Podcasts about kpi

Hi and welcome to the Magellan Network Show. As we're nearing the Fourth of July holiday, this also means that we're at halftime in our year 2022. This is also the perfect time to make your mid-year review. When most people go into the new year, they usually come up with a list of resolutions or goals. Surprisingly, these goals are forgotten just a month later. That's why you need a well-thought-out process to take inventory of what you did in the first half of the year to ensure that your goals are still on track. In this episode, I talked about: (01:53) Why do we do a narrative? (03:26) What are some of the KPI's included in the review process? (03:44) What to do with benchmarks (03:58) The importance of doing a mid-year review Lastly, as my gift to you, I will provide you FREE access to our Strategic Planning System Review and Benchmark. Go to www.magellannetwork.net to get your FREE copy today. The Magellan Academy & Network The rules and tools for success in the financial services industry are about to change radically. I have spent over 25 years coaching only financial advisors. In that time, I have personally conducted over 50,000 individual coaching sessions. I have built a profound knowledge base of what it takes to achieve lifelong success in business and life. In my career, I have transformed 1,000's of advisors (below are video and written testimonials by many of them). I am going to coach you, teach you, inspire you, and train you all on your mobile device every business day. You are going to get better at business development, practice management, personal development, and your vision. Here is what you are going to get from me each month: - A 5-10 minute morning coach video each business day. - 3 training videos of 20-30 minutes each. This will be a deep dive into four areas I mentioned above. - A live group coaching session where you and I can interact and work together. Here is what you can do each month: - Post a question to me and I will answer it. - Collaborate and associate with like-minded advisors. - Invite other great advisors into the network. Your Bottom Line: Here is the deal. I am not going to ask you for a credit card. Like I said before, coaching is personality driven. You might not like my style or tactics. So with that in mind here is my offer to you. Complete the short form below. You will receive an email with detailed instructions on how to join the network for the next 14-days. I personally approve each submission so this might take a few hours or a day at the most. I will not ask for compensation of any kind during that 14-days. If after experiencing my work for 30-days and if you believe that I can help you, here is the deal. To remain in Magellan Network and have access to Magellan Academy, your daily investment in yourself will only be about the price of a Latte these days. One more thing, it's a month-to-month deal. I'm not going to lock you into anything. Take action now and complete the short form below and I look forward to welcoming you personally inside the Magellan Network. ► Subscribe to our channel here: https://www.youtube.com/user/CoachJoeLukacs?sub_confirmation=1 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coachjoe.guru/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coach_joe_guru/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coachjoelukacs/ Website: https://www.magellannetwork.net/ Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/themagellannetwork Twitter: https://twitter.com/CoachJoeLukacs__

Your marketing strategy has finally worked! Organic and paid leads are finally coming in. But now what? What is the next step to ensure that a new lead will go down the sales funnel and turn into a sale? In this episode of the Keeping it Real podcast we sat down with Greg Harrelson to talk about what you should do as an agent. Keep these tips in mind so you'll know how to take action and convert those leads into paying clients! New Perspectives: The Right Ratio for Your KPI Before everything, let's discuss your key performance indicators or KPIs. Most agents refer to the contact-to-close ratio, which frequently shows low numbers. That's why we want to introduce a better KPI to help shift your focus: capture to contact.  This way, you can focus on increasing your number of conversations versus closings. You'll be in touch with more people you can convert instead of contacting a few leads and converting even fewer. Reaching Out to Your Leads Now that you have leads, it's time to contact them using a method called double dialing or calling them twice. This changes their way of thinking and prompts them to answer you on the second call. However, if that doesn't work, you can activate a workflow on the Real Geeks customer relations management (CRM) platform. That way, you'll have as many touch points with the lead as you need to close the sale. Make sure you're in control of the platform or autoresponder and not the other way around. Your leads will be more willing to engage with you if there's a recognizable human element to these communication efforts. There's No Dead Lead As a real estate agent, you'll want to abandon the phrasing “dead lead.” They might be inactive, or maybe they've simply “ghosted” you, but they're probably still looking to buy a property — just not with you. You need to activate a workflow that will reengage them or contact them manually so they can have a one-on-one conversation with you. Nurture the Lead, No Matter What Phase They're In You may encounter leads that are not ready to buy or leads that are just thinking of buying. Many agents abandon these leads in pursuit of those more likely to convert immediately. However, it's essential to keep the three phases of a buyer in mind: dreaming, exploring, and buying. If somehow a buyer calls you and is ready to buy, remember that they've probably talked to other agents who abandoned them early in the game, thinking that the buyer was still in the dreaming or exploratory phase. So be patient, nurture those leads, and take advantage of technology like the Real Geeks CRM to ensure that you manage them efficiently. Realistic KPIs You Can Target For a contact-to-closing ratio, 16% – 18% is good enough for the average real estate agent, but it's low compared to the potential of a capture-to-contact ratio. For that, you can focus on getting at least 30% before aspiring for 60% – 70%. That's an almost 300% increase in contacts, with no additional expenses! Contact Real Geeks! Ready to learn more about our real estate CRM? Contact us today and tell us how we can help! You can also watch this podcast episode on YouTube for a more in-depth discussion of the concepts above.

David J.P. Fisher is the President of RockStar Consulting, a Sales Hall of Fame inductee, keynote speaker, author, and coach. Part of our journey as salespeople is the alignment of our individual values with how we sell. Being intentional about this growth not only makes us sell more effectively but also makes us more memorable. David comments further on the role of sales leadership in enabling the success of sellers, as well as win rates being an essential KPI.    HIGHLIGHTS ● Know yourself more to sell better ● Be intentional with authentic vs salesy behavior ● Coaching on self-awareness and incremental changes ● A seller's win rate is a key indicator of performance   QUOTES David: "If you are a young seller who has that first sales job and you just are getting this message from the people on high that, hey, you just got to do this, again, self-awareness is not an easy, not only an easy path, it's not an easy path to choose, I think, and that's why you get stats that half the sellers are unmemorable." David: "If I was deliberate about it, at least then I can then figure out if it works or not. I wasn't just muddling along. It was like I was deliberately trying this, holy crap, it worked. Okay, so let me examine that. Or I deliberately do this, it did not work. Let us re-examine this." Andy: "The salespeople that work for them are basically the product, and that product is an individual who can go and operate at a certain level in a predictable fashion. And so, that's really the job of a sales manager. My job is to develop these individuals in such a way and manage them, coach them, so that they can really achieve a certain level of performance, that being quota."   Find out more about David in the link below: ● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iamdfish/   More on Andy: Connect on LinkedIn Get Andy's new book "Sell Without Selling Out" on Amazon Learn more at AndyPaul.com   Sponsored by: Revenue.io | Unlock exponential growth with an AI-powered RevOps platform | Revenue.io Scratchpad | The fastest way to update Salesforce, take sales notes, and stay on top of to-dos | Scratchpad.com   Explore the Revenue.io Podcast Universe: Sales Enablement Podcast RevOps Podcast Selling with Purpose Podcast

Today's business needs little introduction. Berkshire Hathaway is one of the largest businesses in the world and run by arguably the most famous investors of our time, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.  To break down the business, I'm joined by Chris Bloomstran. Chris is the President and CIO of Semper Augustus and has gone as deep on Berkshire as anyone I've ever encountered, making him the perfect person to do this with. Given the reams of excellent content already out there about Buffett and Berkshire, we focused our conversation on the specific elements that make this business so special. Please enjoy this breakdown of Berkshire Hathaway.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is presented by Visible Alpha. The team at Visible Alpha built a platform to analyze consensus data and financial metrics on over 6,000 publicly traded companies. Rather than having to dig through models one by one, Visible Alpha extracts data from every line item across sell-side models so you can better understand expectations on metrics beyond just revenue and earnings. Listeners are invited to try Visible Alpha for free by visiting visiblealpha.com/breakdowns   -----   This episode is brought to you by Daloopa. Daloopa streamlines a major pain point for investors. By capturing all of a company's KPIs and adjusted financials into their database - Daloopa makes it easy to quickly update your models for what matters. Daloopa uses AI to find every KPI disclosed - from charts, to text, and even from footnotes of investor presentations. Daloopa updates these KPIs and data points in your existing Excel models in one click, regardless of your source or format. Test Daloopa for free at daloopa.com/Patrick.   —--   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   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: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss   Show Notes [00:02:26] - [First question] - What Berkshire has taught the world about float [00:14:00] - How much of Berkshire's success was predicated on insurance  [00:23:17] - Whether or not Berkshire's capital source has been more important than stock selection  [00:30:04] - Why there's such a disparity between good stock pickers and holding companies [00:36:24] - What the major signposts of durability are when evaluating companies [00:38:29] - Acquiring Alleghany and using that as a case study that reflects their values [00:47:22] - The role that energy has played in Berkshire's growth  [00:59:54] - Thoughts about the major pieces of Berkshire and the future of the company  [01:05:46] - Important lessons learned about investing and business from Berkshire's story

„Viele Agenturen haben sich in die „bunte-Bildchen-Ecke“ drücken lassen. Und das führt dazu, dass sie bei den ökonomischen Themen der Unternehmen nicht mit am Tisch sitzen, sondern nur Abarbeiter von Kreation sind.“ Klartext von Anja Stolz, die als CMO der R+V Versicherung seit ihrem Dienstantritt vor rund drei Jahren das Marketing des „schlafenden Riesen“ auf Links gedreht hat. Ihrer Überzeugung nach könnten Agenturen aber durchaus eine Rolle als Kundenversteher einnehmen. Dazu müssen sie sich an die Dinge herantrauen, vor denen sie sich gefühlt oftmals scheuen: Prozesse, KPI's, Business Cases. Denn „Marke ist eben nicht nur Werbe-Chichi.“ Und auch in dieser Folge von #WhatsNextAgencies begegnen uns wieder die performanceorientierten Vergütungsmodelle: Anja Stolz glaubt fest daran, dass darin die Zukunft einer erfolgreichen Zusammenarbeit liegt. Am liebsten sind ihr Agenturen, die mit ins ökonomische Risiko gehen und sich an den Erfolgen der Maßnahmen messen lassen. Voraussetzung dafür ist gegenseitiges Vertrauen, Transparenz in der Kommunikation und Fairness – dann klappt's auch mit der extra mile. Neben diesen Fragen der Agentur-Kunde-Beziehung gibt Anja Stolz bei Kim Alexandra Notz spannende Einblicke, wie sie es geschafft hat, sich als Marketeer selbst zu befähigen, so ihren Bereich vor einem Nischendasein nur im Umfeld Werbung statt kundenorientierter Marktbearbeitung zu bewahren und das Marketing eines der größten Versicherungskonzerne des Landes zukunftsfähig zu machen. Kleiner Spoiler: Digitalisierung als Selbstzweck ist dabei keinesfalls ihr Ding.

Key Things Discussed How OKRs can shift company cultures towards more outcomes-based approaches – especially relevant for Covid-inspired distributed workers. The difference between OKRs, KPIs, and their sometimes complementary goals. How to infuse company-wide meetings and employee evaluations with OKR-oriented measures and priorities. Deployment of CLEAR – Career Path, Learning Objectives, Expectations, Accountabilities & Rewards – in a sales context. How leaders who are vulnerable to personal challenges set a tone that trickles down and encourages OKR adoption throughout the ranks. Why creating an environment where it's safe for employees to ask questions – and fail – is a key element to successful OKR implementation. Tips and tactics for anyone getting ready to adopt an OKR approach. Show Notes [00:20] Growing up in a big, rambunctious family, Bradford realized early on that he was energized by two things: Making people happy and understanding how business works. [02:25] Bradford defines the HR function and its multi-dimensional role in showcasing and aligning departments across the enterprise. [03:30] About Bradford's take on the freight industry and Loadsmart, a provider of digital solutions to manage industry logistics. As CPO, he was part of creating a powerful, scalable, synchronous clearinghouse for automating communications and industry flow.  [07:10] What it will mean for Loadsmart to provide an AI-driven platform that coordinates and connect not only shippers, who are the primary customers, but also carriers, ports, customs, warehouses – the many dispersed elements that have never before had access to shared data. [10:00] Throughout his career and multiple engagements, Bradford has been building on OKRs that weren't much more than KPIs when he started on the journey – a journey, he says, that never ends. [12:00] Defining the core difference between an OKR and a KPI, based on the lens used and varying indicators. [15:10] Bradford highlights the transformational impacts on company-wide meetings that focus cross-functionally and creatively to expand ideation and stretch goals. [16:58] KPIs do have a place within organizations, particularly in areas where baseline goals are important for level-setting. [17:42] About linking OKRs and evaluations, for Loadsmart a quarterly process based on four check-in questions focused on exceptionality. [19:50] “Loadee” evals include results-focused OKR questions that flip the paradigm to emphasize effort and output rather than a check-the-box mentality. [23:49] About CLEAR (Career Path, Learning Objectives, Expectations, Accountabilities & Rewards), an automated progression program that offers employees flexibility from quarter to quarter in how they pursue objective goals. Bradford shares examples from sales, where he recently rolled out a highly successful program. [29:27] Accelerated by Covid, workplace culture is rebranding performance management to shift from a performative (long hours, butts in seats) mentality to an impact- and measures-based orientation.  [31:09] Ideation and expectations at the senior level in terms of how to bring OKR strategy to life, starting with the pyramid of progress:  At the individual level it's about initiatives and tasks and making progress towards long-term team objectives. Then measuring for key results. Expectations can be set top-down, but individuals are empowered bottom-up to try things, fail fast and drive initiatives autonomously. Ideation comes into play as observation and opportunity-oriented rather than imposed problem-oriented solutions as a starting point. [34:45] Testing ideation is a critical next step in successful OKR deployment: Build tools (they can be fairly basic) to create evidence-based data analytics rather than blindly pursuing initiatives based on hearsay or intuition. Test adoption and outcomes via KPIs by tracking things like revenue. [37:25] Bradford explains how he once used the creation of a cricket league for employees in India as a strategic initiative (including data metrics) to drive corporate OKRs like employee engagement and productivity. It was a fun and popular way to get there! [40:48] Why employees have to be empowered to fail in order to be successful.   [42:45] Bradford's advice for how people managers should respond when employees fail? (Which they inevitably must …)  Whether an individual or a team: Do they have clarity as to what went wrong? Be prepared to do a retrospective to uncover the reasons for derailments. OKRs can be as critical for indicating what not to do as what to do.  Meet regularly to go over OKRs and identify what's red, yellow, green – and why.  Is it psychologically safe for people to proactively raise a hand and get help? Leadership should not shy away from being vulnerable. Humility and authenticity trickle down through the ranks in liberating ways. [46:10] When it comes to OKRs, sales is a somewhat different animal. There are, however, great opportunities to partner and leverage in a marketing context. (46:52] Quick-Fire Questions: What's your dream and, if you've got a deadline, what's that? It's changeable based on his evolving family life and the new dimensions it brings. What do you appreciate most about your team? Their openness to trying new things, which is critical when rolling out unfamiliar, innovative initiatives.  What's top of mind these days? Budget planning and performance. No. 1 tip for launching new OKR initiatives?  Less is more! It's much easier to measure for quality through patient sequencing. It's all about progress. Are you developing metrics and milestones rather than “to do” lists?  When success is clearly defined and measurable, OKRs are lots of fun! Relevant Links:Follow Our Guest: Website | LinkedIn

EPISODE IN BRIEF In today's episode of Coaching Conversations, Nick and Chris discuss recent news on the minimum wage increase and sort through strategies to combat the wage rise. You may have navigated the past two years very well, but for those with staff doing low to medium skill level activities, it's news that brings yet another obstacle. So, if you're a business owner and feeling a little unsettled by the government's decision, this one's for you. The nitty-gritty of the minimum wage increase is coming up in this new episode of Coaching Conversations….  Time Code/Show Notes 0.26  Intro: Business coach experts Nick and Chris shed some light on the way forward and share some strategies to soften the blow. 02.20  Covid has devastated small businesses so it's hard to reconcile this new increase with the pain of the past few years. But like GST, you must learn to accept it. 4.00  Change your mindset. What if you think of it as helping your employees realise this small reward. Think of it as alleviating some of the financial stress so they may be free to focus on the job – and less on an inadequate wage.     6.35  It is what it is. Accept it. Then think about how you will tackle it. How do you become more client-centric – how do you add value…  how do you INCREASE your fees to combat the wage rise.           8.40 How can you become more valuable to your customers. 10.43  Nick encourages you to look at the increase over a year.          Look at how you can manage that figure and split it up over that time and how you may make it back. 14.10  Observe the facts. Get out a calculator and figure out how much it will cost per employee. Don't let stress snowball. Reverse engineer it over the cost of a 12 months… 15.25  Work on a deal. How can you create a win-win and base the increase on performance. Ask ‘are you really happy with a 5 percent increase…. What can you do to increase your value to me so I can look at a further incentivisation…' Change the entitlement into an incentive. Or create a ‘Bonus' structure. 18.00  Make it a performance-driven KPI and give them more. You can flip the mindset on it's head. 22.10  Beware the employee who takes the hand out and does nothing to earn it. Do you really want those who do not add value to their talent and skills... 23.50 Nick talks about how you can pay your employees to work smarter not harder. How do you push them to earn bonuses not hand-outs… 25.25  Reach out to ask@upcoach.com.au if you have any questions and change your mind-set under the guidance of an extraordinary business coach.                                           EPISODE SUMMARY        It's all in the re-think. The way you manipulate your mindset to change entitlement into an incentive. Have awareness – have acceptance. Ask yourself… how can you increase more value on the front end - from the people who are buying products from you… Calculate the percentage increase over a year – then multiply that by the amount of product you need to sell. And do a deal with your employee around their performance. Incentivize an increase instead of it being a seen as a handout…

Nic Marks's TED talk on the Happy Planet Index has been viewed millions of times. He studied maths at Cambridge, is a trained therapist and statistician and was a member of the Think Tank (New Economics Foundation) working on wellbeing that became hugely successful and influential at Governmental level. A happy team is a successful team. Happiness is ill defined and therefore can be thought of at three different levels. ‘I feel happy' which is an emotion, ‘I am happy with…' which is a cognitive judgement and ‘I am a happy person' which is a personal trait. Happiness is not a state to reach and maintain, it is a wave function where we go up and down; in and out of happiness. When we are happy, we should carry on, when not happy we need to make a change. Happiness all the time would actually be dysfunctional. Happiness is a very social emotion. We are 30% more likely to laugh in the presence of another person. This is all about generosity and giving, our ability to have multiple relationships which require the investment of time. “Are you happy at work?' is a simple question relevant and east to answer from the CEO to the newest intern (from shop floor to the top floor)KPI's are usually a lagging indicator, so leaders need to consider focusing on leading indicators such as a weekly ‘happiness' check in for teams. Happy individuals deliver better quality and quantity of work and creativity is heavily linked to positivity.We can't separate our home and work life as regards happiness, organisations are full of human beings who need care, empathy and understanding to allow all to feel valued and deliver value. This episode is packed full of top tips and strategies for any leader to start to make happiness a KPI in their organisations. To check out your own happiness at work see: www.fridayone.comTo learn more about Friday Pulse: www.fridaypulse.comRead more about Nic and his work: www.nicmarks.org and www.happyplanetindex.org 

980. Vlog63. Análisis de colaboraciones y alianzas  Un negocio sin duda puede llegar a crecer más rápido si se apalanca en realizar colaboraciones de alianzas con otras empresas o asociaciones. ¡Si te interesa que tú Forecast llegue a la meta ! Aprende a crear un funnel de ventas en LinkedIn  para captar leads calificados a través de Leads for Sales nuestra mentoría VIP online para empresas, inscribirte en la próxima edición.  https://youtu.be/U5T1a4cKCIE En este video blog les comparto de manera honesta todas las vivencias, retos, éxitos y aprendizajes que vivo al dirigir la Agencia de Negocios B2B Katyaman.com. Esta semana intensa llena de aventuras, desafíos y nuevas experiencias. Diplomado en Sales ThinkingRole Play con representantes de empresas corporativas. Monitoreo y Networking dentro de ​LinkedIn y optimización de campañas Medición de KPI's Luego de cambios se revisa que aumentan los indicadoresSeguimiento de relaciones comerciales dentro de ​​LinkedIn. Análisis de posibles colaboraciones y/o alianzas con asociaciones y consultorías.Investigación Solicitar apoyoReferenciaEntrevistas en Video Podcast Negocios en Digital.Juan Martinez, experto en Atracción & Gestión del Talento, Desarrollo Profesional, Marca personal & Employer Branding, Formación, Recursos Humanos, Empleabilidad, Especialista en LinkedIn, con él hablamos sobre Cómo tener colaboradores felices.Álvaro Pinilla, Consultor colombiano, con él hablamos sobre los Mitos sobre estrategia empresarial. Juan Pablo Sans, Copywriter en ventas y estrategias de email marketing, con él hablamos sobre Beneficios de Embudos de Venta por Email.Miguel Angel Martin, Catedrático y consultor español, con él hablamos sobre Gamificación en los negocios. Hasta acá todas los retos y crecimientos que hemos vivido junto con el equipo para hacer crecer nuestra agencia y servir de manera eficiente a nuestros clientes  Háganme llegar sus comentarios,  observaciones y cualquier feedback a través del formulario de contactar.  Gracias por estar al otro lado, porque sin ustedes esto no existiría,  gracias por seguir escuchando el podcast en las diferentes plataformas,  por sus valoraciones de 5 estrellas en iTunes,  sus me gusta y comentarios en ivoox,  por el corazoncito verde en Spotify, en YouTube. Bendecido viernes y nos vemos el lunes con un tema de negocios y empresas. Un abrazo, Katya —------------------------------------------------------------- Katya Amán Enseño a implementar sistemas de generación de leads calificados en  LinkedIn Antes de que te vayas me gustaría hacerte una cordial invitación a que te unas a NUESTRO GRUPO EN LINKEDIN, dónde harás Networking y aprenderás más sobre cómo generar oportunidades de negocio predecible y constante. En el grupo comparto de manera exclusiva contenido que sólo lo encontrarás ahí.

You can subscribe, rate, review, and listen to every episode of the "Unleash the Awesome" podcast at https://gambrill.com/podcast .  0:28 "If you're not assessing, you're guessing." - Paul Kolody 1:18 "What gets measured gets managed." - Peter Drucker 1:30 How people typically measure weight loss, and what they need to be looking at instead. 2:48 Leading vs. Lagging indicators. 6:35 Key Performance Indicators (KPI's) to consider as you are starting and scaling a business. 8:08 "Build your email list!" - Dave Gambrill 8:30 "Using the power of AIDA in Your Marketing" - Episode 18 of the "Unleash the Awesome" podcast with Dave Gambrillhttps://gambrill.simplecast.com/episodes/using-the-power-of-aida-in-your-marketing . 10:49 Digital products and group coaching have fat profit margins.  16:40 "The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals" - Chris McChesney, et al. https://amzn.to/3bn7LhU . Come join the conversation in our communities... Digital Marketing Mentorship with Dave Gambrill Facebook Grouphttps://www.facebook.com/groups/dmmdavegambrill . Digital Marketing Mentorship with Dave Gambrill Telegram Channelhttps://gambrill.com/telegramdmm . And let me know what you thought of this episode and what you'd like me cover in future episodes over on Instagram.https://www.instagram.com/gambrill/ . If you're on TikTok, you can follow me over there too.https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdEb7qbW/ . Here are some of the other most popular episodes of "Unleash the Awesome"... "Russell Brunson Shares Powerful Insights from his Book 'Traffic Secrets" - Episode 23https://gambrill.simplecast.com/episodes/russell-brunson-shares-powerful-insights-from-his-new-book-traffic-secrets . "Job Search Secrets and How to be a STAR in the Interview" - Episode 34https://gambrill.simplecast.com/episodes/job-search-secrets-and-how-to-be-a-star-in-the-interview . "Dr. Robert Cialdini Shares Powerful New Insights Regarding Influence and Persuasion". - Episode 66https://gambrill.simplecast.com/episodes/dr-robert-cialdini-shares-powerful-new-insights-regarding-influence-and-persuasion . "The Secret Behind How John C. Maxwell Became the World's #1 Leadership Expert" - Episode 9https://gambrill.simplecast.com/episodes/the-secret-behind-how-john-c-maxwell-became-the-worlds-1-leadership-expert . #unleashawesome #mindset #metrics #davegambrill #techtools #entrepreneur #success #sidehustle #digitalmarketing #coaching #toolset #digitalceo #onlinecourses #10x #funnelhacker #successhabits #speaker #trainer #coach #consultant #habits #goals #paulkolody #author #mentoring #masterminds #practice #repetition #teaching #publicspeaking #keynote #kpis #sixsigma #mentor #goals #dreams #10x #4hww #process #systems #caloriedeficit #burncalories #loseweight #losebodyfat #strength #conditioning #speed #agility #hunterdoncentral #hcrhs #4dx #lead #lag #indicators #2cc CONSUMER NOTICE: You should assume that I have an affiliate relationship and/or another material connection to the providers of goods and services mentioned in this broadcast and may be compensated when you purchase from a provider. You should always perform due diligence before buying goods or services from anyone via the Internet or offline.

SEM, CTA, ROI, KPI, PPC, CAC... el marketing está lleno de palabros muy técnicos, pero que debes conocer para ser un buen marketero. Hoy te explico 9 de estas palabras para que no te quedes con cara de WTF y pienses LOL cuando ves estas iniciales.

2022年6月2日下午，亚马逊中国宣布旗下的kindle电子书商城将于2023年6月30停止运营，这标致这kindle正式结束在中国大陆的运营业务。作为电子墨水阅读器的头号品牌，kindle一直在阅读爱好者的心头好。同时在大众眼中，kindle又有着截然不同的评价，诸如“吃灰神器”，“泡面盖”之类的标签常常被贴到了它的身上。在二手平台咸鱼上，kindle和跑步机，卷发棒，空气炸锅并称为四大神器，不仅在为各大快递公司完成年度KPI考核时贡献着自己的力量，也在无形之间增进了陌生人之间的沟通和交流。无论好坏与否，kindle的本次退出都将会在国内的电子书和电子阅读器市场上掀起新一轮的风波。在这个竞争积累又极度内卷的行业里，kindle不是第一个倒下的，也不会是最后一个。本 期 嘉 宾 ： 直树桑科技自媒体人，从事电子墨水屏阅读器相关内容的创作，《如何用Kindle高效学习》作者hzcneo有趣而无用的人做着有趣而无用的事 节目总时长 00:37:43在这期节目中，我们探讨了以下这些内容： 03：15 kindle本次退出中国的原因分析 08：37 电子墨水阅读器，手机和纸质书的阅读差异 13：02 电子墨水阅读器现在的发展状态 21：29 中国的电子书市场概况 27：30 国内出版社对电子书的态度 30：38 电子书盗版的问题 本期使用音乐 片头曲：Just Take Me in Your Arms ——Just Take Me in Your Arms片尾曲：Bookshop Background —— Jazz Paradise Music Moment

Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)   Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”  Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing. Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client's hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific. Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don't fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it's important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.” Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words, I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency's franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.  Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years. When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.  Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency's DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency's “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members' personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.” Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business's equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise. Joe can be reached on his agency's website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.  ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe. JOE: Rob, great to be with you today. ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don't you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm's specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it. JOE: We're the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that. When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We're the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We're one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.  ROB: Wow, congratulations. There's a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let's peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What's a typical engagement look like? JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we're talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them. Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today's world, and particularly within the franchising space. ROB: That's a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that's interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What's the mix of touchpoints there? JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there's different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there's also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses. Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they're looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel, and then we can from there figure out their cost per quality applicant by channel and then develop a marketing mix that's going to allow them to continue to grow. ROB: There's a lot going on there. Over time we've seen different platforms that have tried to jump to the forefront to help, I think, organizations like ChoiceLocal, handle marketing for multilocation, for franchises. What's the state of the tool ecosystem for this? Has any tool that tries to help with this problem and actually create a library of content to push out to different locations worked? Or has it not worked and you end up building some of those solutions yourselves? How do you look at dozens of locations, different local needs, some shared content, that sort of thing? JOE: There are a lot of agencies that will come in and sell franchise systems, their own proprietary tech in order to bring that about. What we've generally found is when these marketing agencies bring in their proprietary tech, it's more in the agency's interest and less in the interest of the franchisor and the franchisee. Essentially, it's “Here, take this marketing solution. Take our proprietary tech, and then it's impossible for you to leave us.” That's how they set that up, and it can create some difficulty and a lot of angst within these different franchise systems. When working in the franchising space, what you need to do is build a win-win ecosystem where the franchisor wins, the franchisee wins, and as a byproduct of that, as the agency you win as well. There's a whole host of various tools in this, from Rallio to WebPunch to SOCi. There's a lot of others. Yext. These are all various powerful tools that can be used and deployed. There's other powerful tools in the call tracking space, too. You have companies like CallRail who do a really strong job with this, with call analytics and those types of things. The job of the agency is to find the right tools that are right for that franchise system while also using their agency buying power to leverage economies of scale and do what's in the best interest of their client partners. ROB: If I hear you correctly, there's not a one-size-fits-all best franchise management tool. It is a little bit of a best of breed, it's a what are the needs of your particular brand/set of stores, that kind of thing. Sometimes it is Yext, maybe sometimes you bring CallRail to the table. You're the experts, and you're prescribing the menu that you recommend. JOE: Yeah, that is right. One thing, too, as you follow these companies – depending on how much they're investing in R&D, how much they're willing to listen to their customer, how much they're willing to allow their agency partners to fuel their product roadmap and guide their product roadmap – that's really how you're going to pick your partners, in large part. There's a lot of these SaaS companies that are not very customer service minded. They're more like “Get in, sign up for a product, and then leave us alone” kind of deal, and as an agency, that's not the kind of partner you're looking for. You're looking for ones that will invest in making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers. Why I say that is that's something to look out for in the beginning. And the other reason I say that is the companies that are willing to invest in their customer service also tend to invest in their product development, and you'll notice there's ebbs and flows of who's good and who's bad when they do this. And things change, so you've got to find a partner that's always looking to change and adapt with the market as it changes and evolves. ROB: It's interesting how the cast of characters has changed. When I google for this problem space, Hootsuite is out there, Content and Sprout are out there contending for just a small slice of that franchise deal. But you know they're chasing every other vertical in social as well. I can certainly appreciate – we're in Atlanta; CallRail is a neighbor company here. Do you know their roots a little bit? It's an interesting background on them. JOE: It's a really neat company. ROB: The founder started off with a site to help people with BMWs that were out of warranty to find a local repair shop. My understanding is if you have a BMW that's out of warranty, you need a local repair shop. That's what I've heard. So, he started off doing lead gen for these local shops and then built call tracking to help prove the value of his BMWershops.com website, and ended up building CallRail from it. JOE: What's neat about CallRail, too, is they really have come in – there's a lot of companies that historically have played in that place, and they really trounced them. Some of their advanced features and some of their call analytics, listening to calls, transcribing calls, turning them into qualified leads, or basically saying what's a qualified lead, what's a hot lead, what's not a lead, and how they built some of that technology – it's pretty cool stuff. ROB: Yeah, there's a tremendous customer focus there. I do want to shift gears for a moment; I want to get to the origin story of ChoiceLocal. What led you to create this firm? What led you to this point of focus, of all the areas you could have focused on helping and niches you could have served? JOE: I served at a company that served multibillion dollar companies. I was a Vice President of Operations of Product Development there. We served Fortune 500 companies – FedEx, CBS, other multibillion dollar publicly traded companies. That's where I spent my day and that's who I served. We built a team of 180 full-time digital marketers. Kind of a neat story. Started as employee #8, within a few years worked my way up to VP of Ops and Product Development and did that. It was cool. I learned a lot and I had some really great mentors while I was there. The owners there have done some really amazing things outside of agency, just building multimillion dollar companies and multibillion dollar companies and taking some of them public, like NCS Healthcare and others. So, I learned a ton while I was there over that 10-year period. Then in 2012, we had a pregnancy. Went into an ultrasound room with my wife and there was no heartbeat. So we lost our son, Ben, pretty late in the pregnancy. I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don't want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don't want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.” That's actually how ChoiceLocal got started. In its simple form, our mission always has been – our mission and our core values were written prior to even having a business plan – our mission is help others. We help our partners succeed, our franchisor and franchisee partners, help their dreams and aspirations become a reality. We help our teammates' dreams and aspirations become a reality. We've been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio five years running. We have a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s, which is unheard of high. You ask people, “What is a good employee Net Promoter Score?”, the answer is 30. We're hanging out in the 70s. So, we really work to live that mission and really care about others. Working in the agency space, a lot of agencies will bring in talent, they will work them like crazy for like five years until they burn out, and then they leave and they go in-house. Having experienced that and have friends who've experienced that in other companies, I wanted to do something fundamentally different. That's why we founded ChoiceLocal and built it the way that we have. But our mission of help others is also giving back. We take 10% of the profits out of the company and we use it to help kids in need. Our big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year. We created the Benjamin Isaac Foundation, named after our son, Ben. We just gave a home to a single mother with three kids. Her name is Brie; she's got three beautiful boys. We just had their house dedication two weekends ago, and that was through Habitat for Humanity. We were the sole sponsor for the home. Got to meet her beautiful boys. We helped them move in, had the housewarming and a dedication. It was so cool. It's just so cool. We do tons of other stuff like that. So far this year – it's now June, and we are at a little over 6,000 kids that we've helped through various charities that we partner with. ROB: Well, 4,000 more to go and then another goal. JOE: Yes, raise the goal. ROB: There's a depth in that origin story. I think something that is interesting to think through – when you have a team, when you're giving to causes, how do you connect the day-to-day of what the team is doing to the causes that the company is giving to and really ensure that there's an authentic connection there? I think it can be very disconnected sometimes. Here's the owner, here's the team, we're building this stuff, some money got shot out over here – to a good cause, but maybe it doesn't feel relevant to the day-to-day. So how do you think about connecting the team to the cause? JOE: That's a great question. It's a really great question. The first thing is we hire for people that have the core values that we have. Family, giving, integrity in all things. There's certain ways that you can interview people to make sure that they have those. And if you actually study some of the psychology behind it, if you study various hiring techniques that are used in books like Topgrading and WHO and those types of things, there's ways you can interview for those core values and competencies to screen people out that don't have that. So, you're hiring people that believe what you believe and then you're coming into a culture that celebrates those core values and celebrates those things. For example, we have a team meeting every single month where we update on everything that's happening in the agency, what's going on with business strategy. We're transparent on financials and performance and all of those things so everybody can see what's going on. We have a part where we talk about help others and core values. In core values, people nominate teammates and they celebrate how they live those core values out, and we tell those stories. A lot of those core values are how we help our partners and internally, but it's also how we give back. And then we tie in our financial performance. We then say, “Because we were able to do this, we were able to give Brie and her three boys this gift.” We make it very personal. Along those lines, we also have quarterly volunteering. We try to get every teammate to volunteer once a quarter so they can see, feel, and touch the work they're doing. My personal favorite is when we go to the Boys and Girls Club of America. Those kids need love, they need support, they need good mentors, and when you go there, you feel fantastic afterwards because you've been able to deliver some of that for them. So that's really powerful. And then we also do this BHAG walkthrough. BHAG stands for big hairy audacious goal. We have this roadmap, and then we say, “Here's three kids that were helped because of this. Here's 1,600 kids that were fed for a year in a place of education.” We did this charity giveaway through our annual thing at the International Franchise Association called the ChoiceLocal 10k Charity Giveaway. People enter a drawing giveaway. There's a really cool story – there's a woman who served as a board member of the International Franchise Association; today she owns about 20 Taco Johns franchises. Very successful businesswomen. She picked the Great Harvest Heartland as her charity, and she ended up winning. What I found out after she won is that as a kid, she was so poor that she needed to go to the foodbank to eat. So, it was a very personal gift for her. That's the type of stuff that really hits home, when you always tie it to that personal story. And then when you say, “Because you were able to do this specifically,” and you name the person, “it allowed us to be able to do this.” Sorry, I'm passionate about this – the last thing I'll add to it is helping the business owner. This particular franchisee is having a really hard time and they're on the verge of going out of business. We had a good amount of this through COVID. We announced the ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package for our customers. We have this whole “grow through the downturn” quarterly priority and theme. We saved probably 30 franchisees from going out of business during COVID, and that was really cool. We celebrated each one of those as a company during the team meetings and made a really big deal out of it, because it's a huge deal. They put their life savings into the business. Together, we helped save their business. That's flipping awesome. It's really cool. ROB: What an opportunity. I hear a certain proximity that you're referring to within the team. Is all of your team right there, one office, one team? Is that your world, or are people in different places? JOE: It used to be that way, pre-COVID. We were in the office three days a week, and Monday/Friday work from home. COVID hit and we went 100% remote. Then we had highest teammate Net Promoter Score ever, highest client Net Promoter Score ever, highest revenue ever by far, highest profit dollars. We're like, this is working really well. So we surveyed our team and said, “What do you guys want to do?” and everybody said basically, work from home, come into the office once. So, we instituted that. What we then found is about 10-15% of our staff in a given week would come into the office, and they'd come in on different days, and when they came in there was like 3% of our staff there. It felt a little lonely, and some people like that connectedness. So I just met with our leadership team on this this past week; we're probably going to be instituting now – we do a lot of stuff on Slack. I know a lot of companies do. Basically, we're going to have ChoiceLocal In-Office Day. It's going to be completely optional, but everybody that's going to go is going to go into Slack, fill out this poll, and RSVP and say “Hey, I'm going to be in the office this day” and try to get other teammates to come in. And then they're going to have a group of probably 30-40% of the company in on that individual day, and they can hang out together. Plus we do all the fun stuff. We have team meets once a month. Those are in person. About half the company comes to those; the rest are virtual. We bring in catered food. We're in Cleveland, so we're going to watch a Cleveland Guardians, which used to be the Cleveland Indians, game. ROB: Yeah, that's an adjustment there as well. JOE: Stuff like that. We do Topgolf. We do a big Christmas party every year. Stuff like that. It's fun. It's so fun. ROB: It sounds like an adjustment, but it sounds like listening to the team, it sounds like adjusting well. When I think about folks I've known in the agency world in Cleveland, there's no shortage of opportunity to lose your team to the revolving door of brands. That seems like it's probably the way of life there – not to mention the regional opportunities with vendors. It really does take some work to keep them on the agency side, I think. JOE: Historically, at my prior agency that was definitely a continual challenge. We launched ChoiceLocal with the mission of help others, with the goal – we're not perfect at this; I don't want to sugarcoat it – but with the goal of being a fast-paced, high energy environment, but you work 40 hours, then you unplug and you leave work at work. We were able to build our systems so that's possible. We historically have had almost no turnover. Now, with that said, this year during COVID, our turnover rate has spiked a bit, but it's nothing like I was ever used to. In a year we would have maybe, out of 100 people, like 1 to 2 people leave that we didn't want to leave. Historically. This year that number is probably up to like 4 out of 100. ROB: Yeah, that's turnover, but it's not a high turnover rate. It is managing what it is. It sounds like you have learned a lot along the way. As you think about lessons you've learned building ChoiceLocal, are there particular things you think of that you would wish to go back and tell yourself to do differently if you were able to? JOE: There's a whole host of things. One of the things I have as an advantage is I was a political science major, and I learned absolutely nothing in college that is useful to me today. [laughs] ROB: A beginner's mindset is what you're saying. [laughs] JOE: Yeah, exactly. There's this book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and there's so much truth to that. I was raised treat others the way you want to be treated, and that's how I've always operated. I've always brought that to what I do because I thought it's the right thing to do. But I've actually found it's an amazingly sound business strategy. What I'm going to say now may be a little bit controversial, but there's so much stuff that you learn in business school, like when you're getting your MBA and those types of things, and so much of that you need to throw out and ignore because it's trash. For example, you're a service-based business, so a person is not a commodity. A person is not a tool to be used. A person is not a KPI. They are a person with dignity, a person who has a family, a person who deserves to be cared about, loved, and appreciated. If you just do that and focus on that first, the business results tend to take care of themselves. But at the same point, KPIs are important. Accountability is important. Ensuring that you have that is critical. Knowing that you hire right for core values first and for performance second, but also critically important – all of that integrates really well, and those are really important things. The last thing, from a mistake that I made, that I'll say is there's a book called Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Else Smarter, and basically the premise of the book – and this happens for a lot of folks in agencies, particularly in leadership positions – how did you get successful? You got successful by busting your butt and being pretty smart about the way you do things. That's how you were successful. The weakness that comes with that is as you get a bigger team, you need to shut up, you need to ask questions, and you need to be humble. That's the next level. And that book, for me, as I was evolving and growing as a leader, taught me those skills. It played a really important role, and now it's something I believe in so strongly. I met with a future VP of our organization who's probably going to get promoted to a VP very, very shortly, and I said, “Read this book. Take it to heart and do it.” Then I said, “Here's all the stupid things that I did, and here's how this book helped me.” ROB: You start to pull apart some pieces, many questions come to mind. I start to think about – clearly, when you talk about future VP, there's some planning there. There's still some awareness of individuals in your organization, even though at 100 people, it starts to get hard to know everyone. Especially when some people aren't even coming in one day a week, possibly. It's an interesting mix. I think this probably had to be intentional for you as well – building up the leadership team. What are the pieces you've put in place at different stages in the business to build around you to be your best, but also to help the company be its best, maybe where you aren't? JOE: Hire generous people, people that love helping other people be successful. If you have people on your leadership team that don't believe that, don't have them on your leadership team. And if you don't believe that, work on it. [laughs] It's so critical. You need to hire generous people, surround yourself with generous people. It's funny; I was like, we're the world's best at marketing for franchise systems, world's best at franchise development, consumer marketing for franchising; we're the world's best at recruiting for franchise systems. Why don't we just own a franchise system? So, we launched a separate franchise system, hired a guy who led another franchise system to $750 million in network revenue to be the CEO of it. And he believes what we believe. What attracted him to us first and foremost – and he's got an amazing track record in franchising – was our values. He's a generous person. He believes in integrity. He believes in accountability and performance at the same time. So, you've got to find people that believe that and have those competencies. The other thing I'll say is it's important, if you're hiring somebody to lead a business, that they understand that business. You can do it and you can be successful if you don't understand it inside and out, but it's way harder. If you can find people with the right values but also who have worked at different levels in that industry over the course of their career, they can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various decisions, and when you make a decision, how it affects people in different parts of the organization or what you're actually asking and what it entails to make it happen. Which tends to result in better decisions being made, better business performance, less mistakes. Those are the types of things that you really look for. ROB: What franchise business have you got yourself into, then, now? JOE: The name of it is Broadview Dental Group. Our vision is to be the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years. We have some aggressive plans, but I am very confident that we're going to be able to pull it off. ROB: And I've heard that some different models of roll-up franchise operating groups – I've heard they're taking the dental world kind of by storm. The independent dentist is starting to dry up a little bit. Are you seeing that? Is that part of the move? JOE: Yes, it is, and it's sad. What's ended up happening – there actually is one other franchise system in the dental space. I wouldn't call it a real franchise system. That sounds arrogant. I don't mean it that way. But if you look at how franchise systems typically operate, where they basically have some sort of buy-in and then some sort of royalty, it's set up very different with the buy-in being extremely, extremely, extremely high. It's different. But if you look at most of them, they're called DSOs or DPOs, and what they basically do is a dentist is like “Hey, I want to get my practice to the next level.” Then these DSOs or DPOs, which are typically funded by venture capital – this isn't always the case, but typically with venture capital, they care about one thing, which is maximizing shareholder wealth. They'll say, “Okay, you want to take your business to the next level? Sign here. We get 70% equity in your business up to 90% over time, and we can fire you if we want to, and we'll help get your business to the next level.” When you're a dentist and you're passionate about helping others and you're passionate about your practice and your trade, you basically just need a really good business mentor, and most dentists really haven't had it. So what we're doing is giving them 100% equity in their own business, a way to get to the point where they can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it, and all they need to do is follow our system. And they own 100% of their business. They can sell it when they want to, and when they sell it, they'll sell it for a higher multiple because guess what? In franchising, when you sell your business when you're ready to retire, it's worth more because it's a franchise system and it's proven. There's less risk involved. ROB: Right, it's not (Your Name) Dentistry. It is part of an umbrella. There's brand equity there, there's a system. They don't have to figure it all out. One of my college roommates, his dad was in the dental world, and when you mentioned the high fee to buy in – he always told me dentists like to buy expensive things, so I guess the franchise must be one of those things, just priced for the market, I suppose. When we look ahead to what's next for ChoiceLocal, what's next for marketing in the franchising world, Joe, what are you seeing? What are you excited about for the firm, for what is going to be necessary for your clients to continue as the marketing world evolves? What are you seeing? JOE: There's so much exciting growth ahead. One of the things that I love about being an agency that focuses on ROI and provable results is every time there's an economic downturn, it's good for the agency growth and it's good for your customers. What happens is when there's an economic recession, which I believe we're headed into – we have horrible inflation and there's certain policies that have to be implemented to bring it under control, and the result of that is going to be a recession. What happens in those cases is companies tend to pull back in marketing. But if you're driving marketing where for every dollar they spend, you're giving them $18 in new customer revenue, it's stupid not to spend that. You can grow through the downturn. You can take market share. Imagine putting a dollar in the stock market and getting $18 back within a year. It's a brilliant investment. It's a simple investment. So, what's going to end up happening is that's going to accelerate growth within agencies that are ROI-focused as this economic recession hits, and for however long it hits for. That's exciting. But what I'm also excited about in the newer leading-edge things within agencies is the ability for big data backed with artificial intelligence to transform marketing, to transform business, and frankly to transform medicine. I was talking with the COO of ChoiceLocal, who serves a role with Broadview as well, and we're like, who ever thought that two internet marketers would fundamentally change healthcare and dental care in the U.S.? You'd be like, “Explain that.” It's the same thing you do in marketing with big data. If you have a massive amount of data in a HIPAA compliant way, you can anonymize it, data mine it, and find correlations and causations and literally, with that type of patient data pool, you can change medicine. Similarly, you can do the same thing with marketing, where you can data mine, you can find ways to micro-target ideal customers based on who current ideal customers are – and you may not even know what some of those things are – and then you can target them and measure the performance and lift. That's crazy cool stuff. And that's the newer leading-edge stuff that's really exciting, particularly when you're dealing with franchise systems and the volume that's behind that. ROB: Right. You've got volume there, you've got a growing scale in the business. To think about leveraging it for more than just “Hey, we're bigger” – lots of interesting things there. Joe, when people want to find and connect with you and with ChoiceLocal, where should they go to find you? JOE: They can go to choicelocal.com. Everything is there. They can follow ChoiceLocal on pretty much every social media channel that exists @ChoiceLocal. So they can do that. They can follow me personally on Twitter @helpothersjoe or connect with me on LinkedIn. I try to post a lot of content there that's specific to purpose-driven business, which is a huge passion of mine, as well as franchising and marketing as well. So yeah, @helpothersjoe on Twitter is for me personally. ROB: That's excellent. Joe, thank you for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your experiences. Congratulations on what you've built so far and why you're building it. I think everyone listening has enjoyed the depth in the origin of the business and the intentionality as you build it. JOE: Thanks, Rob. Thanks for all you've done and thanks for having me on today. It really is a great pleasure. Really appreciate you. ROB: All right, appreciate you. Take care. Bye. Thank you for listening. The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast is presented by Converge. Converge helps digital marketing agencies and brands automate their reporting so they can be more profitable, accurate, and responsive. To learn more about how Converge can automate your marketing reporting, email info@convergehq.com, or visit us on the web at convergehq.com.

When it comes to running your own business numbers are your friend. Aside from the obvious revenue numbers they can help you get a snapshot of your business and give you an early indication of what's working well, and not so well. Having decent KPI's doesn't need a massive time investment, 15 minutes once a week may well be enough to give you all the information you need. They are a great window into your business performance - in this episode I talk through how they might be able to help you.Say hi and leave a message or question on the Women's Wealth PodpageWant Help Creating Your Version of Wealth Or Simply Find Out MoreBuy my book here | Non-UK book hereSocials:Connect with me on LinkedIn | Join the Women's Wealth Community hereIf you enjoy the Women's Wealth Podcast (formally Selling Without Sleaze) please rate and review us on Apple or Spotify 

For businesses both large and small, churn is a key KPI leaders try to wrap their heads around. Atlanta founder Sebastian Builes has built Arcum, which leverages AI to predict when your customers will churn up to 12 months in advance and more importantly, why they may churn. He joins the podcast to talk about growing up in Colombia influenced his entrepreneurial aspirations, how he's formulated Arcum's go-to-market strategy, and how he's building community in Atlanta through this monthly founder meet-ups.

I am @Compound248 and this is the next installment in our Business Breakdowns mini-series focused on Digital Infrastructure, where we are breaking down a handful of companies that are key players in the digital infrastructure asset class.    In this episode, we will talk about a company that delivers that airbourne experience, Gogo. Known for its eponymous inflight WiFi service, Gogo is frequently misunderstood, having undergone a transformation to focus purely on the business, or private, aviation industry. It sells equipment that gets installed on a private aviation airplane, and then, in infrastructure like fashion, monetizes that equipment with high margin service revenue for decades. We're fortunate to be joined by Oak Thorne, who has led Gogo for 20 years into the success it is today.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is presented by Visible Alpha. The team at Visible Alpha built a platform to analyze consensus data and financial metrics on over 6,000 publicly traded companies. Rather than having to dig through models one by one, Visible Alpha extracts data from every line item across sell-side models so you can better understand expectations on metrics beyond just revenue and earnings. Listeners are invited to try Visible Alpha for free by visiting visiblealpha.com/breakdowns   -----   This episode is brought to you by Daloopa. Daloopa streamlines a major pain point for investors. By capturing all of a company's KPIs and adjusted financials into their database - Daloopa makes it easy to quickly update your models for what matters. Daloopa uses AI to find every KPI disclosed - from charts, to text, and even from footnotes of investor presentations. Daloopa updates these KPIs and data points in your existing Excel models in one click, regardless of your source or format. Test Daloopa for free at daloopa.com/Patrick.   —--   This episode is brought to you in partnership with Roundhill Investments, the advisor to the Roundhill IO Digital Infrastructure ETF – BYTE - which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BYTE. The fund tracks the BYTE Index, which measures the performance of 40 leading global digital infrastructure businesses, such as towers and mobile communications, fiber and fixed line connectivity, and data centers. For a prospectus and more information, please visit roundhillinvestments.com/etf/byte.   -----   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   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: @JoinColossus | @patrick_oshag | @jspujji | @zbfuss   Show Notes [00:04:02] - [First question] - Gogo's history and how his history intersects with it [00:08:03] - His background and what lead him to joining Gogo  [00:10:01] - A primary focus on US airlines and high-end air travel specifically [00:11:37] - 30% market penetration of potential WiFi signal outfitted aircraft [00:12:33] - What the competitive landscape looks like today and how many planes they have [00:14:15] - Whether the formerly unaddressable planes will make their way into their fleet  [00:16:04] - Their product offerings today and the differences between them  [00:19:26] - Overview of their business economics and their digital infrastructure  [00:21:31] - Unit economics and labor and install costs [00:23:44] - How much more traffic their existing network could handle   [00:24:17] - CapEx, service revenue, and a projected 20% system growth  [00:25:55] - Cost structure margin on their recurring service revenue  [00:26:36] - Where they are in building out their 5G network [00:27:25] - Momentum of business growth year-over-year [00:28:29] - How the ATG network actually works and how the 5G connection improves it  [00:30:44] - What portion of their business comes from aftermarket installations [00:32:18] - Competitive nature of this sector and if someone could come after Gogo [00:35:23] - Speed differentials between their varying network offerings   [00:36:48] - Price differences with competitors and the strength of their dealer network  [00:38:19] - Expensive alternatives and the customer experience of GeoSatellite services  [00:40:42] - Describing the differences between GeoSatellite and Elon's Starlink [00:46:19] - Reasons why Starlink might become a competitor [00:48:56] - How Gogo's 5G and global broadband product are offensive and defensive  [00:51:24] - Portion of new US delivery aviation planes built with in-flight WiFi solutions [00:53:39] - Plans to become a free cash flow generating machine  [00:55:01] - How long he anticipates this growth runway to continue  [00:56:27] - Potential risks to Gogo from a legal and regulatory perspective  [00:57:33] - Legal allegations from SmartSky and using the unlicensed spectrum [00:59:50] - Cyclicality of their clients and suspended business periods   [01:02:18] - Their channels and customer concentration  [01:03:17] - Minority shareholders and their long term vision  [01:04:57] - Two key lessons for others attempting to build and lead a company 

Come si misura l'impatto del marketing sul nostro business? In questo video vedrai i più importanti KPI (key performance indicators) da monitorare per capire se stai andando nella giusta direzione. Vedremo diversi tipi di KPI di Digital Marketing, legati al sito web, alle campagne pubblicitarie, all'ecommerce, all'email marketing. Mi trovi su instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igorpapo.it/

Come si misura l'impatto del marketing sul nostro business? In questo video vedrai i più importanti KPI (key performance indicators) da monitorare per capire se stai andando nella giusta direzione. Vedremo diversi tipi di KPI di Digital Marketing, legati al sito web, alle campagne pubblicitarie, all'ecommerce, all'email marketing. Mi trovi su instagram: https://www.instagram.com/igorpapo.it/

Today we're diving into the story of Neal Schaffer. He specializes in helping marketers figure out How you choose to spend your time, money based on what your KPI's are. This will be a great story of how someone out in the world works to figure out how to do this for their own business and others. Plus, we will talk about how everyone is wondering if Pinterest marketing is still worth it. Hint, it's tied to ROI.

This episode looks at a marketing campaign and my lack of paying based on key performance indicators or KPIs.  This was a slightly costly mistake and, thus, one that sticks in my memory.  The mistakes that cause us some level of pain are also the easiest to remember. However, that is not the only lesson to learn from this past mistake. KPI - Key Performance Indicators Any form of sales or marketing campaign can be a black box when we do not set KPI values.  There must be a way to measure success (or failure), and our metrics are the key performance indicators.  For example, most advertising campaigns focus on clicks or leads for a measure of potential additional sales.  Likewise, there is a KPI referred to as impressions that is to measure how many people see the ad. Pay On Delivery The most significant challenge in any transaction is matching delivery and payment.  You can see this on e-bay and Etsy sales, among other similar sites.  We want to ensure that we get what we pay for or are paid for our product/service.  However, we can take a "trust them" stance and pay upfront or provide a service before payment.  Those options allow us to get burned, and I was in this case.  Trust is something to be earned.  Therefore, we should avoid cash upfront situations unless we have reason to trust the other party. If you like this season, you will probably like Scott Adams' book, "How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life."

A high-level look at what is a KPI (01:17)The KPIs of OTT & CTV (03:39)The main KPIs of audio (09:41)The main KPIs of display & native (12:36)The main takeaway (13:54)New to Programmatic? Check out our primer episodeEmail us at info@GranularMarketing.comFollow us on Facebook

Andrew Stotz talks with Dr. Mustafa Shraim of Ohio University about Deming's approach to variation, comparing it to Lean and Six Sigma. "When you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles, and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the [Deming] theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here...the component that is missing [from Six Sigma] is a commitment to quality." SHOW NOTES4:30 Variation 12:40 The problem with Six Sigma 20:40 Statical Process Control Charts 25:44 Deming chain reaction 30:03 Suboptimizing departments 43:01 Management by visible figures 40:05 Why Deming, why now? Driving out fear 50:52 Continuous improvement and Plan-Do-Study-Act TRANSCRIPTDownload the complete transcript here. 0:00:04.1 Andrew: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest, Mustafa Shraim. Mustafa, are you ready to share your Deming journey?   0:00:19.8 Mustafa: Absolutely, let's go for it. Thank you.   0:00:21.5 Andrew: I'm excited. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Mustafa Shraim is an Assistant Professor at Ohio University teaching quality management and leadership. Professor Shraim has over 20 years of experience as a quality engineer, corporate quality manager, and consultant. His PhD is in Industrial Engineering. He publishes widely, and he has a passion for Dr. Deming's system of profound knowledge. Mustafa, why don't we start off by you telling us the story about how you first came to learn of the teachings of Dr. Deming and what hooked you in?   0:00:57.5 Mustafa: Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you for inviting me back. So...   0:01:01.9 Andrew: Yeah.   [chuckle]   0:01:06.1 Mustafa: The whole thing started when I was doing my master's and that was the late '80s, at Ohio University, and I was concentrating on the area of quality. So, I was doing research, and my research touched up on what Dr. Deming was doing. I was doing it in design of experiments and quality tools and things like that. But of course, you come across Dr. Deming's work when you talk about quality control, in general, and statistical quality. So, that was the first encounter of learning about what Dr. Deming did in Japan and how he used statistical process control and things of that nature to teach how you can improve your processes, your products, and later on, the management. But at the beginning, I did not really get into his management philosophy so I was more on the technical end of Dr. Deming's teaching which was mainly quality control and SPC, and just improving quality in general.   0:02:24.1 Mustafa: So, as I went... So I went, and I started my first job as a quality engineer, and quickly after that, maybe after one year, I moved to another company, and I became a statistical quality engineer, and I was doing... I was a part of a training program there. I was doing training on SPC as a part of a training for employees at that company. It was a union shop, it was automotive, and so we utilized statistical process control and what Dr. Deming was teaching. So, that was the beginning of it, but later on in the '90s, I started learning more about Dr. Deming after I read "Out of the Crisis" and then "The New Economics" about his management method. In fact, his management methods just captured me. I knew I got hooked on the quality part first, but the management method just brought it together for me. And since then, I've been reading and practicing, trying to at least, what Dr. Deming has taught.   0:03:41.9 Andrew: And would you say... One of the things that I started realizing was that the statistical... What I thought was the end was the statistical tools. And what I started to learn is that, actually, the statistical tools start to have limitations if you're not doing the management of the whole operation in a good way. And I think that that's something that really resonated with me when I started putting the pieces together. How do you see the role... And in a little bit I'm gonna ask you about some more specific tools, but just generally, we have statistical tools, but we also have management. Many people may think that you can just apply statistical tools and solve all the problems, but I'm curious how you see that interaction between the tools and the management style.   0:04:30.2 Mustafa: Well, as you know and many, probably, of your listeners already know that Dr. Deming had understanding variation, or some variation, as a part of his system of profound knowledge. So, understanding variation, under it, is really learning how to distinguish between the types of variation that you would have in any situation, managerial or process situation. So, that interaction there is really big. That really captured me because what Dr. Deming says is like, more than 80% of the application for statistical process control is actually, should be in management, and not necessarily just on the line, controlling quality of the product. So that was... It captured me, and because of explaining how many managers, many supervisors, don't understand the difference between common cause and special cause variations, and they start managing people with common cause variation going up and down, and they reprimand if it goes down, and they praise if it goes up, and that actually just makes things even worse in the future. As you probably know, it's tampering with the process.   0:06:08.8 Andrew: The best way that I've ever come up to try to explain this is to say to people, "Imagine there's 10,000 people in a stadium. They all flip a coin, and you say, 'Hey, if you flip heads, go to one side of the stadium. You flip tails, you go to the other. Everybody sit down. Okay, now... '" Or basically say, "Flip the coin again, and if you flip heads again, so two times, stay standing. And if you flip tails two times, then stay standing, but if you hit the heads and tails, then sit down." And now, your audience is getting smaller and smaller. If you do this 10 times, you will have 10 people, generally, you're gonna have 10 people that have flipped heads consecutively 10 times, and people that flip tails consecutively 10 times.   0:06:54.1 Andrew: And if we said, if we started off the whole game by saying, "Tails is bad." Now you've got some people that have done bad 10 times in a row, and some people that have done good 10 times in a row. But we know, because of the design of that example, that it's purely random. So, the question... So, we can understand that, but when we think about random variation, what Dr. Deming started to do is show us how that fits into management and psychology and how we're missing that. I'm just curious if you can help us to understand how that variation fits into that management 'cause you started talking about rewarding and all that. So, just curious about how those things fit together.   0:07:38.7 Mustafa: Right. For example, within the control limits, and those are the limits that are on a control chart, and they are spaced three standard deviations up and three standard deviations down. All the variation within is mostly a common cause variation, and it's due to the system. It's a system variation. It's not attributed to any special cause whether it's operator or something else that changed. So, distinguishing between the two becomes very important because if you don't look at variation from the perspective of a control chart, what happens is that you are in the weeds, and you look at every point as either really high up or high down cause you don't have any perspective as to how to evaluate or filter this type of variation. On the other side, also you don't want to not react to something that is special. For example, if you don't have the control limits, and if you don't have a proper way of looking at the variation, then you might end up also passing a special cause as a common cause, or not reacting to it enough to fix it and to make it a part of your controllable system before moving on.   0:09:16.7 Mustafa: From both perspective, I think it's very important for managers, for leadership, to understand why we do this. It's not just something that you have to do on the production line. It is something that you have to do in management based on performance. Look at your data and see if it's a stable process in control or if it's not, then you need to start eliminating those special causes. Like Dr. Deming said that, "Nothing really is born perfect as far as the processes." I'm paraphrasing here. But when you start a new manufacturing process, it doesn't mean that it's going to be in control; you have to work at it. You have to eliminate one by one all these special causes that come up before you start seeing a stability. And then after stability, then you will be able to work on the system part of the process, which is a long-term continuous improvement projects.   0:10:29.9 Andrew: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember a story. When I was working at Pepsi, we had a bottling plant in Los Angeles that I worked at. And the management were putting pressure on the people that were running the bottling machine because the variation of the level of the liquid in the bottle was getting wider and wider. And so, as a supervisor on the factory floor, my job was to go and kick ass, basically, and tell the guy, "Hey, come on, what are you doing here? You're messing around." And he just said, "Look, Andrew," and I was a young guy who listened to what these guys said, and he said, "Look, look at that machine over there. They spent the money to buy that filling machine over there, and you see there's no variation. Look at the old machine that they've got, and they haven't bought the parts to repair it. I keep telling them, if they don't buy these parts, I can't get to that point." And he was like... And I realized at that point that it was a management decision that needed to be made to reduce that variation at that point. It wasn't an operator that we should be punishing for that. And I think I wasn't that popular bringing that information back to management 'cause they wanted to say, "Well, no. It's the worker," and that's where I started to think about that common cause variation, and how do you improve and reduce variation?   0:11:48.3 Mustafa: Right, right. And if you leave it also to the worker, sometimes if they don't know what to do, they start tampering with the, actually, production process, and it makes it worse. So, a training for them on variation is also important. It's not only for management but also for workers as well.   0:12:08.2 Andrew: Yeah, good point. I know your expertise in this area is so valuable, and I think that it's great to have you maybe break down the following four terms that we hear, and maybe just generally discuss the differences, and then we'll talk about them in more detail. But the first term is Lean or continuous flow, the second is Six Sigma, the third is 14 points, and the fourth is system of profound knowledge. So, maybe just give an overview. What are these things? What do they mean?   0:12:40.0 Mustafa: Okay. Well, the Six Sigma part came about in the mid '80s and started in Motorola, and a lot of people already know that. And the reason it came out is because Dr. Deming's contribution in the '80s just brought a lot of attention to variation. In addition, you have also some big issues like the Ford transmission issue that came up. And there was a study about variation, and so there was a lot of attention being focused on variation. So Motorola... Somebody at Motorola, Bill Smith, an engineer over there, actually, came up with this idea of Six Sigma. And what that means, in general, is that if you have a spec that is a certain width, like upper and lower spec limits, then you want your process to operate in about half that space. Basically, that gives you good capability of the process, and then you don't have to worry about it. The first problem that came about from Six Sigma was the controversy about the shift. The people who invented Six Sigma, or packaged it together, said, "Okay. Well, we know you wanna operate exactly in the middle, but, normally, processes shift like one-and-a-half standard deviation here, or one-and-a-half standard deviation there so we want to allow that."   0:14:18.7 Mustafa: So, that is one of the biggest controversy because when you shift something like that, the process may be out of control without knowing. So, they did not really take that into consideration, although they are teaching control charts within the Six Sigma body of knowledge, so that was not really taken care of there. But that was one of the flaws that is out there in Six Sigma. Now, there are topics in Six Sigma that are... They're okay. We can teach certain topics on continuous improvement, root cause analysis, things of that nature. But the statistical thing here was wrong. And again, the reason Six Sigma was popular is because it is packaged the way it was packaged. You have companies buying this, and you have all the titles that came with it, and you know how companies love titles, especially here in the United States. So, you got all the belts; everybody must have a belt. You gotta go through training, you gotta... And then after you get your belt, what happens? You're gonna save us money. You're gonna have to do projects, and your job is to save me 20, 30, 40, 50,000 or 100,000 sometimes. So, that was the Six Sigma part of the whole thing.   0:15:51.6 Mustafa: And so, the Lean later became Lean Six Sigma. But Lean, by itself, came from Japan, originally. It's eliminating waste. Think about things like over-production, waiting, inventory, extra motion, all of these little things that you think they're little, but when you put them together, that's a lot of waste. So, to make the process flow better, you need to eliminate all of this waste. It's more about productivity and moving things faster within the organization. Then, when we contrast that with the 14 points, the 14 points are the system for management. It's all about... It's about management. It's also about quality, like improving forever the processes and systems for example, and have a constancy of purpose like the first point says. This was the application of what then became the system of profound knowledge as we know it. I don't know... I don't wanna go too far with definitions and things like that, but the Lean Six Sigma, they had the problem of the statistical flow from the Six Sigma part, and then you have all the management by numbers, management by objectives from both the Lean and Six Sigma.   0:17:30.3 Andrew: And I'm gonna try to summarize what you just explained by talking about the Six Sigma. Is what you're saying the flaw or the issue was is that, in order to try to get good quality, why don't we just set our expectations of what we're gonna get out of the system so tight that when we actually produce, we're in a narrow range, but we're never... Let's say we don't allow... We built the system with so much margin of error that even if we move around in our output, that that still is within a very tight range. Is that the concept?   0:18:10.5 Mustafa: Yeah. That is the concept. But the problem with that concept is, if you move around, if you let the process move around one-and-a-half standard deviation, for example, which, what it says, this indicates that you could have special causes that you don't react to. You don't know at that point because you have moved the process. You end up having special cause variation based on that shift because that shift could be real, a special cause and not just allowing natural... Naturally, the process does not move one-and-a-half standard deviation   0:18:53.0 Mustafa: all of a sudden because there are tests on control charts that if the process... For shift. So, if the process, for example, gives you nine points in a row on one side of the center line, that's a flag because that's a shift. That's a shift in the process. Now the process shifted on you, and you're not reacting. You're not doing anything about it, so you have to stop and take a look at it. So, what Six Sigma is saying is, "Yeah, the process could shift one-and-a-half standard deviation." But in statistical process control terms, it can't without reacting to it.   0:19:37.5 Andrew: And a simple control chart, or run chart, will probably reveal this better than looking at a histogram type of chart, like a Six Sigma type of chart where you're observing the output of the system moment by moment. Would that be correct to say?   0:19:56.5 Mustafa: Right, right. So, the control chart... And I did a paper... And there are people that are out there and doing the same thing. I did a paper and showed that if you move the system one-and-a-half standard deviation, you will see all these points beyond the control limits by simulation, simulation of the process. You move it, and you'll start observing so many points being out of the control. And so, if you allow it, then all of a sudden you start seeing all these points beyond the control. And what do you do? So, there is nothing to cover that within the Six Sigma body of knowledge.   0:20:40.7 Andrew: And maybe it's a good point just to talk briefly about the control charts and what Dr. Deming taught about that. I think when I started seeing the control charts as he was describing them, I started to see a real intense focus on looking at... at trying to understand what's really happening with this system and trying to observe it in real-time. And the more that you did that, the more you really start to understand what's driving the performance of that system. So, maybe could you just take a moment, think about the listener or the viewer that doesn't understand the control charts yet, maybe just give a big picture about what those are, and what's the value of them?   0:21:27.7 Mustafa: So, the control chart is basically... If you think about plotting points over time, that would be a run chart. So, just looking at your performance over time and just plotting points, that's a run chart. A control chart is basically taking the run chart and creating control limits on it. And the control limits came from Dr. Shewhart who invented the control charts. And he put those control limits to minimize a couple of mistakes: not reacting enough when you have to, and not over-reacting when you see something. They were more economics. They were not statistical in nature. They don't really depend on statistical distribution or anything like that. They are very robust. They can be used in a variety of applications without having to look at the distribution of the data. And they tell you when to react to a special cause and when to leave the process alone.   0:22:41.3 Mustafa: So, when you leave the process alone, it means that you have common cause variation, just the systemic type of variation that occurs over time. But that doesn't mean that you don't work on it as management. This is a management part of the work. So, when you have a stable process, it means that this is a time for management to initiate, maybe, continuous improvement project or initiative to reduce that variation, and not... Because you can be stable and in control, but you still have a lot of variation in the process. So, the spread is very wide in the process or, in the control chart, it will be going all over with a lot of variation, but it's still within the control limits. It could have this kind of scenario. And that's when management has to step in and say, "Okay, we need to look at this from a big picture and try to look at all the causes and do some kind of continual improvement."   0:23:53.3 Andrew: Mustafa, I would think that when you look at it, it turns out that it's like a continuous experiment. And you're looking at the outcome in a control chart, and you're trying to think, "Okay, if we... " Let's just say that we add a new piece of machinery. We upgrade a particular part. Then we look and say, "Okay, how did that impact the output of the process?" And then you start to see that what you're talking about, and I think what Dr. Deming is talking about was the idea that, start to get this intense focus on how do we improve this process? And how do we reduce that variation to a point? There's no point in reducing it beyond a certain point. But just that focus. Whereas with Six Sigma, it's kind of a theoretical thing, and there's other aspects that you've talked about. But just that, a control chart really allows you just to focus on testing and understanding that the whole... The output is a function, not only of the people on the production line. Let's say if it's in a factory, and it's the machinery, it's the way you organize, it's the shifts that you work. It's all of these things. So, I can't help but think that it's kind of like the fun of testing and seeing the result coming out of it.   0:25:09.1 Mustafa: Right. When you say a special cause, it doesn't mean always that it's bad. It could be good. But you have to study it, and you have to see what happened. So, was it intentional? Was it unintentional? But at least you would stop and look and study. And that's the idea. It's not just to let it go without studying it. On the other hand, the common cause, you're just looking at the width of the variation in general. And you try to reduce that, like you just mentioned, over the long run.   0:25:42.0 Andrew: So... Go ahead.   0:25:44.8 Mustafa: No, I was just gonna go back to Dr. Deming before I move to Dr. Deming's chain reaction model. I use that all the time. I use it when I was doing workshops in industry, and I use it now in my classes. And I put that... The chain reaction model. And what the chain reaction model for those of the listeners who are not familiar with it, Dr. Deming says that, "You have to start with improving quality, and the rest is just a chain reaction." So what happens is, when you improve quality, and that is, and what he's talking about here, is a commitment by management to quality. It's not just a one-time improvement of quality, it's a commitment on improving quality. Then you start seeing defect decreasing. You start utilizing equipment better. Errors decrease and all of this becomes much less. Your productivity, as a result, goes up because the cost is down, or your input cost is down so now your output is better, and you have a good productivity which keeps you in business, and you provide better jobs to your community. I think...   0:27:18.8 Andrew: That topic is so interesting because I think most people, at the time of Dr. Deming and even now, think quality is a department; quality is something we apply in a certain area. And when you think about setting the purpose of a company to improve quality, it's a very risky thing. Most people think, "No way. Our company is about sales. Our company is about profit. Our company is about customer satisfaction," or whatever that is. Those things all are the intuitive things that we come up with to say, "That's what drives our business." And Dr. Deming, what you're saying is that... Dr. Deming says, actually, the chain reaction that starts from quality leads to all of those things. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?   0:28:07.5 Mustafa: Right. So, we know that we have to start on quality. But take, for example, companies that are engaged in Lean projects. So, what they do in Lean projects, you try to eliminate waste. And eliminating waste could also be a risky business if you just arbitrarily start cutting costs of material, of employee hours, or eliminating jobs, for example. If you take it from the productivity block of the chain reaction model, you go nowhere. You gotta go back from the quality, improving quality, and that's where the chain reaction starts. But for many Lean projects, they actually start from the productivity block. So, improve productivity from the productivity block, that doesn't really work because you are not committed to quality at that point. So, what happens is, you start maybe buying cheaper material or eliminating jobs. That might help you in the short run. The short run may be the next quarter. It's going to help you out. You're gonna improve the bottomline. Later on, all of this is going to come back as customer complaints, returns, issues with employees, lack of motivation because now they have to do more with less hours, and so on and so forth. But it creates a whole set of problems that are addressed in the system of profound knowledge from the psychology part to the learning part, and knowledge and the PDSA.   0:30:00.4 Andrew: So, let's go back to then now. I wanna talk about the system of profound knowledge so that the listeners out there, some of them understand it very well, but some of them may not understand what that means at all. So, now we've kind of been through a little bit about Lean. We've been through Six Sigma. We talked a little bit about the 14 points, and I think the point that you're just making is that when you look at Dr. Deming's 14 point, first one is create constancy of purpose. The second one is to adopt a new philosophy, and the third one is to end dependence on quality inspections. It's like those top three are telling the senior management, "Your job is to improve quality." That is what's going to lead this chain reaction. And I think you've illustrated that in your discussion really well. So, take a moment and tell us about system of profound knowledge as you see it.   0:30:49.8 Mustafa: Okay. So, the system of profound knowledge is... There are four pillars or four components to it. And the first one is appreciation for a system, meaning that you have to see systems in place. You have to do a connection of different parts together, that you cannot do things in silos. You cannot suboptimize. You have to look at the aim of the system, and you try to work for the aim of the system, not the aim of each department. But with that comes the idea of creating the variation part, and what is systemic variation and what is a special cause variation? Systemic variation is a part of management's decisions. They have to make improvement on that in the long term. And how you react to variation. So, if the system has a certain capability, and then you ask somebody, "Okay, I want you to get me that which is up here, way up. That's your objective." If the system is not capable, what is the employee going to do? They're going to try to create that number to please the boss. As Dr. Deming was referring to, they tried to please their manager or the boss. So, you might take risky steps to do that, including maybe fudging numbers or coming up with ideas to create that number.   0:32:37.1 Mustafa: And that goes to psychology, so now you are... You don't feel good about it. You have to keep your job. You have to do all kinds of stuff to make sure that you don't lose your job because you could not achieve that. Now you become less motivated. You're not really engaged. And what happens? They provide you with incentives, outside incentives. Bonus is based on work that you have to do, but the system is incapable. You cannot perform beyond what the system is capable of. So, that creates all kinds of problems. And the last part is the learning part or theory of knowledge, and that you have to have a method. You have to have clear definitions and, basically, you have to know what you need to accomplish, and by what method and how you know when you get there. That's a theory of knowledge. There is no knowledge without a theory, and it has to be... It has a temporal element in it, meaning that you revise the theory, and you create more knowledge. So, that's in a nutshell how you... How all of these components are related to each other. But to me, the systems and variation, they're just out there, and I see it everywhere as a problem.   0:34:14.3 Andrew: Yeah. So, to summarize, the system of profound knowledge, as you've explained, is appreciation for a system. Number two is knowledge of variation, number three is a theory of knowledge, and number four is psychology. And one of the things that I came to learn about Dr. Deming is, I always say he's a humanist. He's a person that really sees that people should have joy in work, and he wants to see people reach their full potential, and he understood the powers of incentives like you just explained. So, now that we understand a little bit of the theory of the system of profound knowledge, what is going wrong out there in this world? Let's talk just briefly about, why is this so significant? Come on, I just go get my black belt in Lean Six Sigma and the problems will be solved, but what is it about the theory of profound knowledge that... Or the system of profound knowledge that people should pay attention to now?   0:35:21.5 Mustafa: Well, with... For example, let me just take it from a different perspective. If you look at Lean projects, and you eliminate. for example, waste. if you don't have a system of profound knowledge to check all of the things that needs to be checked, like variation and psychology and making sure that people are not fearful to do their job, then you're creating other problems, not only just... You're not just reducing waste, you are actually, maybe having... overburdening the employees with removing waste because when you remove waste, you may be removing jobs, you may be removing hours, you may be removing employees. That would create a overburden. You could also create problems for the customers and fluctuation and defects and variation.   0:36:21.8 Mustafa: That's why the system of profound knowledge is an integrated system. It's not a just one piece. Once you start going from one door, you gotta address all the other components that are tied together to it. So to me, from whatever door you go in in the system of profound knowledge, let's say you go from the psychology which is you drive out fear. You create a good climate. You do all of these things, then you start seeing people coming up with innovations, reducing variation, and working together collaboratively which creates a good system. So, whatever door you go in, you're going to get to it because they are connected. There is no way that you're not going to address the other points if you have knowledge about the other points.   0:37:15.0 Andrew: It's an interesting thing that I would say in modern management, in modern life, people are trying to compartmentalize things and thinking that being a specialist in a particular area, whether that's medicine or whatever in business, that by compartmentalizing, it gives us comfort that we can become an expert in this area and all that. But what you can see... And I'll tell you, Mustafa, about my mother who I take care of. She's 83. And if we have a problem with her foot, the doctor may say, "Okay, don't walk for a little while." Well, that causes another problem. You start to risk bedsores. You start to have problems with GI system. And what you find nowadays in medicine is it's getting more and more narrow where doctors are not seeing the holistic pieces, and I see myself always constantly thinking about the whole picture to that. And I think what I'm hearing from you is that, that we should be looking at things more holistically, and that's what the system of profound knowledge is teaching, is that... Would you say that?   0:38:24.1 Mustafa: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, you have to... The main thing there is, companies, traditionally, they try to just suboptimize through their management by objective, "We want each department to save so much money," and then, once they start doing that, everybody affects the other negatively, but they don't know until later on that they have done that. You might gain the objectives in the short run, but in the long run, it's going to be disastrous for the aim of the organization.   0:39:03.9 Andrew: So, you just raised another point that Dr. Deming teaches about is suboptimization. And what he tried to teach was that the objective of the senior management of the company is to optimize the system, not its component parts. Have you seen...   0:39:19.9 Mustafa: Right.   0:39:20.9 Andrew: In theory, people should know that, but how is that going wrong in this world these days? And why is it important to be thinking in this holistic way that Dr. Deming was teaching?   0:39:32.5 Mustafa: Because companies, if they don't do things systematically, and they don't apply the whole system of profound knowledge, altogether, they're going to rush into money-saving exercises, and those money-saving exercises could be replacing material with lower-grade material. It could be, maybe, not hiring experts and hiring somebody who doesn't know what they're doing, and not providing training, or cutting training, or foregoing maintenance. There are so many things that you can start focusing on because you have issues. So, you have issues with a customer, and you start focusing on cutting costs, arbitrarily, not with a method, arbitrarily starting cutting costs in different departments. When you put it all together, just things don't merge well together because you're trying to suboptimize. You're trying to lower the cost in each department and not really improve the aim, or attain the aim of the organization as a whole.   0:40:48.3 Andrew: We've covered so many different topics. It's pretty exciting, like this sub-optimization. I think is a really interesting one. And I wanna raise a new topic that is the opposite of one of the topics that you raised. You talked about the chain reaction. Let's talk about the opposite chain reaction. I'll tell you a story in my own coffee business. We had put some pressure on some of the people in the procurement part of the business to reduce cost. That's reasonable. Management wants to reduce cost so there we go. We put pressure on them, and we told them... We incentivized them. And what we saw was that they ended up proposing a lower quality coffee bean, green coffee bean. The production people didn't like it because all of a sudden they had to recalibrate the machines. So, there was already a cost right there because the... It was harder to hit the client's demand of what taste that they want, consistently hit it.   0:41:47.9 Andrew: Then the people that were delivering, when we delivered the product to the customer, we had some returns where the customer is like, "No, I don't like this taste," or that we would have much more variability. And all of a sudden, we had customer complaints. And then we started to realize that, "Okay, now we gotta go and replace that with the proper stuff," and then all of a sudden there was all kinds of cost. So, the chain reaction you talked about was, start with quality and you start to reduce costs throughout the chain. And a reverse chain reaction is when you start by trying to optimize one point and not realize that it's a whole system, and therefore what you've caused is a negative chain reaction of cost just when you thought you were cutting costs, you're actually raising costs.   0:42:33.7 Mustafa: Right. That is a great example of that because what you've done is maybe just looking at the productivity part, you wanted to make sure that the costs were down so trying to turn the knobs on certain things, and then it just backfired on the quality part, increasing errors, increasing customer dissatisfaction and all of that, and that happens all the time.   0:43:01.4 Andrew: And that's what Dr. Deming says, "How can you measure the cost of a lost customer? How can you measure the dissatisfaction and the frustration?" Some things are just unmeasurable. So, I wanna...   0:43:15.2 Mustafa: Right. So, that brings about the issue of visible figures. You're managed by visible figures only, and not really the stuff that are behind the total cost, which some of it is unknowable or unknown.   0:43:34.2 Andrew: Now, Professor, this is really strange. Here we are, talking about quality. You're such an expert in all of these statistical methods, and now you're saying, "Wait a minute, you can't just measure by visible figures." So, this is again a paradox of Dr. Deming where you come into his teaching, seeing all of these numbers and all that, and now what you're telling me is it's not just visible figures. Could you just elaborate on that?   0:44:02.7 Mustafa: Yeah, absolutely. Visible figures are figures that are available right there for you, and you just react to it. If things go up, you wanna reduce costs. You just take action. But visible figures are really a limited part of the whole story because the total cost of not doing things right or not following the Deming management method. They're not going to be... You're not gonna see them until later on. You may be able save for a quarter or two but, beyond that, things are going to start accumulating in terms of defects, returns, and things of that nature. So, from the Deming point of view, the visible figures are only a smaller portion of the total figures which cannot be measured at the time you're looking at the numbers and taking action.   0:45:04.3 Andrew: It's interesting because we hear sayings like, "What gets measured gets managed," and those types of sayings. And one of the things that I... When I teach young people about this, I oftentimes say, "Well, let's just look at a simple thing. What is the value of a hug? Measure it." It's immeasurable. Particularly, in a particular situation when someone is traumatized, or in a really painful situation, and that hug made a huge difference in their life that could actually have kept them alive and led them to another so that... I think that's the visible figures that you're raising. It's such a small part of this world. The bigger part is how it all fits together. And so, I think you really inspire me to rethink about this concept; that it's way beyond just visible figures.   0:46:03.5 Mustafa: Absolutely, absolutely. This thing is just... One of the things that really captured me with the Deming philosophy is visible versus invisible figures, and the sub-optimization part versus the aim of the system. And those things are just so powerful when you think about them, when you think about why we're promoting, or why we're talking about Deming, and why now and all of that. It's these things that are very common these days. And they have... To have a good system, to have good management, you have to eliminate management by visible figures on... You still have to have visible figures, but visible figures-only is what Deming is... What it was Deming opposing. What he was against, I guess.   0:46:57.8 Andrew: Yup. And you said, "Why Deming? Why now?" And I'm thinking about it myself. And my answer to that is that we have a whole generation of young people who think that successful management is, maybe, sitting at their desk behind a computer looking at KPIs. And then, when someone is down on their KPI, send them an email, kick their butt. And when someone is up on a KPI, give them a bonus, and that's it. And then you go home at the end of the day. And they're so lacking in the psychology aspect of the system of profound knowledge, but just in what management truly is. So, from my perspective, "Why Deming? Why now?" is because we have the risk of it turning into some kind of automation system of management that will always end up underperforming. Why would you say, "Why Deming? Why now?"   0:48:00.5 Mustafa: So, as you can see that, for me, "Why Deming? Why now?" is I don't see management using variation as a way to distinguish between the common cause and special cause, and also their reaction to it, or the mistakes that they make as a part of it. So, that's a big thing. The other thing is the fear that people are experiencing at the workplace. Recently, we've heard about the great resignation. People just don't wanna go back to work anymore. And a lot of people expressed that they just don't like the environment that they work in. And we know that most people, about 70% of people who quit, they don't quit because of a pay or anything like that. It's because of relationship with their bosses and the company, and they just don't feel that. So that the environment has a fear in it. So, when you create fear, you're not going to have people that contribute and collaborate, and I think that's big. If we learn anything from this whole pandemic, it is that you have to create an environment of trust because if people are away working virtually or work in the office, you shouldn't have to worry about them if you have created that environment or the trust.   0:49:34.6 Andrew: Yup. And you mentioned about the pandemic. If there's one thing we've learned, fear is a massive motivator. The level of things that people have gone through in a state of fear, things that people would have never imagined that they would have done. And so, I think what you're talking about is just one more of the many Deming principles, which is to drive out fear. And I just wanna summarize some of what we've gone through, and then we'll wrap up. So, we've talked about the differences between Lean and Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. We've talked about Deming's 14 points. We've talked about the system of profound knowledge. We've talked about optimizing versus sub-optimizing. We've talked about the chain reaction, and I gave the example of a reverse chain reaction. And then, we talked about visible figures and understanding that there's much more than that, which is such a paradox for me when I first started learning Deming's teaching because I thought I was gonna take comfort in those numbers and the visible figures, but he told me, "No, no, no. There's much more." And finally, we talk about fear. Is there anything else that you would add to this final wrap-up of the conversation?   0:50:52.3 Mustafa: So, we started talking about Lean and Six Sigma and... Six Sigma is a continuous improvement process, but you don't really need to use it to... You can use the Plan-Do-Study-Act to it. There is no problem if you use it, and you recognize what's wrong with it, and you try to fix it. There's no problem with that. But, I think the Plan-Do-Study-Act and the theory of knowledge is sufficient for you to start working on things. But, like I mentioned, some companies, they like the titles and the tags and the big investment because then they use that as a motivator to get people to start working on projects to bring money back, to save the company the money that was spent on them. So, that's the only thing I wanted to add is just like you can't just rely on something that is big. The Plan-Do-Study-Act was good enough, and I think it's good for any organization. The problem with applying the Plan-Do-Study Act is that you have to have management's commitment because remember, when you do Six Sigma, you're basically outsourcing your quality to an external source, providing the training, the titles and all of that. You can cut it off any time. But when you do the theory of knowledge and the Plan-Do-Study-Act, you have to commit. The commitment is really the big deal here, or the component that is missing is a commitment to quality.   0:52:44.9 Andrew: Well, in wrapping this up, I wanna come back to where we started. Where we started was you were a young master's student and coming out of studying about these tools of statistical methods and all of that stuff, and you entered into our conversation, and you entered into the introduction to Dr. Deming through these tools. But here we are at the end of this interview, and now you're talking about such much bigger issues, and I think, for me, that inspires me about what Dr. Deming has taught because it is expansive. And the more you study it, the more you see it's way beyond just tools. So, Mustafa, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for coming on the show and sharing your experience with Dr. Deming's teachings. Do you have any parting words for the audience?   0:53:41.5 Mustafa: All I have to say, you gotta get started somewhere, and the system of profound knowledge is it. So, I would definitely recommend... I have been through many of the seminars that the Institute offers, and I would highly recommend that and also getting Dr. Deming's book "The New Economics." That's a good start. Of course, the follow-up is also just as important and continuing with the journey.   0:54:15.7 Andrew: Well, great advice. Get "The New Economics;" read it. It really sums up a lot of Dr. Deming's teachings. He put it together right at the end of his life. And that concludes another great discussion within our worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

John Ghiorso is the Founder and CEO of Orca Pacific, a full-service agency focused exclusively on helping brands succeed on Amazon. He started the company 12 years ago and they now work with over 100 brands, managing their sales channel and optimizing their Amazon advertising campaigns. John is here to talk to us about the three major trends regarding Amazon that businesses need to pay attention to in 2020. He speaks on making sure you're using all the Amazon advertising properties at your disposal, doing your advertising budgeting in a way that is driven by performance, and having a strong content and SEO strategy. Tune in to learn why it's critical to get your business online and the value in focusing on content marketing and what's important to your audience.   During this interview, we discuss:  2:18 – Orca Pacific's evolution and growth  4:31 – Has the covid-19 pandemic heightened the need for brands to get on Amazon?  6:33 – The strategy that leads to Orca Pacific's customer acquisition   9:38 – Trend #1: Search & Display Advertising  12:50 – Trend #2: Budgeting with KPI's  14:40 –Trend #3: SEO & Content Strategy  15:51 – Examples of native content on Amazon  17:23 – Insight on browse and research behavior on Amazon  18:04 – Brands to look at for inspiration on Amazon content   19:18 – John shares his takeaway regarding Amazon's fast-changing environment & thinking outside the box  19:53 – What is John's dream business superpower?  20:40 – John shares his favorite growth driver.  21:25 – His most recommended book  Plus, a whole lot more!  John's Websites: Connect with him on LinkedIn Orca Pacific Listen to his podcast: eCommerce Deep Dive  Evernote Traction by Gino Wickman ————————-  If you enjoyed this episode, please RATE / REVIEW and SUBSCRIBE to ensure you never miss an episode.  Connect with Dennis Brown   AskDennisBrown.com  LinkedIn  Twitter  Instagram [Free Giveaways] 

Guest: Chris Cocca, President - Strategic Sales Solutions, LLC In today's marketplace, employers are competing for talent more than ever; and compensation plays a big role. In this episode we discuss incentive compensation and how it can be used, not just for the sales team, but for all employees. In order to have a successful compensation program, you must have the right infrastructure to support it. This includes a lot of acronyms like COLA, KPI, SMART and EOS! We discuss these topics…and of course we talk about cocktails! Hosted by Kimberly Prescott, Founder and President of Prescott HR

CFO Consulting Services Cary Prejean Turning Your Business into A Well-Oiled Machine Cary Prejean #CFOConsulting #Accounting #CaryPrejean Hi, and welcome to the show! On today's show I have the pleasure of welcoming founder of CFO Consulting Services Cary Prejean to talk all things business, including finance, KPI's, systems, strategy, along with taking a deep dive into his 3-step process for transforming your business into a well-oiled machine. Cary has more than 35 years' industry experience as a CFO and consultant. His background includes a bachelor's degree in accounting, a CPA license and he's also a certified ontological coach. Cary works with business owners to help them turn their business into what Cary labels his ‘well-oiled machines' process. Cary is a public speaker and hosted the “Financial Design Hour” on WJBO radio in Baton Rouge. He has also taught financial courses over an eight-year period, at Louisiana State University, University of Louisiana-Lafayette, Southeastern Louisiana University and Baton Rouge Community College. To learn more about the topics discussed, or to contact Cary directly to see how he can help turn your business into a well-oiled machine, click the link below. Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” My Future Business is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

TV shows like ‘The Office' sometimes poke fun and business jargon and corporate management speak and it seems the internet is the place we turn to try and make sense of it.   New research from Preply reveals the 10 most googled business acronyms.   Searches for ‘POC' have increased dramatically - depending on who is saying it the abbreviation can mean ‘proof of concept' or ‘point of contact' and even ‘plan of correction'.   ‘KPI' means Key Performance Indicator followed by SME for small - medium enterprise and EOD which apparently appears a lot in emails and during meetings where work should be completed by the ‘end of the day'.       Instagram is adding new tools designed to support young users with their mental health.   There's particular concern around teenagers comparing the way they look and the platform will prompt users who repeatedly look at the same type of content, to try something different.     And this from the US where a medical therapeutics company is using 3D printing technology to develop an artificial exterior ear to help patients who are born with a rare condition which means part of their ear is either missing or hasn't formed correctly.  

This is Matt Reustle and today we're breaking down Diploma. Diploma is a specialist distributor of medical equipment and industrial components listed in the UK. It's a business you're unlikely to be familiar with and, at first glance, may appear mundane. But dig a little deeper and you'll find a high-quality operator generating significant free cash flow through a mix of organic and inorganic growth channels.  To break down Diploma, I'm joined by Charlie Huggins, an investor in the business and Head of Equities at WealthClub.   For the full show notes, transcript, and links to the best content to learn more, check out the episode page here.   -----   This episode is presented by Visible Alpha. The team at Visible Alpha built a platform to analyze consensus data and financial metrics on over 6,000 publicly traded companies. Rather than having to dig through models one by one, Visible Alpha extracts data from every line item across sell-side models so you can better understand expectations on metrics beyond just revenue and earnings. Listeners are invited to try Visible Alpha for free by visiting visiblealpha.com/breakdowns   -----   This episode is brought to you by Daloopa. Daloopa streamlines a major pain point for investors. By capturing all of a company's KPIs and adjusted financials into their database - Daloopa makes it easy to quickly update your models for what matters. Daloopa uses AI to find every KPI disclosed - from charts, to text, and even from footnotes of investor presentations. Daloopa updates these KPIs and data points in your existing Excel models in one click, regardless of your source or format. Test Daloopa for free at daloopa.com/Patrick.   -----   Business Breakdowns is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Business Breakdowns, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.   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: @bizbreakdowns | @JoinColossus    Show Notes [00:02:23] - [First question] - The history of Diploma, what they do, and what's attractive about their business model [00:04:39] - Size and scale of the business and their market capitalization [00:07:03] - Overview of what their life sciences business vertical looks like [00:10:00] - The cyclicality of the seals and controls business verticals  [00:13:45] - Returns on invested capital and thoughts on the capital intensity of seals [00:15:06] - What allows their businesses to keep growing and what characterizes a strong acquisition target for Diploma [00:19:14] - An example of how Diploma fits into the value chain [00:21:24] - How Diploma acquires for low multiples when making acquisitions  [00:23:41] - How they drive quantitative and qualitative returns in their acquisitions [00:27:35] - What management is like at Diploma and their longevity in the business [00:33:19] - Overview of their competitive landscape  [00:35:27] - What the business does with extra cash flow in the absence of M&A activity [00:38:01] - What Charlie finds special about Diploma and what has him excited for the future [00:41:22] - The key risks in each vertical and what worries him about them  [00:48:07] - Lessons for investors, business executives and operators from the Diploma story

Just like in any other industries, Data visualization is important in Amazon business as it can benefit from data collection and analysis. Collection of data is always a big and important part of the equation. In this episode, Larry Lathrop will have us informed with the correct data we need to do data visualization. With a goal of making it easier to identify patterns and trends of our business, data visualization comes handy but are we getting the correct data we need? Get Larry's advice and tips, in this data fuelled episode. In This Episode: [01:10] Larry Lathrop on the show. [04:35] What is Data Visualization? [05:11] Type of data we need for this? [08:36] Top 3 mistakes newbies make about data visualization. [12:28] Making sure we have clear data provided. [15:00] Starting & implementing. [19:25] Tools for KPI. Guest Links and References: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larry-lathrop/ Website: https://owllytics.com/ Freebie: https://bit.ly/WizComFreebie Book References: Between the Spreadsheets by Susan Walsh The Big Picture by Steve Wexler Storytelling your Date by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic Links and References: Wizards of Amazon: https://www.wizardsofecom.com/ Wizards of Amazon Courses: https://wizardsofamazon.mykajabi.com/a/27566/x6Kwkz6p Wizards of Amazon Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-FBA/ Wizards of Amazon on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/WizardsofAmazon/ Wizards of Amazon on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wizardsofecom/

Every organization has its core values, mission statement and KPI's and those are the core of the company's culture however when toxicity is not put in its proper place or eradicated what is the impact it has on the success of a company's culture? Let's talk about it! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The primary role of a CEO is to lead and guide their organization's overall performance as well as make strategic decisions on the company's future. CEO's may seek advice on key issues, but they have the final say in making such decisions. In this episode, Michael Kurland interviews Vikram Malhotra, senior partner at McKinsey and author of CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets that Distinguish the Best Leaders From the Rest. In this podcast, they discuss what it takes to be a great CEO. They also share how to connect and manage the organization, and why CEOs must always take time for themselves and manage their personal energies accordingly to have a greater impact on their company.  Key Takeaways Vik's life and work background and an overview of his book. What it takes to be an excellent CEO. Specific details on how to align values and culture in an organization. Why CEOs need to connect with their people at all levels. How CEOs need to track the hard and soft KPI's in an organization. How CEOs mobilize the organization towards a common goal. Why CEOs must engage and interact with their board members and stakeholders. Why CEOs must take control of their energy to have a positive impact on the organization. Quotes I knew that I needed to take care of myself if I was going to be able to run this company effectively. And so I started a regimen of exercise and meditation. Michael These great CEOs were servant leaders. I found them to be authentic, humble, and excellent listeners. They have a vision, passion, and a clear sense of direction, and they excel at working with others. - Vik   Book Mentioned in The Episode CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest Get the Books here: Official: https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-on-books/ceo-excellence  Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/CEO-Excellence-Mindsets-Distinguish-Leaders/dp/1982179678   Featured in this Episode Vikram Malhotra Senior Partner, McKinsey & Company. Advisor to CEOs, top teams, and Boards on strategy, transformation, organizational effectiveness, and growth | Co-Author of CEO Excellence Profile: https://www.mckinsey.com/our-people/vik-malhotra  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vik-malhotra/ Website: https://www.mckinsey.com/   Michael Kurland CEO and Founder of Branded Group, Inc., Host of "Be Better with Michael Kurland" podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikekurland Website: www.branded-group.com   A Word from Our Host Thank you for tuning in. I hope that today's episode inspired you to become a purpose-driven leader in your career or your community. There's no doubt that when we lead with purpose, we can change lives. If you enjoyed today's show, I'd be grateful if you would take a moment to rate us on your preferred listening platform to learn more about Brandon Group's better experience and how we provide industry-leading on-demand facility maintenance, construction management, and special project implementation. Visit us at www.branded-group.com. Be sure to follow us on social media, and you can also reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. Until next time, be better.   Chapters 00:00 Introduction 01:07 Vik's Background and what does he do? 03:21 Vik's experience for over 36 years and putting it into his book 06:25 Vik's Book, “CEO Excellence” and what it is all about. 08:03 Vik telling what does it takes to be an excellent CEO 13:53 Getting the stockholders and shareholders on the same page during the pandemic 16:07 Mike, as a CEO, can connect more with his people down the line 19:55 Viks sharing how CEOs aligned and tackle the soft stuff in an organization 22:53 Viks Sharing how to mobilize the organization as CEOs 25:08 How should CEOs engage and interact with their board members 26:42 Viks Shares how CEOs are connecting with their stakeholders in three things 30:26 CEOs on managing their energy 35:13 How to find and reach Vik 35:34 Conclusion   This podcast was produced by Heartcast Media.  

Сегодня я вам расскажу свое видение по поводу такой темы, как инвестирование в SEO. И почему все же SEO – это на самом деле инвестирование, а не расходы. В маркетинге мы часто измеряем KPI любого бизнеса и рассчитываем возврат инвестиций. А как быть с SEO, если вложения в него не дает доходов в первые месяцы, […]

Safety performance indicators can be very beneficial to any company looking to measure their safety and health improvement efforts.  A special thank you to the National Fire Protection Association. NFPA LiNK® is the information delivery platform set to revolutionize how you work. Put safety expertise at your fingertips with digital access to NFPA® codes and standards, plus exclusive enhanced content. Utilize dynamic search functionality, bookmarking, and the ability to share and collaborate with others to save time and get the job done right. With NFPA LiNK, you can go by the book without the book to get the job done right faster and more efficiently. Learn more at nfpa.org/link

Why do companies have these? Do KPI's effect you? Are you personally apart of a key performance indicator? These questions and more are answered on this episode. After this episode ask yourself these questions and post the answers on facebook. power minutes on facebook trainingteam@doublekwik.com email address  

Hey guys! This episode we got Alex Morris. Alex is the man behind the substack: The Science of Hitting. This is second time we have Alex as a guest and on this episode we talk all things Retail. We covered a lot of topics ranging from why he likes retail businesses, to Target's latest quarter reports, the bull case for Five Below, retail's KPI and unit economics, and the difference between the Dollar Tree and Dollar General. [0:00] Who is Alex Morris? [5:50] Changing your Investment Philosophy. [7:50] Finding Great Founders [9:50] Jack Dorsey [13:00] Position Size [21:00] Managing a Portfolio. [26:00] Why Alex likes Retail Stocks [31:00] The KPI of Retail Businesses? [33:00] Dollar Tree vs Dollar General [43:00] Unit Economics [46:00] Target: The Canary on the Coal Mine? [1:01:00] Retail's Tough Comps [1:03:00] Five Below [1:35:00] More from Alex and Closing Questions If you like what you heard, check out Alex on Twitter and his Substack. Finally, a big thanks to the following sponsors for making the podcast a reality. Mitimco This episode is brought to you by MITIMCo, the investment office of MIT. Each year, MITIMCo invests in a handful of new emerging managers who it believes can earn exceptional long-term returns in support of MIT's mission. To help the emerging manager community more broadly, they created emergingmanagers.org, a website for emerging manager stockpickers. For those looking to start a stock-picking fund or just looking to learn about how others have done it, I highly recommend the site. You'll find essays and interviews by successful emerging managers, service providers used by MIT's own managers, essays MITIMCo has written for emerging managers and more! Quartr Quartr is revolutionizing the way investors interact with IR departments, listen to conference calls, and engage in investment research. The best way to think of Quartr is like Spotify for investor conference calls. Quartr is 100% free and includes markets from 12+ countries (with plans to expand in the future!). Investors can easily request new companies, and Quartr is quick to add them. You can learn more about Quartr by visiting their site, Quartr.se If you're interested in changing the way you research companies, download the app today and give it a try on Apple and Android. Tegus Tegus has the world's largest collection of instantly available interviews on all the public and private companies you care about. Tegus actually makes primary research fun and effortless, too. Instead of weeks and months, you can learn a new industry or company in hours, and all from those that know it best. I spend nearly all my time reading Tegus calls on existing holdings and new ideas. And I know you will too. So if you're interested, head on over to tegus.co/valuehive for a free trial to see for yourself. TIKR TIKR is THE BEST resource for all stock market data, I use TIKR every day in my process, and I know you will too. Make sure to check them out at TIKR.com/hive. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/valuehive/support

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO podcast. I am Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space and we're here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs. Today I’m excited to have Catherine Young from Worldline Global join us. Catherine, I’d love for you to introduce yourself, your role and your organization to our audience. Catherine Young: Thank you, Shawnna, I’m so excited to be here. So my name is Catherine Young as introduced already and I am the director of sales enablement at Worldline. I work for a particular go-to-market division so I’m very close to the front line and I’m helping the salespeople sell by the usual sales enablement tricks of sorting out the contents, the data, the training, the communications, the CRM, the whole gamut. It’s a really fun place to be. I’ve been in sales enablement since 2014 when I joined Xerox and I was a global sales enablement lead there and that was a bit more of an HQ role, so it’s fun to come back to the front line, but the other interesting thing is in my whole career I’ve realized, I have always operated at that interface between technology and humans and so that’s been the theme that’s run through my career. SS: I’m very excited to have you join us today. Now, Catherine, I’ve known you for a while and one of your areas of expertise is driving digital selling transformation. In your opinion, how has digital selling evolved, especially in recent years, and why is it becoming increasingly important for sales organizations today? CY: Yeah, I think digital selling has always been and continues to be about connecting with people, learning about them, what matters to them, and helping them, and by doing that you nurture your deep and strong relationships. This continues even through evolution. So, the sort of fundamental principles remain, but what is changing I think is that seven or eight years ago digital selling was a support to the face to face selling. It was used well by both business development representatives and account managers, but usually in the interim between the face-to-face encounters. Of course, during the pandemic, we didn’t have that face-to-face bit, we only had the digital engagement with prospects and customers and influences. Now that we’ve left the pandemic and we’re moving into a hybrid world, I think that digital selling has become equally important to in-person selling. I think one of the reasons it’s becoming so is because digital-first is the new normal. We mean that in both the sense of the younger generation who are coming through into the buying positions that are digital natives, so they’re going to go digital-first. Even the other generations, everyone in the buying community uses the internet and social networks to educate themselves and they will gen up on everything to do with your products, you, your company, and your competition and they do all this before they even want to have a sales conversation. For salespeople to actually connect with buyers, they have to be online. I think it’s just the compulsion to be a digital seller has become greater than it ever was, but if they do that, then the seller becomes a beacon by sharing their knowledge, guiding their buyers, and creating two-way conversations and they will be successful in selling so they can emulate some of that face to face stuff that they used to do using digital selling techniques. There is a wonderful statistic that floats around in the sales enablement world about the fact that 74% of buyers choose a company that first adds value. It’s increasingly important for our salespeople to be online in these digital spaces. Being engaging and helpful because that’s where they’re going to add value and therefore they will get the sale a bit further down the line, if we don’t, then it’s simple, one of your competitors will come along and sweep the buyer off their feet. SS: Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more. You touched on this a little bit in that response, but from your perspective how are buyer expectations shifting alongside the digital selling transformation? CY: It’s so interesting because this has been talked about for a while in our space but I think we have to come back to the fundamental reason, which is to think about what you experience in your personal life, in your day-to-day lives. We’ve got On Demand TV, we’ve got hyper-personalized news feeds in our social platforms, recommendations in every website we visit, and even adverts. We can get the answer to any question you can imagine just with a few chosen words typed into the right place. More recently we’ve got things like the rise of the same-hour delivery of groceries. If you live in cities, I mean within an hour you can get what you need to your door at a click of a button. I was doing some sightseeing recently and I was just reminding myself that I’ve got in the palm of my hands a personal guide to the city. Somebody to tell me where to go, which road to take, which turn to take and it’s giving me information about the city as I’m walking around. These are all things that have become intrinsic in our experience of the world, but we sometimes as B2B professionals or B2C professionals, in the business world, we sometimes forget that the people we are selling to are still the same people who have access to those great features, functionalities, and experiences. The buyer’s expectations are shifting towards this sort of speed and this personalization and this digital and everything in the palm of their hands. We have to try and be there in our selling capacity doing the same. We can be present, we can be digital, we can be personalized in the experiences we deliver, answer questions, you know, be there, be the guide, be relevant and that’s what digital selling is to me. SS: What would you say digital selling looks like today? And how can enablement really effectively prepare reps for this type of environment? CY: I think if we go back to thinking about those expectations of the buyers, we can certainly talk about what digital selling should look like. To answer the question more directly, the good proponents of this are doing what I’m about to say, and then the rest of us can perhaps catch up, but think about this on-demand expectation. We can’t as human beings be on-demand 24/7. We have to think about other ways of achieving that, so what about asynchronous methods of communication like personalized video messages. In fact, what I like about something like giving the buyer a message through a video means that they consume the information when it suits them best. Not necessarily when it suits you best, but I love the fact that they can stop, rewind, speed up, whatever suits their circumstances. What’s fascinating about this is that it’s actually something that’s only possible with video, not even possible in real life. So maybe that’s even better than a live meeting if we believe that the buyer should be the one that is in control of the experience. Then talking about providing answers to questions. Well, that’s really easy for social sellers to achieve on social platforms and they do it in two ways. You can do it by sharing your knowledge, sort of broadcasting it out there, the 1 to many so that you are, again, I used the word beacon earlier, you know, you’re this beacon of knowledge and helpfulness that people will be attracted to, but also by responding to queries. People do ask questions on social platforms. They do seek help, advice, and recommendations. So the secret for a successful social or digital seller is to be there. Be there to hear that those questions are being asked and then be able to answer them. The same hour delivery, I mean initially you think, yeah that’s never going to happen, in the B2B world, so, okay, I’m not asking for a salesperson to be on your doorstep within one hour, but what about thinking about providing your buyers with more of a self-service or self-directed experience? You’re allowing them to get the information they want when they want it. I mean they couldn’t really be more immediate in your delivery than that, I’d say. Good salespeople have always been the trusted guide, the one that helps the buyer navigate their complex or unfamiliar environments. I just see that like a mobile phone guiding me around a foreign city, not only are you helping me make decisions at each junction, along the way you’ll give me those tips and recommendations that further enhance my experience. Of course, we can and should personalize the content we deliver to our buyers to get that hyper relevancy that they expect and to be frank they deserve. So, digital selling looks like these things to me. It looks like using the platforms, the tools, the content in a more agile way, in a way that can be repackaged to personalize the journeys for the buyers and to give them what they need when they need it. Sales enablement is basically there to support all of that. So we look at the platforms, the content, the data, the training, the processes. All of those things need to be aligned to help the salesperson operate in this digitally agile way and then the salesperson is unable to deliver the experience the buyer wants and therefore the buyer gets a great experience and that to me actually encapsulates what sales enablement is. SS: Absolutely. Now as there is a shift to digital selling, obviously that adds in a bit of a layer of complexity for sales reps. From your point of view, how can enablement help reduce friction for reps, especially as they navigate transformation in the sales landscape? CY: I thought about answering this in many different ways because to me almost my raison d’être is to reduce friction. So it comes in many different forms. It comes in my day-to-day activity and supporting the salespeople, but also in what I do to push back into the organization to improve the way that the organization interfaces with sales. I think it’s sort of summarized by sales enablers who see the big picture, they join the dots and they orchestrate. They orchestrate all of the different elements that impact upon the seller’s ability to do their job and to do their job. In other words, we help salespeople sell. When we talk about removing the friction, I think it’s a lot to do with orchestration or coordination. Working with other departments to deliver things in an organized way, in a structured way, so that the salesperson isn’t bombarded by many different voices and many different messages. Perhaps we start by coordinating it and that can be really simple things like setting up a training academy that has set dates and times for any sales training and having a calendar that if you want to go and deliver training to the salespeople, you come and fit into the next available slot in the calendar. It’s a really simple idea, but it really reduces the amount of tension that you can get between the sales teams and the other departments. In a similar way, emails. There are so many emails that get sent out there and everybody says, oh you must know about this thing and I’m going to send an email to hundreds of salespeople and dozens of departments are doing this every day and it gets very noisy. So another simple solution is to create a digest newsletter, put everything that they need to know in one place, but combine the messages from the product team, the operations team, marketing, even from sales leadership, so that it becomes an easy to read message and one that you can go back to as well. Then sales enablers are working on big projects that help to reduce the friction. A sales enablement platform integrated into the CRM becomes the single focus point for the salespeople. Not only does that remove so much wasted time, it makes things quicker and easier. It reduces friction, which improves the sales experience and therefore that translates to improving the buyer’s experience. One final point of friction that I’m enjoying dealing with in my current role is the relationship between sales and the wider company. This is important because we all perform better if we are joined together in our objectives and we understand each other and what we all do. So you can start with data. You can’t always get people to talk to people but you can start pulling data from around the business and sharing it with one another. That starts to help, for example, products to understand what’s being sold. Even also things like where we lose sales, why are we losing those sales, and feeding that back to the different teams, pricing, product process operations. Legal wants to understand what is the role of an account manager or business development manager because they’re looking at contracts for a customer that the salesperson has sold a product to and they’re just looking at words on a page, unless they can start to understand what’s going on in the sales world and vice versa. Obvious things like sales need to be aware of the marketing campaigns that are going on and operations need to know how many new customers are going to come knocking on their door in the next few weeks or months so that they can resource up. I think for me, what I’ve done is I’ve taken a formula and if we can make improvements in each of the elements in that sum, then we get a better outcome. The formula is visibility plus efficiency plus consistency equals repeatability and predictability. So what I mean by that is visibility comes back to this data point. Just get information out there and share it widely and share it with each other and don’t be siloed in who sees the data and be as transparent as you can because that way lies understanding. Efficiency is reasonably obvious and this is another area where we reduce friction, looking at ways to improve processes to improve collaborations and cross-departmental communication wherever you see something being inefficient, a sales enabler should step in and try and turn it into something that is efficient. Consistency is about creating that consistency so that you’ve got your processes, your structure, your content platform, whatever it is, but it’s built-in a consistent way so that it’s understandable and more importantly it’s scalable and that equals repeatability and predictability. If we can get all of this line then we can create a world in which we know what’s happening, things like sales pipeline forecasting and like I said about operations knowing what customers are coming, we can predict what’s happening with confidence and the repeatability is important, if we want to scale, if we want to bring new people on new hires or even expanding people’s knowledge and understanding. If we can do it in a consistent, efficient, visible way, then we can get that repeatability. So for me this is where performance comes from, is nailing down that repeatability and predictability and that’s where if we’ve done that by reducing the friction. SS: That’s amazing. I want to shift gears a little bit. You wrote in an article that the three must-haves for sales enablement are sponsorship, empowerment, and resources, particularly when it comes to driving change initiatives like digital selling transformation. How do these three factors influence the success of it? CY: Well, these three elements are essential to have an effective sales enablement function, particularly a formal sales enablement function. As enablers were often operating with some but not all of these, but if that’s the case, what you tend to be delivering are random acts of enablement and we all know in our hearts that random acts of enablement do not improve business results. It’s been proven time and time again with statistics that organizations that have a formal, structured, and supported sales enablement function have higher win rates, higher quota attainment, and quicker time to revenue. What quicker ramp-up time whatever your KPI is because random just doesn’t move the needle enough it’s just 1 firework. It’s just pretty for a while, but then it all fades away. If we think about things like the fact that sales enablement is by its nature across collaboration function then, of course, we can use our charm and our influence to persuade others that they should work with us, but this can be exhausting and it doesn’t always work, so something like sponsorship which was one of those three key elements we need to step in. I’ll give you an example. I ran a campaign to drive up the adoption of a sales tool a few years ago and the first thing I did was engage the senior VP for sales. Once I got his advocacy, I was able to use his name and his photo, and a quote from him in the launch email and it said that he supported this initiative and that he expects everyone to sign up. This is so much more motivating to the salespeople than receiving an email from me who is an unknown from HQ. More importantly for me, it motivated the sales directors and the sales managers because they knew their boss wanted this to happen. So it didn’t rely on me going to them and saying, please, please, please, will you help with this? It just had the boss’s name at the end of the letter so they made it a priority and they put the effort in to support the project. Now I supported them to support the project. That’s what enablement is. This was a key factor and through all of the different parts of the campaign, the success was that the adoption rate went up from 20% to 80% within six weeks. These things are essential to influence the success of both individual initiatives, like the adoption campaign, and the overall business results, like win rates, quota attainment and time to revenue. SS: This has been fantastic, Catherine. In closing, I have one last question for you. How do you think digital selling will continue to transform in the next year and beyond and how can enablement help organizations really stay ahead of these changes? CY: I think the first part can be answered quite easily, which is digital selling will become digital experience selling. Another statistic I found was that 89% of consumers buy based on their overall sales experience regardless of price and functionality. We know from our out-of-work lives that a great experience is what we seek. We don’t just want functional factual interactions and maybe it’s because we’ve been through two years of being so removed from one another that we do crave that human element. We also like hybrid working, we like the flexibility of online encounters because they’re easier to arrange, less costly and take up less time. So we want the human element, but we also quite like doing it from our own living rooms or dining rooms. I think that means what you need to do in the digital selling world and it is that you need to make your online encounters as good as your face-to-face encounters used to be. So that’s what I mean about digital experience selling. All the characteristics of digital selling remain that we talked about earlier about connecting with people, listening and learning about them and helping and guiding them, but adding to that, providing a smooth, engaging, effective digital experience to the buyers. So this is the thing, allowing them to self discover information or maybe the salesperson helps guide them, like the fruit from the palm of the hand, and they explore those options together, but what’s shifted is that the buyer and seller are more side-by-side in this way of working rather than face to face. I think it’s important that the experience should be however the buyer prefers it to be. Where the sales enablers come in and it goes back to the basics, you know, it’s providing the platforms that allow these experiences to be designed, built, and consumed. I think we need to use the data to know and understand what is meaningful to the buyer so that we can continue to evolve those experiences and we need to allow our content to be flexible because we tend to create content in quite a structured way, but it needs to be more snippets so that we can use the ingredients in different ways to create different outputs and that’s what supports the many different journeys. Of course, if we want our salespeople to operate in this new world, they need to be trained and coached and supported, and I think that’s what’s going to be so important over the coming year or two in sales enablement. SS: Catherine, thank you so much, I learned so much from you in this conversation today. I really appreciate the time. CY: Thank you. You’re most welcome. SS: To our audience, thanks for listening. For more insights, tips, and expertise from sales enablement leaders, visit salesenablement.pro. If there is something you'd like to share or a topic you'd like to learn more about, please let us know we'd love to hear from you.

Bonnie Habyan is a communications marketing professional with an MBA in banking and finance. She's been a news reporter, a wedding DJ and even a Miss Baltimore Oriole. But now she's taken on a whole new role: as an author. Her book, The World According to Bess, is a true love letter to her 90-year-old mother—a woman who can definitely give the Sh*t My Dad guy's dad a run for his money. What surprised Bonnie the most about the book process is that, despite her history in marketing, launching a book is a whole new animal—an animal that requires as much of a plan as any other business...complete with KPIs, plans for how the book plays into ultimate business goals and much more. So what has she figured out about a book business plan and what are her KPI's and plans? It's all in this episode. GET EXCLUSIVE ACCESS TO MY BESTSELLING BOOK BULLETIN (4 QUICK TIDBITS EVERY THURSDAY), BY GOING TO WWW.BESTSELLINGBOOKBULLETIN.COM

In this episode, Billy is going to dive deep into job efficiency and how we can work to make our businesses 100% efficient through software and automation! You surely don't want to miss this show!   https://sera.tech/go/service-business-mastery/ Sera is all about time and efficiency! [00:04:00] “And efficiency will allow you to offset these price increases because a large portion of the money spent on running these businesses is spent on inefficiencies, redundancy, and other such things. That is, after all, what Sera is all about. Isn't it about time? And if we can reduce everyone's time while increasing their efficiency, we'll see a significant improvement. So BillyGo, my HVAC and plumbing company, has been beta testing this thing for nearly three months now. And our efficiency has remained relatively high,” says Billy Stevens. [00:05:00] “We're still double that, and we expect to see even more progress as time goes on”, he adds. [00:06:00] Billy talks about how field service management software handles your day-to-day operations while working to increase the financial health of your business. You can see your labor costs in real-time with their patent-pending job time efficiency reports! A price book is a key to success, efficiency, and profitability! [00:11:00] “The Price book is a living piece of our software. As a result, it is unique. It's not static.  It aids in the creation of these efficiencies. And without it, you won't be able to achieve the desired efficiencies', says Billy Stevens. “Sera makes it easy to modify and update each task, equipment item, and overhead expense separately or in bulk.” Do you know what's the most interesting part!?  Price Book Updates in Less than 2 Minutes! Billy Stevens recently joined Service Business Mastery Podcast and here are some key highlights from the show: What makes job efficiency accurate? The right KPI you need and why setting smart KPIs is important. How you can make your business stand out and various aspects of the HVAC business. About amazing software built for technicians  The Simple Alternative To Outdated Software and Spreadsheets How to achieve your business goals How to increase office efficiency Subscribe to Service Business Mastery on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our website, or wherever you get podcasts to hear more such fascinating and insightful stories. Spotify Podcast Play - https://spoti.fi/3Q2jWAH Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/397Lwf8 Google Podcast Player - https://bit.ly/3NPkUyc Stitcher Radio - https://www.stitcher.com/show/service... Amazon Music - https://amzn.to/38Nvd77 iHeart Radio - https://ihr.fm/3x3u3wp

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are metrics that measure how well your product is doing. As useful as they are to proactively manage a product, they are not always effectively applied. In this podcast episode, I discuss six common KPI mistakes. I explain how you can overcome them and leverage key performance indicators to maximise the value your product creates.

In today's Podcast, Simon Severino from Strategy Spring and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the 3 CEO habits every business owner needs to scale and grow. Business owners' habits are critical in determining the success of every business. To be successful in business, you must be conscious and conscientious of your behaviors towards your company. Smart business owners keep tabs on their business day-to-day by ensuring that every activity concerning marketing, sales, and operations is carried out in a fashion that brings the most desirable results. Plus, they don't joke around with their business KPI measurements to accelerate where they are recording success and improve on the areas they are losing. 

How TikTok can Humanize your Brand   This episode we have MJ Widomska.   MJ is the founder and Director of the Award-Winning Creative studio YRS Truly, helping brands in the games industry reach their KPI targets with influential campaigns with an amazing team that is fully gender diverse. In this episode we chat about the benefits of using TikTok, why its so important to market globally, and the impact The Witcher has had on Poland's gaming landscape.   This is episode 83 of She Plays Games.

As the head of your company, you should significantly reflect on how to empower the entire workforce. This episode will direct you to the value of establishing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and why you and your team should have a mutually beneficial relationship. Tune in to make your vision as a real estate investor even clearer!     KEY TAKEAWAYS The true and real essence of success The primary struggle of investors and entrepreneurs Why you should develop KPIs for your team The most critical and essential KPI to consider     TWEETABLES “Success boils down to happiness” “The only thing that matters is having conversations with the people who have the things you want.” “If the effort is there and the results aren't coming, it's a skills challenge.”     ASCEND Don't Wait To Enjoy Your Life, Tomorrow, Live It Today! How To Grow Your Business, Expand Your Impact, and Experience Your Perfect Life:  

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.Today we’re thrilled to bring you our conversation with Jessica Peltz-Zatulove and Kate Beardsley, co-founders of Hannah Grey VC. Backed by firms such as Twitter, JP Morgan, Screendoor, Insight Partners, etc. the firm recently announced it’s oversubscribed $52MM seed fund and (13 investments made to date). Jessica and Kate have backgrounds in entrepreneurship, branding, and strategy, and bring their wealth of experiences to this week’s episode.About Jessica Peltz-Zatulove:Jessica Peltz-Zatulove is a Founding Partner at Hannah Grey.Prior to founding Hannah Grey, Jessica was Senior Managing Partner at MDC Ventures, leading investments in companies including Netomi, Gradient.io (acquired by Criteo), Veritonic, Indicative (acquired by mParticle), Catch & Release, Perksy, and Mezzobit (acquired by OpenX). Before she was a VC, Jessica specialized in connecting marketers with tech at innovation consultancy Evol8tion and at Zenith Media.Jessica also leads a NYC’s Women in VC group and created the Global directory for Women in VC, which now includes 3,800+ women investors spanning 2,400+ venture funds across 200+ cities and 60+ countries.About Kate Beardsley:Kate started her career as director of special projects for Martha Stewart Living, reporting directly to Martha Stewart. She went on to become Chief of Staff to Ken Lerer at the Huffington Post, and joined him to co-found Lerer Hippeau, a NYC-based fund focused on early-stage companies.In 2014, Kate joined Upslope Ventures as Managing Partner which took her from NYC to Denver. She is active with the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association and the Rockies Venture Club.Episode Summary:01:26 Why did they start Hannah Grey, and what were the key components they knew were necessary for them?08:21 What exactly is their product outside of capital? 13:36 Thinking through LP discovery and composition20:11 Learnings from raising a fund, including the difference between raising from institutional investors and non-institutional investors30:51 What internal KPI’s they track for the firm 35:26 The future of service-oriented venture38:44 The ‘Hannah Grey’ Experience when supporting founders. 43:25 Recommendations for emerging managers46:46 Cultivating a community of female investorsMentioned in this episodeHannah GreyI’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Jessica and Kate. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee Agency This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

Today we have a returning guest Carla Iniguez from Cycle CPA, sharing with us how we can get a better handle on our numbers and KPI for our businesses. Carla is as passionate about the green industry as you guys are, and loves helping folks to improve their financial IQ and know their numbers! Listen in as she shares some helpful tips to measure and improve your business today. Enjoy.   EQUIP EXPO 2022 registration (CODE: BRIAN Saves 50%) www.LawntrepreneurAcademy.com Price Adjustment Letter Brian's Lawn Maintenance - YouTube Ballard-inc.com Yardbook.com StihlUSA.com Exmark.com KUJO Yardwear EquipmentDefender.com Earthway.com https://landzie.com/ (Brians10 Saves 10%) https://linktr.ee/brianslawnmaintenance (w/ Brians10 Deals) www.thehardscapeacademy.com  @brianslawnmaintenance https://www.instagram.com/cycle_cpa/ https://cyclecpa.com/ (use code "Brian" to save $200 when signing up. Brian's Lawn Maintenance * PO Box 930233 * Wixom, MI 48393

Are you an ambitious fitness entrepreneur and looking to build a fitness business that can run without you? Then tune into today's episode, because you will definitely take away a few “ah ha” moments. Pete Piranio delivers advice on how to set processes in place to help you acquire clients and grow sales. KPI's also play a big part in your success. Learn the one KPI that 99% of personal training business owners don't talk about and include in their tracking.

When business owners are too busy focusing on lead generation to do the research to create content, they now can use AI, language processing, and machine learning algorithms that measure user intent. This makes the best content for your product and campaign. In a world where SEO and keyword research is not enough, having AI to fall back on can only bolster your content customer interaction, create better conversions and increase ROI for your marketing strategy. Jeff Coyle, the co-founder of MarketMuse.com, helps businesses in the B2B space ensure their content is on target with every campaign through AI content creation. After 17 years in the industry, Jeff Coyle created MarketMuse. The push behind creating a content intelligence platform was that he understood that content workflows are painful, manually created, and subjective performance. His mission was to develop a data-driven metric for content that speeds up the workflow of creating content and SEO. With MarketMuse, there is editorial expertise and excellence every time. The metrics are there for building authority, creating content, and engagement. MarketMuse works within the natural language generation and processing space, which sets it apart from other AI writing companies in the industry. In today's crowded market space, your content needs to stand apart in so many ways. That's where AI content creation is an asset. It takes the content that was written, will sort through it, and tell you which pieces need work, which ones are on target, and how to improve upon them, so the results move your company or brand forward. The content you get from AI is often only a stepping stone because it still needs to be fleshed out by a human. But with the metrics from AI, you know which direction you need to go in. Do you have enough authority in the field where this particular article or blog will have a positive KPI? Or do you need to build a more solid foundation to see the results you are looking for?Artificial intelligence is used for a content generation but also topic modeling. Jeff created a seeding process that has three components. The seeding process helps figure out what topics match your needs. The three components are your stuff, the stuff you want to be, and your competitors' stuff. You need to go over your current content with a keen eye. Evaluate it. Is it serving your purpose? Is it speaking to your audience? Understand the depth of your coverage and how much success they are providing to your site. The second component is what do you want to be? You need to understand where you want to be and how to get there. Lastly, you need to see what your competitors are doing and where they have voids. Their voids may give you a competitive advantage because it's easy for you to jump in and fill in the gaps. AI is the wave of the future. There will always be better, newer versions. That's the beauty of technology. Jeff's One Big Tip is using AI to enhance your content your writing and get a better handle on the topics you are covering. This will produce positive metrics and keep your business ahead of the competition.In this episode[2:18] Use AI to focus on targeted content every time you publish. AI takes the emotion out of decision-making, giving you neutral direction.Using AI to collect content speeds up creator workflow.[5:28] The difference between AI content and AI writing and why the difference is so significant.Every time you publish, you're liable for what you put out. AI content is verifiable at a faster pace than other methods.[15:55] Topic modeling and how it works.Using AI to sift through already existing content ensures you get a direct hit with each piece you produce. AI can be used as a tool to figure out what your content is missSupport the show

Do you speak your staff member's language?   Iven Vian sits down with us to stress the importance of incentivizing your team and being able to align with their interests for them to work more efficiently. Iven has 3700 units in his portfolio and about $185 million in real estate assets under management. As a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, he operates with military precision as the Lead Operations Manager at Anthem Capital. His advice is to have a steadfast commitment to your vision and see that every opportunity leads to another opportunity.   [00:01 - 07:52] People Are the Greatest Asset Iven shares how he stumbled into real estate His experience working in an operational environment in the military Applying this to his current role Placing targets and letting his team execute Providing resources and incentives to his staff    [07:53 - 12:05] Setting Your Priorities Straight How he was able to do his full-time job and real estate at the same time The value of partnerships Figure out your end goal and commit to it 100%   [12:06 - 17:18]  Persistence and Taking Massive Action Leveraging relationships and developing a marketing platform Having the right mindset when raising capital “What you have, investors need” The hardest part is getting the first deal Once you achieve that, you already have your track record Always know your why   [17:19 - 18:55] Closing Segment Reach out to Iven!  Links Below Final Words Tweetable Quotes   “Lead people and manage processes. Don't micromanage. You cast the vision, you set their eyes on the target where you want them to execute.” - Iven Vian “One of the key differentiating factors I think is persistence and taking massive action. The process will test how committed you are.” - Iven Vian “‘What I actually do is this is that I help people invest passively in deals to maybe meet or exceed their income, to earn passive income, and to save money on taxes.' If you go out about your day with that mentality, it changes your perspective and how you approach your day when you talk to people.” - Iven Vian -----------------------------------------------------------------------------   Connect with Iven through the Anthem Capital website. Follow him on LinkedIn as well!   Resource Mentioned: Brad Sumrock Connect with me:   I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook   LinkedIn   Like, subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or whatever platform you listen on.  Thank you for tuning in!   Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:   [00:00:00] Iven Vian: If you want to scale and grow, well, treat that first one, like all of, actually treat all of them like they're your own child. And you know, they're babies that need a lot of attention. If you don't have the bandwidth to do so, put together a team that can provide the correct oversight you need. Again, to answer your question, it's just persistence, persistence, digging deeper. What is your why? You know, and really check yourself and understand what is that you're doing and why you're doing it.  [00:00:28] Sam Wilson: Iven Vian is a retired air force. He is a 20-year veteran. He's a multifamily syndicator, has 2300 units under management, about $185 million in real estate assets under management as well. Iven, welcome to the show.  [00:00:54] Iven Vian: Awesome. Thanks for having me, Sam. Looking forward to the opportunity to be able to share.  [00:00:58] Sam Wilson: Hey man, pleasure is mine. Same three questions I ask every guest who come to the show: in 90 seconds or less, where did you start? Where are you now? How'd you get there?  [00:01:05] Iven Vian: What did I start? Stumbled into real estate. Mother-in-law said lady's going through a divorce down the street. Why don't you buy that single-family house? Bought the house. [00:01:13] Iven Vian: Then I bought a second house, tanked me. I realized I need to get mentorship through a mentorship program. I learned about multifamily. My eyes are opened to the possibilities of multifamily, and I set my target on that and went through those long journey to be able to get to where I am today. But as you said in the intro today, we have done roughly 2300 doors, around 17 deals in about six years time.  [00:01:34] Sam Wilson: That's a lot, it's a lot of moving pieces. Today, your main role is what?  [00:01:39] Iven Vian: Yeah, my main role in Anthem Capital, there's two of us, my business partner, his name is Tariq Sattar He's focused on the transactional side, so acquiring and disposing, and I handle everything in between, operations side. [00:01:51] Iven Vian: Given my background of 20 years in the air force, I live in an operational environment, very dynamic environment my entire career. So it kind of suits me well, focusing on that piece with the multifamily business.  [00:02:04] Sam Wilson: Wow. So you handle all the asset management sides of things. Can you tell us, kind of break down what that means for you? Let's just start with that. Maybe just tell us what an asset manager does and then, you know, what it looks like.  [00:02:17] Iven Vian: Yeah, absolutely. So, given the fact that I flew B1 bombers and the air force, I kind of understand things that way still, right? And so in the flying world, you have to understand the target and then build a plan, working yourself from the target backwards, and how are you gonna be able to achieve the overall end goal and objective? [00:02:33] Iven Vian: So in this case, a multifamily investing, our overall end goal and objective is to realize the return on our investor's investments. So if we have a target return schedule of say, 8% cash on cash analyze and 90% total return over the course of five years, that's my focus. And then I am leading a team to ensure we meet or exceed those return numbers, right? And so working from the target backwards, then from day zero all the way to day of exit, I'm making sure we stay on path, right? But the way I put it is like this. I lead people and manage processes. Don't micromanage. You cast the vision, you set their eyes on the target where you want them to execute. [00:03:21] Iven Vian: And in this case, we work with a third-party property management company. We give them the expectation and provide resources for them to be able to execute and perform. And, you know, we do in a way where if they're able to hit their numbers, pocket management numbers, we're going to be able to hit our numbers when it comes to setting budgets for the property management company. [00:03:41] Iven Vian: And then we have weekly calls. I mean, you know, practically speaking, we have weekly KPI calls. They go over the performance numbers and we make real-time adjustments along the way as needed to ensure again, we hit that big picture angle of the return on investors investments.  [00:04:01] Sam Wilson: When you say that you give the property management company the tools and resources they need for execution. Can you break that down a little further for us? What tools do you feel like they need from you on a consistent basis?  [00:04:14] Iven Vian: Well, first of all, you need people to manage these assets. So how do you view that? So, for me, I view people as my greatest asset, my greatest resource. So are you going to men run the manning or you, if you have a 200 unit property, 150 unit property, you see, I'm only going to allow in a budget for one manager and one maintenance guy, and then you let them work 12 hour days and including Saturdays and maybe, you know, on holidays and then you burned them out, right? And then your property suffers as a result over the long-term or do you say, you know what, we're going to build a healthy budget when it comes to allocating proper money towards a labor line items and like, listen, you're going to go out and do it the 18, you're going to have a manager, at least an agent, a maintenance guy, and also make ready guy. [00:05:07] Iven Vian: And we're going to pay them market rate. We're going to take care of them and we're going to incentivize them for performing well. So if they were able to hit certain numbers, if it comes down to physical occupancy or hitting a certain income level, Or decreased in our delinquency by a certain percentage, over a specific period of time, then we're going to incentivize them. [00:05:28] Iven Vian: We're going to give them bonuses or we're going to give them what they want. We've got to be able to speak their language. And this is where leading people comes in to play because one particular managers didn't really care about money. She just wanted a time off to go to stay in her cabin on the lake. So that was her language. So like, okay, if you hit these numbers, you're going to get extra days off to go to your cabin and spend time on the lake. Where other managers, you know, they're motivated by money. So the way I see like this, we have alignment of interest. If the property's performing well or, and we're exceeding our baseline numbers that we need to hit, absolutely, we're going to give them bonuses. We're going to incentivize them to do so.  [00:06:07] Sam Wilson: Yeah. It sounds like a lot of that, like you said, managing the people and figuring out what it is that they want and then trying to set targets and goals such that they want to work towards getting the things that they want.  [00:06:17] Iven Vian: The other side of this, I was going to mention as well, is when you take on like value add projects, there's a capital improvement plan that you put in place and that property needs improvements. And you have a lot of ways to dissect that. Are you going to do in-house turns or are you going to hire third-party contractors to do the in-house, to do the interior improvements, right? And so on these calls, for example, asking them, we're asking the question, how much rent-ready product do you have? Do we need to bring in additional help to be able to turn these units at a timely fashion to drive our revenue growth?  [00:06:52] Iven Vian: If so then yeah, let's go out and get estimates to see how much it will cost to bring on a third party contractor, to be able to turn these units in a timely fashion. So that, to me, that's the other side of resources. You know, we're giving them approval to go out, hire third party again, not to overwork them and to create efficiencies in the overall process.  [00:07:14] Sam Wilson: Right, because those are things that the property management company is not going to have just the green light to do as they see fit. I mean, those are things that you guys have to go add additional expense that maybe you weren't counting on, right?  [00:07:26] Iven Vian: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. You know, and things change all along the way. You know, maybe we had an influx of notice to vacates where more people are leaving the property than you originally expected because you tighten down the controls a little bit more. [00:07:39] Iven Vian: And they reacted, you know, they kind of overreacted. So now you have like 20 vacancies in a particular month. Like, listen, this, find a way to get this ton and bring it again, you know, a third party to be able to turn these units.  [00:07:51] Sam Wilson: Yeah. I love that. Thanks for taking the time to kind of give us a little bit more color on what an asset manager does. Let's shift a little bit here and talk about me working a full time. And growing 2300 units at the same time. I mean, that's pretty impressive. And a lot of work how'd you do it?  [00:08:08] Iven Vian: Partnerships, hands down, partnerships, my business partner, Tariq Sattar. He and I have been working together now for, going on eight years. [00:08:18] Iven Vian: We started in a single-family space. I was a hungry investor and I wanted to buy houses. I ran out of capital, got a realtor license to sell houses to earn additional money, to put back in the houses. Tariq was my first client. Tariq ended up buying 45 houses through me over the course of two years. [00:08:36] Iven Vian: So to get to 45 houses, we looked at about 600 in the course of two years, like five a day kind of thing. So we developed a very good relationship. And it turns out Tariq is an all-star kind of individual, very financially astute man. And he and I had created this vision together that we want to pursue multifamily. [00:08:56] Iven Vian: And so I leveraged his experience from his corporate days. He was in construction business. So he was the one that was handling the calls with the attorneys, mortgage brokers, real estate brokers, while I'm flying my airplane, 24,000 feet, right? And so, but you know, when I land or on my way to the gym, or, you know, in between one place to the next, I can use to make a call like a pullover the side and, you know, send out a quick email, things like that. [00:09:24] Iven Vian: Or I can have, you know, late afternoon calls with the property management company and still lead people that way. And so that's how we're able to build Anthem Capital from ground up through our partnership.  [00:09:37] Sam Wilson: Got it. Yeah. I mean, that's a lot of moving pieces and you're flying, you were based stateside or you were based overseas? [00:09:44] Iven Vian: Stateside. My last half of my career is in the reserves. That's the other piece too, is that I didn't pursue a lot of opportunity in the military world or I could have, right? Because that requires more commitment time. And first of all, you know, committed to my career ultimately, and I had to make sure I kept arms length distance between my personal aspirations and my military career. [00:10:09] Iven Vian: But, you know, I found a way to have a somewhat flexible career while doing that. And so you have to ask yourself, what are your priorities in life? What is your overall goal? Do you want to make it big in the corporate world? You know, we're speaking to some other investor looking to jump into multifamily, or are you willing to like, not be on the corporate ladder, you know, promotion track so that you can have time to focus on multifamily. For me, I gave up the idea of being a general someday or a Colonel, you know, I was fine with that because I wanted to do this. [00:10:39] Sam Wilson: Right. Yeah. It sounds like finding what it is that you wanted. And then, like you said, find it, what'd you say early on there, you found the target and worked your way back.  [00:10:47] Iven Vian: Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just wanted it and like, you got to have passion about this thing. And you got to commit. A hundred percent, you got to commit. You cannot be one foot in one foot out. And, you know, for those that are married, have families or significant others, like it has to be like, you know, a solidified front across the board, right? You got to have those difficult conversations with your significant other and make sure there's continuity there because you know, involves a commitment, which means traveling a lot or going to conferences or being on late-night meetings. [00:11:18] Iven Vian: Or not being available for certain family functions, things like that, right. That's where the rubber really hits the road, right. But, you know, once you start seeing the result happen, you realize there's something to this business and there's that scary interim period of like, I'm not pursuing military, multifamily hasn't quite taken off yet. [00:11:37] Iven Vian: And I know money's coming in right now and I'm exposed. Like I have a lot of money out there in the market and very little on capital right now. I think it's the commitment, the steadfastness, the clear vision that allows you to get through that moment. [00:11:50] Sam Wilson: No, I think that is great. I think all of us have been there at some point. [00:11:54] Okay. Yeah. We're figuring this out. There's a lot of moving pieces. I like the way you put it. That was so poetic. There's a lot of money out there that we've put out in the market and it's like, okay, we're pulling something on that faith and confidence to move. Keep moving forward. I think is the key. Talk to us about the finances side of things. It's, we're talking about that. Are you responsible in any way for raising capital or is that all on the business partner side?  [00:12:15] Iven Vian: We're always raising capital to everywhere, every day.  [00:12:18] Sam Wilson: Tell me about that process for you guys. What have been some things that you feel like you've done really well, that kind of helped you guys raise capital for your opportunities? [00:12:26] Iven Vian: You know, I started out with the multifamily mentorship network and mentorship program that had an ecosystem. You know, I didn't know a lot of people with millions of dollars, right? So I joined the ecosystem in my case is Brad Sumrok based out of Dallas. And that's where I started raising capital. Then again, through relationships because real estate, like anything in life, is a relationship business. [00:12:47] Iven Vian: I found people who already had an investigative database and developed a partnership with them. And they came into our deals as Co-GPs and they provided their network to help raise capital for the deal. You know, on my first investment, my first deal was a three-property portfolio, about a $2.6 million raise, you know, nine months into this program. [00:13:09] Iven Vian: We raised $2.6 million to take down a first transaction, leveraging relationships. As you get more experienced, you realize you have to develop a marketing platform. So I have a marketing platform back then that I'm building. I have a marketing team now, you know, I'm not quite there yet, but I'm working on the newsletters, social media posts, Instagram, LinkedIn, all of those things that you need to do to be top of mind when you're out there raising capital. You know, it starts with the mindset of you're always raising capital. [00:13:40] Iven Vian: You know, it's not compart, you're not, you don't compartmentalize that. You never know who you're going to run into, right? And so part of that is like, what it is you do? Do I buy my own apartments? No. What I actually do is this is that I help people invest passively in deals to maybe meet or exceed their income, to earn passive income and to save money on taxes. So like, if you go out about your day with that mentality, it kind of changes, your perspective and how you approach your day when you talk to people.  [00:14:11] Sam Wilson: Right, I like that a lot and it, you know, it's often been said, and I'm not sure if I agree with it or not, but it's a nice idea is that, Hey, you know what you have, investors need and or they say that the investor needs you more than you need the investor. I've heard that phrase as well. Yeah, I think it is good to a point. It starting out though, for people who are looking to scale their business. It's not exactly any comfort, cause it's still like, man, that just seems like that's a tall hill to climb, you know, starting out whether or not they need you or not, it's finding and locating them and then like you said, like you gave away the key, there was that, you know, you joined a group that had an ecosystem that already kind of understood this process out of the gate and people like you coming in that maybe didn't have the deep bench of capital raising experience could get in there and kind of figure out a way to flourish early on. It sounds like that was a key for you. [00:14:56] Iven Vian: A hundred percent absolutely would not be here today. If it wasn't for the ecosystem that I joined immensely, shortened that timeline for me to get up and running.  [00:15:06] Sam Wilson: When you see people, and I'm sure you've seen them inside of that group, cause there, you know, there's always successes and there's always failures. What do you see some of the keys are for the people that join a group like Brad Sumrok's group or another one. What are some things you see them do that help them scale? Maybe that when you see some others, you know, potentially coming in languish, what's the difference?  [00:15:27] Iven Vian: One of the key differentiating factors I think is persistence and taking massive action. Again, it goes back to what I said earlier. The process will test you how committed you are. You can easily get discouraged when you put in 50 offers and you get zero. LOI is out of the proce