them. It’s just counterproductive and disingenuous to a live environment. You as the speaker need to be considered to be value bringer and you have to explain these things. I would say as few words as possible on any kind of visual support. The content in what someone says, you should outline in bullet points, words or phrases, but not in complete sentences. Don’t lock yourself into phrasing them, in any particular way. Let yourself react to those ideas and explain them, and that’s come off and it’s very authentic and genuine. Kelly: No words on slides. Chris: No words on slides. I would join the audience in cheering if I were to see less words on slides. It’s easy to do, and I think it’s actually fear. People are insecure and they’re like, ”Ah, I got to put all these words on here.” Well take the words off and say the words to people. Kelly: No words on the slide, that’s number one. What was number two? Chris: Number two outline your points in a way that you can speak to them in a genuine way instead, for example, I have been involved in the banking ecosystem since I was 22. Instead of writing that out and then reading it, you might just have something that says 22. You look at it and you say, “Ever since I was 22, I’ve been working in banking.” Let those words, let you work through the thoughts, so that the words come to you at that time. You have to have good notes but it will force you to pick the words authentically and people will hear that. That’s number two. Number three is when you pick these ideas and when you explain them, pretend you’re explaining them to your 92 year old father, or your grandma next door. In other words avoid jargon, you’ve got to be simple, direct and accessible, and I think that people who work in the idea profession tend to be complicated, inaccessible and you always want to be as clear as possible. Simplicity is not easy, it’s very difficult and working on that simplicity is an incredible investment in giving your audiences, who’s paying attention, a return of interest. They will appreciate you, summarizing things very simply and to button this third point off. Work very hard to summarize the single point that you have to make in one sentence. Imagine that your audience is walking out the door, and they don’t have time to hear your whole speech, what would be the one thing you would want to tell them. If you complain, oh no it’s too complicated, it can’t be distilled into one sentence, I would say to you that your audience is doing that anyways. After they walk out, someone’s going to say, “What did Kelly Coughlin talk about?” “Oh, Kelly is working on this cool BankBosun thing, that it’s needed, it helps out C-suite Executives in the banking industry.” They’re summarizing what you’re saying anyways. If you jump into their shoes and try to say all right, “What is the one takeaway from this? You’re going to help them do that. Kelly: That’s good, I recall again from that conference you spoke at. There was some prep work that you recommended. Chris: Sure, let me focus on one of them. A lot of acting technique or approach is focused on combating the nerves and stress of performing. That we appear, genuine, authentic relaxed. One of the truths of performing in front of a bunch of people is that you are nervous. It’s human, so what we want to do is make sure that we find another truth to counteract that. The best counter measure to stress is breathing. When we’re with our friends, or when we’re relaxed, or when we’re uncomfortable and not threatened, the human being breathes from the belly, they use … we use our diaphragm to pull in breath, and when you’re very relaxed, and actually if you watch your kids when they’re sleeping, you’ll see their stomachs go up and down. Now their stomachs are going up and down because the diaphragm is pulling in breath. When we’re nervous we tend not to breath from our diaphragm, our belly, we tend to take shallow breathes and it makes us more nervous and it changes our voice. Someone who’s really relaxed would sound like this, but if they were breathing … their voice goes up a little bit, and it gets a little breathy, and it’s just not as grounded. We can hear that, we feel that someone has a breathiness to their voice and it’s a little higher in pitch, but if you take a breath, and breathe from your diaphragm, not only does the pitch go down, but you can also project your voice further. You can talk louder. So breathing, putting your hand on your stomach and trying to train yourself to breathe so that your stomach flops out when you breathe in, is one of the most effective counter measures to stress and to get you back into yourself, to being a relaxed confident genuine person. Kelly: Let’s talk about, what are kind of some of the deal killers out there. The absolute be cognizant that you don’t do this. Chris: We’ve already touched on some them. These things would be anything that disconnect you from your audience; that separate you from them. For example, number one, the minute you start reading off of the slide, you’re not being in front of an audience genuinely. You’ve turned towards the screen, you’re reading something that everyone else is perfectly capable of reading. I mean that’s just a fundamental disconnect with one audience. “Hey buddy, I can see the slide and you’re reading it for me and it doesn’t make any sense.” Another one would be reading your speech which is very similar, and that’s telling the audience, “I’m not going to talk with you. I’m not going to share with you my ideas, I’m going to read what I wrote, and you’re going to listen to it.” At which point the audience feel like, well why don’t you just give me them for the reading, so that I can read it. Something that’s kind of fun, that I’ve uncovered, is that the average person speaks at about 150 words a minute. We can understand and we think at about 800 words a minute. That means that there is an attention gap. Every time someone starts talking over a couple of 100 words, where my mind is running circles around what you’re telling me. You always have to participate in that because if you don’t, if you don’t give them something to think about that is helping you, they’re going to think about something else. Kelly: Well don’t the non-verbal clues fill that void to a certain extent? Chris: They can, or they cut against it. Something that I was just doing some research on, hand gestures and body gestures. It’s fascinating, the neuro-scientists have studied it, and we use specifically our hands to make gestures, to help us think of a word, and so if we’re genuinely using our hands it’s because we’re trying to think of how to say something, but if you want someone who has prepared a hand gesture like a politician or a bad speaker. The hand gesture comes at or after what they’re trying to say, not before. In the real world, the hand gesture comes a little bit before what it is that they have to say. That’s what the hand gesture is for. When someone plans it, when someone says, “I think it would be good if I moved my hand like this.” They tend to do it in a way that’s very disconnected and fake, because we can tell that. Instinctively, they do it as you’re saying the word or phrase, or after it. That’s an example of another disconnection with an audience where they get the sense, and it’s an unconscious sense, it’s not, “My, he moved his hands in a way that was not matching with the phrase. Therefore I think he’s fake.” We’re not aware of that consciously but unconsciously we think to ourselves, “Wow this guy is a … he’s a fake, he’s not being real with us.” It’s very common. Kelly: Tell me about what should people do with their hands as a default, and then how should we stand? One foot, two feet, hands in the pocket, hands by the side? Give us a couple of ideas on that. Chris: It’s hard to do, but you forget about your hands. Don’t plan any gestures, let your hands go. Just like I was suggesting with your words to jot a note, and then let the specific words you use to express that idea come out in that moment. The same thing should be with your hands. Let your hands make whatever gesture. If you’re an Italian, outspoken hand gesturing person, that’s what you have to do. Kelly: Even if it’s a distraction I’ve been to talks where somebody will be using their hands, you end up following their hands the whole time. Chris: I would say to you that hands gestures become distracting when they’re not connected with what they’re saying. If they’re connected with what they’re saying, you’re not even going to notice them. You become attracted when they’re not connected. If someone has a non-verbal tick, if they’re just moving their hands and it has no connection with what they’re saying, yes it becomes repetitive and it’s a distraction. It’s just like someone who says, has a verbal tick and says um, um all the time and it’s distracting because it’s getting in the way of um, um what you’re trying to say. Kelly: What about movement on the stage? Chris: Less is more, when you start moving around, there’s a huge temptation because of nerves, the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight reaction kicks in, and people want to move and I see this so frequently with inexperienced presenters. They’ll start wondering around the stage, or they’ll shift away back and forth on their feet, and that is not connected with anything they’re saying 90% of the time…99. They’re just moving because they’re full of adrenaline and they feel like they should move. But, if it’s not connected with what they’re saying, it is inherently destructive. Why is someone pacing back and forth on the stage? It’s funny because I’ll get push back on that, people will say, “Well I’m trying to be more interesting and dynamic on the stage.” I have no problem with being interesting and dynamic, I have a problem, if it’s not connected with what you’re saying. When in doubt, you need to practice standing still because you’re going to want to move. Move if there’s a reason, move if it makes sense. For example, if you’re separating a point. In the first situation, the FED needs to do XYZ and I’m going to talk about this for a while. In the second situation, and then you can move on that, that might make sense. That’s an example, but that requires practice and planning. So I always recommend that people just stand still. Kelly: Do you prefer microphone that is attached to you versus attached to a podium, because you’re kind of stuck and glued to the podium, but is that your preference? Chris: Yes, a lapel or lavalier microphone allows you to forget about the microphone and that’s what you need to do with a majority of the technology that’s helping support you. Some microphone on a podium tends to trap you behind the podium, which is bad for a number of reasons. You have a temptation to lean on the podium, you’re blocked and a lot of your body language from the audience. You might have more of a tendency to look down. A lavalier microphones will allow you to just take one step to the right or left of the podium, and to find a comfortable position in front of the audience and be accessible. Kelly: That’s terrific, I appreciate that. Chris do you have a favorite quote to finish off here? I always like to get one Chris: Any good quote. Kelly: Good quotes. Chris: Good quotes. “In law, what place are tainted in corrupt but being seasoned with a gracious voice obscures the show of evil.” Kelly: Good one, Chris I appreciate your time on this, and good luck to you with NarrativePros, and we’ll be in touch. Anybody wants to contact Chris, feel free, Narrativepros.com, is that the website? Chris: That’s it. Kelly: Thanks Chris We want to thank you for listening to the syndicated audio program, BankBosun.com The audio content is produced by Kelly Coughlin, Chief Executive Officer of BankBosun, LLC; and syndicated by Seth Greene, Market Domination LLC, with the help of Kevin Boyle. Video content is produced by The Guildmaster Studio, Keenan Bobson Boyle. The voice introduction is me, Karim Kronfli. The program is hosted by Kelly Coughlin. If you like this program, please tell us. If you don’t, please tell us how we can improve it. Now, some disclaimers. Kelly is licensed with the Minnesota State Board of Accountancy as a Certified Public Accountant. Kelly provides bank owned life insurance portfolio and nonqualified benefit services to banks across the United States. The views expressed here are solely those of Kelly Coughlin and his guests in their private capacity and do not in any other way represent the views of any other agent, principal, employer, employee, vendor or supplier of Kelly Coughlin. .  

DJ ADDICT - DJ MASTER-T DIRTY VALENTINE The Essential Love Side (14.02.2010) 01 - The Isley Brothers ft. R. Kelly - What would you do 02 - Minnie Riperton - Lovin' you 03 - Aretha Franklin - Call me 04 - Raphael Saadiq ft. Jay-Z - Oh girl 05 - Jay-Z - Girls, girls, girls 06 - Teresa A.K.A. Celine - Guys, guys, guys 07 - Bootsy's Rubber Band - I'd rather be with you 08 - The Isley Brothers - Beetween the sheets 09 - Diana Ross - Missing you 10 - Notorious Big ft. 112 - Missin' you 11 - Common ft. Mary J. Blige - Come close 12 - Erykah Badu ft. Common - Love of my life 13 - D'Angelo - Lady 14 - Nelly ft. Kelly Rowland - Dilemma 15 - Raheem DeVaughn - Woman 16 - El Debarge - I like it 17 - Lenny Kravitz - I belong to you 18 - Mariah Carey - Underneath the stars (drifting rmx) 19 - Oxmo Puccino ft. K-Reen - Le jour o tu partiras 20 - Mary J. Blige ft. Foxy Brown - Love is all we need (trackmasters rmx) WWW.DIRTY-21.COM www.essentialflavor.com http://facebook.com/addictdj http://twitter.com/dj_addict http://facebook.com/mastertbluntdjFacebook