Podcasts about kinkos

 Memorial Day – Remembering our Veterans! Penny production to stop! // Being caught doing embarrassing things! Fired from KLSX with no money, copying resumes at Kinkos. LAX rush is ON! People are getting out of town // Residents in Echo Park have had it with delivery drivers. Ghost kitchen has 20 vendors and drivers are constantly coming & going // June 4th I'll be at the Queen Mary! 8 convicted in Kim Kardashian Paris heist trial. Guy pulls out his guns in Pasadena and then calls the police on himself. 

First Black people were too dumb and ignorant to get ID. Now, The View's Sunny Hostin says it's women. Kamala once said a lack of Kinkos was her reason for opposing requiring ID to vote!  

Can you believe we haven't talked to a horror writer yet? Well, we fixed that ... meet Seth Sherwood. Sadie Dean and Jeanne Veillette Bowerman talk with Emmy-nominated horror writer/director Seth Sherwood about the 10 years it took for him to break in, the challenges and joys of writing horror, tips for newbies wanting to break in, and so much more!Seth Sherwood's Full Bio:Seth M Sherwood is an Emmy-nominated Los Angeles-based screenwriter, director, designer, and producer.  His feature screenwriting credits include Leatherface for Millennium/Lion's Gate and Hellfest for Valhalla/CBS Films. He also provided uncredited on-set script work for London Has Fallen.  On the TV side, Seth has staffed on two teen-horror shows with Awesomeness TV: The Unsettling and Light as a Feather for Hulu. He's also written for the forthcoming Wytches for Amazon. He has developed original pilots with Amblin TV, Valhalla Entertainment, and Universal.  In the 90s Seth was a Pacific NW art-kid who made zines out of Fangoria magazines at Kinkos and was an early adopter of Apple products, (and now they've trapped him.) He hopes to some day pay off his student loans. If he died tomorrow he would be survived by several bottles of anti-anxiety meds.He's also still looking for somebody to invite him to their D&D group.Resources from this episode:Seth's book, The Scary Movie Writer's GuideSeth's SubstackSeth on X: @SethMSherwoodSeth on IG: @Seth.M.SherwoodPipeline Podcasts:All OG Pipeline Artists podcasts can be found on pipelineartists.com/listen.YouTube:Watch full (read that as "most ... maybe not any" because Jeanne is tired) episodes on YouTube.Follow us on X:@recklesscr8tive@SadieKDean@jeannevb@pipelineartistsFollow us on IG:@recklesscr8tive@_thesadiedean@jeannevb_@pipelineartistsEnter Pipeline's Contests:Script Pipeline (Screenwriting, TV, First Look, Pitch Contest)Film Pipeline (Short Scripts and Short Films)Book Pipeline (Unpublished and Adaptation)

Laura and Xhafer ring in the New Year with Battlestar Galactica - Season 1, Episode 2: Water. Laura wonders if character stupidity is a symptom of being a Cylon. Xhafer speculates Gaeta will single-handedly keep the Galactica's Kinkos in business.Join The Discord @ https://discord.gg/MUHKDDk6TN

What I learned from reading Leading By Design: The Ikea Story by Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull and The Testament of a Furniture Dealer by Ingvar Kamprad.----Ramp gives you everything you need to control spend, watch your costs, and optimize your financial operations —all on a single platform. Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to Ramp and learning how they can help your business control your costs and save more. ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to learn from history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. You can search all my notes and highlights from every book I've ever read for the podcast. Get access to Founders Notes here. ----Join my free email newsletter to get my top 10 highlights from every book----Notes and highlights from the episode: Ingvar works on IKEA from the time he is 17 until he dies at 91.The Testament of a Furniture Dealer by Ingvar Kamprad (1976) is a sermon on the culture of IKEA  IKEA's common goal: We have decided once and for all to side with the many. IKEA will offer a wide range of well-designed furniture at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.Billy Durant (founder of General Motors) describing Henry Ford's one single idea: Durant noted that Ford “was in favor of keeping prices down to the lowest possible point, giving to the multitude the benefit of cheap transportation.” — Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors by Lawrence Gustin Something Ingvar repeats: We will do it a different way.This will not be easy. We must demand much from ourselves.IKEA must have low prices. Ingvar's dedication to that idea is total. Without low costs we can never accomplish our purpose. The principle can never be compromised: Our policy of serving the many can never be changed.If you are not enthusiastic about your job, one-third of your life goes to waste.Wasting resources is a mortal sin at IKEA.Expensive solutions to any kind of problem are usually the work of mediocrity.Planning is often synonymous with bureaucracy. Exaggerated planning is the most common cause of corporate death.Simple routines have a greater impact. Simplicity in our behavior gives us strength.No reports. No committees. Just done. — Elon in the early days of SpaceX Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger. (Founders #369) We dare to do things differently.You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country. — Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea. (Founders #181) Concentration is important to our success. The general who divides his resources will invariably be defeated.We can never do everything, everywhere, all at the same time.We must concentrate for maximum impact, often with small means.Concentration means that at certain vital stages we are forced to neglect otherwise important aspects.Constant meetings and group discussions are often the result of unwillingness or inability on the part of the person in charge to make decisions.Only those who are asleep make no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active.The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development.It is always the mediocre people who are negative, who spend their time proving that they were not wrong. The strong person is always positive and looks forward.Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning (He said this when he was already 33 years into running his company!)Bear in mind that time is your most important resource. You can do so much in ten minutes. Ten minutes, once gone, are gone for good. You can never get them back. Divide your life into ten-minute units and sacrifice as few of them as possible in meaningless activity.Let us continue to be a group of positive fanatics who stubbornly and persistently refuse to accept the impossible.Ingvar's family had to rent out all the rooms in their house to strangers to make ends meet.Selling things became an obsession. Trading was in my blood.By 1997 IKEA had mailed out over 100 million catalogs.Ingvar was the first person in the furniture industry to combine a mail order catalog and a furniture store.Cost awareness was to be IKEA's anthem.Ingvar's greatest regret was working so much that he missed out on seeing his 3 son's grow up: Childhood does not allow itself to be reconquered.I have not been able to avoid severe losses. Both fiascoes and triumphs have marked the history of the business.Ingvar would rather his employees make mistakes than be idle.The wave Ingvar rode: Sweden's housing construction boom. More than 1 million new apartments were built after the war. All of them needed well designed, affordable furniture. The way IKEA was described by its competitors: A monster with seven heads: “If you cut off one, another soon grows.”A golden rule of IKEA: Regard every problem as a possibility. The boycott by the National Association of Furniture Dealers was the best thing that ever happened to IKEA. It forced IKEA down a path of product differentiation and helped them stumble upon the idea of flat packing and self assembled furniture.The laws of IKEA since birth:  -A good cash reserve must always be ensured.-All property must be owned.-All expansion is to be largely self-financed.-There shall be no boasting.We push cost awareness at all levels with almost manic frenzy.Ingvar believes in the ability to wait out difficulties.Ingvar believes in gathering unfiltered intel from the front lines. He makes unannounced store visits and spends time talking to the employees unloading furniture and helping customers.The day he is free of IKEA life for him will no longer be worth living. He loves it, aways wants to lie as close as possible to it, and never tires of improving it.A demon in me says I have so much to do. I am never satisfied. Something tells me what I'm doing at the moment has to be done better tomorrow.Behind this multinational tycoon is a country boy with a fierce sense of being an underdog.He has a peasants distrust of a favorable destiny that keeps his feet on the ground.----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

Welcome back to THIS. with Shauna Griffiths! This episode, Breaking Down Creating Your Own Opportunities features Brett Essman, a Art Director and Creative Director in the Creative Agency world, who sports just the right amount of humble swagger as he leads in work, life, and in youth basketball.  One of the things I love most about this episode is the #LeadershipAthlete in Brett that shines so brightly. He clearly leads his own team, agency, and clients with incredible resilience and commitment to the pursuit of optimal performance. In his "spare time" he transfers his skills and mindset to his son's basketball team. As you listen - you'll notice the business and basketball lessons overlap. Whether you're at work or on the field of play - the rules of the game are much the same.   Tune-in to this episode to hear about: His DM that hooked me and created this episode opportunity  Brett's career journey that is evidence of his innate drive to create his own opportunities What creating your own opportunities means to Brett His three rules of teamwork that apply to business AND youth basketball  Shifting perspectives to take on the challenge Proactive problem solving that allows you to find solutions before clients know they exist Nostalgic chatter among two hoop heaps Words of wisdom from the guy who thought he may be working at a local Kinkos his whole life  We hope you enjoy the episode and look forward to your feedback about it! Feel free to reach out to either of both of us directly on LinkedIn.  #creative #agency #creativeagency #coaching #basketball #leadershipathlete #consulting #coaching #leadership #leader #opportunity 

Devon and Beau recap their day at Moonie Club's Sailor Moon Day Party in Brooklyn! They then cover episode 27 of Sailor Moon: “Crushing on Ami: The Boy Who Can See the Future”. Burger finger pics, many falling objects, and questionable character design! Enjoy ✌

Margo is joined by artist and designer for the gift & home decor industry, Jennifer Brinley. Jennifer has been in the industry for over 20 years with a degree in Studio Art from UC Santa Barbara and she believes well designed products can bring moments of joy. Her creative path took her to graduate school for architecture before promptly dropping out after learning advanced math was involved to pass "structures." She then bounced around with a variety of jobs to save money to go to Europe for 3 months with a childhood friend. After Europe, came the quandary of what to do next and decided she would go back to school to become an art teacher. A want ad looking for a T-shirt designer led to quickly creating a fake portfolio and she began designing T-shirts for Crazy Shirts as well as getting a business license to sell her own T-shirts. She met her licensing agent by chance making color copies at Kinkos and today her designs have been on everything from tableware, gift mugs, kitchen textiles, rugs, fabrics, placemats, trays, coasters, gift bags, flags, art poles and planters.   Margo and Jennifer discuss: Finding inspiration in nature and how one of her best selling products is a nature inspired design Balancing creativity and business in the art world The importance of staying informed and interested within one's industry Fueling passion through seeing others' work and new trends The impact of art and design on behavior and well-being The benefits of engaging in art daily for brain stimulation Biophilic design and nature's calming effect on the brain Studies on neuroaesthetics (the measurable changes that occur in the brain while looking at art, design, architecture, interior design, etc)    Connect with Jennifer: https://www.instagram.com/jenniferbrinley/   Connect with Margo: www.windowsillchats.com www.instagram.com/windowsillchats www.patreon.com/inthewindowsill  

Go behind the scenes of how Gary Kusin systematically built Babbage's, which later became GameStop, into a market leader and how Gary led a major turnaround of Kinko's, taking EBITDA from -$11M to +$180M in just 3 years. Learn how he made difficult decisions like closing stores and reducing headcount, while aligning the team around new leadership principles and business lessons learned directly from iconic leaders like Fred Smith of FedEx, Jack Welch of GE, and Ross Perot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode of the Startup of the Year Podcast, our host, entrepreneur, and investor, Frank Gruber (https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankgruber) is joined by Gary Kusin, Co-Founder of GameStop and Laura Mercier Cosmetics, former President and CEO of Kinkos, and author of his new book “Always Learning: Lessons on Leveling up from Gamestop to Laura Mercier.”     Be sure to check out Kusin's new book, “Always Learning: Lessons on Leveling up from Gamestop to Laura Mercier.” You can order it here: www.GaryKusin.com.   We invite you all to join our community today to access the support, expert advice, and resources you need to elevate your startup by going to: www.est.us/join       Thank you for listening, and as always, please check out the Established website and subscribe to the newsletter at: www.est.us      Subscribe to the Startup of the Year Daily Deal Flow: www.startupofyear.com/daily-dealflow   Subscribe to the Startup of the Year podcast: www.podcast.startupofyear.com   Subscribe to the Established YouTube Channel: www.soty.link/ESTYouTube       ***  Startup of the Year helps diverse, emerging startups, founding teams, and entrepreneurs push their company to the next level. We are a competition, a global community, and a resource.     Startup of the Year is also a year-long program that searches the country for a geographically diverse set of startups from all backgrounds and pulls them together to compete for the title of Startup of the Year. Checkout Startup of the Year at: www.startupofyear.com       The program includes a number of in-person and virtual events, including our annual South By Southwest startup pitch event and competition. All of which culminates at our annual Startup of the Year Summit, where the Startup of the Year winner is announced, along with an opportunity at a potential investment.      Established is a consultancy focused on helping organizations with innovation, startup, and communication strategies. It is the power behind Startup of the Year. Created by the talent responsible for building the Tech.Co brand (acquired by an international publishing company), we are leveraging decades of experience to help our collaborators best further (or create) their brand & accomplish their most important goals. Check out Established at: www.established.us    Connect with us on X (formerly Twitter) - @EstablishedUs and Facebook - facebook.com/established.us 

Meg and Jessica engage a bunch of BFFs of the podcast and celebrate Desperately Seeking the 80s' 100th episode at Bailey's Corner Pub.Please check out our website, follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, and...WRITE US A REVIEW HEREWe'd LOVE to hear from you! Let us know if you have any ideas for stories HEREThank you for listening!Love,Meg and Jessica

Darby Vannier, with over 20 years of experience, is a seasoned leader adept at building and growing organizations. As President & CEO of Indispensable Leadership Group, he excels as an executive coach, consultant, speaker, and fractional COO, focusing on strategic and leadership development. He has led effective teams of more than a 100 employees, coached others into their own leadership positions, and created stability during challenging organizational transitions. Darby built his career on the philosophy that developing the right people is the key to success.  Learn more at www.beindispensable.com.   Questions ·      Even though we read a very short snippet of your journey, your little bio, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about how you got from where you are to where you are today. ·      Your book titled, The Indispensable Leader. So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about that book? What was your intention when you wrote the book? What is the book about? Who is the book geared towards and kind of what was your sentiment when you were putting it all together? ·      Which role do you think is more effective, the manager's role or the leader's role? ·     Now in the book, you also talk about, which I found this part really fascinating that you should be curious, and you should engage curiosity. Explained to us a little bit about what you meant when you said, engage or encourage curiosity and being curious as a leader. ·      In the book, you also mentioned the whole conscious competence model. So, I'd love for you to kind of just explain that to the audience as well, the four phases and then the example that you gave to reinforce the concept. ·      Could you also share with our listeners, what is the one online resource, tool, website or app that you absolutely cannot live without in your business? ·    Can you also share with our listeners, maybe one or two books that you've read, it could be a book that you read recently, or even one that you read a very long time ago, but it had a great impact on you. ·      Can you also share with us what's the one thing in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people. ·      Now, before we wrap our episodes up, we always like to ask our guests, do you have a quote or a saying that during times of adversity or challenge you will tend to revert to this quote if for any reason you get derailed or you get off track, and the quote kind of helps to get you back on track. ·      Where can listeners find you online? Highlights Darby's Journey Me: Now Darby, even though we read a very short snippet of your journey, your little bio, we always like to give our guests an opportunity to share in their own words, a little bit about how you got from where you were to where you are today.   Darby shared that it's kind of a diverse career actually. So, he started off in retail, actually kind of in the entertainment industry, working as a manager at a 22-screen movie theatre, which is an interesting industry, especially back at that time when it was before digital movies and everything, and everything came in on natural celluloid film and everything.  So, yeah, 22 screen movie theatre, they would serve 1000's of people a day and that was an interesting experience getting started because it definitely was jumping right into that retail type environment, bringing in at that point, you're talking about most of their employees were high school or college aged students and, and so that's just a different level of team member that you're managing.  From there, he kind of jumped even further into retail, he actually became a store manager for Kinkos at the time, so the print shop at Kinkos, which is now FedEx Office, but at the time, it was still Kinkos. And at that time, all the Kinkos were 24-hour stores, like they never closed, didn't close on any holidays, didn't close any hours, nothing. So, that was definitely a learning experience he will say, managing a 24 hour a day business from that standpoint.  And he did that about 6 years and then moved into the non-profit world where he took over as CEO of an International Livestock Association, actually for alpacas of all things. And it's always an interesting story because he tells people when he got the interview for the job, he had to look up what an alpaca was because he had a general idea that it was like a llama, but he didn't exactly know what it was, so kind of entered into a whole new realm there. And he did that for about 11 years where he reported directly to a board, grew that organization, fixed a lot of things in that organization, and then grew that organization. And then they actually went through a merger process and merged with another national organization. And he took over as CEO of the newly created merged organization for that industry.  And then from there, he decided, he's kind of ready to be done with this non-profit thing, and he exited non-profit, went back into the for-profit world, joined a company that does leadership development, strategic planning, executive coaching, that sort of thing, because he's always been passionate about leadership, and did that for about 7 years.  And then last year decided he's going to break off and do his own things. He had a company established previously for some consulting and stuff that he had done and he just expanded that and started offering fractional leadership services and executive coaching on his own and have built that up from there. So, still working on that and that's kind of gets us up to date.    About Darby's Book – The Indispensable Leader Me: Now, as part of this journey, you are also an author and your book is titled, The Indispensable Leader. So, could you share with our listeners a little bit about that book, I do have some questions I want to ask specifically, but I kind of just want to hear in your own words, like what was your intention when you wrote the book? What is the book about? Who is the book geared towards and kind of what was your sentiment when you were putting it all together?   Darby shared that the book is really geared towards anybody, he wouldn't even say young leaders, he would say anybody who's really either starting out in leadership, leading other people or even if they have been leading people and they just want to have some experience and some knowledge to refine maybe their leadership style.  And it's kind of one of those things, he's kind of kept stories over the years throughout his career, because he's sure you have experienced throughout your career, you encounter interesting things, he'll just put it that way, some challenging things and some difficult things, and then some really exciting things.  So, he had lots of things that he has accumulated throughout his career that he felt like these were good learning experiences for him at the time, and had he had this information when he was starting out being a leader, it would have been highly beneficial.  So, in the midst of COVID, back in 2020, when everything kind of shut down, and we all had more time, because we were staying home and everything, he decided that seems like a good time to start writing a book. So, that's when he started on the book.  And the book really kind of goes down the path of taking this idea, he started off the book by basically saying, you hear people say this question….”Are you a manager? Or Are you a leader?”  And he really attacks that and he say, we're really looking at that wrong, because he thinks that's the wrong question. It assumes that people who would probably consider themselves managers of things, cannot be good leaders and that's not the case. He knew a fair number of people who definitely consider themselves managers, who are really spectacular leaders as well.  So, he kind of asked people to look at it a little bit differently and what he thinks people mean is actually more of are you more manager oriented? Or are you more visionary and entrepreneurial oriented?   And if you think about that as a spectrum, everybody exists somewhere on that spectrum. And you don't want to be at the far end of either end of that because you don't want to be too high visionary, that you just come up with a lot of ideas and nothing gets done. But you don't want to be too far managerial where you only care about checking off your list, and you don't really care why you're doing it.  So, what he basically asked people to do is think about this more like a Venn diagram, where you have two intersecting circles and let's take the best traits of both manager and visionary archetypes, and create the best possible leader that you can be because there's only a certain amount of things that you have access to yourself, there's only a certain amount of things that you can gain yourself.  So, let's find those best things and then let's try to release the bad things so the bad traits of those archetypes so that we don't fall into those ruts as well. And he kind of goes down that journey and he uses a lot of stories from his career to illustrate various points on leadership and talking about mentorship and some of those things as well so that people can gain that knowledge that he didn't necessarily have at the time as he was going through it.    The Effectiveness of the Manager's Role and the Leader's Role Me: So, I like the fact that you spoke about, are you a leader or a manager, but even outside of that you talk about in the book, just visionary leaders and I'm not sure what was the other term that you had outside of visionary? Managers.   So, can you just differentiate, I know you said, we look on it from a different perspective. But if we were to put it in terms of hierarchy, or better yet, in terms of in an organization, if you really want to motivate people, get them to do what you want them to do without having to literally stand up over them with a stick over their head saying, “If you don't do this, this is the sanction that's going to be enforced.” Which role do you think is more effective, the manager's role or the leader's role? Darby shared that he would actually say both are important and it's good to have a mix of both types of individuals within an organization.  Here's the reason why. So, people with managerial characteristics who fall more on that side of the spectrum are people who are very process oriented, they're usually very organized, they're the ones who are able to look at something and say, here's how it's going to get done. They can outline the 50 steps it's going to take to get there. They're about creating a list and checking off the things and getting stuff done. They're the ones that are talking about, what are we going to do? And how are we going to do it?  And sometimes they don't always care about the why they should and that's what he means by making sure that they try to pull in the best traits of both worlds. But those are the folks who are going to get stuff done for you. And they are the folks who can execute on a vision. So, basically, they can take a vision of a founder or a visionary and they can translate that vision into the action steps that it's going to take to accomplish it.  So, on the visionary side, you have to have visionaries as well, because the high visionary people, those are the folks who are generating lots of ideas, they're coming up with five or ten new ideas every day, they're usually very passionate about their ideas.  Oftentimes entrepreneurs are visionaries, because that is the type of individuals who are drawn to starting a business and taking that risk and everything. Because in their minds, when they think of an idea, when they envision something, it's done like we're there, and it is done. They're the ones that are more going to be talking about why are we doing something, like they want to be able to explain and show their passion for why is it that we want to accomplish whatever it is that they've come up with.  The difficulty you can run into with a visionary though is, is that they tend to move on very quickly, because if you get a very high visionary person, they only love generating new ideas, they don't want to talk about how to get there, they just want it done.  So, that visionary needs to have people who are more managerial in nature so that they can actually get stuff done. And in most companies, you almost have to have two top individuals who are one is one and one is the other.  That's why you often see a CEO whose high visionary and you see a COO who is the person who executes and those two individuals have to have a high amount of trust, because they will piss each other off and that's the bottom line.  Because what will happen is, is that COO who's more process oriented, who's the one going, “Okay, there's these 50 problems we have to solve before we can get there” they are going to be like saying slow down and pump the brakes, we got to back up here.  And the high visionary CEO is the one saying, “No, we got to move forward. And I want to do all these things, and everything.”  So, in order for their company to be highly successful, you almost have to have that mix. You see this with celebrity leaders he'll call him. So, people like Steve Jobs, for example, it's well known that he was very high visionary, brilliant guy, came up with amazing things, had very high expectations, very passionate about his industry.  But he learned very early on, he basically lost his company initially, before he came back many years later, he learned very early on that he needed to have people that could execute those ideas, because he just wanted to spend time on generating ideas, he needed an execution team as well.  So, eventually, he figured out he had to have individuals who worked with him that he trusted, that could execute those ideas that could challenge him and slow him down, he would on the opposite side of that push them forward. So, it's this weird balancing act. So, every company needs to have a good mix of both in order to be successful.   The Art of Being Curious as a Leader Me: Now in the book, you also talk about, which I found this part really fascinating that you should be curious, and you should engage curiosity. And curiosity sometimes I think can be misinterpreted, sometimes, for example, people will think that curiosity I find is being inquisitive, it's a similar adjective but inquisitive for some reason connotates, almost you being concerned or asking questions about things that should not concern you. But I do believe that that's how we learn right? About asking questions, exploring, experiencing. Explaine to us a little bit about what you meant when you said, engage or encourage curiosity and being curious as a leader.   Darby shared that it certainly can mean inquisitive and that is something that it can mean. But when he talks about being curious and when he coaches leaders and encourage them to be curious, what he's really trying to do is encourage folks to be lifelong learners, like he wants you to be curious about new things, go read books, go meet new people, go join a group that you wouldn't necessarily join because by gaining those additional experiences, and that additional knowledge, you're only going to grow as a leader. So, he's very big on making sure that folks that he coaches and himself, do not get stagnant.  And what that means is you have to be engaged, you have to be engaged in what you do. You have to be engaged in your industry, you have to be engaged in life. So, sometimes it's professional development, and you're joining an association or you're reading a book or whatever.  Sometimes it might be personal development where you're learning a new language or travelling to a country that you've never been to so that you can gain that experience because all of those things are important. They are going to make you a much, much better well-rounded leader, especially as he speaks to college students every now and then.  And as he speaks to college students, that's one thing that he talked to them about is gain a broad set of experiences because a lot of us really end up, in the United States, a lot of folks who go to college end up going to college nearby home, so, they're exposed to, yes, a new set of people, but it may be very similar to what they're used to. So, he encourages people to get out of your comfort zone and go do some other things because the more experiences you have, the better leader you're going to be.  Certainly, looking back at his career, he's sure as you look at your career, every single thing that he dealt with and went through, all of that past history really made him into the leader that he is today. And everything that he's doing today will make him into the leader that he is in five years, that's the bottom line.  So, you got to have that curiosity, if you don't, you're going to end up stagnant, you're not going to really grow as a leader, you're probably not getting promoted up very much. In most industries, you really do need to be curious so that you can continue to expand as well.   Me: Yes, I totally agree that you should definitely be open to learning and from everything that you do, it definitely adds to who you are today, as you said, what you're doing now is building for where you're going be five years from now.   Conscious Competence Model and the Four Phases Me: In the book, you also mentioned Darby, and I was exposed to this many years ago when I had done a leadership course myself, the whole Conscious Competence Model. And I liked the example that you gave with the baby. So, I'd love for you to kind of just explain that to the audience as well, the four phases and then the example that you gave to reinforce the concept.   Darby shared that this is something that really helps in coaching as well, because it's something that everybody goes through, but they don't really pinpoint that they're actually going through it.  So, the idea here is there's four phases of competence. And you really start off no matter what it is, in some new experience, in some new activity, you start a new job, you learn how to drive, whatever it is, you start off this idea as being unconsciously incompetent, which means you're incompetent at whatever you're doing, and you don't even know you're incompetent at it. And that's a big problem because then you're doing things and you don't even know you're doing them wrong.  So, the idea is, hopefully somebody will point out to you or you'll eventually move into the idea of conscious incompetence. And that's really where you're still incompetent at it, but you recognize that you're incompetent at it. So, you know, you're doing it wrong, it's kind of a situation, you know that you don't know something.  And then after that, the idea is that you move into conscious competence, which means that you're competent at it, but you have to think about it all the time, it's not become a habit, like you have to actually think about whatever the activity is. So, if you think about when you're learning to drive, this is a good thing. Or this is a thing we encounter, you have to constantly think about turning your turn signal on or stopping at the stop sign or stopping at the light or seeing the light turn yellow, or whatever that is, you are at that point consciously competent. So, you can do it, but you got to think about it all the time.  The last phase is really where you want to get to, especially with regard to leading people, you want to get to unconscious competence, where it is that you are competent at something and you don't have to constantly think about it, it just happens. So, this basically is the idea of it becomes habit.  There's actually an author named Charles Duhigg, he wrote a book called The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, it's a spectacular book, but he talks about habit loops where your brain is set up so that it creates these habit loops out of things that you do regularly. And that's how you end up, if you've ever driven a car, and then you're driving along, and sometimes you're like, I don't remember the last five minutes, and it kind of freaks you out. That happens because of that, because your brain can handle that sort of thing. And basically, has created a habit loop.  It's the same reason when he left his position last year, and he was no longer going to the office on a regular basis, your habit loop changes. So, normally my habit loop for driving to the office was the same every day, he would do the exact same thing, the exact same route, whatever it was, well, on two different occasions, at the end of the year, last year, he was driving in the direction of where his old office was. And he looked up and pretty soon, like he's driving towards the office, he's going the whole wrong direction for where he was headed. But his brain engaged this habit loop that his brain thought, “Oh, you're doing the habit loop, we haven't done in a while to go to the office.” And then he ended up on the entirely wrong road and everything because he was going to the office. But that's the idea of unconscious competence that you want to get to is be able to create those habits so that things just happen for you on a regular basis.    Me: So, just want to remind our listeners, Darby's book is out, available on all platforms that you would want to purchase a book from, I would definitely recommend that you go and consume some of the great content he has in it. I haven't fully finished reading it, but the parts that I have been able to garner were really, really insightful. And he was able to share a bit of it with our listeners in the conversation today. So, definitely a must have read for 2024. Thank you so much for sharing Darby.   App, Website or Tool that Darby Absolutely Can't Live Without in His Business When asked about online resource that he cannot live without in his business, Darby shared that from his perspective, it's LinkedIn just because of the industry that he's in. It is definitely the one online resource he could not live without. There's a lot of things out there, of course, especially with social media, and everything nowadays, it really depends on the industry individuals are in but for him, LinkedIn is it and definitely those who are listening, you can find him on LinkedIn, he will connect with you just search for Darby Vannier, and he's happy to connect with you on LinkedIn as well.   Books that Have Had the Biggest Impact on Darby When asked about books that has had a great impact, Darby shared that there is lot of books that certainly he has utilized over the years. But there is one book that he has bought and given away more copies of this book than any other book.  And it's a book called Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, it's by a woman, her name is Susan Cain. And it's about kind of leading as an introvert. And the reason that he liked it is that he knows it doesn't always seem like it to individuals when he does these podcasts that he loves to speak to people and stuff like that. But he's a pretty big introvert. And it was the first book that he read that he was like somebody actually gets him.  So, she kind of talks about what it's like to be an introvert and how it's kind of a spectrum. And there are certainly individuals who are introverts who have no desire to speak to people, for example. Whereas, he loves that, if he gets a group of 1500 people to speak in front of great, he's happy. Now, he doesn't want to step down off the stage and talk to you one on one really, afterwards, he'll do it. And you won't necessarily know that he's uncomfortable. But that's not his comfort zone.  So, every introvert's a little bit different and it's more about how your energy is recharged. So, his energy is recharged by quiet time and being alone. He has no problem going on a vacation for a few days and being by himself the entire time and not talking to anybody, that would freak out an extrovert. But the reason he loves the book is and that he's given it to both introverts and extroverts. And the reason it's important for extroverts to read as well is you work with a lot of introverted individuals and this world we live in is catered to extroverts. And it can be incredibly difficult for those of us who are introverts to live in. And we are forced to adjust to you all.  So, he encourages extroverts to read this book as well, because you really learn a lot, especially as you lead and manage people, it will help you better manage individuals, it will also help you understand how to take advantage of utilizing the skills and the experience of introverts that maybe an extrovert doesn't necessarily have. So, from a professional standpoint, he always recommends, he also recommend it for individuals who are married, who have spouses who maybe are the opposite of them, because it will help you to totally understand your spouse a lot more as well.    What Darby is Really Excited About Now! When asked about something that he's excited about, Darby shared that he's still under a year on totally breaking out on his own and building his own company. So, building his business is what he's really passionate about right now. He's working on a new speaking topic regarding the impact that leaders make in the world and even over interactions that they might have considered insignificant. So, it's kind of like the ripple effect, so he's working on this talk and he's excited about that as well to be able to talk to folks about that.  And then just really working to help each one of his fractional leadership clients be as successful as possible. It is so amazing to be able to work with multiple clients and see individual companies continue to grow and scale and to have a part in that as well.   Quote or Saying that During Times of Adversity Darby Uses When asked about a quote or saying that he tends to revert to, Darby shared that he doesn't really have a quote, but he kind of have more of a philosophy and his philosophy with this. And he uses this again when he coaches other leaders too is, “Everything is temporary. And the one thing you have to remember is, is that everybody around you is going through their own stuff.” So, he always encourages people to be kind when you're dealing with other individuals, because you don't know what's going on in their lives, no matter how well you think you know them, you don't know everything that's going on. So, as he encounters adversity, he tends to kind of revert back to, “Okay, let's control what I can control. And then I need to let the other stuff go.”  He certainly has had multiple times in his career where he's had some very difficult situations that he's dealt with professionally. And that's what he's come back to is okay, can you control this particular thing that's happening? No. But you can control these other two aspects of it and you can make sure that you do those things really well.  And what he has found is if he does that, and he just remember that this is just one more piece of experience in his life and in his career, part of that past history that he said that makes us all who we are, if he can remember that, then it's usually easy to get through those things. Not that it's not a challenge, still can be a challenge, still can be stressful, but it does definitely help you as you move through those challenging times.   Me: All right. So, we will definitely have that summary of what you shared with us in terms of that, quote, or that thought, that helps to get you from one stage to the next if for any reason you feel derailed.    Where Can We Find Darby Online Website – www.beindispensable.com Facebook - Indispensable Leadership Group LinkedIn – Indispensable Leadership Group LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/darbyvannier/    Me: Now Darby, thank you so much for hopping on our podcast today and sharing all these great insights from your book, as well as all of the experience and exposures that you've had over the years that have crafted the person that you are today and the invaluable knowledge and experience and coaching that you've been able to offer to your clients. And so, the information that you shared with us was extremely valuable. The examples that you gave, the characteristics and the comparison as it relates to having a bit of both is critical to the organization success as a manager and a leader was really, really, really insightful and I just want to extend a great amount of gratitude to you for taking time to share with us today.    Please connect with us on Twitter @navigatingcx and also join our Private Facebook Community – Navigating the Customer Experience and listen to our FB Lives weekly with a new guest Links •     The Indispensable Leader: How to Use Your Inner Manager and Visionary to Achieve Leadership Success by Darby Vannier •     The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg •     Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking Susan Cain   The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience Grab the Freebie on Our Website – TOP 10 Online Business Resources for Small Business Owners  Do you want to pivot your online customer experience and build loyalty - get a copy of “The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience.” The ABC's of a Fantastic Customer Experience provides 26 easy to follow steps and techniques that helps your business to achieve success and build brand loyalty. This Guide to Limitless, Happy and Loyal Customers will help you to strengthen your service delivery, enhance your knowledge and appreciation of the customer experience and provide tips and practical strategies that you can start implementing immediately! This book will develop your customer service skills and sharpen your attention to detail when serving others. Master your customer experience and develop those knock your socks off techniques that will lead to lifetime customers. Your customers will only want to work with your business and it will be your brand differentiator. It will lead to recruiters to seek you out by providing practical examples on how to deliver a winning customer service experience.

⁠⁠Join our PATREON for bonus episodes.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ This week we have Robert Fish of 108 and Unsufferable on to talk about the Oasis album (What's the Story) Morning Glory? We also discuss: our haters, Charlie Walker's drumming (Chamberlain/New End Original), Black Flag, deciding to be the singer, the Lifetime origin story, the worst kind of skinheads, moving to Tucson, Kinkos, fast time at the Philly ISKCON, joining 108, Deadguy, Unsufferable writing process, Killer Mike's barber shop, IDLES, workin for the man, Pearl Jam Vitalogy, Definitely Maybe, Creation Records, hype up songs, the Run Into The Ground swag bag, and so much more. ________ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Order our Gatekeep Harder shirt here!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ // Follow us at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@danbassini⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mysprocalledlife⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, @robert_fish⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@runintotheground⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Since the mid-1970s, almost every jazz musician has owned a copy of the same book. It has a peach-colored cover, a chunky, 1970s-style logo, and a black plastic binding. It's delightfully homemade-looking—like it was printed by a bunch of teenagers at a Kinkos. And inside is the sheet music for hundreds of common jazz tunes—also known as jazz “standards”—all meticulously notated by hand. It's called the Real Book. But if you were going to music school in the 1970s, you couldn't just buy a copy of the Real Book at the campus bookstore. Because the Real Book... was illegal. The world's most popular collection of Jazz music was a totally unlicensed publication. The full story of how the Real Book came to be this bootleg bible of jazz is a complicated one. It's a story about what happens when an insurgent, improvisational art form like Jazz gets codified and becomes something that you can learn from a book.The Real BookThis episode originally aired in April 2021Roman note: I love this episode. An all time favorite. Pass it along to someone jazzy if so inclined.

In this episode, we share two growth techniques from leaders of Kinkos and Sleepy's. Never heard of them, no problem! Listen in and learn ways you can drive innovation on your team that will fuel growth.

Allen Karpinski is a song writer, guitarist and founding member of the Ohio band The Six Parts Seven. Fellow Ohioan, Joey Beltram is this the singer, songwriter behind Goodmorning Valentine. Over the course of a weekend in 2006, the two bands came together in a small in studio in Kent, Ohio. What yielded was a beautiful collaborative collection of songs called Kissing Distance (out February 16th via Suicide Squeeze). Joey and Allen share the magic of the experience and the spark that inspired this collaboration.  Joey tells us how an unusual spontaneity and openness in the studio led to a beautiful and novel experience for the band. Joey lends us some in-sight on the recording and writing process, they talk Kinkos, the fall of Pitchfork and we hear a couple tunes. The Six Parts Seven Goodmorning Valentine Episode supported by Distrokid Episode supported by Izotope

Tim Conway dislikes marathon runners/ Joe's Pizza and Tim's countdown of people he allows to own a pizza oven // Mark's Sag-discount & Tim's Kinko's resume printing story // Cash Keyword: “Bank”//Audio of Tim Conway's lawsuit over $20 Million dollars via CBS // 25th anniversary for the Sopranos / Niecy Nash's Emmy Win for role in Netflix's Dahmer

There are lots of different trappings of wealth. A big house. A nice car. Exotic vacations. First-class flights? Private flights? Not everyone can afford these things. In fact, that's sort of the point—they are considered fancy and elite because of how elusive they are. But is this really wealth? Or is this just materialism? On Christmas (and it's the Dec 25th entry in *The Daily Da*d book, too), we quoted Paul Orfalea, the billionaire founder of Kinkos, who defined ‘success' as having kids who come home for the holidays. He was saying that there are lots of wealthy people out there who don't have that, who are estranged from their family. But what's interesting about this idea is that it is largely focused on where you and your kids end up later in life, when they have a choice about how much they see you. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 

On today's episode of The Lives of Writers, Jeff Alessandrelli interviews Kazim Ali.Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist. His most recent book is Sukun: New and Selected Poems, which draws from his six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. He's also published novels, translations, anthologies, and a memoir. He was a founding editor of Nightboat Books.Jeff Alessandrelli is the author of several books, including the poetry collection Fur Not Light. He is also the director and co-editor of the small presses Fonograf Editions and Bunny Presse.____________PART ONE, topics include:--the Kinkos era of indie publishing-- looking back at 25 years of work for SUKUN: New & Selected Poems-- finding the echoes in a body of work-- the LP as poetic book form-- also putting out a New & Selected with Harper Collins India-- revising early poems and Dickenson's alternate wordings-- the new book within the new book____________PART TWO, topics include:-- starting out as a reader and writing-- varying Englishes and language that crosses borders-- working as an organizer for student organizations-- the many genres in Kazim's body of work-- not changing just to achieve a marker of success-- founding Nightboat Books or small presses in general-- always working on something creative____________PART THREE, topics include:-- the beginnings and evolution of Nightboat Books-- the small press experimental writing landscape then and now-- spirituality and faith ____________Podcast theme music provided by Mike Nagel, author of Duplex. Here's more of his project: Yeah Yeah Cool Cool.The Lives of Writers is edited and produced by Michael Wheaton.

This week Jeremy and Reid are posing some questions. Has Stephen Spielberg ever made something sexy? And Should we talk about finances? Let us know. Other topics include Minority Report and Kinkos. Minority Report (2002) ◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠ ⁠➩ WEBSITE⁠ ◦ ⁠YOUTUBE ⁠◦⁠ ⁠⁠INSTAGRAM⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠➩ SUPPORT W/$.99⁠ ◦ ⁠PATREON⁠ ◦ ⁠THE MERCH⁠ ⁠➩ REID⁠ ◦ ⁠JEREMY⁠ ◦ ⁠JACK⁠ ◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠ ⁠➩ withdanceandstuff@gmail.com⁠ ◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠◠

Nailing your Graphic Design Portfolio can make the difference between scoring your dream client, project,  job or making business cards at Kinkos. Whether you're pitching a client, or in a job interview,  truth is, no matter how good you are and how great your work is, it won't just speak for itself! But what are people looking for? Isn't your website enough?How far back do you show your work?F*&k it - just show it all, right?With over 100s of portfolio reviews at zfactor, join The Angry Designers this week as they hold no punches back, on what it takes to build a Winning Graphic Design Portfolio.  The Bearded Canadians discuss what makes the difference between "your hired" and "your fired" including:- Important core components of a portfolio- Digital vs Physical- Porfolio creation checklistBy the end of this episode, you will be able to put together a portfolio that will provide you the confidence to win you more clients and land better jobs. Stay Angry our Friends –––––––––––Want to see more? See uncut episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/theangrydesigner Read our blog posts on our website TheAngryDesigner.comJoin in the conversation on our Instagram Instagram.com/TheAngryDesignerPodcast

If you have bagpipesEntrenched second summerSilly curtain rod holdershttps://www.usforkliftcertification.com/a/state_forklift_certification/Missouri_forklift_certification.html#:~:text=Upon%20passing%20the%20test%2C%20you,are%20good%20for%20three%20years.Google turned 25…https://g.co/doodle/cpmuy3mhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NE7Ty6vtqU&t=31shttps://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/ or https://clark.libguides.com/google-search-tipshttps://coolcat.org/What happened to Kinkos?FedEx- https://www.zenbusiness.com/blog/fedex-logo/ Remakes…90s TV show draft…in the future!!Check out our other episodes: ohbrotherpodcast.comFollow us on InstagramCheck us out on Youtube

Welcome to another enlightening episode of "The Founder Hour.” Today, we have the distinct honor of hosting an entrepreneurial luminary whose journey has left an indelible mark on the business world.Our guest, Paul Orfalea, isn't just any entrepreneur; he's the brilliant mind behind Kinko's, a company that redefined the business services landscape. Paul founded Kinko's in 1970 with a simple idea and a $5,000 loan. What began as a small copy shop in Isla Vista, California, grew into a global phenomenon with over 1,000 locations worldwide before being acquired by FedEx for $2.4 billion in 2004.Throughout our conversation, we'll delve into the fascinating details of Paul's incredible journey. From his early days printing term papers for college students to navigating the challenges of scaling a business, Paul's insights are invaluable. He's not only a successful businessman but also a college professor and a passionate advocate for education and philanthropy, founding the Orfalea Foundation to support children and families in need.*The Founder Hour is brought to you by Outer. Outer makes the world's most beautiful, comfortable, innovative, and high-quality outdoor furniture - ALL from sustainable materials - and is the ONLY outdoor furniture with a patented built-in cover to make protecting it effortless. From teak chairs to fire pit tables, everything Outer makes has the look and feel of what you'd expect at a 5-star resort, for less than you'd pay at a big box store for something that won't last.For a limited time, get 10% off and FREE shipping at www.liveouter.com/thefounderhour. Terms and conditions apply.*The biggest fortunes aren't made on Wall Street. They're made way before startups hit the stock market. Consider Mike Walsh, a name just like any of ours who invested $5,000 into Uber. And that investment money? It grew to a staggering $24,827,400!Such opportunities were once behind closed doors. Reserved for those with connections or vast fortunes. But that's no more.StartEngine is tearing down those exclusivity walls and making startup investments accessible to you and me...With Howard Marks, co-founder of the gaming giant Activision at the helm, StartEngine and its 1.7 million users have fueled startups with over $1.1 billion. This is no longer just an investment platform, but an investing revolution.And it gets better. They're inviting you to be a part of their journey. With just $500, you can join their live fundraising round and own shares of this revolutionary company.Visit https://www.startengine.com/offering/startengine5 and jump on board before their investment round wraps up.Disclosures:17b disclosureThis Reg A+ offering is made available through StarEngine Crowdfunding Inc. No broker-dealer or intermediary involved in offering. This investment is speculative, illiquid, and involves a high degree of risk, including the possible loss of your entire investment. For more information, please see the most recent Supplements, Offering Circular, and Risks Related to this Offering. The information provided in this marketing material is for illustrative purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. Past performance, including the success of certain individuals, is not indicative of future results. Investing in any market, including startups, involves risks, and there is no guarantee that similar opportunities will yield comparable returns. Number of Users is determined by counting user profiles with unique email addresses which are active and have been confirmed. Includes funds raised via Reg CF and Reg A+ combines through StartEngine's funding portal and broker-dealer, as well as StartEngine's OWN raise.

This week Holden and Jake "I came into this Kinkos erect" Young hop into their Titans as they blast their way through the complex and massive history behind Respawn Entertainment!

In today's episode, we're trying something different!   Usually, y'all know I have one guest and I ask them a whole bunch of questions.    BUT today, I have THREE guests. And I asked each of them to give me the advice they wish they could tell their 20-year-old self.   In today's episode, you'll hear from:   - Bing Gordon: Former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts  - Paul Orfalea: Founder of Kinkos… which sold for over $2.6 BILLION dollars!! - And Bob Metcalfe: Who invented the ethernet cable… which was the original internet.   ALL of these guys have two things in common: They're AT LEAST 70-years-old and they're all multi-millionaires… or billionaires!   Who better to get advice from in your 20s!? If you've ever wanted to learn about what 70 year-olds would tell their 20-year-old selves, you'll love this episode.   In this conversation, you'll enjoy 3 BIG things: - What Bing Gordon DIDN'T do in his 20s that would have made his life a whole lot easier - The advice Paul Orfalea's mom gave him when HE was in his 20s - And the ONE skill Bob Metcalfe wishes he learned sooner… that you can learn NOW.   Enjoy those 3 things… plus a bunch more ear nuggets along the way.   If today's episode inspires you to start your own business but you don't know where to start — join my Monthly1K course!! I just reopened it and you can join it now for just $10 bucks. Yep, it's not a subscription. You just buy it once and I walk you step by step through how to create a one thousand dollar per month business. Head over to OkDork.com/Monthly1K to sign up. And check out TidyCal, our scheduling tool. New Mutual Availability beta feature out now! ✉️ Signup for my weekly newsletter (I reply to emails): https://okdork.com/email-newsletter/  

Welcome back Awful listeners, this weeks episode is scary.... scary good. This week we sit down with comedian, actor, and horror movie reviewer Andy Rocco. This week we talk package delivery, school yard protective bullying, recycling, and Kinkos after dark! Enjoy!   Awful Service is a customer service based comedy podcast. Hosted by Minnesota based comics and Co-hosts Matt Dooyema and Joe Cocozzello . Featuring Rebecca Wilson. "Awful Theme Song" by Jeff Kantos and "Karen Theme Remix","Show Us Your Resume", "Gee Why Did It Fail" and "Awful Outro" by Mr Rogers and The Make Believe Friends Message us your stories ; Awfulservicepod@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @podservice. Facebook @AwfulServicepod. Instagram @awfulservicepod.

If you have heard that ADHD is the “entrepreneur's superpower” you might be more than a little confused. Let's face it, ADHD is a diagnosable neurobiological disorder that can create countless struggles in life. So, which is it: superpower or disability? In this episode, I will unpack some of the myths, misconceptions, and stereotypes regarding ADHA and entrepreneurship, share the three subtypes of ADHD and which one I see more often in successful female entrepreneurs, the need for support in business and life for those with ADHD, the importance of taking risks, developing resilience and leveraging hyperfocus and your zone of genius. I will also clarify the difference between having ADHD traits and having an ADHD diagnosis. "If you suspect that you have ADHD, you have experienced failure. And at the very least, you've had tons of experience with adapting to your circumstances, circumstances that were not designed for you."In this episode, you will learn the following:1. What is the connection between entrepreneurship and ADHD?2. What does it take to be successful as an entrepreneur with ADHD?3. How do entrepreneurs with ADHD leverage their strengths and neutralize their struggles?Mentioned in this episode:Johan Wiklund, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Syracuse University: http://bit.ly/3IKSpBZBook: Delivered From Distraction by Ned Hallowell, MD: https://bit.ly/3ZeisqvStrengths Finder Assessment - Significance theme: http://bit.ly/41uy77pWell-known male entrepreneurs with ADHDSir Richard Branson: http://bit.ly/3XWTf2WCEOs of Kinkos & Jet Blue: http://bit.ly/3SoVUS2Some of my interviews on this topic on other podcasts: ADHD & Business Ownership, an Entrepreneurial Case Study: https://bit.ly/3YeugJuHow ADHD Traits Affect the Small Business Owner: https://apple.co/3FsO44HThe Prevalence of ADHD in High-Achieving Women: http://bit.ly/3KpeirTConnect with me: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diannwingertcoaching/Website: https://www.diannwingertcoaching.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5qFHTPZTAxtYvVLyip3h0AInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachdiannwingert/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/diannwingertcoaching/Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here: https://the-driven-woman-entrep.captivate.fm/reviewChapter Summaries:[00:00:00]Not all entrepreneurs have ADHD, period. And not all people with ADHD become entrepreneurs. There are...

If you have heard that ADHD is the “entrepreneur's superpower” you might be more than a little confused. Let's face it, ADHD is a diagnosable neurobiological disorder that can create countless struggles in life. So, which is it: superpower or disability? In this episode, I will unpack some of the myths, misconceptions, and stereotypes regarding ADHA and entrepreneurship, share the three subtypes of ADHD and which one I see more often in successful female entrepreneurs, the need for support in business and life for those with ADHD, the importance of taking risks, developing resilience and leveraging hyperfocus and your zone of genius. I will also clarify the difference between having ADHD traits and having an ADHD diagnosis. "If you suspect that you have ADHD, you have experienced failure. And at the very least, you've had tons of experience with adapting to your circumstances, circumstances that were not designed for you."In this episode, you will learn the following:1. What is the connection between entrepreneurship and ADHD?2. What does it take to be successful as an entrepreneur with ADHD?3. How do entrepreneurs with ADHD leverage their strengths and neutralize their struggles?Mentioned in this episode:Johan Wiklund, Professor of Entrepreneurship, Syracuse University: http://bit.ly/3IKSpBZBook: Delivered From Distraction by Ned Hallowell, MD: https://bit.ly/3ZeisqvStrengths Finder Assessment - Significance theme: http://bit.ly/41uy77pWell-known male entrepreneurs with ADHDSir Richard Branson: http://bit.ly/3XWTf2WCEOs of Kinkos & Jet Blue: http://bit.ly/3SoVUS2Some of my interviews on this topic on other podcasts: ADHD & Business Ownership, an Entrepreneurial Case Study: https://bit.ly/3YeugJuHow ADHD Traits Affect the Small Business Owner: https://apple.co/3FsO44HThe Prevalence of ADHD in High-Achieving Women: http://bit.ly/3KpeirTConnect with me: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/diannwingertcoaching/Website: https://www.diannwingertcoaching.com/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5qFHTPZTAxtYvVLyip3h0AInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/coachdiannwingert/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/diannwingertcoaching/Loved this episode? Leave us a review and rating here: https://the-driven-woman-entrep.captivate.fm/reviewChapter Summaries:[00:00:00]Not all entrepreneurs have ADHD, period. And not all people with ADHD become entrepreneurs. There are...

This episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast is about determining when it is time, as a Founder, to bring in an outside CEO to run the company. We have a gentleman named Nick Wilkinson. Nick was a CEO that was brought into a company called Binary Tree that one of our members Steven Pivnik had founded, and he was trying to position for sale and upgrade the talent. Nick was the guy he identified and ended up bringing into the company. Nick's Background Originally from the UK. After graduation from university, Nick spent the first 10 years of his career in the British Royal Air Force. After the Air Force, he joined what was then a pretty small company in the UK called Computer Sciences Corporation, CSC, which Nick subsequently spent the next 20, almost 25 years rising through the ranks of CSC from a consultant all the way through for various account management roles to ending up as a direct report to the CEO in, at that time was like a hundred thousand people company with 16 billion in revenue. With a great career in the UK. he was lucky enough to do some interesting jobs, which brought him to the States. He also lived in Australia for a few years and really assimilated a huge amount of knowledge and expertise on how to run large-scale organizations. Back in the early 2010s he was the CEO of a private equity-backed company backed by Bear Capital which was also in the IT services area. And that company and Steven's company oftentimes coexisted with clients. They didn't do the same thing, but they did, provided complimentary services.  Here is more of the conversation between Jim Schleckser, CEO of The CEO Project, and Nick Wilkinson. What was the size of the company, the training company, and the IT space prior to coming to Binary Tree? The private equity company was mid-market. It was of comparable size to Binary Tree. I made a decision when I left the large corporate world that I didn't want to go and do the same thing again, I wanted a change. I wanted to have more direct visibility of what I was doing and how it affected the business. I wanted to be a CEO. And I decided that I wanted to try that in a different financial structure, a different capital structure. And that's what led me into the private equity world. An important component of being able to step in as a CEO for a Founder is rolling your sleeves up and not needing somebody to do everything for you. In the founder-owned company, there aren't a whole host of staffers and people to do things for you.  A lot of entrepreneurs get dazzled by the resume. They see your big career and think, this guy's brilliant, but then they bring that individual in, and they can't do the big to small translation. You obviously made the transition successfully, but what would you characterize as the differences? Most people can't make that transition. You did. What were the differences and why were you able to do it where maybe others might not be able to? A big part of it is personality. And I'm trying to answer the question without blowing smoke in my own direction. You've got to be reasonably self-effacing and modest, the servant leadership things. I know what it felt like to be at this level, and then a mid-manager and the senior manager and management. I had walked a mile in other people's shoes, and I was always willing to empathize with them and try and see things from their perspective. I've always been someone who's espoused lifelong learning. In addition, the founder must have a certain willingness to change and to listen, but at the same time a clear sense of what it needed to be successful in his or her company. That chemistry is important. If I was trying to figure out if somebody had the right profile or didn't, what would you recommend as the two or three questions to figure out if they've got the profile with you? If you were faced with a new opportunity with a big customer because a CEO must be capable of going out and meeting with customers, what do you do? How do you approach that? Shortly after I arrived at Binary Tree, we traveled out to the middle of nowhere and gave the pitch. We didn't win the business, but the fact that I was willing to be the one who made the deck, I went to Kinkos to get it photocopied. I helped prepare the guy to give the pitch and everybody thought, if this guy isn't here just to tell us what to do, he's willing to do it himself. So, a question that gets a potential CEO to show that they would do it themselves, that they would be there in the trenches with people as opposed to telling them from back at HQ. That would be a good way to frame something How do you follow the legacy of the Founder and establish credibility? How do you establish a relationship with the team? Moving into a CEO role in a new company, not a company that you've been in for some time, promoted into, you must have a balance between the drive to implement the things that got you the job, with the need to really learn about the business, to respect the fact that your knowledge of it is superficial when you've been outside it. You must learn how it actually performs. Where's the value really created? Who are the heroes? Where are the tensions? Where are the hidden gems? How it really works. So, it's that balance between listening and doing, which is always the case for a CEO, but extremely important in those first 60, or 90 days. If you move too quickly, then the organizational will or the body will reject the organ transplant as one of my advisors once said to me but if you move too slowly, you've missed your opportunity, and your authority diminished. And people wonder, why did we make the change then? So, you must have a plan. And revisit the plan with the founder, hers, or his DNAs in the company, and who better person to give you feedback on whether well, that would work, but I wouldn't try that you need to keep that relationship going. It's really that balance between listening and doing that's essential.  How much of your original plans survived? Most things that I expected that we would do, we did. Did we do them in six months? No. One of the things that you must learn in smaller companies is that you must take smaller steps. The organization is not robust enough to do dramatic change. There are capital constraints. You must temper your ambitions with the, with the resources that you can muster. For more about the board, sacred cows, the difference between working with PE firms and Founder owned companies, and other lessons learned, listen to the full episode of The Lazy CEO Podcast. About our Guest - Nick Wilkinson After my initial period of military service in the Royal Air Force, I have enjoyed a successful career across a wide spectrum of the IT software and services industry: a proven CEO in private equity and founder-owned companies and extensive, global multi-functional leadership experience in a publicly traded corporation. I have also established myself in the entertainment industry as an author, screenwriter, and producer. In all my activities, I relish transformational challenges and managing through the lifecycle of devising strategy, establishing a vision and purpose, building, motivating, and sustaining an outstanding team, and executing for results. I cultivate win-win relationships with customers, partners, and colleagues. And, perhaps most importantly, I bring optimism and a healthy sense of humor and perspective to every situation.

Monica is joined by comedian and motivational speaker Mike Cotayo who comes prepared with four fantastically bad ideas. A sleep app that wakes you up when you are doing good! Sponsor and ex-husband who needs to get it together. Rebranding kinko's to kinky's… you'll have to see where that goes. Follow Mike and review and rate this show. Use code Monica15 at blkcrkcbd.com for 15% off great CBD products.

We're back, but less social; no death robots; Twitter's downward spiral; sure, this kills primates but let's trial Neuralink on people; NFTs decline, go to museums; collateral FTX damage; Meta fined for data scraping; DoorDash, Deliveroo profitability problems; I am Groot's Holiday; Mickey Mouse's evolution; Wednesday; BritPop; Knives Out; Memory; the White Lotus; Neal Brennan; Dropbox changes; Spotify festival posters; AI gets... weird & creepy; Apple Karaoke; FTC wants to stop Microsoft's acquisition of Activision; the Tower; Dennis E. Taylor; Jesus Jones & the cesspool of the music industry; Nine Nasty Words; the Muppets & adult Star Wars; Radioshack, Kinkos & Egghead; Goblin mode!Sponsors:Kolide - Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet. Learn more here.Hover - Go to Hover now and grab your very own domain or a few of them at hover.com/gog and get 10% off your first purchase.Show notes at https://gog.show/581/FOLLOW UPSan Francisco approves police petition to use robots as a 'deadly force option'San Francisco lawmakers vote to ban killer robots in drastic U-turnWho Said It: Kanye or Hitler?IN THE NEWSChinese Bots Inundate Twitter With Pornographic Spam Amid COVID ProtestsTwitter has stopped enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policyTwitter data leak exposes over 5.4 million accountsTwitter's Janitors Are on Strike at Its San Francisco HeadquartersNeuralink CEO Elon Musk expects human trials within six monthsNFTs, on the Decline Elsewhere, Are Embraced by Some MuseumsCrypto lender BlockFi files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid FTX falloutMeta fined €265 million over Facebook data scraping in the EUDoorDash is laying off around 1,250 corporate employees‘Purely economic': Deliveroo Australia's CEO on why management pulled the pinMEDIA CANDYThe PeripheralThe Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday SpecialMickey: The Story of a MouseWednesdayThis is Pop: Hail Britpop!Knives OutGlass Onion: A Knives Out MysteryMemoryThe White LotusNeal Brennan - BlocksWhat The Cameras Don't Show You On Guy's Grocery GamesAPPS & DOODADSDropbox support for macOS FAQs20-year-old California student creates viral Spotify festival poster appOpenAI's New Chatbot Will Tell You How to Shoplift And Make ExplosivesUPDATED: It's way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW imagesPrisma Labs, maker of Lensa AI, says it is working to prevent accidental generation of nudesMeet Unstable Diffusion, the group trying to monetize AI porn generatorsUnstable DiffusionAdobe Stock begins selling AI-generated artworkApple abandons controversial plan to check iOS devices and iCloud photos for child abuse imageryApple Music's Latest Party Trick? Karaoke!F.T.C. Sues to Block Microsoft's $69 Billion Acquisition of ActivisionThe Tower - Idle Tower DefenseAT THE LIBRARYOutland by Dennis E. TaylorDeath Threats From an 8 Year Old - The Story of Jesus Jones by Mike EdwardsThe Birth and Impact of Britpop: Mis-Shapes, Scenesters and Insatiable Ones by Paul LairdNine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever‘Goblin mode' chosen as Oxford word of the year for 2022Critical MassSECURITY HAH!The CyberWireDave BittnerHacking HumansCaveatControl LoopThe Muppets Christmas Carol Extended Cut Coming to Disney+Video press kit for Star Tours when it launched, showing that Anthony Daniels is a team player.Star Wars w/ Dan Zehr | I Don't Know About That with Jim Jefferies #131RadioShackComputer Repair Technicians Are Stealing Your DataThinking about taking your computer to the repair shop? Be very afraidTikTok ‘Invisible Body' challenge exploited to push malwareLastPass reveals another security breachGPT-2 Output Detector DemoCLOSING SHOUT-OUTSFarewell to Christine McVie, who gave us music for all timeSuper Steve's HolidaySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What I learned from reading Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea.Follow Invest Like The Best in your favorite podcast player hereTwo episodes I recommend: Paul Orfalea - It's About the Money episode 299David Senra - Passion & Pain episode 292 [5:23] I've never met a more circular, out-of-the-box thinker. It's often exhausting trying to keep up with him.[6:21] I graduated from high school eighth from the bottom of my class of 1,200. Frankly, I still have no idea how those seven kids managed to do worse than I did.[9:29] I also have no mechanical ability to speak of. There isn't a machine at Kinko's I can operate. I could barely run the first copier we leased back in 1970. It didn't matter. All I knew was that was I could sell what came out of it.[11:24] Building an entirely new sort of business from a single Xerox copy machine gave me the life the world seemed determined to deny me when I was younger.[14:04] The A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.[24:02] I learned to turn a lot of busywork over to other people. That's an important skill. If you don't develop it, you'll be so busy, busy, busy that you can't get a free hour, not to mention a free week or month, to sit back and think creatively about where you want to be heading and how you are going to get there.[25:07] There's no better way to stay "on" your business than to think creatively and constantly about your marketing: how you are marketing, who you are marketing to, and, always, how you could be doing a better job at it. You'd be amazed what kind of business you can generate by a seemingly simple thing like handing out flyers.[27:18] The phone rang. It was one of our store managers calling to ask me how to handle a bounced check. I held the receiver away from my face and looked at it, flabbergasted. If every store manager needed my help to deal with a bounced check, then we really had problems.[40:55] I never walked in the back door used by coworkers. I walked in the front door so I could see things from the customer's perspective.[49:06] You had to remember he'd been picking up the best ideas from all around the country.[55:14] I believe in getting out of as much work as I possibly can.[55:45] By now, you'd have to be as bad a reader as I am not to figure out that I have a dark side. You rarely hear people talk about their dark sides, especially business leaders, which is a shame because successful businesses aren't usually started by laid-back personalities. I don't hide the fact that I have a problem with anger.[1:04:37] I'll give you an example of a corporate view of money. We used to sell passport photos at Kinko's and we advertised the service in the local Yellow Pages. It would cost us 75 cents to make a passport photo. I calculated that price jumped by $1 to $1.75 when you added in the cost of the Yellow Pages ads. We'd sell those photos for $13 a piece. You think this is a nice business? Shortly after we sold a controlling stake in Kinko's, the new budget people came in and, to make their numbers, they got rid of the Yellow Pages ads. They saw it as an advertising expense and didn't take into account how it affected the rest of our business. I used to go to the office and think, "Are they deliberately trying to be idiots?" These straight-A types drove me nuts. Then, like a self-fulfilling prophecy, we abandoned our passport business. That is corporate dyslexia. There is a lot of corporate dyslexia going on out there.

What I learned from reading What I Learned Before I Sold to Warren Buffett: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Developing a Highly Successful Company by Barnett Helzberg Jr.This episode is brought to you by: Tiny: The easiest way to sell your business. Quick and straightforward exits for Founders. Capital: Banking built for Founders. Raise, hold, spend, and send—all in one place. Tegus is a search engine for business knowledge that's used by Founders, investors, and executives. Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily (my new daily podcast)[5:00]  Then, right there on the sidewalk I told one of the most astute businessmen in America why he ought to consider buying our family's 79-year-old jewelry business."I believe that our company matches your criteria for investment, I said. To which he replied, simply, "Send me the information. It will be confidential.”My conversation with Buffett lasted no more than half a minute.[8:00] My dream buyer for the family business all along was Warren Buffet.[11:00] "This can be the fastest deal in history," Buffett said."But what about due diligence?" I asked, surprised at how fast the negotiations were moving.Most suitors demand to see every scrap of paper you've ever generated and to interview every top manager.That wasn't Buffett's way. "I can smell these things, Buffett said. "This one smells good.”[12:00] First A Dream by Jim Clayton. (Founders #91)[13:00] Buffett on his management technique: “Managers run their own shows.They don't have to report to central management. When we get somebody who is a .400 hitter we don't start telling them how to swing.”[14:00] I was always taught that many, many people were out there developing ideas I could use. I have found that to be true throughout my life. These thoughts and ideas have all been borrowed or stolen from many wise people.Think of the world as your garden of marvelous people and ideas with unlimited picking rights for you.[17:00] Cable Cowboy: John Malone and the Rise of the Modern Cable Business by Mark Robichaux. (Founders #268)[23:00] Despite missteps, entrepreneurs are a special breed who do not give up on the larger goals.[24:00] It's not hard to express the quality we're looking for in metaphors. The best is probably a running back. A good running back is not merely determined, but flexible as well. They want to get downfield, but they adapt their plans on the fly. — Relentlessly Resourceful by Paul Graham[25:00] Entrepreneurs are driven to succeed. They possess an almost naive belief that nothing can stand in their way, they are mentally deaf to those who belittle their chances, they love to compete, and they have the skills of broken field runners who take the bumps and bruises along the way, change course when necessary, and stay focused on the goal.If this is not you, don't try to fool yourself. It's not worth it.Thinking you can start your own business or wanting to be your own boss, just because you hate your job, when you really have no desire or stamina to go it on your own, is courting disaster. Where there is no real will, there is no way.Some people are more  enamored by the concept than the reality. They would rather contemplate the beauty of the mountain from the base.The entrepreneur wants to climb the mountain first, briefly appreciate the gorgeous vistas from the summit, and then find the next mountain. If you possess this obsession of seeing your own creative notions succeed and are willing to pay the price, then you have no choice but to pursue the life of an entrepreneur.[29:00] He taught us to concern ourselves only with those things over which we have control.I thought he was unique in this until I realized this is one of the key common traits of highly successful people.Those folks are never victims; they take what comes and handle the situation. The rest is a waste of time.[30:00] Upgrade the herd annually: "You make more money closing bad stores than opening new ones.”His philosophy made sense. We decided we would rather spend time and effort on a $4.5 million store that could ultimately achieve annual sales of $6 million than on a lower-volume store with less potential.[32:00] Focus is your lever to success.Do not underestimate the incredible amount of mental discipline it takes to focus yourself and your teammates. Wonderful alternatives and seductive opportunities abound and temptations to go in multiple directions are unlimited.Commit yourself to be the best, define what that means, and focus on the head of that pin like no one in your industry.[32:00] Estee Lauder was a master at doing things don't scale. — Estée Lauder: A Success Storyby Estée Lauder. (Founders #217)[33:00] To be successful, have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart. —Thomas Watson The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson Sr. and The Making of IBM by Kevin Maney (Founders #87)[38:00] Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet. —African Proverb[40:00] Some of our partners created an inhospitable climate for customers. Some posted negative signs.At one store a manager hung a sign in red warning customers that they would be charged a steep fee if they bounced a  check. It said, "The bank doesn't make copies and we don't cash checks." That really got me boiling.I jumped up on the counter and ripped it down as customers and coworkers looked on, amazed. That may sound extreme, but I needed to make the point in a memorable way. I didn't want signs like that staring our customers in the face.I told our coworkers that the occasional hit we took for a bounced check cost far less than what we lost-and couldn't quantify-by creating a subtly hostile atmosphere. —Copy This!: How I turned Dyslexia, ADHD, and 100 square feet into a company called Kinkos by Paul Orfalea.[42:00] Nearly any action or communication means far more when done urgently.Trust only movement.[42:00] One person with a belief is equal to a force of ninety-nine who have only interests. —John Stuart Mill[43:00] None of this works if you can't trust your own judgement.[46:00] This reservoir of knowledge and human experience creates tremendous opportunities and advantages for you as an entrepreneur. You are heir to the discoveries of many entrepreneurs who skinned their shins trying something new. It is likely other  entrepreneurs before you have experienced the same challenges and problems, and found ways to surmount them.[47:00] You have the experiences of thousands of experts and mentors at your fingertips.[47:00] The incredible, wonderful, and unavoidable truth is that seeking the help of others can put you light years ahead of other people who beat their heads against the wall trying to reinvent the wheel[48:00] I've never found anybody that didn't want to help me if I asked them for help. I called up Bill Hewlett when I was 12 years old. He answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to build a frequency counter. I asked if he had any spare parts I could have. He laughed. He gave me the parts. And he gave me a summer job at HP working on the assembly line putting together frequency counters. I have never found anyone who said no, or hung up the phone. I just ask. Most people never pick up the phone and call. And that is what separates the people who do things, versus the people who just dream about them. You have to act. —Steve Jobs[53:00] "Max kept repeating, 'As hire As. Bs hire Cs. So the first B you hire takes the whole company down." — The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni.[54:00] “The greatest thing you can do for your competition—hiring poorly.” —Bill Gates[59:00] I wish that I had known sooner that if you miss a child's play or performance or sporting event, you will have forgotten a year later the work emergency that caused you to miss it. But the child won't have forgotten that you weren't there.—I use Readwise to organize and remember everything I read. You can try Readwise for 60 days for free https://readwise.io/founders/—Subscribe to listen to Founders Daily—“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

My guest today is Paul Orfalea. Paul founded Kinkos, the popular copy chain, in 1970. He started with a single photocopy shop in California and grew the business into a $2 billion multinational operation over the course of his 30 years in charge. Paul is a non-traditional leader in the best sense and we discuss his philosophy of business building, from why your subordinates should frustrate you, why you shouldn't love your business and tips he learned on hiring well. Please enjoy this conversation with Paul Orfalea.    Founders podcast on Paul Orfalea.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is brought to you by Tegus. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard-to-get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC, and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single, modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. I've been so impressed by the platform that my firm, Positive Sum, recently made an investment in Tegus. We did so because we feel that Tegus will be the gold standard platform for investing research for decades to come. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co/patrick.    -----   Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. Brex is the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high-limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt, and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best.   -----   Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.    Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.   Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus   Show Notes [00:02:58] - [First question] - What it was like to be a very bad student in highschool [00:04:22] - When he first realized he was unemployable [00:05:02] - The origin story of the very first Kinko's [00:06:13] - What the ideal progression of an entrepreneur is in his mind  [00:06:57] - Recognizing real customer problems and what he enjoys most about sales [00:07:53] - Finding what has worked well in each Kinko's and coaching managers [00:08:54] - Something he found that a manager was doing that blew him away [00:10:22] - Getting messages from his brain to everyone else in the Kinko's network  [00:11:45] - The difference of working on and not in the business [00:13:22] - What he got better at when it came to managing people  [00:13:57] - Why a good salesperson will sell you broke   [00:14:41] - Disagreeableness as a positive characteristic for people in business [00:15:08] - Whether or not candor is different from disagreeableness [00:15:36] - Why he teaches, what he teaches, and his teaching style [00:18:31] - Explaining the Federal Reserve in two minutes   [00:19:47] - What students most commonly want from him   [00:20:06] - Whether or not making yourself inaccessible as a leader is good for promoting a self-starter attitude amongst team members  [00:21:39] - The story about tearing down a sign that was antagonistic to a customer [00:21:58] - The role of anger in his career and something he's worked on over time [00:22:31] - Where Kinko's falls on the spectrum of bad to great businesses [00:24:09] - Characteristics he'd look for in founders to back a business early [00:25:08] - Qualities of a business he'd cultivate more or less if he could start over [00:26:18] - Lessons learned about using the word employee [00:26:42] - His strategy for where to go next once he had his original concept [00:27:21] - The most clever marketing strategy he ever deployed or designed [00:27:45] - Learning to spread the glory instead of the money   [00:28:30] - The state of entrepreneurship today compared to when he started  [00:29:50] - How he instilled frugality and the saving mentality in the business  [00:30:42] - What motivated him across his career [00:31:35] - Why being in it for the money seems odd in today's lens [00:32:34] - Who he most admired or most admires today  [00:32:51] - Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman [00:33:08] - Preserving the alignment of integrity and action  [00:33:42] - What it felt like to sell a business he'd worked so hard on  [00:34:57] - How good he is naturally with numbers and math being dyslexic  [00:37:17] - Defining success as having your adult children want to hang out with you and what stood out about his parents to him  [00:38:05] - His parents' impression of him while he was building Kinko's  [00:38:34] - What has his interest and keeps his interest most  [00:39:56] - The most interesting person he's ever worked with at Kinko's [00:40:48] - What he would have done differently if he started from scratch [00:41:24] - Something that is most underappreciated about the United States  [00:43:00] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him  [00:43:57] - A big lesson he's earned in a deeper way that he wishes he could share with others

On today’s episode, the guys started off with a BANG! Is Reggie Miller a legitimate HOF’er? Phantom says no and someone may disagree! Who’s your go to broadcaster for the NBA? Jeff or Stan VanGundy? SVG and his Kinkos story! CWebb as a broadcaster. Bringin back, “Protect the Pumpkin!” Before Twitter just “Red-en someone’s nose […]

Listen to other people's stories. Analyze them. What resonates? What doesn't? What is the purpose? In this episode of Sales Reinvented, Cathy Goodwin shares why you can't just have a handful of useless stories that you deploy without thought. Each story must be carefully crafted to reach your audience and is crucial in the sales process. Learn how Cathy creates purposeful stories in this episode!  Outline of This Episode [0:46] Why storytelling is an important skill to possess [2:26] Learn what type of story to tell at the right time [4:20] The role of the customer's backstory [9:43] Learn from listening to others' stories [11:54] Top 3 storytelling dos and don'ts [15:08] Why purposeful storytelling is key The importance of purposeful storytelling Storytelling has become the most important tool in the marketing arsenal—especially in copywriting and content creation. Storytelling allows you to do things you can't do any other way. Telling a story helps illustrate points. It helps you share your expertise without sounding boastful. You can show a lot about what you do and who you are by telling a carefully chosen story.  You can also explain a complex concept. Many businesses offer opportunities to clients that didn't exist five years ago. Cathy knew someone who developed an app to help people find spaces to hold events. How do you explain that? How do you show why people might need the app? They shared why they created it: the founder needed somewhere to host a birthday party. Simple, yet effective. Learn what type of story to tell at the right time Everyone tells stories. Cathy says to think about meeting a friend for coffee or a beer. When you're catching up with each other, you tell stories. What you have to learn is what type of story to tell and when to tell it. A business story isn't the same as a personal story. You have to identify a story that has a purpose. You also have to learn the different kinds of business stories. Some stories explain. Some stories build relationships. Some demonstrate expertise. You need to know when to tell each kind of story. The role of the customer's backstory Suppose you're in a restaurant. You see the server walk by with a good main course. You didn't see it on the menu but now that you've seen it, you want it. Cathy firmly believes that's what a story that sells should be like. You want to create a dream for the reader. You take them into the dream and share the details. Encourage them to enter the scene with you. Give them an idea of what the outcome of working with you might look like. Then, you need to get the audience to say, “I want that.” How do you accomplish this? It's important to know the customer's backstory. Cathy believes there are three parts to a customer's backstory: The problem itself: If you run a printing service, why do people come to you? Maybe they need flyers printed by next week and they're complicated to print. It's a complex job, so they come to you.  Why can't they do it themselves? Why can't they just go to a Kinkos or a FedEx? Why do they need help? What is their baggage? How many times have they been to other print shops? Have they had good experiences—or bad experiences? Maybe their order was late, misprinted, or people were rude to them. They bring baggage to the encounter with you. This is true for any relationship.  When you know these things, you know how to begin to craft and tell a story. What else do you need to know? Listen to learn more!  Why purposeful storytelling is key Cathy attended a networking event in Seattle. Everyone was sharing what they did for work. But one woman stood out. She said, “I'm going to tell you about one of my clients. She didn't have any savings, couldn't put money aside, and had a bad credit score—but she wanted to buy a house. So we worked together for a few years. Last week, this woman closed on her very first house.”  Everyone at the event found a reason to get that woman's card. They all knew someone in a similar situation who she needed to talk to. She communicated what she did quickly and vividly through the use of a purposeful story. She chose the perfect story for a networking event. If you can do that for your prospects, you'll connect on a deeper level—which can ultimately lead to sales.  Resources & People Mentioned Building a StoryBrand by Donald Miller Cathy's book: Grow Your Business One Story At A Time Cathy's podcast: Strategic Storytelling Connect with Cathy Goodwin Connect on LinkedIn Follow on Twitter Cathy's website  Connect With Paul Watts  LinkedIn Twitter  Subscribe to SALES REINVENTED

  MORGANA RAE is an international bestselling author, an award-winning entrepreneur, and a pioneer in personal development for 27 years, putting LOVE first to build wealth and impact. A favorite guest on television, radio and print, Morgana has guided thousands of entrepreneurs, innovators, healers and humanitarians to heal the rift between heart, spirit, and money… to save the world as only they can. (You can find longer bios at www.morganaraemedia.com)   www.MorganaRae.com Unknown Speaker 0:00 Your journey has been an interesting one up to hear you've questioned so much more than those around you. You've even questioned yourself as to how you could have grown into these thoughts. Am I crazy? When did I begin to think differently? Why do people intend Brandon Handley 0:12 to one? Hey, their Spiritual Dope What's up I got a special guest on for you today it is Morgana Rae she is a 20 time international number one best selling author and mentor coach, as he's regarded to be the world's number one authority on relationship with money. Her groundbreaking approach to love centered wealth building has featured her on the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo Finance, all the major television networks coast to coast radio and hundreds more. We're gonna fans call her the money goddess, because of the many documented stories of clients manifesting unexpected income of hundreds 1000s 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s even over a million dollars, within hours of changing their relationship with money, a pioneer in personal development for over 27 years, we're gonna write speakers and coaches from a desire to empower idealistic entrepreneurs, artists, healers, and humanitarians to have a big impact in the world and the heal the rift between heart, spirit and money. You know, so thank you so much for being on today. It's funny, because, you know, Wall Street Journal is great, right? Yahoo Finance all the major telecom and the one that of course, gets me I'm like coast to coast. What? So, so awesome to have you on here today. Morgana Rae 1:36 Thank you so much. Yeah, coast to coast was fun. And you get a lot of time, and it's in the middle of the night. So my husband's what was listening from home, because I have to do it on the landline and we don't have any landlines at home. And he says you are breathing really heavily during that interview, because I was just pacing the whole time to keep my energy up. But it was it was a great experience. It's I mean, Toshinori it's amazing. Brandon Handley 2:07 So right, how is this, you know, legends in the field, and that you've been with quite a few other legends as well. But that's the one that that's the one that jumped out at me and was super excited about that. So I usually like to start this off, we're going on with the whole idea that you and I, we are conduits for Source Energy, right? And there's somebody listening on the other end of this podcast today that needs a message that can only be delivered through you through source energy to them. What does that message today Morgana Rae 2:40 the people that I speak to that I'm speaking to right now, like, I'm not interested in the sociopaths, so we're going to leave them out of the conversation. But spiritual people, the do gooders of the world, the artists, the innovators, the healers, the humanitarians, these are the people who have the most painful relationship with money. By the way, you know, very rich people have pain too. And I've coached on the total extreme ends. But I'm speaking really here to the spiritual do gooders who really just want to help. And that is such a different mindset and relationship with money than say, the entrepreneur who is happy as a clam, to make lots of money harming people. I was in a mastermind years ago real mix of people, but I felt very out of place. Because one of the speakers was going on and on about how owning shell companies allowed him to sell potentially defective helmets and potentially defective guns. But if he got sued, he was protected because he owned a shell company. And that's not what I want to bring into the world. That's not what I support. I felt really, really alienated by that. So that's that, oh, do this make money? Yeah, that's an equation, but that hurts. That hurts. For those of us who care and honestly, that mindset is threatening the very existence of human life, and a lot more on planet Earth, the whole like Exxon, hiding all its data about climate change. That by the way, is also not a healthy relationship with money if you are so scared of not making a certain number milestone that you're willing to risk life on earth that is not a place of abundance. So what I want and you You know, I tend to just channel as I speak, and I never ever, like script or plan what I'm going to say, but I do know what I want to teach. And I want to today teach how to get love, and your highest values and your most divine self, and money playing on the same team as partners, not adversaries. So that's, that's what I want to focus on. Brandon Handley 5:34 Now, I love that. And you're right. It's so it's funny. We've gotten to a point now, I think, and you know, the money exchange being currency exchange being an energy exchange, where people can't even say the word money, right? Like I, I'm literally, what I'm doing today is working for money, bless you. And bless you. I think the third time is like you get a wish. Granted, it's the the CIO, is interesting for a minute, because people came to say, you know, I want to work for money says like, oh, well, you know, we're gonna, there's going to be an energy exchange, meaning there's going to be money exchanged, but like, not being comfortable enough to just say, I charge $5. Now, right? And so being able to get that to the point where you say, money is spiritual, and it's not necessarily just a material thing. So I sounds like that's kind of what we get to, or at least get them all on the same plane if it what's your approach there? Morgana Rae 6:39 Well, money, I think really highlights or magnifies what's already there. And where I started kind of my origin story on this path of working with money as a pain door to spiritual growth and personal development, and also clients making a lot of money is that I had such shame and guilt about charging to help people, I really felt like I was taking their money and that was harming them. And that was a bad thing when I really was here to help. And lo and behold, I became really, really good at not making money like, like Olympic medal caliber ability to repel money from people who wanted to hire me. And at my lowest point, I was living in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world, a million dollars will buy you a teardown. And I was making $100 a month with half a dozen coaching certifications, a bunch of celebrity clients, mountains of testimonials really, really dialed in marketing and the website and the brochure and the business cards and the tagline and l o ads, and the vision boards and the affirmations, and the local la healers who kind of wave their hands and change your money, DNA and all of it. None of it worked for me. None of it worked for me. I had to get to the secret reason that I was repelling money what was inside of me that was pushing it away intentionally, completely unconsciously. Consciously, I was going to those awful networking meetings and and getting more and more certifications and just taking more and more classes on sales and this and that. And I took a class on overcoming sales objections and I'm like a super good students. So seven people let me get my fingers right seven people in a row. I overcame their objections, which means that they said I can't afford it, or I don't have time. But I really want to there are these like words that you say and I overcame their objections, and I kid you not. Those same seven people did not show up and did not pay. And I sitting here now, I actually don't believe in overcoming people's objections. So I believe in letting people make a decision for themselves. They know what is right for them better than I you know, it's not my decision to make what they can afford and what they can't afford. And I don't like manipulating people I actually tried to talk people out of hiring me and see if they jump over that and convince me then we have a client but that's, that's today. So back there. I hit a really just deep moment of despair. I you know, when I got that seven to no show, that was when I completely ran out of hope. Like I was doing all the metaphysical stuff. I was doing all the practical stuff, and I've been doing it for a long time. And I want to make a point here that if you ever find yourself doing everything you're supposed to be doing, taking everybody's classes real Applying it doing everything you're told to do, and do this. And you do this nears, you keep doing everything you're supposed to be doing and you aren't getting the results that you desire and deserve. It is my opinion based on my own experience and coaching 1000s of clients that you are probably unconsciously protecting us yourself from what you're pursuing. And you're not crazy, you're not a failure, when we dig deep, you will find that you have really, really good reasons, good solid reasons to protect yourself. And we need to make what you want safe. It has to be safe. And it has to align with your values or you will always be like running into a brick wall. And just driving yourself crazy. But it's amazing how quickly and dramatically things change. When what you want become safe. By the way, I just, you know, listening to like, share my bio is always you know, kind of a meta experience to hear somebody, you know, describe you and I had a client a week ago, Friday call me up who went on my very intense spiritual tiny, one week money goddess retreat that I keep to like three to six, sometimes eight women, so that I can coach everybody individually really deeply. And I coached her in September. And she called me a week and a half ago to tell me that she made $1.2 million between September and Brandon Handley 11:44 that's women only, like that's how the guys can jump in. Yeah, Morgana Rae 11:47 everything else I do has guys, that's just the one thing. But so that was like between the end of September and mid February. So I'm not even going to count how many months I think it's like it's not many, a couple million dollars, not a lot. And by and she is a spiritual teacher. So it can be Hi, Mike, I have like a raw food coach multi seven figures, like I get really weird, brilliant people. Even even the like, even the sciency ones, the big the big data lady is also into magic. And there's a data analyst in Australia who talks to dead people. So that's that that's my crowd. Okay, so I'm in this really dark, horrible place, just I don't even want to live anymore because it feel and I'm rushing through this really quickly because I want to get to content and teaching. But when you know what you're here to do, finally, right, and you have this gift, especially if you're a healer or an artist, and you have this gift that has to come out. And you can't make a living at it. It feels like you're being rejected by the universe itself. And it feels cruel, because you're doing everything you were told to do, and you aren't getting it and it feels sadistic and mean, and it's like I don't even want to play. And that's where I was. And I'm speaking to any of you who know what that's like, now, Pastor center? Brandon Handley 13:21 I'll tell you no, it's like, right. I mean, it's, you know, think my first round of coaching was like that. I'm like, wow, you know, I've got all the right things I'm doing. I'm doing all the right things, saying all the right things, Jones the right places and all this stuff, like, you know, and then you know, I guess it gets to a point where definitely a gift has to come out. And like you're saying like, well, universe is rejecting I know, I know, at that point, like I'm doing something wrong, if it doesn't feel like it's an alignment. And you know, the values aren't aligned, and you keep throwing up against the same thing. So what hasn't changed? Morgana Rae 13:57 Yeah, there really wasn't anything left to change in my doing. And so I'm in this place where I can't afford anything. But I still have a coach can't afford rent, but I still have a coach, thank goodness. Because that's what changed my life. Very shortly after hitting this really horrible place, I think it was this the next day, because we're talking now a couple decades ago and every decade it gets a little fuzzier. I had a session with my coach, great guy who had been making suggestions really, really wonderful coach and I would do everything and nothing was shifting and we were like, didn't know why. And that day when I was in such a helpless, sad, angry, despairing place that inspired something in him to come out that just told total game changer. And he asked me this really weird question. He asked me if your money was a person who would your money be. And instantly, I saw exactly who my money was being. And it was this big, scary, dirty, violent biker dude who terrified me. Like, by the way, I always feel like I have to apologize to bikers at this moment. It's not you. It's this this one. Like, stole that the long sideburns and you know, the wife beater shirt and the tattoos, but there was something about him that was just really mean and dangerous that I couldn't be with. And I instantly saw myself at like a live event. So I could have my eye on him every moment hyper vigilant to create maximum distance between the two of us. And that was my lightbulb moment. Oh, my God, that's what I was doing. I was creating distance between money and myself as if money was going to kill me. Completely unconsciously. Because daily, I was taking all the actions I was supposed to take. A friend of mine says it's not your fault. It's your responsibility. Which is awesome. So there's no blame here. But because this relationship is your responsibility, you have the ability to respond and change it. Yay. So it was so clear to me in this moment that this biker, there was no way that I could have money in my life. If it was this guy, it just wasn't going to work. So I had to get rid of the biker, I had to get rid of what I now call the Money Monster. Which, by the way, has nothing to do with money. Like we can start with financial crimes and the experiences scarcity are people who exploit and do terrible things in the name of money or when you you know we can we can start with your own financial traumas are of your family or ancestors, we can start there. But that's not that's, that's just the door. That's just the beginning. What the reason money is such a painful subject, it's so taboo, like we can talk about sex, but we can't really talk about money and numbers. And there's so much shame and fear around it is because money represents really the deepest, deepest pains and challenges and vulnerabilities of being human. It represents love, are we loved? Does the universe love me? Am I wanted value am I valued? What is valued? What are my values? Its value? And bottom line safety? Like? Do I even get to exist? Am I treated like a human being can I eat? Can I get medical care? Do I have a right to exist? Is the world a safe loving place that values may or not, that is exactly what money represents. And so that's where you want to dig up the root cause of this Money Monster. So I have I didn't know that at the time, I had to kind of figure it out and reverse engineer it. So I could do this for other people later. I just happened to be in that horrible moment of experience, which made it very easy. So Brandon Handley 18:34 yeah, I mean, you are in the ultimate survival mode, right? You're in the ultimate survival mode or your quote unquote, like rock bottom. And, you know, I always talk about the difference between, you know, the people that are at the rock bottom, they have nothing left to lose, or the guy won't go try this other thing, right? It's like the Janis Joplin song, nothing left to lose, right? And then you've got two healthy normals, right? Which are the people that that are that are there, okay, where they're at, but they're not okay, right. They don't want they don't want to change it. But like, it's sometimes it's easier to lose everything so that you can go for exactly what you want. Morgana Rae 19:10 Well, I believe and I call my process alchemy, like, you know, so, law of attraction, fans take a deep and cleansing breath. You'll get to have your positive thinking in a little while, but right now, it's not going to help you. It'll keep you stuck. So what we want to create as maximum polarity alchemy is the transmutation of lead, lead in human experience into gold. And the first thing we have to do is separate them completely and focus only on the lead and it's like a slingshot and it creates a tension that catapults us where we want to go but first we have to go really, really deep into the lead into that experience that we don't want to have, because that's what motivates change. And when you're in neutral Reality I call it money mode. It's kind of you're stuck. Can we change? Yeah, but first we have to dig, we have to dig a lot deeper into your reason to need to change. So that is the, like, glorious, sacred opportunity of these these hard moments. And that's where I am, kind of take a different tack than the way Law of Attraction is taught. I'm not saying hi vibes only I'm saying, Let us you know, low vibes are part of life, they are sacred, they're useful, they actually have a tremendous power in them, if we use them, you've been through the experience, let's not waste it, don't come back another life and have to do it again. Let's get it now. And just milk it for everything, every every drop of wisdom and enlightenment, and empowerment and evolution that we can get from it. So you know, go deep, and then make it into this really human real monster that has no good, because this is what we're going to change. And it makes it more real when it's a person. We can talk about ideas for years and years and years, we can make lists of negative beliefs about money, so what but when we talk about relationship relationship is between people, even if that other person is your cat or your dog, you know, it's it's personal. There's there is back and forth, it has to feel that way for it to be real and relatable so that we can change it to have a real reference. So that's step two is making making the root cause the wounds anything that made you feel unsafe and loved unworthy things, maybe you're ashamed of maybe violence or accidents, especially things that illnesses especially things that don't look obviously like they have to do with money. I find that's really the best place to look. And then you then you imagine it's that that there is this person who is responsible for all of it. It just can't be your parents and it can't be you because in step number three, and this is what I developed since I went through my own shift first time decades ago, I found it more effective with clients that if instead number three, you obliterate you obliterate the beast, by any means necessary. So hello, Love and Light crowd. I know you're all vegans. With yoga mats, I know it. And I invite you to be as violent and overdramatic, and and thorough and complete in destroying the monster because at the end of the day, this monster will destroy you. There can only be one my mother loved Highlander. So there can only be one, there can only be one. Let's make that you. Yeah. So rid of it. Brandon Handley 23:15 Yeah, real quick, just just just second, just pause as we go along for a second, as you're talking about, you know, creating this maximum polarity and going into the alchemy. I mean, there's a lot of energy stored and pent up energy in these areas. And you're talking about going to, right? And then you know, are you talking about transmuting that like you know, energy into into this right into the things Morgana Rae 23:38 like the fire, it's like the fire in the alchemy lab. So our victim experience which I think you know, it's like I don't want to be there. But it's part of the human experience and if you've been there and I have been there then the you want to use it. And I in my experience, the victim experience tends to feel very heavy it's kind of got a heaviness a coldness of dampness if we're gonna get all like touchy feely about it. But what helps you rise up from that victim experience and set boundaries and say no, like Monty Python Thou shalt not pass? Is is that like that slain that flaming torch and we have all these beautiful spiritual archetypes we've got Durga in India, you've got St. Michael in the West, you know, just slaying ignorance. And we're only we're not killing anything that has a corporeal form. So you just want to embody that that like Kali, flare of ignorance. I also loved Shiva, I got my degree in religion, I was really into Indian religion so and just destroy this embodiment of everything that He does not get to move forward in your life, like everything that you do not want to allow in your life experience. You put that in the monster and you reject it in this very dramatic, like Lord of the Rings playing the orcs fashion. And that's the first half of the process. Brandon Handley 25:24 I mean, sounds good, right? And definitely a bunch of terminology I certainly understand. Right. You know, so we're making we're making this monster and we're we're personifying it. Right? I think anytime we in stories, right, we personify, there's a need to personify so that we can are able to relate to a lot easier. And that's what you're doing when you create this Money Monster and personify it. So that, right, Morgana Rae 25:51 and it makes it a lot more specific, and unique and personal to you. This is your monster. This is not some generic everybody's monster, this is yours. And this one is focused on you. So it's very personal. And the way to take your power back is is that third step of destroying the Money Monster. And then when the monster is gone, yay, there's a new situation. When I first got rid of my monster, yay, I really and and I had this experience of oh my god, there's this feeling of emptiness. Like, I've had this omnipresent monster Dude, my whole life around me that I never felt it, it's like you know, air, but when it's gone, you really notice, and nature abhors a vacuum. So I didn't know to destroy the monster then. And I was afraid it was going to come back. Or some like random Money Monster strolling down Sunset Boulevard was just going to get sucked into my vortex. So I needed to fill that spot. Immediately. Instantly, as soon as the monster is gone. Now we have a new problem slash opportunity, which is we need a new relationship. And it needs to be completely the polar opposite of what we had. Now the lucky thing is when you've slayed the monster, and you have slayed and obliterated and rejected everything that you do not want in your life experience, only one thing remains and that's love. Like that's it, that's all that is, is love and expressions and manifestations of love. So when I thought to myself, well, who could I have in my life that I would want so much that I'd be willing to have this relationship even if it's money because money has been very hurtful and scary in my life and I don't want to get into that kind of thing again. So I instantly luckily visualized in that moment just kind of showed up ready made. Who showed up with this tall dark handsome romantic young man carrying a bouquet of red flowers dressed in a tuxedo as if he wanted to take me out and he was very romantic and very loving and very in love with me and wanted to woo me which was is actually the character of this relationship is that it feels like love relationship love comes first before the cash and I have found over the course of coaching so many people that a lover dynamic usually is best best for a number of reasons on a spiritual level you're both equals your your honey this new relationship the money honey, you can you can break his or her or their heart you know, it's not rescue me money, you know, its partners, which is really healing and it kind of heals all those broken unloved bits inside of us. And because I also know that many of us have had really, you know, terrible sexual trauma, maybe a sexy money honey isn't the place to start. So the first rule is that this new relationship is really really safe. And that this person loves you. Loves you exactly as you are loves you more than anybody in the world. And this is somebody that you want to be with and have in your life as a partner because this person is worthy of your deepest love and admiration. shouldn't trust and it's just cool to be with someone nice, safe, you feel loved and you love back. That is step four, that is meeting your money, honey. So when I met mine, and I was aware of wow, this is so weird. This is like Money loves me, which is completely different than my lifetime experience and nothing that I expected. But he felt so vulnerable. And I could feel how much I had been breaking his heart for years by pushing him away. Like, I, I was the one hurting him. It's like, wow, I don't want to do that. So as you're not ill, it was actually me, I and this is really important. Unbeknownst to me, I've always been the gatekeeper. It's like, it's like Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz with the red shoes, like, you always have the power. But you had to go through this experience this Initiation this portal to find it because it's part of your evolution. So when it became safe, then I had the power. So but I knew he wanted to stay with me. But here's the kicker is I had no experience and how to allow this money to stay with me the way he wanted to. So I asked, that is the greatest thing about having this hot, sweet, adorable loving fun money, honey, of the money per episode, an American imaginary person as I can ask and get an answer back. So I asked him what he needed. And that first time out, he said he needed me to love him and stop treating him like a monster. And I thought, well, that's fair. What does that look like? Sure. And so we talked about it, and we I made a commitment to him. So step five, is you have the conversation with your new relationship with money. And Step six is you take concrete, measurable action. And this is what I committed to him was that next time you brought me a gift, I would say thank you. And that would look like if somebody wanted to hire me, because that's generally how he was trying to give me gifts. I would say thank you by saying this is my fee without any shame. With that feeling of appreciation, as love, and I got to try it out really quickly, because four people called me the next day and hired me for double what I'd ever charged before. Yeah, Brandon Handley 32:35 that's amazing. Would and it is right. It's kind of like that paradox, right? Where you're talking about having all that energy there, that Money Monster was kind of made me almost like a money bodyguard. Right? You know, you can look at it kind of any other way. But like now, she says she doesn't want any, you know, right. And then and then as soon as you know, you took a different different approach. And he said, you know, let them all in, you know, and, you know, but real quick, another one, you mentioned a couple concrete measurable actions, what, you know, and to me that, I think about, like, you know, numbers and timeframes and anything like that, but you said, You made him a promise, right? Something different. So what would be like another one or two concrete measurable actions? And we'll do that. Yeah. Morgana Rae 33:22 So for me, it was all accidental. And so I'm a lot better with the people I coach, I was just sort of like, oh, this is, you know, Oh, it worked. And then, and then I had all these clients, and I wasn't marketing the money stuff at all, but they were human beings, which meant that money came up. Because money is honestly the number one excuse that we human beings give for everything we can't have, do or be. So that's why and that's the only reason that I focus on money in air quotes as my pain door because the work really isn't about money. But it is fun when people like Anna call and you know, tell me that they that she made the $1.2 million or Perry made they made over $12 million. The big numbers are you know, kind of stand out so concrete measurable action, this is fun. Because when you're asking your money, honey what he or she or they need from you or want from you or you know, just whatever that conversation is. The answer that comes back is typically very wise and impossible to execute. So it'll be love yourself. Or trust yourself. Or the worst. Relax. Never ever, ever tell a woman to relax That's, that's bonus. That's Brandon Handley 35:02 yeah. It's funny how many times you hear it, but you still can't figure it out. Morgana Rae 35:12 So very cool, good, aspirational ideas. And nobody can love themselves perfectly 24/7 For the rest of their lives, we want to have a win. Also, I believe that if you want physical, concrete, tangible, measurable change in your life, then you want to take some kind of concrete, physical, tangible, measurable action, because it's kind of pulling it out of the ether into the physical realm, energetically, and you are teaching yourself and the universe that something has changed, but you want to give some kind of physical representation as sort of the little nice bow on top for any active magic. So what I suggest is you just start brainstorming with your money, honey, you don't have to know what the answer is, because you've got your partner here. And if you're really tuned in, and this person really feels real and present and yummy, and you're excited, then it's going to be easier to get communication back. And for some people, you can just do it in your mind. Some people it's I have a client right now a guy you know, some people think I only coach women, but I also coach guys. He's very kinesthetic. He's very in his body. So writing works better for him. So you just like Neale Donald Walsch, you know, Brandon says that don't turn up money, honey, that you just write it out. However it is. But so what you're looking for as you just sort of spit out ideas is how your honey response in my experience, like it's, it can come out really quick and easy and fast and quiet. And sometimes it's so quick and quiet that I can pretend that I didn't hear the response. But you learn how to how to dialogue with your money, honey, and you learn how to recognize his or her response. So what you're looking for is the thing that really lights your money honey up and what is very, very common with clients is clients love to be like good students. So very often, the first thing that will come out is I'm going to make 30 sales calls a day and I can just I just want to like collapse and like dig a grave right in that moment. It just feels so heavy. Yeah, I mean, what's happening there they they're in there, they're using their conscious mind and they're doing what they think they should do. But if they run it by their money honey that's not turning their money honey on the money honey doesn't think that 30 phone calls a day is going to be fun unless the money honey does but so far, I haven't seen that yet. Brandon Handley 38:20 It's funny though, too. Right? And sorry to interrupt, right because this is exactly the question and like I said when you said you know this measurable action that's exactly what I'm thinking Well, I gotta go 30 calls a day I gotta do this thing. I got to trudge and grind my way through it and my money on he's over there like keep going your mule Morgana Rae 38:40 Yeah, but see that usually is more of a Money Monster Energy. So this is this is what is so fun about coaching and every human being being different. So I've might question that we might find out oh, that there's still some Money Monster left or maybe the money honey just doesn't like that. And we just we keep going. And so things it can be something obvious like do your taxes get that out of the way and my client will tell me oh my God doing my taxes felt like foreplay I'm like great but also sometimes it's something completely unrelated to money my client Katie curtain and this is public. It's you know, I've got I've got the she let me like record and sell the audio was actually on a public teleclass and then she became a private client afterwards. But so the first time we slayed her Money Monster, she had her money honey, her money honey, really lit up at the thought of her going skating in December, in Canada where it's really really cold, but that's what her money honey wanted. So she says She was going to do it. And then she didn't do it the first day, because she was so stressed about money. And there's so much to do. So she didn't do it. Day two, didn't go skating because she was so stressed about money and debt and all that all that she had to do, nothing happened. Day three, she went skating, she took her 10 year old little boy with her, they had this amazing time, this amazing heart connection, she came home, she got a phone call, and somebody gave her $10,000 without her even asking. And that was the beginning of the journey. Janet brockmeyer also very, very similar story, her money, honey wanted to go walking, but she's too busy trying to get clients for a week. Finally, she went walking, and she picked up two clients at more than she'd ever charged before. I have a client whose money honey wanted her to stay home and do laundry, and she got a phone call and a $20,000 client. So it can be about money, or it can be about something else. It can be self care, you know, is is very attractive to money, healthy boundaries, very attractive to money. Sometimes my money honey says, You know that thing you've been putting off? It's time to do it. Okay. Right. Brandon Handley 41:12 Now, you know, you said Law of Attraction earlier. Right? And, you know, it feels similar in that some of these actions are in alignment with like, kind of what we really want to be doing, but we're letting money be the monster that it is and saying, Well, you can't do that right kind of thing. But in law of attraction, in some circles, right? It's like, do the thing that makes you feel good, just go do that and feel good? Or like, Morgana Rae 41:42 yeah, go ahead. Sometimes. Back in 2007, I thought it'd be a really cool idea to go on a book tour. And by the way, at that time, my book might at that time, my publisher was OfficeMax. Like, now I've got a real book. And you know, Walmart carries it. But back in the day, my publisher of record was OfficeMax, sometimes Kinkos, the dependent on where I was. And I had booked a cross country book tour, where I was speaking at like, all these mystical bookstores up and down the west coast on the East Coast, a little bit in the middle and doing radio shows. And it was really, really cool. Until it was approaching. And then I didn't want to do it. All I could see was I was spending so much money on airfare and housing and rental cars with no guarantee of making a penny back. And I just didn't want to do it. And my money, honey said, you're going to do it because you said you're going to do it. And I did it. And honestly, I completely sold out my inventory. At my first speaking gig. It was, I think, some kind of like, conscious living speaking conference in San Francisco. And then the next day, out of the blue, I suddenly had a TV interview in Sacramento and I and I honestly made more money in that in those few weeks than I'd ever made before. But I had no I didn't know that I would. And it really came down to you don't know what's going to happen because that's life. Like, I never predict what's going to happen. Sometimes I can see something but most of the time, especially with sales, I don't predict that. But yeah, my money How do you said do it even though I didn't want to do it? That's integrity. Brandon Handley 43:46 Yeah, I'm in with that. Right. Like, you know, the Four Agreements type of thing right sounds and you had to do what's your own integrity with but also sounds like sounds like Your Money Monster was showing up because you were starting to worry about like, you're starting to worry about you know, spending too much I'm doing all this and I know money honey, I said we'd go out again, but not right now. Now. I suppose you're taking for a nice steak dinner. But you know, what a mind in the pennies or whatever. And so it sounds like kind of like that's what showed up and but you went ahead and you listened. You got that guidance. And you know, it kind of opened up and it shows you that. Go with it. Like yeah, we don't know what's gonna happen. And that's what I love about sales too, right? Because they'll sales always like, we want linearity. Show us. The lines going up. You're like, well, how we'll do it. Morgana Rae 44:38 Yeah, well, I love the way you put that because yes, sometimes you just have to decide. You have to decide who do I choose to be in relationship with. I did this teleconference back in 2007. And it was the first big one that I'd ever really done. And I had the speaking gig in Norway. I was single at the time, and I had As fantasy this is totally not related, but I have this fantasy that I go to Norway and get to say something like, Why yes, Hans, I'd love to see your long boat. So that yeah, that's how I was making business decisions anyway. So I have this big figs speaking virtual gig on a huge platform, and I was the best I've ever spoken up until that moment, right. I was like, really on and I was making, I was making an offer like a ridiculously underpriced offer. But it was stretchy for me at that time. And then no sales came in. And my shopping cart crashed. In retrospect, I think that probably so much was coming in at that time that it completely crashed, and I wasn't getting any orders. And I felt so betrayed. So betrayed by money, because I just spent the last 90 minutes talking about what a great person your money honey is, and how you have to be a great business. Or sorry, a great a great relationship partner. And, and then he did this to me, and I was cursing him out, like, so angry, so hurt. And what was even worse was it didn't upset him. He just thought it was funny. He was laughing. And, and, and he said, we'll turn it into an opportunity. And I'm like, oh, and he says you'll figure it out. And I had this instant moment of self awareness that cursing out my money, honey may not be the embodiment of being a good relationship partner right now. So you're Brandon Handley 46:45 hanging out with Hans Morgana Rae 46:46 Fu Fu so I like pulled up my big girl personal development panties and, and said, okay, okay, I'll look for the opportunity. But I want you to know, I'm really, really mad at you. And the next day, I got a phone call from the host of the class that I taught for this huge personal development company, who said, Oh, my God, that was amazing. I had never thought of money as a relationship, which is hysterical, because that is their signature product, its relationship with money, that whole company. And I'm, and she's saying, and I'm sharing the recording with everybody in our office. So I'm glad. That's wonderful. And like, my little antenna starts to perk up. I wonder if there's an opportunity here. So I tell her that, like, my shopping cart went down, and I'm pretending to have a sense of humor about it. And she goes, Oh, that's terrible. And I go, but can we do about it? What can we do about it? And she said, and she said, Well, I will just send out the replay to our audience of 500,000 people, would that be okay? And I thought, yeah. So it went out to 500,000 people. And my sales were far more than they would have been had all this drama and broken shopping cart nonsense, far more than it would have happened. Like, you know, just long term clients. Yeah, totally covered the trip and all that kind of stuff. And it was a really good learning moment for me. Sort of so you can actually have a fight and still be loved. You have to choose Are you going to have a relationship with your money honey, your Your Money Monster, you don't know what you're gonna get with your money, honey, but you do know what you're gonna get With Your Money Monster and you know, you don't want it. And things can turn out far, far better on the other side of what looks like a mess, right? So you just have to, you know, you just have to stay in relationship, like a real relationship, stay in communication, and keep putting love first. Brandon Handley 49:07 What's it look like? I guess, to have that ongoing relationship, like I guess, you know, are you writing notes on the daily be like, hey, you know, money honk money, honey, you know, to hear what's going on, you know, do we send notes to each other? What's the ongoing communication process like? Morgana Rae 49:29 It's gonna be different for everybody. I have a client named Athena who goes on God walks and she just has conversations with her money, honey out in nature, and it's been really supportive for her in first financial stuff. She went from being in mountains of debt and in a bad marriage with two small children just kind of making $100 here and there with psychic reading gigs to making 10s of 1000s of dollars a month in about five months. And then her Honey, honey said I don't want you to do that anymore. I want you to focus on music. So she's been on that other journey and her money honey has been there in terms of like getting married and her money honey has been there when one of her children tragically was killed. And she had to ID the body. And she said she couldn't have done it without our money, honey. So it's a it is a spiritual journey. She doesn't walk in what I do, what is my easiest way to like get the most value out of the relationship and stay connected daily is I have a practice of every day answering a bunch of questions that I created for myself. And some of that is in my book. What is not in the current iteration of the book, but I think I want to add it is I like to share what what are my challenges actually, there it is, in the book, I'm on a on a weekly a weekly thing, but I do a daily now, which is what is challenging need, what do I have? Do I have any negative thoughts is like the best way that by the way, my negative thoughts, it's almost like a turns my money honey on because it gives him you know, something to do. Right? He wants something to do. So if I, like come out with that, you know, saw I'm not good enough, I'm gonna fail at this. Nobody loves me. He'll respond usually first by laughing and tell it and then giving me whatever message like I need. And that's my favorite practice for staying in daily relationship is kind of flipping my own negative defaults. And then hearing my money, honey, it's sort of a trick or a hack for accessing your highest wisdom without all of your neurotic baggage attached. Now, it's also like if I making it this other person, then this beloved, right? And it's kind of flirty, right? You know, he's just he thinks that my insecurities are adorable, by the way. So this my husband's like, they are so similar. Brandon Handley 52:22 I'm glad, I'm glad it's continued to work out. And definitely, it's definitely quite a bit in here that you've shared. There's plenty more on your website, you've got your books, podcast, plenty of other podcasts and audios. And what we'll share out some links at the end here. But is there anything else right in this moment that you'd like to share? If not, I've got just a little little bit that we do. And then and then we have to towards the end? Morgana Rae 52:44 Oh, yeah, I have a really fun, non scary, easy quiz on my website, my money love quiz, that I encourage you to start there if you don't know where to begin. Because all it there's, you probably have figured out I'm I'm really not into the judgey Shamy thing. I believe we are all on the same journey, which is to a life that is focused completely on love, lifestyle and legacy. And the only purpose of for money to exist is to serve love, lifestyle, and legacy. And when it serves anything else, that's when problems happen. So we're all on the same path. And so this quiz just kind of it helps. It helps you identify where you're just really super strong rockin it, where you need support. And based on your responses, it lets me know what to send you. Like, instead of just giving everybody in the world the same gift. It's like, Oh, why don't you listen to this? Maybe this is where you need to go next. And so that's that's the quiz on the homepage. Brandon Handley 53:59 Very cool. Now, thanks for sharing that. That will be beneficial. I love that you send out something that is actually not just like, hey, thanks for thanks for filling this out. Everybody gets one of these right? Says personalized little bit. These tend to degree that they're answered. So we'll definitely send people there. And if you've got just a couple moments here, then what I always liken this to this podcast, who's kind of like spiritual speed dating, right? Like somebody's tuning into the podcast, and they're like, I'm just looking for my next vehicle speed day, who am I gonna spend like, because, you know, I think you know, in the world of marketing to like the average time that somebody spends about 90 days like kind of listen to like certain podcasts before they move on or this day, right? So it's a speed date. And you're my spiritual bachelorette of the day. So spiritual Bachelorette number one. I think this one, this is a good question for you. Why is there poverty and suffering in the world? I think Morgana Rae 55:02 people are fundamentally just as sentient beings. We're frightened. And because we're frightened, there is a tendency for some people to hoard. I don't think, you know, oligarchies with all these resources beyond whatever they need. They are very, very frightened people. It's it. And I think this is why we have poverty and suffering, because we have the resources, we have the technology. But there's a there's a very tribal, a very ancient wiring, in our belief system, that we have to be separate from others. And we have to have more than others. And it shows up in lots of different ways. You know, religious wars, racism, sexism, fear of otherness, fear that there won't be enough for us. And I think that's where it all comes from. And the solution is, it's so individual, it's systemic, yes, but all systems begin with individuals, is we have to work on ourselves first. And it always, always, always boils down to I am enough, when I am enough, it is possible for me to have enough. When I not enough, everything in the world is never going to be enough. And that's that's the real world work that needs to be done. Brandon Handley 56:44 Nothing that's powerful. A couple of things now, right sounds like, you know, part of it's just like this, this heritage, right? It's it's been kind of handed and people just aren't breaking the chain, right? Be like, well, this works, especially if they're rich, right? Like, well, this worked before. And we all say rich, I'm gonna keep doing it. Right? Let's keep this Let's not break this chain. And then the other part, right? I am enough, are idea of things folks who earlier, right? The money equals our value, I don't see a bunch of money. So I must not be worth a whole lot type of thing. And really just kind of changing that other game, you're like, Well, you know what, actually, I don't need the money to show me my value. And as I begin to see my own value, understand that I'm enough, I began to see more money, right? It's kind of it works a little bit in the reverse. And then I think that we've been taught, that's been my experience anyways, right? And, you know, you talked about the vacuum, sometimes it's just like, as a bag up and somebody acts it up, and then that's great. Right? So that'll happen. And so it's pretty interesting to see that happen, especially when we when we talk about our worthiness and our value. And we we tend to relate that worthiness and value to how much am I doing? And how hard am I working? Right versus your enough, like, you don't have to like, you know, I don't know, sacrifice your all of who you are, to get what you want. So, Morgana Rae 58:07 like the wealthiest state of being, is when you don't need to prove anything right. Brandon Handley 58:13 Now, I love that. I love that one more here for you. Because I think that it relates to what you're saying. In you mentioned about people being frightened, right. So when they're frightened, you know, that to me would indicate that that's preventing them from living to their full potential, what else would be keeping people from living to their fullest potential? Morgana Rae 58:34 Well, I actually I had this image when you were talking about being frightened, because like, one of my favorite topics is the connection of love and money. And one of the unintended consequences that I found of my work early on, which is my favorites, is that when people heal their relationship with money, their love lives get better. So women, when we're frightened, we become really like hard and protective and masculine and we have our armor up and we're like, we want this that that and we're not going to settle for anything less and we're like, and gods are like, Oh my God. And men when they slay their monster what is so beautiful is like, you can see it in their shoulders. They're like this and and, and they they become the heroes they've always wanted to be. And so while women when they when they need their money, honey, they may be like, Oh, I can finally finally relax. Now it's safe. I can just wrap myself in my money honey arms and, and be supported now in this moment. And for the man it's like their money, honey. It's like you slay the monster for me. You're my hero. And he's like, Yeah, I am. And so he becomes really attractive not just to money, but to romance. And the same for women. And that that is, I think, my happiest favorite effect of the work because it really ultimately, is. It all boils down to our relationship with life. Are we safe? Are we wanted are we loved? Brandon Handley 1:00:17 Awesome, we're gonna thank you so much for coming on today. Now I know we can send them to take the quiz, folks, where should we send them to connect with you? Morgana Rae 1:00:27 Morgana ray.com Just my name with a.com at the end that is the mother ship that has my video series that has the quiz that has my book that has hundreds of articles and videos and you know my programs and if you want to, like run off to Bali or Mexico with me for a week and become a money goddess, that's where you'll find it too. Brandon Handley 1:00:50 Awesome. Thanks so much for being on. Morgana Rae 1:00:53 My pleasure. Thank you for having me. I Unknown Speaker 1:00:56 really hope you enjoyed this episode of the spiritual dove podcast. Stay connected with us directly through spiritual dove.co. You can also join the discussion on Facebook, spiritual and Instagram and spiritual underscore Joe. If you would like to speak with us, send us an email Brandon at spiritual dove.co And as always, thank you for cultivating your mindset and creating a better reality. This includes the most thought provoking part of your day. Don't forget to like and subscribe to stay fully up to date. Until next time, be kind to yourself and trust your intuition Transcribed by https://otter.ai

U.A.P or U.F.O why change the name? / Probability of us being here // Cro and neils relationship / Neil came from kinkos / more alien talk // Neil and cro bond over space and nasa and buzz aldrin // wolf man creature / going out on a high note

What you'll learn in this podcast episode As the business world makes an overdue shift from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism, is it possible that we will see an erosion of innovation? How does a company's purpose impact its success? In this episode of the Principled Podcast, LRN Chief Advisory Officer Ty Francis MBE talks about how corporate purpose and stakeholder capitalism fuel innovation with Mark R. Hatch, CEO of clean energy startup SiLi-ion, Inc., an instigator of the maker movement with the founding of TechShop, author of The Maker Movement Manifesto and The Maker Revolution, and researcher on the influence of “organizational purpose” on innovation and business transformation at Pepperdine University. Mark has dedicated his career to educating the business community on innovation and advanced manufacturing and has spoken at the White House on these topics. Listen in as the two discuss what it means to help people—and companies—around the world do the right thing.   Featured Guest: Mark Hatch Mark R. Hatch is an advanced manufacturing entrepreneur, writer, and sought-after speaker and advisor on innovation, the maker movement, digital strategy, and advanced manufacturing. He has held executive positions for innovation, disruptive technology, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship in various industry sectors. Mark is the CEO of clean energy startup SiLi-ion, Inc. and an advisor to Studio MFG, an advanced spatial-web innovation consulting and manufacturing design firm. Mark has dedicated his career to educating the business community on innovation and advanced manufacturing and has spoken about these topics to various audiences—including the White House, TEDx, Global Fortune 500 firms, and Harvard University. He has appeared on prominent media outlets such as ABC, CBS, NBC, Bloomberg, CNN, and Fox, and has been quoted in Bloomberg Business, FastCompany, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The LA Times, and The San Francisco Chronicle among other publications. An avid researcher on the influence of “organizational purpose” on innovation and business transformation, Mark is working on his DBA at Pepperdine University and is a faculty member for digital innovation and strategy at Pepperdine's Graziado School of Business. He is also an entrepreneur in residence at UC Berkeley. Mark holds an MBA from the Drucker Center at Claremont Graduate University and a BA in economics from UCI.   Featured Host: Ty Francis Ty Francis MBE is a Welsh-American business development, operations executive, and subject matter expert in Corporate Governance, Ethics, Compliance and Culture and is currently LRN's Head of Advisory Services, and a member of the Executive Team as a Special Advisor to the CEO.  Ty has utilized his expansive network of industry experts and thought leaders to help companies enhance corporate character, culture, D&I and transparency and has launched E&C programs and forums in the US, UK, France, Hong Kong, Japan, Brazil, Singapore, Brazil and the Middle East. He spent over a decade in New York City where he was EVP of Global Programs at the Ethisphere Institute and prior to that led the Corporate Board member business at the New York Stock Exchange's Governance Services division.  In 2019, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Business by the UK's Solent University for his outstanding contribution in the field of corporate governance and international trade. In 2017, Ty was appointed a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE), by Queen Elizabeth II, in recognition of services to business.  Ty also studied at Stanford's Rock Centre for Corporate Governance and Oxford University's Said Business School and is a Certified Compliance & Ethics Professional (CCEP).    Principled Podcast Transcription Intro: Welcome to the Principled Podcast, brought to you by LRN. The Principled Podcast brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership, and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to discover valuable strategies from our community of business leaders, and workplace change makers. Ty Francis: As the business world makes an overdue shift from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism, is it possible that we'll see an erosion of innovation? How does a company's purpose impact its success? Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm your host, Ty Francis, Chief Advisory Officer LRN. Today I'm joined by Mark Hatch, an accomplished entrepreneur, advanced manufacturing expert, and sought after speaker on topics of innovation, disruptive technology, and the future of work. Mark holds an MBA from the Drucker Center at Claremont Graduate University. And is presently pursuing a DBA, a doctor of business administration, from Pepperdine University. We are going to be talking today about corporate purpose, stakeholder capitalism, and what it means to help people, and companies around the world do the right thing. After several successful decades in business, Mark is now researching the influence of organizational purpose on innovation and business transformation at Pepperdine, while simultaneously serving as CEO of the clean energy startup, SiLi-ion, amongst other things. Mark Hatch, thanks for joining me on the Principled Podcast. Mark Hatch: Thank you very much, Ty. It's great to be here. Ty Francis: Okay so, for those of us saying to ourselves, "Where have I heard this name before," please tell us a little bit about your professional history. Now, we know you as the founder of TechShop, and an instigator in the maker movement. What else? Oh, yes, you've spoken at White House about advanced manufacturing, and at the Clinton Global Initiative, something my wife [inaudible 00:01:58] was actually involved in during her time at Swiss Re. Mark Hatch:   Oh, how fun. Ty Francis: Yeah, she was at Swiss Re for about 10 years and worked very closely with President Clinton. So, that's a name, it's all too familiar in my household. But I also know you're involved in the Singularity University, which sounds very Star Trekky, which is an interesting side note, especially since we're talking about purpose today. So, I've given an overview, but can you give us a little bit more about your backstory Mark? Mark Hatch:   Oh, hit a couple high points. I'm a former green beret, so I was in the army for three years coming out of high school, which was quite entertaining. And then, I started my first company, an interactive multimedia company back in '80s. One of the things I've discovered that I'm really good at is jumping into something way too early. And then, getting beaten up for years and years until it becomes the obvious next thing. The interesting thing about that interactive media though, was that John McAfee of McAfee Antivirus was one of my first investors. I actually got to know John before he became infamous, I guess. I spent a little bit of time at Avery Dennison, a big package goods company. A little bit of time at Kinkos, where I launched the e-commerce portion for Kinkos. And pulled T1 lines around the United States to wire them all up. Spent a little bit of time doing a health benefits ASP and so forth. But most people, if they know who I am at all, is from the maker movement days wrote a couple books in it, and spent a lot of time traipsing around the globe trying to get people to make things again. Ty Francis: Well, I want to touch a couple of those things. So now, you aren't the average professor, as we've just heard, because you've got some real bites to your bark. Within what you just told me, I did read that you raised over $20 million and turned TechShop into that leading brand in the maker movement, growing it from 1 to 12 locations. And more impressively membership and revenue 20X in five years. I got that right, 20X? Mark Hatch: 20, yeah. As long as you start from a very small base, it's really easy to hit those high numbers. Ty Francis: I think you and I have got a different definition of the word easy.  If that wasn't impressive enough, you also grew that $200 million business at Kinkos by 18%. But I think more impressive than that, and someone who runs a P and L you cut costs by 15 million in a single year. Mark Hatch: In a single year, yeah. Ty Francis: That is both impressive. And I get, your students get a kick out of all that experience. We had a pre-conversation before. And I mentioned that I'm lucky enough to know Sir Richard Branson. And he told me years ago how he went into a bookshop, and pulled a bunch of books off the library that were about business. I think the first 20 he counted, none of the authors had actually been in business, or run a business, and were anecdotal at best. Looking at what you've done and what you've succeeded, how has that happened? And how has that paradigm shifted to you now? Mark Hatch: One, I do actually tend to live in the future. It's a bad habit. I've got a very, very clear view of what I believe is going to happen. And I clearly did not take my desert training in the Special Forces very well, where they beat into your head, never mistake a clear view for a short distance. It will kill you. So, I saw interactive multimedia early. I saw dot com early. I've seen many of these things. What I managed to do with TechShop was raise funds, and grow the base quickly enough so that we actually survive for a solid 10 years. But what I do is innovation. My entire career has been on the edge between in a research and development, or the most recent trends, and then commercializing them, turning them into something that a consumer can understand, and acquire. Ty Francis: So, I am seeing a Star Trek theme in all of this, by the way. Seeing into the future. A Q-esque type person here. But this is fascinating. And you, obviously, have an incredible foundation [inaudible 00:06:08] what you are doing, looking at the past, predicting the future. But I do want to tap more into the research you're doing at Pepperdine. And as part of your DBA, again, I'm looking at this and I have an honorary doctorate, and I feel very, very small right now. Mark Hatch: Congratulations. That's quite impressive actually. Ty Francis: Yeah, but apparently when the air cabin crew asks if there's a doctor on the plane, I'm not allowed to raise my hand. When they say, "What can you help this person with?" I can say, "Well, I've got an interesting anecdote about business." So the DBA you're pursuing right now, I mean, I particularly admire the notion of going back to school for an advanced degree. I've had a limited amount of business success. And during the lockdown, I took three courses, one at a side business university at Oxford, one at Stanford, and one at the London School of Economics. The recurring theme through all of those courses... One was executive leadership. One was DEI and leveraging business through it. And the other was international relations and global politics. Organizational purpose was a common theme through all of those postgraduate and diplomas. And it was fascinating how that was a theme, and linking back into business. So, I want you to talk about your work on organizational purpose. But first of all, can you give me, or us a definition of your definition of organizational purpose? Mark Hatch:    There are like three versions of what purpose means. But to get a little bit technical, the short version is really simple. Like the single word, the single concept is why a corporation exists. That's what purpose means, why? Now, usually, when you use the term, what is your corporate purpose? You're not thinking of the single thing that the word means. You're thinking of a corporate purpose statement, or a development of a series of concepts. Or, as they say in business speak, it's a construct. So, I have adopted George et al's from 2021, which is interesting. Most of this good work has happened just in the last few years. So, purpose in the for profit context captures the essence of an organization's existence by explaining what value it seeks to create for its stakeholders. So, you're creating value. But then he goes on and defines it a little bit more, which I like. "In doing so purpose provides a clear definition of firm's intent, creates the ability for the stakeholders to identify with and be inspired by the firm's mission, vision, and values, and establishes actionable pathways, and an inspirational outcome for the firm." Sorry, that's very technical, but that's the best broad version that includes mission, vision, and values, which people tend to associate with purpose when you ask them what a corporate purpose is. But let me back up a little bit. So, the reason I got intrigued with this was, well first of all, I'm very purpose driven personally. I was, usually, involved with technologies that I found intriguing, and could improve humanity in some way. But my experience at TechShop was at a completely different level. People were joining because of the purpose of this idea that we could remake our lives by going to a shop that had, basically, democratized access to the tools of the industrial revolution. We were giving the average Joe access to tools that they had never had access to, unless they were 80 years old, had come up at three machine shop or something. But we were giving them laser cutters, and 3D printers, and so forth.  And I personally got a level of satisfaction out of that. And I got my staff members to perform at levels I had never seen before. We had members that are evangelists. I mean, it seemed like sometimes they would go out on the street and tell people, "Have you heard of this place? You've got to come in." We had this one member, he quit his job. And he didn't have a great job to begin with, but he quit his job as a night watchman, came up and couch surfed. Like that was a thing for a while, couchsurfing.com where you could go and spend the night at somebody's house randomly. This was well before hotel folks came along. He would evangelize each couch that he slept on became a member, like not the couch, the people. Every place that he went, we got new members. And we thought about maybe paying him just to hang around, and sleep on a new couch every night because he was our best attractor. And so, this got me really interested in this concept of what is your corporate purpose? And how does it play out and impact the organization at large? Ty Francis: I think the biggest question that we have, and I have is when people are talking about this concept, how organizations are dealing with this, how are you articulating this to companies, to brands, to leaders, and how to actually put this into practice? Because many of the conversations I have with boards, with GCs, with anyone, they understand the problem. They see what's happening. They read and they see blogs, and they have conversations with the fellow board members. But it's actually the tangibility of creating a strategy that puts this into place. And something they can follow. I guess what's the sticky sauce? What's the magic wand that you throw over your clients, your peers on how do I actually put this into play? Mark Hatch: So the research that I'm doing specifically came out of kind of the question, how do I deal with the naysayers? How do I convince a board, or a C-suite folks that are like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever. I've got my ESG guy and they're going to keep me between the lanes, and everything's going to be fine." I started down this path as like, what do we actually know about corporate purpose? Where did it spring from? Actually, I go all the way back. What's the original concept of a corporation? Where did that come from? And it goes all the way back. It's crazy. It goes all the way back to pre-Babylonian times. And I won't bore you with all of that, but it turns out you couldn't have a corporation without having a purpose of some kind. It wasn't allowed. The state would not allow it. The king would not allow it. I've got a great quote out of the Law of Corporations 1702, "The sole purpose of a corporation is to improve the society and support the king." Full stop. You can't say, "Okay, I'm here to do like, blah, blah, blah. And I'm going to make this." No, no, no, no. How are you going to help your customers? How are you going to improve society? And how are you going to support the king? And if you don't have an answer to that, I'm sorry, not only will I not give you corporation, if I happen to have given you one, and you have strayed too far, I will shut you down. And this was actually the norm up to about 1880 globally. And there's this great quote. It was Massachusetts Bay Company and they charged this poor sod 200 pounds for overcharging his customer. And then, on Sunday morning, the preacher got engaged talking about the egregious greed, and what can happen. And it was simply against the law. And then, things changed with the 14th amendment, some other bizarre things. But we've had this like weird era, and that's how I would describe it, between 1886 to about 1950, we were set loose. You didn't have to have a purpose at all. You actually didn't need any purpose at all. You could just go down to Delaware and say, "I want to set up a company." And they go, "Great." They still would ask, what are you going to do? And so, in your mind, you had to at least have a customer, or somebody you were going to steal money from. You had to have some idea. So even today in your charters, you have to say, "Okay, I'm going to be in this industry segment," which by the way, you just send them a note and that can change. But about around 1950, that started to shift. So, that was a long winded way of saying, so how do we deal with these guys? And what I wanted to do, and what I'm doing is I'm a practical guy, I'm a practitioner. I don't want to sell them something that doesn't work. What does that mean for your purpose? And so, I'm really intrigued with this idea of empirically based management tools. How do you know something works? Not one of those 19 books that Sir Branson was talking about, but the one that comes out of the trenches. So, I've gone back and I've done a fairly significant review of all of the literature on corporate purpose. What's actually known from a theoretical perspective from doing interviews, which I don't put a lot of weight into because you get what you want out of your interviews. But actual empirical work that's been done in this space. And it turns out those corporations that do have a purpose that's more than simply serving customers, they have substantially superior financial returns. And actually, I think your firm is an example that promulgates that point of view based on research you guys have done in the past. Ty Francis: Our tagline is, principle performance. And I'll add that some research we did last year echoes most of what you're saying. I mean, all of what you're saying. My own advisory team released a report alongside our marketing team. And we called it our LRN Benchmark of Ethical Culture, which is a multi-year, it's a collaborative research effort, which draws data from nearly 8,000 employees, 17 industries, 14 countries. And that study conclusively proves that ethical cultures don't just protect corporate reputations, but they propel the bottom line. Companies with the strongest ethical cultures, strongly outperform by approximately 40% those with weakest ethical cultures. And that was across all measures of business performance, customer satisfaction. You talked about employee loyalty, innovation, adaptability, and growth. It's very simple, and you can make a lot of links to this. But if you keep people happy, if people believe in what you are doing, they will stay. If they stay, they will not leave. If they will not leave, they will not take IP with them. They will not go somewhere else. So, all that money you've invested in hiring them, training them, making them better people they will not take that somewhere else. Mark Hatch: Yeah, your brand positioning, your ability to [inaudible 00:16:32]. The theory is actually pretty well illuminated. Actually, the step that I'm taking... I think we have, in fact, proven that having a higher purpose can, or will result in superior financial success. So, there's my answer to the naysayers. This is really simple besides being the right thing to do, and to feel good about yourself, and your company when you go home at night, and you talk to your kids about what you're doing, your returns are higher. But the next question that I asked is, okay, show me how? Just throwing a purpose together and announcing it from the mountaintop is not the right answer. Now, we are getting results, so kudos to the companies that are executing. But I'm trying to answer the question, okay, how do you operationalize a superior purpose? What are the actual specific financial drivers that create superior firm performance? Innovation, and then specifically radical innovation is historically the largest way that firms create superior returns by far. There are other ways of doing it: brand, financial management, operations, Six Sigma, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the number one way of improving your financial performance is actually to do innovation. And then radical innovation in particular. That's my little chunk that I'm chewing on is can I show that firms with a higher aspirational purpose actually get superior innovation returns and superior radical innovation returns? And the quantitative numbers have come in. I'm now working on writing it up. And it's clear like it's 0.0001 chance that it's false. In fact, a higher purpose does drive radical innovation in a very significant way. It explains 30% of the variance of that. And like 35 to 37% of all variance in your innovation. It's huge. So, my answer is, okay, install, purpose, and innovate. Point this amazing effort that you've created, point this missile down the range at radical innovation because you're going to get an enormous return out of it. Ty Francis: You've actually answered the next question I was going to ask about, what this means for the future of business, and what is your vision for how company leaders can apply these insights? As you said, it's not enough for somebody to read in a book about what's happening. It's how they can relate that and put that into practice to change the dynamic of their own companies. We're not just talking about this. Investors are asking companies point blank, define your purpose. What are you doing to make the world around you better? Larry Fingers, writing to CEOs every single year. In the UK, the banking industry are asking, "Yes, we get it. You're raising capital for people, but what else are you doing?" It's a little bit, what have you done for me lately kind of thing. Mark Hatch: We've come full circle now. In 1886, we decided, okay, you don't have to have a purpose. But now, we are rewriting the laws. The SEC in the US, the UK, as you mentioned, the French have done it. The Italians have done it. The Germans did it ages ago. But there's an enormous amount of pressure now on corporations to be able to explicitly measure what their social good is. They don't necessarily call it your purpose, but that's what they're getting at. When I came at this, of course, I have the context of working at Singularity University as a speaker. And I know, I know a friend of mine is Salim Ismail, who's driving this whole exponential organization's effort globally. And, in it, he said, sidebar conversation. "So Mark, I've tried to do these exponential innovation efforts without a massively transformative purpose at the beginning of the effort because the corporation was like, 'Yeah, you're making me feel kind of weird about this idea of changing the world and all that. We're an X company, let's just do the execution part and skip the massively transformative purpose part.'" And he said, "Every single time we did that, it failed. Every single time. We got nominal innovation out of it." And it actually makes sense when you think about the internal resistance of individuals in their risk profiles. Typically, you go to work and you want to have things normal. And then, what's going to happen all day long, and you're competent and so forth. But when you start doing innovation and, particularly radical innovation, you don't know what tomorrow looks like. You don't understand who your customer is. You don't know what the value is per se. And you're thrown in the deep end and you got to figure it out. Now, it's not quite that bad, but it is substantially different than your day-to-day. And it's hard. Doing radical innovation is the hardest part of being in business because you don't know how it's going to come out. That as a background, is like, "Oh my goodness, you're kidding me. You just told me that one of the keys to being able to execute this isn't actually reaching for the stars." It's not like, can we get a 15% increase in this? Or can we cut costs by 10% or 5%? It's can you cut cost by 50%? Can we double our market share? Can we open up an entirely new market segment? Just saying those words creates a new tension in somebody's head. You bring them in and say, "Okay, we're going to get 10% here, and 15% there." And everybody goes, "Oh cool, I don't have to change anything. I can go back to my desk and keep stamping those pieces of paper. And I'm good." You come in and say, "I want a 50% increase. And I need a 30% reduction over here," actually you've lost the audience because for the next five minutes, all they're going to be wondering is whether or not they have a job. Am I qualified to do this? That's what got me going. And we live in the most exciting time in all of human history. We've got more technologies coming on stream in amazing and radical ways, and how they're interacting with one another is absolutely stunning. So, this is the best time in all of human history to do radical innovation. This is the best time to go after actually deep purposes. And I feel sorry for these corporations who are going, "Okay, let's try to get a 12% bump over the next two years." They're doomed. In my mind it's like, forget it. You and I and others in this world are going to teach the executive suite that radical innovation is possible, it will drive the bottom line, make them feel better and will, in fact, change the world. And I'm proving it empirically. That's kind of what I'm excited about. Ty Francis: It reminds me of a quote that was a famous NFL coach. And I can't remember it now and I'll come back to you by the end of the podcast. But it was about reaching for perfection that you'll never attain it. But on the way down, you will hit excellence. And I think this is an area why people aren't reaching for the stars is surprising because it's that competitive advantage. When we talk about how this is a competitive advantage, not just on a social scale, but on a business scale, we've been talking to board directors. We had a collaboration with a group called Tapestry Networks. We spoke to 40 directors of publicly traded companies, I mean 40, 50 companies. And they represented about 70 or 80 different companies across their different board positions. We did this specifically to talk about purpose and culture. We released the findings in a report called Activating Culture and Ethics for Boards late last year. And the results, albeit mostly predictable, the boards want to put culture at the top of their priority list, but they still don't fully understand how to measure it. The refreshing part was that they see that the paradigm shifted from board members having a nose in, fingers out ability to more having nose and fingers in because they are starting to see this as a competitive benefit to having both strategy and culture and purpose aligned. And with that, I think they're seeing they have a better understanding of what corporate purpose should be. I think we're trying to see a tangible move in the... I'm using quotation marks here, a "tone from the top" conversation on how boards are impacting priorities, and are influencing culture. So, how does that help your research for what you are doing now for the future of work? Mark Hatch: You've done the surveys, you know what the answers are. But what I'm trying to do is start a small renaissance around, prove it to me. What are the actual ways that you operationalize it? It's like, okay, employee retention. Okay, measure employee retention. But don't just measure employee retention, invest in your employees. If you know that they're going to hang around longer, don't just sit on your hands, and say, "Oh cool, they're going to be here longer. Woo hoo." No, no, no. What that means is you can't actually invest in them in ways that your competitors can't. That's operationalizing this idea of this competitive advantage, invest in your customers, invest in your brand. What are you doing specifically to drive your brand in relations in a deeper way? You've created this competitive advantage. You've got this great purpose now sitting on the shelf. Great. How are you going to operationalize it? And can we measure it? That's my point. It's can we actually measure it and see what the returns are? Ty Francis: The measurement, that's the trick. Everyone knows what they should be doing, but they don't know how they should be doing it. Mark Hatch: And if you don't measure it, then you don't care about it. Ty Francis: Wasn't that the famous misquote from Peter Drucker what you can't manage, you can measure, or the other way around? Mark Hatch: Right. Ty Francis: So we've been talking a lot about boards and purpose, but we know the SEC, and we're talking about the US. Obviously, although I'm American, I'm also Welsh. So, I'm curious if your research extends to Europe, or other regions. I mean, is this universal? Or is it just stage one USA, stage two [inaudible 00:25:55]? Mark Hatch:    It does work at least in the UK. So, I chose my sample's 50/50, US/UK. 50/50, male/female. Native English speakers, try to control for some other variables. This is clearly true in the UK and the US. My suspicion, obviously, is that it's true in a lot of other parts of the world as well. Other research suggests that it is at least pan-European. Gartenberg's work and others. Gartenberg did some quantitative research that had 500,000 companies in it from around the globe. And they were able to show empirically that purpose does, in fact, drive superior financial returns, similar to what your research did. Ty Francis: When you're talking about this corporate purpose, I've noticed working in the States for a long time, that there is in the States and, to a certain extent, in the UK as well, there's a shareholder driven purpose kind of alignment where there's in broader Europe, France, and Germany, and Italy there's more of a stakeholder driven perception. So, there you see in Germany where you've got the different kind of board levels, and with the very straight labor laws in France, you are seeing that connection between leadership, and the employee base having to be aligned because they've got no choice because if they don't like what their companies are doing, they can change it, and quite dramatically. So, that would be interesting to see how that dynamic between the UK and the US, but then certainly further afield of that, how the European companies and organizations are actually using this corporate purpose vehicle to their competitive advantage. Mark Hatch: Right. One might hypothesize that corporate purpose, that's a fundamental driver. But how you operationalize it may vary from region to region. Maybe brand is a better tool than radical innovation. Maybe employee retention is a better one. I'm not sure. I doubt it, frankly. I think innovation is one of the fundamental things that you do as a business. Drucker would say, you're not even an entrepreneur, if you're not doing innovation. You can call yourself a businessman, but you're not an entrepreneur. And so, I suspect that innovation. And then as we're moving, again, the opportunity set available now to innovate is phenomenal. Radical innovation, it should be a fundamental strategy for any business that's trying to drive purpose into their organization, and with their stakeholders. Ty Francis: Well, before we sign off, and before I get a raft of my very angry American listeners asking why this British guy is talking about American football? It was Vince Lombardi, [inaudible 00:28:28]. And his quote was, and I'll see if I can get this right, "Perfection's not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence." Mark Hatch: Yeah. Ty Francis: So Mark Hatch, this has been a fascinating conversation and one that we have merely pricked the surface of. And I'd like to have you back to talk a little bit more definitively, especially when the research is done, to look at those results. Thank you for sharing your thoughts with me today and us on this episode.       My name is Ty Francis. I want to thank you all for listening to the Principled Podcast by LRM. If you have enjoyed the conversation today, please do give us a top rating on your favorite podcast app. Goodbye for now. Outro: We hope you enjoyed this episode. The Principled Podcast is brought to you by LRN. At LRN, our mission is to inspire principled performance in global organizations by helping them foster winning ethical cultures rooted in sustainable values. Please visit us at lrn.com to learn more. And if you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, or wherever you listen. And don't forget to leave us a review.

In this weeks episode, Gregor and 'Ack meet with Kinkos, a mage who specializes in magical duplication. Kronk and Fargrim head to their boujee tailor for fancy attire before the council meeting. This episode is sponsored by Loadboost! Follow this link or use code "dice" at checkout for 10% off! https://vitaliboost.com/discount/Dice Follow us at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Kronkmart https://www.facebook.com/DroppedDice https://www.patreon.com/DroppedDice https://rss.com/podcasts/droppeddice Thank you!

OVERVIEWOn this week's episode of Bucket Talk, we chat with Boston-based hardscaper & business owner Victor Oliveira, aka @thegoodbossofficial on Instagram and TikTok, along with his long-time mentor, OG Dave. At 16, Victor bought a truck from his uncle for $700, whipped up some business cards at the local Fedex Kinkos and started his own landscape business. ABOUT VICTORFrom an early age, Victor knew school wasn't for him. When he was in 10th grade he dropped out of high school and decided to start his own landscape business. He bought a truck from his uncle, made some business cards at the local Kinkos and got started from there. By the time his first year ended, he already had seven accounts, in spite of the challenges that come with starting a company. “The easiest way to do it is just to do it. You know, like, just don't think about it, just ask questions, you know, just keep going. Don't let something so simple shut you down. Just find a way around it. If you can't get through that wall, just find a way around it.” - Victor Victor was working on one of his first big jobs with OG Dave's son Sean, and when they realized they needed some help they called on Dave and his 42 years of experience to lend a hand. From that day on, it has been a collaborative effort. Just a few moments with OG Dave and Victor and you know that their work is their true passion. Take a quick look at their work and you can tell they're not only experts of the landscape and hardscape craft, but guys you just want to be around. “My biggest thing is, I go above and beyond to make someone happy. You know, if I'm working on the house, I want to make sure they're extremely happy. Even if I have to take money off. Because you know, that's how I get more work. Word of mouth is my best and only advertisement.” - Victor Between the two of them, there is a lot of wisdom. Dave brings decades of experience and knowledge to the job and Victor, along with his skills, brings an attitude and leadership that is hard to compete with. He is known as The Good Boss for a reason; he keeps his team tight and treats his people well. If you're on their team, you're taken care of. “I would say try to do what you like to do. Whatever it is. It's cliche, but in the beginning, it's all about the money. But you know, after a certain amount of time, you've got to like what you do, or sell it and move on to something else.” - OG Dave When it comes to advertising, Victor and OG Dave let their work and their character do the talking. Something isn't up to par? They won't charge for it. It is all about relationships for them — without honesty and a humble spirit there is no new work. To them, a few thousand bucks isn't worth losing a solid account and it shows.

Remember Kinkos? That is where Brad Jay got his first lead into action sports announcing. Pregnant wife at home and wedding coming soon, Brad Jay got his start on his epic X Games Journey. Timing is everything in this episode. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/tameyourtalent/message

At 18, Raad Mobrem met Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinkos. Inspired by Paul, he was inspired to start a company. Upon graduation from college, Raad started his first enterprise. Inside that business, they built an operating system to track purchase orders, inventory, etc. They fixed their own back office issues. This rolled up and was acquired by Intuit, becoming the foundation for Quickbooks online. Now at 27, the first person he called and thanked was Paul Orfalea.  After leaving, Raad did self reflection about his rapid rise. He considered how networking and access can lead to success. Learning from futurists who were always one or two steps ahead of the rest, Raad's own journey could accelerate. Today, his Intro company connects true experts who can take others to greatness. With Intro, he has moved from success to significance, ultimately inspiring millions around the globe by multiplying wisdom.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/success-made-to-last-legends--4302039/support.

Doughnuts, Sports, and Embezzlement- and that's just in the first 15 minutes. Want to know Paulina's and Lucy's taglines? PLUS- Hot Matt is back in the OC and Teresa's man MIGHT have a guy at Kinkos helping him with all his printing needs.

This weeks episode is part 2 of episode 15! Rich and I talk about Dennis Rodman and his life, how much time it takes to really be friends with someone, and Rich shares the Mark Wahlberg story we've been waiting for! SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST

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Spider-man: No Way Home is out today! We are joined by Estevan's good friend Matt. And while we haven't seen No Way Home yet, we are too excited. Today we talk our predictions, we celebrate the character, and talk about the future of the MCU. Tune in to see if we were right about anything and, as a Redband promise, Estevan will quit pursuing his dreams and go work at Kinkos if Toby McGuire and Andrew Garfield do NOT show up in this movie :) Be sure to FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/redbandpodcast/PODCAST PRODUCED AND EDITED BY:Estevan CarrionInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/estevan_thebestavon/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChnTw9XnaokQ6_sTW9iB3HQ

Vice President Kamala Harris suggested during an interview Friday with BET News that voter ID laws will make it more difficult for those voters who do not live near Kinko's or OfficeMax to vote. "In some people's mind, that means you're going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove who you are. Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don't -- there's no Kinkos, there's no OfficeMax near them," she warned. "Of course people have to prove who they are," Harris said, but "not in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to prove who they are." Support The Show: https://waynedupree.locals.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Aaron Levant is the CEO of NTWRK. He's one of the most exciting builders at the intersection of fashion, culture, events, and media. We discuss launching a profitable car magazine at age 9, pitching Marc Ecko on ComplexCon, raising tens of millions for NTWRK from star investors like Jimmy Iovine and LeBron, being "oppositionally defiant", and how he thinks about his career in thirds.Subscribe to our newsletter. We explore the intersection of media, technology, and commerce: sign-up linkLearn more about our market research and executive advisory: RockWater websiteFollow The Come Up on Twitter: @TCUpodEmail us: tcupod@wearerockwater.com---EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:Chris Erwin:Hi, I'm Chris Erwin. Welcome to The Come Up. A podast that interviews entrerepreneurs and leaders. Aaron Levant:This is a common theme in my career, which some people say ignorance is bliss, I like to say ignorance is rich. What I mean by that is it's like every single thing I've done I don't know anything about. And when you know too much about something, you become institutionalized with fear. It's because I knew nothing about putting on an event or a trade show, I wasn't scared of it. I just did it, and didn't think about it that much. It just happened, and it was luckily successful. Chris Erwin:This week's episode features Aaron Levant, the CEO and founder of NTWRK. Aaron is one of the most exciting builders at the intersection of fashion, culture, events, and media, and he started super early. At just nine years old, Aaron used picture cutouts and a Xerox machine to launch a car mag, and it was profitable. He sold copies to friends at school and advertising to neighbors. Then in his early 20s, Aaron launched a fashion trade show, which he sold to a major exhibition company. There, Aaron had mastered the biggest experiential businesses of the past decade, like when he pitched Marc Ecko on ComplexCon. But Aaron's not just a builder, he's also operationally defiant. He doesn't follow norms and believes that lack of experience is major advantage in launching startups. This mindset fuels Aaron's current business, NTWRK, which powers shopping at the speed of culture. NTWRK is hands down one of the hottest players in content and e-commerce and has attracted backers like Jimmy Iovine, LeBron, Drake, Foot Locker and many more. Now, Aaron's story is remarkable but his character is more impressive. He's unconventional, uplifting, and so grounded. That plus hearing him talk about his future plans for NTWRK and how he thinks about his career in thirds makes for a must-listen. All right, let's get into it. Chris Erwin:Tell me a little bit about growing up in the valley, your household, and what your parents were like. Aaron Levant:Valley here in San Fernando Valley in LA is a nice place to grow up. A little bit of suburbia, very, very close to LA. My parents were amazing people who were very creatively inclined. My dad was in the entertainment business and spent a long time as a writer, television shows, and things like that. So I'd say I grew up in a pretty creative household. My mom actually had a little independent clothing label in the '80s, so I had some adjacency to the apparel business that I properly didn't even realize until years later, but my mom was always involved in that. My parents were very into pop art, into pop culture. My dad's a huge toy collector, he has 50,000 toys. So this affinity for pop culture is something I've been growing up around my whole life. Chris Erwin:Between your father's toy collection and then also being a writer in the entertainment and your mother in commerce, the whole new shoppable entertainment, starting to get where it comes from pretty early for you. When you were growing up, did you think, "oh, yeah, I want to go into Hollywood. I want to be like my dad or I want to do what my mom does." Was that going through your mind at all? Aaron Levant:No, never. I mean, I had no interest in doing anything my dad did. I would say, like most people, probably I wanted to do the opposite of what they did so I never ended... Even though maybe what I'm doing has some connection to the entertainment industry now, I was always going the other way. I would say... I never met him, but my mom's father, my maternal grandfather who I never met, was very entrepreneurial. I felt like I've always had something ingrained in me to be entrepreneurial, which different than what my dad did and being interested in businesses where my dad has no interest in business whatsoever. He almost despises it to a certain extent. So I would say I rebelled against anything my parents did and wanted to do my own thing, for whatever reason. Chris Erwin:What type of businesses was your grandfather building back in the day? Aaron Levant:He was in real estate, which is something I didn't get involved in either. Again, I hear this all by way of my mom and my grandmother, but he was just very entrepreneurial from a young age, always trying stuff, apparently a very, very smart guy. So, I try to think that's where I get some of smarts from, because my dad is just not a business inclined guy. He's all about being creative. Chris Erwin:I think you need both sides of the brain for what you're building right now, so it makes sense. Aaron Levant:Definitely. Chris Erwin:Your entrepreneurial ambitions, my understanding is that they manifested pretty early. I think you put together a car magazine at eight or nine years old, right? And then you were selling that to some of your school friends? Aaron Levant:I still am and was back then interested in cars. Sometime around maybe nine or 10 years old, I had made a car magazine through just, I guess what now be a zine, just cutting up a bunch of other great images of cars from books and going to Kinkos or what was Kinkos now FedEx now, and photocopying it. I went to my next door neighbor who was an Arby's franchisee, and I sold him the back cover advertisement for I don't even remember the price. But I just knew that my magazine wasn't going to be legit unless there was an ad on the back cover. So I guess I tout that as my very first business deal, and then I was selling that magazine at school and at camp. For whatever reason, I just felt like I was always trying to do stuff like that and did various random projects as early on as that all the way till I was 16 when I started doing some form of real business, I guess. Chris Erwin:So it felt like in your pretty early on was that you just wanted to do stuff. You wanted to create, you wanted to try things out. There's just this hustler inside, right? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I'm not even sure where it came, but it just felt natural to me to try to create and try to monetize out those creations. Chris Erwin:I've also heard you describe yourself as you go through your teens years as being, and I think that's persist through today, oppositionally defiant. Is that right? Aaron Levant:Yeah, I think that's an actual word from the DSM, which I think is the book that they use in psychology to define what's wrong with you. It's like the dictionary of mental illnesses. I think my mom pointed that out to me very early, which is I had a tendency to go against authority, for good or bad reason, whether that's kicking the principal in the leg at the first of preschool or doing any number of antics I did through my elementary and short high school years. I always felt the need to go the other direction and go against the grain, against authority. And that was, for some reason, instilled in me, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact I just wasn't interested in being in school or be at camp or being anywhere there was authority figures trying to tell you what to do and how to dictate what you do with your time. It was all very boring and mundane for me. Chris Erwin:Through that resistance earlier on, did that also attract these types of friends and people that you wanted around you? Were you becoming a leader amongst the peer groups saying, "I'm going to do things differently." And people were like, "Yeah, we're going to follow Aaron?" Aaron Levant:I would say, as you know, depends. As I was younger, no, I think most of the kids I was hanging out with were pretty nice and I was the jerk in the group. As I got older, I probably attracted the wrong people, and then I spun out of that when I was 18 years old. But no, I was just always doing wrong for myself, not necessarily with others or for others. Chris Erwin:My understanding is that in 10th grade you get out of high school and then you start interning at GAT. Tell us what was GAT, and why was that interesting to you at the time? Aaron Levant:Probably one of the second or third business adventures was I was really passionate about design and graffiti art and street art all through the '90s when I was a young teen. And being interested in that design and graffiti art and being interested in business, I was trying to figure out how do you make a living out of doing you're passionate about. And then it dawned on me that all graffiti writers were working at GAT, particularly the main place and many other street wear companies doing the T-shirt designs. If you're a great graffiti artist, you're doing topography, it's a great transition into designing t-shirts and make a living for yourselves, so I said, "Okay." I started to develop an affinity to these companies. Aaron Levant:Randomly, a guy I grew up with, Tal Cooperman, introduced me to the owner of that company. Through meeting him a few times, he ended up offering me an internship, and GAT was the definitive late '80s, mid-90s street wear brand in LA. It was such a great opportunity for me not only get close to this company and learn a trade that I was interested in but also be around some of my favorite artists and learn from them and learn a craft which at the time was graphic design for me in the beginning of my career. Chris Erwin:Going back to that moment, were you like, "Yeah, this is the logical progression for how I get into my career."? Or were you a little bit shocked as, "Oh, I wasn't expecting to go down this path, but... "? Aaron Levant:I don't know if I was thinking in terms of it as a career, I was just so excited. I was such a fan, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I forget the days when I was legitimately just a fan of things. I was just so excited to be there, and again, it just became a career but I kind of stumbled into it. I was just genuinely happy to be there just to be a fly on the wall and be a fan. And then over a series of years of sticking around there interning, having low level positions, I turned around a few years later and I'd worked my way up to being a partner in the company. And then I was like, "Wow, well, I guess I turned this genuine interest or passion into a job." Chris Erwin:What do you think helped you rise to become partner so quickly? Aaron Levant:I think being willing to do anything, being willing to work for free in the beginning and then almost nothing, minimum wage for years after that. You don't have any baggage, I'm like, "I was this important guy in this company, so I will the trash out, right? I will do literally anything." He's like, "Go drive to Orange County and pick up this sample." I'm like, "Great, I'll great there right now." Whatever I could do. I was waiting for someone to hand me the ball, and I would just run with it. I was so excited. There's a famous Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G line where he's talking about you got to treat every day like you're an intern, like it's your first day on the job, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I think I genuinely carried that through well beyond the time I was an intern. I think that is what propelled me up, that every time there was an opportunity I raised my hand and ran at it enthusiastically where other people may not have. Chris Erwin:Passion was there and it feels like you were just having fun. You were like, "This is cool. This is where I want to be. I'll work for whatever, but I'm doing this with cool people, and I'm all in." Aaron Levant:At that time, most of my friends were still in high school and then eventually college, and I was well on my way to making my career, doing cool stuff, traveling around the country, so it was exciting. Chris Erwin:Fast forward a bit, and let's talk about the Agenda Show, which was a trade show I think that you were a part of for almost around 15 years. Tell us about what that was and how that came to be. Aaron Levant:Through my job at GAT, the founder of GAT was pretty much my first mentor, and I have a series of mentors in my life that really help shape my career and my life, we would go with Luis to a lot of trade shows with his clothing brand. First it was this big show in Las Vegas called the Magic Show, which is the biggest fashion trade show in the world at the time. It would get over 100,000 attendees. We would go to the show in San Diego called the ASR Show, Action Sports Retail. These were B2B marketplaces in the fashion industry for different segments. We would go out as an attendee, as an exhibitor if you will. We'd buy a booth, and we'd sell our wares to the retailers traveling from all over the world. Aaron Levant:In probably 2001, I had gone to New York to a really small show called To Be Confirmed, which was some guys from London. They had just rented a loft in Soho instead of some huge show at the Javits Center or the Las Vegas Smith Center, they just got a loft and put up some rolling racks and some table and chairs. They had a cool DJ and bar. I said, "This is pretty fucking cool." I looked around, I was thinking, "How hard is this? You rent an empty room and have some people throw ups some rolling racks and you send out a postcard, you invite some buyers and make a cool ambience." I'm like, "I like this." Aaron Levant:That was in the back of my mind. At that time, me and Luis were actually throwing some parties in our warehouse in Downtown LA called Agenda: Art, Music, Beer. It was just something we did as a fun thing to promote our clothing companies. And in 2002, in September, after having a bad experience at the ASR Trade Show, I said to Luis, I said, "Let's turn our Agenda parties into a fashion trade show as a competitor to the BIG Action Sport Show in San Diego." And he said, "Yeah." And in January 2003, a few months later, we rented a Thai restaurant across the street from the BIG Show, invited 30 of our friends. We charged $500 a booth. We weren't really doing it to make money, we just thought we didn't have to pay the other guys $5,000 and we could provide a service to our friends and just do something cool. It just organically just happened. But it was this small little B2B fashion trade show for independent brands that I did when I was 18, 19 years old. Chris Erwin:When you had that bad experience at ASR, you have the conversations and you're like, "All right, we're going to launch the Agenda Trade show," Were you excited, were you nervous, were you scared or was it like, "No, I got this. Of course, we're going to crush this."? What was going through your head? Aaron Levant:This is a common theme in my career, which some people say ignorance is bliss, I like to say ignorance is rich. What I mean by that is it's like every single thing I've done, I don't know anything about. When you know too much about something, you become institutionalized with fear or they say paralysis by analysis, right? Chris Erwin:Yes. Aaron Levant:Because I knew nothing putting on an event or trade show, I wasn't scared of it, and I didn't know to be corky or to be fearful or have any expectation. I just did it and didn't think about it that much. It just happened, and it was luckily successful, but I'm sure it wasn't perfectly executed or anything that way. But I just run into things head first, run into a lot of problems, and don't really do too much research in front end because when you do you seem to scare yourself or psyche yourself out of doing whatever that said thing you're going to do. And I've done that a few times in my career where I don't know anything about it, and I've been successful than sometimes people who do know something about it because they're institutionalized with fear. Chris Erwin:Institutionalized with fear, I really like that. I just wrote down ignorance is rich. I think that's a fantastic phrase. All right, so at Agenda, it seems that you go through a eight to 10 year period of expansion and then realizing, hey, we have to move the venue from San Diego to Long Beach and then into Vegas. You're collaborating but then you're also expanding and some new competition is coming. And there's a lot of details I'll probably skip over here, but along that journey, what are a couple of moments that really stand out to you? Aaron Levant:Three key things. One, I did the business completely independently, first with me and Luis and then later with me and my cousin. I still lived in my parent's house. Any business that people think about now in the world that we operate in, they raise capital, they raise seed money, they raise a Series A, they've got a burn rate. All these businesses have a finite amount of time if they're going to make it or not make it before they basically have to shut down operations or become profitable, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I didn't have that. I didn't even understand that as a concept, so I just kept going even when it was going good and not going bad. I carried that forward for so many years, so many times we weren't making money because we didn't really have many employees, I lived at home with my parents until I was 23 or something. It allowed us to push past the point where most businesses would have given up and go, "Oh, the margin isn't growing, or revenues aren't growing at the right rate." We had no analysis of the business. It was an overwhelming theme that allowed us to ever keep pushing forward, probably sillily at some points, to get to a point where we got actually really successful to then where we almost had to shut because the competition got so fierce. Aaron Levant:In that moment in 2009 when our business was on the brink of going out of business, I think the defining moment for us was we finally pushed further enough and had this organic growth trajectory over many, many years, almost six years at that point, that I met a guy, Roger Wyett and Paul Gomez from Nike and Hurley, and they offered us an opportunity to stop being the small show across the street from the BIG Show. And this was the big judo business moment for us, which was they said, "Hey, how about you step out of this role you're in as being the parasite... " Or I call it the little sucker fish that swims along on the shark. We're all this little cool thing happening across the street from these big behemoth thing. They said, "Why don't you come with us? You bring Agenda to the US Open of Surfing, which is the biggest action sports consumer event in the world. You should put your trade show in the middle of it, there's a half a million people that will be there." Aaron Levant:That was a big departure for us. We were in the verge of going out of business with this one business model we knew, but we were making money finally. And it was like this jump. It was like we had to take this leap off the cliff, and it was either going to work or we were going to be dead in the water. But we're almost going to be dead in the water anyway. So we made this jump and in one year of doing this our business grew 2,000% and we put ASR out of business, which is the company that been in business for 30-something years before that, owned by Nielsen Business Media. It was a huge company, established, respected company by all means. It was this moment where everything changed in our favor and it was almost unprecedented. Aaron Levant:So I think that was for me the real lesson there is to take those big risks, to do something that literally was going to sink the company or save the company and has inspired me to continue to do things that throughout my career. But without that moment, I wouldn't be sitting here today. I never would have done probably anything I've done after that. Chris Erwin:I think it's a takeaway that I'm definitely hearing, it just goes back to what you said, again, like ignorance is rich, because you weren't looking at the business of saying, "What are the right metrics and all of that?" Where if you were looking at it through lens or had different training up to that point you would have shut it down. But you were building a brand, and you guys were just like, "No, there's something here. There's something here." Sometimes early stage businesses, they just need longevity, like stick around enough because most just shut down within three to five years. But with longevity, other opportunities or other ways of thinking about what you have and how it can work and this duo coming from Nike Hurley and saying, "Hey, guys, here's another approach." And you're like, "That's a great idea, let's do it." And it just happens. Aaron Levant:Yeah, that one moment literally defined everything for me professionally, financially. But if we didn't make that far, we never would have had that chance. Even in that moment it was risky, the best risk I ever take. Chris Erwin:So it continues to grow and then you eventually sell to Reed Exhibitions in 2012. What was the reason for that? Aaron Levant:Up until that point, from 2003 end of 2012, we sold the end of December, the day before Christmas we signed the papers, the businesses was completely built independently, no loans from family, no lines of credit, no investors, no nothing. It was just me and my cousin. We owned 100% of the business. We financed the business. It was starting to get big. We were doing millions and millions of dollars in business, tens of millions and was making real EBITDA, but it was one of those things that it's risky and there's our cashflow that was on the line, right? We had built something that was fairly profitable and weighed the risk of... We had just gotten out of the 2008 financial crisis. We saw a lot of bad stuff happen with that. I lived through seeing what happens during 9/11, right? There's all these things that come in. Aaron Levant:We're on this incredible ride, we're making so much money, and we just did the math and said, "Hey, we can continue to do this on our way and carry the risk and something can happen and we can all the value, or we can extrapolate the value now." And I think we did some quick backing up in that. We figured we'd make more money and a lower tax rate than we could in six years if we sold the businesses today, if we kept operating it, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:And there's lots of unknowns in the next six years. Which I'm actually lucky because the business did down trend in the six years following that. It was a calculated financial risk, and I had a bigger vision for the company than my cousin did. He was very risk adverse, also because we owned it independently and it was all our own money and capital on the line. We were just operating four shows when we sold. I took it, after I sold it, to about 30 shows. He didn't want to go along with those things, so ultimately we sold. He exited the business, and I went with Reed and built a whole portfolio of new products, consumer-facing products, conferences, video products. I had a much bigger vision than what we were doing in this small mom-and-pop shop. So I think it really allowed us to take the financial risk off the table and set us up fairly well, but also allowed me to really chase the bigger vision that I had for the company. Chris Erwin:Speaking of risk appetite, it seems that there's this constant leveling up or laddering up where it's like, 'I'm going to try something, and then have a bigger win and then a bigger win and then next." Aaron Levant:It's called gambling. Chris Erwin:Got it. Aaron Levant:It's not a healthy- Chris Erwin:So yeah, the question is, was your risk appetite growing where you felt like, "Hey, as an entrepreneur, as a business leader, I'm increasingly capable and I want to take bigger bets."? Aaron Levant:Absolutely. In every situation in my career, if I had the opportunity to spend 100 I'd spend 100. My cousin would say, "Spend zero." We end up spending 50. It was a good yin yang balance, right? But at a certain point, when your business is hot and you have that moment, there's a reason they say, "Strike while the iron's hot." Right? Every time we had that, that's when I say, "Let's go. Let's double down. Let's quadruple down." He didn't want to go, and I think I've always been in favor of going. I've lost a lot too, don't get me wrong. I've had plenty of horrible ideas but, true believer, you're not going to get anywhere, you're not going to build anything meaningful, anything big by not doing that fairly often, by putting it on the line and rolling the dice on that. I'm a huge proponent of doing that as much as you can without being completely irresponsible, but you have to be slightly irresponsible. Chris Erwin:And maybe we'll get into this as you describe how you built the NTWRK executive team, but do you like having people around you that actually push you even harder and saying, "Yeah, that's a good idea, but here's even bigger, Aaron." Or do you like people that pull you back and then have debate about what's the best path forward? How do you like to build leadership around you? Aaron Levant:I think you got to mix of both. You've got some really good financial people that are helping me keep an eye on whatever that may be, the margin or the burn rate or things like that to make sure that I'm not completely unchecked and doing completely frivolous things. But, yeah, I mean, I think I love having people around me who are more aggressive, who have bigger goals, who are uninterested in doing small things, especially investors, right? You get that internally from staff, like my partner here Moksha Fitzgibbons who's the president of NTWRK, constantly pushing. I thought I was aggressive, he's more aggressive than I am, constantly pushing the envelope, trying to push us to do bigger, faster, be more aspirational. And then our investors who have done all the billion dollar businesses where they're like, "Yeah, that's cute what you're doing, but this doesn't interest us unless it gets X big." Aaron Levant:I love that kind of challenge because it makes me try to think bigger where what may be relative success to me on a scale of my career, to them is a blip on the radar. It aspires me to want to do bigger or to make a bigger impact and create larger brand awareness and to take that bigger Hail Mary pass if you will. I need those people around me constantly. Chris Erwin:All right, so at Reed, you sell Agenda to them but you continued to run the Agenda Trade Show. But then you're also responsible for... I think you launched 30 different events while you're there, including ComplexCon. I mean, I know you're always a dappler and doing different things, but it seems like you were all in on Agenda and now you've got a lot of different babies and children to take care of. How was that transition? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I mean, look, I had never finished high school, never went to college, getting to Reed was an amazing opportunity for me because I worked inside a publicly-traded company at a very senior level. It was like going to college, really learning to work in a structure. But also to them they're a $7 billion dollar company. It wasn't just interesting to buy this little portfolio for trade shows and sit on it, right? I had bigger aspirations, and we needed to make bigger to move the needle for them at a corporate level, so they encouraged my bold thinking and they had the finances to go after it. Aaron Levant:So we acquired a company called Capsule. We got in a joint venture with Complex on ComplexCon, which is super exciting. I launched a educational conference called the Agenda Emerge, which is like Ted Talks for fashion entrepreneurialism and a media brand around that. So all the above, every single way they could they would encourage me to go bigger, faster, think internationally, and really push my ideas to the brink of where they could go. Chris Erwin:What a great partnership because sometimes joining a bigger corporate, they want to throttle you. Things are more controlled, more measured. But it seems like for the type of leader you are and your ambitions, it was a great partnership that actually propelled you and gave you experience I think that was really setting you up for your next phase, which is taking a digital business which was Complex, which I know did start back in 2003 as a print magazine, but it became a huge digital business and then your role was like, "All right, how do we create an incredible RoL event for it. So talk about how ComplexCon came to be. I'm just curious, what was in that initial pitch? What were you thinking? Aaron Levant:The interesting part about selling my company to Reed is that they own all of the Comicons around the world. They own 500 major events, many of which are consumer facing and they really focus them around passionate fan communities, what they call fandom. So it's like packs for video games, New York Comicon, Star Wars Celebration. I learned about this event format, which is really new to me because I was in B2B, and I said, "I wonder if Agenda could become... " And this is also part of the inspiration for something like the Comicon for sneaker heads. Aaron Levant:But I realized that Agenda been building itself in the industry, we didn't have a consumer affinity. So I struggled to say, "How can Agenda do what Comicon's doing?" This light bulb went on in a conversation I was having with another one of my mentors, which is Marc Ecko the founder of Complex Media. We were at this event in LA, and I just said, "Well, why don't we get together and do ComplexCon." Right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I said it almost in jest, and he's like, "Yeah, I like that. I like that." Funny standing there with him was Moksha Fitzgibbons who's now the president at NTWRK, and came over and Marc said, "Hey, tell Moksha what you just told me." I told him, they said, "We like that." And they generally encouraged. And then a week later I was in New York. I scrambled for a week, I put together this pitch deck. I got in the room with Rich Antoniello who was the CEO of Complex and Noah who was editor in chief, Marc, and Moksha, and I pitched them this deck. Aaron Levant:It was pretty basic. It just basically took the blueprint of Comic-Con and applied it to the brand of Complex. They all loved it. I was surprised because it was just such a bold, ambitious idea. We worked for two years from that point. That was January of 2015 I pitched them, we signed the contract in November of '15, and we launched in November of '16. The funniest part about that conversation which I'll tell you, which is everyone was around the table very engaged. Moksha was sitting on the coach. At very end of the presentation I thought I'd done a great job but he looks over from this Blackberry and says, "How much money are we going to make?" I go like, "Profit? You guys, Complex?" "Yeah." I said, "I don't think, $1 million." And he goes, "Do we really care about making $1 million?" I was so deflated at that point. I thought it wasn't going to happen because he was the Chief Revenue Officer, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I was like, "If we don't get his buy-in, this thing's never going to happen." But he actually got on board and was the biggest champion of the thing, and it was an amazing experience. But nothing more than saying, "Hey, let's create the Comic-Con, the fan culture, Superbowl, the world's fair for sneaker and street culture." Chris Erwin:The Agenda was a B2B trade show, this was targeting consumers. Where you anxious about, "Oh, wow, how am I going to drive the same type of traffic and hype and momentum around this event?"? Or was it, "No, I can do this. I'll figure it out, I've done it before."? Aaron Levant:Well, I think that's exactly what I was saying, that's why I didn't just end up doing call it AgendaCon, right? Complex had the consumer reach and the social media reach and the affinity with consumers, and I had the relationship with the brands and the exhibitors and the know-how in event production, so the marriage was beautiful in that sense. It was bringing my offline experience with their online marketing reach and bringing that. Of course, we did a lot more things that neither of us would do, market it ourself almost like a concept promoter, which is new to both of us. But it was the perfect marriage of their audience and our event expertize. That's really why it worked. Chris Erwin:Like you said, when you were at Reed, it was like your MBA. You were like the senior executive of a big public company but you were just doing deals, launching new businesses, and learning a lot about business as you went. This was probably a great change to learn of how can you create an event from a digital business but then really market it through all the paid and earned organic channels. Now thinking about where you in your career, that was probably a great learning experience for you. Aaron Levant:Absolutely, right? There's so many learnings in ComplexCon. I think the number one learning for me was as successful as the event was, the digital groundswell that the event created, call it organic customer acquisition, the earned media, that was so big that that was such an eye-opening experience for me, how much the physical world could influence the digital community so much more effectively than just trying to market to people digitally. That was really my big takeaway and a lot of the inspiration for wanting to leave and come join NTWRK. Chris Erwin:I know at ComplexCon now with $100 ticket prices and incredible curation of products, there are attendees who will spend days waiting in line so that they can get early access to the different product vendors, right? Did you guys see lines out the door in your first year of ComplexCon? Aaron Levant:Yeah, there was thousands of kids lined up around the corner at both sides of the convention center. We had a literal, and I mean this in the most literal sense, a stampede of kids pushing past security, knocking down full-grown security guards, extensions, police officers. People literally almost being trampled to death. It was actually scary. The second year we had people who were stowing away, like when people stow away in a ship. Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:We had kids who snuck in days before and were hiding in a broom closet so that they can get early access. The level of pandemonium around ComplexCon year one and two and three was just so insane. It was dangerous. There were actually people injured and it was also so amazing to see. I was almost trampled to death in the crowd were people fighting for Pharell sneakers at the Adidas booth. It was pretty insane the level that people go to but also I understand not only the passion and the fandom, but if you can buy a sneaker for let's say $120 and we sell it for 5,000 the next day, then you might be running full speed as well. Chris Erwin:Yeah. I imagine you seeing that probably flipped a switch inside you being like, "Well, look at this fan energy and the fandom. There has got to different ways that we can build this to be even bigger and then harness it both in online and real world environments." I think that probably leads, I think, in September 2017 you have a conversation with Jimmy Iovine that you're all starting to think through the new NTWRK business plan, so tell me about that moment. Aaron Levant:Jimmy and his son Jamie, who's my partner, had had a previous business in LA called Meltdown, which was a classic comic book stores. Out of this comic book store they were doing a YouTube show that was... call it QVC meets Comic-Con. It actually started to get a little energy and there was an article written in Forbes Magazine saying it was an innovative idea. They had put a little money into it and were trying to launch as a business and had some false starts. But the idea was there. I got interested with Jimmy around this idea that he was working on, which was the Meltdown thing. They said, "What are your thoughts on this?" It was a loose introductory meeting just to talk about this Meltdown concept. Aaron Levant:I saw it and I inherently understood it. I thought it was a great concept, but I had a little bit of a broader vision around what I thought NTWRK could be. We ultimately changed the name of the company and changed the focus to not just be Comic-Con pop culture focused, it will be a broader youth culture, sneakers, street wear, entertainment, gaming, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This idea of aggregating the most passionate fan audiences into a platform, procuring the most exclusive drops and having the actual talent who created them present it to you on a daily basis, I thought there was huge merit around it. Ultimately, that night I went home, and I wrote a business plan that ultimately ended up being verbatim what we're doing for NTWRK for Meltdown. I was still working at ReedPop at the time. I felt like over the course of the next few months the conversations I had with Jimmy and with Paul Wachter, who's chairman of our board and runs the investment fund, main seed advisors who funded our seed round, I saw one thing clearly. Not only do I think this was a great business idea but I thought for me I'd done a lot of things in my career, and I think ComplexCon was the pinnacle of my career, but I had the opportunity to come and jump on board and work with a group of people who had a bigger creative vision than I had. Aaron Levant:While I was at Reed, I was the crazy, creative one in the room, and in the conversation with Jimmy and these guys I was the one who was thinking small. They're the ones who had the big, crazy, creative vision. I liked that, where it putting me back on my back to level up. They had just sold Beats for three and a half billion or whatever that was, and they really are epitome of people who take passion around creative and brand and push it to that main stream level. I had relative success but not that level, right? I wanted to be in the midst of that type of greatness and learn from that to take my career to the next level. Chris Erwin:So this happens in September 2017 and then you raise seed round. When does that seed round close and when do you start being all in and focus on NTWRK? Aaron Levant:I quit ReedPop in February of 2018 and then worked on refining the business plan on NTWRK for a few months., and then in May of 2018 raised the seed round, and then we launched in beta in October of '18. From May to October built the team, built the kind of MVP product, and just worked on refining what the business was and what the brand was. Chris Erwin:How much did you raise in the seed round. Aaron Levant:15. Chris Erwin:15 million? Aaron Levant:Yeah. Chris Erwin:What type of team did you assembly around you? I think that was different because you're building a digital product, you hadn't done that before, right? Aaron Levant:Yeah, look, there's three things we do at NTWRK that I have almost no experience with, building technology, becoming a media company, and being a retail company in a way, right? I'd been adjacent to a lot of those things. I'd been on the boards of some companies that have done some of those things, but I had never done it. So that's other part of it, it was super exciting for me. Look, we had to hire a whole new team of people who... I prided myself in the event industry, if you want to hire someone, I knew who all the best people were. This was really easy for me. My Rolodex that was really strong. This was like going in unchartered territory so I had to figure out what I was doing and try to find the right people. I think it was a big challenge for me in a good way and challenged me to spend my network, no pun intended, and go out and find new groups of people to talk to. Aaron Levant:I never hire usually recruiters or people like that, I always do it through referrals. So this was a process, it was 24/7 process of trying to find new amazing people who came from other great amazing organizations. Chris Erwin:Who or what most helpful to you during that time? Was it your board, was it Jimmy? As you were being like, "Okay, I need to have a new muscle to hire these new leaders with capabilities that are unfamiliar to me," what was helpful? Aaron Levant:Yeah. I mean, look, everyone was helpful, ultimately just me pounding pavement, picking up the phone, and trying to... Spent a lot of time LinkedIn, just cold hitting people up. Sometimes great people come to you in interesting ways. Our CFO, COO who's still here today, Emerson, came from a referral for Guston who was the original owner of Meltdown, the comic bookstore. You wouldn't think the guy that has comic bookstore's going to find you a CFO, but he actually found us the best guy. Referral and just always going out there and telling everyone you know, whether it's your aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, colleagues what you're looking for and asking who they know and getting people to send you great people is honestly the best way. Aaron Levant:Everyone was helpful, the board, the internal staff, and me just literally going on LinkedIn like a crazy person and finding people who like they're impressive and just dropping them a cold line. And then I'd have to try and explain to them, "Hey, I want you to come to this company that doesn't exist, that I can't tell you a lot about yet, and it doesn't have anyone else working here. Are you interested?" That's always the fun processes, getting people to leave their careers. It isn't like I'm the founder of some billion dollar tech unicorn and this is my second thing, right? There is some selling involved here. Chris Erwin:But I think that you had had an amazing career to date. You had a pretty rockstar board instead of investors, so when most people heard your pitch, where they like, "Yeah, Aaron, this is exciting, I'm in."? If you were to say the biggest trepidation, people who hesitated, what was the number one reason? Aaron Levant:I would say every department but technology has been, I wouldn't say easy, but we could recruit people. Chris Erwin:Okay. Aaron Levant:Technology is by far the hardest thing because if you're an amazing engineer, if you're an amazing CTO, you're an amazing product person, there's nothing but options for you in this world. Everyone has the same pitch, amazing founders with an amazing backstory, who've had success before, amazing board and tons of money in the bank from some of the top VCs and private equity funds. So, in that case, even though we had a lot of those things, we were in no better footing than anyone else. If anything, we were a step backwards. So I feel like that was the hardest thing, and still is. I think we've come over that hump now. We finally recruited an amazing CTO here at NTWRK, which is Marko who previously led engineering at GOAT for the last six years before joining us, which obviously a very impressive business. But that's probably been the thing that took the longest amount of time. Chris Erwin:I just interviewed Christian, the president of Complex, and he said that what's unique about his team is that everyone there is a fan, either they like hip hop, they like street wear culture, they like music. Was there also a through line that you were bringing from like, "Hey, as I've built my career today and for the team that I know that's really going to exceed here, people need to love this intersection of pop culture and commerce entertainment."? Was that important to you? Aaron Levant:It's always been important to me. I would say it's become, depending on the role, some places more important. We need the foremost experts, authorities, thought leaders, test-makers in those field and people who are picking the merchandise, people who are having a consumer front facing role in our business and has an effect on what you see on screen and what our customer are consuming. Sometimes I would, in the past, I think it was an immature part of my leadership style, is that I would dismiss amazing people who could bring such value. They came from greatness, right? Some organizations have a culture of greatness and excellence, and I would dismiss those people because they weren't into what I was into. Aaron Levant:Often in my career until NTWRK I think overlooked some really amazing people that probably could have helped me along the way. So I think that could be a very arrogant thing to dismiss someone if they don't love sneakers. I don't even really love sneakers to be perfectly honest with you. I think it's both, you need a good mix of finding the best people who are the hardest workers, who are the smartest, who are going to challenge you and bring value to the business and finding the people who are going to help you keep on the center of culture, and blend those people together. Chris Erwin:Before moving into some specific work that you're actually doing at NTWRK and some of the partnerships and the launches, what did it feel like to go from a hustler entrepreneur to now a steward of capital? You had raised $15 million in the seed round, it's a big seed. I believe all your other businesses were bootstraps, you weren't representing investors. So what was that shift like for you? Aaron Levant:Everything I'd done until Reed was completely independently financed by me, and I treated those like real scrappy, scrappy, scrappy businesses, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I was fighting tooth or nail for everything down to what I was paying for an office chair. If someone tried to order a $50 office chair online, I'm like, "You can get it for $38 at Ikea." Those little things, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:My cousin used to call it the million dollar loaf of bread. It's these little things that add up to all of a sudden you've spent a million and you're regretting it. So I was real scrappy in my entrepreneurial days. At Reed, I was scrappy but I definitely learned to be a shepherd of capital in that I was working a publicly-traded company and there's a lot of process there. So I think the two things really set me up well. I understood how to work with large amounts of money at Reed, and I understood how to be a scrappy entrepreneur in my whole previous career. I think I applied both of those things well here. And I went back to trying to be scrappy to the point where even sometimes the board would say, "Aaron, you're being a little too scrappy. You got to spend some money. We gave you all this money, you got to actually buy some Herman Miller chairs." Whatever the analogy is right? It's not all about chairs but I like to use that as the analogy for frivolous spending. Aaron Levant:Look, I feel every day utterly responsible for the investors who gave us money and the LPs for the funds that I need to deliver for them. I put that pressure on myself every day to an extreme extent that I need to return. Like, "Oh, this VCs getting money, whatever, it doesn't work out, one in 10, they'll get their money back." I don't think about it like that, and I hope nobody does who's a CEO. But I feel an absolute personal obligation to deliver minimum tenfold for everybody. Chris Erwin:For the investors who will listen to this, I think they're going to be very happy to hear that sentiment. What also comes out here is that these new investors like Jimmy and Warner Brothers Digital and LeBron also want speed. For a return on capital, it's like "Aaron, yes, being prudent is great, but just move fast. You're on to something and we're betting on you. If you're going to help build this market, and so speed is a major asset." I think that starts to show its face because then you raised pretty quickly after your seed, you then raise a 10 million series A in September of 2019. So that I think that is led by Live Nation and Foot Locker and Drake's also involved. At this point, what are you now building towards, and what are some of the key build highlights that are now setting you up for what we're going to talk about is where NTWRK going in the future? Aaron Levant:What we're really building for is to build the definitive marketplace for youth culture amongst the coolest personalities and pop culture goods, the most sought-after drops and releases across every category that we think is cool, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:And that's a pretty expansive view. I think we aggregating, much like I did at Agenda or ComplexCon, we're finding these passion audiences, we're convincing the most meaningful players in those audiences to create special site specific drops and things for this platform, and now we're just doing in a digital way under much more expansive amount of categories. Aaron Levant:We got the proof of concept in 2018 and '19 and now it's just about now it's just about how do we scale that, how do we get more people on the platform, how do we go from one drop a day to 40 drops a day is what our hope is by the end of next year, 40 unique, specific, custom, exclusive things in one day is a lot, right? Chris Erwin:And to do it over and over again. It's not like you're just building up towards one single day a few months out, it's like this is a daily thing? Aaron Levant:Yeah. And how do we make each one of those not only equal quality, how do we increase the quality over time and how do we take this from a few million people to tens of millions of people, and we become for the overused elevator pitch about our business, the QVC of Gen Z? I think that is exactly what we're trying to do and I don't take objection to that elevator pitch, I actually like it. Chris Erwin:As you think about going from one drop a day to 40 days a day, is there data from the performance of your past drop campaigns of what is selling, what is driving user acquisition that you're using as a data feedback loop and/or is it also a combination of just going gut of like, "This is a cool product, I dig it, we're going to launch with this too."? What is that approach? Aaron Levant:I would say it's 50% gut, 50% data at this point. I think over time it'll become more data. In the beginning it was probably 100% gut because we had no data. Obviously, it's taking learnings from the things that are working, the categories, the personalities. There's a lot of learnings in there around how we scale this business and there's also a lot of surprises, right? I think some of the biggest surprises we learn is just because X celebrity has a big audience, it doesn't mean they sell anything or anyone wants to buy anything from them. There are many personalities that have a much smaller audience, maybe just a few 100,000, that can sell 10X any big celebrity, because they have hyper-engaged audience, an organic audience. Aaron Levant:I think that's been one of the biggest surprises. I think one of our biggest aha moments was in 2018, Ninja was the biggest esport star in the world. He's still a huge star, right? We were like, "Oh my God, if we could just get Ninja to come on NTWRK and sell some stuff," when he was on the Ellen Show and breaking the internet, "we'll get a million downloads in one day, right?" Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:We go, we do this deal with him, we get him on and he's got an exclusive collection for us for holiday and 50 people came. It was nothing, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:New people. It was ridiculously low and it was like, "Wow, it's like sometimes these people that are so big actually don't move culture in a way that you think they do. They're propped up stars for consumption and click-bait but they're not really able to have a meaningful consumer products business." So sometimes you can't just go off the data of how big their social audience is or what their engagement looks like online, things like that, you have to some gut around, do people actually want to buy products from them? I think there's a lot of example of big celebrities who are very much household names but couldn't sell anything. And then there's some people that can create a brand that does billions of dollars, right? Chris Erwin:Wow. Yeah. Aaron Levant:So it's a real hit or miss there and that's really part gut. That almost becomes the more important part. Chris Erwin:It's interesting hearing about that because at my company, RockWater, we are helping different shoppable entertainment companies think about what their go to market launch is. And so we've been reviewing tens of these different live streaming content products. And we're seeing that some of the platforms actually audit the different types of creators or influencers that are onboarding and saying, "Are you a good fit? Are you not a good fit? If we think that you're going to be a premium creator you'll get more customer service resources and we're going to help prop you up." Has your team built any proprietary tech or methods of how you assess the personalities who are going to do a product collaborations with your team? Aaron Levant:I wouldn't say we're assessing them beforehand. We definitely have the post data where we've worked with them. But I would say here's the counterpoint to that even. I'll give you another example, the most successful individual personality on our platform beside Takashi Murakami, is a guy named Ben Baller, who's a celebrity jeweler, podcaster, all around personality. He has a big consumer products business with us. He's been on NTWRK for six months doing multiple things and almost all of them didn't do very well in the beginning. We kept sticking with him against the lack of positive data, right? It wasn't selling through, the audience wasn't engaging. And then eventually we had a breakthrough moment with him. I equate this almost the Agenda thing, you keep pushing forward and we always had a feeling or I had a feeling this guy was working to work and now he's our number two star on the whole platform from a revenue basis. Chris Erwin:What was in your gut that kept you sticking with him, similar to when you were at Agenda? Was it the ignorance is rich, like "No, I believe in this guy, I like him," or was there something else going on? Aaron Levant:Yeah, I believe in him. He was enthusiastic about the partnership, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:Some people, some celebrities they do these things and it's like an obligation. They go, "I got to show up and do this thing and sell this book." They pretend like they're enthusiastic but really they're not. They do the bare minimum. They're like, "oh, I'm obligated to do one social post, I'm going to do just that and then I'm going to take it down." Those people that are going to fight to make their things work. They're going and doing... like GaryVee, great example, that guy is a salesman of salesmen, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:He gets on and he's going to pitch himself like nobody. DJ Khaled, Ben Baller's one of them. They're enthusiastic and they're going to go above and beyond tenfold. And it knew that eventually it would break through, and it did. There were even people inside our own org who tried to kill the partnership, go, "Hey, this guy's not working. We've got all these other products on him, let's put these on the shelf, right?" Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:"Let's not push forward." I'm like, "No, you got to do it." It wasn't anything other than just seeing his level of enthusiasm towards the partnership. I believe that you can bank on that. Chris Erwin:The talent enthusiasm is so key because they have so many opportunities in front of them nowadays of how many different social platforms that they're on, how many different advertisers they can work with, what products can they launch. I remember when I was running Big Frame, the management company under Awesomeness TV, partners would come up to me and ask, "How do I work with your talent? How is this going to be a thriving partnership?" I would always, "You got to sell them on your product and on your vision and not just throw money at them." I would often nix them like, "Hey, if our sales team was pushing too hard," of like this was a big six or seven figure dea where our managers knew that the talent weren't really into it, I'm like, "We shouldn't do this because this is just going to fail and both sides are going to walk away unhappy." Chris Erwin:So I like how you described the enthusiasm is so key. Curious to talk about the future vision for NTWRK and some of the things that you're building towards. I've heard you talk about that you want to festivalize marketing and user acquisition. And I think that there's definitely intent to have many more shopping festivals I think in the new year. Tell us a little bit more about what's your thinking there. Aaron Levant:One of the things that I was obsessed with from day one, even in the original business plan, was looking at things like Alibaba's Singles' Day, which obviously has become since the last three years much more well known thing here in the US, and they made $75 billion this year, I think. They made a week-long event, previous iterations it was a day long event, they made $35 billion. They really took something that was like Black Friday or Cyber Monday here in the US and they made it look like the MTV Music Awards. It was a video first event, it was live stream, and it was crazy, right? And how they entertanmenize shopping, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:I took how you took something like a ComplexCon, something like an Alibaba Singles Day and make a marriage between those two ideas and you launch an online shopping festival. That's really what we're doing with NTWRK. In the coming year we're launching six proprietary shopping festivals, each one around a different audience vertical and two big shopping holidays. These are big ideas for us. We did our first one this year called Transfer in August, which was a design and culture festival in partnership with a creative named Edison Chan from Hong Kong and the artist named Futura 2000, which was an amazing event. We had over two billion media impressions on that event, so we were excited about that. We're launching one just a few weeks here called Beyond the Streets which is an online art fare that's themed around street art and graffiti, which previously was a physical event that now we've brought online. And next year we'll have six. We'll do one called Unboxed in February that's themed around collectables and toys. Aaron Levant:We'll do one in March or April called Off Court which is focused basketball culture. Really about packing two days full of content, meaning dozens or almost 50 to 70 exclusive drops in a two-day period, bringing in the talent who created those drops or musicians, athletes, artists to do panel conversations much like we would at some of my physical conventions or festivals in the past, having live music performances, having a gift shop, having physical takeaways we send the people in the mail beforehand, and really entertainminizing and festivalizing this online shopping experience. It's really about taking hundreds of pieces of content that you can usually absorb over the cause of a month and smashing it into a two-day period and creating sensory overload. We're excited about what that does for the businesses on the go forward and how that draws new customers and how that creates excitement, and also stimulates brands and creators who want to work with us, right? Aaron Levant:If you just called and said, "Hey, you want to do something on a Wednesday because it's Wednesday." They're like, "Ah." You call them and say, "You want to be a part of this festival and all the top brands and creators in the world will be there?" It's much more motivating value proposition. Chris Erwin:Are you building this online experience in tech in-house or you're working with a partner to do it? Aaron Levant:It all lives on networks made of IOS and Android platforms, so it's literally sitting right on top of our day-in and day-out platform. It's not a separate experience. And that's the whole point. The whole purpose of this is to draw people into what we do and to utilize the technology and the proprietary native commerce and video technology we build here. Chris Erwin:You are planning six of those events in 2021. Aaron Levant:Six festivals and two shopping days, which is a one-day festival. For example, 10/10 is NTWRK's birthday, so that our annual celebration where we do a huge promotion. We don't want to be a retail company, I think that's a dead asset class, I think it's a boring idea. I think the number one thing for us to do that is we're creating these moments. We'll do some of the standard retail things like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Back To School, whatever, but how we create our own moments and we create our own annualized trend. What if we stacked all of our festivals in the first quarter, which is usually the lightest quarter for retail, what if we could buck that trend by doing all this exciting stuff. Aaron Levant:So we're creating our own retail holidays and creating our own trajectory of what we do and when we do it. We don't want to prescribe to what Macy's does per se. Chris Erwin:I was going to ask how you gauge success of that. ComplexCon will talk about, "Hey, we drive 20 to 30 million of merchandise sales in Long Beach and we're the number one contributor to that economy." Are the KPIs for you, it's revenue but also how it fuels the rest of the business or ability to attract different artists and personalities to the platform for the new year? Aaron Levant:It's all the above. Obviously revenue is an important KPI. Transfer for example was our highest two days of revenue ever during our last festival. Obviously we intend to beat that coming up in the new year. User acquisition, earned media. We had, like I said, two billion media impressions on that. It's also about how many new brands we attract to the platform, new talents, because then those people could have an ongoing relationship with us. Even things like Google Trends data, if you look at the dates around Transfer, some of our highest searches were NTWRK, right? So all of the things are extremely important KPIs or metrics we're going to track, but we want them all. I think that's a great thing about a festival, it solves for every meaningful thing we want to track in the business, the businesses just accelerates that. Chris Erwin:Let's also talk about another big initiative for the company which was your April 2020 investment in FaZe Clan, one of the world's largest esports and gaming collectives. If I understand this right, it was a $40 million round for FaZe Clan and you guys were the lead investor, is that accurate? Aaron Levant:Yes. Absolutely. Chris Erwin:What's the strategy where NTWRK is defining shoppable entertainment and shopping at the speed of culture, and now you're also making a really big investment in esports and gaming company? What is the goal of that? Aaron Levant:I think it's a pretty simple idea, which is we want to be at the forefront of what's happening in youth culture. I liken FaZe Clan as the leading brand in what is arguably the fastest growing space in media and entertainment, which is gaming lifestyle, esports, right? The numbers are astronomical, so when we think about attracting new audiences that are passionate about something, to me it's esports is the skateboarding of the day, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This is the thing that captures the hearts and minds of possibly billions of people, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:Not just millions, it's a much bigger totally addressable audience here and why not partner with the top brand and organization and the largest brand and organization in that space. The analogy I like to use is that Netflix brings disruption to video streaming, Spotify to audio streaming, NTWRK is trying to do for merchandise streaming, right? Chris Erwin:Yeah. Aaron Levant:This is the category that doesn't really exist. So what makes those platforms destinations is the proprietary content that they have. It's not that we make an investment in a great organization, but we also secured a deal to control the global consumer products rights for that company. And so right now if you go on NTWRK and you scroll down through our feed in couple days from now, we're dropping an exclusive FaZe Clan Beats by Dre headphone exclusively on NTWRK. So when you think about us bringing together a collaboration like that, first time Beats has ever been in the gaming space. Obviously, Jimmy, our lead investor was the founder of Beats, bringing together with the top gaming organization in the world and you can only buy that product on NTWRK. Same analogy like you can only watch Game of Thrones on HBO or you can only watch House of Cards on Netflix. Proprietary content drives new audience and drives revenue and

In the latest episode of This Could Be a Podcast, Nathan and Bobby discuss tipping industries, meeting Eva Longoria at a Kinkos and attention spans.